May 14, 1971
Page 15110
MUSKIE ON THE ISSUES
Mr. HART. Mr. President, on April 16, 1971, Congressional Quarterly published an article about the distinguished Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) which I commend to the attention of the Senate. I would particularly point out the section of the article in which Senator MUSKIE outlined his views on some of the fundamental issues facing our country today, including the need to end the Vietnam war now. He also discussed with the Congressional Quarterly interviewers his stands on questions about the environment, civil rights, and other issues.
I ask unanimous consent that this material be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
MUSKIE CAMPAIGN: CAUTIOUS PACE BY THE MAN IN FRONT
For Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D Maine), 1971 is a year of political groundwork, legislative chores and a sharply reduced profile. This middle phase in the campaign of the Democrats' acknowledged front-runner for the presidential nomination follows a year in which frequent travel and speeches on national topics brought him heavy television and newspaper coverage throughout the country. And it precedes the final phase, a formal bid for the nomination in 1972.
The decision to shift into the middle phase came after Muskie's well-received election-eve television broadcast to the nation Nov. 2, 1970.
"In 1969," said staff director Berl Bernhard, "it was a matter of getting the country to see who Ed Muskie was." He said the need for this kind of exposure declined in 1970 and ended after the election-eve broadcast. "We were flooded with requests for things after that," said Bernhard.
ORGANIZATION
The first major step in the new phase of operations was the arrival of Bernhard in February as director of the campaign, replacing longtime Muskie aide Donald Nicoll, who became the Senator's director of policy development and research. (Box p. 857)
Bernhard, 41, is a Washington attorney who served as staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in the Kennedy Administration. He was counsel to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 1967 and 1968, when Muskie was the committee's chairman. During Muskie's campaign for the Vice Presidency in 1968, Bernhard served as an adviser and speech writer. And when the Muskie Elections Committee opened an office in downtown Washington early in 1970, the space was convenient to Bernhard's law firm, one floor above.
Six full-time staffers manned the office when it opened, under the direction of Nicoll and Robert Nelson, a lawyer who worked under Bernhard at the Civil Rights Commission and later was executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
By late August, the downtown staff had grown to 12 full-time employees and 30 summer interns. And by late March 1971, there were 40 full-time staffers and about 50 volunteers. The committee had expanded to suites on three floors, including rooms in the law office from which Bernhard is on leave. Next door to one of the suites is the private office of the Communications Company, headed by Robert Squier, Muskie's media consultant.
Published reports at the time Bernhard became staff director indicated that Muskie was seeking to tighten up scheduling and political and press operations. Muskie said the appointment would "assure effective coordination of the activities of the men and women who work for me."
FINANCES
In 1970, the Muskie Elections Committee filed financial reports with the Clerk of the House of Representatives, even though this was not legally required. On Oct. 30, 1970, the committee reported receiving $182,893.14 and spending $205,870.63.
Expenses for 1970 activities have been estimated at $1-million to $1.5-million, and Bernhard said as much as $8-million may be required for the primaries and other efforts leading up to the national convention in the summer of 1972.
Of the money received by the committee in its first six months of operation, a large proportion was contributed by executives in the motion picture and entertainment industries. The largest single contributors, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Picker of New York City, gave $10,000. Picker is chairman of the executive committee of United Artists Corporation. Several relatives of Picker, officials of United Artists and executives of other entertainment firms also gave contributions of $500 or more. In early April 1971, Muskie named Edward L. Schuman, 54, of Detroit, a vice president of Walter Reade Theaters Inc., as national coordinator of fund-raising. Some sources indicated that Picker suggested Schuman for the job and that Schuman would serve as Picker's representative in the campaign.
Schuman said there had been no coordinated effort in the motion picture industry to underwrite the Muskie campaign. "I know Picker," he said, "but we're not close friends." Schuman said Muskie "has really no great business support in the country." Schuman supported Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy (D Minn. 1959-71) for President in 1968 and New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, a Republican, for re-election in 1969.
Bernhard said much of the Muskie fund raising in 1971 would center on banquets, direct mail appeals and the setting of financial quotas for groups that have offered to assist the Muskie campaign in key states.
