Washington Week In Review; 311

President Nixon's, as he'll ask for continued wage and price controls, one of the stories tonight on Washington Week in Review. Here is moderator Lincoln Furber. Good evening. The search for peace in Vietnam seemed to bog down this week. The word stalemate was being heard as Henry Kissinger flew home to report to the President and presumably to explore further the South Vietnamese position on who controls what after the shooting stops. The President announced some plans aimed at fighting inflation and a sharp conflict began shaping up between the legislative and executive branches over the impoundment

of appropriated funds. Here tonight to discuss these and other events of the past week, we have Neil McNeil, Chief Congressional correspondent for Time Magazine, Hobart Rowan, Financial Editor for the Washington Post, Charles Cordray, Military Affairs writer for the Baltimore Sun, and Peter Lissa Gore, Washington Bureau Chief for the Chicago Daily News. Peter, can you shed any light for us on the apparent delay in the ceasefire negotiations? Well, if it's light at the end of the tunnel you're talking about, link the answer is no. As the king of Siam might have said, it's all a puzzlement. We seem to be in the position now of negotiating with our Saigon ally what we're prepared to sign really with our Earth's-Wile Hanoi enemy. And the speculation, and his only speculation, is the President Nixon is confronted with the decision of whether he will go ahead and sign a separate agreement with the North Vietnamese, leaving Q in the position of having to go along whether he likes it or not.

And the opinion in this town is divided as to whether the President would do that. My own view is that he would find it very difficult to do for the reason that he is often talked of a peace with honor, and when he's talked of a peace with honor, he's meant not abandoning our Saigon allies. He's put an awful lot of eggs in the two baskets, so to speak. And I find it difficult to believe that he would go ahead and sign a separate peace agreement with the North Vietnamese. There are others, however, it must be said who do believe that he will. He may be forced to, if two continues to be as obstinate as he has been. So we really don't know very much about it, but today, Henry Kissinger has been going touching all the bases in this government. He is conferred with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even went over and talked to the Secretary of State, has had breakfast with this outgoing Secretary of Defense. He is consulted with the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Helms.

All this seems to point to the fact that some decision is in the works, the direction of that decision we really don't know much about, because in all my experience in Washington, this has got to be one of the tightest secrets held by very few men about the course we're taking. But at some point, it strikes me, the President will have to go before the American people and explain to them what's going on. On October 26th, Dr. Kissinger said that peace is at hand, we believe. Here we are many weeks later, and there is yet no peace. When that point will come, we don't know. Pete, can anybody conceive of what a separate agreement would look like? It would leave out all the political concessions that Hanoi has either made or has not made according to the controversy. But what would it look like? Well, that's a good question, Charlie, because we ought to keep in mind what we are about. We're trying to get a ceasefire so that we may withdraw completely. This one is shaken in this view when you hear that some 10,000 advisers may be sent to

South Vietnam to police, the situation, the aid that we're going to send to them to see that the Saigon regime stands in place. But I don't honestly know what it will look like, but in any case, it strikes me as that the political settlement is going to have to be made eventually among the Vietnamese themselves. If you just want to roll, as Kissinger played in his own terms, his actions have been astonished. How much authority does he have? How much freedom? He's acting almost as what we see as an alternate to the surrogate president. Well, is he that important or is he very important and there's no doubt he's playing a very critical role, but in my judgment, the president of the United States is still a matured Nixon, and he will take the credit or the blame for whatever happens, and I'm sure he is in fact calling most of the shots.

Now, he's given Kissinger a good deal of latitude. If things go wrong, I think Kissinger would be the first to realize that he is in place to be the Patsy. But I don't buy this business that Saigon has tried to perpetrate that there's a division between the president and Kissinger. I think he's operating under a mandate which he understands from the president. You said that peace with honor, the way Nixon is defined, it means doing something for two. Or at least not appearing to abandon him now. Okay. How long can the president go along in a situation where two is holding up the agreement? Can you visualize, for example, things rocking along for another, say, 60 days this way? Doesn't the president sometime come to a point where he has to say, okay, I let two go? No, I think that he may decide that that's what he has to do, but it will be so smudged over in such a way that it will look like, well, he won't sign it, but we're going to stay with him.

