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Tuesday, July 9, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Nixon Summit Fizzles
President Nixon hit no home runs during his recent excursion to the Soviet Union, but there was still interest in creating action for summit fans.
The big story was what was accomplished—or rather, what wasn't accomplished—at the summit. The stage was set for another great negotiating coup by the President. At home, Congress was trudging along with the impeachment investigation, but Nixon had stolen the spoon of the Middle East. He was hailed in Cairo and Damascus, officially treated as a king in Israel; and all the time the Russians waited placidly, taking no part in the Middle East settlement.
Then it was on to Moscow for the summit and a great climax. Unfortunately, Nixon's success in Moscow resembled the successes of two high waters—Napoleon and Hitler. The Russians aren't dumb; they are as sly as Nixon. They knew the perilous position he was in at home, and they knew he was willing to go to shocking lengths—promising nuclear facilities to both Egypt and Israel to detach at least one of their Nixon needed success abroad in order to remain secure at home.
Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brehznev talked about three main issues during the summit. They agreed to a limited ban on underground nuclear testing and a further limitation on missile defenses. The third issue was the big one—multiple warheads.
didn't Now, however, the Russians are on the verge of installing their own multiple warhead system and state-funded States in destruction power.
Nixon and Brezhnev reached no agreement on the limitation of multiple warheads. They didn't even reach an agreement on future negotiation of the question. Mighty Nixon had struck out.
Despite this failure, there were entertaining sidelights to the summit. The American television networks sent along their usual horde of newsmen, commentators and journalists but this time they didn't restrict themselves to the actions of the two big men. Instead they swarmed over Moscow doing the kind of investigative reporting that has caused an uproar in the United States. They interviewed Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov who was on a hunger strike to draw attention to the rights of human rights in Russia. They also covered a seminar of Jewish scientists.
The Soviets, unaccustomed to such initiative by the news media, cut off the networks when they tried to beam these stories out to them. The NBCs, the TV doubledly, they took the action for national security reasons.
Another story emanating from the summit showed that Nixon has a place for minorities in his entourage. Manolo Sanchez, the President's valet, had the great honor of tasting Nixon's food before it was served to him. The food had been approved by a Soviet doctor before going to Sanchez, but when came to protecting the President's health, they taken. Sanchez can take his place along with such brave and loyal men as Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez.
—Michael Rieke
A View of Vern Miller
Funny, how your mind wanders when you're relaxed. There I was, all spread out on the grass and watching the Jaycees' Fourth of July fireworks display, when I started thinking about Vern Miller. I don't know what made Vern Miller pop into my head. It might have been the patriotic pyrotechnics exploding above me—but I doubt it. It must have been the smell of the grass.
Well there I was, sipping on a cold can of Fanta Grape soda and sharing a pan of homemade brownies with my friends, when I started making of the ways in Vern Miller and we are alike different.
There's one thing, I concluded, that Vern and I definitely have in common—happiness. Vern looks to me like a man who gets a lot of enjoyment out of his life, and I know I sure get a lot out of mine. But on the other side of that coin there is one important difference.
As far as I'm concerned, any way that Vern Miller chooses to pursue his personal happiness is fine with me. I have neither the moral nor the legal right to say yea or nay to any pleasure Vern Miller seeks, as long as it doesn't infringe upon my own right to the pursuit of happiness.
This may not be the only way in which Vern and I are different, but it's this difference that gives me a clearer understanding of some of our lives. We have used, like patriotism, prejudice and the Fourth of July.
—Alan Hurlbut
By NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN King Features Syndicate
Lack of Investment Forces Corporations to Borrow
Inflation Hurts Big Business Too
WASHINGTON - A few days ago a rumor swept the market that giant Westinghouse Electric had plumb run out of money. This famous corporation's stock plunged as people realized that its debts had soared from about $200 million to something in the neighborhood of $500 million in less than two years.
Matters were worked out and some of the fright passed as it was announced that large credit lines had been opened up. The interest rate is almost 12 percent, a staggering figure for a major manufacturing corporation to have to pay. The Westinghouse company, however, aren't alone. It would appear that American business is gaining for dought.
