THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington In his message asking for temporary suspension of the seven per cent tax credit on corporate investment, President Johnson told Congress, "I am going to cut all Federal...
...But he didn't really mean all Federal expenditures, as the rest of the message made clear...
...Suspension of the investment tax credit on new equipment and the fast tax write-off on new structures are small steps in the right direction, but further curtailment of domestic programs that have already been hobbled would be a sorry substitute for other affirmative action...
...No nation ever enjoyed such prosperity," the President reminded Congress, but non-white unemployment stands at 8.2 per cent and another long, hot summer has provided grim testimony of the frustrations felt by many Americans who have heard talk —but have seen no tangible evidence —of a Great Society...
...There was something for almost everyone in the testimony delivered in the ornate Senate Caucus Room—high drama and low comedy, money and sex, pale pedagogy and frolicking politics...
...This therapeutic possibility is implicit in the latest of the agency's un-Bondish misadventures—the case of the vanishing jewels...
...No government official has the authority to lie, but he has the duty to protect his country...
...For sophisticates there was the deft, oh so deft, needling of the President by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who barely hinted at broken promises...
...The Word from Washington In his message asking for temporary suspension of the seven per cent tax credit on corporate investment, President Johnson told Congress, "I am going to cut all Federal expenditures to the fullest extent consistent with the well-being of our people...
...Mansfield believes in the power of history to help heal the wounds of Vietnam...
...For wrestling fans there was that clumsiest of "heavies," Mayor Samuel W. Yorty of Los Angeles, and juggling devotees had that artful trickster, Representative Adam Clayton Powell...
...There is private agreement within the highest circles of the Administration that the size of the U.S...
...Nobody was handing out either commodity...
...Johnson's State of the Union message last January contained similar assurances, even while anti-poverty and education programs were being reduced to meet the mounting needs of the war...
...But it is equally unrealistic to act as if, in such a prosperous America, the people of Watts and Hough and Harlem will be satisfied with the status quo...
...The quorum bells rang, the audiences left, blinking in the afternoon sunlight, and nothing was changed...
...To speak of tax increases a month before election day may be politically unrealistic...
...But life in the secret service is never secure...
...His message to Congress acknowledged that "it would be shortsighted to abandon the tasks of educating our children, providing for their health, rebuilding the decaying cities in which they live, and otherwise promoting the general welfare...
...Only a few months earlier, at one of the cheery high spots in the manicdepressive cycle of official Vietnam assessments, the Administration was talking of reducing arms procurement to avoid excessive stockpiles once the war was "won...
...It must be based on truth...
...Across the country the political atmosphere is steeped with grim triviality...
...The climax came when Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, and his reform school friend, Arthur Dunmeyer, told about Harlem the way it is—sordid and tough and sick...
...This time Senator Mansfield carried with him a group of influential Senators...
...troop presence in Europe is grotesquely disproportionate to our military and economic interests...
...But the fact is that the Administration has been mesmerized by fear against altering the course of military escalation...
...On the question of troop reduction in Europe the senior Senator from Montana has also opened the door to public discussion on a matter that the President would have preferred to keep from general view...
...It would be ironic indeed if the Senate, the nation's most celebrated gentleman's club, should also be its last town hall...
...In New York City the Liberal Party, that stern force of conscience, anointed former Trujillo lobbyist and politically fickle Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., as its knight-errant in the quest for the gubernatorial grail (and Liberal Party survival...
...None of the Democratic Party's chief figures was engaged in major contests of power, which most likely explains the drabness of the primary season...
...He told us again last month when he testified before Senator J . W. Fulbright's Committee on Foreign Relations...
...But the Democrats were also afflicted with a spirit of consensus at a time when differences on the big national questions could most profitably have been debated, as they had been in the U.S...
...Could it be that there ^were secret strategy meetings at the Langley, Vir ginia, intelligence fortress on the sub ject of how to slip the Tofte jewels into the path of the insurance investi gators...
...We are pleased to have the Assistant Secretary set the record straight, and we accept his reassurances as factual...
...The New York Liberal Party's willingness to temporize with liberal scruples to maintain its grip on Row C of the state ballot perhaps best exemplifies the nation's political temper...
...Such comforting projections are out of vogue now, and the likelihood is that a supplemental appropriation of at least $10 billion will be required for defense expenditures this year even if the war were to remain at the present level of hostilities...
...The President believes overridingly in the power of bombs...
...Mansfield's sense-of-the-Senate resolution on the troop issue may flounder as a result of the Presidential displeasure it incurred...
...From Buffalo to Sacramento this seems to be a season of joyless politics...
...They said it couldn't happen but Senator Mike Mansfield has come into his own as a strong Majority Leader...
...They hauled out papers which CIA spokesmen maintained were of the most classified nature...
...Alternative courses are available...
...In Buffalo last month, the New York State Democratic Party enacted a wearisome and machine-sanitized rite of nominating Frank D. O'Connor for governor...
