The Word from Washington

...The Committee succeeded...

...It did so by placing recruitment of Corps members in the hands of local school authorities, who are unlikely to roll out the welcome mat for innovators, and by giving state school officers —perhaps the most conservative segment of the educational bureaucracy —full charge of Corps programs...

...The case of the Selective Service Act is even more depressing...

...The logical sequel, therefore, to the Baker case was not reform...

...Johnson, in turn, said their "statement of accord" was "music to my ears...

...And I want you to know that your President sleeps better every night knowing that Jack Valenti is your president...

...It was in the immediate post-Baker era that the Senate chamber echoed with proposals for self-innocu-lation against any recurrences of the nastiness...

...Then, too, a bipartisan committee on ethics was constituted although its seats remained empty because of the evident reluctance of Senators to sit in judgment on their peers...

...Nonetheless, the investigating Senators, in a spasm of propriety, decided it would be improper to go into those matters...

...Nonetheless a narrow majority of four Commissioners voted last June 22 to give ITT control of both the medium and the message...

...The censure vote, said Stennis, inaugurates "a new start in a way for the Senate...

...But there have been many times of testing for the American people—and we have risen to that challenge together, firm in our resolve before—and we shall rise again...

...Art Buchwald says it's tough to carve out a niche as a Washington humorist because everyone in the Capital is always being funny...

...I know many of you here are interested in show business—especially motion pictures," he said...

...In a celebrated essay on the ugliness of small-town America, H. L. Mencken rejected the notion that mere ignorance or inadvertence could have achieved "such masterpieces of horror...

...In the case of U.S...

...Hidebound local schoolmasters and their spokesmen in the Washington education lobbies took a dim view of the Corps from the very beginning, and managed to hold it to minimum budgets for the first two years...

...Louis Harris, whose survey found an eleven-point increase in the President's popularity, thoughtfully made the findings available a day ahead of public release so that Johnson could take them to the Democratic Governors' Conference in St...

...one of its chief advocates was ultra-conservative Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, Barry Goldwater's favorite economist...

...When they can be—with honor—they will be —at the earliest possible moment...

...When he returned, he reported to the President, of course, and then he offered to share his observations with the White House press corps...

...Potomacus...

...It was the night after the first Glassboro meeting, when Johnson flew to Los Angeles to address a dinner of the thousand-dollar Democrats called the President's Club...

...The new law also stiffens provisions for punishing draft offenders and returns the nation to a definition of conscientious objection that the Supreme Court explicitly rejected as too restrictive in 1964...

...And I say, too, with all emphasis, that all of us have a lot of sympathy for him...

...No, it will not do what it was designed to do...

...The parliamentary melodrama of Senator Thomas J. Dodd's censure has now passed into the rich institutional lore of the United States Senate, a forum well suited by cast, staging, and accoustics for good theater...

...It was the Dodd affair...

...The Congressman got down to the essentials at once: "As we told the President," Teague said, "we found the boys up at Hill 881 and Hill 861 had fresh eggs for breakfast, and cold milk, and cold orange juice—which is different from what I saw in World War II...

...He referred that night to "the spirit of Hollybush" that he hoped would result from his talks with Soviet Premier Kosygin, but the spirit of Hollywood that Johnson conjured up is likely to haunt us much longer...

...But the Ninetieth Congress, unleashing its libido for legislative ugliness, took another approach: it extended the Corps, funded it, and destroyed its usefulness...

...And there is little evidence that the Deliberative Body is prepared to do anything about it...

...Perhaps they were bedazzled by visions of fresh eggs and ice-cold orange juice...

...And the members of the "world's greatest deliberative body" looked upon the Baker case with the smug knowledge that it did not tarnish one of their own...

...The governors, who had some unkind words for Johnson at their meeting last December, were properly impressed and gave the President a vote of confidence...

...Elated President Relaxes at the Ranch," The Washington Post headed a story...

...We have in mind not merely such monstrosities as the House-passed flag-burning bill, but also the grave and perhaps irreparable damage done to serious and substantive measures...

...There is a cruel poetic truth to the tired barb, "Dodd is dead...

...A kindred perverse passion appears to afflict the Ninetieth Congress as it pursues its legislative labors—an irresistible urge to produce deformed public laws or to wreak mayhem on those already in existence...

...Born in the radical think tank called the Institute for Policy Studies, originally sponsored by Senators Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, eventually espoused by the Johnson Administration, the Corps was conceived as a body of several thousand young, energetic, highly-motivated men and women who would bring new ideas and much-needed enthusiasm into the troubled school systems of the land...

