THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
Stein, Jeffrey
THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON Being here Jeffrey Stein The first shock wave from the election has passed over Washington. Those residents who were not busy packing or unpacking spent the last days of...
...An oral surgeon was chosen to run the Department of Energy...
...His sponsors asked who lost China...
...Ex-cultists unite...
...they came to full flower under Eisenhower...
...When Carter officials ordered an investigation of the December slaying of three U.S...
...Describing their subjects as "KGB-connected," the dossiers are replete with personal as well as political histories...
...A former member of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, Steven Hassan, has been sending out a newsletter for the past year warning about the cult's recruiting techniques and political activities...
...The ever surprising, ever loony U.S...
...What's so strange about that...
...Arabian Gulf nations have "almost certainly" paid more than $350 billion for military goods and services since 1974, according to a top-level former Pentagon officer writing under the pen-name Abdul Kasim Mansur in Armed Forces Journal...
...Let's remember that it was Carter who boosted the Pentagon budget, approved the MX, reinstated registration for the draft...
...Some of the better stories got me to thinking about the late Peter Sellers's last movie, Being There...
...Walske, however, expects Reagan will scratch the Clinch River breeder project as a physical, fiscal, and public relations turkey...
...Oh, c'mon," Reagan's chief of staff, Ed Meese, protested to reporters...
...Sure he knew...
...The group has been selectively distributing "confidential" dossiers on several journalists, activists, and union workers to offices on Capitol Hill...
...diplomat in Central America, is designed to lock the Reagan Administration into defense of the current "moderate" junta...
...Take Dwight Eisenhower: He had Charles E. Wilson, who came from General Motors to run the Pentagon, and who thought (and said) that what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice-versa...
...Participation by FBI agents ostensibly guarantees a thorough investigation, thus preserving the notion that Washington seeks to rein in the right-wing death squads inside the Salvad6ran military...
...Justin Dart of Dart Industries...
...Hassan now informs us he has linked with other ex-cultists from Guru Maharaj Ji's "Divine Light" mission to establish a Washington office open to former members of any cult who want to spread the anti-cult message...
...Holmes Tuttle, a Los Angeles auto dealer, and the like...
...There was the day, for instance, when Reagan was in Los Angeles, getting his hair cut, while his controversial choices for appointment as Secretary of State and Secretary of Labor were being named in downtown Washington...
...The movie's last scene showed him as the newly chosen President, wandering off into the woods and talking to trees, while in the background the business Jeffrey Stein is The Progressive's contributing editor in Washington...
...Most of Ronald Reagan's intimates are business leaders—Alfred S. Bloomingdale, former board chairman of the Diner's Club...
...Under the sponsorship of an industrialist who mistook Sellers's silly mut-terings for Delphic pronouncements of profound significance, Sellers was maneuvered into the Presidency...
...And now by Ronald Reagan, who has had much experience reading lines written by someone else...
...A mobster was chosen to serve as an economic adviser...
...Air Force officers" before the attack, it added...
...They suggest the USLP may have practiced surveillance on its targets or gathered information from Federal or local intelligence agencies...
...The Dulles brothers came from Wall Street...
...It was Carter who wanted the Iranian generals to staff a counterrevolution...
...Mansur's" article, which has caused a stir in Washington politico-military circles, concludes the expenditure has "brought them neither military capability nor security, and in many cases, has no prospect of doing so...
...Truman had allowed the first sinister whispers of treason in high places...
...The Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey, was a director of half a dozen large banks and industries...
...leaders of America were carving up the country...
...Carl Walske, the head of the pro-nuclear Atomic Industrial Forum, has been telling visitors he expects Ronald Reagan to go forward with the controversial nuclear reactor breeder program, as Jimmy Carter was expected to do...
...In Being There, Sellers portrayed a thirty-five-year-old dimwit who had spent his entire life watching television...
...Highly sophisticated U.S., European, and Soviet bloc equipment often failed to function well, the Journal noted...
...Reagan's ask who lost Iran and Nicaragua...
...So why not an actor in the White House...
...And it was Carter who doubled inflation, cut back domestic programs, left the tax burden squarely on the backs of the middle class...
...Every President I can remember has followed a script written for him by someone else...
...nuns and a Catholic lay worker in El Salvador, the high-level team included FBI agents...
...Labor Party, once ultra-Left, now ultra-Right, has come up with another zany but sinister ploy...
...And on the same day, Reagan was asked whether it was true that he would be taking a pre-inaugural trip to visit Mexican President Jose Lopez-Portillo...
...Lights, camera, bring on the actor— the real thing/ Still, this transition casts an eerie shadow, similar to the transition from Harry S. Truman's Administration to Eisenhower's...
...aid and advice since its creation in a Washington-directed coup in 1979, faced convincing charges that its security forces were implicated in the murders and cover-up...
...It was Carter who tried to save the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua...
...But he was only following the script...
...Those residents who were not busy packing or unpacking spent the last days of 1980 and the first of 1981 chortling over news from Ronald Reagan's transition headquarters...
...A case in point: the Iraq-Iran war, wherein the military machines of both nations performed dismally, neither deterring attack nor providing victory once the conflict began...
...Even Reagan's people won't put up with nun-killers," the diplomat confided...
...February briefing Loon Lake, D.C...
...And a wiretapper was installed at the State Department...
...Running the Government is like running General Motors," puffed Bloomingdale, one of sixteen millionaires who helped Reagan choose his Cabinet...
...The Cabinet secretaries will be like the presidents of Chevrolet and Pontiac...
...Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had for months sought tactical advice from European "and even some U.S...
...The lines don't change much—just the style of delivery...
...Exactly the same sort of folks were named by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter...
...Sure enough, Robert D. Nesen, who runs an Oldsmobile-Cadillac dealership in Ventura, California, emerged as the leading candidate to be Secretary of the Navy...
...G-Men go South...
...Go forth and multiply...
...Arms and oil...
...Reagan said he didn't know, but a few hours later, the trip was officially announced in Washington...
...Perhaps that's what frightens people about Reagan: When it comes to acting, he's the real thing...
...The Carter tactic, according to a top-level U.S...
...A construction executive was chosen to run the Department of Labor...
...Being here, you can feel it...
...Joseph Coors, the beer magnate...
...J.S...
...A Datsun lobbyist was chosen to head the National Security Council...
...Reagan is also rumored to be considering taking away nuclear export licensing from the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and other Government departments which review nuclear exports, and giving all such authority to the State Department, where it would come under direct control of the White House...
...This unreported and significant development provided the Carter Administration an avenue out of its dilemma: The Salvadoran regime, preserved by heavy doses of U.S...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
