Letter from Washington

With Congress in recess, the President at the ranch, the pundits in Southampton, and an August lull oozing through the city, it would be easy to assume that the widely reported Shultz/Clark tug of war is being hyped by the press simply to fill a void in hard political news stories. Well, oddity of oddities, the press is, basically, telling the truth: The Secretary of State is unhappy, frustrated, and alternately enraged and depressed that the President’s National Security Advisor, William Clark, is doing to him what Henry Kissinger did to Bill Rogers, i.e., moving the center of gravity of our foreign-policy-making away from the State Department and into the White House.

It should be noted, however, that, while the fundamentals are correct, there are two exaggerations in the reporting: First, Shultz did know about last month’s dispatching of troops to Central America before the story broke in the papers, although he did not learn of it until after it had become a fait accompli. Second, Mr. Shultz is not contemplating resignation, nor is he playing games with it. He plans to weather the crisis, and to stay on at least through the 1984 elections.

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With Congress in recess, the President at the ranch, the pundits in Southampton, and an August lull oozing through the city, it would be easy to assume that the widely reported Shultz/Clark tug of war is being hyped by the press simply to fill a void in hard political news stories. Well, oddity of oddities, the press is, basically, telling the truth: The Secretary of State is unhappy, frustrated, and alternately enraged and depressed that the President’s National Security Advisor, William Clark, is doing to him what Henry Kissinger did to Bill Rogers, i.e., moving the center of gravity of our foreign-policy-making away from the State Department and into the White House.

It should be noted, however, that, while the fundamentals are correct, there are two exaggerations in the reporting: First, Shultz did know about last month’s dispatching of troops to Central America before the story broke in the papers, although he did not learn of it until after it had become a fait accompli. Second, Mr. Shultz is not contemplating resignation, nor is he playing games with it. He plans to weather the crisis, and to stay on at least through the 1984 elections.