THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington With fingers firmly crossed and knuckles poised over the nearest wooden surface, White House advisers are predicting there will be no "long, hot summer" this year. The...
...One hears talk, especially among the Democratic Senators standing for election next year, of campaigns that will be conducted at arms-length from the White House...
...And those who are urging an unconditional permanent cessation of bombing should ask themselves: 'What are the consequences?' It is one thing to talk abstractly of peace and war...
...He called for "enlarged resources" for the Office of Economic Opportunity, but he placed equal emphasis on "tightened administration of those programs so that the poor receive the maximum benefits at the lowest cost to the American taxpayer...
...The Medal of Honor ceremonies staged with increasing frequency in the White House Rose Garden are being turned into Presidential exercises in self-justification...
...It is this: Was that grenade on one of the trucks, or on one of the trains, or on one of the sampans that we let pass unmolested during that long 37-day pause...
...Finally, Johnson urged Congress to make sure that antipoverty agencies are "totally disengaged" from all political activity—that they refrain, in other words, from seeking access to the channels of power...
...But it was not the last sacrifice to be demanded of the fallen soldier...
...In the process he stumbled so awkwardly that he undercut his own plausibility as a candidate for the Presidency...
...And are there answers...
...Johnson would not publicly voice such terms as a basis for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam...
...It was implied in the unhurried tone of President Johnson's message to Congress on "America's Unfinished Business: Urban and Rural Poverty...
...The irony, then, is that the first and most resounding burst of applause for the Hartford speech was not from within Republican Party ranks but from the White House...
...But there have been reports that before the Senator's trip to Vietnam he was invited to the White House for an application of the Johnsonian "treatment...
...But the substance was something else again...
...Reports from these areas are profoundly pessimistic, with the majority of the incumbents convinced that they will have to run far ahead of the President if they are to win re-election...
...There is unconfirmed speculation that the President pressed upon Brooke evidence to show that the United States is winning the war militarily and that it would be a great mistake for the first Negro member of the Senate since Reconstruction to align himself with Mr...
...If we're still in Vietnam on July 1, 1968, both you and I will lose...
...It is a course that is likely to keep the War on Poverty out of controversy...
...Unless, of course, the White House advisers are wrong about the long, hot summer...
...If i^jfwas, then Daniel Fernandez died as more than a hero of battle...
...The civil rights crisis has abated, they assure each other, and the most urgent, most provocative problems of the slums are being met...
...A community action agency," he assured Congress, "should provide a voice in planning programs to mayors, local business and labor leaders, the citizens to be helped, teachers, lawyers, physicians—all those who give their time and efforts to relieve poverty in their communities and who know well the needs of their neighbors...
...In one Senate utterance, when he was Majority Leader, Mr...
...On the question of participation by the National Liberation Front in a postwar South Vietnam, Romney is more rigid than even the Administration...
...This provides another measure of the disarray within the President's party...
...He had just come out on the winning side of the Cuban missile confrontation with Premier Khrushchev...
...There were tears in the eyes of Republican Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, according to some news accounts, after he received the celebrated call from President Johnson commending him for switching rather than fighting on the Administration's Vietnam policies...
...The importance of the war in the calculus of the 1968 Presidential election was summed up in the observation to the President several months ago by one of the sixteen Democrats: "If the war is over," he said, "you'll be unbeatable...
...Both Brooke and Romney would continue the bombings although both warn piously against what Romney calls "massive military escalation...
...Is the President haunted by the other questions too...
...Last month's tribute to Specialist Fernandez was a case in point...
...The latest Gallup poll auguries point to declining support among Democratic voters for the President's conduct of the war— the disaffected encompassing nearly half the Party...
...Johnson added: "The question that haunts me as we meet here today should really concern every American...
...Johnson declared himself against any form of extremism, whether of the "Ku Klux Klan or the ADA...
...On the list are Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Montana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin...
...The President said all the right things: he quoted Jacob Riis on the plight of the cities, noted that want is "cruel and present reality" to thirty-one million Americans, and affirmed his commitment to "a total strategy against poverty...
...ADA came to town for its annual meeting a week before the cherry blossoms, and never was the sense of alienation more profoundly felt between the White House and the band of intellectuals who, only a few years ago, played so influential a role in Washington...
...He threw himself across a live grenade and saved the lives of four of his comrades...
...Other questions come to mind about the death of Daniel Fernandez and about all those Vietnam deaths that win no Medals of Honor...
...Johnson seemed preoccupied with the "confusion and mistakes" of the War on Poverty...
