Washington
Someone says that all the tourists who were scared away from Washington last summer after the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination have converged on the Capital this week. The radio says the Senate galleries have jammed up so tightly for the vote on the ABM that senators’ wives are being turned away, but there are empty seats. The press gallery, however, practically spills over at the edges. News has been exploding on and off Chappaquiddick and Martha’s Vineyard, in Saigon and Bucharest, along the moon routes, everywhere but Washington. So Washington reporters are starved for news. Abetted by some of the more apocalyptic senators, they can’t seem to write about the ABM without firing off adjectives like “cliff-hanger,” “razoredge,” and “countdown.” All very dramatic, for the moment, but one has that feeling of leaving the theater anti trying to remember what the play was about.
The next day the editorial writers confiscate the reporters’ adjectives and speak in qualified tones. The New York Times titles its editorial “The Administration ‘Wins,’ ” and urges “delay” and “statesmanship” on Mr. Nixon in considering what to do with his “victory.” The Washington Post similarly puts quotation marks around “won” and “lost” in speaking of the Senate’s 50-50 and 51-49 votes on the ABM, and writes, “Despite all the last-minute drama and legislative high-jinks, it had been evident for a couple of weeks now that the crucial vote . . . would be inconclusive.” Later, George McGovern for the liberals says that the question whether to develop a system of multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV’s) is, “if anything, more urgent” than whether to proceed with the antiballistic missile.
On the other hand, the orchestrated drama of the ABM fight did have meaning. It is all very well to say, as ABM advocates do, that those in opposition were in large part motivated by an irrational extension of anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and that the ABM simply became a symbolic target for “the furies and frustrations generated by the war in Vietnam” (Stewart Alsop). Some anti-ABM leaders, like Senator Stuart Symington (Democrat, Missouri), acknowledge the symbolic aspect of the fight. But symbols reflect rational as well as irrational concerns.
What is “commitment”?
At sixty-eight, a former Secretary of the Air Force, war administrator (during Korea) , and presidential aspirant (in i960), Symington must seem an unlikely leader of the Skeptical Party to many of his Establishmentarian acquaintances. A friend who has watched him at work recently says, “He’s spent his career accumulating extraordinary knowledge of the relation between military, political, and economic policy, and particularly about how the military works, without ever particularly thinking about it. Now we’re in trouble in all those areas at once, and he’s begun reflecting on the connections like a man who is twenty years younger.” The only senator currently serving on both the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, Symington became chairman of a subcommittee of the latter this spring, and he is readying an investigation into U.S. “commitments” abroad. “What is a commitment—men, money, what?” he says as we sit in his office a few days after the ABM vote. American dealings with Thailand are to be a prime subject of the investigation; implicit in this focus is a concern Symington and his staff share with more conventional Senate “doves” that whether or not the Nixon Administration is committed to the slogan “No More Vietnams,” the United States may already be “in” Thailand as a consequence of the original “commitment” to South Vietnam.
Symington is elegant in manner and appearance, and almost military in his bearing. This heightens the effect when he draws on strategic expertise and knowledge of weaponry to support his moderate political views. After a detailed critique of the Pentagon’s technical arguments for the ABM, he says in the Senate just before the ABM vote, “It has gotten to a point . . . that we have some senators who can hear the farthest drum before the cry of a single hungry child in the street; and we have some senators, fed up with that approach, who can hear all the children, whether or not they are hungry, before they can hear a single drum.
“Then there is another group, and a large group, which can hear every single child and every single drum and say: ‘What of it? I’ll vote for all the children and I’ll vote for all the drums.’
“That is perhaps the worst position. It is as clear as light that the integrity of the dollar, through such problems as inflation and the continuing balance of payments, is slowly but steadily being eroded to the point where our people are suffering—really suffering. . . .
“Therefore, I earnestly hope there is a fourth group on this floor, a group who will say: ‘We have to establish some priority. We cannot go on forever listening to the terror talks about the dangers which are made to justify the latest of these new weapons systems being presented to the Congress.’
“I say this as one who admits his own error in voting for every one of these systems up to this particular Sentinel-Safeguard system.”
In his office Symington remarks, “I had some criticisms of Bob McNamara, but I agreed with him when he said the military think about weapons the way women think about perfume.”