Item, Might American Telephone & Telegraph with its prestige, its triple-A credit rating and its monopoly power to hire promise to pay more than 9.5 percent to raise $250 million in annual debt for the bank's bond. But even the banks don't have money. Citicorp, the holding company for the First National City Bank of New York, a monaster institution with $44 billion worth of assets, is going out and borrowing $850 million from the public. These unusual notes combine such safety, such high inflation, and such cashing them in, that the savings and loan associations are screaming that they are bein' robbed of their customers.
For gigantic Citibank to stoop to offering the small investor-vestor almost 10 percent interest suggests that it also wants to make its customers more comfortable, we are ushpaxying in all this non-money? For the small man, the answer to that question is easy. He owes 22 cents
Cook was appointed in January 1973 and confirmed by the Senate in February, becoming, at 35, the youngest chairman in the history of the important federal regulatory agency. His government career came tumbling down in May 1973 when Stans and Mitchell were indicted. During the investigation, it was revealed that Cook was involved in directing the deletion of a paragraph from the complaint against Robert Vesco and his enterprises on a $200,000 cash gift to the Nixon re-election committee.
But Cook did admit a series of dishonest acts as general counsel of the SEC when he was seeking to curry political favor in 1972 and 1985, a time when he served by President Nixon to head the agency.
—He took the action to coverup the cash transaction in the pre-election period in 1972 at the request of Stans, who was then appointed as Chair of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
Briefly, here is what Cook has admitted under oath:
But the big boys? The corporations? Has it happened to them too? It would seem so. Nobody will invest in the stock market, so they can't raise money to buy new equipment that way. Raining钱 through bonds, as you've seen above, is exorbitantly expensive, and often impossible. Wicked old ITT recently had to postpone offering a new bond issue, presumably because they thought there wouldn't be enough customers.
—Cooklied under oath before three committees of Congress in denying conversations with Stans on the Vesco cash and the Vesco bond. A definite investigation of Vesco on charges of having
Mortgages are as hard for corporations to come by as for you and me. There is also what they call depreciation, which means that, when you buy a $100 machine with a 10-year term, it will be worth $10,000 when it wears out you can buy a replacement. Today, however, inflation may have kicked up the price to $250, what is a poor corporation to do? It does what we do. It goes to the equivalent of a small loan company like HF-C, but as millions know, small loans or short-term loans are costly.
"In 1973 corporations increased their bank loans by roughly $35 billion. A big chunk of these loans was secured to finance long is terribly dangerous," said Tom Holt, one to finance long is terribly dangerous," said Tom Holt, one of the few investment analysts who has been able to help his customers make money on the market during the Niks era.
Holt's latest figures also show that corporations are now being reduced to the same desperate kind of expedients families must resort to when they don't have enough cash. They simply don't pay their bills. This year inter-corporate debt, the amount of money that one company owes another, is running at a rate of $24 billion, or about twice what it was just two years ago. Even that isn't generating enough cash, and they are paying their taxes. Income tax liability, as they like to call no-money in the board rooms, has gone up to $13 bill from less than half a billion in 1972.
Cook Remains SEC Chief Despite Admissions
All in all, Holt figures there is a capital gap of around $50 billion. He expects that companies will be forced to start unloading inventory at bargain prices in their struggles to get that money. This would, naturally, lead to cancelling plans to increase production capacity. Who needs it when companies are dumping goods they can't sell? With that the need for interest rates will go down, but so will employment, which is the absolute taboo of contemporary politics.
Another dreadful possibility is that the government, faced with whole industries instead of companies going under, will bail the entire industry out. Not just Penn Central but every railroad, in which case we then have a free enterprise system in which the price of failure is that you stay open for business anyhow.
Cook was not named as an unindicted conspirator in the indictment for obstruction of justice and perjury from which he had been acquitted by a federal jury in New York.
