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Tuesday. December 4, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
McGovern Endures
As he spoke to the crowded masses in the Kansas Union Friday night, George McGovern demon- torized the voters for their weaknesses of his political career.
George McGovern is not a very imposing figure. Some of the labor moguls rejected him in the 1972 presidential campaign because they thought he appeared to be a "lightweight."
His approach to the podium in the Union Ballroom was somewhat overshadowed by a vibrant reception from the cheering throng of people who loved or respected him and simply to see a bliz-time personality.
His Liberace-like voice crackled across the room in a polished but unassuming manner. Some in the crowd, especially the curiosity of the girl who had been disappointed after waiting so long in the humid ballroom.
In the manner of most politicians, McGovern broadcasted some decidedly partisan rhetoric that was warm response from the audience.
But like too few politicians, George McGovern talked sense. He went beyond rhetoric and partisan polemics and gave reasons for his actions and opinions. Thus he demonstrated once again that he is one of the few public figures who has enough respect for the intelligence of his audience to give thoughtful and logical analyses.
Perhaps McGovern has too much respect for the intelligence of the people. Perhaps that is one reason he was demolished in one of the biggest landslides in the history of presidential elections.
He seemed to speak with pride when he said that his presidential campaign had been corruption-free, that he had used no illegal contributions and that the Nixon investigators, despite zealous objections, found the evidence of wrong-doing anywhere in his campaign.
McGovern has many friends in Lawrence. The crowd reacted, predictably, in an enthusiastic manner. Members of the audience asked McGovern reasonable and relevant questions. The scene was nothing similar to the cattle-run atmosphere at K-State three years ago when students reacted to President Nixon with all the political and social consciousness of a football pep rally.
George McGovener won't be as beloved in defeat as Adalian Stevenson as He will probably be the only anecdote in the history books
Statistically, his 1972 defeat was miserable. Too many people were blinded by his superficial short-comings and branded him an incompetent on insufficient evidence. Others had wanted a messaiah to lead us out of the political wilderness, but McGovern didn't and doesn't have the trappings of a messiah.
But he got more than 28 million people to vote for him for president, and he influenced important segments of the society.
Several years from now school children will see George McGovern as one of those minor characters obscured by the foggy past. But his influence will be felt for more than one generation. —Bill Gibson
WASHINGTON - The service manager for an electronics company distributing the tape recorder by President Secretary Rose Mary Woods is skeptical that she could have inadvertently erased 18 minutes of a Watergate tape, as she has claimed.
By JOHN SAAR the Washington Post
Tape Experts Skeptical of Erasure
Contacted by telephone at the Los Angeles headquarters of Martel Electronic Sales Inc., which markets the German-made Uher recorder used by Woods in transcribing the tapes, Carl Bennett said the chances of such a mistake were "poor... very, very low because of the way it is designed."
Bennett and other recording experts contacted emphasized that there are built-in safeguards on nearly every tape recorder against the kind of accidental erasure described by Woods. "To erase, you have to manually depress two buttons simultaneously said Bennett, 'if you press either one first, it won't do anything.'"
*ON COME ON ROSE MARY!*
"It's not easy to do at all. It's hard for me
to see where it's a mistake," the service
said.
The only other way erasure could have occurred, Bennett said, would be if Woods had been using the tap recorder with a microphone, which was an important mechanism. It was unlikely thought that, as a secretary, Woods would be using the microphone. "Most secretaries don't use a mike. They use a foot stat that no 'record capability'," Bennett said.
Bennett explained that for Woods to have accidentally put the tape recorder into an erase position, as she testified before Judge S'ica, it would be necessary to press the oedal to 'play' position and simultaneously press a key labeled 'record'. Bennett also was puzzled by the source of the audible hum which replaces the audible sound of the H.R. Haldenman on an 18-½-minute portion of the tape. "That baffles me," he said, "there's nothing in the equipment which could cause that tone."
Bennett described the Uber 5000 model used by Woods as "a professional piece of gear which sells like hotcakes" and retails for 500 dollars. The service manager said it was popularly used for dictation, but was also used for "more or less so-called buglings."
An executive for the Sony Corporation of America, Fred Tushinsky, explained the working of the commonly used safeguard against accidental erasure, called an "interlock." Most such systems are operated in a sequence of deliberate actions—depression of the 'record' button followed by engagement of the 'forward' or 'play' control.
Tim Maddalon, service manager for the Sanyon Electric Inc., cited possible exposure of the tapes to a magnetic field to explain erasure. Told it happened on the job, he said. The imminent hard to believe, I am afraid. I'm for the president, but it's a little hard to swallow."
