The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington! The Ninetieth Congress is moving into Washington like a large storm cloud of unknown depth and ferocity. That, at least, is the way it is being viewed by the Johnson...
...That, at least, is the way it is being viewed by the Johnson Administration after these past three years of balmy consensus in Congressional relations...
...As Capitol page, clerk, and secretary to the Senate Democrats, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker was on the public payroll, man and boy, for the better part of two decades...
...There was the extraordinary polemic over whether the word "consensus" should be banished from Republican lips...
...But in the view of some of Washington's most knowing Democrats, Mr...
...In the wake of the Baker-Black disclosures, Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark advised all U. S. Attorneys that "this Department must never proceed with any investigation or case which includes evidence illegally obtained or the fruits of that evidence...
...Manchester, a gifted and painstaking journalist, has dealt with aspects of the assassination that are bound to revive old animosities between the Kennedy and Johnson camps...
...It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time...
...The right to be secure against illegal government eavesdropping belongs not only to justices, ambassadors, and Senators...
...It is remarkable that a Polish-born, Harvard-educated scholar who in 1960 counseled John F. Kennedy on Soviet and East European affairs should now rank so importantly in the Johnson Administration...
...These are ugly possibilities, and they are giving rise to legitimately grave concern...
...The book, based on interviews with members of the Kennedy family and staff as well as many dozens of witnesses to the murder in Dallas, is certain to anger President Johnson...
...The pity of it is that President Johnson seems to have accepted the notion that the American voters were signaling him to slow the pace of domestic legislation...
...SB The promise of the Ninetieth Congress is simply that the great momentum for reform and modernization of American society, begun under President Kennedy and accelerated by President Johnson in the Eighty-ninth Congress, is now slowing down...
...His comments on the shortlived ideological dispute with Rockefeller verged on the fatuous...
...He is also one of the most salutary influences to join the Council, one of the tightest and most inbred craft unions in Washington...
...For in your time," he said on May 22, 1964, "we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upwards toward the Great Society...
...The remarkable summit meeting between George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller in Dorado Beach, Puerto Rico, may some day prove to be a rich subject for analysis by the political anthropologists of another day...
...It would be tragic if the Administration were to let the bureaucracy swallow up Brezinski as it has so many men of talent...
...In the new Congress the President picked up thirty advocates of strong military action in Vietnam but lost forty or more votes for his ambitious program of domestic reform...
...There is a strong possibility, of course, that Baker will beat the fraud and tax evasion charges of which he is accused because of the acknowledged fact that his telephone conversations were tapped by the FBI...
...In this wiretap-wary capital, Justices of the Supreme Court are reportedly worried that their private deliberations may have been overheard...
...In each case the study shows that the margins of support for the President have vanished and the opponents are now dominant...
...The Ninetieth Congress may very well turn those words into an epitaph...
...In some ways the words consensus and agreement mean the same things," the Michigan governor sedulously told newsmen as he and Rockefeller finally buried the hatchet...
...The new Congress is not markedly different from the one with which John Kennedy suffered the frustrations of political stalemate during his last eleven months...
...Unlike much of the critical literature on the assassination, Manchester is understood to have concluded that the basic premises of the Warren Commission are correct: that Oswald, acting alone, murdered President Kennedy...
...nervous Senators are ordering electronic "sweeps" of their offices in an effort to find hidden listening devices...
...But such speculation, intriguing as it may be, should not becloud the principle involved...
...Senator Robert Kennedy is said to be apprehensive that publication of the book will damage irreparably his last links with the White House...
...Washington loves a morsel of gossip and the impending publication of William Manchester's book on the assassination of President Kennedy has set tongues wagging as no book since Theodore White's last major work...
...In the Eighty-eighth Congress there was the national spasm of shock and remorse after President Kennedy's murder that helped to launch the dazzling successes of the Great Society legislative program...
...It belongs even to gamblers, racketeers, and radicals...
...It may well become the gravest political challenge Lyndon Johnson has faced during his years in the Presidency...
...It is astonishing that such instructions from the nation's chief law-enforcement officer should be necessary, but it is obvious that they are overdue...
...The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all...
...Its strongest impact was President Johnson's speech in New York last summer which signaled a dramatic turn in Administration policy toward Europe...
...There were pictures of the two suntanned celebrities at golf or in gesture-filled conversation...
...The resources and energies that might be applied to executing the Great Society have been diverted to the war in the jungles of Vietnam...
...By throwing the spotlight on the insidious and pervasive practice of electronic snooping by Federal investigators, Baker has succeeded where a generation of civil libertarians has failed...
...I associate consensus with someone who hasn't fared so well with it...
