Correspondents' Correspondence
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT & ARNOLD & ABRAMS, ELIAHU SALPETER
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Stone Age Economics New York last November 7 were...
...There are signs that they are grouping to fight for their markets...
...More compelling was the argument that Mrs...
...Last spring he expressed his frank opinions to me in a long, late-night session at his home in Mo Kay district, some 50 miles south of Saigon, where he had been serving for several years as district chief...
...We need American technical help, but not your advice on how this war should be waged...
...For a fact, the politics of this budgetary operation are exceeding-ly clever...
...He also is the most stubborn and narrow-minded military commander I've ever met...
...The Vietnamese colonel was a good leader of men as well as a brave soldier...
...While most Israelis tended to agree that each stop en route represented a diplomatic coup, the journey had enough unpleasant aspects to lead some, including a few newspapers and Knesset members, to ask whether the trip was really necessary or profitable...
...By 1974, as a result of repeated rate reductions, these taxes will deprive the prosperous of $25 billion less than they would have paid at 1969 rates...
...The South Vietnamese command had initiated a major sweeping operation on the outskirts of Mo Kay, and had excluded the local forcesA severe blow to the district chief's pride...
...Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS Stone Age Economics New York last November 7 were Americans voting in favor of increased Medicare hospital charges...
...The questions are not rhetorical...
...Your people have influenced us far too much, and we have gone from mistake to mistake because we listened to you...
...In retrospect, there was something starkly appropriate about the manner of Cu's death...
...The substance of the discussion also seems to have been on the positive side...
...But that was not the point...
...This is my country and I understand it better than any foreigner...
...That was wrong and he knew it," says Reed...
...Cu asked Reed to summon American air support, a key function of U.S...
...After the conference, however, the Vatican spokesman (apparently on instructions from high Church officials, who were panicked by Arab protests) issued an incredibly crude and unfriendly statement...
...This resulted in a significant portion of public opinion here shifting to the position that the visit had not been worth the insult...
...Reed, 31, was with Cu when the colonel was killed late last fall...
...He was made of sterner stuff than most men...
...Despite his laxity in administrative matters and his weakness as a military tactician, he struck responsive chords among his superior officers...
...Finally, more than an hour after they had been requested, American planes arrived to strike at the suspected enemy position...
...He was not questioning his companion's memory...
...the 47-year-old colonel remonstrated, as his American adviser sat silently with us...
...Oddly enough, successful resistance may come from an unlikely source, the business beneficiaries of the Great Society...
...A less paradoxical prospect is the dissolution of the fragile truce between the Administration and labor and a renewed militant struggle by the unions to save the programs they not only actively sought but helped to shape...
...Thus in all but contractual language, the middle class is promised that more money will now be spent on it and less on blacks, other minorities, and the poor in general...
...He went the way he had lived: in an unsanctioned battle he sought on his own, fighting with considerable courage, fierce pride and fatal stubbornness...
...Instead, he thanked Israel for taking care of the shrines...
...The President promises not to raise personal and corporate income taxes, the only mildly progressive features of the Federal tax system...
...Meir, in her capacity as vice president of the Socialist International, left for Paris to join the Social Democratic heads of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Austria at the annual meeting of leaders of that organization...
...Cu sat sulking for three days...
...Meir went to talk with the African leader about the fact that five "progressive" and Moslem-dominated black African countries have recently severed diplomatic relations with Israel...
...And these parties could, with a little luck, capture the balance of power between the Gaullists and the Socialist-Communists in March...
...It's all a neat transfer of responsibility for supporting the Pentagon and the rest of the Federal establishment from the affluent to the needy...
...You know little about the basis of guerrilla warfare...
...Meir was having second thoughts (which she seldom has), they were certainly dissipated by President Pompidou's petulant attack on the prime ministers expected to attend the Paris conclave...
...He got most of them out of the open...
...Colonel Nguyen Van Cu appreciated U.S...
...Did they crave an end to Federal attempts to increase the supply of low-rent apartments...
...robert Lekachman A Soldier's Epitaph Saigon this is an epitaph for a South Vietnamese Army officer who had a profound sense of what the fighting in his country was about and who could not accept the Americans' role in it...
