The Word from Washington
The Word From Washington The performance was quintessential McNamara. The Secretary of Defense stood at the head of the class, so to speak, crayon in hand and map at his back to defend the...
...Potomacus...
...The Word From Washington The performance was quintessential McNamara...
...There has been an Orwellian quality to the Administration's efforts to dissolve its internal differences on bombing policy...
...Or so the General told the recent convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars...
...Senator Ervin called the CIA arguments "specious," and protested that the agency wanted "the unmitigated right to kick Federal employes around...
...But the news media, he complained, tend to accentuate the negative, stressing, for example, "the plight of civilians caught in the path of the war...
...We hope the CIA pointed out in its long, secret letter that it wants to treat Federal employes just as it treats everybody else...
...The experts have been telling us for years that the threat of a common enemy could end the Cold War...
...Will the Marine Corps Association buy full-page ads to explain the latest pointless search-and-destroy mission in the Vietnam's DMZ...
...The setting was the press conference early this month at which he confounded even the most sharp-witted of his journalistic auditors with the offhand remark that the differences between himself and the Joint Chiefs of Staff hinged on a mere "fifteen per cent of ten per cent of 13/30ths" of the 30,000 bombing sorties being conducted each month by American warplanes...
...It follows, therefore, that he does not care for much of the news emanating from Vietnam...
...And why not...
...Speaking of the plight of civilians— as General Johnson was, but only in passing—we wish to record here the comment of Werner P. (Soft-Hearted) Gullander, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who was one of the civilian observers President Johnson dispatched to Vietnam for last month's national election...
...Will the Subversive Activities Control Board launch a full-page campaign to prove it really does have something to do sometimes...
...O'Hara has recommended the expenditure of $4 billion annually—less than the yearly cost of the space program—to create one million new jobs in the slums...
...The only public evidence of the President's mind is where the bombs drop...
...plane losses and more toughness and solidarity on the other side of the Seventeenth Parallel...
...Lieutenant General John L. Throckmorton, who commanded the federalized Guardsmen in Detroit, called them "trigger-happy, nervous soldiers," and testified to a House subcommittee that they defied orders to unload their weapons...
...Nor is it a minor difference of views that prompts the Subcommittee to charge that the Administration has "shackled" the air war against North Vietnam or that "civilian authority consistently overruled the unanimous recommendations of military commanders" for heavier aerial strikes against the North...
...Both are still unhappy about the bill sponsored by Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr., North Carolina Democrat...
...The bombings of the North, by any observable measure, have failed to produce anything but higher U.S...
...Well, apparently they sit around that big, secret CIA building in Langley, Virginia, and ask each other probing questions about personal finances, sex attitudes, religious beliefs, and family affairs...
...General Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, may not know much about news but he knows what he likes...
...It is no secret the President is worried about the size of his budget deficit and he proclaimed to all that he has no desire to give bonuses to rioters...
...Where President Johnson stands in this intramural struggle is not altogether clear...
...If there is one common ground on which experts and amateurs, Senators and aldermen, rich and poor can agree it is that the chief irritant in America's urban agony is unemployment— chronic, enforced idleness—in the ghetto...
...How do they while the time away when the spy planes are grounded by bad weather and the agents in the field are taking a long weekend and no troublesome government is in need of immediate overthrow...
...All this has been taken in some quarters as evidence that the President is more in sympathy with the ultimate solutions propounded by the Chiefs of Staff than with those advanced by his Secretary of Defense...
...Johnson's popularity quotient...
...What do they do at the Central Intelligence Agency on a slow day...
...We are reading the ads with new interest...
...The non-Golderwaterite wing of the Republican Party speaks with the voice of the dove, as does a growing segment of leaders in the President's own party...
...Under sponsorship of the National Guard Association of the United States, a series of full-page advertisements prepared by a Madison Avenue agency has been extolling the virtues of the Guard in The New York Times and The Washington Post...
...The CIA twice refused to testify at public hearings on the Ervin bill, but in a ten-page letter aptly stamped "Secret," it raised a host of objections to the measure...
...Signals have been flashed from the White House calling for the defeat of such legislation...
...No one can assess the tragedy the National Guard has averted...
...I think you would be doing the country a disservice if you felt for a moment that there were any deep divisions between us," Mr...
...It is a sorry record, but we are intrigued by the public relations technique the Guard has adopted to cope with it...
...No one can count the number of lives the National Guard has saved...
...It is no more than a start in the enormous national undertaking that will not be completed until American society can make it possible for all who live within it to fulfill their lives with decency and self-respect...
...We think his message augurs well for the Administration's effort to "build bridges" between Washington and Moscow...
...Well, maybe not...
...Yet the Secretary of Defense may be closer to the national emotions on Vietnam than is President Johnson...
...The proposals by Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, and Representative James G. O'Hara of Michigan, both Democrats, for massive employment programs are not gestures of idle extravagance...
