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University Daily Kansan Monday. Nov. 7. 1960
The NSA Controversy
The most clearcut and controversial issue in the campaign for student council seats between the two campus political parties is the National Student Association. While University Party and Vox Populi both endorse NSA as a good organization for KU the issue is how NSA should be utilized by the University.
"THE UNIVERSITY PARTY PROPOSES that all major or controversial (NSA) resolutions be discussed and voted upon by the All Student Council, so that our student leaders will be empowered to take a proper and responsible stand." This is the section of the UP platform dealing with this phase of NSA.
"Vox supports: Forming a committee to discuss and present principles of proposed KU-NSA policy to the ASC for action. Inviting NSA to KU for its national convention. Making KU a leader among Midwestern schools in NSA policy formation." This is the section of the Vox platform dealing with this phase of NSA.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO parties' planks on NSA boils down to whether the committee Vox proposed and the ASC recently adopted is necessary. The committee was set up to study NSA resolutions, outline the facts both pro and con and present to the ASC its recommendations in the form of a resolution. This NSA committee will also study some other off-campus problems.
The University Party feels that the number of major or controversial issues which arise from NSA each year is not great enough to warrant committee action, thus delaying ASC action and
discussion on the proposals for weeks. UP says that probably only a half dozen issues will need to be discussed by the ASC each year and that this number will not be too great a burden for the ASC without the committee.
There are several sound arguments for the committee. First, the members of the ASC cannot possibly be well acquainted with all of the issues such as the controversy on the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the "Kerr directives." These are examples of some of the stands that NSA takes and it is foolish to assume that the average member of ASC will be prepared to discuss issues of this nature.
SECONDLY, THE NSA TAKES UP A MULTITUDE of questions. Some screening body is needed to analyze the bulk of material that is sent out from the national organization. There is an administrative committee now, but it is not suited for this.
Thirdly, the committee that has been set up is a cross-section of student opinion ranging from conservative to liberal and Republican to Democratic.
Since the ASC has established the committee to study and recommend resolutions to the Council, the committee will at least have an opportunity to test its effectiveness. We feel that this committee is a sound move in the direction toward cutting down misunderstanding between the student body, the student body president and the All Student Council on various issues that arise each year such as the sit-in controversy which flared on campus last spring.
— John Peterson
Gubernatorial Race in Doubt
Douglas Favorite in Illinois
By Ralph Wilson
Illinois poses a big question mark for politicians at all levels.
Douglas a Favorite
Among the lucky few who can be nearly certain how illinoians are going to vote Nov. 8 is Democratic Sen. Paul H. Douglas. The people probably will disregard his Republican opponent, Samuel W. Witwer, and send Douglas back to the senate for his third term.
Despite the cries of his opponent that the "myth of Senator Douglas as a scholarly economist needs to be exploded because it's a phony and dangerous," the former economics professor is a strong favorite for reelection.
The backbone of Sen. Douglas record is his claim that he saved more than 2 million dollars by amendments to money bills. Better
than one-fourth of this sum has come from defense increase cuts. A smaller percentage of this total came from a cut of a proposed increase in disabled veteran pensions.
The senator also is claiming that he wrote, with the aid of the late Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, the first "Federal Aid to Education" legislation to gain Senate passage.
Sen. Douglas has been stressing his leadership in the fight for stronger civil rights, for any and all types of aid to education, for slum clearance, public housing for the unemployed and needy, and that he is the author of the latest minimum wage increase.
eating "the type of greater centralized government control, accompanied by cheap money, that was tried in the 1930's and found wanting."
In combating Douglas, Witwuer has chosen to attack ideas which he feels Sen. Douglas has implied rather than attack the senator on his record. Witwuer recently said that he feels that Douglas is advo-
It appears that Douglas should retain his seat by a sizeable vote.
However, in the gubernatorial race the Republican incumbent, Gov. Stratton, has troubles, with a capital T.
Stratton in Trouble
Otto Kerner, former county judge, seems to be pulling away from Gov. Stratton in their votegathering race. Kerner is apparently holding Stevensonites and other Democrats while he is picking up a number of Eisenhower-Nixon voters.
By contrast, Stratton seems to be getting only a minority of those Eisenhower voters who plan to nod in favor of Vice President Nixon.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
All of these scandals have been brought about by the poor financial condition of the state. Kerner has picked up several votes by pushing a crash program which he says is necessary "to stave off financial insolvence." The plan calls for a graduated income tax.
