FROM - Charles A. Spears

TO - Letter to Editor - Dallas News

About your November 23rd editorial "Germans to Blame" praising the German monetary situation--? You want to equal the Germans in stopping inflation--balancing the budget, eliminating poverty, unemployment and illiteracy--having a favorable balance of trade--having the greatest annual economic gain?? Then follow the German precedent of spending only 4% of G. N. P. or 24% of federal budget on militarism.

Also, please consider that the Germans spend 22% of their federal budget on raising the level of the lowest 20% of their social structure. The U. S. A. has subsidized both Germany and Japan for 23 years now by spending 65% of our federal budget (1968) on militarism--so there are no slum ghettos in Germany.

The motivation for our delusion somehow escapes all reason and logic. How much longer do we play the "Super Power" game of the Pentagon and the "Man From Uncle" game of the C. I. A?? Remember 10% of Texans are illiterate and we stand 38th amongst the states in income per capita. And under the last year of Eisenhower we were 45th amongst the nations in economic gain. Is that what we want now ?

P. O. Box 430
Sherman, Texas

11-25-68

BACKGROUND FOR PERSONALIZED PACIFICISM
---
FRUSTRATING FACTS
---

1. Since 1914 (my year of birth) more people (over 100,000,000) have been slaughtered in the Game of War than in previous 500 years. Why?

2. Men and rats are the only mammals that kill their own kind--and rats only when they are starving. Do men enjoy any romance or adventure from war any longer?

3. Between sophisticated opponents, conventional weapons such as aircraft and ships on surface have been outmoded by Science since 1945.

4. Warfare of modern military mind now deals in slaughter of non-participants--women and children. Think about this!

5. Dresden Germany, February 13th, 1945, our unspeakable atrocity, slaughtering 135,000 non-military people in a designated non-military target in one night. Also Tarawa--Iwo Jima--Rapido River--those unnecessary murders of our youth. Who speaks for the dead?

6. We have dropped more bomb tonnage on <u>South Vietnam</u> than on all of Europe in Second World War. Does this indicate so-called <u>restraint</u>?

7. "We have to destroy them in order to save them"--from what? One-third of all South Vietnam children have been made orphans.

8. Military teaching--capitalism must have a survival war with communism, even though communism economically is an illogical anachronism of 1848. What is being planned now resembles the Catholic-Protestant slaughters of 16th century only on a massive scale.

9. Capitalism 1968--52% of all corporation profit goes to government--where are old 1914 cliches defining socialism and capitalism? Military spending is now 200% more than the after-tax net of all American corporations.

10. "The <u>truth</u> shall set you free"--U-2 flights; Bay of Pigs; Tonkin Gulf attack; Korean ship; (CIA operations all).

11. We have atomic weapons sufficient to destroy all life on this earth--enough to eliminate Russia six times. Now 70 billion more $ is planned for atomic warefare alone.

12. Our 1968 military spending exceed entire G.N.P. of 3rd nation on earth; our annual spending of 90 billion dollars in 30 months could increase for positive use U.S.A. total productive investment by 50%--or such an amount could double the industrial investment of two entire continents of South America and Africa in 36 months.

13. If our military spending were cut 50 billion dollars we would still be spending double 1968 Russian expenditure.
Nixon says he won't cut it? God help us!

14. From 1945 to 1955 we surrounded Russia with air bases and missiles--where are these investments now?

15. Now we have another GOOF program--(Korea-Tiawan-Vietnam) of surrounding China. With atomic submarines such air force waste is useless except profitwise to manufacturers.

16. Diplomacy world-wide is made useless by CIA "Man from Uncle" game. Three of our ambassadors have so testified recently.

17. So-called capitalism in southeast Asia is an equivalent of Mafia-Cosa Nostra. Owners of South Vietnam are dope-peddler crooked Chinest businessmen hated by the people.

18. Ho Chi Minh is the hero to the people of South Vietnam--nothing we do can change that fact--nor the fact that China is Vietnam's enemy for 1,000 years.

19. Hitler was put in power by a few collaborating businessmen and military men--racial prejudice was the modus operandi. Can demography happen here? Put a mustache on George Wallace and what have you got?

20. The amount of $ poured into propagandized people and their congressional representatives by military and manufacturers of their hardware--seem to insure that we will have at least one war each decade. It is necessary in order to warrant the continued debacle into the gross nationalism and inane militarism of Napoleonic origin. Nixon's campaign budget is 25 million dollars--from whence does it come?

21. Under the Super-power Game--undeclared war with forced enlistment is the poor boy's penance for which Justice would prefer death to come by lottery.

22. Do you know about the savage chemical and biological warfare being developed in U.S.A.? It is the ultimate of violence--vicious and inhumane. Any professional military planning mass murders of civilians under any flag is sadistic. Is our U.S.A. the only nation refusing to outlaw chemical weapons--78 others have signed?

Realizing that this is controversial to most people--on which points can you agree? American military hero David Monroe Shoup former Marine Corps Commandant indicates that gross militarism is projecting us toward ultimate catastrophe. Similar opposition comes from General James Gavin and General Matthew Ridgeway--but the public knows little of the truth--and heeds them not.

12/6/68

Letters to the Editor:

Dear God--save us from ourselves. The prosperous masses of our people in their con-
fused frustration unconcernedly cry out against economic assistance to the backward
rural massestrying to escape abject poverty in foreign lands. The income of our poorest
people is many times just the average of the nearest nation to the south--where one-half
of the people silently subsist under a form of military repression on less than $80.00 per
year per capita.

Our so-called "enlightened" proletariat will support under the name of National Defense
any expenditure suggested for potentializing mass genocide--until 65¢ of every federal $ goes
to militarism. Our U.S.A. by CIA determination is the only nation (amongst 78 signers)
refusing to abolish chemical and biological warfare that ultimate of savagery which can
more cheaply destroy literally, and perhaps secretly, millions of those desperate revolt-
ing people.

Our brainwashed congressmen are even more calloused than their electors--they swallow
the propaganda of the CIA-Pentagon professional military and those very few somewhat
greedy industrialists just as dear old General Ike said they would. But General James
M. Gavin, General Matthew B. Ridgeway and General Shoup former commandant of Marine
Corps have spoken out against our mad path toward destruction. Quote General Shoup,
"I believe that if we would keep our bloody fingers out of these nations so full of de-
pressed and exploited people, they will find a solution of their own.....And if unfortunately
their revolution must be of the violent type it is because the 'haves' refuse to share with
the 'have nots' by any peaceful method".

With six times more than enough atomic missiles to destroy all life in Russia--we now plan
to spend 70 billion dollars more on such useless hardware. And Richard Milhouse doesn't
believe we should sign the non-proliferation treaty. Great God--forgive us!

That "principal" candidate for president Richard Milhouse Nixon seems just now to speak in
silly platitudes and cliches like a spellbinding carnival Barker. His federal effort will be
"to encourage private enterprise"--as if that wasn't what has been done since 1930 on a
federal level with so-called "crop loans" to farmers, guaranteed mortgages and low in-
come rent subsidies for construction business, just as it has for decades subsidized the
oil industry with that 27-1/2% depletion allowance. And the great warrior Nixon says
he will not reduce military spending--his campaign funds therefore have exceeded all
records for all time--being over 25 million dollars.

Remember this dear heart--it wasn't sex or loose morals that destroyed the Romans but
rather their obsession with conquering "backward" nations done in the name of "national
defense". One of these backward nations Jerusalem--and historians and linguists know
that the two "brigands" that Christ was hung between were revolutionaries probably of the
Essene sect. About 2,000 years later the Roman military found it necessary to destroy
Jerusalem--don't you suppose that it was "in order to save it"?

Then in the 15th and 16th centuries another extraordinary delusion confused the mini-scale
minds of mento consume wealth and destroy lives--that insanity of Protestant-Catholic
religious warfare. Now in the last one-third of this 20th century Science has given us
two alternatives--the positive computerized potential of a surplus economy for the
first time in man's existence on this terrestrial ball--or the negative potential response
of destroying all life. That basically is why youth is in revolt against the so-called
establishment. Think and take a stand for reason. There is no economic problem
that cannot now be solved if we use our resources in a positive way.

Charles A. Spears
Box 430, Sherman, Texas

BANK Foad CHAIRMAN

10/14/68

The News' View
50 Years Ago

USE OF AIRSHIPS

It is now proved that men can fly pretty
much as they will. They can fly a hundred
miles or so without becoming wing-weary
and at a rate of speed that the auto can
not match. But the question that pesters a
utilitarian age is what are the airships
likely to be good for?

As a rich man's toy they seem to be
par excellence, more costly doubtless than
the auto and having perilous possibilities
at least as great. But what service do they
provide?

Every war board has made some requisitions for a few. For what? Not as engines of destruction. For although it might be possible when the elements are propitious to hover over an enemy in the dark and pelt him with lyddite bombs, a civilization that has forbidden the dum-dum bullet could hardly countenance the use of airships in such a way.

So far, airships can be regarded merely
as a toy of uncertain value and as an im-
plement of war of uncertain resource. One
with a fancy may prefigure the airship a
vehicle of Mercury. But even in that ca-
pacity it could serve as communication
only with communities which the railroad,
the trolley, the auto, the telegraph and the
telephone have not yet found out. And that
number of communities is very small in-
deed.—From Dallas News editorials of

Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey
President-Elect Richard M. Nixon
Mrs. Richard M. Nixon
Mr. Herbert Klein - Dir. of Information (Nixon)
Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson
Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman
Hon. Ramsey Clark, Attorney General
Hon. Clark Clifford
Mr. William C. Foster
Hon. Walt W. Rostow
Hon. Arthur M. Okun
Senator Joseph Clark
Senator John Sherman Cooper
Senator J. W. Fulbright
Senator Joe E. Gonzales
Senator Philip A. Hart
Senator Edward Kennedy
Senator Mike Mansfield
Senator Eugene McCarthy
Senator George McGovern
Senator Edmund S. Muskie
Senator Gaylord Nelson
Senator Charles Percy
Senator William Proxmire
Senator Abraham Ribicoff
Senator Ralph Yarborough
Honorable Carl Albert
Honorable Henry B. Gonzales
Honorable Wilbur Mills
Honorable Dean Rusk
Mr. George Champion, Chairman Board
Federal Reserve Board
Mr. Gabriel Hauge, President
Sherman F. Maisel
Mr. Robert McNamara, President
Mr. David Rockefeller, President
Wm. W. Serrill
Kermit Gordon
Dr. Walter Heller
Mr. Raymond Judd, Minister
Mr. Herman Kahn
Carl Kaysen
Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
Dr. Paul W. McCracken
Dr. John Moseley
Mr. Harry Ransom, Chancellor
Dr. David Reagan
Edwin O. Reischauer
Dr. Paul Samuelson
Mr. Allen Smith
Dr. Cruce Stark
Herbert Stein
Dr. Kenneth Street
Dr. Daniel B. Suits
Mr. Willis Tate, Sr.
Mr. Tifflin, Economist
Dr. James Tobin
Ford Foundation
Stewart Alsop
Mr. Al Altwegg
Atlanta Constitution
Chicago Tribune
Cleveland Plain Reader
John Cobbs, Editor
Walter Cronkite
Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby
Daily Texan Editor
Detroit Free Press
Mr. Henry Grunwald, Mgr. Editor
Kansas City Star
Kenneth Kramer
Walter Lippman
Los Angeles Times
Louisville Times
Miami Herald
Nashville Tennessean
Pittsburgh Press
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Mr. James Reston, Editor
St. Louis Post Dispatch

San Francisco Examiner
Mr. Eric Severide
Washington Daily News
Rev. Frank Alverson
Rev. Richard Braum
Rev. George Fee
Rev. J. Thomas Graves
Rabbi Levi Olan
Rev. Archbold Tolbert
John R. Beckett
James Doss
Mr. Elliott Janeway
Mr. Sol Price
Mr. Henry B. Quick
Mr. J. William Russell, Jr.
Mr. Thomas J. Watson, Chairman Board

PLAYBOY

August 11, 1971

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

It is our pleasure to send you "Who Runs The Government" which appears in the September 1971 issue of PLAYBOY Magazine. Robert Semple, The New York Times White House correspondent, makes a number of disturbing observations on the subject of who exactly is holding the reins of government. Mr. Semple thinks that the President has less of his supposed power over appointments to government posts, and "that nearly one-third of these posts are already occupied by holdovers with status acquired through good service and seniority" and that they are virtually impossible to remove.

If you should care to comment on this article, the Editors of PLAYBOY would be pleased to accept your letter, for publication or not, as you desire.

A. C. Spectorsky
Editorial Director

ACS:mdr

Encl.

