No Cheers, No Jeers

A President about to address a new Congress has a threefold problem: he must be firm but not insulting, must recommend without demanding, must be conciliatory but not abject--in short, he must present the best illustration possible of how the executive and legislative departments should work together in a democracy. When the President is of one party and the Congress of another, the problem is intensified.

As he prepared his State of the Union message, Harry Truman was well aware of this problem. For more than a month he had shunted aside most other business while he consulted secretaries, statisticians, counselors and Cabinet members about the speech. His amazing confidence was still unflagging;* White House aides predicted that it would turn out to be a good speech.

But this week, as, standing on the rostrum of the House, he delivered the fruit of all this husbandry to a joint session of Congress, it was clear that Harry Truman had been the victim of too much conferring, too much polishing, too much looking over his shoulder at his critics. By the time he was finished, it was apparent that he could have delivered his message in either the Union League Club or a union hall, without getting many cheers or jeers in either place.

Lick & Promise. To a nation which had demanded a change in policy he offered, scarcely any policy at all. Instead of specific remedies for the nation's problems, he produced mainly a vaguely worded collection of generalities which implicitly invited Congress to do as it pleased.

Some major matters he avoided completely. There was no mention of portal-to-portal pay, of income-tax reductions, of such an old troublemaker as FEPC. Foreign policy and foreign trade he dismissed with a lick & a promise--and an aside on "the difficulty of reaching agreement with the Soviet Union on the terms of [peace] settlement." One of his few specific requests was for the continuation of war excise tax rates--which he himself had just lifted by abruptly announcing the termination of hostilities (see below). .

Labor was the hottest issue, and Harry Truman handled it with gloves. He asked for legislation to outlaw jurisdictional strikes and their secondary boycotts. Since even most labor leaders want the same thing, that was like coming out against sin. He wanted better federal mediation machinery to stop strikes, and increased social legislation to "alleviate the causes of workers' insecurity."

Friends of labor "could take comfort from some words: "We must not, in order to punish a few labor leaders, pass vindictive laws which will restrict the proper rights of the rank & file of labor." But his proposal that a joint congressional-presidential commission be set up to draft labor legislation was opening the door to another Case Bill--since that is exactly what G.O.P. congressional members would demand.

Words & Tools. Nowhere did the President seem more anxious to pass on the burden of decision than in his precipitous retreat from wartime controls. Said he of the economy in general: "Private enterprise must be given the greatest possible freedom" to continue the expansion of our economy." Said he of housing: "The primary responsibility to deliver housing at reasonable prices that veterans can afford rests with private industry and labor."

Dutifully he ticked off the fields where Congress would be required to work. Rarely did he provide the tools. He promised to balance the budget, and hoped, with a smile, "that the Congress will cooperate in this program of economy." He said that the nation's agricultural objective should be "a balanced pattern of peacetime production without either undue sacrifice by farm people or undue expense to the Government." He got some of his loudest applause of the day when he called for the maintenance of adequate defense, reminding Congress that he still wanted merger and universal military training.

He said, of course, that he wanted to cooperate with Congress and hoped that Congress would return the compliment. But by his lack of specifics and the dull roundness of his words, he had virtually abdicated in Congress' favor.

* The Gallup poll reported this week that his popularity had risen three points from its preelection low of 32%.

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