THE Senator from Kentucky was speaking about the President of the U.S.: "In one hand he holds the purse, and in the other he brandishes the sword of the country. What more does he want?" The Senator from Massachusetts compared the President to Briareus, the 100-handed giant of Greek mythology: "He touches everything, moves everything, controls everything. I ask, sir, is this legal responsibility?"
The critics were Henry Clay and Daniel Webster; the President thus chastised was Andrew Jackson. Throughout U.S. history, the Senate and the Chief Executive have stood in a special relationship, which, at its best, has been a form of creative tension. At times the tension was relaxed to the point of subservience by the White House to the Hill and, occasionally, vice versa; at other times it was heightened into open, relentless hostility. To date, no Senator has publicly used Webster's sort of language about Lyndon Johnson, although Johnson seems to have considerably more than 100 hands. Still, the long Viet Nam debate has sharply renewed the state of tension between the President and the Senate.
Watching TV during the last few weeks, Americans saw the spectacle of a half circle of rumpled men on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—Chairman William Fulbright peering over his spectacles like a country-store sage, Oregon's Wayne Morse flailing a limp arm, Vermont's George Aiken beaming avuncularly for the cameras—all of them questioning or baiting Administration witnesses and, through the witnesses, Lyndon Johnson. In the end only five Senators voted against tabling a motion rescinding the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution, which had authorized the President to take all necessary action in Southeast Asia. But perhaps two dozen other Senators, while refusing to vote against the Commander in Chief, were nevertheless known to have serious reservations about Administration policy. Almost to a man, the critics were Democrats in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. They were thus at odds not only with their party's leader but with a President justly famed for his unsurpassed mastery in handling the Senate.
The dissent was far from a revolt against Johnson and was much milder than some of the Senate's historic uprisings against the White House. It was a challenge nonetheless, and a reassertion of the Senate's constitutional mandate to give "advice and consent" to all treaties and, by projection, to all U.S. foreign policies. Irritating as it may seem in times of crisis, the founding fathers intended that the Senate should act in just this way—as a chamber of deliberate counsel, second thoughts and extended debate, a guardian against rashness on the part either of the popularly elected lower House or of the President. The Senate has had its greater and its lesser days—and at any given time its current members usually suffer by comparison with the "giants" of a nostalgically remembered past. It has, in fact, changed and renewed itself often, reflecting the facts of American history and politics from the smallest matters of patronage to the highest questions of principle.
Test of Will