THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington Old-timers in Washington can scarcely believe their eyes. The Johnson landslide has turned the House of Representatives into a bastion of liberalism while the Senate looks...
...He will now be spending part of his time on the Great Society's beau-tification campaign, the rest of his time he may spend in everything and anything...
...But his ability is unquestioned...
...As a New Frontiersman, Goodwin spun through the government with bewildering speed...
...In all this, Goodwin has accumulated both experience and enemies...
...He went on to say, "It would be nothing less than a tragedy for us to go and get involved in the Congo as we are in Vietnam...
...And in New York, Consolidated Edison wants to build a hydroelectric plant at the base of Storm King Mountain, about sixty miles north of New York City on a lovely stretch of the Hudson River...
...Under pressure to disgorge the first-year flow of money, the Federal anti-poverty office has expanded at a dizzying rate...
...And yet, ironically, he will continue to be sardonically dismissed for his want of "style" by sneering highbrows...
...Johnson will look for a negotiated way out of Vietnam...
...The reason, as much as anything, lies in the initials DSG...
...Ironically, Humphrey, who was associated with civil rights and disarmament, is now replaced as whip by a Southerner who has opposed both...
...Potomacus...
...In 1960, he joined Senator John F. Kennedy's staff and worked with Theodore Sorensen on many key speeches...
...One of President Johnson's key aides has more lives than a Texas wildcat...
...Conservationists, led by Senator Paul Douglas, Illinois Democrat, have valiantly (and vainly) tried to block construction of a steel mill and industrial harbor right in the middle of the Indiana Dunes, the beautiful recreational area on the southern shores of Lake Michigan...
...It is interesting that in the past year three fights have arisen that all involve the same issue: Mammon versus scenery...
...His manner can be as blunt as his words are sharp...
...The key man to watch in the imminent debate on our policies in South Vietnam is Senator Richard Russell, the Georgia conservative who is the very personification of the Senate Establishment...
...There is no organization in the Senate parallel to the DSG...
...The importance of Russell's views is that they carry great weight at the White House...
...The plant would ruinously deface the St...
...At the same time, we were appalled by the debacle in the Senate that has put the South in command...
...Robert F. Kennedy, who began his Senate career in the very last row of that august chamber, has begun to rebuild the battered platform from which he hopes to launch himself into the Presidency...
...And in Washington, meanwhile, another power struggle of infinite subtlety is beginning between Kennedy and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the heir-presumptive to the White House in 1972...
...DSG stands for the Democratic Study Group, an informal but effective liberal bloc within the House that commands the support of more than 100 members...
...We were delighted with this heartening evidence that the House Democrats intend to use their power, even though we were unenthusiastic about the purge of the two Dixiecrats who had openly supported Goldwater, and even though the rules reforms have not yet touched the fundamental problem of seniority...
...But Russell, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, is not regarded as a "doctrinaire" by Mr...
...The pressure for escalation in Vietnam comes, significantly, from the Air Force and Navy—services that would not have to carry the brunt of a dirty infantry war...
...How did it happen...
...In the District of Columbia, which was to be a showcase for the rest of the country, the war on poverty has turned into an unseemly bureaucratic civil war...
...Johnson's excessively corny speeches, but there is a strong odor of plain snobbery in much of the talk about the President turning the White House into Hamburger Heaven...
...The other day Senator Russell told newsmen that America's initial decision to get into Vietnam was a mistake...
...President Johnson intends to fill that void...
...Contending for the anti-poverty dollar are the traditional social service agencies which are charity-financed, on the one hand, and the newly-created Federal anti-poverty organization for the District...
...And yet a half year and three-quarters of a billion dollars after its launching, the anti-poverty crusade has yet to show any tangible benefits to the poor...
...We confess that we are not enamored of Mr...
...Our hunch is that barring an unforeseen catastrophe Mr...
...Russell's outlook is shaped primarily by a hard-boiled assessment of American capabilities, and he shares the skepticism of old-line Army generals who see little hope of winning a limited war on the Asian mainland...
...President Johnson has gone out of his way to demonstrate his affection for the younger Kennedy, while his relations with his former Attorney General have been persistently chilly...
...If he does, and if shooting does stop, we suspect that one of the chief architects of peace will have been Richard Russell of Georgia...
...The reelection of Senator Mike Mansfield as Majority Leader was a foregone conclusion, and so was the reelection of the tricky Senator George A. Smathers of Florida as Secretary of the Senate Democratic Conference...
...We refer to Richard N. Goodwin, who is now barely over thirty years of age, and who is back near the top as a White House aide...
...He went from the White House staff to the State Department, where he tried to put some steam into the Alliance for Progress...
...Poverty has been a talismanic word in Washington during the entire fourteen months that Lyndon B. Johnson has served in the Presidency...
...After graduation, at the top of his class, from Harvard Law School, Goodwin came to Washington in 1957 as a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter...
...He then went to the House committee that exposed crooked television quiz shows, and as chief investigator was, more than anyone else, the nemesis of Charles Van Doren...