Muskie staffers expect organized labor to be a major financial and organizational element of the campaign even though Muskie, as a Senator from a largely rural state, is not as closely associated with labor interests as are several other potential Democratic candidates. Bernhard said of the unions, "They've made it clear that Muskie is totally acceptable." But he listed no specific unions or labor leaders as Muskie backers. Of the early contributions to the Muskie Elections Committee, a $2,000 donation was made by the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
YOUTH SUPPORT
Another factor in the Muskie drive will be students, although Muskie youth organizer Lannie Davis conceded in March that Sen. George McGovern (D S.D.) "has picked up many of the best people." Davis, 26, is a Yale Law School graduate who worked in the 1968 McCarthy campaign and in Emilio Q. Daddario's unsuccessful race for Governor of Connecticut in 1970. (McGovern campaign story, Weekly Report p. 759).
Bernhard promised that "we're really going to work on the younger people," adding that students would be used as an important source of new ideas and policies, not just as volunteer campaigners.
POLICY EXPERTS
Muskie drew national attention in August 1969, when he announced that he was assembling a "brain trust" of policy experts to brief him on national issues. According to policy chief Nicoll, the size of this informal group has grown to more than 100, about 60 percent from academic ranks and 40 percent from law, business and public service. Nicoll said their advice comes in the form of private conversations, lengthy memos and drafts of speeches for Muskie.
Nicoll did not discuss individuals in the brain trust, but those linked with it have included former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Warnke, former presidential economic advisers Arthur Okun and Walter Heller and Harry McPherson, Bernhard's law partner and a former speech-writer for President Johnson.
ISSUES
Even though his is the largest staff any contender has assembled more than a year before the 1972 presidential election, Muskie in April 1971 was many months away from becoming an announced candidate. "There's no real necessity to do it," said Bernhard. "When you do it, you should be ready to do a bit more than just announce. You do it to maximize your position; you don't do it just for the ritual. The announcement is the clarion call to people who want to work for you to get ready. The most important thing Ed Muskie can do right now, rather than announce, is talk about the substantive issues."
The forum for Muskie's discussion of the issues in 1971 is the Senate. Legislative initiative is the second major feature of the middle phase of the campaign.
"You're going to see him back here in Washington, because he's facing an awful lot of legislation," said media consultant Robert Squier. "And because most of the contenders come from the Senate, that's an appropriate stage for the thing to be played out on."
This attention to chores would mean fewer trips of the type Muskie made in 1970, when public exposure was still a key element of strategy. Deputy staff director Robert Nelson explained that Muskie would continue to make public appearances in 1971, but that scheduling would be aggressive rather than reactive – the Senator would choose the appearances he wanted to make instead of depending on offers from outsiders. Nelson said this was one of the advantages of the front-runner.
One area of speculation concerned the ways Muskie's Vietnam policy differed from that of McGovern, the only announced candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and a long-standing Senate opponent of U.S. war policies. Muskie did not support expansion of the war in its early years, and in 1971 he said he had private doubts about it as early as 1965. But he backed Johnson Administration policy into 1968.
"We believe that freedom is at stake," he said in March 1966. "We believe that the right of small nations to work out their own destiny in their own way is at stake. We believe that containment of expansionist Communism regrettably involves direct confrontation from time to time and that to retreat from it is to undermine the prospects for stability and peace."
Muskie expressed reservations to President Johnson about the bombing of North Vietnam in January 1968, but he did not make his views public at that time. At the 1968 Democratic national convention, he spoke against an unconditional halt to the bombing but phrased his opposition in a moderate, relatively conciliatory tone. He said he would be prepared to accept a bombing halt if the President "has reason to believe – and I think he ought to be prepared to take some risks – that this could advance us one step further toward the negotiating table on substantive issues."
(Muskie vice presidential nomination, 1968 Almanac p. 1016)
Early in 1969, Muskie called for a standstill ceasefire by both sides in Vietnam, breaking with Nixon Administration policy. And he called the moratorium demonstration Oct. 15, 1969, "just what the country needs." He expressed doubts, however, about the plan offered by Sen. Charles E. Goodell (R N.Y. 1968-71) to set a date for U.S. withdrawal.
Muskie's estrangement from the war deepened in 1970, as he sharply criticized the allied incursion into Cambodia and backed the unsuccessful Hatfield-McGovern resolution authorizing withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam by Dec. 31, 1971. (1970 Weekly Report p. 2173)
"It should be clear to all of us by now," he said in February 1971, "that this war is essentially a war fought among the Vietnamese people for political ends. And therein lies a lesson of this tragedy. We cannot substitute our will and our political system for theirs. We cannot write the social contract for another people."
