THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington By some who profess to know him best, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara is portrayed as the chief dove of the Johnson Administration's official family. The private...
...Even more coincidentally, the mayors' manual was produced under an $86,000 community action grant—from the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...But on the thirty-eighth day the dissidents became unstoppered...
...And Shriver has taken another look at the law and found it doesn't say maximum feasible participation of the poor after all—just maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served...
...Nonetheless, Representative Charles E. Bennett, the Florida Democrat who led the Congressional chorus against Thompson's burial, congratulated the Departments of Defense and Justice for preserving the purity of the national cemetery...
...He is regarded on the right as a dangerous radical and, though this reputation is totally unfounded, it has sufficed to block his scheduled appointments as deputy director of the War on Poverty and as counsel to the Defense Department...
...He now serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and is expected to leave the government soon for an academic post...
...During the thirty-seven days of The Pause the voices of criticism on all sides held themselves in check...
...Since then the big-city mayors, made uneasy by the prospect of anti-poverty programs run by the poor, have made their weight felt at the White House, and the White House, in turn, has reminded Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity of some political realities...
...Surprise, insist some of the President's closest friends and aides, is an underlying element of Johnsonian strategy—one that is designed to keep his adversaries perpetually off balance...
...To do otherwise, Bennett declared, would have made the nation appear "weak and idiotic...
...Johnson's policy of unpremeditation may not some day surprise him along with the rest of us, with unthinkable results...
...Such an attack would also destroy most of the key governmental, technical, and managerial personnel, and a large proportion of the skilled workers...
...And the President, in turn, confounded many of his closest supporters in Congress and his aides in government by dashing off to Honolulu with half the Cabinet for talks with the men who are waging the war in Vietnam—-all on one day's notice...
...The irony of McNamara's testimony is that it was designed to counter the pressures of Congressional warhawks who want the Pentagon to spend more money on obsolete, manned bombers...
...And now, we suppose, it looks strong and bright...
...His testimony before a House Armed Services subcommittee during the final stages of the Johnson "peace offensive" provides a troubling perspective on the public McNamara that may not do justice to the private man...
...Orchestration" was the chant during the short-lived era of the Lyndon Johnson Peace Offensive...
...Certainly the Capitol has had abundant exposure to the tactic in this latest phase of war management...
...The last time, we recall, was forty-two years ago...
...Conference of Mayors made the same point last month in a new manual, Economic Opportunity in Cities...
...There will be no retreat from our earlier policies and no slackening in our effort to press for vigorous and creative compliance with that requirement...
...image in Latin America (especially following our Dominican intervention) than many of the careerists in the State Department whose job it is to worry about these things...
...A community action program where there is no participation by the poor cannot be viewed under any circumstances as fulfilling the legislative requirement," Sargent Shriver said last November 5 at Scottsdale, Arizona...
...It has become clear," the mayors asserted, "that the areas to be served in any city contain families of various income levels and it is often the stable citizen in such areas who most often has time and motivation to volunteer first for community action...
...Is there a method to the mad speculation of the right-wing press...
...The preposterous seems probable in the paranoic never-never land inhabi-tated by the ultra-right, and the unlikely appears imminent...
...Several days before McNamara made his appearance on Capitol Hill, United Nations Secretary General U Thant spoke of Communist China as a nation on the brink of a "nervous breakdown...
...Perhaps not, but that is the impression that quickly spread throughout Washington and which was voiced by House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan...
...Prevailing prejudices in the land of the living are mirrored in the land of the dead," Jessica Mitford observed in her best-seller, The American Way of Death...
...The Yarmolinsky scare stories seem designed to build pressure for House passage of a long-pending bill—it cleared the Senate last May— that would subject the appointment of Hoover's successor to Senatorial confirmation...
...While President Johnson and his far-fluttering envoys were proclaiming peace to all who would listen—including Moscow, Hanoi, Peking, and the Vietcong—these were the words being broadcast from McNamara's lips on Capitol Hill: ". . . A considerably smaller number of weapons detonated over fifty Chinese urban centers would destroy half of the urban population (more than fifty million people) and destroy more than one-half of their industry...
...It was impossible for Moyers, however, to muffle the grunts and gasps of top Administration officials who were scrambling to keep their feet in the landslide of last-minute motion...
...This prospect—far more than the gentle, professional inquisition in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room—is the Administration's chief pitfall in prosecuting the war...
...Potomacus...
...Yarmolinsky has learned to bear such tidings stoically...
