Eight Pillars Of Society

HIS DESIRE FOR NOSTALGIA is unquenchable: President-elect Ronald Reagan this week announced the first eight nominees for his cabinet, and they resemble quite closely their predecessors in the first 190 years of the Republic--white, male and Harvard-educated.

These new administrators--whose average age slightly exceeds the national speed limit--share other traits as well. They are conservative, and they are distressingly corporate in their outlook. For the most part they shun leisure suits, which must distress Jerry Falwell and company, but their political philosophies seem very far to the right of skewed national spectrum. Actually, their political philosophies are comparatively unimportant--they seem sure to be loyal team players, who will follow the admonitions of a veteran leading man.

A few of the first batch of nominees deserve special recognition for past achievement--Caspar W. Weinberger '38 seems sure to bring with him from Bechtel Corporation a happy view of the close harmony in which government and industry must work. And then there's William J. Casey, who earned the top job at the Central Intelligence Agency with his deft handling of the Republican's presidential campaign. Or William F. Smith, Reagan's personal attorney, who will run the Justice Department--Reagan, it seems, has forgotten the problems one of his Republican predecessors experienced when he put his closest political cronies in charge of enforcing the nation's law.

Reagan will announce seven more cabinet positions this week--it is hardly worth wishing that he recognize the advances of the last two decades by appointing women and minorities to the posts since they would be obvious and insincere tokens, and since they would be just as willing as the rest to march us towards armageddon for the sake of supply-side economics and military superiority. And it hardly seems worth the trouble for the last remaining liberals to mount challenges to these gray corporate faces--their ammunition, whatever of it survives, should be saved for the day when these men start to implement policy.

Usually, always before, in fact, this newspaper has disagreed with the prophets of the New Right. We add our voice, however, to one demand they have made in recent weeks--that Henry Kissinger be given no voice in the new administration. Our reasons are different, of course, from Rev. Falwell's--we have no fears that Kissinger will be soft on communism or try to redistribute the world's wealth. But however unlikely, even the possibility of Kissinger's political resurrection is horrifying. No man in this country ever deserved more to be tried as a war criminal; no American ever deserved less another chance to kill and destroy.

Almost as bad would be the selection for Secretary of State of former Nixon chief of staff and NATO commander Alexander Haig. Haig's role in Watergate remains an open question; a man with questions of that sort in his past should not be given a position of major national responsibility. If Reagan should offer his name to the Senate, we urge the most careful scrutiny of Haig's Watergate involvement--and expect that that would render his approval impossible.

Reagan's appointments should not be viewed as conciliatory or moderate. They represent the worst of America, just as bad as the fervid evangelicals of the Moral Majority. The eight men Reagan has named to be his close advisers are archetypes of the U.S. corporate elite, interested in serving the desires of almost none of this country's or the world's people, interested instead in further increasing corporate control of everyday life. Reagan would have been hard-pressed to do worse.