Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at Windmills w l l i a m Colbv’s new book makes clear that he aiways thought James Angleton, the CIA’S counter-intelligence chief, was a lunatic. When Angleton was fired, Tom Braden,...
...arts money for Joan Mondale’s friends...
...By five o’clock, an hour after the briefing [for the new program] had begun, Eizenstat had reached the point where he was reading off the list of little programs awarded each agency as a payoff for its participation in the whole ghastly process: social service and health money for HEW...
...Inthe past, when military aid was needed for a less popular cause, the budget expertsat the Pentagon and the State Department had always been able to make the funds available and then cover the costs in a later military appropriation bill, without serving notice to the combatants...
...But marriages are seldom really threatened, for when the hostess rises, husband and wife usually rush to one another in happy relief at not having to think of something else to say to their partners...
...E r e ’ s another tribute to the collective wisdom of business and government, in the area of trains...
...When Angleton was fired, Tom Braden, a former CIAagentas wellasajournalist, wrote a column making clear he felt the same way...
...You are placed between two dinner partners of the opposite sex who are the only people you can talk toforaperiodofabouttwo hours...
...Nixon chose to advertise his move this time...
...The Board, by the way, employs seven full-time investigators to check on violations of law at local bars, night clubs, and liquor stores...
...w h e n YOU read one dav that the dollar is falling because we import too much oil and the next day that there isa glut of Alaskan oil in California, don’t you begin to suspect that there is something wrong with the way the government and the oil companies are managing things...
...Why on earth, when we are faced with the prospect of an energy shortage or the intolerable inflation that would be caused by paying enough to the extractors to keep energy from becoming short, don’t we rebuild the roadbeds and modernize railroad equipment...
...But subsequent revelations sh6w that the Left wasmoreright than1 gave it credit for-that many of its troubles did come from the FBI...
...Charles Peters...
...Instead, the recommendations guarantee more bureaucracy, regulations and frustrations for local officials...
...Another idol bites the dust, at least according to Bobby Baker, who in his forthcoming book alleges that the late Estes Kefauver was on the take...
...The pension was made generous with the idea of rewarding combatweary troops, not paperwork-weary bureaucrats...
...They are both, by allaccounts, superior editors...
...If you sometimes think we’ve been too hard on Richard Nixon, blamed the poor man for too much, thinkagain-it turns out that Nixon was responsible for the OPEC 1973-74 price increases that still threaten to destroy the dollar...
...Since then I’ve reviewed what we said and found it uniformlyunkind, whichis too bad-not because our criticisms weren’t true, but because we’ve been blind to the Podhoretzes’ good side...
...Yet during the 20 years of Angleton’s power, neither Colby nor Braden said a thing...
...Libya was the first to halt all oil shipments to the United States and to nearly double the price of oil on the international market...
...The main-course offering of the “full dining service” for breakfast was an English muffin and an egg that appeared to have been the victim of a struggle between someone who wanted to fry it and someone who wanted to scrambleit...
...Tip O’Neill keeps on saying he gave nothing of value to Tongsun Park in return for the $7,000 worth of parties that Park gave for him...
...Jimmy Carter likes it more than most...
...As Nicholas Lemann pointed out in our last issue, Carter and his top aides, Jordan and Powell, leave policy formulation to others...
...This is of course increasingly true in suburban areas throughout the country...
...Every president likes foreign policy, probably because it permits him a wide area of action, or at least the appearance of action, only occasionally encumbered by the messy need for congressional approval...
...As a small businessman, I know what a liberal overdraft policy could mean and understand why his neighbors in Calhoun love him...
...One reason, according to an article by Robert C. Ellickson in the Yak Low Journal, is the “we’re aboard, pull up the ladder” attitude of suburbanites, whose opposition to growth, thou& stated on environmental grounds, prevents new construction and drives up the value of their own dwellings...
...He gave in on that point and got a contract...
...Did they think protecting King’s sexual indiscretions was more important than exposing the head of the FBI as a blackmailer...
