APPOINTMENTS CALENDAR

...Turner will bring a lot more to the job than administrative competence, more even than the administrative brilliance with which he is freely credited by almost everyone who has seen him at work...

...It's easy to understand why such an appointment should shock the hawks...

...Admiral Turner was inventing it...

...If Turner brings that same kind of openness to reevaluation to the CIA, it could be the most important thing to happen to the Agency since its inception and an event of great value to the country...

...No, the mistake was in the appointment itself...

...WASHINGTON REPORT I APPOINTMENTS CALENDAR President Carter made a serious mistake in his original appointment of Theodore Sorensen to head the CIA in an era when that agency simply has to be stopped from burglarizing, eavesdropping upon and, from time to time as occasion may suggest, killing American citizens, an era, too, when the agency's historic policy of conducting: international relations through assassination and the deliberate wrecking of the economy of foreign nations must be reexamined...

...We will bear any burden: Richard Helms, Howard Hunt, J. Edgar Hoover as public "servants" compose a formidable burden...

...That's heresy...

...For he was speaking on the premises of an in4 March 1977:134...

...Actually, of the old guard, the best available man for that spot would have been James Schlesinger, who, briefly in the job, started the investigation of illegal activities at home and abroad that led to Dan Schorr's forced retirement but not yet, so far as we know, to any real reform...

...And, though Ruskin College and its sister institutions were begunat a time when the modern educational system, as part of the 'Welfare State,' had hardly emerged, it would be wrong to suppose that they became superfluous once the postwar Welfare State had been established...

...That is to say, it was begun as a place where those who had not had the chance to benefit from higher education at the normal time of their lives (i.e., straight from school) could rescue themselves in later life, by attending courses as full-time students, with maintenance grants, which would enable them either to go on to University or to find other niches in society suited to their innate abilities--abilities which had not been truly exercised or utilized earlier...

...As it happens, I've seen him at work myself, found myself working with him, or for him, and emerged from the experience in frank admiration of the openness of the mind to unusual suggestions, the willingness to entertain unorthodox assumptions and the energy and style brought to bear upon activities generated from some assumptions...

...The fear is that the slightest ray of common sense on the subject, such as that provided by Warnke's question, may cause the whole night-blooming world of militaryindustrial largesse to wither and die, at least to cut back on the profits and perquisites on which hawks in the Senate and elsewhere have become rich men and mean to become richer still...

...Orthodoxy is that we are forced to go into arms in a big way because the Russians have gone into arms in a big way...

...So it was ironic that Mr...

...An arms control man who thinks arms control is possible7 Horrors...

...The whole process has been rather like having Hinky-Dink Henna and Bath House John Coughlin take over the cause of government reform in Chicago and begin by appointing a crowd of the old hacks and heelers as a committee for reform, with salaries, staff, limos and expenses...

...its students are field-grade officers in mid-career, who have been carefully selected by the system as likely candidates for the higher reaches of command in the future: they're an elite, intelligent, dedicated, narrow, as is the way with most elites...

...But in content: in 1972, when Turner started what has become a high growth industry in all the military services, the war in Indochina was still raging away in what then seemed its eternal course, military people at large, but especially those with Vietnam service, were absolutely convinced that theymand their countrymhad been betrayed by the American press, reporters and news analysts, on the other hand, were no less convinced that the war was insane, criminal even, at best an effort to destroy Indochina in order to save it, at worst a dark scheme to extend or protect the holdings of ITT, Chase Manhattan and the oil cartel by the endless slaughter of American youths and the general population of the region...

...But they were a tiny minority...

...I first heard of, and from, Stansfield Turner, five years ago...

...There were, to be sure, a few journalists that journalists like me regard as unpaid--as far as is known--flacks for the arms industry, military affairs columnists holding reserve commissions, people who wear neckties with the American flag tastefully incorporated in the design, that sort of thing...

...The talents of the speech writer are not those principally needed to run the CIA even in times when we were all more innocent about that gang than we are now...

...Neither did anyone else...

...I had no clear idea of what such a thing might be...

...If the hawks were a little smarter than they are, they would profit from the switch they forced from Sorensen to Turner and be glad with what they've got in Wamke rather than risk someone even more dedicated to arms control...

