TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...George C. Wilson of The Washington Post looked at how the Northrop Corporation does it and found that Northrop has 61 former military officers on its payroll...

...The reason I wrote these words is that in our early years I had to sweat to get liberal writers to deal with this issue...

...He’s the speaker of the lower house of the Texas legislature and has his staff working on a bill to limit tenure at the University of Texas to ten-year appointments...

...he simply had not thought about many of the foreign and security problems that have confronted him in his first year and a half in office...

...If the left sometimes oversimplifies when it asserts that this country is run for the rich, there are two cases where it is clearly correct...

...We s h o u l d h a v e a l o t of c h e a p e r , conventionally powered submarines, and also should expand our vertical take-off plane program (VSTOL...

...But now Iran’s internal troubles are making the front pages, and Saudi Arabia may not be far behind...

...But all things considered, we admire Nader...

...yesterday...

...T h e American Society of Association Executives has just released a study showing that the average head of a trade association in Washington now makes $85,100 a year in base salary and $103,900 if you include benefits...

...The average travel time between Washington and Philadelphia, including taxi to the terminals, is two hours and 12 minutes by train or two hours and 15 minutes by plane: But the air fare is more than double the train...

...What a comfort this news will be to those who lost relatives and friends in the war in Korea which came the next year, followed in six months by the Chinese intervention that was so disastrous to our forces...

...Until the recent news, I doubt that one reporter in a hundred knew the initials meant General Services Administration...

...A Washington research group asked local journalists to name the place in a government agency they would most likely go to for information...

...What I said was, “How do causes suddenly become chic...

...Its lobbyists include Jack Paris 111, the director of the Georgia National Guard when Jimmy Carter was governor, William Timmons, a major Republican lobbyist, Jack McDonald, a former congressman, and Stanley Sommer, a former reporter and Senate staff member...

...Tilting at Windmills Think for a moment about the hatred between Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland, Arab and Jew in the Middle East, Greek and Turk in Cyprus, Hindu and Moslem in India, Ibo and Hausa in Nigeria, and black and white in South Africa...

...You have to get along with so many different groups...

...If a ship wears out, it is replaced-very likely by a better and more expensive one of the same kind...

...Even the reporters who knew about the agency stayed away from it in droves because its work sounded so mundane...

...Although I was constantly seeking such articles, I was able to get only three between 1969 and 1973...

...The White House position, instead of being pro-openness, was that only the president should have control of the records for 15 years after he leaves office...

...The t“ew skilled members of its staff have tended to be crooks attracted by the combination of no publicity and a lot of contracts to hand out to people who might be induced to reward their friends in power...

...Along the way, Bell admitted yesterday, with his usual candor, he ran into political reality: a coalition of members of Congress and criminal justice interest groups who promised to fight the LEAA dismantling proposed by the Carter administration...

...Similar errors were made in estimating Russian armor (there were 24,000 tanks instead of the 10,000 predicted) and air power (9,000 planes instead of 5,000...

...Certainly one reason that the scandals occurred in the first place is the lack of press attention to the GSA over the years...

...This may explain why press coverage of government agencies is so bad...

...Those of you who despair of ever getting liberals and conservatives out of their respective prisons will be heartened by a recent vote in the U.S...

...Charles Peters...

...Here’s a sampling of his views, as reported by the Colorado Springs Gazette- Telegraph: ‘ L . . . w e o r d e r w e a p o n s n o t in response to their probable mission but in response to bureaucratic pressures within the armed services...

...The DOE office in Washington is one and a half blocks from the train station...

...It is my suspicion that the civil service secretly hates the people who have real work to do...

...If you’ve wondered why international negotiations like SALT seem to go on forever, take a look at the color photograph in the August 14 issue of Time showing American and Soviet d e l e g a t e s s i t t i n g on a t e r r a c e overlooking the blue waters of Lake Geneva...

...The need for change at GSA is clear,” Kessler continues, “but in trying to bring about change, Solomon, like the heads of other federal agencies, does not have the management tools and power available to most executives in private industry...

