TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...None of the White House correspondents has ever disclosed this fact, although there is no defensible distinction between it and the congressional scandal that won their award...

...This too seems exaggerated...

...Without art,” says Saul Bellow, in his Nobel acceptance speech, “we do not know ourselves or anyone else...

...Ten days later, after the appearance in The New York Times of an article by James Wooten that was critical of Carter’s administrative st le, Powell proceeded to question dmernbers of the White House staff to try to find out who Wooten’s sources were...

...There was, for example, a sign-out book at the Peace Corps that everyone who left after 7 p. m. was to sign...

...In other words, we’re a mixture but mostly we’re with the party of hope...

...The pyolqlem is that he does not like t~ arpe, so that even though he may hear dissent, there will be no follow-up give-andtake discussions during which he could be persuaded that he was wrong...

...They need to put themselves in the shoes of the people their laws affect...

...It was Cartei’s self-imposed April 20 deadline...

...But a new form of art is emerging, rooted in journalism but partaking of psychology, anthropology, and the 19th-century novel...

...Politicians and those who teach politics tend to see human beings as groups and statistics...

...But we fear that conventional big-spending liberals will not face what has to be done to make either program truly feasible economically...

...Recently we received a letter from a reader who said she is disturbed by our “constant” attacks on liberals...

...But it is totally accurate as regards our po!icy toward Latin America...

...By going she might have found out which federal programs were working and which were not working and why...

...Carter’s mail is 40 per cent more than Mrs...

...Very comfortable apartments for single people like Costanza are available for a third that amount...

...So approximately 100 staff members made a point of regularly delaying their departure until between 7 and 7:15...

...Last month the White House Correspondents’ Association gave its major award to two reporters who had disclosed that military funds were being diverted to pay for congressmen’s travel expenses...

...Today the only information the President has about such problems is either selfserving, from the agencies involved, or extremely random, from a press that shares the natural tendency of the White House staff to focus on Washington’s dramas to the exclusion of the country’s...

...We would like to see tax breaks restricted to those who start new enterprises, build new plants, drill new wells, or who suffer loss through no fault of their own...

...But Midge retains the common touch...

...There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of...

...Schultze’s Law says, “If you can’t measure output, then you measure input...

...We favor tough government regulation on matters of health, safety, and fraud...

...This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without...

...art, we can’t receive...

...A more serious result of this phobia about leaks may have been the President’s energy policy...

...On specific issues, we favor such liberal programs as a national health service and a guaranteed annual income...

...In *** *** work is also a badge of importancelong hours suggest that you have so much to do that you really can’t cram it all into a regular working day...

...It is ironic that the new employees who aren’t answering mail aren’t doing much of anything else...

...And, in the last month, we have been reminded by Richard Gott of The‘ Manchester Guardian, that since 1949 we have trained 33,534 military officers from” Latin American countries at our School of the Americas in Panama...

...Turn to the business pages, which often reflect what the companies are telling the business and investment community, as distinguished from the general public, and you’ll find this paragraph by The Washington Star’s Philip Greer and Myron Kandel under the headline “Liquidity Boom Spurs Market”: “Exxon has about $6 billion in the till and executives there, we’ve learned, expect it to climb to around $1 5 billion by 1980, in spite of heavy exploration expenses...

...But tremendously difficult problems like energy can sorfietimes benefit from what James Boren calls dynamic inaction...

...He conned the President into thitlking, “better an unexamined policy than one the public finds out about before I want them to...

...In order to lead the executive branch, in order to recommend sound legislation to the Congress, the President needs to send his staff out-into the government agencies and into the country-to find out what the government is doing and what it should be doing...

...But Air Force planes are regularly used to give discount vacations to the families of White House reporters, as Tmdi Osborne reported in our Feburary issue...

...Wooten describes Carter as “brutally brusque” with his subordinates...

...Carter is not going to fire qnyone for speaking up...

...they need to remain constantly aware of both man’s darker and nobler sides so that they can guard against the former while not restricting the expression of the latter...

...The word got around that Sargent Shriver periodically took a look at the book to determine who the really dedicated were...

...art helps take those shields away...

...Certainly we owe these people a comfortable life when they are no longer able to work, but to contend we have a contractual obligation to pay them pensions while they are being generously compensated at another job is to ignore the fact that the original bases for the contract have largely disappeared...

...Walter Goodman, writing in the A r t s and Leisure section of The New York Times, recently argued that politics and art should remain separate...

...We simply can’t afford a national health service that does not control physicians’ fees and hospital costs...

...The truth about deadlines is that you need them much less at the top of government-where lots of ambitious people are constantly waving their hands to attract the President’s attentian-than down below where dynamic inaction is the wav of life...

...However, we also believe that assumption should be accompanied by an awareness of all the factors that make reform difficult...

...On April 15, Jody Powell, appearing on the MacNeil-Lehrer Report on public television, said, “One of the things we decided down in Plains was not to get too upset about leaks...

