THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON

...Both the President and the Pope are seasoned statesmen, and each knew what to expect...

...commander in Vietnam held an off-the-record dinner in Washington with a group of Pentagon correspondents and vented new notions of hot pursuit and naval blockade in Cambodia...

...Car rentals are solidly booked and what is good for Number One is demonstrably good for Number Two (and the nation...

...As for the forthcoming hearings, Fulbright offered to "help set things straight" by inviting Acheson to testify "as Metternich, Rasputin, or in any other role that he finds congenial...

...The Word from Washington General Eisenhower's farewell warning against the mischievous influence of the military-industrial complex was never more relevant than in these recent weeks of delicate diplomatic probing for negotiation in Vietnam...

...In modern times, Greece made sounder progress toward stable statehood under a half century of strong rule by King George I than at any time since...

...There is no indication, unfortunately, that the Administration will deal as urgently with even the simpler and more superficial inequities that have helped engulf the draft in controversy...

...The question that bewildered anyone who had followed the events of the preceding weeks was: Why did we do it...

...While the precise details and the contents of various statements are confidential, the Members of Congress attending these meetings came to the conclusion, many for the first time, that our Vietnam policy is not based on hopes of achieving a negotiated settlement of the war...

...A military solution is sought, and this obviously precludes meaningful negotiations to settle the war now on the best terms possible...

...I couldn't be better satisfied...

...The discussions had been quiet and low-keyed and were in progress when General William C. Westmoreland dropped the first blockbuster...

...Once again a lamp of reasoned discussion was snuffed out...

...military bureaucracy is as much at war with U.S...

...Most of the others seem eager to go along, and we have not yet heard the American consumers and taxpayers shouting, "Fowl...

...On October 31, we met with Secretary Rusk and later a number of us spent an evening at the White House with the President...

...In a reply also addressed to the Post, Senator Fulbright recalled some interesting testimony by the former Secretary before the Senate Committee on March 24, 1947...

...NASDA is determined not to lose the next fight...

...In view of this coming spectacle, those contemplating advice to the colonels against authoritarian rule would do well to remember that dwellers in glass houses should pull down the blinds and maintain a becoming silence...

...But the President ignored some of the recommendations and Congress scrapped the rest, leaving the system "worse than it was before," according to Burke Marshall, who headed the commission...

...Prince Sihanouk, who must survive in that explosive epicenter formed by the convergence of Chinese, American, and North Vietnamese power, had to decry the new and, it would seem, officially sanctioned talk of American invasion...

...It's a time for exultation," proclaimed Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey...

...Secondly, Acheson continued, "if I properly forecast the pre-Lenten Mar-di Gras which the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations intends to put on based on the proper constitutional roles of President and Congress, the President will be depicted as Nero or King Charles I, while Senator Ful-bright will appear either as an incendiary shouting 'Burn, Baby, Burn!' or as Oliver Cromwell, and Senator McCarthy as Nero's fiddle or John Lil-burne, the pamphleteer of the Levellers...

...And so the organization has asked each state agriculture department to kick public funds into a kitty that will pay for a Washington lobbying office...

...diplomatic initiatives as it is with the Vietcong and Hanoi...

...The military junta that has seized power in Greece and is providing Europe with its first Fascist dictatorship since World War II has found an articulate champion in former Secretary of State Dean Acheson...

...We doubt that the Pope was referring directly to Mr...

...Johnson when he warned, a couple of days later, that "new obstacles" block the path to peace...

...Chicago will be ours...

...As a result, the year will bring with it a period of maximum danger that the Vietnam war will widen into the unwanted land war in Asia our military experts previously have opposed...

...In view of the setting of the 1968 Democratic National Convention we repeat herewith for the benefit of convention planners, dissidents, party regulars, and students of American literature the concluding words of Sinclair's novel: "We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted...

...The Cambodian leader thereby infused new life into the fractured initiative of late 1967...

