Editorial / Encomiums for Califano
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial / Encomiums for Califano" That not one notable in all of Washing- ton- rejoiced at the incongruity of raising up a hustler to preside over the largest governmental department of dogoodery in Christendom I take to...
...The advance of research and interpretation enables us to see now that the crucial questions about Truman concerned Russia...
...Joe is living proof that one of Washington's legendary "workaholics" can be cheerful...
...Art Buchwald, Herblock, and other members of the Washington intelligentsia...
...He weeps with them, he roars on their behalf, he navigates every blind turn in their zigzagging public philosophy—he prospers...
...And I believe that the day will come when it will be either us or them...
...he sticks close to his sources and does not, in the fashion of some historians of the period, supply a bold thesis to which the details are subordinated...
...HEW provides...
...Today Joe has more money to spend, more people to manipulate, and more areas in which to intrude...
...This has always been his strong suit...
...On leaving office he joined up with the hottest political law firm in Washington, Arnold and Porter, and spent the next couple of years leading business clients across the tricky terrain of government regulations, many of which he knew from the inside out, so to speak...
...Today he must be considered Kennedyism's most accomplished and enduring practitioner, always feverishly throwing himself into noble causes, always flattering the popolo minuto with heroic guff, and never missing an opportunity to snatch a bit more of their freedom and their loot...
...Henry Fairlie has pointed out that the Kennedys "could not sit still...
...A month earlier Joe had struck at the hospital moguls, urging that it become malum pro hibitum for hospitals to raise rates by more than nine percent annually...
...How powerful were they...
...The dots were discomfited, but they were not surprised...
...There is that absurd earnestness with which government's career bureaucrats pursue hopeless and often contradictory policies...
...Then too I can see him personally rewriting regulatory codes, making them even more incomprehensible and perplexing to bureaucrats and the regu36 The American Spectator March 1978 lated alike...
...Moreover, let us remember that even the elegant...
...All this is true, but it does not gainsay my claim that Joe is, deep within, a clever and jolly soul...
...During his great years he has presciently sensed the changing moods and has generally latched on to those about to change these moods...
...From 1963 to 1973, spending for Great Society programs soared from $1.7 billion to $35.7 billion, and since then it has more than doubled...
...Above all, Donovan is impressed by the contrast between what was expected (and what he believes should have been expected) and what Truman accomplished—and he refuses to give all credit for success to advisors and subordinates...
...He sees greater Washington for the farce that it is, and he enjoys the act...
...Less than a year after publication of the second book he was back in power...
...Donovan uses well over 400 pages and covers only the first term...
...In his last year of private practice this interesting man earned more than General Motors chairman Thomas Murphy, thefifteenth highest paid business executive in America...
...Between clients he played politics in the gardens of the Democrats and wrote two books: a slim and banal volume titled The Student Revolution: A Global Confrontation (1970), and a thick and banal volume titled A Presidential Nation (1975...
...They are the most humorless hinds of all, and nothing could be more entertaining and profitable than using their own canards to enslave them...
...He has all the rhetoric of the constituencyof-conscience crowd down pat, and he still maintains his table at Sans Souci...
...Donovan does not, however, debate with the scholars about their interpretations...
...Sad to say, not everyone appreciated the rising hustler...
...Such shifts are not unthinkable—some suffering situation could turn up at the Tour d'Argent...
...As the organization into a large number of small chapters suggests, Donovan is fascinated with the details of the story, and he has gathered together a vast amount of information...
...Is he arrogant...
...in the second he frets over the awesome power that Richard Nixon somehow managed to gather in the presidency...
...No less reliable a source than the Brookings Institution reviewed Joe's work back in the spring of 1972 and proclaimed the Great Society full of mold...
...Imagine how much greater a contribution to knowledge this book would have made if it had been written on "Great Restaurants: A Global Phenomenon...
...He knows that the bureaucrats over which he rules are born mules to be goaded and manipulated...
...Joe's prose style is outstanding, even for a Washington operator, and the distinguishing mark that gives it away every time is that some variation of the word "enhance" appears on every third page...
...Hospital costs may indeed be barred from rising more than nine percent annually, but one can be sure that no loss of service will be suffered at Bethesda Naval Hospital or at any other hospitals reserved for government's elite...
...Califano—a Washington operator of unsmiteable energy and acquisitiveness—departs Georgetown to take over the Nation's loaves and fishes operation...
...All this was achieved with his customary blatancy...
...Donovan's writing is at its best in describing scenes and people,nearly all of whom he saw in action as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune...
...Traditional big government programs of the New Deal type were plausible, for there already existed knowledge of how to transfer money to the needy or how to build dams...