The Hodge scandal, the Howell scandal and the Downey scandal, all which have come during the present Stratton administration, have been mentioned numerous times as reasons for voting against Stratton.
Straton has shaken off the Kerner attacks as a silly doom-and-gloom theme.
Gubernatorial Race Close
Both candidates may have to stay up late to learn the outcome of the election as it promises to be very close. The key lies in the dection of the heavily Republican downstate area.
The presidential battle for the state's 27 electoral votes should be as close as the state has ever seen.
Religion may play an extremely important role in the coming election. Many of the Catholic downstate Republicans are switching over to Kennedy and may have failed to register because of the anti-Nixon feeling. In the upstate area much the reverse is true. Many of the Democrats are anti-Catholic and are defecting to the Republicans, while, many are refusing to vote for a Catholic or a Republican and probably will stay at home.
From the Newsstand
Death of a Salesman
Richard Nixon and I came to New York yesterday afternoon like thieves in the night. There was not a soul at Butler Terminal—nor Javits, nor Rockefeller — save one man from headquarters, estimable but hardly puissant. The first words we heard were from the lips of a dazed witness who had seen secretaries running and squealing from the House of Morgan to look upon John F. Kennedy.
I cannot believe what my eyes are now seeing. What we watch is like the collapse of some great temple constructed with all the ingenuity of the set designers union for some historical spectacular when the rains come; and the paper columns begin to melt and the whole structure begins wetly to sink into the mud from which it came.
He is not a man I cherish, but there is in the sight of him the painful recognition that something human somewhere is being cruelly violated and humiliated. The gestures are the gestures of someone trapped five fathoms deep; when he stands on a platform and makes a fist, it is a piece of mush; the forearm no longer jabs for emphasis; it merely flounders. These are the movements of a drowning man. He appears to be going out, as John F. Kennedy would say, "not with a bang but a whimpah."
***
HE CANNOT BE ENTIRELY WITHOUT RESOURCE; HE cannot be entirely without courage; it is conceivable that he can right himself and arrest this terrible slide. But he seems defeated in his interior. A reporter who has observed with friendliness his progress over the years said yesterday that he had never seen Nixon so limp and soggily desperate.
"I think they're staking everything on the last three minutes of the debate. You know Nixon has the last word." Three minutes to midnight.
They moved him Tuesday over a route essentially of comfort stations, St. Petersburg, Fla., at dark and the Wilmington of the duPonts at midnight. St. Petersburg is a Republican enclave; his audience was a Goldwater Golden Years Club of 10,000-odd. He told them that he was going to take the gloves off at last, and then he fogged and flubbed and reached for applause he did not get. It was his usual dishonest performance, but it was also pathetic.
The crowd was pathetic too—stout old parties holding signs saying "Nixon, Good to the Last Drop of Blood," and an old lady who had drawn a picture of a smiling dwarf's head—rather like Khrushchev—and labeled "I Wear a Smile Because I Am a Nixon Man." A whole myth seems to be going with him, the golden years of white Protestant America; we seem to be witnessing the final entombment of William McKinley.
HE TOLD AN AIRPORT CROWD AT TAMPA THAT HE thanked them for their, "frankly, loyalty." In Wilmington, yesterday morning, he seemed to be riding the coattails of a local Congressional candidate. When 700 people came to the airport at Wilmington to meet him, he held them in mush for half an hour saying that he had told Pat that no one would be here at this time of night, and that it was a miracle. He is embarrassingly grateful for any small attention.
It does not seem credible. Nixon is the candidate of an immensely rich party; he has the indorsement of an enormously popular President; he cannot go out quite so drearily as this, the way poor Harold Stassen and poor old Joe Martin and poor Bill Knowland went. But at least those men—some of them, at least—had dignity at the end; this is merely squalid.
Of course, he clings to the hope that Eisenhower may save him. The bleached bones of the Stassens and the Martins lie witness to the vanity of such hopes. Generals die in bed. Richard Nixon, a combat soldier, seems to be dying horribly on a public platform, an object of public humiliation. It cannot be true, but it is the evidence of the eye.
(Excerpted from an article by Murray Kempton in the Oct. 20, 1960 edition of the New York Post.)
Dailu Hansan
UNI DEIT
University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
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