THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington "There has been a substantial improvement in the situation in Vietnam," the Vice President said on his return from Saigon, adding that our greatest enemies there are...
...On Capitol Hill, Secretary McNamara stepped out of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to advise reporters that China "has no reason to fear military action...
...It might be well, meanwhile, for the delegates at Geneva to make a pilgrimage to Palomares...
...We are reading Kipling in the hope that his tales of the Raj will dispel our doubts and encourage us to take up the burden...
...Booklets on welfare work and aid to the aging are in the works...
...The White House has high priase for his efforts...
...It was to be shown at a Presidential "Salute to Congress" reception, but at the last minute the White House scrapped the project...
...But the issue is of such burning importance that I hope I will be forgiven if my words seem out of order or improper in any way...
...But the terrified farmers cursed their crops, and fear of radioactive poi-oning raced through the seacoast community...
...His disaffection can only be read as a recognition on Hartke's part that political trouble is brewing for the coming Congressional elections as the war is enlarged and its impact is brought home on the television screen...
...Hartke's role is a sure sign that the President will have to apply the full force of his consensus-building powers in the months ahead not only to national opinion but to his old power base at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue...
...It contains a descriptive catalog of "landmark education legislation enacted under the Johnson Administration," along with half a dozen photographs of the President —holding a baby, smiling at Negro students, shaking hands with elementary pupils, addressing a joint session of Congress, signing a bill...
...A member, he wanted to point out, "should not be left completely to his own judgment—because judgment is elastic and varies between individuals...
...Mankind's peril came clear in a message of flaming directness...
...Therefore he took to the House floor one recent afternoon to say he was "shocked" by published charges against Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat...
...He was a compliant Administration man with strong ties of political loyalty to Lyndon B. Johnson...
...The bureaucrats, to be sure, tried to hush it up, first with secrecy and then with bland depreciation of the dangers...
...Equally surprising was the sudden volley of criticism by the Hoosier Democrat at the military escalation of the war...
...one official told The Wall Street Journal...
...The Word from Washington "There has been a substantial improvement in the situation in Vietnam," the Vice President said on his return from Saigon, adding that our greatest enemies there are "hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease...
...Tentatively titled "The Fighting Eighty-ninth—the Congress That Wouldn't Wait," the film featured Gregory Peck as narrator and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as background music in a stirring recital of the President's legislative victories...
...Since the first Geneva conference in 1955 these deliberations have been haunted by an atmosphere of unreality, of passionless and sterile polemics, in which the debaters had nothing to offer but their inflexible instructions from home...
...Resnick said he found it "particularly painful" that" Dodd "stood accused of carrying out assignments for a registered foreign agent in behalf of a foreign government...
...A rumor making the rounds of Washington's cocktail circuit has it that he's alive—in Argentina...
...There are some important American politicians who go along with this view—who would commit the United States to a strictly-policed reduction in nuclear stockpiles...
...Naisbitt, the creator of these and other flashy publications, is the Administration's favorite hard-sell publicist...
...It is an argument that grates in the ears of the smaller nations...
...I got the message," Resnick said...
...Naisbitt, who formerly helped the National Safety Council promote its frightening highway death statistics, has stuck to the print media since...
...for weeks they have been writing about Dodd's "peculiar projects" in behalf of various private concerns, and especially his association with Julius Klein, the energetic agent for West German interests...
...Angier Biddle Duke rushed to the spot to bathe—as though dedicating a new and exclusive spa—and so advertised the health-fulness of the waters in which one of the atomic bombs still lay undiscovered...
...Secretary McNa-mara's characteristically quantitative assessment was offered in the spring of 1962, after the first of his countless missions to Vietnam...
...protestations that there was no danger, the air force resorted to the extraordinary measure of airlifting 1,500 tons of Spanish soil across the Atlantic for burial underground...
...Now an atomic bomb lay hidden in the waters off Palomares, one of those unspeakable accidents that lie at the center of the world's nuclear anxieties...
...Well, it's better than reading comic books, isn't it...
...One of the most beguiling political developments in Washington was the recent transformation of Senator Vance Hartke, Indiana Democrat, from an Administration canary into one of the most vocal of doves...
...When his brief speech appeared in the Congressional Record the next day, all references to Dodd had been expunged...
...In Geneva, not far away, the eigh-teen-nation Disarmament Committee was in session...
...Long before he got to these remarks, however, the freshman Congressman was gaveled down by Speaker John McCormack...
...Yet in spite of U.S...
...An eerie sense of witnessing the past envelops us as we scurry from the White House to the State Department, from Foggy Bottom to the Pentagon, to keep up with the latest reassurances...
...Reading habits of waiting patrons in the nation's barbershops will be radically revised if John Naisbitt has his way...
...The one who ran for Vice President on the Republican ticket in 1964...
...And the President who brandished the blunted spearpoint was John F. Kennedy, in his 1963 State of the Union message...