Possibilities
The scenes on the Senate floor at the end of the debate are the more vivid because the voices of two of the leading participants, Margaret Chase Smith and John Sherman Cooper, are too soft to be heard in the galleries, or even by many of their colleagues. One of the liberal leaders of the last twenty years, exSenator Paul Douglas of Illinois (defeated by Charles Percy in 1966), has come to the chamber and watches from a couch in a corner, greeting old friends from his seat. His once impressive frame is now thin and frail, but he stands up to greet the courtly Richard Russell of Georgia, his enemy in civil rights fights through the years. Russell has had cancer. These two old men, mortals who used to be called powers, whose time is passing, make the moment seem more fluid, less tense, less “historical.”
In contrast, one sees (as does everyone else present) Edward Kennedy, whose time may have passed for reasons rather more within his control than is the case with Douglas and Russell. If they represent the March of Time in this tableau, he represents an uncomfortable present. He seems very much alone on this stage, his sunburn and nervousness combining to create the illusion that he is under a spotlight. He twists in his chair from one tentative pose to another, saying little and rarely being spoken to. Watching him, one feels like part of the pressure on a giant needle pinning him like a fly to a microscopic plate. Later, at a press conference after the vote which he shares with his anti-ABM colleagues Mike Mansfield, Philip Hart, and John Sherman Cooper, the reporters direct just one question about the ABM to him.
If he seems conscious of his disgrace, his colleague Edmund Muskie has been cast as Quiet Dignity. His fingers are thoughtfully poised, the tips touching. One wonders if anyone cares. Two other “possibilities” (as the press characterizes men who get themselves mentioned as presidential aspirants), Fred Harris of Oklahoma and Walter Mondale of Minnesota, are slouched next to each other, apparently indulging in comedy relief, for they guffaw and shake with laughter. They look more like study-hall pranksters than “possibilities,” but this is customary behavior in the Senate. Gene McCarthy, grayer than last year, squats down with them for a moment. (Favorite teacher from last semester?) More laughter. What have they to say to each other, the two ambitious younger men who believed in Hubert Humphrey (they were his campaign co-managers), and the older, sardonic one whose view of Humphrey seemed similar to that of most adults toward the Faster bunny?
The eye takes in Cabaret touches: J. William Fulbright’s Garbo-like sunglasses; Everett Dirksen’s now grotesque form.
Overheard: “I once heard Governor Rhodes of Ohio say, ‘Watching George Romney run for President was like watching a duck make love to a football . . ”
“I had lunch with Hubert Humphrey today. He told me he had views on the German question, the Soviet question, the Asian question. The man’s been reading a Rand McNally atlas . . .”
Happening
The Senate ponders whether to slow down the Nixon Administration’s refashioning of the Johnson Administration’s version of one of the Pentagon’s plans, and says, “No, but . . .” The House puts forth a tax plan which is called the “Tax Reform Act of 1969” and heralded as such, but which cuts more than it reforms. Some of the editorial writers warn us that we have been through all that before. The reporters write leads which speak, as did the Washington Post and the New York Times, of President Nixon’s “revolutionary” welfare and revenue-sharing proposals. But the bodies of their stories do not support the revolution, and wonder instead whether the government will agree to put money where the President’s mouth is.
Nothing is happening here, but everything is happening here. “Leadership without leaders,” Gene McCarthy calls it. He is speaking of the amorphous yet forceful popular pressure for tax reform and against the military. “McCarthyism without McCarthy?” he is asked. “Something like that.” One finds no heroes in Washington just now, few villains, no certainties, abundant ponderables and imponderables. One senses that a delayed state of shock prevails in the city, reflecting to some extent the national mood. People can’t quite believe yet that 1968 was a true story. The pieces have still not been picked up (and since Senator Kennedy’s midnight drive there are more of them in smaller fragments). Observing the dulled sensibilities of political and journalistic acquaintances in Washington, one feels the more certain that the President’s recommendation of lowered voices was both an act of shrewdness and of consideration for the national nerves. And though he has been tempted into shrillness from time to time, some of his advisers have stuck to the modulated pitch, particularly in the area of diplomacy. Phrases like “low posture” and “low silhouette” are used to project a post-coonskin-on-the-wall foreign policy.
