Painful Reappraisals

One prediction in President Kennedy's State of the Union message last January has proved to be dismally accurate. "The news," he said, "will be worse before it is better." Last week, as John F. Kennedy closed out the first 100 days of his Administration, the U.S. had suffered a month-long series of setbacks rare in the history of the Republic. First came Russia's man-in-space triumph. Then the shockingly bungled invasion of Cuba. Finally, and belatedly, came the sickening realization that U.S.-backed Laos was about to go down the Communist drain.

Loss in Laos. Back in March, the President spoke determinedly of a U.S. "response" if the Russians failed to halt their aggression-by-proxy in Laos. Declared he: "No one should doubt our resolution." But Nikita Khrushchev obviously did. He stalled off Kennedy's proposed cease-fire for five weeks, stepped un the Communist Pathet Lao's guerrilla offensive. By the time Khrushchev finally agreed to a cease-fire last week, the Communist troops controlled about half of Laos. Even after the British-Russian announcement of a cease-fire agreement, the rebels stayed on the offensive. When and if the Communists go to the Laos peace conference, scheduled for mid-May in Geneva, they will appear not as plaintiffs pleading their case but as military victors dictating their terms (see THE WORLD). The U.S. had been cozened into standing by until it was too late--and Khrushchev had made it look easy.

At midweek President Kennedy summoned Democratic congressional leaders to a White House conference on the Laos crisis. They came out of the meeting grim-faced and tightlipped. "It was very distressing," said one, "very distressing." At week's end, with the news from Laos getting more distressing by the hour, the President called the National Security Council into session for the third time in eight days.

Time to Sing Bass. In the midst of his cold war harassments, Kennedy kept up his pursuit of national unity, begun the week before in face-to-face talks with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Last week, filling out the G.O.P. spectrum, he met with New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller at the White House, and later, visiting New York City for the first time since his inauguration huddled with Elder Republicans Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur.

The Republican leaders consulted by Kennedy responded handsomely, promising him their fullest cooperation. But some others seemed less willing to remain silent in the face of setback. Snapped G.O.P. National Chairman Thruston B. Morton: "The time has come for our Government to sing bass in world affairs and not take refuge in shrill Byzantine ambiguities."

Beyond Moratorium. To have any meaningful influence on the course of the cold war, national unity has to be something more than a moratorium on criticisms of the President: there must be a set of policies for the nation to unite upon. So far, Kennedy has failed to provide that set of policies. Last week he made two public speeches--but in neither did he put forward specific proposals for action. In New York he used his speech to the Bureau of Advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers Association to urge the press to refrain from publishing stories that are not "in the national interest" (see THE PRESS). In a speech to a Democratic gathering in Chicago, he spoke bracing words about the vast efforts that would be needed to win the cold war. But he left his listeners wondering just what he was calling upon them to do.

Astir in the Administration was a conviction that something must be done--if anybody could produce any ideas. This activism without policies was exemplified by a series of talks that Adolf A. Berle, head of the President's task force on Lat in America, held with Latino diplomats. Berle was trying to round up Latin American support for sanctions against Fidel Castro (see THE HEMISPHERE), but he had to be pretty vague about it because the Administration had not made up its own mind what measures it wanted to undertake.

Momentum of Events. If John F. Kennedy was a President still in search of policies, he had at least decided that the Administration's policymaking machinery needed overhauling. He felt that the professionals in the Pentagon, the State Department and CIA had failed him. In the months ahead, there would certainly be some personnel shifts reflecting a new pecking order (see following stories) and involving CIA Chief Allen Dulles on the down side and Brother Bobby and Longtime Aide Ted Sorensen on the up. To remedy diffusion of responsibility, the President decreed a new system under which a single official, armed with special interdepartmental authority, will oversee each cold war battleground. As a start, he put Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell L. Gilpatric in charge of Laos, and Assistant Defense Secretary Paul H. Nitze in charge of Cuba.

It was all to the good to be overhauling administrative machinery that had performed unsatisfactorily. But the momentum of cold war events had surged past the point where administrative tinkering or eloquent rhetoric could serve as a substitute for solid policies and decisive action. "I'm so tired of words," said a Washington correspondent, reflecting a feeling also prevalent outside the capital that it was time to stop making nagging speeches and get down to work.

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