The Word from Washington
Stein, Jeff
THE WORD F ROM WASH INGTON JeffStein DUE PROCESS The people, not the politicians, deserve due process Harrison Williams rubbed the stubble on his upper lip, crooked his elbow on the polished oak...
...Due process...
...Capitol where the Weather Underground set off a bomb almost twelve years ago...
...The rich were eating the country alive with Stockman's blessing...
...Or threats to invade Cuba, or Nicaragua...
...I revisited the site of the Capitol blast last month after the countrywide sweep for accomplices to the Nyack, New York, Brinks shootout apparently involving remnants of the left-wing underground...
...Civil rights, what a bore, was pooh-poohed...
...Called the Office of Foreign Missions, its job will be to wreak tit-for-tat revenge on diplomatic missions in Washington when U.S...
...The White House economic program had been more than voodoo, it had been a cynical charade to wrap up the Republican larceny in fancy "supply-side" talk...
...The April 1970 blast from a men's room blew out the windows in the Senate's private dining room and knocked a large portrait of George Washington off the wall thirty yards around the bend...
...a Jepsen aide acknowledges that the Senator discussed Reynolds's firing with Attorney General William French Smith en route to Moshe Dayan's funeral, before the AWACS vote...
...Mary Travers sang...
...Tucked into the General Government Appropriation Bill for 1982 are a few line items that tell the story: The White House Office has awarded itself an even $1 million more than Jimmy Carter needed to run the place, $21,278,000...
...diplomat...
...So did former judge Howell Heflin of Alabama and David Pryor of Arkansas, who shook his head at what he regarded as FBI entrapment of Williams...
...These peculiar displays of restraint stick in the craw...
...The Peace Corps was on the ropes...
...Bread and Circuses President Reagan is quick to tell ordinary Americans to tighten their belts while the White House quietly boosts its own budget...
...The Senators around the table nodded agreement and would tell the reporters later how important it was to observe due process...
...The legislation authorizes the hiring of no additional staff, who numbered 158 in Carter's last year as President...
...Down the White House corridor from Allen's office, David Stockman fiddled with another set of figures...
...Republican leader Howard Baker of Tennessee, however, ensured that it would be smoothed over in perpetuity: With the help of a mumbled voice vote from the few Senators on the floor, Baker managed to have the entire exchange struck from the Congressional Record...
...As of mid-November, he had still gotten nowhere...
...I should have the opportunity to know what did deal with me at those meetings [sic...
...It's all been dealt with before, he gently told Pete Williams...
...THE WORD F ROM WASH INGTON JeffStein DUE PROCESS The people, not the politicians, deserve due process Harrison Williams rubbed the stubble on his upper lip, crooked his elbow on the polished oak table, and seemed to focus his downcast eyes on the reflection of the chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the Senate hearing room...
...The Senator listened and smiled and talked in courtly tones...
...This art form hit a new low in the U.S...
...The Congress and an enthusiastic White House want to loose the CIA and FBI on us again...
...Where is a sense of restraint, the kind shown when a soiled character or two from the White House or a convicted United States Senator are in a tight spot...
...I remember sitting in a budget hearing presided over by Alabama's Moral Majority Senator, Jeremiah Denton, as representatives from small towns and villages pleaded to save the Community Services Administration...
...Where is the due process in a nuclear first-strike strategy...
...TIME WARP The tourists and the Congressional aides scurry by without a second glance these days, but there are still chips in the walls of a first-floor corridor in the U.S...
...will slap a surcharge on Russian embassy bills here, under the legislation...
...Metzenbaum and several colleagues were taken aback at Hollings's breach of decorum with the apparent smear, and Hollings later rose to apologize...
...He had been caught in his own lies and maneuvers...
...Chairing the Ethics Committee meeting, as the New Jersey Democrat and his lawyers plugged for a last-ditch delay before the vote on Williams's expulsion from the Senate, Wyoming's Malcolm Wallop sought to be fair...
...representatives feel slighted abroad...
...diplomats...
...Reagan took him out to the woodshed, and put him back in his office...
...J.S...
...In the end, Williams got yet another chance to stave off final judgment...
...It never appeared, so it never officially happened...
...Senate Judiciary Subcommittee looking into prosecutorial discretion...
...The problem with Ronald Reagan's law 'n' order program is that he's got it backwards...
...He had abused the public trust as surely as Harrison Williams, but Stockman was going to get another chance...
...Where is due process in the executive dismantling of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, the civil rights office of the Justice Department or the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization...
...Due process...
...Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah and Democrat Dennis DeConcini of Arizona now want Attorney General Smith to appoint a special prosecutor to examine Hultman's conduct...
...Or to heap fire, pestilence, war, and starvation on a Salvadoran peasant who wants out from under the American thumb...
...Due process...
...The Air Force's chief of staff, General Waldo Bernal, is scheduled to become his country's next delegate to the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington...
...Right...
...Last year, the appropriation was for $3,125,000...
...Five United States Senators sat at the other end of the table, in judgment...
