New/Old Winds Ablowing

The capital of political caprice is outdoing itself this spring. Change is as thick as pollen. A year ago, Jimmy Carter was telling the nation that we were at last "free of that inordinate fear of Communism," and now he and his Vice President are sounding as if they are at least a bit worried, and maybe we had better be too.

It was only a few months ago that the CIA was being kicked around like an old dog, and the former spooks were sticking to their Georgetown dens. Last week Richard Helms, James Angleton and James Schlesinger, distinguished agency alums, held court at an F Street Club bash as miniheroes, showing that sentiment is now shifting toward the ideas that the world is still dangerous and we need information, ill-gained or otherwise.

The Administration's year-end claims of great accomplishment pointed to the new overtures to Cuba, but all of a sudden, with a third of Cuba's army loose in Africa, Fidel Castro is not quite so nice a fellow as was imagined.

And then last Wednesday we looked up and Bob Hope, who must date from Warren Harding, was back in the White House exchanging one-liners

with Carter. Few people would have bet a zloty that this favorite of Republican Presidents would ever have been invited to serve as ringmaster in Carter's White House.

Historians, diplomats and politicians are thumping their heads. Many of us were marching bravely up the hills behind the banners of tax reform, reducing arms sales abroad, eliminating almost all secret policy deliberations, cutting the White House staff and shunning the oldtime party bosses. So last week Carter was in Chicago savoring the heritage of late Mayor Richard Daley, the White House staff was growing, presidential aides were ferreting out leaks in the Administration, Carter was complaining that he could not ship arms secretly to help friends, and the IRS commissioner admitted that as long as we have "multinational corporations, syndicated partnerships, multigenerational trusts" and a big complicated country, we will not have a tax system that could be "fairly characterized as simple." Richard Scammon, a man-about-Washington-politics for decades, cannot recall such dramatic changes in the atmosphere since 1940, Henry Kissinger recalls nothing like it since 1948.

One White House counselor rightly points out that the phenomenon goes beyond Carter's new tack. Inflation and the action of the Soviets have coincided and brought about reversals of viewpoint across the political spectrum. The Brookings Institution, which considered a $34 billion cut in defense spending five years ago, now suggests a $10 billion increase.

Almost everybody at dinner parties now talks about the damned "pendulum," as if that expression explained everything. Some sort of chiseled political writ passed down from the mountaintop. The pendulum swung too far after Viet Nam and Watergate, they say. Now it may be swinging back too far, continues this non-explanation. "Hail Stalin, architect of Western unity," recalled Scammon, quoting from the dim past. "Change the name to Brezhnev."

This is an "assertive society," mused some of the boys up at the American Enterprise Institute, and it responds best to dynamic leadership, both domestically and internationally. They were digging back for John Kennedy's lines about bearing burdens and holding high the torch. They figure those phrases will be back in vogue before long,

No corner of Washington seemed untouched by the new/old winds ablow-ing. Fred Emery, over at the Federal Register, where new Government proposals are catalogued and printed each day, looked up at his staff at the close of work on May 18. The alltime record had just been broken--512 documents had been recorded in eight hours, eclipsing the old record of 386. "Hey," he said, "this Government is supposed to be going the other way." Yeah.

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