We're going to provide the aid we have promised. We're going to provide all of the other support we have promised. I don't think it will ever be quite that abrupt or that dramatic part because that isn't the way President Nixon works with allies, particularly. And with an ally that he has said is one of the four or five great politicians of the world. And he's made so many rhetorical commitments to the Saigon regime that I don't think he could do it abruptly. Can I turn you to domestic affairs? The president is still completing his team, new team for the second administration. There was some changes this week. Political diplomatic and the power structure of Agno, for example, Vice President Agno has lost some power together. Yeah. There's a new secretary to the ambassador to the UN. Yeah, all right. Let's just hold about that. Well, the Agno thing is interesting because during the campaign, the president often said that the Mr. Agno had done one of the most effective jobs as the head of this intergovernmental relations council. That means that he was the liaison man with governors and mayors and so on. And yesterday, or the day before, they took that role away from him.

And of course, in the fashion of these things, they said they did it because the Vice President recommended that it be done. It's been put in the domestic affairs council. The question to be asked is, what does this imply for the Vice President's political future? Contacting mayors and governors gives him a kind of broader political base for 1976 than not contacting Wood. So we don't know. It's a very curious change. Charlie, let's go back to the war for just a moment here. Can you say why President Chu is so reluctant to accept what is being negotiated? What are his objections? Well, I can give you a homely answer that I heard in rather high quarters today, Lincoln. That is, the two are still Americanized. Well, the rest of the war is being busily vietnamized. He's had years of expectation that he'd get what he asked for until the wind out of the war began.

So he's hanging in there and always trying to get more and to put off the ceasefire as long as he possibly can. And there's several things that are worth pointing out about all this. The first, of course, is a vietnamization still goes on. The American withdrawal continues. It is maintained that the vietnamization program is building a South Vietnamese armed force against a threat that's double approximately double the threat that actually exists within South Vietnam at the time. In other words, the enemy force is much less than it was in 1969. Secondly, too, it's been pointed out to some of us, is really taking quite a gamble with the American government because he fails to realize that the Congress may cut off his water if the President of the United States doesn't. This has been threatened time and time again in Congress, but it may loom larger this time. And so, finally, there are some people here who are very important to think that time

has come when the question of aid to General Chu should be raised rather forcibly, and that in due course, the country will have to say no to him. Charlie, you said that we continue our withdrawal, as I understand it, there is a 27,000 man figure now, and that that's remaining at that plateau until these negotiations are completed. What do you mean by you're continuing our withdrawal? I think that, I mean that the actual figure is under 27,000 and a few hundred net reduction results every week, and the force that's in there is really only there for negotiating purposes, say, for some advisors spread around the country, but it has no military influence. And I think the Americans in South Vietnam now are wholly there for the prisoner negotiation. Would the military subscribe to a separate agreement with Hanoi?

I don't know, I have, I sort of vacillate in my judgment of what the military feel now, but... Is that your own vacillation? That's like the military vacillation. No, I try sometimes to reflect myself, but the military endowed it, I'm asking. No, but I... I don't know. I don't know that. I think that, Charlie, that Neil B. Bart, that the military, one of our friends, found out quite some time ago that certain things were going to happen, one was that we weren't going to try to win the award, two was that we were going to try to get out, three that they were going to get smaller, four that there was the rest of the world out there and the focus was going to be on Europe and so on. So let's get this thing shaken out, let's get out of it and get on with our business, but do it in a decent way, and I think that's where it stands, so I think they would welcome any settlement. Charlie, you spoke of the problem. Maybe wrong.

