THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington Riffling through the notes and texts and handouts and clippings accumulated in the course of a long and dismal Presidential election campaign, we find the phrase that best...
...Item: The Pentagon has been testing a "Decision Information Distribution System" capable of automatically turning on every radio and television set in the nation to receive messages from the Government...
...He plans to hold hearings in January "so that the American people may know the full details about this and other Big Brother plans that the Nixon Administration may be hiding from the Congress and the public...
...Still, the feeling persists that something different and far more sinister is now at work in this Capital—that the power of the State is wielded by men who operate by trickery and stealth, who despise even the surface trappings of democracy, who will stop at nothing to subordinate the public interest to their private purposes...
...Newspapers are printing nasty little editorials about the Navy's Frisbee fling...
...Texaco and Gulf, 2.3 per cent each, and Arco, 3.8 per cent...
...Perhaps the Air Force could pick up where the Navy left off, while the Army explores the possibilities of yo-yos, pogo sticks, and hula hoops...
...The U.S...
...Standard of New Jersey is number one, and therefore doesn't try as hard...
...Congressional critics of the Pentagon are citing it as a horrid example of military waste...
...It cost relatively little, as those things go...
...Both are likely to be subjected to inordinate pressures in the months and years to come...
...We are referring, of course, to the huge sums secretly collected and deviously spent by the Committee to Reelect the President...
...Who was the last President to declare—as Mr...
...And it will not result in extinguishing a single human life...
...The indicators of potential repression are varied and complex...
...the presidents of our universities and the professors and . . . some of our top businessmen" have an obligation—a duty—"to stand by the President of the United States when he makes a terribly difficult, unpopular decision...
...Standard of Ohio, 2 per cent...
...Not very much, mind you, but paying taxes nonetheless...
...Who was the last President to proclaim his intention to pack the Supreme Court with justices who will sustain such erosions of liberty...
...But there is more...
...Not all of these ugly activities can be laid directly at Mr...
...We checked these figures against our own tax rate for 1971, and came away feeling just a bit depleted...
...Oil Week indicate that some oil companies have (gasp...
...One can't tell yet precisely what, if anything, she had in mind, but one can make an educated guess...
...For the moment, we are waist-deep in the quagmire of despotism...
...It works...
...It produced no multi-billion dollar contract, replete with cost over-runs and manufacturing defects, for the Whamo Manufacturing Company (which holds the trademark on Frisbees...
...He was all for the depletion allowance and other tax benefits enjoyed by the oil men, he said, and he thought they ought to be increased...
...What sets the current Administration apart, however, is the overpowering suspicion that it stands ready, willing, and able to press into application every mischievous device that may have been conceived by the engineers of repression...
...actually been paying taxes...
...Item: Secret Service agents assigned to protect Senator George McGovern provided the White House with reports on his confidential meetings during the Presidential campaign...
...Senator George McGovern was moved, in the final weeks of the campaign, to cite the Frisbee project as an example of the kind of foolishness that would not be tolerated if he were elected President...
...The Word from Washington Riffling through the notes and texts and handouts and clippings accumulated in the course of a long and dismal Presidential election campaign, we find the phrase that best sums it up for us was uttered not by Richard M. Nixon or George McGovern, not by Spiro T. Agnew or Sargent Shriver...
...Nixon did in a recent campaign speech—that "the leaders of the media...
...During his celebrated visit to John Connally's Texas ranch a few months back, President Nixon delivered himself of a few kind and appropriate words in behalf of the oil industry...
...Nixon's supporters and apparently directed by his closest associates...
...When was the last time, in America, that wiretaps, dragnet arrests, "no-knock" searches, and preventive detention were officially defined and defended as normal instruments of government...
...The parallels from the past fall short...
...Despite the lack of military payoff, however, the Frisbee study strikes us as one of the more laudable military research efforts of recent years...
...Potomagus...
...Grant's Administration and in Warren G. Harding's...
...The wife of the former Attorney General may well know more than most of us ever will...
...Both deserve every ounce of support the people can provide, for we will be needing them as we never have before...
...Conoco, 2.1 per cent...
...it paid a whopping 7.7 per cent tax rate...
...to the campaign of political espionage and sabotage mounted by Mr...
...We are for more and better Frisbee projects at the Pentagon...
...And sinking...
...We wish we could say the same for some of the Pentagon's more "productive" studies...
...Something will have to be done...
...They found that Frisbees are intractable—that they tend to "take off straight up like a rocket" when they are expected to float gracefully to earth, that they simply won't go where you want them to...
...Which was the last Administration to advocate—and attempt—prior censorship of the press...
...We try to tell ourselves, in moments of forced optimism, that it has all happened before, and that the Republic has endured...
...It was Martha Mitchell who cried out, during one of her famous nocturnal telephone calls, that she couldn't stand "all those dirty things that go on...
...Item: A military reserve unit—the Special Analysis Division, which meets monthly in a White House annex—has the mission of compiling a "National Watchlist" of persons with "devious ideas" who will be dealt with in the event of a national emergency...
...The assurance came none too soon, for figures recently published by U.S...
...These sober critics, we suspect, have never tried to fly a Frisbee...
...to the mysterious adventure at the Watergate...
...One purpose of the "Watchlist" is to provide postmasters with the names of persons whose mail is to be inspected...
...The White House insists that it has no plans to use the system, but Representative William S. Moorhead, Pennsylvania Democrat, notes that "it exists and can be used...
...Nixon has a mandate now, or thinks he has, which amounts to the same thing...
...It got the Naval Air Systems Command out into the sunshine and fresh air...
...Nixon's door...
...It coped with the massive corruption in U.S...
...It recovered its sanity after the Palmer Raids that followed World War I, and after the McCarthy witch hunts that followed World War II...
...James W. McCord, Jr., one of the men indicted in the Watergate break-in, is an alumnus of the Special Analysis Division, and helped draft its contingency plan for instituting nationwide censorship...
...The most enterprising among the giants were Standard Oil of California, with a tax rate of 1.6 per cent...
...to the fact that the President has deemed it neither necessary nor desirable to repudiate such tactics, let alone explain them...
...The eighteen largest oil companies earned more than $10 billion last year, and paid out all of 6.7 per cent of their net income in Federal income taxes...
...To the extent that they expose, debate, and resist, democracy in America will be preserved...
...Navy is being subjected to much criticism—quite unfairly, in our view—for devoting four years and $375,000 of the taxpayers' money to a futile search for possible military applications of the Frisbee...
...We've had precisely the same experience...
...Two fragile and fallible institutions —the Congress and the press—stand in the way of incipient fascism...
...It is possible to conjecture that we ain't seen no thin' yet...
...if they had, they might show more sympathy for the frustrated scientists of the Naval Air Systems Command who did their best to develop "an air-launch illumination system using a gyroscopi-cally stabilized disc"—a Frisbee, that is...
...To the extent that they knuckle under, it will be lost...
...Reviewing the record of the past four years—and particularly of the Presidential campaign—who can conceive of the President drawing a fine line of constitutionality or, for that matter, of common decency...
...The Special Analysis Division was apparently created a decade ago, and the FBI, it transpires, has been secretly compiling dossiers on all members of Congress for more than twenty years...
Vol. 36 • December 1972 • No. 12
