THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The political fog index in Lyndon • Johnson's Washington is rising almost as alarmingly as the latest figures on U.S. troop landings in Vietnam. It is a natural enough occurrence. The warm air...
...It was the President's finest speech—a sensitive acknowledgement that "in the battle for true equality too many, far too many, are losing ground every day...
...The distinction between the two types of criticism, Alsop adds, "is exactly like the difference between arguing where to go before a journey begins, and persistently back-seat driving after the journey reaches the most perilous mountain road...
...If this is a deliberate design on the part of the President—a form of calculated, Pavlovian disorientation of the Communist world—there is little evidence of success so far...
...Even as Mr...
...Senatorial dignity has always been offended by suggestions that steps should be taken to guard against conflict of interest in the legislative branch...
...An outstanding example was the recent dispute between the State Department and the White House over the combat role of U.S...
...It can only be conjectured that President Johnson vaulted through the White House roof when he picked up The Times...
...Viola Liuzzo was murdered on an Alabama highway-would be deferred while the House Committee on Un-American Activities applied its peculiar talents to an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan...
...Important members of Congress and some of the most astute diplomatic careerists in the capital are becoming increasingly restive under the Johnson foreign policy doctrine...
...In Stalinist jargon, the Alsop Corollary is known as "democratic centralism...
...I don't think we need it...
...a stirring pledge "to move beyond opportunity to achievement...
...Black is white and white is black— or so the Administration seemed to be saying that Wednesday morning to as perplexed a contingent of newsmen as ever filed into the White House press office...
...While the President spoke of the great satisfaction with which he would sign the new voting rights bill, his legislative lobbyists worked overtime in the House to eliminate from the measure a flat ban on the poll tax in state and local elections...
...Office of Education announced that "freedom of choice" pupil assignment plans which in Dixie have, with the rarest exceptions, permitted nothing but token school desegregation, would be acceptable under Title VI...
...Johnson spoke, some of his aides were fighting a rearguard action against demands for expansion of the three-year-old Executive Order on housing discrimination, which has had only a minimal impact on residential racial barriers...
...He has complained, from time to time, about a lack of "volunteers" for the Committee...
...State's press officer, Robert McClos-key, announced that authority had been granted for use of American troops in combat operations to support the South Vietnamese...
...For the Administration, as well as for American Negroes, it is time to move beyond opportunity to achievement...
...For reasons never explained, the President waited until May—ten months after he signed the Civil Rights Act—to appoint the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission authorized by the law...
...Proposals for disclosure of outside interests have repeatedly been rebuffed...
...They are "soft-headed" at best, "malicious" at worst, peddlers of "petty rubbish," and advocates of "betrayal...
...The fog index continues to rise...
...Alsop puts it this way: "No special harm is done overseas by pointing out that the government is not doing this, that, or the other which may need doing...
...But those who looked beyond the rhetoric to the Administration's actual civil rights achievements could say with the President, "not enough, not enough...
...If the facts are correctly presented, the result is at worst a minor, soon-forgotten contribution to the national debate...
...There is a growing conviction that foreign policy is too important to leave to the War Room...
...The U.S...
...He didn't get around to it, somehow, but when the Eighty-ninth Congress convened in January, Mansfield predicted appointments "within a week...
...If you want to set up a police force in the Senate to police ourselves, go ahead and do it," Jordan said...
...Next morning The New York Times concluded editorially that the United States was now engaged in an officially-recognized ground war on the Asian continent...
...approached the target date with no staff, no regulations, no office space...
...Under the resolution, sponsored by Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, the bipartisan Committee was to investigate violations of existing rules, recommend disciplinary action, and propose additional regulations "necessary or desirable to insure proper standards of conduct" by Senators and their employes...
...On the other hand, when the government has committed itself to a delicate and dangerous course of action, the limits are far more narrow...
...This was so, despite White House protestations that nothing had changed...