...Those are burdens and distances we don't really need the new head of the CIA to shoulder and to shuffle yet again...

...Warnke's gravest sin apparently was his expressed opinion in the past that possibly the Russians had gone into arms in a big way because they were afraid of the way we were going into arms, namely big...

...I regarded that as an extraordinary accomplishment in 1972, but the genius of it lay in Stansfield Turner's ability to get beyond his profession's conventional view of the press as the enemy and bring in that enemy to allow his students to learn what it was and how it worked...

...Sorensen's best known effort was, of course, the famed inaugural address of Kennedy, which, if you think about it, can be read as an open season hunting license for the CIA, as also for the FBI in its own assorted assaults on the Constitution and the citizenry...

...The heart of that matter seems to be the violent objection of the hawks on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee --and in the Senate at large--to having an arms control negotiator who believes in the possibility of arms control...

...In other words, Ruskin College is a monument to the failure of the mainstream' educational system to cope with the human problems of real people...

...He made his speech, symbolically but ironically, at Ruskin College, Oxford...

...The point of the orthodox position is not to teach history but to justify ever-increasing arms budgets...

...Strictly speaking, I suppose, in an ideally planned world where 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his need' was the operative principle of the normal educational system, from infant school to university or college, places like Ruskin College would not be necessary...

...A service war college is not a service academy...

...The journalists were no less selected--by Stansfield Turner...

...On the contrary, in the past thirty years they have expanded greatly...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM BRITAIN PLANNING AND EDUCATION Some weeks ago, prime minister James Callaghan began what he hoped would be a great national debate about education...

...The other big appointments struggle has been over Paul Warnke as chief arms control negotiator...

...Now Ruskin College is one of six institutions in Britain originally designed to cater for the casualties of the British educational system...

...By and large, the journalists present were the real thing and deeply opposed to the war on the obvious intellectual, moral and historical grounds, or on the ground of having been on the ground, or both...

...Callaghan should make his speech, about planning education in such a way as to ensure that the correct supply of students would go where they are most needed, at Ruskin College of all places...

...In short, the first Military-Media Conference ~had aU the elements for a riot, a slaughter, a few muggings, a few bodies found floating in Narrangansett Bay...

...Commonweal: 133 That didn't happen...

...we will travel any distance: to Vietnam and Cambodia, to the Bay of Pigs, to Santiago, Chile, where it's raining and Dr...

...As things have worked out, and by pure inadvertence on the part of the Senate's hawk aviary, Carter will end up with an incalculably more competent man out at Langley, his Annapolis classmate but not really old school chum, Admiral Stansfield Turner...

...Again, it is a theological question only partially subject to journalistic or historical elucidation...

...Until now our arms control negotiations have resulted uniformly in one thing: more arms...

...What did happen was that two hostile segments of the population were thrown together, kicked, scratched and bit each other for a while but did come to realize each that the other was going to be around for a while, each that the other did contribute something to the Republic, each that the other employed methods which, while different, were not necessarily treasonous on that account...

...In form, nothing especially remarkable...

...The form was simple, long familiar to those who attend seminars, conferences and conventions: two or three days beginning with plenary sessions and formal addresses, going on to small groups of students talking with the visiting "experts," usually one or two of us to twelve to twenty of them, ending formally with a dinner featuring remarks in a lighter tone, and informally in prolonged sessions in the bars of Newport and Jamestown, the Flag Cabins of the base and the president's house...

...Sorensen's pinnacle of public service was as speech writer to John F. Kennedy, a role for which he displayed considerable talent, emerging as a kind of William Satire with class...

...At this writing, Wamke's ultimate approval seems a safe bet if not an absolute sure thing...

...AUende is ingeniously committing suicide by dive bomber...

...He was president of the Naval War College at Newport and wanted me t~ come up to take part in something called a Military-Media Conference...

...The mistake was not, as is generally thought around here, in nominating Sorensen without clearing it with the Senate's hawk establishment, nor, as is universally accepted, in backing off too quickly, failing to go all out for Sorensen...

...But the fact that they do exist, and cater to a need, simply goes to show how inadequate any national educational planning always is to the needs of real people...