A Compromise for Trade

Up the winding driveway, through grounds bursting with redbud and dogwood, to the great white Shenandoah Valley mansion of Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd, drove some distinguished visitors, among them Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Democratic Senators Lyndon Johnson and Walter George, and Republican Senator Eugene Millikin. They met in the second-floor room that Byrd uses as his home office. From the meeting came a decision to strive for a compromise that might save President Eisenhower's liberalized foreign-trade bill--still under discussion in Harry Byrd's Senate Finance Committee--from being ruined by crippling amendments.

Next day, Walter George laid it on the line to his Finance Committee colleagues. Said he, in a closed meeting: "Gentlemen, we can go into each tariff rate one by one and write new rates for every commodity; or we can simply make up our minds that we are going to write a reciprocal trade bill and forget about the individual commodities. Gentlemen, that is the choice.Which will it be?":

A few hours later, Johnson, Byrd, Millikin and a few others began drafting a compromise amendment. They eliminated amendments favoring specific industries, but inserted an escape clause under which the President, in the interest of national security, could grant tariff protection to industries injured by foreign competition. With the compromise clause written in, the Finance Committee last week approved the trade bill 13 to 2.

The bill still faced a hard floor fight. But it got a helping hand from Dwight Eisenhower, who traveled to New York for an appeal to some 1,400 newspaper executives. Said the President: "To abandon our program for the gradual reduction of unjustifiable trade barriers . . . would mean a retreat to economic nationalism and isolationism. It would constitute a serious setback to our hopes for global peace."

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