Washington Report: Hi'ya, Fella, Yourself
Sisyphus
the NAL that "NAL people have moved on to other things and don't need the church anymore," but that doesn't tell the whole story. The NAL was killed by a lack of imagination and the same...
...The task is to get them together and get moving...
...As the Congress recessed for the election campaigns, the Majority Leader, Senator Mansfield, and Senator Cannon, chairman of the Rules Committee, have indicated the hearings in the Senate would probably be re-opened...
...However, Rockefeller, energetic, outward, breathing success, easily turned aside their hostility...
...Correspondingly, Ronan, for example, professes to see no conflict-of-interest in accepting half-a-million dollars or more from the Governor of a State for whom he worked, but presumably was to work in a public-interest capacity beyond that of the political well-being of his boss...
...The way he disburses money lacks accountability, an indispensable factor that was badly shattered during the Nixon Presidency...
...His basic mistake was letting himself be lured off the Supreme Court by Lyndon Johnson in order to wash at the United Nations Johnson's dirty-linen from the Vietnam war...
...He can not be allowed to say that he will stay aloof...
...two, if he did, he should be disqualified for the position of Vice President...
...There are still a lot of Catholic progressives and people who can be progressives with a little education...
...This problem is aggravated in this situation by the stated attitudes of both the donor and recipients...
...It shouldn't have happened, he told furious Arthur, who yet may have the last word...
...Except for those adhering to another system of political economy, the problem for most Americans is not so much the immensity of the Rockefeller wealth--ali's fair in love and war under capitalism's ground-rulesm than it is the disposition of the money...
...Individual gifts to his associates total far more than many Americans earn in a working life-time...
...Now, disparate dements have a binder--a case of a generous hand, however well-intentioned, that is stronger than the instrumentalities of governments themselves...
...reach into every major nook and cranny of the American economy...
...One wants not a eunuch but a contributor in that position...
...But it would be an opportunity to ask questions that are truly meaningful...
...I November 1974:102 Then, in mid-October, it was disclosed, as a result of the customary FBI investigation into his nomination, that brother Laurance had invested approximately $60,000 in publication of a clap-trap, derogatory campaign biography of Arthur Goldberg, the Democratic nominee contesting Nelson's re-dection in 1970...
...Since neither Ford nor Rockefeller, assuming his confirmation, was elected to his position as President or Vice President respectivelyma unique situation in our history--the possibility of continued muddled responsibility at the highest levels of government is a dismaying one in the era of Watergate(s...
...First, he would not...
...Another recipient included a syndicated columnist, who years ago borrowed money to buy a newspaper~lending further substance to observations set down in the last of these columns from Washington that the Augean stables of politics are not the only ones in need of cleansing these days...
...After all, as his Press Secretary told reporters, Nelson paid the required gift taxes, didn't he...
...He should be asked about his views on inflation and his attitudes should there be in the months ahead, as some predict, a recurrence of the energy-crisis of 1973-74...
...After this disclosure, Nelson Rockefeller telephoned Goldberg to apologize...
...9 Reagan-ites and the Human Events crowd in the Republican party...
...Then, in early October, flowed the "leaks" from the direction of the House Judiciary Committee on the subject of Rockefeller's largesse...
...And, merebers of Congress are beginning to ask themselves, if Nelson Rockefeller gave so lavishly to those who pleased him in the performance of their duties for him, one may shudder at the other side of the sybaritic coin: what awful fate befell those who displeased him as he pursued the Presidential grail during his four decades in public life...
...It marks the end of a certain style of reform from a very particular group of people...
...Its chairman, Peter Rodino of New Jersey, feeling his summer oats from the Nixon impeachment hearings from which he has reaped national recognition, showed signs of being willing to engage in another political High Noon...
...If 12,000 people~the peak NAL membership ---couldn't remake the church, 25 people meeting in a small Washington hotel can't sound its death knell...
...The tentacles of the wealth of Rockefeller & Co...
...Less palatable is the rationalization that at the beginning some members of Congress, with reservations about the nomination, convinced themselves of: that being rich, Rockefeller was uncorruptible . . . would not be subject to temptations Richard Nixon and others were heir to...
...NAL people" weren't any more successful in talking to non-NAL people than the princes of the church have been...
...That is my Religion," Undershaft says in Shaw's play, Major Barbara...
...Rockefeller's is an inverse way of laundering money...
...Rockefeller's Kent State East...
...I am a millionaire...
...If he is confirmed, as he may still be, the awesome dimensions of the Rockefeller money and power should be made clear and, to whatever degree possible, accountable...
...The walking death of the NAL, though far from a good sign, doesn't mark the end of lay reform in the church...
