Letter from Washington

Talk about political ineptitude! Who else but Jimmy Carter could manage to knock the tenth anniversary of Chappaquiddick off the front pages? Even some fine, high-minded liberal media folk (is there any other kind, you ask) were planning to wallow in those murky Massachusetts waters come the 19th of July. But no, Carter couldn’t wait to share the good news of those famous fresh faces—William Miller, Patricia Harris, Paul Volcker, and Charles Duncan.

While we’re on the subject of ineptitude, we should mention that Carter simultaneously scraped the meadow muffins off Jerry Brown’s boots. For those of you who have sworn off wire-service fillers at the tail end of news columns, here’s the story. Brown appointed to the Orange County Board of Supervisors a man who had served time as a POW in the Vietnam War. This particular POW, it developed, had cut some antiwar tapes for his hosts, the North Vietnamese. The national press, smelling blood, was packing for a search-and-destroy mission to California when the urgent message arrived from the White House. “Hold everything. Jimmy’s back from the mountaintop and he’s figured it all out.” The cosmic answer, as we now know, was that some sinister force had appointed a clutch of stumblebums to the Cabinet.

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Talk about political ineptitude! Who else but Jimmy Carter could manage to knock the tenth anniversary of Chappaquiddick off the front pages? Even some fine, high-minded liberal media folk (is there any other kind, you ask) were planning to wallow in those murky Massachusetts waters come the 19th of July. But no, Carter couldn’t wait to share the good news of those famous fresh faces—William Miller, Patricia Harris, Paul Volcker, and Charles Duncan.

While we’re on the subject of ineptitude, we should mention that Carter simultaneously scraped the meadow muffins off Jerry Brown’s boots. For those of you who have sworn off wire-service fillers at the tail end of news columns, here’s the story. Brown appointed to the Orange County Board of Supervisors a man who had served time as a POW in the Vietnam War. This particular POW, it developed, had cut some antiwar tapes for his hosts, the North Vietnamese. The national press, smelling blood, was packing for a search-and-destroy mission to California when the urgent message arrived from the White House. “Hold everything. Jimmy’s back from the mountaintop and he’s figured it all out.” The cosmic answer, as we now know, was that some sinister force had appointed a clutch of stumblebums to the Cabinet.