THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington How easy it is to whoop it up for war, and how hard to dissent from the herd when the pressure builds up. President Johnson is making no secret of his displeasure with...
...In private, Administration officials acknowledge that U.S...
...Freedom itself invariably complicates the work of diplomats...
...A willingness on our part to loosen up commercial relations," Frank said, "could conceivably serve as a prelude to negotiations on broader political issues...
...But there is no comparable murmur of displeasure about Senator Russell Long, who casually remarked that we can take on Communist China and the Soviet Union if need be...
...Certainly the thirty-page report sent to the Rules Committee over the signature of Attorney General Nicholas deB...
...There is the question of the Committee's power to dragoon witnesses into closed-door hearings...
...He was criticized by The Washington Post for his failure to exploit the Committee's educational potential by holding open hearings that would elicit expert testimony on major foreign policy problems...
...Dagmar Wilson and Donna Allen, leaders of Women Strike for Peace, refused to testify in a star-chamber closed session of the Committee...
...In fact, there is no such fever discernible, though an American withdrawal from Vietnam might set off a wave of bitter partisan attacks parallel to the "Who lost China...
...Reynolds contends that Baker was part of an axis of illicit power in the nation's capital—a white collar Cosa Nostra—that radiated to Congressional offices, executive agencies, and the White House...
...Mail from constituents is seldom representative, and in this instance the dissenting Senators come from states where globalism is traditionally unpopular...
...Both sides are equally guilty of the jettisoning of conflict-of-interest legislation in the Senate...
...Has Congress profited from the seamy lessons of the Baker case...
...The House Committee is giving guerrilla support to those in the Administration who want to throw up a paper wall around the United States...
...Senator Karl Curtis, Nebraska Republican who is one of our least favorite Senators, summed things up as neatly as anyone with this comment: "I don't think it's completed, but I think it's done...
...Still in his forties, Robert Lewis should become better known in a job ideally suited to his talents and convictions...
...He has been deputy administrator of price supports for the past four years, an important but anonymous job...
...They are spelling out some hard facts that could become commonplace beliefs in the near future...
...They have been cited for contempt (along with Russell Nixon of the left-wing National Guardian) and now are in the midst of costly and tangled legal proceedings...
...Lewis is familiar to readers of this magazine for his articles on farm problems...
...One must sympathize with Chairman J. William Fulbright of the Senate Foriegn Relations Committee...
...Saxon has been charged with political favoritism by dispensing national bank charters to prominent Democrats...
...Robert Lewis is a liberal nourished on the LaFollette Progressive tradition...
...They also acknowledge that North Vietnam might well serve as a buffer to Chinese expansion...
...Bankers and politicians have cohabited since the birth of the national banking system...
...Translated from bureaucratic longhand, his job will be to direct programs designed to diminish the blight and squalor found in so much of rural America...
...But now the accused is Don B. Reynolds, a low grade Whittaker Chambers sort of figure (he even has a Maryland farm) with a penchant for moral rather than ideological melodrama...
...Because of his bumptious and mercurial manner, Saxon has succeeded in sowing enemies everywhere, from the White House and his fellow regulators to the old-line banking interests that long prospered under monopoly conditions...
...and Professor Harold Berman of Harvard...
...Yet we suspect that in the long run Mr...
...he is familiar to many in Washington for his passionate concern for the farmer—not as a statistical abstraction but as a person...
...Two Washington housewives are showing more spunk in opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee than the vast majority of tremulous House liberals...
...Meanwhile, there is no small irony in the fact that one of the principal Senate investigators into irregularities in the banking system, John J. McClel-lan, Arkansas Democrat, is himself a director of the First National Bank of Little Rock, a fact which sparks a memory of a distant past...
...But these points are made in the greatest privacy and are hedged with all sorts of cautioning qualifications...
...It would be nothing short of miraculous if no prominent Democrats or Republicans were interested in the hundreds of charters issued by Saxon since he became Comptroller...
...Johnson is impatient with dissent and (unlike his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt) often refuses to see that a diversity of opinion increases his freedom of movement...
...These charges are not altogether un-tinctured with political motivation but they do have a simple-minded appeal...
...For all his faults of abrasiveness, Saxon has wrought a small revolution in American banking...
...And it must be acknowledged that in a short-run tactical sense, Congressional dissent complicates Mr...
...This was the designation of Robert G. Lewis as administrator of the Rural Community Development Service in the Department of Agriculture...
...Katzenbach represented no such inquiry...
...Johnson's diplomacy...
...So the Senator did invite testimony on East-West trade, and three foremost authorities came to Washington: George Kennan, former Ambassador to Yugoslavia...
...attacks of the previous decade...
...That to us is the saddest aspect of the White House quarrel with the Senate dissenters...
