Washington

on the World Today

LYNDON JOHNSON has labored mightily to find an end to the conflict in Southeast Asia. Those who call him insincere in his peace campaign do not know the man or the politician. The war is an enormous burden on both. However rough and tough an operator the President may be, he is a man who is deeply moved and hurt by suffering, waste, and destruction. The casualty lists touch him to the quick. He cannot understand why men cannot settle their differences around the conference table to their mutual advantage.

As a politician, the President knows that if the war drags on interminably, it could be his undoing. He is not prepared to admit that he did other than what he had to do in providing increased aid to South Vietnam last year and in applying pressure which he thought would force the Communists to the bargaining table. But he recognizes that Vietnam is an increasingly dangerous political issue and that it could play a significant part in the 1966 congressional elections and in his own re-election campaign only two years away.

Let no one say that the President does not earnestly want a settlement of the war. It is his most urgent wish and one that he never ceases to nurture by work and constant inquiry. He is determined at the same time not to let the war destroy his domestic program. That is why he took a bolder-than-life stance in support not only of continuing but of expanding the Great Society.

And, political being that he is, he shrewdly challenged those who would cut the domestic program to say whom they would sacrifice. Would they take from the children, the sick, and the distressed? “I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam,” the President declared. Yet even he must have had his doubts, for he also said: “Because of Vietnam we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do.” The doubts will increase if the fighting increases.

The President does not like to be told that anything is impossible or that the nation cannot accomplish miracles. One reason why he is frustrated in Vietnam is that the pressures he applied last year have not produced the results he expected. Now he cannot accept complacently either the Federal Reserve Board’s tightened monetary policy or warnings that he cannot have both guns and butter. He will fight for both, and they are both expensive. The economy is operating closer to capacity than at any time since World War II. Yet strains are bound to develop that will make the President’s problems more difficult.

The threat of famine

While the Administration is pushing with all possible speed its Great Society programs, it may soon find that in the important area of agriculture it is time to think in terms of new policies. We are a great power almost as much because of the richness of American farms as because of the strength of American industry. We are the only nation in the world which has a significant farm surplus and which also could easily increase its agricultural production. For three decades we have designed our agricultural policies to limit production; within a very short time we may have to do everything possible to encourage production. As the underdeveloped world, including Communist China, continues to lose the ability to feed itself, the pressures on the United States to produce more food will mount.

A few simple statistics tell the stark story. Before World War II, the underdeveloped world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America exported to the developed industrial countries of the North approximately 11 million tons of food and feed grains a year; today the industrial North exports to the underdeveloped world 25 million tons of grains annually. Thirty years ago the United States and Canada exported 8 million tons of grains a year; now they export 60 million tons. Thirty years ago Russia and Eastern Europe exported 5 million tons annually; today they import 12 to 15 million tons. In Latin America, where population growth is fastest, food output per capita has declined 7 percent since the end of the 1950s.

Underwater harvest

A few years ago the nation appeared to be on the threshold of far-reaching conquests in the science of oceanography. President Kennedy and his science adviser, Jerome B. Wiesner, were enthusiastic about the prospects of new ways to “tap the ocean depths.” The seas seemed to many scientists to be as important in the held of exploration as outer space. Oils and minerals, new sources of food, a key to a better understanding of wind and weather, as well as new possibilities of national defense, were there for the oceanographers to discover.

Yet progress in the years since March, 1961, when President Kennedy sent Congress a special message on oceanography, has been disappointing. Instead of the coordinated program he wanted, there has been fragmentation. Biologists, geologists, chemists, physicists, and others interested in the science have competed with one another. A score of government agencies have vied for the scarce amount of federal funds appropriated. Engineers and technologists have been under pressure from fishing, shipping, mining, defense, recreational, and conservation interests. Various industries have competed with one another. There has been, as one scientist has said, a gap in leadership. There also has been a gap in advocacy, for the Johnson Administration has not shown the keen interest of its predecessor.

Congress has been subject to the same diverse pressures from scientists, special interests, and the competing bureaucracies. More than twenty-five bills — none sponsored by the Administration — were introduced last year to deal with the problem, and each house passed a bill designed to bring about a coordinated effort. But no agreement was reached, and the effort is still going on to reconcile the versions approved on each side of the Capitol.

Chief hope is now centered on the Senate bill, which was sponsored by Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington, chairman of the Committee on Commerce. It would establish a Cabinet-level National Council on Marine Resources and Engineering Development, with the Vice President as chairman. The council would be charged with developing “a comprehensive program of marine science activities, including, but not limited to, exploration, exploitation, and conservation of the resources of the marine environment, marine engineering, studies of air-sea interaction, transmission of energy, and communications, to be conducted by departments and agencies of the United States.” It also would direct and fix responsibility in the several agencies.

As Senator Magnuson has told the Senate, the Convention on the Continental Shelf, only recently ratified by the required number of nations, gives the United States a new continent to explore and to exploit. The land area of the United States is 3,615,211 square miles. The surface area of the Continental Shelf adjacent to the United States is 850,000 square miles. Its potential wealth is incalculable. A definition of government policy is clearly needed, and then, as President Kennedy said five years ago, “concerted action, purposefully directed, with vision and ingenuity.” Coordination cannot be achieved with twenty government agencies competing for funds, with government and industry suspicious of one another, and with each scientific discipline wanting to dominate.

