1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

of everyone. These views were on the surface. There was nothing clandestine about it, but
the atmosphere was very intense. It was a 24-hour-a-day kind of life of the mind, memos,
telephone calls all the time. The integration of the press in these matters was also very
important, because the journalists were on the front lines in all of these issues, in
Vietnam, certainly.
People who had been on the front lines and in the jungle, the battlefields had come back
to Washington, and there was such a back and forth of intelligent discourse, nothing like
the careful feeding of “embedding”. Reporters in Vietnam were free to go where ever
they wished and they went. The Washington policy debate was a very large intellectual
landscape, a large unmanageable political landscape, which had very few barriers
between them and the White House, the State Department, between the legislature and
the journalists. They were all on the same battleground. It was in the best sense, public
debate, which included citizen groups and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and
other nations, too, their embassies and high level visitors.
Q: Were there any points of contact within the State Department that you found
particularly useful or fruitful for your work?
MILLER: For the subject of arms control, all of ACDA (Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency). The ACDA was very powerful at that point. They had recently been empowered
by Hubert Humphrey and the many congressional supporters of the creation of this very
special agency. So, in the beginning, the main figures associated with ACDS, Gerry
Smith, Paul Warnke and Ron Spiers, Tom Pickering, Phil Farley. There was a whole
group of ACDA people who were my neighbors in Hollin Hills who used to go into the
Department or up to the Hill together in car pools.
Q: Were there any sort of favorite – I don't mean personally favored – but in confidence
correspondents whom Senator Cooper really used or listened to more than any of them?
MILLER: Well, he knew all of the leading press reporters and columnists. Many came to
dinner at his home in Georgetown.
Q: The Washington Star.
MILLER: And certainly bureau chief and chief reporters of the Washington bureau of the
New York Times, but the editors in New York, too, and all of the key correspondents.
But Cooper saw mainly those that covered the Hill in those years. There was John Finney
of the New York Times, the editors of both the Post and the Times, which included the
group that had been in the CIA and then went into journalism. There were columnists like
the Alsop brothers and Marquis Childs and Mary McGrory. All of the columnists, and the
key correspondents who had served in Moscow and Vietnam. All were at the dinner
tables. The journalists were very much a part of the Washington social scene.
Q: I'm told today that the social set is much less, because there's much more scurrying
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