The Nation's Pulse

...If the result is somewhat uneven, Nixon's Good Deed should nonetheless help to redress any impression that the White House has, for the last six years, been solely a place of eavesdropping, corruption, and petty burglary...

...The emphasis, however, is on telling a story and it is done with admirable conciseness, if not always with accuracy...

...As William F. Buckley, Jr...

...If the UN were merely a forum for ineffectual but well-meaning career diplomats given to moralistic preachments about events beyond their control, it would, I suppose, be tolerable enough...

...The book's main author, Vincent J. Burke, was one of those rare Washington journalists who knew something about the isues he reported, and his untimely death left to his wife the task of completing his most important story...

...and the structure will remain only the form...

...Heeding the call of a communique issued by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in February 1945 from Yalta (a conference more memorable for placing half of liberated Europe under Soviet protection), representatives of the victorious nations in World War II met in California to found "a general international organization" that would "maintain peace and security," "prevent aggression," and "remove the political, economic, and social causes of war through the close and continuing collaboration of all peace-loving peoples...

...In Nixon's first year in the White House, the increment in the welfare rolls—some 750,000 families—was almost as large as The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 19...

...Israel was not permitted to respond to this particular demonstration for world peace...

...The UN's latest efforts in this direction include kicking Israel, the villain of the Mideast, out of UNESCO, and expelling South Africa from the General Assembly in direct violation of the Charter...

...One question, however, goes beyond Moynihan's criticisms: Namely, at what point should this country simply say "Enough" ? The UN today is fairly described as an assemblage of cynical, hypocritical, blathering, and obnoxious representatives from all the corrupt, dictatorial, and pretentious little regimes that dot the globe in this enlightened age...

...Although the United Nations has done virtually nothing in the last 30 years to justify the bright hopes expressed at its inception, it retains a place of affection in the hearts of American liberals that is rivaled only by the Social Security system...

...The Burkes offer a play-by-play account of how this extraordinary proposal became the major item of domestic legislation of a Republican President and how a coalition of conservativesand liberals twice managed to prevent its enactment...

...Last year, in overconsuming meat which wasted the cereals that could have saved them, we ate the little children of the Sahel, of Ethiopia, and of Bangladesh...

...A generation of junior high school students in the postwar era has been taught to view the UN in a similarly rosy light...

...The] realities of power will soon seep into any legalistic structure which we erect to govern international life...

...Thus, with a rhetorical flourish worthy of an Albanian Propaganda Minister, the t 'N was proposed to a war-weary world as its last, best hope for peace...

...Following any of these suggestions would yield a welcome contrast to what one sees today...

...On taking office in 1969, the President and his aides encountered a problem which had the earmarks of a crisis...

...Han Suyin, another heartfelt sympathizer with Third World aspirations, suggests that to solve this problem, "we have to begin by sharing now everything, and that means that a lot of people with a lot of private property, for example, should divest themselves immediately of it in favor of the poor...

...That we further legitimize such hijinks by footing over twenty-five percent of the annual bill is but an additional foolishness...

...FAP was a type of negative income tax...

...Surely, the picture is brighter here: after all, who has not warmed with thoughts of international charity after chucking a dollar into the tin can of some young scamp trick-or-treating for UNICEF...

...The Burkes know the issues and, even more, the personalities...

...And above all else, the supposed symbolic value of the institution itself is regularly venerated, as if the United States or world peace would somehow stand jeopardized should the United Nations vanish from the scene...

...But this is not the standard the authors use in evaluating FAP, nor is it the way in which the Nixon Administration judged their proposal...

...The "deed" was welfare reform—specifically, the proposal of the Family Assistance Plan in 1969...

...Perhaps there is merit in the United Nations that I have overlooked...

...They will become the content of it...

...Book Review/Leslie Lenkowsky Two Cheers for FAP • In this post-Watergate year, a book entitled Nixon's Good Deed perhaps deserves appreciation more than review...

...The UN building in New York is a gleaming monument to cherished beliefs about the inadequacy, in a nuclear age, of a world order rooted in nationalism, a treasured portent of the global government to come...

...It is clear, to begin with, that judged in light of the sweeping vision articulated at Yalta, the UN is laughably inept...

...In place of debate one hears at best idiotic blandishments like the following gem from the representative of India (quoted by Daniel P. Moynihan in "The United States in Opposition," Commentary, March 1975): "The activities of the Soviet delegation at the session showed once again that the Soviet Union deeply understands and shares the aspirations of the Third World...

...Occasionally, they consider broader issues of governing suggested by the events as well as other aspects of the Nixon Administration's domestic proposals, particularly food stamps and the Supplemental Security Income plan, which provides a guaranteed income for the aged and disabled...

...Its essence is change...

...Suffice it to say that only a naif would have expected anything else...

...Indeed, I think the time has come to question whether the United Nations an an organization deserves continuing American involvement...

...The most laudable stand it ever took to "prevent aggression," et al.—Korea—occurred well over twenty years ago, and was predominantly and overwhelmingly a United States, not a UN, endeavor...

...More often, the air is filled with mindless chants against "United States imperialism" and similar ritualistic rot...

...At the very least, the record of the mob in Manhattan in recent years should shift the burden of persuasion to those who advocate further affiliation with this institutionalized affront to honesty and dignity in human affairs...

...If one grants that the UN is worthless as a direct peacekeeping force, can one yet defend it as a forum either for international debate or for the articulation ofmoral positions on important issues...

...Its failure to deal effectively with almost every crisis of any significance is said merely to illustrate how far we have to go...

