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Summer Session Kansan Friday. June 22,1962
Keys to the New Frontier
The march to the "New Frontier" is the battle-cry of the Kennedy administration.
Medicare, tax cuts, foreign trade and the Common Market, civil rights, aid to communist countries are only a part of the area Kennedy plans to set right.
But, as does every president, Kennedy must push his plans through Congress. Toward this end, two men, both Democrats, one a Senator and the other Speaker of the House, are a primary key in the opening of the door of the New Frontier.
THEY ARE Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Speaker John McCormack from Massachusetts. Both men stepped
into big shoes—Mansfield follows hard-hitting Lyndon B. Johnson; McCormack follows the popular late Sam Rayburn. They are judged in Washington on the basis of how well they compare to their predecessors. Nationally, they will be judged on how they handle the problem of putting the New Frontier through Congress.
Now, at the start of the Congressional session, with portions of President Kennedy's legislative program in deep trouble, a United Press International reporter has interviewed both men and looked at their record. His focus on these two pivot men of the New Frontier appears on this page.
—Karl Koch
Sen. Mansfield
'Nice Guy' in Tough Spot
EDITOR'S NOTE: There is an old saying that nice guys always finish last. Few would dispute that Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield is a nice guy. Less certain is where he will finish in his effort to push President Kennedy's legislative program to passage in the House. His official dispatch deals with his record and his own analysis of it.
By Louis Cassels United Press International
WASHINGTON—A member of the Senate press gallery refers to Sen. Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., as "the Bucky Harris of senate leaders."
Baseball fans will get the point. Others may need to be told that Bucky Harris is famous among baseball managers for being a nice guy who hates to push people around the way you sometimes have to do to win a pennant.
That Mike Mansfield is an awfully nice guy is one proposition that would muster a unanimous, bipartisan vote in the Senate. Few members of the Senate are as well-liked and completely trusted as the quiet, unassuming, straight-shooting Mansfield.
Under different circumstances, he might also have been regarded as a forceful majority leader. But it was his fate to follow the hard-driving, flamboyantly successful Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mansfield is well aware that his own easy-going approach suffers in the eyes of some by comparison with his predecessor's penchant for getting things done.
"LYNDON WAS a better leader than I am, by far," he told a reporter who recently visited him in his simply-furnished, readily-accessible office adjacent to the senate floor.
When the reporter's face registered surprise at this candid statement, Mansfield shifted his pipe and undertook to elaborate.
"Lyndon was a very dynamic leader," he said. "He had a keen sense of timing and drama. He got a lot of legislation passed which a Republican president vetoed. When I succeeded him as Democratic Leader (in January, 1961) I had that foundation to work on. During my first year, we were able to re-pass a number of bills for which Lyndon had laid the foundation.
"This year I've been more on my own, and the going has been more difficult as a result."
"Senator," said the reporter, "that is the most modest statement I've ever heard a politician make."
Mansfield shrugged.
"It's the truth," he said.
IT IS NOT, however, the whole truth. If Mansfield has rammed through fewer administration bills than Johnson was wont to do, the reason is not that he lacks ability. Most of his colleagues would rate him one of the most competent legislators in either chamber of Congress. The Senate's slower pace under his leadership reflects Mansfield's unwillingness to use some of the methods of pressure, persuasion and cajolery which Johnson used skillfully, and in the opinion of some senators, ruthlessly.
"I am not an arm-twister," Mansfield explained. "I don't believe in it. You might win for the time being but you leave scars that will come back to haunt you later."
Whether the administration's legislative program will fare better over the long run in the Senate under Mansfield's gentle rein rather than Johnson's whip is a judgment which cannot yet be made. So far this session, as Mansfield acknowledged, the record is not one to cause great elation at the White House. The administration's tax reform bill, approved by the House, is in deep trouble
in the Senate Finance Committee. Hearings have not even begun on the trade bill, and not a single major appropriations bill has been finally enacted for the new fiscal year which begins July 1.
MANSFIELD'S DESIRE to push President Kennedy's program has never been questioned. Aside from party loyalty, he is a warm friend and admirer of Kennedy.
"I couldn't work with a better President, or one who thinks more nearly along the same lines as I do," he said.
Mansfield is 57. He is a lean, wiry man who looks as though he keeps in shape with frequent exercise. Actually, his only athletic activity consists of an occasional solo round of golf at a nine-hole course on the grounds of the old soldiers' home.
Mansfield qualifies as an "old" soldier, and also as an "old" sailor and Marine. He is one of the few men, in or out of Congress, who has served hitches in all three services.
HE WAS 14 years old, and in the eighth grade at Great Falls, Mont., when the United States entered World War I. He ran away from home, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Navy, where he served for two years as an able seaman. After the war, he served one year in the Army, and then transferred to the Marine Corps, which sent him to China for street patrol duty in Shanghai.
"It's a very exclusive club," he said between puffs on his pipe. "Dues are $2.50 a month."
He remained at the university, as a professor of Latin American and Far Eastern history, until he ran for Congress, and was elected, in 1942. His background as a scholar is still evident, both in his addiction to tweed jackets and pipes, and in his recreational activities, which consist mainly of reading and listening to good music on his hi-fi set.
These youthful adventures left him with an abiding interest in the Far East and the conviction that he needed more education. He made up for what he'd missed in high school by intensive reading, passed the entrance examinations at college, and by 1934 had a Master's degree and a post on the faculty at Montana State University.