...What Carter got from the bureaucracy was, according to David Broder of The Washington Post “ten recommendations supported by 38 strategies, or maybe 10 strategies supported by 38 recommendations, plus 160 suggestions for improving old programs left scattered in five agencies-in short, a smorgasbord...
...A few months ago Norman Podhoretz wrote me protesting the treatment heand his wife, Midge Decter, have received in our columns...
...z e Washington Star recently pointed out that real estate prices in suburban Fairfax County have risen to the point where most of the county’s present residents could not afford to buy their homes today...
...Transportation Department money for ‘intermodal connections...
...Doesn’t O’Neill realize that what he gave Park was the gift of public friendship, and how much that friendship must have impressed lesser congressional lights, signaling to them that dealing with Park was okay...
...There was a tremendous flap immediately before it was announced because when Carter read it, he didn’t like a lot of what he saw...
...H e r e is my entry for the Joseph Kraft award to journalists who fill their columns with complaints about their travel experiences...
...The result was the soggiest, sorriest-looking mess I’ve ever seen...
...Cancellation of the national debt or a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia might be advocated as the 60-minute mark approaches...
...The General Accounting Office has come out against the military’s pension after 20 years’ service, pointing out that 93 per cent of the enlisted personnel who were taking pensions after an average of 2 1 years of service were working in support-type jobs that had none of the hardships of combat...
...I was on such a train, one called The Cardinal, a couple of months ago...
...The late J. Edgar Hoover was a similar case...
...Of course the New Left had its authentically absurd aspects, but it also perceived that only through radical change based on more human values can we solve our most pressing national problems...
...The only shortcomings of Making It were its lack of humor and its lack of sensitivity to the moral dimensions of its subjectwhich gets back to my old quarrel with Podhoretz and Decter...
...There is a rule of the Interstate Commerce Commission requiring full meal service in trains traveling 12 hours or more...
...Guess what happened...
...All through the late sixties and early seventies, when groups on the Left would blame their ineptitude and internal dissension on FBI infiltration, my inclination was not to believe them, to think they weremaking excuses...
...FDR, on the other hand, would have talked to every assistant secretary and would have been influencing what was happening all along the way...
...The new development bank for urban industry was fought over by Treasury, Commerce, and HUD...
...In 1972, with thecost ofhealth care spiraling upward at an alarming rate, Congress enacted a law that provided for local control of hospital costs...
...Anyway, we’re happy to acknowledge what we like about the Podhoretzes and regret not having done so before...
...mini-grants’ for ACTION...
...In his message, which figured to please his liberal political opposition, Nixon disclosed that the United States had already authorized shipments of $825 million in missiles, artillery pieces, and fighter aircraft to Israel during the first 12 days of the war...
...Whatever its motivation, Nixon’s announcement of increased aid to Israel set off a chain reaction among the Arabs...
...Thecombination was in a plastic bag and was heated by immersion in boiling water...
...He has had an average of 68 meetings a year with foreign leaders, compared to 32 for John F. Kennedy and eight for Harry S. Truman...
...So there was a wild scramble of last-minute changes and briefings to answer presidential questions...
...and neighborhood grants for Rosalynn Carter’s favorites in the bureaucracy...
...But his acceptance of an uncollateralized loan from an Arab banker seems just about as damning as the Hiss typewriter was to the cause of another person I wanted to believe in...
...These dinners can be excruciating...
...And the proliferation of liquor stores and bars could be kept under reasonable control by zoning laws that kept them out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and churches...
...The New York Times reports that Brock Adams, the Secretary of Transportation, blames the recent epidemic of train accidents on “depressingly neglected railbeds and equipment...
...solid waste grants for EPA...
...OPEC, the organization of petroleumexporting countries, realized for the first time its own strength and continued raising prices throughout the next year...
...The Wall Street Journal reports that the proportion of freight transported by trucks instead of trains continues to grow...
...The point is that Carter didn’t get involved until the policy was drafted...
...ICC, where are you...
...To whom did it entrust the task of controlling costs...
...Camicia, unlike his predecessors at the bargaining table, had started out working in the mines himself, so he understood the miners and realized how important the right to wildcat strikes was to them...
...According to The Washington Star, she got up in the middle of a formal Washington dinner party, announced she was tired, and walked out...
