UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansas
Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
JANUARY 29,1979
Death penalty looms
Not surprisingly, the death penalty has once again raised its ugly head in the Kansas Legislature.
A new bill introduced in the House recently by four Republicans would reinstate capital punishment in all premeditated, first-degree murder cases in Kansas.
Or course, death penalty bills are not new to the Legislature. The House passed a death penalty bill last year that eventually was tabled in the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee.
Nevertheless, the move, though expected, is disappointing. Capital punishment is an inequitable, unnecessary and distressingly simple-minded attempt at deterring crime.
IF ONLY it were really that easy.
Still, the current bill does attempt some new approaches. It includes a provision to put those persons convicted of murder to death by intravenous injection, "in an effort to remove the barbaric atmosphere from the method of execution," according to the sponsors of the bill.
Unfortunately, however, barbarism cannot be disassociated from the act of
execution. Whatever the method of death, the results are still the same, and those results are intolerable.
BUT APPARENTLY that is too much to hope.
It would be hoped that the state of Kansas would refrain from returning to such an objectionable method of punishment. It would be hoped the elected officials of Kansas would raise their voices in a humane chorus and put an end to discussion of the death penalty.
Current indications are that the new bill should pass the House and presently has nearly enough votes to pass the Senate. It looks like execution may be a new addition to the scene in Kansas.
And that is a shame. Death in any form is cruel and unusual, despite the claims of any court.
If the death penalty is to be defeated it will take courage and a high degree of moral leadership on the part of our legislators.
The Legislature must reject the new bill. The state of Kansas should not stand for execution in any form.
GOP choice of Detroit follows heated debate
The situation had become tense.
After a 24-hour period of intense negotiation, no decision had been made. The Republican Party Selection Committee had been huddled earlier this week in accord but had been unable to decide which party would host the party's grand national convention.
Throughout the backroom negotiations, the two factions—the conservative and the moderate—were unable to reach a mutually agreeable settlement.
Said their leader, Republican National Chairman Bill Brock, after almost two days of talks. "We're having an extremely difficult time. There's no probability of reaching a decision tonight. We will return to school for breakfast and to reach a final decision."
BUT BY THE end of the second day of intense negotiations, the battle came down to a final standoff.
the decision, no doubt, was tough. There were many cities to choose from. They could hold their usually sullen, subdued convention in a gold dome, or in a city called the Big Apple. There also was the city on the岸 or the metropolis called the Twentieth.
The conservatives, with their southern sensitivities, felt that grand Texas city, Dallas, although not exactly embedded in the South, could fit the bill.
But then Dallas could counter with some sort of cheerleading effort to add to all the
But the moderates wanted to attract the urban vote and Detroit, they believed, was as good a place as any. Why, if the convention were in Detroit, it shouldn't be too hard to swing a giant, free luxury car pool for the delegates and candidates.
Finally, after the smoke had cleared (or course the vice chairman of the committee was absent) he left.
BUT THE moderates weren't free yet.
The choice had to be ratified by the whole
assembly.
And there, the moderates found more opposition to their choice. The conservatives were not going to give up, but for that matter neither were the liberals who didn't like Detroit.
Said one southerner to the selection committee, "You had three people applaud when Detroit was announced. 'That isn't solid support.'"
National committee members from the great states of Nevada and Florida wanted to have a choice of three cities. So, the committee agreed to vote on the idea.
But first, a vote was taken to determine if the alternative proposal vote should be done secretly. That vote ended in a tie, but was changed later because a committee member said his vote was incorrectly tallied. The secret vote lost.
THE COMMITTEE then voted to see if it wanted to vote on alternative cities. That vote was not approved.
Finally, the entire committee approved Detroit as the glorious site for the grand convention, which is to be held in Cobo Stadium at 7:30 p.m. 700 and 400 square feet of work space.
Said a Texan of the committee's final choice: "I regret that very much. I think Dallas was clearly a better choice . . . It's a baffling decision to me."
Brock said after the intense negotiations: "I have never participated in a more difficult process than the site selection committee."
Now that the site has been selected, the party can begin to tackle its next big and most important choice: a presidential candidate.
It can choose Dole, or Reagan, or Ford, or
permand, or Crane, or Connally, or Bush,
Stage is set for showdown in Iran
The events taking place in Iran in recent days closely resemble a theme often seen in American westerns: the tough bad guy, Mr. Bazouk, who is not happy if vows to return some day and take over.