MANSFIELD SERVED 10 years as a member of the House, taking an active interest in foreign relations. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent him to China to inspect conditions there. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman sought to make him an assistant secretary of state. He chose to remain in Congress.
Elected to the Senate in 1952, he served on the Foreign Relations Committee, and acquired a reputation as a leading congressional authority on complex Far East problems. This reputation accounts for the attentive hearing he got, both in Congress and "downtown" at the White House and State Department, when he appealed in a speech earlier this month for a hard, critical reconsideration of America's whole foreign policy in Asia.
LIKE PRESIDENT Kennedy and Speaker John W. McCormack, Mansfield is Irish by descent, and a member of the Roman Catholic Church. His father, Patrick, was an immigrant from Kilkenny and was working as a hotel porter in New York when his first son was born. The son was christened Michael Joseph Mansfield, but no one has ever called him anything but Mike, and that is now his "official" name in the Congressional Directory. The Mansfields moved to Montana when Mike was three, and he grew up in Great Falls.
Speaker McCormack Behind the Master
EDITOR'S NOTE: The man who follows the master historically is at an initial disadvantage, whatever his qualifications. When John W. McCormack be- come a member of the company he was working with, the job formerly held by the late Sam Rayburn. The following dispatch describes his record and gives his views of the task confronting him.
By Louis Cassels United Press International
WASHINGTON—When John W. McCormack was elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives last Jan. 10, one of his colleagues remarked:
"I don't envy him. Sam Rayburn is a mighty tough act to follow."
No one knew this better than McCormack. He had served for 21 years as Rayburn's loyal deputy. When he finally ascended to the speakership at the age of 70, he knew his performance inevitably would be compared with that of his immensely popular predecessor, who died of cancer last Nov. 16.
That the comparison has not been wholly favorable to the new speaker will surprise no political realist, least of all McCormack.
As the House approaches the windup phase of its first session under his gavel, some members are complaining that he has failed to provide sufficiently vigorous leadership. Others are saying that while of course he's not Mr. Sam, he has done a very good job on the whole.
CRITICS ASSERT that House committees are not getting their legislative work done as expeditiously as Rayburn demanded. They say that appropriation bills in particular have fallen behind schedule in a way that the late Texan would never have tolerated. They charge McCormack with inept handling of the Philippine claims bill, which suffered a surprise defeat in the House, at great cost to U.S. relations with a valued ally.
On the other side of the leoger, McCormack is credited with a masterful job of steering the administration's tax and debt limit bills to House passage. And there is general agreement that, if he has not achieved the impossible feat of filling Rayburn's shoes, he has at least succeeded in quitting certain apprehensions which were expressed at the time of his election.
Recalling his zest for partisan warfare during his long years as floor leader, Republicans had wondered how this all-out Democrat could adjust to the relati/ely impartial role of speaker.
McCormack assured them on the day of his election that he would conduct his new office "without regard to party affiliation." And most members agree he has bent over backwards to make good on that pledge. Even in his daily news conferences—a forum which Rayburn often used to needle the Republicans—McCormack maintains a studied non-partisanship.
BECAUSE HE is the first Roman Catholic to serve as speaker, and because he has been notably devoted to his church, some Protestants were fearful he might be subservient to the Catholic hierarchy. They noted in this connection that he sided with the Catholic bishops and against the administration in the 1961 battle over federal aid to education.
A few days after he took office, McCormack invited a group of Protestant leaders to the speaker's rooms at the Capitol for a two-hour conference. He told them he had a high regard for all churches, and that no religious group would have legitimate occasion to accuse him of unfairness as speaker. To date, none has.
Before and for some time after McCormack took over the second most powerful post in the government, there was a good deal of nervousness in Democratic quarters about how he would get along with President Kennedy.
The 70-year-old speaker and the 45-year-old president have in common Boston nativity, Irish blood and Catholic faith. But these similarities are perhaps less important than this further fact: both are Democratic politicians from Massachusetts, whose ambitions have collided in the past, and who currently are confronted with a situation in which the brother of one and the nephew of the other are battling for the Democratic Senate nomination in their home state.
If there is a Kennedy-McCormack political feud, as capital gossip has proclaimed for many years, it is being waged by mutual consent in Massachusetts rather than Washington. The strongest Kennedy supporters in the House acknowledge that McCormack has gone down the line for the administration's legislative program with unswerving loyalty.
SITTING IN his ornate, high-ceilinged office, just off the House floor, McCormack told a recent visitor that his relationships with the president are "excellent."
"It has never been remotely alluded to between us," the Speaker replied. "We are both big enough men not to let a thing like that affect our ability to work together for the good of the country."
"Have the two of you ever discussed the hot Senate race in Massachusetts between your nephew Edward and his brother Ted?"
McCormack is a tall, lean man with a long, bony face. He looks rather like a New England schoolmaster, and this impression is heightened by his white hair and rimless glasses. He wears gray pin-striped suits, whose pockets invariably bulge with papers. His one concession to the popular image of an Irish politician is a predilection for cigars, which he uses both for smoking and for waving in great, eloquent gestures.
He is a political orator of the old school, fond of rolling phrases. During his years as Democratic floor leader, he proved himself a master of the polite insult, which is the only kind permitted under
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