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Tuesday, November 9, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Strength of Laughter
Laugh. Smile Be happy.
It's not, always easy in these days,
when turmoil, violence and crises follow one after another in a blinding and bewildering succession of daily chaos.
And so we frown, we bellow with rage and we shake our fists at the injustices we see in America. We throw up our arms in frustration as we see our society on the verge of collapse from the population crises, the drug crises, the racial crises, the environmental crises, the poverty crises and a multitude of others.
We need, especially now, the ability to laugh at ourselves and the world around us, for if we cannot laugh we will find ourselves going slowly insane.
This is not to say we should not work to create a better more just, more humane world. These are certainly serious endeavors. But we need sometimes to look at our efforts from the other side, to admit our absurdities, to laugh with our critics, instead of quaking in fury or retreating in despondency.
And if we can laugh at our frustrations, how much easier it will then be to try again and again until we succeed.
Depression comes easy and so does overreaction to criticism. Shirking our defeats with a laugh takes strength but it's an exercise against futility.
So strengthen your mind—laugh!
—Pat K. Malone
Garry Wills
McNamara and 'Functional Duplicity'
Midway in 1967, President Johnson complained to a Senator, "McNamara's gone dovish on me." That he didn't read the recent book, Henry L. Treworth's McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon. It is a book that makes good reading just now, as the ex-President says, "Convince us that he was dissolving all along."
There is no reason to withhold our pup from Mr. Johnson—he was a victim of the war and was victorious did not live to write their memoirs). Still, Robert S. McNamara was a victim of the war and of Johnson, and he said that Mr. Johnson tells us how beleaguered he was.
Trewitt's book is sympathetic to Mnamara. He knows how easy hindrance works, and that pressures work on someone in McNamara's position (not to mention Johnson's). But the mere truth, no matter gently told, is harsh enough.
The first thing that emerges from the
book is McNamara's own lack of self-doubt. All that team of Kennedy decision-makers can look back now, and say it will hard to make decisions. They are too good at being easy. They came into office trumpeting their own competence, mocking DoNothing Be saying that the worst thing they are doing nothing (often it is the best).
Early on, McNamara told his aides,
"If we can learn how to analyze this thing, we'll solve it." He needed facts and figures on which to base this analysis—and aides supplied them dutifully. He did not realize, yet, how difficult it is to get sound data, and it got it passed up to him undistorted.
But he should have realized it. He was basily distoring data himself, tailoring his reports in a different way for the press, the military, the president, and the Congress. There is nothing surer than this response to a different response from each of these audiences, and weighted things to gain. But he did not reflect on the fact that
this“politizing” of the data goes on at every level of an action like the Vietnamese war—right down to the squadron leader’s daily report. If one’s lieutenant wants kill-counts, you give him kill-counts. After all, the Secretary of Defense was giving his bosses what they wanted.
Trewitt finds convincing evidence that Felt, but suppressed, strong doubts about the Tönkin Gulf "second attack," the overthrow of Diem, and the usefulness of strategic bombing. But for years he was all confidence and insight about the war in his appearance before Congress. He was the best and most convincing of sometimes unconvicted) advocate of the Tönkin Gulf resolution, the extension of the war, the bombings of the North
He was caught in the classic bind of a politician. He had doubts—but didn't that makes him a better, more restrained, war-monster than his successor would be, if he resigned? He did doubt, but the war was in large
part his responsibility, and he must try to see it through to as good a conclusion as he could manage.
He had doubts, but wasn't the most effective way of voicing them to the President? And if he was to keep the President's ear, he must firmly support him in public. By such gradual steps was it possible to be for and against the war at the end?
And we must remember this was just one "functional duplicity" in a whole series of interacting half-trues, white lies, and face-saving evasive answers. We can argue that arose over Vietnam because that is systemic is the untruth of politics. The point is not that we are faced with a pack of liars, but that their little tricks, so carefully inflicted, converge on an orchestration of Official Untruth.
Johnson was not himself the sole orchestrator, though his memoirs give us the "large picture"—and, consequently, very little truth.
Copyright, 1971, Universal Press Syndicate
James J. Kilpatrick
A Look at Mr. Rehnquist
WASHINGTON—Nine of the last 12 nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court, who named want the Senate. It was not much of a problem to read their reported statements on their cast of judicial thought.
A more difficult task is presented in getting a line on the map of the American states, H. Rehquenist, the President's nominees for the vacant Black nominees for the highest judicial lawyers, one in private practice, the other as government counsel; they think, speak and act with judgment. Their high calling has made them players, not umps, and this role needs to be kept in mind.
It needs especially to be kept in mind in the matter of Mr. Rehnquist He is coming under heavy fire just now from a team he was offended by things he has done or said as Assistant Attorney General. He has, for example, been "tough on demonstrators" He has "supranded" him and has "defended a President's unrestrained power to eavesdrope on private citizens." The impression is being cultivated that Rehquist is somewhat to the right of Torquemala and just to the left of Gengkhis Khan.
