Washington
The morning that the President announced his modified “Safeguard” anti-ballistic-missile program, there was a gathering in the offices of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a leader of the opposition to the ABM, to review Kennedy’s statement on the matter. Nixon said about what Kennedy and his people had expected him to say, but it was a complicated subject, and Kennedy’s assistants placed calls to some of the outside consultants, whose advice had been sought ever since the issue came up. Room 431 of the Old Senate Office Building is something of a magnet to those who aspire to shadow cabinet status, so in due course Richard N. Goodwin, the intellectual gun-for-hire who happened to be in town, dropped by as did others in the Kennedy orbit. The ABM was the President’s “first major decision”—so billed by his press agents—and the Kennedy response was important.
On being “nonpolitical ”
Whenever there is a question of public policy, Ted Kennedy must have a statement on it. To the newspapers (if this is any guide to anything), a Kennedy statement has greater political weight, greater specific gravity, than the pronouncements of any of the other outs: Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Edmund Muskie. The Kennedy statement on the ABM had a certain style and rhetoric that has become typical of the established opposition, in Congress and out of it, when confronted with an act (or nonact) of the Nixon Administration. That is to say, it was a moderate statement by any standard, written with a tone that befitted not only a Kennedy but a Kennedy who is assistant Democratic leader of the Senate. There was no hint of partisanship (Nixon’s name was not mentioned in the text) , and Kennedy’s aides offered the thesis that his cooperation with Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky in the fight against the ABM reflected Kennedy’s judgment that the ABM issue was not “political”; it had nothing to do with politics. It was carefully explained that Ted Kennedy did not want to become entrapped as Robert Kennedy had in the debate about Vietnam, whereby every time he spoke out against the war, it was assumed that he was pursuing a political vendetta against Lyndon Johnson.
Accordingly, the senator was caused to say in his March 14 statement that the Administration “had missed a number of important opportunities to advance our common cause in the world.” There were eight tightly written criticisms of the Nixon proposals, and the statement ended with a recommendation of a Gaither-like commission to inquire into our national priorities (everyone seems to have forgotten that the Gaither Report found the Russians gaining . . .). It was an exceedingly sophisticated document, mitigated not a whit by the realization that Kennedy has on call virtually the entire MIT-Harvard political-scientific complex. But it was not exactly a call to arms, or a summons to the barricades. The analysts in Washington, to borrow a phrase from Ho Chi Minh, insist that the objective conditions in America do not yet permit rebellion.
It is another way of saying that Richard Nixon has yet to hear the sound of tumbrils in Pennsylvania Avenue; he seems to feel the natives are not restless. It may yet happen, but the gray young men in the White House believe it will not; if everyone keeps cool. Nixon politics, believe it or not, is the politics of atmosphere (“existential,” as the cliché has it), which one supposes is only natural for a man who was once described by an aide as “a guy who creates himself as he goes along.” There is a somnolence in the Capital that has the unmistakable smell of the Eisenhower years, and to say that is not necessarily to sneer; Ave have moved some distance since 1961. It is a mark of the degree to which Washington has been isolated from America in the three brief months since Lyndon Johnson took his leave. There was no mistaking the trouble the country was in with Lyndon Johnson in town, symbolizing the disaffection, exacerbating it with his very presence, alienating everyone around. Those who live here now wonder if the sounds of the cities, the blacks, and the young are penetrating the sealed windows of the White House. The suspicion is that they are, they truly are, but there is no indication except private assurances—that they are.
Hovering
It is a strange phenomenon, discontent at about every point on the compass. It is only that the comfortable white middle class receives so little notice in the heavyweight newspapers and magazines that the resentment at high taxes is so often overlooked; congressmen know it from their mail. There is bitterness and anger at what ordinary people regard as an American plutocracy. Taxes on every level grow, and services deteriorate; the water is befouled, the air is clogged, the schools decline, and the government waxes fatter. These are no longer merely the concerns of the special-interest groups or Ralph Nader; they are the concerns of ordinary people.
Somewhere there must be a connection between this and the criticism of the American military, although there is an unfortunate tendency to equate Washington or Cambridge attitudes with attitudes elsewhere. There is not, as far as anyone can judge, any imminent grassroots revolt against lieutenant colonels. Still, in a town as traditional and conservative as Libertyville, Illinois, the town where Adlai Stevenson maintained a farm, the most respectable of the citizenry were upset over the deployment of an ABMmissile site six miles from downtown. They were not upset enough about it to demonstrate against it, but they organized meetings and wrote letters to the local newspaper: this, in a town which places patriotism literally next to a belief in God. Then the citizen reads of so moderate a senator as Stuart Symington reversing his position, denouncing the war, ABM, the military-industrial complex, and the defense budget, and wonders perhaps if matters have not changed since World War II. Where have all the John Waynes gone?