Last week, as this Middle East drama continued, the Ayatullah Khomeini announced he was coming out of exile to control in Iran. But Prime Minister Shaikh Bakkari vowed Sunday that he would be driven out of office by Khomeini.
"All the nonsense and rumors they (the newspapers) are writing about my resignation are untrue," the prime minister told the Iranian people in a broadcast address. "I am going to remain in the stronghold of the constitution."
That remains to be seen. But the events leading to the climactic showdown are themselves as complex as the two leading figures.
Bassam, a 62-year-old international lawyer, was appointed to lead the new civilian government by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before the shah was forced out of the country by uprisings orchestrated by Khomeini.
A 25-YEAR veteran of opposition politics, Bakhtiar has been a frequent inmate of the shah's prisons because of his support for free elections, the abolition of the SAVAK secret police and an end to the torture of prisoners.
By appointing Baktikar as prime minister and by granting certain police and political reform, the shah had hoped to secure a stable throne. It also was hoped that after so many months of bloodshed, many Iranians might lose their taste for violence and welcome a moderate government that is even –even with the shah nominally in charge.
But this has not proved to be the case.
Some of the shah's foes have accused Bakhlar of conspiring with the monarch. Strikes and protests have continued in Iran since heavily have flared in the United States.
Khomeini, 78, spiritual leader of Iran's 32 million Shiite Moslems, is the prime mover behind the campaign against his lifelong enemy, the shah. He directs the struggle from self-imposed exile in a Paris suburb and sets out to establish an Islamic state, which in control. He has denounced 'Bakhtiar' the government as being a tool of the shah.
KHOMEINI CLAIMS the shah's father, Reza the Great, had Khomeini's father killed. Khomeini also insists that his own son, who apparently died of natural causes last year in Iraq, was another victim of the monarch's regime.
Khomeini commands an army of 180,000 mullahs, Moslem holy men whose influence reaches into every village in Iran. This network, along with a large number of Islamic theology students and zealots, provides dedicated cadres in the field.
dependence on foreign interests to build his empire has brought Western-style decadence that has ended Islam's conservative teachings. In protest, they have burned banks, movie theaters, liquor stores and other symbols of Western attitudes.
The anti-shah groups share a resentment of what they consider humiliating domination by the Fahrani, or foreigners. This vestige of the colonization of earlier empires is also a major support given the shah by the United States and Britain and their western allies.
Moslem leaders charge that the shah's
AND SO THE scene is set for Khomeini's return. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians are expected to greet the religious leader as the man who will overthrow the monarchy. Bakhtiari has indicated otherwise.
The same can be said with a reasonable degree of certainty of Iran. The bigger question is, who goes and who stays?
In the shoot-em-up world of westerns, the town has never been big enough for both the sheriff and the new man. In invariably, somebody has to go.
Economic diplomacy will not work
Bv WILLIAM VERITY
N. Y. Times Feature
MIDDLETOWN, Ohio - Linkage, the tactic of wrapping a political aim around an economic package, cannot be applied to United States-Soviet Union trade.
Having recently returned from talks with ranking Russian leaders, I am convinced that further exercises in economic further be futile—or even counterproductive.
Why? To begin with, the current level of support with the Soviet Union is too small to be meaningful.
In 1977, our total was $600 million in non-
agricultural exports, only $250 million in imports. For economies that measure their gross national products by the trillions, that's negligible. West Germany exported more than $3 billion of agricultural products to the Soviet Union in 1977, Japan, about $2 billion.
LET'S ALSO remember that however admirable our desire to persuade Soviet leaders to show greater concern for human rights, they view such efforts as inappropriate. They should extend term linkage, or "conditioned flexibility," they intercept as questionable reliability.
When trade depends upon how a few people in this administration evaluate the
Several weeks ago, the William Allen White Foundation announced that the recipient of its 1979 Award for Journalistic Merit will be James J. Kilpatrick. In making this announcement, the president of the Foundation noted that "James J. Kilpatrick is a very special William Allen White Foundation finds exemplary." Kilpatrick is, for example, "an
Kilpatrick is not deserving of award
To the editor:
earnest advocate, but a respecter of truth. . . It is entirely appropriate that Kilpatrick join the ranks of the distinguished men and women who have
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been honored in this beloved Kansan's memory."
