Disarray in the Government

"I eat lunch in the White House mess in 25 minutes," lamented a White House aide last week. "Everybody is afraid to talk. So the only thing you can do is bury your head in your soup."

"I heard [Secretary of Agriculture Earl L.] Butz was thinking of resigning, and when I heard that, I got right on the phone to tell him not to do it," said Iowa Congressman Bill Scherle, standing outside the House chamber during a debate on the farm bill. "He's our friend. If we lose him we lose a lot."

"I heard some of the stories about George [Secretary of the Treasury Shultz] leaving, so I called up Sunday night, and it was only 8 o'clock and he already was in bed exhausted," a friend said. "He'd been working all day at the office. I'm concerned."

"Everything has stopped," declared a frustrated Washington attorney. "We've got stuff over in Antitrust and at Treasury. We can't get any decisions. And at the Price Commission it is hopeless. We've got a raft of exceptions we're trying to get settled from Phase II."

"We've been trying to get the St. Louis airport straightened out for months," mused a senatorial assistant. "They need more facilities there. The question is whether they should expand Lambert Field or whether they should build another airport over in East St. Louis in Illinois. First John Ehrlichman had it, and he said he would make a decision. You know what happened to him. They told us the decision was in the hands of Egil Krogh, the new Under Secretary of Transportation. You know what happened to him too. Now there is a new man, I can't even remember his name."

"We don't know where to go for direction," sighed a White House staff assistant. "We've got the President's daughter being contradicted by the press office, and then she contradicts them. Our new lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, issues a memorandum, which is immediately disavowed by the press secretary."

"I ran into a friend of Melvin Laird's [the new White House domestic czar] out West, and he felt Laird would be cut in a couple of months," said a Washington lawyer.

These are the voices of Washington now. Some others:

"It is more serious than I ever remember it . . . It isn't just people sitting in front of their TV sets and watching the Watergate hearings. It is deeper than that now. There is a tremendous uncertainty . . . My friends want to leave not because of Nixon so much, but because nothing has happened . . . I can see now that I'm not going to be able to accomplish much. Would I be disloyal if I left at the end of the year? . . . I keep hearing how hard it is to get the President's attention."

Mel Laird, Bryce Harlow, the new White House political operative, and Al Haig, the chief of staff, are fighting this crushing weight of discouragement. So is Nixon in a way, but he remains a distracted--and now ill--man. ("How do we get him out of that cocoon?" worried one White House official last week.)

An expanded meeting of Republican congressional leaders marked one small step for the better. Nixon asked for advice on the economy, and he listened. There was Illinois Senator Charles H. Percy, heretofore considered a White House enemy, warning about an onslaught of angry American tourists who are finding out how diminished the dollar is overseas, urging productivity councils, a flexible investment tax credit, spending cuts. Percy got it all out, and driving back to the Hill with G.O.P. Chairman George Bush, he felt better. So did Congressman Les Arends, who reported on the problems of farmers from his Illinois district. Texan John Tower thumped for the need to increase beef production. New Hampshire's Norris Cotton told the story of how a farmer drove 100 miles to talk to him because he thought Cotton was close to Nixon and could deliver the message. Well, now he could. We once paid farmers to kill animals, the fellow told Cotton. That was wrong. Why don't we turn it around now, do something to build up supply instead of restricting it?

Big John Connally, the disenchanted counselor, was there, back in the fold ("He nodded wisely a couple of times," reported one participant), and so was the disheartened George Shultz, ready to trudge on. The ripples from such meetings can in the long run change the Government and the nation. But is it too little and too late? Richard Nixon's Government is for now an ocean of despair.

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