...For several months the U.S...

...In a letter to The Washington Post that was widely and approvingly reported in the captive Greek press, Acheson urged us all to put ourselves in the Greek colonels' place, and cautioned us against protesting their authoritarian rule...

...General Hershey, who is even older than J. Edgar Hoover and almost as hostile to the concepts of due process, seems no closer than the FBI chief to the retirement they have both so richly earned...

...We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours...

...An American Presidential primary—where-ever it might be held—is bound to enrich the local coffers and focus the world's attention, however fleetingly, on local problems...

...Both had trouble from instability and poor judgment...

...The General's jubilation was occasioned, of course, by the indictment of Dr...

...A visitor from another planet might, indeed, conclude that the U.S...

...Specifically, it is committed to see to it that Federal poultry inspection is not extended along the lines of last year's red meat measure...

...His Holiness was left with a bronze-like bust of the President for his knickknack shelf, and the President had still more proof for the home folks that he was willing to go anywhere, anytime, in the interests of peace...

...Sihanouk renewed the prospects for discussing Cambodian border security in an interview with Washington Post correspondent Stanley Karnow...

...Certainly no friend of Greece would wish to see her return to the 'constitutional government' of the two Papandreous, the old fool and the young rascal, under which she was headed for Kerensky chaos, and possibly war with Turkey...

...Much greater military effort, including steps previously ruled out as carrying too great a risk of widening the war, can be expected in 1968...

...Why should the Presidential preferences of several thousand residents of the nation's coldest corner influence the selection of a Republican nominee eight months hence in Miami Beach...

...This is awful good news...

...This ingenious application of Lieb-ling's Law—"If a man is smart enough, he can kick himself in the seat of the pants, grab himself by the collar, and throw himself out on the sidewalk"— has been concocted by state agriculture commissioners and their trade organization, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA...

...The regional ego is being massaged to the point of satiation by the warm flood of national attention...

...First," he wrote, "Greeks both ancient and modern have had grave trouble when they experimented with non-authoritarian rule...

...This belief grows out of a recent discussion some of us had with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and certain recent comments of the President, both public and private...

...The commissioners are still smarting from the defeat they suffered late last year when Congress, despite the best lobbying efforts of NASDA and the meat packing industry, passed the reasonably effective meat inspection law that President Johnson signed on December 15...

...Marshall seems in no imminent danger of indictment for his criticism, but he also seems in no danger of being listened to...

...Surprisingly enough, the fallout of the Westmoreland briefing subsided...

...Johnson's statement, issued as he left the Vatican, was a circumspect pledge to "keep closely in touch" that had all the earmarks of having been drafted even before he arrived in Rome...

...Benjamin Spock, Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and three others on charges of conspiracy to encourage violations of the draft laws...

...Somalia and Guatemala and Afghanistan might well ponder New Hampshire's example...

...However indifferent may have been New Hampshire's experience with a state lottery, it is enjoying enormous dividends from its early Presidential primary...

...If, on the other hand, it was ordered with the full knowledge of the President and his top circle of advisers, then the world might surmise that American policy in Vietnam is more frighteningly inscrutable than anyone would have dared to think...

...There's nothing new about the President...

...Hershey was not the only one to rejoice at the indictments...

...Potomacus Escalation Ahead by Representative Robert Kastenmeier Ibelieve the die has been cast for drastic increases in the war in Southeast Asia...

...aid to Greece, Acheson said then, would "pave the way for peaceful and democratic developments" and block "the rule of an armed minority...

...Future generations of anthropologists may well ponder the curious ritualism of the New Hampshire primary...

...It may be, he observed, that "the former Secretary is inhibited by the fear of being thought 'soft on Communism.' For my own part, I shall be prepared to take the Senate floor any time, as indeed I did some years ago, to defend him against such a calumny...

...The Haiphong raid caused as much private consternation within the State Department as it aroused publicly elsewhere in the world...

