OPINION
The University Daily
KANSAN
April 18, 1984 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kannan (USP$ 600 6400) is published at the University of Kansas, 181 Stuaffer Fint Hall, Lawrence, KS 60032, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer session, excluding weekends. Subscriptions are paid by mail or by email for six months or $2 a year in Douglas City and $18 a year in Lawrence. Student subscriptions are a 6个月鼓励 grant through the student activity fee. POSTMASTER. Send address changes to: USP$ 600 6400, Kannan School of Journalism, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 60032.
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Tough questions
A member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission toured the Wolf Creek Power Plant near Burlington yesterday as controversy continued to swirl around the NRC.
The visit by Commissioner James Aggelstine followed a similar tour by him of the Callaway County nuclear plant near Fulton, Mo., Monday.
The commission member's visit brings to mind several serious questions. One question regards how the affairs of the NRC are conducted.
Aggelstine's tour followed the cancellation of a more thorough inspection of Wolf Creek by another NRC official. The inspection was cancelled, according to the NRC, because the chief inspecting engineer for the commission quit his job.
Gov. John Carlin and other state officials had roundly criticized the cancellation.
Agglestine's visit is to be commended. He is getting out of the office to see the plants that are up for licensing.
Are there no other people at the NRC who are capable of inspecting the plant as planned? What would the NRC do should a serious accident occur involving another nuclear plant? What would it do should a serious accident involving Wolf Creek occur once the plant comes on-line?
Aggelstine's desire to tour each nuclear plant before it is licensed is certainly a good one. But that aside, his visit certainly was not as technical or as through as the chief engineer's visit would have been.
Unfortunately, other questions remain. Aggelstine would do well to tell other members of the NRC about the concerns of state officials, including the necessity of inspections by NRC engineers.
But KU's Association of University Residence Halls pressed on with its bovcott.
KU's Panhellenic Association this week joined five residence halls in their boycott of Coors beer, and the Student Senate probably will consider a boycott resolution at its meeting tonight.
The well-publicized boycotts began last month after William Coors, chairman and chief executive officer of Colorado's Adolph Coors Co., allegedly made racist comments to a meeting of some Denver minority businessmen.
Coors then apologized to the city of Denver in two full-page advertisements he bought in the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.
Coors, however, said he was quoted out of context and filed a $150 million libel suit against the Denver newspaper that covered the speech.
But that didn't alter bovecott plans.
But that may rather boycott plans.
So Coors officials agreed to establish a $100 million economic opportunity program for blacks.
But KU's boycott continues
The groups understandably are upset. Coors' remarks, if true, are more than discouraging. They're sickening. And no amount of full-page ads or economic aid could ever diminish their racist tone.
But in the rush to convict Coors, one important issue has been overlooked: Should we begin this campaign before Coors' guilt has been established with certainty?
William Coors says he was misquoted. Coors officials say a tape of the speech, which will be used as evidence in the libel hearings, will confirm his innocence.
Instead of waiting to hear the tape, KU student leaders chose to launch this boycott and have said they would call it off only when the tape proves that Coors was misquoted.
Their position is simple: Coors is guilty until he proves himself innocent.
This premature boycott should be postponed.
The protest warranted
Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, D-N.Y., announced Sunday that he was resigning his post as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Moynihan, also the ranking Democrat on the committee, resigned in protest of CIA failure to properly inform the committee about U.S. involvement in last month's mining of Nicaraguan harbors.
Under U.S. law, the CIA must keep the House and Senate intelligence committees fully informed of its activities.
Direct CIA aid to Nicaraguan rebels mining harbors is reportedly in violation of international law.
But the CIA insisted that the
However, Moynihan recalled only a short mention of the mining when CIA Director William J. Casey briefed his committee on those dates.
Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed March 8 and again March 13.
Since Goldwater is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee and is a Republican, we can assume Moynihan's anger is genuine.
Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz. also protested the lack of communication between the CIA and congressional intelligence committees.
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If so, the Reagan administration has once again demonstrated its determination to militarize Central America at all cost.
LETTERS POLICY
Nixon hasn't changed at all
From the outset, the idea of an hour and a half of Richard Milhous Nixon hunched over and shaking his head after all over an incident did not appeal to him.
I had seen portions of the other two Nixon interviews — one with David Frost and one with Diane Sawyer — and watched the former president tiptoe his way through picking out the scraps he liked.
