Point of View

The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. Washington columnists are a small but influential group. It may be that no other comparable group wields as much influence in the formation of American public opinion. The columnists deal both in fact and opinion. Often they are the first to break news. But more often through statement of opinion they stir up controversy and stimulate political debate. National Educational Television, believing in expression of opinion, has asked nine nationally known columnists to appear on this program and to say what each wants to say, what each feels needs saying. National Educational Television presents point of view. Colin Evans brings 12 years of political reporting to the column he writes with his partner Robert Novak. Mr. Evans, personal friend of the late president Kennedy, expert on congress, and co-author of one of the fastest growing columns in the nation, has every reason to title his column

inside report. He knows politics, inside, and out. Mr. Roland Evans. The president has set their own style in the White House, both as head of the government and as head of their party. In his 14 months in the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson has already changed many things. But nothing so much it seems to me and nothing really so significant as his relations with the press. Mr. Johnson has, really he's revolutionized the absolutely vital intercourse between the president and the press by downgrading to use a very kind word, the presidential press conference. And so doing, he has significantly changed the view in the scene of the White House that are available to the American people. Now believe me, this is no complaint. This is no request for a special interest by a reporter myself to serve the self-interested the press.

I now, and I'm first to admit, the press occasionally likes to have a fringe benefit here there, a special concession. There is a special interest in many so-called press campaigns, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is a fundamental change that President Johnson has made in his relationship and in the president's relationship with the press, and it is not motivated by any special interest. It is motivated by the simple fact that a president's dealings with the press are absolutely central to the president's dealings with the country. And the reason for saying this is really quite simple. In Great Britain, that ancient repository of all so many of our democratic institutions and processes, the prime minister, the head of the government, is regularly a publicly question on the floor of the House of Commons by friends, by enemies, hostile questioning, questioning involving every aspect of life and of government in Great Britain. The president of the United States, however, heads only one of the three coordinate branches,

the executive branch. The other branches, the legislative branch and the judicial branch, has now a way to question to bring into public view any aspect of the president's handling of his job. The president's short, he can't be subjected to questioning by anybody in the government in the executive, legislative or judicial end of it. This is where the press comes in, because if it weren't for the press, the issues that are so important to the people of this country, on which the president has to make vital decisions every day, could not be and are not exposed in the full way, in the complete way they should be, without a presidential press conference. Really the press conference is the conduit. The pipeline is at were, between the president and the people. It is the forum that tests the president in a reflexes and that demonstrates his ability to talk on complicated subjects, some pick of you, some transcendent.

Only the press conference gives citizens an unadorned, unrehearsed view of their president. A planned, carefully edited presidential speech, given with invisible teleprompters, does no such thing. Nor does a televised group interview with two or three reporters. Nor does an appearance on the political stump. Only the presidential press conference offers that interspontaneous look at the president, that the people of this country deserve. Between November 1963, when he took office, and his inauguration last January 20th, President Johnson has had exactly eight press conferences, to which all or most members of the press could attend. That's to say, he's had only eight meetings with the press. With enough notice to make it possible for reporters to get there, before the press conference was over, to get there on time. All the rest of his press conferences, some 27 or 28, have been held with only a few moments

notice, and many of these have come on Saturdays, when reporters are about as scarce as Hens Tees, around the White House. Whose purpose is served by this curious, shying away from the press? Certainly not the press, certainly not the rest of the government, where officials not in close communion with the president, would benefit from a free interchange of views between the president and the press, certainly not the people. The only conceivable beneficiary is the president himself. But any benefit he may obtain from avoiding the press is strictly marginal when compared to the country's laws. The benefit that Mr. Johnson obviously thinks and hopes that he obtains from avoiding the press, frequent and regular press conferences, is the benefit of secrecy. Mr. Johnson has wrapped his inner thoughts and his true goals in secrecy. He learned as leader of the Senate, as the truest leader of the Senate really in this century,

that to tip his hand in advance was perhaps to lose a battle. And this is a perfectly accurate way of conducting the Senate. But now the president has carried this super sensitivity to the press into the White House. His relations with the press today are confined to frequent, but almost always off the record briefings with the White House press corps. And this insulates him from the run of the mill, reporter who works for a smaller newspaper and from so many of the reporters from abroad whose job is to interpret the president's views to their readers abroad. As a result, who can know what the president really thinks about Southeast Asia, about such abstruse plan as the multilateral nuclear force about the resurgence of German nationalism, for example? What Mr. Johnson really thinks about these things is filtered through a smothering blanket of official papers behind the convoluted appraisals of his assistance.

