NOTES IN THE NEWS
note in the news The Initiative in Berlin Elsewhere in this issue, James P. Warburg, one of our most creative analysts of foreign affairs, faces up to the challenge of "What to Do about Berlin."...
...Our classic aversion to doing anything general has settled into general acceptance of the co-existence of boom and bust, surplus and deficiency, unearned increment and unearned squalor...
...The Drug Bill—and After With proper apology to the drug makers of America, who have a proprietary interest in the word, the passage of the Drug Industry Act of 1962 can only be described as a miracle...
...Although the President asked that over-the-counter drugs be included in the bill, they are exempt from the new factory inspection provisions and the law will have only a limited effect upon them...
...It is a good bill only because of the thalidomide scare...
...In America they have no plan...
...Unemployment is acknowledged to be a problem, but a spotty one...
...It was Adenauer who snuffed out the hope that flickered briefly following an American proposal for compromise settlement of one of the thorniest problems in the Berlin crisis...
...No depression, no recession, and more people than ever with more good things than ever before...
...The magnificence is reduced to opulence and the opulent are many times the number of the last century's few...
...Beggars all over Paris and Rome...
...And most of the omissions from this year's measure will be reintroduced as new bills when the Eighty-eighth Congress convenes in January...
...Manufacturers of prescription drugs will now btf subject to more rigorous factory inspections and stricter quality controls...
...the roast beef dinner at the Drake in Chicago is $7.50...
...The United States had suggested the establishment of an international authority to control access to Berlin—an authority on which both East and West Germany and East and West Berlin would be represented, along with the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria...
...Teachers short, schoolrooms packed...
...Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany and President Charles de Gaulle of France have torpedoed every proposal to develop Western initiatives designed to achieve an end to recurring crises in the Berlin tinder-box...
...For example: Unemployment rose in August and September to an official 5.8 per cent, as high as last January and higher than in any intervening month...
...The eighty-six-year-old Adenauer has been even more stubbornly destructive...
...If doctors become familiar with these names, the reasoning runs, and if they are assured of better drug quality, they may be encouraged to prescribe by common names instead of brand names and save their patients money...
...It is even possible that one of Kefauver's basic aims, the reduction of drug prices, will be realized to some extent...
...But its glory is fading...
...they have to be effective, too...
...Confronted by an aroused public and a new demand from President Kennedy for tougher drug legislation, the Senate and House did some second-thinking on the measure and agreed to strengthen it...
...Bankruptcies up 400 per cent in the past ten years...
...Almost a fourth of all American families, and more than half of farm families, are living on incomes of less than $4,000 a year...
...in Europe it is maybe half that...
...Yet after all this is said, one still feels like a traveler who climbs a hill and sees the many hills he still must cross...
...The Kefauver plan for breaking the monopoly on drug patents through a system of compulsory licensing—his major proposal for bringing drug prices down—became an early and fatal casualty...
...As of March, 1962, seventeen per cent of our manufacturing capacity was idle...
...Crime (and delinquency), alcoholism, mental illness all hitting new highs...
...The assurances Mrs...
...And all the curves on President Kennedy's TV charts are going up, up, up, all the time...
...In Keyserling's view, both the evidence of a stagnating economy and the key to its revival lie in the obvious and urgent need of a large proportion of our population for better housing, more education, improved nutrition, adequate medical care, and the numerous other amenities that are supposed to mark our "affluent society...
...But there's an old saying among the bangtailers that you can't beat a horse with no horse...
...Now the contradiction is kaleidoscopic...
...A room at Claridge's in London is $24 (single...
...And the miserable many are half, or a fourth, as many as they were then...
...The bill that the President signed into law last month is a good one...
...But new researches by the Conference on Economic Progress provide sobering evidence that there is little ground for easing our concern...
...Chanceller Adenauer will visit the President the day after our elections...
...Economic Stagnation It has become fashionable along the New Frontier to reassure the American public, particularly that segment that will soon cast its ballots in the Congressional elections, that the economy is not in such bad shape, after all...
