THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington Not since President Johnson's showy embrace of Premier Ky in Honolulu has any event caused such profound melancholy among U.S. policy planners as the Buddhist uprisings...
...But the officials we came to see, the very men who bear a public trust to hear us, have been only half listening...
...Potomacus...
...Color it yellow and tickled-pink...
...Smith, Kline & French Laboratories was merely checking on possible "illegal sources of drugs" when it hired a detective to spy on a wholesaler who was underselling his competitors...
...OEO, which is rarely shy about promoting its programs, is remarkably reticent about birth control...
...Powell's office privately let it be known that powerful Southerners were opposed to the Farmer project, that the OEO budget would be imperiled if it released the big grant to the Center...
...It is still anybody's guess how this will affect the overall American design...
...The cherry trees along the tidal basin bloomed on time last month, and the tourists arrived on schedule to admire them...
...However, there's no need to be alarmed...
...The special design, we assume, will encompass equipment for printing the rest of the CIA budget...
...And reports persisted that Dean Rusk wished to take his leave of Washington as soon as the President saw fit to release him...
...The occupants were homeless Negroes from the Mississippi Delta who believed the pledges of the Great Society and came to Washington to collect...
...And the most knowledgeable heads in Washington have been wagging in private despair at the survival odds arrayed against the year-old Ky regime...
...The object of Powell's legislative wiles was the long-delayed literacy program that might have been a boon to millions of educationally deprived Negroes—the Center for Community Action-Education...
...We wonder whether OEO has checked its policy with the White House...
...Chester Cooper, one of the top Vietnam staff experts, was on the verge of leaving...
...Furthermore, Farmer had once identified himself with a challenge to Powell for the Harlem Congressional seat...
...The tulips have begun to bloom outside our tents...
...The war on poverty's general headquarters in Washington endorsed it...
...It started with Ky's maladroit response to the Buddhist uprisings and the military insurrection in Danang—first with acknowledgement by Washington officials that U.S...
...But it seems unfair to carp and criticize when the purposes are so pure...
...In thumbing through the 1,308-page appendix to the Federal budget issued in January, we had no difficulty finding the CIA appropriation request...
...There was talk—again emanating from the Hill—that Farmer was a "poor administrator...
...Across Pennsylvania Avenue in Lafayette Park, four yellow tents sprouted among the tulip beds as pointed reminders of promises unkept...
...Color them ash-white...
...Conceivably a new generation of advisers and managers would soon inherit the war and try to make the peace...
...The charge of excessive secrecy seems unjustified...
...The same directory devotes four words to family planning...
...They are piqued at the sharp drop-off in money and services that were provided by the Democratic National Committee in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was running too...
...Johnson's war...
...In these past weeks it has been fascinating to behold the subtle downgrading by Washington background briefers of Ky's personal stature in South Vietnam's ruling Directory...
...The anti-poverty agency prohibits use of its funds "to announce or promote through the mass media the availability of the birth control or family planning program financed by a grant...
...But everyone forgot to reckon with Adam Clayton Powell...
...The upheavals in Vietnam came concurrently with upheavals in the Administration's varsity squad of policy advisers...
...Johnson himself a few months earlier, might well have cursed the fickleness of his Washington patrons...
...There were persistent reports that President Johnson favored it, too, as a constructive channeling of the movement's energies...
...This city is now obsessed not by Ho Chi Minh as much as by the Buddhist Tri Quang, that inscrutable little Vietnamese holy man who appears to have his finger on the button of civil protest...
...Leaders of the civil rights movement embraced its goals...
...Representative Adam Clayton Powell, political boss and ambassador plenipotentiary from Harlem, has given the civil rights movement a lesson in obstructionism that must have been the envy of his most diehard Dixie-cratic colleagues...
...Since we have been here we have seen progress of a kind," said the group's spokesman, Frank Smith...
...It was right there, at the bottom of page 907—a relatively trifling $1,290,000...
...Powell's victory was insured by OEO Director Sargent Shriver's timorous back-down...
...Last is The Consensus...
...The Army will in turn reimburse the school for one-half this difference...
...We never realized preparation was required...
...Patriotism, discipline, honor, and conduct will, therefore, be available at minimum cost...
