The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington The long, hot summer in the dusty ghettos of America was oh, so remote from the long, cool, carpeted corridors of the Sheraton-Park Hotel. Delegates to last month's White...
...It didn't turn into a rally for peace in Vietnam...
...The young radicals of SNCC denounced the Conference as a put-up job and stayed away...
...It was no less surprising several days later to hear Senator Milward Simpson, a conservative Republican from Wyoming, quote from Senator J. William Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat, in questioning the President's credibility on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution...
...From the Congressional response— or lack of it—one might conclude that Mr...
...He has had little reassurance from the polls in recent weeks...
...David Carliner, who appeared before the Internal Security Subcommittee in behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, obviously regarded both bills as unconstitutional, but he told Eastland: "I think the ACLU would feel your bill provides more safeguards from the view of civil liberties than the State Department bill...
...The American troop presence in Vietnam is now ten times the size it was during the last national election two years ago—and the demands of the draft are increasing...
...This has produced some strange permutations on the domestic political scene...
...The House Administration Committee, which has never approved a campaign reform bill, does not intend to tamper with that unblemished record by acting this year...
...Vice President Humphrey, the Old Humphrey, delivered a rousing keynote address...
...The President's Vietnam managers, for that matter, seem far more concerned with the logistics of the constitutional assembly election next September than the logistics of the war...
...In the Senate, the President's proposals have been referred to the Rules Committee, which is responding with the same languorous indifference that marked its inquiry into the Bobby Baker affair...
...At home, war has become a far bigger ponderable in the lives of Americans than at any time since Korea...
...President Johnson put in an unscheduled appearance and received a warm welcome...
...A. Philip Randolph, the venerable honorary chairman of the conference, hoped aloud as it opened that it would produce "a new vitality which the civil rights movement needs...
...No word of controversy or dissent was heard in any of the three plenary sessions...
...We apply this judgment to Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest and, in lesser measure, to Harold Weisberg's Whitewash...
...He warned the delegates not to expect him to perform miracles—"to put right in one year or four all that it took centuries to make wrong...
...But it would deny court review of its decisions, and empower the Secretary to deny a passport whenever he decided that "the applicant's activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States...
...The Department would impose a mere one-year sentence and $1,000 fine for Americans who defy its travel curbs...
...All of the elaborate preparations— the careful timing of the Conference schedule, the close screening of participants, the unusual security precautions, the tight procedural rules—paid off and produced a near-consensus...
...In fact, however, the proposals fall far short of effective control...
...But stimulation and excitement were not on the program...
...Violators would face five years in jail and a $5,000 fine...
...Be it loophole or law, Congress is content to let the matter lie...
...Earl Warren was so anxious to get the job finished that he reportedly threatened to close down the investigation four months before it was completed...
...Johnson had advanced a stringent new code for campaign financing...
...The Negro people in Bo-galusa will be peeved," said Robert Hicks, a paperworker who heads his city's civil rights movement...
...They went through the agenda and went home...
...The CORE contingent stirred little enthusiasm for its militant positions...
...Only the State Department could make the senior Senator from Mississippi look like a civil libertarian...
...But the two books, based on examination of the report's twenty-six volumes, make it clear that the Commission's evidence was riddled with internal inconsistencies and that the procedures of the Commission were far from flawless while those of the FBI were—in some respects—unimaginably sloppy...
...But on Capitol Hill there is no disposition to hack away at the vines that bear the golden melons...
...The movement, he said, "needs stimulating, it needs some exciting force which will bring it up on the scale of national priorities...
...From the Administration's point of view, the Conference was a great success...
...It didn't "blow up," as many in the government had feared, into an attack on lax enforcement of existing civil rights laws and policies...
...It is no secret that President Johnson is probably Washington's most devout poll watcher...
...Eastland, the chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, wants to make sure the State Department has authority to clip the wings of "beatniks," "peaceniks," Communists, fellow travelers, and anyone else it prefers to keep at home...
...Now come new bearers of doubt, in the form of full-dress post Warren Commission critiques, to reopen the old questions...
...Potomacus...
...It's a close contest, and reasonable men can differ over who's ahead...
...The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...
...I hoped I could come back and tell them some kind of action would be taken immediately...
...The old, established civil rights groups had their responsibility and respectability on display...
...The requirement that members of Congress report substantial gifts and payments for "personal services" would impose no obligation to disclose investment income, capital gains, transactions in property or statements of assets and liabilities, including loans...
...The hundred pages of recommendations prepared in advance by the Conference's high-powered steering council, splendidly ambitious and splendidly vague, were approved intact and began at once to fade from memory...
...He is sponsoring a bill that would give the Secretary of State the power to prohibit travel by all Americans—or "certain classes" of Americans—to foreign countries the Department rules out of bounds...
