THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington It will fall to the Senate to repair, if it can, the serious damage that the House did to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. For reasons that remain obscure, much...
...He had a date in Ottawa with Prime Minister Lester Pearson, he had a war about to break out in the Middle East, he had a week's record total of casualties in Vietnam, he had a recalcitrant Congress, but he was doing his duty at Expo '67...
...We have seen that smile, that look, on more than one occasion recently, and we have felt a little sorry for the President each time...
...White House Science Adviser Donald F. Hornig told a Congressional committee earlier this year that a single transcontinental flight would expose everyone in a 100,000 square mile area— perhaps ten million people—to the shock of the boom...
...And it did—a baseball cap, a welder's helmet, military caps, 300 hats in all...
...Under Mrs...
...The President looked baffled for a moment, then he rushed on—past the larger-than-life portrait of Marilyn Monroe, the kitchen gadgets, the dolls, the space capsules—wearing the smile, the look...
...Early in 1962, President Kennedy and then Congress designated a quasi-public corporation, Comsat, to operate the American portion of an international satellite communications system...
...The more that is disclosed of the terms and the engineering data on the American entry in the supersonic sweepstakes, the less appetizing the whole project seems to be...
...There have been other times when her stubborn insistence on having things her own way threatened education bills—but on those occasions the then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee was able to hold the Congresswoman in check...
...Office of Education to apply its desegregation guidelines uniformly in all fifty states...
...Since Long's bill was prepared at the White House there are those who may well wonder how disingenuous the President and his staff can be on such matters...
...We watched Mr...
...Johnson would do well to insist that the bill be drawn so that he cannot show even a semblance of benefit from its provisions...
...In another case—the controversial "thirty channels decision"—the Commission opposed the Defense Department's efforts to deal directly with Comsat rather than through a consortium of private carriers...
...As the plane now goes into its major development stage there is still no solution to the sonic boom problem...
...The alibi is unconvincing...
...Some supporters of the Oregon Con-gresswoman—who holds second rank on the House Education and Labor Committee behind chairman Carl Perkins, Kentucky Democrat—have suggested that she proposed her amendments in an effort to head off the even more devastating alternative proposed by Representative Albert Quie, Minnesota Republican...
...Ultimately, the growing concern here over Comsat's future concerns its role in domestic satellite communications...
...Would the Republic suffer...
...We'll pay you $40,000...
...When the House finished its sorry work on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the small joke in the corridors went this way: "Adam, come home...
...At still another time the Commission decreed that the carriers should own half of the ground stations, upon which the Comsat system depends no less than upon the satellites...
...Comsat has been scrutinized far more closely by the Commission than ever was A. T. & T. The general tenor of FCC decision-making in the satellite area has been to protect the established industry rather than to stimulate the new technology with its remarkable economies and efficiency...
...We know as little as the next man about President Johnson—perhaps less —but we are reasonably certain that the game of soccer, for all its admirable qualities, is not one of his foremost preoccupations...
...POTOMACUS...
...All is forgiven...
...The satellite corporation's bid was roughly a third of the private carriers' offers...
...But when the Administration's school bill reached the House floor she became, as one of her colleagues put it, the "drum majorette" for a Republican-Dixiecrat coalition determined to undermine the measure and strip it of effective civil rights enforcement...
...That chairman, however, is lying on the beach in Bimini these days...
...The much-balleyhooed Supersonic Transport (SST) is also the subject of widely-voiced misgivings by responsible Government officials outside the Federal Aviation Agency...
...Green pressed her case vigorously even after the House had turned back, by a vote of 197 to 168, the Quie proposal to convert ESEA into a package of unspecified "block grants" to the states...
...Green is fiercely independent and often unpredictable...
...The suspicions that were engendered by the bill were not quieted by Senator Russell B. Long's decision to apply the measure to the 1968 election, especially after the President in his own message omitted the next national election in which he will figure...
...A third Green amendment would require the U.S...