...The specter that Washington has feared worst of all— the total collapse of vestigial popular support in Vietnam for the American military presence—was clearly discernible through the civil clamor...
...For the better part of a year Farmer and his brilliant associate, Myron Woolman, built the outlines of a literacy drive that was designed to assist the more than ten million functional illiterates in the United States...
...fewer than 300 high schools around the country participate...
...policy planners as the Buddhist uprisings that have swept the metropolitan centers of South Vietnam...
...Make it the same warning color as The Mandate...
...No less ardent a hawk than Senator Richard B. Russell, the Georgia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, voiced it in a home state speech: "If it becomes clearly evident that a majority of the Vietnamese do not want our help, I would favor withdrawing immediately both military forces and economic aid...
...Some of the Mississippians have been living in a tent city near Greenville since last July...
...Vice President Hubert Humphrey conferred his blessings on the Center in a private letter to Farmer...
...Furthermore, the Pentagon explains, "the training will also prepare high school graduates for service in the Army...
...And State Department agents were sent to monitor the speeches of Yale historian Staughton Lynd just in case these contained "anti-American remarks...
...They argue that Congress, at least, should be kept informed...
...Most of its so-called leaders support the President's Vietnam policies but insist on calling it Mr...
...Military training for high school students assists in developing patriotism, instilling discipline, and encouraging a high sense of personal honor and conduct," the Pentagon advises in its recent News Release Number 217-66...
...It is now time to introduce the Lyndon Johnson Consensus Coloring Book...
...Although the Farmer grant application was on his desk for weeks for final "sign-off," action was suspended in deference to Powell's demands that the promotion of literacy be left to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and not to "any new outside agency...
...In his message to Congress on health and education, the President declared: "It is essential that all families have access to information and services that will allow freedom to choose the number and spacing of their children within the dictates of individual conscience...
...In invisible ink...
...Congressional leaders issued the seasonal prediction of great accomplishments and early adjournment...
...Schools will hire retired (military) personnel and pay the difference between an individual's retired pay and the equivalent of his active duty pay and allowances," says Number 217-66...
...It remembers that profits took a twenty per cent jump last year, breaking all records, and it sees a continued climb in earnings this year...
...Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Minnesota Democrat, has revived demands for a Congressional investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and in the House some members are calling for creation of a joint committee to keep a public eye on the CIA...
...It doesn't want to rock the boat...
...Embarrassed officials were glad to see them go...
...But the ROTC Vitalization Act—a fine example of the art of legislative nomenclature—makes Junior ROTC a bargain...
...He is angry with the Administration because Congress has not repealed the "right-to-work" provision of the Taft-Hartley Act, over new minimum wage laws, and—most of all—because of President Johnson's wage-price guidelines which labor thinks are aimed mainly at labor...
...This was the nationwide campaign that was to be headed by James Farmer, former national director of the Congress of Racial Equality...
...Not long ago Henry Cabot Lodge said American forces would never be ordered out of Vietnam by any regime in Saigon...
...People don't seem to believe that others have the right of privacy...
...Because of its immunity from accountability, these legislators say, the CIA has blundered into reckless and perilous adventures...
...Scrupulous budgetary and administrative safeguards were written into the program, which was to have been launched with a grant of more than $800,000 from the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...It doesn't know whether its oracle is John Lindsay, Richard Nixon, or Everett Dirksen...
...The message was sent in March...
...They are worried about the cutbacks in vote-attracting Great Society spending programs...
...President James M. Roche of General Motors Corporation, who apologized when his company was caught setting snoopers on the trail of Ralph Nader, author of the book, Unsafe at Any Speed, went on to assure investigating Senators that GM had no intention of intimidating Nader, undermining his reputation, or hindering his critical testimony on the auto industry...
...The most recent indications are that the Administration, alarmed at the civil convulsions within South Vietnam, wants to advance the timetable for establishing a civilian government in Saigon as well as for the calling of national elections...
...White House gardeners took a last, forlorn look at their carefully manicured lawn before its annual desecration by the pagan rite of the Easter egg roll...
...The volume will be a timely guide to this year's political oratory...
...After four days and nights in Lafayette Park, the Mississippians folded their tents and went home...
...He didn't say what kind of approach would help...
...In time, word spread from Capitol Hill that the Harlem Democrat was opposed to the Center...
