The nation
the three-front war

At a closed-door session on Capitol Hill last week, Secretary of State Christian Herter made his final report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on U.S. affairs abroad.
Afterward, Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore summed it up for newsmen.
What Herter presented, said Gore, was "not a very encouraging review".
That was something of an understatement in a week when the underlying conflict between the West and Communism erupted on three fronts.
While Communists were undermining United Nations efforts to rescue the Congo from chaos, two other Communist offensives stirred the Eisenhower Administration into emergency conferences and serious decisions.
1) Cuba.

Hours after a parade of his new Soviet tanks and artillery, Dictator Fidel Castro suddenly confronted the U.S. with a blunt and drastic demand: within 48 hours, the U.S. had to reduce its embassy and consulate staffs in Cuba to a total of eleven persons (the embassy staff alone totaled 87 U.S. citizens, plus 120 Cuban employees).
President Eisenhower held an 8:30 a.m. meeting with top military and foreign-policy advisers, decided to break off diplomatic relations immediately.
"There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure", said the President.
"That limit has now been reached".

Through Secretary Herter, Ike offered President-elect Kennedy an opportunity to associate his new Administration with the breakoff decision.
Kennedy, through Secretary-designate of State Dean Rusk, declined.
He thus kept his hands free for any action after Jan. 20, although reaction to the break was generally favorable in the U.S. and Latin America (see the hemisphere).
2) Laos.

After a White House huddle between the President and top lieutenants, the Defense Department reacted sharply to a cry from the pro-Western government of Laos that several battalions of Communist troops had invaded Laos from North Viet Nam.
"In view of the present situation in Laos", said the Pentagon's announcement, "we are taking normal precautionary actions to increase the readiness of our forces in the Pacific".
Cutting short a holiday at Hong Kong, the aircraft carriers Lexington and Bennington steamed off into the South China Sea, accompanied by a swarm of destroyers, plus troopships loaded with marines.
On the U.S.'s island base of Okinawa, Task Force 116, made up of Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force units, got braced to move southward on signal.

But by week's end the Laotian cry of invasion was read as an exaggeration (see foreign news), and the U.S. was agreeing with its cautious British and French allies that a neutralist -- rather than a pro-Western -- government might be best for Laos.
French & Indians.

There was a moral of sorts in the Laotian situation that said much about all other cold-war fronts.
Political, economic and military experts were all agreed that chaotic, mountainous little Laos was the last place in the world to fight a war -- and they were probably right.
"It would be like fighting the French and Indian War all over again", said one military man.
But why was Laos the new Southeast Asian battleground?

At Geneva in 1954, to get the war in Indo-China settled, the British and French gave in to Russian and Communist Chinese demands and agreed to the setting up of a Communist state, North Viet Nam -- which then, predictably, became a base for Communist operations against neighboring South Viet Nam and Laos.
The late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles considered the 1954 Geneva agreement a specimen of appeasement, saw that resolution would be needed to keep it from becoming a calamity for the West.
He began the diplomatic discussions that resulted in the establishment of Aj.
"The important thing from now on", he said, "is not to mourn the past but to seize the future opportunity to prevent the loss in northern Viet Nam from leading to the extension of Communism throughout Southeast Asia".

Russian tanks and artillery parading through the streets of Havana, Russian intrigue in the Congo, and Russian arms drops in Laos (using the same Ilyushin transports that were used to carry Communist agents to the Congo) made it plain once more that the cold war was all of a piece in space and time.
Soviet Premier Khrushchev sent New Year's hopes for peace to President-elect Kennedy, and got a cool acknowledgment in reply.
Considering the state of the whole world, the cold war's three exposed fronts did not seem terribly ominous;
but, in Senator Gore's words, it was "not a very encouraging" situation that would confront John F. Kennedy on Inauguration Day.

The Congress

turmoil in the House

As the 87th Congress began its sessions last week, liberal Democrats were ready for a finish fight to open the sluice gates controlled by the House Rules Committee and permit the free flow of liberal legislation to the floor.
The liberal pressure bloc (which coyly masquerades under the name Democratic Study Group) had fought the committee before, and had always lost.
This time, they were much better prepared and organized, and the political climate was favorable.
They had the unspoken support of President-elect Kennedy, whose own legislative program was menaced by the Rules Committee bottleneck.
And counting noses, they seemed to have the votes to work their will.
Deadly deadlock.

There were two possible methods of breaching the conservative barriers around the Rules Committee: 1) to pack it with additional liberals and break the conservative-liberal deadlock, or 2) to remove one of the conservatives -- namely Mississippi's 14-term William Meyers Colmer (pronounced Calmer).
Caucusing, the liberals decided to go after Colmer, which actually was the more drastic course, since seniority in the House is next to godliness.

A dour, gangling man with a choppy gait, Colmer looks younger than his 70 years, has gradually swung from a moderate, internationalist position to that of a diehard conservative.
He is generally and initially suspicious of any federal project, unless it happens to benefit his Gulf Coast constituents.
He is, of course, a segregationist, but he says he has never made an "anti-Negro" speech.
For 20 years he has enjoyed his power on the Rules Committee.
There his vote, along with those of Chairman Howard Smith, the courtly Virginia judge, and the four Republican members, could and often did produce a 6-6 deadlock that blocked far-out, Democratic-sponsored welfare legislation (a tactic often acceptable to the Rayburn-Johnson congressional leadership to avoid embarrassing votes).
Equal treatment.

