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Tuesday, March 26, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commer
rationales, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Campaign for Survival
A question by Dan Rather of CBS News at President Nixon's press conference last week in Houston pointed out that Nixon once again is trying to sell a basically unsalable product: himself.
Rather, a well-known White House reporter, got a huge ovation from the media. Broadcasters when he identified himself to ask Nixon a question
"No, sir, Mr. President," Rather replied, "Are you?"
When the applause died down, Nixon asked, "Are you running for something?" That got another round of cheers.
Nixon might well have answered affirmatively, for he appears to be running hard to stay in office. In the last couple of weeks, he's held a flurry of news conferences and at least three Chicago, Nashville and Houston.
The Nashville visit even looked like a campaign stop. White House advisers and five vice presidents for three days preparing an Air National Guard hangar for a rally.
Two hours before Nixon arrived, bands showed up to entertain the crowd on the martial and country music. Somebody even passed out the words to a song entitled "Stand Up and Cheer for Nixon." You can imagine what it was like.
When Nixon appeared at the dedication of a new building for the Grand Ole Opry, he even tried his hand at spinning a yo-yo and joying with it. He played the piano. Those antics definitely marked him as a candidate.
Meanwhile, George Gallup has been as busy taking the pulse of the electorate now as he was two years ago during the real campaign. This time, however, Nixon seems to lose hope. He was down to a 25 per cent approval rating in the poll released last week.
All of this, of course, comes in response to the current impeachment inquiry in the House Judiciary Committee. The only curious part of it is that Nixon is starting his campaign only now.
A number of groups have been fighting a propaganda war over impeachment on months. On the pro-impeachment side is a coalition of American for the American city AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union and Ralph Nader's Congress Watch.
On the pro-Nixon side are such groups as Americans for the Presidency, the National Citizens' Committee for Fairness to the
These groups have been fighting the battle with full-page newspaper advertisements in an attempt to generate mail to members of press.
Presidency and the Committee to Support the President.
In his own campaign, Nixon seems to be applying the techniques that helped him win the 1968 Presidential election. As he went on to become a television create an image of himself without seeming to do so.
The television press conference, as much as Nixon hates it, has great potential for posing Nixon as an embattled President taking firm positions of leadership. An embattled fraternity enhances this kind of depletion because Nixon can give vague answers and still get bruit applause.
Consequently, Nixon has been appearing before friendly audiences the Executive Office in Chicago—the decorators House and the Tennesseeans, whose love for Nixon is second only to their love for country music.
And, as he did in 1968, Nixon is sticking to a single group of set responses. He never says anything new, and he never expands on a position once taken, not even when pressed to do so.
In this group of set responses, he carefully misrepresent the aims and requests of the House Judiciary Committee, his degree of cooperation in the investigation, historical precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers.
Nixon's hopes for success in this strategy lie in two basic assumptions. One is that people are too lazy to try to understand the issues, to see beneath the misrepresentations, and that whatever is said will be believed as the truth if it is said often enough.
Such a strategy aims beyond Congress to the voters, who ultimately approve or disapprove of impeachment. The more support Nixon drums up among the electorate and the closer to the November elections the impeachment vote comes, the more the House will vote to impeach.
So Nixon needs only to continue his dealing tactics and com-
mande impemphasis with his impeachment with the future of the Presidency. The vital unanswered question is whether the United States will for it all and buy Nixon yet again.
Bob Simison
Middle Class Suffers Most from Inflation
By DENNIS DUGGAN
NEW YORK-You can almost cut the fear, it's so thick. The rate of inflation is about 2%. In almost a generation, in Washington and spokesman testifying before a congressional committee warns that his office's policies take to the streets to seek economic redress.
The rich? They can take care of themselves. If there's one thing that beats inflation it's having money—and land and power. But what about Mr. In-between? The silent majority? The middle class? What's be thinking about these days?
The Daily Kansan welcome letters to the
students of the university are double-sided and longer than 100 words. Each letter contains a space between the author's name, according to space Similitude and the editor's name. The letter also provides the student's name, year in school and position; others must provide their name and year in school and position; others must provide their name and year in school and position; others can be contacted for verification.
A TEMPLE UNIVERSITY professor claims that the middle class is "up against the wall" and that it may be looking for someone to blame. "Inflation has taken the dream out of the American dream," says John C. Raines, who teaches social ethics at Cal Poly. "Before these people in a dark fashion that they aren't upper mobile anymore."
And he adds: "Inflation has chewed the middle class to pieces. It's taken their self-confidence away. Many of them are walking around asking 'Who's doing this to me and why?' When you get a lot of people asking those questions you get competition to whose doors it's doing it and why . . . and whoever wins that competition will win up in power."
