Decline of pretence in Washington

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33740, 13 January 1975, Page 13

Decline of pretence in Washington

(By

JAMES RESTON,

of the "New York Times," through N.Z.P.A.)

W ASHINGTON.

At the beginning of the New Year, the most hopeful sign in Washington is the general decline of pretence. There are still a few windbags around pretending that everything will turn out rosy, but on the whole, the mood is serious, and there is a greater willingness to face the economic and political facts. This is a big change. No big promises now. No selfproclaimed saviours babbling about generations of peace and prosperity. Just a lot of ordinary guys in trouble, looking for a way out and asking fqr help. It’s not very heroic, but it’s a little nearer to reality.

Suddenly, all the big shots have been cut down to human size. The President doesn’t pretend he has all the answers. One day he is fighting inflation with Budget cuts and bigger taxes, but he changes with the facts and proposes tax cuts and a bigger deficit to fight the recession. and doesn’t grieve much over the switch.

Even the President’s wife,| who is expected by tradition to strike an adoring pose, treats her guy in public like any other fallible husband. Watching him on television the other day, she took him by the hand and laughed and told him he has “come a long, long, way.” Things are so bad now that even the Vice-President is given work to do. Unlike his predecessors, Mr Nelson Rockefeller is spending most of his time on the second floor of the executive office building across the street from the White House, making coffee for a stream of visitors. He hasn’t had time to move in to the new Vice-President’s house on Observatory Hill, to move his family to town or to organise his staff, but already he is deeply involved in domestic and foreign policy, not to mention the C.I.A. controversy, and is getting almost more assignments than he has time to handle. The mood is different on Capitol Hill. too. Freshmen members of the House of Representatives are supposed to slip quietly into town and tip their hats to the elders of the establishment. This year, the 75 new Democratic mem-

ibers arrived and demanded the right to question the Democratic chairmen of the committees, and their demand was granted. In the next few days they will also be questioning Dr Kissinger. The balance or power is shifting in the Congress. The authority of the autocratic chairmen of the committees is waning. The tragic collapse of Wilbur Mills is merely a symbol of a much wider dispersal of power. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee will no longer have a veto over tax policy. It will, for good or bad, be determined by a much larger and more liberal Ways and Means Committee. And even the leaders of the House, the Speaker, Mr Carl Albert of Oklahoma, and Mr Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts, are no longer as secure in their jobs as they were a year or so ago. In short, at the beginning of the New Year and the new Congress, there is an obvious reduction in personal , authority in both the legislative and executive branches of the Government, and this extends even to the authority of men like Dr Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of I State, and to institutions like the Central Intelligence!

Agency, which have been relatively free of Congressional control in the past. Now Dr Kissinger, who starts the year with a bad hack, is complaining, with some justification, that the Congress is not only performing its duty to set the broad lines of foreign policy, but is trying to dictate the day-to-day negotiations. And the C.I.A. is protesting that it cannot run a secret intelligence operation if all its secrets are subject to public disclosure.

So the new mood around the White House and the Congress raises some new question in both places, the procedures are more open and more liberal. The exercise and the trappings of personal authority have been stripped away. Hugh Sidey, of "Time” magazine, for example, notes that Mr Richard Nixon’s slid-l ing door in the Oval Office,: The secret entrance for' secret guests, has been re-1 moved and plastered over by Mr Ford. The 15 eagles and 307 battle streamers in the i Nixon Oval Office have disappeared, along with the I tape-recording system, and

the President of the United States is now available to I members of the Cabinet, the' Congress, and the press forj candid discussion of thej nation’s problems. AU this is to the good,! but the question now is how this new freedom will be| used. Nothing in recent I history has prepared Wash-, ington for the shared respon-1 sibility President Ford is now offering to the Cabinet,! the Congress, the press and' the people. They have all been complaining in recent . years that the President andi his staff were doing too much and were too remote,! and now they are complaining that President Ford is| doing too little, not being | decisive enough, not coming! up with a programme that! will solve all our problems in. a hurry. Washington doesn’t quite I know how to react to these new conditions. After the I dominant personalities and presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, the Cabinet members don’t quite know how to exercise their new authority. The Democratic Party is -split a dozen ways, with half a dozen of

its members in the Senate running for the Presidency, and it can’t quite agree on a party programme to deal with the nation’s problems. Even the press is slightly baffled by the President’s 'informal and disarming ways. He gives interviews whenever he likes. Some of them are on the record, some of | them are off the record, and ! usually he talks as frankly land casually as he did when •he had the boys in for a drink on Capitol Hill. i In the process, he exposes his problems and admits his dilemmas, uncertainties and (weaknesses. In other words, he is an honest man, limited |in many ways and looking for help, insisting that the | remedies lie not with him 'alone or even with the Government as a whole, but with the co-operation of the whole ; nation — business, labour, and all the rest.

In short — no pretence, and' the problem is that Washington hasn’t yet adjusted to a President whij [admits honestly that ht ' doesn’t have all the answerl