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Friday, January 26,1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Scars of War
The Vietnam War has been a war of attrition that has eaten away at America's soul and self-respect. Yet the cease-fire agreement to be signed Saturday evening will bring us peace with honor, according to President Nixon. In his inaugural address, Nixon spoke of a new role America is to play now. "The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs," he said. On the battlefield, however, Nixon has failed to apply new tactics.
If the cease-fire accord is signed and implemented on schedule, all Americans held prisoner throughout Indo-China will be released within 60 days from Saturday. It is unfortunate that so many had to become prisoners within the 60 days that have just passed.
Four years ago, Nixon promised us peace, but only the magic of an approaching election drove a ceasefire close to his grasp. In October, Henry Kissinger said he was close enough to peace to touch her, but we waited three more months for his verbal image to become tangible. During those three months Iranan bombs pounded home to Vietnam the determination of Nixon's odd morality, that honor is possible only if we stubbornly insist on showing America's strength to the end.
The first B52 bomber lost in the Vietnam War was shot down last
November. Since then, BS25 have fallen on Vietnamese soil as do flies on a carcass. With them have gone countless victims on the ground and the planes' crews, the last Americans to die or become prisoners of war in this honorable end to our unfortunate involvement.
We will now leave the Vietnamese with the responsibility of securing their own future. The time has come to consider our own. The misery of war has traditionally been soothed by victory celebrations, but we have no victory and little to celebrate in Vietnam.
In the last few weeks, newspapers have begun to carry pictures of the Vietnamese as if the war were going out of style, but I doubt that it is. By Saturday night America may be officially relieved of its painful entanglement, behind us we will leave a country that has been a victim of this war. Nam's civil war has not been resolved. Even now both sides are concentrating efforts to defend or claim what they believe to be theirs.
During the past decade America has begun to awaken to its internal disorders and external cancers. This nation has been through a difficult adolescence which has deeply scarred our society. Perhaps the scars and cynicism of the past 10 years of domestic and foreign conflict will remain with us long enough to ward off future mistakes. This one has taken too long to gauge itself into our national consciousness, and is a wound that will not readily be healed.
—Linda Schild
Hospital Christening
Although no official announcement has been made on the name of the new student health center, the name allegedly has been chosen by University of Kansas administrators.
This decision must not go unnoticed for several reasons. It was a committee composed of students that urged the construction of a new health center. Students are financing the construction through their fees. Also a committee composed of KU administrators should not have sole authority to make the name selection. As prescribed under the Senate Code, which outlines University governance, there must be 20 per cent student representation on university committees.
It is the student's health center and it is therefore logical that the center be named by the student body.
It is proposed that the new health centre be called Watkins Hospital in the central city.
Why take all the old miseries of the present hospital and assign them in name to the new health center? We will have a new facility and better services. We will be able to get better health care.
Elizabeth Watkins made many great contributions to the University. We are thankful for her financial and cultural contributions. They are part of unsurpassed alumni support for KU. Let us keep her memory with the present building.
The new health center, however, should bring with it a new image, and should have assigned to it a name selected by those who urged construction, financed the project and will use it most.
—R. E. Duncan
Nicholas von Hoffman
Back into the White House
WASHINGTON—Four years ago the political analysts were predicting our entrance into an era of one-term presidents. Having made that mistake they couldn't foresee that at Richard Nixon's second inauguration the Pennsylvania Republican would be the president to discourage the birds from defeating on those watching the parade. This act showed that the administration was committed to at least one kind of bombing halt, although nobody in Washington prepared to guess at the enormously enormous pigeon, the size of a BS2, had appeared over the presidential limousine.
They might have had at the B2S pigeon with a SAM mission, but the closest thing they had to one of them was Sammy Davis Jr. who foiled expectations by not showing up. Davies claimed he had the flu, but maybe he feared it would have been too much like his performance at the Republican National Convention last summer. But what happened was—a Miami Beach road company played to an audience of angry Congressional Democrats who were scared to show their feelings.
The same cast of characters was doing the same numbers, even to the repetition of those grizzly and patronizing "heritage" events attended by Nixon's hard-nosed, short-tailed lawyer and advertising agency friends. The very same types who
occupied the yachts and mansions last summer, the Fords and the Rockefeller's, were here, made old money look like new.
