THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON

...The bombastic mimeograph machines of the extremists on the far right are churning out a new flood of abuse against United States trade with the Soviet Union, the treaty which would permit the opening of consular offices in a number of cities in both countries, and the proposed treaty against genocide which has been pending for years in the United Nations...

...Potomacus...

...If there were no war in Vietnam, they seem to believe, it would be necessary to invent one to nip in the bud the modest flowering of the Great Society...

...Washington was sorely displeased with Halberstam's unsparing dispatches describing how badly the war was going...

...The White House, through Moyers, put out the word that there had been no contacts between the Administration and steel industry leaders and that the President had played no role whatsoever in seeking to thwart the increase...

...As the war escalates," the Mansfield mission warned, "and Hanoi becomes ever more dependent upon Chinese support, a dependence which Soviet aid at best only tempers, the likelihood also increases that North Vietnam will not be able to negotiate a settlement without at least the tacit consent of China...

...Because of a curious bit of legislative fumbling that went into the making of the Medicare law last year, some two million applicants for hospital and nursing care will be asked, "Are you now or have you been for the last twelve months a member of any organization which is required to register under the Internal Security Act of 1950 as a Communist-action organization, a Communist-front organization, or a Communist-infiltrated organization...

...But not embarrassed enough to drop the offensive question from benefit applications...

...When new "guidelines" to Title VI were issued by the Department a few weeks ago, a high official confided that the "unfortunate" Chicago episode would not have been possible if the Department of Justice had been consulted—that is, the initial threat to Chicago would not have been made...

...aerial strikes against Communist targets in Vietnam...

...We have long marveled at the bold belligerence of men too old to carry arms...

...He has displayed an admirable immunity to the shallow slogans and empty enthusiasms that tend to infect the President's more favored advisers, and a courageous determination to raise his voice against the chorus...

...Once again, the truth caught up with the deception...

...What lay between was contested at the outset of 1965 and is still contested...

...No sooner had this version of the White House line appeared in print as an authoritative exposition of the President's feelings than it was exploded by the Administration itself in the form of a withering attack on the industry price offensive...

...This was the somber assessment of the war in Vietnam by the bipartisan five-Senator mission headed by Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield upon returning from a thirty-five-day tour of world capitals...

...In Alabama, where eighty-eight per cent of the districts are "in compliance," less than half of one per cent of the Negroes attend classes with white children...

...On gastronomic grounds, at least, Senator J. W. Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat, may congratulate himself on his good fortune in not being invited to this winter's White House dinners for visiting foreign dignitaries...

...The official dishonors heaped upon him are, in a sense, an even greater award...

...Empowered for the first time to withhold Federal funds from discriminatory programs and activities, the government has chosen the line of least political resistance...

...Circumspect though the report may have been in its form, and in its skimpy recommendations, the mission members should be credited with having shown enough courage to call a stalemate a stalemate...

...Now all Title VI enforcement activities are to be coordinated through the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach has made it clear he will not try to rock the boat...

...Last month he was expelled from Poland under the weight of an official accusation that he wrote "slanderous articles" about the Warsaw government...

...Most recently the steel price increase provided another example of the Administration's policy of calculated ob-fuscation...

...And unquestionably the tone of the report reflects the opinion of many within the government who are appalled by the prospect of unlimited escalation—but are afraid to speak up...

...For months on end President Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Moyers played an untiring refrain that there had been no meaningful signals from "the other side" pointing toward negotiation...

...But even a few judicious "no comments" would be preferable to the present policy of The Big Obfuscation...

...By failing to make the guest list when the President entertained German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan, and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Senator Fulbright was spared such dubious delicacies as baked red snapper with cold beets, and cold puree of chick peas...

...This latter dish, M. Verdon observed more in sorrow than in anger, is "already bad hot...

...Secretary John W. Gardner says he will enforce the law, though he would personally "not stop an aged Communist at the hospital door...

