In 2012, when Barack Obama won reelection, an odd but thrilling metaphor engulfed me. The election was like the climax of one of those early Howard Fast novels. After enduring months of derision of their leader as somehow unAmerican and countless maneuvers to curtail their right to vote and incessant tirades against the poor for taking, not giving, after enduring all the despicable attempts to belittle and suppress them, the poor and the blacks and the Hispanics and the young and the women united and arose to defend their hero and astound and frighten all the smug fat cats. “What a wonderful thing is metaphor,” wrote Christopher Fry in one of his plays. Well, so much for metaphor...

While reading The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s formidable biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, I found myself recalling my role in the election of 1960 when Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon for president. I was a junior member of the Washington staff of the Associated Press then but nevertheless landed some juicy assignments. Since my role has been ignored by biographers and historians, from Theodore H. White to Caro, I thought it might be helpful to set down some of the details...

The reelection of President Barack Obama is provoking an avalanche of punditry that does not need more from me. I just want to note a handful of highlights that may get lost in the avalanche. Most important, the result averted a calamitous injustice. If Obama had lost, it would have been a victory for obstruction, lies, distortion, deceit and racism. A cynical and shameless campaign, concocted four years ago by Republicans obsessed with dishonoring the new president, would have succeeded. Supporters of Romney even put forth a campaign argument that amounted to blackmail: since the stubborn Republican House of Representatives would never work with Obama, they said, the good of the nation demanded Romney as president...

It must have been galling for the Republicans to see so many blacks voting for their own in the 2008 presidential election. The returns must have struck many Republicans as unfair, even undemocratic. Nothing else can explain the way the Republicans have allowed racism to stain their campaign against President Obama for a second term. No one likes to throw around so nasty an accusation, but I don’t know what else it is...

If American elections made sense, the selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as the Republican vice presidential candidate would be universally regarded as about as foolish a move as the selection of Sarah Palin four years ago. By no stretch of logic can any reasonable analyst justify the choice. Mitt Romney is so bland and clunky a candidate that for a long while we all have had a tough time figuring him out. He has been running around crying out that he is a rip-snorting genuine extreme conservative, but it was hard to take him at his word. It all sounded like election hooey. After all, he was a somewhat decent governor of Massachusetts who gave us Romneycare the model for Obamacare. A lot of people felt that once elected he would revert to his innate blandness. They also probably felt that his innate blandness might even turn into innate goodness. The embrace of Ryan changes all that...

My wife says that President Obama’s negotiations with Congressional Republicans reminded her of the story of my bargaining session with a merchant on the island of Zanzibar more than forty years ago. I spent two hours bargaining with him for a Zanzibar chest and ended up paying more than he originally asked. It’s not an unfair comparison. The tawdry turmoil of the last few weeks over an increase in the national debt ceiling left me with some broken images. One is the weakness of what we all used to regard as the most powerful office in any democracy on earth. Has it become so weak that it can be held hostage by an imbecilic faction in the Republican Party? I suppose so...

Losing the House so badly was a Democratic disaster of the highest magnitude. No rationalization of the defeat, no pipedream about the future will change that. Despite what happened on November 2, incumbents rarely lose office easily. Even a decisive Obama victory in 2012, powered by a recovered economy, is unlikely to dislodge so many Republicans. Some of the Know Nothing Tea Bags will probably be around for a while. Obama does have a communications problem. He reminds me of Pierre Trudeau, the great prime minister of Canada...

It is hard to disagree with Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana about the sorry state of Congress. It is gripped by “institutional inertia,” it is not doing “the people’s business,” and it “must be reformed.” But his decision to run away from the Senate will not ease the paralysis. In fact, if a Republican takes Bayh’s seat, the woes will probably worsen. In a piece for the New York Times, Senator Bayh listed a host of congressional problems, including ultra partisanship, campaign financing, gerrymandering, lack of personal contact, and endless filibusters. The last problem, surely the most outrageous, should be the easiest to fix. Yet I am not sure there is much of a chance to do so...