Such a time is difficult for the press, which, as has often been observed, behaves like a parasite, and never more so than when one-industrytown Washington is having a slow season. Like freshmen in a Pol. Sci. course, the press wants to know where the Administration “stands”; to which ideological or regional factions it is committed; whether Robert Finch of HEW or John Mitchell of Justice stands taller with the President, and so on. Much more relevant questions in Nixon’s Washington are: What are the pressures— political, economic, and popularon this Administration? Which ones does the Administration view as most compelling? Writing about pressures and trends requires a great deal more perception and subtlety than writing about “front-runners” and “favorites” who have “charisma,” or “insiders” who have “clout.” It calls for understanding of background and process and of how people in and out of power react to various kinds of adversity or challenge.
This is hard enough for the press to do when it is following the government and the government happens to be wrong—as both were in assuming well into 1968 that an incumbent President could not be unseated. It is harder when the government doesn’t know its own mind. The press is supposed to report “facts,” but the reportable facts about Washington under Nixon don’t add up to much. And when the press tries harder, the effect seems the more ludicrous. A recent column by James Reston began, “The main thing about President Nixon’s proposals for dealing with poverty in America is that he recognizes Government’s responsibility for removing it.” Why is that the “main thing”? And how does Reston know? The press doesn’t really know now, at the end of this gestation period of the Nixon Administration, who or what Mr. Nixon is, covert reformer, benign reactionary, “healer,” “pragmatist,” none of the above. But the press writes with those categories in mind, and so it persists in trying to define what does not seem to lend itself to definition.
Senator Charles Goodell of New York, the energetic Republican whom Governor Rockefeller appointed to Robert Kennedy’s seat and who has been pressuring Nixon to go left to the consternation of Republican regulars and the Restoration-minded Kennedy faction in New York, has some ideas:
“The President will move with pressures, and make commitments. I was one of those active in trying to get him to make a commitment on the hunger issue last fall during the campaign, and I was attacked for criticizing him, but he did make a major commitment this spring. He never particularly played it up, though; he didn’t even announce it personally. I think he is less emotional than any recent President—I don’t mean he has no feelings; we all remember his 1962 speech to the press. He is an analyst.”
Why didn’t he respond to the pressure of the Senate, then, and let the men of goodwill, like Senator George Aiken, and even Senators Cooper and Hart, play a role in what after all would have been some form of commitment to the ABM? Why, instead, did he behave as Lyndon Johnson had at the Democratic Convention of 1968, refusing to let the liberals have their bombing resolution as a matter of principle, when in the end the President stopped the bombing anyway?
“Or like the Republicans in 1964. I don’t know, maybe it was Mel Laird. He’s a fighter; likes to push things through.”
It is all very difficult for the press —for anyone—to discern. Certainly there are signs that the Nixon Administration is open, curious, in the best sense. One observes Undersecretary of State Elliott Richardson’s bright young assistant having lunch with ex-Secretary Dean Rusk’s bright young assistant. Nixon’s White House Counsel, John Erlichman, has sought advice on how the government works from his predecessors under Johnson. Nixon himself has talked with Dean Acheson, whom he was taxing fifteen years ago with responsibility for the “loss” of China. The former Secretary of State, who feels we must pull away from involvement in Vietnam, finds the President and his advisers for the most part “reasonable” and “uncomplicated,”and the atmosphere in Washington an improvement over the irascibility of Johnson’s last months in office. The Administration’s embarrassing missteps, such as the nonappointment of Dr. Knowles to a key HEW assistant secretaryship, are more the consequence of inexperience and naïveté than of cutthroat politicking, he believes.
Whatever their goodwill, Mr. Nixon and his aides clearly made little effort to “bring us together” in the later stages of the ABM fight. Indeed, in the course of the fight, several background stories from Washington suggested that men close to the President suspect that the anti-militarist mood has been inflated by the press, and has little popular base except on campuses and in the intelligentsia.
I asked Herbert Klein, the President’s Director of Communications, whether there was concern in the Administration about the way the proand anti-war division seemed to be deepening over issues like the ABM and military spending, following roughly the same liberal-conservative pattern as developed in Johnson’s last years. “It depends on what you mean by liberal,” he said. “For example, I consider Scoop Jackson a liberal.” Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington to whom Nixon offered the Secretaryship of Defense before choosing Melvin Laird, is certainly one of the few ur-hawks who has also been a progressive on domestic affairs. But the fact that he seems so much in agreement with the hardline wing of the Nixon Administration makes him an exception to the rule, and hardly proof that there is no liberal-conservative split in Washington.