And hovering over all of it, the American economy, inflating at just under 5 percent a year, a cornucopia out of control—or nearly so. The Federal Reserve Board raises the rediscount rate to 6 percent, a move almost certain to create unemployment. Who is hit by unemployment? The blacks, last to be hired and first to be fired, which brings us round to the people who have been demonstrating and protesting for three—is it four? five? ten?—years. But we know all about them now. The only question is when they will return to the streets, and how the Nixon Administration will deal with that. The country is ready for a reaction, a state of mind which the White House will surely take into account. A highly developed sense of cool is important, but will it be enough? It won’t.
The tone of the Administration was set by the President-elect during the interregnum. It was all very low key, no raised voice and no sweeping policy statements; as a matter of fact, no statements period, sweeping or otherwise. Mr. Nixon was said to feel that until the nastiness that infected the public dialogue was cooled, no business was possible. It was a more subtle point than merely the understandable wish of a new President to gain the confidence and good opinion of his people. It was a belief that no business was possible until the fever was broken, and calm restored to the land. One way to clear tlie atmosphere was to stand mute, at least in public, on the theory that while silence would uplift no one, neither would it be an irritant. It was a decision which may in the end rank as the first major move, or non-move, of the Administration. The President behaved diffidently from the outset, and his associates (with the exception of Melvin Laird, the Wisconsin congressman who was named Defense Secretary) followed suit. Miss Willie Mae Rogers, of the Good Housekeeping Institute, came one day and left the next; Walter J. Hickel, initially savaged for his handling of the great oil leak off the Monterey Coast, drew raves after a fortnight. Robert Finch, who may turn out to be the strong man of the Administration, says little and by most accounts performs admirably. But no one knows what Finch, Attorney General Mitchell, HUD Secretary Romney, or any of the others are performing at. It is disconcerting.
No shopping list
So on his eighty-fourth day in office, the President quietly slipped a mini-State of the Union message up to the Hill. It was an odd document, affirming that Vietnam and inflation were his first priorities, and declaring that the remainder would not carry “large price tags.” In the field of social legislation, the operative lines were: “We now have a hodgepodge of programs piled on programs, in which too often the pressure to perpetuate ill-conceived but established ones has denied needed resources to those that were new and more promising.” That passage is not entirely clear, but was a faithful declaration of one of Nixon’s favorite campaign themes: that now was not the time to devise new laws, but to give life to the old ones. In sharp departure from custom, the domestic message was not a shopping list of major legislative proposals. Nixon’s proposals ranged from increasing social security to reorganizing the Post Office. Unspecific in the extreme, the message spoke of “new measures” for this, programs to “increase the effectiveness” of that. “No extravagant promises,” the President said, and stuck to his word: “This Administration will gladly trade the false excitement of fanfare for the abiding satisfaction of achievement.”
But beyond the sanctimonious verbiage, there was a certain admirable realism. The simple truth appears to be that the White House does not know precisely what to do about our major ills, what with the economy in very serious difficulty and—probably more important—the lack of agreed solutions. It is very difficult to quarrel with the priorities: Vietnam first and the economy second. It is a plausible argument that the country cannot move ahead, as another President put it, until those two matters are resolved. The rest of it waits in the wings. No President ever entered office with fewer promises to keep (and, judging from the first three months, less determination to keep them).
The cities need more money, but how should it be distributed and to whom and for what? T he blacks are in rebellion, but what to do about that? The alienation of the young continues apace. There will be no One Hundred Days or even a Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Days of legislative miracle in this Administration. “We are still recovering from Kennedy’s 100 Days, and Johnson’s 100 Days, and even FDR’s 100 Days,” a White House assistant says crisply. He was asked if he could name one absolutely essential piece of domestic legislation, and he replied that he could not; is our dilemma one that can be solved by new laws?
Partly because there is so little that can be held on to, partly because a number of people here suppose that Nixon is correct in aspiring to decontaminate the atmosphere before proceeding to visible substantive matters, there is a tendency to wait and see. (Most people concede that, whatever the oilier merits, it is a sound political strategy but one that is certain to bring problems home to roost in the cities this summer, or in Vietnam by September.) If the estimate is that Vietnam lies at the heart of the matter, then is it not wise to expend energies on that, and hope for a solution which will restore some measure of decency to America’s international life? As this is written, the President and his associates have convinced most skeptics here that they mean business on Vietnam; they mean to get out. They say that as a matter of policy; it has been concluded that the war is unwinnable. More important, well-informed persons in the Administration are now predicting substantial troop withdrawals this year, with possibly a cease-fire (or at least a very much lower level of violence, which in translation means many fewer American casualties) by late 1969 or early 1970. With Vietnam on the front burner, other matters move to the rear. That was what was meant to happen to ABM, and probably would have happened except for the extraordinarily maladroit testimony of Melvin Laird, which opened the question of Soviet intentions, first-strike capabilities, and the curious SS9, the monster weapon the Russians are said to have deployed. At any rate, on the principal matter of Vietnam, the President’s friends and colleagues say the negotiating approach is different from that of the Johnson Administration. Kissinger is no Rostow, Rogers no Rusk. Have trust. Wait.