...It is permissible, says columnist Joseph Alsop, to take the Administration to task for failure to act, but reprehensible to question its actions...
...There are going to be some Negro teachers who will lose their jobs...
...For the iron and bamboo curtains seem to be drawing together while Washington is pulling apart...
...Public service would not be worth it," says Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who contends that publication of his private resources would reduce him to second-class citizenship...
...No Senator has yet been selected to serve on the Select Committee...
...The warm air rising from the higher councils of the Administration is colliding with the chilly blasts of journalistic intelligence from such critical fronts as Santo Domingo and Saigon...
...When the Cooper resolution was passed, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana promised that the six-man Committee would be named "either this month or next...
...To hear the condemnations of the press in the highest quarters of the Johnson Administration is to be reminded of the paranoic ravings of the Goldwaterites against the "Eastern Establishment press" during last year's campaign...
...When civil rights leaders protested against "wholesale dismissal" of Negro teachers in the South, an unflappable Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare observed: "There is nothing in the Civil Rights Act that requires placing of Negro teachers...
...Almost a year has passed since the Senate, squirming in the uncomfortable spotlight of the Bobby Baker case, voted to establish a Select Committee on Standards and Conduct...
...We hope the White House conference on civil rights to be held in the fall will address itself to these and other gaps in Federal performance...
...Discrepancies between official pronouncements and the reporting of reputable newspapermen in the Dominican Republic were so profound as to tar thoroughly the government's credibility...
...The Administration approached the end of the fiscal year with a marked reluctance to invoke Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars Federal financial aid to discriminatory state and local programs...
...The need to tell the truth is still the same, but the official view of the truth needs to be given the benefit of the doubt until decisive proof to the contrary is forthcoming...
...1 "Equal opportunity is essential but not enough, not enough," President Johnson said in his powerful and perceptive commencement address at Howard University...
...One of the few Senators to oppose the Cooper resolution last year was B. Everett Jordan, the bumbling North Carolinian who has had the unenviable task of presiding over the Rules Committee's on-again, off-again Baker investigation...
...POTOMACUS...
...The zigs and zags of public policy and Administration statements on Vietnam have become so bewildering that even within government the left foot seems unable to disentangle itself from the right foot...
...One of the President's closest confidantes expressed this journal-phobia admirably when he proclaimed in the White House lobby that a New York Times reporter, who covered the Dominican rebellion with distinction, could be equated with three battalions of the enemy...
...It is an established fact, though, that by noon of the same day his press secretary George Reedy had a new statement prepared denying that there had been a change in the U.S...
...troops in Vietnam...
...Now the White Doctrine has been refined by an Alsop Corollary...
...But last July, with a national election in the offing and the revelations of the Baker case in the headlines, the Senate voted sixty-one to nineteen to establish the Committee on Standards and Conduct...
...The complex fair employment provisions go into effect July 2, and Congress provided for a full year of advance preparations...
...Then he announced he would be "available" as a candidate for the mayoralty of New York City...
...Johnson's dramatic television appearance after Mrs...
...Instead, Commission Chairman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr...
...The President himself professes in his public utterances to welcome debate, but savagely disapproves in private of newsmen whose dispatches do not conform to the official view of events...
...We have heard a similar case made in behalf of Communist Party discipline...
...Because of very limited enforcement powers, we may have difficulty carrying out the full intent of the Act," Roosevelt said...
...His judgment has been supported by his colleagues, if not by events...
...William S. White, President Johnson's adulatory Boswell, has left readers of his syndicated newspaper column in no doubt about critics of the Administration's foreign policy...
...At the Justice Department it was announced that drafting of new legislation designed to curb racist terrorism in the South—the law promised in Mr...
...In practical effect, there was little meaningful difference between the two statements...
...troop mission for Vietnam—or that there was anything new in the authority to use American troops for combat operations...
...Both made it clear that the role of American forces in Vietnam had passed beyond the advisory stage that had been acknowledged during the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
