Mood in Washington: Unconditional Surrender
King, Larry
Washington is a dismal place just now. The muddy Potomac, dreary and snuff-colored, stirs slowly and painfully like and old man waking to the agony of his years. Somehow, even the Capitol...
...And on that of Rusk, General Westmoreland, and others of McNamara's band...
...If a given issue could not be satisfactorily compromised or its fate preordained in advance, then the roll would not be called up yonder if LBJ had his way...
...More, he often lashed timid bureaucrats for not being interested enough in the programs they administer, to think big, plan boldly, or request adequate funds...
...This we have on the President's own authority...
...No brave but foolish charges for him into the valley of death...
...If LBJ is not firmly wed to Ole Dame Halfloaf, then he is at least still living with her in a commonlaw state...
...The American Dream must wait...
...It was as if they said: "I'm weary of the road and the traffic and all these dizzy speeds...
...His "victories" as Senate Majority Leader were carefully forged in Capitol corridors, cloak rooms, and over pleasing blends of grog...
...The betting in Washington right now is that it won't happen...
...A small covey of doves will cry into the wind that we should quit Vietnam, or never have gone in...
...He sensed in the first days of his rule that he could use the martyred John F. Kennedy's memory to pass civil rights legislation and other progressive bills long gathering dust...
...All Great Society programs must run the Appropriations Committee gauntlet...
...On the floor, Udall's effort to bind the bleeding wounds by offering a leadership-backed resolution to seat Powell in the House was, we now know, ripped asunder by the familiarly dismal union of Republicans and Dixiecrats—joined by so-called moderates with skittish eyes on "the white backlash...
...Senator Dirksen is best known these days as a "recording star" and House GOP Leader Gerry Ford is at once part Lions Clubber, part Chairman of the Board, and part snows of yesteryear...
...LBJ will not, of course, deprive us of our occasional verbal table scrap: we remain ready to negotiate, we seek peace, we hold out the olive branch...
...The daily press commends President Johnson for "leveling" with us, at long last, on our determination to stick it out from Saigon to the muddier Delta bogs, and for warning us of the sacrifices required—the blood, toil, tears, sweat, and taxes—as if this tardy candor, admitting only that which everybody knew in the first place, somehow magically justifies the expansion of an old and horrid mistake...
...Some built-in radar (often suspicously resembling Lou Harris's polls) tells him when to change...
...Reactionaries are branding the program a failure, the poor themselves are carping because their great expectations have not been realized, and the President not only sounds like a defensive, paper-shuffling bureaucrat but invites more trouble in speaking of the time required "to get money for these various new programs into the mainline...
...We have it on the authority of Bob Hope, Joey Heatherton, and every oboe player, or Miss Something-or-Other returned from entertaining Over There...
...In the morning fog the city's massive monuments and slabs loom as bleached sepulchers: melancholy repositories for old bones and old deeds and old dreams...
...John E. Fogarty (D-R.I...
...Nor is the poverty fight hopeful...
...Ill will stirred up by the Powell incident, coupled with President Johnson's near-neglect of civil rights in his State of the Union message, is sufficient reason to predict more "trouble in the streets" come the long, hot summer— or possibly even before the winter's thaw...
...Nor could liberals look to their Congressional honchos for inspiration...
...They should have...
...One knows there will be no spring this year: neither flowering of the bush nor of the spirit...
...The $74 billion dollar war budget, third largest in U.S...
...A larger band of hawks will demand what they call Total Victory...
...The notion persists here that for all his flamboyancy and indiscriminate goddamning LBJ isn't the natural hell-giver that HST was...
...as a major setback...
...The muddy Potomac, dreary and snuff-colored, stirs slowly and painfully like and old man waking to the agony of his years...
...Ah, what can one say of Vietnam that has not been said before...
...Mankind is not one bare bone better off with Mississippi's Rep...
...five, spends more time in tiresome rhetoric about "fighting Communism" than in looking to the legislative future...
...The majority followed Rep...
...It is all dismally predictable down to the repeated sacrificing of butter in the name of guns...
...When Mansfield again applied the brakes this year, everybody who is anybody in the federal scheme rushed to board the stalled vehicle...
...Among new House members the concept of "warring on poverty" quite possibly is throwing stones at bums...