...During the aluminum price confrontation Moyers persisted in telling newsmen at the Texas White House that there was no relationship between the Administration's plan to release aluminum from the stockpile and the price increase that had been proposed by the industry...

...field commanders were authorized to send troops across the Cambodian border 'in line with "the inherent right of self-defense...

...It was approved by Congress because the Administration proposed it, and it was proposed by the Administration because it thought Congress wanted it...

...In fact, that point may already have been reached...

...The number of Negro pupils in biracial schools almost tripled this year...

...And even as the Senatorial mission threaded its course through Southeast Asia it was clear that Laos was being used as a staging area for U.S...

...The mission warned that all of Indochina, and even the entire southeast Asian mainland, could readily become the enlarged battle theater of the Vietnamese war...

...Even as the document was being drafted, the word was put out officially that U.S...

...The genocide treaty," proclaims the rabid Liberty Letter (sponsored by Liberty Lobby) in tones of horror, ". . . would allow the World Court to try persons or communities for inflicting what they determine is 'physical or mental injury' to any minority group (whatever that is) within a nation...

...His reporting earned him a Pulitzer Prize...

...Washington promptly deplored "any effort to impose censorship by restriction or expulsion of any American correspondent...

...But the tarnish has begun to show through even the Moyers' sheen...

...He was cast as a straight-shooting Baptist who could be depended upon—mere so than any of the canny political operators who surround the President—to follow the Boy Scout commandments...

...But his advocacy last fall of a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam was at least premature, in the Administration's view, and his criticism of the Dominican Republic adventure was an all but unforgivable breach in the consensus...

...The language was left over from an earlier and unsuccessful draft of the Medicare bill, and now all concerned seem terribly embarrassed...

...We know it was not anticipated by those who saw in Title VI an effective way of achieving desegregation...

...New York Times correspondent David Halberstam has had the unique honor of being anathematized by both the Communist and non-Communist worlds...

...Newsmen in the capital are haunted more than ever by the gnawing issue of the Administration's credibility...

...But in retrospect it was Halberstam's tough and realistic view of the war rather than the Administration's rose-tinted public relations that proved correct...

...Equally impressive is the boundless generosity of the affluent who volunteer to sacrifice the meager resources of the needy...

...There were high hopes that he would inaugurate a square deal in the dissemination of news from the White House...

...It was not the cheeriest note on which to convene the new session of the Eighty-ninth Congress...

...This has not been the case...

...Senator Jacob K. Javits, New York Republican, who is one of many members of Congress trying to have the requirement repealed, says he is sure it was not the intent of Congress to demand a political disclaimer of aged applicants for medical care...

...The prognosis of the mission was for costly deadlock—an "open-ended" war with the rapidly increasing American military buildup in Vietnam being matched evenly by a commitment of men and arms from the Vietcong, Hanoi, and from Peking...

...Senator Fulbright, the urbane chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, possesses as discerning a palate as ever came out of Fayetteville, Arkansas...

...Dudman, somehow, became the villain of the piece in reward for his enterprise...

...Furthermore, the report raised the specter of the Vietnam fighting expanding into general warfare on the Asian mainland...

...If their answer is affirmative they will, presumably, be denied the benefits of the law...

...He knew the President's mind, it was said...

...Its one attempt at vigorous enforcement—the threat to hold up some $30 million in aid for Chicago's racially imbalanced schools—was quickly aborted when Mayor Richard Daley made his considerable weight felt at the White House...

...During his service in Vietnam, Halberstam related, President Kennedy appealed to The New York Times management to replace its man in Saigon...

...It was precisely because of such doubts in the past that Moyers was appointed to the job of press secretary...

...No less an authority than the President's recently departed chef, M. Rene Verdon, has indicated that the fare served on these momentous occasions leaves something to be desired...

...It is patently unrealistic to expect the Administration to tell the whole truth at all times—especially during episodes of sensitive diplomatic or political maneuver...

...The American Civil Liberties Union contends this could be done at once "by a simple administrative decision," but the Department of Health, Education and Welfare intends to play it safe by waiting for Congress to eliminate the requirement...

