American Notes

At Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia last week, two buses carrying 23 prisoners from the Atlanta federal penitentiary pulled up to a chartered Boeing 727 waiting on the tarmac. The convicts, handcuffed and clad in identical blue uniforms, were herded into the jet, which took off for the two- hour flight to Havana, Cuba. The 23 men were the first batch of Cubans to be sent back to the homeland they had fled in the Mariel boat lift of 1980. According to the Justice Department, all the deportees had committed serious crimes in Cuba or the U.S.: four of them were murderers, eight were robbers, three had engaged in drug dealing, and eight were guilty of assaults.

The Reagan Administration has fought for the deportation of the criminals and mental patients who were among the 125,000 "freedom flotilla" Cubans who came to the U.S. claiming political asylum. Under an agreement struck with Havana last December, the U.S. can now deport as many as 2,746 Cubans at a rate of 100 a month. "We are afraid that these men being returned to Cuba will be tortured," said Dale Schwartz, an Atlanta attorney who has been fighting to block the deportation of the prisoners. "As for whether it will be a bloodbath, we don't know. There's really no way of monitoring that sort of thing in Cuba."

"It's not just a job, it's an adventure." That's the slogan of the Navy's enlistment commercials. Unhappily, however, some Navy pilots are looking for careers and adventure outside the military. In fact, Navy Secretary John Lehman told Congress that letters of resignation from pilots and flight officers jumped by 75% from 1983 to 1984. Last December alone, the Navy lost 175 pilots and 40 flight officers. Most of the dropouts are joining U.S. commercial airlines, which plan to hire 6,000 pilots this year. High salaries and the rewards of a more normal family life make the commercial pilot's lot more tempting than life aboard an aircraft carrier.

To spur re-enlistments, Lehman last week announced a plan to grant cash payments of up to $36,000 for Navy aviators who sign up for four to six additional years in the service. In the past such bonuses were made in annual installments of $6,000, but the new program will offer lump-sum distributions. The Navy estimates that the bonuses will cost the Government $9.3 million for the remainder of the fiscal year. Even so, this outlay is a cheap alternative to the price of training new flyers. The estimate for that: $1 million or more per pilot.

For the past four years, Japanese automakers have voluntarily held back their exports to the U.S.--after a lot of arm-twisting from Washington. Last week the President's Council on Commerce and Trade recommended that the U.S. not ask the Japanese to extend restrictions that expire at the end of March.

To the White House, the controls have outlived their usefulness. Detroit's automakers, which lost $4.2 billion in 1980, had profits of $6.3 billion in 1983 and nearly $10 billion in 1984. Sales last year reached 7.9 million cars, vs. 5.7 million in 1982. The agreements limited Japanese imports to about 20% of the U.S. market. When the imported cars became scarce, prices rose. The cost of the Nissan Maxima in the U.S. went up 30.1%, the Toyota Cressida 35.1%. The restrictions may have saved 44,000 U.S. jobs, but, says the study, they cost U.S. consumers more than $1 billion a year in increased car prices. Detroit's carmakers were disgruntled by the White House proposal. Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca said that abandoning controls now, in the face of a $123 billion U.S. trade deficit, was "beyond me."

With about 27,000 employees in a building spread over 29 acres, the Pentagon is often a managerial morass. The Defense Department signs more than 50 million contracts a year and spends some $800 million a day. Complicating matters is the rivalry among the armed services for money, material and men. Last week a group of military experts at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies released a report calling for a restructuring of the Pentagon.

One of the key problems, said the report, is that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff does not have enough power over his colleagues. To increase the Chairman's prestige, the study recommended making him the principal military adviser to the President and the National Security Council. In addition, the report called for Congress to handle the defense budget on a two-year cycle, instead of annually, in order to force legislators to concentrate on broad issues rather than minor details. While many military observers supported the study, senior Pentagon officials remained unconvinced, expressing reluctance toward changing the system in any way.

AMERICAN NOTES

CONTRIBUTIONS

Gifts from an Old Pensioner

"They kept on sending letters that said, 'Give me so much money,' " recalls Gerald Colf, 84. "So I did the job I was asked to do." Indeed he did. Colf, a retired home contractor who lived in Hermosa Beach, Calif., gave away more than $4,200 of his life savings last year to 27 conservative groups that solicited him by mail. Overdrawn at his bank, Colf began selling old newspapers for cash and scrounging in trash cans for food.

Colf's plight came to the attention of his granddaughter, Judy Kerrigan, 36, who lives in Reseda. She recovered about $1,400 of his contributions from such beneficiaries as Voters for Reagan and Americans for Reagan. But other groups failed to reply to Kerrigan's entreaties.

Last week President Reagan read about Colf's plight and tried to reach him at the Kerrigan home. The President, Kerrigan says, said that Colf should throw future solicitations "in the trash" and called him "a great American."

The impressed Colf, who now lives in a retirement home in Reseda, put the President's photograph on the wall of his room. Said Colf proudly: "I never wrote a check for a Democrat."

AMERICAN NOTES

AUTOS

Quotas Near the Finish Line

AMERICAN NOTES

DEFENSE

Rethinking the Pentagon