Washington goes to work
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington President Reagan has his well-publicised 'job hiring freeze' in force but there must have been one exception made. The White House staff have quietly hired a set designer.
Just as the Capitol was embellished and decorated for the Inauguration last week, some unseen hand transformed the back of the White House into a perfect stage set for the President to receive our manumitted diplomatic mission. The little show that was next put on was a jewel of its kind— the right amount of brassy fanfare, enough 'God bless America' to lump up the throat and another splendid delivery of an intelligently crafted speech which by turns jerked a tear, plucked a patriotic chord, flexed a muscle and moderated a bit of reason. Nancy wore green. The television and the newspapers have created an atmosphere of patriotic terror. A free press is not necessarily an individualistic press, or a press of diversified opinion, and our organs of public expression have been bugling but one ditty, as if , from a single brass trumpet: Don a yellow ribbon and shout your lungs out for the Red, White and Blue.
Nevertheless, enough already. We are choking on yellow ribbons and lachrymose , ejaculations by television announcers. Even the hostages, after 14 months in solitary, are beginning to have had it. As one of the returners put it with an eloquence greater than Ronald Reagan's 'We're alright, especially us marines, as soon as they let us get home an' get back to chasing women.'
One cannot say how involved in this great welling-up and gushing forth the general populace may be. We are all schooled and softly intimidated into exclaiming approved sentiments, but in more informal moments a few people, at least, can contemplate the returnees without gulping or clenching a fist. During the weeks of the Nixon resignation, to pick another occasion when the mass media worked itself up to a genuine, mouth-foaming shamanistic trance, the country as a whole stayed calm while its leaders got hysterical. So, this time, there may also be an indeterminate number who believe that locking up 52 government employees and smacking them around for a year or two may not be too high a price to pay for what the United States got out of Iran these past 30 years.
On the other hand, we know that propaganda pays. Even practiced doubters get washed off their feet and carried along in the flood when the tale of American impotence is repreated so long, so loud and so lavishly. The new Secretary of Defence, Caspar Weinberger, speaks without let up about 're-arming America' as though we are a bucolic nation of agriculturalists with nothing more ferocious in our possession than a matched pair of bullocks and a flintlock.
From the start the President is being less incendiary. In his inauguration address he invoked the sacred dead in Arlington National Cemetry: 'Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach. . . Aravia, Pork Chop Hill. And in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.' But then he added, 'The crisis we are facing today does not require of us the kind of sacrifice . . so many thousands . . were called upon to make.' That is considerably less bellicose than John Kennedy's inaugural with his declaration that Americans 'will go anywhere . . . pay any price.'
Nonetheless, as of now the administration has no plan, no strategy and apparently no interest in an arms limitation, much less a disarmament, agreement. President Reagan's spokesman —for the nonce we can abandon 'spokespersons', there being almost no highly placed women —are agreed that all government expenditures are to be tut, save social security (for current, though not future, pensioners) and the military. Not that this means the plan is to take the United States into the first available conflict. Ronald Reagan and his advisers, mindful of the inadequacies of our fire power, are walking carefully. The new Secretary of State has pulled back from Jimmy Carter's declaration that America's boundaries are to be found somewhere in the Gulf of Persia.
The situation, then, is anomalous: look one way, and you see the torch being applied to a great circle of patriotic bonfires; look the other and behold a judicious, not particularly visible, Reagan in the first few days of his administration, a Reagan who is quite obviously not rolling up his sleeves to pop someone on the swot.
In much the same way there are contradictory clues about the manner in which he is going to run his presidential office. We have the incident of the queenly Nancy Fancy announcing that the 50,000 dollars official White House allowance for the new family to redecorate is insufficient to take care of even a single room. On the other hand we learn that Mr Reagan has ordered. the portraits of Jefferson and Truman
booted into a shadowy corridor to be replaced in the Cabinet room by oils of Coolidge and Eisenhower. 'Many people have the erroneous impression that those two spent more time golfing and relaxing than being President,' Reagan says, 'they forget to look at the record of those years prosperity, peace and inflation.'
The word is that Reagan hopes to be able to take care of things the way those two worthies did by presiding over the govera ment in simplicity like a board chairman. This is what the Reagan people call 'Cabinet government: Any power a presi dent does not care to exercise his Cabinet officers or someone else will be delighted to take away and use. The Reaganisti, a number of whom do have the advantage of having suffered 'through the Nixon-Ford years, know by experience how easily a. Cabinet Secretary and his office can escape, never to be recaptured , The hope is that the White House will surround the Secretaries with deputies and assistants who will toe the Reagan line and make all those chaps in the Departments of Commerce and Interior, and everywhere else, do the same. The idea • is to keep the Cabinet members from being held hostage-, if you'll pardon the expression, by the permanent bureaucracies.
Changes in • the civil service laws, the credit for which must go to jimmy Carter, give this incoming president considerably more power to frighten, cow or castrate top-echelon snivel servants. Beyond that, he has, under the new legislation, more jobs in the higher part of the bureaucracy he can 'fill with his own people, if he can find his own people. The task of discovering five to ten thousand persons wilt') agree with you, are competent and matched to roughly the right job is enough to make even stout, Republican ideological hearts go patterpatter-pa use-plop.
At the same time, Reagan is . being Counselled to restore the whole panoply of the imperial presidency. Some people are asking for it because they believe a president's glory is our glory. All that saluting • and presenting of arms takes them back to the Sixties when we had real power, son. They remember Lyndon Johnson on the tarmac being guided by the marine captain Saying, 'This. is the way to your helicopter, sir,' and they remember Lyndon's arm arcing out in the direction of 100 or more Parked machines as he answered, 'All them helicopter are my helicopters.' • It is also possible that the golden mirror • n'eld just behind the President's head may blind Congress into submission. The look of Power may be confused with the possession "pf Power, particularly in the hands of a resident adept enough to finesse and never get his bluff called. , In a few weeks Reagan will have to send als first substantive economic proposals of ,rentisylvania Avenue to the Cave of Winds. 1.n the meantime, there is work enough ound Washington, We have to take down iose confounded yellow ribbons. They are • even tied to the trees.
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