THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON

...Ami sacra fames—the infernal lust for gold—has again become a major theme of foreign affairs...

...His formula for success in Washington has been based on the arts of persuasion rather than exposition...

...Monetary experts here have long preached the need for thoroughgoing reform...

...But he has been so graceless about the entire incident, so resentful of legitimate questioning, that he himself has inflated a trifle into a cause celebre...

...This gives prestige to the dollar and to sterling, but also imposes special burdens on two countries that are in chronic balance-of-payments difficulties...

...It would seem that the Wisconsin Republican's medical care package might give the AMA an even bigger case of fright than the President's proposal...

...Senator Russell B. Long, son of Huey and once the "princefish" of his family's political dynasty, has finally emerged on his own as the kingfish of the Senate...

...However, Senator George Aiken, Vermont Republican and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, let the cat out of the bag in an interview with the oil trade press...

...Long is important now, and he is a man of ambivalent promise...

...her government is as centralized as at any time since the days of Louis XIV—and economically far more stable...

...These were our reflections in the first exuberant days of the term the President won in his own right...

...Johnson made his famous mock apology to the press: "In the light of your interest...

...But hardly had Ford begun his labors when the dinosaurs in the back benches rose, up and repudiated him—first in the competition for minority whip and then in filling a vacancy on the Ways and Means Committee...

...her costly colonial empire (including Algeria) has been liquidated...

...As a prime minister, Mr...

...This puts him in solitary silence in this gabbiest of capitals...

...I will bear in mind, in connection with any future funerals, your very strong feelings in the matter . . ." It may be high time to establish an anti-poverty program in the area of Republican leadership...

...Since the White House "regulars" are generally the only newsmen on hand for the unscheduled news conferences, the President has been spared the sharp and informed questioning of the specialists in foreign affairs, economics, labor, and other important areas of policy-making...

...The essential problem is that the United States and Great Britain provide the reserve currencies that finance much of world trade...

...This mumbo-jumbo was consistent with the current passion among GOP tacticians for Rube Goldberg-like tables of organization, shadow cabinets, ad hoc committees, and other political totems...

...What adds a bitter taste to the Gaullist attack is that Americans cannot make ends meet because of overseas defense expenditures (which benefit France), outflow of capital investment (which also benefits France), and tourism (ditto...

...In the name of "constructive opposition," but more likely as a move to divide Democrats, Representative John W. Byrnes of Wisconsin came forward with a so-called national voluntary health insurance plan that comes closer to socialized medicine than anything the Administration might have dared to advocate...

...Johnson, we suspect, is just at the beginning of his real troubles concerning the complex and vital problem of world monetary policy...

...He can kick the United States squarely in the shins with the secure knowledge that the American nuclear deterrent protects France as well as the rest of Europe...

...France is in a unique and enviable position of self-sufficiency...

...It is a position that does not win Long many votes back home but it does express the powerful strain of populism in his background...

...her economy is booming...

...Johnson's intensely proprietary attitude toward the "news" in the White House...

...Yet Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen's cloying Biblical parables in support of the Administration's right to continue the shipments were quoted extensively...

...I don't know," Reedy answered...

...France has ample gold reserves, but for America the result would be a deflationary disaster because shortage of gold would make money dear and force interest rates sky-high...

...It needs to be pointed out to the American people that American foreign policy in many parts of the world oozes with oil," Morse stormed...

...Johnson bitterly regretted his non-attendance in London when he saw the televised last rites...

...Humphrey was inexplicably passed over...

...It was no surprise that the Capitol was unusually well saturated with oil lobbyists on the day of the Senate vote...

...Although he has been much in the papers and on television, he has not been truly accessible in the sense of being regularly open to free exchange on affairs of state...

...Johnson the regular televised press conferences that John F. Kennedy brought to full flower as a technique of Presidential communication...

...Meanwhile, unless the Republicans in Congress come up with genuinely constructive alternatives and responsible criticism they may need their own private Medicare program to insure party survival...