Where is the maestro?
Those are the chords, but where is the maestro? He is an almost invisible presence in Washington now, which is not to say that he does not govern but that he is not seen to govern. After the overwhelming presence of Lyndon Johnson (one recalls now with an odd fondness the 115 press releases distributed in one weekend in 1965 at the LBJ Ranch in Texas; they were meant to demonstrate the dominance of the Johnson presidency, even when it came to rest aside the Pedernales), the new style here has tended to disorient the professionals, which is partly to say the press and those to whom the press speaks. The White House now is like city hall in a small suburban town: it is possible to talk to just about anybody (save the President and Kissinger) , and it is almost certain that one will walk away with an empty notebook; either that or a notebook filled with empty thoughts, Beyond that, there are no randy anecdotes, no backstairs gossip, and no cozy two-hour chats with newspapermen; and no courtiers either.
Now it is all very businesslike, buttoned-up and corporate; it is a team which moves Forward Together. When a journalist wondered aloud one day in April whether Secretary Rogers and Secretary Laird were engaged in a struggle “lor the mind of Richard Nixon,” the response was a sharp negative. Rogers and Laird, in office seventy-five days, did not know their own minds; much less were they engaged in a struggle for Richard Nixon’s. The Administration has settled in, but it does not control.
So Washington is in the eye of a hurricane whose force is gathering elsewhere. Save for his press conferences, the President has not appeared on national television. He has made no major speeches, lest the Eisenhower eulogy be reckoned a major speech, and his one comment on our domestic crisis was a rather mild letter of support for the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame, who talked tough to demonstrating students on his campus. In keeping with the policy of no recrimination, Nixon Administration officials do not criticize their predecessors; privately, however (at this writing it truly is private) , they seethe over the conditions of the American presence in Vietnam (no progress has been made—and none was apparently really contemplated—in turning the war over to the Vietnamese; de-Americanizing it as it were) , and over the administrative tangle throughout the bureaucracy. One has to see this bureaucracy to believe it: Secretary Rogers and Undersecretary Richardson entered the State Department with five personal assistants between them, a cadre barely sufficient for the Federal Trade Commission, let alone the State Department. Henry Kissinger has moved into that vacuum, and to the extent that the levers of power are being touched at all, it is Kissinger of the White House who is touching them.
“Such trouble”
The rest is all behind the scenes, and what has confused and puzzled everyone here is the silence of the critics. They seem tired of strife and disharmony, weary of politics itself. The liberal establishment awaits events, with only an occasional whiff of grapeshot from Tom Wicker. There is no confidence that anyone knows the proper solutions to the problems which bedevil us. All that is known is that out there in the campo there are millions who are dissatisfied, a society which has gone wrong; in Washington today, the principal topic of conversation is Portnoy’s Com plaint.
The gulf is great. It is possible to take lunch with Raymond k. Price, one of the President’s speech writers and idea men, and listen to a reassuring (and plausible) estimate of the situation in America, a confident belief that matters are moving well, that the public will permit the Administration time to try of put things right. In the afternoon, back at one’s office, the telephone rings and it is Adam Walinsky, one of the most kinetic of Robert Kennedy’s bright young men, who says in the opening minutes of what turns out to be a forty-five-minute conversation: “I think we’re in such trouble you wouldn’t believe!” One has to know Walinsky, and the rhythm of his speech, to convey the apocalypse: “Such trouble . . . you . . . wouldn’t believe!” He goes on to speak of the war, 300 dead a month, the talks in stalemate, more promises, less action, and are these the lessons zee are teaching our children? How much time do you give them? Walinsky thinks that Nixon has already passed beyond the boundary of decency. He measures the days now in dead.
Walinsky and Curtis Cans, leaders of the New Democratic Coalition, issue a statement: “It is now exactly a year since President Johnson announced the first steps toward de-escalation and settlement of the
war in Vietnam. It is four years since the first combat units of American Marines went ashore. It is eight years since the small civil war began to turn into a major international conflict; four years since the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese, and their Soviet and Chinese allies began to match us deed for deed, weapon for weapon, or the deadly spiral of escalation; and just over a year since the Tet offensive showed, for all the world to see, the bankruptcy of a foolish policy and a failed adventure.”
But very few listen to the NDC in Washington now. It is not a major movement, but something born of the fire in Chicago. Or something else: Vietnam perhaps. The town is silent, in spring, waiting for summer, something to turn up.