The Word From Washington

...It turns out that the Rivers phenomenon, while a bit on the egregious side, was not unique...

...Mr...

...In this case, however, there were overriding considerations: to comply with the Moorhead Subcommittee's request would have meant disclosing details of the phantom army operated in Laos by the U.S...

...The figures help explain why the Armed Services Committees have nearly always been eager to meet the military's most inflated fund requests, rarely bothering to look at the cases of mismanagement, waste, and corruption that surface from time to time...

...According to an official estimate recently presented to Congress, the foreign intelligence-gathering activities of the CIA, the military services, and sundry mysterious agencies of the Federal Government cost the taxpayers about $3 billion a year...

...The use of some 1,000 Army agents to spy on antiwar organizations and their members was "inappropriate," "poor judgment," even "unwise," the Justice Department's lawyer acknowledged, but in his view it did not violate the Constitution or any Federal statute...

...The main entrance to the local Air Force base was "Rivers Gate," and a housing project on the Navy base was called "Men-Riv Park...

...There were fears that one more military facility might sink Charleston into the Atlantic...

...operations in Cambodia...

...His perennial campaign slogan was "Rivers Delivers," and the Army, Navy, and Air Force obliged by frantically scrambling to locate their installations in his bailiwick...

...All of which was immensely reassuring, except that we found ourselves wondering vaguely about that one copy and the uses to which it might be put, and wondering even more why the Government was so insistently telling the Court that it wanted no restraints imposed on a practice it claims to have abandoned anyway...

...The Senator makes a persuasive case, maintaining that "the Congress, which must make decisions on foreign policy and national security, which is called upon to commit the material and human resources of the nation, should have access to all available information and intelligence to discharge properly and morally its responsibility to our Government and its people...

...the Pentagon controls the House Armed Services Committee...

...By doing so, it also, in effect, controls the Congress...

...A less official but probably more realistic estimate current on Capitol Hill places the cost of these operations at about twice that amount...

...Money is no question," Rivers' successor, Louisiana Democrat F. Edward Hebert, told Congressional Quarterly...

...But as for actually sending businessmen to jail for deliberately endangering their customers—well, there is such a thing as carrying law and order too far...

...The Word From Washington A few minutes before midnight on Wednesday, March 15, a State Department courier bearing a message from the President of the United States arrived at the Georgetown residence of Representative William S. Moorhead, the Pennsylvania Democrat who heads the House Subcommittee on Government Information...

...Nixon miscalculated, as Presidents have had a way of miscalculating about Vietnam for a long time now...

...The Pentagon looks after its own...

...In the last analysis, aren't all Americans responsible for "decisions on foreign policy and national security...

...The President waited until the last minute to assert "executive privilege," and did so with marked reluctance, because he knows it raises the hackles of Congress and undermines his carefully cultivated image of an "open" Administration...

...The Congressman was not entirely unprepared for the unusual visit, for he knew midnight was a deadline—the hour when American aid to Cambodia would automatically be suspended unless the President responded to a five-week-old request from the Subcommittee for a report on U.S...

...Griswold assured the Court that the Army's surveillance program had been discontinued, that the data banks in which findings were stored had been dismantled, that the "blacklist" compiled by the military agents had been destroyed—except for one copy...

...The word from the White House was that President Nixon would formally avail himself of "executive privilege...

...It might have put Indochina back on the front pages, contradicting the President's assertion of last December that "Vietnam will not be an issue in the campaign as far as this Administration is concerned, because we will have brought the American involvement to an end...

...Chairman Hebert acknowledges that his power is "awesome," but he doesn't mind...

...CQ found that in the past decade, the Senate has on only three occasions changed the dollar total of the military authorization bill reported by its Armed Services Committee...

...Except for a few favored members of the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees, no one in Congress knows precisely where in the Federal budget these appropriations are hidden, or how much they amount to, or what they produce...

...Senator John Sherman Cooper, Kentucky Republican, is sponsoring legislation that would require the CIA to provide the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees with the same reports it now furnishes to the White House—"fully and currently," as his bill states...

...Neither does the Pentagon...

...He has formally invoked the "privilege" only three times since entering the White House...

...I intend to build the strongest military we can get...

...Aren't all Americans called upon to "commit the material and human resources of the nation"—their material and human resources...

...Central Intelligence Agency...

...But they could hardly have acted more foolishly...

...A recent survey by Congressional Quarterly disclosed that two-thirds of the members on both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees come from states or districts in which Department of Defense expenditures constitute the number one source of Federal money...

...Nixon's secret...

...Potomacus...

...Although the papers the Subcommittee had sought —the annual "country field submission" compiled by the U.S...

...Therefore, shouldn't all Americans have access to "available information and intelligence...

...As they say at the White House, some fellas just won't get on the team...

...Within a few days of this peculiar disclosure, Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold stood before the Supreme Court to argue against imposition of any judicial restraints on the military's domestic espionage activities...

...This, in turn, might have raised questions about other covert activities carried on by the United States in Laos and Thailand...

...The North Vietnamese—holding to the perverse notion that as long as the United States will not make peace, they might as well wage war—have taken the wraps off Mr...

...The Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which has been delving into the Army's extensive surveillance of domestic dissenters, recently came up with the startling discovery that military installations across the country had been ordered to standby alert on Election Day, 1968, against the contingency of guerrilla assaults directed at the nation's polling places...

...embassy in Phnom Penh, the Agency for International Development, and the U.S...

...The House committee has a perfect record: Its recommendation has never been altered on the floor...

...Information Agency—had routinely been supplied since the Eisenhower years, Mr...

...Nixon had decided they were now "internal documents" not suitable for Congressional scrutiny...

...The Federal Government, like some of its more frenzied critics, is capable of astonishing descents into the pathology of paranoia...

...The industry lobbyists, apparently reconciled to the fact that some kind of bill is likely to be passed, are making it known that they would be willing to accept the imposition of an occasional fine when the Government proves that a hazardous product has knowingly been sent into the market...

...If the American people had known all the facts about Indochina eight or ten years ago, they might not have acted any more wisely than the national security managers who were privy to the data...

...A major target of their efforts is a clause that would authorize criminal prosecution for willful violation of Federal safety standards...

...Well, Mr...

...Under a 1961 foreign aid statute, the Administration must supply such information to Congress within thirty-five days—or invoke the President's traditional prerogative of "executive privilege...

...When the late Representative L. Mendel Rivers was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, his Charleston district acquired a measure of notoriety as a sort of military-industrial complex in microcosm...

...Far less persuasive is Senator Cooper's contention that members of these committees can—and should—be counted on to keep such information secret from their constituents...

...Representative Otis G. Pike, Democrat of New York, one of five habitual (and ineffective) dissenters on the thirty-nine-member House committee, says, "The House Armed Services Committee doesn't control the Pentagon...

...As this is written, Indochina is back on the front pages, and it is an issue in the campaign...

...Moorhead might just as well have gone to bed...

...Lobbyists for leading appliance manufacturers, including Philco-Ford, the Frigidaire Division of General Motors, and the Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association, have been working overtime attempting to remove the teeth from a consumer safety bill now pending in the Senate Commerce Committee...

...By invoking the "privilege," he would keep the money flowing while withholding the facts...