...President," said the guide, "this exhibit shows America in Hats...
...They file into the oval office at the appointed time, mumble their set speeches, present their plaques or posters or season passes, pose for pictures with the President, receive the smile, the look, and then file out again...
...Green has worked valiantly in the past in behalf of sound Federal aid to education...
...Nonetheless, the plane's team of military developers appears to be doing its best to muffle the SST boom until after election...
...Since then the technical progress, especially in development of a synchronous satellite (one whose orbit time is in step with the earth's rotation), has exceeded the wildest dreams of the program's governmental architects...
...The satellite communications act of 1962 would permit Comsat to provide satellite services directly to private users, on the condition that the FCC approve...
...And this is a battle that will reverberate in Congress and the White House...
...We were not present for the soccer ceremony, but we have little trouble visualizing the expression on the Chief Executive's face: the forced smile, the look of feigned attentiveness...
...There is a distinct danger, in the eyes of some officials who have followed the satellite system since inception, that the program may be seriously compromised...
...Would anyone really mind...
...We wonder, sometimes, what would happen if a wax doll, lifelike and automated, photogenic, equipped with a better smile and a more genuine look, were detailed to handle these ceremonial functions...
...When President Johnson's campaign financing bill descended upon Capitol Hill it failed to assuage many of the doubts of those who feared it was a massive public assistance program to incumbent Presidents...
...The effort succeeded to a far greater extent than the battered Democratic leadership was willing to admit...
...As one Comsat official lamented: "This means that the private carriers own half of each ground station and also half of the corporation that owns the other half...
...Under the law, Comsat's board must maintain a theoretical balance between representatives of the carriers and the public...
...The aim is laudable, but the practical result is likely to be further erosion of the already minimal desegregation enforcement in the South...
...Would the world come to an end if the President—the real President—were to devote all of his time to things that really matter...
...The effect of the Green amendment, therefore, would merely be to provide Southern racists with new ammunition in their determined effort to maintain dual school systems...
...Clearly the President would have done well to include a provision for continuous reporting of campaign spending—before as well as after the election...
...Green's sponsorship, two "mini-Quie" amendments were added to the House bill...
...Treasury Undersecretary Joseph Barr did endorse this concept in subsequent testimony before Congress...
...Like her fellow Oregonian, Senator Wayne Morse (with whom she is usually on the worst of terms), Mrs...
...Another fear of the commercial carriers is that Comsat would threaten to break up the cozy rate accords worked out by the industry under the benevolent eye of the Federal Communications System...
...For about $4 million a satellite can be put in orbit that can transmit as much as ten times the number of voice channels carried on a transoceanic cable costing more than $50 million to install...
...She has been a staunch supporter of civil rights...
...One would give the states full control over innovative programs under Title III of the Act, and the other would do the same for state education improvement funds under Title V. Neither change augurs well for education, considering the extraordinary hostility to experimentation and reform that pervades almost all state departments of education...
...Because of the concern on the part of private carriers that the impressively cheaper satellite will make obsolete a world-wide network of cables and other equipment established by the traditional communication companies...
...Timid Federal bureaucrats have given up any pretense of coping with the problem of de facto segregation in the school systems of Northern cities...
...Why...
...For reasons that remain obscure, much of that damage was the work of Representative Edith Green, Oregon Democrat...
...Well, maybe it would...
...The spur to competition is obvious—but the Commission has never allowed Comsat to enter the competitive lists...
...Johnson trot through the United States pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal...
...Yet the President took time out on a recent day of world crisis and national confusion to be presented with a season pass by the manager of Washington's new soccer team...
...Mrs...
...It is all the more ironic, therefore, that Comsat's future as the instrument fixed by national policy to operate the system is ominously clouded...
...Almost each day brings its stream of worthy visitors to the White House —Boy Scouts, poster girls, beauty queens, gray ladies, promoters of innumerable interests and causes...
Vol. 31 • July 1967 • No. 7