...In recent weeks, readers of such journals as Human Events, the Washington Observer, and Freedom Press, always ready to lend credence to the fantastic, have been advised that Adam Yarmolinsky is being "groomed" to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...We have no strong views on whether the directorship of the FBI ought to be filled with the advice and consent of the Senate...
...Shriver said it would be "a serious misunderstanding of fact and policy to conclude that there has been or will be a decreased emphasis on maximum feasible participation of the poor...
...China will be ready to join the comity of nations when it Stops Worrying and Learns to Love the Bomb...
...Given current expectations of vulnerability to enemy attack (before and after launch), and simplicity and controllability of operation, missiles are preferred as the primary weapon for the assured destruction mission . . ." These words were being read in Peking, Moscow, and Hanoi as well as in the non-Communist world while the American evangelists of peace were plying their frenetic course from one world capital to another...
...Yet, somehow, in the ornithology of nuclear politics McNamara comes through publicly as a Strangedove...
...Katzenbach's predecessor, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was moved to rebuke the Attorney General by inserting in the Congressional Record an editorial noting that "to hate and harry the sinner to his grave is hardly in the American tradition...
...Army Thirty-second Infantry Division in the New Guinea campaign of World War II...
...This all may be true...
...The message McNamara was trying to get across is that for the cheapest and most effective results, Armageddon should be fully automated...
...But there is an unsettling feeling in town that Mr...
...His friends wonder why he has stayed so long...
...Johnson's departure for Hawaii his press secretary, Bill Moyers, was sedulously explaining to White House reporters that the trip had been carefully planned for months...
...On Capitol Hill a growing and vocal band of Senators under the leadership of Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat, seemed bent on confounding the Administration by embarking on a "teach-in"—under the glare of klieg lights before a national television audience...
...But that was in November...
...And was he not a card-carrying member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People back at the Ford Motor Company, where the highest form of civic engagement for his executive brethren was prompt payment of their dues to the National Association of Manufacturers...
...We doubt that his interment in Arlington would have disturbed the rest of the 135,000 men who lie buried there—among them at least one Nazi who was once our prisoner of war and several hundred Confederate soldiers who died in combat against the United States...
...The private version of McNamara that circulates in some Washington quarters is of a man who is profoundly affected by the horrors and moral ambiguities of the war in Vietnam and the specter of nuclear holocaust...
...What U Thant did not say is that this is the mark of an immature society...
...He is said to have been far more concerned about the U.S...
...It was sounded at White House press briefings, in the corridors of the United Nations, in news columns and in syndicated columns...
...Katzenbach joined the shabby crusade...
...His politics were not questioned when the nation awarded him its second-highest decoration, the Distinguished Service Cross...
...More dismaying was the alacrity with which Attorney General Nicholas deB...
...Apparently there is...
...And so, inevitably, professional war veterans and other patrioteers rose up in clamorous indignation when the word got around that the ashes of war hero Robert G. Thompson, Communist, were to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery...
...Thus, without any use of the bomber forces, the strategic missile forces recommended for the [fiscal year] 1967-71 period would provide substantially more force than is required for an assured destruction capability against both the Soviet Union and Communist China simultaneously...
...The morning of Mr...
...They're not necessarily one and the same, Shriver now notes, and "if an arrangement doesn't violate the statute, it certainly doesn't upset us...
...It was the kind of cause that was bound to appeal to some of the smaller minds in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, and they fearlessly supported the attack on a dead Communist and his bereaved widow...
...In a tortured, seven-page legal memorandum the Attorney General redefined the regulations governing burial of veterans in national cemeteries, thereby taking the Pentagon off the hook...
...We do feel it ought to be filled more often...
...These lawmakers, alas, seem to suffer from the sort of romantic delusion about man's role in modern warfare that afflicted the Polish cavalry early in World War II before they encountered German tanks...
...Johnson is bent on surprising not only his critics but those upon whom he must depend for orderly exposition and execution of his policies...
...Some Administration spokesmen privately acknowledged their dismay that the greatest peril for the supposed war consensus lies in the weeks and months ahead when Americans, sitting in front of their living room television sets, can see their sons mauled and slaughtered in the jungles of Indochina...
...And there is the ultimate question too of whether Mr...
...Afterwards, however, as the military caught up with diplomacy and the bombs began raining down again on North Vietnam, that awful word, "disarray," came back to haunt the official explainers of Administration foreign policy...
...Was the President trying to drown out the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings...
...Coincidentally, the U.S...
...He was talking about the controversial passage in the Economic Opportunity Act that specifies that community action programs should be "developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served...
...Robert Thompson had been a Communist for a decade in the Thirties, had sojourned in Moscow and fought against Franco in Spain before he served with the U.S...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
