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Friday, May 5, 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Hoover the Institution
I hope that J. Edgar Hoover will prove to be the most powerful federal agent America will ever have. There should never again be any man in this country who could wield the power that he did for as long as he did. I do not want to discredit the things that he did achieve for the FBI and this country. He developed a strong, effective investigative bureau for the country. He was unselfish in his devotion to the bureau and was willing to give to it all that he possibly could. His integrity and patriotism have to be respected.
However, in building the FBI he made himself too important—in a way it became more his organization than the country's. When people started to suggest he retire or be replaced he told the country he would not quit. He had not bothered to prepare anyone to assume the job of directing the FBI. Perhaps he thought he would never leave the job. It is almost as if he became an institution, one which could not easily be approached or removed
As yet no one seems to know what kind of information Hoover had collected for his files. He supposedly kept dossiers on Americans who had never been accused of a crime. It was recently reported that the FBI furnished bedtime reading for Lyndon Johnson about the sexual activities of people in Washington. If that is true it provides an intriguing insight into the
personalities of both Hoover and Johnson. Hoover's patriotism was of the America-right-or-wrong variety and he had FBI agents keep under surveillance people who actively criticized the government. He had protesters watched whether they were denouncing the war or demanding more government interest in the environment. If it is ever publicized what information has been collected for FBI files it is likely that the amazement of this country would surpass that aroused by the papers, suppressing information about government actions is dangerous to a democracy. Equally dangerous and perhaps more ominous is a government agency that can maintain secret files on citizens, particularly those who have spoken out on public issues.
As the bureau will have to find a new director perhaps now would be the best time for it to adapt a new perspective. Now is the time for this country to decide if it wants a bureau of investigation that is concerned merely with finding people of whom there is reason to believe have committed a crime. Either that or the bureau could continue to develop as a snooping agency on those who take the responsibility and exercise their right to criticize their government when they believe it to be wrong.
Mary Ward
Eliminate the Fee
The Student Senate's annual budget hassle is finally over. Its results: allegations of misspent funds, counter allegations and an $18,000 budget deficit. The Senate has also taken another step toward an extensive commitment to funding non-university activities.
It now appears the Senate lacks the competence, expertise and maturity to administer a budget of nearly a half-million dollars. I have long supported the activity fee as a means of funding many worthwhile campus programs or organizations that its allocations has convinced the fee is no longer worth the accompanying petty bickering and puerile politicking.
Every imaginable group is on the Senateate dote, including the Kansan. It is time for each of these groups to make it on its own. Unfortunately, there are some truly worthwhile groups, the Concert Course for instance, that would be hard put without Senate money. But the Senate has proved it is
incapable of managing its own budget. The budget is a hand-out administered to many organizations that exist only for government agencies and impressionable bureaucrats.
Besides the proliferation of countless nonpurpose pretense organizations, the Senate has committed itself to funding groups with thin and often imperceptible ties to the University. This is not the idea behind the activity fee. It is not a city-wide community chest. It is meant to provide funding for student needs and organizations that have some benefit to members of the university. An decisions about funding non-University groups, from this point, will necessarily be arbitrary. Guidelines have gone out the window.
Students concerned about the use or misuse of their money should initiate a petition to eliminate the activity fee and the accompanying headaches and inequities effective second semester next year.
—Thomas E. Slaughter.
Readers Respond
Violence,Relays,War...
To the Editor:
What is being done to stop the rising incidence of physical violence on this campus by bagging, wagging, and physical harassments given such diminutive treatment in the Kansan (and the Journal World) archives. The incidents pose to the university community is far more significant than of contact than the headline fare? When will the new lights that will adequately light the entire campus be installed? How will the security procedures of the Traffic and Security Office be implemen- open meeting to discuss campus security instead of parking meters? When will we once again attend the KU campus after dark?
—Vernon Minor,
Steubenville, Ohio
Graduate student
Timmons OK
To the Editor:
The KU Relays were memorable and will certainly be regarded as one of the most successful ever held. As KU students, we wish to thank all those who helped to make it so successful by one individual, KU Trek Coach Bob Timmons.
His dedication and hard work was overlooked amongst the glamour and excitement of the people, both the respect and praise of everyone connected with the State of Kansas. Relays and the State of Kansas.
Things like the Relays make KU great. Our thanks go to Coach Timmons and all those who helped him.
-Greg Euson
-Western Springs,
Chathammore
-Bill Niles
-Wichita minor
Ideology
To the Editor:
While I agree that the war in Vietnam is an issue which should constrain, each of whom is an accomplice in the atrocity, I do not think that a demonstration should have been allowed within the country. It would be Kansas Relays. Tickets were sold with the promise of an athletic event only. The demonstration took place on a hill and outside the entrances, instead of just several minutes as a "side show" within the stadium. This long been used as a bridge connecting peoples with radically different ideologies — I hate to see people use it, too, for any cause whatsoever.
-Keen Stein
Overland Park sophomore
M. McKee
Rochester, Minn.
sophomore
Right Wing Attacks War Policy
Garry Wills
What matters is its source. It was written by James Burnham, principal international analyst for the Right of Way Foundation magazine's editor supported the B-52 raids, Mr. Burnham was concluding that "Communist success in the current operation will speed the day (of) this success." He added failure will do no more than delay it.
"Nixon's Vietnamization is inherently self-contradictory." There is nothing very surprising, or even profound, in that judgment.
