Man Of The Year: John F. Kennedy, A Way with the People

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some criticism about it. People are saying that they are tired of getting up every morning and reading what Kennedy is doing. They want to read what Khrushchev and Castro are doing."

First Realization. On the home front, realization came quickly to Jack Kennedy that not everything was going to come up roses. The 87th Congress had convened with lopsided Democratic majorities—but those majorities were deceptive, particularly in the House of Representatives, where conservative Democrats (mostly from the South) and Republicans saw Kennedy's squeaky win over Dick Nixon as less than a national mandate. The first major fight in Congress was over the Kennedy Administration's all-out effort to liberalize the House Rules Committee. The resolution carried by a scant five votes—and right then and there President Kennedy, a veteran vote counter, concluded that his domestic programs were in for trouble.

He was absolutely right. During the year, in 66 messages to Capitol Hill, the President made 355 specific legislative requests. Of those, the Congress approved 172. In general, the Congress gave the President almost everything he wanted in the field of national security. After desperate fights, it approved Kennedy Administration requests for the biggest housing bill in history, an increased minimum wage and new federal highway financing. But such pet Kennedy programs as aid to education and medical care for the elderly never even came to House votes. And in one of the bitterest blows of all. President Kennedy got for his vital foreign aid a half-loaf that did not meet his urgent demands for long-term borrowing authority.

Naive Request. In foreign affairs, understanding of the difficulties came more slowly to the President. At the outset, Kennedy naively conveyed a request for a six-month moratorium on Communist troublemaking while the new Administration got its house in order. In response, Communist guerrillas began gobbling even more hungrily at faraway Laos. Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko came to the White House to sound out the new President. In the Rose Garden, Kennedy sternly warned Gromyko of the danger of pushing the U.S. too far in a situation where its prestige was at stake. Gromyko listened—and the guerrillas kept advancing in Laos. As the situation worsened, Kennedy went on national TV at a press conference to declare that a Communist takeover in Laos would "quite obviously affect the security of the U.S."

The plain implication of Kennedy's statement was that the U.S. would send arms and, if necessary, troops to defend the security that had been equated with its own. But nothing could have been further from Kennedy's intention, and only a few days later State Department officials and White House aides began downgrading the importance of Laos. Kennedy himself said, in a qualification that counted Laos out: "We can only defend the freedom of those who are ready to defend themselves." Actually, the new President had been caught in a talk-tough bluff aimed, at best, at achieving a pallid, precarious truce in Laos.

But Laos did not diminish Jack Kennedy's self-confidence. Neither did the space flight of Russia's Yuri Gagarin. To that, Kennedy reacted in a manner characteristic of his first months in the White House. First he called in his space experts, demanded that they come up with