THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington The most dismaying footnote to the Vietnamese crisis is the ignoble collapse of the State Department. It was quite typical of Secretary of State Rusk, for example, that he...
...Johnson to reject the idea...
...In the present imbroglio, he is the author of quite possibly the most fatuous diplomatic formulation of the postwar years—that the Vietcong "must stop what they are doing" as a precondition for talks...
...As a result, the prospects for Senator Edmund S. Muskie's air pollution control bill are now buried under layers of political murk...
...For all the sound, smoke, and fury there are three basic issues in the controversy: first is a health warning on each pack of cigarettes, an innovation that the industry is prepared to accept if the warnings are sufficiently innocuous...
...Bass, he protested, was merely parroting the "party line" of the cigarette advertising men...
...It was quite typical of Secretary of State Rusk, for example, that he was out of town (in Teheran, at a CENTO meeting) when President Johnson gave his important April 7 speech on Southeast Asia...
...But, alas, Pearson spoke out in public before he conferred with President Johnson in private at Camp David...
...Senators Vance Hartke of Indiana and Ross Bass of Tennessee, both Democrats, performed valorously for the tobacco industry during the Senate Commerce Committee hearings on cigarette advertising legislation...
...The Secretary, it is said, conceives of his role as being that of a chairman of the board...
...Public Health Service submitted the results of a poll during the hearing showing that two out of every three persons queried wanted advertisers to use health warnings, Hartke branded it as "propaganda...
...The Hoosier Senator also tried, but failed, to strike from the record a witness' statement that the 44.7 per cent increase recently in cigarette-related respiratory diseases "was so marked that it overshadowed a remarkable decline in the same period in deaths from communicable respiratory diseases . . . " Bass was not to be outdone...
...Petty stuff, surely, when the stakes are so high...
...Among the names mentioned are Under Secretary George Ball, Senator J. William Fulbright, Ambassador David Bruce, and Presidential aide McGeorge Bundy...
...Information from a variety of sources supports the conviction that the air strikes are the biggest single barrier to the beginning of talks...
...He does not assert leadership—in fact, he hardly ever expresses an opinion...
...Our favorite candidate, for what it is worth, is a true dark-horse: Senator George McGovern, who has taken a dissenting position on Vietnam and who has maintained it with uncommon good sense, temperateness, and eloquence...
...Johnson...
...Pearson, speaking in New York, urged some form of international presence in Vietnam...
...Yet Rusk is not an unintelligent or incompetent official—he just happens to be a first-class subordinate, a kind of permanent secretary in the British civil service tradition...
...We confess to a touch of nostalgia for the sharply-defined combat line between the two principal political forces that existed last year between the Democrats and the Goldwaterites—especially in the area of foreign policy, with President Johnson then holding firm against adventurism in Southeast Asia and evangelizing for an honorable peace...
...There is some fine-cured irony in the last point...
...Even persons who work closely with him are not sure what his convictions are...
...Take Winston Churchill, intoned the Senator from Tennessee: "A cigar was his symbol...
...And none other than Barry Goldwater proclaims the Johnson Administration to be the conservator of Goldwaterism...
...The President, said Goldwater, is "moving firmly and decisively on a foreign policy course charted straight out of the Republican campaign of 1964...
...Those who believe that a good dose of violence will bring the Vietcong and Hanoi to heel have less inhibition about pressing their views on Mr...
...Ray Bliss, the new G.O.P...
...Johnson's temper...
...The result is that the State Department has all but abdicated its traditional role as the proponent of diplomacy at the bureaucratic summit...
...Only last December, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze had said that because of the swiftly-spreading bane of automotive air pollution "effective control of these emissions is needed now...
...We would like to think that the story is unworthy of Mr...
...Johnson...
...The tobacco men from the states-rights-conscious South are fearful that some states may go beyond the bounds of Federal legislation and enact far tougher restrictions on cigarette huckstering...
...We pass on without comment this tip to investors from a Washington stock market research service: ". . . To suit all market tastes, Moody's Stock Survey issued a list of Anti-Poverty stocks: Allegheny Power, American Electric Power, Columbia Gas, Ky...
...To the incredulity of some witnesses in the room, Bass then recalled the famous figures in history who were confirmed tobacco addicts...
...That was too much lor Emerson Foote, former cigarette advertising account executive who is now one of the leading voices for health-warning legislation...
...President Johnson has turned it into a benevolent inca-pacitator which has disarmed some of the most bristling Republican partisans...
...Rusk, speculation has quickened about a possible successor...
...ground forces in Vietnam and the air attacks...
...But there is enough precedent to warn us that it would be unrealistic to rule out the influence of temper tantrums on our Vietnam policy...
...The circumstances remained mysterious, although it seemed clear that the tug had been applied at the White House...
...second is the inclusion of warnings in all cigarette advertising, a step that the cigarette manufacturers adamantly oppose...
...How all-pervading is the balm of consensus politics...
...Most of our traditional allies, for another, are privately critical of the attacks, however fulsome their public expressions of support...
