OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
February 1, 1984 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
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Sen. Edward M. Kennedy spoke plainly in his speech Monday at Kansas State University, more than he does typically.
A critical look
He attacked President Reagan in virtually every area. From arms control to economic policy, he pointed out what he saw as the failings of the Reagan presidency.
The items Kennedy mentioned were many:
- "The numbers do not lie Since 1980, 5 million more people have fallen below the poverty line."
- "Why does this administration exalt government when it builds bombs and missiles or interferes with fundamental liberties and individual privacy, but scorns government when it vaccinates a child or feeds the poor or helps a young family to own a home?"
- "In 1984, we must also demand that America's role in Central America be stated, debated and resolved."
Kennedy's speech was the 61st in the Landon Lecture Series. His
remarks were critical and stinging in their accusations against the president. Some of them are true.
But in other instances, Kennedy failed to do some critical thinking of his own.
He said that Reagan's State of the Union message "was carefully crafted to fit the coming campaign." Did Kennedy expect less? After listening to it, one would gather that Kennedy's speech had as its basis the same partisan politics that he criticized.
Kennedy called for a look to the future instead of the past in the 1984 presidential campaign. Let us hope that the critical appraisal Kennedy speaks of is made by voters of all philosophies as they consider the choices for the next president.
Moreover, Congress hardly is blameless when considering the country's present problems. Indeed, many of Reagan's programs passed through the same Congress that Kennedy is a member of.
Keep death toll down
Another U.S. Marine died during heavy fighting in Beirut Monday. The death toll keeps rising. And Americans are becoming increasingly unwilling to stand for more loss of life.
The government's position is clear: President Reagan thinks he must at all costs prevent the Lebanese government from falling under Syrian control.
But at this point, the only way to prevent the Syrians from taking charge is by regaining the support of Lebanese who are allied with Syria against their government.
If these forces can be turned around, the government in Beirut could survive and the Syrians would eventually have to leave.
Lebanese President Amin Gemayel could take several steps to draw these lost sheep back into the fold. And the Reagan administration should require that Gemayel take concrete steps toward reconciliation before more American lives are lost.
Reagan has put America on the line in Lebanon to the point that abandoning our allies there could bring about the worst military loss since the Vietnam War.
A victory by the Syrians would also send a foreboding signal to other countries who rely on U.S. support and would present the Soviet Union with a significant victory. And it would mean that America acquiesced in the destruction of a pro-Western government.
Reconciliation measures might include opening government offices to leaders of opposition forces, doing away with the six-to-five ratio of Christians to Muslims in parliament and conducting new elections.
The United States needs to convince the opposition in Lebanon that its position is best when it is talking rather than when it is fighting and that the United States has more to offer than does the Soviet Union.
Striving for greatness
"America has always been greatest when we have dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars — living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain."
With these words, delivered during his third State of the Union Address last week, President Reagan launched a new American dream. It was one of his administration's most productive and popular moves to date.
We applaud the president for this initiative, because to realize a dream of this proportion takes a strong beginning fueled with vision.
The dream is to put a permanent operating U.S. manned space station in Earth's orbit within the next decade.
It is not too large a price to pay for the benefits that the space station will give us.
peaceful, economic and scientific gains will become a valued catch phrase during the construction and use of the station, and that we shall all eventually share in the project's benefits.
The estimated final cost of the space station project is $8 billion and Reagan has already approved $150 million for the project in the budget.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansas also invites guest columns to group up to invite guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer Flint Hall. The Kansas reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LETTERS POLICY
This column was supposed to be fiction.
Senate elections absurd
But the reality of the Student Senate presidential elections is far more absurd than anything a simple columnist could make up.
The story soon will be on United Press International's regional wire. An article, datelined Topeka, an article, datelined in the Wichita Eagle-Begon.
People are laughing. The story ranks right up there with the one about Notre Dame students rioting on Tuesday and run out of Captain Crunch cereal.
I keep waiting for somebody to fish the ballot box out of Potter Lake. It's got to be there.
