Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at Windmills Last month we commented that this country’s indifference to its Vietnam veterans is a national scandal. Equally outrageous is its indifference to the plight of the refugees...
...And we were wrong when we forced draftees to fight and die in what could at best be described as a morally ambiguous situation...
...Doesn’t this suggest that they were knowingly lying when they passed these counts along to Washington during the war...
...We owe those draftees a tremendous debt...
...Were your hopes that Jimmy Carter has a streak of the populist reformer in his soul boosted by Cecil Andms’ proposal to limit the size of farms that can receive water from federal irrigation projects...
...But we began to go wrong in 1965 with our campaign of mass slaughter against the Vietnamese...
...So we can find some common ground...
...Braestrup has impressive evidence that Tet was a military defeat from which the Viet Cong never recovered-certainly, by the communists’ own account, it was North Vietnamese regulars, not Viet Cong, who led the find attack on Saigon-and that this defeat was uniformly reported as a Viet Cong triumph by the American press...
...General Wheeler would have probably gotten away with sending 200,000 more draftees into that horrible mess...
...Young is honorary chairman of the United Negro College Fund, of which Jayne is a trustee...
...We expressed our confidence that the editorial writers of the two papers would stand up for the people and protest...
...But it’s clear that the communist alternative was so unpalatable that thousands have fled and 4 thousands more are fighting a guerrilla war against the North Vietnamese...
...When we used to sit around the office talking about political stories, someone would say, “This guy Park doesn’t smell right,’’ and someone else would invariably answer, “But John Brademas says he’s okay...
...Clean and at one time a roommate of Park’s at Georgetown University, had been Park’s main Washington character reference...
...We are sad to r e p o r t t h a t w e w e r e mistaken...
...Jayne and Frank Ikard gave a supper reception for UN Ambassador Andrew Young...
...The great Wisconsin legislature scandal, in which state officials were caught billing private calls to the public, has produced two of our favorite defenses against charges of impropriety...
...The order was not a Carter initiative but simply compliance with a decision by a federal judge in a suit brought by National Land for the People, Inc...
...Carter wouldn’t go...
...And doesn’t that suggest that Americans who saw merit in either side of the war debate were not necessarily either war criminals or communist sympathizers...
...The Ikards provided the small group of UNCF trustees and Eastern business leaders with food, flowers, and music at their Kalorama Square residence...
...There is a deplorably racist tendency on the left to say that while Europeans should have democracy, communism is just dandy for those yellow people...
...Many soldiers have fallen on that nameless front...
...Captain Hooper also went to work for the firm on his retirement...
...were indicted for a conspiracy in which the officers used their official influence to try to procure a contract for a planning firm for which Admiral Cagle, who was chief of naval education until he retired, later went to work as a $200-a-day consultant...
...Nineteen of the commissioners had no consumer contacts at all during the past year...
...The taxpayers of Alexandria, Virginia, have been forced by federal regulations to install a $30,000 elevator at the George Mason Elementary School...
...against the Bureau of Reclamation, which is part of Andrus’ Interior Department...
...This is further testimony of Carter’s cowardice in the face of the government employees’ lobby...
...Remember when you were closing the purchase of your home and you were suddenly presented with a mysterious list of charges...
...If they are underpaid, one wonders why 5,664,757 people tried to get civil service jobs in the first six months of this year and only 31,630 found vacancies...
...Now that Park has fallen, the most effective Washington lobbyist is certainly Frank Ikard, the former congressman who runs the American Petroleum Institute...
...Speaking of regulation, wasn’t the absolute pit the time in the fifties when the FTC ordered cigarette companies not to advertise tar and nicotine content...
...Well, the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act of 1974 was supposed to stop all that and could have saved consumers billions of dollars...
...First, Esther Luckhardt, a state legislator who chatted with relatives in India several times at the taxpayers’ expense, said she was justified because she didn’t take any junkets and was thus saving money by using the phone...
...Now that they are getting full health care under Medicaid, they are being cut open by surgeons at twice the rate of the general population...
...According to a recent survey, (as reported in The War Managers, a new book by Douglas Kinnard), 61 per cent of the generals who served in Vietnam say that the body counts there were grossly exaggerated...
...Another example of how journalists have moved out of the poverty class: The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, Philip Geyelin, paid $2 14,500 for his new house on Kalorama Square...
...It found that they met with industry representatives ten times as often as with consumer groups...
...Charles Peters...
...Buried in a story about the requests made by congressmen to the Congressional Research Service was this unsettling query from the office of Speaker O’Neill: “If a staffer had funds in a Swiss bank and died, what problems would be encountered in getting the inheritor’s money back to the U.S...
...It’s time for both the left and the right to admit where they were wrong and to find a common ground from which to view this miserable period in our history, a common ground that will make it possible for us to face the obligations -to both veterans and refugees-the war has imposed upon us...
...Incidentally, a fascinating irony about the Vietnam war has just been made clear by a new book, The Big Story, by Peter Braestmp...