...Next is the Republican Party...
...But no one, least of all the White House, takes this threat very seriously...
...But now the latest crisis has raised that unthinkable, unspeakable prospect...
...interests were staked on the survival not of Ky but of the junta government he nominally headed and then with frank admissions on the highest level that Ky's days are numbered...
...There is also evident concern in the political nerve centers on Capitol Hill that the anti-American rioting in supposedly friendly and sovereign South Vietnam will trigger a massive revulsion to the war within the United States...
...The snooping industry has its private and public sectors, and business is booming for both...
...Miss Frances Knight, the jealous proprietress of the Passport Office, asked overseas embassies to keep an eye on a traveler, Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes, only because he "reportedly in the past has had strong convictions toward Communism...
...It is afraid to buck the President on his "informal" price restraints but it also has never had it so good before...
...Defeatism has set in," Frank Smith said...
...The people of Washington who had never known us have become our friends...
...For weeks the impending formation of the Center was one of Washington's best-kept secrets...
...The jaunty little fighter pilot, who had been anointed by Mr...
...We would not let things reach such a point, Lodge reportedly suggested...
...The other is construction of "a facility especially designed for classified printing requirements...
...Walt Rostow, chief of the State Department's policy planning staff and a hard-nosed veteran of Vietnam planning councils, was being shifted to the White House...
...Most Americans don't fancy the idea of putting their sons in Army uniforms any sooner than is absolutely necessary...
...The message seemed clear enough: Powell regarded the literacy program as a threat to his dual role as Congressional overseer of Federal education largesse and as a political figurehead in the Negro power elite...
...The snoopers themselves have told us so...
...Attorney General Nicholas Katzen-bach, whose Justice Department regularly violates the ban on wiretapping in Section 605 of the Federal Communications Act, blandly advised a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee last month that FBI agents break the law "only for intelligence purposes in national security matters...
...The growing army of eavesdroppers, wiretappers, mail-watchers, and trash-sifters invariably has the most admirable of motives...
...The purposes for which the money would be spent were also specified— two purposes, to be precise...
...They pitched their tents in Washington when officials of the Office of Economic Opportunity raised legal, technical, and financial obstacles to their request for anti-poverty funds to build low-cost cinderblock houses in Mississippi...
...One is completion of "a sidewalk, exterior lighting and air-conditioning modifications" at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia...
...We suppose it also cures acne, prevents bad breath, and helps insure financial success and popularity with the opposite sex...
...Turn to the business establishment...
...Color it amber, the cautionary color...
...Color him red...
...McGeorge Bundy was gone...
...This kind of approach," an OEO spokesman volunteered, "contributes more to postponement and delay than to speeding things up...
...It still exists but the pressures of the war, rising prices and taxes, the unrest in America's economic and racial ghettos threaten to disrupt it...
...Spring keeps its promises, even in Washington...
...The same detective, it turns out, has also worked for forty other drug firms— presumably for similar worthy reasons...
...Word travels slowly in Washington...
...Once again the Harlem Congressman had successfully taken care of Number One...
...They are especially afraid of the Vietnamese war's effect on the ballot box next November...
...Here is George Meany...
...And now here are the forty-odd Democratic freshmen in Congress from districts most susceptible to GOP capture...
...The news in News Release Number 217-66 is that the Army, acting under authority conferred by Congress in the Reserve Officer Training Corps Vital-ization Act of 1964, is about to expand its Junior ROTC program in secondary schools...
...Once again Washington is haunted by the paradox of the military war going well and the political war deteriorating to the point of collapse...
...There is too much snooping going on in this country," Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Connecticut Democrat, complained...
...Their homes disappeared, along with their three-dollar-a-day jobs, when machines took over the work in the Delta's cotton fields...
...The encyclopedic, 414-page "Catalog of Federal Programs for Individual and Community Improvement" issued by the Office of Economic Opportunity devotes all of page 265 to an informative discussion of farm fish pond management...
...After beating up on itself during the primary battles of 1964, the Party is still searching for a candidate and an identity...
...Meany is beginning to compile a shopping list of favorite Republicans to support this fall, according to the AFL-CIO press...
...Color it black and blue...
...Though Junior ROTC was established years ago, the idea never really caught on...
Vol. 30 • May 1966 • No. 5