...Louis last month...

...And so, for the first time in many months, the President's pockets are again stuffed with percentages, and he produces them at the slightest provocation...

...v. Seeger the court ruled that for purposes of establishing CO status, the law's requirement of belief in a "supreme Being" could mean a "sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of the possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God of those admittedly qualifying for the exemption...

...These allegations came from the very sources which served to trigger the initial investigation...

...That must have smacked of godlessness to the Rivers committee, for it wrote into the new act the requirement that "as used in this subsection, Religious training and belief' does not include essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views, or a merely personal moral code...

...Still the parallelism between the two cases is arresting...

...Yes, there will be a Teacher Corps...

...Should it decide after the merger to meddle in ABC coverage of the defense and space programs, or of foreign affairs, there would be no one in a position to tell it to buy the morning paper or tune in on the morning news...

...This was supposed to be the year for draft reform...

...Dodd himself, white-maned and sagging, survives the tribal ordeal of censure but it has made of him a posthumous figure...

...That, at least, was the concern of the professional staffs in both the Justice Department and FCC as well as the three Commissioners who voted against merger...

...Until Congress emasculated it this summer, the Teacher Corps could claim to be the most promising of the Great Society programs...

...They don't hear all the voices of despair and of all the chaotic conditions that come to us through the day...

...They can't be and still preserve our freedom...

...But the House Armed Services Committee, under the inspiring leadership of Representative L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, was determined to preserve the draft law with its principal inequities—and make it worse, if possible...

...Public office would not be worth it," Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen once thundered in perhaps the only unintentional double entendre of his Senate career...

...It was no radical proposal...

...Sometimes I think of that Biblical injunction, when I see them advising their fellow citizens to negotiate and saying we want peace and all of those things...

...Just in case any of the fainthearted and weak-kneed failed to get the message there was more—much more...

...But resistance to such a simple first step runs high in the Deliberative Body...

...The Texas Democrat, chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, visited the war zone recently at President Johnson's request...

...That has been completely reversed and this year ten per cent of the bodies are South Vietnamese and ninety per cent of the bodies are North Vietnamese . . ." Teague offered to answer questions at that point, but the White House correspondents had none...

...But where is the evidence that the Committee is prepared to grapple with the system that produced a Dodd case—and will inevitably produce another one...

...GM was first with its harassment of author Ralph Nader by private detectives...

...It went like this: "Those who do not smell the powder or hear the blast of cannon, who enjoy the luxury and freedom of free speech and the right to exercise it most freely, at times really do not understand the burdens that our Marines are carrying there tonight, who are dying for their country, or the burdens that their commanders are carrying, who wish they were all home asleep in bed, or even carrying a placard of some kind...

...In the wake of the two Glassboro summit meetings, the public gave the President a sixty-seven per cent "positive" rating on "working for peace in the world"—an eighteen-point increase since May...

...This is the very Senate chamber from which nearly four years ago the case of Bobby Baker bubbled to the surface...

...There seems to be, he suggested, "a positive libido for the ugly . . . the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable...

...In its place there is a style of corporate behavior that might be called the New Crassness...

...Dodd, perhaps, is dead...

...It was Senator John C. Stennis, the austere Mississippian and Dodd's chief prosecutor, who delivered the funeral oration...

...We are deeply indebted to Representative Olin E. Teague for a concise but immensely cheering first-hand account of the situation in Vietnam...

...But on "handling war in Vietnam" the President's "positive" rating was still a skimpy forty-six per cent...

...Their emissaries would hang out in press rooms or press clubs, always good for a reassuring word or some bibulous camaraderie...

...A group of Congressional Republicans reacted even more sensibly (and more remarkably) by coming up with a genuine "constructive alternative"— total abolition of the draft system in favor of an all-volunteer Army...

...One of the most commonly-prescribed antidotes to Doddism and Bakerism is public disclosure by all members of Congress of their income and financial holdings...

...The hour was late and the day had been eventful, but the President was going strong...

...Weeks later Miss Shanahan learned that another ITT executive had called personal associates to inquire into her "background...

...No one even asked how the corpse counters tell the difference between North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese bodies...

...Never mind the fact, or embarrassment, of his flitting physical presence in the Senate...

...But if Johnson took time to read the fine print in the Harris poll—and we are sure he did—he must have had a second thought or two...

