THE CREATIVE TENSION BETWEEN PRESIDENT & SENATE

THE Senator from Kentucky was speaking about the President of the U.S.: "In one hand he holds the purse, and in the other he brandishes the sword of the country. What more does he want?" The Senator from Massachusetts compared the President to Briareus, the 100-handed giant of Greek mythology: "He touches everything, moves everything, controls everything. I ask, sir, is this legal responsibility?"

The critics were Henry Clay and Daniel Webster; the President thus chastised was Andrew Jackson. Throughout U.S. history, the Senate and the Chief Executive have stood in a special relationship, which, at its best, has been a form of creative tension. At times the tension was relaxed to the point of subservience by the White House to the Hill and, occasionally, vice versa; at other times it was heightened into open, relentless hostility. To date, no Senator has publicly used Webster's sort of language about Lyndon Johnson, although Johnson seems to have considerably more than 100 hands. Still, the long Viet Nam debate has sharply renewed the state of tension between the President and the Senate.

Watching TV during the last few weeks, Americans saw the spectacle of a half circle of rumpled men on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--Chairman William Fulbright peering over his spectacles like a country-store sage, Oregon's Wayne Morse flailing a limp arm, Vermont's George Aiken beaming avuncularly for the cameras--all of them questioning or baiting Administration witnesses and, through the witnesses, Lyndon Johnson. In the end only five Senators voted against tabling a motion rescinding the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution, which had authorized the President to take all necessary action in Southeast Asia. But perhaps two dozen other Senators, while refusing to vote against the Commander in Chief, were nevertheless known to have serious reservations about Administration policy. Almost to a man, the critics were Democrats in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. They were thus at odds not only with their party's leader but with a President justly famed for his unsurpassed mastery in handling the Senate.

The dissent was far from a revolt against Johnson and was much milder than some of the Senate's historic uprisings against the White House. It was a challenge nonetheless, and a reassertion of the Senate's constitutional mandate to give "advice and consent" to all treaties and, by projection, to all U.S. foreign policies. Irritating as it may seem in times of crisis, the founding fathers intended that the Senate should act in just this way--as a chamber of deliberate counsel, second thoughts and extended debate, a guardian against rashness on the part either of the popularly elected lower House or of the President. The Senate has had its greater and its lesser days--and at any given time its current members usually suffer by comparison with the "giants" of a nostalgically remembered past. It has, in fact, changed and renewed itself often, reflecting the facts of American history and politics from the smallest matters of patronage to the highest questions of principle.

Test of Will

Britain's Prime Minister William Gladstone called the Senate "the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics." Most Americans--excepting Senators--were then, and would be now, astonished at such an encomium. The Senate was formed chiefly because the smaller states feared that they would be outvoted and overwhelmed if the only legislative body was apportioned by population alone. To reassure them, the framers of the Constitution agreed to add a second House, in which each state, regardless of size, should have two delegates who should be selected by the state legislatures as "ambassadors" of their states to the national Government.

Senators considered themselves remote from popular passions and found no embarrassment in having Aaron Burr preside over them after his murderous duel with Alexander Hamilton. They felt responsible only to themselves and their own sense of grandeur--and that sense, taken seriously, may force a certain largeness of spirit on the pettiest of men. They early established the tradition that any Senator, with only minimal procedural exceptions, can rise at any time to speak on any subject, and from this right evolved the Senate's unique place as the arena where a minority can make itself heard. Said Daniel Webster: "This is a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence, who know no master and acknowledge no dictation." As for the President, Connecticut's Roger Sherman described "the executive magistracy as nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the legislature into effect."

The first test of will happened only four months after Washington's Inauguration, when he dutifully called upon the Senate to ask its advice and consent to a treaty with Southern Indians. He brought with him his Secretary of War to explain the details. The treaty was read aloud, but because of the noise of passing carriages, some Senators complained that they had not grasped it and, refusing to be hurried, moved to send the bill to a committee for study. "This defeats every purpose of my coming here," said Washington, who, according to an eyewitness, was "in a violent fret." Two days later, the President returned; he watched as the Senate rewrote the treaty before his eyes. During the episode, he snapped: "I'll be damned if I ever go there again!"