As a columnist the whole thing reminds me of semi-por baseball; not all that competent and a lot of catch. As a student, I confused.
I understand why Kevin Walker is angry. He lost an election by 13 votes that he should have won.
In the November election, 114 ballots were invalidated. Some of them were marked "Momentum" instead of with Walker's name and the name of Mark McKee, his running mate.
The rationale behind the decision was simple. "Momentum" could not stand for Walker and McKee because they had missed an Oct. 17 filing deadline. Therefore, election officials could not be 100 percent sure that a vote for "Momentum" was a vote for Walker and McKee.
The recounts were next. According to Walker, Dennis "Booq" Highberger's Costume Party won the first one, by one vote, Scott
Right, guys.
Swenson and Priority won the second one.
Walker said a tally sheet was lost. Jim Clark, chairman of the elections committee, said the tally sheets were added incorrectly.
At a recent forum on student government, Jim Cramer, student body vice president, said that an auction had to be fair and appear fair.
But that doesn't mean I would have voted for Kevin Walker.
I would have appealed the election too.
The wonderful irony of the situ
JOHN
HANNA
Staff Columnist
On Oct. 24, Walker enrolled, and on Nov. 23, he was disenrolled. Presently, he is not enrolled and has no tuition. He has said he cannot pay his tuition.
ation is that the candidate who should have won the election didn't deserve to win it.
Fine. But he should have taken care of his financial obligations before he ran for student body president.
What's particularly funny here is that Walker doesn't have to be a student to run a write-in campaign Frankly, if the University lets him, he could wait until after the election to enroll.
Although I would have agreed with Swenson's feelings, I wouldn't have appealed the decision to the University Judicial Board.
Swenson's appeal has only delayed an election that he might have won because of Walker's enrollment problems.
Fortunately, Loren Busy, veteran student senator, has arrived on the scene to save the credibility of the Senate. Hooray for Loren.
Undoubtedly, Busy is sincere about his desire to rescue the Senate's reputation, but anybody who would choose to run now is also a shrew politician. Because he has not been directly involved in the previous election, he looks good as a candidate.
But I saved the really good news for the end.
Busy could win a race that he probably wouldn't have won before, which, quite frankly, wouldn't be all that bad.
The Senate decided Friday to form a new Elections Committee. Cramer said this group may recommend changes in present elections rules and present those recommendations to the Senate Foley.
But everyone knows that already, and there's a chance that the new committee might actually do it.
Obviously, the Senate needs to change its elections rules and bring in an outside group to conduct its own studies of voting of a similar spectacle next year.
This movie epic of the absurd might actually have a happy ending.
Lectures trouble reporters
WASHINGTON — As one of the last acts of his life, Martin Herz, a diplomat, teacher and writer who died last year of cancer gave a series of four lectures at George Washington University. The Vietnam War in Retrospect.
Some of Herz's conclusions
The talks, which have now been published by the university, raised some interesting questions for de- and for journalists in particular, and for journalists in general.
The United States is not capable of waging a protracted war, especially one that is complex and difficult to understand.
He was talking about combat and Vietnam, but his point could just as easily be applied to Lebanon and the U.S. wish to salvage the situation in that tangled swamp of contradictions by sending a U.S. peace-keeping force as an expression of American resolve.
If Herz was right, then so is Syrian Foreign Minister Abdul Khalm Khaddam when he says. "The Americans are short of breath, and will eventually drop Lebanon behind them." He popularized to quick fixes.
The lack of American staying power, Herz said, is partly the result
JIM ANDERSON United Press International
of the shortcomings of the American press, which tends to report all wars in terms of good guys vs. bad guys.
In Vietnam, the conventional wisdom of American reporters was that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt, repressive and hostile.
But in retrospect, he said it was clear that the South Vietnamese government was making military progress in fighting the war, and that it was generating popular support, while the Viet Cong were increasingly dependent on forced inductees from the North.
