Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at Windmills As a lunatic fan of baseball and football, I am not ordinarily bothered by the hysteria that characterizes America’s reaction to sports. However, I don’t like boxing, so I...
...However, I don’t like boxing, so I was struck by this sentence from The Washington Star’s story that the television, but not the ringside, audience was told the round-by-round scoring of the Ali-Shavers fight: “The electronic precedent created an immediate uproar in ring circles, provoked protest from leading boxing officials and, in Washington, triggered sharp reaction from congressional, government and consumer groups...
...Ymelda Dixon’s column in The Washington Star recently began: “In Georgetown and environs, politics continues to be the chief topic of conversation unless a sex scandal has broken or an entertainment star has died...
...In the Middle East the President has proceeded with a commendable effort to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of both the Israelis and the Palestinians...
...That got me over the addiction hump, and from there it was surprisingly easy to quit...
...Now that everyone is finally realizing that one of the main problems of the government is its inability to fire incompetents, the House Civil Service Committee has come up with a bill to make it even harder...
...Considering the harm that cigarettes do, shouldn’t the development of such a medication be a primary target of health research...
...I smoked three packs a day for more than 25 years...
...More and more, especially among the oldsters, the plaint is: ‘Why don’t we see more Carterites?’ This tack is not entirely confined to Democrats who went underground during the Republican administrations and who, after supporting Carter, expected to rise and shine again...
...This confirms what we’ve always suspected: If the President proposes a program the people think will actually deal effectively with the energy problem, the people will support it even if it means real sacrifice...
...They are the only members of the White House staff who see him personally and frequently and can participate in a wide-ranging give-and-take on matters of policy...
...It also tends to deprive the President of argument and suggestions from anyone who doesn’t have line responsibility over the matter at hand...
...And then he says okay-but it turns out that he is mocking them...
...And, of course, there’s the serious problem of misleadingly labeled caviar...
...The government spends millions of dollars to fight the effects of cigarette smoking, but almost nothing to find ways to help people stop smoking...
...We second the motion...
...Schlesinger’s approach is “I’m so goddamn intelligent and arrogant that if I talk to you politely you can assume you are being recognized as a fiist-rate mind, and you can be sure no one else is worthy of inclusion in our dialogue...
...Dealing only with those who have direct authority means, as Robert Samuelson has pointed out in The National Journal, that Carter’s tax and energy and welfare and social security programs are compartmentalizednot connected to one another, as they should be...
...T h e Brookings Institution has recommended that the Agency for International Development be abolished...
...Rationing would not only make sure that gasoline went to people who needed it instead of people who would pay any price, it would also avoid the inflationary consequences of such schemes as the well head tax...
...If we are to have any hope of a program that really helps poor nations, we need a totally different personality type to run it...
...But placed at the intersection of Pennsylvania and Constitution, it not only dwarfs the Gallery, but obscures the marvelous view of the Capitol one used to have coming down those avenues...
...He was right about the B-1 and about the fast breeder reactor...
...I think a more important reason why people keep smoking is that nicotine is addictive, and that’s where the government can step in...
...In 1961, 31 per cent of AID’S full-time American employees were based in Washington...
...There have been no suits filed by the ACLU, no benefits by Pete Seeger...
...A good idea,” friends replied, “but the people would never stand for it...
...Most serious to us is his failure to take on the bureaucracy...
...There are things government can’t do, but it can ration gas...
...He grabs two napkins and prints-deliberately using a print scrawl like that of a seven-year-oldthe name of their home county, and then he prints a large, sloppy capital J and a large, sloppy, capital B. He shoves the napkins to them...
...Charles Peters...
...We don’t always succeed...
...It might have been defensible set on some lonely plain or even in the city if it had been scaled to its surroundings...
...I haven’t smoked since...
...Carl Leubsdorf of The Baltimore Sun did pursue the story to the office of White House counsel Robert Lipshutz, who told him, “We always try to do the right thing...
...Then, seven years ago, I got so sick that I couldn’t smoke for a week...
...For some reason, however, the press has not pursued the story...
...They look at the napkins stunned, and the woman looks mortified, almost panicky, and they take this putdownofa-napkin with them as they walk away from the famous leader they had been so proud to meet...
...The figure is now 69 per cent...
...I tried every conceivable way to stop...
...That must be a great comfort to Viola Harkins...
...Obviously what smokers need is a medication that does for them what my sickness did for me-helps them through the first few horrible days of withdrawal...
