The Battalion
Viewpoint
July 22, 1981
In
Slouch By Jim Earle
“Could you explain one more time how that helmet protects a
skydiver if something goes wrong?“
Journalists watch out:
diplomats have big ears
By JIM ANDERSON
United Press International
WASHINGTON — Every so often, the
State Department releases a bricksized
volume in its series “Foreign Relations of
the United States.”
The heavy tomes, made up of some 1,600
pages of secret cables, memos and notes
that are all more than 25 years old, make
great door-stops. For the history buff with
stainless steel eyeballs, the collections of
declassified documents can also give an in
sight into how foreign policy was made and
how dull all those closed-door diplomatic
conferences really are.
The latest volume, from the Geneva con
ferences of 1952 and 1954 dealing with In
dochina and Korea, is a grinding exercise in
futility. But, almost accidentally, the col
lection of documents has a lesson in it for
journalists.
Diplomatic correspondents tend to think
of themselves as collectors of information,
gleaners who can put hints and opaque
statements together to make a meaningful
view of foreign policy in action.
Several of the documents just declassi
fied show that the reporters, to a degree
they will find surprising, are themselves
the source and channel of information that
is collected and used by the diplomats.
For example, one “confidential” cable to
the State department from U.S. diplomat
U. Alexis Johnson reported in 1954 that
“several knowledgeable American corres
pondents” had talked with an American
press officer about their belief that the
Chinese communist leadership was taking a
role increasingly independent from that of
the Soviets.
The cable quotes “well-versed observers
such as Edmund Stevens of the Christian
Science Monitor, Ed Korry (then with Un
ited Press and later U.S. ambassador to
Chile) and Joe Fromm of U.S. News &
World Report.”
The Johnson cable says it was the consen-
The Johnson cable ends with a diplomatic
cop-out: “I do not entirely share these
views but pass them on as of possible in
terest. ”
Ironically, another 1954 cable, this one
from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
at Geneva, gives the official U.S. line:
“There has been nothing to date indicating
any differences of opinion between the
Soviet Union and communist China.”
Dulles flatly ordered that no official U.S.
source should even hint that there were
major Sino-Sovet differences. But six years
later, when Russian advisers were pulled
out of China, the State Department official
ly recognized what had been apparent to a
small group of reporters in Geneva: There
were real differences between Moscow and
Peking.
Another memo from Johnson recounts in
detail a dinner table conversation between
J. Kingsbury Smith of International News
Service and a man named Zhukov, a Soviet
correspondent from Pravda.
Zhukov, who apparently was more than
just a Soviet newspaper reporter, laid out
for Smith (who then passed it on to Johnson,
who was head of the American delegation)
much of the communist strategy in the In
dochina conference.
Smith, now national editor of Hearst
Newspapers, says he had already written
for INS what he passed on to the American
delegation about the Zhukov conversation,
and he had no idea that Johnson was meti
culously passing on his dinner table chit
chat to the State Department.
The moral seems to be: Diplomats have
big ears, and reporters should be careful
when talking to them.
The Battalion
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Clouds gathering over GOF El
By DAVID S. BRODER
WASHINGTON — So many things are
going so well for the Republicans these days
that it seems almost churlish to suggest that
there are a few clouds on the horizon. But
there they are — and they may as well be
acknowledged.
First, though, the good news for the
GOP. Ronald Reagan has reached his six-
month anniversary in the presidency in re
markable fine political fettle. That is attri
butable to two interlocking accomplish
ments.
ternationally. The Ottawa economic talks,
focusing on the overseas effects of Reagan’s
unique mixture of high interest rates,
budget stringency and tax cuts, is putting
on display the tensions within the alliance
'over his fundamental economic policy.
When the president comes home, he
will face a series of decisions on major de-
fesne weapons systems and the export of
American arms to the Middle East, on all of
which his own party in Congress is divided.
He and his senior aides have done an
extraordinary job of focusing public and
congressional attention on their chosen
agenda of budget and tax cuts. They have
dominated the debate on those issues.
Second, they have benefitted from thr re
markable display of cohesiveness and acu
men by the congressional Repulicans under
Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and
House Minority Leader Bob Michel.
Social Security looks like a political tar-
baby for Reagan and the Republicans; in all
the optimistic polling, the one jarring ele
ment is the suspicion by large majorities
that those now in power may jeopardize or
cut back the most widely supported part of
the social safety net. The administrations’s
mishandling of the Social Security issue is
worrisome — very worrisome — to Reagan
loyalists on Capitol Hill.
And that raises the third nagfe
Despite the record of achieve® old Inc
first six months, there is still slit: 0 rder are
Washington about how deeplyaive, says s
tively Reagan is engaged in thewB re m * >
tendency to skate lightly over lit j-) r
of many policy discussions. Itv. se( j amon
to learn that for five days after ft e n referr
staff had been briefed on tin anded do>
Reagan was shielded from knowsually can
a major scandal was about to bre3pl° rers a
spymaster Hugel. Kimber
„ , jent mon
Soon, the President will depan^joug m0(
vacation, and the questions al)(!. m ts from
really minding the store are ak^
to rise in volume. Kimber
vo groups
Finally, for all their publicizecf exitail ' Al
the Democrats are showing signs 011 ?
, . c order folk
mg one lesson from their morcsfe
The teamwork of the White House and
the GOP senators and representatives has
been awesome to behold. The public is
plainly impressed; each succeeding set of
polls measures further progress by the Re
publican Party toward majority status in the
country and a highly competitive position
in the 1982 congressional race.
