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Wednesday, June 20.1973
University Daily Kansan
Watergate Explanation, Not Revelations, Needed Now
By ROBERT C. MAYNARD
WASHINGTON-For all of the stunning revelations of indecency on high, something very important is missing from my daily diet of news and information.
As I hear that the President was willing to place spies in the mailbox and burglaries in the apartment, "national security" every citizen was a suspect, I keep looking for an explanation of the meaning of all of this to the contours of his policies for nearly 200 years to call a democracy.
It almost seems as if we are all too stunned to consider it. But, that for me, is an absurdity. The revelation of hush money from the Philippines and perjury in the name of "the Philippines"
From that night to the present, the press has treated the affair largely as a police investigative story, which is properly how it happened. It is no surprise that something very different. Now, it seems to me, the press and the nation are overdue for a deep and continuing inquiry into the implications of these revelations for the public in democracy as we have always perceived it.
IT IS REMARKABLE simply to note that we have arrived at the anniversary of Watergate. It was just one year ago that five men in rubber gloves were found in the offices of the democratic national committee.
Regardless of the extent of wrongdoing
that is eventually proved, the press is under an obligation to go to the next and more difficult level of examining the question of whether there is a difference between government and the governed.
IT WAS ARGUGED during the height of the war in Indochina that often presses the
Robert Mavnard
was covering the wrong story. We were covering ground action and air support and many of our readers were fairly thrusting their questions to the experts' questions of what that war and the exercise
of awesome power were doing to the foundations of American society. Eventually, we in the press came to see that the war abroad was raising large and ugly numbers of people at home. It is fair to say that we have not come to terms with all of them even now.
Watergate reporting can benefit from the press experience with the Indochina crisis, where they have on those hearings and the ancillary revelations, many of which have caused some commentators to wonder aloud at the possibility that a state in the name of "National Security."
Having uncovered the police aspects of the scandal, the press is now obliged. I believe, to open up for debate a number of questions about how we have been doing it, and to clear up a desire to that dangerous misconceptions persist in the minds of many Americans.
I AM NOT just speaking of the woman from Sisseton, S.D., who wrote to the Washington Post chiding the press for its personal 'vendetta' against "the principal governor" and thinking of Patrick Buchanan of the President's staff. He wrote in the New York Times chasing those who called for Nixon to enlargen his current stewardship of the White House into some sort of government office, which would suggest distasteful in the extreme:
"What they are urging," he suggested, and that the President betray the mandate of 1962. "Why is it not done?"
behalf, the democratic verdict of the ballot box. . ."
There, it seems to me, is where the press might begin its deeper inquiry. Irrespective of any possible guilt on the part of President Nixon, Watergate dramatizes in another form the same imbalance in this society as the Indochina tragedy: how powerful should the chief executive of this country be? The press has gravitated to the coverage of the
Presidency in a manner that has in times past approached awa. Much of the rest of the society concurns in this way of looking upon the President as larger than life.
analysis
upon me trespasser as larger than inte. WE NEED A very clear understanding of what has become of the office when men have said that they lied, even committed crimes, because someone in a credible position to do so could utter the seven words, "It is the wish of the President." Arguments abound as to how the
Arguments abound as to how the Presidency ever came to be an office of such power that its holder could feel threatened by a force on the citizenry or bomb Cambodia without a shred of authority having been granted by the other elected representatives of the people. But the press could help us understand some of the extent of that power so that we can debate in an arena wider than ever, if that is what we in a democracy intend for the Presidency to be.
The nation was shocked when an attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, declared before Congress that executive privilege could be meant to extend down to the last filederk. Given Indochina and Watergate, it would obligeviation very seriously and begin explaining what people who made people what the founders intended by creating three branches of government.
ANOTHER PROBLEM FLOWS from the point of view of the Presidency. The President defined the role of a governmental body to illegally invade the privacy of citizens as one of "national security." It seems to me that it is time to take the question of both internal and external, from the top.
The special investigation unit the White House created was concerned at least in part with Weatherman and the Black Panthers. It would be helpful to know how much of a threat to national security is posed by such groups or any other group using extra-legal means to protest social issues; issue that America needs to understand themselves is how we are to work out our relationships with each other.
