THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington Two Days in May (with apologies to Messrs. Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey) would provide an apt title for the definitive account, when it is written, of the U.S....
...Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum is merely mild distaste compared to the bureaucracy's loathing for an appropriation unspent...
...Significantly, the lowest step in Herman Kahn's escalation ladder is labeled "cold war...
...At the United States Office of Education, which has presided over the distribution of hundreds of millions of Federal dollars to segregated Southern schools, grizzled officials are shaking their heads over the activities of their agency's new Equal Educational Opportunities staff...
...It was in his impromptu television address to the nation on the night of Sunday, May 2 that President Johnson publicly pinned Communist horns on the rebellion...
...intervention in the Dominican rebellion...
...It struck us most keenly, for some reason, as we watched Mrs...
...And the simple-minded realpolitik of the hawks in the White House and Pentagon seems now to have become the first rung of American policy...
...Potomacus...
...Bosch cried out from exile: "Something evil is happening...
...The prose, with its barbarous pretentiousness, would be ludicrous if it didn't seem to fit the mood and mentality of the Johnson Administration these days...
...Here, again, is Armageddon, a la Kahn, nicely bureaucratized for the military mind —complete with charts and diagrams...
...But there is also increasing resignation to the fact that the flow of Federal funds must be maintained, even if it means compliance with the law...
...In these circumstances, the temptation will be great for Russell to tread the path of demagoguery or at least equivocation...
...New and higher appropriation requests must be justified, and a surplus makes for a poor argument...
...Juan Bosch—hooded in black and with mourning mien—at the meeting of the OAS consultative assembly during which delegates agonized over the mangled remains of her husband's revolution...
...The season explodes here in a chromatic blaze of dogwood, tulips, azaleas, and picket signs...
...The figures were further broken down in terms of two types of activities—program development and program administration...
...Even at that point, however, the high-level leaksmen were not ready to charge that the Communists had seized control...
...Here is Kahn, the elephantine pedant with his "propaedeutic and heuristic methodologies" ("Wow, The Real Stuff...
...While the birds chittered overhead in Lafayette Park, those who endured Auschwitz, Buchen-wald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau sang, "We survived...
...The rate of recruitment has tapered off, and so have the bulletins from the Peace Corps...
...hard-liners in Washington and Santo Domingo were sniping at him with those very charges mouthed by the junta leaders who drove him from office: he is soft on Communism...
...We wish him well...
...he is undependable...
...When we get a hot one, we'll drop it on him...
...Next year Russell must run for election to the Senate, and he faces certain opposition by a Thurmond-style Republican...
...Don't worry," one Kennedy aide remarked recently...
...We believe a recent statistical salvo from Shriver's office surpasses all previous efforts and may warrant at least a temporary cease-fire...
...As governor—the post he resigned to fill the seat of the late Senator Olin Johnston—he directed the peaceful desegregation of Clemson University, demanded compliance with court desegregation orders, and devoted his energies to improving the state's sorry school system...
...This year, twenty springs after the liberation of Europe from Nazism, half a thousand survivors of Hitler's death camps came to Washington to pay solemn, subdued thanks...
...Some of the tabulations have been forwarded to President Johnson, to be recited to weary White House correspondents in lieu of answers to hard questions at press conferences...
...This was for President Johnson (whose aversion to being scooped by subordinates is now legendary) to do...
...Its title, On Escalation...
...Javits aides charged that the Syracuse visit was a put-up job, designed to steal headlines for Kennedy...
...Few cities are so exalted by spring as Washington...
...At the Department of Agriculture, for example, where cheerful collaboration with all-white county committees in the South has been the rule for generations, administrators reacted with obvious dismay^-and with less obvious attempts at evasion—to the suggestion that Federal assistance must henceforth be channeled through biracial local agencies...
...There's all that money to be spent...
...Herman Rahn-on-the-Hudson, the sly chronicler of Doomsday, is out with a new how-to-do-it manual...
...in effect, it defined as thirteen years the "all deliberate speed" timetable which the Supreme Court laid down in its school desegregation decision of 1954...
...Bosch himself, in exile on American soil, was a broken and bitter man...
...Among the white supremacist officials of the South, there is still some hope that the bureaucratic libido for spending will prevail over the inhibitions of Title VI...
