The Week in Review
Tuesday, March 5, 1963 University Daily Kansan
GOP Makes Cuban Hay In Preparation For '64
Not for 15 more months will the American voters go to the polls again to state their preferences for president, Senate and House. But "64" already has become the watchword, and the Cuban story, with its many ramifications, is giving good cheer to the sometimes disheartened Republican party.
Ted Lewis of the New York Daily News wrote (and it should be noted that neither he nor his newspaper is pro-Kennedy) that the Republicanans may regret their decision to exploit the issue of Cuba. It was last week in which Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois made note of the death of four American filers in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Dirksen's disclosure rapidly stirred anew the controversy over the disastrous attempt to overthrow Premier Fidel Castro.
THE SYNDICATED columnists debated the wisdom of the Republicans making Cuba their all-out issue so far in advance of the 1964 elections. Doris Fleeson noted that Sen. Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, who has never been exactly an adherent to Democratic policies, has wiped out bipartisanship with nary a tear.
Last week's developments had the surface air of offering ample ammunition to the Republicans. More and more there seemed to be lack of interest in playing along with administration positions visa-vis Cuba and communism.
Hickenlooper did this as such Republican liberals as Sens. Cooper of Kentucky and Javits of New York spoke for a continuance of bipartisanship — real bipartisanship, in which the GOP might help shape policies and not merely ratify them.
There were sharp attacks on the lying and hypocrisy — as critics phrased it — that had come to characterize the Kennedy news policy. But the Daily News' Lewis observed that it was the Central Intelligence Agency — that much-attacked law-unto-itself empire in government — which practically forced the reluctant leaders in the White House to conceal the Bay of Pigs deaths.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried it last week, with a guarantee that Castro will not be permitted to export armed attack from Cuba. And the debate over the Russian troops which remain in Cuba merely intensifies the quarrel. A report by the CIA's McCone won't help—he divulged that at least 1,000 to 1,500 Latin Americans went to Cuba last year for sabotage and guerilla training. And more are still going.
LEWIS OBSERVED that both Allen Dulles, former CIA chief, and John McCone, the present CIA boss, are good Republicans. But it seems highly unlikely right now that anything short of a tremendous Democratic victory in Cuba could quiet the Republicans.
Every so often someone — frequently someone who was irritated by the Kennedy charges at the time they were made — makes note of what we might call the prestige image of the United States, to use a term quite symbolic of the sixties. Many will recall that Kennedy made hay of the reported decline in American prestige during the Eisenhower era.
THE KENNEDY administration has been interestingly evasive about how it stacks up in respect to prestige. Last week the U.S. Information Agency let some reports leak out, but they were too old to tell much. After all, what people elsewhere in the world thought of Kennedy in January 1961, before he had a chance to perform, means little to us now.
As the bickering over Cuba continued with little let-up, there were pussy-footing moves between Peking and Moscow Communist leaders. Conversations perhaps aimed at rapprochement took place in both Moscow and Peking. In Moscow, Premier Khrushchev continued what has been his thematic
contribution to Marxism — the need for peaceful coexistence.
U. S.-SOVIET relations remained the focal point of much of the week's news; it takes little effort these days to link many news stories to the cold war. Secretary McNamara of the Defense Department reported last week that long-range reconnaissance planes from Russia have been flying low over American aircraft carrier task forces in both Atlantic and Pacific for more than a month.
And at Geneva, that storied city of conferring world leaders, the disarmament talks seemed likely to fold as the Russians refused any part of talks on details of a test-ban treaty unless the West accepts Russian offers to two or three onsite inspections against nuclear cheating each year.
If Cuba was the chief problem spot in foreign affairs for President Kennedy, the tax program was the chief problem spot in domestic affairs. The President made a blunder of some significance last week; addressing the American Bankers Association at a symposium, Kennedy said he wants Congress to vote a tax cut of at least $10 billion this year, even if it means an end to tax reform.
Kennedy apparently made this as a slip more than as a calculated policy comment, and the slip is interpreted as a blow to Secretary Dillon of the Treasury Department. Tax reform is important to the administration, and opponents of tax reform were given ammunition by the President's blunder. Another area where the President may be in for trouble is in his medicare proposals.
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