Switching Squads

"In Washington," mused an Administration aide last week, "there are very few half times and no fourth quarter. Every once in a while we need a new platoon." As if on signal, the changeover is now taking place in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.

One by one, most of the top men who have worked in and around the State Department since 1961 are abandoning their posts. McGeorge Bundy, foreign-policy coordinator for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, left in February. Thomas Mann, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and third man in the State Department hierarchy, announced his departure last month. Under Secretary George Ball, Dean Rusk's No. 2 man, will probably be gone within three months.

U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs, the No. 4 man, is expected to replace Ambassador Edwin Reischauer in Japan before fall--Mrs. Johnson has already measured the Tokyo embassy windows for curtains--so that Reischauer can return to Harvard, which has offered him a newly created chair in Far Eastern politics. David Bell, head of the Agency for International Development, is also outward bound, most likely will join Bundy at the Ford Foundation after the current foreign-aid bill has been convoyed through Congress.

Battle Fatigue. The old squad's exodus stems neither from policy differences within the Administration nor from any personality conflict with an always demanding, often difficult President. Most of the men who came in with the New Frontier are victims of battle fatigue after five long years of physical exhaustion and intellectual enervation. "After you've butted your head against the same old problems for a while," rues one oldtimer, "you just don't charge as hard any more."

All those who have left or plan to leave will be missed. Some have been brilliantly effective. President Johnson, who, like Kennedy before him, has carped at the paucity of ideas and long-range planning within the State Department, will at least have the opportunity to send his own platoon to Foggy Bottom.

Behind the Johnsonian veil of secrecy, the selection process has already begun. Last week the President named Zbigniew Brzezinski, the astute, dynamic director of Columbia University's Research Institute on Communist Affairs since 1961, to a secondary but sensitive and influential post on State's Policy Planning Council. Polish-born and Canadian-reared, Brzezinski, a U.S. citizen since 1958, has been a persuasive advocate for the U.S. position in Viet Nam at widely publicized teach-ins. He is singularly attuned to the many nuances of modern Communism and has suggested bold departures in American policy to capitalize on the changes currently taking place in the Communist world. At 38, he is also young enough to charge headfirst into the perennial problems that will try the new platoon.

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