...Resnick alluded to a series of "Washington Merry-Go-Round" columns by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who have apparently tapped a rich lode of Dodd's correspondence...
...To them it means the sanctifi-cation of the existing nuclear monopolies...
...How ironic that the two World War II allies that were able to crush Hitler's legions a generation ago now cannot induce Bonn to forswear possession of nuclear arms...
...I don't agree with the view that we are going to lose and that the white man will be driven out of Asia forever," he declared...
...This is the concern that is voiced privately by many Administration Democrats...
...The "substantial improvement" was cited not by Hubert H. Humphrey (who brought back news that "the tide of battle in Vietnam has turned in our favor") but by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who visited Saigon in the spring of 1961...
...It didn't come off," a spokesman said...
...Instead, the Record mentioned "alleged activities of a Member of the other body...
...In Washington, Marshal Ky's Ambassador, Vu Van Thai, told the National Press Club that "we have to get our whole country [North and South] out of the grasp of China...
...A companion volume, dealing with "landmark" health measures and similarly studded with Johnson photographs and quotations, is now being distributed...
...The United States and the Soviet Union never have had a greater community of interest...
...atomic bombs fell out of the sky on the Spanish coastal town of Palomares...
...Potomacus...
...He said he had sent an aide to check on Pearson's and Anderson's files, and found the material "unquestionably authentic...
...Perhaps we may be forgiven a slight gap in credulity...
...Representative Joseph Y. Resnick, New York Democrat, is new to Congress and untutored in its gentlemanly ways...
...In his eight years in the Senate there had been no suggestion that Hartke was either a maverick or a man of strong conviction on foreign policy matters...
...Why circulate the pamphlets to barbershops...
...The spearpoint of aggression has been blunted in South Vietnam," the President told Congress...
...The spectacle of Hartke's rough cross-examination of Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler on the Vietnam war budget raised many an eyebrow on Capitol Hill...
...Their nuclear club grows larger and less exclusive each year...
...They were relayed to Resnick later by "a few of the senior members" of the House, he reported...
...We have heard them all before ¦—the disavowals of "mindless escalation," the hints that just a few more troops ?x>r a few thousand more) will make the difference, the pledges of social reform, the euphemisms that call war "pacification" and bombing "interdiction...
...Their voices are heard, however, only in the privacy of the conference room and the off-the-record luncheon...
...The hopes for a treaty in the current Geneva meeting are no worse than before and perhaps better than there...
...The reading reform movement has already begun...
...It was an accident...
...All this, Resnick intended to say, made a compelling case for adoption of a Congressional code of ethics...
...Not to Senator Russell Long, Louisiana Democrat and the President's stalwart champion on the unfriendly Foreign Relations Committee...
...Both superpowers seem to realize that their common ends would best be served by a formula that calls for outlawing the spread of nuclear weapons...
...There may not be a code of ethics, but there are rules about what one may say about a fellow member of Congress...
...Last fall he took time off from his duties as information aide to Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John W. Gardner to produce a movie for the White House...
...No less than 30,000 barbershops have received, at government expense, a sixty-four-page pamphlet entitled "The First Work of These Times: A Report to the People on Education...
...The only way we are going to achieve a treaty is by placing the line below the present nuclear weapons states," insists Britain's Disarmament Minister, Lord Chalfont, echoing the big power line...
...Remember Bill Miller...
...The purpose of the pamphlet, which has also gone to Congressmen, libraries, school superintendents and other educators, is to provide the public with a positive image of the Administration's accomplishments...
...Would this Geneva session prove more fruitful than those of the past...
...Proliferation spells danger to each—so much more each year that the old standards of ideology are becoming subordinate to those of national interest...
...Four U.S...
...So it was that the eight-nation neutral bloc proposed the dismantling of existing nuclear arsenals to go hand-in-hand with the ban on proliferation of atomic weapons among new club members...
...Ambassador and Mrs...
...The two chief irritants continue to be Germany's nuclear appetite and the resentment of the have-not countries generally to the H-bomb paternalism of the big powers...
...Perhaps it would...
...So far they dare not speak out publicly...
...We would be immeasurably cheered by these confident assessments by unimpeachable sources, were it not for an unfortunate lapse in time...
...Persuaded by the resounding declarations of Honolulu that President Johnson and South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky are as one in their assessment of the war and its aims, we were startled to read that Marshal Ky believes he has the "noble and supreme task" of "liberating the North and reunifying the fatherland...
...Dog-eared copies of Playboy and True Detective will give way to handsome, profusely-illustrated brochures extolling the virtues of the Great Society and its architect, President Lyndon B. Johnson...
...Perhaps I am breaking an unwritten rule," Resnick said in the prize understatement of the Eighty-ninth Congress, second session...
...Confusing...
...We aren't sure...
...Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we are winning the war," Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reported...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