How can we understand that stalwart band of forty Republican nay-sayers in the Senate, determined to prevent health reform no matter how necessary, determined to embarrass their president no matter how much they embarrass their country? The Republicans are behaving as if they have lost their way and somehow turned up in the British parliamentary system. They are like mean kids who show up for every baseball game with no gloves or bats but only skates and hockey sticks. The Republicans have deluded themselves about the American way of legislating for some time...

I have finally read the complete text of our 43rd President’s Second Inaugural Address. Although I had not seen the ceremony on television, I had tried to read the speech a couple of times the day after but found it impossible to penetrate the fog of glitter that enveloped his words. I was put off, I think, by the gnawing conviction that I must be reading the valedictory speech of some high school senior. The words were highfalutin, the themes were lofty, and the concoction bore no relation to the world around us. Each paragraph vanished in my mind as I tried the next. So I gave up...

In 1952, the first time I ever voted, I cast my ballot for Adlai Stevenson. Since then my presidential choice, always a Democrat, has lost more often than not. But no loss has been as dispiriting and bitter as this one. It is hard to take. The Iraq adventure is a catastrophic failure, launched on arrogance and faith, managed with ham hands and closed minds. The cost has been awful. Yet the know-nothings who launched and managed it have received a resounding endorsement. Bush and his ideologues will face no accounting for failure and stupidity...

I have been reading No Ordinary Time lately, Doris Kearns Goodwin's marvelous history of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. There are so many reminders of my childhood, so many names of long forgotten officials like War Production Board chief Donald Nelson that we used to memorize from My Weekly Reader. Goodwin describes the remarkable ability of President Roosevelt to unify the nation and mold public opinion...

I'm hesitant about adding to the cacophony over the elections, but I do have a few reflections. These bear no hallmark of objectivity. I do not like the strutting George W. Bush and can not conceive of him growing into greatness à la Truman. What if? I have toyed with this a lot. What if Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and his henchlady Katherine Harris had announced from the beginning that, in view of the closeness of the machine recount, they had ordered a hand recount of all the votes of Florida...

I covered the House of Representatives for the Associated Press for a year or so during the 1960s and left with profound respect and affection for what is really a unique American institution. For years as a foreign correspondent I would extol the genius of our House against the lap dog role played by Houses in the parliamentary system used by democratic countries in Europe and former British dominions like Canada...

Since I usually write about foreign affairs, I have not covered much of the Monica story. I did have to whip out color on the first day she showed up at the federal courthouse to testify in secret before the grand jury. The frenzy of the photographers and the glee of the television performers and the gawks of the tourists made the story feel even more unwholesome than usual...

You can hear the moments of boredom tick away whenever you tell Americans that no other industrialized democracy has the same dispiriting problems as the United States--not the crime, not the guns, not the homeless, not the unschooled, not the poor, not the racism, not the ugliness. Listeners may mimic interest for a short while, then their glances roll up and away. They may not doubt me but, content in smugness, they do not care. After 21 years as a foreign correspondent, I returned home late last year to a country bristling with astonishing problems, most left untended. Yet many Americans persist in believing that their country has a divine mission on Earth, a model for all others. Ignorance about the rest of the world seems total. Our son set off for high school the other day in a T-shirt emblazoned with a bust of Lenin. I jokingly warned him to be careful. “Don’t worry,” he said, cynically not jovially, “no one at school knows who he is.” Few if any peoples can boast as much democracy and energy as Americans. These are wondrous gifts that foreigners can hardly fathom. Yet I often wonder now to what purposes they are put...

Medicare will be “the most sweeping new departure in American Social legislation since Roosevelt’s Social Security Act thirty years ago.” That description, culled from one of the many news accounts of House passage of the bill, already has deadened into a cliché. All analysts have accepted the fact of medicare’s great impact, but very few have bothered to delve into the details of that impact. How will America and medicine change after medicare? Only a fool would try to predict this with certainty. A bill, especially one 296 pages long, has byways and tremors and lurking commas that can twist society in a manner no one anticipates. Yet some trends can be spotted ahead of time. Medicare has the potential to confirm doctors’ fears that federal pressures will change the way they practice medicine. It also has the potential to stuff a financial bonanza into the pockets of America’s fat-cat doctors...

