The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington Out of sight does not necessarily mean out of mind in Washington. The Subversive Activities Control Board, which has had precious little to do in recent years, thanks to...
...Editorial writers, columnists, and assorted wags, understandably seized by the opportunity to comment on something they understand, have been having a field day with the new ceremonial garb...
...The Capital's spring will be brightened, of course, by the splendid cream-and-gold uniforms, complete with funny hats, that President Nixon has procured for his palace guard...
...He had enough love to go around —even for them...
...Nixon his new hobby if it provides him with a diversion from the heavy burdens of office—and apparently it does, for he has also outfitted his staff in handsome flight jackets for their travels aboard Air Force One, and waiters in the White House mess now sport dashing red blazers...
...We're anxious to be busy...
...For our part, we're just as concerned as President Nixon about needless Government expenditures, and we'd like to see him put that $401,000 into more new White House uniforms...
...President Nixon's proposed Federal budget indicates that Mr...
...We write before the Senate has had an opportunity to work its final will on the nomination of Judge G. Har-rold Carswell of Tallahassee, Florida, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, but there seems little doubt that the nomination will be confirmed...
...His constant travels occasionally brought him back to Washington, and we caught up with him two or three times after that...
...The President's clever scheme for phasing out the Vietnam war by "Vietnam-izing" it has a nifty domestic parallel: The war on poverty is being phased out by impoverishing it...
...Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unconstitutional a 1968 law empowering the Department of Justice to ask the Board to classify individuals as members of Communist groups...
...We'd rather have the President preoccupying himself with uniforms than with bombs...
...The Word from Washington Out of sight does not necessarily mean out of mind in Washington...
...In fact, the first appearance of the White House policemen's new formal haberdashery has already done much to dispel the tedium and torpor normally induced by the annual State of the Union, Budget, and Economic Report exercises...
...Mere membership" in the Communist Party, a unanimous three-judge panel held, is protected by the First Amendment unless the members are also alleged to have engaged in illegal activities...
...I was out in the Far East a little while ago," he said, "and I ran into a darkskinned fella...
...And in the country...
...imperial purple—as in Rome after the republic had been cast down...
...Young Harrold was only twenty-eight years old in 1948—practically a babe in arms...
...He handed us a copy of The Catholic Worker, which he served as associate editor and sold for a penny a copy on street corners across America...
...He may be right on that score, too...
...Almost everyone—President Nixon, Chairman Eastland of the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey—agrees that Judge Carswell should not be held accountable for the "youthful indiscretion" he committed in 1948, when he swore undying fealty to the noble doctrine of white supremacy...
...When we saw the new police uniforms for the first time at the arrival ceremonies for Harold Wilson, we thought for a brief, hopeful moment that the President and Prime Minister might burst into song—a rousing duet, say, entitled It's a Ver-ry, Ver-ry Special Relationship...
...He wasn't one to call policemen "pigs," though...
...Waters, who came to the Board after working for the SACB's late and lamented Senate champion, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, also hopes that some of his friends in Congress will come up with a new line of work for the Board—a revived security screening system, say, for Government employes...
...Bernard J. Waters, the Board's new general counsel, hasn't given up hope...
...For our part, we don't begrudge Mr...
...A couple of months ago we commended the Defense Department in this space for deftly dealing with the problem of "cost overruns" by simply barring further use of that embarrassing term...
...Boys will be boys...
...Graustarkian costumes...
...Potomacus...
...Nixon borrows a few more notions from the light opera repertoire...
...Waters...
...In just one day's outpouring to the Letters column of The Washington Post, nostalgic readers variously recalled "the gvardaiskaya pekhota of His (late) Imperial Majesty Nikolai Aleksandrovich, Emperor of Russia...
...We first met Ammon Hennacy on a fine spring day in Washington about ten years ago...
...We never saw him anywhere but on a sidewalk outside a Federal office building, and always with a placard in one hand and a stock of Catholic Workers in the other...
...Judge Carswell is fifty years old now, and President Nixon cites his youth as one of the estimable qualities that recommended him for appointment to the Supreme Court...
...He was, as usual, a one-man picket line, shaggy and weather-beaten, cheerfully walking up and down outside the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission with a sign protesting nuclear testing...