...Washington, the number of hours you while a refrGhing change from Gerald Ford’s un-dynamic and dontinuing inaction, has its dangers...

...Granum quoted Carter as saying it would be ‘unfair’ to change the pension benefits of military retirees who have gone to work for the government, or to bar other military pensioners from getting on the federal payroll...

...We want to assure her and our other liberal friends that we count ourselves in their number, We believe that one * * * * * * must act on the liberal assumption that things can be better...

...The school displays on one of its walls a framed letter from General August0 Pinochet, the president of Chile, dated November 6, 1973, two months after the overthrow of Allende, in which Pinochet expresses his personal thanks for the work of the school...

...Thecase involved a suit against the board by the heirs of a murder victim whose killer had been paroled by the board after serving only ten months of an eight-to-ten year sentence for robbery and attempted murder...

...She’s paying $1 ,170 a month in rent for her Washington apartment...

...In most cases, a full respect for truth and complexity requires at least some modification of this view...

...Those who know say the policy was formulated almost entirely by James Schlesinger and that people like Michael Blumenthal, Charles Schultze, and Bert Lance did not have a chance to comment until it was too late to make any major alterations...

...There’s really no use doing anything until you’ve figured out what to do...

...The story is false...

...In other words, since bureaucrats don’t produce anything, the only thing they can congratulate themselves about is the amount of effort they put in...

...If other public officials follow Carter’s reasoning, we’re headed for state, local, and national bankruptcy...

...Carter’s performance orientation...

...The message was not lost on New Frontiersmen...

...Their meters continue to tick and their clients continue to pay...

...Proust calls these hints our ‘true impression.’ The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a ‘terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.’ ” As Bellow goes on to point out, the novel is not providing those true * impressions today...

...The curric*** *** ulum includes courses in “interrogation techniques” and in “urban and rural counter-insurgency concepts...

...The reason can be found in Schultze’s Law, formulated by Charles Schultze, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors...

...The President...

...And it will remain so until Carter either fires some people or finds real work for them to do...

...Nor can we afford a guaranteed annual income that is added to instead of replacing our other income maintenance programs...

...Wooten also charges that Carter is using the Secret Service to deny the staff access to the oval office...

...The Left sees American foreign policy as the tool of the militaryindustrial complex...

...n addition to the fear of leaks, another factor contributed to the lack of time for criticaf comment...

...For about 30 years that policy has been dominated by the CIA, which was staffed originally in Latin America by former FBI men who shared the enlightened world-view of their ex-director...

...that’s where we’re being taken by our pension plans for public employees...

...At the Clinton Town Meeting, President Carter said the practice of double-dipping “ought to be eliminated,” but now comes Ted Krop of Scripps-Howard with this story: “President Carter has acquiesced to the hiring of additional ‘double dip pers’ despite his statement that the practice ought to be eliminated, the White House said today...

...The study analyzed the 2,967 indictments obtained from 1972 through 1975 by strike forces in six major cities and found that, while a large number of convictions resulted from the indictments, 52 per cent of those convictions did not require the persons sentenced to go to jail...

...They are, however, more like the dangerous tendencies of FDR, JFK, and LBJ than those of Nixon, whose mistakes Carter seems the most concerned about avoiding...

...We cannot change the terms of those pensions to accord with fiscal reality if employees are deemed to have a “contract” right to the existing terms...

...most of them are really just on the side of big business...

...The security guards, unaware of all this, changed the signout time to 6:30 p. m., and those same 100 staff members proceeded to sign out between 6:30 and 6:45...

...The James Wooten article that so upset Jody Powell expressed some of the same concerns about Carter that we discussed in December-that he was like a military “commander with his staff and that he did not encourage face-to-face dissent...

...The top people and their assistants frequently do spend 12 hours or so-if you count lunch-at the office...

...The reason they were not consulted in time was that Schlesinger played on Carter’s fear of leaks...

...Very few, however, devote more than half that time to real work...

...Isn’t it time we forrried a liberalconservative consensus that would agree to be soft on victimless crime and fjrst-offense, non-violent crime, but hard on violent and organized crime...

...This kind- of thinking has produced disastrous decisions in the Oval Office before, and it is depressing to realize that regardless of what was decided down in Plains, the present administration seems no more enlightened about leaks than its predecessors...

...But what the politician can learn from the artist seems to us both obvious and urgent...

...We feel that both conservatives and liberals need to be self-critical and we try our best to assist them toward that end-by helping them laugh at themselves, by helping them see their own oversimplifications, and by helping them face the valid points on the other side of the argument...

...Otherwise we’re enthusiastic about free enterprise-as, by the way, are very few of the people who call themselves conservatives...

...We have already recommended a constructive way for the President to put all his people to work...

...She asked the management to take out the gold faucets in the bathroom...

...It’s easy for politicians to live in ‘a world elaborately constructed to shield out large chunks of life...

...The same article, by Karen DeWitt of The Washington Post, that told us about Midge Costanza’s $1 , 170-amonth apartment also said that Costanza works “20-hour days...