THE DIFFICULTIES for Republican representatives who want a more progressive look for their party were dramatically illustrated at the House Republican Conference on January 14. First, the conference kept a conservative monopoly on the leadership by rejecting the bid of moderate Peter Frelinghuysen, Jr., of New Jersey to replace Leslie C. Arends of Illinois as party whip. Then, with a standing ovation, the conference welcomed into its ranks Albert W. Watson, the South Carolina Democrat who resigned from his party after House Democrats had deprived him of committee seniority for supporting Barry Goldwater. The message of the two acts was quite emphatic because of the rebuke to the new minority leader, Gerald R. Ford, Jr., of Michigan, who had recommended Frelinghuysen in order to give the outnumbered liberals and moderates some voice in policymaking. For liberals, particularly those belonging to an informal group known as the Wednesday Club, the episode shattered any illusion that they had gained strength as a result of the disaster suffered by the party last November 3. The Frelinghuysen rejection, in fact, was an ungracious slap at the Republicans who survived the Johnson landslide with the most ease...

AN OLD FRIEND, encountering Representative Wilbur D. Mills in a Washington restaurant recently, reached out and squeezed the Arkansas congressman's arm. "Does it feel sore?" he asked. Mills showed a trace of a smile. "I haven't felt anything yet," he replied. Behind the jest was a serious issue: whether Lyndon B. Johnson, for all his Congressional arm-twisting, can persuade Mills to accept the principle of medical care for the aged financed through Social Security or a similar payroll-tax plan. This would represent a breakthrough for Medicare supporters, and might just be enough to send the program through Congress this year. There are many reasons why Medicare has never been approved, but the main obstacle has been Mills. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where all Social Security and tax bills must originate, Mills has blocked a bill from the House floor for seven years. Although Mills has repeatedly turned aside administration pleas, there have been recent reports, perhaps based more on hope than on substance, that his opposition to the Social Security approach of the King-Anderson Medicare bill is softening...

For most of his years under the lights of Washington, Barry Goldwater of Arizona has sported the guise of a hard-hitting, sure-thinking Republican who speaks his mind without blur or fuzz or fudge. “Much of his popular appeal,” wrote biographers Rob Wood and Dean Smith two years ago, “centers around his willingness to stand firm on his beliefs, and to speak frankly - even bluntly - no matter what the cost.” Even as late as last August, Russell Kirk, the sage of the National Review, could write, “he has a mind calculated to arrive at hard decisions without dangerous vacillation.” Goldwater’s views always have evoked the same journalistic vocabulary: decisiveness, ring of action, no pussyfooting. In recent weeks, however, this rock image has begun to flake. Newsmen have started the inevitable comparison of recent pronouncements and found them clashing. Goldwater simply is not saying the same things he said so surely one, two or three years ago, or he is saying them with far less sureness in his tone...

[The tax bill which has cleared the House and now awaits Senate action involves far more than a cut in tax rates. It is a complicated measure involving many other changes. Here are some questions and answers on how it might affect you.] The tax bill approved yesterday by the House would reduce income taxes by $11,000,000,000 for the nation as a whole. If the Senate passes it in its present form, what will the measure do for you? Here are answers to some of the questions a puzzled taxpayer might be raising: Question - Will this mean more money in my pocket? Answer - The Treasury Department says "virtually every American taxpayer" will pay less taxes if the bill is approved by Congress. Q. - How much more money? A. - That depends on your income. For example, the Treasury figures that average tax reductions for those in the $5,000-$10,000 income range will be about 20 percent. Using percentages, the biggest tax cuts will go to those earning less than $10,000 a year. But, whatever the percentage, those with high salaries will usually get more dollars in their pocket than those with lower salaries...

Harry and Sadie, a mythical American couple have pencils in hand trying to figure out how much they will save if Congress vote for a tax cut. A tax bill comes before the House on Tuesday. If the House passes it and then the Senate passes it and President Kennedy signs it - and no one changes it along the way - this is what a tax cut will mean. Harry, a schoolteacher, earns $6000 a year. Sadie, in her spare moments while taking care of two children, makes and sells dresses to neighbors for a profit of $1500 a year...