Herrz said the American press — particularly television, with its enormous political impact — had a lot of bad news that was bad for the home team.
The lasting impressions of the Vietnam War are photographing; South Vietnamese soldiers clinging desperately to helicopter skids. Gen. Loan summarily executing a Viet Cong leader in Saigon, bodies laid out in the U.S. embassy compound after the 1980 Tet offensive.
He said these vivid impressions, which had immense political impact on the U.S. public and Congress, obscured the more subtle but difficult larger truths: The South Vietnamese troops generally fought well and they were improving toward the end of the war; and the Tet offensives were so devastating that command forces that decimated the Viet Cong and forced the North Vietnamese to take over the fighting in the South.
Herz offered no solution to the problems he posed.
But he thought the lack of American ability to back up its worldwide commitments would lead to more Vietnamesis (and Lebanons).
He concluded, in his final lecture, the last writing of his life:
"All I can do is point out to you that what happened in Vietnam has had repercussions almost everywhere because it affected what we think we can and cannot do, as just as it is. The people they think can do with impunity.
"This is not a good situation and it cannot last."
The mayor hopes for a lasting peace
Initiative, as they say, built this country of ours.
More specifically, initiative and the resolution to go out on a limb has shaped our particular section of the country.
Midwesterners have justifiably been trademarked as ground breakers willing to voice their common sense opinions. But some folks in Lawrence would like to discredit an obvious positive initiative in favor of unfounded skepticism and insecurities.
David Longhurst is a Lawrence businessman, and like most of us he is tired of being a silent partner in the disarmament system. Longhurst, the mayor of Lawrence, is also very impatient with the present impasse in high-level nuclear discussion.
And he is ambitious and intelligent enough to see how initiative can join with intelligence and position to raise a louder voice on the issue.
He has used that voice in the past year to send letters to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov urging them to start talking, and offering our city to them as a place for meaningful discussion.
Now, if he uses his voice to present an unpopular message to local people, that message better please him. A man of old-fashioned tar-and-feathering.
But the message in his campaign is, “Let's talk peace.” What message can be as positive and peaceful as that?
And I'll bet the ranch that at least 90 percent of the rest of us in Lawrence agree we want Longurst's kind of peace, and most of us would welcome any kind of summit, anywhere.
But some people in Lawrence would like to think that if another city got a summit instead of Lawrence, Longhurst would be found the following morning in some alley, in the throes of a serious drunken stupor — downbrotten, slightly, unappreciated and screaming. "There goes my Senate seat; there goes my life."
GARY
SMITH
Staff Columnist
No, Longhurst isn't trying to be commissioner of the United States. He just wants peace.
seed of thought within each of us who do not possess his voice
Recently the mayor related a story to me that both defines his intentions and reflects a frustrated
"The day after the movie 'The Day After', a radio reporter asked me a question that no other reporter had yet asked me.
"He said, 'God forbid something like this (nuclear war) ever happening, but how would you feel? if it ever did?' I thought about it for a
moment and told the reporter that it did happen that I would feel that I did not do everything in my power to stop it.
"You see. I have to do everything I can within reasonable limits or I will feel responsible. That's why I sent a second letter asking Reagan and Summit. If I hadn't sent it, I would've been doing all that I could."
No matter how small the response was from Washington, there was a response; someone was listening to David Longhurst. And through his singular voice, the rest of us who Lawrence home were also heard.
Instead of criticizing Longhurst, we should be congratulating him for sticking his neck out and speaking Our Midwestern mind.
G
In the ABC-TV production, it wasn't the movie that was important, it was the message. Likewise, it is not Mayor Longhurst's hope for a future with the public as important; it is the message that dialogue is needed anywhere that is.
If a summit was announced tomorrow, human nature would forgive Longhurst a bit of disappointment if his hometown was ignored in favor of another city. However, he would more likely be found the next morning explaining to his son what the summit could mean if those folks from Washington and Moscow began listening to the loudest voice instead of the most insane.
1
Now that would be a popular revolution this world can live with.