There was sufficient pretext to demand Colmer's ouster: he had given his lukewarm support to the anti-Kennedy electors in Mississippi.
Reprisals are not unheard of in such situations, but the recent tendency has been for the Congress to forgive its prodigal sons.
In 1949 the Dixiecrats escaped unscathed after their 1948 rebellion against Harry Truman, and in 1957, after Congressman Adam Clayton Powell campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, his fellow Democrats did not touch his committee assignments, although they did strip him temporarily of his patronage.
(In the heat of the anti-Colmer drive last week, Judge Smith threatened reprisal against Powell.
Said he: "We will see whether whites and Negroes are treated the same around here".
) But Speaker Sam Rayburn, after huddling in Palm Beach with President-elect Kennedy, decided that this year something had to be done about the Rules Committee -- and that he was the only man who could do anything effective.

In a tense, closed-door session with Judge Smith, Rayburn attempted to work out a compromise: to add three new members to the Rules Committee (two Democrats, including one Southerner, and one Republican).
Smith flatly rejected the offer, and Mister Sam thereupon decided to join the rebels.
The next morning he summoned a group of top Democrats to his private office and broke the news: he would lead the fight to oust Colmer, whom he is said to regard as "an inferior man".

News of Rayburn's commitment soon leaked out.
When Missouri's Clarence Cannon got the word, he turned purple.
"Unconscionable"!
He shouted, and rushed off to the Speaker's Room to object: "A dangerous precedent"!
Cannon, a powerful, conservative man, brought welcome support to the Smith-Colmer forces: as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, he holds over each member the dreadful threat of excluding this or that congressional district from federal pork-barrel projects.
Sitting quietly on an equally big pork barrel was another Judge Smith ally, Georgia's Carl Vinson, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Threat of war.

As the battle raged in the cloakrooms and caucuses, it became clear that Judge Smith could lose.
His highest count of supporters numbered 72 -- and he needed nearly twice that number to control the 260-member Democratic caucus.
The liberals, smelling blood, were faced with the necessity of winning three big votes -- in the Democratic Committee on Committees, in the full party caucus, and on the floor of the House -- before they could oust Colmer.
(One big question: If Colmer was to be purged, what should the House do about the other three senior Mississippians who supported the maverick electors?
) In all three arenas, they seemed certain of victory -- especially with Sam Rayburn applying his whiplash.

But in the prospect of winning the battle loomed the specter of losing a costlier war.
If the Southerners were sufficiently aroused, they could very well cut the Kennedy legislative program to ribbons from their vantage point of committee chairmanships, leaving Sam Rayburn leading a truncated, unworkable party.
With that possibility in mind, Arkansas' Wilbur Mills deliberately delayed calling a meeting of the Committee on Committees, and coolheaded Democrats sought to bring Rayburn and Smith together again to work out some sort of face-saving compromise.
"Here are two old men, mad at each other and too proud to pick up the phone", said a House Democratic leader.
"One wants a little more power, and the other doesn't want to give up any".
Battle in the senate

The Senate launched the 87th Congress with its own version of an ancient liberal-conservative battle, but in contrast with the House's guerrilla war it seemed as pro forma as a Capitol guide's speech.
Question at issue: How big a vote should be necessary to restrict Senate debate -- and thereby cut off legislation-delaying filibusters?

A wide-ranging, bipartisan force -- from Minnesota's Democratic Hubert Humphrey to Massachusetts' Republican Leverett Saltonstall -- was drawn up against a solid phalanx of Southern Democrats, who have traditionally used the filibuster to stop civil rights bills.
New Mexico's Clint Anderson offered a resolution to change the Senate's notorious Rule 22 to allow three-fifths of the Senators present and voting to cut off debate, instead of the current hard-to-get two-thirds.
Fair Dealer Humphrey upped the ante, asked cloture power for a mere majority of Senators.
Georgia's Dick Russell objected politely, and the battle was joined.

Privately, the liberals admitted that the Humphrey amendment had no chance of passage.
Privately, they also admitted that their hopes for Clint Anderson's three-fifths modification depended on none other than Republican Richard Nixon.
In 1957 Nixon delivered a significant opinion that a majority of Senators had the power to adopt new rules at the beginning of each new Congress, and that any rules laid down by previous Congresses were not binding.

Armed with the Nixon opinion, the Senate liberals rounded up their slim majority and prepared to choke off debate on the filibuster battle this week.
Hopefully, the perennial battle of Rule 22 then would be fought to a settlement once and for all.

Republicans
last act

Since Election Day, Vice President Richard Nixon had virtually retired -- by his own wish -- from public view.
But with the convening of the new Congress, he was the public man again, presiding over the Senate until John Kennedy's Inauguration.
One day last week, Nixon faced a painful constitutional chore that required him to officiate at a joint session of Congress to hear the official tally of the Electoral College vote, and then to make "sufficient declaration" of the election of the man who defeated him in the tight 1960 presidential election.
Nixon fulfilled his assignment with grace, then went beyond the required "sufficient declaration".

"This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated", he said.