A very different impression may be formed from a careful study of the actions and prepared statements over the past three years. These make a stack of papers four inches high. To study them to gain a better understanding of argument compelling in its force, but found in reason. One also sees Rehnquist as the first person to command the command of Canon 6 that his obligation is to represent one's clients 'with undivided clients, of course, have been the General and the President.'
Yes, he is tough. He speaks to the Newark Kiwanis Club on Law Day of 'the new barbarians' and asks whether they suggest in the area of public law that disobidence cannot be tolerated, whether it be violent or not. He says that the further suggestion that if force or the threat of force is required in order to enforce the law, no shirt from its employment.
He is wholly a man of the law
The minority, no matter how disaffected or disenchanted, an unrestricted obligation to obey a duly imposed Government as we know it could not survive for a day if it persecuted law laws which it would obey, and
radicals, these actions of State and Federal governments are only the most minimal sort of attack that can be serious provocation, and that these actions on the part of the state thoroughly defensible but ab-
After studying Supreme Court nominee Reinhquist's speeches prepared for memoirs Kilpatrick him to be a poor writer but possessor of "a brilliant insistence" and a scholar's patience."
those which it would not obey" In another Law Day address, this one in Houston, he defends the government's position in the matter of violent demonstrators. He said that he had them up. "I suggest to you that, quite contrary to the views expressed by the defenders of the
solutely necessary. They are absolutely necessary not only for the preservation of order, but for the preservation of liberty itself. We must not equate dissent with corruption; we would like to pose the corollary as neither should we equate destruction with dissent."
Time after time, one finds Rehmann, defending "the balancing approach," and "the balancing approach," in his speech at Tempe, Ariz., in December of 1970, he provided a superb defense—agree or not to prevent "preventive detention." He is constantly remarking that "all or none" of the cases he accepted. He is contemptuous of the excuses in Federal surveillance activities. These at one and another rather clearly got out of hand.
Rehnquist is not the most felicitous writer one might encounter. He spits infinitives. He hangles verbs. He falls into the trap of constructions that smack of redundancy. He has not mastered the distinction between "less than" and "fewer than." The author has used Rehnquist's Rehnquist, on his advocate's record, offers a brilliant intellect and a scholar's patience. On the court, he may disappoint Nixon but will disappoint me, but he promises to make a tremendous judge.
(C) 1971
The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
AP News Analysis
House Plays Politics on Phase 2
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democratic leaders must decide in the next two weeks whether to commit their heavy artillery to a drive for a major congressional threat or the next phase in control of the emergency.
Their decision involves both risks and possible rewards.
Their hand is being forced by the Banking Committee which apparently without assistance, suddenly went on the offensive with sweeping amendments to President Nikon's proposed, Phase 2 legislation, for a House vote before Nov. 19.
THE MOST CONSPICUOUS of the amendments would require payment of previously negotiated pay increases, even retroactively, in all but "grossly disproportionate" instances.
Nixon wants this decision left to the labor management-public Pay Board.
Speaker Carl Albert, D-Dak, and Major Leader Hale Boggis, D-Lai, have avoided any commitment, saying they want time to study the committee's committee chairmate, its committee itself, resuming work on the legislation next Thursday, has more key decisions to make, such as the one whether to grant a full year's extension of control over the changes backtrack on some of the changes it has already approved.
EVEN IF JT DOES no more than it already has done to the Nixon's legislative proposals, the resulting bill could have tough sleeding on the House floor. In private, some of the backers of change concede this and say the degree of formal party backing
the bill receives could be crucial.
BUT IF THE majority Democrates rise the administration program to this task, they share responsibility for it.
There are political risks and potential gains in either course Democratic leaders may choose. The kind of amendments the committee has approved are immediately popular with imminent members and presumably with such consent spokesman as Ralph Nader.
If instead they give Nixon essentially what he asked for, they will be in position to blame him for any shortness in 1972—a presidential and congressional election year.
legislative drafting last Wednesday, the nets-ixon try mood was clearly in the ascendant. Enough Democrats joined the Senate to knock down every substantial amendment offered that day.
While a number of Banking Committee Democrats were nursing proposed amendments when the committee started its
OVERNIGHT THERE was a starting change. Tough proposals by management and public members of the Pay Board, had jolted the labor members, and had been leaked.
Armed with newspaper accounts that non-labor Pay Board members were proposing an amendment to leave the retractivity and even renegotiation of some contracts, the amendment seekers roared in protest and carried the day--through and beyond the day--in paper-thin margins by paper-thin margins.
Although labor obviously was pleased by the amendments adopted, sources close to the Board said they were little or no direct labor lobbying for them—the Pay Board revelations were enough.
shot back, and any appearance of non-partisan consideration of Phase 2 legislation vanished.
THERE IS A widespread feeling on Capitol Hill that the tough proposals coming from two-thirds of the Pay Board may represent a bargaining stance and fairly quickly be modified.
THE WHITE HOUSE responded angrily, Democrats
Meanwhile, whether by accident or design, the committee has suspended further work on the legislation until Thursday. By that time, the extent of agreement the three elements in the board have achieved may be known.
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Griff and the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
"Copyright 1971, David Sokoloff.
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