THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
September arrives, and with it the tribal frenzies of fall electioneering. The country will survive, but campaign time is always worrisome. As the stock market and the Presidential popularity...
...Then Dodd started having second thoughts...
...But by the paradoxical rules of the Vietnam quagmire, the heavier the U.S...
...Already on the record are intriguing disclosures that Dodd's "campaign" expenditures included entertainment bills from the New York Athletic Club, the University Club in Washington, the Congressional Country Club, the Hartford Club in Connecticut, and other watering holes...
...Dirksen asked...
...I am more interested in the humble people of this country than the hierarchy of the churches," he declared...
...When spokesmen for leading religious denominations opposed the Dirksen amendment in Senate hearings last month—one called it "a minimal and questionable embellishment"—the Senator was undismayed...
...A minor casualty of the Vietnam war, but one that saddens us, is our esteem for the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara...
...He dropped ten of the libel counts—those dealing with allegations about his use of campaign funds and his receipt of compensation for "favors"—because, he said, he wanted to "expedite" the suit...
...Premier Nguyen Cao Ky was sailing off a scenic island in the South China Sea...
...You never know," Dirksen said...
...Under Hyde's direction, and with the lackluster make-up of the rest of the Commission, the initiatives of the Kennedy-era FCC are in danger of bogging down...
...The very next day there was more news from Saigon: a new intelligence estimate placing the number of enemy troops in South Vietnam at 282,000— an increase of 52,000 since the first of the year...
...He invited the Justice Department to conduct an inquiry...
...As the stock market and the Presidential popularity quotient skitter at home, the thunder of the Vietnamese war reverberates ever more loudly across the Pacific...
...In the Senate and governorship races there are more Republicans who face election challenges than Democrats...
...The Secretary was asked about the studies, of course...
...We fear our disillusionment may deepen if the war drags on for eight or twenty years...
...The selection has aroused justifiable fears that there will soon be a revival of those palmy, free-and-easy days when the FCC was little more than a government handmaiden to those it is supposed to regulate in the public interest...
...At home the Administration has found no way to control the thermonuclear anger in the black ghettos of the big cities, notwithstanding the rhetorical war on poverty...
...But the Secretary, with characteristic precision, had also reported 31,571 enemy soldiers and guerrillas killed in action, along with an unprecedented defection rate...
...Hyde is openly antagonistic to the FCC investigation of AT&T rates, an inquiry that he can easily subvert as commission chairman...
...The Senator's reticence is understandable...
...Johnson's record in appointments to the regulatory agencies is not a bad one, so far...
...Reluctantly, we've decided that McNamara isn't neat...
...Some "malicious untruths" may yet be brought to light—though perhaps not precisely those the Senator had in mind...
...From time to time, he drops a gentle reminder of these facts...
...Dirksen added that he has received "suitcases" of letters favoring his amendment, though other members of Congress make no such baggage claims...
...Many of his generals were either gambling, visiting friends, or basking in the sun near swimming pools...
...He declined to turn over financial records to the Ethics Committee because, he maintained, it lacked jurisdiction to look into them...
...And if he isn't neat, what is he...
...It might require 750,000 U.S...
...The House races will provide more of a political litmus test, despite the fact that nearly fifty Democratic House seats were wrested from normally Republican districts during the aberrational Johnson landslide two years ago, thus creating an unusual imbalance that might revert to normal...
...When Washington columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson began publishing unkind allegations early this year about Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, the Senator said he had nothing to hide...
...President Johnson is, applying the ultimate in conventional warfare pressure in hopes of achieving settlement before the polls open in November...
...He said that he couldn't find them around the office—not that they were not made, not that they didn't exist, but that he couldn't put his hands on them...
...Somebody," he suggested recently, might offer the prayer amendment as a rider to the Civil Rights Bill—perhaps as a substitute for the fair housing section...
...Another item listed with "expenditures for election" was the cost of flying Dodd's dog from Washington to Groton, Connecticut...
...It expressed itself in the sadly-diluted housing section that finally won House approval...
...Washington's emotional temper is eerily reminiscent of the year 1950, when the thunderhead of Korea suddenly boiled up...
...The increase, as The New York Times reported, "puzzled some observers...
...The problem is familiar to anyone who has wrestled with a monthly checkbook balance: the figures just don't jibe...
...The television wasteland about which Newton Minow once scathingly lectured the industry promises to spread like dry rot...
...It is a pity that he relaxed the standard in a regulatory area wherein his personal interests are so great as broadcasting...
...Now it is Vietnam, the rising price of bread, the Dodd Case, and the Bobby Baker Affair...
...We expected better from McNamara the Mathematician...
...During the same period, the number of North Vietnamese infiltrators into the South had been estimated at somewhere between a definite 35,000 and a possible 54,000...
...Our confidence in McNamara the Methodical was shaken...