I thought it unlikely that he would say anything new the third time around, despite CBS' tantalizing promises of a "new, candid Nixon."
But Richard Nixon is like an annoying scab on the national consciousness that we somehow can't help picking. So, against my better judgment, I watched two of the three interview sements.
Nixon talked about, among other things, his wife, his disdain for the rich. Leonid Brezhnev's supposed
MICHAEL ROBINSON
Staff Columnist
And bad as it is that the network brought Nixon back to let him sputter their inanities, they compounded their crime by pushing his lies and distortions about his wrong-doings as "new" and "candid."
The word Nixon used more than any other in describing Watergate was "stupid." He did not say it was criminal, which it was, or abusive of power, which it was, or even wrong.
lechery. Lyndon Johnson's earthiness, the Kennedy family and the media's biases
The overwhelming majority of his remarks were either about what everyone already knew — such as his Johnson stories — or incidents no one wanted to know — such as his Brezhnev stories.
That CBS picked these segments from more than 35 hours of interviews makes me wonder how bad the rest of it was.
When interviewer Frank Gannon, a former Nixon aide, asked him why he had never simply apologized for Watergate, Nixon said that there was no greater apology than resigning the presidency.
But the truth is that his resignation in August 1974 was not an apology — it was a way to get out from under the roof falling down on top of him, to save salvage what was left of his pride by walking away from, rather than being driven out of, the presidency.
He did not admit his complicity in the cover-up, which qualified as criminal conspiracy. He did not comment on the fact that the grand jury that indicted the other Waterloo officer had unindicted co-conspirator. He didn't mention that virtually the only reason he wasn't indicted was that
he was a sitting president of the United States at the time.
Once again, Nixon blamed his subordinates and his re-election campaign staff for Watergate, ignoring charges that he was engaged in wiretapping and dirty tricks before 1972.
As Allan Cigler, KU associate professor of political science, said, "If you want to know how to really was, take a look at the Nixon tape material. See if you think that's proper behavior for a president."
So did the interviews have any value?
Cigler said that although they didn't change his view of Nixon, they were a sign of a larger attempt to undermine the Watergate and the Vietnam War.
But it would be a serious mistake for us to turn to Richard Nixon for that evaluation.
Perhaps the best way to look at the interview is through a statement that Nixon himself made:
"While presidents are human, people expect them to be more than human," he said. "It's very important that they see the best side of the man."
For the last 10 years, and perhaps longer, Richard Nixon has been trying to do just that — show the best side of the man and gloss over the bad points.
That isn't unusual, but in Nixon's case, he has caused continuing damage to people's faith in government.
Nixon's only chance is to keep coming back in a new and improved package, hoping that our memories of the presidency will help us anything other presidents did not do.
Promise of a brighter tomorrow
A blatant and infectious frenzy has settled over this land. Unemployment, nuclear war and a churning Central America continue to gnaw at the American consciousness.
Will our laborers find jobs? Can nuclear war be avoided? Is El
Salvador the next graveyard for American soldiers?
For this sweltering Earth there seems to be little hope and a short future.
The nation's problems are my own. The world's problems are my nation's.
I hear the shrieks of the unemployed. I wonder whether we are civilized enough to safely contain the fire. Do you see myself fighting in El Salakar,
And so, I am concerned beyond
reason. But the world's leaders have no solutions, and neither do I.
We all, I think, live in dread of what might happen. We decipher trends and polls and try to arrive at a conclusion about the abstract and indefinite future.
Amid the bleak forecasts, though,
if we look hard enough, something
can calm this world of ours. We have
hope in our children.
Like most American families, mine has gone through turbulent times. But we gathered last week and came apart to eat, talk and reminisce.
As I write this, the memories are fresh. My brothers and father are glued to the furniture, discussing the times. And my nieces and nephew scamper about, looking for something to destroy.
The threatening clouds have kept us in. The cold wind batters the chimes on the porch. It is almost as if we are actors in a desperate play.
The too-short days passed without consequence. As the grown-ups talked, the children played. The children helped us for the duration of my visit.
'The thorns of unemployment and nuclear war will be in their hands one day. Our duty lies in preserving this world so that they might mend our mistakes or continue our advancements.'
Looking back on the weekend, though, the gathering was of consequence. Sure, I was able to be with my family. But there was more.
