Imperatives on the Up

President Eisenhower's three legislative "imperatives" met with their inevitable ups and downs on Capitol Hill, but as Congress pushed toward August adjournment, all three were on the way up--bruised but not lamed. Congressional adventures of the Big Three last week:

Defense Reorganization. Running a rough congressional equivalent of a four-minute mile, a joint conference took just 27 minutes to smooth over differences between the Senate and House versions (TIME, July 28). Without further debate, both houses then okayed the bill and sent it to the White House. Said the President: "Except in relatively minor respects, the bill adequately meets every recommendation I submitted to the Congress on this subject."

The major achievement of the new bill is that it notably streamlines the Defense Secretary's operational command over the armed services, acting through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For its part, Congress keeps the power to challenge, within 30 days, presidential orders transferring functions from one service to another in peacetime, also keeps open the right of service chiefs to appeal directly to Congress.

Foreign Aid. Texas' Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and other Senate chieftains were laying plans to put back at least two-thirds of the House's $600 million slash in foreign aid appropriations.

Reciprocal Trade. Before passing the Administration bill by a resounding vote of 72 to 16, the Senate knocked out the Senate Finance Committee's most damaging piece of butcherwork: a provision that the President may not overrule Tariff Commission recommendations for higher tariffs unless majority votes in both houses of Congress back him up (TIME, July 21). Co-sponsors of the amendment to undo the Finance Committee damage: Majority Leader Johnson and California's Minority Leader William Fife Knowland, joining forces in an overwhelming coalition. "This was not a party matter," said Johnson. "This was Congress standing there together telling Khrushchev to take a look." Concentrating on winning the major victory, Johnson and Knowland left it up to a Senate-House conference to work on some of the other changes that the Finance Committee wrote into the House-passed bill, e.g., the committee slashed the bill's time span from five years to three and the President's maximum tariff-cutting authority from 25% to 15%. Likely conference result: a four-year, 20% compromise. That would still be something of a victory for the Administration's freer-trade program: the original reciprocal trade act has been extended ten times since its birth in 1934, but never for more than three years at a stretch.

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