The Word from Washingtion
The Word from Washingtion Representative Paul N. (Pete) Mc-Closkey, California Republican, first came to nationwide notice in 1967, when he won his House seat by defeating Mrs. Shirley Temple Black...
...No other Republican arose in the House to support McCloskey...
...I have here a segment of that pipeline," the General said...
...The testimony makes a mockery of Pentagon assurances that such practices were always strictly limited and were all but abandoned long ago...
...Though he backed Nelson Rockefeller for the Presidential nomination before the Miami convention in 1968, he campaigned vigorously for the Nixon-Agnew ticket...
...I would like to show you what that pipeline looks like...
...Across the street in the New Senate Office Building, Senator Ribicoff hears a succession of spicy tales of high living and low racketeering in Vietnam —of generals kept on retainer by liquor concessionaires, of colonels thriving in the black market, of sergeants getting rich on rakeoffs from the slot machines in NCO clubs...
...Do you see any significance," Mr...
...With Ronnie Reagan of the television reruns lodged in the Governor's office in Sacramento, with ex-hoofer George Murphy holding down a Senate seat, the GOP hardly needed another show biz star from California...
...Who's fighting the war...
...Instant solutions pop up, and problems recede back into their holes...
...The pipe in question, of course, is the piece of four-inch-diameter tubing that Secretary Laird and Air Force Lieutenant General John W. Vogt proudly displayed to reporters at the Pentagon a month ago as evidence of the great successes achieved by South Vietnamese troops in their "incursion" into Laos...
...It was bound to happen sooner or later...
...In recent weeks, however, the people whom columnists identify as "Washington wags" have been doing their best to close the risibility gap by venturing little jokes about Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird's famous piece of pipe...
...Maybe this is what "Vietnamization" is all about (it must be all about something) . Between playing gumshoes at home and playing the rackets abroad, the Army must be running out of troops...
...Steed asked, "in the fact that most of the outcry against the American SST is just coincidentally started about the time the Russians decided to go into the world market for the sale of their SST...
...The witness was that most ardent champion of the SST, Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe...
...it was getting to be too much of a good thing...
...Republican Senator Barry M. Gold water of Arizona—remember him?—and Democratic Representative Tom Steed of Oklahoma—ever hear of him?—have discovered that the campaign against further Federal subsidies for the supersonic transport plane is a Bolshevik conspiracy sustained by "well-known Communist front groups...
...Shirley Temple Black in a primary and going on to final victory in November...
...Well, the GOP chiefs aren't pleased any more, for Pete McCloskey is rocking the boat...
...The briefings make you feel so good until you get back to your office and read the morning paper...
...It's a job that has been lying vacant for some time...
...And now he is talking about enlisting an anti-war Republican—perhaps John Gardner of Common Cause, or Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, or Senator Charles Percy of Illinois—to challenge the President in the Republican primaries next year...
...It was like running in place for five years...
...Rees provided his constituents with a graphic account of a briefing he had attended at the White House—his first since 1968...
...A careful review of our own detailed and voluminous notes, in which all humorous items are identified by the bracketed word [Laughter], reveals that nothing very funny has happened here since President Nixon tried to deck out his palace guard in comic-opera hats a couple of years ago...
...If no other candidate comes forward, McCloskey is willing to mount the challenge himself...
...In fact, McCloskey turned out to be an asset to the Party...
...It was like an old movie on the late late show...
...But somehow we aren't moved to [Laughter...
...Well, thanks a lot, Mr...
...McCloskey was something of an oddball even then—a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, a much decorated veteran of Korea, who was outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam war...
...Some compare him to Allard K. Low-enstein, who single-handedly launched the campaign that drove Lyndon B. Johnson from the White House...
...Us Washington has not had much to chuckle about lately...
...Absorbing investigations, both of them, replete with ugly revelations of official misconduct, but we can't help wondering who's fighting the war...
...A rare exception recently came to hand, however, in the form of a release from a California Democrat, Representative Thomas M. Rees of Los Angeles, and it has attained a measure of well-deserved prominence since it was issued a month or so ago...
...What's more, McCloskey was bright and personable, and seemed solid enough on every issue but the war...
...In the last two days, ground forces have gotten to the pipeline at this point and have torn up some 300 meters of the pipeline...
...They are merely "erroneous, mischievous, and inaccurate...
...This has been a major achievement and will cause substantial inconvenience to the enemy...
