Cabinet Charade

To reporters who accompanied him on a two-lap stroll around the White House south lawn one morning last week, President Johnson proffered a special invitation: Come on over to the Cabinet meeting this afternoon.

Sure enough, at the end of the regular Cabinet session, doors were thrown open and newsmen ushered in.

Thereupon Johnson, accompanied by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Under Secretary of State George Ball and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, hurried off to a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In taking his leave, Lyndon designated Presidential Aide Horace Busby as master of ceremonies for the Cabinet Room charade.

Hello, Joe. Starting off with new Treasury Secretary Henry ("Joe") Fowler, who was attending his first official Cabinet meeting, Busby called for round-the-room recitations. Fowler's contribution was that "considerable improvements have been detected in a preliminary way" in efforts to trim the balance-of-payments deficit. However, he added hastily, "it is too soon to make any predictions" about reductions in the first quarter of 1965. His piece said, Fowler slipped from the room.

Next up was Internal Revenue Commissioner Sheldon Cohen, who, while not a member of the Cabinet, had sat in on the session anyway. Cohen noted that the Treasury Department would make some 42 million income-tax refunds totaling $5.6 billion this year, and that he was wrestling into shape a more carefully graduated withholding plan to ease the problems of underwithholding as well as overpayments.

By this time several high officials, such as Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and James Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had departed silently, and reporters had slipped into growing numbers of vacant chairs around the coffin-shaped table. Near the end of the session, Busby called upon Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, who turned out to be the showstopper.

So Long, Screwworm. Solemnly reporting that there are 81,000 varieties of insects in the U.S., Freeman noted that his department had virtually eradicated the screwworm in the southwestern U.S. and parts of Mexico by attacking the insect's reproductive cycle. He said that he was going next day to the Beltsville, Md., agricultural station to see some experiments along the same line, added: "If you want to see how a cockroach acts when there's some sex attractant around, come on along." To which U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who was last on the list to recite, replied: "I always wanted to know about that."

And where was Lyndon? Well, he was getting ready to take off for a long weekend in Texas.

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