The American people can't find out what he really thinks in answer to a spontaneous question unrehearsed. Early in his administration after the tragedy of Dallas, it was only natural for Mr. Johnson to feel his way slowly and cautiously. Besides, as predecessor Mr. Kennedy could feel press conference questions with an incredibly death touch, and Mr. Johnson might have been perfectly understandably cautious that he might suffer by comparison. But that was 14 months ago. Today President Johnson would do the country in himself a great favor, I think, not to mention the press. If he started to hold systematic press conferences open to all the press, really the great society deserves no less. Henry J. Taylor comes well prepared to the job of columning. He has, over the years, been a foreign correspondent almost everywhere in the world, served as ambassador

to Switzerland for four years, and was a delegate to the disarmament a nuclear-controlled conference at Geneva. His column, distributed by United Features, appears in 160 newspapers, Mr. Henry J. Taylor. Well, it is an easy friend of his to make a living, and so I'm going to talk tonight about our money, and that part of our money, it's a large part that the government spends because the whole subject is so full of political malarkey. Not to begin with, the average American family is perhaps, you know, spends about a quarter of its income for food. And yet we pay more for taxes than we pay for our food and clothing combined. And every time we turn around, we hear the demand that the government still needs more money. They never get enough. Well, now, of course, to an extent, this is true, providing you're going to relate the amount of money that the government needs, but to what we need, that is to say to human

wants, human desires. And that's a very, very appealing thing, affects me the same as it does you. But the point is that we pay for every penny. And some place in here, this government of ours, having grown as vast as it is, has got to establish a priority of the needs for the money that we spend. Now better than 50 percent, of course, or just about 50 percent of our tax money goes to the defense department. As a matter of fact, the defense department gets and spends every year more than the net profits of all the corporations in the United States. Just as the commodity credit corporation in our farm program loses more money every year than General Motors makes.

Now this is a very old story. And when people ask me, as they frequently do, all right, how would you cut down on the government spending? I can only offer three prescriptions. In the first place, anybody who has moved around the city of Washington knows that the federal government operates like Noah's Ark. There are two of everybody. And little by little, they build their nests. And if you get enough bureaucrats and there are plenty, they'll always find something to do, and they'll always defend what they're doing. Now this problem doesn't originate with Mr. Johnson anymore, and it did with President Kennedy or President Eisenhower. It's a very old one. So I'm going back to an anecdote in respect to how we can cut these expenditures. Mr. Truman faced the same thing, but he was facing it particularly in our armed forces. And the Air Force and the Navy and the Army all insisted that they had to have every nickel

that they demanded for the security of the United States. Well, the last thing that fine Mr. Truman wanted to do would be to tamper with the security of the United States any more than you would arrive with. As a result, he became, by his own statement, just simply fed up with trying to find out how to get these big bureaus to operate efficiently and to stay within what the public could afford to pay. He couldn't do it. So he picked up the phone and he plucked the man out of New York, who by then was President of Columbia University, General Eisenhower. And he said to him, this ungeneralized Eisenhower's own statement to me, will you please come down here to Washington and give me a lift? And General Eisenhower was commissioned by the President, and he did leave Columbia University, came down here, checked in the Mayflower Hotel and stayed in Washington for

two weeks and met with all his old comrades, most of them men who owed their military position to his own recommendations of the past. And finally, at the end of two weeks, all he could do was look at those fine folks and say, now, so and so, and so and so and so. We've all spent our lives in the armed forces. You know, as well as I do, is that the average military man, me included, said General Eisenhower, would fortify Mars if he got a chance. You can't have this money and charge it to the American people. I can't tell you where to take it out of your appropriations, but I tell you what I'm going to do, you'll just have to cut 20% off the top and live with it. Went over to the White House, General President Truman supported him, and that was that. It simply gets unworkable.

The same things occurring right now in these appropriations, for example, that are being asked for many medical things. Take cancer research. President Johnson and many people are suggesting that the federal government appropriate very large sums of the people's money for cancer research. Now can you imagine anybody in the whole world that doesn't want to whip the problem of cancer? But the simple truth of the matter is that very, very large sums of money, very great institutions like the Sloan Kettering Foundation in New York, which is an immense concentration of brain power on this horrible subject, don't need money, not in this volume, but they need his brains, sometime there'll be a breakthrough, but the relationship between appropriations and achievement, the relationship between money and inflation, which is an offset to the human welfare, is very remote. You cannot just simply run the printing presses and print government bonds and float people

across their troubles. We must have a priority. Otherwise, we pay the same penalties that France paid, Germany paid, that Britain's paying now, when we're not able to pay as we go. And then when you realize that one single project, the moonshot, will cost $20 billion, and that we're going to be paying every penny for it, and that this is only far down the list in many of the other things that we're doing, all of which certainly have some merit, but you can't be all things to all people, and you cannot spend the people's money for all things that we would like to have and still say seldom. And what is folly in the family, namely going broke, is not wisdom in the kingdom. We want these things, we'll have to work and pay for them, but at least the government owes us a priority in the spending of the funds that you and I have to supply.

