THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington We have been wallowing in self-pity this spring, and the blame rests with that Anonymous Associate of Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, whose thankless task it...
...military officers who are now trying to litigate their way out of active duty...
...Pearl Harbor was merely one example...
...Potomacus...
...But the opposition is couched in the name of economy...
...The war on poverty, as Senator Dodd's case reminds us, begins at home...
...It didn't seem to bother liiin when he was news director for the Washington bureau of the American Broadcasting Company...
...Behind Congressional balkiness at approving this form of support—designed to liberate the poor from the ghetto—is the fear of exodus by Negroes to lily white suburbs...
...It is persistently rumored that Secretary of State Dean Rusk will not be far behind in the line of departees...
...The story, Fleming pointed out, was written on Saturday by a man seventy-eight miles away from the President's ranch...
...Testimonial dinners," said the A.A., "enable a poor man to remain in office...
...It dates back to the Korean War and has been opposed by three Presidents...
...Congress is fashioning a grotesque mirror image of the Great Society as originally conceived, directed, and produced by President Lyndon Johnson...
...Pentagonological Law, a branch of the forensic science peculiar to Washington, is being put to its severest strain by the war in Vietnam...
...We know, we know...
...We receive no residual legal fees, and our lecture honoraria barely pay for throat lozenges...
...That is the import of action taken on two of the most compelling Great Society programs—the National Teacher Corps and the rent subsidy program...
...The anti-establishment camp is populated by a smattering of Congressional dissidents and a younger generation of State Department careerists (under the spell of Walter Lippmann...
...It would be a rankling irony if ghetto America remained a forgotten and invisible part of the Great Society...
...And perhaps it is just as well that a new generation set to work fashioning the solutions for the world of the 1960's rather than the world of nearly a generation ago...
...Most regrettably, none of our friends has feted us at $100-a-plate—or even $l-a-plate— testimonial dinners...
...Against this setting of confusion it is now expected that some of the principal architects of the postwar Fax At-lanticus will be leaving the government...
...From our position, barely afloat in the mainstream of American debt, even the Senator's austere emoluments look good...
...At the risk of incurring Fleming's further wrath, we wonder why he and Moyers do in fact spend so much of their time telling reporters how stupid and even corrupt they are...
...On the traditionalist side of the argument are the blue ribbon eminences comprising what John Kenneth Galbraith recently branded "the foreign policy syndicate," which with the permanent establishment has determined U.S...
...alliance policy are being publicly questioned—especially the inflexible anti-Gaullism of the State Department...
...In fact, we've heard worse on occasion from the White House press spokesmen—as, for example, at the time of the Dominican crisis last year...
...But Pentagonological Law seems ever up to the challenge...
...Quite unwittingly the Anonymous Associate—let's call him A.A.—brought us eyeball to eyeball with our own economic plight, and we have been blinking ever since...
...But underneath the glassy surface of U.S...
...The Word from Washington We have been wallowing in self-pity this spring, and the blame rests with that Anonymous Associate of Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, whose thankless task it was to explain the Senator's intricate income arrangements to the press...
...Now it appears all too likely that Congress will follow the lead of the House Appropriations Committee and cut off every penny the Administration requested to put the program into motion...
...Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs J. Robert Schaetzel, one of the most hard-line pro-Atlantic unity and anti-Gaullists, has been tapped by President Johnson as U.S...
...One of the most vexing assaults has come from a group of U.S...
...In one case, he complained, a columnist wrote about the "bleeding ulcer" of Press Secretary Bill D, Moyers without ascertaining that doctors had pronounced the ulcer "cured...
...With all the zeal that afflicts the recent convert, Robert H. Fleming, the new deputy press secretary at the White House, is protesting against "poor reporting" by the Washington press corps...
...Defense Department attorneys drafted for Secretary McNamara what may go down as one of the most curious relics of the Vietnamese war...
...Could it be a calculated campaign to discourage those who write stories that lack the official imprimatur...
