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Monday, November 19, 1973
University Daily Kansan
Break Well-Deserved
A definite irritability always infects students at this time of year. Vague acquaintances no longer say hello to each other when passing in the hall or on the sidewalks, and professors find their students especially bleary-eyed and quarrelsome.
The students' patience with each other, bureaucracy. President Nixon and other of an organization are initially short toward the end of the semester.
The irritability is the result of the pressure and strain of too much work being due at the same time. The problem is partly the result of the de facto conspiracy of professors, who inevitably require papers, assign projects or schedule tests on the same days.
How many tests, papers and projects have you had to deal with just before the Thanksgiving break? A brief private poll indicates average of three requirements per student were due today.
This doesn't mean that most professors make unreasonable work demands. But many due dates follow natural breaks in the semester and, with ironic coincidence, rarely fail to collide.
The other source of the problem is the natural student instinct to procrastinate.
Usually plenty of time has been allowed to complete whatever assignments are required. But a university community has a lively and highly-charged atmosphere, complete with innumerable distractions. And the temptations of procrastination are almost too much for even good students to bear.
With a groan and a No-Doz pill,
the pieces of the academic puzzle
are gingerly picked up by the
weary student and put into place.
Now is the time when every student must pick through the wreckage of all that has been postponed and make one of those frequent decisions whether to struggle or resign and become a bum.
Seven semesters of such struggles have taught me that the battle is generally won in the end, no matter how hopeless the situation seems to be. Some professors may ask why they experience a test, or a project turns out to be less hellish than expected.
Certainly the Thanksgiving holiday in itself gives students a reason to for. For weary and irritable students the holiday is a needed salvation.
Bill Gibson
Mail 'Canceled' in Garbage Cans
Aiming For the Mailbox Helps
By MIKE CAUSEY The Washington Post
WASHINGTON--Making excuses for the mail service is about as productive an exercise as carrying a banner denouncing someone on a street corner in downtown Pekin.
Last summer, a top post official and I emerged *from* a Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant after a hard-writing lanceon. He looked to his left and immediately started staggering. Figuring it was likely he might have drunk, I offered assistance.
As bad as it sometimes is, however, the postal service is only as good as the mail people who deliver it. Sometimes, customers make things very tough.
"My God." he said. "look at that."
The "that" in question was a well-dressed woman who was absent-mindedly stuffing several hundred letters into a shoulder-high trash container affixed to a lamp post. About six feet away was a blue mail box, where most people stick their letters.
Risking life and limb, the post chief handle through traffic to the trash receptacle.
WADING THROUGH CANDY wrappers,
banana peels and discarded newspapers,
the high-level mailman retrieved several packages containing about 200 business letters. They were properly stamped and wrapped for first-class or airmail delivery, but they had been put in the trash basket, not the mailbox. "You wouldn't believe how often this happens," he said as he sadly dropped the mail into the mail box.
I'd forgotten the incident, until Oliver Corona of the National League of Postmasters passed along an interesting item. Corona edits the postmasters' publication, and gets a lot of flak from people when they find out what he does for a living.
Corona has worked up an "Oh Where Oh Where Has My Letter Gone" kit, based on a set of guidelines written by a frustrated officer in South Bend, Ind. It goes like this.
"Question: is it really possible to lose mail within the post office?" so, how can it happen?
"LET ME COUNT THE WAYS," the postal official replies. Then he does:
—Deposit your letters in the handy snorkel box in front of the library marked "For Deposit of Library Books" or in the boxes labeled "Help Keep Our City Clean."
—Omit the return address, forget to apply a postage stamp or put an 8 cent stamp on letters requiring 16 cents. The addresses then refuses to pay the postage due; the letters cannot be returned to the sender and the letter disappears into dead letter branch.
—Be a very important person. Everyone in the post office knows you or your firm so displaying the street or post office box number are not required in your address. Everyone knows you, that is, except three newly hired letter-sorting machine operators and one substitute carrier serving customers. A customer insufficient return address or no return address at all. The letters go to a dead letter branch.
"It isn't nice to fod Mother Post Office, but try anyway. Send first class mail in a fourth class carton—and omit the return address to avoid reprisals if detected. The post office inspects the content and assigns a postage due change that is promptly refused by the recipient. The parcel goes to the dead letter branch."
Carelessly place the letter behind a residential mail box for letter carriers to retrieve and deliver it.
"THESE APPEALS," the South Bend postman said, "do not constitute an appeal for sympathy—only for understanding. Unfortunately they are neither infrequent or exaggerated. Quite the contrary, they part of every postal service working day."