...Unlike the earlier, and for the most part discredited adventures in this genre, the new books are works of sober and painstaking analysis...
...barely put in an appearance...
...Delegates to last month's White House Conference on Civil Rights were overpowered by the contrast...
...Most of the work was dumped on the shirt-sleeve lawyers who comprised the lowest echelon of the Commission staff...
...Leaders talked about unity and progress, and congratulated each other on their achievements...
...The trickle has only started...
...Little was heard in Washington, though, over the success of former Representative Charles Porter, a Democratic critic of the Administration's policies, in his effort to regain a House seat in the same state's primary...
...Its immediate effect upon publication was to quiet the chorus of dark conjecture about the assassination—especially the intimations of conspiracy...
...For the fragmented civil rights leadership, the Conference was a family reunion, complete with the frictions that are usual at such affairs...
...At one Cabinet-level background press conference it was solemnly asserted that if the Vietcong monsoon offensive did not come off this year then peace (i.e., surrender by the North) was just around the corner...
...It is clear that in the investigation the FBI and Secret Service operated like two rival feudal baronies...
...It didn't press new demands for swift and drastic action...
...Senator Ted Kennedy, representing the government-in-exile during his brother's absence from the country, came by to make a statement for the television cameras...
...Omission of such vital information would drastically limit the effectiveness of any disclosure requirement," Senator Case commented...
...The Department's bill also would authorize restrictions on travel "in the national interest because such travel would seriously impair the conduct of United States foreign affairs...
...Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia heard only six per cent of the testimony...
...From the date of its release in September, 1964, the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy has stood as the impregnable and definitive archive of the event...
...For decades," President Johnson told Congress when he transmitted his proposed Election Reform Act of 1966, "we have tolerated the growth of seeds of cynicism from the underbrush surrounding our present method of financing political campaigns...
...As Senator Clifford P. Case, the New Jersey Republican who has fought a lonely battle for Congressional ethics, observed, the President's feeling for full disclosure "is only skin deep...
...It is also incredible that the Warren Commission itself chose to exclude a major FBI report on vital aspects of the case —which was certain some day to provoke a new trickle of doubts in the official version of the assassination...
...U. N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg dropped in to say a few kind words about the war...
...Epstein, particularly, shatters the popular notion of the Warren Commission as a perfect tribunal which sifted every significant piece of evidence and came to an immaculate conclusion...
...Senate...
...The State Department is vying with Senator James O. Eastland, Mississippi Democrat, to see who can come up with the most restrictive new law curbing the right of Americans to travel abroad...
...The State Department believes Eastland's bill is too severe...
...But it will be fascinating in the months ahead to see how President Johnson and his party, as well as the Republicans, gird for the test...
...Like the President's earlier proposals for Electoral College reform and four-year terms for Congressmen, the campaign-spending bill has been consigned to legislative limbo...
...There was a quiet sense of elation within the Administration at the victory of Representative Robert B. Duncan, a Vietnam hawk, in Oregon's Democratic primary race for the U.S...
...There has been slippage, if the pollsters are correct, in public support for the President's conduct of the war and indeed in Mr...
...For my part, I believe we would be adding 'more loophole than law,' as the President characterized current legislation governing campaign contributions and expenditures...
...This may, of course, be only a seasonal aberration...
...They spent $500 to send me to this big show, this come-on, this waste of time...
...We know why we are here," he said, but many of the delegates weren't sure...
...It is too soon to suggest that the off-year elections of 1966 will serve as a reliable war referendum for the American people...
...When voices were raised in behalf of price tags and priorities and prompt enactment, they were all but muted in the diffuse format of twelve separate working groups...
...The primary election season is a time when Washington is addicted to scanning the political skies for signs and portents...
...Neither book wholly destroys the Commission's critical conclusion: that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy alone and on his own...
...Delegates from Watts and Harlem and scores of dreary ghettos in between were left to wonder what it was all about...
...There was the day, for example, when Representative Charles Goodell of upstate New York, an influential young House Republican, took the floor to quote war critics Hans Mor-genthau and Bernard Fall against the Administration...
...Everyone seemed disposed to take his word for it...
...The books too are a reproach to the American press which proved itself unable to cope with the ocean of facts that poured out of the twenty-six volumes...
...One hears from the Administration's normal information outlets in Washington that the war is going well...
...Johnson's general popularity...
...A thin picket line denouncing conference participants as Uncle Toms faded away after the first day...
...Campaign expenditures and contributions of $100 or more would be reported to officials of the House and Senate who lack the staff to audit the reports as well as the inclination to insist on enforcement...
Vol. 30 • July 1966 • No. 7