...At the heart of their argument is the constitutional guarantee against involuntary servitude...
...policy toward Europe there is furious contention between the old generation of NATO alliance advocates and a new school of policymakers who accept the need for new accommodations on the continent...
...No government contractor has offered us the free use of an Olds-mobile, and no aircraft firm has provided "courtesy" flights...
...Under Secretary of State George Ball is expected to depart Washington by June...
...When the twilight legal basis of the war was questioned during Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Pentagon all but declared the old-fashioned declaration of war as obsolete...
...At the top of the Administration an attitude of po-litesse toward de Gaulle is being counseled...
...Some excerpts: "To declare war would add a new psychological element to the international situation, since in this century, declarations of war have come to imply dedication to the total destruction of the enemy...
...Ambassador to the Common Market...
...Still another rebuke went to a reporter who wrote of the President's "foul mood" on Easter Sunday...
...Another columnist wrote that Moyers "seems to be spending most of his time" telling reporters "how stupid and even corrupt they are...
...Ergo, the four officers are properly being held under the charter of a war that ended a decade and half ago...
...We have our own thoughts on "poor reporting...
...Fleming disclosed his grievances recently to the local chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, a journalism fraternity, and he cited specifics...
...Another blow at America's poor is the evisceration by Congress of the Administration's rent subsidy program...
...But one that has been seriously offered is the argument that since no peace treaty has been signed in Korea, the Korean national emergency still exists...
...told reporters, "that a Senator's salary is inadequate and that for most men in Washington the break-even point on expenses is about $50,000 a year...
...There is nothing in modern international law which requires a state to declare war before engaging in hostilities against another state...
...President Johnson is warily avoiding any large or sudden initiatives in response to the de Gaulle challenge, almost as though Washington were waiting for the medical odds to run out against the seventy-four-year-old French chief of state...
...They are part of the American way of life...
...Any newsman, Fleming chided, could find out that Moyers doesn't spend "most of his time" making speeches...
...Not long ago one of the most common complaints heard around the European wing of the State Department was that the country had forgotten about that continent in its all-consuming preoccupation with Vietnam...
...For reasons that pass comprehension, the American Security Council has not invited us to make paid radio talks...
...It is well known," the A.A...
...Our salary, we confess with shame, does not approach a Senator's $30,000, to say nothing of the break-even point...
...This stew has begun only recently to bubble on Capitol Hill where some of the deepest assumptions of U.S...
...We share this patriotic sentiment, and hope our negligent friends will take the hint...
...foreign policy for twenty years...
...Examples of hostilities begun without prior declaration of war abound in recent history...
...This complaint is no longer heard, thanks to Charles de Gaulle and his ultimatum on impending French disengagement from the NATO military alliance...
...While gouging deeply at this neediest sector of American public education, Congress can be depended on to heap its public largesse on affluent middle-class schools through the impacted aid program—an educational subsidy to schools in areas heavily populated by families of military or other Federal employes...
...Bad manners makes bad diplomacy," is the injunction that is being passed down from on high...
...Thanks also to de Gaulle's intervention was the exposure of American policy in Europe for what it is: a bundle of uncertainties wrapped in an envelope of tired and rigid doctrine...
...Congress gave a modest enough charter to the teacher corps for the current fiscal year to recruit special faculty for ghetto schools...
...If it is, it may well succeed...
...Within the full alliance stalemate still prevails on the question of nuclear sharing with Bonn and on the character of NATO's retaliatory strike policy—whether a pause or an automatic measured response...
...Pentagon lawyers don't seem to have a clear-cut line of defense...
...If the four officers should simply quit, it is pointed out, they could be convicted under a 105-year-old statute that was designed to prevent pro-Confederate officers from deserting the United States Army...
...Shocking inaccuracies, perhaps, but we've heard worse...
...The four officers, from each of the three main services, say the government cannot hold them—in the absence of a national emergency—beyond their contract period of service...
...It is rather sticky, this business of fighting a major undeclared war in Southeast Asia...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