The invisible cities
A collection of Nixon speechwriters told a veteran of Johnson’s White House staff earlier this year, “You have to understand, the President doesn’t read the papers. Pat Buchanan [a White House aide] writes up a three-page extract of what’s being said in the papers for him, and sometimes he doesn’t even read that. As for the cities, some of these people don’t even know they’re there. They don’t see them.”
This is clearly a view of only part of the Administration. There is also the minority faction of urbanoriented reformers, led by HEW Secretary Robert Finch and Director Pat Moynihan of the Urban Affairs Council. As the press has reported, they have won a few and lost a few more. Clearly they have influence, and interestingly, they are heard on the merits. One of Moynihan’s assistants in the White House says, “Pat won in the battle for welfare reform by playing it like a scholar. These guys say, ‘Harvard urbanologist, maybe he’s got something,’ and anyway he’s the only one around. Burns [Arthur Burns, the President’s more conservative economic counselor], on the other hand, lost by playing the politician. He’d say what was and wasn’t politically feasible. On this one, the President listened to Pat, who proposed what he thought was necessary.”
Moynihan, Finch, and friends are not the Nixon Administration, though. In the absence of clear indications of what is, the press has focused an unusual amount of attention on the prominent figures to their right, led by Attorney General John Mitchell and his old frontier staff. In particular there is interest in a curious book called The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, $7.95) by Kevin Price Phillips, twenty-nine, an assistant to Mitchell during the campaign and then in the Justice Department. Mitchell is a power; Phillips writes like a fanatic. The relationship between their two points of view is unclear, though Mitchell has made statements to the effect that his staff members do not necessarily speak for him. Briefly, Phillips’ book argues on the basis of extensive statistical research that a Republican Party based in the “Heartland” (Midwest), West, and South can and should co-opt the Wallace vote, isolate the liberal Establishment element of the party roughly located in “the partners’ rooms of Wall Street and the salons of Fifth Avenue,” and rule for a generation on a populist mandate.
Mr. Phillips’ book, for all the statistical evidence it employs, reads like fantasy. Words like “economics,” “inflation,” “depression,” or “recession” hardly appear at all, for this is a book about “ethnic” (read white) man, as if his economic condition were unrelated to his political judgment, or to the state of the parties. And much as Lyndon Johnson seemed to assume that some sort of jingoistic passion meant more to Americans than the lives of their sons, or their own sense of values about American interests abroad, Phillips writes as if ethnic identification has and will overcome anything and everything. This seems excessively doctrinaire. The evidence of white resentment of black revolution is abundant. Subtler and more difficult to calculate is the vote that hedges: as when Boston voted for an Irishman of moderation (Kevin White) for mayor over an Irishwoman who seemed certain to create divisiveness (Louise Day Hicks).
“The Phillips book answers a lot of questions for people who don’t believe anything.” So says one of the many independent-liberal Republicans in Nixon’s Washington who observes the Administration with detachment. “Can you imagine sitting down to formulate a policy on school segregation if you had never thought of it before? That’s what people who are really at the center of the White House operation, like [Bob] Haldemann and Erlichman, are like, and that’s why the Phillips book is getting read.”
Isn’t
One can improve one’s perception of Nixon’s Washington by talking to D. David Bourland, Jr., recently described by Time as the linguist who developed E-Prime. EPrime consists (as Bourland would put it) of the English language minus the verb “to be.” We abuse the verb “to be,” Bourland feels, making it a crutch and distorting our view of reality. Nothing stays the same, everything “is” in a process of change; therefore one speaks of a mythical static world when one says that something “is” something. Or one speaks in meaningless clichés. (“Life is like that.”) Also, one speaks subjectively, and with an authority to which one presumes, but which one doesn’t, document. (“X is a liberal.” “Nixon is a pragmatist.” “The plane is scheduled to leave any minute now.”)
Bourland sees Nixon as “the most interesting political figure since Roosevelt. He reminds me of what McLuhan meant by comparing a light bulb to pure information.” Bourland means by this that one can’t define Nixon by simple statements of “identification,” and he feels also that Nixon in this sense may faithfully reflect the confusions and dislocations of political identity and division in the country. Nixon’s Administration employs Robert Finch and John Mitchell, Pat Moynihan and Kevin Phillips. Like the several factions in the country at large, these men seem unlikely to come to substantial agreement with each other over the larger political questions. Should not a President represent the country?