RECEIVED

AUG 27 1971

CENTRAL FILES

THE PLAYBOY BUILDING • 919 N. MICHIGAN AVE. • CHICAGO 60611

Broadway in April 1967—and closed after seven performances. A few days later, Feiffer wrote a typical letter to a friend: "The Boston critics who didn't understand it understood it better than the New York critics, who totally withdrew from it, followed immediately thereafter by the audience. But my dismay has been replaced by hostility, so I am back to normal." The play later reopened for a successful run off-Broadway and last year was made into a movie starring Elliott Gould and Alan Arkin and directed by Arkin. Some of the critics still found Feiffer's bleak message intolerable, but the crowds went along, at least in sufficient numbers to make the film a box-office success. "No [other] stage writer has gone deeper into the paradoxes of middle-class America," wrote one sympathetic reviewer. "Despite the fact that he must suffer arrogant dismissals [by some], he has added significantly to the debate of the nation's destiny."

More recently, Feiffer wrote the original screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge," starring Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen and directed by Mike Nichols, about whose talents Feiffer is rhapsodic: "If I never work with a different director, I'll be happy." The movie, which seems destined to be one of the most controversial—and successful—of the year (see our review on page 40), traces the lives of two men, Jonathan and Sandy, from their college friendship through middle age, graphically chronicling their failed relationships with women along the way. To explore Feiffer's vision of himself and the society he satirizes on film, stage and the printed page, PLAYBOY assigned free-lance writer Larry DuBois to interview him. DuBois says of his subject:

"There's always a tendency to feel on edge the first time you meet someone whose wit can be as sharp as Feiffer's. It's OK reading about yourself in Feiffer's cartoons, but what if he demolishes you in his living room? The feeling vanishes quickly. He greets you in slippers, a baggy old pair of slacks and a sweater that you know he's lived in for most of his life, and he's a pleasant, casual host who invites you into the kitchen to make your own instant coffee before you start the interview.

"Feiffer lives in one of those big, old co-op apartments on New York's Upper West Side, where he hangs around with the neighborhood intellectual-literary set that provides so much material for Spiro Agnew's speeches about the effete Eastern establishment—and, of course, for his own work. His apartment is spacious and cheery, decorated with art prints from the satirical masters of the past couple of centuries, and the hallway from the front door is practically overwhelmed by one of Feiffer's favorite treasures—a three-foot papier-mâché caricature of Lyndon Johnson. He works in an over-

sized den, littered with posters from 'Little Murders,' old sketches, new sketches, papers and books. It was there that we began the interview, which went on for an entire week, with Feiffer sprawling each afternoon in his easy chair punctually at two and not moving until five, at which time he would announce that he was exhausted.

"He talks the way he writes—not so much with one-liners as by hitting upon a thought, slowly expanding it frame by frame until he has stretched the logic to the point where it snaps. A verbal cartoon strip. We both laughed a lot, and even when Feiffer's words were most devastating, his manner made them somehow impish and unmalicious. In many ways, Feiffer is refreshingly unlike your ordinary celebrity. His idea of a big time is to watch whatever old film he can find on television; the week I was visiting, he was particularly impressed by the original version of 'Dracula.' He doesn't travel if he can avoid it. He is terrified by the thought of appearing on a television talk show. He does make his share of cocktail parties, but preferably as close to home as possible and with people he already knows—partly, I would guess, because he's shy, but also partly because he's such a hard worker. I began by asking him about his decision a few years ago to extend that work beyond cartooning."

**PLAYBOY:** You had it made a few years ago with your cartoon strip. Why did you decide to risk your reputation to get into writing plays and movies?

**FEIFFER:** The two conscious reasons I had for branching out from the cartoon were that, first, the audience for the cartoon wasn't big enough and, second, the cartoon was becoming so widely accepted that I figured I must be getting misunderstood, so I decided to move into forms in which I could be better understood and thereby narrow my audience. Don't ask me to explain that.

**PLAYBOY:** We doubt if you could. In any case, the audience for your latest movie, *Carnal Knowledge*, is likely to be very large, indeed—at least in part because of its no-holds-barred commentary on American sexual relationships. Would you have been as candid if you had written it five years ago?

**FEIFFER:** I wouldn't even have tried. *Carnal Knowledge* never could have been made before the sexual and language barriers were dropped in films. But in the past three or four years—I suppose it began with *The Graduate*—there's been this sudden opening up in movies, and it's a very exciting thing. Most of the newer films have been as unserious and cliché-ridden as the old Hollywood, but still, it's opened up areas for people like me to get involved in.

**PLAYBOY:** How do you feel about argu-

ments that the freedom to deal with sex on the screen and in the bookstores has gone too far, that we're paying too high an aesthetic price for that freedom to those who abuse it?

**FEIFFER:** That's a good PLAYBOY question, but it doesn't interest me very much. I always mean to go to porno movies and always somehow forget. It's one of those things that I may enjoy terrifically once I'm there but that I never remember exist when I'm not there. Anyway, the whole issue has nothing to do with aesthetics. It has to do with censorship. I remember when they were talking about how comic books lead people into violence. Now they're talking about how dirty books and movies lead people into sex. They've come up with the domino theory of pornography. Now it's in the bookstores, the theaters and movies, and if we don't stop it there, soon it will be in the bedroom. Even if the argument worked, the fact that there might be .0002 percent of nuts who would be galvanized into unbridled masturbation, sodomy and rape by going into a 42nd Street bookstore and reading *Lesbos in Leather*, or by going to some horny flick, still isn't a convincing argument for censorship.

Finally, one has to make choices. That's what a democratic society is all about. To make a choice in favor of what amounts to a rape of the mind in the guise of morality is a very dangerous choice, indeed, and one I can't imagine agreeing to. Anyway, the lesson of Denmark seems to be proven here. Hollywood is discovering that "X" movies aren't such a boon. If all you've got going for you is raunchy sex—which does have a certain charm about it—people are going to get tired of it after the first lavish indulgence, just the way it happens in domestic relations, beginning with, "Oh, boy, I'm getting laid tonight," and progressing to, "Oh, my God, I have to get laid tonight," and ending up, "Not tonight, honey, I'm tired." I tried to capture some sense of that attitude in *Carnal Knowledge*—the very mixed attitude men develop over a period of years in their relations with women. If there were any censorship, and the sex were cut out, or the language compromised, it wouldn't be the work I wanted it to be or make the point I wanted it to make.

**PLAYBOY:** What was the point you wanted to make in *Carnal Knowledge*?

**FEIFFER:** There's a speech in an early draft of the script that I cut out because it seemed too on the nose and because I'd rather have audiences figure it out for themselves than say it for them. But let me read it to you. In his 40s, Jonathan says to a young woman, "Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you

is that' nothing's changed. You think
boys grow out of not liking girls, but we
don't grow out of it. We just grow
horny. That's the problem. We mix up
liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me,
one couldn't have less to do with the
other."

PLAYBOY: How do you explain that attitude?

FEIFFER: It's a result of the society that the Jonathans were born into and the mythology they were reared in from birth, which geared them to think in certain ways about themselves as men and about their relationships with women. They were trained to think about women as conveniences, receptacles, appendages and adjuncts, but never to think of them in the same terms in which they think of their buddies. I think it was—and still is—true of both sexes that there is first a sense of relating to sex in a social way rather than a sexual way. It has to do with rivalry and envy, with competition with the other fellows, more than it has to do with women.

There's a cartoon I did about this many years ago in **PLAYBOY** that's still one of my favorites. There's this guy who says to his friend, "I've quit going out," and his friend asks him what's bothering him. The guy describes what happened the night before. He's sitting home alone, the telephone rings and this great sexy voice says that he doesn't know her, but she's a friend of a friend, she just landed at the airport, and she doesn't know anybody in town, and can she come over and see him. He knows she's going to be awful-looking, but she shows up an hour later and she's the greatest-looking girl he's ever met, with the most extraordinary body he's ever seen. They sit and they drink and they talk for hours. She's got the most fascinating mind he's ever known and they've read the same books and they like the same music. They just fit together like nothing else that's ever happened to him. They come together in the most gentle way and they make the most perfect love. It's the best, the most exciting, the most wonderful moment he's ever experienced in all his life, and he says to his friend, "All through this, do you know what I was thinking?" His friend asks, "What? What?" And he answers, "Wait'll I tell the fellas."

The first thing a kid comes to understand about sex is, "Well, it's something guys and girls do with each other—exactly what, I don't know, but it's supposed to be terrific, and the guys who have done it are the guys who seem to be the block leaders, and they look a different way, and they act a different way, and everybody says that's terrific, so I guess I want to do that, too, whatever it is." Jonathan's friend Sandy has a line in the movie that I love. When he's a

freshman, he says, "I feel' the same way
about getting laid as I feel about going
to college. I'm being pressured into it."

PLAYBOY: Is that the way you felt when
you were a freshman?

FEIFFER: I was exceptional; Sandy and Jonathan were way ahead of me. I didn't even know about sex. When I was in high school, I was much less interested in getting laid than in getting out. I had a 24-hour-a-day hard-on, but I never quite connected it with sex. I was terribly retarded in that area and never, ever, knew what to do with this thing in my pocket and never, ever, dreamed it could be used with girls, or how you were supposed to use it. A fascination with breasts was the closest I came. To me, sex was something you had with a woman's breast. I didn't know there was anything else. I was so unpracticed in the dark, scary world of carnality that I didn't even know you could go blind, I didn't know you could get warts and pimples or that it would fall off. I didn't even know the folklore.

PLAYBOY: When did you find out?

FEIFFER: About a week ago.

PLAYBOY: We deserved that. Don't you think most men grow out of most of those childhood attitudes about sex?

FEIFFER: Not necessarily. And in many
cases, it may be the other way around. It
seems to me that when you're dealing in
human relations, the problem is con-
tinually relearning what you've always
seemed to know and always seem to be
forgetting. It's one of the things you
find in psychoanalysis, and in writing,
when you've got to dig up ancient in-
sights about what it was to be 16, 17 or
18. When I was writing *Carnal Knowl-
edge*, I kept rediscovering things that I
used to know but that I didn't remem-
ber anymore. I guess what I really dis-
covered is that the only thing separating
me from that 17-year-old kid that I was
is that I live in a different set of circum-
stances now. But if some miracle put me
back in high school, I don't think I'd do
a hell of a lot better now than I did
then. If I were single again tomorrow
and taking out a girl on the first date, it
wouldn't be worldly, sophisticated, 42-
year-old Jules Feiffer. It would be some
17-year-old schmuck wearing that as a
disguise and still worried about whether
or not he was going to get laid. Or a
cheap feel. Or even a French kiss. Sandy
and Jonathan have the same problem in
the movie.

PLAYBOY: Hasn't the sexual revolution
helped liberate men from many of these
hang-ups?

FEIFFER: Sure, but it's created tensions of its own. The sexual revolution related mainly to men and not to women. The women's lib movement, with all its nuttiness and perversity, is much more important than the sexual revolution, because what it will basically do over a

period of years is make both men and
women stop dealing with each other as
objects. At this point, women are treat-
ing men as objects—in this case, the
object is “pig”—and much movement
writing is just about as foolish as it
makes men out to be. But that will wear
itself out, and what will come out of it
is people looking at each other as indi-
viduals and coming to terms with each
other as individuals. They'll either make
it or they won't, but it'll be on a more
realistic basis and have less to do with
role playing and mythmaking.

PLAYBOY: Haven't young people already
made progress in that direction?

FEIFFER: Superficially, it's a lot easier for kids today to be open and available with each other about sex. I suspect, however, that no matter how early they start on sexual experience, or how much of it they have, they may not be as truly far into understanding it as they think. It's like anything else that's serious: Once you think you've got it down, it gets away from you or reverses field. Look at the communal ideal that appeals to many of them. It's been tried before, and in Western society, at least, it's continually broken down. One thing is very clear: The family situation is basically unsatisfactory and people have forever tried to find replacements for it. The replacements, like the communes, though, are simply finding a substitute family to replace the original family and falling into many of the same patterns that one disliked in the original family. But I really can't talk any more than this about what kids are like now, because I don't know them. I'd have to make all sorts of projections that would end up sounding Max Lernerish. The kids I talk to are always such a combination of incredible sophistication and incredible innocence. They seem to be born with a knowingness about things I still don't know and yet, with it all, an enormous dumbness, a willingness to accept without questioning all the random assumptions of their group, however weird—to accept, as readily as kids in the past, whatever mythology their crowd puts out.

PLAYBOY: Like?

FEIFFER: Christ, I'm lousy at examples—but, well. I find the whole marijuana discussion a pain in the ass. The kids are using grass as a mystical tool, as though it were something more than just a cigarette that gives you a good feeling. What turns me bitter is the cliquishness and snobbery of grass users, the need to find ethical, ideological and political reasons to support something they use because they like to get stoned. I distrust anything that's given a tribal value.

PLAYBOY: Have you smoked grass yourself?

FEIFFER: I've had grass and all it does is
depress me and sometimes make me

walk into closed doors. That doesn't mean I think it shouldn't be legal. Everything else that depresses me is legal, why not grass? But here are all these kids going around putting down booze and mysticizing grass. Well, I still cling to booze. I don't make much noise about it; I'm not mystical about it. I just like to drink it. It tastes good; it makes me feel better; sometimes it gives me ideas for cartoons; and it allows me to survive dozens of parties till four in the morning when ordinarily I'd be home at 11:30. Now, I know, and everyone else who drinks knows, that we drink out of weakness, out of a basic character defect. We're all a little apologetic when we overdo it. But users of grass are like people who live in San Francisco. They so overboost it you begin to wonder what their true feelings are.

