Washington Report: To Arms! To Arms!
Getlein, Frank
instance, who in Carter's earlier words didn't know where Sweden was or how to get to Canada. Nor are doubts relieved by some high-level appointments, notably that of Griffin B. Bell as...
...The remainde[ was, appropriately, diminuendo, with a coda consisting of the new/old Carter Secretary of Defense reiterating 4 February 1977:68 his chief's promise to make cuts in the Gargantuan DeIense budget but finking out on the time: not really possible until 1979, perhaps 1980...
...We find it especially ironic that Carter should have persisted against intense opposition on this, the poorest of his nominations, while acquiescing so readily to the withdrawal decision of Theodore Sorensen as director of the Central Intelligence Agency...
...Since the proposition is purely theological from our point of view--even the CIA is not going to produce some secret speech from the Kremlin outlining such semi-suicidenhow can we be persuaded of its truth, if its advocates really do believe it to be true and are not just claiming it to be true in order to make money...
...Treasury, the more securities the more security, the sooner the better, not a moment to lose, damn the cost overruns, full speed ahead, and curst be he who first cries, Hold, enough...
...Nor are doubts relieved by some high-level appointments, notably that of Griffin B. Bell as Attorney General, a lawyer and judge with a widely publicized obstructionist reputation in civil-rights cases...
...in return, the military will not attack, as it has in the past, the Agency's independence of military dominance...
...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 69...
...All of this gave way to the big set piece of the show: the CIA report on the Great Soviet Arms Build-Up of the last decade or so...
...One entertainment not listed in the Concourse of Events and at least as expertly choreographed, rehearsed and conducted as the best of those that were, was the Soldiers' Chorus lifted in the last days of the Ford administration warning the Carter administration and the country at large that The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and the only way to stop them is to inundate the militaryindustrial-flackery complex with money from the U.S...
...Similarly questionable is Carter's choice of Charles Schultze as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors--a man who last summer helped block passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill and who, in the words of economic analysts Robert Lekachman and Michael Harrington, is "evidently prepared to accept a whole decade of extraordinarily severe unemployment...
...On the face of it, the proposition seems ridiculous, but anything is possible, including that...
...As regards the set-piece, you don't really have to be profoundly cynical to assume a trade-off: the CIA supports the military letch for funds...
...So there it all was, out on the stage...
...We trust it will not be so with jobs...
...He must recognize that there is a hard-core unemployed in this country, particularly among urban black and minority youths, and that direct affirmative action is necessary on many levels and in numerous job-skill areas if these groups are to be reached...
...The latter objection is crucial...
...Finally, a great token of good faith would be the relinquishment of the privileges of rank...
...The trouble with a lot of theology almost until our own time has been that the theologians, as often as not, had a lot riding on such questions as how many angels could dance on the point of a pin...
...That first obvious proposal to accompany the scare stuff is simply that the arms industry be nationalized...
...Here it was at last: the voice of ultimate authority, the Charlton Heston of government...
...Each new administration seems to have its special challenge...
...The overture was sounded in letters to The Times, swelled to a brilliant opening number, everybody on stage, in an Op-Ed Solemn Warning about the Soviets signed by everyone the military-industrial flacks could dredge up, including such an honorable former naval person as Elmo Zumwaldt and several less so...
...If the burglars, liars and letter-openers of the CIA said it was so, how could anyone doubt...
...As that of the past administration was the rescuing of the office of the presidency (and here give Ford high marks for what he accomplished), that of the new will very likely be jobs...
...A jobless percentage rate of near 8 percent is intolerable, the more so when one group comprises 20 percent of the jobless, as do blacks...
...After the opener, individual divertissements began the build-up all over again, in traditional, George Abbott-Leonard Bernstein style...
...The interregnum President did his own number with variations in a masterpiece of timing just when, for a change, everyone in the country wanted to think well of him...
...Forecasters are predicting a moderate early pace for the Carter administration...
...The check, here as hitherto, is that if the price of drinks at the Pentagon's general officers' club is raised to, say, half of the price of equivalent downtown bistros, the Russians will be at the Rhine by Wednesday: if any upstart Congressman so much as asks questions about the way miracle weapons cost twice their estimates and don't work, the Red Army will air-drop into Omaha Friday morning, early...
...at last admit that, yes, the harpies on the shore did have something there, too bad we couldn't hear them...
