Cities: Studying the Study

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Despite its worthy intentions, the President's Commission on Civil Disorders made several tactical errors in its report on the causes and cure of Negro rioting — and critics lost no time last week pointing them out. Though its overall findings were well received, there were irate charges that the com mission had failed to condemn those responsible for the rioting last summer, and that the report's Armageddon tone was overly dramatic. But the most damaging gaffe by the eleven-member commission may turn out to have been something far more simple and personal: its disregard for President Johnson and what he has accomplished.

Feeling that the commission, which he appointed himself, had slighted the Administration's efforts to help Negroes, Johnson all but ignored the study. He did not invite the commissioners to the White House, as many expected him to, for release of the report, pointedly refrained from commenting on it publicly for three days. When he did bring himself to mention it, before a bankers' meeting on the urban crisis, it was with faint praise. The report "is one of the most thorough and exhaustive studies ever made," said the President. "I don't ask you to embrace every recommendation they make—but I do ask you to do the best you can."

Nero Congress. There was some justification for the President's pique. Johnson knows only too well that the commission's imaginative recommendations for eradicating the squalor of the ghettos will seem intimidatingly ambitious to the penny-pinching 90th Congress. New York City's Mayor John Lindsay, vice chairman of the commission, warned that "the cost figure is relatively unimportant in terms of what we have to do in or der to save this country from the possibility of chaos." Nonetheless, with the Viet Nam war taking more than $2 billion monthly, Congress is in no mood to embark on an uncharted, unbudgeted program. "This is extravagant and unattainable," declared Texas Representative George Mahon, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. "If you really got to tackling this thing, $100 billion wouldn't go very far."

Predictably, congressional reaction split along geographical and ideological lines, though many legislators were keeping an open mind. While Mahon voiced the sentiment of the hard core rural and Southern areas, New York Democratic Representative Richard McCarthy spoke for the urban sector. "It is my hope," said he, "that the historians will not be looking back at me and the rest of us and declare that we constituted the 'Nero Congress' which took this report and did nothing about it."

Most all of the nation's big-city mayors were unreservedly enthusiastic about the report—particularly at the prospect of snagging more federal funds. "I have practically spent our city bankrupt trying to meet the problems in our community," said Newark's Mayor Hugh Addonizio on NBC's Meet the Press.