...Joe has had to hustle all his days, yet he has shown that the thing can be carried off with joie de vivre and brass...
...Soon Washington would be transformed from a drowsy Southern city of boozy pols into a world capital, the seat of the most immense government on the planet...
...Donovan does not address these questions and actually is not very clear about his assumptions here...
...Witness the arrival of Joe Califano at HEW: Poverty bureaucrats by the hundreds peer down from their windows as up the drive he comes, encased in his limousine, followed by a gorgeous retinue—there can be seen his $78,225-per-year bodyguard, there his $12,763-per-year cook, there a former vice president of Harvard University, and others follow...
...Yet as always Joe could not sit still...
...Our pols and top bureaucrats must be kept in the pink and with minimum delay...
...And then, of course, he would holler at the oafs...
...I believe that these rascals are not only blind to preposterosity but intent on intimidating into gloom all those with a proclivity for cheer...
...Whether such comparatively low-key mischief amuses Joe is not recorded...
...Great Society endeavors, however, like programs for improving health care, preschool training, and job training, were more difficult...
...Six months later he walloped the health-care crowd once again, declaring to an uneasy assemblage of the American Medical Association: "There is virtually no competition among doctors or among hospitals....there is precious little competition among pharmaceutical companies or among laboratories [whose] research has become big business, with patent monopoly pots of gold at the end of the research rainbow"—pots of gold demanding the professional services of sharp Washington lawyers, let us hasten to add...
...CI ENCOMIUMS FOR CALIFANO (continued from page 4) he...
...But in fact they cannot be dealt with effectively until the Russians are persuaded to open up their archives...
...No about-face has been beyond his God-given talents...
...yet there is no serenade of guffaws, no general outburst of facetiae...
...Under Johnson, Joe rose to become one of the most powerful White House aides in history...
...Does he work 18-hour days, bullying his employees, and incessantly expanding his influence...
...The American Spectator March 1978 37...
...No wizened idolater of the Protestant ethic is (continued on page 36) 4 The American Spectator March 1978 dence denies that Truman was swayed only by political considerations and did not have commitments to liberal and humanitarian principles...
...The chief shortcoming of this new book is its lack of a controlling theme...
...Not only did he have a hand in water-pollution control, but by 1967 he was deeply involved in more exciting mischief like the so-called consumer legislation, automobile safety, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and possibly the most notable botch of all, Model Cities...
...What is more, Joe discusses the crises in terms decidedly pleasing to the ritualistic liberals but without ever revealing his role in bringing the crises to life...
...In the first he batters the "establishment" for its insensitivity to student aspirations in the 1960s...
...In the years to come behemoth bureaucracies would be shelved in gigantic and hideous buildings—every one looking like a fortress designed by Le Corbusier...
...And Joe has been left with more subtle policies like ridding American high schools of such vestiges of bigotry as father-son dinners...
...Contradictions between his past promises and present posturings never slow him down, and no one seems to mind...
...At many points he adds to our knowledge and understanding of episodes and people and relations among them, for instance: the Palestine issue...
...He senses the vacuity of Encomiums for Califano R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...His penchant for diatribes is one of his most ingratiating facets...
...Joe, after all, knows what is best for the flotsam and jetsam...
...If it does doubtless Joe will be there to inform us...
...Knowing what we know about Joe's style of life, I can think of nothing more fattening than to have accompanied him on these researches...
...Joseph A. Califano, Jr., to head the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and no one in Washington saw anything amiss...
...Doubtless he entertained himself with mischievous subterfuges just to make their work grimmer and more idiotic...
...Joe's 1960s handiwork is already running the country into bankruptcy and word of its worthlessness is spreading...
...Joe keeps his face to the horizon...
...The most striking feature of both books is that they treat issues which at the time of publication horrified ritualistic liberals...
...He is absolutely shameless...
...In the first book Joe frankly admits that he has just milked the Ford Foundation for an around-the-world trip and that the drivel he has ladled out is the result of "essentially impressionistic" stops in places like Rome, Paris, and London...
...I predict he will continue to skip along his blessed path...
...In fact its chief has access to a whole stable of specialists on 24-hour call lest the chief stagger...
...In 1976 he handed one pharmaceutical company the largest bill for services rendered that company had ever received...
...Of that I am certain...
...What would they have accomplished if Truman had behaved differently...
...These were important components of the Kennedy style...
...This anecdote is useful, revealing as it does the Washington exaltês' high esteem for that bizarre frenzy that they take to be an acceptable simulacrum for work, and suggesting as it does Joe's mixed reviews...
...One of Joe's favorite areas for reform is health care, and for years he has bedeviled the health-care tycoons...
