Nation: Atavistic Yearning

Though it has a constitutional duty to give the President its “advice and consent” on treaties, the U.S. Senate exerts little influence on American foreign policy. The Chief Executive, as in most countries today, runs his country’s foreign relations. Most Senators reluctantly accept their ever more limited role in this area; some do not. It is thus a measure of Johnson’s declining prestige in Congress that the Senate should have seriously considered a resolution declaring that national commitments to foreign governments would henceforth be binding only when Congress agreed on them with the President.

Introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, the Senate’s foremost dove, and co-sponsored by Georgia’s Richard Russell, its most powerful hawk, the measure had wide backing, reflecting the upper body’s atavistic yearning for a role it thinks it once had. If passed, the resolution would have been no more binding on the President than one asking Americans to be kind to dogs. It would nonetheless have been a rebuke to him, and this consideration swayed some members of the Fulbright committee last week.

Though such a reproach might barely have been noticed when Johnson was high in the polls, today, at the nadir of his popularity, it might be looked upon abroad as a vote of no confidence in all of his foreign policies. The President’s current position, some members felt, is simply too weak to stand such a battering. Thus the resolution paradoxically became an even greater measure of Johnson’s decline when it was blocked last week. Some such motion may very well pass the Senate this year, but it will probably be so mildly worded that even Johnson will not be too aggrieved.