No Evidence of Any Effect on Congress - The historic civil rights march on Washington - massive and orderly and moving - has dramatized the wants of Negroes in America, but leaders still faced the task today of trying to turn drama into action. Speaker after speaker told the 200,000 Negro and white sympathizers massed in front of the Lincoln Memorial Wednesday that their demonstration was no more than a beginning. 'Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content,' said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 'will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.' Demonstrators and their leaders made it clear that one sign of progress, in their view, would be congressional approval of President Kennedy's civil rights bill...

The civil rights marchers may not see it all, but this is a city nerved by power, lined with marble, vibrant with areas of beauty and blighted by contrasting areas of squalor. It is a city of great monuments and slums, of complex law and petty crime, of history and lethargy. To the 100,000 or more civil rights marchers expected here Wednesday, Washington will be a symbol of national power, a capital where men and women petition for redress of grievance. They will gather at the base of the soaring Washington Monument, the center of a vast complex of greenery and marble, a monument that looks east to the Capitol, north to the White House, west to the Lincoln Memorial and south to the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin rimmed with cherry trees. Then they will march a few blocks down huge avenues and across parklands to the Lincoln Memorial, a temple in the style of the Parthenon in Greece. These are the symbols of government and beauty and history that draw almost 5 million tourists to Washington each year. But Washington has other faces, too...

Is President Kennedy’s legislative program stuck in the bogs of Congress? Some critics say so. The White House and Democratic leaders say it isn’t. Congress has passed July 31 - the suggested legal date for adjournment - with only a few bills of substance to show for it. This session will go on at least to Thanksgiving and perhaps to Christmas, the longest spell since the Congress of 1950. “It seems to me that on the basis of the record to date” said Sen. Jacob K Javits, R-N.Y., in a recent Senate speech “we are assigning ourselves a unique niche in history as the biggest and longest running, slow-motion show to hit Washington in years. And I believe we are in grave danger of seeing ourselves dubbed the 'standstill' Congress, or worse. ” Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts disagrees...

On July 4, the National Armory in Washington looked like every Goldwater fan’s dream of a Republican national convention: pretty girls and blaring bands and bunting and flags and hotdogs and spotlights and college kids and TV stars and gay placards and enormous portraits and cowbells and hooters and laughers; and everyone united for one man, not there, named Goldwater. The occasion was the National Draft Goldwater Independence Day Rally, staged by the National Draft Goldwater Committee to convince everyone (including Goldwater) that Barry means business. At the least, the committee convinced reporters and politicians in Washington that it knew how to run a show. This is a feat sure to impress people in this town and to keep the committee above the “bunch of amateurs” class. The conservative Republicans bent on nominating Goldwater would have lost face badly if the show had deteriorated into a hoarse, shoving melee, but things ran smoothly and with decorum. The committee, headed by Texas Republican Chairman Peter O’Donnell, Jr., had planned for weeks. Hotel reservations were set up for thousands of visitors. Suggestions for placards, were issued (DON’T TARRY- GO BARRY, JFK - WE WILL BARRY YOU)...

For the first time, the United States is at the door of the International Monetary Fund as a borrower. Few people prophesied this when the Fund was founded at the United Nations Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But obviously times have changed. The United States which had huge supplies of gold in the early postwar period, has found its supplies dwindling. That is why President Kennedy told Congress Thursday that the United States has been authorized to draw up to $500 million worth of currencies from the Fund this year. This transaction is a classic example of how a nation uses the Fund when it has a balance of payments problem. That's what the Fund is for, and other countries have been using it for years. The United States has a balance of payments problem because it sends more dollars overseas than it takes in...

Negroes have less chance than whites to get a high-paying job in the North, but most employers and unions deny this stems from racial discrimination. Negro leaders generally contend it does. In Chicago, for example, they say that hardly anyone downtown hires Negroes as office workers, store clerks, or skilled craftsmen. "The Loop of Chicago looks like a snowstorm at 5 o'clock," says Hamp McKinney of the Urban League of Chicago, "with only here and there a little brown speck in it." But employers and unions say that situations like this are not caused by racial discrimination. They say there are not enough qualified Negroes to fill the jobs available. Negro charges of job discrimination have flamed into one of the most searing problems in the North, where almost half of America's 19 million Negroes live...