My nephew and my honest, innocent nieces gave me the answer to the problems that so plague me of late.
The radiant life in their small faces gave me reason to hope. Their minds, unbroken and unbiased, willingly took on the challenges of a world completely beyond their scope.
As my father looks to me as the hope of a new world, I could see the promise and bright future of the young.
And just as we try to show that our parents' trust was well placed, I am sure that our children will improve upon what we will leave them.
The thorns of unemployment and nuclear war will be in their hands one day. Our duty lies in preserving this world so that they might mend
our mistakes or continue our advancements.
Easter approaches. Some will not see its importance. Some do not believe its importance. But in this season of new beginnings, we all must take a hard look at the world's present trials.
We must recap the problems that gnaw at us. We must look at the past, and we will see that this world is being shaped by the efforts of new generations.
Take time this spring to ponder what we have done and what we can do. But most importantly, let us pray for our children.
Let us see the hope that lies with them so that we may prepare them to carry on our legacy more peacefully and justly than we have.
We're destined to live out our lives amid threats. Our world will be frenzed. But there is hope, my friends. We have our children.
President an expert at telling tall tales
The first time I realized that Ronald Reagan went in for confusing fantasy with fact was in 1968.
Law and order was his favorite theme in those days of civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, and while making a speech in one of the Western states he cited an alarming statistic.
He said that people were becoming so lawless that during one recent month, eight cops had been shot.
When the story came over the news wire, I phoneh his public relations man and asked him if he knew about a certain
The public relations man confirmed Reagan had used those alarming figures, but he said that he didn't have the faintest idea where they came from.
So I wrote about Reagan's speech and pointed out that Reagan's figures were whacky, the cops had to be careful.
There had been only one or two killed all year.
And I suggested that maybe he was confusing us with him.
some time after that, I received a letter from teague in which he denied ever talking about him.
And that was still another fantasy, since the wire service reporters had heard him, and his own press secretary had confirmed it.
At the time, I thought maybe he'd just misstated statistics; that he meant to say that they had been killed over a three- or four-year period, which has been more accurate, if less dramatic, than a month.
(    )
But as Reagan's flair for storytelling has shown, that wasn't the case. Reagan just doesn't believe it.
Reporters who covered his campaign in 1980
we amazed at how easily he would find an anecdote, a story with a moral, a tearful tale, to fit whatever his message to an audience was that day. And how often these anecdotes were nothing
One of the most memorable was a heroic, patriotic conversation between two airmen who were in a disabled plane during World War II.
When Reagan described that conversation, it brought lumps to the throats of the listeners.
The only trouble with that story was that Reagan, although in the Army, never left the United States He spent the war making propoganda films in Hollywood.
They were so moved that it never occurred to them that it would have been hard for Reagan or
MIKE
ROYKO
Syndicated Columnist
the nazi death camps to photograph the evidence of the atrocities.
But now he's served almost an entire term as president of the United States, leader of the free trade movement and co-founder of
anybody else to know what the two airmen talked about, since the plan was they both died in the plane.
At the time, the attitude of much of the press seemed to be: Well, it's a political campaign, and politicians are allowed to bend the facts a bit when they're out there hustling votes.
Reagan told the man how moved he had been when the war ended and he, as a soldier, entered
Not long ago, Reagan had a conversation with an Israeli visitor and their talk got around to the Nazi intrelicts against Jews.
And not long ago, he did it again. While talking about the great school prayer debates, he recalled how he had participated in organized school prayer way back when he was a boy in grammar school, and that organized prayer hadn't been any problem in those good old days.
This prompted somebody from the ACLU to do some checking, and they found that organized school prayer in Illinois had been legally stopped well before Reagan was of school age.
And one of his old teachers said, no, they didn't have prayers when Reagan was in her school.
These aren't just a few isolated instances. He seems to do it all the time. Somebody has put out a book documenting Reagan's factual lapses and one White House reporter has amassed a sizable
Telling whoppers is harmless enough if you're leaning on a bar or entertaining friends at a party.
But it's a little strange for a president to spin fantasies and tell them in all seriousness to support his own views and positions.
And it can be unnerving if you ask the question:
Does he really know they're fantasies or could it be that he's just an actor?
With all due respect to the office of the presidency, when the person starts talking about things that happen in some kind of dream world, I think he wonder whether he's hitting on all cylinders.