WASHINGTON REPORT: The Road to Hell is Paved . . .
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED . . . . with good intentions. America meant well, runs the choric refrain of the unrepentant and the repentant-those who were "in" at the takeoff, but...
...Kennedy descended a staircase to the tune of "Hail to the Chief," after which they met their guests...
...von Hoffman, Peck's bad boy of the Washington Post, suggested the other day in a column a counter-offensive: "Yes, recriminations...
...Not second-hand shoot-outs via paid press agents of the contestants, or by separate appearances in the muffled broadcasting studios where the pablum of the Sunday panel shows is dispensed...
...von Hoffman himself would write, with his special grace of understatement, about those with whom he disagrees...
...The good money poured after bad can't be retrieved...
...One is almost tempted to say "autopsy...
...Whatever-the time is not for recriminations...
...The newspaper reporters loved it...
...All alike in their full-dress pieties on behalf of forgetfulness about "Vietnam...
...This is what most in positions of public or private leadership are suggesting, that the policy didn't work-not that it shouldn't have been instituted in the first place...
...Each a Polonius of the defunct Cold War...
...And it appealed to the elitist academic community, where there's a lot of repenting to be done...
...His recent columns overwrought, unlike the ones of his earlier years, recall someone's definition of exaggeration: truth that has lost its temper...
...After the second World War, there was a popular movie named "You Can't Go Home Again...
...However, in the grog shops around town, his men after working hours talk about "political recriminations" being launched during next year's campaigns...
...America meant well, runs the choric refrain of the unrepentant and the repentant-those who were "in" at the takeoff, but not at the crash landing...
...Layers of ornamental procedures, the senator continued, were added during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, including, during the latter's administration, military aides dressed like soldiers in a Victor Herbert comic opera...
...Not at all...
...Let us care for the Vietnamese orphaned, adults as well as children, that President Ford has chosen to bring by American express to the continental United States...
...A President giving the Congress hell for not "fulfilling America's obligation to the South Vietnamese people" has access by radio and television to an incomparably wider market than does his political opposition in the Congress-individually or collectively...
...The administrations of six Presidents can no longer be fully and fairly recorded without reference to their responsibility for our Thirty Years' War in Southeast Asia, a war we waged both by proxy and in place...
...The President is trying to quiet the right-wing lions in his party, internationalist liberals in the Congress, mostly Democrats but some Republicans, too, are most reluctant to face up to the flaws in their preachings for the last 30 years...
...They balk at reassessing the presidency with a view to adding restraints to its foreign-policy authority because someday each of them hopes to become President...
...What's needed these days is a few above-board shoot-outs in the political corral, between the President and members of Congress...
...But without trying to stretch a point, Americans can be historically and intellectually orphaned, too-unless their political leaders, hopefully with restraint, seek to explain the whys and wherefores of our bloody excursions not only into Southeast Asia but also into Asia, as a whole, during the last 75 years or more...
...A lefty Joe McCarthy, that von Hoffman's recriminations might spawn, is no more welcome eight months away from a presidential election year than a rightie...
...Recently, a syndicated columnist, a client of Presidents, accused one senator of being "didactic" toward President Ford during a meeting between the Foreign Relations Committee and the President at the White House...
...But who died and made this President, any President, God...
...He's off his rocker, too- as Mr...
...If anyone doubts this, let him simply listen to the observations of a senior senator, who himself admits to having given a succession of Presidents their heads in foreign affairs...
...The President, after parading for a week in sackcloth and ashes, has reversed himself and is now wordily proclaiming that Indochina was only a bruise and dashed to Norfolk, Virginia, one recent Saturday to dedicate a new $700-million aircraft carrier three times the length of a football field...
...Nor can the four dead Kent college students...
...Eisenhower...
...SISYPHUS...
...Consequently, members of Congress, whatever their differing private opinions, are inclined to buy the President's pig-in-a-poke of unity and no recriminations this year in hopes that somehow it will turn out to be a genuine article...
...All alike in their apprehensions about being found out as vainglorious and wrong...
...Our colleague down the street, Mr...
...They're the same persons who publicly ascribe Watergate to an overzealous President, rather than to what the genuine motivation was-an effort to substantially alter de facto and by stealth and sometimes not by stealth the Constitutional basis of the nation...
...The Constitution, not Emily Post, should govern...
...Privately, Democrats and dissident Republicans in the Congress express fear that this will occur...
...The President and most members of Congress see a short-term political interest for themselves in declining to do any serious re-analysis of our foreign-policy objectives...
...What's needed is direct talks across the tables at the White House and in the congressional committee rooms...
...It's not certain, however, that the American people will be informatively instructed...
...Those in Congress with presidential aspirations are burdened with an added restraint...
...We'll find that out in the presidential year...
...He talks publicly about "unity" and putting the past behind us, as if it were simply a fender-bender auto collision...
...White House staff parked guests' cars and military aides conducted guests to the President and Mrs...
...Keep tuned...
...These encounters would be a good cleansing agent by which Congress can render to the presidency the things that are the presidency's-including foreign policy administration and formulation-and the President can render {restore, actually) unto the Congress the things that are the Congress's-including monitoring of foreign policy operations and a summoning of Presidents to periodic accountings of their stewardship in this area...
...Truman standing there directly greeting each arrival...
...The senator probably was...
...During Camelot, guests entered the White House and then waited, assembled, until President and Mrs...
...Back when Harry Truman was President, as the senator relates it, a guest at a White House evening function simply drove to the White House, parked his own car, walked in the front door and immediately saw President and Mrs...
...When General Dwight Eisenhower became President, he introduced the aide system...
...Americans may learn to distrust presidential heroics, but, if they do, it will be a lesson self-taught, not taught by those who have an obligation to teach such a lesson...
...They refuse to acknowledge Patrick Henry's observation that the "Presidency squints toward Monarchy...
...But analysis, postmortems would do nicely, thank-you...
...Now, there's been another war for Americans...
...Those who are speaking publicly are inclined to the view that our policy there didn't work...
...It may be they know more than their leaders...
...Lots of them...
...The 56,000 American servicemen killed in Indochina can't come home again, either...
...One can imagine Patrick Henry walking out on the whole scene...
...The senator said he wishes now that he had...
...Meanwhile, few are suggesting how to avoid another Vietnam...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 5
