THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington By vote of 248-to-176, the House of Representatives has taken a firmly moral stance: It will not tolerate payroll-padding and nepotism in its ranks—provided the culprit is...
...But as of now, after the firing of Reuther's first salvo, George Meany, the impassive plumber, seems as solidly in command as ever...
...There is no lack of scoundrels in the Congress...
...otherwise she would not have been replaced...
...Millions of Americans also summon up, with the mention of Betty Furness, the image of a brand new Westing-house refrigerator and its sparklingly white emptiness...
...When a misguided aerial attack last month took the lives of ninety-five South Vietnamese villagers, the White House Press Secretary routinely commented that such incidents "are always regrettable...
...By careful hints dropped here and there, by advance stories planted on and off the record, he had built a considerable amount of anticipatory interest in his speech...
...George," he said, "is not very . . . political...
...And Betty would conform to McLuhan's notion of a cool performer...
...It cannot be maintained that Powell's extracurricular adventures impaired the legislative process...
...Office of Education to say a few words in behalf of better schools...
...Despite the Federation's commitment to equal rights, exclusionary racial practices still flourish in its locals...
...I meant to indicate that he had a good sense of timing," Romney lamely explained when a newsman flushed out the governor's off-the-record charge against Percy...
...It is understandable that he should finally have chosen the path of open confrontation rather than conciliation from within...
...But it is also the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watch death by fire fall from the improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend...
...Such words—indeed, even such thoughts—are out of vogue in Washington, where pragmatic geopoliticians speak in bland euphemisms and abstract statistics about "kill ratios" and "pacification...
...For although the world's imperfections may call forth the acts of war, righteousness cannot obscure the agony and pain those acts bring to a single child...
...it is part of the daily fare on the House menu...
...Reuther and his fellow insurgents look with concern at the vast, unorganized segments of the labor force— such as migratory farm workers and urban service industry employes—in which the Federation leadership has shown little interest...
...The junior Senator from New York is no slouch at the public relations game...
...The intellectual poverty of the Romney campaign was farcically underscored by the Rambler Man's contretemps with Senator Charles Percy over the word "opportunist...
...It is the young men, Vietnamese and American, who in an instant sense the night of death destroying yesterday's promise of family and land and home...
...The rift is opening...
...She told reporters when the appointment was anounced that she was "not well enough informed to give a responsible answer" to questions on such sensitive subjects as supermarket boycotts...
...You can be sure...
...And now, why not Smokey the Bear for Secretary of Interior...
...Nor can it fairly be alleged that Powell was punished because he is a Negro...
...You can be sure if it's Westinghouse...
...Mining The more George Romney talks, the less credible he becomes as a contender for the Presidency of the United States...
...Reuther is now fifty-nine...
...A refrigerator in McLuhanesque terms would be a cool medium, one that invites the widest level of public approval...
...53 The parts of Senator Kennedy's speech that we found most impressive received little attention in the media...
...Racism surely influenced the votes of some of the 248, but others may reasonably be presumed to be free of the taint of bigotry...
...But in the months ahead, we predict, Rockefeller's name will come to the fore in the contention for next year's GOP nomination...
...The President, whom the press had described as "subdued," even "withdrawn" since the first of the year, was suddenly omnipresent again, and bursting with portentous announcements...
...But Powell smacked his lips and pronounced it delicious, and his former colleagues and fellow sinners will never forgive him for that...
...The Vietnamese war is an event of historic moment, summoning the grandeur and concern of many nations...
...Others, however, need have no fear...
...She was warm and vocal—too vocal for the advertisers who must perforce try to hoodwink consumers in the packaging and ballyhooing of their products...
...Everyone can take whatever side of the matter that he wants to...
...It is therefore only natural that eyes are now turning toward New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a last hope to redeem the non-Goldwaterite wing of the Party...
...What more reassuring thought could there be in this- era of credibility gap...
...If Powell neglected the interests of his constituents, the fundamental tenets of democracy suggest that they—not Congress—judge and remedy the situation...
...These dire prophecies are now coming back to haunt the house of labor...
...The sin that prompted Adam's fall was not that he partook of the forbidden fruit...
...It was also the blue collar rank and file of yesteryear that has now migrated to the lily-white, wrinkle-proof suburbs of the Partially Great Society...
...It will not allow a member to offend public decency and defy the law —when Powell is the defiant offender...
...Ho Chi Minh and the troops that he is sending in from the North...
...Reporters who covered his first major campaign swing in February returned to their bureaus and home offices shaking their heads...
...Mrs...
...Then he went on to the U.S...
...On Capitol Hill, shortly after Kennedy finished his speech, Senator Henry Jackson of Washington happened to find and release a long letter from the President defending the Administration's Vietnam policy...
...Powell's grave and inexcusable offense was that he committed his transgressions in public, rejoiced in them, and brought down notoriety on himself and on his colleagues...
...The prospects of his succeeding Meany to the Federation leadership are nil...