...But today the example of New Hampshire's primary industry stands as a model of Yankee enterprise to the entire underdeveloped world...

...President Johnson called the draft law a "crazy quilt" last spring, and a Presidential commission proposed extensive reforms...

...When the Westmoreland story surfaced in the Washington press, the effect could not have been less destructive to diplomatic exploration than would have been a 2,000-pound bomb dropped on Pnompenh...

...Accordingly, President Johnson chose Ambassador Chester Bowles to carry out the tender mission to Pnompenh...

...If the Haiphong raid was part of an automatic, pre-programmed target agenda carried out at the discretion of field commanders, then there is clearly no coordination of diplomatic and military strategy in Washington...

...Fulbright noted that Acheson's tolerance for authoritarian rule in Greece does not appear to be matched by similar tolerance for the totalitarian regime of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam...

...Since Congress thoughtfully directed the courts last year to give top precedence to cases charging violations of the draft law, there is every prospect that an early trial will enliven the political debate in this election year...

...We may know some day...

...We suspect that the hastily arranged year-end conference between President Johnson and Pope Paul VI was neither as acrimonious as some of the journalistic "indiscretions" from Rome described it nor as cordial as the official accounts insisted...

...Government had been seeking to negotiate with Prince Sihanouk a mutually tolerable means of reducing Cambodia's role as a sanctuary for Communist troops...

...Sixty-one years after the publication of The Jungle, the Socialist muckraker who wrote it, Upton Sinclair, sat in Lyndon Johnson's White House to commemorate the signing of a new Federal meat inspection act...

...Not a country cove, nor a laconic street corner pundit is immune to the roving, omnivorous eye of the network lens...

...Then, incredibly, on the eve of Ambassador Bowles' trip American bombers blasted the port of Haiphong, giving rise to charges by the Russians that we hit one of their ships...

...The Greek press, which hailed Acheson's letter as an event of wide international interest, has, to the best of our knowledge, taken no interest in the ensuing correspondence...

...Even steps leading toward negotiations seem to be forestalled...

...we shall have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness...

...It would be ungenerous to think that Sinclair's welcome would have been any less warm had anyone chosen to read the concluding paragraphs of The Jungle...

...Civil libertarians and leaders of the peace movement—including some of those indicted —have long sought a court test of the legal and moral issues involved...

...An instant case is the effort to achieve international control of the Cambodian border, the potential gateway to a wider shooting war in Asia...

...CHICAGO WILL BE OURS...

...Taxpayers in most of the fifty states will be footing the bill this year for a new anti-consumer lobbying effort...

...The trend of these exploratory discussions in the fall and early winter months was toward the strengthening of the International Control Commission as the chief enforcement mechanism...

...And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory...

...It had become a trip that held far greater potential than settlement of the Cambodian border question, coming, as it did, directly in the wake of North Vietnam's latest formulation of negotiation possibilities: stop the bombing and there will be talks...

...The idea, which this column offers gratis to the Administration and the world, could even revolutionize foreign aid...

...A few of the more enlightened state commissioners have announced that they don't plan to pay the assessment...

...The U.S...

...And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood—that will be irresistible, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago to our standard...

...It became clear that the administration seeks total surrender rather than a settlement...

...The discussion was in response to a letter a bipartisan group of Congressmen sent the President urging a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam as a means of getting negotiations started toward a settlement...

...Hershey, who recruits for the Federal penitentiaries with almost the same fervor that he brings to his duties as director of the Selective Service system, was cheered not only by these impending prosecutions, but by the official assurance that there are more to come...

...Motels and hotels are bulging throughout the state...

...The invasion by press, radio, and television is in full swing...

...Restaurants are full...

...Acheson went on to explain, twenty-one years ago, that "it is our object to help to maintain the present constitutional system of Greece so long as the majority of Greeks desire it, and to help Greece create conditions in which its free institutions can develop in a more normal fashion...