**PLAYBOY:** By campus standards, you sound almost reactionary.

**FEIFFER:** In my life style, I'm strictly a conservative; I can't be moved from point A to point B without a subpoena. Obviously, I share much of the kids' criticism of society today, but that doesn't say much. So does Nixon. They and I are really living in different cultures. Mine is corrupt and theirs is getting there. But we're both comfortable. Sometimes I'm in with them, sometimes I'm not.

**PLAYBOY:** Is that why you stopped speaking on the college lecture circuit about three years ago?

**FEIFFER:** I had a regular "This Is What I Think" speech that I used to give at colleges-until the colleges started giving it back, and one kid at Columbia told me, "I agreed with some of what you said, and I disagreed with some of what you said, and I have the feeling that in ten years you're going to be Al Capp and we'll have to put you up against the wall." So I decided, who needs this? and I quit speaking at colleges. But I've started up again in the past six months, and it seems to be opening up again. You get a sense of thought once more invading the thought process.

I think one of the things that makes it so hard for many of us to abide the actions of the young these days-aside from the actions of the young-is that I and many like me cleaved our political identities out of the war in Vietnam. There was a certain post-Joe McCarthy giddiness in knowing that there was only one real opposition to Rusk, Namara and Bundy, and it consisted of I. F. Stone, Hans Morgenthau, Dr. Spock, Robert Lowell, *The New York Review of Books*, me and a couple of thousand smiling peace marchers. One felt like a member of a very select minority. We were the left and all those guys in Washington were the enemy. Then we woke up one day to discover

that we were nothing more than liberals, no more of a threat to those in power than Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. And taken no more seriously by the student left, who had outflanked us, than by the elders of the Democratic Party who, in response to our growing influence, nominated Hubert Humphrey for President.

**PLAYBOY:** Those must have been traumatic times.

**FEIFFER:** Oy! For me to find myself talking about responsibility, practicality, pragmatism to all these building burners and bomb throwers, when all those years I thought it was the pragmatists I was exposing, well, needless to say, I underwent my own identity crisis. At the age of 40, I listened seriously to 22-year-old Weatherladies lecturing me about Marxist Leninism. It was like arguing with AYD girls back in high school. I'd catch all their inconsistencies and still lose the argument. I listened to 20-year-old counterculture journalists lecturing me on revolution and rock lyrics, and I began to use words like "groove," "outasight" and "heavy," while quietly building up this enormous thirst for Glenn Miller records. My voice began to crack again. I broke out in psychic acne. I had returned to adolescence.

**PLAYBOY:** How did you react to that?

**FEIFFER:** I reacted exactly the way I did in adolescence: I withdrew and became alienated. I recognized there were serious problems, because I watched Walter Cronkite, but mostly I felt: Why don't they all go away and leave me alone? Why don't the Panthers go away and the Vietnamese go away and the elitist kids go away? I began to think things like: Well, I've done my bit, let the others carry on. I began limping around like Lee J. Cobb in *Death of a Salesman*. I had confronted my middle-aged adolescence with a shot of middle-aged senility. I took solid, pussyfooting stands on every issue. On student occupation of buildings, I decided you could occupy but you couldn't make a mess. When files were raided and they documented the lies and hypocrisy of the school administration and the trustees, I deplored the fact that files were raided, but I applauded the results of the raid. I condemned the shouting down of Washington VIPs on campus but couldn't wait to see it happen again. Mostly, it felt to me as if I were watching a monumental struggle between Venusians and Martians. I was in a world full of funny green people where I wasn't part of the solution, and I wasn't part of the problem and, what's more, I wasn't even part of the culture. Somehow, unknowing, I'd been drafted into the radical middle.

**PLAYBOY:** What's the radical middle?

**FEIFFER:** It was the theme of my old "This Is What I Think" speech, which was about how America was being run by an underground conspiracy far more

threatening than the more publicized radical right and radical left, and this was the radical middle. And then I'd do an analysis of the radical middle, showing that its role was that of a moral mathematician, that it would find the extremes in any debate and locate itself equidistant between them. But that even its choice of extremes was questionable, because it recognized only certain extremes and ignored other extremes, and the extremes it chose a middle position between would invariably be the safest and least controversial extremes. And then, having taken the middle position on these middle extremes, the radical middle, through its powerful role in the mass media, would publicize its position as the moderate position, or the responsible position, or the pragmatic position-and whatever party was in power, this position would automatically be supported by John McCloy, Dean Acheson and the Rockefeller brothers, plus *The Washington Post* and *The New York Times*.

**PLAYBOY:** Your radical middle, which sounds suspiciously like the Eastern liberal establishment, sort of came apart on Vietnam.

**FEIFFER:** It was later that the existence of the radical middle was made official by calling it the establishment, but by then it was splitting at the seams. Vietnam did it. The radical middle took every possible position on Vietnam that there was to take, except the position of cut and run. Which was my position at the time. My current position is to bug out. But in 1968, the radical middle was for both continuing to bomb Hanoi and retreating into enclaves, so it was useless to me as a conspiracy. I had to find a new conspiracy theory to explain things. At that point, I came upon my 12-Guy Theory of Government.

**PLAYBOY:** How does that one go?

**FEIFFER:** There are these 12 guys running the country, and they all went to the right schools and they're all trained for their jobs and they all have drawers full of classified information and they all have direct lines to the White House. So they resent it terribly when outsiders, like the American people, try to butt into their foreign policy. It's their Vietnam war and, after that, their Indochina war and, after that, possibly, their world war. It's also their civil rights and their economy and their ghettos and their recession. Their role is to guide and our role is to be guided. Because what's a democracy for but to bring in the best-qualified elite to govern us? So it didn't matter who was in-Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon-there would still be these same 12 guys in and out of the White House. Not always the same names, but always the same teams. Kissinger subbing for Bundy, Moynihan in for Schlesinger. So it didn't matter who

make people curious about his own "con-
tingency planning."

**PLAYBOY:** Don't you believe Nixon when he says he's ending America's combat role in Vietnam?

**FEIFFER:** If you're still killing people, I tend to think of that as combat. Even if we're no longer using ground troops by 1972, there will still be U. S. planes dropping U. S. bombs. If that's an end to our combat role, it's a curious one. To Nixon, ending the war means arming our gooks to shoot their gooks. That's not pacifism, it's racism. Nixon doesn't know *how* to end the war. He's still making decisions on the basis of his theology. He'll take seriously 100,000 telegrams about Lieutenant Calley and feel there's a political upheaval in the land that has to be dealt with. But two or three times that number of people—*people*, not telegrams—can show up in Washington over and over and over again and, as far as he's concerned, they don't measure up to the size of his recent buddy Calley.

**PLAYBOY:** Did you follow the Calley trial closely?

**FEIFFER:** I get the feeling I don't follow anything very closely. I always fear that if I read the press too carefully, I'm going to fall into the trap of believing that they're telling me what's really happening in the world. What I find interesting about the Calley trial is how differently the public reacted to Calley than to Manson. Just in terms of record sales alone, Calley has far outdistanced Manson. He's *our* kind of mass murderer. Or possibly, people believe that the Tate murders happened but that My Lai didn't happen. The Tate murders happened because they took place in Los Angeles—which people think exists but in fact doesn't—and My Lai didn't happen because it happened in Vietnam, which doesn't exist except on television. It also happened to gooks, and they're not real people, and it happened during a war, and anything we do in a war is OK as long as it's our side that does it. A V. C. throws a bomb in a market place and kills six people and he's a fanatical terrorist. A B-52 pilot drops tons of bombs over North Vietnam and kills hundreds, but he's not a fanatical terrorist; he's just doing his job. And if they shoot him down and take him prisoner, he's a hero, and a martyr, and a bargaining chip. It all has to do with our rules of war, which state: one, that Americans are good guys; two, that we only get into good wars; and, three, that no matter what we do and what acts we commit, they're the acts of good people, perhaps regrettable, but war-is-hell-and-acts-such-as-these-have-always-taken-place-in-wartime, which makes them pardonable, and Calley should be given either the Medal of Honor or Agnew's place on the ticket in 1972.

**PLAYBOY:** There's been a good deal of talk about war-crimes trials for high-ranking American violators of the real rules of war. With the country already as divided as it is, do you think war-crimes trials would serve a useful purpose?

**FEIFFER:** Well, the talk about Johnson used to be that he meant well, that he was a victim of circumstances, that he didn't want the war any more than anybody else and that if it weren't for Vietnam—people always forget the Dominican invasion—he'd be remembered as one of the best Presidents in history. That makes it sound terribly tragic and complex but simply ignores the fact that the man is a certifiable war criminal. It's like all those articles talking about the pain and indecision McNamara went through. No doubt the German high command went through many moments of self-doubt and torture, too; but despite all that self-doubt and torture, I can't bring myself to feel much pity for them. What's at stake here is more important than any gratification of the left's desire for personal revenge on these men. Our cold-war theology has allowed us to retain in our adventures around the world a self-righteous image of the American, even though he might also be an imperialis, a slumlord and a baby burner. Until recent years, there never seemed to be any conscious sense of contradiction in this; and even today, that sense of contradiction is found only among intellectuals, students and—very late in the day—the clergy. It may take something like a highly respected international war-crimes tribunal to shock us into seeing that while we thought we were playing policeman to the world, we slipped into playing war criminal to the world. But of course there'll never be any tribunal; and every time Nixon sees any light at the end of the tunnel, he'll defoliate it.

**PLAYBOY:** You said Johnson is a certifiable war criminal. In what way did he conduct himself differently from any other head of state acting—however misguidedly—in what he perceived to be the national interest?

**FEIFFER:** How many heads of state do you know of who are responsible for trying to turn an entire country into a parking lot? There must be some limitation on the concept of national interest, or when do we start dropping nukes?

**PLAYBOY:** You say that Nixon is committing the same blunders as Johnson, but for some reason he doesn't seem to stir the same rage in you that Johnson did.

**FEIFFER:** It's different, in a way. If Nixon reminds us of the man who sells whiskey to the Indians, Johnson reminds us of the man who sold the whiskey to Nixon; Johnson is the snake-oil salesman who comes on publicly like a preacher. With

Johnson, who did have a rather brilliant nine months before he was elected in his own right in 1964—as the peace candidate—there was a very clear betrayal. You don't find that feeling of betrayal with Nixon. After all his years in public life, there couldn't have been many people left who would trust him deeply enough to feel betrayed by him. There was no question who he was when he was elected, despite the fact that over the years, James Reston kept inventing and reinventing something he called the New Nixon. One other thing: There's something about Johnson that makes him seem more than he is and makes you seem less than you are, which is a sense that's guaranteed to bring out animosities. With Nixon, it's the other way around.

**PLAYBOY:** What do you mean?

**FEIFFER:** Well, he always gives the impression of role playing. He knows he's not really President. He knows Eisenhower still is. It's all some sort of amazing charade that he's getting away with. You see it at least once in every Nixon press conference. He'll stumble over a word or two, get it wrong, and there'll be that momentary loss of control you see in the eyes, the sense of panic, and you can see the thought processes: "Oh, my God, they're going to find out!" I saw Nixon's "Checkers" speech playing at the New Yorker Theater the other day. You should see it. If Nixon had gone into the movie business instead of politics, he would have been head of MGM by now—and we might still have a studio system. It "was an extraordinary show, and to see it many years later is to see all of the mannerisms, the sentimentalism, the fake Hollywood pathos—"my dog Checkers," "my wife Pat"—and a tense upturning of the lips which he thinks of as a boyish grin. Nixon trying to look boyish is enough to break one's heart. All of it is there, and you watch it, at first laughing, and then ending up feeling about Nixon as you might feel about Busby Berkeley. He's the pop genius of American politics.

**PLAYBOY:** Isn't that carrying your view of Nixon to an absurd extreme?

**FEIFFER:** That's all satire is—creating a logical argument that, followed to its end, is absurd. All humor is basically about one or another kind of outrage against logic, but satire concerns itself with logically extending a premise to its totally insane conclusion, thus forcing onto an audience certain unwelcome awarenesses. If it's going to be true satire, it has to be subversive, critical of the system it's operating within. It can't be what used to be called satire a few years ago, which was jokes on suburbia and crab grass and commuters.

**PLAYBOY:** Taking logic to its extreme risks what those who don't share the satirist's sentiments call going off the deep end. Some critics felt you went

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overboard in *Little Murders* by asking audiences to believe that paranoia about crime and social disorders would drive a middle-class urban family mad enough to become mass murderers sniping at passers-by from their apartment window. Do you really feel such an apocalyptic caricature is justified?

