Jenner is Jenner and Morse is Morse, and never the twain should meet. But last week Oregon's eyebrowed, highbrowed, liberal Democrat Wayne Morse rose in the Senate to blast the $3.6 billion foreign-aid authorization bill and found himself shoulder to shoulder not only with those strapping Neanderthal Republicans, Indiana's Bill Jenner and Nevada's Molly Malone, but with Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge too. And when the bill came to a vote after three days of debate, they stood together as part of a notable rear-view rear guard of 25 (see box), roundly beaten by a bipartisan majority of 57.
Actually, neither Morse nor Talmadge nor any of their crew had a wisp of a chance of defeating the bill, which came out of Theodore Francis Green's Foreign Relations Committee with heavy bipartisan backing. The committee refused to authorize only $227 million of the $3.8 billion appropriation sought by the Administration. Moreover, it even approved the President's request for an economic-development fund of indefinite duration, thus setting a new pattern for economic development funds (TIME, June 3). When the measure reached the Senate, both Minority Leader William Fife Knowland and Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson quickly endorsed it. Said Texan Johnson: "This is the kind of philosophy that will get other nations off their backs—and off our taxpayers' backs."
Pikes & Pensions. But to erstwhile foreign-aid defender Wayne Morse, the carefully considered bill was no more than "a gigantic hoax on the Senate and the people." To a chamber dotted with only half a dozen members, Morse proclaimed in his best monotone: "This country does not need, and should not seek, perpetual dependents anywhere in the world . . . Aid in this pattern may help to prop up an irresponsible government which professes friendship for this country and natters the administrators of this program. Sooner or later, however, the people of this country will pay a terrible price for this unmitigated folly." Herman Talmadge settled for less erudition and more emotion. Warming up to the spellbinding oratory that used to send his Georgia wool hats whooping and stomping, the freshman Senator spelled out what he declared to be specific flaws. "While many of our farmers cannot get their crops to market over muddy roads," said Farmer Talmadge, "we build a huge six-lane turnpike in Portugal to a gambling resort. We have sent opera singers to Italy and ultraviolet-ray lamps to India. And we have set up a pension program for overage Chinese Nationalist soldiers."
Problems & Precedent. .Talmadge's stem-winding oratory was deflated by Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, whose Middle Eastern trip last month made him a firmer advocate of Eisenhower foreign policy. "If one wishes to engage in finding very little blisters on the trunk of the great oak tree," said Democrat Humphrey, "it is possible to make it appear that the oak is almost ready to collapse, or that it never should have been a tree in the first place. But if one considers the totality of the program and does not concentrate on a little error here or a little mistake there, one finds a rather encouraging picture."