Washington
Some time ago, a Republican senator of moderate-to-liberal persuasion described Richard Nixon as “the man with the portable center,” and that characterization pretty well fits the current Administration as well. While the President’s own advisers, particularly the more liberal ones, insist that he is a “centrist,” this Administration is to be better understood less in terms of the philosophy of its governing than the technique, which is ad hoc.
One of the President’s associates earlier (his year explained some of the more embarrassing happenings as the results of a lingering hangover from the campaign. That was a period of glorious un-responsibility in which all manner of varying and even conflicting signals were sent out to different constituencies, particularly through local television spots which the national press never covered. But this remains the style of the Administration. Moreover, it appears to be genuinely believed within the Administration that improvisation buys time, and that that, for the nonce, suffices. While they do not go so far as to take credit for the “peaceful” summer, they do not hesitate to point to it. They consciously gambled that the announcement of another troop withdrawal and revision of the draft would buy a peaceful autumn. When the timing for the newest troop withdrawal runs out on December 15, there will be time for something else, even a chance to announce, if not fulfill, Clark Clifford’s prescription for withdrawal of 100,000 troops by the end of this year. This backward reeling of the Vietnam buildup should work fairly well for the President until sometime next year when he has removed about 150,000 men, a number which can be withdrawn at no pain to the military or the South Vietnamese government. At that point, the Saigon government and the military are expected to make things a good deal tougher for him than they have thus far, and so the most difficult decisions are still ahead. There is already a resurgence of talk within the American Embassy in Saigon and among the military and the CIA of how we are winning and must keep the pressure up. One view here forecasts that the denouement will run as follows: the United States will continue to withdraw troops, causing at some point a change in the South Vietnam government, and the new one will probably invite us out because it wants to make peace, or, also possible, will be so right-wing that it will be politically impossible to continue to support it. Meanwhile, the President gives signs of preparing to blame a failure to win an “honorable” or early peace on those at home who abjured his “united front.”
A number of Administration men say that quiet is what the people want, and that is what they are getting. But these officials do not make distinctions: while there are few who profess to miss Lyndon Johnson, or long for the good old days when the Marines were in Santo Domingo, there is an increasing feeling that no one is in charge here. For a President with such a Hun personal following, this is not the soundest of foundations. Moreover, the absence of large-scale riots during the summer and early autumn did not prove that the natives were happy.
The President has probably come closer than might have been expected to his goal of cabinet government, and this, too, explains a good bit, some of it healthy, some troubling. Despite the fact that the While House staff continues to grow, the Cabinet officers are largely left to their own devices, the setting of their own agendas. Only items of major contention (civil rights guidelines) or major presidential initiatives (welfare reform) become matters of White House concern, and at that only the ones the White House staff is most interested in. Thus George Romney is left to devote himself to the umpteenth in a series of attempts to find new methods to build low-cost housing: “Operation Breakthrough.” (This title was arrived at with some difficulty: “Operation Splint” was ruled out because it sounded too much like the space program, and “Operation Threshold” because it was vulnerable, as in “tripping over the . . .”) The Model Cities program, which requires the cooperation of several government departments, is said by Nixon officials not to be working, but the White House does not seem terribly upset over this; there have been several hints of its demise. One member of the Urban Affairs Council staff is spending time on the urban affairs of NATO. The President does not wade into the issues until he has to: and, in a considerable change for the better, if the contretemps within official family becomes public or il working papers are leaked to the press, no one gets very excited about it.
Back and fill
On the foreign affairs side, where White House direction is crucial, there is more disorder, signaled by the departure of five men from Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. While the Administration sought to put the best face on it, and while one departure was caused by poor health, the fact remains that men do not, and did not, so soon give up jobs of such power unless something is amiss. The problem was that Kissinger failed to organize the office and work with his staff to the extent that several of his assistants found that they could not do their jobs. An atmosphere of mistrust developed within the National Security Council offices, and the staff was given neither the ear of their leader—not to mention that of the President, as their counterparts in tiie preceding Administrations had had—nor the authority to exercise their implicit powers to coordinate the government’s national security machinery. As soon as this began to become known throughout the government, they were even more paralyzed. The consequences have been the departure of some very able men who were among the strongest advocates within the Administration of an early end to the war and serious arms talks with the Soviet Union, and a vacuum. With the exception of those issues highest on the President’s and Kissinger’s agenda, the foreign policy machinery of the government was not being run from the White House, nor was anyone else in a position to take charge. Not until a little over a month ago did Secretary of State William Rogers consolidate a staff of his own.
The strains are showing elsewhere. Up to one third of the lawyers in the justice Department’s civil rights division are looking for other jobs. There was a near-rebellion at the Peace Corps, and there is confusion over purpose in several government agencies.
