The Case for Subtlety

Despite Jacqueline Kennedy's tasteful redecoration of the White House, the favorite colors of the Kennedy Administration often seem to be black and white: anything that the President does is good, and any opposition to it is bad. In a young and aggressive President, this is not completely surprising--and many Presidents before John Kennedy have viewed their own programs in equally absolute terms. But it is an attitude that often makes for cockiness along with determination, and it ignores the subtleties necessary to legislative success. Last week the venerable U.S. Senate, whose business is the greys of legislative compromise, took upon itself to teach the young President a bitter lesson about absolutes by killing his cherished medicare program.

Kennedy knew from the first that medicare could not pass this year: a similar bill is still languishing in Wilbur Mills's House Ways and Means Committee, and Mills has no intention of letting it go to the floor. But Kennedy, still smarting under his narrow squeak in the election, thought he saw in medicare a red-hot political issue with which to bludgeon his opponents and win votes for Democratic candidates in November. Though the American Medical Association far overstated the case by calling the medicare bill socialized medicine. Kennedy equated its opposition with callous disregard of elders' health. He bluntly said that he would get his way no matter what Congress did, and by insisting that medicare would be a partisan issue in the fall cam paign, solidified Republican opposition to it. To many -- including some in his own party -- he seemed to be more interested in a political issue than in a bill.

Visions of Blame. In order to drama tize the vision of an obstructionist Congress, he hoped to get a favorable Senate vote on medicare, then blame the well-known coalition of Republicans and con servative Democrats in the House for kill ing it. He had good reason to believe that he could: the 64-36 Democratic majority in the Senate usually makes that body amenable. With that in mind, the Presi dent permitted his Senate leaders to attach a modified form of the King-Anderson medicare bill as an amendment to an unre lated welfare bill. This had the advantage of bypassing the Senate Finance Commit tee, headed by Medicare Foe Harry Byrd.

The Senate chamber, jammed as the Senate tensed for the vote, hushed for the showdown roll call, which came on a motion by Oklahoma's Democrat Robert Kerr to table the medicare amendment worked out by the Administration and five liberal Republicans. All 100 Senators were present -- a rarity. Despite meticulous headcounting, the outcome hinged on a few unpredictable votes. The count began with Vermont Republican George Aiken's crisp anti-Administration "aye"; it had seesawed to a 13-13 tie by the time the clerk reached Douglas of Illinois. Two-thirds of the way down the list the Administration led, 37 to 31, but still ahead was the "murderers' row" of conservatives at the end of the alphabet.

Then West Virginia Democrat Jennings Randolph, an oldtime New Deal liberal who rarely bucks a Democratic President, cast a resonant and decisive "aye." With that the Administration knew it had almost certainly lost, and Arizona Democrat Carl Hayden, who had reluctantly promised to support the Administration only if his vote was needed to produce a saving tie, also voted against medicare. The final vote was 52 to 48--with 21 Democrats joining 31 Republicans (all except Case, Cooper, Javits, Keating and Kuchel) to defy the President.

"Serious Defeat." The President was angry, and he reverted to a black-and-white view. About an hour after the vote, he made an unusual appearance before the TV cameras in the White House "fish room" to declare: "This is a most serious defeat for every American family, for the 17 million Americans who are over 65. [for] all those Americans who have parents, who are liable to be ill. and who have children to educate at the same time." Speaking over reporters' heads to the nation, he said that "nearly all the Republicans and a handful of Democrats joined with them to give us today's setback. I hope that we will return in November a Congress that will support a program like medical care for the aged."

What stung Kennedy most was not the near unanimity of Republican opposition but what he called the "handful" of Democrats (Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen slyly christened them "living profiles in courage") who had made defeat possible--actually a third of the Senate's Democrats. They included such prominent Democrats as Foreign Relations Chairman William Fulbright, Ace Investigator John McClellan, moderate Liberal Mike Monroney, former Vice Presidential Candidate John Sparkman, and Armed Services Chairman Richard Russell, as well as Hayden, Randolph and Kerr.

It was Old Friend George Smathers who drew most of the anger of White House aides for his anti-medicare vote, since he was an usher at Kennedy's wedding, is Democratic conference secretary, yet repeatedly votes against Kennedy on key issues ("He hasn't stood up for Jack since the wedding," goes a White House wisecrack). Heavy pressure had been exerted to capture Senator Randolph's decisive vote, including a telephone call from Kennedy himself. It all failed--and apparently because Randolph was indebted to Kerr for amending a welfare bill so that hard-pressed West Virginia could receive $11 million in aid to dependent children. Thus it was really Democrat Kerr, who also carried Oklahoma Colleague Monroney along with him, who really beat Kennedy.

No Purge. Behind all the personal reasons for opposition to medicare lay the real source of much of Kennedy's trouble with Congress. Many Senators simply did not like the hasty and ill-considered compromise bill--and did not like being lumped as enemies of the aged because they wanted to vote against it. Others resented the strong White House pressure.

The committee chairmen were dead set against the Administration's determination to bypass the finance committee--on the theory that the same thing might later happen to them. More significantly, the Senators resented being used in a hopeless cause to give the President a political issue. The Senators also recognized something else that Kennedy did not: medicare is not so overwhelmingly popular an issue as the President seems to believe. Letters ran heavily against medicare after Kennedy's appearance in Madison Square Garden, and a Gallup poll showed that its popular support had dropped from 55% last March to 48% in June.

Kennedy is nonetheless determined to make medicare important in the November elections, hoping that enough of the blame for its defeat will rub off on the Republicans. He is already scheduled to campaign in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut, New York and Ohio. But wherever he goes, and whatever he says about medicare, John Kennedy will be hard-pressed to explain why the voters should punish his Republican opponents and continue to support the 21 stalwart Democrats of the Senate who ganged up on him last week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.