Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Strength. The defeat came after a long, hard struggle. Last month the Senate overwhelmingly approved almost everything that President Kennedy had wanted. And before the approving vote, the Senate handily defeated an amendment (which the Administration called totally unacceptable), sponsored by Virginia's purse-conscious Democrat Harry Byrd, which would have granted authority for the five-year program, but would have placed its financing on an annual basis...
Onto the floor of the Senate last week walked Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry Flood Byrd. wearing a white summer suit and a small smile. Up for Senate debate and voting was a Byrd-written amendment that would have refused to the Kennedy Administration its urgently requested authority to place the U.S.'s $8.8 billion foreign aid program on a five-year basis, without having to return to Congress with a begging bowl each year. Kennedy's proposal made sense in the need to be able to match Khrushchev in long-term commitments to needy nations...
...Frontier also recognized the importance of the upcoming vote-and President Kennedy himself spent up to three hours a day on the telephone, lobbying with Senators against the Byrd amendment. The Democratic Administration received valuable support from Kentucky's Republican Senator Thruston Morton, chairman of the G.O.P. National Committee from 1959-61. Morton arose on the Senate floor to remind his Republican colleagues that Dwight Eisenhower had sought, and been refused, just such long-term foreign aid authority in 1957. He cited the words of Republican Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: "Economic development is a long-term process...
When the vote came, Harry Byrd fell far short of the strength he had counted upon for his moral victory: the Senate turned down his amendment 56 to 39. So far, so good. After that key vote it seemed likely that the Senate would overwhelmingly approve the Administration's foreign aid bill. But the legislation would still have to pass the test of the House-and to pass that test, it would need all the power, persuasion and politics that the New Frontier could muster...
What was surprising was that Harrison was the hand-picked candidate of aging Democratic Senator Harry Flood Byrd, 74, and the rumormongers were saying that the political nest, feathered so faithfully by Byrd over three decades, was falling apart. All of Byrd's oldtime cronies had either died or retired; the party was still scarred by a split over the methods of combating school integration; population was shifting away from Byrd's rural strongholds. The campaign itself was a bit fuzzy, since both candidates are solidly conservative. Stephens, a former Byrd disciple, had even written to the Senator...