...He needs to be put on the record in respect to these views, since he has not been submitted, for no fault of his own, to a nominating convention of his Party and to the American electorate...
...It may have been unfair to expect the NAL to shoulder the burden...
...Parenthetically, one is impelled to ask the sociologists and other landscape artists of society whether their thesis is valid--that great wealth, however brutally amassed, somehow civilizes itself in the second or, certainly, in the third generation...
...Compared to toppling a President, what's so tough about toppling a political Croesus...
...Senator Allen, a Committee member, gives the impression he now sees the nomination as political quarry...
...He waltzed through his confirmation hearing last month before the Senate Rules Committee...
...Henry Kissinger, whose halo is turning into a marshmallow anyway, received $50,000 just before he joined the Nixon Administration as its foreign-affairs sharpshooter...
...Others who received Rockefeller pin money over the years included Edward Logue, President of the State Urban Development Corporation, and L. Judson Morhouse, once State Republican Party Chairman and later convicted of bribery and pardoned by Nelson...
...At last count, Rockefeller has acknowledged disbursing an estimated $2-million to approximately 20 workers in his political vineyard...
...The burden, though, is no longer theirs--it floats around looking for a shoulder to light on--a shoulder or shoulders that can organize different people on different issues and then help them relate to one another...
...Goldberg wouldn't have won the election anyway...
...Does it then become the Rockeford Administration...
...Most politicians get in trouble for taking...
...JIM CASTELLI (Jim Castelli, ]ormerly with the National Catholic Reporter, is now on the staff o/NC News Service...
...The gifts and the book breathed life into previous opposition whose strength had not been strongly felt...
...Rockefeller may be the first to get in trouble for giving...
...Otherwise, we should leave him to his embarrassment of riches...
...The NAL was killed by a lack of imagination and the same problems that face the institutional church...
...The American hierarchy itself has shown some very healthy trends...
...Oil is the family's lifeblood...
...SISYPHUS Commonweal: 103...
...From the outset, the Rockefeller nomination did draw opposition from three sources: _9 Anti-abortionists who remembered his opposition to their legislation...
...The few Populistminded members of the Congress, unwilling to tweak the Rockefeller tail until the episode of the Goldberg campaign biography come to light, began to speak up...
...Allen, suspicious of anything or anyone without roots in his native Alabama, is a persevering type who has scuttled many a project not to his own liking...
...At this writing, the brass, more aptly, the gold ring goes to William Ronan, chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who accepted a gift of a sum of upwards of $550,000 originally given as a loan...
...The stirrings in the House were unfavorable omens for Rockefeller...
...Rehearing of the Rockefeller nomination in the Senate will probably dwell on the gifts and the book...
...Vice President-designate Rockefeller professes to comprehend no problem with such lavish disbursements of his monies to associates...
...Only Senator Robert Byrd, born into poverty as miserable as Rockefeller's wealth was opulent, asked persistent questions in contrast to the awe-struck, deferential questioning of the other members of the Committee...
...WASHINGTON REPORT HrYA, FELLA, YOURSELF "1 never/ound it a handicap to be a Rocke[eller" --Nelson R Nelson Rockefeller may be the softest touch since Shaw's Sir Andrew Undershaft...
...Until the end the NAL remained an elite of 1960s liberals disaffected with their church...
...9 Penal reformers and others who objected to his decision that led to the quelling of the Attica prison uprising in which more than 40 died, mostly prisoners...
...In a sense, Nelson Rockefeller "is" Exxon...
...Somewhere it's been written: no wealth can satisfy the covetous desire of wealth...
...The book, written by a right-wing pamphleteer, Victor Lasky, was unnecessary as a matter of fact...
...His nomination to be Vice President started smoothly enough...
...Will Rockefeller, as Vice President, continue his profligacy by paying President Ford's family medical bills...
...it is a family consortium of interests that reach throughout the world and, understandably, shape United States foreign-policy decisions...
...Members of Congress, reassessing their position, might also consider the cast of mind of a person, Rockefeller, who says in defense of his gifts to subordinates that they were made to persons "appointed by m e . . . administratively responsible to me . . . in a framework of policy established by me . . . (with) identical interests...
...Apologies or no, the Rockefeller nomination has a touch of gaminess about it...
...Why not...
...Welfare mothers, whom Rockefeller, as Governor of New York State, scolded during non-election years, must have taken a special interest in the list of Who's-Who on the Dole...
...David's Chase Manhattan Bank is more than a bank...
...Calm down, Henry, you've got more degrees...
...The plebeian members of the House Judiciary Committee began to stir by late October as a result of the Medici-like cast of the Rockefeller court...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 5