...No matter how dazzling McNamara's arithmetic and how minute his fractions may be, the fact is that his differences with the Chiefs are large and palpable...
...Not even the most obtuse among the brass could have been fooled by the statistical arabesques of the Secretary of Defense...
...Money is not the whole answer...
...So ineptly did the White House try to sabotage the Clark bill that the lobbyists from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may actually have won votes for the "bonus" program...
...When I went I believed we belonged [in Vietnam] because we had a selfish interest," Mr...
...Within three weeks after he declared them not to be feasible as bombing targets they were bombed—presumably on approval by Lyndon Johnson...
...Nor could the most gullible of men have been convinced by President Johnson's assertion at a later press conference that "there are no quarrels, no antagonisms" between his military and civilian advisers in the Pentagon...
...The recent pattern of intensive bombings near Haiphong would also seem to run across the grain of McNamara's publicly expressed views on the role of bombing: a modest deterrent to infiltration of North Vietnamese troops into the South...
...Even if we have to blow them up...
...We had several thoughts about General Johnson's speech, but in keeping with his precepts we will mention only the most hopeful...
...They think that enemy is China, but we suspect it may be the press...
...No matter on how microscopic a scale the Administration would like to cast its internal differences the disputes are large and they are certain to be exacerbated under the pressures of the oncoming campaign...
...They fear that even if their prying into staff members' private lives is left uncurbed, other provisions of the legislation—the right to sue a Federal agency for unfair employe relations, for example—leaves them vulnerable to possible exposure of secrets...
...Just to keep the game honest, they plug in lie detectors to score the answers...
...Will the Federal Communications Commission hire a Madison Avenue agency to proclaim the virtues of the ITT-ABC merger...
...The President's Commission on Civil Disorders called for integration of the Guard's lily-white units, retraining of its officers and men, and scrutiny of officer appointment and promotion procedures...
...Johnson admonished, with characteristic hyperbole...
...The American news media dwell too heavily on what he calls "the disagreeable aspects" of the war...
...All this, says the CIA, is part of its strenuous effort to prevent infiltration by enemy agents...
...The Detroit Free Pressy analyzing the forty-three fatalities in the city's racial flare-up, found that "the Guard was involved in a total of eleven deaths in which nine innocent people died...
...The National Security Agency is equally vigilant...
...bombing activities in North Vietnam against those who call for still a wider air war...
...Will the method be imitated...
...Both agencies have obtained exemptions from new legislation guaranteeing the privacy of Federal employes...
...Gullander said when he returned from his encouraging visit, "but I'm soft-hearted enough that I now believe in addition that these are beautiful and wonderful people and we cannot let them down...
...The fact is, of course, that job creation is not a bonus for the poor...
...Army propounds a theory of journalism that sounds like the latest essay on "socialist realism" in Komsomolskaya Pravda—and when that theory draws cheers from the annual VFW convention—surely the Great Detente must be just around the corner...
...McNamara was forced recently to eat his own words on the inadvisability of bombing MIG bases in North Vietnam...
...And so it is that from the tiny gaps, mighty chasms of credibility grow...
...Within the country the public dismay with the war grows and this rubs off on Mr...
...But those who have tried to measure, assess, and count have come up with the conclusion that the Guard has much to be modest about...
...And they fail to take adequate note of personal acts of heroism, civic action, and construction work...
...The Secretary of Defense stood at the head of the class, so to speak, crayon in hand and map at his back to defend the recently expanded U.S...
...Joblessness is the twin of hopelessness on the inhospitable streets where riots are spawned...
...This is why the struggle in the Pentagon may project a heavy shadow over next year's Presidential campaign...
...When the chief of staff of the U.S...
...It is at best—in the forms proposed by Clark and O'Hara—a palliative...
...Having just returned from his eighth consecutive encouraging visit to Vietnam in three-and-a-half years, General Johnson was able to assure the veterans that the picture there "is one of progress—military, social, economic, and political...
...Clark proposed, and the Senate Labor Committee approved, a more modest $2.5 billion program to be spent over a two-year period...
...He likes good news, comforting news, reassuring and inspiring news...
...It is whether or not to blow up the port of Haiphong, to cite only an example...
...Displaying a degree of enterprise and ingenuity that one would not have expected on the basis of the summer's performance in Detroit and other racial trouble spots, the National Guard has mounted a campaign of image building...
...I have never known a period . . . when I thought there was more harmony, more general agreement and a more cooperative attitude or when there were more able men in control," quoth the President...
...But for what money can achieve, this much is not enough...
...The fateful question is whose advice will Lyndon Johnson take...
...No one can measure the suffering the National Guard has relieved," boasted one of these fulsome essays...
...The gold-plated hawks of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, for example, are not likely to be pleased by the inference from the White House that they did the country a disservice by referring to the "diametrically opposed views" of McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
Vol. 31 • October 1967 • No. 10