On the other hand, Cook's supporters note the young lawyer finally told the truth about the cover-up of the $200,000 cash gift to the lawyer. As a result, the attorney was done at the request of former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans. Cook testified on this as a government witness in the unsuccessful effort to prosecute Stans' former Attorney General John N. Mitchell.
WASHINGTON D.C.-Months after former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman G. Bradford Cook admitted his important role in the attempted cover-up of international financier Robert Vesco's $200,000 cash gift to the Nixon campaign, Cook, a 36-year lawyer, is still representing clients at the SEC.
By CLARK R. MOLLENHOFF Register-Tribune Syndicate
Kelley Makes FBI Changes Subtle
Veteran SEC staff members are privately asking how long Cook's representation of clients can be permitted to go unchanged because of their unambiance of proper standards of conduct.
WASHINGTON (AP)—Watching Clarence Kiley run the FBI is like watching a river cut through the soil; the change is imperceptible from moment to moment but remarkably obvious over the course of a year.
After 21 years as an FBI agent and 12 years as police chief of Kansas City, Mo., Kelley was sworn in as FBI director one year ago today.
"We must convey to the American people the truth about what the FBI does, and by what they do," he said. "Shortly after he was sworn in. 'It is time to raise the shade so that the public may judge what motivates the men and women of the FBI, so that the public may appraise our
Unlike Hoover, Kelley often has testified
The danger from this kind of financing comes from the unholy price markups a manufacturer has to charge just to get it.
Bureau Establishes Era of Openness With Public
Kelley has introduced a ferment thekley had not known in 48 years under its only previous director, the late J. Edgar Hoover. He was moved slowly and then began to hand urging critics to be patient and on the other, capping his troops to leave the past.
or more on every after-tax dollar he gets paid, and now,
with the cost of every necessity shooting up, he has been
The inflationary consequences should make a prudent man bite his lips, but we are running through a time when other prudent men live day to day in fear that the country is under Southeast Asia, but Wall Street—may be tipping up.
The hallmark of his leadership has been the move toward opening the agency to public scrutiny. Many doors still are closed, but some aren't. Many questions still are answered. Many FBI officials still prey on them, but some are being turned around.
before congressional committees examining FBI policies. He has carried out a heavy speaking schedule before audiences around the country. He has held several meetings with his staff in Washington. He plants another one Tuesday, marking his first year in office.
Atty. Gen. William B. Saxbe recently said of Kelley, "He realizes that the FBI must be responsible to the people of this country, that they are not an entity operating outside the city. We must open themselves up to publicity, tell the people what they're doing."
No single action channeled the FBI away from the course of secrecy, but the pattern of several Kelley decisions established the trend.
He encouraged a Brandeis University professor, John Elliif, to undertake a two-year analysis of the FBI's domestic interior and foreign intelligence. An intense criticism during the past decade.
Kelley also has tried to mend frazed relations with state and local police who often were angered and dismayed at her actions. She makes the credit for work done by local police.
Asked for an interview to discuss his first year, Kelley declined until the news conference.
"Hoover was always schooing you with the sugary language, but when it got down to the nity-griffy, you knew he might steal the credit for cracking a bank robbery when your detectives did all the work," said Patrick V. Murphy, president of the Police
Kelley has attempted to involve lower-
eer officials in some policy decisions in a project called "participatory management" of the Washington headquarters and in field offices.
“Mr. Kelley has got problems himself, a lot of hardened people over there who worship at the shrine of Mr. Hoover and just told him that he's not sane,” Sake said in April.
Saxbe and Deputy Atty. Ken. Laurence Silberman attest to Geyle's cooperation with the department's long-range review of FBI policies. Saxbe said federal prosecutors detected a new spirit of cooperation among FBI agents in the field.
Kelley also has taken steps to join the FBI to its parent agency, the Justice Department. Hoover resisted direction from the government and virtually all attorneys general.
However slight and subtle, Kelley's changes have confounded numerous FBI agents.
Kelley also has moved in other ways
open the top ranks of the FBI to ideas
from the CIA.