Questions of morality, good faith, efficiency, and efficacy of the school guideline idea aside, the most important point about the Administration’s current approach to school integration is that it is a loser. The Administration has entered into an unwinnable contest with psychological warriors. It has not gone, and cannot go, far enough truly to please the South, or that part of the South that the backing and filling is designed to appease. Meanwhile, Southern officials who chose to obey the law have been undercut. A postponement here leads to an attempt to secure another one there, compounding the difficulties. The momentum, the sense of inevitability that the guidelines would be enforced, has now been lost. There has been a resurgence of White Citizens’ Councils, and of protests by white parents, it is in this atmosphere that die Administration will have to make its further decisions, for example when the Mississippi postponement expires on December 1.
The most important question about the President’s proposals for revision of the well are program is whether, for all of the differences in style between Mr. Nixon’s low-keyed speech and the crashing manner in which Mr. Johnson introduced his programs, the final result will be a fundamental change in the lives of the poor or another disillusionment. There is no question that Mr. Nixon, by changing the entire frame of reference in which welfare is now discussed, made an extremely significant contribution. The proposals for national standards, assistance to the working poor, national criteria to determine eligibility, the involvement of the impartial Social Security Administration in place of subjective welfare snoopers are all of fundamental importance. These concepts, having been advanced by a President, are now the starting points for discussion.
It is a legitimate surmise that the President felt able to move on the welfare program because it is despised by both right and left. But for different reasons, and that is where the trouble may come. For all of his modulated delivery, the President may well have committed the heretofore Democratic sin of “overpromising.” There is not enough money in the program to make any difference in the lives of most of those now on welfare. (The Administration says that twenty states will receive higher welfare payments; some welfare experts calculate that the number is more like ten.) Voters upset about the high cost of welfare in most areas will remain upset. Those who assume that there will be a mass transfer “off the welfare rolls and onto the payrolls” will be disappointed. There is some vagueness within the government about just who is on relief, but it is estimated by people at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that of the ten to twelve million people who are on welfare, only about 4 percent are employable. Of these, only 50,000 to 70,000 are men. If all of these employable men and women, and their children, were removed from the welfare rolls, those totally dependent upon assistance would decline by only 15 percent.
The Nixon proposals will of course force mothers of other than preschool children to take jobs in order to continue to receive payments, but Labor Department officials who developed the program are unclear just how many mothers that would put to work. They think that there are about 1.7 million mothers on welfare, of whom about a third could eventually be trained and placed in jobs—a more optimistic assumption than is held across town at HEW. They do not know how many of these women have preschool children, but they think that the “typical” welfare mother has some. They argue, however, that there is evidence that most welfare mothers want to work. This is, in fact, true, and the option to work and still receive federal relief is one of the most enlightened provisions. The question is whether it will be a hollow option. The great need is not so much training as jobs, and until there is a substantial program of training and subsidies for public service employment, there cannot be much more employment of the young, black, and unskilled poor.
With great efforts, presidential backing, and federal subsidies, the National Alliance of Businessmen has placed about 100,000 unemployed or “underemployed” people in (thus far) lasting jobs, and among some manpower experts there is a suspicion that the number is inflated a good bit. There are just not that many opportunities in the private sector for what are referred to as the “hard core,” or jobs which pay enough to support a family. The most worrisome part of the proposals is that which coerces those women without preschool children to choose between working or losing their government support. (This idea, which Mr. Nixon likes to call “workfare”—he wanted to call the whole program that, but was dissuaded—was not simply a sop to conservatives; the President himself is said to believe in it strongly.) The decision whether there is a “suitable” job which must be taken or federal help lost will be made by state employment services. The latter have been notoriously disinterested in, and often even bigoted against, the black poor. There are proposals for reforming the state agencies, which have been fully funded all along by federal money, but there is widespread belief among those who have observed them that you can’t get there from here. They are not to receive more federal funds unless they reform, and that brings us back to the subject of guidelines.
The White House has been sending a briefing team all about the country to explain and promote the welfare proposals to editors and to state and local officials, and the President is said to have been enjoying a state of continuing euphoria over the positive press reaction. He is determined to push them to passage next year, and White House men believe that this is quite possible. The welfare proposals are thought to stand a better chance than the other two parts of the President’s message requiring legislation—the manpower reform and revenue sharing—in both cases because the legislators are being asked to return federal powers to the states. There is skepticism about revenue sharing on all sides. Fiscal conservatives would prefer to retire the federal debt. Liberals fear how state governments would allocate the money. Congressmen in general are not very enthusiastic about voting for tax money to be given to state and local politicians—often the enemy—to spend.
No silver lining
Having confirmed for itself the point first raised by former Budget Director Charles Schultze in the summer of 1968 (August, 1968, Atlantic) that as things are going, there will not be very much money to be spent even after the end of the Vietnam War, the Administration’s next question is what to do about it. For what Schultze was doing, and all that the Administration study did, was, through a combination of forecasts of revenue and costs and assumptions about future government spending, to see how much will be left of the $25 to $28 billion now spent annually on the war. Schultze was sounding the alarm. He warned that those who were hoping that the end of the war would make large amounts of money available for social purposes had better get to work. At the rate things were going, he said, the normal increases in federal revenues through the growth of the gross national product and the money which was to be saved from the war would be largely absorbed by the inevitable growth in the cost of existing federal programs, elimination of the war surtax, and a defense budget that would be considerably higher than the pre-Vietnam level. His warning was an important element in the fueling of the subsequent debate over the defense budget.