In domestic legislation, Muskie's chief interests have flowed from the committee assignments he has held since he entered the Senate in January 1959. Muskie has dealt with environmental problems as chairman of the Air and Water Pollution Subcommittee of the Public Works Committee. And his chairmanship of the Government Operations Committee's Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee has led to a concern with improving communications between the states and the federal government.
Muskie is the author of the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Water Quality Act of 1965, both of which expanded federal standards and participation in pollution control. Muskie's Clean Air Act amendments of 1970, passed over the strenuous opposition of the auto industry, set a 1975 deadline for the production of a virtually pollution-free car.
Another domestic quarrel likely to be played out in the Senate in 1971 involves revenue sharing and President Nixon's attempt to relieve the states' financial burdens with grants to be used for virtually any purposes the states choose. (Weekly Report p. 213)
Muskie strongly opposes this plan. He provoked an angry reaction from several big-city mayors when he said so in an address to the National League of Cities March 22. Muskie said the President's plan would destroy effective specific aid programs that already exist, give too much money to localities that do not need it and fail to provide adequate safeguards against discriminatory allocation of money. "Under the Administration's general revenue-sharing bill," argued Muskie, "Beverly Hills would be entitled to twice as much per capita as New York and four times as much as Cleveland."
This position has deep roots in Muskie's Senate career. He has consistently opposed federal legislation that does not take into account the differing needs of each State or that fails to impose responsibilities on states that wish to qualify for federal aid.
Muskie's 1967 Clean Air Act, for example, established air quality control regions to set standards for pollution levels in different areas of the country. The Johnson Administration preferred national standards for major polluters. (1967 Almanac p. 875)
In 1970, Muskie's approach drew an angry reaction from a task force sponsored by consumer crusader Ralph Nader. According to the task force, "Senator Muskie has never seemed inclined toward making a tough stand toward private industry." But Muskie backers claimed national standards would amount to dangerous oversimplification.
As early as 1966, in criticizing tax inequities in a majority of American states, Muskie said, "Until these imbalances are corrected, it is meaningless to talk about federal revenue sharing – or other unrestricted block grant schemes which could provide windfalls to some states and inequities to others."
Instead of general revenue sharing, Muskie supports federalization of the welfare system, which he has called "another form of revenue sharing, and a good one." He planned to introduce his own revenue-sharing bill, which he said would be similar to one he introduced in the 91st Congress. He said it would allocate money to states and cities on the basis of relative need.
PERSONALITY
Muskie's personality and style will be the subject of increasingly frequent assessments as he heads into the 1972 primary season as the front-runner. Some evaluations have dealt with Muskie's deliberate, cautious approach to making judgments about national problems.
Media consultant Squier sees Muskie's New England roots as an outstanding asset. "The sense of place doesn't have to be spoken," said Squier, "because it's there, it's already inferred. It's look and accent and style and the way he is."
Squier helped to produce the election-eve broadcast, in which Muskie's deliberate tone and affection for his home state were major themes. Muskie accused the Nixon Administration of lying to the American people. Squier argued that only a politician such as Muskie, with his reputation for caution and fairness, could have used those words without seeming to make a personal attack.
But others have pointed to these same qualities as weak spots. One 1970 article quoted a leader in the peace movement as saying of Muskie, "I just don't know where he's really at. He doesn't move me. He doesn't give me any feeling of hope." And a fellow Senator was quoted as complaining that Muskie "never gets into the thick of things, always seems to pull his punches."
"It's interesting to watch the press painting this portrait of me," Muskie said on television March 31. "You never really know how it's going to come out. Some of them say I'm a volcano; others say I'm an iceberg. And the truth probably is that I'm a human being, with quite a range of emotions."
MUSKIE ON THE ISSUES: RESPONSES TO CQ QUESTIONS
Muskie was interviewed March 31 by two members of the Congressional Quarterly editorial staff. Verbatim excerpts of his comments on a number of major issues follow.
Foreign policy
If the United States pulled out of Vietnam this year, do you think the (American) people would be prepared to see the Viet Cong take over South Vietnam?
I don't know of any way that the American intervention in Southeast Asia can guarantee a pre-ordained and blueprinted result for any government in South Vietnam, and I take it that this was not our objective from the beginning. As I understand our objective ... it was to buy the South Vietnamese time to shape their own future in accordance with their own wishes. I suppose at the outset we had no clear concept as to how much of an effort on our part this would involve or what it would cost us. But in any case, it's cost us a great deal by any standard of measurement that one wants to use, and I think it's cost us all we can afford to pay by any standard – moral, material – that one might wish to use. So my view is that we have bought and paid for as much time as we can for the South Vietnamese. They have had the opportunity to build what I gather, outside of our forces, is the largest army in Southeast Asia, equipped by us and trained by us.
