That Damned Cowboy

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

Oh. God, now that damned cowboy is president of the United States.

—Senator Thomas Platt, on the death of William McKinley, and the accession of Theodore Roose-

velt, 1901.

pRESIDENT KENNEDY'S three-day war with the United States Steel Corporation remains in the memory still as the only swift and massive humiliation of an aggressor a sovereign govern- ment has been able to mount in this depressing century.

But it can be something more consequential than a merely dazzling display of the President's brilliance when ambushed. For the entire style of John F. Kennedy as President may have been set in the moments after Roger Blough, chair- man of US Steel's board of directors, handed him the announcement that the company was raising its prices and imperilling the dollar whose defence is so dear to Mr. Kennedy.

He moved in those moments to a posture of retaliation that was certainly improvised. But it would be a surprise if the posture did not become a habit. For the President seems to be one of those men whose lives are shaped by a few great moments and who rather mark time in between.

Until now, his war experience seems to have been the major element in his character. He learned from it that he had the resource of grace under pain and pressure. He used that grace marvellously as a campaigner; but the only gift of command he was sure he possessed was for the management and the deployment of small parties. Week before last, in his wrath, he found himself marshalling the whole government of the United States against its most powerful private industry. In that experience, he found the gift of command in its fullest dimensions.

He proved himself a gracious, if not materially generous, winner. The unfortunate Mr. Blough was invited to the White House to be told that the President proposed no aggressions of his own. The inference was that the Department of Justice would temper its investigation of monopoly in the steel industry now that its price increase had been rescinded. That inference, if correct, would accord with Mr. Kennedy's habitual good manners, but none the less raised some odd questions, the strongest of them: Are the laws of the United States to be enforced only when its President loses his temper?

The answer, so far as the laws to control monopoly are concerned, would seem to be yes. The national anti-monopoly statutes are more than fifty years old and have been no more than a superficial limitation on the tendency of large industry to concentrate in fewer hands. Mr. Kennedy seems to find this tendency unpleasant but essentially irrevocable. He is by temperament committed to holding lines more than the attempt to roll them back. The customs of the economy he inherited will be respected so long as they are not indulged to excess. The United States has in him a policeman and not a reformer.

We have then the Roosevelt the Democrats promised themselves in the 1960 campaign, but he turns out more Theodore than Franklin. Theodore Roosevelt was an engaging President tut not a revolutionary one. His parallels with President Kennedy are obvious: the appetite for physical culture, the overflowing family, the affection for history and the passion for journalism.

Henry Mencken, who admired the first Roosevelt almost as much as he enjoyed him, offers us other parallels.

'He did not believe in democracy,' Mencken remembered of Theodore Roosevelt. 'He be- lieved simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard con- centration of authority. . . . In all his career no one ever heard him make an argument for the rights of the citizen; his eloquence was always expended in expounding the duties of the citizen.'

These terms may be just for Theodore Roose- velt, who had a Nietzschean cast to him, but they are somewhat excessive for Mr. Kennedy's normal tenor. Still there is the memory of that voice saying: 'Ask not what your country can do for you. . .

Mr. Kennedy's outrage at the steel industry was not the response of a romantic liberal. United States Steel angered him, not because he considers riches an affront but because unregu- latell profit is untidy. He conceives government as patrolling the classes without assisting either.

The most significant comment on United States Steel's capitulation came from Secretary of Labour Arthur Goldberg, who expressed his gratification at having an example with which to hold the unions in line. And they will be held in line; government has become the arbiter.

Those liberals who rejoiced to see United States Steel driven into line might have reflected that the John F. Kennedy who was outraged at the independent action of businessmen was hardly enchanted by the independent action of Freedom Riders either.

A major problem of public administration in the United States is to achieve the delicate balance between order and disorder, the latter being, after all, perhaps the most creative of the national traditions. The President has a bias towards order, both public and private, which defines his difference with Theodore Roosevelt, who was personally a rather disorderly fellow and a serious pest after he retired. The guerrilla campaign which Theodore Roosevelt mounted against the presidents who affronted him by suc- ceeding him is certainly not in the Kennedy style.

But the quality of Franklin Roosevelt was also different because of his refined taste for a certain amount of public disorder. A man who had grown up worshipping the second Roosevelt said recently that he thought less of him now than he had used to but that the American people of the Thirties seemed to him greater every time he looked at them. The release of the disorderly energies of that people may have been Franklin Roosevelt's single most important achievement. He presided with enjoyment over a society which moved and shook as much from below as from above. The victory over United States Steel has established John Kennedy as a memorable President; the distahce to Franklin Roosevelt and a truly creative presidency remains, shorter but still a way to travel.