I don't see that priority, and I protest against it. Good night. Richard Stroud has been Washington correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor for 40 years. His knowledge of the people and ways of that city is strong qualification for his erudite articles in Harper's, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other journals of opinion. Mr. Richard Stroud. Man and boy I have watched Congress function for 45 years. There is more talk about reform in Congress now than there has been since World War II. In my considered judgment, such reform is desperately needed. It is not that Congress as ill-housed or underpaid, congressmen have just opened a brand of new, palatial office building, one of five on Capitol Hill. This one has a three level underground garage, fountains, two gymnasiums, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and cost 100 million dollars, making it the most costly office building

in the world. Congressmen are not badly paid. Last year they raised their own salary by one third to thirty thousand dollars a year. In addition to which they get generous fringe benefits. I do not begrudge Congress this pay, nor do I cobb at their free office space. For the most part, they are hardworking men and their professional life is exacting. But I do ask whether we do not deserve something better from our elected servants than what we are getting. The central challenge to the world today is speed. The revolutionary speed of political, military, scientific, and social change, but Congress has not met this challenge. It won rather insignificant matter. It still takes 40 minutes to call the intermodable role of the 435 members of the house. It could be done electronically in ten seconds. Some states and some foreign countries have introduced elected voting, but not Congress. Not long ago I sat in the Senate press gallery while a Russian astronaut was circling the

globe. My little earplug radio picked up continent after continent that he swept over. He did it in 90 minutes. Down on the floor, below me, the leisurely senator who was full of busting had not even got warmed up in that time. Another notorious phenomenon of Washington is the double standard of morality that Congress practices toward the executive branch of government and toward itself. For instance, Congress gelosely insists that there shall be no conflict of interest in the investments of members of the president's cabinet. Johnson's new secretary of commerce, John T. Conner, is an executive of the Merck Pharmaceutical Company. A Senate committee has made sure that he divested himself a stock in that company. In the same way, Congress required Charles E. Wilson to sell three and a half million dollars worth of General Motors stock before confirming him as Secretary of Defense. In 1961, it made Robert McNamara sell a million and a half dollars worth of Ford Motors stock.

Now this is all very well, but while Congress gelosely watches the executive branch, it applies no such stern discipline to itself. Nobody polices the policeman. The fact is, according to a survey by the Saturday evening post, practically all members of Congress make money on the side. In the new House of Representatives, there are 305 lawyers and many of them enjoy handsome incomes directly or indirectly from their law firm's activities. Many of which are with the government and many other congressmen own a control radio stations and watch the activities of the Federal Communications Commission like Angry Hawks. We should always remember what Dr. George Galloway wrote in his history of the House of Representatives. A telephone call from a senator or congressman can paralyze the will of a government executive and alter the course of national policy.

Often when Congress is challenged on ethical matters, it adopts a pompous and faraseical self-righteousness, it is very hard to bear. I am sure the great bulk of congressman or honorable man, in fact, the ethical standard is increased and measurably in 100 years. But one still remembers the Bobby Baker case and realizes that this official dissident majority party was the creature of a loose, back-scratching, favor-swapping environment where he grew up and operated. Senator Clark and some other members conscientiously report their financial interests and sources of income every year, but they are a lonely handful in the great bulk of congressmen. To be frank about it, Congress displays a shockingly low level of political morality when it comes to disciplining its members for junkets, payroll padding, and worse offenses. Do not forget that the chairman of a major house committee stayed out in New York City all during the recent adjournment period because he would have been arrested if he had entered

Manhattan for refusing to pay a $41,000 court judgment. The rest of the House membership is neither expelled, disciplined, nor even admonished this prominent member. The Congress of the United States is the only legislative body of the democratic world that I know of where a minority, sometimes a very small minority, can prevent action desired by the majority. The threat of this veto is often just as potent as the veto itself. Here are examples of what I mean. The chairman of the Powerful House Ways and Means Committee during 1963 and 1964 blocked the so-called Medicare bill, which is only now coming up the passage. A majority of one in the Powerful House Rules Committee prevented a federal aid to education bill from going to conference. Or take a third example, President Kennedy urged a tax cut bill in 1960 to meet a recession. Congress finally passed the tax cut all right, but not until two years later, after he was

assassinated, and after the recession was all over. It is true, of course, that in a nation as big and diverse as the United States a majority should not write roughshod over a minority, we must be careful about that. But surely there is some intermediate point of reform where action can be speeded up. Indeed, the new Congress has already voted in favor of some procedural reforms and is talking about more. Congress hasn't had a thorough overhaul of its rules for 20 years. Now Senator Mike Monroe and 46 other senators are sponsoring a resolution for a new study of Congressional reorganization, and a similar proposal is being offered in the House. Speaking as one observer and a warm friend of Congress, I believe that a comprehensive bipartisan study of legislative procedure and ethics is desperately needed. A majority of our Congress may not always be right, but it is better to take the chance of its being sometimes wrong than to suffer the dismay, demoralization, and despair that

