The Word from Washington
THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON After the kind of ballyhoo and build-up normally associated with a championship boxing match, the first of the Great Debates came off as scheduled on September 23. For...
...Potomacus...
...Everybody who is anybody (or wants to be) makes the requisite pilgrimage to Plains...
...Washington couples are fox-trotting at the city's discotheques and clubs to the strains of Georgia on My Mind...
...Administration heavies are ever-so-discreetly seeking alternative sources of lucrative employment...
...The once lowly peanut has been elevated to new status as Washington's symbol of chic...
...It is not as simple as saying that I refuse to do it...
...After nine months of investigation, dozens of subpoenas, and the expenditure of $150,000 in public funds, the leaker of the House report on the intelligence agencies is still at large...
...It has replaced corn chips on the cocktail circuit...
...Just In Case hedging is a sport second only to softball officials of the Ford Administration are still being cultivated, wined, and dined in the city's rarefied preserves of power...
...I cannot do it...
...But almost forgotten in the uproar was the list of CIA abuses detailed in the document...
...The reporter and the news organization would be the immediate losers...
...But the Capital is preparing for a change...
...a nervous bride-to-be pledged to a groom whose identity is still uncertain...
...To betray a confidential source would mean to dry up many future sources for many future reporters...
...For weeks the media had reported in monotonous detail the negotiations over format, the dispute over the networks' right to show audience reaction, the selection of the panel of questioners, the relative importance of style versus content, the planning, the rehearsals...
...Featherweight was more like it...
...Real estate agents and other property piranhas are closing in for the long-awaited housing turnover...
...For the elite...
...There they stood, attired in matching blue suits and red ties, doing rote recitations for a captive audience of 90 million...
...But beyond all that, to betray a source would be to betray myself, my career, and my life...
...The result was one great yawn an unexpected gift to America's insomniacs...
...Ten days later, the Ethics Committee voted 9 to 1 to release Schorr from its subpoenas, thus ending its efforts to learn how the report on illicit CIA activities was leaked...
...In September, Mrs...
...And something is definitely wrong with a political system that pretends such a show is a decisive debate...
...A not-to-be-missed bargain: only SI 15, plus tax...
...As Marshall McLuhan observed, both President Ford and Governor Carter relied on statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post not for illumination but for support...
...Something is wrong with a political debate whose most exciting moment is a twenty-seven-minute silence...
...And that, perhaps, was the object of the exercise...
...In its attempts to discover who gave the document to CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, the House Ethics Committee tried to cross the constitutional divide which separates the roles of the Congress and the press by compelling Schorr to appear and reveal his source...
...Washington at the end of September: a city in waiting...
...Endicott Peabody and her Committee for Carter-Mondale opened a Democratic Country Store in where else?Georgetown, featuring Georgia-grown peanut plants...
...For some of us doctors, lawyers, clergymen, aw^journalists it is an article of faith that we must keep confidential those matters entrusted to us only because of the assurance that they would remain confidential...
...The less fortunate those who have not been summoned to play soft-ball in Georgia remain disconsolately in Washington, scribbling away at "options" papers...
...We all build our lives around certain principles," he said, "without which our careers lose their meaning...
...For a journalist, the most crucial kind of confidence is the identity of a source of information...
...Schorr did appear, but steadfastly refused to provide any information about the leaker...
...Featured this month is a solid gold peanut dangling seductively from the end of an eighteen-carat gold chain...
...The ultimate losers would be the American people and their free institutions...
...Why not, as a currently popular political autobiography asks, the best...
...Congress races through legislation to quit the city and campaign...
...The aura around the theatre was distinctly like that surrounding an arena where a heavyweight prize fight is to take place," gushed The Washington Post...
...It was the oral examinations of two extremely marginal master's degree candidates...
...Even in Washington, where exercises in futility are common, this one seems egregious...
...Rents are skyrocketing...
...Bailey, Banks and Biddies an East Coast jewelry chain which, like Tiffany's, is a reliable political barometer has a hot new item...
Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11