...A newspaperman who wanted an interview with the Vice President the day after the Inauguration was told that Humphrey was making no appointments for precisely that reason...

...Undaunted, Ford went on to create a new Planning and Research Committee, as an arm of the House Republican Conference, with the high-blown mission of offering "long-term solutions to recognized problems...

...Long has persistently led the battle against the surrender to private interests of public ownership in the priceless discoveries made with Federal research and development money...

...To American oil interests in the Middle East such a move would be catastrophic...

...he can use his political power in the Arab world to start a diplomatic squeeze play on oil...

...What Long does with his power and potentialities may prove one of the most intriguing political stories of the next four years...

...It is said that Mr...

...France has little to lose by the proposal...

...His regret was understandable, especially since the television cameras would almost certainly have focused on him during the moving rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (which, incidentally, the Mormon Choir wanted to sing at the Inauguration—a desire that was vetoed for fear of offending some Southerners...

...They would like to see the industrial nations cooperate in issuing a new international currency that would replace the dollar and sterling and that would be able to expand as trade expanded...

...Yet the President's subsequent remarks about the whole affair, which he minimized as a matter of deciding who should attend funerals, showed that he still did not understand that this was not just another state funeral...

...What is more, under the Byrnes scheme the government would pay doctor bills directly, thus raising one of the scariest bugaboos of the American Medical Association: government control of doctors...

...He is touchier than ever in his dealings with subordinates and with the press...

...Senator Wayne Morse, Oregon Democrat, is one of the heaviest crosses that the mandarins of our foreign policy must bear...

...Johnson is heading for a great fall...

...The President's relations with the press are now permeated with what Ben Bagdikian described in the Columbia Journalism Review as "an air of acrimonious normalcy...

...Some knowledgeable economists rank Long as the most influential anti-monopolist on Capitol Hill since the death of Estes Kefauver...

...Early in February Reedy was asked when the President planned to conduct a press conference...

...This may be the stuff of good politics but it makes for bad journalism...

...Recent developments in the House of Representatives seem to cry out for such a course...

...This epidemic of silliness—which appears to be the "executive virus" of the GOP leadership—has also broken out in the area of Medicare legislation...

...French President Charles de Gaulle's proposal to return to the old gold standard is not quite so bizarre as it may seem, judged strictly in terms of French interests...

...When the trim and athletic Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan deposed the paunchy and bejowled Representative Charles A. Halleck of Indiana as Minority Leader, the idea was to provide a touch of contemporary political dash to the crumbling Gothic temple of the Congressional Republican Party...

...Johnson called a televised news conference on about forty-five minutes notice...

...He stands at the top of the Senate power structure in his dual roles as Majority Whip and as ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, second only to the aging hierarch Harry F. Byrd...

...The President's press and television exposure has been incredibly good by the standards of press agentry...

...Not a line from Morse's speech found its way into most of the nation's major newspapers...

...Humphrey had been told to stand by during Inaugural week to attend the Churchill funeral...

...Long has asserted his will over placid Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and it is already clear who will have the strongest control over the Senate throttle...

...De Gaulle has all the security of an alliance," a non-admirer in Washington said, "and enjoys all the emotional luxury of being non-aligned...

...The unspoken consensus in Washington is that Mr...

...One of his first campaigns in this new session was to insist that new discoveries growing out of government-financed research in the water pollution and Appalachia programs be patented in the name of the public...

...The impromptu, crimped sessions that have become the hallmark of the Johnson Administration verge on parody...

...He had taken it up with the President, Reedy assured his questioners...

...It is in this context that the episode of the non-assignment of Vice President Humphrey to attend the Winston Churchill rites takes on importance...

...At the same time, he joined the small band of dissidents who filibustered against the Administration's communications satellite bill on grounds that it was a monumental give-away to AT&T...

...That night the President appeared before a B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League dinner in Washington and unveiled his plan to visit the Soviet Union before the year is out...

...But on larger questions that will confront the Great Society, such as growing economic concentration, the continued trend toward an administered price economy, and the concurrent stratification of economic power, Long has as promising a record as any man who has occupied high office in the Senate, including his predecessor as Majority Whip, Hubert Humphrey...

