THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington Senator Roman L. Hruska of Nebraska has long been a faithful friend of those special interests that find their most stalwart supporters In the atavistic right wing of the...
...Potomacus...
...In various subtle ways— and some not so subtle—they made it known that they would be just as happy if Dr...
...The new commission's charter is extraordinarily broad...
...She sees in Mr...
...The Administration, which called 8,000 Army, National Guard, and Marine troops to "ready alert" when the Campaign began, is less alarmed, more indifferent...
...And now that he has returned to Washington, rewarded, as the President said, for his "exceptional and brilliant performance" by appointment to the post of Army Chief of Staff, he has brought the faith back with him...
...The enemy seems to be approaching a point of desperation," the General told reporters on Memorial Day...
...He has said so right along...
...Statesmen and politicians delivered moving eulogies...
...Newspaper accounts were comprehensive and complete...
...Time is on our side...
...But they are vanishing before our eyes as this is written...
...Arthur Miller Noted Playright The New York Times June 8, 1968 solemn rites in New York and Washington burned their way into memory...
...In a brief but brilliant career as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr...
...Miss Sinatra came to the Humphrey cause as "a representative of my very concerned generation...
...Goddard would come under industry attack...
...He has displayed particular fealty to the National Rifle Association, ardently defending the gun lobby...
...It was predictable that some members of Congress would make it a point to harass the Commissioner—especially when he was so indiscreet as to suggest that young users of marijuana or LSD should not be stamped for life with the stigma of felony...
...They knew, or thought they knew...
...How will their findings surpass the eloquent indictment by the President's recent Commission on Civil Disorders—the Kerner Commission—whose recommendations lie neglected on Mr...
...I was afraid I'd be mobbed," she said...
...In time—perhaps by the time these words are read—the Campaign will end...
...He leaves the Federal service on July 1, and he will be missed...
...We've all become quite good at handling this sort of thing...
...The pictures of Robert Kennedy alive and dying, the tragic faces of the bereaved, the Violence Honored There is violence because we have daily honored violence...
...He has always been consistent, and he has always been wrong...
...No, they are the pillars of society, our honored men, our exemplars of success and social attainment...
...The poor will go back to where they came from, the plywood A-frames will be razed, the mud will be plowed and reseeded...
...The coverage, everyone agreed, was excellent...
...Martin Luther King envisioned it many months ago, was to make poverty visible in America—visible, especially, to the Administration and Congress...
...No good can come of it, they say...
...A lot of my fans are there, and I'm a tiny person, really...
...He rendered a distinguished service to consumers by mounting a vigorous attack on the shoddy—and dangerous— merchandising techniques of the drug manufacturers...
...Only poverty will remain, no more visible than before to those who prefer not to see it...
...I forecast these trends will continue...
...He kept that faith while the American troop commitment was doubled, redoubled, and then multiplied tenfold...
...James L. God-dard did much to revitalize a regulatory agency that had, under his predecessor, become a willing tool of the industries it was supposed to regulate...
...The children, come to think of it, didn't ask as many...
...The poor have come, to be sure, and for a while they were even Visible...
...The President struck the proper note: troubled but reassuring, sympathetic but firm...
...Johnson's representatives in Paris are pursuing peace...
...they have been downgraded to the status of inconvenience...
...When we sing, nothing's done...
...The Poor People's Campaign, as Dr...
...That wasn't the thesis Martin Luther King set out to prove, but it may be the epitaph of Resurrection City...
...Kenneth B. Clark appeared before the Kerner Commission, he talked about his Alice in Wonderland feeling—"with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction...
...Johnson's desk...
...Miss Sinatra told us all this at a news conference staged by Citizens for Humphrey at the Mayflower Hotel...
...It is still an ordeal, but it has become familiar: the days and nights before the television screen, watching the horror unfold, wondering what in God's name has happened to America...
...policy of "all-out" war, this bemused capital seems persuaded that Mr...
...Any half-educated man in a good suit can make his fortune by concocting a television show whose brutality is photographed in sufficiently monstrous detail...
...When we pray, nothing's done...
...In Congress, the initial panic has given way to boredom...
...Paperback books were rolling off the presses while mourners still filed through St...
...The press, which focused for a while on the Poor Campaigners and the sorry circumstances of their lives, is now preoccupied with recording the squabbles among Dr...
...Patrick's Cathedral...
