Grow up - HUD scandal - column

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE FRONT-PAGE STORY (N.Y. Times, July 24) is headlined, "HUD Approved Rent Subsidies/ After Coors Wrote the Secretary." From the headline alone, the burden of the story is communicated. Here is what the reader is invited to think:

1. Wherever HUD sent money, during the Reagan years, you can bet your life that that money was a gift by taxpayers to greedy developers, whose intermediaries in getting the business got fat consulting fees.

2. Joe Coors is a wealthy brewer from Colorado and known to be a hot conservative. It is especially ironic under the circumstances that he should be the venal influence-peddler.

3. One more sleaze-in-the-box. Now the story does go on to reveal details that are relevant to questions raised about Mr. Coors's behavior. We discover, for instance, that he had zero financial interest in the transaction. Coors is not a developer, nor does he have an interest in the construction company that got the federal money.

We learn, moreover, that when the committee that makes the final decision met, the vote was to include Denver as one of the five urban centers in which the housingrehabilitation money would be spent, and that a city in Michigan that had been on the short list (five) to receive money was dropped. The voting committee, whose names are given in the story, was probed by the reporter, and all its members said that they did not remember why it was that they had decided to vote for Denver rather than for the Michigan city, and that

they had not been aware that Joe Coors had recommended Denver.

The gentleman who had initiated the application for the federal housing funds, Mr. Keith Sutton, said that he had not been aware of the intervention of Mr. Coors either. But he saw fit to add, "That was nice of him."

Now the time has surely come to ask oneself: How does the reading public think that federal funds are allocated? Is there a man with brain so dead as to believe that political influence is not at work when these decisions are made?

Here are two interesting historical examples, both of them involving Kennedys. Senator John F. Kennedy was asked early in the Fifties by the Hoover Commission whether he would consent to cutting a federal subsidy to a little Massachusetts factory organized to make yarn when temporarily it was in short supply because of the Britisb-Confederate blockade during the-Civil War! For almost a hundred years, a hundred-odd Massachusetts yarnspinners had been subsidized to make the stuff available at one-half the price on the world market. Answer by Senator Kennedy? No-the factory stays. Mr. Hoover's deputy came in with a counter-offer: Suppose the government agreed to finance all workers until they died or retired or left, on the understanding that no new workers would be hired to replace them. Is that okay? No.

In the mid Sixties Senator Robert Kennedy gave a talk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There was much discussion of closing down dilapidated and uneconomic military and naval facilities, and a commission had listed the Brooklyn Navy Yard as disastrously obsolete. In his prepared speech, Senator Kennedy had a paragraph in which he confessed his regret that he had to go along with the commission's findings. But the crowd was so uproariously indignant at the proposed action that when Senator Kennedy reached that passage in his speech -he skipped over it.

We all know that it was decided last year that the only way to reduce the number of unnecessary military installations was to get an independent committee to make a confidential examination and come out with a list of the primary obsolete facilities. And then Congress would have the option to-close them all down, or close none of them down. This amounted to the clearest acknowledgment that closing down individual units would put impossible pressures on congressmen and senators representing condemned facilities.

Why then isn't it considered a matter of civic pride, fidelity, and a zealous regard for one's own to write to the Secretary of HUD, to address him as Dear Sam if you happen to be on Sam-Joe terms, and to urge the merits of your state even when it means sacrificing a project in Michigan?

Look. The whole system stinks, But that is that part of democracy to which Churchill referred when he said that democracy was an awful system any alternative to which was worse. If we're going to have federal funds for public housing, we're going to spend those funds in places that irradiate political influence.

Time for people to grow up, and for the sensationalists to contain themselves.