...He described his faction as “the liberal group,” and said he was opposed by “radicals who wanted closer association with Moscow...

...Billy Clayton is our new hero...

...Never mind that its mission may have obsolesced...

...The official word from the administration did not arrive until the day before mark-up was scheduled on the bill called the Presidential Records Act of 1978...

...The l e a d i n g r e s p o n s e w a s “ P u b l i c Information Office...

...Soon after we went to press with Nicholas Lemann’s article on Carter last month, Henry Bradsher of The Washington Star came up with some similar findings of his own: “ ‘He makes his judgments from within the four corners of a piece of paper,’ one official says...

...This is certainly the case in the rest of the federal government...

...1 fear Lynne Bernabei’s article in this issue, along with several other things we’ve said in recent years, will make people think we are anti-Nader...

...Solomon was still bumping into locked glass doors, despite repeated complaints to his subordinates...

...It was supported by Gaylord Nelson, Paul Sarbanes, Dick Clark, and John Durkin, and by Robert Dole, Robert Griffin, Russell Long, and S. I. Hayakawa...

...Lemann3 article pointed out in addi$on that among the members of his W h i t e H o u s e s t a f f , C a r t e r commands the personal loyalty of not more than four or five...

...Indeed, it is my personal opinion that in his indifference to material reward he is a modern saint...

...I must say that I find myself in sympathy with those hawks who want to be able to monitor Russian compliance with disarmament agreements...

...Curtis Gans, whose article, “The Empty Voting Booths,” appears on page 27 of this issue, takes this a step further and says, “Carter’s real problem lies with what might be called the barroom factor...

...Until the early 1960s, hatred of the Jew, the Catholic, and the Negro was an integral part of our national life...

...Civil Service regulations in the opinion of many make it virtually impossible to fire incompetent employees...

...That’s where all the con men are, veteran practitioners of the arts of misleading, diversion, and stonewalling who will make sure you don’t get the truth if it is at all u n f a v o r a b l e t o the agency concerned...

...We do try to take seriously our obligation to criticize ourselves and the liberal movement of which, on the whole, we consider ourselves a part and of which Ralph Nader is one of the most important members...

...This would give him and his staff time to write and profit from their memoirs...

...A year later, according to Ronald Kessler of The Washington Post...

...Senate on a bill that would provide credit for consumer co-ops...

...We did a lot of things wrong during those years, but we also came close to solving a problem that still torments other nations...

...Nobody really has been in c h a r g e s i n c e F a i s a l ’ s d e a t h . A tremendous amount of money has been wasted by a government that has almost no internal budget control...

...As in Iran, revolution is possible from both the left and the Moslem right...

...Historians and other writers would simply have to wait...

...Charles Babcock of The Washington Post describes the education of a public official: “A year ago, Attorney General Griffin B. Bell was looking for a way to abolish the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which has poured some $6 billion into fighting crime over the past decade, with what critics say is a noticeable lack of success...

...Several friends have asked me why I was so snide in our last issue about the nuclear power protesters...

...Engineers on the other hand are people who see things in technically limited terms...

...He was rebuffed by the United States...

...A report by a House subcommittee reveals that Department of Energy officials fly 90 per cent of the time on trips between Washington and Philadelphia...

...we overinvest in huge Nimitz-class nuclear carriers, which are expensive and vulnerable, instead of b u y i n g s m a l l e r and c h e a p e r conventional carriers that can be dispersed and are therefore less vulnerable...

...If it’s not dead now, it’s a long, long way from being the ugly sore it was...

...the Navy’s current five-year plan vastly overinvests in frigates, which, in fact, do not have the capability of carrying out their anti-submarine mission against the Soviets...

...But if you supplement social security by working, you can earn only $4,000 without having your benefits reduced...

...Now consider what has happened in the United States in the last 15 years...

...America has become accustomed to thinking of Iran and Saudi Arabia as pillars of stability in the Middle East...

...Bradsher adds: “Several members of the administration close to the presidential decisionmaking process say the basic cause of this sort of misstep is [that...

