Letter from a Whig

...5. stopping abuse of drugs and alcohol...

...and that the time to act is now...

...The Ad-ministration, in short, is taking the position that there is no "constitutional" or "impoundment" crisis...

...the White House believes that the debate over the impoundment of Federal funds has been turned into a rhetorical bandwagon for would-be (and not-so-would-be) pres-idential aspirants...

...Although the "top-heavy" structure of our armed services still re-mains alarming, e.g., the army only has 4,500 combat spaces for its 50,000 active captains...

...It has been esti-mated that our hospitals could be emp- tied today by as much as 50 percent of their patients (thus lowering the cost for medical care by millions of dollars per year) if individuals protected their own health by: 1. wearing seat belts in their automobiles...

...There are, of course, many critics who argue that there is no fiscal crisis...

...As Viet Cong ~trength (feeding upon local grievances against the Diem govern-ment) grew, Diem "turned to White foreign~: for help, for more aid, for air power, for a new treaty with the Americans...

...And above all, "there was a refusal to consider what the alternatives to escalation really were...

...Nor is the author's influence these days simply limited to the The Alternative June-September 1973 academy: The Best and the Brightest is flooding suburbia as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and rivals Dr...

...Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz...

...American policy-makers, influenced by "the fall of China, the rise of McCarthy, and the Korean War" had become slavish adherents to a belief in monolithic communism and were therefore incapable of seeing "the shades of difference --the fact that Ho, although a communist, might also be primarily Vietnamese...

...Con-sequently, when the 1954 Geneva Agreements partitioned Vietnam and established Ho in the North, John Foster Dulles "decided that the rest of the country" would be "a Western...

...Readers of The Best and the Brightest, lured by inducements "to 17 by David Halberstam Random House,$10.00 The Best and the Brightest is the product of David Halberstam's quest "to find out the full reasons why it (the Vietnam war) had all happened...

...The Kennedy Adminis-tration, seeing "South Viet Nam as a real country, with a real flag," laboring under the Cold War delusion that force justifies force, and still treating communism as a monolith, responded with advisers and increased aid...

...Hopefully we and the government will soon recognize that it is just as much an infringement of an individual's rights when the gov-ernment prevents him from going to the Letter from a Whig practitioner of his choice (whether M.D., naturopath, witchdoctor, or other variety of medical practitioner) as when a quack fraudulently sells metal rings as a cure against terminal cancer...

...2. eating nutritiously...

...The Impoundment of Funds The Administration's congressional critics are particularly sensitive to what they charge is the President's usurpation of their power, (the "impoundment of funds...

...But inflation clearly remains the nation's number one problem...

...By Fiscal Year 1974 the budget for the Defense De- partment will drop to $79 billion or 28.4 percent of the total budget at a time when spending on human resources will rise to 47 percent of the total budget...

...Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott's somewhat cynical statement serves to illustrate the point: "Asking the Democrats to control government spending is like having an alcoholic for your bartender...

...Under the Nixon Administration, bud-get priorities for human resources will have grown at an estimated average of 15 percent, from 1970 to 1974...

...But in a statement by the Dir- ector of the Office of Management and Budget before the House Committee on Rules, Mr...

...The steam to the engine of inflation, as economists of all creeds recognize, is and always will be irresponsible Fed- eral government spending...

...No work by David Halberstam, how-ever, is so lightly dismissed, for as the publisher's puffery points out, when sociologists "polled 150 Ameri-can intellectuals on the most impor-tant influences on their thinking on Vietnam, they responded by naming the late Bernard Fall and Mr...

...Hal-berstam...

...During a special order which was held by the freshman class of the Ninety-third Congress, a number of the congressmen used the special order as a vehicle to indicate their concern over our ever-growing fiscal problems...

...Although various legislative proposals are currently being considered which would ameliorate the current budgetary process, recognition has not always been the father of reform and there is, un-fortunately, no...

...So let us remove these arbitrary, damaging governmental restrictions and allow new institutions and personnel to develop...