...The segregationist state school superintendent of Alabama recently told fellow educators: "The first Reconstruction was hell, and we had to pay for it...
...The President met the Dominican challenge more in the spirit of Caesar and Wessin y Wessin than in that of Isaiah, his favorite prophet...
...Herein lies the essential difference between the Kennedy Doctrine and the Johnson Doctrine...
...Each year at this time, therefore, those Federal agencies that have failed for one reason or another to expend all the funds Congress has allocated go on a frantic fiscal-year-end spending spree...
...I have previously stated," said Kennedy, "and I repeat now, that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba...
...But they have been replaced by his statistic-studded communiques from the War on Poverty...
...And the long-run consequences, it is feared by some here, could prove more ruinous to hemispheric relations than the Bay of Pigs...
...Even Paul Douglas of Illinois manages to maintain tranquil relations with his junior colleague, Everett Dirksen, the oleaginous Minority Leader...
...Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel's ruling that school districts must plan for full desegregation by the fall of 1967 in order to continue receiving Federal aid was hardly revolutionary...
...South Carolina's new self-made Senator, Donald B. Russell, brings to the Capitol a promising background and a challenging future...
...The complaint seems to have been inaccurate, for the Syracuse visit had been on the Kennedy schedule for weeks...
...But the Senate, as befits a gentlemen's club, usually operates with more noblesse oblige...
...From across the street, and across those twenty years, it was possible to read the Nazi sign that said Gas—Jew—Communist Traitors...
...Until the Dominican crisis, nearly all of President Johnson's foreign policy headaches, from Hanoi to Paris, were inherited from his predecessors...
...Truth, Bosch might have added, is the first casualty of war...
...There was a Sophoclean awfulness about the events of those thirty-six hours...
...It was a fitting denouement to those Two Days in May...
...Kahn's latest book makes its appearance as the cold war clouds gather with ominous portent over Washington and as the polarizing currents make themselves felt from the Caribbean to the South Pacific...
...Fortune magazine's May issue renders Kahn's "escalation chart" in eye-catching mega-color, from cold war blues to the calamity pink of "spasm or Insensate War...
...In the early days of his Peace Corps, news media received almost daily releases on the numbers of applicants, trainees, and Corpsmen actually in the field...
...In the event of any military intervention by outside force we will immediately honor our obligations under the inter-American system to protect this hemisphere against external aggression...
...But Robert Kennedy made it clear from the outset that he intended to go it alone...
...Predictably, the Sunday newspapers flowered with fuzzily-attributed background stories on Communist infiltration of the Bosch revolution...
...At one point this spring, grants totaling more than $200 million were held up because the school districts for which they were intended had failed to furnish satisfactory evidence of non-discrimination...
...We are advised, perhaps inaccurately, that compilation of the data consumed 2,356 man- (or woman-) minutes in the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...Even before they could break into print, reports on the numbers of VISTA volunteers, Project Head-Start applications, Community Action programs, and Job Corps trainees have been superseded by still newer reports containing still higher figures...
...The compulsive urge to disburse is —and as bureaucrats see it, properly ought to be—among the chief attributes of the successful civil servant...
...It means the interminable lines of tourists trampling through the White House and under President Johnson's bed in the mornings...
...Relations were frayed even further when Kennedy, visiting Syracuse for a luncheon with faculty members of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship, used the occasion to announce a Federal anti-poverty grant to the city...
...A fascination for figures has characterized the public careers of Sargent Shriver...
...Responding to criticism of inadequate involvement of the poor at the planning and policy level of the War on Poverty, Shriver submitted a "compilation of data" to the House (ad hoc) Subcommittee on Poverty—-and the press...
...It may be well to recall President Kennedy's reply to former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's threat to come to the aid of Cuba during the initial Bay of Pigs landings...
...And it demonstrated, above all, that Lyndon Johnson has little patience for temporizing with the volatile realities of pro-democratic government in Latin America, where the scars of social injustice are so widespread, the demand for reform so hot, and the institutions of constitutional self-rule so new...
...But he has the makings of statesmanship at a time when the South is desperately in need of statesmen...
...As president of the University of South Carolina, he infused academic strength into a feeble and floundering institution...
