THE PRESIDENCY: High Haste, Low Speed

The first thing President Roosevelt does each morning when he wakes in the White House is to read in bed the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post. Then his breakfast of orange juice, cereal, eggs, toast & coffee is brought to him on a tray. One morning last week the President lay abed reading things in the newspapers that might well have taken away his appetite for breakfast. The Press was fairly bellowing with indignation at him because it appeared that he was cocked & primed to ramrod his social reform tax bill through Congress in less than a week.

The trouble began fortnight ago when President Roosevelt tossed into the lap of Congress his scheme to up taxes on the rich as a means of distributing wealth and went gaily off to the crew races at New London. When he returned to Washington five days later he called Vice President Garner, Speaker Byrns, Senate Majority Leader Robinson, Senate Finance Chairman Harrison and Ways & Means Chairman Doughton to the White House for a conference that lasted nearly three hours. These five Administration bigwigs emerged to announce that the President’s new tax plan would be appended by the Senate to the House joint resolution extending a batch of nuisance taxes (TIME, July 1).

Sixty amazed newshawks who heard Senator Robinson announce this new legislative program on the White House steps understood what it meant. The nuisance taxes automatically expired June 30. Unless they were extended by Congress in the next five days, the treasury would lose some $1,500,000 a day in revenue. Presumably the Administration was set to drive the extension resolution through in that time—and with it the President’s tax proposals. Next day the nation’s headlinesbannered the news: a vast and unprecedented tax bill was to be made the law of the land in about 120 hours. Senator Harrison spent the night roughing out a draft of the measure the President wanted so badly. He told the Senate that he did not think there would be time for any hearings. His Finance Committee refused to approve the bill until he could fill in the draft and support it with detailed Treasury estimates. While Senators and Representatives mumbled and grumbled against such haste, Treasury experts worked all the second night figuring what the bill would mean in dollars & cents.

The following morning Franklin Roosevelt was shocked when he looked at his newspapers in bed. Editors were volubly aghast at such haste. Some pointed out that nearly four months was the average time to spend in preparing an important tax bill. “It took Six Days to Make the World!” warned the Roosevelt-loving New York Daily News. Crudest cut of all, the President got from his favorite and usually sympathetic columnist, Walter Lippmann in the Herald Tribune, when he read:

“A Shocking Decision. Without information, without examination, without hearings, without public debate, it is proposed before Sunday midnight to enact a tax program containing the most far-reaching implications. . . . There is no crisis whatsoever calling for such utterly undemocratic and disorderly methods, and the resort to these methods must be stigmatized as nothing less than a flagrant abuse of power. . . . The filibuster is a miserable weapon. But if there is any justification for preserving the right to filibuster, this is an occasion when a filibuster is justified.”

It was obvious to the President that someone had blundered. He had called for a hit & run play and the batter had struck out, with the result that somebody was going to be caught off base. Later that morning better than 100 newshawks trooped into his office for a regular press conference. Raymond P. Brandt, able correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and onetime president of the National Press Club, asked whether the new tax bill was going to be passed in the five-day time limit. Franklin Roosevelt looked up, tartly demanded who had ever said that it was going to pass in five days. Newshawks gawped. They knew that Senator Harrison had openly opposed tax action this session, was not shouldering the odium of forcing through the President’s bill in five days just for love. They knew also what had happened at the White House conference when the President had told his Congressional leaders that his tax program was to be tackled at once so that Senators Long, La Follette and other Share-the-Wealthers could not accuse him of insincerity. Representative Doughton, who can be as stubborn as one of his own North Carolina mules, had insisted his Ways & Means Committee could not prepare the bill until autumn, in time for Congress next January. That, said President Roosevelt, would not do; his tax plan must go through now. Let it be tacked on to the nuisance tax resolution.

But, demanded the President angrily at his press conference, who had said his tax proposal had to be passed in five days? Newspapers had made up that story out of whole cloth. Never had he said any such thing.

Something new in the annals of White House press conferences followed. Correspondents, resenting the accusation of misrepresentation, grimly listened while the Post-Dispatch’s Brandt, standing his ground, asked whether the President’s own lieutenants had not announced the Administration’s program. The President sharply reiterated that he had never given the word for passage in five days. Brandt, booming-voiced but polite, continued, determined to pin him down. Did he want immediate enactment of his tax bill? He did; he had said so in his message to Congress. Correspondent Brandt could find no such recommendation in the message. Seldom had a President been pressed so hard. Never had newshawks come so near—politely and firmly—to telling a President that they did not believe him.

Actually, all admitted afterwards, Mr. Roosevelt had spoken the literal truth. He had never at any time asked to have his tax program passed in five days. But unless Senator Harrison lied to his colleagues, the President had wanted his tax program added to the nuisance tax bill which did have to pass in five days. When the news was rushed to the Capitol Senator Harrison refused at first to believe that the President had repudiated the project. Later, like a good soldier, he said that he must have “misunderstood”‘ what the President wanted, but he absolved the Press of having misrepresented what was told them. If Harrison had misunderstood, so had others. More than an hour after the President had tongue-lashed the correspondents at the White House. Senator Barkley of Kentucky, substituting for Leader Robinson on the Senate floor, was still, in all innocence, insisting that the President wanted his program added to the nuisance tax bill. When the news was broken to him Mr. Barkley asked to have his remarks expunged from the Congressional Record. They were not, because Senator Long, who likes to see the President in hot water, objected.

Immediately the whole project for speeding passage of the President’s taxes collapsed. Without opposition the House resolution to extend the nuisance taxes went through the Senate unadorned. While the House prepared to put the President’s program in the form of a regular bill which would probably keep Congress sitting most of the summer, Republican Vandenberg, twitting the Democratic leaders, demanded assurance that this new procedure was the President’s final plan.

Said Senator Harrison wistfully: “I wish I knew.”