comes from not being able to vote at all. Art Hoppy belongs to one of the rarest of all breeds, the humorous political columnist. Many try, he succeeds. Despite he appears on point of view not only as a commentator on the Washington scene, but as chairman of his newly formed organization, the League for Total Birth Control, Mr. Art Hoppy. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm sure you'll agree that my distinguished colleagues tonight have brilliantly outlined a number of the minor challenges we face, and have ably presented excellent solutions half-hearted though they may be. But none, I fear, is touched on the gravest threat of them all to human existence, the population explosion. As anyone who has read the exhaustive literature on this subject knows, the population explosion is bound to go off at any moment, boom, and will all die of suffocation. Consequently, many well-meaning do-gooders are advocating limiting the number of human beings in the world through birth control.

We've got to put a stop to people growing up poor and hungry, they say, and the way they do, in the way to do this, they say, is to keep them from being born. True, these limited measures have been enjoyed a limited success, and today, millions of unborn children owe a deep debt of gratitude to birth control devices. For, by not being born, they have unarguably escaped being poor, being hungry, or having to wait in line with the movies. But are these limited measures enough? No. Statistics irrefutably show the population is still ominously growing. Millions of more people are alive than ever before. This is terrible. They are ruining the world for the rest of us, and we were here first. A moment's thought will convince you, I'm sure, that at least 98.2% of the world's problems are caused directly or indirectly by people. Thus, by reducing the number of people, it's quite obvious we will reduce the number of our problems. This is the essence of all theories of population control, but our present half-hearted efforts, worthy though they may be, can never fully succeed, or they may perhaps reduce some of our problems, but they can never eliminate all of our problems.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why a little band of us selfless do-gooders have formed the league for total birth control. Our motto is, band the mom. We hope to see Mother's Day proclaimed an occasion of national mourning, and we can only pray that King Herod will be restored to his rightful place in history as a crusader for a better world. We are not, however, starry-eyed idealists. We are not calling for a unilateral cessation of gestation. But what we do say is a limited ban is not enough. What this world must have is a universal total birth control treaty, with adequate on-site inspection, of course, to prevent cheating. Think of the rewards the problems total birth control will eradicate. These include not only poverty and hunger, but traffic congestion, smog, the common coal, the balance of payments deficit, people who call you up at the last minute to invite you to parties, people who don't, agrarian reform, what to have for dinner, urban sprawl, unglued postage stamps, and post nasal drip.

Of course, we will not realize the benefits of total birth control overnight. A brave new world cannot be built in the day, but in five years our kindergartens will grow less crowded. In 16, the number of inexperienced new drivers on our highways will begin to diminish. And in 20, we will have licked once and for all a seemingly insoluble problem that is baffled man for centuries, teenagers. Eventually, as the years pass, we will be able to find ample parking spaces, empty tables and restaurants, and perhaps even tickets to Hello Dolly. Without a lot of people to bother them, our professional men will have more time to pursue their life's work. Our politicians will have more time to be loved. Our ministers more time for golf. And our doctors more time for politics. So be a selfless do-goodard. Do your part to make this a better world. Practice total birth control with grim dedication. Get out there and practice, practice, practice night and day. And remember, as all we advocates of any kind of birth control say, you are not doing this out of selfish motives.

You are generously doing this for the sake of the future. You are nobly sacrificing having children in order to save your progeny from all the problems and irritations of life that plague you and me. It's the least you can do for them. So let us march forward together, fellow do-gooders, under the brave banner of the league for total birth control. It says, think of the generations yet unborn. And let's keep them that way. Marguerite Higgins, one of the very few women to achieve the elite status of top-ranked Washington columnists, began her career during World War II. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Miss Higgins, has reported from Germany, Korea, Vietnam and Washington. Today, her column appears in News Day, The Washington Evening Star, The Chicago Daily News, and 60 other papers in the United States and abroad, Miss Marguerite Higgins. A disillusioned ally diplomat once in a bitter moment described American policy as friendly to the neutrals, neutral to the enemy, and hostile to its friends.

How sadly and truly that description of American policy fits United States actions in Vietnam, from which this reporter has just returned. It's not that America wants to play the enemy to its friends in Vietnam. As the months, years, coup d'etat, and crises go by, it becomes appallingly evident that the United States simply does not know who its friends are in that tormented country, or how to distinguish them from its foes. Incredible? Of course it's incredible. And that's what gives the situation in Vietnam its persistent nightmarish quality. We are in Vietnam, theoretically, to help the duly constituted authorities and the people combat the communist officers and enlisted men who have been sent south, and vastly increasing numbers, by Ho Chi Minh, to terrorize, infiltrate, trick, and bleed the Vietnamese nation into submission to the communist north.