You mentioned specifically aid to two. Why do we have to think of it in those terms? Why can't we think of it in terms of aid to South Vietnam or aid to Vietnamese people? Why do we have to... I think we should, and I think that in all these discussions that perhaps we should think in terms of the government in Saigon rather than a particular man, but I was just using a shorthand. Well, is he automatically out if an agreement is signed, or is he ever going to be featured in? I don't think so. Pete's got some interesting intelligence on two's chances, do you want to share it with folks? Well, you know, it's the optimistic view is, of course, you can hang in there, but a great many people in this town in rather important positions believe that two eventually is going to have to leave that's going to be the price of any kind of reconciliation in the South. Let's agree with that. So, yes, that certainly is the communist intention one way or another, and whether he can survive the political battles ahead.

Charlie, I'll ask you a question about Secretary Laird. I gather around town that he's pretty unhappy with his job and very anxious to get out counting the days and that he has turned down the national Republican chairmanship, for example. What can you tell about it in his own personal equation after four years there, and in terms of his political future, if any? That's a big one, isn't it? First, let me say, I don't know anything about the Republican national committee, thing you mentioned. Whether he's sick of his job is a little hard to judge. He said he'd stay four years. He thinks that's long enough for anybody to stay there, and he's right. That's a big thing to run for four years. His future, he says, he's not going into politics. You've known him longer than I have. It's hard to believe. He's going to take a three-month vacation, and if he comes back into politics, don't be surprised.

Question is where, and in what capacity? He himself is inclined to have doubts, I believe, about running for the Senate in Wisconsin, against Gaylord Nelson, or William Proxmeyer, and so I don't know what openings there are. But I cannot imagine him getting out of politics. In another defense department connection, Charlie, the Grumman company, I'd like to ask you about the implications of a company that refused us to build additional planes at the contracted price. They want more money for the plane, the F-14. Here there is a real big collision between a major contractor and the U.S. government, which has said, build us the next batch of fighter planes at the contracted price. They said they won't do it because the price is escalated, and it's not their fault. The escalation has been twice what was expected when the thing was negotiated. What it reveals very quickly, Link, is that the government, the defense department, is

quite sensitive to charges, complaints about overruns. It intends to hold Grumman to its contract. There's going to be a lot of back and forth between now and the time Congress gets back into harness. We'll have to go into it again another night. All right, let's stay on the subject of money and particular wage and price controls. The President said something about what he wanted this week in that area. Can you tell us about that? That's right, Link. He said he would ask Congress to extend the authority to control wages and prices past April 30th when it expires. When you consider it, it was about the only thing he could do because to pull the plug on wage and price controls now would have meant an acceleration of inflation at a time when the pressures are still there. So although he philosophically and ideologically, he's a free market man, he doesn't like controls, he's learned to live with them. And as a matter of fact, practically everybody else has two. Businessmen gripe about controls, but they're very happy with that five and a half percent wage guideline that holds down their pay increases for their employees.

The union leaders gripe about the hold down on wages, but in fact, wages have outstripped the price increases, so workers are doing better. And the public, of course, benefits from the hold down on inflation and they've been fewer strikes this year, so everybody gets along with the system. Now, of course, the longer you keep controls on, the more distortions you get. So the idea is to peel the thing away gradually, get to a kind of a system where you control the important things and let the Mickey Mouse stuff go, and that's probably what they'll do. They'll probably keep controls on for, I would say, a year, and then keep that club in the closet so they can always jump back into a situation and put stronger controls into effect when they're needed. And this is the very big difference between what Mr. Nixon is saying now, and he may remember his first press conference, when he said he wouldn't dare interfere with the wage and price-free enterprise system.