In other areas, FBI observers said Kelley had demonstrated sensitivity to individual rights and a willingness to explore ways of safeguarding them.
Foundation and former New York City police commissioner.
The practice is catching on, said Edward S. Miller, who retired last week as deputy associate director in charge of investigative operations.
"He takes enough time to communicate has ideas to the rest of us. If anybody has that idea, he'll give it."
looted mutual funds of more than $224 million.
On three occasions, Cook liked to a
teacher before, finally admitting
his role in the project.
Senators William Proxmire (D-Wis.) and Edward Brooke (R-Mass.) asked the Justice Department to examine Cook's testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on whether a paternity purported injury was warranted. The appropriations committee supported the Proxmire-Brooke request with a 16 to 0 vote in sending it to Attorney General Saxe several weeks ago.
Cook's critics say it is about time that a precedent is established to demonstrate that SEC employees and officials are not subject to the same rules as those out in the SEC's own "rules of practice."
The Justice Department has made no response.
Cook's cooperation as a government witness probably should be taken into account in the decision of whether to prosecute him for admitted perjury, though he received no promise of immunity when he finally decided to tell the truth.
misrepresented matters to the SEC or have otherwise engaged in unprofessional con-
They point to Rule 2-E of the rules of practice of the SEC that provides for disbarment if any lawyer is found to be "lacking in character or integrity, or to have engaged in unethical or improper professional conduct."
SEC lawyers seriously question whether
The rules of conduct also provide for disbarment when the SEC finds a lawyer "to have willfully violated or willfully aided and abetted the violation of any provision of the federal security laws or any rules and regulations thereunder."
Cook should be permitted to practice law before the SEC when he has admitted actions as an SEC official that would have resulted in disbarment action if they had been done while representing a client before the SEC.
Cook's defenders at the SEC say no precedent exists for invoking the rules of professional conduct against an official of the SEC or another entity, and that they used only to discipline attorneys who have
Even as a quiet debate goes on behind the doors of the SEC as to whether General Counsel Lawrence E. Nerheim should institute disarmment against the former chairman of the SEC, it has been made by the Illinois Bar Association that could result in action there.
Disbarment by any state would automatically end Cook's right to practice before the SEC, and the SEC General Counsel's office would be spared the anguish of initiating action against a former associate.
Cook, a native of Lincoln, Nebraska, is also a member of the Nebraska and Akron football teams.
Greed Blinded Big Business, Stars
King Features Syndicate
WASHINGTON — The purported celebrity swindle of $100 million by the Home-Stake Production Company must elicit a few reasons. Their got done to them what they do to others.
By NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN
The IRS and SEC allegations have yet to be proven, but it does warm the cynical heart to suppose that guys like Sen. Jacob Javits, R-N.Y., finally got theirs. It assages resentment to read that stars of political fat and television talk like Candice Berger got clipped for $125,000. It does the same with Mr. Trump through this incident that Bob Dyland does not blow his money on the wind but puts it into tax shelves.
The Candice Bergens can plead occupational fatuity, but what shall we say of the board chairmen, presidents and vicepresidents of some of the biggest firms in America being victims? The list of alleged suckers includes top-ranking men from Pepsi Co., Western Union, First Boston Corp., American Express, Procter & Gamble, Lynch, Neiman-Marcus, R H. Moneghe, General Motors, Steel, Gannett newspapers and the First National City Bank of New York, the second largest in the country.
Guys like Hoyt Amidonid of U.S. Trust and Walter Wristen of Citibank are businessmen, as is David J. Mahoney, chairman of the board of the Norton Simon group in San Francisco, who what they are doing. They and the dozens of other executives who invested had ample
In 1967 Home-Stake's auditors, Arthur Andersen & Co., would only provide a qualified certification of the company's annual report, after which Home-Stake and Andersen went their separate ways. The company has now become country's most prestigious auditing firms have tipped off these astute and prudent leaders of capitalism?
opportunity to know what was with what Home-Stake.