**FEIFFER:** I can't justify the view taken in *Little Murders*. You either respond to it or you don't. I can't prove, for instance, that we're doing badly in Vietnam any more than the Pentagon can prove that we're winning, except that one point of view seems to make sense and the other doesn't. After a number of years, if the convictions and opinions you hold seem to be borne out by events, you simply trust them, and beginning with John Kennedy's assassination, I have developed the view of society that's written into *Little Murders*. His assassination highlighted for me the age of gratuitous violence we'd come into, a violence that grew out of the frustrations of the American dream as measured against the American reality, out of a previously isolationist nation having to go internationalist very suddenly in a big way. And despite, or as a consequence of, what it thought of as its good works, feeling increasingly isolated, unappreciated and finally unwanted. So, in reaction, it turns narcissistically violent toward the outside world—Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam—and paranoiacally violent toward its own internal world: race violence, random violence, motiveless mass murders.

In that sense, *Little Murders* is actually about Vietnam, about how we can burn down the country and still see ourselves as good guys defending our homestead. Gary Cooper, the war criminal. I don't think the film's vision is apocalyptic. Because the family is shooting out their window at strangers in the street? That has nothing to do with apocalypse. It has to do with the frontier faith. It doesn't mean the world is ending; it means these particular people, while having gone mad, have gone mad in a very traditional, very American way. By their lights, they're protecting their home. They're taking action after remaining passive for too long. They're Tom Destry strapping on his guns to the cheers of the audience. They're doing what they see as right, and with exactly the same self-justification as any B-52 pilot dropping blockbusters over Vietnam. If the ending of *Little Murders* is apocalyptic, then what sort of vision do we get every day on NBC when they blandly give us the latest body count? All I was trying to do was show what we've become by putting together one sensibility with another—random murder out of windows with the sort of random murder we're

playing around with in Southeast Asia.
**PLAYBOY:** All the evils you see in American society must make this an epochal period for a satirist.

**FEIFFER:** Professionally, it's on the upgrade, but there isn't enough cold, hard repression. If the press were still as controlled or timid as it was in the Fifties, then my work would be easier, a more clear-cut case of black and white, censorship and freedom. That's the ideal environment for satire; but beginning with Jack Kennedy, repression became so sophisticated that we slip into it as comfortably as we do into an old shoe. It's very difficult when the Government tolerates diversity of opinion to such an extent that it has practically no effect on anyone, sort of like inviting the opposition into the White House for coffee after they finish picketing. Happily, Mr. Agnew now means to put the press out of business, and Mr. Mitchell means to put the doctrine of a legal defense out of business. So businesswise, things are looking up.

And the Government deserves credit for making a satirist's life more challenging. This began for me some years ago when there was an Atomic Energy Commission committee set up to investigate the effects of radioactive fallout, and they called it "Operation Sunshine." How do you compete with that? In my play *The White House Murder Case*, the name of the disastrous military operation that backfires and kills 750 GIs was "Operation Total Win." When Nixon went into Cambodia three months later, they called it "Operation Ultimate Victory." A week after Cambodia, the play died. George S. Kaufman once said, "Satire is what closes Saturday night." It's not true. It's reality that closes Saturday night.

I once did this cartoon after the Newark and Detroit riots with Johnson appointing a fact-finding commission that included one Democrat, one Republican, one intellectual, one anti-intellectual, one young person, one old person, one Negro and one bigot. The last panel had the President smiling his least sincere smile and saying, "Come, let us reason together." I thought that was a pretty good satire on the Johnsonian political mind, which thinks that by putting together totally antagonistic, often irreconcilable views, he has bought off the future. A week later, the White House asked for the original. I went into a deep depression, because I couldn't figure out where I'd gone wrong. The only explanation I could come up with was that Johnson didn't realize it was a satire. He thought it was a perceptive and admiring evaluation of the way he did things. Talk about effectiveness!

**PLAYBOY:** Is that why you do satire? To influence change?

**FEIFFER:** The first reason is self-indul-

gence. I like the work. The second is to score points for my side. But I've never thought that one's own work, however strong, was enough to make a real dent in the prevailing culture. All you can hope for is that, along with other small shifts, it might represent a swing of opinion and be part of that swing; and since the work is being done in the mass media, it might be of help simply by showing other people who thought they were alone that they aren't alone.

**PLAYBOY:** Satirists seem to be in short supply among conservatives. Why?

**FEIFFER:** Well, there's Al Capp, who's sort of a one-man short supply. Poor Capp. He's turned into an elderly right-wing Abbie Hoffman. If you're going to score points, you've got to make sense, and every time he tries to score, he goes off like an elephant gun and instead of zeroing in with logic, buries us with kamikaze overkill. Satire has to do with logic, not grotesquerie, and all that guffawing, hand-twitching self-titillation works against him as a propagandist.

**PLAYBOY:** Aren't you partly just disagreeing with his politics?

**FEIFFER:** I once debated Capp and found out he *has* no politics, just prejudices. What makes him fail as a satirist isn't his conservatism. There's no reason you can't be a successful conservative satirist. I used to think of Bill Buckley as a marvelous satirist. Imagine my surprise when I learned that he took his writing seriously.

**PLAYBOY:** You spend a lot of time talking and drawing cartoons about politics, but you sound a little weary of the subject. Why?

**FEIFFER:** I've o.d.-ed on politics. In any case, it's no longer very interesting or revealing to talk about Vietnam: it's become as institutionalized as racism, so that just like racism, every time your side looks like it's had a victory, you end up pretty much where you started. Besides, there is no new horror or duplicity that doesn't become assimilated into our systems within a matter of days, sometimes minutes. So I've given up solving our foreign-policy problems for a while. I'm sure Vietnam will wait for me to come back to it. I'm moving my other work—plays and movies—back into a much more interior, private world that deals with personal relationships, with men and women, with men and men, with couples interacting with each other, with people in the business of day-to-day survival. At the moment, if I feel at odds with politics, it's because I can't allow it into that created world. I have to sink myself totally into this other atmosphere if I'm going to do anything with it.

**PLAYBOY:** Young people seem to be moving in the same direction you are. Do you think there's any connection

ELO

you play it, and when you leave that role, you find yourself so uncomfortable that, in my case, while I seemed to drop in, I had really dropped out. I discovered that I simply can't function in an activist role, because I stop believing that it's me who's doing it. What I know about the Chicago convention has more to do with what I saw on television than with what I lived through. Six months later, I heard some tapes of the things I said in Chicago and I was quite surprised. They sounded pretty good to me, but it was somebody else talking. The fact is, I really wasn't there.

**PLAYBOY:** After the convention, you refused to endorse Hubert Humphrey. Looking back on it now, less emotionally, wouldn't you have preferred him to Richard Nixon?

**FEIFFER:** In 1954, Nixon wanted us to invade Indochina, and one of the strongest Senate supporters of that move was Humphrey. I really don't know how much Humphrey would have changed things. He was so deeply implicated in the war that the protest would have started sooner, gotten bigger faster and we would have had the repression earlier. If he couldn't stand up to Mayor Daley, how in the world could we expect him to stand up to the Pentagon? Outside the terribly important area of Supreme Court appointments, I'm not sure a hell of a lot would have been different. And with the Democrats still running the White House, the Democratic Congress would have been much less likely to make even the feeble intervention into the war that it has. As much as they like to deny it, a lot of that is just politics. Have you noticed how all those new doves vote when it comes to cutting off funds for the war?

**PLAYBOY:** Surely, that line of reasoning didn't lead you to vote for Richard Nixon?

**FEIFFER:** No. I voted my conscience and voted for the best man: Dick Gregory—although I was worried about Mark Lane being number two on the ticket, a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

**PLAYBOY:** Are you optimistic about having more of a choice in the 1972 election?

**FEIFFER:** What difference does it make if Hubert Humphrey changes his name and calls himself Ed Muskie?

**PLAYBOY:** You think of them as the same?

**FEIFFER:** Well, who is Muskie? The only person who could make Muskie seem a serious figure in American politics is Hubert Humphrey, possibly the least interesting man to run for office since Richard Nixon. What got Muskie the public's eye was that for five minutes once, a kid heckled him and Muskie invited him up to the platform. That was a very theatrical move and a very smart one, but basically an old showman's trick. He got the public's attention

and became a star, and that's his only claim to power and fame. He's got no other credentials. It's still not possible to figure out his position on the war, because it changes with the polls. He hasn't made a single statement on the Chicago convention and Daley's police. But he's against pollution. That's terrific. And he's against the war this week. That's terrific. But there's no evidence he's got a single idea in his head—other than wanting to be President. I'm not saying he's a bad man; I'm just saying he's a very ordinary politician, and to that extent, one has every right not to trust him. In a casual way, I've been following his statements on the war since 1968, and he's a professional waffler. If he moves left on the war now, it will have nothing to do with any burst of insight on his part other than the burst of insight that has to do with votes.

**PLAYBOY:** Do you regard Ted Kennedy any more highly?

**FEIFFER:** No, for strictly emotional reasons. In 1966, when Bobby was heading the Government in exile, I was trying very hard to get myself to trust him, because his record in the Senate was a good one and his opposition to the war, though still erratic, was becoming increasingly strong, and because if anyone was going to take it away from Lyndon, it seemed clear that it had to be Bobby. So I wanted very much to like the former Attorney General and was working my way around to it, when I made the mistake of going to a party for the Kennedys on Martha's Vineyard, and there they all were—the New Frontier—and the smell of elitist careerism in the room, the smell of high-level inheritance was so powerful that it had a kind of sensuality to it, the smell and look of a bunch of guys about to get laid.

You picked a Kennedy, any Kennedy, and surrounding him or her would be half a dozen boozing hopefuls—advisors to the President, secretaries, undersecretaries, trouble shooters, Congressional liabilities—and they all had this glassy-eyed stare that wasn't hard to interpret. It read: If you think this is a good party, wait till we take back the White House. It was all so naked and self-righteous. As a card-carrying fantasist myself, I was made very uneasy by the Kennedy fantasists. I thought, "Oh, my God, Sorenson back! Salinger back! Mac back!" So it's not Teddy that bothers me, it's Camelot that bothers me. I could never make it with Camelot. So ask not what I can do for Teddy, ask what Teddy can do for me: not run.

**PLAYBOY:** Are there any politicians who inspire you?

**FEIFFER:** I don't see why we have to settle for Humskie-Musphrey while George McGovern is around. McGovern was

among the earliest critics of the war and a far more serious man with many more qualifications than any of the showbiz people he's running against, so naturally he's not considered a serious candidate. The press seems to have a rule that a serious man can't ever be a serious candidate. I guess the underlying assumption is that anyone who wants to be President has got to be kidding. But let McGovern win one primary and overnight the press will decide he's a serious figure. They'll even try to assign him charisma. You remember charisma? If you're a Democrat and you have it, you get shot.

**PLAYBOY:** McGovern might have helped his chances for the nomination if he had capitalized politically on the contents of the Pentagon papers, which were reportedly leaked to him before they appeared in *The New York Times*; but he decided not to release them. What was your reaction to the controversy?

**FEIFFER:** What's interesting about the Pentagon papers is that they bear out entirely what critics of the war—including McGovern—have been saying for years, and what the press, outside the left press, has been generally denying, ignoring or dismissing. You know, it's hard to blame Nixon and Agnew for being furious with the press. All through the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy years, the press played ball with the Government. During the Korean War, Syngman Rhee, who was no better than Diem, was called the George Washington of his country. *The New York Times* knew about the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union and it knew about the Bay of Pigs before either became public knowledge, and, in the interest of higher patriotism, it published neither story. If the *Times* had blown the cover on the U-2, it would have prevented Eisenhower from being caught in a public lie; and remember, in those days, we were still shocked when a President lied. We didn't know it was policy. And if the *Times* had blown the cover on the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy would have called the whole thing “contingency planning”—the way the Pentagon papers are labeled now—and canceled the invasion. What makes Agnew furious with the press is that for the first time in any war, it's trying to report the truth. The sons of bitches! What a betrayal! Why now? Why us? I mean, no wonder Nixon wants to dump the First Amendment. It's being used against him! See, the point is that if Nixon wanted us out of Indochina, those Pentagon papers would be a godsend; but he doesn't want us out, and that's why, even though the papers deal with the duplicity of Democrats, he had to stop them. They hit too close to home. They

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between your move inward and theirs?

**FEIFFER:** That's interesting. I hadn't thought of it, but who knows, there might be. I think part of it is simply exhaustion. People are always playing the survival game to some extent, and when you find that moving in one direction and beating your head against a wall is increasingly thankless, then to salvage something of yourself, you take a break and move in other directions. It goes back and forth, and in some ways, it's a rejuvenating process. But this whole apathy thing has been overstated for years. When there is apathy, there's a legitimate reason for it, and the reason is that people have realistically looked at the world around them, and they find the alternatives so unrewarding that there's nothing better to do than turn off. But when anything comes along they can finally relate to, they respond like crazy. Look how many people went to the spring demonstrations in Washington. There's still a gut response, despite the history of losership that precedes all demonstrations; they keep on coming. So I don't think it's a slide into apathy based on stereo rigs and dope. I think it's more along the lines of an emotional and psychic process of natural selection. When it gets too dangerous out there, you move inside until you feel at one with yourself, and then you move out again, and the process continuously goes on.