Letters Policy
IT'S HIS NOTION that most of the middle class is living in a "financial nightmare." It also tells us that normal occurrence. He also fears what that happened to the German middle class between World War I and World War II helped to their American counterparts.
"The German middle class was looking for someone to blame for inflation. Hitler told them it was the Jews. They bought that idea. It could happen here. Someone could
say the reason paycheeks are getting smaller and prices are getting bigger is that too many people are on welfare. Or they are to blame. Or Communists in unions.
According to Ehrenhalt, the Labor Department estimated that a family of four living on an "intermediate level" in the fall of 1972 needed $11,466 in most urban centers (but $13,179 dollars in New York City. But or five years before, the figures were $9,996, that the family needed 32 per cent more money in 1972—just to stand still).
An American economist who seems to agree with at least some of what Raines says is Saim Ehrenhart, an assistant commissioner of Labor in New York. "It’s disillusioning," he says, "to get a 10 dollar pay raise and then find out you’re no better off than you were."
"I WOULD LIKE to know," says Raines, "how many people are cashing in their life insurance policies. I would like to know how you could help them go to the dentist. And I'd like to know how restaurants that cater to the middle class eat out, where aren't eating out as much as before."
IN 1973 THE INFLATION rate was 8.8 per cent. Wages rose by an average of 5.8 per cent. Thus, if you got an average 4.2 per cent in arrears and this does not figure in "hidden" taxes—the higher taxes you pay as you move into higher wage brackets, or higher earnings.
"What people ought to be looking at are those giant corporations who can pass on their expertise in the oil and gas giant oil companies," he says. "They've worked out a buddy system with the big government administrative agencies. What is in this is an oligarch disguised as democracy."
It is his contention that too much of the blame for inflation is being placed on the wrong gas—gas station operators, for example. The problem has beenup by enraged and frustrated drivers.
Raines would also like to know what the wealth of the men who run the government is. "How much are the chairmen of key committees in the House and Senate worth? I think if we knew things like that we'd know why we're in the trouble we're in."
Kissinger Needs to Stay at Home
By THEODORE C. SORENSEN Special to the Warranton Post
Henry Kissinger is succeeding once again in his Mideast shuttle diplomacy. We all wish him well but we should also wish him well as he will be a brilliant envoy, negotiator and mediator.
But his job is secretary of state—the first since John Foster Dulles to have undivided responsibility for our foreign affairs and the first since Charles E. Hughes to serve a President too weakened by distrust and the first to effectively foreign policy leadership himself.
James Byrnes discovered on his way out a generation ago, can weaken any secretary
If this secretary's office is to be the decisive command post needed, continuously orchestrating the diverse aims and claims besetting our global role, even with the vast resources available in our suitcase for very long. Lengthy and frequent absences from Washington, as
Understandably, Kissinger is tempted in this winter of our discontent to seek every escape from Potomac missaia and Pentagon Plumbers, in favor of new heroic pronouncements abroad. But he knows that modern foreign policy is more than a setback for Washington. Neither the Indochina war nor America's responsibility for it has ended. Washington's detente with Moscow is today less enthusiastically viewed in both capitals. The open door to Pekong may be only uncertainly ajar. And 1973's "Year of Europe" produced enough disarray to国家的 countries to decline the honor this year.
THESE FACTS SPELL not failure on Kissinger's part but the unavoidable truth
that modern foreign policy leadership is not episodic but a continuous effort, intimately involved with domestic institutions and government, as a patient plugging away in Washington.
Only the personal involvement of a powerful secretary of state can preserve the bureaucratic struggles over pecking order and policy that inevitably increase when White House control remains. Before the end of his tenure abroad, it must undertake far more difficult negotiations with other U.S. agencies. Secretary Kissinger's earlier travels to the Midwest not only delayed our government's internal deliberations on SALT—and thus the talks themselves—but also facilitated the government's own views. Similarly, the politics of international economics and energy confront Kissinger's department with daily
Electroshock therapy, according to Frydman, is used "sparingly and selectively" in Kansas state hospitals. In the opinion of Dr. Peter R. Breggin, who is one of the nation's leading experts on electroshock therapy, this method of treatment invariably damages. And Breggin points out that qualities such as self-control, sensitivity
Frydan says tranquilizers are "overused" in state hospitals in Kansas. At times, he says, instead of being treated, patients are merely rendered dooley by what he scornfully refers to as "chemical strait-jackets". Frydan finds state hospital psychiatrists guilty of another unethical medical practice: extremely powerful medication applied upon patients in order to counter the side-effects of tranquilizers, regardless of whether the side-effects have actually occurred or are likely to occur.
