THE ABM ILLUSION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70B00338R000300100118-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2006
• Sequence Number: 118
• Publication Date: October 4, 1967
• Content Type: OPEN

Approved For Release 2006/01/30 :CIA-RDP70B00338R000300100118-4
October ,1~, 196' CO]vGRESSIONAL RECORD -SENATE
Architects, a city ..plan influenced by the
Baroque concept of Versailles really was "an
:assertion of a bold new republic in a barely
touched wilderness," today it seems more
nearly like some nineteenth-century mil-
lionaire's castle transported brick by brick
from its European setting to an esthetically
uncertain America.
Worse, if the "plan" of the federal city has
been distorted by growth and Sn it's turn has
distorted growth, then beyond the limits of
L'Enfant`s sketch maps there is little but
helter-skelter. Far into the Virginia and
Maryland countryside sprawl the suburbs,
some tight and lovely like Kenwood with its
cherry trees, most flung down with a builder's
giant careless hand on treeless plains that
were formerly forests, some waiting hideously
to become official slums, The freeway build-
ers, frantically flinging as much traffic as
possible into Washington's already strangling
thoroughfares, are at once behind in their
work and agitating for the privilege of pour-
ing concrete over everything. Rapid transit
does not exist, although a limited subway
system soon will be under construction;
some federal workers who live in far-out
suburbs actually arrive in their parking lots
at 5 and 6 o'clock in the morning to avoid
rush-hour traffic, then sleep behind the
wheel until time to punch the clock. What
they suffer on the way home is ghastly
to contemplate, especially in the special
torture Washington reserves for creeping
motorists-August.
East of 16th Street, whole areas are en-
tirely populated by Negroes living in the
poverty and slum conditions they have en-
dured so long in other cities. Many of them
can see the Capitol dome from the littered
alleys and cluttered sidewalks and bare, sun-
baked porches that are their escape Prom the
tenements; it can hardly be an inspiring
view.
Washington is famous for crime and rape
and muggers-although I know of no sta-
tistics which prove it the worst in this re-
gard, or even an unsafe city. The fact that
it has a majority of Negroes, and its hier-
archy of Southern politicians, combine to
foster the myth. that black men make this
a terrified place. But there is no part of
Washington so sullen as the Watts district
of Los Angeles or Oakland's Ne so
seething as New York's Ha m, or~mo'`ra?
dangerous than its Central rk.
The petty bureaucracy o what is laugh-
ingly called the District Columbia gov-
ernment is inefficient, im ervious, and Sm-'
.movable. Congress is re onsible, in many
ways, for inadequate sc al budgets, shock-
ing welfare payments d institutions, and
low prices at thew key stores (you can
buy better wines m. cheaply in Washington
than in any city I know-a poor consola-
tion). Nobody has the right to vote anybody
out of office, much less in, and there is so
much slow, sloppy, and untimely street con-
struction and repair that the old saying
perfectly fits: "It'll be a great city if they
ever get it finished." Old landmarks go under
here as they do elsewhere-the house where
Woodrow Wilson married Mrs. Galt got the
wrecking ball a year or so ago, and only the
Kennedys saved part oP Lafayette Square
opposite the White House from becoming a
concrete canyon; two sides' of Farragut
Square have been completely rebuilt while
I have vratched from my office window, and
what they have done to Capitol Hill in a
decade ought to be a federal crime.
In the summer the Potomac is apt to smell,
and any time, as Bobby Kennedy said of
New York's East River, if. you fall in, you
don't drown; you dissolve. In winter the
streets are either glassy or slushy and snow
removal is hopeless. When I lived on R
Street, hard-packed snow stayed on the
pavement for six weeks after the Kennedy
Inaugural blizzard.
But all of this is not really the Washing-
ton I first saw that brilliant morning thirty
years ago when I came out of Union Station
to the edge of the great plaza, holding my
father's hand, and stood stricken in .the
giddy light, dumb with wonder and belief,
This is not merely because the surface of
the city is so much altered from the miracle
place of my boyhood. The trolleys are gone
now, and I don't suppose tourist. Ysnnilies
stay in rooming houses on Capitol Hill any
more.-TheTSmlthsonian .has a~,rnassive~ new
and everyone drives down td Mount Vernon
on a four-lane highway. There is a cheap new
facade on the Capitol, and Harry Truman
put a balcony on the White house; Mrs. Ken-
nedy filled its public rooms;, with antiques,
and Lyndon Johnson filled its private offices
with Dallas modern and piped-in Muzak.
Union Station is cavernous and gloomy now>
and the last time I was them the fountain
where the children played was dry and full
of dead leaves. Jimmy Hoffa's marble temple
for the Teamsters' Union stands along the
plaza where one of those elegattt hotels did,
and the rest oP them are no lodger elegant,
if they ever were. Naw the great; entrance to
the city-the most beautiful 'bntrance in
the world, Ithink-is the long ride in"from
Dulles International Airport, alonng the Po-
tomac on the George Washington Park~IFay,
with the spires of Georgetown University ris-
ing across the river and the Washington
Monument shining iri the distance.
That is not, of course, real change, and
neither is the relatively new Jeife~son Me-
morial on the Tidal Basin or the heodare
Roosevelt Bridge or even the mogstrously
ugly third House Office Building. (1?here al-
ways has been a touch of the gpatesque
about Washington-the old SmitP~sonian,
far instance-and perhaps in time even this
crouching eyesore on Capitol Hill wi~l seem,
like others, at home in the city.) No,:~the es-
sential Washington is just what it wasi thirty
years ago, and more, having survived3archi-
tects, engineers, politicians, burezcrats,
demonstrators, and urban planners. It is just
what it was because Americans still cep in
the Lincoln Memorial and small bo~s still
stand in awe in front of George W ?3hing-
ton's tomb and troop happily throu~h, the
set dreams at the FBI and bur with
pride en they first see the nation' Capi-
tol. Pare still bring their childr n here
and show t the Declaration of I epend-
ence under g s and listen to he tour
guide's spiel in fr t of the Supr e Court
and take pictures o e atat of Albert
Gallatin in front of the ury.
Perhaps few of them know who Gatllatin
was, or care, but the meanest of them know
he was part of something, and they are part
of it, too. I have seen fat women in ridicu-
lously tight shorts walking carefully around
Statuary Hall in the Capitol, peering