There is one certain thing in otherwise uncertain Vietnam. It is certain that if the north would let the south alone, Vietnam would thrive and prosper and put Ho Chi Minh to shame, just as surely as West Berlin puts East Berlin to shame. But what did the United States do? In the fall of 1963, we went into the business of hiring and firing governments. We betrayed our mission, the war effort, because we were embarrassed and bamboozled into believing that the government of No Dinh Dinh was indulging in the evils of religious persecution. But there never was any religious persecution. The so-called Buddhist crisis was entirely political and madman factors at least in part in Hanoi and Peking. But alas, the United States was too ignorant, or too lacking in courage, to stand up for our L.I.D.M. and face the fact that we were actually the victims of a hoax, a hoax perpetrated by a tiny, militant, totally untypical group of ex-communists in Buddhist garb.

I know it's hard for Americans in our normal and safe country to believe that communists would play such dirty tricks as deliberately to use a religious cover for their deeds. I sometimes am tempted to say, yes, Virginia, in Vietnam, communists do play dirty tricks like that. In Vietnam, the communist tinge branch of the Buddhist, as distinguished from the vast majority of moderate, holy Buddhist men, is led by the monk Tic Tic Quang, Vietnam's ace government toppler. The full dimensions of America's mistake in falling for Tic Tic Quang is evident in a United Nations report of 1963. In this report, United Nations investigators describe an interview with the Buddhist monk. He was approached by one of Tic Tic Quang's suicide squads and asked to burn himself in

the fall of 1963. The suicide squads told him that one of his friends had been beaten to death by the police, the other horribly tortured, and left with a broken arm. As he put it in the dialogue that you can see in the United Nations report, he felt that he ought to do something to make up for this suffering and to help Buddhism, so he agreed to commit suicide. He was given his pill to kill the pain. He was also told to be two days later in the central square where the gasoline would be given to him. But in the intervening two days, as luck or perhaps Buddha would have it, the monk went through the streets of Saigon saying his goodbyes and found the Buddhist who was supposed to have died very much alive, just a few hours before he was himself to burn up. He met the second one who had been tortured and whose arm was perfectly healthy and who

would never look better in his life. But America's mistakes in falling for Tic Quang's tricks were then and right now, compounded by our insistence on instant democracy, instant democracy for an oriental nation, much of it not passed the Stone Age, and which has never experienced nationhood or even known peace. In 1963, it was the Americans who insisted that students and so-called Buddhists, etc. had the right to demonstrate and ride, even in the middle of a war. And so, Mobocracy came to the streets of Vietnam and is still there. Since Jim, the resulting chaos and confusion has plunged the outcome of the war into a grave doubt. So, should we give up? Of course not. The repercussions around the world should we break our word in Vietnam or horrendous, especially in exposed places like Berlin. Berlin would begin to fear the same.

And if it cost a lot 25 years ago to look away when fascist Japan huffed puffed and agressed, what would be the cost today if we looked the other way while an even more powerful and certainly more ambitious, red China did the same. But we must recognize our mistakes. We must recognize that no person can keep control of the chaotic situation in Vietnam without resorting to the same tight reign as Jim. Above all, we must recognize that we are fighting two wars, one against the yet-cong in the countryside and another against the rock-throwing, riot-staging, left-wing Buddhists in the Philippines. If the militant Buddhist leaders in Saigon are recognized as subversive conspirators instead of the spiritual characters they pretend to be, the problem of containing their power and rendering them harmless should not be insoluble. What is essential in Vietnam is that the power to overthrow governments, any government which they do not control, be

taken away from this handful of monks. If this is not done and soon, there will be no prospect but ever of any stable government in South Vietnam. If it is done, we can regain the road to victory. After all, we were on it in the summer of 1963. Drew Pearson follows in the muck-raking tradition of Lincoln Stephens and Ida Tarbel. His column published in 600 newspapers specializes in illuminating the closed-door councils of our government. Mr. Drew Pearson. During the third week of January, the Senate again resumed the investigation of Bobby Baker the one-time pageboy. About that same week another congressional committee let it be known that the Justice Department was suing the giant Hannah Nichol Company for allegedly dupping the government out of $1,800 by Aronius Bookkeeping in a conflict of interest. The Hannah Nichol Company is part of the