...Senate Majority Leader Mansfield stands in the road waving his red lantern, while his top chieftain, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana...
...Though the President's more enthusiastic chroniclers tell us that LBJ is "not retreating," they offer little evidence...
...Unless one talks sense...
...That, after two years of Congressional "Donothingism," Lyndon Johnson will tell the country to "give 'em hell...
...Fogarty was also the undisputed (if unofficial) leader of twenty-odd liber als (some of whom needed periodic injections to keep the faith) who almost invariably followed his lead on close votes...
...How easy for detractors to interpret this to their liking...
...Fogarty was a totally committed liberal...
...Conservatives control the House Appropriations Committee in the Ninetieth Congress...
...A muddled middle group will privately mutter over their nocturnal cocktails in the Congressional Hotel of how they are meanly trapped and will wish aloud to God that Vietnam would dry up and blow away...
...The Ninetieth Congress, from the liberal view, is like the little boy from a dimly remembered song of childhood: made of "snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails...
...More times than most outsiders realized, Fogarty made the positive difference...
...come let us reason together...
...Hale Boggs, Democratic Whip, is conscious of the Yahoos and Main Street bourbons within his Louisiana constituency...
...And now the liberals have meekly surrendered their only effective weapon for jarring progressive bills out of this ancient legislative graveyard...
...And yet the war will go on and on and on...
...Liberals similarly engaged in various forms of fratricide in the Adam Clayton Powell controversy...
...From here, it looks about as easy as Hell Week for the fraternity pledge...
...Speaker McCormack, at age seventy...
...His further admissions of retreat— only an oblique reference to a ''fair housing" law without ever com mitting himself to new legislation in that field, an otherwise total absence of the mention of civil rights, the implied acceptance of Senator Mansfield's exhortations to re-examine that which has so recently gone before, the stress placed on a larger role for foot-dragging state and local government units —only encouraged the wearying old coalition of reactionary Republicans and befogged Dixiecrats to rise again, howling...
...He knew the country was not yet ready for Goldwater and The Bomb in 1964, shrewdly exploiting the blunders his GOP opponent so generously sprinkled as gifts along the campaign trail...
...More and more he clearly emerges as the "Consensus President," ready to compromise or logroll until the majority agrees—and never you mind what the majority agrees on...
...Though the British once sacked Washington and the Army of Northern Virginia menaced its gates, seldom has the Capital seemed more vulnerable than now...
...As chairman of an Appropriations Committee sub-unit (on Health, Education, and Welfare) he managed a high percentage of Administration bills...
...His generals of the Cabinet, and their vast army of civil servants, have marched back down the hill to entrench in defensive positions...
...Vietnam...
...We have just begun to fight...
...This was the mood of the country—the country said as much in the November elections— and it quickly became the prevailing mood in Washington...
...For all his heralded walking on legislative waters, his fantastic energies, colorful wheeler-dealing and mad boohawing, Johnson has never been one to swim against strong political tides...
...He may have had trouble even defining the word...
...I must follow them, for I am their leader...
...Even the greenest freshman in the back row knew that Lyndon Johnson offers neither deal nor gift when operating from a stance of power...
...There is yet another reason that many basic Great Society programs may go nowhere fast...
...Perhaps the damage was done even before the speech...
...How far he has turned away from the President who only short months ago promised that "We shall overcome...
...Civil Rights: "Martin Luther King went out to Chicago and stirred up a hornet's nest just when I needed Ev Dirksen's help...
...A year ago when Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield suggested a moratorium on the Great Society, it was dutifully noted by correspondents and then largely forgotten...
...One doesn't require a high grasp of exotic mathematics to deduce that even if one allows for a couple of GOP defections the economy bloc will be in charge...
...Thus Congressional liberals arrived in Washington in a state of acute apathy— or confusion, or both...
...One must conclude that civil rights, like virtually everything else, is sitting in Senator Mansfield's stalled bus to catch its breath...
...Their hang-dog attitude was reflected in their appalling acceptance of retreat from the 21-day rule in the House on the grounds that "improved" make-up of the Rules Committee renders the safeguard unnecessary...
...resembles a pudgy Barry Goldwater in his hawkish cries about Vietnam...