President Kennedy asked members of Congress on Wednesday to look into their hearts and help end "rancor, violence, disunity and national shame" by passing the most sweeping civil rights bill since Reconstruction days. And he told them to stay in session this year until they do so. His proposals drew a favorable reaction in Congress. But Southerners served notice of a filibuster and threatened to tie up his entire legislative program. Liberal forces in both parties praised the proposals. But key Republicans who may hold the balance of power took a cautious approach. The President's plea came in a special message that accompanied a bill brimming with weapons against racial discrimination in stores, hotels and other public places, in schools, in jobs, in polling booths. He asked for a law banning discrimination by any privately owned enterprise that serves the public. He asked power for the Attorney General to start school desegregation court suits on his own. He asked for a massive program to train unskilled Negroes and others for higher paying jobs. He asked for the right to withhold Federal aid from a project when local officials discriminate against Negroes. He asked for much other legislation. And, in a real sense, he may have asked for one of the great legislative battles in American history...

More than 2000 Negro and white demonstrators marched through Washington on Friday in a civil rights protest that had the air of a happy summer outing until they met Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The confrontation with Kennedy seemed to dispel the pleasant, friendly, almost festive atmosphere that had prevailed during the hot afternoon. The demonstrators grew angry because Kennedy kept them waiting in the hot sun for about a quarter of an hour and, when he arrived, Kennedy grew annoyed as he spied some home made signs charging racial discrimination in the Justice Department. Kennedy, standing on a rostrum at the door of the Justice Building, denied this. "Any individual can come here and get a job if he is qualified," he said. At the end of his speech, there were more cheers than boos. Despite this mutual irritation, the demonstration contrasted sharply with other racial protests that have erupted through out the Nation. There was no violence...

President Kennedy outlined a broad legislative program on civil rights Tuesday night and asked the American people for help in ending racial discrimination and in stemming “the rising tide of discontent that perils the public safety". The President spoke to the nation after Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama had bowed to federal pressure and stepped aside so two Negro students could register at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his radio-television talk, the President cited the Alabama crisis in making his appeal and outlining his legislative program. He said he will ask Congress next week for legislation that would: 1. Prohibit stores, hotels restaurants and theaters from discriminating against Negroes 2. Allow the federal government to take a more active part to court suits aimed at desegregating public schools 3. Allow Negroes to take advantage of their right to vote. But the President said that legislation alone would not do the job of insuring that the U.S. Constitution is color-blind...

President Kennedy outlined a broad legislative program on civil rights tonight and asked the American people for help in ending racial discrimination and in stemming "the rising tide of discontent that perils the public safety." The President spoke to the nation after Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama bowed to federal pressure and stepped aside so two Negro students could register at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his radio-television talk, the President cited the Alabama crisis in making his appeal and outlining his legislative program...

Sometimes a Congressman casts a vote that eventually puts money in his own purse. If he found someone else in government making a self-serving decision like that, the congressman would arch his brow, pound his fist and bellow. The cry of "conflict of interest" would resound against the walls. But no one, or at least hardly any one, arches, pounds, or bellows when the congressman casts his vote. There are 535 members of Congress. Of these, 315 are lawyers, some still allied with active, lucrative law firms representing a host of different clients. Thirty-three congressmen have some form of interest in banks, trust companies, or savings & loan associations. Twenty-three congressmen or their families have some sort of interest in radio or television stations. A handful of members are farmers, voting on farm legislation. Far more than a handful own stocks, sometimes in heavy amounts, in interests ranging from oil to soda water...

[Chief Justice Earl Warren has called for a great national debate on three proposed constitutional amendments. In this last of three articles, Stanley Meisler discusses the two amendments aimed at the Supreme Court.] Chief Justice Warren has chided lawyers for their silence about three constitutional amendments. Warren's irritation is not surprising. Two of the amendments are aimed right at his court. "For the bar of America to be as inactive as it has been in this situation," he said recently, "is almost an abdication of its responsibility to the public." As head of the Supreme Court, Warren did not take a position on the amendments, but he clearly was concerned that, with little or no debate, sixteen state legislatures had approved at least one of three amendments. If any amendment wins support from 34 states, Congress must call a national convention to accept or reject it...