The men in the White House chose the route of the wireset and the mail cover. It was a long route, but the men made it work.
Watergate: 'National Morality Plav for '70s
By PAGE SMITH
The Los Angeles Time
Grim and grisly as the specifies of Watergate are, the episode is, in a larger sense, one that describes the process going back a considerable distance in time. On one level I am tempted to carry it back to the French 17th century and descartes and his "Discourse on Method."
In his "Discourse," Descartes offered the one-liner of all time, "cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am." The ultimate reality is nothing but the world we doubting mind. The world itself was perceived as "object," as mechanistic and quite separate from the all-powerful mind. Indeed, the only thing that connected the earth and the world was the intervention of God.
This destruction of outmoded authority and the "objectification" of the material world marked a dazzling new era in history—the age of science and technology. The inclination to imitate a winner is irresistible.
IN ADDITION to the studies of the natural world, all studies of man from prehistory are warranted.
themselves after an enormously successful natural science.
The world, natural and human, was treated as something to be organized and manipulated for specific ends. Moral and ethical questions were, increasingly, more and more relevant in a phrase once heard far more often than presently, especially in the academic world, "value judgments," and value judgments were, on the face of it, un科学istic. They were simply impediments to religious code and were simply impediments in the way of scientific objectivity.
It may seem a far stretch from Descartes to "the plumbers" of the Committee to Reelect the President, but it is not so far as it seems. The lock-pickers and burglar of the White House were simply can-do boys who believed in the boss and in getting the job done by means of whatever technology was available.
Wrong? When the world is objectified,
where is wrong?
A NUMBER of them were obviously surprised and distressed when senators asked their moral questions—whether they said that what they were doing was wrong.
The senators were rather stiffly self-righteous. But in some instances, it was clear that they were on the other side of a wall, and there were no conventional pieties from the can-do boxes.
There was an especially ironic moment when one senator asked James McCord a question like this: "How could you, after a long and honorable career with the CIA, do
What we are witnessing is less a Senate investigation than a purgation, a ritual of exorcism, a remarkable drama in which we can trust to bridge the gap between these two world views. For objective, operational world where manipulation and results rule, and an older world we can't quite bring ourselves to entirely let go of or cease to believe in, a world where all things are right and other things are wrong, a world, in short, of "value judgments."
"MY GOD," one wished to cry out through the television receiver to the senator, "the CIA is the epitome of the can-do ethic, or non-ethic. It is the supreme, ultimate center of organized immorality, the dirty-tricks bureau of all time. In the name of keeping America secure and great, the United States is not merely condoned but sponsored, by building up natives to fight against their countrymen to things better not mentioned."
That was just the point. That was why McCord could, with an untroubled conscience, commute burglary. He had been a member of the national burglary, the thievery and doubledealing.
such a dastardly and illegal thing as
organize and lead the Watergate break-in?
PEOPLE WHO make value judgments are dangerous; they are kookies and Commies and long-haired students, hippies and agitators and dirty radicals. There is, it seems, only one legitimate value judgment—the greatest and most powerful and most benign power in history; all other value judgments are inoperative.
readers respond
We enjoyed the Curriculum & Instruction Survey article, as far as it went. ("Liberal Arts to Require 'Feedback' for 1700 students," CRI Journal, we would like to correct some of the erroneous statements presented in the article. Many of the comments printed in the story were founded on a lack of knowledge about the project and were set forth as if correct.
To the Editor:
We believe that students have both the competence and the right to evaluate instruction. Kenneth Eble, Director of the Project to Improve College Teaching of the AAUP and the Association of American College has said, "Student evaluations do not lead to perfect data departments use to judge teacher teaching. Surely a system which rests upon opinion, heartray, occasional high praise or bitter complaint, cannot be hurt by adding
to it some data on what actually goes on in a classroom."
(1.) Students are not competent to judge instruction.
(2.) One assistant professor objects to the lack of data, especially the use of profile answers instead of written comments. He obviously has not read the instructions sent to him through campus mail, which explain the use of comment sheets provided to each student allowing lengthy written comments. He also asks a student to answer a student answer card for 15 questions to be by the instructor to answer questions applicable to that course only.