"I know of no commercial tape recorder sold for consumer use that does not include an interlock against accidental erasure," said Tushinsky, a marketing vice president for the Japanese corporation's American subsidiary.
Asked to rate the chances of someone accidentally erasing existing recordings, he said, "I think it would be very hard to do it accidentally."
Energy Crisis Portends Changes
BY ROBERT J. DONOVAN The Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -Without doubt we are entering a crisis over the energy shortage, but one more crisis ordinarily would be a normal diet for a generation bred on crises.
Cries often change things somehow or other, yet this generation is habituated to change too, particularly change of fad, style.
The difference in the energy crisis is that it portends not a momentary, superficial change but perhaps a sweeping change affecting modern civilization.
What looms is a change from which we
Readers Respond
Appeal to 'Screamers' Ineffective
To the Editor:
For the past month or so, the campus has been plagued by a few people proclaiming the "gospel" continually. These screamers are often accused of being "scene" screening at disagree with them.
I can easily tolerate and listen to someone who wants to tell me of his beliefs once; I can even tolerate a few loud speeches. However, this is not the kind of thing that you for 'you' simply interrupts my thoughts, aggravates my headaches and pollutes my ears.
I want to suggest that the disturbance be stopped by some official means, such as charges of disturbing the peace or any applicable University regulation.
I've tried screaming back, talking to them quietly and even using a method similar to their own—"God told me to tell you to quit screaming." I concluded that an appeal to the better nature of the situation is ineffective in stopping the disturbance.
I realize that this action will only increase the screamers sense of being God's prophets and possibly martyrs. But I think the peace of everyone and the freedom of people with other beliefs, some of whom have come here partially to get out of a proselytizing atmosphere is more than the attitudes of the screamers.
Lynne Miller Lawrence junior
Paper Conservation
To the Editor:
Because of the seriousness of the energy shortages facing our country and particularly our lives here at KU, we are ignoring another shortage that is less dramatic though highly important—the need to graduate students to a graduate student at KU have witnessed, in my own department and in the University as a whole, a tremendous waste of paper. My mailbox is constantly crammed with insurance plans, funeral plans, announcements of events that already occurred or that I have already received six announcements about and information about undergraduates or full-time faculty members only.
Now that I have become aware of an
impending shortage I am all the more appalled by our careless use of resources. I was particularly angry to read about the KU Family Newsletter, reprints of the book "A Kansan Girl," and just send old Kansan copies) to be sent to parents and spouses (whose spouses who, interested at all, have probably read the Kansan all alone). Some 20,000 copies will be mailed out. Perhaps if there is some real need, they can be distributed but your article merely reported the event.
If I may be so bold, I wish to offer some suggestions on conserving paper. As a teaching assistant, I tend to require that all papers be typed single space, front and back, and the margins are all the content that is important, not the appearance. Most department newsletters could do the same. Departments could maintain a bulletin board for the proliferation of information rather than putting one copy of the information in each student's mailbox. And finally, departments could reuse paper print on one side only.
Most important, it is up to the individual to find ways to conserve paper for himself. At this point, individual initiative and cooperation may be deter mandatory regulations. Please help.
Elizabeth Green
Graduate Student
Miami Beach, Fla
Hasty Reviews
Reviewer Yemans claim that the "effect" of Wanda Wilikomirska's "technically fine performance ... was diminished by the excessive length of the film, which took over the hours (and which) seriously injured Wilikomirka's reception because the audience was tired and requested no encore." The third movement of a sonata by Kafka was more poignant, it was "very quick" (Nov. 28), earlier in the semester, the same review applauded
I have been speed-reading the Kansan all semester long—with haste, yes, but not with waste—and would now like to congratulate jet-age reviewers Diane Yeamans and Cheryl Crooks for the consistency of their "revieweds."
To the Editor:
Leonard Rose's interpretation of Bach's "Suite No. 2 in C Major" because "each of the seven movements was short and varied, and the audience enjoyed them all" (Oct. 29). In another review, she bemoaned the failure of her own performance to start "almost 15 minutes late" (Oct. 15).
Reviewer Crooks, meantime, said that the Experimental Theatre production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," is worth seeing and that it can "be an incredible film," the motion plays quickly and the play is over in two and a half hours" (Nov. 2). She loved the Hashinger Theatre production of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" because "performance time is only one hour." She added that the attributions to the show's success" (Nov. 9), As for the University Theatre production of "A Doll's House," she issued the following warning: "The play is long; the KU production lasts three hours. ... There are empty turns, so you prepared to spend an hour at the theater" (Nov. 15).