...Along with McGeorge Bun-dy, Richard Goodwin may turn out to be President Kennedy's most important White House bequest to Johnson...
...With the election of Hubert Humphrey to the Vice Presidency, the one Senator capable of giving some unity to the liberal bloc has been promoted to a relatively powerless post...
...The vote on the rules reforms was 224 in favor and 201 opposed...
...He continued on to the Peace Corps, and was about to be named President Kennedy's special adviser on the arts when November 22, 1963, came...
...President Johnson is chary of both "General" Wayne Morse and "General" Joseph Alsop— the Oregon Senator wants a quick negotiated settlement and the columnist wants to widen the war...
...The Senate liberals could not even agree on a place and time of meeting...
...Above all, it has helped the Texan in the White House dispel Northern liberal suspicions of him as a regional politician with an inordinate fondness for oil wells and filibuster...
...The younger brother was clearly the more natural politician, with the gregarious charm that some intimates of the family liken to the Kennedy grandfather, "Honey Fitz," the most consummate of Boston pols...
...It has stirred bureaucracy, energized talent, kindled a new idealism, and even loosened appropriation purse strings...
...All this is giving rise to concern among friends of the program that the Johnson Administration's overzealous-ness in prosecuting the war on poverty may be the very grounds of its undoing...
...At the Federal level, the anti-poverty program lost two of the most productive minds in government—Adam Yarmolinsky, who was sacrificed on demand of the Southern bloc in Congress, and Richard Goodwin to the higher policy councils in the White House...
...There may be one ironic hitch, however, in the long-range plan of Robert Kennedy...
...The Johnson landslide has turned the House of Representatives into a bastion of liberalism while the Senate looks as if it will truly be the sapless branch of the Eighty-ninth Congress...
...It should be no surprise if Kennedy, within the next year or two, pre-empts Wagner's role as leader of the faction-ridden New York Democratic Party...
...That would be a monument to poor statesmanship...
...But the election of Senator Russell Long as party whip over Senators John O. Pastore and Mike Monroney was a self-inflicted wound...
...It was because the DSG helped enlist agreement on a reform package that the liberals were able in swift order to deprive two Dixiecrat Congressmen of the benefits of seniority, to push through a rules-reform package that has strengthened the power of the party leadership and clipped the claws of the conservative Rules Committee, and to establish a two-to-one party ratio on all committees...
...He also wants to use the highway program as leverage for national beautification—and to get rid of car dumps and other traces of urban scrofula...
...And so the drama unfolds...
...Though intellectuals are appalled by his prose, President Johnson may wind up spending more time on questions of aesthetics than any Chief Executive since Jefferson...
...It has also poured out millions of dollars in anti-poverty grants (with the announcements providentially timed to be issued just before Christmas) to communities which, like the District of Columbia, barely had time to budget the money intelligently...
...Surely Senator Hugh Scott, a Pennsylvania Republican, had every reason to needle the Democrats by pointing out that Barry Goldwater's opposition to all three measures was virtually the major issue of the campaign...
...Goodwin is credited with playing the major role in writing the President's brilliant State of the Union address and he is perhaps the ablest all-round assistant the President has...
...This would be a stunning reversal of form, but the reason is not wholly numerical, since in both chambers the Democrats have a two-to-one margin...
...Johnson has told associates that he wants to do for preservation of beauty in America what Teddy Roosevelt did for conservation—make it a cause and a trademark for his Great Society...
...The significance of the vote is that it measured the maximum strength of the conservative Democratic and GOP coalition—and the totals showed that for the first time in more than twenty years there is a liberal majority in the House...
...In years past, Democratic and GOP membership on Ways and Means has been arbitrarily kept at a three-to-two ratio...
...Croix River, one of the least-spoiled recreational waterways in the entire United States...
...Again, protests have been in vain...
...It is a fascinating process to watch...
...Sadly, the Senate liberals are making Allen Drury look like a sober historian in portraying liberals as woolly, wide-eyed, and woefully indecisive...
...Soon President Johnson was availing himself of Goodwin's facile pen and quietly returned him to the White House, first as a part-time and now as full-time aide...
...As Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin has pointed out, there is at present no Federal law that gives protection to scenery...
...While he was assuming the role of freshman Senator in Washington, Kennedy's band of New York supporters was moving in the state capital in Albany to challenge the supremacy of Mayor Robert F. Wagner in the Democratic power structure of Kennedy's adopted state...
...Long has voted against the test-ban treaty, Medicare, and civil rights, and now he is supposed to help enact the very legislation that he has opposed in the past...
...Those who witnessed the opening session of Congress were struck with the contrast between him and his brother, Edward...
...In Wisconsin and Minnesota, the same kind of battle is being fought to stop the construction of a coal-burning electric generating plant at Stillwater, Minnesota...
...The last point is especially important because it has meant that the potent Ways and Means Committee has finally acquired a liberal majority...
...In blunt terms, because the Senate liberals are by and large an assemblage of spoiled little starlets...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 2
