Democratic Debacle

So hushed with suspense was the Senate that the few muffled coughs in the crowded galleries echoed across the chamber. Veteran Capitol correspondents had never seen before, during a Senate roll call, so many individual Senators intently keeping their own running tallies of the votes. As the tension mounted. Vice President Richard Nixon got up from a seat in the back of the chamber and walked over to Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Hugh Scott to watch Scott's tally sheet. On the Democratic side of the aisle, John F. Kennedy sat somber-faced, his chin propped on one hand, his other hand nervously fiddling with a pencil. It was the most dramatic scene of Congress' postscript session: the nip-and-tuck roll call on the Kennedy-backed proposal to provide compulsory medical care for the aged.

When the clerk finished droning his way through the roll, the tally stood at 46 nays, 42 ayes. Dick Nixon swung behind the chair of New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits, his top Senate ally in the medical-care battle, and smilingly patted him on the shoulder. Jack Kennedy stood up and stalked out of the chamber.

The Leader's Leader. Candidate Kennedy's defeat marked the collapse of the high political hopes he had brought to Washington two weeks earlier: hopes of getting through Congress a parcel of New Frontier welfare measures that would pay off in votes in November, whether the

President signed the bills or vetoed them. So sure had Kennedy been of success that he moved out in front of his vice-presidential running mate, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, to lead the fight. He even opened a new office next to Johnson's and, as "the leader's leader," made it clear that he was in command.

Kennedy's brightest hope was the plan to provide free medical care, including up to 120 days' hospitalization, for everybody aged 68 or older on the federal social security rolls, with a one-fourth of 1% increase in social security taxes to pay the cost. In staking his prestige on that sweeping plan, Kennedy underestimated the strength of Southern opposition. Shortly before the vote, Majority

Leader Johnson sent Kennedy word that, with most of the Southerners dead set against the social security plan, and with the American Medical Association lobby working beaverishly against it, Kennedy needed some Republican votes to win.

Holding the Line. Nixon had been working behind the scenes to make sure that Kennedy did not get the needed Republican votes. On Senate social wel fare measures, liberal Republicans such as New York's Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, New Jersey's Clifford Case and Maine's Margaret Chase Smith, some times vote with liberal Democrats against the Senate's conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. To possible line-crossers, Nixon forces argued: G.O.P. votes for the Kennedy proposal would help Kennedy in November and therefore hurt Nixon.

An hour before the roll call on the Kennedy plan, Kennedy took the floor and pleaded for Republican help. By doing so, he pointed up the disunity in his own party, blurred the image of strong leadership that he had tried to create. He needed "at least five or six" Republican votes, said Kennedy. Replied Javits: "You ask us to endorse this. I am sorry, sir, but this is not the season for that." On the roll call, 19 Democrats, mostly Southerners, deserted Kennedy; only a single Republican, New Jersey's Case, deserted Nixon. Then the Senate proceeded to pass a modest bill providing medical aid only for "needy" old people, in a joint federal-state program to be administered by the individual states. After a few nicks by a Senate-House conference, the bill got through the House in fair shape to escape a presidential veto.

The Rule of Rules. The rest of Kennedy's legislative program shortly met with an utter rout in the House at the hands of Virginia's leathery old Howard W. Smith, who has been a Congressman since Kennedy was 13 years old. The consent of Chairman Smith's powerful Rules Committee is needed to send a House bill into Senate-House conference. Backed up by the committee's long-time alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats, conservative "Judge" Smith handed Northern Democrats a tough warning: the committee would kill off Kennedy's $1.25-an-hour minimum-wage bill by bottling up the House bill (thus forestalling a House-Senate conference to work out a joint version) unless they agreed to bury the remainder of the Kennedy short-session program--housing, federal aid to education and a bill to ease Taft-Hartley restrictions on picketing at construction sites.

To rescue the minimum-wage measure from Smith's clutches, House Democrats had to agree to his terms. Even so, the House and Senate minimum-wage bills went to a conference loaded with conservatives, and it looked as if the final measure would be close to the House version (calling for $1.15 an hour, with coverage extended to 1,400,000 additional workers). "This isn't Kennedy's Congress," said one Kennedy man. "It's Judge Smith's Congress."

With Jack Kennedy thoroughly trounced--by Dick Nixon in the Senate and by Howard Smith in the House--all that remained of the original Kennedy-Johnson list of short-session "must" measures was the only genuine, non-politicking item in the lot: foreign-aid appropriations. At week's end, despite a stern warning from Ike that "a cut of this size will jeopardize the security of the country," both houses voted $3.7 billion for foreign aid--$560 million less than the President had asked for. (Afterward, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended an additional appropriation to restore $190 million of the cut.) That done, Kennedy, Johnson & Co. made ready to get the disastrous post-convention session over with and get out of town. Asked by a newsman whether he thought that the Democrats had made a mistake in scheduling the post-convention session of Congress, Kennedy showed the strain. "I didn't recess it," he snapped, "and I didn't bring it back."

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