New Rules for New Problems

Democrat Henry Jackson of Washington, a man who wanted to be President, sipped tea in a deserted corner of the Senate dining room one evening last week. A busy day was ebbing for "Scoop," co-sponsor with Virginia's John Warner of a new proposal for a freeze and reduction of nuclear weapons. A Rumanian delegation was waiting nervously outside to shake his hand. Aides scurried in and out, whispering to the Senator about committee votes on whether to authorize new nuclear aircraft carriers.

"Rigidity," muttered Scoop, as if the word had a bad taste. "Partisan politicians, ideologues," he added with equal suspicion. "We have to make this system work, and you cannot go out and look in a book for directions. We need intellectual pragmatism with integrity."

The Senator, with 42 years in Washington, was arguing that leaders of both right and left, facing new problems of economics and power, had responded to the unknown by retreating into safe but worn-out rules and conventions of diplomacy and politics. There they were moored, liberals and conservatives, bombarding each other with conventional foolishness, while the world clamored for common sense.

After a trip through Europe in 1980, Jackson concluded that the security of the Western alliance was becoming more a problem of politics than of military hardware. A year ago he wrote to Reagan, urging him to capitalize on the rising sentiment against nuclear weapons and launch "a dramatic, sustained American peace offensive."

Twelve months later, Reagan is being dragged into the issue, well behind the Soviets.

Just about wherever one looks in the U.S. Government now, one finds what Joseph Califano, former presidential aide and Cabinet officer, calls "stalemate." Since nobody is quite sure what to do, says Califano, everybody backs into familiar positions and stays there. America's answer to most problems of the past decades was to throw money at them. For all its vaunted budget slicing, this Administration cannot break the habit entirely. Consider the military budget. Califano insists, "Nobody knows how to spend an extra $34 billion for defense in one year." As Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare under Jimmy Carter, Califano had a budget of $182 billion a year. He now admits that some of the huge funding increases that Congress appropriated for things like cancer research could not be properly directed.

With his usual fervor, Texan John Connally spouted some of the same heresy on a recent visit to Washington. Connally, who was once Secretary of the Navy, would chop $10 billion from the defense budget, and then use that cut as a club to get Congress to hold down the entitlement programs that mainly benefit the middle class and will be responsible for a big chunk of the new deficits. Break the old constraints, Connally pleaded, or soon it will be too late.

Down at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in Foggy Bottom, State Department theorists are constantly explaining what the unwritten rules specify: If the U.S. sits down to talk with Central American revolutionaries or Cuba's Fidel Castro, that very act legitimizes their lawless behavior. Well, then, says Scoop Jackson at the other end of the avenue, let's make some new rules. Don't discuss issues publicly, but do it secretly. "Talk, talk, talk whenever you can," he urges.

"We are hearing from Main Street now," says Jackson, who once had a reputation as the Senate's hardest hawk. "People there are far more sophisticated than many of us think. They can understand an issue like nuclear weapons. They do not want to follow a rigid policy. They are saying that at some point before we blow ourselves up, we are going to have to get rid of these nuclear devices. They are not crazies, and we need to listen to them."

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