...military escalation to end the war the more adverse is its impact at home and on world opinion...
...Among other bills regularly forwarded for payment from the "Testimonial for U.S...
...troops, or maybe more...
...But we have admired him for his tidiness...
...By election day, 1966, the United States may be moving toward a future troop commitment of more than three-quarters of a million men—roughly twice the number that fought in Korea...
...Dirksen believes not only in the power of prayer but also in the power of the prayer amendment...
...Today is Sunday, the people go to the movies," said a young Vietnamese who had succeeded in obtaining a discharge from the army...
...He can offer the amendment at any time, tie the Senate in knots, and put the members on the spot...
...The Ethics Committee, which differs with Dodd's definition of its jurisdiction, has been quietly subpenaing bank and commercial records that bear on such transactions...
...Vietnam has been poisoning American political life in gradual doses...
...The conflict might last eight years, these studies found, or maybe twenty...
...The Johnson consensus produced a string of dazzling domestic legislative achievements on Capitol Hill, but the power of cohesion seems to be failing beyond the Potomac River, thanks to the war...
...He recalls occasions when prayer changed his life...
...It has worked a polarizing effect on debate as it has become a scale on which all other judgments are weighed, both pro and con the Johnson Administration...
...But the 1966 campaign will be a seismic indicator of what may be in prospect for U.S...
...First there were the dispatches from Saigon last month citing American military projections of the war's duration...
...As the projections proliferate, the Secretary is bound to fall behind with his filing...
...Supreme Court—and amend the Bill of Rights for the first time in the nation's history—by allowing children in public schools to recite "voluntary prayers" in the classroom...
...The impeccable part in his hair, the precise cost-analysis figures worked out to the umpteenth decimal point, the ability to keep a desk clean while all about you are cluttering theirs, the vaunted reputation for computer-like efficiency—all these we have held in high regard while contemplating our own hopelessly disordered lives...
...He pledged his "full cooperation" to the new Senate Ethics Com^ mittee in an investigation that would demonstrate "the malicious untruth of the charges made against me...
...Potomacus Never on Sunday SAIGON, South Vietnam, July 17 (AP)—North Vietnam's order for partial mobilization and a stepped up war in South Vietnam brought shrugs in Saigon today...
...As the statistics are pressed into service to do double duty—proving that we are winning while demonstrating that we need more troops to win—the totals are likely to become irreconcilable...
...The 1966 elections will not provide a full national referendum on Vietnam and the Great Society because of circumstances that have little to do with the overriding issues...
...Senator Thomas J. Dodd" bank account in Hartford were those of Schneider's liquor store on Capitol Hill...
...On Capitol Hill there has already been something of a Northern Lib-lash to the fair housing title of the civil rights bill...
...As a prosperous entrepreneur of the airwaves himself, the President would seem to be under a special requirement to make the most unexceptionable of appointments to the communications commission...
...But now it seems we were mistaken...
...We've always had our doubts about the Secretary's policies, of course, and on occasion we've suspected him of a lack of candor...
...Would he offer the amendment under such circumstances...
...And, notwhithstanding the polls and other evidence of the war's unpopularity, the President appears determined to play support for the war as a prime campaign issue...
...Korea, inflation, and the Mess in Washington were the political incantations that began the unlovely decade of the Fifties...
...By one of those happy coincidences that illuminate the lives of the faithful, his sponsorship of the amendment gives him extraordinary leverage as this election-year session of Congress plods toward adjournment...
...This is the precept that President Johnson seems to have adopted in choosing Rosel H. Hyde, the good, gray, industry-oriented eminence as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission...
...What's good for broadcasting is good for the country...
...His life was an open book, he announced—and his books were open too...
...In the aftermath of the summer's riots it may well come to pass that the white backlash, that great spectral issue of the 1964 campaign, will reappear to haunt this year's elections...
...When lawyers for Pearson and Anderson tried to question him about finances in a pre-trial deposition session, Dodd snapped that such questions were "beyond the scope of the lawsuit...
...It is no secret that Hyde regards the best regulation of broadcasting as the least regulation—a quaint but pernicious doctrine in this era of television satellites and community antenna television systems and the general explosion of new electronic technology on one of the last frontiers of the public domain—the air...
...politics as the Johnson Administration completes its third year of power...
...Johnson and his family have reaped a fortune from their broadcast franchises throughout Texas, the harvest from a modest investment of his wife's capital during the early 1940's when he first came to Congress...
...He filed a $5 million, fourteen-count libel suit against Pearson and Anderson...
...And he is determined to reverse the U.S...
...Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Republican leader, is a devout man who believes profoundly in the power of prayer...
...The Internal Revenue Service, which harbors an understandable curiosity about the use of tax-exempt campaign funds, is also conducting an investigation...
...The right to pray is a civil right, isn't it...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