He's doing that, and he plans to continue it, and I imagine that we'll have some kind of controls in the background for a long time to come. Is what you're saying is that in your judgment, the wage-price controls have been pretty effective and have fulfilled the basic purpose? Well, I don't think there's any doubt about it. The level of prices is down about almost two points on the index from what it might have been. Is that a housewife vibe? Well, a housewife sees the price of food going up, and that's the part of it that's uncontrolled, and they're probably not going to be able to do anything about it. But if you go into stores to buy things, the level of prices is not up as much as it would have been without the controls. Unemployment isn't down. That's one reason why controls have to stay, because they haven't been able to solve the unemployment problem. It's down from where it was. It's down a little bit, but not very much. It's 5.2%. Well, getting close to 5 is against 6. Yeah, but it ought to be close at a 4 before you can really drop controls, because you have to keep pumping up the economy and try to create jobs, which is one area where they really

haven't succeeded. Bart, is there any good reason or any reason at all that food prices can't be held down through controls of some sort? I heard Donald Rumsfeld not two weeks ago saying, this is just an aberration, there's seven or eight percent increase in the housewife, so he's the rest of it's all under control. This just doesn't cut well. It's almost impossible to think of controlling food prices in any serious way unless you had a vast price control agency, and even then it might not be possible, because so much depends on the weather, the way the crops turn out, and food price control is something that nobody has ever figured out very well. They can control the marketing margins, they can control profits, they can hold down, processed foods a little bit, but as your wife knows, you can go into the fruit markets and the vegetable markets, it's going to depend on the season, and there's almost nothing you can do about it.

But isn't there a political element in that or was, because they wouldn't go at the farmers, they wouldn't really put any controls on the product at the farm level, it was after the first transaction, I don't really understand it, but they didn't really want to go at the farmers, did they? Well they know, if they want to let the farmers get high prices, and they want the people in the cities to have low prices, and if they ever solve that one, they're going to win lots of elections. I'd like to ask you about the budget, will the president keep the 1973 budget within the $250 billion that he has pledged to, and how much flim flamery are going to go on to make the 1974 budget look like a full employment budget? Well, one, he says he's going to keep the budget in that $250 billion within that scope, and I think he may be able to do better there than a lot of people thought just a few months ago, and as to flim flamery, I don't think he'll take second place to the Democrats. There's things he even handed to the Democrats, Charlie Schultz, who was director of the budget for the Democrats, used to say he'd be willing to sell the ground into the White

House if he could make a profit on it. There are all sorts of ways to fuzz up the budget, and I'm sure they will, but I do think that probably they can be tougher budget cutters than the Democrats thought, because they're going to be more ruthless. I really think they were. The president's got a job freeze on the federal level, no promotions, no hiring, and so on. Where else can they cut? Space, for example, this last flight to the moon, does that mean a major cut? Oh, no, I don't think most of that money is what it says. No, I think where they can cut, I think they can cut more on defense spending. Charlie probably won't let me get away with saying that, but I think there are some, there is some fat in the defense budget that could be trimmed away, and I think Richardson is probably going to make an effort to do it. Cap Weinberger and HEW will, if he can find any loose money that isn't committed that he doesn't have to spend, I'm sure he won't. I think all through the government, they'll be just tougher than they have been before and make a real effort anyway to hold down expenditures so that they don't have to go

into the tax business. The last thing they want to do is raise taxes. Can I go quickly to respond to the accusation level that I don't disagree, but I don't think it's possible to make a big reduction in the defense budget in only six months in a physical year. Oh, no, talking about that. No, well, of course, but I mean there are years ahead. And although all of the projections, which the talk of an ultimately necessary tax increase were based on years out there, we'll keep talking about money, Neil, and move over to you. Money is at the root of this possible confrontation between the Congress and the President upcoming. Can you tell us about that? Well, it is money, but it's more involved in that. It's a matter of constitutional prerogatives. What we've talked about this before in the program, back in the final days of the congressional session in October, the President vetoed the Water Pollution Control Act, which is a very large multi-billion dollar program.

