The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington The Johnson Administration's foreign policy, as it has been articulated by its exponents in recent months, would pass neither sophomore English nor sophomore logic. It...
...a national health service, and if people don't pay their own bills, they have little or no influence over the kind of care they get...
...Not since Joe McCarthy barked "Point of order, point of order" at the Senators investigating him have local connoisseurs of irony enjoyed such a rewarding moment...
...Victory is also around the corner in the war on poverty...
...That is what you reported as a landslide during General Eisenhower's period," the President reminded newsmen...
...i There are some hard-bitten Washington skeptics who see in the escalation of the bombings in North Vietnam an attempt by the Administration to recover its standing in the polls of public opinion which had revealed a sharp decline in support for the President...
...leadership, he volunteered, is out of step with the rank and file...
...In the light of that ambitious goal, Senators wondered why Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity was making such a modest fund request for fiscal 1967...
...It is, he added, "a budget for troubled times, and under other circumstances would have been larger...
...Prudent fiscal management is the hallmark of the Johnson Administration...
...Hudson is described as a "moderate" in medical politics, while his designated successor, Dr...
...The word from the White House has been that a majority of Americans would prefer a more hawkish military policy in Vietnam than the one adopted by the President...
...Nationally, Mr...
...Now, five years later, Rostow has been brought back from the genteel bureaucratic exile of the State Department policy planning staff and, on Vietnam policy, seems to be closest to the President's ear...
...News accounts of the American Medical Association's convention in Chicago prompted our family physician, a kindly man, to offer a few therapeutic words...
...President Johnson said in Omaha that we should count to ten before we dissent from his policies in Vietnam," wrote New York Times Associate Editor James Reston...
...Such protests must be construed as special tributes to Dodd, since their authors—like the Senator himself— have never before been preoccupied with the niceties of fairness in Congressional investigations...
...We reminded him that he had said the same thing ten or twelve years ago, and he sighed and went back to taking our blood pressure...
...We bombed the Hanoi and Haiphong fuel depots to raise "the price of aggression" for the Communists—targets we supposedly forswore for fear of unifying Hanoi, Moscow, and Peking...
...president, warned that doctors must prepare for new proposals to extend medical benefits...
...Johnson boasted, pollsters Louis Harris and Oliver Quayle gave him a fifty-five per cent national popularity rating...
...But it doesn't work...
...The elections are little more than three months off...
...The effect wears off, and you have to take another...
...They have not felt free—as Dodd did—to interrupt the testimony of others, to demand perjury indictments, and to request that Senators disqualify themselves as prejudiced...
...I thought this was a fact-finding hearing and not a trial," Dodd rasped at the Select Committee at one point...
...House of Delegates highly resolved that members ought to insist on direct billing of patients under Medicare—a procedure that is certain to create a financial hardship for the elderly poor...
...Senator Wallace Bennett, the Utah Republican who has subjected Dodd to the closest questioning, "ought to be ashamed of himself," Chamberlain clucked...
...It opened with a singing of The Star Spangled Banner in a lower east side New York meeting hall where twenty or thirty or forty years ago it would surely have opened with The Internationale...
...Charles L. Hudson, the new...
...Tired...
...Our doctor, who has never been to an...
...Beneath the Marx-o-matic oratory the Party's draft program was no more revolutionary than a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report...
...Milford O. Rouse, who will take office next year, calls himself a "conservative...
...Okay: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, 8,9,10...
...The prose from the old Bundy basement office that Rostow inherited is windy and sycophantic, like nothing that has been heard since Jack Valenti left the old plantation...
...Johnson which fifty-five per cent of the country feels in its heart that he is right...
...In 1961 Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor recommended a major enlargement of the American military presence in Vietnam...
...They have rallied around him in his hour of adversity, and are fearlessly castigating his tormentors on the Senate's Select Committee on Standards and Conduct for being unfair...
...If appearances can be believed, the CPUSA has become in the recent era of American prosperity a paper tiger from which the breath of rebellion has vanished...
...One could very well ask why we request so little when the need is so great," Shriver acknowledged...
...Then the State Department solemnly insisted that the new air strikes represented merely a continuation of existing policy...
...convention, said the blood pressure was up a bit—but nothing to worry about...
...Confused...