...If this took place, it really wouldn't matter if procurement officers continued to move through the revolving door which has played its significant part in accelerating the arms race: they'd have nothing really to gain by the switch from private to public and back...
...inexplicably, Jimmy Baby had forgotten to mention the time-lag on the husthags: I will never lie to you, but ! may overlook a few details when I'm telling the truth...
...It is only the profits that go to the private sector...
...Had the word come to an end in 1350 or, even better in some ways, in 1618, the contending theologians could have settled their disputes with complete authority, complete acquiescence, complete agreement...
...Besides, there is the seductive thought that nothing might have helped more in rehabilitating the CIA in those areas of the world where it has been a fomenter of coups and practitioner of unsavory arts than the presence of a pacifist as its head...
...If the emergency is so desperate that general officers gave up their free gardeners, barmen, valets and chauffeurs, we could all believe they mean what they say and are not just looking for butlers and parlormaids in addition...
...If there are citizens who honestly think, on the record, that the CIA has done more, much more, to "erode the cause of freedom" in America than the Soviets have dreamt possible, such observers simply don't understand the true nature of American freedom: our freedom lies, not in citizens' freedom from having the CIA climbing in their windows and rifling their letter-boxes, but rather in their freedom to have CIA reassurances that those things don+t really matter compared to the Agency's ability to cope with the dread Soviet menace, as it did so brilliantly at the Bay of Pigs, in Indochina and elsewhere...
...This is neither all that difficult nor all that far-fetched...
...Retiring officials appeared before congressional committees, others made addresses to citizens' groups...
...We can believe in the imminent Soviet arms menace if the people who are warning us about it first insure that they themselves or their friends and comrades in the arms business are not set up to make tons of money---or rank, or perks & pdvs---out of the fright they wish to create in us...
...The same thing is true of the arms merchants, the general and flag officers so concerned about Soviet intentions, and, of course, their flacks in press and politics...
...Since weapons systems are by definition obsolete as soon as completed, it will take only a few years of this practice to have the entire arms industry in government ownership as well as government financing...
...TO ARMS...
...In this context, Carter must not be timid about full employment, just as he must understand that it is not enough to stimulate business and presume that the benefits will trickle down to the poorest...
...The ultimate theologian turned out to be Cardinal Richelieu, who believed devoutly in mobile artillery and shifting alliances...
...Similarly, if the Russians do land in Omaha Friday, early or late, we will all know, unequivocally, that the people sending up those warning signals were right all along, the rest of us wrong...
...So phrased, the question answers itself...
...Everybody wins--except the country, of course, but what the hell, somebody has to pick up the check...
...in the rare cases in which losses occur, there are immediate steps taken by the Pentagon, with or without the knowledge of Congress, to reimburse those losses...
...Granted the very real problems connected with the Sorensen nomination, yet if intelligence and a sense of what is needed to restore integrity to the Agency are prerequisites for the post, Sorenson possessed both in ample measure...
...As I have noted before, the one really unthinkable thought that even Herman Kahn cannot bring himself to think is that less money should be spent upon arms and upon Herman Kahn's thoughts about arms...
...The trouble with all the arguments over arms--and the brilliant production we have just witnessed is a beginning as well as a climax~is that they are theological in the medieval sense...
...It could be done in easy stages, even: the next time the Pentagon is letting contracts for the next miracle weapons system, it simply announces that this time the capital expenditures will remain the property of the government...
...In effect large branches of the arms industry have been nationailzed for years in the sense that the bulk of their operating capital comes from the nation's treasury...
...WASHINGTON REPORT TO ARMS...
...It is not quite true, but it is close enough to say, loosely, that no establishment theologian ever backed a proposition that would cost the establishment money...
...On the other hand, if this nation goes into bankruptcy bankrolling its arms binge, presumably even the arms merchants will...
...Yet there does remain the possibility that the Soviet Union is out to gain an overwhelming advantage in arms over the United States and, having gained it, to employ it to destroy this country--and most of its own --in order that the surviving remnant of the world should be Soviet-dominated...
...The second step would be to peg salaries in the arms industries at their military equivalent, with the top operating executive of a military aircraft corporation being paid like a four-star general and so on down the line...
...The arguments are about things that cannot be empirically proved one way or another without utter and absolute disaster...
...The plans for the Carter Inaugural provided the most widespread popular entertainment and cultural manifestations within memory--and provided most of them free or at nominal cost, in sharp contrast to the traditional top ticket at $1,000 a head and not very far down from that for the cheapies...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 3