[Chief Justice Earl Warren has called for a great national debate on three proposed constitutional amendments that have quietly slipped through sixteen state legislatures. One of these amendments would change the way of amending the Constitution. In this second of three articles, Stanley Meisler analyzes this amendment.] States righters quietly trying to push three new amendments into the United States Constitution have a long, rocky, weaving road ahead. Without fanfare, the legislatures of sixteen states have approved resolutions asking congress to call a national convention to consider these amendments aimed at curtailing the powers of the Federal Government. But the states vary in their likes and dislikes, and not all sixteen have voted for the same amendments. Only one amendment so far has attracted as many as twelve states. The states righters need at least 34 states to take a long first step on the rough constitutional road...

[Chief Justice Earl Warren has taken America's lawyers to task for remaining silent while sixteen states approved at least one of three proposed states rights amendments to the United Slates Constitution. In this first of three articles, Stanley Meisler describes the strange, silent drive behind these amendments aimed at curtailing Federal Government powers.] Without trumpeting or the beating of drums, sixteen states have slipped into a strange, silent parade to amend the United States Constitution and curtail the power of the Federal Government. These states have approved at least one of three proposed constitutional amendments designed by men piqued at the United States Supreme Court and alarmed at the ballooning power of Washington. "If proposals of this magnitude had been made in the early days of the Republic," Chief Justice Earl Warren said recently, ''the voices of the lawyers of that time would have been heard from one end of our land to the other." Warren has called for a great national debate, and, of late, a chorus of opposition has started to sound...

Rep. Otto Passman, D-La., said today he finally feels vindicated in his long battle against foreign aid "but vindicated in words, not in action." So he still will wield his ax when President Kennedy's $4.5 billion foreign aid bill comes his way. For nine years, the ax of this dapper, jocular 62-year-old businessman from Monroe, La., has been a major obstacle for any foreign aid bill trying to wend its way through Capitol Hill. No bill has emerged unscathed. Passman derives his power from his position as chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations. He derives his distaste for foreign aid from a simple philosophy, "Head to a bar tonight and watch some people drinking cocktails," he said in an Interview. "Then watch the drama that unfolds each time the waiter brings the check. Everyone grabs for it. We are a nation of check grabbers...."

Many congressmen grumble about the seniority system in Congress, but few want to do anything about it. In 1811, a freshman, Henry Clay of Kentucky, was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. That could not happen today. Time has clamped a tradition of seniority on Congress. No new congressman dares dream now of reaching the cores of power and influence without waiting his turn in a long line. As usual Congress opened this year with voices both inside and out calling for change. The voices include those of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and reportedly President Kennedy...

In 1914 when Carl Vinson, a 31-year-old Democrat from Georgia, came to Congress for the first time, the entire staff was made up of one secretary, paid $125 a month. The law allowed him and all other congressmen no more. Today Vinson has four members on his staff. The average representative is allowed to hire up to nine at an overall cost of $4000 a month. The average senator usually hires more. And so may the congressional committees. In a rush to keep pace with the onslaught of modern pressures, Congress has created its own private bureaucracy that now numbers more than 7,000 people and costs more than $50 million a year. There’s a chance it soon will get bigger and costlier. This week the House will debate a proposal, approved by its Administration Committee, to increase the office expenses of each congressman by $10,506 a year so he can add still another employee to his payroll. The huge bureaucracy on Capitol Hill has provoked criticism particularly from Sen. Allen J. Ellender, D-La., who leads a futile fight each year to wipe out a good number of the Senate's subcommittee staffs...

