The Center

Stewart Alsop

Description

A portrait of Washington politics during one of the most turbulent eras in American history by the twentieth century’s premier US government insider.
 
During his three decades as a journalist and political pundit for the New York Herald Tribune and Newsweek magazine, Stewart Alsop covered many of the defining historical events of mid-to-late twentieth-century America, from the post–World War II boom and the Red Scare to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. In The Center, Alsop provides a perceptive, provocative, and marvelously erudite insider’s view of the American political landscape of the 1960s, reporting from the beating heart of Washington, DC, the power center of the Western world.
 
With an unblinking eye and razor-sharp intellect, Alsop cogently explores an arena of unbridled political power and influence that spans from the White House to Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court. He offers remarkable insights into the motivations and very human foibles of the key figures behind some of the century’s most momentous events: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, CIA Director Richard Helms and Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, among many others.
 
The Center is a must-read for anyone interested in American politics and how the system got us to where we are today.
 

Sujets

• Washington
• Lyndon Johnson
• Robert McNamara
• Reporter
• JFK
• US
• Cuba
• Power
• History of Cuba
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Journalism
• Politics
• Bay of Pigs
• Lyndon B. Johnson
• Politician
• Commentator
• John F. Kennedy
• Political journalism

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 07 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781480445994
• Langue: English

