Creeping Repression in Washington
Wallick, Frank
THERE IS AN AIR OF CREEPING REPRESSION in 1 Washington. You can detect it in many ways. Civil rights enforcement at Health, Education and Welfare is at low ebb. A voting bill is beaten in the...
...At a college editors' conference in Washington conferees spent four days sharpening their rhetoric and tactics on the question of ecology...
...continued on page 237) 198 CREEPING REPRESSION IN WASHINGTON (continued) CREEPING REPRESSION IN WASHINGTON (continued from page 198) • The city's three dailies report in depth on Washington events and gossip...
...And this is shaping up as the political picture for 1970...
...But they are hampered by House rules that give committee chairmen greater powers and more elbow room in shaping the flow and kind of legislation...
...House liberals have a caucus within a caucus, which includes such rough-and-tumble types as Bob Eckardt of Houston, Bob Kastenmeier of Madison, Ab Mikva of Chicago, Phil Burton of San Francisco, Don Ewards of San Jose, and Ben Rosenthal of Queens...
...And the sickness of the cities makes a growing group of senators question lop-sided federal budgets that pour billions into defense spending...
...And he watched television on November 15 when Washington was filled with a half million antiwar marchers...
...There are shifting coalitions in Washington these days...
...We are more a two-income–family than a two-car–family nation, and the fiscal belt-tightening that the Nixon Administration is permitting, even encouraging, is not the way to political victory next fall...
...Such language was once common talk among conventional Republicans...
...It is now fashionable for the present college generation to berate the ills of large government bureaucracy: at the college editors' gathering, an articulate extreme leftist tore into Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel, with a denunciation of every conceivable kind of government program...
...Gary Sellers, a young refugee from the Bureau of the Budget attracted to Nader's free-wheeling operation provided the technical input for the mine safety bill, and California's Phil Burton and an oldstyle liberal, John Dent of Pennsylvania, provided the drive for passage and muscle on the House Labor and Education Committee...
...House liberals are in a different set of circumstances...
...Trite as this notion seems, there was enormous fatigue in Washington from the heady Kennedy years, the shock of the assassinations, and the mixture of Johnson's grand plans to remake American life and also bomb a corner of Asia into compliance...
...They look for leadership, and sometimes it is there...
...Columnists pontificate and muckrake...
...People who never heard of "dialectics" now are witnessing in Washington what may become the unity of opposites...
...Some of Nader's proteges are trying to turn around General Motors, which they describe as a $24 billion governmentwithin-a-government responsible for 35 percent of the air pollution in the nation...
...The judicial clubbing of the Chicago Seven may well be followed by other trials...
...But congressional campaigns are rarely won by money from Washington...
...238...
...Can President Nixon's party really capture the 7 seats it needs in the Senate or the 29 required to organize the House of Representatives...
...When Abe Ribicoff, who was last heard from when he denounced Mayor Daley's cops from the Democratic Convention podium, joined with the Southerners to mock the North for its sins of resegregation—an opposing voice was found, this time in Senator Walter F. Mondale, a liberal's liberal with guts...
...Vietnam contributes to it...
...How do liberals and progressives fight back...
...Here the picture depends on fiscal policy...
...he then left the whole bag for a judgeship, rather than fight the system...
...Heads of state come and go, but government bureaucrats go on forever...
...The Democratic Study Group, and the DSG's peppery offspring, are constantly frustrated...
...A lot of senators just never understood military-weapons jargon and they were easily intimidated by the hawks on the Armed Services Committee," is how a key member of Senator Mike Mansfield's staff explained the new Senate backbone on defense spending...
...Cynics are inclined to write it off as meaningless...
...But in 1969 he couldn't be bothered on Martin Luther King's birthday...
...But the traditional and accepted employment measuring sticks do not tell what it means for a heavy manufacturing worker to work only straight hours, and have no income at all from his wife or another member of the family...
...A quiet and informal lobbying effort during 1969 by scientists and military budget experts enabled many senators for the first time to hack away at the ABM and other vulnerable parts of the defense budget...
...Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, normally an easy-going moderate who had restricted himself to safe issues, took on the unpleasant task of marshalling the votes against Haynsworth...
...Sometimes the only thing that keeps Attorney General John Mitchell's penchant for repression at bay is a Herblock cartoon...
...While the Agnew sallies are hardening the political lineup, a group of about 15 and perhaps as many as 20 Republican moderates join with Northern liberals in the Senate to make a majority on issue after issue...
...that is the only political gesture where he put his reputation on the line, aside from his televised veto message on the $20 billion health and education money bill...
...thus does a Karl Hess, right-wing speech-writer for Barry Goldwater in 1964, make an easy transition to the left incredulity of the Institute for Policy Studies...
...He did, however, fly to New York to save face for President Pompidou...
...The students came from both boondocks and the big cities...
...Most sophisticated money managers in the Nixon administration think the only way to damp down inflationary combustion is by risking "marginal" unemployment...
...Charles Joelson of New Jersey finally made it to the money committee, but was relegated to a lesser subcommittee...
...politics if there is economic distress and grave uncertainty across the land...
...All the Agnew speeches, Mitchell indictments, and other high-level gaffs will not win the middle ground in U.S...
...But the real movers and shakers are such unlikely types as Herb Block, the Washington Post's cartoonist, Art Buchwald, whose satire is more devastating than any editorial, and Ralph Nader, who has attracted some of the brightest young people to poke into the musty closets of Washington bureaucracy...
...Many a marginal congressman elected in the 1958 upset was helped by the same tight money policies, plus 237 CREEPING REPRESSION IN WASHINGTON (continued) a few outlays of union money strategically apportioned...
...Meanwhile, the Nader approach is catching on: it contains the kind of visual drama made to order for the media...
...It is a long climb to committee or subcommittee chairmanship, and rarely does a bona fide liberal make it to the House Appropriations Committee, where the real action is and where the money is counted...
...The Democratic National Committee is no picture of organizational or fiscal health, either...
...A Carswell nomination for the Supreme Court goes to the Senate, and only because of tough reporting does the public discover a chain of racist comments that make the rejected Clement Haynsworth a moderate by comparison...
...Nixon and Agnew popularity ratings may rise and fall a little, then rise again—but on the antiballistic issue, new priorities, and school bussing, Republican moderates join with liberal Democrats...
...Then Daniel Moynihan, with great apologies after his memo surfaces, talks of an era of "benign neglect" on racial matters...
...Even with good times (which only the most far-out optimist envisions), the GOP is bucking American history: the party in power seldom gains seats in Congress during an off year...
...But there is a growing skepticism in the Senate about things military...
...An interesting alliance of one of Nader's "Raiders" and Phil Burton of California obtained a mine safety bill, which proved to have more backbone than any hardboiled nose counters thought possible...
...But does Middle America listen or care...
...A voting bill is beaten in the House of Representatives, albeit narrowly...
...The Nixon administration muffed a great opportunity at the outset in 1969 to begin a very shrewd policy—to get Americans to lower their voices and "bring them together...
...Nixon inherited a nation ready for some calm and deliberate leadership...
...The story of the near-win or near-miss on ABM is not generally understood...
...They are better organized, with the ten-year old Democratic Study Group, a well-financed and well-staffed caucus within the Democratic power structure...
...An articulate radical fringe berated the members of the conservative establishment, accusing them of failure these past 30 years...
...the only thing that really offends Vice-President Agnew is a Buchwald spoof...
...Those who monitor the fiscal health of the nation fear a recession with 6 million unemployed by the time of the congressional elections this fall...
Vol. 17 • May 1970 • No. 3
