The Word from Washington

...The report noted that the Congressman suffers from "a depressive reaction, moderately severe, manifested by profound feelings of fatigue and disinterest...

...We want to make clear that we failed," said Rennie Davis, spokesman for the ragtag and bobtail army of Mayday invaders...

...We had dinner not long ago with a West European journalist visiting the United States on a tour arranged by the State Department...

...Congressman Hungate is worried that the Dowdy case may "lead to a lot of humor about the qualifications to serve in Congress...

...The most moving moment of the spring antiwar protests was provided by the Vietnam veterans who flung their war decorations onto the Capitol grounds over the fence that a prudent Government had erected to hold them at bay...

...He had found the official lectures uninforma-tive, and had failed to obtain answers to his substantive questions about American policy...

...They succeeded in demonstrating how fragile is this society's commitment to "law and order" when its leaders feel their interests are threatened...

...Wearing the uniform of youth —a beard, long hair, jeans, sandals, Army surplus fatigues—was sufficient cause for arrest during those days in May, sufficient cause for preventive detention in cramped and unsanitary quarters, sufficient cause for scrapping the constitutional safeguards of due process...

...Presumably, the problem will not arise again for a while...

...Dowdy was "neither physically nor mentally capable of standing trial at this time," since he would be "unable to consult rationally with counsel or assist counsel in his own defense...

...James A. Wechsler New York Post...

...Dowdy exercising his franchise on the House floor the very next day...

...We overheard this conversation between two veterans at the Capitol as they waited to see their Senator: "I think we did this all wrong," said the first...

...Most recently, on April 28, his trial was indefinitely postponed after the judge received a report from physicians at the Bethesda Naval Hospital who found that Mr...

...Specifically, he was charged with accepting a $25,000 bribe to intervene in a criminal investigation of a Maryland home-improvement firm...

...On March 31, 1970, a Federal grand jury in Baltimore indicted Representative John Dowdy, Texas Democrat, on charges of bribery, conspiracy, and perjury...

...historians will recall that it was Warren G. Harding who pardoned Eugene V. Debs after Woodrow Wilson had refused to do so...

...Gates, now senior research assistant for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, had begun his quest for such a pardon in 1966...

...If these are "crazies," what do we call those who send American bombers against primitive Asian villages, who napalm babies, women, and old men, who believe America's future depends on its ability to deal out death...

...As the Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars and Combat Infantry Badges piled up on the lawn, a ten-year-old boy who was watching with us posed an ecological question...

...It's hard to believe that after those few days in May...

...If the Congressman can sustain his rate of rejuvenation—a four-year gain for every new annual issue of the Congressional Directory—he will be under thirty by 1981...

...Recycle them...

...The high point of the evening, he said, was the grace recited before dinner by his host, a Pentagon official, who not only invoked the customary blessing on food but also prayed at some length for Divine enlightenment of the foreign visitor...

...They succeeded in placing the nation's capital under a state of siege...

...We should have done the patriotic bit...

...The paradox is not without precedent...

...And it may turn out that Davis's admission of defeat was overstated, for in some ways the confused and leader-less members of the Mayday Tribe succeeded beyond their wildest expectations...

...The next morning he was off to New York to see the Stock Exchange...

...He had also been treated to an evening of "home hospitality" arranged by the Government...

...He had arrived only three days earlier, but he was very weary...

...When Congress convened in January, some insurgent members of his committee even tried—unsuccessfully—to depose him...

...His first vote was in behalf of a $570,000 appropriation for the House Internal Security Committee, which keeps the country safe from subversive elements...

...The Congressman entered a plea of not guilty and the voters of the Second District of Texas, guided, no doubt, by the honorable doctrine of the presumption of innocence, returned him without opposition to his tenth term in Congress...

...Congressman Dowdy's trial has been delayed time after time on medical grounds...

...Now the victory he was unable to win during the Johnson Administration has finally been achieved in the Nixon-Mitchell era...

...Our friend said his host seemed to feel that even the Deity would be hard-pressed to set his guest straight...

...Most significantly of all, perhaps, the Mayday protesters succeeded in showing that America will not be made whole again until it turns to peace...