[Uncle Sam has spent billions trying to control floods and more billions are committed for the huge job. Still floods exact a heavy toll in property and human misery each year. So is the spending worthwhile? Those most concerned with the program say yes. Their argument: If it weren't for the controls, the $600-$70O million damage bill the public pays each year would be far higher. Stanley Meisler explores the whole complex problem in the following story.] Government officials estimate that the nation's network of levees, dams, and reservoirs each year saves $600-milllon worth of property from destruction by the ravaging rivers of America. Despite this, the rivers have not been tamed. Every year floods destroy $700 million worth of property and inflict widespread human misery. And the toll may be swelling. The great flood-control program of the country, begun in the late 1930s, has not eliminated or halved or even reduced substantially the damage from floods. But its sponsors say it has prevented damage from soaring to staggering heights and blocked catastrophies that might have stunted the growth of some industrial valleys and wrecked the economies of others...

[EDITOR'S NOTE - Although the United States owns more than $3.8-billion worth of foreign currencies, it often has to dip into its own gold supply to meet expenditures abroad.] Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, D-N.Y., squired two good-looking, female assistants to the Lido night club in Paris last summer and paid his way with U.S.-owned francs. The night on the town provoked outcries back home. Powell had a quick defense. He quoted Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon as saying if Powell and other congressmen didn't use these francs the U. S. government would have to burn them. "This is money going right down the drain," Powell said. Dillon said he had no recollection of making the remarks and added that he felt these funds "require the same prudent management and careful handling as any other moneys of the government." In fact, other administration officials say that most times that a congressman uses funds like these, he forces the United States to buy more foreign currencies with American dollars. Powell's night on the town, the outcry, his defense, and the denial by Dillon reflect one of the most complex and massive problems in American international finance... [article also published in the Congressional Record Appendix, 13 March 1963, p. A1354]

Pressures from industry, Congress, and the White House bear heavily on the U.S. government agencies that regulate business and industry. Do the agencies stand fast in the face of the barrage? Not everyone agrees they do. Once again, a debate is swirling about these agencies that make decisions that may mean millions of dollars to a television company, a gas company, a department store, a railroad, an airline or an investment company. The present debate was triggered a month ago by a three-page letter that a frustrated Federal Power Commission member sent to President Kennedy. The commissioner, Howard Morgan, wrote of "pressures generated by huge industries and focused with great skill on and against the sensitive areas of government." He talked of commissioners, in face of these pressures, giving in "too quickly to the present-day urge toward conformity, timidity and personal security." Morgan, who found himself outvoted on key commission decisions, wrote that he did not want reappointment as commissioner. The House Regulatory Agencies subcommittee will open hearings Wednesday on Morgan's charges...

A News Analysis - Is the present furor over Cuba based on fluff or substance? The real answer may lie in the secret correspondence of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy. In the last few weeks of controversy and confusion, an odd drama has been played In Washington. Critics first railed at the administration, crying that Soviet missiles and missile sites still remain in Cuba. The storm drove the administration into an unprecedented picture-show defense of its intelligence operations. But, in the defense, the administration revealed a concern and an uneasiness not about missile and missile sites but about the removal of Soviet troops. None of the published correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy contains any promise to remove Russian troops from Cuba. But the secret correspondence reportedly does. In short, the critics, still may have helped draw attention to a raw nerve of the administration on Cuba policy...

It is a cold winter day at the White House. A handful of pickets trudge through the snow. They have fasted and alternated in marching since the evening before. A snowstorm has buffeted them. Icy temperatures have numbed them. Their placards cry out: Ban the Bomb. Some men in khaki uniforms arrive. Police assign them another area of the sidewalk. The new arrivals, George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazis, are angry because five of their followers have been jailed in Philadelphia. "Jail Red Jews, not our anti-Communists," the Nazi placards say. The Nazis picket for 43 minutes and depart. Two smiling college students reach the scene. They, too, have a placard, and they picket, and wave it for 17 minutes. They have come to the capital only to find that the National Gallery of Art schedule for displaying a famous Leonardo da Vinci painting is such that, they won't get to view it. "We Want To See Mona Lisa," their placard pleads. A policeman notes their departure routinely. Neither the fast of the anti-bomb pickets nor the signs of the Nazis nor the antics of the college boys amaze or amuse him. They simply prove that one day is much like any other day on the sidewalk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...