...Ciga-arette advertising, he scoffed, didn't make new smokers...
...Utilities, and Penna...
...Moderation" is now the password in Republican leadership councils as the Spirit of the Cow Palace fades into the nightmare memory of the debacle last November...
...There is also Hubert Humphrey—but the Vice President has been all but shut out of the meaningful small-group discussions on Vietnam...
...Several high officials could fill the void left by the super-passive Secretary of State...
...It simply switched them from one brand to another...
...Somehow the rug had been pulled out from under the Senator from Maine...
...Medicare isn't comprehensive enough...
...For thy sake, Tobacco," wrote Charles Lamb in 1818, "I would do anything but die...
...The Administration has cast a grievous pall of smog over efforts on Capitol Hill to deal with the problem of automotive air pollution...
...Appeals must be made for the support of labor, Negroes, and the rest of the alienated minority vote...
...It would be the ultimate in elephant jokes...
...During two great crises of the Kennedy era—the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile confrontation—Rusk expressed himself so circumspectly that insiders are uncertain where he really stood...
...he veils every utterance in pretentious doubletalk...
...what has been missing is comparable counterpressure from the diplomatic side...
...As the G.O.P...
...Last month, Pearson was even more outspoken...
...By writing a preemption into the law, which would prohibit the states from getting into the regulatory picture, the cigarette industry would keep the issue in a forum where tobacco's political grip is strong...
...Power &: Light, which they believe should benefit from LBJ's Appalachia bill —Potomacus...
...It would be enormously reassuring if the kinds of arguments raised by McGovern were heard where they counted within the Administration, for this able freshman Senator from South Dakota is making the case for an active diplomacy that should be made by the Secretary of State...
...We must develop Constructive Alternatives," they keep panting at party seminars in breathless efforts to keep up with Mr...
...Sic semper consensus...
...As a result of the feeble performance of Mr...
...Ambassador has been an invisible man in Washington...
...The words seem more fitting now than ever before...
...There is Adlai Stevenson, for example—but the estimable U.N...
...Humphrey is so concerned about maintaining friendly relations with the President that he has been muting his views— at least this is a prevailing impression in Washington...
...The trouble with the Great Society, to listen to some Republican oracles, is not that it goes too far but that its scope is too restricted...
...Richard Nixon, for example, now acclaims the President as "the ablest politician to be in the White House in this century"—no mean tribute from the man who came within a whisker of winning the Presidency...
...We can already see the bumper stickers...
...The pressure from the Pentagon is insistent and explicit...
...The Soviets, for one, make a distinction between U.S...
...As this is written, the bombings continue in Vietnam and the world teeters ever more perilously on the brink...
...This disquiet among our friends came to light when Prime Minister Lester Pearson made a visit to the United States in March...
...Quigley did allow that Health, Education, and Welfare, under a mandate from the President, was engaged in direct discussion with the auto manufacturers on the pollution question...
...It was with bafflement and dismay, therefore, that the Subcommittee heard one of Celebrezze's underlings, Assistant Secretary James M. Quigley, propose that the legislation be put off indefinitely, and that Congress wait, instead, for voluntary compliance from Detroit...
...He told an audience in Philadelphia that he felt that there should be a pause in the bombing attacks...
...The word around Washington is that Johnson was furious with the Canadian Prime Minister...
...Moreover, Mr...
...Up to the point of public hearings early in April before his Special Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, the Maine Democrat was confident that the Administration was fully behind his proposal to require clean-exhaust systems in all new cars, beginning with 1968 models...
...But now the Democratic donkey is growing an elephantine foreign policy trunk while the GOP elephant is learning to produce a consensual bray in domestic affairs...
...Johnson...
...Conceivably it could all end in a Johnson-Nixon ticket by 1968...
...If the proposals for health warnings are rejected by Congress at this session, it might indeed be fitting for the industry to salute the two Senators by putting their faces on every pack...
...The political air seemed clear enough...
...third is the question of Congress pre-empting all authority over cigarette advertising—curiously, a prime legislative goal of the industry...
...Rusk did not participate in the policy-making discussions that preceded the speech—and his absence made no difference at all...
...There is nothing that the President is touchier about than attempts to pressure him into action through newspaper stories—and the Pearson proposals made good stories...
...Mods see it, the voting rights bill needs broadening...
...When will the United States call a halt to the bombings and give diplomacy a chance...
...national chairman and the very figurehead of the Mod-Movement, suggests that the superannuated slogan —Grand Old Party—be excised from history and replaced with "Golden Opportunity Party" and "Government of the People...
...The President, it is said, was contemplating a pause in the air attacks, but Pearson's speech played a part in causing Mr...
...It is difficult to say how all this will affect the Federal Trade Commission's long-deferred regulation to require that both the cigarette pack and advertising carry health warnings...
...One theory making the rounds provides a measure of the general assessment of Mr...
...Party line or not, Bass retorted, "I believe it...
...When the U.S...
Vol. 29 • May 1965 • No. 5
