Wednesday, December 12, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Presidential Edicts Press Ethics
Even the editors of the so-called liberal press are complaining about the lack of columnists and other writers who support the President's positions.
Newsday quoted Harrison Salisbury, editor of the New York Times editorial pages: "I called up Pat Buchanan (presidential speechwriter) about two weeks ago and told him we were having one hell of a time finding people around the country who wanted to support the President's position. I wondered if he might have any suggestions. He said, 'Jesus, we're having the same problem.'
Or it could mean that among those who are informed and talented enough to succeed in analyzing the Washington scene, there are few who would dare to defend an untenable presidential position.
There are some issues that the majority of people, especially informed people, can agree upon. Such one-sided issues include negative judgments concerning the destruction from natural disasters and President Nixon's Watergate defenses.
This could mean that critics are correct in accusing the press of reporting designed to destroy president and conservative values.
But suspicion of the press and its objectivity has pervaded much of the public. Many bitterly condemn the press for slanting the news and each critic has a stock set of examples.
Certainly the press has become more and more powerful. Because of reduced competition among metropolitan newspapers, increasing reliance on wire services and greater exposure of television news, opinion diversification has been reduced. This increases the potential of press-controlled opinion.
And anything that has power automatically attracts criticism. But, despite some exceptions, the whole has not yet abused that power.
There is no doubt that the private opinion of the majority of the Washington press corps is anti-Nixon and, perhaps, more liberal than otherwise. Many news organizations, especially in television news media, are interpreting the significance of the news and pointing out discrepancies in the statements of politicians.
Yet the principle of fairness in giving the news is still adhered to by the great majority of the press.
The faithful aren't very happy when Walter Cronkite tells them news that indicates that the country is going to the dogs or that the President they voted for was not such a good choice after all. And so they blame Walter for their troubles.
But the schism between the press and the President is no coincidence.
Nixon prefers privacy and secrecy while the press relies upon open disclosure and freedom of information. An important part of a reporter's job is to ask good, tough questions. No wonder the press corps becomes belligerent when their questions are ignored or handled in an untruthful or circuited way.
Finally, Nixon is basically a conservative who resists change or the potential for change. Leaving judgments aside, the press encourages change by simply bringing controversial issues or by bringing controversial issues or scandalous activity to the attention of the public.
the better the reporter the harsher the criticism from Nixon's defenders. That is why some of the most respected news organizations, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post-Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and CBS News are the most often criticized.
For too long, many segments of the press accepted the edicts of presidents without question. And so when some reporters examine the issues carefully and reveal discrepancies, they are accused of slanted reporting. In most cases this is just the reverse of the truth.
-Bill Gibson
Newsmakers Reflect Year's Tumult
Nixon's Decline Top Story
By JOHN BENDER
In a year fitted with such tumultuous events as 1973, it might seem difficult to select the major newsmakers for end-of-the-year polis, but this year there was no problem selecting who was Number One—Richard Nixon's the one.
For President Nixon, it seemed 1973 would be a year of success. The prospects for his second term were especially good when a cease-fire was arranged in Vietnam and the American prisoners of war returned home.
Events began to run against the President by early spring. The Watergate investigations turned up evidence that indicated that highly placed administration officials were involved in a variety of criminal activities. White House aides and administration officials were forced to resign.
DURING THE Senate Watergate hearings, it was revealed that Nixon had tape-recorded most of his conversations. Both the Senate Watergate Committee and the special Watergate prosecutor, Arlene Cox, issued suspensions for these tapes.
privilege was rejected. After losing the court of appeals decision, Nixon decided to attempt a compromise instead of taking the issue to the Supreme Court. In October, he offered a summary of the tapes to Cox and the Senate Watergate Committee. Furthermore, Nixon ordered Cox to drop all lawsuits for obtaining the tapes.
COX WOULDN'T ACCEPT these terms.
In response, Nixon told Atty. Gen. Elliot Richardson to fire the special prosecutor.
Richardson refused to obey the order and resigned. Deputy Atty Gen. William Rücklehaus also resigned then carry out the order. Finally, Cox was fired by the solicitor general. Robert Bork.
The public, politicians and journalists began talking about impeachment. The House Judiciary Committee is considering whether there are grounds for impeachment.
In addition to the Watergate troubles, Nixon faced difficulties on the foreign front.
THE PRESIDENT PLANNED to make 1973 the "Year of Europe," but problems of trade, balance of payments and a new international monetary system divided the
Leonid Breznev, Communist party leader, visited the United States in June for the talks with Nixon. The spirit of detente contributed to the agreement agreements reached at the summit.
MOTORISTS SUFFERED shortages of gasoline this summer, and the nation faces
a shortage of heating oil for the winter.
The second-ranking newspaper of 1973, Spiro Agnew, also faced his share of troubles. Agnew was forced to resign from the vice president after pleading no fault against a tax extension. He received a three-year suspended sentence and was fired $10,000.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is third in the newsmaker poll. Kissinger successfully concluded the negotiations for a cease-fire in Vietnam in January and conducted negotiations with Soviet and Communist Chinese officials throughout the region. A senior diplomatic secretary of state in September, Nixon appointed Kissinger to the position.
