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University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, Jan. 8, 1964
In 1964
Today President Johnson goes before the Congress to deliver his budget message, his plan for financing the nation in the new year. He will ask for about $100 billion, a record high.
And in the Soviet Union, Premier Khrushchev goes ahead with his plan to spend more on chemicals and less on missiles.
What else the new year will bring is at best a guess, but some predictions can be made.
The NATIONAL ECONOMY will go up, but not as far as some government officials hope. The overall indicator of the country's economic health, the gross national product, topped with $600 billion mark last month, and will go higher in 1964.
The TAX CUT will pass Congress and be signed into law in the next session, especially now that Johnson has moved first to cut spending. Congressmen who squealed "foul" when the 26 military installations were ordered abandoned will have a hard time opposing Johnson now. And there is a general feeling in labor, business and government circles alike that the tax cut will indeed stimulate the national economy.
UNEMPLOYMENT, however, will not get much better. The unemployment rate has remained at about 6 per cent of the labor force for several years, and even if the tax cut does stir the economy and create more jobs, the slack will be more than taken up by the sudden influx into the labor market next June of the largest high school class in history—the war babies grown up. And these are the very people who are totally unskilled, chronically unemployed.
Even though Sen. Goldwater has announced for the presidency, the scene in POLITICS will not clear up for several months. The Republican nomination is still up for grabs, and no really strong candidate will appear until after a few primaries. If Goldwater defeats Rockefeller in New Hampshire—Rockefeller's home ground—Goldwater will have a much better chance at the nomination.
But there is the recurring belief that it is the eastern, liberal wing of the Republican party which in the end nominates the presidential candidate. If that belief is true, the eastern Republicans may try to find a candidate with more general appeal than Goldwater, perhaps William Scranton of Pennsylvania or even Richard Nixon. Whom the Republicans will run for vice-president depends of course on whom they nominate for president.
The Democratic nominee will almost certainly be Lyndon Johnson—the Democratic National Chairman, John Bailey, last week said he thought so and Johnson has the added power of being the incumbent.
Who will run second on the Democratic ticket will depend on what Johnson thinks he needs. If he wants a strong labor, liberal appeal, the fortunes of Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota will take a sharp upturn. If Johnson wants a strong association with the Kennedy family, Sargent Shriver of the Peace Corps and Attorney General Robert Kennedy are both available. If the Republicans should run Nixon, Pat Brown, the man who defeated Nixon for the governorship of California, would make a strong addition to the Johnson ticket.
President Johnson is likely to do fairly well with CONGRESS in the next session, perhaps even better than Kennedy would have done. Johnson already has extracted promises from Judge Smith, chairman of the House Rules Committee, and Harry Byrd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, to do something with the civil rights bill and the tax cut bill beside ignore them.
The civil rights bill has been reported out of committee in the House, and the House has passed the tax cut bill. Both bills will be approved in this session, although both will be somewhat battered, and most observers think the public accommodations section of the rights bill will be sacrificed to save the rest of it.
How effective Johnson will be in dealing with Congress on other problems can not be known yet, because Johnson has not said what else he wants.
EAST-WEST RELATIONS will not thaw much in 1644, just as they did not thaw much in 1963. The only concrete accomplishment last year was the limited test ban treaty; any other changes were more atmospheric than substantive. The West will have a chance to test the Soviets later this month when the 17-nation disarmament talks begin in Geneva, but the Soviets have not shown any desire to push hard for any settlements of any kind, either by making demands or offering concessions. In the main, Khrushchev seems to be too busy at home and with the Red Chinese to worry much about the West.
A great deal of trouble is expected with the U.S. ALLIES. French President de Gaulle almost undoubtedly will use the U.S. and British elections to try to strengthen his own position as a leader of the Western world. And a wider split in the Common Market is expected now that Ludwig Erhard will seek closer ties with the U.S. and will tend more to buck Gaullist ideas than did Konrad Adenauer.
In the last round of Common Market negotiations, in fact, Erhard pushed for a greater liberalization of tariff regulations to increase trade with the United States—just the opposite of what France wants. He did not get a clear victory, and De Gaulle did get what he wanted—a standard price on agricultural products within the Common Market—but Erhard will continue to push for closer European-U.S. ties.
The Common Market, in fact, is in danger of breaking up; many European leaders already are saying that the Market is out-dated and that a new concept is needed.
President Johnson has an unfavorable image in LATIN AMERICA which he must overcome if his policies are to be effective. Rightly or wrongly, Latin Americans consider Johnson a Southern Conservative, and therefore don't quite trust him. What effects the recent appointment of Thomas Mann, former ambassador to Mexico, as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs will have is not clear yet, but it is expected that the move will make U.S. policy more clear and uncontradictory, if not more effective.
The ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS will run into more trouble-it can't produce results fast enough for some U.S. citizens who seem to think that the United States' main job in Latin and South America is to teach our neighbors to the south about democracy. The Alliance faces a tough enough job just in increasing literacy.
AFRICA will be an increasingly explosive trouble spot this year; there are 35 independent nations in Africa, most of them young and struggling. Mao will try to undermine some of them, and the propaganda wars between the Russians and the Chinese will cause even more unrest than in the good old days when only one Communist line was afoot in the world.
The African nations also form the largest single bloc in the U.N., where they are becoming ever more insistent about U.N. pressure on the remaining vestiges of European colonialism.
U. N. forces are scheduled to pull out of the Congo this year, and the departure of troops could set off more trouble there.
The Congo also will be the indirect cause of politicking in the U.N. The Soviet Union was two years in arrears on payments to the U.N. as of Jan. 1, and the U.N. charter says that any nation behind two years in its payments shall lose its vote in the General Assembly. Part of the U.S.S.R.'s debt is the assessment for the Congo action, which the Soviets refused to support.
France also has refused to pay its share of the Congo cost—France regarded the whole affair as "meddling"and will be two years in arrears in 1965.
And all those problems are just the obvious ones. There will undoubtedly arise new problems as the new year gets older.
Oh, yes. Eddie Fisher will break down and give Liz her divorce so she can marry Dick Burton-provided that individual still likes the idea.
Blaine King
‘Does It Seem to You To Be Getting Warmer?”
The President's Death Retold In 'Four Days'
FOUR DAYS: THE HISTORICAL RECORD OF THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, compiled by United Press International and American Heritage Mazagine (American Heritage, $2).
This is the 144-page text-and-picture book that has been advertised in the Daily Kansan, and that will be on sale, on a limited basis, by members of Sigma Delta Chi, professional society in journalism. The book will be worth your $2.
A lot of memorials to the late President have appeared in recent weeks, almost to the saturation point. If you want something you and your children will cherish in years to come, this is the book.
Start with the cover, hard-backed, in the familiar format of American Heritage, with an attractive full-color picture of Kennedy in the Dallas parade not long before the assassination. Take the over-all quality next. American Heritage does not do a shoddy job. The printing is excellent throughout, and the pictures are there that you would like to have there, if you, that is, spent most of four days sitting, shocked, before your television set.
BRUCE CATTON DID THE INTRODUCTION. It is a beautiful tribute, one that brings forth the exciting, vigorous, young man most Americans admired so much: "When the army bugler sent the haunting notes of 'Taps' across that grave in Arlington Cemetery he sounded a long goodbye and a commitment to eternal rest for John F. Kennedy. For all the rest of us, that was the trumpet of dawn itself."
the editors, true to the title of the book, break it into four sections representing the four days. Black Friday the 22nd shows us the President and his wife, greeting the crowd in Fort Worth. Then the greeting in Dallas, "Welcome to Big D." Then the happy photograph of the motorcade, grinning residents of Dallas lining the streets. Then the sniper's view of the presidential car, and the admittedly gruesome shots of the assassination itself.
That was the day of greatest horror, and the reader sees and reads about the other events of that day—the trip to the hospital, the unsuccessful efforts to save the President, the capture of Lee H. Oswald, the swearing-in, the return to the capital.
ONE OF THE TRULY EXCEPTIONAL PIECES of newspaper reporting of recent years is here intact—the eyewitness account by veteran White House reporter Merriman Smith. Saturday the 23rd recalls that cold Washington day, the White House vigil, the coffin, the stunned people of all nations, the great arriving to pay respects, that superb photograph of the White House worker removing the Kennedy rocking chair.
Sunday the 24th shows the caisson, bound for the capitol, the little family of Kennedy, a view from the rotunda, the tributes, and then that second act of violence, the slaying of Oswald by Jack Ruby that gave television viewers another look at brutality.
The final day, Monday the 25th, is the day of "Hail to the Chief," the cortege on its way to the church, the world's great walking through the street, the Kennedy brothers flanking the sorrowing widow, the funeral, the little boy in salute, the march across the bridge, and the ceremony at Arlington.
This is truly a monumental tribute. The editors, in a kind of appendix, offer the undelivered speech of the late President, the eulogies in the rotunda, resolutions of Congress, comments in the world press, personal statements, the order of the funeral march, the foreign dignitaries present, the eulogy at the funeral, and the prayer at the grave. -CMP