Washington in Perspective

...It is Vietnam that is tearing Washington apart...

...In this modest, perceptive and immensely readable book he views the transient in our national capital in the perspective of the permanent Washington...

...And pervading all is the miasma of anxiety, arising from tensions at home and from the Vietnam war...

...This gives the Washington literature a flickering and transitory quality...

...Perhaps the line should have been drawn between the Bold and the Prudent Easterners...

...Here his comments are illuminating, penetrating and well informed...

...Alsop surveys this melancholy new Washington against the backdrop of the old...

...The Center has rarely been a more unhappy place—certainly not since the last war ended, probably not since the Hoover days, perhaps never...

...Here Alsop sees a great quiet change by which those whom he calls the Bold Easterners—the Ivy Leaguers of the Dulles era who brought to their jobs a spirit of risk-taking and derring-do—have given way to those whom he calls the Prudent Professionals...

...in the Smithsonian Institution's red sandstone Norman castle...

...In the meantime, we have Stewart Alsop to thank for a most literate, instructive and entertaining commentary...

...this erosion of confidence "is what chiefly distinguishes the Washington of today from the Washington of twenty years, or ten years ago, or even five years ago...

...and I wish he had explored the implications further...

...Above all, it is Vietnam that has ended the basic self-confidence of the Washington political community...

...He says very little, for example, about economic issues or civil rights or the urban crisis or taxation (though he has written effectively on all these matters in the Saturday Evening Post) and practically nothing about the regulatory agencies...

...Castro's Air Force consisted not of 18 but about 30 planes, and the first air strike destroyed not 11 but 5 of them...

...The White House itself, when Alsop used to go there for young people's parties in the time of F.D.R., "was like some very old, very pleasant, slightly down-at-heel country mansion of a very rich family...

...What President Johnson belatedly recognized on March 31 is only what President Kennedy said seven years ago at the University of Washington: "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only 6 percent of the world's population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 per cent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem...

...When this happens, the Center, if it does not become a happier place, will certainly be a more sensible one...

...Summer Publication Dates July 8 August 5 August 26 Regular biweekly publication will resume with the issue of September 9...

...and, while he implies a certain regret over the passing of the old romantic days, he reluctantly admits of the changes that "no doubt this is as it should be...

...Alsop has written about Washington for nearly a quarter of a century...

...it is a kind of computerized maze...

...If this is so, why spend seven pages on the second strike...

...Until rather recently, he points out, Washington was the true center of power "only very rarely and intermittently"—during wars and under occasional Presidents of vigor, like T. R. But with the depression and the New Deal, Washington became, "this time for good," the Center...

...Too many reporters see only the present and suppose that national politics began when they had their first drink at the Press Club bar...

...and I wholly agree with his condemnation of the new breed of professional administrators...

...Alsop has a longer perspective...

...The chapter on Lyndon Johnson is the best short sketch of the President I have ever read—a portrait, at once sympathic and astringent, of "this strange, proud, cruel, sentimental, insecure, naive, and bitterly driven man...

...in the old houses of Georgetown...

...Moreover, the notion that a second air strike would have taken care of the rest of Castro's Air Force rests on the premise that he would have left these planes very long, wingtip to wingtip, on an airfield near Havana—a most improbable assumption after the first strike had alerted him that something was in the works...

...But the concentration of power has replaced the idiosyncratic with the bureaucratic style—impersonal and mediocre, like the extension of the east front of the Capitol "in lifeless dull gray marble...

...A chapter on "The McNamara Revolution" in Defense provides a lucid picture of how the civilians have begun the re-conquest of the Pentagon...

...But Alsop's central point is correct and important...

...Its sense of history gives this book its special distinction...

...The understanding that "there cannot be an American solution to every world problem" may be the end of glory, but it is the beginning of wisdom...

...Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, the City University of New York Books about our national capital tend to be topical, written about particular people or particular episodes...

...Yet, while Presidents come and go, while events flare up and fade away, Washington itself endures...

...To be fair to Alsop, he argues this thesis rather half-heartedly and concedes that, even if the second strike had eliminated Castro's Air Force, "it seems all but certain that the corporal's guard of anti-Castro refugees put ashore at the Bay of Pigs would have been destroyed in the end by Castro's hordes of infantry...

...Now it is "not like a rich family's old mansion any more, but like the new house of a very rich man, filled with very expensive old furniture...

...in the later Old State Department Building, with its open fireplaces and its endearing flounces and furbelows...

...Then there is the New State Department Building?hideous without being endearing . .. the place is not drawn to human scale...

...I must enter a dissent, however, from Alsop's attempt to reargue the old thesis that a second air strike would have made any great difference at the Bay of Pigs...

...The most original chapter is on the cia...

...The geographical tidiness of this categorization is somewhat marred by the fact that Ray Cline, who replaced Robert Amory as Deputy Director of Intelligence and whom Alsop curiously describes as a "Midwestern PhD," is in fact just as much a Harvard man as Amory (Class of 1939), and that Richard Helms, the leader of the Prudent Professionals, was after all Williams, '35...

...but I am not sure that one of his remedies?giving the Foreign Service control over the Foreign Service—would not be like sending Typhoid Mary to stop a typhoid epidemic...

...Alsop's review of the American panoply of world power is tinged with a certain nostalgia...

...Alsop properly regards the State Department as filled with committeemania and bureaucratic sludge...

...The old conviction of the great days that Washington "could do, and would do, whatever really needed to be done," anywhere on the planet, has gone...

...Alsop is surely right when he suggests that American policy has reached a great turning...

...What engages him most fully is the center of the Center?that is, the power over war and peace as concentrated in the Presidency, the State and War Departments and the cia...

...As the great-nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, he must have had Washington in his blood anyway...

...and I very much like Al-sop's architectural and atmospheric evocations of this past?in the corridors of the pre-Civil War Treasury Building, with the gilded pilasters topped by Federal eagles...

...and he is acutely sensitive to the changes which the national capital has undergone since Abigail Adams first hung her washing in the East Room of the White House...

...This is the Washington of expanding bureaucracy, spreading "inexorably, like a blob from outer space in one of the television horror series...

...Our short, happy life as a superpower has come, he indicates, to the sorry end of the war in Vietnam...

...As this essential truth begins to permeate the Center, we may hope for a renunciation of messianic illusions and a new definition of the American role in a world of diversity...

...All his chapters have shrewd things in them, but some?such as those on Congress, the Supreme Court, the domestic side of the Executive branch and even the press—seem obligatory and are too sketchy...

...There are still corners in Washington where the past is suddenly present...

...As a result, uneasiness, bitterness and self-doubt "hang over the city like a noxious fog...

...In the first place, his facts are wrong...

...It is, as Stewart Alsop says, "this country's true center of political power," and it has its own abiding structure and characteristics...