...The man who best epitomizes the plight of White House press relations is Press Secretary George E. Reedy...

...Although Egypt is not itself a major oil-producing nation, Morse lectured his colleagues, President Nasser's pre-eminent position in the Arab world "stands as a constant threat to American oil interests...

...As for Hubert Humphrey, he is saying nothing about the whole affair...

...The present international monetary crisis provides the perfect opening for the Gaullist attack...

...He acknowledged that the State Department made a hard sell for continuing the commodity shipments with the pitch that unless the Senate were to rescind a House-enacted ban on surplus sales to the U.A.R., Nasser might retaliate by raising Suez Canal toll fees or even closing the Canal to American freight altogether...

...He is in a position now, as are many of his Southern colleagues, to act on President Johnson's injunction that we "bind our wounds, heal our history, and make the nation whole...

...POTOMACUS...

...But he is the prime victim of Mr...

...And the next day Mr...

...I may have made a mistake by asking the Chief Justice to go and not asking the Vice President [to attend the Churchill funeral...

...At that point there had been only two formal news conferences since the election...

...Then Mr...

...This has become an increasingly significant cause in view of the soaring of government research expenditures—now in excess of $15 billion annually...

...Thus, during the debate early last month over continued shipment of surplus food to the United Arab Republic, Morse was the only member of the Senate to lay bare the economic stakes in the dispute...

...He is death on humbug from the State Department and has what is to them an unattractive habit of cutting through to the grisly realities that lie behind the most fanciful bureaucratic window dressing...

...And he has found that the best way to attract attention from the world is to attack the United States...

...Every President is in part a monarch as well as prime minister—a national symbol whose most trifling acts can stir endless ripples of emulation...

...Russell Long is a no less fascinating bundle of paradoxes than was his father or even his uncle, former Governor Earl K. Long...

...Johnson was ill, and that he may not have been in the best of temper when a decision had to be made...

...In effect, de Gaulle is urging that the dollar and sterling be scrapped as trading currencies and the old gold standard be reinstated...

...But that remedy now seems further away than ever, thanks to de Gaulle...

...Passage of the civil rights bill freed him, as it did other Southern politicians, of the racist obsession and the specter of racial filibuster...

...We believe that Reedy is a man of intelligence and integrity...

...Few of the President's critics really expect this...

...Rather than assuage his vanity, victory last November has enhanced it...

...Certainly Congress and the nation are not ready for it yet, voluntary though it may be...

...Johnson clearly would like to manage his contacts with the Fourth Estate as he did the Senate—on an intimate and highly personalized scale...

...On some economic issues—such as the oil depletion allowance and the closing of expense account loopholes in the tax law (a blow to the free-spending conventioneers on Bourbon Street)—Long is weak...

...It would be unfair to expect of Mr...

...It is quite true that Mr...

...For after all, who could better inform the United States Senate of the plight of the Egyptian people than the fellows from the mammoth oil companies...

...Johnson is superb, but as a king he is an unhedged monarch with a dismaying incapacity for adorning power with grace...

...It is perhaps more acrimonious than normal...

...Johnson went to the hospital, the great Englishman died, and Mr...

...She grows her own food...

...The President had taken the position that "for the time being he has no particular new information to volunteer that you don't already have," the press secretary added...

...The bulk of the financing under the Byrnes plan would come directly out of the Treasury—far more drastic than the Administration approach of increasing the Social Security tax, paid by worker and employer alike, to finance most of the program...

...Prick that foreign policy in many places, and oil diplomacy oozes out...

...It was an inwardly-seething Lyndon Johnson that faced the television cameras on February 4. With heavy-dripping sarcasm, Mr...

...True, he voted with Barry Goldwater on the three key Administration measures of the last session: against the nuclear test ban treaty, civil rights, and Medicare...

...But these devices do not conceal the underlying bankruptcy of ideas in the Republican cloak rooms...