...It is a sop to the Germans, but a costly one...
...Tofte's heirlooms lie in that same ultimate vault where China's nuclear secrets and plans for the next coup in Latin America also repose...
...Sylvester categorically denied that he told American correspondents in Sai gon last year that they "had a patri otic duty to disseminate only informa tion that made the United States look good," and that he expected them to be "handmaidens of government...
...only the White House was not impressed...
...Such was the nature of his proposal for a meeting between Mr...
...If so, how does the agency unload its hot contraband...
...He should be able to withhold information for a time if it involves the safety of the country...
...If so, is it a case for the FBI...
...There is no guerrilla warfare [against the press]," Sylvester said...
...Arthur Sylvester, the durable Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, was once a newspaperman...
...Some of the sharpest tongues in the Administration have sought to paint him as a decent but bumbling fugitive from Academe...
...But Mike the Forbearing has fully supplanted Lyndon the Terrible in the leadership position and is not faring badly these days by comparison...
...One can well appreciate the gusto with which William F. Buckley, Jr., saluted his Conservative Party confreres that week: "The opportunity simultaneously to reject Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller, and Frank D. O'Connor," he wired the Conservative convention, "is a confluence of historical opportunities that dazzles the imagination and leaves one numb with the prodigalities of nature...
...It was a case in which the CIA surfaced one of its top operatives, Hans Tofte, a "charter member" of the organization that Allen Dulles began recruiting in the early 1950's...
...Might Mrs...
...But Mr...
...And he added: "Obviously, no government information program can be based on lies...
...Although the costs of the Vietnam conflict are uncertain," the President said, "if this conflict extends beyond the current fiscal year we will be forced to order additional material and equipment...
...To be on the safe side and to support our men in Vietnam, we must act on this contingency...
...The Republicans choked down their qualms and renominated Nelson Rockefeller...
...Could the CIA security agents have scooped up Mrs...
...Across the country, September's string of Democratic primaries resounded in Washington with the clash and clank of contending state machines...
...There must have been a stifled roar of angry reaction at the White House...
...The Senate is no longer the pressure cooker it was under Mr...
...Inflation is real, and the bizarre dislocations of a "peacetime" war economy must be dealt with by the Administration...
...Some of the nation's top insurance detectives were promptly placed on the trail of the missing gems...
...For students of bureaucratic folkways there was the stubborn determination of Robert Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to drone through an endless prepared recital of slim achievements while restive Senators waited impatiently to question him about what had not been done...
...Mayors asked for money and Senators talked of "imaginative new approaches...
...Rarely was a note sounded of transcending national interest, such as the war in Vietnam...
...Where art thou, 007...
...Tofte's jewels...
...He said he couldn't understand why the general manager of the Associated Press, Wes Gallagher, had charged him with conducting "guerrilla war" against reporters...
...The statement, Sylvester explained, "was taken out of the context in which it was given...
...This to me seems basic...
...But the resolution has already made Mansfield's point...
...Senate...
...Sylvester was asked about his celebrated 1962 pronouncement that "It's inherent in government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it's going up into nuclear war...
...But ever since he accepted appointment as the Pentagon's principal publicist in 1961, his former colleagues in the press corps have insisted on misunderstanding, misquoting, and misinterpreting him...
...The Central Intelligence Agency may be reformed by laughter...
...The plight of the cities was there for all to see, but the solution wasn't...
...A complaint was filed with Washington police by the Toftes...
...The cities may not have that much time...
...In the process some $30,000 worth of jewels belonging to Tofte's wife disappeared...
...CIA security agents raided Tofte's home in Georgetown, where some of the agency's elite live in genteel anonymity...
...And that is the genius of the Mansfield method...
...POTOMACUS...
...It is a drain on the straining American war economy...
...In the area of foreign affairs, Mansfield's role is becoming pre-eminent...
...Ribicoff said the hearings would run two years...
...To protect the country...
...Where, then, will the President effect the economies he speaks of...
...He meant all except the huge sums being poured into the war in Vietnam...
...The first run of Senator Abraham Ribicoff's hearings on the plight of the cities was a smash success...
...While many of the doves have fluttered to safety in advance of the oncoming election, the prickly professor from Montana has remained a constant beacon of respectful dissent from the President's war policies...
...Unless, of course, he is just withholding information for a time...
...Tofte had all the accoutrements of an agent par excellence—a code name, a history of successful operations in Europe and the Far East, an unwavering devotion to the clandestine service in which he chose to make his career...
...Johnson and Charles de Gaulle after the French president's tour of Cambodia...
...In Maryland, one Congressional candidate's campaign jingle is set to the tune of a Sears, Roebuck commercial...
...We know because he keeps telling us so...
...Johnson's control but it seems to be prospering well enough after the transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentary selfgovernment...
...The adjectives most commonly heard were "weak," "ineffective," "vacillating...
Vol. 30 • October 1966 • No. 10
