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Monday, April 3, 1972
University Daily Kansan
Garry Wills
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Kansan Staff Photo by HANK YOUNG
Agnew's False Morality
The first presidential primaries of the year have provided little help in sorting out the gaggle of Democratic candidates vying for the nomination. This will further emerge to challenge the Republican candidate in the November election.
This is of course not the case on the other side. It seems certain that the President will run again and that Agnew will again be his ticket-mate.
In view of some statements the vice-president made recently in an exclusive Kansas City Times interview, the possibility that Agnew overtired "beat a way" from the presidency for another four years is frightening.
To justify the "morality" of the war, Agnew cities the fact that four presidents have endorsed the war and that what Ho Chi Minh did in the North was immoral and that after the Geneva accords were established (1954) the migration from the North to the South was greater than from the South to the North.
The 1954 agreement came long before the United States began its rain of bombs on the South. I imagine that a few of those impatient friends from the North have since neglected their decision to come South.
The most disturbing remarks that Agnew made were in regard to the Indochina war. "I don't think it was a mistake," said the vice-president, and many years might be the most moral war the United States ever engaged in."
None of these justifications stands the simple test of reason.
The fact that four presidents have endorsed the war cannot in itself justify its morality. After all, as many presidents endorsed slavery. Nor does the fact that Ho Chi Minh's troops "... went on agrarian rampages in the North," justify our government's rain of napalm and artillery fire on Indochina. I cannot be convinced that an atrocity on one side justifies an equally brutal response from the other.
However, this part of the moral dilemma does not seem to bother the vice-president. In fact, he acts as though it's been worth it all: "I think it was good enough." In a position where we can say we've won the war in Vietnam."
If the vice-president's justifications of the Indochina war don't indicate blatant moral bankruptcy, they surely reveal a lack of understanding and sensitivity that the American people should not tolerate in the second highest official in the land.
ACAPULCO—One doesn't come to Acapulco, I'm afraid, to find out about Mexico, but about America. What more American, for instance, than capitalists on vacation hiring their critics to come down and preach at them?
A Revolutionary Banker
These particular capitalists belong to the Young Presidents Organization, a group of corporate executives who have worked so hard that we want to get educated the same way.
It is a laudable aim—and, besides, a free load for the lecturer's, who get to preach to their economic betters and feel superior to them. There is much, on conventioneleers conspicuously consuming, Men put on silky shirts and forget their inhibitions. Wives are incessantly both flattered and dismayed. The woman name-badges, the women have hasty-lettered stickers on their blouses.
One expects, in such an atmosphere, that men will be surnily hypnotized with self-praising rhetoric—and that women will be even more very much. But one man did shake them, and would all their lesser critics or would-be instructors—a quiet little banker named Dale Ball, one of their brothers, for a few years back, that making lots of money is not fit work for a grown-up man. That obvious truth has a new glow and ring to it when enunciated by a man that has made a lot of money in his time.
Mr. Ball is not your old-style philanthropist, skimming a bit of cream off the top to "give it back," with tax exemptions as a quiet good and indirect reward for goodness. He had some home truths to deliver to the politicians who do godworks, the politicians and bureaucrats, as well as to businessmen.
His own project, in housing and urban renewal, are not hand-outs nor governmental boodydoggles, but sound investments in a double sense, looking toward the future. (a loss in either column means cancellation of any project, even if it
meant a gain in the other). He also knows that big business pays too little, for the society it claims to celebrate yet. It can be prepared to there is something breathtaking about a serious businessman who gets up and goes to work. He is prepared to pay sharply higher taxes.
He is no wild-eyed convert—just, as I say, a man who knows that businessmen are almost as sillly-effectual as the politicians themselves, and means to do something more important with the rest of his life.
Ball attacked the idea of leaving money to children who must—for lack of wise present spending of that money—be in the environment's cramped endangered air.
And the children haunt him, as heirs of our folly, and the future judgers of it. "When we see our activities through the eyes of our children, the very foundations of our lives are apt to be shaken."
While all the critics grumbled and thundered, he proved that just about the only true revolutionary in Acapulco this week was an American baker.