...The House cheerfully tolerates the peccadillos of drunks and philanderers and the more grievous offenses of those whose vote and influence are sold as cash commodities...
...Potomacus...
...The chief manifesto of the new restlessness was the 7,000-word statement by United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther attacking AFL-CIO chief George Meany and his followers for "complacency, indifference, adherence to the status quo, lack of social vision, dynamic thrust, and crusading spirit," and other assorted crimes...
...Esther Peterson, whom Betty Furness is replacing, was decidedly not cool in her advocacy of consumer causes...
...A few hours before Kennedy started speaking, Johnson made an unscheduled visit to Howard University to reaffirm his commitment to civil rights...
...What a whirlwind of activity was whipped up at the White House by Senator Robert F. Kennedy's speech on Vietnam...
...One hears the sound of growing despair among the Republican moderates on the subject of 1968 Presidential material...
...One public official in a state along the Romney line of march put it in the most delicately euphemistic terms...
...It is the refugees wandering homeless from villages now obliterated, leaving behind only those who did not live to flee...
...First there was the surprise news conference at which Johnson announced he had received a letter—he didn't say precisely when—from Soviet Premier Kosygin agreeing to talks on defensive and offensive missiles...
...The Word from Washington By vote of 248-to-176, the House of Representatives has taken a firmly moral stance: It will not tolerate payroll-padding and nepotism in its ranks—provided the culprit is the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr...
...And at the State Department, just before morning newspapers closed their first editions, Secretary Rusk got in a few words of rebuttal to Kennedy...
...Under the direction of Meany's Secretary of State Jay Love-stone, the Federation has espoused a virulent foreign policy that a Legionnaire could love and in which only a former Stalinist could find his expiation...
...Reuther's position in the AFL-CIO power structure has weakened progressively in recent years...
...In sum, the House, in its impartial majesty, has imposed a rigorous code of ethics on all Harlem Congressmen named Adam Clayton Powell, Jr...
...Miss Furness is likely to discharge her duties with less controversy...
...The first thought that flashed subliminally across our minds, on learning of the appointment, was: "You can be sure if it's Betty Furness...
...Many of them righteously voted for Powell's exclusion...
...After the personal agony of the 1964 campaign, Rockefeller, it is said by those who know him, has no strong appetite for a national campaign...
...In much of the nation's press, the President took the play away from Kennedy...
...They were the passages that graphically described the incalculable damage being done to Vietnam and the suffering visited on the people of that unhappy land...
...Romney is still shopping for a Vietnam policy just as his headquarters is shopping for a foreign policy adviser...
...In the view of some of the Republican Party's canniest tacticians, New York's Governor is the strongest prospect to defeat Lyndon Johnson in 1968...
...A generation ago the sundered state of the American labor movement was reflected at the top by its two cantankerous principals, "Mama" Green and "Papa" Lewis...
...In fact, she said, her housekeeper has been doing most of the shopping...
...The targets of Reuther's outcry were the trade union militants of a generation ago who have now become the paunchy hierarchs of rich and powerful labor bureaucracies...
...For all the rote rhetoric of the Reuther encyclical, there was a sound core of criticism that the labor movement has lost the dynamism that propelled its great political and organizing gains of the 1930's and 1940's...
...Or, as they say in show biz, "Sorry about that, Chief...
...It was an impressive performance, and a successful one...
...Peterson was apparently too vocal for the White House...
...And twelve years ago, when the AFL and CIO were finally united in wedlock, there was an apprehensive clucking that a marriage so mixed could not endure...
...But the lesson of the day was unmistakable: He still has much to learn from the senior politician in the White House...
...Let us reflect for a moment not on the wisdom and necessity of our cause nor on the valor of the South Vietnamese, but on the horror," Kennedy said...
...The sensitivities even of the well-intentioned have been dulled to the human catastrophe that is the war...
...It will not condone joyous journeys at taxpayer expense—when Powell is the junketer...
...At the same session, Johnson urged his fellow citizens to draw a neat line "between their President, their country, their troops, and Mr...
...All that is required of them—all that the House intends to require—is a modicum of discretion...
...Television, too, is cool...
...President Johnson himself has testified that as chairman of the Committee on Labor and Education, Powell was instrumental in the passage of many of the Great Society measures that have become law...
...Perhaps only Marshall McLuhan, the theoretician of media, will understand the full subtlety of President Johnson's action in selecting as his consumer adviser television pitchwoman Betty Furness, who attained national prominence by gracefully and tirelessly opening the doors of Westinghouse refrigerators before TV cameras...
...It will not stand for unjustified absences from legislative duty—if Powell is the absentee...
...Even as he prepared for his showdown with the Meany wing, he wrapped himself in an attitude of secretiveness that vexed some of his own followers...
...Among Republican moderates on Capitol Hill, Romney has hurt himself worst by the epic clumsiness of his skeetering about on the Vietnamese war...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
