New York, December 19.

President-elect John Kennedy sat down this evening with Vice-President-elect Lyndon Johnson and the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, at his father’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, to decide on the first legislation he will propose to the new Congress and the best strategy to win it.

The two tasks must always go hand in hand in a country where the “Opposition” is no single party but a dominating coalition of like-minded men in both parties. The next session of Congress will test the President’s strategic guile more than usual, because three of the four earliest bills he wants to bring up were strangled in the abortive emergency session of Congress called by Senator Johnson, then the Democratic leader, between the conventions and the election. They were:



Medical care for the aged, to be financed through the social security system;

A depressed areas bill;

A bill for federal aid to education; and

The raising of the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25.

“Clownish strategy” over

Superficially, one might assume that once bitten, Mr Kennedy would shy away from forcing the same medicine down the same gullets. But the defiance of the emergency session did not spring from genuine distaste for the legislation itself; it was a resentment of being bullied by the Democratic nominees into swallowing the more lurid patent medicines that were being hawked to the voter.

The Messrs Kennedy and Johnson wanted to prove how heartless and reactionary was the Republican Party, and to be sure there was no slip-up they contrived their own emergency bills in a highly spiced form certain to invite an Eisenhower veto if by chance the Republicans missed their cue and demonstrated their liberalism. For his part, Eisenhower called the liberal bluff of the Democrats by offering several idealistic bills (especially a radical one on civil rights) that the Democrats would he certain to reject. It was a clownish strategy on both sides forgivable only in the hectic midsummer of a presidential campaign. And it didn’t work.



Now, under the mellower aspect of the Star of Bethlehem, both the conservative Southerners and the leaders of the Republicans in Congress have assured Mr Kennedy that they have no animus against him or objection on principle to the legislation he is sketching out. The minority leader in the Senate, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, said last night that the aim of his party will be “to modify, not to oppose” the new President’s legislative programme.



The Southerners, who will always be suspicious of any bold civil rights legislation, are highly pleased with the choice of Governor Hodges of North Carolina as Secretary of Commerce and with the conservative implications of Mr Douglas Dillon’s appointment to the Treasury. Their leader in the Senate, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who took an immediate stand against Senator Kennedy’s old-age health bill in the emergency session, has told the President-elect he is ready to support it with only token changes.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest U.S. President John F. Kennedy in a meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson ( right), at the White House in Washington, D.C., March 1961. Photograph: Henry Burroughs/AP

South’s quid pro quo

It sounds as if Mr Kennedy, Mr Rayburn, Senator Johnson (and his successor as majority leader, Senator Mike Mansfield, who will arrive tomorrow morning) would make up a happy quartet in Florida. But there is a quid pro quo for the Southerners’ benevolence. Their support for Mr Kennedy’s legislation, both early and late, is promised on the not so tacit understanding that the new President will make no real effort to abolish their ancient weapon of the filibuster by changing the Senate’s notorious Rule 22.

It requires a two thirds vote of all senators present and voting to cut off debate on any bill. The Southerners cherish it as the only means of talking civil rights legislation to death. The Democratic liberals in the Senate, who in the first flush of victory assumed that Senator Kennedy was their man, want to change the rule, or weaken it by requiring only a simple majority to enforce the closure.



Mr Kennedy’s first problem with the new Congress will be to flirt with the South long enough to get his social legislation passed, and yet to convince the Liberals that half his heart belongs to them.

