Washington-U.S.A..
COFFIN, TRISTRAM
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Tristram Coffin GOP WHOOPS IT UP The Grand Old Party is whooping it up in Washington with all the lugubrious gaiety of a wake at an old folks' home. Senate...
...asked Meriwether, "You have never repudiated the support of the Ku Klux Klan or any of their supporters...
...Dodd has no enthusiasm for any agreement with the Russians and is one of the 21 Senators who voted against the Antarctic treaty last August...
...But lovers are fickle...
...yes, sir...
...He was one of them...
...was getting in the kind of licks that will cost the Democratic party some votes...
...Barry is, and he's an easy guy to fall for...
...He led what he called "a protest of deep conviction" against the astonishing nomination of Charles Meriwether, an Alabama politician, as a director of the Export-Import Bank...
...The Secretary has two major strikes against him...
...The FBI supposedly interviewed some 400 persons about Meriwether's character...
...They were largely isolationist, economically illiterate, culturally backward and vaguely bigoted...
...Some Washington punsters are plastering their car bumpers with stickers reading, "Goldwater for President in 1864...
...But the boy who really wowed the girls was Barry Goldwater, the new Rudolph Valentino of the country club matrons...
...One lady fiercely told a reporter for the Washington Post that she hoped President Kennedy would "goof" on the big problems, so the GOP could come back...
...Either the FBI is not as thorough as advertised or the White House personnel boys did not read the whole report...
...What will those crazy Americans think of next...
...The fiercest fight centers on foreign policy, with the powerful and not always elastic Foreign Service complaining that Secretary of State Dean Rusk is being pushed out of the pivotal position...
...The "Republican cloth coat" of their heroine, Pat Nixon, was not as much in evidence as the fur stole...
...He is one nice, happy guy...
...Another New England Democrat and Catholic, House Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts has (not unexpectedly) thrown a monkey wrench into Kennedy's number one priority program on Capitol Hill, aid to education...
...Representative Frances P. Bolton, 70 some, from a wealthy Cleveland suburb, insists that the young people's Peace Corps is "a terrifying thing...
...It may be mere coincidence, but Dodd's speech followed by one day President Kennedy's White House luncheon meeting with Congressional leaders on his hopes and plans for a nuclear test ban agreement...
...Last year, when Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidential nomination, some of his toughest opposition came from old-line Catholic politicians...
...The GOP ladies showed no interest in the Republican liberals in Congress, but this is nothing new...
...The most damaging information about Meriwether was that in 1959 he was seen at the State Capitol with his arm around Bob Shelton, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and that Shelton often went in and out of Meriwether's office...
...They worked harder for him than they ever did for Ike, and so bitter was the defeat they have not yet taken off the NixonLodge bumper stickers...
...Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the gracious author of the "Declaration of Conscience," did not address the conference, but Representative Katherine St...
...DOWNTOWN, there is the always uneasy struggle for power at the beginning of a new Administration...
...But the new volunteer firemen of the Republican party are middle-class people on the make: junior executives, ambitious lawyers, wives who figure that if they play it right they might get a call from the Junior League...
...Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, 65, who has been around so long he looks like a caricature of himself, waggishly speaks of "tears, fears and New Frontiers" and implores the Kennedy Administration to "stop talking like Doomcrats...
...The Catholic split on the President's education plan is further revealed by the support it is receiving from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, a devout Catholic...
...He thinks college fraternities are the rock of American civilization (a Sigma Chi himself), he is middleclass in his thinking and outlook, has a style and gives out that oldtime religion of McKinley...
...His penetrating analysis of public opinion was delivered a few days after the Gallup Poll reported the President's popularity up to 72 per cent...
...Second, it is quite plain that the President is the boss of foreign policy...
...they are usually ignored...
...George, who represents Ham Fish's old district in Tuxedo Park, New York, and plays the extreme right, did...
...He does this in a voice which sounds as though he has been gargling bear grease and molasses...
...is searching for Communists in the nuclear test ban movement like a beagle sniffing the underbrush for rabbits...
...He does not have, for one thing, the curiously dark, almost sinister quality Nixon had...
...McCormack is an old-line, hard-shell Catholic whose service to his church has won him a number of high ecclesiastical awards...
...You would repudiate the support of a Communist...
...Captivated by the rich, threecolor ads in McCall's, their goals in life are wall-to-wall carpeting, a $50,000 House Beautiful home, a Lord & Taylor-type wardrobe, a Christmas vacation in Nassau and membership in a good country club...
...All these words and more were addressed to the predominantly middleaged, well-coiffured and expensively dressed delegates at the recent Republican Women's Conference...
...House Minority Leader Charlie Halleck of Indiana, 61, roars with grim satisfaction that President Kennedy will be booted out in 1964 because he will "disappoint millions...
...For example, the disarmament unit, which may become a separate office, is now under the State Department tent, but McCloy reports directly to the President...
...One of those who voted to confirm Meriwether, Senator Thomas Dodd (D.-Conn...
...A number of his associates —UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Under Secretary Chester Bowles, disarmament director John McCloy, Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman and foreign aid director Henry Labouisse—are better known in world capitals, and they are by temperament independent-minded...
...The conference, held in the big convention hall of the Sheraton Park Hotel, provides sociologists or political scientists with a fascinating look at what has happened to the GOP...
...He did not specifically charge the Communists with having taken over SANE, but he planted suspicions all over the lot...
...One of them angrily referred to Kennedy in private as "a Harvard Catholic...
...Dick is no longer around...
...This dispute should destroy once and for all the myth that the Catholic Church in America is a monolithic structure which autocratically issues orders and demands absolute obedience to its decrees...
...And, to make life more horrendous for the Secretary of State, Republican Congressman H. R. Gross of Waterloo, Iowa, proposed during the debate on the State Department appropriation that expenses be cut by serving lemonade at overseas embassy parties on the Fourth of July...
...They loved Richard Nixon...
...First, he does not have great world prestige...
...I feel that I would...
...The day of the Meriwether vote Dodd suggested that the Reds had infiltrated the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE...
...It has never been a secret that he disapproves of the more relaxed attitude of younger and more sophisticated fellow churchmen, like John F. Kennedy...
...For the first half of the 20th century, the hard core of the Republican party—those who remained faithful through the golden days of F.D.R.— was made up of large farmers, people in small towns and little merchants...
...This was the gospel the ladies wanted to hear, whether it was correct or not, and they responded with an almost religious fervor...
...She flatly denied there was any recession, and no doubt there is none in Tuxedo Park, While the ladies of modern Babbitry were having their fun at the hotel, Senator Jacob Javits (R.-N.Y...
...Slim, beautifully dressed, handsome, glib, but not too profound, the Arizona Senator declared that the people "are already tired of a party whose only answers to our problems are the hackneyed failures of the New Deal and Fair Deal...
...The witness replied, "No, nor have I of the colored people, sir...
...He wants a steady flow of information and even conflicting views, but he does not insist that it all be filtered through the Secretary of State...
...Meriwether was one of those political pay-offs every President must make...
...At the Senate Banking Committee hearing, Senator William Proxmire (D.-Wis...
...Alabama Governor John Patterson, who came out early for Kennedy, wanted a good job for Charlie, and, since Meriwether was State Finance Director, someone in the President's entourage looked over the fiscal field and saw a spot open in the ExportImport Bank...
...They liked the status quo and wanted no changes...
...Eisenhower, by comparison, preferred to listen only to Secretary Dulles, who filtered out or toned down almost all the bad news...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 12