He never did--on treaty business. In fact, no President ever again appeared before the Senate to argue a treaty's merits until a desperate Woodrow Wilson did so, in 1919, to plead for approval of the League of Nations. Soon, other countries came wearily to recognize that any treaty concluded with the U.S. President or Secretary of State was, as Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. put it later, "still inchoate, a mere project for a treaty, until the consent of the Senate has been given to it." In general, this practice has been less hampering to U.S. diplomacy than might have been expected. Over the years, the Senate has considered some 1,500 treaties, rejected or refused to go along with the President in only about one out of ten. On occasion, senatorial amendments have been recognized in afterthought as improvements.

Pinnacle of Power

For all the Senate's self-importance--and despite its quickly asserted control over presidential appointments--there was little doubt in the early days of the Republic that the real power lay in the House of Representatives. But after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the struggle to hold the Union together gave new importance to the Senate as the forum of national debate, and it found its highest prestige in this time of great orators: Webster, Clay and Calhoun. These men served so long that, in their perspective, Presidents came and went, but the Senate continued. When Andrew Jackson, an outsider who swept into office with the first genuine popular vote, ventured to object to a Senate action, the body replied stonily: "The President has no right to send a protest to the Senate against any of its proceedings."

Jackson represented the first major presidential challenge to the Senate. He tried to wrest patronage away from the Senate, where it had been a somewhat clubby affair, and largely succeeded in putting it under party control. More important, he sought to establish the concept of the President as the representative of the whole nation. The Jacksonian concept did not immediately prevail. During the Civil War, the Senate was subservient to Lincoln. But with war's end and Lincoln's death, it rapidly reasserted itself and achieved its pinnacle of power if not prestige. Its leaders were party bosses and spoilsmen; in the burgeoning economy of the Reconstruction Era, many a robber baron found that a state legislature could be bought and, with it, a Senate seat. When one Senator seriously proposed a bill unseating those Senators whose places had been purchased, Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho replied: "We might lose a quorum here, waiting for the courts to act."

Senators never felt grander. The Congress decided what industries to protect with tariffs, what railroads to build, what public works to undertake. They chose, or thought they chose, Presidents. And they were hawks: the Senate had more than its share in pushing the U.S. into the Spanish-American War. Some time before, a young scholar named Woodrow Wilson had written mournfully: "The President may tire the Senate by dogged persistence, but he can never deal with it upon a ground of real equality. His power does not extend beyond the most general suggestion. The Senate always has the last word." Noted Senator George Hoar at the turn of the century: "If Senators visited the White House, it was to give, not to receive, advice."

But the bosses went too far, and such reformers as Wisconsin's Robert La Follette and Idaho's William Borah in 1911 forced the Senators to accept the 17th Amendment, providing for election of Senators by direct popular vote rather than state legislatures. The Senate was never the same again--nor was the presidency.

The New Base

The growth and complexity of 20th century America seemed to require ever more powerful and centralized administration, and Theodore Roosevelt had already shaken the Senate by doing something nearly unheard-of--he presented his own program, the Square Deal. Following Roosevelt's example, Wilson dared officially to present "Administration" bills. The Senate found itself organized under strong party leadership directed from the White House. In 1917, when a minority balked at the arming of merchantmen and launched a filibuster led by La Follette, Wilson denounced them publicly as "a little group of willful men." Diehard Senators called the statement "little less than an outrage," "unparalleled and unprecedented." But a few days later the Senate voted cloture, curbing general debate for the first time in a century. The Senate had been successfully bullied.

Three years later, in a celebrated confrontation, the Senate got even and rejected U.S. participation in the League of Nations. In the scholarly lexicon, this is the classic example of the malign power of the Senate to "destroy" a U.S. President who had become an idol to all the world. In a sense it was--but not quite. The proposed treaty had been radically altered by the "reservations" added by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. Still, some thought it would be better to have this treaty than none. Wilson, however, wanted all or nothing, and he instructed the Democratic Senators to vote against it; obediently, they did so. On the first ballot, the treaty was defeated not because the Republicans voted against it--only 13 out of 49 did--but because the Democrats opposed it 42 to 5.