**PLAYBOY:** Are you willing to discuss the kind of work that's going on in your head now?

**FEIFFER:** Not much. But whatever I do next, it'll be moving on from *Carnal Knowledge*, not from *Little Murders*. I want to do something about marriage. I think the most interesting story is how men and women get on with each other, the terms they accept to live together and survive together, the compromises they make, the betrayals of themselves and of each other, and how, despite the fact that over and over again they find that it can't possibly work, it still seems to be preferable to anything else they know about. In the end, it becomes rather heroic. It reminds me of the relationship of the two men in *Waiting for Godot*, who are on this endless search, but after a while the search itself becomes worth while, almost rewarding. Many people find that pessimistic, but I find something inspiring about it.

**PLAYBOY:** You said that marriage can't possibly work, but somehow it does. What makes it so difficult?

**FEIFFER:** It's difficult because if you live with another person, you're going to have to deal with that person, and most of us want to be dealt with rather than deal with. Most of us want to somehow be magically taken care of. There's this thing in all of us that I suppose is part

aristocrat and part child; we want to be served, and served without being forced to recognize the existence of the servant, and certainly without dealing with the servant as an entity. What destroys fantasies and gets everybody into trouble early on in relationships is that two people come together each thinking the other is the servant, and they find they've been had. And so it comes to the point where you say, "My God, there's another person in my bed! And she's here under false pretenses."

**PLAYBOY:** Is it that simple?

**FEIFFER:** Not always. If you can get yourself past that point, and keep going and going and going—in other words, if you don't retreat and fire that servant and find another one, and that's all some people do all their lives—then marriage has some remarkable rewards, though the rewards are never as good as the fantasies.

**PLAYBOY:** Then why get married?

**FEIFFER:** Most of the married men I know got married because their wives made it impossible for them to stay unmarried, Not necessarily by ultimatum, but by making the pressures and guilts so intense that it simply became easier to get married than to stay shacked up. But being a permanent bachelor can't possibly work. It means you've stopped taking any chances. It means you've made a contract with yourself about what the world had to be, at an age when you were much too young to have any idea what the real world was, and you're insisting that the world stick to that contract. Somewhere along the line, that notion has to be given up, or a person is just going to be dead at the center.

**PLAYBOY:** You obviously aren't a great admirer of bachelorhood, yet you didn't marry until you were 32.

**FEIFFER:** Most bachelors, I suspect, aren't the miserable failures at bachelorhood that I was, at this whole business of meeting a girl and establishing false identities, and having exactly the same conversation you've had with hundreds of other girls, and she gives you exactly the same responses, and through it all, while you're being terribly interested in each other, all you're really thinking about is getting laid. Finally, you reach a point where you feel too old and silly to do any of that, or to take it seriously any longer. It seemed to me a thankless game: when it didn't work, it wasn't much good, and when it did, it wasn't much good either. When it worked, it was just a little less lonely, but not a hell of a lot less lonely. I hated every second of it. But I hated and feared marriage even more. It meant I had to become a grownup.

**PLAYBOY:** Why the reluctance to grow up?

**FEIFFER:** Look at the examples I had. Also, how could I make it as a grownup

and a boy cartoonist all at the same time?

**PLAYBOY:** How did you develop your devotion to cartooning?

**FEIFFER:** Cartoons were my first interest as a kid, what I loved the most. I couldn't write well enough to be a writer, or draw well enough to be an artist, so I knew that the only way I would ever make it would be to combine my meager talent for drawing with my meager talent for telling a story and, by putting the two together, come up with something sensational.

**PLAYBOY:** Was it always satire that you planned to do?

**FEIFFER:** No. I was mostly attracted to the storytelling in cartoons—Van Buren's *Abbie an' Slats*, or Caniff's *Terry and the Pirates*, or Eisner's *The Spirit*. What I loved best about these comics was that they created a very personal world in which almost anything could take place, and readers would accept it even if it had nothing to do with any other kind of world. It was the fantasy world I loved.

**PLAYBOY:** Why?

**FEIFFER:** Because reality was such a pain in the ass. I realized that if I didn't put my hooks into fantasy, there would be no hope of surviving my childhood.

**PLAYBOY:** When did you realize that?

**FEIFFER:** It must have happened shortly after birth, and it's been happening ever since. I realized at a very young age that there was a conspiracy of grownups against kids, because if a grownup said something, it had to be true, since other grownups believed it was true and if a kid disputed them, he was wrong, by definition.

I didn't know about the class struggle in a Marxian sense, but I understood it very well in a generational sense. I knew that I was a member of one class and that my parents and teachers were members of another class, and that we were enemies. By the time I was five, I felt that I was this rich kid, kidnaped by strangers—my parents—who were terribly kind people, but still not my real parents, because I knew damn well that my real parents didn't live in the Bronx. They lived in a castle in Freddie Bartholomew's England, and it was going to be my inheritance once we got things straightened out. But the reality was this dreary world where I had to go to this dreary school which was teaching me things that neither the school nor I was really interested in. There was this awful sense of injustice. Who could I write to? Roosevelt? I was skeptical of becoming a grownup, but I knew I didn't like being a kid. In the world I lived in, my job as a kid was basically that of reconnaissance. You had to be this very talented spy, who sounded like one of them and looked as much as possible

[LCL]

L.C.

like one of them, but knew every minute of your waking hours that you weren't one of them; but you didn't know what you were one of. I'm sure my childhood would have been radically different if I could have found any friends I could talk to honestly.

**PLAYBOY:** Why couldn't you?

**FEIFFER:** I guess it was a formidable shyness. The best kids are the biggest and most athletic—affable, outgoing kids—and I was a shrimp. I was skinny; I didn't eat enough, as my mother never forgot to tell the neighbors. I didn't play ball. I didn't even learn how to catch a ball until I was 15, and to this day I don't know how to throw one. The only person I was at all capable of talking to was myself, and even there, I had severe lags in communication. I understood with complete objectivity that I was a total failure, so if I was going to make a comeback, I knew it had to be as a grownup. Grownups didn't have to take gym.

**PLAYBOY:** How did you finally manage to escape from the Bronx?

**FEIFFER:** I got drafted—which, with all its horrors, was a relief, because the enemies were now *official*; they weren't disguised as parents and advisors who had only your best interests at heart.

**PLAYBOY:** It's difficult to imagine you in the Army. What was it like?

**FEIFFER:** I found myself, during basic training, shocked in a more profound way than I had ever been, at the brutality and impersonality that's built into the system. In fact, I no longer existed except as a body. As soon as I put on fatigues, I lost my power of speech. I couldn't talk anymore. I picked up a stammer that I've never totally lost. I couldn't relate my thoughts to my speech. It was the first time in my life I had been exposed to pure naked fascism, and it was terrific. Up to that point, I had always been dealing with reasonable teachers and reasonable parents, and they were always *understanding* me. All my resentment and hostility, expressed as best I could to them on any issue, was always watered off by some explanation which seemed a hell of a lot more rational and mature than my argument. So while I felt that I was dealing with villains, the villains always ended up being the good guys, and I kept ending up as the bad guy, and I could never quite understand it. The Army was a lot better because, first of all, they were *incapable* of explaining anything, and while the role playing in civilian life was one of reasonableness, the role playing in the Army was one of Hitler. That's who they all wanted to be when they grew up. So while I felt totally miserable, I felt more justified and more in the right than I had ever felt before. It was a

period when I could really allow myself the luxury of hate—pure and blissful hate. It helped me grow. Significantly enough, I did my first satire in the Army.

**PLAYBOY:** What was it?

**FEIFFER:** It was about Munro, a four-year-old kid drafted by mistake. Munro tried to explain to the authorities that he was only four. The authorities said that was impossible because they didn't draft four-year-olds. Finally, the authorities convinced Munro that he really couldn't be four, so he faced up manfully to life in the Army. That was my first work of satire, and it was also my first work of satire that was turned down by every publisher in New York.

**PLAYBOY:** How did you get by when you were discharged from the Army?

**FEIFFER:** I played the unemployment-insurance game. I'd take some job for six months, then arrange to get fired, which was never difficult, since I spent most of my time on the john reading books. This was the Fifties, and there wasn't any underground press, so I'd take my cartoons around and find that I was a favorite person of editors in publishing houses all around New York, because each new work would entertain them thoroughly and then they'd say, "No, we don't think this would have a market." I gave them a good time while they gave me a bad one, and it became clear that I was never going to get a market. My problem, I decided, wasn't that I wasn't good enough to be published. It was that I wasn't *famous* enough to be published. And I couldn't get famous until I got published.

**PLAYBOY:** How did you break out of that?

**FEIFFER:** In 1955, *The Village Voice* began in New York, and I offered to do a weekly cartoon for them at no money, which was their usual price. I had carefully selected the *Voice* for its intellectual audience and its snob appeal. I knew that after a while, if I became the darling of the intellectuals, I would find a publisher who would think me famous enough, because six of his friends read me, to publish me in book form. It worked.

**PLAYBOY:** Your fantasies about getting rich and famous sound surprisingly conventional, rather like a young executive out to climb the corporate ladder.

**FEIFFER:** Remember, I'm a product of the John Garfield generation, a veteran of dozens of Warner Bros. movies about poor kids from the East Side shaking their fists at the Manhattan skyline and screaming into the night, "I'll lick you yet!" Deep in my heart was the dream that someday I'd see my name up in lights. What a bitter recognition of reality it was when I finally arrived at the stage where I could have my name up in

lights and there were no more lights. Modern theater-marquee design had done away with them. So now my name is up in black. It's not the same thing.

**PLAYBOY:** Weren't you concerned that success might blunt the edge of your satire?

**FEIFFER:** For several years, I made an honest effort to sell out, but I just couldn't make it that way. I tried very hard, but I wasn't a good enough hack. I was only good at doing my own stuff, and I've discovered that rage can't be bought off. If you have it, you have it for life.

**PLAYBOY:** Has success been as good as you fantasized?

**FEIFFER:** I'm not the least ambivalent about it. Success is good and failure isn't. It's been better than I fantasized, because during all those years you work to achieve it, you spend so much time and energy at the business of making it that there's very little time or energy left to pay attention to the craft itself. Finally, with the question of success taken care of, you can start paying attention to being an artist, and it's a hell of a lot more interesting, because until you're secure enough—and I don't mean financially—to be willing to risk failure, the hunger to make it keeps getting in your way.

**PLAYBOY:** Don't you feel even a twinge of nostalgia for the "good old days"?

**FEIFFER:** The only time in my life I've ever been nostalgic was when we shot the first scene of *Carnal Knowledge*. We had to reconstruct a college dance of 25 years ago. Bobby socks. Saddle shoes. Punch bowls. Words like "conceited" and "stuck-up." Phrases like "bullshit artist" and "Your next will be your first." We hired local kids to be the college kids of the Forties. They cut their hair, they learned the fox trot and the lindy. They couldn't believe anyone had ever danced that way; to them it was the minuet. The first shot in the film is this terrific-looking coed walking into a college mixer dressed exactly like Ann Rutherford in the Andy Hardy movies, and on the Victrola is Tommy Dorsey playing *I'm Getting Sentimental Over You*. I had chills, and tears in my eyes. I found myself nostalgic for a period in my life that I had absolutely hated. But I wasn't nostalgic for my real past. I was nostalgic for my MGM past—the past that, on Saturday afternoons back in the Forties, I had watched on the screen and seen as my future, which would take me out of the East Bronx and into these incredible movie mansions, the real-life duplicate of which I have seen only once—at Hugh Hefner's. Because he saw the same movies I did and had it built according to specifications.

**PLAYBOY:** The current nostalgia fad doesn't seem to have overwhelmed you.

Why do you think it's so popular with
others?

**FEIFFER:** It's my generation's admission that nothing works anymore, so we all want out. God died in the early Sixties, then the two Kennedys and King, then the electoral process, then somewhere in the middle of all that, the family; then America died, and finally hope—although hope didn't so much die as wither away. The reason America died is because we blew it. The reason hope died is because the kids blew it. So at last we're given something solid with which to bridge the generation gap: our mutual failures.

**PLAYBOY:** That's a bleak vision. Is there a way out?

**FEIFFER:** Well, before this interview, I decided I'd better force myself out of my adolescent senility and look for some answers, because it's all right not to know the answers around the house, or with friends, or even writing plays and movies; they can be ambiguous and then critics will take them seriously. But in a *Playboy Interview*, I knew I'd better really know the answers. So I turned off the TV and went back to reading books. Books used to know, before I stopped

reading them several years ago. So I read Richard Sennett's *The Uses of Disorder*, and it's a nice try, but he doesn't really know. And I read Charles Reich's *The Greening of America*, and boy, does he not know! And I read Alvin Toffler's *Future Shock*, which turned out to be a whole book about how he and nobody else knows. So, in digest, I turned the TV back on and there was the CBS news team. And none of them knew! Not even Eric Sevareid knew! So I realized I'm in the same position as the experts. They don't know and I don't know.

