Studying the Study

Despite its worthy intentions, the President's Commission on Civil Disorders made several tactical errors in its report on the causes and cure of Negro rioting -- and critics lost no time last week pointing them out. Though its overall findings were well received, there were irate charges that the com mission had failed to condemn those responsible for the rioting last summer, and that the report's Armageddon tone was overly dramatic. But the most damaging gaffe by the eleven-member commission may turn out to have been something far more simple and personal: its disregard for President Johnson and what he has accomplished.

Feeling that the commission, which he appointed himself, had slighted the Administration's efforts to help Negroes, Johnson all but ignored the study. He did not invite the commissioners to the White House, as many expected him to, for release of the report, pointedly refrained from commenting on it publicly for three days. When he did bring himself to mention it, before a bankers' meeting on the urban crisis, it was with faint praise. The report "is one of the most thorough and exhaustive studies ever made," said the President. "I don't ask you to embrace every recommendation they make--but I do ask you to do the best you can."

Nero Congress. There was some justification for the President's pique. Johnson knows only too well that the commission's imaginative recommendations for eradicating the squalor of the ghettos will seem intimidatingly ambitious to the penny-pinching 90th Congress. New York City's Mayor John Lindsay, vice chairman of the commission, warned that "the cost figure is relatively unimportant in terms of what we have to do in or der to save this country from the possibility of chaos." Nonetheless, with the Viet Nam war taking more than $2 billion monthly, Congress is in no mood to embark on an uncharted, unbudgeted program. "This is extravagant and unattainable," declared Texas Representative George Mahon, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. "If you really got to tackling this thing, $100 billion wouldn't go very far."

Predictably, congressional reaction split along geographical and ideological lines, though many legislators were keeping an open mind. While Mahon voiced the sentiment of the hard core rural and Southern areas, New York Democratic Representative Richard McCarthy spoke for the urban sector. "It is my hope," said he, "that the historians will not be looking back at me and the rest of us and declare that we constituted the 'Nero Congress' which took this report and did nothing about it."

Most all of the nation's big-city mayors were unreservedly enthusiastic about the report--particularly at the prospect of snagging more federal funds. "I have practically spent our city bankrupt trying to meet the problems in our community," said Newark's Mayor Hugh Addonizio on NBC's Meet the Press.

"Unless the Federal Government and the state government step in and help, I doubt very much whether there is any kind of a future for the city of Newark." Said San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto: "We have the problems and everybody else has the money." They see at least a partial answer to their current budgetary woes in the commission's recommendations, many of which call for large infusions of federal funds to the cities.

Some Doubts. Atlanta's Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. was so impressed with the report that he has already ordered the city planning department to analyze it in detail and then assign specific recommendations for action to various departments. The Chicago city council passed a resolution hailing it as an "outstanding report of unparalleled importance," although Mayor Richard Daley was unhappy that it had not criticized strongly enough the "criminal elements" that take part in riots.

The commission's contention that racial disorders result from "white rac ism" was widely disputed. California Governor Ronald Reagan charged that the commission "failed to recognize the efforts that have been made by millions of right-thinking people in this country." Richard Nixon and others zeroed in on the commission's failure to place heavy blame on the rioters themselves. "I think," said Nixon, "the commission has put undue emphasis on the idea that we are in effect a racist society." Vice President Hubert Humphrey also had some doubts about the commission's conclusion that the U.S. was moving toward a form of apartheid. "It may be true, although it is open to some challenge," he said. "If it becomes a nightmare reality, it will be because our free society failed." Said New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller when asked about the two-society thesis: "That's an interesting way to dramatize it."

Harbingers. Not unexpectedly, the report was most hotly challenged by the nation's police departments, which were specifically condemned by the commission for acquiring automatic and heavy weapons against the possibility of renewed riots this summer. "They still seem to be using the police as whipping boys," complained Miami Police Chief Walter E. Headley Jr. "Why shouldn't police departments be stockpiling lethal weapons? Weapons are being stockpiled in Viet Nam, and this is a war too." Houston Police Chief Herman Short called the commission's criti cism "ridiculous," adding: "The stockpiling of heavy weapons wouldn't mean anything to anybody if everybody obeyed the law." Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins, one of the eleven commissioners, took exception to his colleagues' complaints about the report. "I'll buy it, I stand with it, I fall with it," said Jenkins.

In fact, the study will have done the nation a service if it does nothing more than stir up meaningful debate. That it already is doing. So intense is public interest in its findings that a soft-cover version published by Bantam Books is already well on its way to the bestseller lists. In what a company spokesman called "the most phenomenal sale of any book in recent years," the report sold at a clip of 100,000 volumes a day in its first three days.

More than debate, however, is needed. While adoption of the whole of the report's recommendations may be too much to expect immediately, some of its proposals, notably parts of its programs to upgrade Negro housing, education, jobs and welfare, could feasibly be enacted by Congress. As the commission warned, there is no time to lose. Ominous harbingers of summer violence were already evident last week in several cities. Windows were smashed, and a Negro boy was shot to death by police in Omaha when a speaking appearance by Alabama's George Wallace touched off two nights of disturbances. A strike by garbage collectors in Memphis escalated into scattered disturbances and threats of rioting. And a proposed riot-control training exercise by Tennessee National Guardsmen in the state's four major cities brought angry protests and warnings from Negro leaders that the troops' appearance could touch off violence.

Though the need for action is obvious, Johnson has given no indication that he will support the commission's recommendations with the kind of presidential push needed to transform them into reality. In fact, one White House aide said that Johnson planned no new programs as a result of the report. "We've gone about as far as we could possibly go," he said. "Anything more and we wouldn't have a prayer of getting Congress to enact the surtax." Yet there are times when the President must galvanize a nation's conscience and will --and this is clearly one of them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.