Frate bill payers have discovered that a dodge they once used to sack it to the finance company won't working anymore. The dumper that squatty truck checks or money order, without a stamp and with no return address. The postage-due check that the finance company, which paid the bill
Many large companies, including utilities, banks and department stores, have now instructed their mail rooms not to accept any postage-due material. With the new law, they have fired of subsidizing bill-payers who tried to cushion the firm out of 8 cents.
Now a growing number of firms refuses all postage-due mail. If it doesn't have a return address, the envelope goes to the dead letter office. The company sends an "overdue" notice, and the customer cusses the postal service.
Multiplied several hundred times a day,
that added up.
Great Principles Forever With Us
Bv MIKE MCGRADY
Newsday
I made the kids stay up for the television movie the other night. The movie is called "Mr. Smith goes to Washington." It may be the carniest movie ever made, and the kids were fighting me all the way on this one. There was strong sentiment for the movie. Ms. Mitty played Water Mitty," both playing at the same time, and I finally had to gull rank.
"Mr. Smith goes to Washington," you will doubtless recall, is the story of an idealistic young man, played by James Stewart, who is appointed senator.
THE YOUNG SENATOR'S home state is being run into the ground by a millionaire publisher named Taylor. The senior senator is a lawyer and the two of them are planning to build a dam out of concrete and graft. About this time my youngest kid wanted to go to bed.
"You stay right there and listen," he was told.
It comes down to the final stirring scenes, Jimmy Stewart on the floor of the senate telling everyone why he won't go along with the dam over the boys' camp.
ferent thing. Oh no. If you think I'm going back there and tell those boys in my state "Now, look, fellows, forget all this stuff about the land you live in, it's all a lot of hooey, this isn't your country, it belongs to a lot of Taylors—oh no, not me. And anybody here that thinks I'm gonna do to that, they gotta 'nother talk coming."
It's all from another time—"gee whiz" and "hooey" an alanthropic. Still I worked to keep the kids awake. I wanted them to see this corny movie about this country, going to explain to the other senators that they should take a closer look at this country.
"BUT OF COURSE if you've got to build a dam where that boys' camp oughta be," he says, "to get some graft and pay off some political army or something, that's a dif-
"And you won't see just scenery," he says. "You'll see the whole parade of what man's carved out for himself after centuries of fighting, fighting for something better than jungle fight, sighting to his can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color or creed. That's what you'd see."
"AND NO PLACE OUT there for graft, or lies, or compromise with human liberties...it's not too late. Because this country is bigger than the Taylors or you or me or anything else. Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're
right here. You just have to see them."
Well, that was about it. There was a happy ending, of course, and the kids went off to bed happy, and the television set was turned off before the late news. I didn't want to hear from the Democrats, tapes, I didn't want to see Ron Ziegler explaining all about the TTAs. I didn't want to hear some congressman explaining why impeachment is such a difficult thing. Why would anyone have to you can hear it in any saloon. The final argument is that he's guilty, but no more guilty than anyone else. It takes many forms. They say: "Oh, politicians have always been corrupt. And they say: 'The Democrats would be just as bad.'"
I CAN't BUY IT. We don't excuse a murderer because there have been so many other murdersers in the past. This strange tolerance, this forgiveness of corruption, bothers me as much as the corruption itself. If the actions of an Agnew or a Nixon don't stir up our sense of outrage, what will? Are we losing all capacity for outrage?
And there is a related question: Have we lost our original vision? Have we forgotten the history of this place?
ourselves at the mercy of a man who talks up the constitution at the same time he is trying to put it aside, talks about the rule of law at the same time he tries to rise above it. If he gets away with it, if he unchecked, he talks about the constitution and the law.
It is as clear as "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and maybe as cory. But we have always been called naive and realistic; frankly, that is the way I prefer it.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas daily examination periods. Mail subscription rates: 35 per month for Lawyers, K-60042. Student subscription rates: 35 per month for Accommodations, goods, services and employment coverage; color, cover or national origin. Opinions expressly in writing to the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
NEWS STAFF
News BUILD... Susan D.
Editor
BUSINESS STATE
Bob Simison
BUSINESS STAFF
Business Advisor . . . Mr Adams
Business Manager ___ Steven Liggett
Watergate 'Hero' Jobless
The Washington Post
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
WASHINGTON—There is something obscene about the fact that Frank Wills, the young nightwatchman whose diligence led to an arrest in a burglary, should be unable to find work.
joblessness, apparently, is his reward for making it possible for us to save ourselves from incipient tyranny. History may record him as a hero, but his contemporaries let him fail. He was one of the few where he lives on $65-a-week unemployment compensation. And even that is running out.