...I have it on good authority that the gentle Cy Vance would scramble behind his chair whenever a caravan arrived from Joe's office...
...What did the Russians hope to achieve...
...Alas, such a volume will have to await a shift in the left-liberal canon of concerns...
...I have a vivid image of him merrily trundling around the halls of government, gathering bushel baskets of incomprehensible facts and dubious analyses, pasting them down and tying them together with portentous and hopelessly wrongheaded conclusions, then ordering some twitching ninety-pound secretary to lug them off to his already sorely pressed boss...
...Public service should continue to attract him...
...If his suggestion were made law would the consequent loss in hospital services affect Joe...
...Yet even in these dreary hours he must have enjoyed himself...
...He sought out the Kennedy promise, namely: the good life via humbug and the taxing power...
...They often involved unacceptable amounts of coercion and knowledge that did not exist...
...Mais bien stir...
...The grandchild of an immigrant fruitmonger, Joe bounced about the hard surfaces of Brooklyn, graduated from Holy Cross, and entered Harvard Law School from which he emerged magna cum laude after honing his legalese at the Harvard Law Review...
...Was he not one of those LBJ aides responsible for domestic intelligence operations against civil-rights activists, black militants, and anti-war protestors...
...They were written in dark times when a new spirit of impious brainlessness threatened to take over the Democratic Party and to finish off everyone ever associated with that party's ancien regime...
...he is a public servant who chooses his publics wisely...
...Of course his language is not always as grandiloquent as that of JFK, but it has plenty of noble exhortations, spiced withnonce values like compassion and progress...
...This is a charge that ought to be laid to rest once and for all, and its veracity is not too difficult to establish...
...Newspapers were given to calling him "deputy president of the Great Society," though his formal appellation was "special assistant for domestic affairs...
...Robert S. McNamara, the theorist...
...there and anywhere else he could get a foot in the door...
...He kept his nose to the Zeitgeist...
...In 1971 he continued this service when he started his own law firm with Edward Bennett Williams, owner of the Washington Redskins...
...Donovan has explored the full range of writings by historians on the Truman period, and has profitted from recent openings in the Truman Library...
...Today he must exult in speaking out against health hazards such as alcoholic beverages, chocolate cream pies, and tobacco—the latter, incidentally, being an industry in which, so the newspapers say, he has considerable amounts of stock...
...Cost can be no object lest they be distracted from improving our condition...
...He is one of the most successful and I believe joyful men to come to Washington in the past twenty-five years...
...In the eighteen years from 1960 to 1978 he spent scarcely seven practicing law, and then he had but four clients...
...and Truman's first campaign tour in 1948...
...And secretive...
...Joe had been felled by the tragedy of tennis wrist...
...Still, our president asked him to patrol the provinces of excess profits, exploitative health care, and man's inhumanity to man...
...Yet by masterfully playing to every inflection of the current wisdom he managed to put himself in good odor with the mob...
...Joe's tenure at HEW might be slightly less exciting than his career under LBJ . Gigantic social policies are still talked about, but there is a troubling reluctance in the Congress to pass them...
...We need desperately in this country to redistribute more wealth," Joe has notified the Christian Science Monitor, and he knows whereof he remonstrates...
...He is one of God's darlings...
...In fact he is famous for joshing it up with reporters, pols, and anyone else not directly subordinate to him...
...EDITORIAL That not one notable in all of Washing- ton- rejoiced at the incongruity of raising up a hustler to preside over the largest governmental department of dogoodery in Christendom I take to be exquisite evidence attesting to one of my most dearly held convictions, to wit: that we live under a near-tyranny of humorless minds...
...Hustling the Good Life In the late 1950s Joe spent a couple of sad years practicing law on Wall Street, which was quite enough for him...
...Joe was quick to grasp the change Kennedy was bringing about...
...To be sure...
...The April 17, 1971, New York Times confirms it...
...Some went so far as to allege that he unscrupulously claimed authorship of memos actually written by subordinates...
...His past does not trouble him...
...These matters he now ponders from his box at Washington Redskins football games with Mr...
...His wife, the former Gertrude Zawacki, apprised him of the amusing grandeur of the New Frontier, whereupon he shook his barristerial chains...
...These activities can be amusing, especially in the case of affirmative action where onecan totally disrupt the lives of millions of stuffy middle-class drones and at times personally thrust an utter incompetent upon his superiors...
...I have never seen a picture of him that there was not a twinkle in his brown eyes...
...Practically all the celebrated New Frontiersmen came a cropper, but Joe matured...
...Others insist that Johnson admired the prolific young memoist, fending off any criticism of him with statements like: "Don't you criticize Califano...
...This the ancients would call hilaritas...
...He did it on the op-ed page of the very Times...
