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University Daily Kansan Friday, Nov. 17, 1961
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A Dedicated Leader
Praise of Sam Rayburn has been flowing from every direction since his death yesterday morning. Even those who have sat on the opposite side of the aisle in Congress have responded with warmth and affection in their accounts of dealings with "Mr. Sam."
In his half century of service in the House of Representatives of the United States, Sam Rayburn established a record as one of the greatest legislators in the history of our country. The length of his tenure represents more than one-fourth of the total history of the United States.
"MR. SAM" BEGAN HIS CONGRESSIONAL career in the days before prohibition and women's suffrage. He took over his seat in the House in a time when the United States was a country existing behind a wall of isolationism. He later saw the United States develop into the position of world leadership that it now occupies.
As the United States developed into an international power Rayburn started his own drive for the position he had aspired to since early childhood. In 1940 he was elected to the speakership of the house, a position he held twice as long as anyone else in the history of our country. He built his job into the nation's second most powerful post, outranked only by the Presidency.
IN HIS YEARS AS SPEAKER Sam Rayburn mingled with the great. He was a close adviser to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. Although his advice was not sought, he had much to say about the programs the Eisenhower Administration was able to carry out.
Speaker Rayburn never had any desire to be a senator or anything else but speaker. He considered the power of the house to be at least equal if not greater than the power of the Senate. Anyone who in Rayburn's presence used the term "upper body" to refer to the Senate simply did not know much about getting along with Sam Rayburn.
THE SPEAKER'S LAST YEAR in the House he loved was spent working for the legislative program of a Democratic President whose candidacy he had initially opposed. This was Sam Rayburn—always devoted to his party. So great was his dedication to the goals of his party that in 1955 a special "Rayburn" dinner was held to bestow the title "Mr. Democrat" on the House leader.
President Kennedy tells of the time he was in Canada, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was in Asia, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk was at Geneva. A high level call came into the White House switchboard, for each of the three in his turn.
"Then who is keeping the store?" the frustrated caller demanded.
"THE SAME MAN WHO'S ALWAYS KEPT it—Sam Rayburn," the operator was supposed to have answered.
The name of Sam Rayburn will certainly go down as one of those who were most dedicated to their country. It has not been often that a man has had the opportunity and the desire to serve his countrymen as long and as well as Sam Rayburn did. A historical perspective is hardly needed to judge the accomplishments of this man. His era will be recorded as a bright one in the history of the country he served so well.
Ron Gallagher
The KU-MU Rivalry
Preliminary negotiations have already been established for a peace pact between KU and the University of Missouri. The pact is scheduled to receive final approval in a meeting of the student representatives of both schools which will possibly be held Sunday.
THE PACT IS AN UNDERSTANDING ON the part of students of both universities to promote better relations and prevent riots and property destruction. It is an understanding which, if followed, will lead to the betterment of the reputations of both Universities.
School spirit will run high on Nov. 25. Everyone expects it to. But perhaps a definition of school spirit is necessary.
School spirit is difficult to define in terms of what it is, and simpler to define in terms of what it is not.
Win or tie, spirit is not flaunting the score in the face of the visiting team. It is not "playing the victor" by making fun of the defeated.
Spirit is, however, loyalty to one's University. But loyalty cannot explain away fighting in the stadium, nor can loyalty explain away name-calling of the opposition.
SCHOOL SPIRIT IS NOT WAVING derogatory banners about the opposition. It is not wearing a large badge with the letters ATAP.
You may answer that some of KU's opposition teams have not had "school spirit" or that they have done many of the things KU students are being asked not to do.
It is true that Missouri started the "war of the badges" by wearing AHAB buttons. But it is also true that they have agreed not to wear them Nov. 25.
It is true that at last year's KU-MU game uncomplimentary banners and signs were displayed for our benefit. But MU has agreed to leave these at home this year.
SCHOOL SPIRIT IS MANY THINGS combined. Among them it is the combined efforts of students backing a decision made by the governing body they have elected.
In this case, students from KU and MU must back the peace pact which will be made by the combined committee, working for the best interest of all students.
Support KU with the right kind of spirit and leave the "fighting" to the football team.
NSA In World Affairs
NSA membership goes beyond the local campus level. It is not my intent to de-emphasize the services NSA has to offer the member schools—which I feel are outstanding—but rather to point up several things that I do not think have been covered.