...The righteous legislators who thundered in April that they were not about to reward rioters have made it plain that they will not reward peaceful petitioners, either...
...He is, in the words of a Senate colleague, the least noble Roman of them all...
...Who produces these shows, who pays to sponsor them, who is honored for acting in them...
...The Word from Washington Senator Roman L. Hruska of Nebraska has long been a faithful friend of those special interests that find their most stalwart supporters In the atavistic right wing of the Republican Party...
...We're here on a tight schedule—that's honestly why I can't go...
...While American casualties in Vietnam mount to new records, while the fighting intensifies and more and more of South Vietnam is destroyed under the new U.S...
...She also shares his enthusiasm for Vice President Humphrey's Presidential campaign, which she regards as "an historic opportunity to help achieve our national ideals of peace and progress...
...Consistency is a virtue, and General William C. Westmoreland is, therefore, our most virtuous general Through good times and bad during his tenure as commander in Vietnam— and they were mostly bad—he never wavered in his faith that victory was just around the corner...
...It was to be expected, of course, that Dr...
...The weekly magazines provided "depth" and "color...
...The Poor People are no longer classified as a threat...
...Goddard didn't rock the boat...
...The suspicion arises—and we hope it proves unfounded—that the President has created an anti-Kerner Commission: one that will dispute the previous panel's proposals for sweeping social action, or at least turn attention away from them...
...If that is not its purpose, what is...
...The poor were to come to Washington, to camp on the capital's manicured lawns, to get in the way, to be embarrassing...
...Are these people delinquent psychopaths slinking along tenement streets...
...But man, when you get up there and burn, something's done...
...When Dr...
...Humphrey "the idealism and energy of youth and the maturity of twenty-four years' experience in public life...
...Endurance on the battlefield and patience at home are required...
...Physically they are still here, still wading through the mud of the improvised shantytown called Resurrection City, still sweltering in the sun that beats down through the plastic skylights of the plywood shacks, still turning out from time to time to hold a rally or a demonstration...
...What will Senator Hruska— or the other commission members— tell us about violence that we do not already know...
...But they are vanishing just the same...
...Miss Nancy Sinatra is beautiful and blonde and rich, and we are told she has inherited some talent for singing from her illustrious father...
...We've had a lot of experience...
...We are in no position to assess the prospect of endurance on the battlefield, but the patience at home surpasses comprehension...
...I believe in nonviolence—I'd like to keep on believing in it," says a Campaigner from Philadelphia...
...He could not have known it would happen again so soon...
...King's successors, the logistical difficulties in West Potomac Park, the incidents that occasionally disturb the peace...
...The commentators were eloquent, even informative, through the interminable hours...
...Less understandable was the dissatisfaction with FDA's new energy that began to be communicated from the White House and the upper levels of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...No rewards are being passed out this year, and even those Senators and Representatives who sympathize with the Campaign wish it were over...
...His forces are deteriorating in strength and quality...
...Parents found it easier, this time, to answer children's questions...
...He proclaimed the faith just before this year's devastating Tet offensive, and reasserted it immediately afterward...
...I have no time...
...It hasn't happened...
...But when we march, nothing's done...
...It encompasses the investigation not only of "assassination motivated by prejudice, ideology, politics, and insanity," but also "violence on our city streets, and even in our homes," the President said...
...Perhaps the new commission is an elaborately ingenious device for furthering the education of Senator Hruska...
...She told us that, too...
...Church and state made the necessary arrangements with dispatch and dignity...
...But even if it produces a report that is scholarly, incisive, courageous—what then...
...I might get lost in the crowd, I actually don't have time...
...The doves are silent for fear of imperiling the "negotiations," and the war has been virtually eliminated as a topic of political debate...
...She also explained why she did not visit Resurrection City during her day and a half in Washington...
...Now, for reasons that remain obscure, Senator Hruska is to serve on the new "commission of distinguished Americans" named by President Johnson, in the wake of Senator Kennedy's assassination, to explore "the causes, the occurrence and the control of physical violence across the nation...
...Time is on our side," says General Westmoreland...
...They were to force a nonviolent confrontation between the nation and its conscience, and conscience, hopefully, would win...
...thesis that any American has the right to possess a handy device for snuffing out the life of any other American...
...Vice President Humphrey advises that Americans must have the patience to stay at the conference table for months, and perhaps for years, until a "satisfactory solution" is obtained...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