MA Hannah Empire long dominated by a former secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey. And one week before this, Senate Democrats had elected as their party who had whistle-long of Louisiana, who had freely admitted owning stock in an oil company with heavy holdings and offshore oil. At the same time, he was voting that this offshore oil be transferred from federal to state jurisdiction where his and other private companies could exploit it. His vote was a violation of Senate rule 11 and a conflict of interest. Thus there were three conflicts of interest known at about the same time. Yet they got entirely different treatment in the press. The Russell Long conflict was not mentioned by the newspapers at all nor by the senators. They knew about it, but they voted for him anyway. The Hannah Nichol conflict of interest was very important. Senator Symington and Missouri had previously criticized George Humphrey and pointed out that the contract was signed by Gilbert Humphrey just four days before his father entered the Eisenhower Cabinet. Congressman Charles Vanick of Cleveland

had described the contract as the most ingenious money-making device since the invention of the printing press. However, the latest development in this conflict of interest brought few headlines in the press. Now in contrast, the Bobby Baker investigation has brought continuing headlines over a long period. So the question is, what is the difference? In the Bobby Baker case, he was charged with giving a high-fi said worth about $700 to a senator who later became president. Well, that was about eight years ago. He was also charged with arranging for that senator to get insurance after his heart attack. That was ten years ago. He was also involved in influence of the defense contractor to switch from one company to another in placing vendor machines in his plant. This was not against the law. He also borrowed money to build a hope motel at Ocean City, Maryland and invited important people there for its opening, also not against the law. In fact, none of the headline facts regarding

Bobby Baker so far have shown that he violated any law. This does not mean that I'm condoning what he did. I'm not. My question is, why the press, the public and the senators were interested in his case and not in other cases involving more money and more important people? Now take another comparison. The high-fi said which Bobby Baker gave to Lyndon Johnson was presented in 1957. The insurance for his heart attack was negotiated right after 1955. I want to read a letter written in 1958 involving another president, Dwight D. Eisenhower and another conflict of interest. The letter is from Ikes Farm Manager, General Arthur Nevens, and reads as follows. The funds for the farm operation are getting low. We would each, we would ask each of you also to let me have your check in the usual amount of $2,500. The similar amount will also be transferred to the partnership account from

the W. Alton Jones funds. Now that letter was addressed to Billy Byers of Tata, Texas, the man well known in oil and to Georgie Allen, another oil man, while the Alton Jones referred to was the late head of city service. Now this letter I repeat was dated in 1958 after the 1957 high-fives that was given to Johnson. And after the 1955 insurance deal, the letter regarding the upkeep of the eyes now farman involved $7,500 in that one transfer of money alone. Well actually the money which the three oil men paid to subsidize the Gettysburg farm was estimated overall by internal revenue at more than half a million dollars. Internal revenue rule that the barns, the farm machinery, the expense of farm hands, salaries for farm managers were not, were gifts to Ike and not deductible expenses. These were gifts paid to a man who had reversed present Truman in regard to oil. Truman had upheld the Supreme Court regarding offshore oil and blocked various moves by Congress to turn

it over to the states for private exploitation. Eisenhower reversed Truman in what was called one of the biggest giveaways of federal oil lands in history. Yet very little of this has appeared in the press. And there's been no congressional investigation. General Carval of Delaware has repeatedly asked for an investigation. He has Senator John Williams of Delaware who instigated the Bobby Baker case while he didn't go into the Eisenhower farm gifts as well as the Johnson high-fives set. But Senator Williams did not move. In both cases presidents of the United States are involved. Yet there have been no headlines regarding one president and continued headlines regarding the other president. Again, I ask, why the difference in treatment? Well, you might reply that it's because Eisenhower is no longer in office while Johnson is. But the farm gifts were known when Ike was still present. Well, I think actually there are two reasons for this difference in news treatment. First,

the Republicans are much more vigorous in investigating Democrats than vice versa. Republican senators have been like bird dogs and trying to embarrass Johnson. Democratic senators were complacent about investigating Eisenhower. Second, and this is important. The press and television and most senators are cowardly when it comes to big corporations and big names. They pick on little guys, not big guys, and Bobby Baker is very small potatoes. He was a page boy from South Carolina who came up to Washington, did what he saw certain senators and big corporations doing and the small boy from the hometown got caught, not making good. However, the amounts involved in his case are peanuts compared with the Hannah Nickel contract while the high five said he gave Johnson his peanuts compared with the gifts three oil men gave to Eisenhower. In the latter, however, big corporations, powerful interests were involved. George Allen is director of 20 corporations. City Service is one of the major oil companies, and they carry weight. Bobby Baker, the page boy from Pickens

South Carolina doesn't. Well, I may appear cynical, but that's the way the mop frequently flops in Washington. Jules Fifer began by giving his cartoons away because no one would buy them. Today his cartoons are conversation pieces here and all through Western Europe. Mr. Fifer punctures human nature, and human nature is the same everywhere. Mr. Jules Fifer. The president's education program succeeds in side-stepping the church state conflict mainly because it has become an easy conflict to side-step. You see, it no longer really exists. The church, like other minority groups, has been assimilated. It is now a thoroughly Americanized institution, successful business-minded, socially-oriented, paying respect but

scant attention to its dead founder, whose picture still holds the place of honor on the conference room wall. Since God, in the view of most Americans, is to all intents and purposes, and naturalized citizen, there is little reason for conflict. Seen in this light, the church state issue is exposed as a red herring, designed to conceal the real conflict in our education system. It is not between church and state, it is between adult and child. The adult child conflict is a serious one, except for its more sensational aspects, such as dropouts and delinquency, it has been largely ignored. The president's decision to spend $1 billion educating children of the poor is belated recognition that the poor are finally waking up.