Wells described her life at Larned State Hospital in a 6-part series of stories for the book *Miracle in Mind*. She amusedably about with nothing to do, mass prescriptions of tranquilizers and the gray world of her ward, where patients were treated with stuffing or bedpans in the presence of other patients.
pressures from other bureaucracies with far larger budgets and constituencies; and only the presence of the secretary can have eroded anewrosion of his department's domain.
CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS in particular require constant cabinet-level handholding. Unlike foreign ambassadors, congressional chairmen are not content to receive any assistance from an assistant deputy undersecretary. An absentee secretary cannot get the trade bill or aid appropriation he needs; and congressional blockage of most-favored-agendas is less effective. Moscow may slow down detente far more than another Kissinger visit can speed it up.
Some absences are necessary. Latin America deserves more visits to follow up the success of Mexico City. Egypt having had Kissinger in living color, Syria is equal time. But equal time is not possible for all who demand or even deserve it.
IF KISNINGER's domination of foreign policy as a presidential aide was justified on grounds that the State Department was "a bowl of jelly" (to quote an earlier White House lament), it surely will not now be transformed into meat-and-potatoes without his constant direction. Building a wall around the office, that provides diplomatic early warnings and encourages, instead of submerging, foreign service talent-requires a large investment of the secretary's time in dry, routine personnel and organizational meetings not suitably held between stops in his flying bedroom. A one-man show builds upon our new ambassador to Moscow, for example, by inviting Bohlen or Thompson If the secretary of state files over personally for every top-level contact with the Kremlin?
Much of what is done abroad can be done easier in Washington. But much of what is done in Washington cannot be done alone; other foreign ministries may travel widely. One example is the position as does Kissinger in this Watergate season. "A secretary," said Dean Acheson, "who is really doing his job cannot do it during the weeks and weeks which these ministries censure." At least he should ask himself each time: is this trip really necessary?
Committee Backs Mental Patients Group Says Kansas Hospitals Endanger Mentally Ill
Editor's Note: This is the last of a two-part discussion of alleged humiliation and danger facing Kansas mental hospital protection groups's efforts to protect patients' rights.
Betty Walls, a reporter for the Wichita Eagle, signed herself into Larned State Hospital. She later wanted a "good story," she recently told Louis Frydman, associate professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas and the Mental Patients Support Committee.
An unacclused source, who is a social worker, states that, at Oswatimoe State Hospital, patients are pressed into janitorial service for the staff. They scrub employees, empty washbasins and dust, often in the same room as their privileges may otherwise be withheld.
By JEROME LLOYD Kansas Staff Reporter
Senate Bill 765, which the Lawrence-based Mental Patients Support Committee backs, would grant the mental patient protection from hazardous treatment methods and would increase his autonomy under medical care before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the group's view, the humiliating danger that many mental patients face in Kansas state hospitals is the result of poor medical ethics, besides being unassured from the standpoint of democratic values. The facts strongly bear out their position.
Rachel Longhurst, a young Lawrence resident, describes her recent stay at Topeka State Hospital as a "living death." Like many other patients on her ward, she was forced to take tranquilizers, in her room, while attending to the aides. According to Longhurst, when tranquilizers caused side effects in the patient, "the aides just sat there and did nothing." She claims that patients were punished for minor infractions by being assigned degrading jobs; they cleaned mopped floors, and washed sheets.
and subtly, could be permanently blunted by shock treatment. Breggin says that Ugo Cerletti, who developed electroshock therapy in 1938, used the method on human subjects after he had discovered that it caused brain damage in dogs.
The Mental Patients Support Committee, which includes some 20 members, isn't alone in its quest to affirm the constitutional rights of mental patients. There is a similar committee in Missouri. A group in Wisconsin recently sent to the Supreme Court a petition against involuntary compulsory treatment and endangered. The Supreme Court has communicated to the Wisconsin group interest in the petition.
And in Kansas, Atty. Gen. Vern Miller,
who is a staunch legalist, recently informed
Frydman that he considered involuntary
death as a reasonable defense to do
violence, illegal and unconstitutional.