Second, there is a growing awareness in
Washington that the Reagan White House
is thinly staffed and perhaps stretched too
far for the demands of the expanding agen
da. The triumvirate of Ed Meese, Jime Bak
er and Mike Deaver gets very high marks,
as does budget chief Dave Stockman, con
gressional liaison Max Friedersdorf, and
public relations counselor Dave Gergen.
past. They are saying with some : "Among
on both the tax bill and Soc >day of fol
issues that they are the party tkte vitality
for the wage-earners, the vjjvHillCoui
orphans and the Republicans a. r i ^ exas ^ e:
of the affluent. uropean-i
aence and
It is not a subtle or elevatingi|^ ex ’ can
but it has worked in the past.
Mississippi special election sho^^ ^ j
And yet ... and yet. There are at least
four reasons to belive that the next few
months may see some bumpy passages for
the Reagan bandwagon and test the GOP in
ways it has not been tested so far.
First, the tightly controlled agenda is
about to expand, both domestically and in-
But there are conspicuous weaknesses in
the non-budget domestic issues area and in
all of foreign policy — weaknesses that the
insiders acknowledge and whose consequ
ences the public will soon enough come to
see. The Max Hugel fiasco at the CIA was a
warning sign that other national security
disasters are waiting to happen. In that
area, Reagan is in a race against time to
shore up a sagging policymaking stucture.
in the full flower of Reagan’s po
offers the potential for unifying
class constituency across racial;
gical lines, and producing a vict
Democrats now and then.
None of this suggests that Reai
political revolution are about to
r
j
tracks. My own guess is that the: Robert N
will come through this shakeout d wine-m
ably good shape. But I’d be surp He was k
quite the cakewalk or the triumpl ,sc hoolat’
sion these first six months have 3 Texas o
tactly hon
;ars in Fn
<W
sus of the correspondents, based on the
close observation of tiny hints such as the
guest lists of diplomatic dinners, that Chou
En-lai “has been making obvious efforts to
forge (his) own foreign policy in the Far
East.”
TO TUB
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Speaker
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Reagan, summit both under fire
fniversity.
State Se
ill address
y medici
id their g
iremony i:
By JIM ANDERSON
United Press International
WASHINGTON — When the members of
OPEC, the cartel of oil-exporting states,
jacked up their prices 400 percent in 1974,
they started something new in summitry:
the annual roving migration of statesmen,
economists and journalists known as the
Western economic summits.
From a sense of collective alarm, the
seven leading Western industrial democra
cies were invited to meet in France in 1975.
It has turned out to be an annual event.
The political leaders of Canada, Britain,
Japan, the United States, West Germany,
France and Italy have gathered once each
summer to plan joint actions for those prob
lems which have a solution and to try to
increase their common understanding of
the insoluble issues.
Have the summits done any good? The
carefully considered answer, supplied by
statisics and by statements from participat
ing officials, is, “Yes, a bit.”
They cite as examples:
— The original idea of reducing depend
ence on outside oil supplies has succeeded,
to some extent. In the last seven years, the
use of oil in all the countries dropped about
5 percent. It did not succeed in holding oil
prices down and those costs have more than
doubled in the last two years.
— The cooperative economic action did
not succeed in averting what is now seen to
have been a full-scale recession in all the
countries in 1980. But it did spread the
burden around the industrialized coun
tries.
— The countries agreed to take joint
action against international terrorism in
1978. The decision has not by any means
eliminated transnational acts of terrorism
but it has made them more difficult.
— By coordinating their trade polices
with the Soviet Union, the Western coun
tries probably were able to exert more lev
erage on the Soviets in the wake of Afgha
nistan. However, the burden of that
cooperation fell mainly on the United
States, which saw its exports to the Soviet
Union slashed 67 percent.
— In last year’s summit at Venice, the
seven nations agreed inflation was the chief
villain in their combined economic crisis.
Despite a big jump in oil prices, the coun
tries have held to their word and concen
trated on fighting inflation, even though
unemployment rates rose in all countries as
an indirect result.
One of the inherent problems of the
annual gathering of the seven nations is that
they are not equals. The United States,
with a gross national product of $2.4 tril
lion, has an economic weight that is greater
than the combined product of Canada, Bri
tain, West Germany, France and Italy.
This year, more than most, there is an
underlying current of adversary politics
within the group as the Western Euro
peans, in a series of preliminary meetings,
agreed upon action they think the United
States should take.
U.S. officials say much of the prelimin
ary manuevering is meant for domestic
political consumption in Europe. But,
allowing for that, there appears toi' Dr. W.<
genuine grievances against the Tarleton
administration on three points: ? st w
— The Reagan economic recovf uates^n 0
ram, while laudable for making^
dollar strong, is doing so in wayst% c j ie j or , s
profound and sometimes harmftilfjnted at t]
ences on the other countries - in Associa
devaluing the French franc and tarter esti
pound to make the dollar healthy ^ be gra
— The Western Europeans, paflBBHI
the West Germans, have close ec(
and political links with Eastern Eni(
they fear the sometimes stride^
Soviet rhetoric coming from Wail
will create a new Cold War. %{
European nations, which havegainf!
asure of economic and political ind'
ence from Moscow during the f- f or
detente, may once again be locked^
new Iron Curtain if the clock is tuff
to the Cold War days.
— Some of the Europeans doubt-
Reagan administration is sincert ■
trying to reach an early agreement' 1 q f y
Soviets on arms control. The Rea$ " /
cc
Soviets on arms control. The Reaga 1
nistration scrapped the painfully ad Q £y
SALT II agreement and has shownt- /
of urgency in approaching the So' 1 ^ TV
talks to limit long-range nuclear f /
stationed in Europe.
American officials warn that nod And Ie
results are expected from the Otta' c Conditi
mit. That is another way of say#!
think they can contain the criticisitj
other nations and the industrial'
the summit will be pretty much lib
before.
Sped
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