Reaching into the Future

After two of the longest, most grueling sessions in memory, the 89th Congress feverishly wound up its business last week and adjourned. With its final key measure, appropriating $5 billion for various Great Society programs--the 50th major bill adopted in the current session--Congress had in 1966 alone approved legislation that ranged from an anti-jellyfish measure to a new antipoverty law, and authorized expenditures of some $144.6 billion, second only to the $147 billion that it appropriated for a world war in 1942.

The 89th was the first Congress to address itself--in its legislative thrust as well as its membership--to the U.S. as a nation of city dwellers. Largely concerned with "the real dynamics of urban life," in President Johnson's phrase, it marched against the problems of slum housing, overcrowded streets, underemployed minorities, inadequate schools, polluted air and water, rising crime, complicated tax structures and shrinking recreational facilities. And it produced its prodigious array of social and economic legislation in spite of the tension and upheaval caused by a costly war. Indeed, the 89th went further than any other in modern times to exorcise the once-fashionable lament that Congress has become hopelessly incapable of tackling 20th century problems.

Most Democratic members of the overwhelmingly Democratic 89th (294 to 139 Republicans in the House, 67 to 33 in the Senate) viewed these accomplishments with understandable partisan pride. Rhapsodized House Speaker John McCormack: "This is the Congress of fulfillment, the Congress of our accomplished hopes, the Congress of our realized dreams. The Democratic Party has again found political and social immortality." More matter-of-factly, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield observed last week: "Both the quality and the quantity of legislation were good. Of course, a great deal of it simply came to a head; previous Congresses deserve credit for getting ready much of what we passed this year and in 1965. In some areas, we have gone too far."

Far & Frenetic. Clearly, the 89th would have done greater justice to its own record if it had been allowed time in 1966 to review and refine the titanic body of legislation that it had mass-produced in 1965. Yet, despite the President's promise last fall that the Congress would have little else to do this year, the Administration handed Capitol Hill a formidable new workload at the very start of the session.

In consequence, many of the hastily framed Great Society programs, however admirable, have not been carefully restudied in terms of cost, maximum efficacy and relevance to the nation's needs. Many state and city officials complain that such badly needed federal programs as the war on poverty and new educational ventures sometimes take too little account of local conditions. Federal specifications for the management of some antipoverty programs, for example, are the same in generally prosperous rural areas as in city ghettos; New York, with the highest number of addicts in the nation, gets no more dollar aid for the war on narcotics than Montana, which has almost no such problem.

Some of the 1966 session's most significant legislation was rammed through in the frenetic atmosphere of an eleventh-hour, election-year rush to adjournment. Out of the last minute stampede emerged such major congressional acts as creation of the 89th's second new Cabinet-level agency, the Department of Transportation; a near-record $58 billion defense appropriation; a $3.7 billion anti-water-pollution bill; a $3.97 billion federal college-aid measure; a two-year $5 billion extension of the Food for Peace program.

A New Relationship. The second session, like the first, heralded a broad, long-term change in the relationship between Washington and U.S. society. By adopting an auto-safety bill and a truth-in-packaging measure, Congress showed a new determination to protect consumers from hazardous products and dishonest marketing. Federal aid to education was expanded in this session to a total of $10 billion--50% more than the entire U.S. budget in 1939.

The $1.3 billion demonstration-cities bill opened the way--at last--for reconstruction of rotting city cores. The plan sets up a partnership between federal and municipal governments that aims to coordinate all phases of human and physical rehabilitation, from job-training programs to the dissolution of racial ghettos.

Rebelling a Bit. Thus, though many members were preoccupied by Viet Nam, the war did not dominate the 1966 session. Indeed, save for the fulminations of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright and Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse, there was almost no meaningful opposition in Congress to the Administration's Asian policy. Yet, concerned by spiraling war costs and mounting resistance to civil rights legislation, many Democrats openly questioned the propriety of many new domestic programs.

As a result, Congress this year rejected a batch of legislation, notably: a new civil rights bill with a controversial open-housing clause, a proposal to repeal the right-to-work section of the Taft-Hartley law, a measure giving home rule to the District of Columbia. Beyond that, Johnson's foreign-aid requests were slashed by nearly $500 million, and Administration measures to reform the Electoral College, create four-year House terms, and overhaul the 31-year-old unemployment-compensation system were never even brought to a final vote.

"Political Salesman." The President was determined not to ire voters by calling for a deflationary, across-the-board tax hike. Yet all through the second session, Johnson kept urging the Congress to keep his domestic programs at low price levels. To many members, his pleas smacked of election-year politicking, but when the final dollar total for programs passed over both sessions was added up, the 89th had actually allocated $3.3 billion less than the President had requested. For the two years, the 89th had appropriated just under $264 billion, an alltime record.

Many people did not like that part of the record. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, whose cooperation had guaranteed passage of several controversial Administration proposals, expressed the opposition's reaction in characteristically flamboyant prose last week: "The Administration goes its higgledy-piggledy way; its high priests are no longer the flower of American culture but skilled political salesmen who pursue domestic social programs with the popeyed ardor of a Harpo Marx chasing blondes."

Whatever its high-priced shortcomings or long-term accomplishments, the 89th never did anything very easily or very early. Even the seemingly simple act of adjournment came hard. As the session plunged into its final hours last week, Senate leaders found themselves lacing one last formidable obstacle, a tax bill to encourage foreign investment in the U.S. It had already passed the House, and the proposal itself was no serious problem. But it was loaded with so many assorted amendments (24 in all) that it was laughingly labeled "the Christmas tree bill." Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore opposed one amendment that would allow taxpayers to allocate $1 or $2 of their taxes to a Government-operated presidential campaign fund. He threatened to call for a quorum count of the Senate, in the knowledge that it was impossible to find anything like the 51 members needed for a formal vote on anything--including adjournment.

Calling Brisbane. Senate Leader Mansfield finally managed to summon back enough campaigning Senators (many of them aboard Air Force planes) on Saturday to assure a quorum. The bill flipped through by a 31-22 vote. By late afternoon, Mansfield and Acting House Majority Leader Hale Boggs had made their traditional adjournment calls to the President--in Brisbane, Australia, waking him from a sound sleep. Said the President to Boggs, "Congress has done an outstanding job." Replied Boggs: "Go back to sleep, Mr. President."

Had this Congress been, as Lyndon Johnson claims, "the greatest in American history"? Certainly not in comparison with the First, which from the hazy outlines of the Constitution devised the working design of government that has guided the U.S. ever since. On the other hand, the needs of American society--if not the nature of Congress--have been transformed almost beyond recognition since then. Judged not only by the volume of legislation passed--which is unparalleled--but also by its direction, diversity and ultimate impact, the 89th may well rank in history's view as one of the most effective Congresses. The real import of the 89th lies in the shape of its influence on the future. Many of its far-reaching programs are now only beginning to make what surely will be a historic impact on American society.

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