And they will have had, with the elections next fall, the opportunity to hold two successive elections. We have bought for them all we can afford to pay. That the election results will be guaranteed, no....
What sort of policy would you like to see this country adopt, based on the lessons we have learned in Indochina, toward future commitments overseas?
I suspect that a lot of the lessons we have learned may not need conscious implementation. I'm sure we've learned that Communism is no longer an international monolith and that's, I hope, a useful lesson to learn. Secondly, I hope we've learned that the policy of confrontation with Communism in any of its forms isn't the best way necessarily to deal with it. I hope we've learned that allowing ourselves to get involved in a guerrilla war with a small country on the other side of the world is a misuse of our military power – if it is not any moral failure on our part. Inescapably, it involves the killing of a lot of innocent people and civilians, women, children, whether it's down on the ground or from the air, and I hope we've learned that.
If we've learned that much, it still is going to take some time and rather painful . . . reappraisal of our national interests to define with precision what our role should be in the world. I don't think the majority of Americans want an isolationist America or would consider that an isolationist America would be serving our best interests. We can't escape having an influence in the world. The question is, "What kind?" It's still a hostile world in many senses.
I think that our responsibility for trying to make it into a rational world is very heavy, and I think we'll sense that increasingly as we react to our experience in Indochina. I think we ought to see more clearly the need to communicate with the Soviet Union and with Red China, with hostile countries as well as friendly countries and neutral countries, in order to create a climate in the world which will make it possible for us to serve the needs of the deprived and backward peoples of the world and at the same time recognize the legitimate aspirations of other developed and industrialized nations which will differ from our own – recognize that people are going to choose different forms of government and different kinds of societies – and the fact that they are different than our own should not precipitate alarm on our part or a disposition to try to get involved and intervene....
The environment
As the cost of cleaning up the environment becomes more clear, is it possible that this will become less of a motherhood issue and that there might be a backlash? What can we do to clean up the environment and yet prevent a decline in the economy?
The problem of dealing with the environment is clearly something more than a motherhood issue, because it involves tough decisions that have economic consequences as well as environmental consequences. For the last year or so, we have concentrated so upon the desirability of a clean environment that I suspect many people haven't taken into their calculation the economic costs....
What we are talking about is regulating economic activities, and that regulation involves technology. It involves effort, and this involves money, and so it involves the economic viability of the polluters involved. It involves the economic health of communities and regions, and it involves the problem of utilization of resources.
And it is out of these tough kinds of decisions which will necessitate a balance of environmental values against other costs, economic costs to the community, that political issues will arise – locally, in many, many instances, because most of these decisions are local decisions; but nationally, occasionally, as in the case of the SST, because a national decision is involved.
Nationally also with respect to such things as the automobile, because only national policy can deal with it. So, yes, it's going to be a painful process, it's going to be a costly one and it's going o develop a lot of political issues and backlashes.
Civil rights
Do you see any need at this time for additional legislation on civil rights, or do you think the problem could be handled in the executive branch?
Well, if one thinks of civil rights in the narrow sense of legislation mandating an end to discrimination or a denial of civil liberties or citizens' prerogatives or freedom of choice or so on, I suppose that we have done a great deal here, much of which isn't being effectively implemented or enforced; and one thinks, of course, of the problem of school integration and of voting rights and so on, where a great deal of work still needs to be done. But if one thinks of civil rights in the sense that there are other forces which limit the opportunities and the mobility of blacks and other minorities – economic forces housing patterns, residential patterns, community development patterns – then a great deal needs to be done.
The school integration problem, for example, with respect to large metropolitan areas, north and south, has not been effectively dealt with; and I don't know that it can be effectively dealt with, with any of the tools that are represented by court decisions up to this point. We don't have adequate guidelines or instruments for implementing them. The Mondale Committee (the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity) has been studying this area, and again we are dealing with housing patterns, residential patterns, transportation patterns, local and political jurisdictional lines. These are frustrating, not only with respect to racial questions but a lot of others. And so this is the toughest part of it, because, in effect, in order to bring ... real freedom of choice within the reach of all Americans, including blacks and other deprived minorities, there's going to have to be a restructuring of the country and the cities in these terms, and that is major surgery. And it is going to involve legislation. It will require changes in attitudes. It will require effective action on all three levels of government.