...The Senate Ethics Committee over which Stennis presides seems to have fallen back exhausted from its moral travail...

...The Senator's case hinged chiefly on allegations that he diverted campaign contributions into his pocket, that he collected double payments for travel from private benefactors as well as the Government, and that he used his Senate position to plug the interests of West German lobbyist Julius Klein...

...It has replaced the soft soap with the hard knock...

...It was all very chummy and comforting, and Johnson went on to an untroubled vacation in Texas...

...Dodd is censured...

...A study commission appointed by President Johnson turned in a remarkably sensible report acknowledging major inequities in the Selective Service system and proposing remedies...

...The trouble is that Glassboro is already fading from memory, that the Middle East is settling back into its pre-June pathological state, but that the war in Vietnam goes on and on...

...It would have been comforting to read Mencken's comment on that...

...Next came ITT which took a more frontal approach...

...But Doddism continues undiminished under the Senate dome...

...The President provided a sneak preview not long ago, and the picture was not a pretty one...

...See what Art means...

...Once upon a time in palmier days, well-heeled corporations would lubricate their way through the corridors of power with wine and song...

...But the script called for more than good, clean fun, and Johnson soon sounded another note—one that received little attention in the press because of the lateness of the hour...

...How does the war look to Johnson now, and what will he have to say about it in his forthcoming campaign for reelection...

...Johnson scored sixty per cent on "handling U.S...

...It called for abolition of student and occupational deferments...

...The transgressor was, after all, merely a hired hand...

...That was the time when, so to speak, class showed...

...It also has interests in forty foreign countries...

...The new Selective Service law—a four-year extension— bars random selection, retains the privileged sanctuary of undergraduate and vocational deferments, and strips the President of much authority he previously had to institute reforms by executive order...

...But they can't be and still retain our national honor...

...and overhaul of the archaic and often discriminatory draft board system...

...I believe and hope that it's a new start for Senator Dodd as well...

...Among the pioneer practitioners are General Motors and the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation...

...Buy a paper in the morning, she replied...

...The President abandoned his commission's recommendations, the Republicans abandoned their constructive alternative, and Congress abandoned the idea of draft reform...

...Outside the Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles police were wading into war protesters, but inside Johnson was charming the Hollywood faithful...

...This is a good time," he said, "to repeat and warn the fainthearted and the weak-kneed that this is a time of testing for our country, a time of testing at home and a time of testing abroad in 122 other countries that are watching us through their field glasses...

...During Federal Communications Commission hearings on its merger case, ITT officials badgered reporters and their Washington bosses...

...Sometimes I think of my friends who don't understand all of the cables I read from all of the 122 countries...

...It ignored, however, a broad and detailed catalog of charges by former staff workers that Dodd accepted money and other favors from businessmen and organizations whose interests on the Hill he was able to further as a member of the United States Senate...

...This baptismal effort backfired when it was laid out publicly in Senate hearings and in the press...

...The Word From Washington President Johnson takes a scrupulously reciprocal approach to public opinion polls: when they like him, he likes them...

...What gives piquancy to this behavior is that a central issue in the merger case was whether the many-splendored corporate interests of ITT might dominate the news content and general programming of its prospective affiliate, the American Broadcasting Corporation...

...If the Senate is engaged in a "new start" the signs of its advent are nowhere to be seen...

...random selection of inductees at age nineteen in accordance with clearly established national standards...

...Two examples at hand are the new laws extending the Teacher Corps and the Selective Service Act...

...The giant telecommunications company (1965 revenues $1.8 billion) holds hundreds of millions of dollars in Government defense and aerospace contracts...

...They can't be and still protect our system...

...New York Times economic reporter Eileen Shanahan, for example, told of a visit from an ITT senior vice president in which he asked to see the story she had filed to New York...

...I try to look with understanding and charity upon them, and in the words of that Biblical admonition, 'God, forgive them for they know not really what they do.' " So spoke the President in Los Angeles...

...The compass of the inquiry in both Baker and Dodd investigations was drawn to the narrowest specifications...

...Teague also brought back some non-culinary intelligence: "We were told a year ago ten per cent of the bodies found were North Vietnamese and ninety per cent of the bodies found were South Vietnamese...

...The style of doing business in Washington, we regret to report, has declined lamentably...

...This era is gone...

...role in Middle East crisis...

...George Christian, the White House press secretary, says President Johnson is "a very candid man" who is "rather open in his discussions with the press...