The awful and dangerous thing is that after all these years of disappointment and betrayal, people—particularly college students, because they're trained this way—are still looking for the answer. They feel sure that somewhere there's the right book and in the back of it, they're going to find the answer. Every year, that sends us off at least once in some weird new direction, which lasts about as long as it takes that particular book to rise to the top of the best-seller list and then drop off, to be replaced by the next answer. The awful truth may be that there just aren't any

answers. We may simply have to go on this way.

**PLAYBOY:** William Buckley once said that despair is a mortal sin. You sound as though you're guilty.

**FEIFFER:** I hope what I've said here doesn't lead anyone to despair. I think there are certain positive values to not knowing, especially after so many years of such uninformed expertise. But don't get me wrong. I don't knock despair. First of all, it's very classy. Secondly, it looks like we're in for a craze of it just as soon as we finish the current craze for nostalgia. One can already see the signs: intellectuals in despair, parents in despair, hard-hats in despair, middle America in confusion, which is their version of despair. But all of it is a peculiarly American kind of despair. Despair with a kind of upbeat. A kind of lilt to it. It's the kind of despair that doesn't stop you from having a terrific time on weekends. All in all, it's not the worst of interim emotions. You can survive pretty good with despair—which is more than I can say for our recent versions of hope.

Reprinted from PLAYBOY, September 1971

©1971, Playboy

# WHO RUNS THE GOVERNMENT?

*it's not the people you elect to office but their erstwhile business cronies and political hangers-on who turn the bureaucratic wheels*

**article By ROBERT SEMPLE** AMERICANS ARE TAUGHT in their high school civics courses that the people rule this nation through an elective process—every two, four or six years—that sufficiently changes the composition of the Federal Government to guarantee that the will of the people will prevail. As usual, however, high school civics and the conventional wisdom are deficient—not totally, but enough to make anyone who knows how Washington actually functions feel very uneasy, indeed.

For the fact of the matter is that we are ruled only partly by our elected officials. We are more pervasively ruled by what is, for all practical purposes, a hidden Government—hidden in the CIA, the Federal Reserve Board and the lowliest echelons of the

Peter Le Vasseur 1971

Department of Housing and Urban De-
velopment and all the other vast agencies
—a largely invisible but hugely powerful
apparatus composed of men, some former
business cronies of politicians, who are
appointed to their positions (or who win
them through competitive Civil Service
examinations, thereby ensuring perma-
nent tenure), whose performance is never
reviewed by the public at large and whose
influence often increases as their careers
span different Administrations. These are
the members of the permanent bureauc-
racy—and to many observers they, more
than any others, are the real voice and
muscle of the Government.

If this sounds alarmist, I would pre-
sent as evidence a rather cagey politician
who does not routinely act on impulse:
Richard M. Nixon. Among the more
tedious aspects of Mr. Nixon's first four
weeks in office, back in 1969, was his
systematic effort to win friends and in-
fluence people in the sprawling bureuc-
racies of the capital. His strategy included
courtesy calls on each agency and, as
White House correspondent for *The New
York Times*, I followed him around. My
friends thought I had lost my mind, for
the visits were seemingly routine and pro-
duced little hard news. After the fourth
or fifth such visit, I had begun to share
their doubts; then I saw something
scrawled on a blackboard in a nondescript
room on the fourth floor of the Treasury
building, which Nixon was scheduled to
visit that afternoon. It read in its poetic
entirety:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
The President is coming
To see you.

Quite infantile—and, besides, it didn't
scan. But it justified my otherwise bar-
ren pilgrimage, because in its simple
sarcasm it explained rather well why the
President had decided to court the bu-
reaucrats: A lot of them didn't need
him, a lot of them didn't like him and
he, in turn, was concerned whether, as a
minority President propelled into office
by the slimmest of margins, he could
bend them to his purposes and views.

A few minutes after my discovery, in
another room, Mr. Nixon (who did not,
as far as I could tell, notice the joyless
welcome chalked on the blackboard
down the hall) addressed a group of
senior civil servants. He commended
them for their devotion to nonpartisan
duty and pleaded for their continuing
loyalty and energy in the years ahead.
His ingratiating and at times sanctimo-
nious performance was not without irony.
For here was Dick Nixon, a conspicuously
loyal member of an earlier Adminis-
tration that, in 1952, was at best indif-
ferent to and at worst contemptuous of
the bureaucrats, especially if they hap-
pened to be Democrats. Here, too, was
the man who had promised, during the

1968 campaign, to clean house at the
State Department. But instead of clean-
ing house at State or anywhere else, he
invited the entrenched army of the Po-
tomac to go right on keeping house.

And all for a very good reason: The
bureaucracy is not what it was in 1952.
It is larger, and probably more sluggish,
and certainly more confident and self-
assured. Each agency has built large and
loyal constituencies among the public.
And each is filled with men who owe
their appointments to some earlier Presi-
dent and are protected either by Civil
Service regulations or by exemptions
written into the law by Eisenhower in
1954 and Johnson in 1966. Like the
press—and members of the bureaucracy
often regard themselves as a fourth
branch of Government—they know that
while Presidents and Cabinet members
come and go, they remain, guardians of
the past and custodians of much of the
future.

The presence and the power of the
permanent bureaucracy stirs annual de-
bate in the capital and leads to periodic
efforts by elected officials, especially the
President, to reform the apparatus, to
make it a more efficient and responsive
instrument of the popular will. It would
be a mistake, of course, to think that the
continuing struggle between elected
officials and the Civil Service involves
a perennial fight pitting *all* elected
officials against *all* appointed officials.
The hostility between the two groups is
not endemic. An elected official like the
President is responsible, after all, for a
good many of the most important Feder-
al appointments (although not so many
as is commonly supposed, as we shall
see) and—especially if he is clever and
chooses shrewdly—he can use those ap-
pointments to carry out the policies and
pledges set forth in his campaign. He
can also use his appointees to obstruct
or soften or otherwise obfuscate his
announced policies; for example, by nam-
ing a conservative administrator to im-
plement proposals that appeared liberal
during the campaign. Mr. Nixon's ap-
pointment of Maurice Stans as Secretary
of Commerce is a case in point; under
Stans's guidance, Nixon's repeated cam-
paign pledge to give Negroes a "piece
of the action" through black capitalism
has come to virtually nothing.

The real issue in Government is not
between the elected President and the
top men he appoints; Cabinet Secretar-
ies and Undersecretaries can be made to
serve his purposes. The real issue is
broader: the continuing tension between
those who are in some sense vulnerable
to the wishes of the electorate (Presi-
dents, Congressmen, even Cabinet mem-
bers who usually leave office when the
President who appointed them is de-
feated or retires) and those who remain
insulated from the electorate through sen-

iority, skill, tenacity, influence or simple
anonymity. They make up the permanent
bureaucracy. Government cannot work
unless the men who carry the popular
will to Washington every few years can
make an impact on them; and so far,
our elected officials haven't been very
successful.

This issue—and the tension it pro-
duces—is very real and equally frus-
trates a wide range of men who would
not ordinarily be caught in the same
room. The late Robert F. Kennedy, for
example, was baffled, beaten and ulti-
mately reduced to helpless anger by the
refusal of bureaucrats in the Department
of Agriculture to cut red tape and deliver
free food to the starving children of
Mississippi. But it was Senator Strom
Thurmond, not widely known for his
sensitivity to hungry blacks, who framed
the matter most succinctly when he dis-
covered that despite the soothing assur-
ances of a succession of Secretaries of
Health, Education and Welfare, the
Office of Civil Rights was still sending
enforcement agents to South Carolina
hell-bent on desegregating Thurmond's
school districts. "The trouble around
here," he complained, "is that what
goes in at the top doesn't come out at
the bottom."

That, slightly restated, is the reason
Mr. Nixon spent all that time visiting
the agencies in the first month of his
Presidency. He simply wanted to make
certain (or, more precisely, give himself
a fighting chance) that the policies he
put into the agencies at the top through
his appointed Cabinet Secretaries and
Undersecretaries would emerge at the
bottom, in time, as operational pro-
grams. As economist and management
expert Peter Drucker has astutely ob-
served, the "strong" President nowadays
is not a man of shining vision but one
who knows how to make the lions of
the bureaucracy do his bidding. Some
would argue—as Tom Wicker did in
*PLAYBOY's* October 1970 issue—that
more is required of a President than
administrative skill, especially in these
times; but it is equally true that a
President who fails to tame the bureau-
crats is doomed to an unhappy tenure.

It is to the White House, of course,
that the sensible man takes himself
when he wants to find governmental
frustration of the purest sort. For it is at
the White House—even the Nixon
White House—that the visions are the
largest and the eagerness to influence
the rest of the body politic most evident.
It is there that the bureaucrat who re-
sists official policy, or fails to understand
it, or simply bungles it, causes the most
pain. Consider the following example.

Last year, my wife and I invited one
of the President's senior domestic advisors
and his wife to dinner at the Five Crowns
restaurant in California's Newport
Beach, a favorite hangout for key

Nixon staffers when their boss is resting at his elegant compound in San Clemente, some 25 miles down the coast. At one point in the evening, my wife innocently asked our guest how she could effectively join the fight against pollution. The aide first suggested that she join some citizens' campaign to clean up the Potomac. Then he paused, as if dissatisfied with his answer, and, at a decibel level he rarely reaches (judging by the startled expression on his wife's face), he said with passion: "The other thing you can do is go sit on Carl Klein's doorstep, and sit there and sit there, until he gets off his tail and does something!"

Carl Klein was then the Assistant Secretary of Interior for Water Resources, and it was the White House's considered judgment that he had done little or nothing to assist the Administration's efforts to enforce water-pollution standards and chase down errant industrialists and dirty municipalities. As it turned out, my wife was not required to track down Klein at the Department of the Interior, since he was gone a few weeks later. He had been appointed by the President—more precisely, rammed down the President's throat by the late Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose protégés are still scattered all over the Government—and when the time came for his dismissal, he was forced to accept the awful uncertainty that burdens most Presidential appointees. As Wally Hickel discovered, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

But there are not many men like Klein whom the President can easily get at if he decides they aren't measuring up. The reason is that his true powers of appointment are less than they are commonly supposed to be. A study by Congressional Quarterly early in the Administration, for instance, pointed out that the potential political patronage open to the new regime amounted to about 6500 Federal jobs with a total minimum annual salary of $106,400,000. But this was a misleading figure, because no President can expect to fill all those jobs with new people (there's never enough time); many of the officials he does manage to appoint become captives of the bureaucracies they're supposed to run; and a sizable percentage (nearly one third) of the 6500 posts are already occupied by holdovers with status acquired through good service and seniority, who cannot be removed except for cause—moral or professional turpitude—that is usually impossible to prove.

It should also be noted that the 6500 posts over which the President theoretically has some influence constitute only a tiny fraction, a mere platoon, of the Federal army, which now numbers some 3,000,000 civilian employees. And these are not all mail carriers. Among them

are men with the capacity, judgment and acumen to make or break policy by expediting or obstructing programs at the middle and lower levels.

Finally, there seem to be entire agencies (never mind the individual bureaucrats) that remain impervious to Presidential suggestion, because they have either powerful allies in Congress or influential constituencies among the citizenry. The Soil Conservation Service, the Forestry Service and some of the regulatory agencies—most notably, the Federal Trade Commission—have acquired independent lives of their own, as Ralph Nader never tires of pointing out. Neither John Gardner nor Bob Finch could make a dent in the welfare bureaucracy at HEW; thus, the only hope for a radical change in the welfare system would seem to be an overhaul of the laws governing that agency, as implied in Nixon's proposed Family Assistance Program. The Office of Economic Opportunity was dominated (until Nixon effectively reduced the scope of its power last year) not so much by the Republicans he named to run it as by holdover Democrats wedded to the more aggressive pace of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Public Roads has remained a powerful obstacle to the efforts of successive Secretaries of Transportation to make highways the servant, rather than the master, of constructive land use and population growth. And every time the President or some conservation-minded Congressman sets out to save this or that ecological treasure, he finds that the Army Corps of Engineers has already planned some project in the area and is stubbornly resisting efforts to cancel it.

The outstanding case of bureaucratic isolation from the popular will is, of course, the Federal Reserve Board, whose independence stems from the deep-seated and honestly motivated conviction that politicians should not be allowed to monkey around with the money supply. Johnson ranted and raved at William McChesney Martin when L. B. J. wanted easier credit, but his shouting came to little, because Martin—then nearing the end of the 14-year term of which FRB chairmen are assured—was legally accountable to no one but himself and his system. Mr. Nixon seems to be getting along quite well with Arthur Burns. his choice to succeed Martin, but there are signs of strain below the surface.