The economy
If wage and price controls seemed to work as means of temporarily controlling inflation, would you have some fears or reluctance to see a long-term period of controls? Would these interfere with a free economy to the extent that they would be something you wouldn't want to get into?
There are those, Professor Galbraith notably, who think that we must have these kinds of controls permanently. I must say I don't accept that – not at this point at least. But I think we may need wage-price controls for their psychological value in order to end this game of catch-up, which is really what the principal inflationary force is at the present time – the game of catch-up which just stimulates this spiraling price and wage increase. I would like to see an incomes policy in the sense of a wage and price advisory board, which I have been advocating for a long time. The idea did not originate with me, obviously. But it increasingly has been recommended and urged by people on both sides of the political aisle and by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the present and past (chairman), and I think that this could be structured in a way that's worth trying as an alternative to wage-price controls....
Welfare
How far do you think federal control should extend in social programs such as minimum income, federalized welfare and health insurance, and how much responsibility should be at the state and local levels?
I think all three of these areas are areas in which the federal involvement must be greater, because they deal with problems that aren't going to be dealt with effectively unless the federal resources are applied to them. The problem of health insurance and health delivery systems (and) facilities are two escalating problems that affect the ability of almost all Americans – poor, lower middle income, middle income – to meet the costs of serious illness. And the costs are escalating.
... In part this is traceable to the fact that when we enacted Medicare, increasing the demand for health facilities, we didn't do anything about increasing the facilities. And so the pressure upon existing doctors, nurses, hospitals, nursing homes, increased to the point where costs escalated, wiping out some of the benefits of the Medicare program and also putting the cost of adequate care beyond the reach of more and more Americans who weren't quite the beneficiaries of Medicare. This time . . . as we deal with the problem, for which health insurance proposals have been advanced (and I cosponsored those), I hope we focus on the need for meaningful programs. And these will not be created without the federal government's presence to deal with the hospital shortage, the medical school shortage, the nursing shortage.
Welfare reform, of course, is a question that I think is answered by people all across the ideological spectrum in about the same way. Whether we talk of beneficiaries or of administrators or the taxpayer, everyone is agreed that this system doesn't work, and what we are talking about in part, at least, is not new governmental costs, but a more equitable carrying of present costs that are paid for by government at one or another level. In addition to that, of course, we must provide decent income levels for those who are on welfare....
Crime and justice
Do you think the crisis in crime in this country has reached the point where it might be necessary to accept some kind of restriction on civil liberties in order to reduce the crime rate?
No. Preventive detention and the so-called no-knock provision are the two ... most visible evidences of this approach to dealing with the crime problem. They do not get at the cause, and so we're paying too high a price, and we shouldn't pay any in terms of civil liberty for a solution that isn't a solution. There are a number of points at which we have failed to act adequately – the drug problem, for example, which pervades not only the question of crime, but almost every other social problem that afflicts our cities – housing, schools, race relations. You go through the whole catalog of social ills and crimes and problems which afflict America today, and they cannot be dealt with effectively unless we deal effectively with the drug problem. And we haven't done that. We've done less than we should have to deal with the international traffic in drugs, which is a real point of control.... And then, of course, we have to deal here at home with the addict and with the pusher of drugs – and we haven't done that effectively – as well as education of the young and eliminating some of the frustrations of life which prompt people to turn to drugs. I speak not only of the young, but also the deprived, the poor and the blacks.
If we turn our attention to the question of law enforcement itself, and what you do with the violator, first, you have to apprehend him and punish him; but even more importantly, to free the innocent and to rehabilitate those who are found guilty. We've done almost nothing nationally to deal with these problems: the problems of the courts; the problems of the penal institutions – for example, probation and parole systems, social services of all kinds; the court problem alone, the overcrowding of the courts, the overcrowding of calendars, the inadequacy of the probation and parole services available to judges; the speedy administration of justice. If we could deal with this alone, we'd go a long way to dealing certainly with the habitual offender and dealing with first offenders as well. . .
MUSKIE'S BACKGROUND
Profession: Attorney.
Born: March 28, 1914, Rumford, Maine.
Home: Waterville, Maine.
Religion: Roman Catholic.
Education: Bates College, A.B., 1936; Cornell University, LL.B., 1939.
Offices: Maine House of Representatives, 1947-53;
Governor, 1955-59;
Senate since 1959.
Military: Navy, 1942-45; discharged as lieutenant.
Memberships, Waterville Club, Lions, AMVETS, American Legion, VFW, Grange, Kennebec County and Maine Bar Associations.