Three (speedy) cheers to reviewers Yeamans and Crooks for confirming my suspicion that there is, indeed, a sudden shortage of everything—including the human energy to sit still and simply enjoy the arts, the music, the comedy or humor. How hurry! Incidentally, when will the Kansas start reviewing television commercials or track meets?
Paul Stephen Lim
Graduate Student
Manila, Philippines
It seems that behavior patterns of the people who commute to work in the big cities are established in the university towns. I refer to the often-criticized practice of each automobile being occupied by only one passenger. In recent days I have sampled cars coming north from 23rd Street and going east through Lincoln Square, cars have only one person. The scores were: 21-8, 18-13, 11-5, 20-5, 16-7. A waste of gasoline and parking space.
Parking, Gas Waste
Associate Professor of Music History
To the Editor:
J. Bunker Clark
by Sokoloff
Griff and the Unicorn
have to become accustomed to living in colder houses in the winter, if they have not already begun to. This hardship, if that is what it is, may continue until we have learned to mass-produce solar heating systems.
will not return to things as they have been now for so long. The Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial the other day that Mr. Obama has called for dealing with the energy shortage "will more than likely lock the nation into that solution for at least the remainder of the decade" Some experts believe for much longer, this would be an acute scene toound to take on new form and color.
Readers will have to get used to smaller newspapers because of the shortage of newspaper, and for the same reason writers will have to write their hearts out to do so.
VERY LIKELY WE ARE facing the prospect of the kind of change that many persons living today experienced after the two world wars and the Depression.
FORTUNATELY, ARCHITECTS have drawing boards, for that is what they must now go back to. Houses will have to be painted with a glossy finish and a familiar glass-faced office building is fast becoming intolerable because the glass lets the sun's heat in during the summer and the furnace it heat out during the winter. There are so many sort of thing in the stern days ahead.
The change then was fundamental, even though we may not have realized it while it was happening. Prosperity, as it turned out, was a very big part of the success but prosperity of a vastly different kind and in altogether different circumstances. The bluebirds, or some of their fine-feathered friends, did come over the white cliffs of Canaan to watch the sun rise but what a different tomorrow it was!
Frugality with gasoline will change everything from grocery-shopping to love-hiking. If you go out and simply cannot go on getting our proteins from meat on the scale we have been. We will have to eat less meat because there will be fewer people in this still-expanding population will want.
AND WHILE WE ARE cutting back on meat, it will be no time to acquire a taste for salmon. We must catch it in the catch is down, and the retail price in the East at least is expected to reach $4.50 a pound by winter. We also seem to have practical limits.
You get something of the same sense of impending fundamental change now when you watch the commercials still running on television for big luxury automobiles.
And these days will not end when we cross the Rhine or take Okinawa, as was the case with the well remembered wartime shortage of petroleum. We need petroleum, ore, timber and so on has finally forced us on shorter ratios until the rather distant time when coal, the sun and the atom provide us with all the energy we need to be rather different from what it is today.
**YOU GET MUCH THE same feeling too when you gape at the new World Trade Center in New York, a twin-tower behemoth about the same amount of energy as a city of 100,000 people. Or when you order a steak. Or firewood. Or ponder moving to the suburbs. Or plan a vacation that will take you through the vacations these days do not? Most of the old
WE ABANDONED THE neighborhood store for the shopping center that can only be reached by burning gasoline. The old gas station is no longer even in part, of town.
That is an example of the sort of loss that makes the looming change disturbing. While the party was in full swing we lost our leader, and we provided amenities in the years ahead.
We tore down the Ritz-Carlton in favor of monotonic hotels with air-conditioning. Now the air-conditioning is in jeopardy, but we were not built to open and let in fresh air.
To adjust to the kind of changes that are almost certainly in store for us will force alteration in our habits, attitudes and values, as all periods of deep change have.
Outside the South, families are going to
Maybe the inconveniences en route will be worth it. The old order has become pretty trashy. Adversity is a tonic sometimes. The happiest songs were written in the early '80s, and Mikhail has something to seek above and beyond unrestricted use of the automobile.
self-contained disks disappeared with the coming of the superhighways.
Ammo Box Beds
War Leftovers Recycled
HUE, South Vietnam--There is hardly a house in South Vietnam in which something that was used in the war isn't being given a new function.
Bv DELLA DENMAN
Special to Newsday
Nearly every housewife uses spoons made from napalm in sauces, canopies molded from aluminum aircraft fuselages and other materials have handles made from cartridge cases.