...who is also the Chair- man of the Senate Armed Services Corn- mittee, has promised to weigh the reThe Best and the Brighte st quests of the Department of Defense "as we have never weighed them before...

...However, the reduc- tion of the price for treating sickness and disability will not alone solve the problem completely...

...Concern for a respon-sibie understanding of American foreign policy, rather than the intrin-sic merits of the nook as history, compels us to take The Best and the Brightest seriously, for in it Halber stam is attempting to shape public opinion by supplanting old and ines-capable realities with new myths and wishful thinking, The author's thesis, disjointed and scattered throughout 665 pages of text, can be stated as follows...

...The Time To Act Is Now" The importance and far-reaching con-sequences of the current debate over the Federal budget should not be underestimated...

...That goal will be reached by the individual's own efforts, and by health education (although not of the ineffective kind on which the gov- ernment is currently spending millions of dollars), as much as (maybe more than) by better, less-expensive medical care...

...Let us en-courage men to be responsible for them- selves and their own lives, not chain them to the past while saddling them with the ever increasing burden of pay- ing other people's medical bills...

...That reputation is something they must work hard and constantly to maintain...

...weapons procurement procedures...

...Waste was added to inef-ficiency because Congress lacked the means for a constant and systematic review of existing programs...

...Mr...

...A question that was almost never raised was whether the Vietnamese might not be better off under Ho, and to what degree the success of the Viet Cong was a measure of this...

...unless we stop debauching our currency long enough to restore international con-fidence in the dollar, we will have a moral, constitutional, and economic crisis on our hands which will dwarf any of the other l~roblems and evils to which we now address ourselves...

...When it comes to protecting the lay- man against "bad medicine" one of the best devices that exists today is not the licensing and regulating of government, but the close, careful watch which rep- utable hospitals keep over the work of their staffs...

...An equally strong proponent of the Department of Defense, Senator John Stennis (D-.Miss...

...Speaker, (the Speaker of the House of Representatives) that unless we do something to reduce that $25 bil- lion which goes down the drain every year in interest on the Federal debt...

...we have progressed beyond govern-ment's ability to cope...

...The FY 1974 outlays for the Department of Defense is at the lowest level since 1940, when outlays represented 16.6 percent of the total budget...

...reason to believe that the Ninety-third Congress will be able The Alternative June-September 1973 to counter this problem any better than its predecessors...

...The United States is thus spending substantially less on the research and development of wea- pons systems than it has been in recent years, However, given the reorganization of national priorities, congressional critics covering a broad political spectrum have come to realize that the military, like the other sectors of our society, can no longer support lavish programs of dubious merit...

...Speaker, I suggest that the re-sponsibility for action is ours...

...Under President .Johnson the figure fell to 5.4 percent and President Nixon brought the level even lower, to 5 percent between 1969 and 1972...

...Here is the sphere where government can legitimately take ac-tion --when an individual's rights have been infringed and there is a need for the redressing of injustice...

...unless we act to reduce the 43 percent of every taxpayer's earnings which are confiscated by government at all levels...

...During the last decade Federal spending on domestic programs alone has increased 220 percent...

...Diem, "an American creation which fit American needs, nit Vietnamese ones, "lacked the support of the peasants...

...Since 1973 is not even a political year it can be expected that the political demagoguery coming out of the nation's capital from Democrats and Republicans alike will yet reach even greater pro-portions...

...Our Air Force has two majors for every airplane...

...Needless to say, this is one assertion that will not go unchallenged...

...0 bastion against Communists," and Dinh Diem was "installed" in the South "by foreigners...

...3. exercising sufficiently...

...Atkins' Diet ReVolution on the best seller lists...

...In fact, during the Kennedy Administration, Ash pointed out, the impoundment of funds averaged 6 percent of the total unified budget between 1961 and 1963...

...And today, with only 2.5 million men under arms --as compared to 12 million during World War II --we now have seven more four-star generals and admirals than we did during the war...

...But this is no longer true...

...In order to make fast strides toward im- proving health, we don't need more doc- tors, medical research, or fairy god-mothers to pay the bills, we need to refocus on what we are trying to ac-complish --maintenance of good health...