Family: Wife, Jane; five children.
Committees: Public Works; chairman, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution; Government Operations chairman, Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations; Foreign Relations.
Career Highlights. Throughout his political career in Maine, Muskie has been a Democrat among Republicans, a Catholic among Protestant and a Polish-American among Yankees.
After winning election to the state house of representatives in 1946, he ran for mayor of Waterville the next year and lost – his only defeat until he ran for the Vice Presidency in 1968. He remained in the legislature and was house minority leader in 1949 and 1950.
In 1951, he resigned from the legislature to become Maine director of the Office of Price Stabilization. He declined an invitation to be the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1952, but accepted in 1954 and defeated incumbent Republican Burton M. Cross (1952-55) to become the state's first Democratic Governor in 20 years and its first Catholic Governor ever.
After serving two two-year terms, Muskie became Maine's first popularly elected Democratic Senator, unseating incumbent Frederick G. Payne (R 1953-59) with 60.8 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 1964, defeating Rep. Clifford McIntyre (R 1952-65) with 66.6 percent of the vote, and in 1970, defeating Republican Neil S. Bishop with 61.7 percent.
MUSKIE STAFF, ADVISERS
These are some of the chief members of the Muskie campaign organization:
Staff director: Berl L. Bernhard, 41, a Washington attorney and former staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
Deputy staff director: Robert L. Nelson, 39, an attorney who was Bernhard's deputy at the Civil Rights Commission and later was executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law.
Director of Policy Development: Donald E. Nicoll, 43, administrative assistant to Sen. Muskie from 1962 to 1970 and manager of Muskie's vice presidential campaign in 1968.
Press secretary: Richard H. Stewart, 39, former congressional correspondent for the Boston Globe.
Media consultant: Robert Squier, 36, president of the Communications Company, Washington, D.C., and an adviser to Hubert H. Humphrey's presidential campaign in 1968.
Speechwriter: Jack S. Sando, 30, a Washington attorney.
Domestic policy adviser: James Campbell, 32, Washington attorney and former consultant to the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.
Foreign policy adviser: Tony Lake, 32, a former assistant to Nixon adviser, Henry Kissinger.
KEY LEGISLATION SPONSORED
Sen. Muskie's staff included the following bills in a list of major legislation sponsored by Muskie during his 12 years in the Senate:
Environment
1963: Clean Air Act, authorizing federal research and technical aid to states to create or improve regulatory programs for curbing air pollution. Passed (PL 88-206). (1963 Almanac p. 236)
1965: Water Quality Act, establishing the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration and a water quality standards program and reorganizing the federal water pollution control program. Passed (PL 89-234). (1969 Almanac p. 743)
1970: Clean Air Act amendments, establishing national air quality standards and setting a 1975 deadline for production of virtually emission-free automobiles. Passed (PL 91-604). (Weekly Report p. 42)
1970: Water Quality Improvement Act, strengthening the federal government's authority to clean up oil spills and to recover the cost of cleanup from polluters, as well as to control sewage discharge from vessels and water pollution from federal activities. Passed (PL 91-224). (Weekly Report p. 42)
1971: National Water Quality Standards Act (S. 523) to revise the water pollution control program, extend the water quality standards program to all navigable U.S. waters, authorize $12.5-billion in federal construction grants for waste treatment facilities over the next five years and require all new plants discharging wastes into navigable waters to use the best available pollution control technology. Pending. (Weekly Report p. 749)
Economy
1969: Export Administration Act, expanding opportunities for American business to engage in East-West trade. Passed (PL 91184). (1969 Almanac p. 499)
1970: Securities Investor Protection Corporation Act, establishing a private corporation to administer an insurance fund to protect investors from broker-dealer failures. Passed (PL 91-598). (Weekly Report p. 48)
1971: Transportation Research and Development Act (S. 1382) to channel federal money proposed for the supersonic transport plane into research and development in aviation safety, into aviation systems serving areas of concentrated population and into urban mass transit systems. Pending. (Weekly Report p. 794)
Federal-State Relations
1969: Intergovernmental Revenue Act (S. 2483) to provide a federal revenue-sharing plan for states and localities based on need and tax effort and to establish federal tax credits for state and local income and estate taxes. Did not pass. (1969 Almanac p. 961)
Urban problems
1966: Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, establishing the Model Cities program to renew urban neighborhoods through a broad range of programs, including new housing, experimental schools, health care centers and recreational facilities. Passed (PL 89-754). (1966 Almanac p. 210)