...But we try...
...Perhaps they’ll take up the cause of defectivediamond buyers or of passengers who get bumped from the Concorde...
...In the case of the energy program, the lack of outside criticism has been particularly costly...
...His welfare and tax reform programs point in the right directions...
...As I am writing this, six weeks have elapsed since Viola Harkins was fired from her White House correspondence job as a security risk...
...The three illustrate a broad range of contemporary architecture and each is a disaster in its own special way...
...It is half way between the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building and the House’s Rayburn Building...
...Nine out of ten smokers interviewed in a HEW survey recently said they wanted to quit, so it seems not t9 be lack of the desire to stop that keeps people smoking...
...But they aren’t going to accept even modest sacrifice for a program that won’t work...
...Peter Gruenstein, executive director, said, “I find it incredible that people who pay $100 for a seat to a fight get worse service than people sitting at home...
...Comments one of the bewildered: ‘Maybe it’s just that we are not the Carterites’ cup of tea.’ ” This may be bad news for Georgetown but it’s good news for the rest of us that at last we have a White House staff that appears immune to the social hustle...
...This is demoralizing to the rest of the staff...
...S v e r a l months ago we suggested that Carter try gasoline rationing as a democratic non-inflationary alternative to the Schlesinger program...
...The vicious back-biting that used to go on at the White House under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon hardly exists under Carter...
...Almost as bad, Carter grants access to only five p eople-Powell, Jordan, Eizenstat, Brzezinski, and Frank Moore...
...The present head of AID, John Gilligan, is a nice man who seeks a smooth, trouble-free administration...
...Carter fell for it and got an ill-considered energy program in exchange-and managed to make the program the centerpiece of the fiist year of his administration...
...They are a man and a woman and they ask for autographs for people back home...
...If there is anything good about the war between the pro- and anti-abortion people, it is the way that it illustrates that people do not have to have a pecuniary interest to get involved and work hard on behalf of political causes they believe in...
...No, Brown says...
...Bbt most White House staffers are not well known...
...One of the consumer groups that stood up for the rights of the affluent ringsider as against the average man sitting beside his television set was Ralph Nader’s new group, F.A.N.S...
...William Clay, co-sponsor of the bill, and tell him what you think...
...The agency is top-heavy with senior program analysts who draw high salaries for telling a dwindling number of people in the field what to do...
...carter’s statement that he would rather commit political suicide than desert Israel reminds one of Richard Nixon in his prime (it’s those Arab precincts in Brooklyn that can really kill you...
...From all we’ve heard, it was a McCarthyite outrage of the kind that usually makes liberal blood boil...
...It did so with fairness and efficiency and at reasonable cost during World War I1 and can do so again...
...J e n y Brown’s warm humanity has been captured by Martin Schram of Newsday, who, in the course of eating dinner with Brown at a restaurant, observed this incident: “Two Brown constituents from rural California shyly approach...
...Write Rep...
...There are other good things about this administration that need to be pointed out to balance all 6 the negative comment it has received recently...
...The aesthetic crime of the year is I. M. Pei’s new building for the National Gallery...
...Harkins was fired by Hugh Carter, Jr., widely regarded as the least able member of the White House staff, because she had recently seen a former boyfriend with whom she had worked in a Black Panthersponsored breakfast program five or six years ago...
...The bewildered know few administration figures except Cyrus Vance, Patricia Harris, Joe Califano, Bob Bergland, Brock Adams and/or James Schlesinger...
...We’re trying to figure out where this new direction might lead the Nader movement...
...But I kept smoking...
...I felt real contempt for my lack of will-power...
...The bill (HR 6225)’ according to Joseph Young of The Washington Star, would give employees the right to a hearing before being fired, in addition to all the rights they now have after they are fired...
...Nor is there the fear of the President’s dark side that was present under Johnson and Nixon (fear that your phone might be tapped, for example, was widespread under both men...
...But there is a negative side...
...And because of reduction-inforce rules and the elimination of 10,000 jobs since the height of the Vietnam war, senior employees have been steadily bumping the younger, more energetic, and more imaginative out of the agency...
...Now we have a poll, recently reported by the Associated Press, that says nearly 60 per cent of automobile drivers said they would support rationing if the President thought it was necessary...
...There is also something unsettling about the way Schlesinger conned Carter...
Vol. 9 • December 1977 • No. 10
