THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington Even though it happened by inadvertence, President Johnson could not have chosen a more appropriate time to declare his War on Smog. Within hours after he issued the...
...By deft manipulation of the government's varied and complex accounting methods—by inserting on the plus side the sale of $5 billion in Federal loan participation certificates here, a dubious (and regressive) tax "surcharge" there, and a postal rate increase somewhere else—Mr...
...They came from the silent doves within the foreign policy bureaucracy who had been trying to prod the Administration into a more active negotiating mood...
...It was especially hollow in view of the subsequent disclosure that North Vietnam as late as December agreed to a face-to-face 'discussion in Warsaw by ranking diplomatic emissaries from both sides on how the war might be ended...
...Then in words that might have issued from the lips of his Republican counterpart, Everett M. Dirksen, Mansfield added: "To my knowledge, this is the only legislative body left in the world which has a degree of flexibility which can protect minorities—and I speak of no one minority—which can protect the smaller states, and which can give due and proper consideration to questions of great national and international importance...
...Much earlier, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong had told New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury that his country would not require pre-conditions for peace talks...
...Still, McClellan's parochialism on the filibuster issue can at least be understood on the grounds of regional self-interest...
...Columnist Joseph Kraft was moved to comment that the President "seems ready to bring the country face to face with unpleasant truths and harsh facts...
...POTOMACUS...
...The official response in Washington was noncommittal skepticism...
...Art Buchwald, who rises to the formidable challenge of being funny about Washington two or three times a week, wrote a column some time back suggesting that there was really no J. Edgar Hoover—that the pre eminent G-man was just an invention of the FBI's redoubtable publicity apparatus...
...To be sure, the President's January messages finally dropped the pretense that his Administration would luxuriate in full appropriations for butter as well as guns...
...Johnson managed to disguise, if not conceal, the full enormity of the Vietnam war's impact on the domestic welfare...
...With caution and moderation, he talked of pressing the war on poverty "at a controlled and reasoned pace...
...But the faintheartedness of the Democratic leadership led almost inevitably to the defeat at the hands of the droll Dirksen...
...Instead of the usual dismissals, American spokesmen here said they regarded Trinh's signal as a serious initiative, one that the United States was giving the most serious attention...
...In effect," the Wisconsin Democrat told his colleagues, "Senators representing less than twelve per cent of the people of the United States can block a rules change...
...Vice President Humphrey, to his credit, tried to put the question of cloture reform to the Senate in a form that might be decided by majority vote...
...National or Social...
...Literal-minded readers im mediately dispatched indignant letters to their editors...
...McCormack's election was followed by a series of sharp reverses by the leadership, most notably in the takeover of the Appropriations Committee by conservatives and—a favorable development—in the passage of the twenty-one day rule to restrain the obstructionism of the Rules Committee...
...The carefully orchestrated build-up of expectations collapsed summarily...
...As in the Senate cloture vote it was a triumph of clubbiness over the public interest...
...The new press law, we suppose, will take care of that...
...Life would be less c complex if they would both retire...
...The fact is that Buchwald's critics understated their case...
...Or is McClellan saying that he and his Republican-Dixiecrat colleagues know what is best for the rest of the country...
...The new press law enacted by Brazil's rubber-stamp Congress also provides severe penalties for publication of news deemed damaging to the security or financial stability of the nation...
...Even the President's $21.9 billion request for the Vietnam war, based, as he noted, on "the possibility of an extension of combat beyond the end of the fiscal year," is already being questioned by those with direct knowledge of the rate of current military spending...
...Where he spoke buoyantly last year of a nation "mighty enough . . . healthy enough . . . strong enough to pursue its goals in the rest of the world while building a Great Society at home," he settled this year for acknowledgment that the nation has "many commitments and responsibilities which make heavy demands upon our total resources...
...The State Department backgrounders further let it be known that the authenticity of Trinh's message was being vouched for by Communist and non-Communist capitals that served as intermediary channels...
...To say, however, that the President's messages have taken a more realistic turn is not to say they are models of official candor...
...Johnson reiterated that he had not gleaned the faintest signal from Hanoi to justify suspension of the bombings...
...To hear a man of Mansfield's sense and scholarship prattling about the Senate's institutional mystique is disquieting...
...Without a hint of caution he promised to "provide all the resources needed to combat aggression...
...There should be no doubt about where the Administration places its priorities this year...
...In the aftermath, the President's appeal to Hanoi for any reciprocal response—"almost any step"— carried a hollow echo...
...Johnson has written off the Great Society...
...There was too a J. Edgar Hoover, they insisted—they had seen him live on television...
...The question of credibility aside, we find nothing to cheer about in the fact that Mr...
...In the oppressive atmosphere of deception and dissimulation that hovers over the Capital, the faintest ray of candor tends to win cheers from those who long for the light of truth...
...From Saigon came the first flash in the form of North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh's broadcast that there "could" be negotiations if the United States were to stop the bombing of the North...
...From Foggy Bottom there were muffled lamentations...
...After March 15," Mr...
...Cloture reform could make the difference between passage or failure for some of the President's bills...
...The semantic stress on the word "could" was not placed by North Vietnam so much as by Administration officials in their background contacts with newsmen...
...Against this pithy summary statement, the utterances of such champions of minority rights as Senator John L. McClellan, Arkansas Democrat, stand out as prodigies of self-contradiction...
