The World from Washington
The World from Washington Last month we devoted a few paragraphs of this space to Representative Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, the California Republican who has mounted a challenge to President Nixon...
...It called for "a prompt and total disengagement of all United States troops and military support from Southeast Asia," and it was signed by more than 700 state legislators—Democrats and Republicans —from thirty-five states...
...It is too soon to tell what, if anything, all this betokens for Mr...
...The biblical injunction is to rejoice at the redemption of every sinner, and it is good to have the Senators see the light even now...
...They took it to the White House, where John Hold-ridge, a member of the President's National Security Council staff, treated them to a discourse on the dangers of Communist aggression...
...And its reporter, Christopher Lydon, was "a liar" whom the police would eject from Magruder's office "if he ever shows up here...
...Last month, by decree of Labor Secretary James D. Hodgson, both sets of briefings were discontinued...
...That's the God's truth," Senator Humphrey tells the students...
...The President feared, Humphrey says, that if his Party's candidate sought "headlines" on the war, he would jeopardize the "delicate" negotiations then under way to bring the other side to the negotiating table in Paris...
...As James M. Naugh-ton of The New York Times recently noted, Muskie "did not publicly declare his opposition to a continued American role until October, 1970"— some seven months ago...
...To be sure, the Vice President hedged his statement...
...With Governor Ronald Reagan's benign approval, the GOP stalwarts denounced McCloskey for "siding with the radical groups on the left" and pronounced him to be "an enemy of the American political process...
...The discontinued briefings were proving to be an embarrassment to the Administration...
...McCloskey, we wrote, "has established himself as the conscience of the Republican Party...
...In the last quarter of 1970, there were an estimated 290,000 unemployed ex-GIs, twice the number of a year earlier...
...The World from Washington Last month we devoted a few paragraphs of this space to Representative Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, the California Republican who has mounted a challenge to President Nixon on the issue of withdrawal from Vietnam...
...In February, for example, the Secretary of Labor told reporters at the White House that an unemployment decline of two tenths of one per cent had "great significance...
...The BLS takes pride in the integrity of its data, and its experts have taken pains to keep the record straight...
...As the Congressional debate over the supersonic transport plane approached its denouement, William Magruder blew his cool...
...Well, better late than never...
...It's time to say a kind word about Vice President Spiro Agnew...
...It was "an orderly retreat," he said...
...In his 1968 campaign for the Vice Presidency he defended Johnson's conduct of the war...
...By this time next year, we suspect, the woods will be full of "enemies of the American political process...
...A publicity campaign belatedly begun by the Nixon Administration in February was intended to ease the situation...
...He remains determined to contest the Republican Presidential nomination next year under these three circumstances: if the President continues the present policy of bombing in Indochina...
...A general had an even better term for the headlong flight back to the South Vietnamese frontier: it was, he said, "a retrograde movement...
...The same day a BLS official told reporters at a Labor Department briefing that the same decline was "marginally significant...
...We were hardly off the press when the California Republican Assembly, the Party leadership, met solemnly in Los Angeles to read Pete McCloskey out of the Party...
...As director of the SST program in the Department of Transportation, as a man convinced that opposition to the SST was un-American, Magruder could contain himself no longer...
...And—horrors!—quite a few of them are likely to be Republicans...
...Its columnist, James Reston, was "a despicable man...
...But the Bible does not say redeemed sinners must be given their Party's Presidential nomination...
...Po to mac us The Gl's 'New Enemy Despite the fervor of his recent "Welcome Home...
...Agnew was the only one honest enough to use the forbidden term "retreat...
...It was an unusual petition—not so much for what it said as for who signed it...
...On the "David Frost Show," Senator Edmund S. Muskie, Maine Democrat, reveals that he started having "real doubts about our involvement" in Vietnam as long ago as 1965, but kept them to himself—or, at least, shared them only with President Johnson...
...He has also broadened his attack to encompass the President's failure to provide "moral leadership" in race relations and the Administration's repressive attitude toward dissenters...
...It was scary," Mrs...
...Or perhaps he just didn't get the word...
...He was invited to "register in another political party," though the CRA didn't specify which...
...Despite Magruder's best efforts—or, perhaps, because of them—the SST went down and now, we suppose, President Nixon will have to find his man a new job...
...There's always the possibility of an ambassadorship, but Magruder may not be cut out for the work...