...The New Republic and The Washington Monthly have mentioned it, and Henry Bradsher recently wrote in The Washington Star about a story in the North Vietnamese army newspaper describing the contents of a diary kept by a major who was killed by anticommunist guerrillas...
...They still must be wondering what they did that was different from what their colleagues do every day...
...As a result of that reporting, the massive escalation stopped...
...One is the Secretary’s Open Forum at the State Department...
...After all, our propaganda encouraged them to rely on us...
...And we owe the South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees sanctuary...
...In the fighting, it is not clear where the front line is and where the rear area is,’’ the major wrote...
...T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post that in 1974 John Brademas accepted from Tongsun Park an envelope containing 59 $50 bills...
...Brademas excuses his behavior by pointing out that his voting record is not pro-Korean, so the money he’s taken hasn’t influenced his official conduct...
...That great liberal newspaper, The Washington Post, has just agreed, at the urging of the attorney general of Maryland, to stop making its paper boys pay up when their customers don’t pay...
...There are occasional bright spots in the federal bureaucracy...
...But suppose the reporters hadn’t gotten the story wrong...
...Several months ago, we noted in this space that the real estate assessments of local homeowners had gone up 66 per cent during a period when the assessments of business property, including The Washington Post’s and The Washington Star’s, stayed the same or decreased...
...Aren’t you glad you aren’t the reporter who called the Acting Comptroller of the Currency last December to inquire about disciplinary actions against one of Bert Lance’s banks and then never called back to get the detailed information the office had subsequently prepared for you...
...So are we...
...Last month we ran an article called “The Corrupt Military: A Case Study.’’ Here’s another...
...Another state legislator, Dave Berger, who made 62 calls to relatives and friends in Scotland, said he didn’t charge the calls to his home phone because it would have upset his mother...
...This guerrilla war has gone largely unreported in the liberal press...
...Faced with a similar problem of gaining access to liberals, Ikard came up with this solution, as described recently by the society reporter of The Washington Star: “The week started out with a bang last night...
...Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer ought to be ashamed of themselves...
...We weren’t wrong to try to help the South with supplies and volunteers, any more than the American left was wrong to give such help to the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War...
...Common Cause persuaded 39 federal regulatory commissions to let it take a look at their appointment books...
...They call it the nameless front...
...Equally outrageous is its indifference to the plight of the refugees who continue to flee the various communist regimes in Indochina...
...Couldn’t the same words have been found in the diary of a South Vietnamese major ten years ago...
...The two kinds of indifference are related, I think, in that they both testify to our national inability to come to terms with what happened in Vietnam between 1961 and 1975...
...Neither of these award-winning newsmen could come up with an answer during the remaining 20 minutes of the show even though Powell twice repeated the challenge...
...All during August, when Hubert Humphrey was finding out that he was dying, White House staff members were urging Carter to visit the former Vice President...
...And doesn’t it remind anyone who has served in the government that the numbers game is one ofthe main problems of government that those outside have no awareness of...
...About ten minutes into their 30-minute public television show on August 23, Jody Powell challenged them to cite one illegal or unethical act performed by Bert Lance...
...But the fact is that good lobbyists work in subtle ways, and Brademas was being used by Park as much as anyone else was-his function was not to drum up support for South Korea, but to make Tongsun Park respectable in liberal circles, which he did quite effectively for some time...
...The billions aren’t being saved because HUD, with a grand total of 15,000 employees, has assigned exactly three of them to oversee enforcement of the act...
...Boyer has persuaded the department to establish a “dissent channel” through which foreign service officers who feel their views are being blocked by their superiors can get their ideas and opinions transmitted to Washington...
...The burdens of the poor continue to grow...
...Most of all, we need to be sensible and humane with one another as we look back on our years in Southeast Asia and try to heal the terrible wound that it left with us...
...Do e sn ’t that sound familiar...
...Surely the right can now see that the massive escalation in 1965 was wrong and that the effort to bomb the North Vietnamese into submission was stupid...
...On August 31, Vice Admiral Malcolm W. Cagle and Captain James N. Hooper, Jr...
...Chaired by a former Peace Corps volunteer, Neil A. Boyer, the Open Forum tries to encourage openness in the Foreign Service...
...So thank God the press was wrong...
...It matters not to the feds that George Mason does not have a single handicapped student...
...They shouldn’t have been...
...This is not to say that most of the South Vietnamese governments we supported were not corrupt and undemocratic...
...The Post was actually compelling its newsboys to make security deposits from which the newspaper would cover bad debts by home subscribers...
...Carter has, as we predicted in May, approved another federal salary increase.This one is for 7.05 per cent...
...What Reid’s story didn’t mention was that for years Brademas, generally regarded as a liberal Mr...
...Surely the left must concede that the number of people who have fled Indochina since the communist takeover is persuasive evidence that there was in fact a substantial part of the population who did not want to live under communism...
Vol. 9 • October 1977 • No. 8