The Administration’s post-Vietnam projections were not released, and in fact there were a number of them. Only one was presented to the White House meeting, after which Pat Moynihan informed the press that the “peace dividend” was “evanescent, like the morning clouds” over San Clemente. Even then, one man who worked on the study concedes that the defense figure presented to the meeting was “probably lower than the Department of Defense will settle for.” The Pentagon’s own working assumptions are that there will be no reduction in defense spending after the war, and in an interview, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird projected no postVietnam saving at all. “If the war were to come to an end in Vietnam,” he told me, “and you had no pay increase and you were to bring your forces up to combat readiness, and you began to modernize the services, particularly the Navy, then you could project a saving of probably $6 to $7 billion. If you had a pay increase or went to a volunteer force, then I think you’d have some difference. If we failed to get some agreement with the Soviet Union, they are going ahead so fast on strategic missiles, they outnumber us in conventional forces and conventional weapons, then the budget goes up.” Pay increases come about regularly, and the Nixon Administration is committed to a volunteer force, which Laird estimates would cost another $8 billion.
The Nixon Administration’s postVietnam projections were even lower than those of Schultze, who was Budget Director from 1965 to tytiy. For the new team took into account as further claims on the money the welfare and revenue sharing and other domestic proposals the President has already made, the revenue loss from the tax bill as it passed the House of Representatives, and a projected policy of generating a budget surplus—not, its authors say, as Republican ideology, but as a device for freeing money for investment in housing construction. The gloomy announcement at San Clemente was designed to send out two signals: (1) if Congress votes tax relief, it is making a policy decision that will affect other matters for some time to come; (2) please understand what we’re up against and stop criticizing us for “token programs. (HEW has done its own study, and concluded that under the rosiest and therefore most unlikely circumstances it could gain only another $4 to $5 billion to spend after Vietnam, an amount that would not go very far to meet all of the claims in schools and universities and medical services and curbing pollution.)
The Administration thereupon passed up one opportunity for affecting the future, by concurring in the politically attractive idea that the revenues raised by reforming the tax code should be spent on tax relief. It stood by while the House, for varying political reasons, voted tax relief that will cause a net loss to the Treasury. While the Administration’s proposals to the Senate lowered this amount somewhat in the short run and transferred some of the relief to corporations, the long range impact of this position has been estimated within the Administration to go as high as a revenue loss of Sio billion (about the same figure as the House-passed proposals it had obliquely warned about) by 1975It is reasonable to expect that the senators will be even more generous. That leaves doing the difficult work of revising existing senseless programs, and getting tough with the Pentagon.
After some back-and-forth, and with efforts to maintain its “law and order” credentials, the justice Department ended up with just about no position on the question of penalties for marijuana, leaving the issue to Congress. Fearing that it would look “soft,” the Justice Department earlier had rejected a proposal drafted in its own offices to lighten the sentence. Instead, it proposed, in a bill to clarify the various existing narcotics laws, that the existing penalty structure for marijuana be maintained: a minimum of two years and a maximum of ten in prison for the first offense of possessing marijuana, five to twenty years for the second: five to twenty years for the first offense of selling marijuana, and ten to forty years for the second. The decision was influenced by members of Congress whose opinion Justice valued, but after the bill was introduced and widely criticized, Justice officials decided they had listened to the wrong people. Therefore, when Attorney General John Mitchell testified before the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee, lie backed off, suggesting he was willing to negotiate with Congress. A Department spokesman says that they Mould be willing to accept no mandatory minimum imprisonment, and one-year maximum, for possession of any drug—heroin, LSD, marijuana, and so on—and no mandatory minimum, and up to five years’ maximum imprisonment for possession with intent to sell marijuana and LSD: slightly higher for heroin and cocaine. As even the head of the Bureau of Narcotics put it to Congress, “In order for any criminal penalty structure to be effective, it must be acceptable to the Courts, the prosecutors, and the public. It must represent a rational, credible approach to the problem.” Government health officials have said that the laws are out of proportion to the danger, and attacked the “fables” about marijuana and “scare techniques” to discourage its use.
Perhaps to offset this apparent retreat, the Department at the same time launched its “Operation Intercept,” a scheme to keep Mexican marijuana out of the United States. The result, said Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, would be to so drive up the price that kids would stop smoking it. The project appears to have sprung from the brow of the Pentagon: government agencies are fitted out with radar-equipped “pursuit-type” aircraft: the Coast Guard and Navy will allocate more ships and personnel for “surveillance” of ships; helicopters will be supplied to the Mexican government, and fields will be defoliated. “It is our considered, thoughtful conclusion” that marijuana is harmful,” said Kleindienst, “and in addition to that, it is illegal.”