Millions of us won't judge Nixon fairly. Like his inauguration parade—they'll ridicule it when a fair critic bowls a meal to the Miss Teen-age America Pageant or the half-time ceremonies at the Super Bowl where future presidents might office provided the National Football League can be persuaded not to black out home-city TV coverage.
They'll poke fun at the herds of millionaires and their wives stuck in the doorways and the taut-check counters of the hotel. They won't get $1,000 and couldn't get to the bar; we'll laugh them now, because the ceremony is over and Nixon doesn't need us any more. We should ever have to look at the ugly faces of America again.
The new man will push his way in a little farther and then he'll stop to listen. Somewhere way off in back there will be a rustling sound like feet in old bedroom slippers and a weak voice calling out, 'Manole, Manolo, don't let them see me!'
That's what he's going to do. He's going to vanish. Four years from now when the next guy rides down Pennsylvania Avenue he'll have to bring a crowbat to jimmy's house. The officers it force enough to stick his head inside he's going to see that the whole place is stacked from floor to ceiling with ancient unread copies of the Washington Monument Through this great litter there will be tunnels and repository
areas for old cottage-cheese cartons and empty bottles of catup.
(U) Washington Post-King Features Syndicate
Nixon Embraces Conservatism
WASHINGTON — Richard Nixon's inaugural address last Saturday was vintage stuff. Once he came to power, he embracing old conservative doctrines: federalism, self-reliance, limited government. At least in the conservative view, it will all together supervise liberalism.
James J. Kilpatrick
There are signs, moreover, that in his second term the President means to put these responsibilities determined, even at the risk of further alienating a hostile Congress, to keep a firm lid on federal spending. He has won apologetics for revenue sharing plan, and while he has a major flaw-it gives local governments the authority to spend money without the responsibility of raising it-the usual excuse is a useful step toward reversing the flow of political power.
"The time has come," said Mr. Nixon on Saturday, "to turn away from the condescending policies and down-of 'Washington knows best.'"
Yet doubts remain. Last month the White House published a staff study "summing up the accomplishments of the first four presidents" and training exercises to lay this staff study beside the inaugural address.
Yet his staff summary of the first four years indicates that time after time, in first one area and then another, the administration fostered paternalistic policies. In such fields as agriculture, urban planning, community planning, aid to education, and the reduction of pollution, Washington knew best. The staff study boasts of increased federal spending on consumer protection and guidance. Here we learn about the agency's administration, 10,000 nutrition aides are at work in low-income neighborhoods.
"Let us encourage individuals at home," said the President, "to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves."
Between 1969 and 1973, the staff tells us tells, loans to small business leased from $280 million to $3 billion. The number of persons receiving food stamps increased from $500 million. Federal subsidy of the arts climbed from $8 million to $38 million. Housing subsidies almost doubled, from $850 million to $1.1 billion. Under Mr. Nixon, assisted housing units reached a record level of $49,000 in 1971.
"In trusting too much to government," said Mr. Nixon,
Yet the staff study bursts with pride at the creation, in the first four years, of such agencies as the Office of Child Development, Child Center Program, National Child Center Atmospheric Administration, Council of Environmental Quality, Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Drug Abuse Protection, Rural Telephone Bank, Office of Mobile Product Information Coordination Center, National Institute of Education, Right to
Read Program, Office of Minority Business Enterprise and the National Institute of Toxicological Research.
For all his fervent insistence on limited government, the President has presided over an administration so bloated with bureacracy that the White House staff must now be cut by 10%. But it was the work ethic, the President has sponsored a plan of guaranteed annual income with built-in guarantees against work.
Too much reliance on government, said Mr. Nixon, "leads only to infilated expectations, to reduced individual effort, and to disappointment and frustration." He could have found a sad
example of this falling in a $100 million program, listed by the staff among his accomplishments, intended to provide one hot meal a day for lonely old persons. At that level of expenditure the staff gave 1 out of 20. The other 19 can dine on expected expectations.
But one recalls a Bible Belt hymn about the light in the window: "While the lamp holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may come." The President's political, social and economic principles are altogether sound. All we conservatives could ask, this second time around, is that he consistently apply them.