...Sixteen blocks west on Pennsylvania Avenue, Richard Allen put on a confident face as he shut off reporters' questions about the $1,000 he had received from a Japanese journalist and stuck in his safe...
...As it turns out, Reynolds had long wanted to interview former South African officials on the possible role of a secret, Pretoria-backed slush fund in Jepsen's defeat of Democratic incumbent Dick Clark in 1978...
...I am really concerned about due process here," Pryor said again and again, tapping his cigarette nervously on an ashtray...
...Williams suddenly broke into his lawyers' word games and begged his former colleagues, "Why can't I have the minutes of the executive session...
...M January Briefing Bible Passage Iowa Republican Roger Jepsen attributed his last-minute switch on the AWACS vote in October to Bible study with his wife, but an upstart U.S...
...Jepsen, who just two days before the vote had claimed it would be "idiotic" to sell the AWACS package to Saudia Arabia, has been after the Reagan Justice Department to get rid of Jim Reynolds, the Carter-appointed U.S...
...Still, he was willing to grant the convicted felon a few more days to produce evidence that might put his ABSCAM involvement in a new and better light...
...Meanwhile, down at Foggy Bottom, thirsty State Department officers are getting an extra allotment in their overseas "grog ration" from the White House...
...In a telephone conversation, Reynolds said Justice Department officials told him to mind his own business when he asked last May for a green light to go ahead with his investigation...
...It is the people who deserve due process...
...Allen would not be hustled out of office, a trophy for the press...
...The matter was quickly smoothed over...
...Clark was the Senate's most insistent critic of U.S.-South Africa ties...
...The President himself should start by getting rid of Stockman and Allen, each a disgrace to the country...
...A woman from Kansas told the Senator about a CSA program that had helped teach youngsters how to sew, or balance a family budget, or start a small business...
...Postscript: Hultman is national director of the Reserve Officers Association...
...Cocaine Envoy According to a former Bolivian cabinet minister, one of the Andean nation's newest coca plantations (read: cocaine farms) is under trie management and protection of the Bolivian Air Force...
...Then he slammed down the gavel and wiped out the program...
...This year, the White House has thrown in another $455,000...
...First, there would be an investigation...
...Really off the Record Florida reporters have been outraged by Republican Senator Paula Hawkins's habit of denying she ever said such-and-such to a reporter even after the reporter confronted her with a tape of their conversation...
...We're not going to let them push us around anymore," growled a mid-level U.S...
...It is likely that Jepsen was motivated by more than a desire for a partisan body switch...
...Attorney in Iowa is suggesting there may have been more earthly factors involved...
...She said it paid for itself, if only by dulling the hard edge of despair in her town...
...Due process...
...Evan Hultman, a former Iowa Attorney General and Jepsen's Republican candidate, has been investigated by a U.S...
...It's time to stop coddling the criminals...
...At local Catholic University one recent Friday night, the young gathered to sing folk songs and speak out against all the easy—and eager—war talk coming out of .the Pentagon...
...Hit 'em with a Silver Spoon Inching through Congress is a bill to establish a new State Department bureaucracy long sought by U.S...
...Within a week of the AWACS vote, meanwhile, the White House directed the Justice Department to get busy on the background checks for Reynolds's replacement...
...Arsonists hit property owned by the Nicaraguan government...
...A new internal security committee promised new witch-hunts...
...There was a wall of contradictions in Allen's answers about the, um, gratuity, as well as the story put out by his friend Fred Fielding—once convicted in the Watergate disgrace but now back at work in the White House—but President Reagan bent over backwards to be fair...
...The fund due for an increase, officially known as the "representation allowance," is really used to throw embassy cocktail parties...
...Clearance for the new man could prove to be difficult...
...Reagan will be taken care of later...
...Attorney for Northern Iowa...
...Due process...
...As his lawyers talked, his other arm fumbled for a cigarette in the pocket of the three-piece suit that had lost its banker's fit...
...Jesse Helms, all jowls in affirmation of fair play, pronounced it was a duty...
...It seemed like the old days...
...Catch words older than today's undergraduates wafted through the press: Guantanamo, nuclear war, peace march, protest, red scare...
...Somewhere, the bombs are ticking...
...In mid-September, Hultman announced ROA's backing of the AWACS sale, and rallied his membership behind the Saudi deal...
...Teach-ins on El Salvador and nuclear doom sprang up at the universities, priests denounced the war fever from the pulpits...
...The Administration railed at Fidel Castro, sent the Caribbean fleet on maneuvers off Central America, dropped hints of invasions and coups d'etat...
...Senate in mid-November when, during an ill-humored debate over prayer in the schools, South Carolina Democrat Ernest "Fritz" Hollings apparently lost his grip and referred to Ohio's Howard Metzenbaum as "the Senator from B'nai B'rith...
...It was okay to say "girls" again...
...When utility bills go up in Moscow, say, the U.S...
...The facts would be weighed carefully...
...His short, shaggy gray hair looked like a cancer patient's...
...The next day, 2,000 strong, they marched through the streets of Washington, in a day of protest that ended in mass arrests at the Pentagon's door...
Vol. 46 • January 1982 • No. 1