...In any case, the Senators concluded, chances for a negotiated settlement are slim...

...But the idea of arraigning the killers of Violet Liuzzo, Medgar Evers, or James Reeb before the world tribunal is not without some appeal...

...The incident summoned up an earlier episode in Halberstam's turbulent newspaper career—one which he recounted some months before in Commentary magazine...

...Of all the men who stand in the innermost ring of President Johnson's confidence, the young and talented Bill Moyers enjoyed the most lustrous reputation in Washington...

...It is a novel interpretation, to be sure, of the proposed genocide treaty...

...In Mississippi, with seventy-nine per cent of the districts "in compliance," the percentage of Negro pupils in desegregated schools is only six-tenths of one per cent...

...And once again, there were spasms of renewed doubt in the word of the White House and its appointed voice, Bill Moyers...

...But the value of the Mansfield mission report was that it would inject a balance into the impending Congressional debate over the war in Vietnam...

...Cautious in wording, grim in substance, and alarming in its portent, the thirteen-page text served as a useful antidote to the short-lived wave of euphoria touched off by the Johnson "peace offensive...

...Gleefully, these rugged individualists suggest that new Federal programs in education, health, and welfare must be curtailed, if not abandoned outright, to allow for bigger and better military outlays...

...All this is required under Section 103 of the Medicare Act...

...The war in Vietnam has also given a severe battering to the credibility of the President's words at home...

...Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Richard Dudman punctured that fiction with his account—admittedly incomplete—-of the La Pira mission to Hanoi...

...The "carrot-and-stick approach" which the Administration has billed as its policy toward enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has turned out to be mostly carrot and little stick...

...Under the Office of Education's generous interpretation of Title VI, ninety-five per cent of the school districts in the eleven Southern states are now listed as "in compliance" with Title VI, but only six per cent of the Negro pupils in these districts are attending desegregated schools...

...With the smug self-assurance of men who have stumbled across an eternal verity, Congressional conservatives are advising us that the nation cannot afford guns and butter too—and that the butter, therefore, will have to go...

...Officials point out that "progress" has been made in the South, according to their yardstick...

...It was a verdict that must have given scant comfort to President Johnson and his State Department, notwithstanding the tone of restraint with which the report was underscored...

...The Senator's public comments have been offered with reluctance and restraint...

...The pompous rhetoric misses the point: it is not their butter they are prepared to sacrifice, but the thin margarine spread on the stale bread of the poor...

...Mansfield and his four Senate colleagues—Democrats Edmund S. Muskie of Maine and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, and Republicans J. Caleb Boggs of Delaware and George O. Aiken of Vermont—could not, by any stretch of the imagination or political invective, be regarded as soft-headed on the issues of the war...

...What was controlled then by the Vietcong is still controlled by the Vietcong...

...We hope the President is willing to stomach good advice...

...Poignant, indeed, must have seemed the words of the State Department in commenting on the banishment...

...We doubt that even die-hard segregationists ever dreamed the Federal government would countenance such tokenism...

...But in this twelfth school year since the Supreme Court ruled that racial assignment of pupils is unconstitutional, ninety-four per cent of the South's Negro children still await the benefits of desegregation...

...We would like to think that it was out of deference to the Senator's sensitive tastebuds that the President failed to invite Fulbright to the White House dinners, but we fear it was more a matter of Presidential pique at Ful-bright's policy pronouncements...

...The Word from Washington ". . . What the Saigon government held in the way of terrain in the early months of 1965 (and it was already considerably less than was held at the time of the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem), is still held...

...We hope his colleagues will waste no time in proving him right...

...We are certain Senator Fulbright is willing to stomach bad cooking in the line of duty...

...Culinary considerations aside, there are compelling reasons for keeping Fulbright in close contact with the White House...

...The question will be asked of those who are eligible for Medicare but not entitled to cash benefits under the Social Security or Railroad Retirement programs...