Getting tough

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington As spring slips toward summer, there have been few retrospective looks backward to this season ten years ago. What little attention has been accorded the remembrance oi the first tumultuous months of 1968 has been directed to the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's murder and the progress of black people since then.

But 1968 was also the year the students almost burned down Columbia University, the year of the 'Chicago Convention and Mayor Daley. The year of the conviction that a new anti-war politics was being forged by a special generation of young people. The greening of America it was called, after a best-selling book amplifying those happy themes.

The new politics and the anti-war move

ment went on to fight Richard Nixon with both sides unaware that his administration would accomplish the greatest progress toward detente and disarmament. If that fact needed underlining, it got it the other day when President Carter sent Walter Mondale to address the United Nations special session on disarmament while he saved himself for the Nato meetings being held at the same time in Washington. For a President given to the flashing of outward signs and symbols, it was an unmistakable message that the foreign policy direction of the Nixon administration, previously reversed by President Ford, would not be restored by him.

The dismissal of the UN session may rep resent inability rather than ill will. Mr Carter's State Department has almost reached a strategic arms treaty with the Russians, but as of now it has no chance of getting the two-thirds vote in the Senate it must have for ratification. With Congressional leaders of his own party off on a bellicose rant—the Senate democratic majority leader has been snorting about the country making military-preparedness speeches—it is highly unlikely a SALT treaty would get a fair hearing. The don't-give-'em-an-inch attitude is so prevalent that Mr Carter almost failed to get his innocuous, watery, much-amended Panama Canal treaty through.

Assuming the President has not himself become a convert to making America more of an atomic porcupine abristle with missiles than she already is, part of Mr Carter's problem is that the anti-war organisations have suffered a massive diminution in strength compared to 1968. Where rallies of 100,000 came easily then, manifestations of a tenth of that number are seldom if ever held now. Again, shut out of effective voice in either political party, with no access to the mass media, anti-armaments people have been thrown back to committing minor acts of civil disobedience to get even trifling attention. Not that sentiment in the country has become crazily jingoistic. The impression one gets is of considerable scepticism, if little accurate knowledge, about the huge increase in war expenditures being discussed here.

But diffuse, politically impotent sentiments are no match for the money and organised clamour for more guns and a tougher line toward the Communists. For that the Zaire episode was made to order. During the better part of two weeks we've heard of almost nothing else in Washington. The television has broadcast the murders of white Europeans and the dastardly role of the Russo-Cuban conspiracy to every corner of the nation. Indeed, the murder of whites was so emphasised, the affair began to look like a graceless colonial grab for the copper mines in that luckless land. This brought about a spate of blacksgot-killed-too articles.

Neither approach has enflamed the populace, most of whom cannot name ten countries in the Dark Continent. Even some members of Congress still wonder if Moscow's role in Africa is so important and remain unimpressed by the administration's suddenly passionate involvement with states whose prime ministers wouldn't even have rated a picture-taking ceremony in the White House rose garden five years ago.

There is some conjecture that the President is exploiting Moscow's equatorial frolic in order to show the Senate that when it comes to Communists, he's as tough as a witch's toenail. The hope is his behaviour in Africa may win favour for SALT, if and when •the issue is ever presented to that body of rich, stuffy and conventionalminded Americans who make up the Senate. If that is his tactic, he has fooled no one and has added another controversy to his list of troubles, because he's now asking for legislation which will permit him to play CIA-type games in Angola, something he currently is not allowed by law to do. Whether the CIA is any longer a serviceable instrument is a matter of debate. For a clan destine, super-secret organisation dedicated to skulduggery, it is strangely unable to stay off the front page. When outsiders aren't accusing it of crimes both heinous and ridiculous, its own ex-employees are ceaselessly exposing it. The flow of books by former agents appears endless. A helpless government has taken to suing these authors for their book profits, but this approach didn't discourage John Stockwell, who headed the CIA Angola task force in

1975, from coming out with yet another book (In Search of Enemies W.W. Norton and Co., N.Y.).

The CIA crimes Mr Stockwell recounts are less against mankind than against the American taxpayer. He paints a picture of an organisation whose upper echelons are jammed with over-the-hill slobs, spending their days cheating on their expense accounts and their nights at parties where they drunkenly drop the names of their own secret agents. Stockwell's description of the government-paid-for-home of the chief CIA agent in Kinshasa completes the picture of a fat-in-the-gut organisation of the most dubious competence: 'The foyer . . . was as large as the living room of most American homes , beyond was a vast space with three separate clusters of furniture, rather like a hotel lobby. This was the living room. A wall of french windows opened on to the $40,000 swimming pool. . . added at government expense in 1968. The right wing of the house included four or five bedrooms, each with its own bath, on the left were the dining room, kitchen, pantry and servants' quarters. Altogether there were six.bathrooms including the one in the additional servants' quarters in the yard. The villa was cooled by a dozen air conditioners mounted in the walls.' How's that for inconspicuous hardship on the lethal marches of the cold war?

As if that were not enough, it has recently come out that the federal government's own Occupation Safety and Health Administration has accused the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, outside Washington, Of numerous violations of the safety code: no exit signs, loose wires, dangerous stored flammable liquids and workers exposed to carbon tetrachloride, a carcinogen. The only consolation is that the CIA's Russian counterparts are more brutal and even less effective.

But Africa isn't what Americans are talking about when they drink their beer: that topic is taxes, the most odious and hated of which is the property tax, not a negligible item in a society where perhaps two-thirds of all families own their homes. Unlike the federal income tax which is taken our of your pay check before you get the money, or the sales tax which is collected in dribs and drabs, the property tax is visible and therefore particularly painful. It is based n.8 what the assessor thinks your house .0 worth. And since the price of houses in states like California has been galloping way ahead of inflation, tax bills have been zooming upward accordingly.

The conseq.uence is that Californians are to vote in the next few days on a proposition which would cut taxes back to their 1975 levels and severely limit the power of goy' ernment to raise them in the future (California is one of a number of states which have direct popular legislation bY plebiscite).

Those self-same voters were made angrier by news that the Pentagon — under the Equal Opportunities Act — was spend: ing $430,000 of their money to train armeo forces chaplains to minister to the needs of enlisted witches and warlocks. It is not known how many such individuals there are serving their country's and Satan's flag, bnr armed with their preternatural powers, it Is presumed they can shoot straighter than the ordinary soldiers, and that ought to be 8 comfort to friend and foe alike.