The Fight That Wasn't Made

Last March, urging Congress to enact the Randall Commission's tariff recommendations, President Eisenhower said: "If we fail in our trade policy, we may fail in all. Our domestic employment, our standard of living, our security and the solidarity of the free world--all are involved. "Last week Senate Democrats underlined the President's failure to fight for a program that he had said was necessary.

Bottle & Press. When the Eisenhower Administration took office, it had no foreign-trade policy--although the materials out of which one might have been fashioned had been at hand for years. The Randall Commission, appointed to study trade policy, brought forth a plan that it advertised as imperfect but politically practical--a plan which Congress would adopt. The chairman, Inland Steel Co.'s Clarence Randall, assuring himself that he could win support from key congressional members of his commission, undertook to make compromises that reduced the President's bargaining power with Congress.

Chairman Eugene Millikin of the Senate Finance Committee promptly dissented from the Randall report, thereby showed that Randall's assurance was misplaced.

Nevertheless, Dwight Eisenhower adopted the Randall proposals as his own and sent them to Capitol Hill.

There they came before the House Ways & Means Committee's Chairman Dan Reed, who last year had set up a roadblock on Administration bills in his committee. This year the Administration was so pleased by signs of cooperation from a mollified Reed that it leaned over backwards to accommodate him. The result was a deal in which Reed agreed not to bottle up the Administration's social-security expansion bill if the Administration would not press for its trade and tariff program, except for a simple one-year extension of Reciprocal Trade Agreements authority. What the Administration got Reed probably could not have bottled up anyway; social security has the fond approval of most Congressmen, and a majority of Reed's committee already wanted the one-year trade-agreement extension. With the contented smile of a cat after swallowing the canary, Dan Reed proclaimed: "I'm part of the Administration." Maple & Vine. Democrats saw a way to make political hay of the President's abrupt retreat. Tennessee's Freshman Senator Albert Gore announced that he would try to substitute the Randall proposals (threeyear extension, authority to cut all tariffs 5% per year) for the one-year extension.

Said Gore: "If for the second year in a row the supporters of international trade kept silent, the sentiment for world trade might start to wither on the vine. And the rest of the world might get the wrong idea of what we really stand for." Gore's ideas about world trade go back to his early days in Carthage, Tenn., when, as a young schoolteacher, he made friends with a fellow townsman named Cordell Hull. Sometimes, when Gore met Hull on the Courthouse Square, they would sit on the roots of a big sugar-maple tree, and the Secretary of State-to-be would talk about life in Washington.

Recently, 20 years after Cordell Hull inaugurated his Reciprocal Trade Agreements policy, Albert Gore visited old Cordell Hull in his Washington hotel, then opened his free-trade drive on the Senate floor. The Administration, he charged, had a "do-nothing policy." Illinois' Paul Douglas asked: "Is it not an extraordinary spectacle ... to have the Democratic Senators fighting for the President's program, over the opposition of virtually all the Republican Senators?" Colorado's Republican Gene Millikin replied, setting off a bizarre exchange:

Millikin: We are fighting for the President's program, as set forth in writing.

Douglas: At what time?

Millikin: The last time the President spoke.

Douglas: But what about the time before?

Millikin: I am not talking about the time before. I am speaking of the time when the President said he wanted a one-year extension.

Douglas: After the Republican Senators frightened and intimidated the poor man . . .

Gore, lacking help from his party's official leadership, did not expect his substitute to pass, but the vote (32, all Democrats, to 45) showed that, with a little White House backing, it would have passed: a switch by only seven Republican Senators was needed. Eisenhower had waited too long to take a position; then had asked, through Randall's hopeful compromises, for too little; then spread the word that he intended to fight for this minimum; then had retreated without a fight. There was no reason to think that next year would be a better time to revive the issue. As matters stood this week, the foreign-economic-policy fiasco was one of the worst failures of the Eisenhower Administration.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.