I have read with interest your recent articles and letters about NSA. I would like to present one side of the picture.
The National Student Assn. is the chief spokesman against Communism in the world student community. The work of NSA in the international student community was recognized in a statement of evaluation adopted by the three major deans' organizations in the United States recently, declaring that NSA has "spearheaded and led the mobilization of the unions of students of the free world in
... Letters . . .
combating the partisan propaganda and distortion of truth fostered by the Communist-led International Union of Students."
MARRIAGE: A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two—Ambrose Bierce
Short Ones
BORE: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.—Ambrose Bierce
Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.
—Ambrose Bierce
SAINT: A dead sinner revised and edited.—Ambrose Bierce
These sentiments have been echoed by many others, including former President Eisenhower who said: "the USNSA is rendering a significant service to the people of this country and to the world."
President Kennedy wrote last August 17, that "the record of the National Student Assn. in matters of campus, national and international concern is well known, and one of which all of you can be proud."
The situation at the University of Kansas is, in reality, not the question of affiliating or not with the organization NSA, but whether it wishes to rejoin the national and international student community.
I feel that NSA is the most effective means by which we can accomplish this goal.
Bruce Hall
Bruce Hull
Chairman. Missouri-
Charmian, Missouri Kansas Region USNSA
By Mark Dull
Kansas City, Kan., graduate student
THE WATERS OF KRONOS, by Conrad Richter. Bantam Books. 50 cents.
Old and not well, John Donner drives up to the Kronos River and painfully gazes upon the huge concrete structure that progress has thrown up against the forces of the mysterious river, backing it up the valley in bewildering defeat, and submerging by many fathoms, the small Pennsylvania Dutch town of Unionville.
KRONOS — THE RIVER OF TIME — has sealed off Unionville from the rest of the world, as time has sealed off the past from the present. Through the magic of fantasy fiction that flows from the vivid and descriptive pen of Conrad Richter, Donner momentarily brushes aside the "moving hand" and propels himself through the receded waters of the Kronos into the town and the life that he knew as a bcy. Readers will be, pleasantly, I think, reminded of Thornton Wilder's retrospective play, "Our Town" as they consume the author's lightly nostalgic passages that resurrect an earlier America.
John Donner trudges down the shadowy streets that he had run through so unappreciatively as a boy, now as an old stranger to his family and the townspeople. The realization that he is alone pierces his tortured and sensitive soul. His family and his home are lost to him. Even the graves of the picturesque St. Mark's Reformed and Trinity Lutheran Cemetery have been uprooted and moved into an orderly substitute for a cemetery, with identical numbered markers for gravestones, high above the Kronos.
THE CHASM THAT EXISTED between the father and the son in the boy's childhood yawns even wider in this reunion through the inability of the father to recognize his aged son. He is unable to get close enough to his constant mother to determine whether he can re-establish their old intimacy.
He finally disproves to his satisfaction any connection with the classic Oedipus story in his relationship with his father.
"It was the great deception practiced by man on himself and his fellows, the legend of hate against the father so the son need not face the real and ultimate abomination, might conceal the actual nature of the monster who haunted the shadows of childhood, whose name only the soul knew and who never revealed himself before the end when it was found that all those disturbing things seen and felt in the father, which as a boy had given him an uncomprehending sense of dread and hostility, were only intimations of his older self to come, a self marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth."
THE RIVER OF KRONOS figures rather strongly in the novel as one of the many symbolic devices employed by Richter. Kronos, according to pre-Hellenic myth, was the youngest son of Heaven and Earth and leader of the Titans. By advice of his mother he castrated his father, who therefore no longer approached Earth but left room for the Titans between them. Later Kronos is overthrown by his own son. He has taken precautions against this by swallowing each son in turn. However, the mother decries him and hides her last son, Zeus, from him, and substitutes a rock in swaddling clothes for the child. Kronos seems to have survived today as the symbol of father time.
As the river Kronos is vanquished by the modern dam of the new era, the mythical Kronos is also deceived once again and stayed from re-creation by Donner's re-entry into the past and his disclosures in the home of his father.
THE INFIRM DONNER is at last given part relief in his quest for the answers to the questions that have haunted him, and he shrugs a great weight off his wintry shoulders. His sojourn behind the closed doors of his now cherished childhood is not wholly complete and author Richter hedges a little on the completion. He lays aside his pen leaving Donner immobilized, and the responsibility with the reader to write the last page of the novel.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
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