Copyright, 1972 Universal Press Syndicate
I DO NOT QUESTION THE
RATIOISM OR SINCERITY
OF THOSE WHO DISAGREE
WITH MY POLICIES TO
BRING PEACE-
OR ANYMORE THAN I QUESTIONED THE PATRIOTISM OR SINCERITY OF THOSE WHO DISAGREED WITH ME ON ALGEB HISS
AUXMORE THAN I QUESTIONED
IN 1968, 67, 66, 65 AND 64 THE
PATRIOTISM OR SUSCERITY OF
THOSE WHO DISAGREED WITH
MY MUPPORT OF THE WAR-
IN THAT LIGHT I WOULD HOPE
THAT AUCHNE SEEKING THE
PRESIDENCY IWOULD EXAMINE
HIS STATEMENTS CAREFULLY—
OR ANYMORE THAN I GUESTJOYLEV IN FISH THE PATRIOTISM OR SIN-CERTITY OF THOSE WHO DISAGREED WITH ME WHEN I FIRST SUGGESTED SENDING U.S. TROOPS INTO INDOCHINA.
SO THAT I WILL NOT HAVE TO REVEAL THE NAMES OF THOSE WHOSE PATRIOTISM AND SINCERITY I DO NOT QUESTION.
James J. Kilpatrick
Unions Damage Worker Image
HOUSTON - John E. Healy II spoke at more than 200 meetings last year–industry meetings, union meetings, committee meetings—and at many of them the Empire State Building. The story takes only a few paragraphs, but it packs a wallop.
Healy is the handsome, hefty, third-generation builder from Wilmington, Del., who is the outgoing president of the Associated General Contractors of America. The AGC met here last week in its fifty-third annual convention. The 5,000 delegates represented a renewed determination to restore sense to their deeply troubled industry and they took with them the story of the Empire State
The world's greatest skyscraper broke ground on Jan. 22, 1830. At peak employment, 3,400 men were working to erect the skyscraper and to support a million bricks, to install 70 miles of water piping, and to connect 3,500 miles of telephone cable. The 102 stories went up at an average of four-and-a-half weeks per week On May 1, 1831, just one president Hoover dedicated the building and tenants moved in.
which a contemporary bunny would demand, but the manhours required to install air conditioning have been more expensive than the new techniques of the past 40 years. The grim truth, in Healy's
The same structure today, says Healy, would require three to three-and-a-half years to complete.
Granted, the Empire State Building lacked air conditioning.
view, is that productivity in the building industry today is less than half what it was then. And the work ethic has been lost."
It has been lost, he believes, through the power of avaricious trade unions, and through the weakness of contractors willing to buy labor peace at any price. The process has grossly inflated costs, and it has diminished the dignity of working men.
Members of the AGC are eager to have their troubles known. Day in and day out, their experience confirms the picture painted in a
hard-hitting report last month by engineering Views-Record. In 1906, a Chicago mason laid 192 blocks a day; today two masons are required for the same work, and they lay 100 blocks a day. In the days when concrete was finished by hand, a contractor can finish a finished concrete per man per day; today, with all kinds of power tools, the rate is 600 square feet.
The magazine cited the sorry example of a power plant job that required several small gasoline-powered generators. The union successfully demanded that each generator be watched by an operating engineer, an assistant engineer, and the operating engineer got $200 to $400 a week "for starting once or twice a day a gas engine smaller than those on many home lawn mowers." Each electrician received the same kind of money "for pushing the wire plugs into the sockets of the machines" to run the equipment. The contractor said he never did discover what the pipefitter did. Such examples are legion. A billion-dollar project in Albany has suffered repeated delays because of a dispute between teamsters and operating engineers. Who to hold for a truck? Why not rise jobs, demand elevators, one union member has to ride up when men are lifted, another
union member goes for a ride when equipment is lifted. If a worker carrying a toolbox has to be hoisted, both union representatives go along. On a platform, the workers, Philadelphia, electricians and carpenters quarreled over the installation of a chain-hung ceiling lamp. In the end, each union got a piece of the action: The carpenter screwed two hooks on the chain; the electrician put the plug in a wall socket. Cost: $40 per installation.
are suffering, as many contractors turn to the open shop. Jobs are vanishing as pre-cast concrete and pre-assembled units of steel and aluminum replace those that had been contractors who met here in Houston gave Healy an ovation when he insisted that with the unions' help, "or without it," productivity and morale must be restored. If the builders will match their convention zeal with hometown determination, the old construction firm's fair day's pay may yet be revived. It's what the unions have been asking all along.
By Sokoloff
Copyright, 1972, Washington Star Syndicate. Inc.
Griff and the Unicorn
Many labor leaders privately agree that this nonsense has to stop. Union members themselves
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN America's Pacemaking college newspaper
*Copyright 1972, David Sokoleff.
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