I write this letter to disagree. William Allen White believed in racial equality and he believed in the desirability—indeed, the necessity of a racially integrated American society. And, most important, he acted on these beliefs. For several decades, he was a member of the board of directors of the National Association for the Adoption of Children's P脏 and in 1904 in his only venture as a candidate for public office, White opposed the Ku Klux Klan in campaigning for the governorship of Kansas.
And what of James Kilpatrick? If racism may be defined as a belief in a program of racial discrimination, segregation and domination based on one race's alleged superiority and another race's alleged inferiority, then Kilpatrick is a racist.
Examples abound in his writings of his commitment to an ideology of white supremacy. For example, in his book The School System School Segregation, Ultrickratt argued not only that he but his own as well, by claiming "that over a period of thousands of years, the Negro race, as a race, has failed to contribute significantly to the higher and nobler forms of racism," but also defines that term. This may be a consequence of innate psychic factors. Again, it
may not be, but because contemporary evidence suggests little racial imposition, it is possible that characteristics of the white race, as best it can, and to protect those characteristics, as best it can, from what is sincerely regarded as an increasing influence of Negro characteristics.[12]
Is a white supremacist "a respecter of truth?" Do these statements exemplify the truth as William Allen White defined it? Hardly. Perhaps Mr. Kilpatrick has undergone a transformation and recanted his views, but his knowledge, edited his readers of any change of heart or mind. For these reasons, I believe that presenting James Kilpatrick with the William Allen White Foundation Award for Journalistic Merit is an insult not only to the writer, but also to Kansan, "but to all Kansans and particularly to members of this community."
And why would school desegregation threaten the white race? Kilpatrick has an argument. He argues that to integrate the schools of the Southern States ... is to risk, twenty or thirty years hence, a widespread racial amalgamation and a debasement of the society as a whole.
William M. Tuttle, Jr.
Professor of history
it is my conviction that what makes the present impasse so frustrating is that it is expanded—not restricted—trade that is in our mutual best interest.
As an illustration, let's examine the opposition to selling equipment and know-how to help the Soviet Union develop oil and gas reserves.
So, let's act in our own self interest,
recognizing the benefits for our own
careers.
SUCH OPPOSITION ignores the fact that 95 percent of this technology is available outside the United States. Our loss is a foreign trader's gain, so support for our "uncompromising stand" may be seized overseas by a barely concealed snicker.
But assuming that we could successfully delay Soviet oil and gas production, would the Soviet Union curtail industrial activity or military-preparedness goals? Would we?
Isn't the more logical result likely to be intense Soviet competition for available oil and gas from the Middle East? Higher oil and gasoline prices for United States consumers could be the least of the worst possible outcomes.
LEFTS SCRAP the silly restrictions imposed after the Export Control Act of 1949, which gave companies a parentality on the premise that you can't aim a rifle while holding up your pants). Laughable? As late as 1989, brassieres instructed men to wear gloves were considered a strategic "export"
We can and should seek a steady, reasonable increase in trade with the Soviet Union; it can be accomplished with little risk and much mutual gain.
2. CONTINUING present policies set out
Some of the common-sense changes might include the following:
in the Export Administration Act of 1968, but speeding up the process for reviewing export licenses. We should allow outside experts and applicants to participate in hearings and to confront those who oppose a particular license.
1. Removing those sections of the Trade Reform Act of 1794 that link economic crises with immigration and sideriders. They're not doing their intended job. We should substitute a clear mandate to look after United States interests, fair, mutual beneficial trade agreements.
3. Repealing sections of the Trade Reform Act of 1974 and the Export-Import Act of 1980, we will bring our Export-Import Bank from participating in financing exports to the Soviet Union. Then we should grant United States expatriates from abroad those who are granted by other countries.
Increased trade offers opportunity for greater cooperation in many areas as well as increased contact. Normal trade relations and moderate expansion in commerce can raise the United States-Soviet Union total to a level of $15 billion within the next three to
So from my viewpoint, a policy of holding trade hostage for political ends is self-defeating. The Russians can live without us, but they cannot against them. But we both would be poorer for it.
William Verry is chairman of the Armco Steel Corporation and co-chairman of the United States—U.S.S.R. Trade and Trade Council, a trade-promotion group.
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