...policy toward Europe has too long been in the hands of a small clique of patricians and senior bureaucrats whose vision of the continent is frozen into the immediate postwar mold...
...Yet Kennedy has not yet made any public move to repudiate the book or to disassociate himself from it...
...The hortatory liberalism of the 1964 campaign seems to have been replaced by the deft Congressional realpotitik that characterized Mr...
...But it seems to us the concern comes late...
...He is spending much of the time brandishing his economy cleaver in the face of the public and wooing the Republican Congressional leadership...
...Washington wonders, understandably, about the Justice Department's zeal in making a clean breast of its eavesdropping activities in the cases of Baker and his sometime associate, Fred B. Black Jr., when so many other instances of bugging have gone unconfessed...
...But it may be inconceivable to President Johnson and his supporters that Manchester's book was not part of a conspiracy to advance the Kennedy candidacy by tarring the image of the man who is now in the White House...
...The President enjoyed his greatest moments of political success when he identified himself with the historic role of the national Democratic Party—as a proposer of government action to meet the needs of an urbanized American society...
...I think we need leadership," said Romney—a fine point that apparently eluded most of the newsmen present...
...Potomacus...
...And then the incomparable Barry Goldwater helped to elect an Eighty-ninth Congress ("the fabulous Eighty-ninth" the President and Postmaster-General Larry O'Brien like to call it) that obligingly rolled out a succession of landmark bills that had taken as long as a generation to reach fruition...
...U.S...
...Johnson has little to gain by abetting the slaughter...
...Johnson's style during the divided government of the Eisenhower days...
...at least one friendly embassy, that of the Dominican Republic, has had its telephone calls monitored by the FBI...
...No sooner were the returns in than the talk in White House circles began to turn on such phrases as "consolidating" the legislative gains of the Eighty-ninth Congress, or "digesting" the newly-won programs in the Executive branch...
...But the times are changing and as the members of the Ninetieth Congress file into Washington this month the President may find that the highway of consensus has reached a dead end on Capitol Hill...
...But it speaks poorly for the process of self-analysis being undertaken by the Republican Party's reasonable wing...
...In the Senate there has been only negligible change...
...Brezinski's advocacy of stronger American initiatives toward political and economic contacts with Eastern Europe has already paid off both in Administration word and deed...
...Lyndon Johnson, so far in the course of his Presidency, has had no occasion to be angry with Congress...
...And it was his most memorable and redeeming trait that he got angry...
...We are not stirred by House Republican leadership promises of a program of "Great Alternatives" to the Great Society...
...But it was only this winter, more than three years after his hasty and graceless resignation, that the energetic entrepreneur from Pickens, South Carolina, rendered his great—if inadvertent—public service...
...It is now two and a half years since the President enunciated his Great Society vision at the University of Michigan with all the resounding brass notes of traditional liberal Democratic rhetoric...
...One possible explanation is that Brezinski defended American policy in Vietnam during the gladiatorial teach-ins of 1965—although he did so responsibly and without the stridency that afflicted so many of the contestants on both sides of the Vietnam dispute...
...Congressional Quarterly, the reliable chronicler of Capitol Hill, recently carried out a painstaking survey of the new Ninetieth Congress and how it lines up on the major programs of the past two years...
...Zbigniew Brezinski, the highly original whiz kid of the State Department Policy Planning Council, was the chief architect of President Johnson's newly-enunciated "peaceful engagement" policy toward Eastern Europe...
...In the new House of Representatives, the margins of support for the various Great Society measures have simply dissolved...
...Even to Bobby Baker...
...Obsession with NATO and anti-Gaullism have been the two strongest passions of the policy ring which has dominated American behavior in Europe since the days of the Marshall Plan...
...This is the paradox of the Republican Party in the plenitude of its candidates: Romney, the front-runner in all the polls, projects publicly as the greenest of the political recruits...
...There is no doubt that such an outcome would come as a great relief to some of Baker's former friends in high places...
...Harry Truman had a "do-nothing" Republican Congress in Washington twenty years ago...
...And there is every indication that the conservative coalition, a powerful paralytic agent on the Hill since New Deal days, will soon be riding again...
...But now Lyndon Johnson's charmed life on Capitol Hill has come to an end...
...Whatever euphemisms may be used, there is little doubt that the drive for the Great Society in Congress is gone and the programs will be starved to death or legislated out of existence in the months ahead...
...On such issues as the teacher corps, rent supplements, urban mass transit, and the funding of the war on poverty there has been a shift of seventy to eighty votes in the House away from the Administration...
Vol. 31 • January 1967 • No. 1