Walk down the main street in any town and you will see traffic lights made from mortar shell cases, gates fashioned from metal frames, gaskets with scrap from burned-out military vehicles.
FROM THE SMALLEST kitchen utensil to a house itself, the leftovers of war are being recycled in a way never anticipated by military commanders. Thousands of Vietnamese who were made homeless by nighting are building their lives on war wash.
In the far north of South Vietnam, just below the dillennirated zone, a whole village has been reconstructed from American-made wooden ammunition boxes. The 1972 Phoong Dien, flattened by North Vietnamese artillery fire in May, 1972, was charred and blackened supports with white sand dunes. Today, the unpainted walls of every new one-story house carry such inscriptions as "Cottondale" or "Chaffee Cranes," and "Ammo for Cannon with Explosive Protectives."
PHONG DIEH IS NOT pretty, but it lives again and its inhabitants are proud of their craftsmanship.
When the villagers returned from refuge camps in Hue and Danang, the boxes were the cheapest and most easily available building material.
At that time, a box cost 80 to 160 piasters (about 20 cents) and a house could be built with 200 boxes. The total cost: about 20,000 piasters. In which which was subsidized by government.
Truckloads of refugees are returning to other abandoned or burned-out villages north of Phong Dieng on Highway 1. They seldom possess anything but a few ragged clobes and an occasional piece of fabric, also made from ammunition boxes.
Recently, one refugee, 30-year-old Pham
Thi Hai, proudly heaved off her truck a six-
foot bed, a cupboard, two benches and a
While she was in a camp outside Hue with her father and two children she scraped together enough pasters to buy the 35 boxes needed to make them.
THE PRICE OF THE boxes, which originally held 105-mm Howitzer shells, fluctuates according to the amount of fighting in the area.
At the height of last year's offensive, when an artillery unit in the Quangtri area was firing an average of 1,000 rounds a day, the 24-metre gun cost only 50 piasters (10 cents) each.
Now that fighting has diminished—units are firing only 200 rounds a day in an insecure area, boxes are in greater demand for firefighters. A new hive has jumped to 150 palettes (30 cents).
"They are sold by soldiers from camps all
they were up to mapg," said Ma Tl Le.
He turned back, and then stood up.
THE HUGE COMMUNICATIONS network that the Americans set up in the country has also given enterprising Vietnamese entrepreneurs the wealth of copper dollars' worth of copper telephone wire encased in red, green, blue and purple plastic have been pilfered from wharves and military bases. Craftsmans are weaving intricate black-and-colored circular 10-inch-high tea cocoes.
Everywhere the flotsam and jettsam or war are being turned over and used again. BUDDHISTS PRAY AT altars adorned with incense burners, candlesticks and vases set in mosaic tiles marked Hue and Danag. Boats lying the Mokeng River are made of airplane fuel tanks. Fishermen casting nuts use MI6 machinegun bullets as weights.
According to a communications official,
each basket contains $50 worth of coff, yet
$25 worth of sugar.
In the country, farmers tend their paddy fields with hoes and spades made from the husks of the rice crop.
"The wire lasts longer than rattan," said a driver in the American Embassy car pool in Saigon, where many of the baskets are woven.
Cylindrical metal mortar canisters filled with cement make telephone poles, gateposts, altar supports and house foundations.
that were destroyed in battle a few miles away. Every usable part has been removed to make agricultural implements; all that is left, deep in weeds, is the chassis.
In the cities, scores of backstreet foundations are busy melting down scrap from shotload airplanes, military vehicles and shell cases. It is sold by the toon to Chinese merchants in Saigon who mold it into a manhole or car pistons, machine parts and even chairs.
Collecting the debris of battle and pedaling scrap at 60 to 70 plasters a kilo (about 15 kg) is necessary. An average weight
AND FOR THE ARMY, where salaries range from 8,000 to 10,000 pilasters ($16 to $20) a month, the sale of reject war materials is a major part of their income; some soldiers make as much as two or three times their salaries.
The U.S. Army has gone, but a constant reminder of its presence are the aluminum cans used for soft drinks and C nations. You frequently see, "Mennon's Shaving Lather," or "jim grape" stamped on the underside of a water container or a candlestick.
IN DANANG MARKET, a vendor sells cooking pots, bug sprayes, siphons and gloves for children, 7 up4ps and 7 up4ups. She buys the cans at five pastasters each and carves out her wares herself. She has been supporting her two children since she knew and knows the easy way to earn a living.
Many Vietnamese, like this vendor, have earned money by recycling materials largely brought into Vietnam by the U.S. Army to support the war effort. Now these materials are providing a living for a people trying to work out a peace.
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