...the average pol, he turns it to his own account, and he does it with gusto...
...Truman's relationship with Byrnes, Marshall, and Acheson...
...There's never been a man around me who wrote so many memos...
...Joe had not only lived it up in Versailles, he had helped to build it...
...Perhaps he set them to doing those pointless studies of mass transit...
...At first his policy responsibilities were tedious matters like supervising the Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works Program and the water-pollution-control regulations...
...Doubtless he would truly like to get on with the spending of more billions and with serving as the architect of an even greater Great Society, but for now this is not to be...
...Nor should we miss their importance in saving a dangerously imperiled career and in illuminating the workings of one of the most unique minds in Washington...
...and Joe found a political philosophy based on harum-scarum much to his liking...
...At any rate, I can well imagine the surreptitious amusement Joe derived from advancing himselfthrough governmental ranks by creating ever more onerous labor for his bosses...
...By 1967 he was probably Johnson's top aide—Walter Jenkins, Bobby Baker, and Bill Moyers having already made their contributions to our history—and no one doubts that he was the chief architect of many Great Society programs...
...His has been a life of inconsistencies brazenly and cheerfully ignored...
...Think of it...
...I am sure that Joe saw the humor in it, and that is why he fetches my approbation...
...after all, he had a hand in the establishment of the Department of Transportation...
...JFK was not incapable of blurting out such bilge as "The American cow is the 'foster mother' of the human race, and a great asset to the nation"—the historic day was February 27, 1960, and the site, Bloom, Wisconsin...
...I believe that America is afflicted by humorless minds whose influence towers out of all proportion to their number...
...It is the kind of joke Joe enjoys best: putting to his own purposes the foolishness of the hour...
...It is a cheeky admission and not without its clever political purpose, revealing as it does Joe's good repute with that august fount of social change...
...Politics was already becoming America's safest route to riches and fun, and political influence for the non-elected and probably non-electable could be secured by showering one's boss with memos, ramrodding whatever idiotic policy is presumed to assuage the crisis of the moment, and solemnly intoning whatever socially approved bromides suddenly become fashionable amongst the powerful...
...Joe has never left Washington...
...In The Truman Presidency, published in 1966, Cabell Phillips covered the entire period from 1945 to 1953 in less than 400 pages...
...My guess is that he takes especial pleasure exploiting Washington's lobbyists of uplift...
...During that year Joe had earned $561,215, nearly $500,000 of it from one pharmaceutical company...
...Give the clowns what dazzles them...
...Yet there is still plenty to do...
...For instance, no one really knows how to raise reading achievement scores in poverty schools...
...In 1977 an HEW physician en route to his summer vacation was actually ordered back to Washington to attend to his ailing boss...
...One may expect ha-ha's all the days of Joe's tenure, but the news commentators reported his appointment with strenuous sobriety, and then became his faithful PR agents...
...In the Kennedy administration he served as a button-down factotum, first for a Mr...
...The achievement of these books cannot be understated...
...Joe became renowned for tireless activity and thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of memos...
...Naturally...
...Some say the truckloads of memos sent up for LBJ ' s nocturnal reading made him groan...
...The contrast between this book and what previously was the best effort by a journalist to survey the subject is striking...
...During the Kennedy years when names like Sorenson and Salinger graced the top of the marquee, Joe selflessly and quietly put himself to the task of learning the angles...
...The second will be explored in a second volume...
...How can one view such a spectacle and not break up...
...He is neither a conservative nor a liberal...
...Phillips used the scholarly literature in a highly selective way, ignoring the revisionism that was already emerging, and complained bitterly about the inadequacies of the materials available to him in the Truman Library...
...In 1976 our populist president summoned him to redistribute the wealth, regulate the Rockefeller impulse that throbs in us all, and clamp down hard on those robber barons then in league with the devious American Medical Association...
...McNamara was more agreeable to such pothering and Johnson seems to have positively envied it—though on this the historians are in, dispute...
...Phillips relied chiefly on interviews for his contributions, but Donovan conducted many more and was also able to draw heavily on a rich collection of oral histories which have become available in the past decade...
...On December 23, 1976, just plain ole Jimmy tapped Mr...
...Cy Vance and then for Mr...
...Did he not shriek and wail with affecting fury over Nixon's hellish intrigues...
...These kinds of problems coupled with high costs make it unlikely that Joe will get another fling at his favorite kind of activity...
...In the meantime, overall interpretations of the Truman period will continue to rest upon untested assumptions...
...His ample cheeks fairly glow with bonhomie...
...Nonetheless he amassed a personal fortune in the neighborhood of one million dollars...
...Nowadays in America this is an essential quality for greatness...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