...Catch-as-catch-can is still the formula of freedom...
...Only the other day, he denounced as "senseless" any attempt by the West to take the initiative with positive proposals to ease East-West tensions over Berlin...
...Furthermore, Keyserling demonstrates that wages and salaries have not kept pace with productivity and profits...
...We will get a healthy man to the moon, but we can't get a sick man to the doctor...
...In several floor speeches following passage of the bill, he recalled the laxity FDA has shown in the past and wondered how well it would do with its new powers...
...Key Policies for Full Employment," prepared under the direction of Leon Keyserling, who was chairman of President Harry S. Truman's Council of Economic Advisers and today A Horse and No Horse In America one man in twenty out of work and productive capacity idle up to fifty per cent...
...We have no plan, and half a century has passed...
...The people of the United States are mindful of what they have been told are their obligations in Beriin, but, once they learn the truth, they will not tolerate a course of action that rejects an honorable settlement and risks nuclear war because a stubborn old man—or two of them—wills it so...
...The American package also called for East-West agreement to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, an exchange of non-aggression declarations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, and the establishment of an all-German committee to negotiate "technical" issues between the two German nations...
...The new law requires simpler generic names for drugs and more prominent display of them in advertisements and on labels...
...But that hope was crushed shortly afterward when the aged Adenauer rushed back from an Italian vacation to reject the proposals because neutral nations like Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland might have a decisive voice on the international control authority...
...Theophrastus Such stands guard as indefatigable watch dog over our economy, cites a wealtl of figures demonstrating that our economy is at a dangerously low ebb...
...Proposals for new controls on the sale of habit-forming amphetamines and barbiturates were shelved...
...And on everybody else's...
...Cosmetics and food were dropped from the bill and they are not subject to the stricter regulation...
...every third Frenchman has a car, every third German a Fernseher...
...The American economy will attain its own goals only when programs are developed to begin meeting these needs, an approach which would create millions of new jobs and more equitably distribute the unprecedented wealth at our nation's disposal...
...in which case we're doing great...
...But perhaps a public frightened by thalidomide will remain aroused, and it will be possible to get good drug legislation through the next Congress without the spur of new catastrophes...
...The outgrowth of a painstaking two-year investigation by Senator Estes Kefauver, Tennessee Democrat, the drug bill, with its promise of cheaper and better drugs, quickly became the target of the powerful drug lobby...
...Representative Leonor K. Sullivan, Missouri Democrat, who gets too little recognition for her own food and drug legislation crusades, was able to keep out of the bill provisions that would permit wider use in animal feed of stilbestrol and possibly cancer-inducing coloring matter...
...Maybe there is no plan but a bad plan...
...In England one man out of twenty on the dole, and two households in five without bathtubs...
...Sullivan remembered, during the House debate, that it took "young women blinded by eyelash blackener," persons paralyzed by a poisonous substance in Jamaica ginger, and the death of at least seventy-three Americans from elixir sulfanilamide, to jolt an ealier Congress into passing drug laws...
...Doctors may expect fuller and more accurate information from labels and promotional material...
...War is what scarlet fever was a century ago, and we are sunk (as we weren't then) under the ancient "curse" of militarism...
...Everything" improves—and the statistics all prove it—but a fifth of the people are hard-pressed in "good" times, a tenth are starving, and the opulent many (unlike the magnificent few of yore) fill their bellies (and their eyes and their ears and their hands) every day as if that day were their last...
...Too many people are asking if there isn't an alternative to a thirty-billion-dollar trip to the moon...
...His proposals make solid sense to us, but quite apart from their specific content, we are greatly heartened that somebody is proposing Western initiatives for affirmative resolution of the crisis instead of hiding behind such sterile slogans as "standing firm in Berlin" and "war if we must...
...The Food and Drug Administration will have more time to examine drug applications and more power to stop the sale of drugs it suspects are unsafe...