...The Subversive Activities Control Board, which has had precious little to do in recent years, thanks to the thoughtfulness of the Federal courts, has not been forgotten in President Nixon's new Budget...
...It will be a poor spring in Washington without him...
...We read in the papers that Ammon Hennacy died a month or so ago in Salt Lake City, where he had been operating the Joe Hill House of Hospitality for vagrants...
...We won't mind if Mr...
...That was in 1960, when Mr...
...With a little luck, we'll all be treated to twenty more years of youthful indiscretions...
...The Board will spend an estimated $397,000 in the current fiscal year...
...He wasn't much of a law and order man, Ammon Hennacy, and his "record" stretched back to World War I, when he served time in the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta for resisting the draft...
...Only a few months ago, the SACB sustained the most recent of a long series of judicial reverses when the U.S...
...I asked him if he was from Indo-China, and he said, 'Naw, suh, I'se from outdo' Gawgee.'" An Atlanta lawyer told a Newsweek reporter that "some of us were really shocked," but others must have been amused by the judge's diverting indiscretion...
...Only three months ago, Judge Cars-well was the principal speaker at a meeting of the Georgia State Bar Association, and began his speech with an engaging, if indiscreet, anecdote...
...The hearings conducted by Senator Eastland's Committee demonstrated that Judge CarswelPs penchant for youthful indiscretions is one of his more enduring traits—the kind of "consistency" that President Nixon has assured us is one of his prime criteria in evaluating candidates for the nation's highest court...
...There was, among a dozen or so similar instances, the Judge's indiscretion in dismissing as "an absurdity" the claim of black pupils that they were entitled to a desegregated faculty in supposedly desegregated schools...
...The Board, reflecting its ample experience with adverse court decisions, promptly put off a series of hearings it had scheduled for the first months of this year...
...We listened with delight to the stories of his latest travels and his most recent encounters with the law...
...If it has to exist at all— and apparently it must—we'd rather see it idle than busy...
...Rumsfeld will have ample time to devote to such important matters without being distracted by the need to administer broad antipoverty—oops!—programs...
...According to the testimony of civil rights lawyers (including one now employed by Attorney General John N. Mitchell's Justice Department), there was constant judicial harassment of black plaintiffs and their attorneys in Judge CarswelPs courtroom all through the 1960s...
...According to a recent in-house memo circulated to staff members of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Director Donald Rumsfeld "does not like the phrases 'antipoverty' or 'the poor.'" Therefore, the memo continues, "please let us all try to remind one another to use the terms 'poverty programs' and 'low income individuals.' It will be hard for us all to break this habit, but he feels it is important...
...one hundred Student Princes banging mugs as they sing the stirring Stein Song...
...Carswell was a mere stripling of forty...
...Some of the more stylized White House rituals could, for example, be set to music...
...Instead, we got only the usual atonal banalities...
...Just what the Board's five members (who are paid $36,000 a year each) and its ten Civil Service employes (whose average salary is $14,500) will do to earn their keep is something of a mystery...
...What's a few thousand dollars more in a budget of $200 billion...
...a bowl game half-time show," and "Mickey Mouse in the 1938 production of Fantasia...
...Sigmund Romberg, where are you now that we really need you...
...He was seventy-seven years old and suffered a heart attack while preparing to go do some picketing at the state capitol...
...The New York Times headed its brief but devastating editorial, "Ruritania, D.C...
...He thinks the Supreme Court may reverse the Court of Appeals ruling—¦ and if he waits long enough he may be right...
...old Shubert productions of The Chocolate Soldier...
...This month's Semantic Sleight-of-Hand Award—a complete edition of Webster's Third engraved on a paper clip—goes to the Office of Economic Opportunity for applying similar ingenuity to the even more vexing problem of "the poor...
...As a young reporter on the prowl for "human interest," we asked him a few questions and took several turns around the AEC while he told us about being a practicing Christian anarchist and a pacifist and an indefatigable promoter of what he called the Green Revolution...
...We're clamoring for work all the time," says Mr...
...But the SACB is a special case...
...for fiscal 1971, it is down for $401,000 of the taxpayers' money...
...The judge was in his forties, of course, and such indiscretions must be overlooked...
Vol. 34 • March 1970 • No. 3