For some Americans, an end to income taxes. For most, a cut. For a handful, a boost That’s the meaning of President Kennedy’s proposed tax changes. And for 6,500,000 Americans, the changes also would mean a shift in the way they figure out their income taxes. These 6,500,000 taxpayers would be nudged from itemizing their deductions into taking the standard 10 per cent deduction. For them this would make the tax cut less juicy than it might have been. No taxpayer should expect these changes to stuff his pockets with dollars overnight. President Kennedy said he does not want the changes to start until later this year and take full effect until 1965. And they won’t take effect at all if Congress doesn’t approve them...

The 88th Congress opened for business Wednesday and dealt sudden death to conservative members' hopes of recapturing control of the key House Rules Committee. This victory for President Kennedy had been expected, but the size of his margin was a surprise. On the decisive vote in the House, his supporters won 235-196. The vote kept the size of the Rules Committee at 15 members. If Kennedy's forces had failed, it would have reverted to 12 members, leaving the committee in the grip of a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats opposed to major elements of Kennedy's legislative program. The committee, which controls the flow of most legislation to the floor of the House, had been under the domination of this coalition until two years ago...

President Kennedy has learned to his dismay that cannons on the White House lawn can drown out everything but Caroline and her friends. He learned this as he stood tight-lipped and at attention yesterday while cannons on the south lawn boomed a welcome for Premier Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria. After Mr. Ben Bella had conferred with the President and left, a reporter asked President Kennedy what he thought of the childish noises that came from the second floor during the ceremonies. “We will talk about that this afternoon,” he said. The President then smiled — but only slightly — whirled, and rushed into the White House. The President’s corrective measures went no further than a talking-to. "Was Caroline punished?” a newsman asked White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger last night. “Not that I know of,” he replied...

Since election day, committees have tossed sheaves of paper on to the desk of President-Elect John F. Kennedy. The papers give him advice on how to reshape, readjust, or revitalize America. Kennedy asked for it. The committees are the special task forces he assigned to recommend ways to solve such problems as distressed areas, defense needs, and overcrowded schools. Kennedy appointed some before election day. The President-Elect asked prominent public officials to head some task forces. He named professors to head others. In one case, the task force comprised one man. Not all the reports have been made public. Not all have been endorsed. But, in general, the reports seem to follow Kennedy's campaign promises and may give some indication of the future course of his administration...

LUIS MUNOZ MARIN, Puerto Rico’s first elected Governor, remains in La Fortaleza. He sits in the Governor’s Palace, confident and pleased, for the jibaros of the mountains and countryside, in overwhelming numbers, have defied their Roman Catholic bishops to elect him to a fourth term. But, while confident and pleased, he also is uneasy. Despite his victory, a threat lingers, perhaps not to his power, but (more important) to the political stability of Puerto Rico. And, while the threat evolves primarily from clericalism, part of the threat also stems from Muñoz Marín himself. During the campaign, the flare-up over the tactics of the bishops, who issued two pastoral letters forbidding Catholics to vote for Muñoz Marín, obscured some of the political problems of Puerto Rico — the very problems that set the climate for the letters. The Governor’s rout of the new Christian Action Party, a creature of the bishops, tended to fill his supporters, particularly abroad, with a heady optimism, blinding them to the dangers still enveloping democracy on the island...

TO AT LEAST one Congressman, a sugar bill posed no problem. The issue was simple, Representative William E. Miller of New York, chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, told his colleagues: You are either for Castro or against him. Since few praises for Castro have sounded through the chambers of Congress recently, Miller’s analysis, if accurate, meant that a sugar bill could be legislated with ease, speed and clarity. But the analysis was far from accurate, and when Congress, after a twenty-three-hour session during the Fourth of July weekend, finally did bring forth a sugar bill, its haggard members looked neither easy nor speedy nor clear. Their decisions had been shaped and pounded by unceasing and sometimes contradictory pressures — pressures so varied, fascinating and obvious that even a hurried survey of them can reveal some of the realities within our legislative process. The story of the 1960 Sugar Act is a case history in American politics. Despite Miller, the issues turned on much more than an attitude toward the Cuban Premier...