The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington Burlesque hasn't died, the wags are saying. It turned up alive this session on Capitol Hill. As we write, the Ninetieth Congress has not yet lurched to the end of its...
...Its rat-infested slums match those of any Northern city one could name, and its needy families wait years for public housing to become available...
...One of the sorest wounds in the relationship between the President and his running mate was Humphrey's inadvertent blooper calling for a Marshall Plan for the Cities...
...For God is not mocked...
...And it started the tightly-knit little coterie of White House advisers clucking about Humphrey's lack of finely-honed political propriety and the malaise of his staff work...
...This was perhaps a twitch of old Humphrey within the confining mold of the New Humphrey...
...He praised the "patience, tolerance, understanding, wisdom and good judgment" of the law enforcement officers who faced the demonstrators, and he added: "We didn't lose forty or fifty lives as we lost in Detroit...
...Could we believe our ears...
...When he does, it is this column's guess that he will prate about lawlessness and violence in the streets rather than the social roots of these symptoms...
...Lyndon B. Johnson, campaign speech, October 21, 1964...
...These words are written with no small measure of pain and sorrow because, for all his faults, we revered the Old Humphrey...
...But Humphrey has lost the very constituency that made him a desirable running mate in 1964, the liberal Democratic activists who have always been deeply suspicious of Lyndon Johnson...
...Now Congress has welched on that commitment...
...Note alliteration...
...But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected...
...An Associated Press survey of GOP state chairmen and national committeemen corroborated the Gallup findings...
...It is, in fact, perplexing to think about what the New Nixon and Lyndon Johnson might have to argue about in 1968...
...We are asking them all to do all they can...
...You have quoted one sentence in a speech that contained many sentences and many paragraphs...
...But the battlegrounds of the House and Senate are already littered with the cadavers of the Great Society programs that were unable to survive the political realignment of the House mandated by the 1966 elections...
...The President mentioned all these things—but mostly he talked about crime...
...Those are the words of our friend, the Reverend Will D. Campbell, who directs the Committee of Southern Churchmen and preaches the gospel of racial justice in the South...
...Nonetheless Nixon is the clear choice of the Republican organization bosslets throughout the nation...
...Whatsoever a man, or a nation, soweth, that he shall also reap," said the editorial...
...We can only say, 'Look out!' For God is not mocked...
...Hubert Horatio Humphrey, meanwhile, looks more and more like an actuarial candidate for the Presidency rather than one who can win the office in his own right...
...The time has come, in my judgment, when the American people are going to rise up and revolt at the lawbreaker in this country," Mr...
...Potomacus reported last month, without the benefit of surveys, that Nixon was far and away the favorite of the Republican organization men...
...He called for "containment without isolation" along with "a positive policy of pressure and persuasion, of dynamic detoxification...
...There are few political secrets in Washington and so it is no secret that the Vice President does not stand these days in the high esteem of the White House...
...An unreconstructed view of the world as a theater of conflict between two monolithic forces—American /Free World Power versus Communist Power...
...Middle age seems to have been good to him," New York Times associate editor James Reston wrote after an interview with the allegedly new Richard M. Nixon...
...We are going to have to obey the law...
...The Administration's anti-poverty program has been butchered and mangled beyond description...
...Look out...
...We didn't have a lot of people carried to the graveyard...
...Its public schools have been found by a Federal court to practice discrimination against the impoverished Negro children who constitute the great majority of the enrollment...
...Potomacus...
...Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, 1872...
...Humphrey lost this constituency because he served his President perhaps too well...
...We thought about it on a recent Friday morning as we stood in the East Room of the White House and listened to the President of the United States...
...Only last summer, Washington had an advanced case of the race riot jitters...
...Will he keep Humphrey on the ticket...
...We must surmise that it is an anger that springs from a profound inner frustration, from the despair of his alienation...
...The nation's capital has its share, and more, of urban misery...
...That was when we thought of Will Campbell and his editorial...
...We hold no brief for the anti-poverty program which has been plagued almost from its outset with maladministration, malnutrition, muddled thinking, and hipped-up public relations...
...What comprises the New Nixon...
...Proverbs 26: 17...
...The AP survey also found a Nixon-Reagan ticket to be the one that most Republican leaders believe would be strongest next year...
...If you believe that, as I do, then you stay with it until you achieve your objective of preventing the loss—through warfare or negotiation—of a vital strategic objective," Nixon told David S. Broder of The Washington Post...
...It's almost halfway to next summer...
...The President talked about that, too...
