The Pixy & the Gladiators

"We're being pictured as the bastards in this fight," said a Washington lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation last week. "And we're happy to be tough enough to deserve the title." A few blocks away on Independence Avenue, a determined Farm Bureau foe was also warming to the fight. Night and day, Agriculture Secretary Orville L. Freeman, 43, was trying to find ways to shove his controversial farm bill through a balky Congress. "Nobody has mentioned compromise yet," said a Freeman aide. "The Secretary wants this bill and he's going all out to get it."

The battle between Freeman and the 1,600,000-member Farm Bureau has turned into one of the Kennedy Administration's bitterest frays. Both Freeman and the bureau have the same aim: to cut down the expense of the scandalous U.S. farm program, which last year cost $1 billion alone to maintain the mountain of surplus foods. Freeman would solve the problem by setting up the most elaborate system of acreage and production controls in U.S. history--and cut farmers off from almost all forms of Government aid if they did not accept those controls. The Farm Bureau favors fewer aids and fewer controls--and it views Freeman's all-or-nothing alternative as naked coercion.

No sooner did Freeman's program arrive on Capitol Hill in January than the Agriculture Secretary and the Farm Bureau began their duel to win over legislators. But the great gladiators overlooked Wisconsin's Democratic Senator William Proxmire, a political pixy who is fond of making dramatic displays of his independence. A member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Proxmire introduced a measure that would, in effect, scrap the Freeman proposals and continue the present farm program for another year. The Agriculture Committee adopted Proxmire's substitute by a 9-8 vote.

Despite this setback, the Administration had high hopes of restoring Freeman's program on the Senate floor. If approved by the Senate, the bill would go to the House, where the issue was close, the pressure was on--and the gladiators could get back to gladiating without worrying about Pixy Proxmire. About the only certain result of Proxmire's action was that he had made himself unpopular at the White House. Said a top Kennedy aide: "This guy cut us without warning.

He's an s.o.b. to pull a trick like that."

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