The Third Imperative

The President of the U.S. grinned, joined heartily in renditions of Sweet Adeline and My Old Kentucky Home that rattled the ballroom chandeliers in Washington's staid Willard Hotel. But Dwight Eisenhower could hardly have been more serious when he finally stood up to speak to some 200 guests at a Republican National Committee dinner last week. Firmly and flatly, he placed the price of his endorsement of 1958 Republican congressional candidates at support for the three Administration programs he deemed "imperative" in meeting the challenge of Communism. The three: defense reorganization, mutual security and reciprocal trade.

Of the three, the foreign trade program was in the deepest trouble. Just how deep was indicated the day after the President's speech, when House Speaker Sam Rayburn summoned Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks to Capitol Hill. Also present at the closed-door meeting were House Republican Leader Joe Martin and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills. Rayburn's grim warning to Weeks: the foreign trade bill faces total defeat in the House unless the Administration backs away from its insistence on a five-year extension and increased presidential tariff-cutting authority.

Rayburn supported his warning with figures. In 1955, he recalled, 128 Democrats joined with 65 Republicans to put across, by a single vote, the three-year reciprocal trade bill that expires this year. But in recession year 1958, with Congressmen worried about competition from foreign imports, a recent secret poll taken by Democratic House Whip Carl Albert showed only go-plus Democrats willing to support the bill.

Behind Rayburn's warning also lay a political ploy, aimed at shifting the responsibility for diluting the reciprocal trade bill from the Democratic Congress to the Republican Administration. Rayburn's friend and proteegee, Democrat Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, suffered a humiliating defeat when the House recently voted down a dole-type unemployment-compensation bill approved by his Ways & Means Committee (TIME, May 12). Hopeful of succeeding Rayburn as Speaker one day, Mills was desperately anxious to avoid even the possibility of a similar defeat. But as a longtime supporter of reciprocal trade, he was also anxious to avoid the blame for gutting the Administration bill. He therefore appealed to Sam Rayburn for help in tossing the responsibility back to the Administration--and he got it in the form of the ultimatum to Commerce's Weeks.

Sinclair Weeks refused to cooperate. "We still want that bill," said he. But getting it was entirely another thing--and if the 24-year-old reciprocal trade program, third and perhaps most important of Dwight Eisenhower's imperatives, was not to be killed or turned into a basket case, it would require all the political pressure the President could bring to bear.

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