Cost of Living

"These are extraordinary times," said President Kennedy in his second State of the Union speech of the year. "We face an extraordinary challenge."

The times and the challenge were extraordinary indeed, and the nation was deeply disturbed by the record of Communist successes and stalemates, from Laos and Cuba to Geneva and outer space. Mindful of his European trip, the President added: "I am here to promote the freedom doctrine."

As President Kennedy reckoned it, the cost of living in cold war had never been higher: in all, it added up to $1.9 billion in new requests, on top of the 1962 federal budget--with the glum promise of billions more to come in the next ten years. "The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe--Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East*--the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history . . . The adversaries of freedom did not create the revolution, nor did they create the conditions which compel it. But they are seeking to ride the crest of its wave--to capture it for themselves." Items in the President's speech:

U.S. DEFENSE. The President announced a reorganization of the Army's divisional structure, a beefing-up of its conventional strength, and asked for an added $100 million to purchase nonnuclear materiel from howitzers to helicopters. He said he had instructed Defense Secretary McNamara to set up a program that would enable ten reserve divisions to go into combat within eight weeks of the outbreak of war. Another $60 million was requested to recruit 14,000 new marines, increasing the strength of the corps to 190,000.

SPACE. The costliest and most controversial proposal was a redoubled effort to overtake Russia in the space race--an effort that would require $531 million immediately, perhaps $20 billion more in the next decade. It is time, he said gravely, "for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last." Biggest item on the stepped-up space agenda: a project to land a man on the moon by 1971--an undertaking, the President said, that would cost as much as $9 billion more in the next five years.

FOREIGN AID. The cost of helping underdeveloped nations was growing higher: $535 million more, nearly half of it earmarked for a special Contingency Fund, to be used at the President's discretion to meet sudden crises, as in Laos. But the alternative price was even higher: "The bankruptcy of unstable governments . . . and of unfilled hopes will surely lead to a series of totalitarian receiverships."

VOICE OF AMERICA. Kennedy asked $2,400,000 for additional propaganda broadcasts to Latin America and Southeast Asia. Communist propaganda broadcasts to Latin America, he pointed out, now total more than 134 hours a week, against 42 from the U.S.

CIVIL DEFENSE. The public reaction to past civil defense programs has been apathetic and skeptical, the President admitted. Yet civil defense is "insurance which we could never forgive ourselves for forgoing in the event of catastrophe." Therefore, Kennedy proposed a whopping threefold increase of appropriations (from $104 million to more than $312 million) to launch a long-range, nationwide fallout-shelter program.

The Congress listened attentively as the President spoke, with only a few splashes of polite applause toward the end of his speech. Kennedy admitted that it was not pleasant "to come before the Congress and ask for new appropriations which place burdens on our people." The Congress and the people could agree that it was not pleasurable, however necessary.

*The President's point was clear, but his globe was topsy-turvy: all of mainland Asia and the Middle East, more than half of Africa, and a third of Latin America, including Cuba, are in the Northern Hemisphere.

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