(C) 1973 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
Jack Anderson
B52 Crewmen Air Grievances
WASHINGTON. - We have talked by overseas船 to BS2 crewmen who are bitter over their losses during the controversial Hanoi raids last December. Some BS2 were shot down, they charge, because of poor planning.
We have also had access to records which tell what really happened over Hanole. The group of crewmen that failed to change the flight patterns for three nights endangered lives. But the patterns were belatedly altered, the toll of BS2s remained high.
One pilot, a veteran of many combat missions, was so upset that he wrote to President Nixon that "We have no plans of BS2a shot down," he complained, "were not necessarily due to every marksmanship but rather due to inep, negative and indifferent planning."
The same pilot sent an even more poignant letter to Sen. George McGovern, himself a former bomber pilot. "I am an Academy graduate that has become frustrated with and ashamed of the career I have held in this country," the crewman, "for I have seen the ideals that I learned at the Academy become a sham in the working Air Force. Dignity is more important than integrity,
and 'cover-your-ass' has replaced honor."
The pilot spelled out some of his specific complaints: "If the military planners had done everything possible to avoid the losses and they occurred anyway, then assuming the raids were necessary, the vast number of aircraft and men shot down would be acceptable. But to have them hit him was impossible, then for the military to state that the losses were expected, is to us tragic.
The secret reports to the Pentagon confirm that the big bombers, winging in one after another like ducks in a shooting gallery, followed the same flight patterns for three nights in a row. Thereafter, the B52s varied their flight patterns and were on every point on the commass.
"It is not true that the planners were limited as to the flight paths required to get the B52s in and out of the aircrews complained of the flight planning, the next days of raiding saw drastic changes to the ways that the B52s entered and exited the Hanoi-Haiphong area."
A top Air Force general acknowledged to us, in retrospect, that the flight tactics should have been changed earlier. On Dec. 18, the first day of the saturation bombing, a salvo of 100 SAM missiles brought down two BS2s. On the second day, approximately 150 missiles were tracked, but they bagged only one bomber.
The third day was the worst. The antaircraft crews below had their missiles trained on the BS2 bombers arrived following the same heading, the sky suddenly was filled with missiles. In shotgun bursts, more than 400 streaked up at the BS2s. It was a mistake, when crewmen told that only the bombs were knocked down.
Their complaints finally moved the Eighth Air Force command to change the flight pattern. On the fourth day, the defenders were SAMs. Nevertheless, they bagged another three bombers.
Thereafter, both the SAM missiles and B52 losses declined. By Christmas the defenders were able to launch only seven of their targets. A truce, however, to repair their defences. On Dec. 26, they sent up a barrage of 100 missiles, another 400 from the other side. The number was back down to 20.
All told, 15 BS25 were shot down, another nine heavily damaged during "Operation Hurricane" and four more were called. Six of the damaged bombers have been repaired. Two more should be ready to return to the air in February; the ninety were taken until July 19th to rehabilitate.
Several B52 crewmen complained bitterly about the Hanoi missions, but only Capt. Michael Heck refused to fly any more bombing raids. An F4 Phantom pilot, Capt. Dwight Evans, Jr., had been flying in combat missions. The total dropped from flying status during the eight years of the Vietnam War is only 23 - 19 because of fear, four for refusal. Another pilot was suspended from flying status during the Korean War for motivational reasons.
Footnote: The pilot who wrote to Nixon and McGovin signed his name. When we reached him in Guam, he acknowledged writing the letters but refused to discuss them. Afterward, his family appealed to us not to use his name.
Interior Department officials have used their power over Indian lands to give the best possible leases to mining, oil and natural gas interests. Then the department enforced the leases with runs.
Injustice to Indians
But it's another story when an Indian asks for help against a lessee. One of the many small, pathetic tales in the Broken Island from government files shows this unfair equation at its worst.
An Indian, Mark Dewey, of St. Stephens, Wyo., complained to
Interior that his lessees and their dogs had chased his horses. One horse died of wire cuts, another was ferociously slain by the dogs.
Despite Dewey's pleading, Interior told him that because he had not gotten approval of Interior to make the lease, "it was a matter . . . we do not know how can be of assistance to you."
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Copyright, 1973,
by United Feature Syndicate. Inc.
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