Frank Wills and his lawyer, Dorsey Evans, says Wills' accidental heroism has made him too great a political risk for potential employers to take.
There's more to it than that, of course. Wills isn't the best educated man in town, having quit school the wrong side of high school graduation. Nor is he the most outgoing, or wordly, or generally well-versed. But he is aware of his shortcomings.
"I'M NOT A COLLEGE MAN or anything
that I can do. I'm not looking for
a 400,000-earn job."
He does, however, think himself deserving of something better than the $80-a-week he was making at the Watergate, or he did not make the job, or the unemployment he faces now.
"Every time there's something in the press about him being out of work, we are approached by all kinds of people with all kinds of officers," Evans said.
A lot of people talk about hiring him, but somehow the promises don't quite realize.
we got calls from Philadelphia and Los Angeles and, after an item in jet magazine, we called back.
them panned out. We contacted all the people who got in touch with us and told them we would consider their offers of work.
"BUT MOST OF THEM were so secrety. They wouldn't give us any of the details. They usually said they were representing somebody else, but they wouldn't say who, or what kind of job was being offered, or how much it paid."
A few times it seemed relief was virtually in hand, but something always happened. A congressman said he could get Wills a job as a Capitol policeman, despite his lack of experience, diploma, or the congressman's influence apparently turned out to be insufficient, Evans said.
He said a major labor union offered Wills an unspecified job and also wanted him to appear at their convention. Officials later cancelled the appearance, and the proffered job disappeared like so many White House tapes.
BUT WILLS ISN'T ASKING to be honored, although there's no doubt in my mind he deserves to be. What he's asking for is work - honest, decemly paid work. He insists there's nothing in his background to suggest he was a good work record, he says, and he's honest and conscientious. The Watergate business supports that. He's primarily interested in
"They sent a small check with an explanation that they had decided not to make a move, because we don't know which way the Watergale hearings are going." Evans
"That's the main problem, I believe. As long as Nixon is in power, people associate Frank with Nixon's troubles, and they are afraid to touch him. Honoring Frank is like rubbing manure in Nixon's face; business people just don't want to do it."
"some kind of workful effect, or security," he says. But not for $0-a week and no
Well, can't the Democratic National Committee (DNC) help him find, something? After all, it was the DNC offices in the Watergate complex that were being burglarized when Wills made his fateful discovery.
Evans said that, after trying unsuccessfully to contact DNCH Chairman Robert Strauss, he finally managed, a few months ago, to talk to one of Strauss's top卧es.
"THEY TOLD ME they could get Frank a letter of recommendation that could help him with a prospective employer," Evans said. "They said they could get him a job but no job and no money. Well, so far they haven't sent either the letter or the plaque."
Maybe the Democratic National Committee doesn't suppose it owes Wills
Evans, who is working without compensation in his efforts to help Wills get settled, hopes things may ease up a bit if he wins. The President will resign or be impeached.
"The booklets cost me $1 apiece, and I printed 5,000 of the hopes that organizations will sell them and make a little difference on themselves and a little for Frank. Kiyoshi said."
Griff and the Unicorn
That may help a little, it still smacks of charity. Frank Wills needs a job. If you know where he can get one, let him know through Dorsey Evans, 1025 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 506, Washington, D.C. 20036.
Meanwhile, he's trying any gambit that offers any chance of success, like the 12-page souvenir booklet, "The Watergate Hero," that Evans had printed.
A Los Angeles Times Editorial
Constitutional Course Advocated
The Los Angeles Times
President Nixon may have hushed for a while the clamor for him to resign by his strong assertion that he won't, but we don't believe the pressure will go away.
The President has lost much of the country's confidence in his integrity. He has lost what both time magazine and the New York Times, which urged him to resign, called his moral authority. The President by his own acts has brought the presidency into dispute and the nation into a turmoil. But he has not failed. How in the best of circumstances he could finish his term in anything but a seriously weakened condition.
But to accept the idea of resignation is crucially different from advocating resignation as a sound solution to the serious problems with its President.
But we believe that to go from these premises to the conclusion that he should be asked to resign is too hasty and too risky a leap of logic and judgment. If he is to go, and he may well have to go, we believe that impeachment is preferable to resignation.