The usual Presidential response to the problem of ineffective and sluggish bureaucracies is to strengthen the White House staff, in the apparent belief that enough manpower and expertise concentrated at the top can overcome timidity and/or inertia down below. This phenomenon has been noted by Robert C. Wood, a former political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

and now president of the University of Massachusetts. Wood served as Undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Johnson Administration, an experience that taught him as much as he had ever imparted to his students about the practical problems of translating the wishes of elected officials into administrative reality. During Wood's tenure, for instance, longtime employees of the Urban Renewal program (which had been a separate entity before the creation of HUD) showed little enthusiasm for—and in one case, to my personal knowledge, lobbied against—the Model Cities program proposed by L. B. J. and authorized by Congress, on grounds that the new program would diminish the funds available for urban renewal. During this same period—just to add to the Undersecretary's frustrations—the Federal Housing Administration (another separate entity in the pre-HUD days) actively resisted administrative orders and legislative proposals requiring Model Cities to provide insurance for homes built in low-income areas. FHA had always spent most of its mortgage money in the suburbs, where the risks were low, and its officials did not relish the thought of (a) overturning three decades of tradition, a powerful influence in most bureaucracies, and (b) risking their good record with the General Accounting Office by placing the full faith and credit of the Federal Government behind rehabilitated housing in the slums.

However, as Wood has observed, the predictable response to these and similar problems—strengthening the supervisory capability of the President and increasing the size and visibility of the White House staff—has not solved them. On the contrary, the predictable response has produced a predictable result: the creation of even more bureaucracies that, without meaning to, further erode the President's capacity to turn the general guidelines of Government policy into actionable programs that fulfill the promise of that policy. The classic illustration is the old Budget Bureau, which has evolved over the years from a modest accounting organization charged with drawing up the annual budget—a rather generalized form of bureaucratic overview—into an immensely powerful, immensely professional agency that has added to its original functions an enormous degree of operational authority. The average Cabinet member cannot make a move, practically speaking, without getting prior clearance from the Budget Bureau. In Wood's time, for example, the Budget Bureau not only determined how much the housing agency could ask for to finance its Open Space program for the central cities but also after Congress had appropriated the funds—involved itself intimately in

ELO

the political and administrative process of allocating the money among competing cities and suburbs.

A case can be made—and probably ought to be—that the increasing powers of the Budget Bureau are the inevitable result of the failures of the lower bureaucracy, that the vast agencies of Government would never accomplish anything unless the Budget Bureau, acting as the loyal, competent, unbiased servant of the President, constantly prodded those agencies into some form of action. This would be a compelling argument, except for one small but ineluctable fact: This is still a Government in which the Cabinet occupies a large role, however symbolic that role may be. We have not figured out a way to get rid of the Cabinet. Cabinet officers still run the departments, at least in theory. Federal employees still look to their Secretaries and Undersecretaries for leadership and guidance. They regard the Budget Bureau—and this is important—as just another level of the bureaucracy, to be obeyed but not to be inspired by. In their view, the Budget Bureau intimates and, in the end, emasculates their own bosses, who must grapple with it at budget time, surrender to its business-office mentality and, if so ordered, abandon programs on which those very bureaucrats, not to mention the Secretary himself, may have spent a great deal of time, energy and imagination. Thus, the Budget Bureau historically has tended to dampen agency morale and has inhibited the very efficiency in execution that, through its intervention in operational matters, it is trying to achieve.

Much the same criticism has been aimed at Mr. Nixon's recent reorganization of his own staff, which in itself demonstrates that the impulse to re-shuffle at the top in order to achieve results at the bottom remains unabated among those who occupy, with mounting frustration, the theoretical pinnacle of power. In brief, what Mr. Nixon did last year was to name White House staffer John Ehrlichman chief executive officer of a new Domestic Council to oversee the creation of domestic policy: simultaneously, he named George Shultz—then Secretary of Labor—to head the new Office of Management and Budget, whose mandate includes not only the budget-making functions of the old Budget Bureau but also a vastly expanded management operation. In effect, Shultz is supposed to ride herd on the agencies and thus make sure that Ehrlichman's policies are translated into workable programs.

It sounds beautiful—and may turn out to be, in actual practice—but there are those who wonder whether the old problems (of morale and efficiency) won't soon begin to resurface. Despite the disclaimers of the new scheme's architects—a commission headed by Roy

Ash of Litton Industries, who recommended the reorganization to the President—it may be that OMB interposes yet another layer (a supermanagement agency, if you will) between the President and the Cabinet departments, demoting the latter yet another notch. Given the obstructionism of lower-level bureaucrats in the old days, when things were pretty well decentralized, it may be a very good idea, indeed, to concentrate more responsibility in the Executive office of the President. But one wonders how many men of stature and competence will henceforth take on demanding Cabinet and sub-Cabinet jobs when they know they will be dealing not with the President but with a couple of guys named Shultz and Ehrlichman and their successors.

Beyond that: Can any reorganization at the top of the Executive branch solve the problems below? As I have suggested, the problems are formidable and are complicated by tenure, by timidity, by politics, by some inherent malaise that seems to turn bright men into paper-shuffling ciphers. What, for example, can Ehrlichman-Shultz do about Mississippi Congressman Jamie Whitten? Nick Kotz, an enterprising reporter for *The Washington Post*, once called Jamie Whitten the Permanent Secretary of Agriculture. He is not a bureaucrat but an elected official who knows how to manipulate bureaucrats and exploit their fears. As chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Whitten has used the power of the purse for 20 years to persuade middle-echelon officials in the Department of Agriculture to promote those programs that help the commercial farmer (cotton growers, in particular), while blocking or minimizing the impact of nearly every constructive effort to alleviate hunger among the black poor. During the Johnson Administration, for example, when the White House and the Budget Bureau were chock-full of well-intentioned liberals, Whitten managed to persuade officials in both Agriculture and HEW to drop Mississippi from a list of states targeted for a malnutrition survey. Kotz accurately points out that in the quiet process of hidden power, a bureaucrat in the Agriculture Department reacts more quickly to a raised eyebrow from Jamie Whitten than to a direct order from the Secretary himself.

There is very little that any President can do—especially if he wants Whitten's votes on other issues—to curb this sort of power. He might as well attempt to dislodge the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, for Whitten's constituents seem disposed to grant him permanent tenure—and, besides, there are probably any number of officials in the Department of Agriculture who would suffer some kind of professional collapse if Whitten were suddenly no

longer around to give them guidance.

The long and short of it is that any President—confronted with a bureaucracy that succumbs to the Whittens of this world—has very little leeway. After Eisenhower was elected in 1952, Harry Truman was overheard to remark: "He'll sit right here and he'll say, 'Do this, do that,' and nothing will happen. Poor Ike! It won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating." Or, as McGeorge Bundy, who tussled with the problems of national security in the Kennedy Administration, has observed, "The ablest of Presidents, with the most brilliant and dedicated of Executive office staffs, simply cannot do it alone."

Ironically, however, there is one area of public policy in which the President has great leverage to work his will: foreign affairs. While the Whittens and the obstructionists at HUD cannot easily be removed, the strangle hold that various bureaucrats and appointed dignitaries have had on the conduct of foreign policy for 20 years can easily be broken simply by not appointing them again. It is worth mentioning the existence of an entrenched foreign-policy bureaucracy, if only because when people start complaining of inertia in Government, they tend to think exclusively of the domestic agencies. But the international arena also abounds with people who are similarly immune from public review. One need only peruse the columns written by James Reston of *The New York Times* to discover who some of them are: the Achesons, Lovetts, McCloys, Nitzes, Harrimans, Cliffsords, Gilpatrics and McNamaras. Many arose in the Truman years and went to ground in the Eisenhower era, but the first thing John Kennedy did after pledging to get the country moving again was to reach back and resurrect them. Richard Nixon has his own equivalents, all cut to the same establishmentarian. Cold Warrior pattern. He kept Henry Cabot Lodge at the Paris peace talks (David Bruce, another old hand, replaced him) and he has stuck with Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador in Saigon. And there has been no real house cleaning at State.

To the anti-Cold Warrior who resents the refusal of Presidents to infuse the foreign-policy process with new blood and who regards the foreign-policy establishment as so many interchangeable parts, the solution is instantly clear: Fire or sensibly retire the architects of the old order or elect a President with a new foreign policy. In short, find a new boy, someone who has not so fully absorbed the diplomacy of the Cold War that he feels compelled, quadrennially, to seek counsel from those who have provided the rhetoric and the policies that sustain the Cold War. But this simple remedy, unfortunately, is not applicable to the domestic agencies, to the middle-level officials in HEW not

HUD nor the Bureau of Roads nor the Corps of Engineers nor the OMB nor the Agency for International Development nor the Departments of Interior and Agriculture and Justice. Canonized by some earlier ruler, their positions secured by acceptable performance and consolidated by tenure, they remain fugitives from the men who are supposed to exercise some authority over them—but easy prey for the Jamie Whittens. Is it therefore true that nothing can be done to give elected officials greater control over the bureaucracy they inherit? No. The prospects for reform are not hopeless. One partial remedy would be to strengthen the roles of individual Cabinet members. The people on the Ash Commission who devised the reorganization plan under which Ehrlichman became head of the Domestic Council and Shultz boss of the OMB genuinely hoped that the scheme would strengthen the ties between the President and his principal appointive officers instead of inserting another layer between them. To his credit, Ehrlichman has attempted, through a complex system of *ad hoc* subcommittees that meet regularly at the White House, to bring Cabinet members into an intimate, day-to-day relationship with himself and other key members of Nixon's palace guard. If successful, this system ought to give members of the Cabinet a larger stake in policy making and, in time, infuse the vast structures around them with a greater sense of purpose.

Moreover, once it's clearly established that policy is to be made at the top, the men in the middle and at the bottom may acquire a sharper definition of their own roles, which are (or ought to be) essentially operational, nonpolitical and professional. Robert Wood recalls that when he was Undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, both Congress and the White House tried hard to arrange for greater coordination between ordinary citizens and local governments in the administration of antipoverty programs. Federal administrators at the local level, however, he complains, "never changed the signals." The will of the President and Congress was thus thwarted, and Wood suggests that new disciplinary measures be devised by the bureaucracy itself to ensure that people on the operational level behave like trained professionals rather than amateurs "intoxicated by visions" of making policy on their own.

When Wood complains about operational types in the permanent bureaucracy who imagine themselves to be policy makers, he and others who share his objections are expressing (sometimes tacitly, often openly) the wistful hope that someday the American Civil Service might be refashioned to resemble more nearly its British counterpart. It is gen-

eraly conceded that the British version works infinitely better and the reasons are not hard to find. One—as Wood has already suggested in his plea for more professionalism in American Government—is that to be a public servant in Britain is to occupy a post of considerable public prestige. The British civil service is free from patronage and its members are not routinely regarded as drudges or even, for that matter, as bureaucrats, which in America is not a kind word. Henry Kissinger, for instance, is constantly referring to men in the State Department as bureaucrats and the contempt in his voice is not calculated to elevate morale in Foggy Bottom. More important, perhaps, is the fact that a clear distinction is and always has been made in Britain between the functions of elected officials and those of the civil service. In Britain, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet (whose officers must all be elected members of Parliament) are solely responsible for *policy* in the broadest sense. The civil service is responsible for the *operation* of that policy. There is none of the confusion of roles that so bedeviled a man like Wood, who found his underlings continuously meddling with what he thought was his and the President's policy.

But unless we can transform our own Civil Service overnight (and I seriously doubt that we can), my feeling is that Government will not work until Congress makes it work. The President and his principal officers in Government can do very little to master the agencies as long as the bureaucrats can play Congress off against the Executive—as long as they can run to Congressman Whitten or to somebody like him whenever they get into trouble or whenever they disagree with orders passed down by their superiors. The public may want a national malnutrition survey; the President may want it; the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers (appointed by the President and, therefore, responsive to him) may want it. But the middle-echelon shuffler, responsive to Whitten, may not want it, and if he can get enough like-minded people together, he can either dissuade his boss from undertaking the project or simply sabotage it. But the Whitten example is an extreme one. The fundamental problem goes beyond the Whittens to embrace not only those isolated Congressmen who, hand in glove with their bureaucratic allies, work actively to sabotage policy but also all those in Congress who, because of apathy or overwork, just don't care what happens to their programs after the legislative process has ended and the bureaucracy has taken control. What we're talking about, in short, is Congressional accountability for the performance of the Executive branch.

Astoundingly enough, given the

amount of energy expended by Congress to invent programs, not to mention the enormous sums authorized for them, the men on the Hill make very little effort to monitor the subsequent performance of their own creations. Bad programs—flawed at conception—not only survive but flourish. Good programs are allowed to founder. Programs with a terminal date of. say, five years are often renewed with little opposition. By then, they have acquired momentum and allies—a bureaucracy in Washington to manage them and a constituency in the country to keep them alive. Ask a typical Congressman how he keeps track of the bureaucracy and he will reply, “Through the GAO”—the General Accounting Office, an extension of Congress that not only publishes the least-read reports in Washington but concerns itself almost exclusively with accounting procedures. The GAO is interested mainly in discovering waste in Government programs and establishing efficiency; but the GAO never really asks the relevant questions, namely: Is the program doing the job expected of it by Congress and are the men in charge of it any good?