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The Center
People and Power in Political Washington
Stewart Alsop
CONTENTS
Preface
1. THE DRAMA OF CONFLICT
2. THE WASHINGTONS
3. THE CENTER OF THE CENTER
4. A BACKWARD GLANCE
5. THE SAD STATE OF STATE
6. DEFENSE: The McNamara Revolution
7. THE PRESS: Fashions in the News
8. CIA: Triumph of the Prudent Professionals
9. THE INNER CABINETS
10. THE SINKING HILL
11. THE COURT: Mystique and Reality
12. THE ERA OF THE INSOLUBLE
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
A rather equivocal and shapeless pudding .
When I had this book about half finished, I was driving west from Capitol Hill on Constitution Avenue in a taxi, when it suddenly came home to me rather forcibly that I really wasn t at all qualified to write a book about Washington.
I was passing the National Gallery on my left, and I noticed on my right an imposing building in vaguely classic style, flanked by two muscular rearing horses. What was it? I peered out of the taxi, and made out a sign over a doorway: FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION . I d never set foot in the building, and I had only a very vague notion of what the Federal Trade Commission was supposed to do. For that matter, although Johnnie Walker, the director of the National Gallery, is an old friend, and I ve been in the place many times, it occurred to me that I am not really at all qualified to write about the National Gallery.
It was a dreary, drizzly day, and it was rush hour. As the taxi made its way slowly up the avenue my gloom deepened. There were a lot of buildings I had never been in, and I had hardly a clue to what went on inside them. The Smithsonian-Dillon Ripley, the secretary of the Smithsonian, was another old friend, but I know no more about the place than any tourist. The FBI-well, I d been investigated by the Bureau several times, for writing what I wasn t supposed to write, but unlike millions of school-age children, I d never even seen the famous pistol range or the exhibit that shows how John Dillinger got his comeuppance.
We passed the White House, and I cheered up a bit-I knew a good deal about the White House. Then there were the ugly World War I Navy tempos on the left. The first time I d been in them was back in 1946, when I started reporting in Washington. I d surprised the late Admiral Forrest Sherman, then Chief of Naval Operations, by asking him whether we really needed a navy, now that we had the bomb-I ll never forget the look of honest amazement on his face. Since then, the Navy high command has moved to the Pentagon, and I had never been back.
Then there was the Pan-American Union building-I d never been in it-and another huge building I d never really looked at before. It, too, had a sign: CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION . All I knew about the Civil Service Commission was that it was headed by a very smart man called John Macy, and that the Civil Service it administered was a bureaucratic disaster for which a great-uncle of mine was largely responsible.
And so it went. It was during that taxi ride that I realized I really couldn t possibly write the sort of book I had set out to write. When I started work on this book, I vaguely intended to do for Washington what John Gunther has done for several continents. The reader would be taken inside Washington and given all the essential facts about the place-about the Civil Service Commission, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission; about HUD and HEW and CAB and FAA and FCC and IRS; about how the District of Columbia is, and is not, governed; about what is worth seeing in Washington and what isn t; and even about Black Washington-which is almost two-thirds of the city, and which is as alien and mysterious to White Washington as Ulan Bator or Semipalatinsk-and how its inhabitants really live.
Maybe somebody, someday, will write such a book. This is not it. Now I understand why John Gunther has never written Inside Washington , although he at one time firmly intended to do so. There are just too many Washingtons to get inside of. And a good many of these Washingtons are interesting only to the people who inhabit them or are in some way involved in them. This book turned out to be only about the Washington that is inhabited by political journalists and the people they write about.
There are reporters in Washington who can tell you all about the Civil Service Commission or the Federal Trade Commission or HUD or CAB, and there are others who can tell you about Black Washington and about how the District is run. All the various Washingtons are covered by some members of the city s press corps of fifteen hundred reporters. But the Washington that is covered by a Washington columnist and political writer-which I have been for more than twenty years-is a tunnel-vision Washington.
The Washington which a political journalist sees with his tunnel vision is the American equivalent of the Moscow which Soviet politicians, diplomats, and apparatchiks call The Center. Moscow is the true center of political power in the Soviet Union, and in the Soviet political empire beyond the borders of Russia. In the same way, Washington has now become this country s true center of political power. This book is about the inhabitants of the American Center, and about the power they exercise.
Until rather recently, Washington was the true center of political power in this country only very rarely and intermittently. It was The Center during the Civil War, to be sure. But during the long prewar political doldrums, the era of the doughface Presidents, it was no true center of power. Nor was it in the decades between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. The Washington Henry Adams knew, in that era of the robber barons and the conquest of the West, was a sideshow, sometimes fascinating, more often dull.
Theodore Roosevelt (the great-uncle who foisted Civil Service on the government) and Woodrow Wilson, who hated each other, together made Washington a genuine national capital, and the First War accelerated the process. There followed another era of the doldrums. Nobody would have thought of calling the sleepy, rather inconsequential Southern town that Washington was in Calvin Coolidge s day the center of anything very important. It was only during the depression and the New Deal that Washington again became, this time for good, the true center of American power.
This power shift largely explains the almost lunatic hatred which the rich and respectable, above all in the Wall Street financial community, felt for Franklin Roosevelt. The hatred was surely irrational in economic terms-in the New Deal era the rich got steadily richer. But power as well as money was at stake, and, more even than the loss of money, men instinctively resent, and bitterly resist, the loss of power.
The Wall Street financial community is still powerful, of course, and there are other major power centers in the United States. But the ultimate power lies in Washington. (This is one reason why Wall Street lawyers and financiers who have exercised power, Washington style, and then returned to Manhattan almost always feel a certain nostalgia: having dealt in billions, the symbol of Washington s power, they find it hard to reconcile themselves again to mere millions.) Washington s power is economic and financial as well as political-it is Washington that must choose between easy money and hard money, between applying the brakes or the accelerator to the economy. But Washington s essential power is political. It is in Washington that the great domestic crises must be dealt with, and the great crises of foreign policy too, up to and including the ultimate choice between peace and war.
This centralization of power in Washington is no doubt a regrettable fact. But it is a fact. Washington is now permanently the center of the United States, as Moscow is Russia s center, or London England s. It is this, and only this, that makes Washington worth reading about. In this book, there are brief excursions outside The Center, but The Center-the complex political community which exercises power in Washington and which is the city s only reason for being-is the subject.
The Center is also the theme of this book, insofar as it has a theme. In his first volume of memoirs, Winds of Change , Harold Macmillan recalls a remark Winston Churchill made at one of his fortnightly luncheons with members of his shadow cabinet when he was leader of the opposition. A rather equivocal and shapeless pudding was served, which Churchill regarded with distaste. He called to the waiter: Pray, take away this pudding, it has no theme. As Macmillan observes, this incident is a warning to authors as well as to cooks. Unfortunately, this book is something of a pudding.
For power is like a pudding. It is formless, or rather it has so many forms that it is equivocal and shapeless. Moreover, it is impossible to write about power without writing about the people who exercise it. As a result, this book is at least as much about people as about power. And the people who inhabit The Center, like Churchill s pudding, have no theme.
Most of them have certain common characteristics. Most of them are able people-a process of natural selection winnows out the really incompetent and the really stupid, in the top jobs. Most of them are ambitious, and most of them enjoy the exercise of power. Otherwise they would not be where they are, for power, rather than money, is Washington s measure of success. But the faces of the people who exercise power in Washington are always changing, and it is impossible for a cook to establ