Any group that wakes up must be educated immediately in order that they may safely go back to sleep again. Our way of dealing with our children needs to be seen within the proper framework. Our proper framework in America is that past certain levels of tolerance, we don't like our children and they don't like us. To most kids, the grown-up is the enemy. The enemy's means of keeping kids under control is well within the tradition that enemies normally use the control captive populations, a combination of supervision and indoctrination. The supervision is called school. The indoctrination is called education. So, in effect, Mr. Johnson's $1 billion is being used to further America's war on children. While on one level, our schools

teach science, UMath, and language arts. On a more fundamental level, they teach with the indispensable aid of parents. How to play the game. How to tell a grown-up what he wants to hear whether the child believes it or not. How to never contradict a grown-up in the presence of other grown-ups. How to never study ahead of the class unless you want the teacher to think you are a show off. And how to generally, on all occasions, avoid letting grown-ups know what you are thinking. These are the unwritten Geneva conventions of childhood. The child's main weapon is a refusal to learn. If he is poor and therefore unsophisticated, he refuses to learn by playing hooky and when he's old enough, dropping out. If he's middle-class and therefore sophisticated, he refuses to learn by

pretending to learn. This results in alienation. One of the problems he will later pretend to learn about in college. By not learning in a quiet way, the middle-class child will gain the plaudits of his parents and the approval of the system. He may even be used later as a teacher. By not learning in an ostentatious way, the poor child gains first the annoyance of the system, then the guilt-ridden reaction to this annoyance followed by lots of money followed by more annoyance when the money doesn't work. If this prognosis is correct, Mr. Johnson's first billion will of necessity be followed by other billions in an attempt to salvage a program in which we will have invested too much to allow ourselves to pull out. In this way, our policy on education may be compared to our policy in the far

east. And the question is raised. Will American children be our next Vietnam? Arthur Croc and the New York Times have been inseparable for 38 years. For many of those years, he has been one of Washington's most distinguished commentators. Once a member of the Pulitzer Prize Award Board, Mr. Croc has himself won three Pulitzer prizes. Mr. Arthur Croc. The roots of the President's plight of the United States foreign policy were planted 18 years ago. It was in 1946 that President Truman told Congress, quote, I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by ominaries about outside pressures. The trouble with this was first that it substitutes a moralism for a practical national policy. Second, that the Truman doctrine has been distorted.

Its originators said it would be employed, quote, primarily in economic and financial aid and, quote, whereas its primary employment has been increasingly military. But principal responsibility for this distortion falls on President's Kennedy and Johnson, much less on President Truman and Eisenhower. Because of this distortion, the United States mounted the bloody and vindictive UN war against Chumby, the only pro-Western chief of the only viable economic state in that imaginary nation. It is responsible, too, for the fact that the State Department and the Pentagon are bogged down in Vietnam on the Asian mainland. The Truman doctrine was a full reversal of the traditional policy of non-involunt, except when danger to national security was clear and present. That danger had previously been defined as the eminence or condition of war involving the United States security, such

as President Kennedy's ultimatum to the USSR in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And President Truman's Berlin Air Lift, when the USSR cut off surface access to Berlin. Historically, these were held to be the only justifications for military involvement. But the Truman doctrine opened the way for the executive to add indirect and theoretical threats to those menacing national security. And this two presidents have done. Conversely, President Eisenhower refused to provide air or any other form of transport to UN military forces moving in war from Leopoldville against Chumby in Ketenga. As an obligation incurred by the Truman doctrine, again, though he approved the training of the anti-Castro Cubans for invasion of the island, he refused to give the go-ahead signal to them. President Kennedy gave that signal. But he followed it to follow through, leading to Ketenga, the fate of

the invasion of forces, which the United States has trained, equipped and financed. He also supplied the air transport to the Ketenga battlefield, which Eisenhower had refused, and involved our military much more deeply in Vietnam. Now we are up to our eyebrows in both situations and don't know how to get out. One of the most deplorable misapplications of the Truman doctrine was the United States' support of totally irresponsible demands by the General Assembly of the UN. The Kennedy Johnson administration required only that these be advanced in the name of anti-colonialism. Thus, our UN vote was cast for immediate independence of all African peoples, regardless of the clear lack of capacity for self-government of many. Our vote was cast for a call on Chumby by the Security Council to dismiss his quote missionaries, unquote, and give representation in his government to leaders of the rebel mercenaries who had committed outrages ranging from rape, arson, and murder to cannibalism,

