Insecurity at the White House
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington
The Rhodesian elections didn't pass unnoticed. We were given extensive television coverage and extended debate over how to react to the results. Andrew Young, aPparently speaking for the administration,' says it doesn't matter how many people voted as long as there are still those other boys 'out thar' in the sagebrush with their repeat in rifles'.
Predictably, conservatives have agreed that the election was a bona fide job and sanctions should be lifted. Quite unpredictably, one major black figure has publicly agreed. He is Bayard Rustin. Rustin isn't as well known as Young, but he is a figure much respected among black leaders not only because Rustin's record as a fighter for black people goes back to the second world war, but also because he is generally conceded to have been the single cleverest tactician in the civil rights movement.
Rustin, who has ties to unions and the old-time left wing which Young doesn't, went to Rhodesia and saw the polling at first hand. He came back saying that, while the election was anything but immaculate, he had seen worse ones in the United States. He also stressed that it was an election, a real election, a means of political decision making — an exercise which he doubted the men with the AK-47s out in the bush would permit if they came to power. To the objection that the new constitution was heavily weighted against blacks, Rustin told Young and a national television audience that blacks fare better under the new Rhodesian constitution than they did under the American one as it was originally passed, without a Bill of Rights and with slavery. The difference between America in the late eighteenth century and contemporary Zimbabwe is that the tide of political equality is running much stronger now. Rustin believes that blacks will shortly be in control regardless.
It remains to be seen whether Rustin's stance will make it respectable for liberals to ask the administration to take another look. A few not-so-very-conservative peoPle have been mumbling that the election was as honest as, if not more so than, most held in Africa; and that opposition to gross Violations of human rights is one thing, but fine tuning the constitution of a complex racial-tribal state in the middle of Africa is another. Nevertheless, the prevailing opinion among liberals, and they're the ones vv. ho have governmental control over this issue, is that failure to support the guerrilla government-in-exile is to open not only Rhodesia/Zimbabwe but a number of sur rounding black states to anti-American agitation and communist penetration.
At the same time as this discussion has been taking place, what will surely be another long and harsh debate has been shaping up over SALT 2. For months now, the White House has been saying that the agreement with the Russians is all but complete. We're informed that something called 'encoding' is keeping the two parties apart. ('Encoding' means putting messages from test missiles in code which makes it impossible for the Americans to understand the data being recorded by the Russian engineers.) Whether these continual postponements of a firm and final agreement mean that the negotiating parties are too suspicious of each other to make a deal is impossible to say. President Carter may be stalling the Russians so as to produce the much promised announcement at a more propitious moment at home; indeed as mat ers stand now, ratification of the treaty by he Senate is unimaginable.
Nor has the resignation of Paul Warnke, the man who did most of the negotiating for Carter, helped the chances of its passage — as some thought it would. Warnke, a Washington lawyer in practice with this city's most famous fixer-dealer, Clark Clifford, has a reputation as a sincere advocate of arms limitation. Since Washington lawyers of the Clifford stripe have reputations as sincere advocates of nothing but the pursuit of self, Warnke stood out. Indeed, he was so visible that he had some difficulty in being confirmed by the Senate as Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Objections to the treaty from sceptical senators are twofold. The first is that no way exists of making sure the Russians aren't cheating, especially with the American electronic surveillance bases in Iran confiscated. The second is that the terms are too generous. On the other hand, the orthodox arms limitation people are saying that arms limits on both sides are so preposterously high as to be meaningless. The unwitting types, who go about proposing comprom ises in the face of logic and common sense, are suggesting one more big escalation in arms development and then the treaty.
Whether SALT is worthless or not, the President says he's going to fight for it. But the appearance of Carter as the cavalier of arms control coincides with the publication of apessimistic assessment of the President by Jim Fallows who was Carter's chief speech-writer until he resigned recently. While giving the Georgia man credit for a pure heart and a headful of good intentions, he writes in an affectionate and admiring way that his ex-boss doesn't know his mouth or any other orifice from a hole in the ground. His programmatic fuzziness, his failure to understand adminstrative politics, and a knowing and principled refusal to learn the way his office must work, have forced him to depend on many elements he originally campaigned to keep out of power — Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzeszinski and Joe Califano, the secretary of the department of Health Education and Welfare who had been a Lyndon Johnson staff man and then sat out the Nixon years working for Coca-Cola and lobbying for various oil companies.
Beyond that, Fallows says that Carter's tenacious refusal to learn how to tell the electorate what he is trying to do in clear and persuasive language has impaired his power. 'Carter's wilful ignorance could —to me — be explained only by a combination of arrogance, complacency, and — dread thought — insecurity at the core of his mind and soul. While Carter accepts challenges to his ideas, and is pleased to improve his mind, he stubbornly, complacently resists attempts to challenge his natural style . . . Those who are close enough to Carter to speak to him frankly either believe so totally in the rightness of his style, or are so convinced that it will never change, that they never bother to suggest that he spend his time differently, deal with people differently, think of his job in a different way.' This is all said with repeated assurances that Jimmy Carter is the good and conscien tious man he is taken to be. The second instalment to be published next month, is about those members of the White House staff whom Fellows doesn't think are quite so personally virtuous. If the godly Mr Carter is all those not-so-good adjectives, Washington waits to see what Fellows will say of some of the ungodly in his retinue. But you don't have to be an insider to note how ill-served the President is by some people —like his Congressional liaison man, Frank Moore. It was Moore who told Carter that he had to sign the atrocious tax Bill to preserve his relations with Congress. After the President announced he would do so, almost rupturing his relations with the electorate, Moore told him that a few phone calls to the Congressional leaders would have sufficed. If some important decisions are made in this absent-minded and vacuous way, the assumption here still is that at least on matters of war and peace like SALT the boys and girls must be giving it their full attention. I hope the assumption is correct.
Previous page
