Waiting for the Turk
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
Washington—It cannot be said how long before its approaching occupation the Washington of the Democrats really fell, since there is no way of locating precisely the moment when the war distracted Mr Johnson finally from his vision of a new and different America.
One veteran of the resultant civil strife among the bureaux defined the process thus set in motion : 'When the government agencies have money—as they did in 1965—all their con- tact is with the outside world, which is clamouring to get it. Then the money slows down and their only contact is with govern- ment, being a continual struggle to steal some other agency's money. Then you spend 95 per cent of your time eating if you're a big fish or trying to escape being eaten if you're a little one. That is how we lived in 1967. Then there is no money at all—and no fish left to forage— and you turn into yourself: you reorganise, you realign, you keep house. That is 1968.'
Washington is a city of internal exiles. The visitor leaves the sub-bureaux of Education— the paint commencing to peel, the secretaries tarrying in the corridors, the faint smell of failure like a slum school—and wanders to the Capitol to find Senator Eugene McCarthy standing in his office and noticing the decay of its paint too. He has always seemed like an internal exile; and never had he seemed quite so alone or quite so much in key with the rest of Washington.
His colleagues are uneasy in his company. 'They treat me like Lazarus,' he says. 'It doesn't say what happened to Lazarus. But I know he must have annoyed them, walking around not telling them what it was like where he had been. The time probably came when they wouldn't deal him into the poker game and, after a while, he just walked away.'
The revolutionary who disturbed the city and the Turk who will come soon to claim it are alike strangers; what has happened was very little their doing let alone their fault. Long be- fore its conquest by the outsider, it had dis- mantled itself.
Mr. Nixon began by appointing assistants of whom no one outside their immediate families had ever beard, and that was slightly disturbing; now he moves towards the anointment of per- sons quite familiar, and this is thoroughly alarming.
He seems to have offered the portfolio of defence to Senator Henry Jackson, a Demo- crat from the State of Washington. Senator Jackson has a passion for weaponry. No con- sequential member of the Senate has been so incensed by such pitiful efforts at arms control as have been indulged by various administra- tions during his long service in the Congress.
'You can't have enough security for Henry,' Senator McCarthy says. 'If be had his way, the sky would be black with supersonic planes, pre- ferably Boeings. But if they were Texas planes, he'd feel the same way; it wouldn't matter if there had never been a Boeing. He is just one of those people who are always saying, "If you only knew what I know"?
,Senator Jackson is, of course, a certified Democratic liberal in all other matters; and the reports that he had been tendered the i Defence nomination were at once glady accepted as evidence that Mr Nixon intends to manage with deference to the last twenty- five years of the acquired wisdom of govern- ment. For Mr Nixon has commenced making his appointments from within the club. Clubs are more important than Establishments; club members accept each other's eccentricities. ('Splendid liberal Jackson, although something of a bug on weapons.') What is disturbing about Mr Nixon is that, now that he has started picking members of the club, the quirk attracts him more than any other quality.
The operations of the club's prejudices are seen nowhere more usefully at work for Mr Nixon than in the general acclamation which greeted the appointment of Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard as his special assistant for national security. Mr Kissinger is an extra- ordinarily agreeable and serious man who carries pleasantly the authority of the expen- sive. There is about him, as there is about Senator Jackson, the gravitas Mr Nixon likes; the one eccentricity that upsets him in a man is an indulgence of the light tone.
Mr Kissinger is an eminently- clubbable man, which, along with his splendid abilities, helps explain those headlines in the New York Times ('Scholars Hail Nixon Choices') with which the President-elect can expect to be comforted more often in the future than seemed likely at his outset. Then, too, Mr Kissinger is in one of those businesses where a man can seem much more appetising than his competitors, there does seem to be a 'thank God it's Kis- singer and not some maniac from the Center for Strategic Studies' aspect of the salutation) that accompanied his appointment.
Senator Jackson declined the offer of De- fence, and Mr Nixon seems then to have turned to Republican Congressman Melvin Laird 01 Wisconsin, returning by this act to some of the mystery which surrounded his early appoint- ments. Congressman Laird is very much not member of the club, being a Republican whose rather chill intelligence has been exercised largely in partisan endeavours. He first attracted national notice as the rapporteur of Senator Goldwater's 1964 platform; after that disaster, he quickly dissolved every tie with its author and was even a pre-convention supporter of Governor Rockefeller this time. Thus he is highly pragmatic in his choices and hard handed in their pursuit. He has been until now almost as stern a critic as Senator Jackson of Mr Johnson's neglect of what they have con- ceived to be our necessities for defence; but his history suggests that his reasons were partisan while Jackson's were spiritual; despite his long sympathy with the discontents of the generals, one can imagine him turning against them in power if only because they are so expensive.. But we would have had Senator Jackson, If Senator Jackson had wished it; and we do have Mr Kissinger; and both are just the sort of persons a Democratic President might have appointed to positions of high policy. By the time this report is read we shall know the names of the new Cabinet. But if the appointment of Mr Kissinger, and the approach to Senator Jackson are any guide, President Nixon intends to govern within the spectrum of the accepted national political tradition. For reasons some puzzling to persons who have suffered through the past eight years of that tradition at work in our military affairs, this evidence 1.5 supposed to bring us comfort.
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