...In a few years time, the organization's hidebound hierarchy is bound to be replaced by younger men more attuned to social responsibility...
...Sometimes I almost develop a stomach ulcer myself just listening to them...
...Unlike the Connecticut Senator, witnesses before Dodd's subcommittee have not been flanked by batteries of lawyers empowered to cross-examine witnesses...
...But it is a pity that no one thought to ask Mr...
...and in four days everyone will have forgotten...
...Its commanding general, Sargent Shriver, told a Senate welfare subcommittee that 1976 is "the target date for ending poverty in this land...
...Senator Thomas J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat whose fascinating friendships and finances have enlivened an otherwise solemn session of Congress, has reason to be proud of his friends...
...In fact, they have been among the cheerleaders when Dodd, as prime mover on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, has issued specious reports based on malicious nonsense and twaddle...
...But perhaps it's also a matter of prudent fiscal management...
...They say it's necessary in order to restore confidence and maintain morale...
...The charges against Dodd, Kilpatrick wrote, were "malicious nonsense" or "twaddle," and "they ought never to have occupied the time of grown men...
...Could it be that a large element in this "healthy majority" is compounded of 1964 Republican Goldwaterites...
...Another conservative columnist, John Chamberlain, who wears the musty mantle of the late George Sokol-sky, has satisfied himself that the allegation that Dodd intervened in Klein's behalf with West German clients "must seem to be about the most puerile and footless charge ever debated by supposedly intelligent men...
...True enough...
...They want a force of American troops," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., quotes the late President as having responded...
...Then we will be told we have to send in more troops...
...Well, goes the current advice, see Walt Rostow...
...Potomacus...
...And so the Party surfaced finally, not with a whimper but a yawn...
...It won't even pass through a thinking man's filter...
...But it will be just like Berlin...
...And in that same Omaha speech President Johnson registered his own rueful reaction to the growing dismay about him: "I hear my friends say I am troubled and I am confused and I am frustrated," said the President...
...James J. Kilpatrick, the dyspeptic Dixie editor whose fulminations are syndicated to newspapers around the country, weighed the evidence on Dodd's extraordinary eagerness to oblige foreign lobbyist Julius Klein, and concluded that "if one applies the usual rule in such cases, that a defendant is entitled to reasonable doubt, the verdict has to be: Not guilty...
...The eighteenth national convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was the late, late show of American radicalism...
...In Chicago, the...
...Most of the comrades wore ties and jackets and looked as though they, like Gus Hall, had driven down the West Side expressway from Yonkers, or at least the uncon-taminated stretches of the upper Bronx...
...It's like taking a drink...
...If this should occur," he cautioned, "we would have...
...the crowds will cheer...
...Defense procurement will soon be curtailed, the President has announced, so that the nation won't be stuck with large stockpiles of surplus military hardware when the war in Vietnam is won...
...Five days before the strikes were ordered against Hanoi and Haiphong the normally reliable California Poll of The Los Angeles Times showed that fifty per cent of the state's Democrats would prefer Senator Robert F. Kennedy as President while Mr...
...What remains is the hackneyed medley of Marxist cliches with which Hall mechanically harangued the bored and perspiring delegates for nearly three hours on opening night...
...We wouldn't want a lot of anti-poverty money lying around once the poor are gone...
...Vietnam becomes the Looking Glass War if one tries to comprehend it in the Administration's words...
...The troops will march in...
...But President Kennedy rejected the advice...
...And in his Texas press conference a week after the bombings, the President reported from his own polling sources a "healthy majority" in California and not just among Democrats...
...The bombings, furthermore, were proclaimed to be a means of cutting infiltration from the North even though it was during the previous bombings of supply routes that the influx of Communist manpower climbed most dramatically...
...The trouble is that under Rostow, successor to the mercifully terse Mc-George Bundy, the Administration's power of exposition has fallen to its muggiest level in years...
...Dodd's dubious documents alleging Communist control of what he calls "the Anti-Vietnam Agitation" have been accepted without reservation by the scrupulous critics of the Select Committee on Standards and Conduct...
...the bands will play...
...Johnson was the favorite of only twenty-six per cent...
...They have not been accorded the privilege—as Dodd was— of deciding when and whether to testify...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
