The Congress: Forced to Give Way

Lyndon Johnson, the Mr. Maneuver of U.S. politics, last week discovered to his dismay that at times even the old pro can be outmaneuvered.

For three weeks, Congress had been kicking around a Commodity Credit Corp. supplementary appropriations bill. The House added a rider banning $37 million in food shipments to Nasser’s United Arab Republic; at Johnson’s urgent request, the Senate voted to allow such shipments if the President found them “in the national interest” (TIME, Feb. 12); under heavy White House pressure, the House last week accepted the Senate version.

But the scuffling was far from over. For the Senate had also attached to the CCC bill riders aimed at blocking an Administration economy plan for the prompt shutdown of 15 Veterans Administration hospitals and rest homes and 20 small Agriculture Department research centers. Among those opposing the President was Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, fighting the closing of a VA hospital in his own Montana.

House-Senate conference-committee members threatened to revive the prohibition on food to Nasser unless the Administration agreed to delay the installation shutdown until at least June 30. Appearing before the conferees were Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman and VA Administrator William Driver, just completing his first week on the job. Freeman agreed to delaying the shutdown, signed a letter to that effect. Driver also indicated—or at least so the Congressmen thought—that he would go along.

What Freeman and Driver had done, apparently without realizing it, was to agree in effect with the original Senate amendments—which would have kept the disputed hospitals and agriculture stations open no later than June 30, the end of the current fiscal year. When the President heard what had happened he was thoroughly annoyed, ordered the whole deal called off. Convinced that he stood to lose on the Arab issue unless he gave way, he offered a 60-day postponement of the shutdowns. The conferees held out for 75 days—until May 1—and got it.

Next morning the appropriations bill passed both houses—but the President had been forced to give more than he wanted.