The Word from Washington
THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON fitters Jeffrey Stein How do you spell relief? For much of Washington, it's clearly R-E-A-G-A-N. The President-elect breezed into town and braced the decaying political...
...Tuning is everything___A private study by the Reagan transition team's chief of African policy argues that the South African military is "prepared to be used to buy time, but not to be wasted or abused...
...J.S...
...The erstwhile Senate majority leader, former Klansman Robert Byrd, talks about a need to "regroup and unify," with not an idea in his head about how and why this should be done...
...They appeared to be chickens...
...He is on the right-wing hit list for 1982...
...Say goodnight, Scotty...
...On further investigation, we discovered that the placing of dead chickens with blood smeared on the breast feathers is a Chilean Indian ritual designed to harass an enemy...
...The dead chickens serve as a warning of worse things to come...
...The prospective Secretary of the Department of Education has two children who have never spent a day in public schools...
...Both Anthony Summers, author of the carefully researched Conspiracy, and Gaeton Fonzi, a chief investigator for the House Assassinations Committee, argue that Phillips was probably the mysterious "Maurice Bishop," the man from the CIA who met with Oswald...
...They had their heads on and were placed head down into the bag, with feet sticking upward...
...Four years later, Landau and a colleague, John Dinges, wrote an investigative book on the affair (Assassination on Embassy Row) and found out that Bush did know a lot more about it but kept his mouth shut...
...President" Reagan...
...It wants more coonskins on the cabin door...
...The New Right is not satisfied...
...The book came out during the primaries, when George Bush was an outsider...
...Now he's on the inside...
...Ann Banks, author of a critically acclaimed history of the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, is organizing a National Writers Conference, tentatively scheduled for New York next fall, under the auspices of the Nation Institute...
...vember 2. It is this personal quality of the man, we are told, that is the best protection against Nixonoid plumbers...
...Writers unite...
...He is at ease about who he is, and why...
...The Democrats are frozen, paralyzed...
...Then what is it about the incoming Administration that gives such good cheer to the braided dictators of Latin America, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis...
...The transition team's personnel director, E. Pendleton James, has praised a draft study drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank, as a guideline for the new Administration...
...On Thursday night, November 20, Ronald and Nancy Reagan dined at the home of conservative columnist George Will, who has been assuring his readers these many years that the new President is a man of open self-assurance...
...On September 21,1976, he was blown up in his car, along with co-worker Ronni Moffitt, by agents of the Chilean secret police...
...ABSCAM south...
...But Phillips is paying attention: Last month, he organized a legal defense fund under the auspices of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) to finance a suit...
...It is their first mistake...
...Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts visited the movie actor's pre-inaugural circus tent across from the White House and offered his "cooperation...
...They may go too far, too fast...
...Here is IPS fellow Saul Landau's testimony to the Washington police: "I looked inside the bag and saw two dead birds, with blood on their chest feathers...
...Without a credible domestic "communist menace" to kick around any more, the paranoid right and the militarists have used the IPS as a handy whipping boy to convince the unsophisticated that "subversives" here at home are the cause of all our problems...
...Generally overlooked in the ABSCAM trial of New York Democrat John Murphy is a videotape clip of the Congressman bragging to an FBI agent of his plans to help the late Anastasio Somoza get back into power via a coup after a U.S.-backed "moderate" junta had been established...
...Even New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served President Nixon so well, will not be allowed benign neglect...
...Each day's headlines arrive like war communiques...
...Unfortunately for Reston and Carter, Senate rules say a former President can only address the body, not take part in debate...
...New York Times columnist James Reston wistfully argued in a post-election column that Jimmy Carter could remain a force in national politics by taking part in Senate debates, as allowed by Congressional rules...
...Phillips is also angered, according to a private letter he sent AFIO members, by a recent book which connects him to the assassins of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier...
...Along with arguments for the repeal of affirmative action orders and abolition of the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Office of Surface Mining, the Heritage report advises Reagan to recognize "the reality of subversion and [to put] emphasis on the un-American nature of much so-called 'dissidence.' " Reagan's chief foreign policy adviser, Richard Allen, has already called for a new, independent agency to combat "domestic terrorism...
...Scuttlebutt...
...Will wrote on NoJeffrey Stein is The Progressive's contributing editor in Washington...
...The strategy being pressed is for Harris to replace the ailing Thurgood Marshall before January 20...
...Exactly one week after the election, a paper grocery bag was left at the doorway of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal-left research organization that has been the object of relentless attack from right-wing quarters...
...According to the Heritage Foundation, "it is axiomatic that individual liberties are secondary to the requirement of national security and internal civil order...
...You've got to be kidding...
...According to Georgetown's Chester Crocker, "Senior officials in the security forces do not conceive their mission as one of indefinite repression at home and conflict on the borders, but as one of buying time externally for essential changes at home...
...There is talk of new bombers, new missiles, and old-style covert action...
...January briefing Dirty tricks___A dramatic encounter is brewing between David Phillips, once the CIA's chief dirty trickster in Brazil and Chile and at the Bay of Pigs, and two writers who have publicly speculated that Phillips met with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas shortly before the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
...HUD Secretary Patricia Harris is said by intimates to be angling for an appointment to the Supreme Court before Jimmy Carter leaves office...
...Capitol idea...
...The chief of the urban affairs transition "cluster" wants to cut off all Federal aid to cities with rent control...
...Counter-programming...
...The last-minute negotiation effort to establish such a junta fell apart, aborting the plan...
...The "Safe Energy Communications Council," an antinuclear media group, has produced a series of television and radio spots scheduled to run in fourteen cities to counter pro-industry spots on nuclear power...
...Both the Warren Commission and subsequent Congressional investigations, the authors argue—Fonzi in a report in the November Washingtonian magazine— willfully ignored the puzzling encounter...
...Insiders say the ploy is hopelessly naive: The emerging Republican majority in the Senate Judiciary Committee would never approve the last-ditch nomination...
...For the monarchists and corporate back-slappers in the capital, Reagan surely holds out the promise of restored grandeur and authority...
...This must be a joke, we think...
...Four years earlier, Landau's predecessor in his job, former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, was receiving regular warnings of that kind...
...Columnist Hugh Sidey was beside himself with dreams of a return to good wines and bourbon-on-the-rocks in the White House...
...Strom Thurmond, who will now preside over the Senate Judiciary Committee, announces he wants a repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act...
...George Bush was director of the CIA at that time and he told everybody—including the police and FBI— that he didn't know anything about it...
...Ideas are welcome: write to her at 72 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011...
...The President-elect breezed into town and braced the decaying political climate here with a series of sharp initiatives from his transition team...
...It is, he says, "what the people want...
Vol. 45 • January 1981 • No. 1