...The war has been moved into Cambodia and Laos...
...Who's fighting the war, anyway...
...At first the Defense Department spokesman, Jerry W. Friedheim, was quite reticent: "I have some difficulties in discussing that particular piece of pipe in exact detail," he said...
...The North Vietnamese, General Vogt explained, had built a pipeline to carry truck fuel down the Ho Chi Minh trail...
...Representative Steed, citing Senator Goldwater as his authority, brought the grim news out into the open at a recent hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee...
...The "newsletters" to constituents which emanate with depressing regularity from Congressional offices—or, rather, from the ever-churning presses in the bowels of the Capitol—are, as a rule, so bland, so dull, so uninform-ative that they receive scant attention even from the correspondents who devote their days to poring over Congressional trivia...
...Others are calling McCloskey the Republican Gene McCarthy...
...Having lost the stomach for fighting this war and suffering the casualties involved, we have grown to accept the idea of hiring mercenaries to do our fighting," he recently told the House, and he attacked the notion that "it is all right to destroy the villages and people of small countries like Laos and Cambodia, if we only do it through air power, rather than . . . where those who pull the triggers actually see the people they are killing...
...The same top-secret confidential charts and the same self-assured masculine tones explaining exactly how we were winning the war to save the fighting little democracy of South Vietnam...
...It's pretty funny, we suppose, and Lord knows we need some comic relief as much as the next man...
...Nevertheless, his challenge, which would have been dismissed as pointless and quixotic before 1968, is now being taken seriously by many of the pundits...
...You say, sir, that this pipe came from Laos...
...Then you are depressed again...
...It was the same old baloney...
...In his judgment, he assured the Congressman, most of the opponents of the SST are "basically loyal...
...A few weeks ago, he startled the Party elders by suggesting that there ought to be national discussion of the advisability of impeaching President Nixon, "if only to bring home to the President the depth of despair many of us feel over his recent moves" in widening the war...
...Secretary...
...One former Army spook tells of a demonstration outside the gates of Fort Carson, Colorado, where fifty-three of the 119 "demonstrators" were either undercover agents or reporters...
...Who's fighting the war...
...One objective of the Laos invasion, he added, "was to cut this pipeline as soon as possible...
...Of course, there were some variations...
...It took another day or two to elicit the truth—or at least another Pentagon version of the truth...
...Last year, as co-sponsor with Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, of the national Earth Day observance, he gave the Republicans a handle on the hot environmental issue...
...As we moved into Laos along Route 9, we got closer to the pipeline...
...The overriding issue, he says, is the brutality of the war and the brutaliza-tion of the Americans who wage it...
...American ground troops are not being used outside of South Vietnam proper, but we're using everything else we can get our hands on—artillery, helicopters, Phantom jets, and B52s...
...Secretary Laird ruefully acknowledged that "it would have been better" to make that clear in the first place...
...But that's about it...
...It was almost a week before someone remembered having seen the celebrated piece of pipe around the Pentagon some time last year...
...And although the South Vietnamese drive has been stalled, it isn't because it is really stalled—the Vietnamese are merely looking around to see how things are before pushing on again...
...In the old Senate Caucus Room, scene of spectacular inquiries in the past, Senator Ervin elicits testimony from a series of former Army intelligence agents about their elaborate efforts to spy on civilians—anti-war politicians, clergymen, students...
...Potomacus...
...Nonetheless, Republican Congressional leaders were rather pleased by his victory...
...Secretary Volpe, it must be said, was tolerant—even magnanimous—in his response...
...There are quips about the Pied Piper of the Pentagon, about pipe-smoking, about playing the pipes...
...White House briefings make you feel so good...
...We raise the question after shuttling back and forth between the hearings on military snooping conducted by Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina and the hearings on military graft conducted by Senator Abraham Ribicoff...
...From my first White House briefing early in 1966 right after my first election to Congress to that cold February morning last week in the year 1971, nothing was really different...
...There were the same star-studded, medal-bedecked uniforms, but on different generals...
...And President Nixon looked in admiration at his generals like a college football player looks at his hero coach —just like Lyndon Johnson did...
...The pipe, it turned out, had been captured on an earlier, clandestine foray into Laos by "a South Vietnamese intelligence-gathering team...
...He wrote: "Nothing had changed...
...Whatever the eventual impact of his dissent, McCloskey has established himself as the conscience of the Republican Party...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