...He asked the prosecutors and the judges to work overtime "to clean up these dockets and bring us justice—and bring it quickly...
...I begin with the proposition that Vietnam is a question of U.S...
...Nixon's elixir for American policy toward China might have been a steal from Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the advanced project department of the General Motors publicity office...
...We got through a very difficult situation...
...The contingency plans that were made to contain a riot came in handy in October at the Pentagon war protest...
...There has not been a change of policy...
...The New Humphrey has acquired a tone of anger and stridency that ap-preciators of the Old Humphrey find wholly alien to his public style...
...security in a strategic part of the world, just as World War II was, just as Korea was...
...When / use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less...
...Johnson pledged his support to the police force, and promised to double it, if necessary...
...And we are going to protect the citizen under the law, though we are not going to protect his right to run over other people, to violate the rights of other people, and to take the law into his own hands...
...The hairline recedes inexorably...
...The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things...
...The Model Cities program, which some Federal policymakers saw as an alternative to the politically beleaguered war on poverty, was similarly hacked to the point of barest survival...
...The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all...
...The self-deprecatory sallies ("I remember what happened to me the last time I ran against a Harvard man . . .") have deepened the patina of humility that runs no more than skin deep...
...Johnson said...
...In earlier days there was the half-facetious quip among the then-regnant Kennedys: "Lyndon-Who...
...He has put on a little girth at fifty-four but taken on a good deal more philosophy...
...We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves...
...The Johnson tax surcharge proposal that was heavily touted by the Administration as an inflation depressant was afflicted with slow death in the midst of the frenetic tangle that was the first session of the Ninetieth Congress...
...We always have said—and we repeat now— that we do not want American boys to do the fighting that South Vietnamese boys ought to do or that Asian boys ought to do...
...As we write, the Ninetieth Congress has not yet lurched to the end of its torpid mid-year session...
...He was swearing in the new City Council of the District of Columbia's reorganized government, and he used the occasion to talk about crime...
...Federal troops were quietly moved into the city to quell the disorders that were expected, but that never came...
...Fifteen years after the Checkers speech, after two Presidential campaigns, after the awesomely graceless farewell to California's electorate five years ago, after the cunning ambivalence of his role in the 1964 Republican convention...
...And the fracturing of expectations on Capitol Hill is certain to anger and radicalize the very constituency that the war on poverty was supposed to take into the consensus...
...Yes, Virginia, there is talk in Washington of a New Nixon...
...The conventional wisdom holds that Johnson will keep Humphrey as long as such a marriage will, in the President's judgment, help him win the election...
...The fact is that the poverty program—because of the super-merchandising job done by the Administration—represents the Government's most publicly identifiable gesture to the Negro underclass of the United States...
...But it enraged the President who is going about the White House privately lamenting over the prospect of a $30 billion deficit next year...
...Lyndon B. Johnson, news conference, November 2, 1967...
...The question that is heard increasingly here is a minor variant of one that began to circulate in mid-1963...
...The words are from an editorial he wrote for the Committee's journal, Katal-lagete (Be Reconciled), about the summer's racial outbursts in Detroit, Newark, and so many other cities...
...Then, several days later, there was a New York Times headline—'New' Nixon Stumping Old Vote Trail—over a story depicting the former Vice President on the stump in New England...
...The lines are heavier around the mouth...
...But that did not imply then and does not imply now that we would not do what we needed to do to deter aggression...
...The New Nixon...
...This was how he set forth the priorities: "If we could clean up this crime situation and make Washington the safest city in the nation, I think it would just be a matter of time, then, when there would be so much encouragement and so much support from all of our people and all of our Congress that we could have the best educational system, we could have the cleanest city, and we could do all these other things that need so much to be done...
...He is far more poignant as a casualty of the office than was Mr...
...Johnson under John Kennedy...
...The Bible Says He that passeth by, and med-dleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears...
...The Word from Washington Burlesque hasn't died, the wags are saying...
...A Gallup survey found him to be leading his nearest challenger, George Rom-ney, by nearly three-to-one in a survey of 3,300 county and township Republican chairmen...
...Mr...
...The allegedly New Nixon flowered again in Foreign Affairs magazine where he revived the old, old foreign policy recipes of the Eisenhower-Dulles era, a meringue of pactomania and protracted conflict...
...But the bludgeoning it took at the hands of the current Congress transcends all this...
...The once Vice President has spoken little about the great domestic convulsions that have gripped the cities of America...
Vol. 31 • December 1967 • No. 12