And the Congress overwhelmingly passed that bill into law by overriding the veto with only a handful of congressmen, 35 and all, voting to sustain the veto. Since then, the President has impounded and now it's directed his officer in charge not to spend, not to distribute some six billion dollars of those funds. This is a new dimension on the concept of impounding funds. It's a new dimension in the concept of a sort of double presidential veto, a veto overriding of a veto. And it's causing great concern, not only in Congress, on Congress's prerogatives. Senator Musky, who's the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Air Pollution, the Water Pollution, made a speech this week calling this a pretty rough speech, called his presidential arrogance and demanding that the Congress stand up to its prerogatives under the Constitution, against this presidential invasion, as he called it.

And he is supporting a new element that's come into this, which is that these funds have been impounded, which means the places where they're supposed to go will not receive them. There are law cases coming from apparently a great variety of cities and states, and this week, New York City has sued the federal government, has sued William Recklehouse, the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, to get New York City's funds, and there's some 265 million alone in New York City, and it's holding up all their plans. This is fascinating. They're challenging the President's Act in directing Recklehouse to withhold these funds as unconstitutional as a violation of a law, in fact, on the books. So it raises all kinds of serious questions. Well, this is the seat. And it looks like it will end up before the Supreme Court in something that has never reached the court before. That's what I'm going to do.

There have been pounding funds. This is the first time a court case on impounding money. The Congress has always been unhappy about the President and impounding funds. The President usually is unhappy about impounding them because he makes Congress angry, but they've always sidestepped the confrontation. It looks like New York City, among others, is going to push this into the federal judiciary and you could get a very, very important decision. Well, what he's acquired in effect is a kind of an item veto, where he's never been able to get through. Well, this is the fascination that I've been looking back on the history of the veto. And in the early days of the veto of the Republic, the President's veto applied only. The President could assert it only if he claimed that the billing question was unconstitutional. He was pledged uphold the Constitution, therefore could not sign it. And Jackson was the first President to claim he had the right to veto a bill he didn't like as a matter of policy, expediency, whatever, not constitutional. That has moved along in where we are. The impounding of funds has a similar sort of veto effect, a new form of veto. It started way back that we mentioned the other night with Jefferson who didn't spend

some $50,000 at Congress appropriated for some gun boats and the grounds of gun boats weren't needed. That has grown to what it is now, which is, in effect, in those days an economy. So waste money to a frustration of congressional intent, a frustration of law. And everything you've said for many, many weeks on this program, Neil, the Congress continues to appear to be impotent. And just this week, Senator Humphrey says the Congress is out of state, out of step, out of date, and outmoded. And there has to be reforms if Congress is going to get with it at all, particularly if it's to challenge the growth of this executive power. Now, is there going to be any real reform in the Congress to permit it to deal with impounding of funds to permit it really to deal with anything? I don't think the question of impounding of funds is involved with reform. I think you mustn't get confused reform and reorganization and something else. Reform goes to the representative quality of the place.

Reorganization goes to its efficiency. I don't think either of these are basically involved. I think what's involved in the impounding of funds is a lack of congressional will, a lack of grit, a lack of the sense of the integrity of Congress as a political institution. Well, right quick, what could Congress do? It's depending on New York City to sue. What would Congress do to find out whether these are— No, no, there are proposals before Congress, Senator Irvin has one. And what's interesting to me on your question is that now it's building all through the Congress, not just Democrats but Republicans on this question of the integrity of Congress and of the congressional prerogatives and the climate is built that may end up in some basic changes soon. Thank you, Neil. Bart, thank you very much for joining us in one final item that may be of interest to this program's viewers. It was reported in Washington today that there is a possibility that Washington Weekend Review may not be funded again after June of this coming year. If those of you who had been part of our audience over the past six years would care to express

an opinion on the possibility of this program's going off the air, here is our address, which is, Impact, the National Public Affairs Center for Television, Post Office Box 28056 Central Station, Washington, D.C., 2005. We'll be back again next week with another Washington Weekend Review. I'm Lincoln Furber, good evening. This has been a production of Impact, the National Public Affairs Center for Television.

Thank you very much for joining us in one final item that may be of interest to this program's audience.