WASHINGTON REPORT: The Great Roll-Back

...For one thing, the Commerce Department speedily issued a correction: No, they were not going to publish the names of American corporations which had complied with the Arab boycott of companies doing business with Israel or having Jewish employees above the rank of janitor...

...Does Ford acually believe that Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany are independent of the Soviet Union...

...But the third presidential boner, the one about the proud independence and autonomy of Eastern Europe, took several days and quite a considerable amount of public pressure (plus we know not how much private pressure starting, presumably, with Kissinger) to get corrected...

...Whether the manipulation consisted of the classic Kissingerian "destabilization," as in Chile, or employed more direct means-or indeed whether such manipulation took place at all outside the President's fevered imagination-has yet to be disclosed...

...Candidate Carter has indeed come out against "waste" in the military, but no one so far has come out in favor of waste, though a quite decent case could be made for it: a niggling concern with pennies saved can easily lead to missing the central point of policy, strict cost-accounting would never have bankrolled the discovery of America or our trip to the moon, and so on in that style for several pages, no trick...

...WASHINGTON REPORT THE GREAT ROLL-BACK In the second of the "debates," as those television shows of the two major party presidential candidates were mysteriously called, President Ford startled the nation and the world by declaring forthrightly that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and would be none so long as a Ford administration remained in power...

...It was entirely appropriate that Nixon himself should have been the President to whom the Chinese presented their suggestions for an historic revision of our relations, for it was he more than most American public figures who had warped those relations from the beginning...

...In the public perception, economy for the military means making the Pentagon generals pay, say, four dollars for the eight-dollar steaks they now get in their mess for seventy-five cents...

...Ford, right out in the open on television, fantasized that he and Nixon between them actually had worked the roll-back...

...Why the strongly stated repetition...

...Needless to say, none of those questions was raised by Ford's "opponent" in the "debate," nor are they likely to be...

...Does he think that anything he says twice is true...

...If the Russians are no longer in Eastern Europe, we ought seriously to question what it is we think we are doing in Western Europe...

...Why the reluctance to correct...

...What the two contenders were contending in that meeting was which of them could be counted upon more securely to keep the country in the hands of the Pentagon...

...Nixon fantasized that he would roll back the Russians...

...In the process of seizing that main chance, Nixon gave American anti-Communism a curious twist which is precisely what Ford the other night, after all these years, was responding to...

...As far as I know, McCarthy is the only American remotely near the presidency who is even able to conceive the problem, let alone attempt to solve it...

...The presidential denial of that obvious fact was a fascinating playing out of a ploy first introduced into our political life by Ford's master and creator, Richard Nixon...

...While he was slavering and howling his way into the vice-presidency, Nixon at one point denounced Dean Acheson's policy of the "containment" of Communism as "cowardly...

...Surely even Ford is aware that there is a Soviet presence in all the Communist countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea-though not to the Adriatic-and that that presence is the determining element in all foreign policy and much domestic policy in the area...

...No such rectification has ever taken place in Nixon's other major contribu-ton to American foreign policy, however...

...If the Russians no longer occupy their Germany-at a profit-perhaps we can stop occupying our Germany-at a loss...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...Ford's imaginary view of the way things are from Poland to Rumania corresponded exactly to the early Nixonian imaginary view of what America could or would do about things over there...

...On the following day a number of things happened as a result of the President's various bold assertions in the "debate...

...Nixon did not invent American anti-Communism as a substitute for serious thought about the world and this country's place in it...

...The Great Roll-back has never been rolled back itself...

...Max Frankel of the Times, sharing the disbelief of all who were still awake and watching, offered Ford a chance to back away from that one and Ford refused, declaring boldly once more that the Soviets had nothing to do with the management of Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia, to mention three, and again implying that this felicitous state of independence was largely due to the fear or respect inspired in the Kremlin by the firmness of the Fords...

...The Portuguese Communists correctly pointed out that the statement could only be an admission that the CIA had been manipulating Portuguese politics, something the Communists suspected all along but couldn't prove until the American President bragged about it...

...Only with extreme reluctance, a step at a time over several days and in the face of an open revolt by the ethnics he considered his own, did Ford finally and rather grudgingly concede that the statement as it stood meant what everybody took it to mean and was, on its face, absurd...

...Once formulated, however, the idea of the Great Rollback became part of our general anti-Communist mythology, along with the notion, also heavily promoted by Nixon, that Mao's China was the creature and total dependency of the Soviet Union...

...Actually, there is much to be said for the imaginary roll-back as policy...

...Pay attention, for heaven's sake...

...Why the statement in the first place...

...What it was meant to accomplish, it did accomplish, namely the conning of what was not yet called the ethnic vote in the working class districts of the Great Lakes crescent...

...The second reaction was in Portugal, where left and right were united for the first time in response to Ford's claiming credit for keeping Portugal from going Communist last year...

...what he obviously said was that Commerce would reveal the names of any American firms that so complied in the future...

...The last suggestion is probably closer to the truth than the other...

...He did recognize the unlimited personal opportunity that thought-surrogate presented and seized it more firmly and to better advantage than any of bis fellow-opportunists in the game, Joe McCarthy, J. Parnell Thomas, Tom Dodd, the whole shabby crew...

...If we have rolled back the Russians, there remains no earthly reason for continuing to bankrupt ourselves and our client-states devoting so much of our national genius to the devising, accumulation and distribution of ever more ingenious and costly systems of arms...

...Nixon asserted that his and Eisenhower's policy would be quite different: it would be a policy of "roll-back" of the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe...

...Needless to say, no such "roll-back" ever took place, was probably never seriously contemplated by anyone, even Nixon...

...Well, there is something to be said for that, no doubt, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the serious revaluation of the place of arms in our economy and our foreign policy that is most urgently needed...

...To intrude a personal note, for which I apologize, that reevaluation is what Eugene McCarthy had in mind when he designated this writer as interim Secretary of Defense in his prospective Cabinet, a designation otherwise baffling, even whimsical to many who heard about it...

...If you heard the President say that Commerce was going to publish such a list, you mis-heard him...