...Dowdy's colleagues, Representative William L. Hungate, Missouri Democrat, has pointed out that "it's possible for a person to be competent for one thing and incompetent for another...

...Mitchell have ratified a "full and unconditional pardon" for John Gates, former editor of the Daily Worker and Communist leader who served nearly four years in prison as a Smith Act violator some time before his break with the Communists in 1958...

...The Government captured some 12,000 of the invaders and announced it had won...

...It was a famous victory...

...To the cheers of her colleagues in the House, a liberal Con-gresswoman denounced as "crazies" those who attempted to disrupt commuter traffic, block entrances to Federal buildings, or congregate on the steps of the Capitol...

...he asked...

...You don't dig what it's all about, man," said his buddy...

...Then, of course, the House will have to stop trusting him...

...The object of this exercise is to show the American people that this war has turned their Army into a bunch of hairy freaks...

...Well, not every young person, but many, many more...

...The Government, the media, and the demonstrators themselves were caught by surprise by the size of the Mayday effort, for they had convinced themselves that America was "cooling...

...They are going to have to jail every young person in America before we are stopped," said Rennie Davis...

...The Vietnam Veterans Against the War who camped at the Capitol in April to lobby for peace looked not much different from the later wave of protesters, except perhaps that they were a little older, and that some of them had left arms or legs behind in Vietnam...

...One of Mr...

...What's the Government going to do with all those medals...

...He was, of course, with the majority...

...The correction comes none too soon, for Mr...

...He has a point there...

...There will be chaos and disruption, there will be anger and retaliation, there will be soldiers in the streets and tear gas in the air...

...It wasn't Saigon, but it was a taste...

...But in the new Congressional Directory there is a change: The Congressman's date of birth is given as April 5, 1902, which makes him a mere stripling of sixty-nine...

...The stench of tear gas hung in the spring air...

...McMillan is seventy-three years old—or was until the latest issue of the Congressional Directory appeared last month...

...Military convoys patrolled the city streets, and armed troops lined the bridges from the suburbs...

...The Biographical Directory of Congress, 1771-1961 lists his birthday as April 12, 1898, and the Congressman used to furnish the same date to Who's Who in America...

...We're the American Legion of our generation," one said...

...Representative John L. McMillan, the doughty Democrat from South Carolina who presides over the House Committee on the District of Columbia and thus proposes and disposes of this capital's municipal affairs, has joined the youth movement in his own special way...

...McMillan is one of those aging House committee chairmen whose timeless tenure has fallen under growing criticism...

...Just who is sane...

...Even "straight" citizens in coats and neckties were swept up in the police dragnets if they happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time...

...We saw Mr...

...Information Agency, and assorted other segments of the bureaucracy...

...We asked our friend, who has traveled widely in behalf of one of Europe's most respected newspapers, whether he had encountered comparable efforts at "brainwashing" elsewhere in his travels...

...For those three days he had been briefed, rebriefed, and debriefed by officials at the State Department, the Pentagon, the U.S...

...We thought about it for a moment and said, yes, we supposed that was what the Government would do...

...I expected an attempt at brainwashing," he said, "but nothing so crude and primitive...

...Only in Russia," he replied...

...In an action that the Administration has not chosen to advertise, perhaps out of deference to the sensibilities of some far-right adherents, the President and Mr...

...We should have come up here with shaves and haircuts, in clean, pressed uniforms, wearing our medals, with flags flying and bands playing...

...Sorry about that," said the Government, "but it was an emergency...

...They succeeded in showing up the hypocrisy of those who will do almost anything for peace except try to stop the war...

...We won't say another word, —Potomacus A Kind Word for Nixon, Mitchell In view of the allegations that critics of the Nixon Administration refuse to acknowledge its better moments, let it be freely revealed here and now that President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell have quietly earned a citation for distinguished conduct in the realm of civil liberties...

...It was an honest admission—more honest than any that has come from the respectable and responsible opponents of the war, the House and Senate doves, the letter-writers, the petition-signers, the patient and peaceful marchers who have also failed...