DEFENSE PICTURE: A ROLE FOR RIVERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70B00338R000300080016-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 9, 2006
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: December 7, 1966
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 2006/01/30 : CIA-RDP70B00338R000300080016-0
eJense A iet ree
3
iii Role for Rivers
By iSarquis Childs
OF ALL the characters in the cast that
will determine whether the United
States is to spend $30 billion to $40 bil-
lion on an anti-ballistic missile system,
none is more flamboyant - or unp
dictable than Rep. L. Mendel Riverres.
The South Carolinian with the dramatic
mane of silver hair and a manner to go
with it is chairman of the House Armed
Services Committee.
Ile might have come out of one of
William Faulkner's novels of the
Snopeses, the poor boy rising to power
and position in the remnants of the
aristocratic South. Seniority gave him
his chairmanship. and he exercises his
power with the imperial touch. As for
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNa-
mara, when he comes to Capitol Hill
to testify the chairman looks on him
frowningly as an emissary from a hostile
power.
Rivers is planning the kind of mission
to Puerto Rico that he led last January.
He orders an Air Force plane-using
Air Force planes to commute to Char-
leston and wherever the whim directs
him he considers his prerogative - that
will. take a number of committee mem-
bers to Ramey Air Force base near San
Juan. There in early January they will
plot the strategy to give McNamara
his comeuppance.
THE REPUBLICANS with their vic-
tory of 47 seats in the House will carry
far more weight in the committee than
they did in the 89th Congress. If they
decide to make the "anti-ballistic missile
gap" a political issue it would be sur-
prising not to find Chairman Rivers
giving them tacit and perhaps open sup-
port. He led the committee last year in
adding nearly $1 billion to the defense
appropriation that McNamara insisted
the Defense Department did not need or
want.
Committee members, most of them on
.the conservative side, are singularly
susceptible to the pressures of big con-
tractors who arms part of what President
Eisenhower called in his farewell ad-
dress the military-industrial complex.
In his zeal to keep the shipyards of his
native state in operation Rivers has had
a running battle with McNamara for ap-
proval of two nuclear-powered frigates.
The frigates are still an angry gleam
in Rivers' eye.
Understandably in view of the enor-
mous complexity of the decision on the
anti-ballistic missile, members of the
committee with the best will in the
world are likely to be swayed by emo-
tions. The whole matter is shrouded in
secrecy. The National Intelligence Esti-
mate, revealing. what the Soviets have
done to place anti-ballistic missiles, is a
top-secret document for the eyes of a
half-dozen policymakers.
The story, so far as it is known, is as
follows. About five and a half years ago
the Russians began to build the sites
for anti-ballistic missiles around their
principal cities. After somewhat more
than a year the operation was suspended.
The reason for the suspension is con-
jecture - the possibility that they were
devising more sophisticated devices for
destroying incoming missiles at a much
greater height and at a distance of sev-
eral hundred miles from the target.
Then a year ago they began to build a
more extensive system.
McNamara will say only that despite
rumors that the Soviet system is poten-
tially more effective than any official
is'ready to acknowledge he considers the
National Intelligence Estimate valid. On
this basis he reaffirms his 1964 state-
ment that there is no break in the stale-'
mate foreaceakl "t'o he '70s. If either
st.
s~ttwv 1 nockoutpl the e would rbe res~ult
pi1}~}~~ q, it
been said on a ~aaiently good
authority that the Tnited"Mates has
undertaken at the highest level to as-
sure the Soviets on the score of the
anti-ballistic missile. If. you don't build
it, we won't.
But in tl.e opinion of the most-season-
ed , I remiinol.ogists this has not pro-
vailed against a deep and growing under-
current of fear. Marshall D. Shulman of
h arvard's Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy and an associate of the
Russian Research Center there, wrote
recently in The Washington Post after
a stay in the Soviet Union that almost
everyone he talked to believed the John-
soni Administration was on a course of
conquest. They simply did not credit the
President with sincerity in his expressed
desire to improve relations with the
Communist world.
McNamara has always been confident
that the United States with its fabulous
productive system could afford what-
ever the nation's defense needs might
be. He cannot escape seeing now, how-
ever, that the cost of the Vietnam War
is cutting deeply into p r o g r a in s for
domestic reform. And if on top of this
Si billion or so a year is added for a
Nike N. system of questionable value
the cuts will be even deeper.
Approved For Releasel2 X06/ 1 =.aC IA DP70B00338R000300080016-0
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