THE FOURTH-RANKING newsmaker is Judge John Sirica of the District of Columbia federal district where Sirica was involved in a case the intergate Seven and the Nixon tapes case.
The fifth through tenth place newsmakers are as follows:
—Archibald Cox, Watergate special prosecutor.
—The Senate Watergate Committee
at levis hearings enthralled
gummer officials.
—As a group, John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Dean who are suspected of being involved in the Watergate scandal.
—Israeli Premier Golda Meir.
Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee.
- Former Atty. Gen. Elliot Richardson who played a key role in the Agnew case and who resigned from Nixon ordered him to fire Cox.
Public Pressure Replaces Guts in Leaders
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—The comforting scenario now enjoying currency in this town goes something like this: One more major bombshell of the Cox-firing or the type-evaporation sort, and impaction which point Richard Nikon will resign.
The reason it is so comforting is that it achieves what more and more Americans are coming to conclude would be appropriate, but about anybody's buying to do anything.
As this scenario would have it, the bombshield would detonate itself. The impetus for impeachment would come from the impersonal polls and the President would remove himself from office.
No need for a member of Congress to stand up and call for impeachment. No need for the House of Representatives to vote a bill of impeachment. No need for any senator to risk being in the wrong third of a conviction vote.
THE REASON THEY SAY they would like it to happen this cleanly is that it would spare the trauma of so catalysicum a process as impeachment.
The true reason is that Congress hasn't the cuts to do its job.
I'm not opposed to having it happen more or less painlessly (although I suspect too many of us would miss the import of what the Nixon Administration has done to the American system if he simply resigned and went away). But suppose there is no new bombbush. Support him. The good luck to get by without firing anybody else, without triggering another major "firestorm."
suppose the most damning criminal evidence against Mr. Nixon personally was contained in the two tapes that are missing and the 18-minute gap in the third. Does that mean that he will be or should be exonerated?
HOW HAVE WE ARRIVED at a situation that makes it necessary for a suspect to convict himself before anyone can indict him, let alone try him in court?
The simplest answer is lack of guts and lack of leadership.
like to acknowledge that they are abdicating their responsibility, so they play at doing what they should.
Because there is no leadership in the House of Representatives, individual members arrive at the moral center by attending the party perhaps the mail from home. They don't
A good example is the current "inquiry" of the House Judiciary Committee, which is considering whether the accusations against the President are of sufficient seriousness and validity to warrant sending a bill of impeachment to the House floor. In practice, it constitutes a holding action, a posture that says the House is doing its duty.
IF THE PUBLIC PRESSURE for impeachment increases dramatically, the committee will say, well yes, there are serious charges that ought to be weighed in an impeachment proceeding. If nothing startles happens for a while, the public pressure should abate of abating, the committee may say just the opposite.
It is reasonable for the House, or for Chairman Peter Rodino's judiciary committee, not to want to rush headlong into impeachment. But it is also reasonable, and accurate, to say that enough already is known—much of it already verified—to warrant the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
I won't bother listing the so-called impachable offenses again. Everybody has his own favorite line, anyway, from the American Civil Liberties Union.
THE POINT OF all the lists is this: Richard M. Nixon, whose administration has been the most corrupt in the nation's past 50 years, had been the administration as President could do irreversible damage to the nation's most sacred institution, must be removed
Incidentally, anybody who still needs a list could do a lot worse than getting the December issue of Progressive Magazine or sending for reprints of the late editorial (one dollar for 10 copies, lowest Gormhail S., Madison, WI. 53703).
Progressive's editors ordered the reprints in advance of publication for much the same reason that the American Civil Liberties Union is distributing its impeachment handbook. Both groups have despaired of being able to do what must be done, unless it is forced to do so through a groundwell of public action. And to that end, they are supplying the people with the tools to lead their leaders.
From Genius to Desolation, From Franklin to Nixon
U.S. Statesmanship Declines as Private Enterprise Takes Over
By HENRY STEELE COMMAGER
Special to Newsday
Two centuries ago when the emerging United States had a population smaller than that of metropolitan Detroit today, the most distinguished group of statesmen the most distinguished group of statesmen the modern nation has ever produced in one generation. Today, with a population of more than 200 million, the most conspicuous feature in the political landscape is its desolation.
Today, with every advantage of wealth and power, of science and learning, we have Mr. Nixon in the White House and Mr. Agnew in disgrace, the government in disorder, the opposition in disarray, the congress in disarray, the opposition in disarray, not a statesman in sight who can be compared with the Founding Fathers without embarrassment.
A mager people—scattered over a vast area, without great cities, without a capitol, without familiar institutions of church, state, university and the learned professions—in one long generation produced Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John and Samuel Adkins, William Hastings, Harold Hallion, James Madison, James Wilson, John Marshall, Thomas Paine and a score of others scarcely less eminent.
The first explanation is a practical one. Eighteenth century America was a simple agrarian society which provided few opportunities for art, music, and open fewenings for such talent as appeared.
practices practice? Secrecy, perhaps?
