THE BEST CONGRESS SINCE EARLY NEW DEAL YEARS

JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES

ROSCOE DRUMMOND, longtime Washington correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor and now the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Herald Tribune.

I BELIEVE that most Washington correspondents agree [on] these conclusions about the 83rd Congress:

1) This has been an extraordinarily productive Congress. As much significant legislation has been put on the statute books as during any comparable two-year period in recent years, and more than most. The nearly balanced strength of the two parties has often in the past stalemated Congress into inaction, into something near to a "do-nothing" record. It didn't this year.

2) Despite some serious setbacks, the President won a very substantial part of his legislative program. This Congress has been more responsive to the President's requests on domestic matters than any previous Congress since the first two years of the New Deal.

3) Important parts of the Administration record concretely reflect the President's stated philosophy of government--a philosophy of economic conservatism with humanitarian overtones. This is true of the tax bill. This is true of the wide-ranging extension of social welfare measures.

4) The Administration suffered critical losses on the legislative front. It had to take only a one-year extension of the Reciprocal Trade Act, and it lost nearly all of the related measures to improve and expand foreign trade. It was unable to meet its pledge to revise the Taft-Hartley law. It was unable to honor its platform promise to give statehood to Hawaii. But it had more victories than it had defeats, and is pledged to return to do battle on all these issues when the new Congress convenes in January.

THE H-BOMB "FALL-OUT": LESSON OF THE "DRAGON"

COLUMNISTS JOSEPH & STEWART ALSOP, long advocates of greater military preparedness for the U.S., discover the "fall-out"--a new byproduct of H-bomb warfare.

SIR Winston Churchill solemnly told the House of Commons [last month] that "tremendous changes have taken place in the whole strategic position in the world which make the thoughts which were well founded and well knit together a year ago utterly obsolete." What the great old man was referring to here is the fact that the hydrogen bomb has turned out to be an even more hideous and destructive weapon than was planned and expected. It has now been discovered that in certain special cases the heat and blast may be no more than the percussion cap of a much larger phenomenon.

This phenomenon is the radioactive "fallout" that showered the Japanese fishing boat Fortunate Dragon and several of the inhabited Marshall Islands with noxious ashes. That this kind of noxious fallout must probably be expected, obviously transforms the new H-bomb from a city-destroying weapon to a province-crippling weapon. Churchill used this new phenomenon to justify the abandonment of Britain's great Suez base. Churchill was saying, in effect, that the Suez base, which stretches for 100 miles along the Canal, was now too vulnerable to have real value.

All the evidence shows that this [fallout] is a new thing. The newness is proved by Sir Winston's assertion that these "tremendous changes" occurred within the last twelve months, which means that these changes were not produced by our first H-bomb test in 1952. The inference is obvious, therefore, that the difference between the new and the other absolute weapons is that the new bomb produces a cloud of fairly heavy particles. And these, being fairly heavy, fall out immediately and locally while they are still dangerous to life. To all this, only one point needs to be added--the H-bomb tested by the Russians last summer was of the new type.

WILL LIBERALS TAKE OVER SOUTHERN DEMOCRACY?

ARTHUR KROCK, Kentucky-born dean of U.S. political reporters, finds that the facts of political life are changing a philosophy he has often admired, Southern Democratic conservatism.

DEMOCRATIC primaries in the South have seriously raised the questions whether the day of the party conservatives is now ending and whether the Southern Democracy is about to join the Northern on the left side of the American political scene. The overwhelming majority of Democrats occupied that area in the first stages of the New Deal. But as its radicalism in creased, a movement which reached its peak under President Truman and the Fair Deal, many Southerners returned to the more moderate political philosophy of the Wilson Administration. The recent primaries in North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas gave superficial evidence, at least, that the immunity of the Southern conservatives may soon be a thing of the past.

Senator Estes Kefauver calls himself a "liberal" as contrasted with a conservative. The challenger of his renomination, Representative Pat Sutton, did his best to paint Kefauver's domestic record in the most vivid radical colors, and attacked him as an "internationalist" who would submerge the U.S. in a world government. Though there was substance in some of the attack, Kefauver won a smashing endorsement from the Democrats of Tennessee. In view of these events, it is not surprising that Democrats are wondering whether the Southern conservatives, whom neither a Roosevelt nor Truman could dislodge from office, are not now nearing the close of one of their chapters in political history.

IKE'S PRESS CONFERENCE: CRISIS INTO OPPORTUNITY

JAMES B. RESTON, Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who felt that the President originally approached his job "like a rookie pitcher with the bases loaded," now finds that "a General stands at ease."

EVEN those professional cynics and amateur psychoanalysts, the Washington reporters, came away from his news conference this morning remarking on the change. He was clearly at ease even with the most controversial questions. He didn't answer all the questions that were put to him, but he answered most of them and said frankly that he didn't know when he didn't know, and at one point even suggested to the reporters that if he was not responsive to their questions, they should interrupt and say so. The President has always tried to be responsive to questions at his news conferences, but there are some obvious differences now. He is clearly better informed. He is talking more freely about foreign affairs.

There are other differences too. The President is reasonably happy about his legislative program. He has lost some battles, but he feels he is winning his campaign for peace abroad and continued prosperity at home.

He entered the White House after a rough presidential campaign in which he made up his mind that the newsmen acted like a bunch of district attorneys who were more concerned to trap him than get information. This he no longer believes. He no longer feels that he has a hostile audience. In short, after a fairly stormy passage during the last year and a half, he has come out into what seems to him to be calmer water. The economic situation at home is improved, peace has been preserved, and the press conference, which used to be a crisis, is now seen at the White House as an opportunity.

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