We believe that in this time of national stress it is most important to follow the constitutional processes. The people elected Mr. Nixon President; the people's representatives in Congress. In Hong Kong, the House must pass a bill of impeachment, which brings a President to trial before the Senate, over which the Chief Justice presides. The President remains in office unless two-tirds of the Senate plus one agree that he should go. He is given power by the People's Republic, else, he is presumed innocent until proved guilty. A difficult process, certainly, but it was established by the Founding Fathers precisely so it would not be easy. The term of the Presidency was arranged precisely in order to give the executive branch of government stability and the passing moment's winds of opinion.
Of COURSE, HE may choose to resign. Although we think it unlikely now, we can foresee circumstances in which his would be forced to resign; for him, or for the country, or for his party.
THOSE WHO PRESS for resignation argue that the presumed length of an impachment would be too much for the country to take, and would tempt the US to intervene. Otherwise, the Soviet Union, into adventures probing of American weakness.
To this argument there are three answers:
First, an impaction proceeding need not be excessively long. We don't suppose that Congress would proceed to so grave a step without ascertaining beforehand the
probability that the consensus of the country demanded the removal of the President. And in the face of such consensus, any one President, well might resign, anyway.
Second, though an impeachment proceeding could indeed tempt a foreign minister to use the temporary would be essentially different from those now afforded by the weakened Nixon, and he proved able enough to persuade the turn of events in the Middle East War.
THIRD, THERE IS the argument that an impeachment proceeding would be excessively divisive at a time when the country longs for domestic tranquility. This is exactly the point where we believe the Senate should not intervene on the weakest ground. Ask Mr. Knox to quit by popular demand would settle few if any of those trouble questions on the basis of which he was forced out. It would instead leave the unanswered charges festering. It would mean that the Senate would personal recriminations that would not calm but would inflame public opinion.
Even if these arguments could be set aside, asking the President to resign is neither straightforward nor courageous. If you think the President has behaved so closely that he should resign, you should take the responsibility of advocating his impeachment.
"
MR. NIXON STANDS variously accused of violating the spirit and the letter of the constitution. There is no safer, sounder, surer way to deal with these accusations than to resort to the procedures established by the constitution.
This is not to say that we advocate a rush to impeachment in place of a rush to legalization.
Some people believe that there is already enough evidence on which to remove the President from office. We respect that point of view, but we don't share it. There is much evidence, but not yet enough. For us, the question is whether we should战 in Warindhohe, to which we objected as strongly as anybody but which we did not consider an impeachable offense; it is not the impounding of funds. For us, the central questions to date are the President's ban and the allegations of the Watergate scandals, and the allegations of corruption in his administration.
IT GOES WITHOUT saying that the President would be eminently impeachable if he were, like his late Vice President, caught in a common crime.
And if the President continues to obstruct the inquiries into the breaking of the laws of the United States, then he will move himself closer to that less easily defined kind of offense that we—and, we believe, the nation—would consider impeachable.
Even more likely, we think, is the possibility that he will place himself in the position that many see him in now, where suspicion and loss of public trust will impair his ability to govern effectively to an intolerable degree.
We do not think that point has yet been reached, but we would by no means rule out the possibility that it will be. If this happens, immeachment would be called for.
LEARNED AUTHORITIES disagree about the grounds for impeachment. We tend to agree with Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the Federalist that the grounds for impeachment should be proved from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are on a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate states duties done immediately to the society itself."
We believe that a President may be removed from office for something other than an offense that would send him to jail, but the cause of his removal has to be grave, and his removal cannot be lightly or easily undertaken.
There is no quick way out of the tangle. The new special prosecutor is continuing his work into Watergate and other allegations that he has made against the disputer over those tapes is still not settled, and much may depend on the outcome of that case. Congress will have to resist the temptation to vote for impeachment now to avoid being pushed the way. It just won't go away that easily.
BUT EVEN WHILE the special prosecutor continues its work, and the judge does not approve its work, the House Judiciary Committee should move with more dispatch and responsibility and bipartisanship than it has undergone ready for an impeachment bill of particulars.
And the House and the Senate should move ahead to confirm Gerald R. Ford as Vice President. A year ago Ford would have been no one's choice for president. That is hard to believe, given that he has been nominated according to the procedures in the constitution, and his long record of personal decency and his forlorn testimony to Congress make him, if not everyone's first choice, at least an American president, should the Presidency become vacant.
The nation has no easy way out of its troubles. There is no road without obstacles, no course without some danger. It will take time. We believe that with steady judgment, a full understanding of the gravity of the choices and a firm resolve to hold to the constitution, the nation and its democratic institutions will endure.