With famine perhaps a greater threat to the world today than the atom bomb, every effort should be made to acquire and apply new information about the harvest underwater. If one hundredth of the energy and money being spent on the space program were applied to the field of oceanography, the results might be dramatic.

The old men of Congress

Leverett Saltonstall, the senior senator from Massachusetts, has announced the close of his political career in typically honorable manner. At seventy-three, he decided that he should not be a candidate for re-election to a six-year term. He made his decision public in ample time to give all potential candidates for his seat an opportunity to make the race. While still in good health, he is retiring from the Senate, where almost a score of his colleagues are more than seventy years of age.

Not long ago, another New Englander, Ralph Flanders of Vermont, voluntarily retired in much the same manner and for the same reasons. But they are the exceptions to the rule. Carl Hayden of Arizona is eighty-eight and presumably will run again this year. Several other senators who are in their seventies will seek re-election in November. Last fall, his health already failing, Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia resigned from the Senate and engineered the appointment of his son to his seat.

After Lyndon Johnson became President, he and a group of friends, including the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, were watching a rerun of his 1964 address on the State of the Union. Behind the President on the podium were Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts and Senator Hayden, the two men next in line for the presidency. “You see, Mr. Secretary,” the President remarked to Rusk, “that is why I won’t leave the country until after the election.” McCormack and Hayden still are in line of succession, but after Vice President Humphrey.

While the older men of the Senate and House hold the positions of power (the average age of seventeen Senate committee chairmen is sixtyseven, and the average age of twentyone House chairmen is sixty-six), the typical member of the 89th Congress is considerably younger. At the beginning of this Congress the average age was 51.9 years; it was 52.7 in the 88th Congress. And many of the brightest stars are among the younger groups in both House and Senate.

Moyers and the press

Few men have done more for President Johnson than Bill D. Moyers, the youthful press secretary at the White House. Most observers of the Washington scene regard the President as one of the ablest men ever to hold high olHee in this country. Yet he has a blind spot: he has never understood or been reconciled to the role of the press or of public debate. He likes to operate in secret, and he resents public discussion of an issue until he is ready to speak.

In the short time that Moyers has been in the press office he has vastly improved White House relations with me press. But the relations can never be easy as long as the President insists on such petty things as having a secretary take down the name of every questioner and the questions asked at a Moyers’ press conference or requiring assistants to give him memos on every meeting, in or out of the White House, with newsmen.

The assistants have been almost completely shut off from the press, even for background purposes, because the President believes that this protects him against unwarranted leaks and is therefore to his advantage. Reporters are equally convinced that it is to his disadvantage because it prevents fuller understanding on their part of the issues and thus makes their reports less complete and less accurate than they should be.

Although Moyers has made it clear that he has a low opinion of the press in general, the press in general has a high opinion of him. Newsmen know that he is under constant cross fire, from the President for saying too much and from the press for saying too little. Most members of the press think that it would be a serious national loss for Moyers to leave his job, from the point of view of both the press and the President.

Like the President, Moyers is quick to criticize the press. He has singled out many stories in recent months for harsh attack. Yet some of the errors that the press has committed might have been prevented if there were more open policy at the White House and more trust on both sides.

“In Washington,” Moyers said recently on television, “the press generally tends to write its opinions of a matter, and then to seek out facts for it.”

As for the presidential press conference, Moyers said that it is the President’s prerogative to decide when and how to use it because “it’s to serve the convenience of the President, not the convenience of the press.” That is surprising doctrine in light of the traditional view that the press conference is for the convenience of neither, but for the enlightenment of the public on publicpolicies. In the absence of a question period on the parliamentary model, the presidential press conference has served as an important though imperfect bridge between the President and the people. But to President Johnson the conference is a nuisance, or simply a platform for a presidential speech well prepared in advance.

Early in the Kennedy Administration, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., asked Jean Monnct, the eminent French friend of America, what he thought of the New Frontier. “The thing I note most is that the conversation is recommencing,” Monnct replied. “You cannot have serious government without collective discussion. I have missed that in Washington in recent years.”

He would miss it again today. Moyers has improved the dialogue between the press and the White House. Some discussion has recommenced. But with other officials under orders to wait for the President to speak, collective discussion is limited. It is noteworthy that the first serious discussion of Vietnam policy in many months was provoked not by Administration reporting of the facts and issues but by the report of Senator Mansfield and the senators who accompanied him on his fact-finding mission.

Mood of the Capital

It may be true that wars once were exhilarating and brought out the best in a united nation. But today Vietnam hangs like a heavy cloud over Washington. It has produced no inspiring slogans, and even the legitimate heroes on the fighting front are unsung. The contrast between vast prosperity at home and misery for soldiers in a dirty war has damaged the nation’s social and moral fabric. The war dominates policy-making in Washington despite the best efforts to prevent it from doing so. It is rapidly becoming the number one political issue.

Whatever the President may say, it has diverted the nation from its course. It is impossible for Washington to concentrate effectively on other issues, including the future of NATO and the problems of world hunger, while preoccupied with the indecisive fighting.