...notes in United Nations Journal, "while as a legislative body [the UN] is useless, and while as a debating body it is invaluable, it does a great deal of legislating and absolutely no debating...

...In the hallowed tradition of the national press corps, internal memos and minutes of private meetings form a sizable portion of the documentation, giving perhaps too Nixon's Good Deed: Welfare Reform by Vincent J . Burke and Vee Burke Columbia University $8.95 much prominence to the work of those unsurpassable leakers, the bureaucrats...

...At a time when bookstores are (or soon will be) glutted with the confessions of sundry ex-convicts, who happen to have been in the employ of the White House, testimony that the Nixon Presidency had its constructive and virtuous moments is almost self-evidently valuable, like a respected character witness at a trial...

...it would have guaranteed all families—working or not, united or not, deserving or not—a basic grant ($1600 was proposed for a family of four with no other source of income) and reduced this amount by 50 cents for each dollar earned in order to maintain the incentive to work...

...From a perspective of three decades, one can fault Kennan only for overemphasizing the degree to which the UN would be even a meaningful structure for the more significant realities...

...The number of families receiving public assistance was increasing rapidly with a consequent rise in expenditures—particularly at state and local levels of government—that seemed out of control...

...The very idea of a similar UN undertaking today is preposterous...

...It has done almost nothing for the world in years, save for providing an incredible spectacle that would be humorous were it not a slap in the face of decent and civilized men everywhere...

...The organization's occasional successes in "humanitarian" endeavors are trotted out as examples of international cooperation at work...

...However, on reading Professor Moynihan's thoughtful piece in Commentary, one discovers that even this field has been permeated with the bombastic, third-rate ideology of the Third World...

...Unfortunately, the quaint conception of reasonable men exchanging views in civilized fashion has seldom found expression in the General Assembly...

...The United States might then decide that putting an international stamp on periThe Mob in Manhattan odic charitable ventures, or obtaining whatever psychic satisfaction there may be in having a world organization, justified membership in and financial support for a United Nations...

...perhaps the organization is yet salvageable for some purpose or other...

...Finally, one comes to the UN's much vaunted humanitarian endeavors...

...This last action—yet another protest against apartheid—was joined, of course, by freedom-loving nations like Uganda, whose incomparable President Idi Amin has expelled white Europeans from his African paradise while expressing his admiration for the racial theories of the late Adolf Hitler...

...At the World Food Conference, the Indian food minister added a grace note to this composition by pointing out that whatever the United States does to help in this area should be viewed not as "charity," but as "deferred compensation" for years of capitalistic, imperialistic exploitation...

...One need not pause here to recount the long catalogue of buffoonery and/or indifference that has marked the UN's approach to international crises in the days since the Korean War...

...International security will depend on them: on the realities of power—not on the structure in which they are clothed...

...After a U.S.-sponsored conference on food and population, Professor Rene Dumont of France cut to the heart of the matter in 18 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 Development Forum, an official five-language UN publication: "Eating little children...

...And at worst, the world is treated to the spectacle of a Yasir Arafat, that brilliant tactician of the war against Israeli children, posturing before a thunderously approving audience with a pistol firmly lodged between his belt and his middle-aged paunch...

...Although the Burkes account for how the deed occurred, their book is weaker in telling us why the proposal of FAP should be considered a "good" deed...

...As for articulating moral positions, the record is, if possible, even worse...

...They will permeate it...

...Moynihan suggests, and wisely so, that it is past time the US began to oppose this nonsense—by trumpeting the achievements of "liberal processes," by asserting "that inequalities in the world may be not so much a matter of condition as a matter of performance," and by ceasing our maddening passivity in the United Nations...

...Nonetheless, Nixon's Good Deed offers fascinating glimpses of how men such as Robert Finch, Daniel P. Moynihan, Arthur Burns, and John Ehrlichman debated the issues and how the President ultimately became convinced that FAP was the right course of action...

...they do not hesitate to pass judgment on the deeds and motives of the latter, with particular animus reserved for leading Democrats and labor unionists...

...While one may quarrel with their interpretations or question their selection of events, the Burkes have produced a reasonably informative rendering of policy making in the Nixon White House and have done so without once referring to the Central Intelligence Agency or the "plumbers...

...I waive consecutive translation and await a response...

...In some quarters, any act of charity towards the poor is inherently virtuous, although no small share of the opposition to FAP came from groups such as the National Council of Churches and other "do-gooders...

...But surely we have reached the point where our continued memberhip, much less our support, should no longer be taken for granted as a given of United States foreign policy...

...It is little more than an abusive platform for every charlatan in a dashiki or a kaffiyeh who wants to excoriate the United States for the edification of the multinational multitude...

...Our mere participation in this assembly of petty tyrants degrades us...

...The petulant anti-Americanism of the so-called "Third World" nations who dominate the General Assembly is dismissed with vague incantations about the need for "tolerance" and "understanding" in our relations with "developing" countries...

...I have already had occasion to show that the rich white man, with his overconsumption of meat and his lack of generosity toward poor populations, acts like a true cannibal, albeit indirectly...

...In a 1944 memorandum which he subsequently reproduced in his Memoirs, George F. Kennan, hardly an isolationist, aptly summarized why the United Nations would have little effect as an instrument for world peace: "International life is something organic, not something mechanical...

...and the only systems for the regulation of international life which can be effective over long periods of time are ones sufficiently subtle, sufficiently pliable, to adjust themselves to constant change in the interests and power of the various countries involved...

...In the last few years, however, the UN has become something more—or rather, something less--than the relatively harmless entity described above...