...The Bobby Baker case may well earn a rating from history as the most bungled performance ever undertaken by a Congressional investigating committee...
...President Johnson is making no secret of his displeasure with Senators like Frank Church, Gaylord Nelson, and George McGovern who have raised temperate questions about the South Vietnam mess (the White House has all but relegated to limbo such all-out heretics as Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening...
...Sir," wrote Senator Daniel Webster to Nicholas Biddle, president of the National Bank in 1833, "since I have arrived here, I have had an application to be concerned professionally, against the Bank, which I have declined, although I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed, as usual...
...Katzenbach should never have been a party to this document, which is short on conclusive findings but long on self-serving denials...
...Johnson may have reason to be grateful to the Senate dissenters...
...And there is the hidden dimension to the whole controversy—the Committee's authentically un-American attack on the right to petition and the right to travel...
...The hearings produced a powerful factual case for more normal trade relations with the East...
...But nobody was listening—especially those Senate liberals who succumbed to the demagogic temptation of opposing freer trade with Poland and Yugoslavia...
...Professor Isaiah Frank of Johns Hopkins...
...Saxon has opened the doors of the banking industry to all elements of American society and has also broken up the stagnant bank monopolies throughout the nation...
...The fact is that the Administration is grappling with a short-term crisis in which it could be damaging to concede these points in public...
...Still, if they were engulfed by letters of denunciation it would be a true symptom of a war fever sweeping the country...
...The consumer can thank him for having made the money business competitive...
...The issue at stake is doubly important...
...If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers...
...Because of his grating personal style and his refusal to practice diplomacy when it was a genuine alternative to conflict, Saxon has finally made his position untenable in the Administration...
...One cannot make too many generalizations about letters to Senators...
...Nor does Senator Thomas Dodd risk official displeasure by urging the country to the very brink of global conflict...
...Johnson's dictionary...
...The visa was granted...
...Yet it is interesting that mail to Senators who dissent from Administration policy on Vietnam has run strongly in support of their position —as high as twenty-five to one...
...He began at once to war with the two other agencies in the national bank regulatory family —the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...
...It would be difficult to find a better man for the job...
...Even though Reynolds may have been a proven character assassin, in the style of the McCarthy era, he has already demonstrated that he knew too much about Bobby Baker's Washington...
...The Justice Department has joined in the shabby campaign to discredit the witness without really trying to determine the truth or falsity of his allegations...
...When it opened nearly a year and a half ago the inquiry centered on former Senate Majority Secretary Robert Gene Baker, who had just resigned following the first stream of disclosures that he had milked his public office for private emolument...
...power cannot forever prop up a ring of hostile states around a China that is becoming the paramount power in Asia...
...As it sputters on the stench becomes more odious...
...He was once a midwestern farmer, and has worked variously for the Rural Electrification Administration, the Farmers Union, and Gay lord Nelson (when he was governor of Wisconsin...
...For the last several months the investigation has revolved around Reynolds with the Senate Rules Committee staff applying its unimpressive skills to the job of breaking down Reynolds' credibility, thereby taking the heat off Baker...
...Kennan is known as a provocative source of opinion, yet the press was massively disinterested...
...But Mr...
...At the same time, the State Department legal division is preparing a comprehensive new passport law for submission to Congress...
...James J. Saxon became something of an enfant terrible in Washington almost from the very minute that President Kennedy named him Comptroller of the Currency...
...Only a handful of Senator Fulbright's colleagues were present, even though Senators clamor for assignment to the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee...
...POTOMACUS...
...He has democratized commercial banking as no Comptroller before him...
...Until he came along the banking community was one of the last exclusive economic preserves of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, our untitled aristocracy...
...Both the Republican and Democratic leadership has avoided like the plague the mandate to appoint members to the so-called Senate Committee on Ethics, authorized by resolution last July...
...Few were around to hear Professor Frank make the cogent point that although the United States imposes a selective embargo on trade with the Communist world, Western Europe has felt free to sell to the Soviet Union hundreds of millions of dollars worth of machinery and equipment...
...It is widely expected that he will soon step down from his job as Comptroller, if, indeed, he has not already done so by the time this is published...
...The Committee is outraged by State Department officials who believe too firmly in freedom and who waive Mc-Carran Act restrictions on granting visas to visitors with left-wing connections...
...One recent Johnson Administration appointment gave us special pleasure...
...It is clearly the duty of the Rules Committee and the FBI to conduct a searching and impeccable investigation of any evidence Reynolds or any other witness has...
...Thus the Senate dissenters may well be advance agents for a future consensus—to use the favorite word in Mr...
...The two housewives sinned by visiting the State Department to request visa clearance for a pacifist Japanese professor who wished to lecture in America...
...Clearly not...
...This is the broader fight in which the housewives are incidental casualties...
Vol. 29 • April 1965 • No. 4
