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congressional leaders of his own party. he was too much of a neophyte to realize what was happening to him from the getgo, and that his real enemies consisted of entrenched interests, which controlled both parties, just the way they do today. Obama faces many of the same problems, and it sickens me that he has failed to learn Carter's lesson ever read "Liberty Under Siege?" Walter Karp that's the thesis of the first half of his book. So the President-elect, a suspect tribune, now knows well enough what the great bulk of the American people expects of him: They want the democratic movement to go forward. What else is an outsider President for? The real question facing Carter, the terrible nightmarish question, is, 'What will the Democratic Congress allow him to do? Suppose party leaders in Congress give him no support at all? What then? "It was bad enough," says Hamilton Jordan, the President-elect's chief political aide, "that they didn't know him and had no stake in his candidacy, but to make matters worse, Carter had defeated their various darlings in the battles around the country" 'When Carter meets, post-election, with Democratic congressional leaders in Georgia, fear and hostility, fear masked as hostility, seem to roll off Carter in waves. "You'd sit at a meeting with Carter," Representative Morris Udall recalls some six months later, "and he felt the compulsion to remind you that he also had your constituents as his constituents and that he wouldn't hesitate to take Congress on .... It was almost like he felt a compulsion to do this, as though he felt it was inevitable, or looked forward to the conflict, or thought it was unavoidable."
"I can get to your constituents faster than you can by going on television," Carter reportedly warns the visiting party leaders. A dire threat indeed, an empty bluff, never to be carried out, but already necessary, or the first hostile shots have already been fired. Nine days after the election <1976>-Veterans' Day-the Committee on the Present Danger makes its first public appearance with a declaration of war against Carter's hopes for arms control and improved relations with the Soviet Union. "The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom," goes the martial declaration, "is the Soviet drive for dominance based on an unprecedented military buildup"-in fact, a 3 percent average increase yearly since 1970, 2 percent since 1974, but America's "will"-and America's oligarchy can be strengthened only by "massive understandable challenge."
The committee members, it is said, form a "who's who of the Democratic Party establishment." Chairman and founder is Eugene Rostow, Lyndon Johnson's Under Secretary of State, head of the foreign-policy task force of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, some twenty of whose members have become Present Dangerists. "We started over, but with the same people and the same ideas," explains Rostow. To discredit the democratic reforms in 1972; to discredit détente in 1976. The same "ideas" indeed: rule by the few, oligarchy restored, one way or another. Cochairman of the Present Danger is Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and "heir apparent" to its president, eighty-three-year-old George Meany; heir to the votes of 14.5 million powerless union members; heir to trade unionism's unswerving devotion to the Democratic machine and the endless Cold War; oligarchy revived, one way or another. Chief counsel of the Present Danger is Max Kampelman, once one of the chief political advisers to Hubert Humphrey, now gravely concerned, among other worries, over the excessive "power of the press." The nine-man executive committee includes Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, one of the first American officials to argue that a President's authority as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. forces allows him to make war at will. What loathing of liberty burns in these hearts! 'What scant love of truth! Chairman of the committee's "policy studies" is Paul Nitze, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, arms control negotiator for Nixon, who quit in "disgust" in June 1974, now a member of Team B, the tumorous appendix to the CIA. Nitze has lived for twenty-five years in an atmosphere of ever-present danger: principal author in 1950 of a momentous State Department warning to President Truman that unless the U.S. embarked at once on the largest military buildup in its peacetime history, the Soviet Union would launch its drive for world conquest around 1 956-Nitze's "year of maximum danger"; principal concocter of the fictitious "missile gap" in 1957; principal author in 1972 of the newest present-danger: Allied "perception" of Soviet nuclear superiority will bind them in terror to the Soviet will unless the U.S. demonstrates its "will and resolve" with a renewed race for nuclear supremacy.
The board of directors of the Present Danger includes a large and varied collocation of trade union leaders, bankers, financial speculators and retired officials of both parties: John Connally; William Casey; Sol Chaikin, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union; and Richard Mellon Scaife, generous supporter of right-wing causes. Also several future "neoconservatives" from the Democratic Majority: Norman Podhoretz; his wife, Midge Decter; Seymour Martin Lipset, the Stanford University political scientist who demonstrated in a 1970 work that the greatest menace to political liberty in America is its exercise by ordinary people. And Jeane Kirkpatrick, that busy tongue of Hydra-headed oligarchy, now convinced that the millions of Democratic primary voters who form a pernicious "elite" have gone one step further into evil and now generate a spirit of appeasement, and even, says colleague Podhoretz some months hence, a "culture of appeasement." Appeasement, in fact, is the leading "idea" of the Present Dangerists. "We are living in a prewar and not a post-war world," says Rostow. "Our posture today is comparable to that of Britain, France and the United States during the Thirties. Whether we are the Rhineland or the Munich watershed remains to be seen." The Soviet Union is Hitler's Germany on the verge of launching a war; the United States, like pre-war Britain, is stewing in fear; détente is cowardly appeasement, Senator Jackson is a second Churchill crying in the wilderness (or so readers of Commentary are told). It remains only to demonstrate-such is the Present Danger's grand object-that Prime Minister Chamberlain, weak, self-deluded appeaser of Hitler, who returned from Munich in 1938 announcing "peace in our time," has been reborn as-Jimmy Carter. The e opening salvo has been fired.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Walter_Karp/Reaction_Launched_LUS.htmllots more at the link |
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