...So part of the solution to the prGblem with which we are currently faced is the freeing of the medical field from government control...

...And indeed, because of the purpose of defense spending, conservatives have been inclined to overlook the cumbersome bureaucratic failures of the Defense Department...

...V3 remarkable when one considers that 37 percent of all impoundments come from the highway trust fund, 25 percent from the budget of the Defense Department, 6 percent from miscellaneous areas such as space, research, and technology...

...These figures represent 70 percent of all the impounded funds, and it means that only 30 percent comes from human resources...

...As frustrations mounted in the South, the United States more and more blamed the North, coming to believe that Hanoi was the villain and the source of the war...

...One freshman congressman undoubtedly spoke for many when he said" "I sug-gest, Mr...

...Thus with a Federal budget that is over 70 percent uncontrollable and with pros-pects of even higher taxes it would seem that the Nixon Administration has all the ammunition it needs to win this battle...

...Roy Ash argued that the im- poundment of Federal funds by the Chief Executive is one of the oldest traditions in American history...

...Misplaced National Priorities...

...it is the individ- ual who must decide "Yes" or "No," "I will take this pill," "I will stop smoking," "I will have this doctor per- form this operation...

...The ultimate responsibility for the maintenance of any individual's health under any system of medical care will The Battle of the Budget "Money," said a recent congressional newsletter, "is what the war in Washington is all about today...

...has pointed to the "godawful waste" and "total inadequacy" of U.S...

...Especially in today's complex society, government cannot be our watchdog...

...In constant 1974 dollars the total figures for the defense budget are less than they were in 1964, before the Vietnam ~tna~ ~r build-up...

...Fatally misconceiving the war as primarily military rather than political, the United States by 1964 "found itself face to face with fail-ure...

...The forces of Ho Chi Minh drove the French out of Vietnam, thereby cap-turing the nationalism of the country, and becoming a "genuine revolution-ary force...

...So the free market not only offers the most and best alternatives, it also offers consumer protection...

...Under normal circumstances, the author's omission to substantiate his work, coupled with his almost extrasensory capacity to know the innermost thoughts of his subjects, would lead the reviewer to dismiss the book as another lamentable ex-ample of declining historiographical standards...

...they charge that our national priorities are misplaced and that if the Federal budget has to be cut at all it should be cut in the area of defense...

...However, it is true that whether we have a free market or a governmental system of medical care, there will always be some low quality medicine and outright fraud being practiced...

...They keep that watch in order to maintain the good name of their institution...

...Although the book is largely based on "some five hundred interviews" and contains not a single footnote, the credulous reader is expected to excuse the author's failure to docu-ment his account because "the politi-cal climate is somewhat sensitive these days, and the relationship of reporter to source is very much under attack...

...In terms of Gross National Product, defense spending is also at its lowest level since 1950" the figures are ('74) 6 percent and ('50) 4.9 percent respec-tively, These figures are particularly startling when it is pointed out that a whopping 56 percent of the current defense budget now goes for manpower costs and it is estimated that 67 percent of the De-partment of Defense budget could go for manpower costs by 1975...

...The present debate over the impoundment of funds is all the more always rest squarely on that individual's own shoulders, not on the state's or the physician's...

...The more we encourage individuals to evade realization of this responsibility, the farther we will be from our goal of reaching each individual's potential optimum health level...

...The confrontation over the Federal budget has quickly become (with only rare exceptions) a hotly debated partisan issue...

...4. stopping smoking...

...The physician makes recom- mendations to the patient, but has no power to enforce them...

...The Nixon Administration plans to use the parliamentary whip on its Republican troops for what it considers some fifteen "budget busters": i.e., appropriations bills which the Administration claims would cause a tax increase and fuel in- flation...

...Ash further claimed that as of Jan- uary 1973 Nixon's impoundment average was at one of the lowest levels in the last fifteen years, 3.5 percent...

...And indeed, the battle of the budget between Congress and President rages on...

...Assuming that we could affect the outcome of the war, American leaders escalated by pouring in moi'e troops and bomb-ing the North...