...The President plans to dissolve HEW, HUD and OEO alliances with urban blacks and welfare types and shift the categorical grants that benefited them into special revenue sharing disbursements to the states and cities...
...No Prime Minister of Israel had ever met the head of the Catholic Church officially before, and the historical meaning of the encounterwith its flags, Swiss guards, et al.was not lost on the Israelis...
...His soft voice hardened as he stared straight at his adviser and added: "Besides, Captain, you will be going home soon, and I wonder if you will really remember us...
...Although widely held, such sentiments are rarely admitted by the South Vietnamese...
...Many of the government troops dropped and froze, a fatal mistake, but Cu remained on his feet, ignoring the bullets whizzing about him and urging the terrified soldiers to keep moving...
...Mitterand is hardly a better friend of Israel than Pompidou, and his Communist partners take an entirely pro-Arab fine...
...In an ungenerous and antiurban period, groans of anguish from the city halls may only convince other Americans that our extremely Chief Executive is on to an extremely good thing...
...Rats, poisonous paint, drunks in the gutters, and high rates of communicable disease may be viewed by the country at large as the appropriate rewards of urban sin...
...To the majority of Israelis, moreover, the assault seemed aimed at their chief in particular, and it made them sufficiently mad to forget whatever reservations they may have had about this part of her journey...
...The game plan is drawn up for the winners in the Superbowl of American life...
...I told him it was impossible to lead such an operation and simultaneously command it...
...President Nixon's budget for the fiscal year 1974 contemplates all these "reforms" and more...
...aircraft had been readily available for the larger action...
...The colonel meant that American officers come to Vietnam to get their tickets punched and careers advanced, not because of any concern for his countrymen...
...Cu wasn't relieved, however...
...Meir thought and in this most of her countrymen concurred that any such charges would be absurd, since her presence in France would be limited to attendance at closed-door sessions...
...Special revenue sharing, like the general revenue sharing the last Congress enacted, promises the mayors and the governors much greater political control over the money than the specific grants allowed...
...Presumably the middle Americans and ethnics whom Nixon has so successfully cultivated don't think much of New York City and the lesser lairs of lesser Lindsays...
...At the time the session with the Pope was announced, it was generally considered a major plus for Israeli diplomacy...
...advisers, and while Reed complied, the support was not forthcoming...
...The Pope, Mrs...
...Are you coming...
...He was egotistical as hell, but he also had great depth...
...Meir and the Socialist leader, the critics contended, might win him some votes from France's half-million Jews, who otherwise would support the smaller parties that are genuinely pro-Israel...
...I won't ever forget him.Arnold Abrams Travels with Golda Tel Aviv prime Minister Golda Meir's whirlwind January tour of Paris, Rome and Geneva received widespread but not unanimous acclaim in Israel...
...Do average citizens so treasure their state and local officials that they clamor for transfers of Federal funds and functions to these notoriously competent, incorruptible, indefatigable public servants...
...I went...
...As the column reached a clearing, the forest suddenly erupted with gunfire...
...Things went the other way around with Mrs...
...Meir stayed away and avoided the suggestion that she was campaigning against the Pompidou government...
...Unfortunately, there were more enemy soldiers than Cu had expected, and they were waiting for him...
...Meir reported, clearly indicated that he was no longer advocating the old Vatican idea of internationalizing the holy places in Jerusalem...
...awards given for ground action in Vietnam...
...firepower and logistical capabilities, but he abhorred what he considered our mechanistic approach to guerrilla warfare and our naive conceit...
...In Vietnamese, "remember" has deep implications, referring more to the heart than to the mind...
...That was the last thing Cu did...
...With the French parliamentary elections only two months off and President Georges Pompidou's Mideast policies a sticky subject, many of Israel's friends in the French capital As well as the Israeli Ambassador there believed it would be better if Mrs...
...Cu is honest, dedicated and sincere...
...Talks between Mrs...
...Cu seemed fearless...
...This was an added blow to the colonel's pride...