...Communist Russia's first school primer—this was some forty-five years ago—began with the words, "We have a plan...
...A recent investigation of FDA's handling of new drugs, he said, left him "surprised, shocked, and disappointed at certain conditions which have been existing for years...
...President Kennedy, who has repeatedly sought to persuade West Germany to develop a more imaginative Berlin policy, will have one more opportunity...
...This is the occasion on which Mr...
...The Drug Act almost died because of public apathy...
...They do have a plan—a, plan that miscarries and carries truth away with it, but a plan...
...The Department of Labor estimates that $6,000 is the minimum necessary to maintain an "American" standard of living...
...He has served warning he will keep close watch on the agency's handling of the new drug law...
...Recently, for example, de Gaulle wrecked even the idea of Western foreign minister talks on Berlin by refusing to permit French participation...
...The magnificence of the few and the misery of the many was a simple contradiction in Dickens' time...
...But these things, good and bad, simply happen...
...And it's all true...
...Then the thalidomide stories and the pictures of malformed babies began to appear in the nation's newspapers...
...But here, just as clearly, were the hopeful beginnings of an approach toward agreement—hopeful because the Kremlin indicated a positive interest in the American plan...
...For far too long the United States has been prevented by the intransigence of the two old men of Western Europe from pursuing a more affirmative course in seeking negotiated settlement of the problems of Berlin and Germany...
...Disorder is still the obverse of liberty...
...His argument was that nothing could be done so long as the Soviet Union maintains its present policies, but he did not say how the Kremlin might be persuaded to relax its present position if the West "stands firm" and there is no attempt to reach a meeting of minds across the conference table...
...And Mrs...
...and we are fearful that the Communists can do both...
...It glories in having no answer...
...And for the first time drugs that are put on the market will not only have to be harmless...
...Here, clearly, was no master-plan for the solution of all the problems of Berlin and Germany...
...Kennedy must persuade, or failing that, demand of the German chancellor a more flexible policy toward Berlin...
...By mid-July, the Senate Judiciary Committee had reduced the legislation to a weak and hopelessly inadequate measure with little chance of passage...
...Humphrey plans to hold hearings in December on the reorganization of the FDA...
...Uninhabitable housing everywhere inhabited...
...Poverty among persons over sixty-five years of age is even more striking: 63.8 per cent of multiple-person families have incomes less than $4,000, and almost eighty per cent of unattached individuals in the over-sixty-five group live on less than $2,000 a year...
...The FDA under Fire Quite apart from the deficiencies of the new drug law, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat and a former pharmacist, has expressed misgivings about its administration...
...Furthermore, Keyserling estimates the real unemployment figure, obscured by computation methods, is nearer nine per cent...
...Surely everyone now knows something of the bizarre history of the new law...
...Hospital beds at $18 to $35 a day—and elderly couples making do on a combined pension of $112 a month (in America...
...Economic growth has averaged only 2.7 per cent over the past ten years, in contrast with the 4.1 per cent needed to maintain full employment and production...
...A whopping thirty-eight per cent of steel capacity was not being used during the second quarter of this year...
...When were things ever better...
...A new aura of optimism—however cautious—surrounds the spokesmen for an Administration that only two years ago implored the nation to "get moving" out of its economic rut...
...Sullivan received in debate—that the law as drawn would keep animals off the market unless they are free from any harmful residue—might carry more conviction if it were not still possible to recall that in 1959 stilbestrol pellets for fattening poultry were also considered safe until it was found that they left a cancer-inducing residue in the skin and certain organs...
...This social order—disorder, rather—has no answer to Communism because it has no answer...
...Nothing general can be done about anything...
...All impossible, and all true...
...Yet how much comfort is there in these prospects...
...The arrogant master of France felt that such a conference might lead the Soviets to believe that meaningful negotiations were possible, and he thought this would be construed in the Kremlin as a sign of Western weakness...
Vol. 26 • November 1962 • No. 11