Nor was this a momentary dive from the magazine's high, "former hawker of the week," to an editorial a week later saying, "Weibastanization would fail through the Hanoi invasion's trumpet, but would be much easier." We have it, on the authority of a principal critic of "no-win" policies, that Vietnamization is just such a no-win scheme.
The Right has, of course, always thought our policy erred in the direction of restraint, of getting there too late with too little. But this analysis of Vietnamization shows that no long-term anti-Communist gain will come from getting out on the Nixon-Theo terms. Then, Mr. Burnham is convinced, will matter. Nothing less than a total commitment to fighting his future; and we are no longer in the business of making such bellicose commitments.
imposed strategic prison, stalemate is the best outcome that can be hoped for in each episode, and must be achieved with proper care to maintain stability in the drama as a whole."
Given this clear view of the war's futility, how could the brighter Right-Wing types support it for so long? They must have been gambling (gambbling) with American troops, would get trapped or exasperated into all-out war; or that we would learn from this unhappy experience to be tougher next time—though we did not "learn" from Korea, and all Vietnam was waged in the same way to wage even half-wars in the future.
A policy of half-war is well entrenched; when this became Nikon's war, its policies also became his. So much for right-Wing hopes that a Right-Wing victory would prevaire along deep foreign policy assumptions prevailing since the Korean war.
The Right Wing has had certain advantages in criticizing what is, after all, the liberals' war, one started by the foreign policy team that John Kennedy assembled. What Burkmann says about Iran is not new, but the war applies just as well to the manner in which we entered and waged (or did not wage) the war: "Within our self-
It was, in any case, a long-odd gambie for the Right, and their brightest people now say that it failed. I believe it was terribly reckless and irresponsible to leave someone who would it but up into something more to their liking—which was all they could hope for in their terms. And the recklessness becomes criminal now, for those who still back the killing. Even George Wallace says there is no problem with the fire there, and as usual he is brawler the some of the point-heads on his side.
Copyright, 1972, Universal Press Syndicate
James J. Kilpatrick
Memoir of a Man Ashamed
WASHINGTON—Richard J. Whalen signed on with the Nikon campaign in the late fall of 1967 as a speech writer specializing in sports, and he teamed through the convention at Miami Beach in the summer of 1968, but five days after Nikon's announcement in disappointment and despair.
before he moved on to Time, to the Wall Street Journal, then t
Dick Whalen since he broke into journalism in 1956 as a 21-year
Now he has packed his experiences over those nine months into a candid and engrossing account of his time as a Flag. "The book will be published by Houghton Mifflin next week. I want to read about Richard Nixon, Whelan's brilliant dissection of his one-time boss stands close to the head."
A personal word: I have known
Today, Kilpatrick reviews a friend's book on Richardixon. Surprisingly enough, the book is written in portrait of the President.
Griff and the Unicorn
old cub on the Richmond News Leader. He served as my associate editor there two years
Man-in-space vs. spaced-out man
In the broad field of contemporary political history I know of no book quite like it. He wrote it in 1960, as I do. I heart what something of Wahlea's ordeal in writing it. He set to work on the manuscript in 1969, as I did, disciplined himself and learned in the lonesome agony known to every man who writes for a living: The work would not come. It is a batten's slump, a bridge dropped by my place, dropped by my place in Alexandra one night a year ago, as to despondency as a happy man could get, and left 50 years to me to read. They were awful.
But logams break at last; and the Whitman returns. Whalen twirl everything away, starried fresh and hit his stride. The finished work is vintage wine. His insights may imply that the White Whaler of Niixon is far more charitable than the Nixon is incursive. Thus Whalen recalls Niixon's appearance one evening in January, 1968, before a small group of corporation officers.
"Watching him perform, I was pleased with his effectiveness, yet uncomfortably aware that it just a performance, another turn on the endstage stage at the rally. The politicians were as candid as Nixon about the small tricks of their trade. He not only squeezed
"The Founding Father." For the past several years, he has been attached to the Center for Computer Science at University. He has asked me to serve as his literary executor, and I have named him mine. We are close friends. I mention all these things of bias in a review of his book.
"Don't worry, Bob," Whalen replied. "I'll write."
The blowup came after Miami; he was ashamed at how done his band did in the company of mediocre merchandisers behind a facade concealing an apprehension, a suspicion and fear—especially fire and his big bag and walked out of Bay Hotel where the team was staying. Bald Haneman called to the band, "Hey, where are you going?"
It was a wry promise. It is fulfilled in a smashing book.
As the months went by, Whalen's disillusion deepened. He was close to the candidate, but not truly close. Over one period of time he met his friend and I had communicated like a pair of tape recorders and had not said a directly personal, unbusinesslike word to each other and occurred to me, and apparently the same was true of him."
By Sokoloff
"But he also did less than he was capable of—or so it seemed that he were forced to conceive his superior intelligence. Yet he was not so intelligent in intellect. Instead, he put an intellectual's mind in the service of a salesman's temperament. He made them across and in the process turned them into something else. He reduced politics to winning elections, he discouraged those who agreed with him, from becoming political leaders."
ideas into catch phrases, he also enjoyed talking about it privately. . . He did the office seeker' ask superwell well.
Copyright 1972
Washington Star Syndicate, Inc
"Copyright 1972, David Sokoloff."
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