How the Foreign Aid Bill Died

Washington has still not recovered from the defeat of the foreign aid bill in the Senate two weeks ago. In its unexpectedness and offhand manner, the event was unique in modern congressional annals. In this reconstruction. TIME Correspondent Neil MacNeil tells how it happened:

MAJORITY Leader Mike Mansfield called the Senate into session at 9 a.m. Friday, three hours earlier than usual, so that his colleagues would have plenty of time to get their perorations into the record before the hour agreed upon for voting --7 p.m. There was an air of anticlimax in the chamber: bitter skirmishing over amendments to the bill had ended two days before, with consistent victories for Administration lobbyists who twisted arms and scraped senatorial egos. Still, there seemed no doubt that the bill would pass. White House congressional liaison men had vanished from Capitol Hill. Their chief, Clark MacGregor, a former Minnesota Congressman, had flown to New England for a Dartmouth football game and a Vermont family reunion.

Throughout the rambling, desultory debate, there were clues that day that something might go wrong, though no one had more than an inkling until it was too late. Frank Church of Idaho, a liberal who had always supported foreign aid, renounced it in an emotional speech. Freshman Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida added his voice of dissent; others, too, joined in. The humiliating diplomatic rebuff suffered by the U.S. only a few days before, when Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese government-in-exile had been chucked out of the U.N. in spite of energetic American lobbying, still rankled. The last Senate speaker was Harry Byrd Jr. of Virginia. His final words: "Mr. President, I shall vote against this bill."

The outcome seemed so certain that nobody had bothered to take a hard tally of all the Senators. Minority Whip Robert Griffin of Michigan counted 20 Republicans who would be present and voting for the bill and he assumed that enough Democrats would go along to make passage certain. The Democrats did not even bother to tally their own. Senator John Sherman Cooper was flying to Kentucky to campaign for the Republican gubernatorial candidate. Carl Curtis of Nebraska was in his home state attending political meetings. Many other Senators had left Washington sure that their absence would make no difference. As it happened, they were right for the wrong reason: the opposition turned out to be overwhelming. After the debacle, Minority Leader Hugh Scott polled every Senator except Karl Mundt of South Dakota, who has been ill and inactive for several years. Scott's tally: 58 against, 41 for.

The vote began routinely, a few minutes before 7 p.m., and the public galleries were nearly empty. Few Senators were on the floor. Only a handful of reporters looked on. James Allen of Alabama voted no, as expected. The tally clerk droned on down the list. At one point, early on, there were six for passage, two against. A few names later the score was six to six--and then it began to slide. The name of Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, an aristocratic internationalist, was called. Crisply, he announced: "No." Now the count stood at twelve for, 18 against.

Suddenly, on the floor and in the press gallery, there was a buzz of shock; the bill was in trouble. One by one other switchers answered no as the clerk read off their names: Bayh, Cranston, Magnuson, Saxbe, Smith, Spong. Rarely does either house of Congress vote down a major bill; the crucial tests come in committee or on amendments, before the final vote. One reporter whispered excitedly: "For Christ's sake! This thing's going to be defeated!" The bells jangled through the Senate side of the Capitol and in the two Senate office buildings. Senator Robert Dole, chairman of the Republican National Committee, came in quickly, voted no and left. Like many others, he did not realize that the bill was going down. As a conservative, he has consistently voted against foreign aid, but as a Nixon loyalist, he might have switched had he known that the measure was in danger. It was not until the next morning back home in Kansas that he learned the result.

At the end, there were scarcely a dozen Senators on the floor. It was 7:07 when Lee Metcalf of Montana, sitting in the presiding officer's chair, announced the outcome; Vice President Spiro Agnew had not even bothered to come. The clerk handed Metcalf a tally slip. With disbelief in his voice, he recited the result: "On this vote, the yeas are 27, and the nays are 41. The bill is not passed." Mike Mansfield, long a critic of the existing U.S. aid programs, was on his feet, surprised and delighted. His syntax slightly awry, he addressed the chair. "Mr. President," said Mansfield, "an event of unusual occurrence has just taken place in the Senate this evening."

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