"Time for Unity"

Congress was a different body of men last week. The faces were the same, but the words had changed.

"I approve completely what has been done," said New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, long a sharp-tongued critic of Administration foreign policy. Sage old Charles Eaton, top Republican of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, agreed: "We've got a rattlesnake by the tail and the sooner we pound its damn head in, the better." Added Virginia's Democrat Harry Byrd, leader of the Dixie dissenters, "This is a time for unity, as we must win."

Zero Votes. The House, which only six months ago had voted down U.S. aid to Korea (and then sheepishly reversed itself) got busy too. It cut short debate on extending the peacetime draft, a red-hot issue suddenly cooled by the winds of necessity, and approved it 315 to 4. The Senate sent it along next day, 76 to 0. The President was thus assured of another year's power to draft 19-to 26-year-olds, and new power to call up the National Guard and the reserves in an emergency.

After the long days of partisan clamor, the Senate rushed through the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, a measure authorizing another $1.2 billion to arm Western Europe and to provide at least $16 million more for Korea and the Philippines. The vote: 66 to 0.

These unanimous and near-unanimous votes were significant, but they did not tell the whole story. The Senate was no longer a cave of winds echoing to the oratory of such agile and bitter isolationists as William Borah, Gerald Nye and Burton Wheeler. The dissenters of 1950 were less adept men, like Missouri's fuzz-tongued James P. Kem or Kenneth Wherry, the minority leader from Nebraska, or droning George Malone of Nevada. Conspicuous in their van last week stood the usually forceful and logical Robert A. Taft of Ohio. The President, said Taft, had no legal authority to take the measures he had taken.

Taft and Wherry announced that they would stand behind the President, but they had a few rocks in their hands when they said it, and quickly whizzed them off at Secretary of State Dean Acheson's elegant top hat. The Communist attack in Korea might well not have taken place, argued Taft, if the U.S. had given the South Koreans proper aid, and he thought Acheson "had better resign." Wherry loudly agreed. Now that the U.S. had decided to protect Formosa, as he had urged, said Taft, he felt vindicated. But Taft said nothing about Senate votes last September and again in May, to authorize multimillion-dollar aid to Korea. Among those who had voted against the bill, both times: Kenneth Wherry and Robert A. Taft.

Old Habits. Congress had reacted to the crisis quickly and well, but it did not shake all of its old habits. The House completed action on a bill cutting excise taxes, thereby restricting revenue at a time when more taxes would probably be needed; then dispersed for its ten-day Fourth of July holiday. The Senate calendar was still clogged with Fair Deal measures which had been debatable before, and were now clearly luxuries.

No one any longer thought that Congress would adjourn by Aug. 1 for the rest of the year. As long as the crisis lasted, Congress would stay in session.

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