In 1971 Home-Stake signed a consent decree in connection with an SEC action charging violation of the stock registration and anti-fraud provisions of the Federal code. Nor was this damaging information hidden away where investors would be exposed to harm of it. The SEC required Home-Stake to print it in its own sales materials.
It might be too much to expect a Candice Bergen to read the sales brochure and understand it, but Walter Wriston isn't a third-magnitude film player and bit magazine writer. The language should have been unmistakably clear to him. The government had all but called Home-Stake a fraud and a con game, and, furthermore, Home-Stake had practically admitted the charges were true because it not only signed the consent decree, it also agreed to provide for the payment of shares sold under these untruthful representations; some $5.6 million was ultimately refunded.
Then why did the mavens of commerce, industry and finance buy in? They could be
innocent but stupid—in which case we are entitled to ask, if that's how these bankers handle their own money, what do they do with other people's?
Possibly greed got the better of their judgment. Company salesmen were taking people to lunch at "21" and telling them they would make 700 percent profit. Seven hundred percent money is by definition not worth investing in, but investing in hopes of getting such a return is either highly religious or has a little larceny in his heart.
Some few investors did get something for nothing, however. These few cashed out early, thereby suggesting an ugly hypothesis.
Did some of the big business types act as shills? Did they know well enough what Home-Stake actually was, but were allowed to take their money and run so that their names could be used to sell dry wells to blonde actresses?
None of the big business figures are under any legal obligation to explain any of the suspicions that must unavoidably fly around after a scandal like this breaks. Because many people don't understand economic conditions aside, one of the reasons that many people are putting their dollars into Swiss mattresses is the success of these shockers over the last few years. Confidence in the personal honesty, not in the business itself, isn't what it once was.
Wall Street, you'd better clean up your act.
Hoaxes Are Fact in Today's News
One of the more famous hoaxes of the early 19th century was published in Benjamin Dav's New York Sun.
When American newspapers were in their youth, reporters would entice the public into buying their newspapers by making up the news and reporting fantastic stories about moon people, balloons and wild animals.
Men of science and learning fell for the moon haax, and there were some red faces when the Sun admitted its "scop" wasnt
Circulation rose, and in 1844 the Sun published a second hoax story written by the American story-teller. Eduar Allan Foe.
Poe's balloon hoxe gave a day-to-day detailed account of a Mr. Bacon moon who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a "fabulous Blinging" ride.
Another wave of sensationism followed the Civil War. A story headlined "Wild Animals Break Loose In Central Park," was published in James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s New York Herald.
After particulars on dangerous lions, tigers and gorillas ravaging New York, the last line of the story admitted that the animal had been shot in the head.
Purely fictitious stories of this type aroused public interest and sent circulation numbers soaring.
Supposedly, this unethical practice has no place in 20th-century journalism. But today's newspapers do carry hoaxs and other content that is not true.
boxes have taken a curious twist and aren't "pure fabrication," but true.
A look at the Watergate hoax (sometimes known as the Exptive Deleted-Inaudible affair) shows all the other elements that characterized the sensational and unrealistic hoax stories of old.
There are action-packed day-to-day accounts of resignations corralled into a rapidly growing past of "formers." (Former presidential aide John Ehrichman, former counsel John W. Henderson, General John Mitchell, former Vice President Spiro Agnew.)
There is romance in the form of a roly-poly playboy who finally gets hitched.
There is the element of suspense—who will be the next to go?
There is obesity
For a while the Watergate hoax aroused public interest. People now seem to be showing signs of boredom.
Suzanne Shaw, assistant professor of journalism, may have summed up public attitude towards the 20th century hoax when she told her Reporting II class recently. "If they don't get those numbers off the front page of Time, I'm going to cancel my subscription."
Newspapers have even more hoax stories to report in the '70s. The Gasoline hauge caught the public's attention and aroused its
As gas goes up another three cents this week, it becomes apparent how fantastic a box it is.
The Food price hoax, the Cost of Education hoax. . . Oh, for the good old days, when a hoax has all make believe.
Marian Horvat