The Invulnerable President

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

AD just how long can the Kennedys go on free from the smallest application of the old rule that golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust? Indefinitely it seems.

The latest Gallup poll asserts that President Kennedy. would defeat the unfortunate Mr.

Nixon in a new election with 65 per cent. of the Vote. These figures fit the judgment of most ob- servers; and they reduce the Republicans to a Point below which an electoral opposition could hardly be said to exist. The proportion will come Closer to balance before 1964; there will, of course, be one of those periods when Republi- cans are euphoric and Democrats depressed, and Political reporters talk about a horse race. But the impression will not down that the present figures are real and that the closer estimates emerging after the 1964 conventions will be illusory reflections of the needs of the parties, of Republicans to hope, of Democrats to feel in crisis, of journalists to sustain a life that would be insupportable if there were to be no more horse races.

All those needs and the persistence of habit might make the 1964 election closer than the true national sentiment would warrant. The true national sentiment could be in this Gallup poll, taken in a period free from noise and the illu- sion of a serious contest.

The President has moved intact through a month that might have damaged him if he could be damaged. His victory over the steel com- panies left rancours which at the very least assure revenue for a Republican Party whose Most faithful contributors had uptil then shown an alarming tendency to stop tithing. The spec- tacle of the Kennedys turning Massachusetts Into their own rotten borough had charmed the beholder less than most manifestations of this great connection. The stock market has been errant. The era of good feeling has then ended; but none of these irritations gives any evidence of corroding the President's great popular image.

it becomes possible now to wonder whether General Eisenhower was not a truly revolu- tionary President and whether he did not begin and Mr. Kennedy is not now consolidating a profound change in the office. Political parti- sanship has come to seem juvenile and somehow undignified to more and more Americans; the voter who boasts of his independence was always determinant, but his number has never reached the crashing proportions it has now. A 65 per cent. majority for a candidate becomes con- ceivable once we understand that a quarter of the American voters may no longer have a party allegiance. and vote only for the man. A President who is both moderate and attractive has an insuperable advantage with these voters. His family becomes the national family; Mr. Nixon is perhaps too selfconscious to be really attractive; otherwise we might reflect how narrowly national fashion was turned by the 1960 election to the delicate elegance of Mrs. Kennedy, instead of to the sturdy unevocative adolescence of the Nixon girls.

Then Hayley Mills would have been the most conspicuous guest at the White House now or- namented by Andre Malraux. A nation dazzled by Mrs. Kennedy at Versailles would have watched with the same devotion Julie Nixon's first date at the Hot Shoppe.

We seem, then, to expect our presidents to be monarchs in both form and function. Their power of decision is, after all, larger and with a greater potential of fatality than Charlemagne's or Henry VIII's ever was. If the times demand a despot, his subjects demand above all else the quality of moderation; their' instinct tells them that a man intemperate about party is apt to be rash about terrible decisions. Eisenhower and Kenndy are, above all, moderates, whose tem- peraments are trusted more to keep them con- stitutional monarchs when the conditions of history allow no other check on their command.

Even their blunders increase the faith of their supporters; the worse conditions become, the larger is the consensus that only they can be trusted not to lose their heads in the present mess. President Eisenhower consolidated his 1956 landslide when Suez made absolutely clear what a catastrophe poor Dulles had been. Mr. Ken- nedy's image was improved by Cuba. Yet Mr.

Truman, who all parties concede was right in Korea, had no worse liability than Korea; such are the penalties of the posture of partisan passion.

Presidents like Mr. Kennedy and President Eisenhower may be immune to great political disasters; but they cannot escape petty annoy- ances. These irritations come, quite naturally, from the most partisan members of the party which elected them. Mr. Eisenhower found his worst nuisance the hard Republicans; now Mr. Kennedy is discovering how pestilential the hard Democrats can be.

A president of the Eisenhower-Kennedy sort tends to do badly with Congress. It is a place to which resentment comes easy; Congressmen do not abdicate to a president as willingly as ordinary citizens do. And so Mr. Kennedy has spent a normal month of petty annoyance and small defeats from a Senate in which his party exercises overwhelming control.

The most serious of these nuisances was the Senate's refusal to give the President authority to extend foreign aid to Yugoslavia and Poland. His legislative spokesmen were so surprised by the magnitude of the coalition against them that, at the last ditch, they could only make the issue one of confidence in Mr. Kenndy's discretion and good judgment.

Once that issue was drawn, a Senate vote against Tito and Gomulka became by indirec- tion a vote against the President himself. This made peculiarly noticeable the condition that the votes which defeated the administration came from Senators whose loyalty as liberal Demo- crats he has taken for granted.

The floor leader of the fight to bar aid to Tito and Gomulka was Senator William Prox- mire (Democrat, Wisconsin), whose stance is consistently to the President's Left. He got the votes of ten Democratic Senators of the same general persuasion. Before this vote, it had been an article of faith with most of them that the President and the Department of State must never be inhibited by the legislature in their authority over matters of foreign policy. Their liberal Republican opposites voted according to that principle; only the Democrats defected in any number.

They had chosen an issue so at variance with their past position as to indicate that the need to rebel was more important to them than the logic of its occasion. Almost all of these rebels are more engaged with domestic social issues than Mr. Kennedy. None is an establishment figure with an administration; all feel neglected and unattended by the President. The Demo- cratic liberals are conscious of small influence with the White House or in their party's Senate leadership. Their Hubert Humphrey is, of course, the Senate whip; he is a good soldier, but there is the sense that the administration commands his energies more often than it consults his judgment.

They are disturbed, as an instance, because the passion seems to have gone out of the Presi- dent's campaign for medical aid to the aged and because Mr. Kennedy seems to be as happy to keep it as an issue in future campaigns as he would be to pass it. This is the irritation of which their vote against Tito and Gomulka is a symbol.

The President's most masterly achievement so far has been the conquest or neutralisation of those persons who did not vote for him. He could not have salvaged as much as he did from the foreign aid Bill without the intervention of Senator Dirksen, the Republican minority leader, who seems to have calculated that his best assurance of re-election is to display the loyalty and discretion of his opposition to the adminis- tration.

The President's formidable talent for recon- c ling his enemies begins to produce uncaIculated scomforts from his friends. There are dangers it a policy so counter to the precepts of those great Whigs who are such objects of the Presi- dent's admiration.

Walpole, Macaulay reminds us, 'gained very few over from the opposition. . . . He knew that it would be very bad policy in him to give the world to understand that more was to be got by thwarting his measures than by supporting them. These maxims are as old as the origin of parliamentary corruption in England.'

Still, the chances are that Senator Proxmire and his new rebels, after disturbing the Presi- dent's peace, will attract the President's atten- tion. One hesitates to criticise a talent as formidable as his; still, even the most intuitive and adventurous politicians take risks when they wander from sound Whig precepts.