Some brand-new mechanism will have to be devised to make crucial value judgments like these. There has never been any shortage of suggestions. I recall with nostalgia Daniel Patrick Moynihan's appearance five years ago before the subcommittee on government reorganization chaired by Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The hearings still stand as the largest compendium anywhere of good (and unused) suggestions on how the Government might better organize itself to attack the problems of the cities. Among the simplest and best of the ideas was Moynihan's proposal for a permanent, well-staffed office to monitor the effectiveness of Government programs. The office would be directly responsible not to the bureaucracy but to Congress and would make stiff recommendations for improving flawed programs or for canceling them altogether, along with the various bureaucratic appendages that have lost their usefulness. On a more modest level, Charles L. Schultze, L. B. J.'s Budget Director, has suggested that Congress can do as much if not more than the Executive branch to control the dollar-happy bureaucrats in the Pentagon; he suggests, for this purpose, that Congress set up a joint committee on the military budget to help establish priorities in the national-security area. Both committees would be staffed with skilled professionals capable of making tough judgments and remaining immune from bureaucratic or political pressures.

It may be argued that, by superimposing Congressional review on the workings of the bureaucracy, we might risk

ELE

out in fire across the nation, anger at all King's opponents, minimizers of his work, enemies of his mission, those who would not hear, who said, "Do not listen," called him liar. They resembled the men who ridiculed Isaiah, those who "say to the seers, 'You shall not see,' and to the visionaries, 'You shall have no true visions; give us smooth words.'" Enemies of the word are betrayers of its bearer—so this was done in memory of him, our brother Martin.

And, the priest added after Communion, in memory of "our sisters and brothers of the Conspiracy." Father Linden, you see, was a member of the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, some of whose members had just been indicted in Harrisburg on charges of planning to bomb and kidnap.

Recent history must seem like a nightmare confirmation of every red-neck's fears. First, a Baptist minister (of all people) started a revolution, one of those safe black oversolemn preacher types out of *The Green Pastures*, with a bible full of submissiveness—yet suddenly, that book caught fire in his hand; the pulpit had become a force again, a source of militant strength for blacks, menace for whites. Churches, long the most innocuous parts of our landscape, were now dangerous—as they had been when Patrick Henry spoke from a pew in Saint John's of Richmond. No wonder Southerners felt betrayed by "their" blacks and "their" religion. This preacher was actually *preaching*, and his words were not smooth.

Then new fears came to the Bible Belt as Catholic priests were charged with political conspiracy—memories of the Al Smith candidacy and “How many troops does the Pope have?” It was the kind of fear that had been laughed at for a long time, pooh-poohed in the Kennedy campaign, considered by the knowing a mere joke in questionable taste. Catholics themselves had spent cautious years dispelling any notion that a priest would meddle in American politics. And they had done their work well. By the early Sixties, there was nothing less dangerous than a Catholic priest.

But no longer. Some priests now carry danger with them—as friends of Philip and Daniel Berrigan have found out. A Pennsylvania grand-jury indictment treats visits with one of these priests in jail as “overt acts” of conspiracy. When two other priests, as a result of that indictment, were arrested in Baltimore, their cardinal, Lawrence Shehan, went instantly to visit them. Will that be considered an overt act of conspiracy? Probably not; though another of the overt acts—a nun’s move to Washington—was performed in response to her superior’s command. It seems only fair that that superior, responsible for the overt act, should be indicted, too. And even if Baltimore’s cardinal escaped the law, he is treated by some as a guilty man. After his visit to the jail, Catholics picketed Masses at his cathedral bearing signs that said, *DOWN WITH RED PRIESTS*—and if Catholics say that, what are the red-necks saying? A man in clerical dress and Roman collar went into a Baltimore hardware store to buy a length of lead pipe—a transaction that caught the eye of a crapulous gentleman just over from the neighboring tavern. He wanted to know what the unpatriotic priest was going to blow up *next*. The answer given was measured: that the

purchaser was neither American nor a Roman Catholic, but an Anglican visitor to this country. His critic, badly deflated, making one last try, asked then just what the pipe *was* for—and the response, this time, was gratifyingly obscene.

Picketers angry or confused over "Red priests" are not the only Catholics opposed to recent trends. Some older-line liberals also feel adrift. They had argued for years that the American scheme of church-state separation, dividing religion from politics, was a valid position. Jesuit John Courtney Murray, once silenced by Rome for maintaining this view, was vindicated at the Second Vatican Council. But by then, priests and nuns were out marching for civil rights, speaking for or against political candidates, running for office themselves, lobbying in Washington (to make laws), breaking into draft offices (to defy laws). There are still some Catholic liberals who think priests and nuns should go back into rectories and convents, let laymen represent their Church "in the world." But that will not happen now. If the Church is to recruit any priests at all, they will increasingly be movement priests, young men sympathetic to radical causes even when they don't actively promote them. The Berrigan are heroes to a whole generation of young men entering the seminaries, staying there or leaving them for a role as Catholic activists.

Not the least bewildered Catholics, we may be sure, are those FBI men who pursue or spy on priests and nuns, tap their wires, attend new liturgies, send informers into parish circles. When Sister Sue Cordes, working for the Berrigan defense committee, went to her sister's wedding a year ago, her mother warned her not to say too much about the peacework—the bridegroom was an agent. Father Redmond McGoldrick, a Jesuit priest who has been arrested four times at political protests, is on polite but guarded terms with his FBI brother-in-law. When agents finally ran down a Protestant minister who had yielded his pulpit to Dan Berrigan, while he was loose and being hunted, they spent 15 minutes talking about the priest's whereabouts and 40 minutes explaining why they, as Catholics, felt justified in stalking priests. The "conspiracy" and the FBI draw heavily on the same Catholic subculture.

For henceforth in one house five will be divided, three against two and two against three.

—Luke 12:52

Why this odd, Kafkan pursuit of Catholics by Catholics? It is not mysterious. Catholics had in recent decades been conditioned to a theological animus against communism, and that attitude dove-tailed neatly with old immigrant desires to prove their loyalty to America. The structure of the Church, moreover, elicited from Catholics a deep respect for authority and made them familiar with doctrinal ways of testing that respect. Catholics drifted naturally, therefore, toward investigative agencies in the fiercest Cold War time. This was as natural as the drift of other young men to the discipline and authority of the priesthood. The process was a mere updating of the classic choice offered in an Italian (or other ethnic) ghetto: While an older brother—Dominic,

say, played by Victor Mature—joined the police force, his younger brother Salvatore (played by Sal Mineo) went off to study for the priesthood. And Dom and Sal were equally good boys.

By the Fifties, of course, Dom had moved up—from cop on the beat to college graduate, eagerly recruited now by the FBI, by Federal and military investigative agencies. As the overworked joke put it, Fordham graduates were hired to check on Harvard graduates. If I may cast the situation in personal terms, one of my best friends from Catholic high school days is still in the CIA. And both brothers of the girl I dated back then were in a seminary—until one of the brothers left to join the FBI. This was a common progression. A Scripture scholar at the seminary where three of the Harrisburg defendants were trained says hardly a year went by, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, without his receiving an FBI clearance sheet on one of his former students, now applying to the Bureau. Hoover's force was attractive to the ex-seminarian at several levels of conscious and unconscious motivation. It gave young men a corps to join, a fellowship with an outsider's role as scrutinizer of men's failings and guardian of order. Boys who might have been uneasy at too-abrupt re-entry into secular life could stand partly off from it, still in distrust, spying on it—God's spies upon the world.

And if, by the Fifties, Dom had moved up from cop on the beat to regional director of the FBI, Sal, too, had gone to college, risen socially, taken on new responsibilities. A good example is the worker priest John Cronin, who found Communists easing into union jobs during World War Two and worked with the FBI to expose them. He was thus in an excellent position, after the war, to draw on the FBI's secret files, which he used to draft the American bishops' hard statement on the Communist menace. His contacts—with labor, Congress, Church hierarchy and the FBI—put him at the very center of postwar anti-Communist patriotism, a situation symbolized by the fact that he (along with Bishop Fulton Sheen) served as philosophical mentor to freshman Congressman Richard Nixon in 1947. Father Cronin even acted as Nixon's intermediary for reports smuggled out of the FBI (through Catholic agent Ed Hummer) when the Truman Administration was trying to halt inquiry into the case of Alger Hiss. Later, when Nixon became Vice-President, Father Cronin became his very ghostly ghostwriter.

Dom and Sal, once marginal Americans, were now a (largely secret) team at the top of things, quiet, well-intentioned saviors of their country. No won-

der a myth began to shape itself in terms of Communist menace and Catholic solution—Monsignor Sheen guiding Louis Budenz out of his Marxist darkness into light, Whittaker Chambers joining Clare Boothe Luce and William Buckley on crusade, an Irish Catholic Midwestern Senator taking on smug Ivy League Dean Achesons and Averell Harrimans. Rome, once suspect, now seemed the firmest bastion of Washington. No wonder Catholic patriots rejoiced—theirs were the country's shrivers, godly protectors and policemen.

Imagine, then, the harsh cheating of expectation when Catholic loyalists were sent out to trap their grade school teachers, “the good nuns.” The awkwardness of it showed up when churches had to be searched; raids were actually made on sacristies, with their surplice closets from which agents had robed themselves when they were altar boys. The FBI men probed in a gingerly way and asked, “Are you there, Father Dan?”—always the polite “Father” appended, giving the whole thing an air of the child’s game: “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Could it really be a father who was hiding from the law? Or, alternatively, if he was doing all this, could he still be called a father?

Little in the agents' personal experience equipped them to answer such hard questions. They had been brought up to consider all authority as one, in church and state, and to think of priests as especially allied with American values against all “outside” forces (for outside, read Communist). How, then, cope with a force not only inside the country and its citizenry but deep inside the Catholic structure of holy things? It would be easy enough to handle a merely selfish or crooked Catholic gone astray. If Dom and Sal had become, respectively, cop and priest, another route of escape from the ghetto had been taken by the third brother, Rocco (played by Richard Conte, now that Edward G. Robinson was too old for the part). Rocco was always the slick one, who finally out-smarted himself, went too far too fast; yet he would stagger back at the end, to die in the flicker of candles down the side aisle of his neighborhood church. Dom had hunted him down, but Sal would find and absolve him—“Are you there, Rocco?”

These new outlaws, however, are of a different order altogether. Rocco, when caught, obligingly repented. The real problem with men like the Berrigans is not that they are priests but that they refuse to recognize their crimes as crime, to give in to the good guys in the only way that matters—giving in to their standards and values. No, these men cling to their defiance, make of it what Catholics used to call “an outward sign of an inward reality”—a sacramental

criminality. As Bureau agents poked further into this enigma—“Are you there, Father Dan?”—did they remember dark confessionals from their youth (Is Father there, can he hear?), remember peering through the screen until a panel shuffled back and one hastily mumbled, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned”?

Catholic boys were brought up, once, on stories of heroic priests who kept the seal of confession—the pledge not to reveal things said to them by penitents—when Government investigators tried to learn what was said inside that box. Government investigators. It is striking how many Catholic saints defied Caesar—the eternal Caesar of state power—and how little impact that fact had on Catholics in America. It took the most conservative and fundamentalist kind of church in America—the Southern Baptist—to remind Catholics that all Christians have a heritage of resistance, from catacomb days. But by 1965, some had been reminded. That year, a young man named David Miller became the first American prosecuted for burning his draft card. He was a disciple of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. When the judge sentenced him, he turned toward prison with a touch of the ancient defiance and told his judge, “Caesar will never have me.” That should have been the warning sign that fools were on the loose again. It was almost as bad as living in the early days of Christianity, when Saint Paul's moves through Asia Minor were charted fearfully. At his arrival, men complained to local authorities, “The world’s troublemakers are now here” (*Acts of the Apostles* 17:6).

> I come out of a tradition stern in point of law and insist in force of obedience. There are those who may have heard of us—the Society of Jesus. We have a name here and there.
> 
> —Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

Few brothers could be more different than the Berrigans—Philip tall and fair, the athlete; Daniel slight and dark, with the face of a smug leprechaun. Phil, unafraid, always needs action; he practically dragged Dan into the Catonsville action (or drank him into it, through a long night of passionate fraternal arguing). Moody, emotional Irish, a bit of a brawler like his father and pestered by the ardent girls drawn to him, Phil is a hard man to say no to, a good man to have with you in a war. Dan, by contrast, is a bit chilly—aloof. Where Phil inspires, Dan disturbs, in his quieter way, probes deeper; the lines in his young-old face are the map of some strange country not yet explored. A shrewd woman, the first time she met him, said he should wear warning bells on the curved-back toes of green boots.

The world's troublemakers—not a