in other words, to approve these crimes by inference and cast public order back into the jungles of the Congo. There are other instances of this hypocrisy. When Nehru sees Portugal's territory of Goa, the United States in effect condoned this flagrant charter violation by not appealing it to the General Assembly, win or lose, when President Saccano of Indonesia invoked military blackmail to force the Netherlands to hand him West Aryan, to which Indonesia has no scrap of historical or ethical claim, the United States applied economic, diplomatic, and other pressures which forced the Netherlands to evacuate its colony. Our zeal in helping to assure this disgraceful result was matched only by that of the UN officer swarmed to uphold the charter, the President, Secretary General, Uthant. A number of highly speculative theories have been invoked by our government as justifications of this sorry record. One is that a firm stand against Saccano or Chumby's communist

enemies would have brought about what they call a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. And now these confrontation jitters, this time respecting communist China, are paralyzing our choice between the only alternatives which could get us out of the bog in Vietnam. The latest news from Saigon suggests that though President Johnson has the same advisors on Vietnam that President Kennedy had and who talked him out of grasping either alternative, they're having less success with President Johnson. Among the consequences of our foreign policy are Burin United States libraries, SACC United States embassies, trampled and spat on American flags, anti-American mobs, and diversion of national resources made possible by our foreign aid as for instance in Egypt to nourish the violence which with the other hand we're trying to suppress.

Richard Roevere's tenure as author of the New Yorker magazine's Let Her From Washington follows a distinguished career as an editor of various journals of political commentary among them common sense and the nation. Book critic and author of several books on political affairs, Mr. Roevere was for many years US correspondent for the spectator of London. Mr. Richard Roevere, it is one thing to speak of a good or a great society as a hope. It is quite another to speak of it as an expectation that is as the certain fulfillment of a plan. For while it is possible to plan a society in the hope that it will be great, it is only with hindsight that greatness can be identified by their works you shall know them and who can judge our works until they have been accomplished. The necessary conditions for great society are something else and it seems to me that the conditions of greatness are what we are now talking about. In the 20th century it is required that a society care about

its members and there are measures of care. Infant mortality is one, the well-being of the age it is another, education is yet another, as is employment. Theodore Roosevelt, the first Republican president of this century, said flatly that the object of government, the prime object of government is welfare. If we can create the conditions of greatness, the chance exists that we may be a judge great if we fail to create the conditions even the possibility of greatness will elude us. About the present and coming enterprises of our national government, there are some large facts of history to be taken into account. One of them is the immense time lag in social legislation in this country in this century. Last year the civil rights bill and the tax cut were passed but these it should be recalled with the first important pieces of domestic legislation in almost

30 years. We have lived through more than a quarter century of great innovation and change in foreign policy but we have had a three decade moratorium on social legislation. Very little between the mid-30s and the mid-60s has been done, has been worthy of noting only I should judge the Tath Hartley Act which was a modification of the Wagner Act but not a very drastic one and certain expansions and amplifications and social security minimum wage and the like. Thus we shall, for a time, be doing work that should have been done some time ago, getting on as John Kennedy used to put it with our unfinished business, finishing it will not in itself make us great unless one is willing to ascribe contemporary greatness to all the western democracies that are far ahead of us in looking for the welfare of their citizens. But we can and I hope we will find ways of going beyond these essential adjustments and adaptations. For the time is rich in opportunities, some of which may

not recur. In the present state of our economy we can create worthwhile institutions with very little in the way of social or economic dislocation. We can afford social justice indeed by promoting it, we can even improve the lot of those who suffer no injustice. A war on poverty may be an expression of a nation's concern but it also happens in our present extraordinary situation to be a means toward economic growth. And our investments in education while essential for any society that feels itself crawled upon to honor the ideal of equal opportunity are also purchases of growth stock. As Walter Lutman has recently put it, we have moved from a time in which we thought the problem was a redistribution of wealth and required for its solution a reshuffling of the deck, a redeling of the deck, hence the square deal, the new deal, the fair deal, to a time in which we have an understanding of the dynamics of our growth and do not have to concern ourselves with a balance of social

losses against social gains. And now for the first time in decades we have a government free to exercise its reading of the public will. One reason for the lack of social legislation over the past 30 years was our absorption in war and diplomacy. But another was the political paralysis that set in in the late 30s and was a constant affliction until this year. The economic opportunities now are almost limitless. The political ones exist for the moment perhaps for this season, possibly for more. We cannot build a great civilization merely by seizing them. That is and always will be a matter for free and largely private enterprise, but a failure to season would foreclose great and early opportunities. If you have listened to the nine columnists and agreed with some of them, fine. If you

have disagreed so much the better, to bring such opinion to the American television audience has been the function of point of view.