...Were they eager to close or shrink community centers, schools and university libraries, neighborhood health clinics, alcoholism treatment facilities, rat control efforts, and lead poisoning prevention...
...The American replied with a nervous chuckle, "Certainly I'll remember you...
...Cu, who spoke English fluently, had translated his own thoughts too literally...
...Besides, Pompidou is not a politician to whom the Israelis owe special consideration...
...Meir's trip to Rome...
...But if Mrs...
...Let the chances for the success of these maneuvers not be underestimated...
...Houphouet-Boigny, an old friend of Israel, is himself under attack from African "revolutionaries" for his liberal and pro-Western positions, and he wanted to play down the Geneva conference...
...To a large extent, he was right...
...The questions started even before Mrs...
...It was sheer John Wayne," says Reed, who stayed at the district chief's side...
...When told about Cu's remarks, the senior American adviser in the region, a retired Army colonel, was enraged...
...The American soon recovered, and although wounded in both legs by shrapnel, led the decimated government force out of the ambush area...
...These contractors, developers, educational publishers, producers of medical supplies, conglomerate dabblers in job training and school performance contracting, and other dealers in the artifacts of social improvement American-style have long since achieved a profitable detente with the Great Society...
...Cu was a handsome man of slight build and with hard eyes...
...True, with fine impartiality the President proposes the slaughter of the innocent along with the guilty...
...He heard me out, but said: 'I'm going in...
...Meir should not appear to be giving the slightest hint of approval to the meeting's host, Francois Mitterrand, head of the Socialist-Communist coalition now challenging the Gaullists...
...In grim contrast, the regressive payroll taxes which finance Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, will rise during the same period by $20 billion...
...The third of Mrs...
...Conceivably, the Israeli diplomats in charge of preparations neglected to take the elementary precaution of asking for agreement not only on the final communique (which was very satisfactory to Israel), but on what would and would not be said afterward as well...
...His candor brought him bitter criticism from American advisers and grudging respect from ARVN colleagues...
...Then, in a move he had not fully cleared with his superiors, he gathered about 250 soldiers for an assault on a heavily jungled area where a Vietcong unit was reported to have taken refuge...
...Following the bombing, and without waiting to determine the effectiveness of the air attack, Cu ordered his men onwardplacing himself up front...
...For his efforts, Reed got a Silver Star, one of the last U.S...
...He kept prodding his men, talking to them, leading them to cover, firing all the time...
...Meir's meetings, with Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who was vacationing at his villa near Geneva, will not go down as a triumph of Israel's foreign service either...
...Yet Cu had only begun...
...As it should, Congress has a bad conscience about some of its favorite boondoggles, among them agricultural subsidies, school aid to federally impacted areas, and housing subsidy programs that at times have generated more scandals than low-rental units...
...Eliahu Salpeter...
...I was his adviser, my place was with him...
...All the same, unless Congress demonstrates a recently unprecedented ability to restrain its own fiscal follies and substitute a coherent set of priorities of its own devising, the odds are that Nixon will win hands downif only on the principle that you don't beat something with nothing...
...He was quite a guy," says Major Byron Reed, who came to Mo Kay last summer and managed to develop a better relationship with Cu than previous American advisers...
...You only know your computers and statistics...
...I'm going to recommend that he be relieved of his post without prejudice...
...It will be a great joke on us liberals if something is saved out of the wreckage of the New Deal and the Great Society by the likes of General Electric, Litton Industries and IBM...
...Nevertheless, Jerusalem advertised the encounter well in advance, causing embarrassment to the President and to the Ivory Coast's Ambassador to Switzerland, who had not known anything about the upcoming event...
...He didn't really respond...
...For his, Cu received the customary posthumous accolades from the South Vietnamese...
...Although the internationalization of Jerusalem has not been mentioned by the Holy See since the Six-Day War, burying that ghost is still important to Israelis and would normally have been sufficient cause for sustaining their initial reaction to the Rome stopover...
...A B-40 rocket landed just behind him, Jailing him instantly, and knocking Reed unconscious...
...His story reveals one of the rarely touched upon complexities of the war, involving as it does a clash of pride and reality...
Vol. 56 • February 1973 • No. 4