...urban parks for Interior...
...Some months back we mentioned that state government seems primarily concerned with dividing the booty-liquor licenses, race track dates, bankfranchises...
...The guaranteed effect: a slowdown of its ability to make loan and grant commitments...
...By this one act they drained billions of dollars from the American economy alone (Europe and Asia were hit even worse) and brought on the worst economic slump since the Great Depression...
...And Making I t , Norman Podhoretz’s autobiography, is a far more important book than was generally acknowledged at the time of its publication...
...It was practically the only book of its time todiscuss ambition and success in America openly and honestly, and I suspect that made the critics uncomfortable...
...Pension reform is something that could happen in the next year, so it’s worth writing your congressman about...
...Why did the reporters who knew he was blackmailing Martin Luther King with tapes of his hotel-room encounters with women not write about it at the time...
...By then Nixon was in the midst of his ‘firestorm’ and made no response...
...Few of us have half that much interesting conversation to offer...
...More often, the possibility of sexual relations with one or both dinner partnersisexplored...
...1 have wanted to believe in Bert Lance...
...One is tempted to say just about anything to liven things up...
...There is a way out, which we failed to mention: deregulate them all...
...Solution: Make it aninteragency bank, with all three departments represented equally on the board...
...I was reminded of this subject by a recent report by James Lardner in The Washington Post that the owners of La Potagerie, a small French restaurant in Georgetown, had lost a $200,000 investment because the District of Columbia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board had denied them a liquor license...
...There is no better example than the recently announced urban policy...
...Who cares how many race tracks or banks there are, except the owners of existing ones, who want protection against competition...
...Broder goes on: “None of the 160 recommendations call for eliminating any single existing federal program-despite the almost universal acknowledgment that some of them are real losers...
...In the areas where the doctors were given the costcontrol job, costs went up faster than in other areas...
...The result is often tedium beyond belief...
...Anyway, to help remind us all that for over 40 years J. Edgar Hoover tyrannized Congress, presidents, and the press, we are inaugurating our J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Series of Memos of the Month, It starts on page 18...
...James Doyle in his recent book, Above the Law, tells this story, which takes place the Friday before the Saturday Night Massacre: “Perhaps it was entirely unrelated, but one of the most fateful decisions of Richard Nixon’s presidency occurred at noon this Friday, when he sent to Congress a message asking for $2.2 billion for long-term military supplies for Israel...
...They have both fought valiantly against radicalchic...
...Allen Ginsberg, who supplied us with our Memo of the Month about the FBI’s efforts to cause dissension in the New Left, has a theory that Hoover was more successful than is usually thought in bringing about the Movement’s downfall...
...But prudent planning also requires us to prepare for a longer struggle,’ Nixon said, and so he was requesting the large amount incase the conflict did not moderate soon...
...That means that maybe the downfall of the New Left wasn’t as self-generated as we now think, and that’s a cause for hope...
...The diplomats on the Middle East desk warned that this move would provoke the Arabcountries...
...The real reason the coal strike was finally settled was that the operators turned the role of chief negotiator over to Nicholas Camicia, president of the Pittston Coal Company...
...Their enthusiasm for professional success seems unqualified by concern for the purposes or ends served by that success...
...A few days later King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, an anticommunist who considered himself a friend of the United States, began cutting oil production and embargoed all shipments to the United States...
...All seven work the day shift only...
...O u r heroine of the year is Blythe Babyak, a writer who is the wife of Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of State for the Far East...
...Whether your son or daughter becomes a doctor or a lawyer should be less important than what they do in their jobwhether, for instance, the clients they help are worthy ones or not...
...But the dead can’t sue for libel, so allegations about them must be taken with a grain of salt...
...Why, to the doctors, of course-the people who either own the hospitals or are paid fees by them...
...Instead of resolving the jurisdictional and bureaucratic struggles, this new proposal compromises and compounds them...
...Richard Nixon, in one of his few acts that I totally applaud, eliminated one course from White House dinners, so the misery of it all could be reduced by a half hour...
Vol. 10 • May 1978 • No. 3