...Spring in Washington means the hallowed silliness of the Cherry Blossom Festival and the Daughters of the American Revolution (who, sad to say, have grown antiseptically tame...
...we can almost hear the War College boys exclaiming) and his avowed aim to "stimulate and stretch the imagination...
...Peaceful coexistence is the general pattern among the Senate's split delegations...
...This second Reconstruction is hell too, but this time they're paying for it...
...that these boards also included precisely 625 Negroes, and that they enrolled 462 "members of other minority groups...
...There is a tremendous conspiracy against the truth...
...Across Pennsylvania Avenue, on the broad White House greens, a huge fountain splashed the sunlight about...
...OEO Inspector General William Haddad, who reviews the applications for anti-poverty funds, is talking tough to program chiefs who want to bypass the strictures of Title VI...
...The discomfiture of Washington's veteran civil servants has been plain to see...
...This year, however, the normally painless process of expenditure has been impeded by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits payment of Federal funds to segregated activities of state and local governments...
...For it was during a thirty-six-hour period—from the morning of May 1 to President Johnson's night telecast on May 2—that the Big Stick reappeared over the Caribbean and shattered the frail hemispheric rule of law embodied in the charter of the Organization of American States...
...In addition, Senator J. Strom Thurmond himself, the GOP's dubious dividend from the Goldwater campaign, will be waging a vigorous campaign for reelection...
...A fragile truce prevails, at this writing, between New York's two combative Senators...
...For on the morning of May 1 the telephones of a select group of Washington newsmen began jingling with calls from high Administration officials who spoke privately of CIA lists of Communist leaders in the pro-Bosch rebellion...
...We understand, however, that the Office of Economic Opportunity was not unaware of Kennedy's travel plans when it timed the release of the grant announcement...
...Robert F. Kennedy, who has irked his seniors by spurning the passive, pliant pose traditionally required of freshmen, has agreed to share with his Republican colleague all announcements of Federal actions—especially grants—affecting the state...
...The disclosure of Federal projects by Congressmen of the party in power is a time-honored practice in the House, though the outs invariably grumble about the publicity benefits reaped by the ins...
...From it we learned that no fewer than 1,413 "representatives of the poor" were serving on governing bodies of local anti-poverty programs...
...The civil rights revolution is all right in its place, they feel, but halting the flow of public money is carrying things just a bit too far...
...The Sunday night speech was also the President's vehicle for enunciating a new Johnson Doctrine for the American hemisphere...
...Metaphors and Scenarios, is certain to titillate the professional Cold Warriors-on-the-Potomac...
...Jacob K. Javits, for his part, has shelved a threatened Senate speech denouncing Kennedy for refusing to play the game...
...Pennsylvania Democrat Joseph S. Clark, for instance, joins with Republican Hugh Scott in jolly repartee of the Gallagher-Sheen variety...
...His first legislative effort, a successful amendment to include thirteen New York counties in the Administration's Appalachia aid program, was undertaken without prior consultation with Javits, in violation of a cardinal precept in the Senate's baroque structure of unwritten rules...
...It was after the Syracuse episode that Javits threatened to air his grievances on the Senate floor...
...How long the truce will last is anyone's guess, but given the aggressive enthusiasm of the Kennedy staff a renewal of news-handout hostilities against Javits appears likely...
...But the rebellion in Santo Domingo was a purely Johnsonian challenge...
...Not until three days later did the government issue a background statement, in effect a Dominican White Paper, prepared by official intelligence sources which, under the ground rules, could not be identified publicly...
...Drawing, perhaps, on his experience with the Chicago Merchandise Mart, he has sent marching from his offices a parade of success statistics matched only by the tabulations found in annual corporate reports...
...And five American Nazis, in khakis and swastikas, paraded in a sullen circle, walled in by police...
...Nonetheless, there were some on the Commissioner's staff who felt his decision was extreme...
...It dazzles the eye and infects the most jaded heart with a sense of renewal...
...Even among the brave anti-poverty warriors of the Office of Economic Opportunity (which got off to a late start and must spend around the clock to meet the June 30 deadline), attempts have been made to rush approval of grants that would violate the Civil Rights Act...
...And how timely...
Vol. 29 • June 1965 • No. 6