...Specialist Four Daniel Fernandez, twenty-one years old, of Los Lunas, New Mexico, died a hero's death in Vietnam on February 18, 1966...
...Johnson was able to accent the positive support in the Governor's speech while muting the few critical notes...
...In this fashion the President shared Page One billing with Governor Romney, and Mr...
...It is something quite different, indeed, and it is understandable that the death of Daniel Fernandez should haunt the President...
...Those old emotions must have been bubbling to the surface again as the organization Humphrey the Faithful founded and Galbraith the Perfidious heads now drifts ever farther away from Johnson fealty...
...And in the baroque lobby of the Shoreham Hotel, the setting for the conference, an observer could feel the sense of frustration and powerlessness that goes with exile...
...Among the Democrats who face reelection to Congress next year the foreboding is growing...
...It becomes increasingly obvious that the Republican moderates have no real alternative to Mr...
...It was, as President Johnson observed when he presented the Medal of Honor last month to Specialist Fernandez's family, "a classic act of courage and self-sacrifice...
...Addressing the soldier's next of kin, invited dignitaries, and the press, the President observed that Daniel Fernandez died "less than three weeks after we, in our ceaseless search for peace, had made our longest pause in the bombing of the North...
...For OEO, which has in two and a half years expended about $100 for each of those 31 million Americans, the President proposed a modest budget increase—$1.86 billion to be spent in fiscal 1968, as against $1.58 billion this year...
...Johnson, cognizant of the alarm that has spread from city halls to the halls of Congress, spelled out another kind of "participation...
...He died a martyr in the search for peace...
...In nearly half of the states the incumbents are, either vocally or quietly, critical of the Johnsonian strategy of steady military escalation in Vietnam...
...More than a year after his death, he was pressed into battle against the President's critics...
...And the President was so eager to underline Rom-ney's support for his current military policies in Vietnam that the White House press office broadcast Mr...
...Back in the bad old days President Johnson's contempt for Americans for Democratic Action was legendary...
...It is something quite different to think of a young man named Daniel Fernandez who will dream no more...
...There was no authoritative word whether Michigan's Governor George Romney, another of the GOP's suspected doves, wept when the White House publicly acclaimed his Vietnam position paper even before Romney had the opportunity to deliver it...
...Potomacus...
...It is a cheery assessment, and a dubious one, but it seems to reflect the complacent mood in the Administration and on Capitol Hill...
...The greatest significance of the President's message lay in the new limitations he imposed on the most hopeful innovation of the War on Poverty—the community action agencies that were initially conceived to provide "maximum feasible participation" by the poor in the decisions that shape their lives...
...NLF members, he holds, should be permitted to enter political life individually—but not as an organized political party...
...Six years ago the Democratic incumbents in the sixteen key states were elected during the height of President Kennedy's popularity...
...Johnson's present course in Vietnam...
...But is the question posed by Johnson the one that "should really concern every American...
...Before the well-publicized switch, Brooke was privately voicing the view around Washington that the United States should move with all deliberate speed and determination toward the conference table...
...Johnson's Vietnam critics...
...Even Mr...
...To make doubly sure that no community action agency fights city hall, as some were bold enough to do in the early, hopeful days of the War on Poverty, the President provided that agencies may be "created by local government," and that all community action boards include "representation for local public agencies...
...The memory of last year's reverses lies like a pall on the horizon of Democratic expectations in Washington...
...For most of the class, the motto will be "go it alone," unless, of course, the President ends the war by the middle of the campaign year...
...In the last mid-term elections it was the combination of uncertainty in the progress of the war and stagnation in the domestic economy that caused the heavy inroads on Democratic strength...
...It is axiomatic in Washington that a trip to the Southeast Asian war theater takes much of the coo out of the most confirmed doves, and perhaps Brooke was merely confirming that prevailing theory...
...The exception was Arizona...
...For the President, the ADA convocation, with its spate of critical oratory, was as welcome as a bad head cold...
...A crucial political battleground in the 1968 elections will be the sixteen states outside the Deep South in which incumbent Democrats are defending their Senate seats...
...Johnson's statement of gratitude several hours before the Governor made his own speech...
...And in 1964, Lyndon Johnson carried all but one of the sixteen...
...The President is also said to have implored Brooke to be a "statesman" rather than a "demagogue"—such as Martin Luther King, Jr...
...For months Romney has been huffing and puffing on the Vietnam issue, seeking a position more consonant with the political polls than is the White House position...
...That is why the April 7 Hartford speech was so crucial to his 1968 White House prospects...
Vol. 31 • May 1967 • No. 5