How do we explain this precipitous decline in statesmanship and in political resourcefulness? Why is it that a nation statistically the best educated in the modern world and certainly the best-experienced in self-governance, followed by an many fields—science, technology, medicine, literature and the arts—is unproductive in the quintessential realm of politics?
WHAT HAS OUR own generation—or the past three or four generations—contributed in the realm of political institutions, or even of political practices? Secrecy, perhence,
IN THEOLD WORLD, a young man of
increased stature in a barn. He might be a bishop or an admiral, a
man of great power.
scientist or an artist, a man of letters, an academician, a soldier of fortune, an adventurer, a social hanger-on, a great lover. In America, he was pretty much limited to farming or fishing, land speculation, the church, the law and politics.
Non—except in land speculation—was there any quick路 to wealth to distract me? I thought it would be difficult. Such land as there was had no effective outlet except in public service of one kind or another and, what is more, that area of service was not only inviting but com-
The Founding Fathers knew, with Milton, that "fame is the spur." They were animated, most of them, by a passion for justice and equality, by a sense of obliteration to posterity.
NOWHERE IS THE CHANGING sense of values more ostentatious than in the attitudes toward posteriority of the data set. The author nowhere is it more dramatic than in the decline of that fiduciary sense that animated that earlier generation but, in Jefferson's wonderful phrase, for "our thousandths, thousandth and thousandth generation."
For a century and a half we were a
posterity-minded people, but now who thinks or speaks of posterity? We no longer seem conscious of our fiduciary obligation to later generations.
The most persuasive explanation of all this is one inherent in the moral and intellectual climate of the day: the exaltation of private over public enterprise.
MOST OF THE LEADERS of the 18th century had been educated on the classics. They had read Plato's sagacious objections to Aristotle, and learned in a country will be cultivated there."
And Pericles pictured the Athenians "drawing strength from the busy spectacle of our great city's life as we have it before us day by day, falling in love with her as we see her." This was what they loved and this was what they served—not their one wealth, but the commonwealth. And so, too, did the leaders of 18th century America who
They could recall that proud boast of Pericles in his great funeral oration to the Athenians; "Our citizens attend both to public and private duties, and do not allow absorption in their own affairs to interfere with the knowledge of their city's." We differ from other states in regarding the man who was former public life not as 'quat but as useless.'
What the American people admire and what the young are expected to emulate are the achievements of private enterprise. Corporation executives, not educators, sit on the boards of colleges and universities; businessmen, not artists and musicians, run companies that employ a majority of industry and finance dominate the hospitals, not doctors or scientists.
BUT WHAT IS the "busy spectacle" which our young people see before them day by day and from which they are expected to draw inspiration? What are the things we most admire and reward? What is it the newspapers celebrate, what is it the television necessarily presents, what is it the government itself commemorates?
exalted public over private enterprise and wrote out their lives in the service of the civil war.
The positions of influence are reserved for the corporate executives or perhaps for those who advise them in law and finance. It is they who sit in the President's cabinets, head the powerful administrative commissions, determine what is to be seen on television or in the films; it is they who, as diplomats, the abroad for their country.
NOR IS THIS surprising. Over the years
Griff and the Unicorn
H,
the term "private enterprise" has come to have great glamor, while the term "public enterprise" is suspect. It is private enterprise that is equated with "American corporate enterprise" and socialized medicine—such as socialized medicine concludes up something un-American.
Nothing perhaps but changes in the general climate of opinion in the country. Some changes are already under way. The misconduct of a minister—a misconduct grosser and more dangerous than anything in our history—has shocked the country into a realization of what is happening. "With small men no great thunder can ever be accomplished."
ONE METHOD OF encouraging public rather than private careers is to move resolutely towards equalizing the rewards, even the待遇. When a job cannot be done by paying public servants the kind of salaries and endowing them with the prerequisites that businessmen now enjoy (imagine giving a Senator, a doctor or a lawyer a salary for doing his job well).
A SECOND PRACTICAL measure to revive interest in public enterprise is equally obvious: to take private money out of politics, to make it impossible for a candidate for any office, from that of mayor to that of President, to buy his election.
A brief consideration of the flourishing state of private enterprise in Sweden, Holland and West Germany, where taxes on high incomes are almost confiscatory, should dissipate the notion that our economy would benefit from our tax laws designed to achieve a more equitable system of rewards to the private and the public sector.
What can be done to revive the passion for public service and public enterprise that animated the generation of the Founding Fathers?
As for changing the climate of opinion, it is more difficult. It could at least be enforced by the courts.
It can be done by providing for higher taxes on high incomes and by closing those loopholes that make our tax laws look like nothing so much as swiss cheese.
those great wellsprings of literature—many of them in the Aegean and the Mediterranean seas—which nourished the development of the generation of the Founding Fathers.
But that, perhaps, is too much to hope for. (Heury Siecle Commager, professor of history and John W. Simpson lecturer at Amherst College, specializes in American political and intellectual history. He is the author of many books, including "The American Mind" and "Freedom and Order.")
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