WASHINGTON REPORT: Now Comes the Winter of...
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT NOW COMES THE WINTER OF.... As for our decades-old Indochina policy, it's not so much that at long last there's light at the end of the tun- nel, as that the tunnel...
...At this writing, the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia is approaching its demise...
...In retaliation, the dishes will be broken over the heads of those still in authority and those long since departed--whether dead or alive...
...The foreign-policy consensus, rooted in the experiences of World War II, is coming apart...
...The faith and trust, essential to successful foreign policy, is dispersed...
...Inextricably entwined with foreign policy of whatever tone and substance is domestic policy...
...Nor, for that matter, are major sections of American industry profiting by American foreign policy...
...President against Congress...
...Ostensibly this measure was aimed at the restoration of an individual liberty: to belong to a union or not...
...President Ford has willingly testified before a congressional committee on another matter...
...In Britain, the major parties can have discernible differences, as in respect to membership in the Common Market, without members from one set of benches shouting "traitor" at those facing them on the other...
...Earlier, he inferred that American Jews may hold a dual nationality because of their support for Israel...
...Who, we might ask in anticipation, will be the John Paton Davies and Owen Lattimores and Stewart Services of this most recent encounter with the Asian mainland...
...The most worrying part of the new Act, as I see it, is that people can now be held, not because the Home Secretary had good evidence to suggest that they may be involved in terrorism, but simply because he suspect.~ they are...
...In view of a recent case, in which the jury trying two Irishmen found in possession of circuit diagrams for bombs, failed to agree on a verdict, the possibility that the police may be holding a good many innocent l~eople in gaol in England (not to mention Northern Ireland) is beginning to worry thinking people...
...While the vast majority of people here clearly feel that Mr...
...Perhaps, our perception of foreign policy has now matured to the point that our governors will not insist on a "bi-partisan" foreign policy with its implication of disloyalty to those who don't adhere...
...Unions liked it because it gave more power to their elbows...
...If amenities were observed, he could again sit down with members of the Senate and House foreign relations committees--in closed session, if need be, and just "talk shop" without any participant trying to win a black belt in political karate...
...However, the threat to individual liberty and security is not only from the terrorists...
...Currently, lower-income Americans, as distinct from the old-hand liberals with their support of an internationalist order, are coming to an understandable conclusion that the burdens of our foreign policy since World War H have been inequitably shared domestically...
...It floundered in those areas historically disparate from our own...
...But in 1971 the Conservative government, in its "abrasive" phase under Heath, passed the Industrial Relations Act, which made the compulsory closed shop illegal...
...The Congress should undertake to reassess our foreign policy in a thoughtful way...
...The scripture, according to John Foster Dulles, has been discredited...
...The Defense Secretary blames the deteriorating situation in Vietnam and Cambodia on the niggardliness of the Congress in the amount of military and economic assistance it has furnished...
...Indeed, in a few industries--notably, and perhaps ironically, the newspaper industry--yon had to have a union card before you could get a job...
...Just something in-between...
...The hold-outs at the Pentagon and quasi-official garrisons of the Old Order are alarmed and angered...
...To ensure the liberty of the majority, in a period of indiscriminate terror and mass organizations, it is paradoxically necessary to reduce the freedom of individuals to do "their own thing": since "their thing" may well be planting bombs in pubs or kidnapping the daughters of the rich and vulnerable...
...demagogues against both...
...The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-ofStaff, General Brown, has misspoken himself again this year--and it's only April...
...That needn't mean we retreat into our boroughs as the only alternative to embarking on Kiplingesque adventures on the burgeoning and unstable frontiers of the world...
...academicians rewriting history on the basis of snippets...
...Now, their informed judgment tells them, comes the winter of our national discontent...
...For weeks, Henry K sat this one out in the Middle East, where he was trying unsuccessfully to fashion a diplomatic house of cards that he had hoped would survive until he can disembark from the Ship of State with his Nobel Prize (for peacemaking) untarnished...
...It worked as applied in the industrially developed regions...
...That is to say, it was legal to require that all workers in a plant should belong to a union...
...It is doubtful that we can be summoned by a new President calling for m/y sacrifice in our role as watchmen on freedom's tower...
...White House couriers lind congressional corridors no longer predictably hospitable to financing our war by proxy abroad in a region of the world marginal to our national security...