In the post-Wilson era, the Senators slowly discovered that despite the loss of their secure base in the state legislatures, they still had a political base that was independent of the President. A Committee of the Republican Senate all but destroyed the Harding Cabinet with a relatively new weapon--the congressional investigation. The real confirmation of senatorial rights came in the struggle with Franklin Roosevelt over his plan to pack the Supreme Court with a liberal majority that would okay his New Deal measures. Despite Roosevelt's overwhelming popularity, despite his highly organized liaison with the congressional leadership, despite his direct radio appeals to the nation, the individualists of the Senate balked. In the 1938 primaries, Roosevelt appealed to voters to "purge" eight Senators who opposed him; all eight were defiantly re-elected by their constituents.

Since then the balance of power between President and Senate has been a subtle matter, only partly accounted for by party majorities. It was a Republican Congress that enacted Harry Truman's foreign policy program, although he was strongly opposed on domestic issues and the Senate forced on him several bills he did not want, notably the Taft-Hartley law. Dwight Eisenhower tried to stay totally aloof, refused even to express his choice for congressional leaders and told his Cabinet: ''We are not going to get into their business." He was the only President to have three Congresses during his Administration controlled by the opposition party. Yet, in the Eisenhower years the Senate attitude toward the President changed drastically, largely because Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson organized the Senate as it had never been organized before and gave Ike fullest cooperation in foreign affairs. As minority leader, Everett Dirksen has offered the same cooperation in foreign matters to both Kennedy and Johnson.

Men of Mettle

The Senate can still claim its old respect for the individual voice, for independence and for unlimited debate. Leadership in the Senate is achieved only through a combination of things--playing the game and doing the chores patiently but also showing individual courage and intellectual grasp. The Senate well remembers Michigan's Arthur Vandenberg in the midst of World War II announcing his abandonment of isolationism, or Ohio's Robert Taft rising coolly to block Truman's angrily conceived bill to draft the railroad strikers into the Army--a bill already whooped through the House by nearly unanimous vote, or Margaret Chase Smith at the height of the McCarthy hysteria denouncing "fear, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance."

No comparable moments have yet occurred during the Viet Nam debate, not because men of mettle are missing, but because it is less a confrontation of principles than a fretful discussion of tactics. Whether in the guise of the irresponsible Wayne Morse, who has no following whatsoever in the Senate, or the dogged Bill Fulbright, perhaps best described in T. S. Eliot's phrase as "the patient misunderstander," the opposition did not advance alternatives. It only expressed a temper of unease. To the extent that the hearings forced debate and reflection, they have been all to the good. But the issue between the President and the Senate is broader than Viet Nam. Events have eroded many specific senatorial functions. In the present world, major decisions in foreign policies are only rarely embodied in the formal treaties that require the Senate's advice and consent; diplomacy is apt to be not a matter of formal agreement but of shifting tactics that must be carried out by the executive. Wars are no longer declared; they happen.

For the public, the Senate has lost most of the entertainment value which it had in an earlier day of fewer diversions, when people followed the varied Senate debate with delight and wonder. It also has lost some of its former function as the country's educator in public issues: such education comes from many other sources now. But it retains considerable influence on national opinion, and Professor James MacGregor Burns, for one, believes that this influence is more important than its old formal power in the checks-and-balances system. "What the President wants today is the advice and consent of the American people," says Burns. "The Senate is important to any President in how it affects this advice and consent."

Senators never wholly forget their ancient charge and tradition--there are still snuffboxes at the Senate lobby entrance, sand for blotting letters on every desk, quill pens available on demand. The Senate roster also still retains a collection of first names not to be found in any other body and surpassing even the cast of characters in a 19th century novel--Ross, Birch, Caleb, Gordon, Norris, Hiram, Bourke, Lister, Spessard, Roman, Gale, Thruston, Claiborne, Winston, Leverett, Strom, Harrison. This assemblage is still magisterial in form if not in substance, still flinging its sounding periods into the stillness of the Congressional Record or the empty seats of the chamber, less magnificent in its manners and less admired for its oratory, indulgent of itself and critical of others, but serving its function--as challenge, check and, if need be, support to the U.S. presidency.

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