...To be sure, Vietnam will spark many verbal fireworks in the Ninetieth Congress...
...Despite the President's love of secrecy and his reputation for harsh dealing with tale-bearers, rumors persisted of a premature surrender...
...This may be the most short-sighted view since Sherman Adams greeted news of Sputnik I with the comment that "We aren't interested in engaging Russia in an outer-space basketball game...
...The President cued the new Congress to his mood when he offered it "a partnership" in his initial address of the session...
...The war on poverty is going nowhere fast...
...Washington is a dismal place just now...
...There were signs that the American Dream must wait yet a little longer even before Lyndon B. Johnson made it official in his State of the Union message...
...In terms of pure numbers, Democrats retain a 30-21 margin (down from 34-16) but no less than seven nominal Democrats can be expected to line up for wholesale cuts in domestic spending...
...This combination, conceived anew in victory, will eat the Administration's lunch again and again as it grows old and fat...
...We have it from every junketing Senator, and from the crew-cut young Captains or Sergeants who pause in burning villages and in dumping Red rice into dirty rivers long enough to step before the cameras and microphones bringing the war into our homes, in living color, through the courtesy of the NBC peacock and manufacturers of odorless body sprays...
...November's reversals: "Well, sometimes the country swings Left and sometimes it swings Right and in the end maybe that gives us the balance we need...
...House Majority Leader Carl Albert may be forgiven a certain caution following his September heart attack...
...Rep...
...Not many observers have seen the opening-day death of Rep...
...Let me sit in the bus and rest...
...Some few say the Ninetieth Congress could be a re-play of the Eightieth Congress of 20 years ago...
...President Johnson changes his poIitical colors as artfully as the head shop steward at Chameleons' Local No...
...123...
...With the new, progressive Eighty-ninth Congress eager to accept its overwhelming mandate, he encouraged its instincts...
...We are there...
...The Republicans...
...One is reminded of the late Huey Long's favorite cynicism: "There go the people...
...Vietnam: "Why do they want me to put my pistol on the table and just sit here while the enemy is killing my boys...
...it is there most major battles must be fought...
...This misses the obvious point that LBJ would be giving hell to a Congress at least nominally of his own political persuasion, where Harry S. Truman was able to flay an obvious and partisan enemy of record...
...One almost hears the sizzle and pop of fried pie oratory now: "Wah, they askin' us to vote 'em all these new millions and billions when the President already sed they near-about chokin' on dollar bills now...
...Morris Udall of Arizona in stripping Powell of his Education and Labor Committee chairmanship, even though Speaker McCormack personally— if ineffectually— urged the Democratic caucus against this course...
...William Colmer in the Rules Committee chair than it was with Virginia's dour old hanging judge, Howard Smith, mesmerized there...
...These few, their drinking and praying done, will then follow the President and the other pied-piping hawks...
...Now, however, he is just as readily encouraging the Ninetieth Congress in its less noble reflexes...
...This may have been a fatal mistake...
...Somehow, even the Capitol dome conveys an impression of timidity in pointing toward an anemic, sluggish sky...
...We are staying...
...That Lyndon Johnson chooses to sit in the bus and rest with everyone else should surprise few literate Americans and no Potomac bird watchers at all...
...history, is evidence enough of future Presidential directions in Vietnam...
...Only if some abrupt, wild-growing flowering of the spirit occurs out there in the great wheated midlands of America, and in other exotic precincts, will Lyndon B. Johnson likely be motivated to put down the Congressional counterrevolutionaries...
...Among the various antipoverty programs, only "Operation Head Start" has even been mentioned for possible expansion...
...HST never worried about consensus, for one thing...
...Johnson is not a daring riverboat gambler: he might bet his bundle if he is holding four aces and has read his opponent's hole card...
...President Johnson— that merry, mercurial Field Marshal of yesteryear's battles—privately snarls at the political war gods and publicly waves the white flag to a ragtag Congress that apparently defeated him before it fired a shot...
...Liberals, already reduced in numbers, lost more of their remaining vitality when they heard of Sheriff Johnson's private lamentations from The Ranch...
...Nor did Truman fear defeat as the squire of Pedernales Stream fears it, even in small things...
Vol. 14 • March 1967 • No. 2