...like the liberals, we’ve never been able to understand how conservatives can be so unfeeling about the poor, the unlucky, and the beaten...

...The Government Accounting Office recently issued a disturbing report on the effectiveness of the government’s special strike forces against organized crime...

...Lawyers for rich clients delight in the delays and postponments brought about by the judge who arrives late and leaves early...

...Now we know why she couldn’t live on it...

...The staff handling the Presi* * * dent’s mail has grown, but not nearly as much as the White House staff as a whole...

...With the exception of the Powell, Eizenstat, and Brzezinski staffs, underemployment is the rule in the Carter White House...

...Tilting at Windmills In May we reported that the campaign for the $1 1,400 pay increase for the top White House assistants was led by Margaret “Midge” Costanza, who said she simply couldn’t afford to live on the $44,600 they had been receiving...

...Deputy press secretary Rex Granum said Carter is aware that his administration has been, hiripg people already receiving military pensions and that he plans no immediate action to stop it...

...We disagree...

...The fact is that the White House mail is being handled more and more by form letters...

...Charles Peters...

...Brusque is right, brutally is not...

...Why, then, do they stay in their offices as long as they do and brag about staying even longer...

...The study showed that the judges spend only half of their working hours presiding over trials...

...One day we’d like to start a school for politicians, and when we do we will make sure our students read Cervantes, Shakespeare, and the great novels of the 19th century, from The Brothers Karamazov to Huckleberry Finn, from Vanity Fair to The Red and the Black...

...Only 20 per cent of the sentences involved more than two years’ imprisonment...

...was said to feel this would violate the ‘contracts’ made with people who had gone into and stayed in military service...

...The original theory behind these pensions was that they were to support in their old age faithful public servants who were no longer able to work:’ Early retirement was designed $or a military that consisted largely of cavalry and infantry corps that demanded the ’excellent physical condition of youth and did not leave the retiree with employable civilian skills...

...Any leader faced with a natural tend en cy toward organizational inertia is tempted to impose deadlines in order to get the jobi, whatever it is, done in reasonable time...

...They desperately need to be reminded of the complexity of man, the complexity of truth...

...On the other hand, there is some good news for those of us who want public officials to think as much about protecting the community as they do about saving the criminal...

...Robert CaTo’s biography of Robert Moses, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, and James Fallows’ article on Bill Moyers in this magazine are good examples...

...On this point, our best information is that Carter will bite only half the bullet, abolishing welfare and some other programs, but leaving unemployment compensation and social security as they are...

...The judges, according to Mary Breasted of The New York Times, replied indignantly that they spend five hours a day on the bench, out of their grueling total work day of six hours...

...Like the conservatives, we’re bothered by liberals’ scorn for the middle class...

...The Arizona Supreme Court has held that members of the state board of pardons and paroles may be liable for gross negligence in releasing prisoners who then commit violent crimes...

...The White House press corps is the winner of The Washington Monthly’s Annual Hypocrisy Award...

...This is unfortunate, because it is likely that at least two of them would have tried to do something about the program’s inflationary tendencies...

...NOW most armed service jobs do not require physical exertion, and most of them constitute excellent p~eparation for technical and bureaucratic jobs either in other parts of government or in large corporations...

...The excuse the Carter people have been giving for increasing the size of the White House staff by 20 per cent-instead of reducing it, as the President had promised-is that the additional workers were needed to handle the great influx of mail received by the new administration...

...The poor, of course, cannot pay and pay...

...The subject of what the artist can learn from the politician is immensely complex, and we reserve comment on it until a later time...

...We aren’t picking on Costanza this time because such exaggeration of working hours is epidemic in Washington...

...On the front pages one reads stories about how, without more price increases and tax breaks, the oil companies will not be able to afford to explore for new oil...

...The laziness of judges is one of the great scandals of the law...

...The Wooten report is somewhat exaggerated...

...By choosing to stay in the White House, she played the old Washington game-and, by permitting her to do so, so did her boss, whose Clinton town meeting seemed to promise something better...

...As late as May 3, Schlesinger was still unable to answer relatively simple questions ffom the Congress about the effects of the administration’s energy program and had to promise repeatedly, “We’ll get back to you on that, Senator...

...It is also one of the lelst-known reasons why the law tends to favor the rich...

...Ford’s, but Mrs...

...it can be especially helpful to politicians because its best examples describe them and their problems...

...Recent evidence of the extent of this scandal was provided by a study of the work habits of New York State Supreme Court judges by the Economic Development Council...

...In mid-April, Midge Costanza-are we picking on her?-refused to go to West Virginia to meet with a delegation of flood victims...

...Carter’s correspondence staff has actually shru6k by one...

...Sooner or later they havetto give up...

...Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides-the seeming realities of this world...

...On Washington’s Birthday, 196 1 , Bobby Kennedy went through the Justice Department parking lot, noting the license numbers of the cars there so that he could write notes of appreciation to all the staff members who had come to work on a holiday...

...It is true that Mrs...