...Commonweal: 37 It should not be beyond consideration that an aggressive foreign policy may not be suitable--or, at least, continuously...
...Perhaps, a better imagery is that the bucks are being assembled to be passed and hurled about...
...The other day, Defense Secretary Schlesinger refused to appear before the Senate Budget Commission as part of a panel to discuss the next year's military budget because Paul Warnke, former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Johnson and one of the chastened ones, was included...
...It has long been the case that nobody could get into the newspaper printing trades without an influential trade union friend or relation...
...It failed when applied to those "countries" which were more groupings of ethnic, even tribal associations, culturaliy disparate from ours, and having at most a rudimentary sense of "nationhood," only now becoming assertive and then assertively so against their patrons--us...
...If any domino theory is valid, it is one that has toppled the Southeast Asian maladventures of successive presidential administratiom--Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon...
...SISYPHUS OOOOOOOOOOOOOO FROM BRITAIN UNIONIZING THE EDITORS The balance between individual liberty and personal security is a very delicate one...
...More in sorrow than in...
...Unfortunately, witch hunts burn people not policies drafted and formulated in the snuggeries of statecraft...
...management liked it because it gave the work force stability...
...Just recently, the General suggested that civilians had stabbed the military in the back --a disconcerting echo of another man's theme who rose to power in Germany in the 1930s...
...The critical analyses of how we became mired in the Big Muddy in Indochina are not being heard with glee by reasonable congressional critics, such as Senators Church and Mathias...
...Their sons are the victims of warfare and their incomes primarily victimized by high prices of imports such as petroleum...
...As a citizen of Birmingham, at a moment when Birmingham has temporarily been in the world's headlines, I feel particularly keenly the delicacy of this balance...
...As for our decades-old Indochina policy, it's not so much that at long last there's light at the end of the tunnel, as that the tunnel itself is collapsing upon us...
...While the debate in the pubs is about whether to hang the bombers, the debate in the newspaper offices is about whether editors should be allowed to stay outside the journalists' trade union...
...Allowances were usually made for "conscientious objectors," like Jehovah's Witnesses, but in general the "closed shop" in the second sense of the term was a part of normal industrial relations in many large firms, and both unions and management supported it, though for different reasons...
...The fact is that the American people have furnished more than 50,000 dead soldiers and nearly $150 billion in tax money...
...And it is the policies that need to be reassessed, reformed and implemented...
...WASHINGTON REPORT NOW COMES THE WINTER OF...
...At least, not for a long while...
...Until 1971, the "closed shop" in Britain was perfectly legal, and in many indnstries normal...
...the South Vietnam dictatorship of General Thieu is shrinking itself into military enclaves, reminiscent of General Gavin's proposal made several years ago...
...The existing one, even to the most vehement supporter of the American Empire, appears to be beyond salvage--no Senator Vandenberg on hand to tell a sitting President that the only way to get his way in foreign policy is to go to the stump and the air-waves and "scare the hell out of the country...
...The issues are complicated, and a bit of background is necessary to understand them...
...This is not an argument that is likely to fire the interest of the average working man: hut it is an important one all the same, and has implications for the press the world over...
...Back home, Henry J in the Senate still wears his armor, but has not mounted his charger on this occasion--thereby giving Robert Novak, one of the fastest guns in the Washington press corps, an opportunity to accuse him of moving "leftward" in a search for support for his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...If Congress is to be blamed, it is because the people's assembly did not call a halt to the bloody business years ago...
...Evidence can be refuted: but suspicions can remain suspicions whatever the evidence or lack of it...
...In fact, it was part of a strategy to curb the growing power of the big unions to dictate to" government and II April 1975:38...
...Jenkins' Prevention of Terrorism Act is too soft, rather than too hard, on the terrorist threat (and that hanging itself is too good for the terrorists) the dangers to genuine liberties that it poses are beginning to be felt...
...No, they have knowledge of the American temper...
...More often, you had to join a union as soon as you had been taken on...
...Cajoled by Kennedy, scoffed at, or worse, by Johnson, and investigated by Nixon, such critics have publicly, at least, declined to have their i~ning of self-congratulatory justification which they might well permit themselves...
...The mass organizations are also in the news for the same reason--and here I mean in particular the trade unions and the government...
...How can you defend yourself against the Home Secretary's naturally suspicious nature...
...Chastened or repentant warriors of the Cold War now are willing to conduct their post-mortems before congressional committees...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 2