Ralph Nader has studied American mental hospitals from the viewpoint of the patient as a consumer of mental health. The Nader report recommends that state hospitals be gradually replaced by other facilities, including crisis intervention centers, walk-in emergency services and widespread mental health arrangements in
The shortage of funds, the lack of skilled personnel and the management problems presented by large patient populations cannot excuse, ever, unethical and undemocratic medicine. If, as the committee has stated, it consistently results in the injury and degradation of mental patients, then a number of rights for mental patients are obviously in order. Kansas psychiatry could make its reputation flare forever in the annals of medicine by admitting that it has essentially unenlightened and incompetent.
general hospitals. Nader declares that psychiatrists should be urged to become practicing physicians who apply their medical training in the most appropriate way. The Mental Patients Support Committee recommends that Nader's views and recommendations.
The strongest argument for Senate Bill 765 is its constitutionality. The bill foreshadows alternatives for the mental patient that are beneficial to his emotional health, and that, as a citizen, he clearly deserves to be included in the foreshadows the obligation to dovetailed democratic principles and medical ethics to the practice of psychiatry.
At present, the state hospital patient in Kansas risks a second, graver illness—his physiological and spiritual degradation. And the free citizen, whose life is already in shadow, may be forced to descend into darkness.
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White Was Colorful But No Shoo-In
Editor's Note: How would William Allen White, pre-eminent Kansas journalist, have fared as a candidate for a Nelman Journalism Scholarship to Harvard University? William M. Lombard, president of the Journalism Department below, reprinted from the February issue of Harvard Magazine.
We sit in our high-backed chairs in a high-ceilinged room, perspiring politely under the high starched collars, toying with the gold chains across our ample vests. Occasionally, a whiff of breeze reaches into the open windows. We are well into a tiring day of talk with the young and the strange. And here is the round jolly youngster from Kansas, talking.
He tells proudly about the verse he writes, and the book he produced with a fellow named Albert Bigelow Paine, *Rhymes of Two Friends*—and how the book ended the friendship. He has a newer book, *The Real Issue*—Sunday-supplement fiction apparently. He wrote it with his wife. And Ida Tarbell, in New York, likes the "Boville" stories he is working on now.
He also knows Kansas politics, no question about that: "Shoeless" Simpson and "Mary Ellen" Lease, as well as Cy Leland, the rising Republican boss. He has mckinley and Mark Mama, and T. R., his new best friend. He is also described as the king he has described as declining in population and trade. At 28, he is applying for a Neiman fellowship to spend a year at Harvard. What is he, anyway? Versifier and storywriter? Politician? Newsman, perhaps? How do we compare him, in promise for journalism, in corruption for the New York Post, in corruption for the New York Post, the man General Taylor pulled off the telegrapher's desk to cover politics; or the 29-year-old Chicagoan, Finley Peter Dunne, who has just created a wondrous bartender or that romantic, dashing man in Cuba—or any of a score more?
You might think we could cuddle the issue: who would keep that one-horse paper in Kansas going if Will White left for nine months? Not at all. Lew Schmucker had run The Gazette when White was off on his political and literary trails, and Lew could it again; and White could write his money-making "Boyville" stories on the side as well in Cambridge or in Emporia.
"Is he a good man?" historian Arthur Schlesinger would ask
about a candidate years later. "And does he have good ideas?"
"Yes."
So face it: this White has excellent recommendations from men eminent in journalism—a somewhat foot-dragging peasant perhaps from managing editor Charles S. Gleed of the Kansas City Journal, who lost him; an all-out endorsement from William Rockhill Nelson of the Kansas City State University; and then on the sunside of the McClare Flats; a businesslike recommendation from Tom Johnston, the Star's managing editor; an avuncular blessing from Ed Howe of Athechis; a warm appreciation by "Webb" Wilder, owner of the Hawtha World and a Harvard man; and a thoughtful letter from Professor James Wheeler, whose work touched on his ivory White's mentor, who has written for many of our newspapers; and this White (as well as Canfield's daughter Dorothy) was a student at University of Kansas.
Though White had not been a brilliant student at KU keenly teaches like Canfield, who taught history, political science, and sociology at Lawrence, and William Herbert Caruba in German and Francis H. Snow in biology had prepared him for the best that Harvard could offer in the exciting days of Charles William Eliot.
There you are. We are judging a man who enjoys Eugene Field and admires Ade Gale, who respects Cey Leland and adores T. R. as an editor, he had won national note the year before with his violent anti-Populist editorial, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" But that was a political document in a political year—when a break of sound from the White House forced the East. White makes his living with his verses and sketches; the paper just breaks even. Where is he headed?
He is not, certainly, a "safe" candidate for a Neiman fellowship, whose purpose is "to promote and elevate the standards"—not of poesy or politics—but of journalism." Will is no shoo-in. Still, we who do the selecting have been sorry if we'd missed him. (Although anyone who followed his rockling career with admiration, as I did, would have to believe that if White wanted a fellowship, White would have a fellowship.)