...Saigon, meanwhile, was alive with rumors that peace might break out, and members of the Ky government, as though coached by a voice from afar, spoke in tones of sweet conciliation...
...The agreement was withdrawn, it is re-reported, when the United States bombed Hanoi in mid-December...
...A little credibility goes a long way these days...
...The only show of House unanimity behind its leader so far this session was a day-long salvo of protest against a Washington Post editorial suggesting that McCormack be relieved of the Speakership in favor of a younger man...
...There is the J. Edgar Hoover who modestly cites the limited jurisdiction of the FBI, and the J. Edgar Hoover who offers his advice and consent to the Senate on international agreements...
...In Washington the new flicker of hope for a breakthrough was cautiously fanned, and the customarily forked language of diplomatic response was momentarily abandoned...
...No useful purpose would be served, we fear, by asking which is the real J . Edgar Hoover...
...So went the script of the Mystery of the Missing Signal...
...It was quite credible...
...Within the House the closest anyone came to uttering the unspeakable was the comment of Representative Richard Boiling, Missouri Democrat...
...It is likely, however, that the General's misery will be tempered, at least in part, by virtual immunity from criticism in his nation's press...
...For all the rhetoric that flowed during the Senate's filibuster debate in January, the comment that stands out most memorably was that of Senator William Proxmire...
...Its dour message was that a signal is a signal only in the eye of the Presidential beholder...
...Columnist Joseph Alsop was beginning to view all this with strident alarm...
...He used the ]phrase the other week when General Artur da Costa e Silva, the Presidentelect of Brazil, came to the White House for lunch...
...Five times during the news conference Mr...
...In the House the fading septuagenarian, John W. McCormack, was once again elected to the Speakership, a job that would tax the energies and dexterity of a man twenty years his junior...
...He mentioned it not at all in the budget message...
...There is the J. Edgar Hoover who issues solemn preachments on the fraying fabric of public morality, and the J. Edgar Hoover who spends every available afternoon at the race track...
...Johnson said in toasting General iCosta e Silva, "that mixture of splendor and misery will be your daily fare, as it is mine...
...White House Press Secretary George Christian merely says it's "a security matter...
...There are two J. Edgar Hoovers, and they are both "live...
...It is apparent," he said during the reversesof the first week, "that the [GOP-Dixiecrat] coalition has the votes in the House of Representatives...
...Where last year he denounced those who would "sacrifice the opportunity for the distressed—the beauty of our land—the hope of our poor," this year he warned that the nation "was not forged, did not survive and grow and prosper without sacrifice...
...Christian doesn't say...
...It is also apparent that there were some miscalculations about how certain matters should have and could have been handled...
...Lyndon B. Johnson likes to quote Thomas Jefferson on "the splendid imisery" of the Presidency...
...The reasons for the new requirement are shrouded in mystery...
...There is the J. Edgar Hoover who assured President Johnson, as the President reported at his news conference last month, that the proposed consular treaty with the Soviet Union "would raise no problems which the FBI cannot effectively and efficiently deal with," and the J. Edgar Hoover who wrote to Senator Karl Mundt, South Dakota Republican, that he wanted to record an "emphatic no" to suggestions that he had dropped his opposition to the treaty...
...By loading his legislative program with a plethora of low-budget attacks on high-cost problems, he obscured the fact that the Administration is seeking for various education, conservation, welfare, and antipoverty efforts even less money than the Eighty-ninth Congress had authorized...
...Walter Lippmann wrote that the new budget is, by comparison with last year's, "a refreshingly straightforward piece of estimating and accounting...
...Not so the aid and comfort given to the anti-cloture forces by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, the shepherd of the Administration's program...
...Within hours after he issued the battle command, a blinding drift of diplomatic murk closed in over Washington and thereupon began the Mystery of the Missing Signal...
...Speaking of the present filibuster cutoff—two-thirds of those present and voting—McClellan said it "constitutes a barrier to oppression by the majority and to the destruction of the personal rights and liberties of the majority...
...And so the President's State of the Union and budget messages won accolades even from some of Mr...
...And he added: "I can also assure you that in our press you are going to feel very shortly that genuine warmth that you radiated, the warmth of a kind man, .a man who has a genuine human feeling and a feeling which is very close to ours...
...He hoped that "this unique institution, which is the Senate, will think very carefully and very long before it changes the rules . . . too drastically...
...A citizen who seeks admission to the White House on official business now must be prepared to give the guards at the gate his Social Security number as well as his name, address, and date of birth...
...He referred to it once—as an afterthought—in the State of the Union address...
...The tough line of Vietnamese diplomacy advocated by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Special Assistant Walt Whitman Rostow seemed to have prevailed over those who counseled moderation...
...The next step in the sequence was President Johnson's February 2 press conference, and it was then the fog index reached its peak...
...Johnson's harsher critics...
...Our reaction was more restrained...
...realistic, candid, and modest in its claims and promises...
...The President-elect assured his host he would "do everything in my power to maintain in the people of my nation a certain state of mind with regard to the United States, so that together our two nations may form and build a true barrier against those who are trying to violate and subvert justice, press, and freedom...
...There is the J. Edgar Hoover who is charged with helping to protect the civil rights of Americans, and the J. Edgar Hoover who suggests, every few months, that the civil rights movement is an ill-disguised adjunct of the Communist Conspiracy...
...Why in McClellan's corkscrew logic the majority needs protection from itself to maintain its personal rights and liberties fails to come through...
Vol. 31 • March 1967 • No. 3