High correlations have been found in numerous studies by respected statisticians to the moment experts showing that student ratings are associated with and that they compare positively with colleague ratings. (Guthrie, Lovell & Nolan, Webb & Nolan, Mazlow & Zimmerman).
(3.) The same person said the questionnaire should have remained at its previous 99 question length. It was shortened to 56 questions because of overwhelmingly negative response from both students and faculty to the length. Most faculty members contacted this semester believe the questionnaire is still too long.
(5.) One complainant purports that an entertainer receives higher scores than a "low-keyed" instructor. Studies have shown that the latter has judgments of a course's value are correlated positively with "instructor's interest in the course." No studies have found that sheer "entertainment" is what entertainers perceive a teacher as a "good" one.
(4.) Another person questioned believes that students mark their "card in pattern" for the 18,663 student answer cards returned this semester was manually checked for capriciousness. An obviously capricious student's results are recorded as capricious.
Every decade or so we must have an national morality play: an enactment on television, with millions of viewers, of our own schizophrenia, our inner dividedness. And yet the old values still hold and to demonstrate that some people must be punished.
In conclusion, we welcome criticism but do hope to dispel myths before they become widely accepted.
And when the play is over—the Hiss-Chambers play, the McCarthy play, the racket investigation play, the Watergateplay—why then we feel purged, purified,braced. We have seen the villains get thebane that he has triumphed over thefalse; good over well; justice over crime.
That, we say a little smugly, is theAmerican way.
AFTERWARD we note with quiet satisfaction that the rest of the world, or some of the rest of the rest of the world, rests on our dirty linen in public—that takes guts.
Nancy Harper, Director C&I Survey
There is one more particular in which all these poor wretches are the victims of history far more than, as they dreamed, its oppressive authority on almost every level of our society.
griff and the unicorn
Power and authority should, of course, go hand-in-hand. Authority invests power with respect to honor and even a kind of sacred trust; authority, kings become tyrants, and the strong become bullies. By the same token, Presidents become suspicious and insecure and everywhere see threats to their power. They must be able to escape aside by unscrupulous gulls and cunning.
MUCH HAS BEEN SAID about the dignity, nobility, etc. of the Office of the President of the United States: "A particular man may be fallible but be warranted we damage irreparable the dignity and the office itself." The office has already suffered for years from authority that is experienced everywhere and that, when it was intact in the Presidency, made it the greatest office in the world.
question that puzzles me with each new revelation about this domestic spy operation, as to whether fear and suspicion ought to be the mode by which Americans come to understand their mutual problems and quell their various fears.
The real point of Watergate is that the man who presently holds that office knows that much of its authority is gone through no fault of his own. The president of the Partie's slight that he himself has never really believed in the authority of the office he occupies (or fitted naturally or comfortably into it), and sensing a loss of power, to desperate expedients to reassert it.
It is as though he were trying to compensate in some way for the diminution of the historic authority of the office by constantly augmenting its powers.
Lawrence graduate student
The same question applies to our external security. It would be helpful if we could gain some insight as to the level of the threat posed to Americans from other countries in this era of detente with the other nuclear powers.
I miss all of these explanations in connection with my Watergate reading because the issue of security looms large through all of this. The question must be posed and the issue balanced out: which was the graver of our security, the dangers being posed by our own systems or solutions devised within the White House to meet those dangers? If I could add to that my diet, 'I digst the remainder of the Watergate disclosures more intelligently.'
Two-for-One Trade As Bikini Devalued
Agence France-Press
NICE—Bare bosoms were bronzing in the sun on the beach at Nice today as the monokini craze took the Promenade des Anglais by storm.
The topless fashion was launched last week by a fulsome quartet, and rather than provoking hows of protest, spread rapidly. To avoid running foul of the law, the advocates of semi-nudity only reveal their charms lying flat on the beach.
NO a we
10th have
Local police said there could be no case of public indecentity since there has been no
Bathers on the whole had no objection to the new fashion, but most said they would rather wear what was right for them.
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7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
616 Vermont 843-0350
University Theatre Murphy Hall
Refreshments and Entertainment in New Murphy Courtyard at 7:30 p.m.
Tick Prices: $2.00 - Students $1.00
Reservations: Telephone: 844-398-9
June 20, 21, 22, 23
Curtain: 8:00 p.m.
1973 Present "JULIUS CAESAR"