...speeches to Vietnam veterans, the best Vice President Agnew can offer them seems to be immediate induction into the army of the unemployed...
...Marjorie Miller came to Washington a few weeks ago to present a petition to Congress and the White House...
...And so, in an interview with the Long Island newspaper Newsday—an interview widely circulated on Capitol Hill—Magruder lowered the boom...
...More significantly, some of his Republican colleagues in the House are voicing their support...
...After a year and more of bad news on the economic front, the Nixon Administration has taken its first firm action: It has moved to stop the flow of bad news...
...It put us in mind of a story Lyndon Johnson used to tell about a lady with social pretensions who attributed her father's death to a fall from a platform at a public gathering at which he was the featured performer...
...For twenty years or so, experts in the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics have been briefing the press on the monthly announcements of the consumer price index...
...They took it to House Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma, who said, "Your views will be given consideration...
...I had a feeling that Presidents come and go but the same advisers keep telling them all the same thing...
...But I've often wished that I'd expressed my doubts publicly at that time...
...Well, you can't please everyone...
...Among the platoons of official spokesmen who have spent the past few weeks explaining away the rout of South Vietnamese forces in Laos, Mr...
...and if Congress has not voted to cut off all funds for the war...
...Some Senate opponents—William Proxmire, J. W. Ful-bright, Gaylord Nelson—were "Olympic stars when it comes to getting out in front of the crowd on an issue and say, 'Look, I'm leading you' . . . without ever bothering to find out what's right, only interested in what's fashionable and what can get them on the front page of the Times...
...Shortly after Agnew finished denouncing "indifference or hostility" to veterans among the general public—as part of an attack on unidentified "home front snipers"—the latest unemployment figures showed an increase to six per cent last month, for a total of 5.2 million jobless men and women...
...The President was in California, but the legislators did not seem terribly disappointed to have missed him...
...It was, he declared, "no good for this country . . . a perversion of journalism...
...Miller said...
...Mrs...
...Those fellas just won't play ball...
...There must be a few doors in the Government that have not yet been slammed shut...
...In this context, veterans suffer particularly...
...Despite the indignation of the CRA, McCloskey is receiving substantial pledges of financial backing for his campaign...
...New York Post...
...It turned out that Daddy was hanged as a horse thief...
...Miller, a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, who initiated the petition drive, and some two dozen other legislators from across the country, took their petition to Senate Majority Whip Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who thanked them...
...The Pentagon's spokesman, Jerry W. Friedheim, insisted that the South Vietnamese troops were engaged in "mobile maneuvering"—as distinct, we suppose, from the immobile kind...
...That I can live without," Mrs...
...Mrs...
...In the best tradition of the Nixon Administration, Magruder also weighed in against the press—especially The New York Times...
...if no other responsible Republican emerges to challenge Mr...
...It was an orderly withdrawal in accordance with plan...
...Henceforth, reporters will have to puzzle the data out for themselves...
...They were not forced out...
...The spring air is thick with mea culpas...
...Nonetheless, his use of the forbidden word was a lonely oasis of relative candor in a desert of obfuscating dust...
...Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat, tells freshmen at George Washington University that there were many times in his ill-fated 1968 Presidential campaign when he wanted to speak out "more forcefully" against the Vietnam war, but President Johnson talked him out of it...
...How would you like to be in that jam...
...Consequently, the analyses they have provided to the press have often undermined the cheery interpretations offered by the Administration's political spokesmen...
...One House critic of the SST, Democratic Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, was a "nincompoop," Magruder said...
...Miller said afterward...
...But the California Republican Assembly had better stay alert...
...Nixon's re-election prospects in 1972...
...Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird said it was all a matter of keeping out of the rain and avoiding "the tremendously vicious and violent reaction on the part of the North Vietnamese...
...At this writing, about a dozen of them have publicly broken with the Administration on the war...
...The Administration has solved that problem now, and is ready to move on to others...
...I guess the tendency is, when the President is a member of our own Party, and you're a Senator, to try to express your doubts directly to him, in order to give him a chance to get the benefit of your views," Muskie says...
...McCloskey, we are happy to report, does not seem intimidated...
...Since 1963 similar briefings have been provided with the monthly release of unemployment statistics...
...But neither pleading letters to employers nor violent vituperation from the Vice President can canceal the fact that it is present economic policy, not home-front "sniping," that is the new enemy facing men home from the war...
Vol. 35 • May 1971 • No. 5