...They are good e n g i n e e r i n g s t u d i e s of t h e subjects, logical consideration, and it’s hard to fault most of his decisions on the basis of what’s presented to himbut they’re too narrow.’ “Trained as a naval engineer, Carter d o e s n o t b r i n g the p o l i t i c i a n ’ s a p p r o a c h t o the p r o b l e m s t h a t confront him, according to one close o b s e r v e r . This o b s e r v e r r e g a r d s politicians, whom he studies professionally, as people who are continually trying to adjust the widest range of human interest...

...They had 360...

...Because the c o n t r a c t o r s , G e n e r a l Dynamics Corporation and Litton Industries, threaten to stop work, and they are two of only three contractors that can build large ships for the Navy...

...The other is that if you’re on social security, you can receive unlimited additional income from dividends, interest, and capital gains...

...A person could walk into a barroom in any region of the country and insult, verbally attack, or even blaspheme the President and no one would raise a hand or voice in his defense...

...One we have pointed out before is the Treasury Department’s custom of paying high interest on high-priced securities that only the rich can buy while paying low interest on the savings bonds the average man can afford...

...Because of it, the GSA has always ranked lowest on the prestige scale of federal employment and has therefore tended to attract and hold the least able...

...The p u b l i c information office is the lust place to go for the story...

...To the extent nuclear power plants are a threat, the danger has existed for years...

...It was only after John McPhee did his piece on the subject in The New Yorker in early 1974 that the subject began to become fashionable in liberal circles...

...Maybe they should take a look at how we did it...

...All of this is true, of course, and has beeq true for a long time...

...In Aught the State Department declassified and released documents showing that in 1949, Chou En-lai made a secret attempt to get American aid in helping China stay independent of the Soviets...

...For over five months the House Committee on Government Operations tried to get the White House to back a bill that would open the records of the president and his staff to the public as much as possible or at least to let the committee know the White House position, whatever it was...

...Yet only recently has it become an issue in vogue...

...The Navy is buying the wrong plane (F- 18) because of political pressures (O’Neill, Kennedy, Brooke) instead of the right one (F-14...

...Last month, for example, the Civil Service Commission downgraded 600 toilet cleaners, reducing their wages by more than $1,000...

...H o w does a defense contractor go about the complex task of lobbying the White House, the Congress, the press, and the Pentagon...

...But in spite of all the evidence of crookedness, I agree with James Polk, NBC’s fine investigative reporter, that waste, not criminality, will turn out to be the major scandal at GSA...

...When Jay Solomon became head of the GSA last year, one of the first orders he issued was that all the glass doors at the agency’s headquarters be unlocked as a gesture of openness to the public...

...And even then, protesting nuclear power didn’t really take off until Rolling Stone magazine got on the case with a series of articles on the death of Karen Silkwood, articles that conjured up the visions of conspiracy and coverup the left so loves to read about...

...An additional factor is the increasing number of graduates returning from English and American universities who want to share the pie with the royal family...

...A recent book, HitlerS Spies by David Kahn, points out that in 1941 the Germans thought the Russians had 200 divisions...

...Add the loss of revenue to governmentsubsidized Amtrak, and the total cost to the taxpayer of a plane ride to Philadelphia is $62.34 compared to $20.10 by rail...

...The mundaneness of the work-building, renting, and equip-: ping federal offices-was a factor in the scandal in another way...

...If the Russians could fool German Intelligence, isn’t it possible that they might fool us...

...Yesterday, Bell was at a Senate hearing e n d o r s i n g a p r o p o s a l sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy that would make changes in that much-criticized agency, but also increase its budget by 25 per cent...

...I found that Washington is a strange city,’ the attorney general explained to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr...

...One good result of the GSA scandals is that it is being written about in the daily press...

...Gary Hart is one of the few senators who doesn’t react to defense expenditures in knee-jerk liberal or conservative terms...

...The administration has agreed to pay two defense contractors $541 million more than Navy auditors say they deserve...