Amended

With its $47 billion annual budget, the Pentagon is the world's richest customer--but it is unavailable for lunch. That was the frustrating future faced last week by both military brass and defense-industry businessmen as a result of a new directive (Amended #137.5 (a) Gratuities) by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's command post. The directive, which replaces the individual judgment by which officers have hitherto been allowed to operate, specifically forbids them to accept not only gifts and gratuities but that pillar of modern U.S. society, the expense-account lunch. "This thing is absurd," says Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hebert. "It means officers can't accept a Coke or a ham sandwich. It says in effect that an admiral can be bribed by a lunch." Cried an anguished aircraft-company representative: "It's an infraction of my civil rights."

The Pentagon's men usually do somewhat better than sandwiches and Cokes. The capital's swankiest restaurants abound with credit-card-packing contractors wining and dining hungry procurement colonels. During conventions of military officers' associations, it has become standard practice for defense firms to pick up the tab for convention banquets. Companies also maintain "hospitality suites" in convention hotels where tired brass can booze or snooze.

The Pentagon felt that all this had got out of hand when left to individual discretion, but its proscription of expense-account lunches along with gifts made many Washingtonians wonder how defense business would be conducted at all. Few officers want to return permanently to taking lunch at the Pentagon's dreary, stand-up snack bars, and neither they nor the lobbyists are likely to revolutionize their lunching habits until there is a test case of the new rule.

In symbolic irony, the new rule takes effect the day before Thanksgiving. A free load will still be permitted in some cases, of course. An officer may lunch at a defense plant, where it would be impossible for him to pay, or he or a relative may accept a memento advertising a defense product. The penalty for the latter is considerable bother, since it involves a detailed report to the Pentagon within 48 hours, even if the report is only about that model airplane that a manufacturer gave to Junior. Reason: "Favors, gratuities, or entertainment bestowed upon members of the immediate families of DoD personnel are viewed in the same light ... no matter how innocently tendered or received."

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