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Wednesday. November 7. 1973
University Dallv Kansan
KANSAN comme
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Nixon Stays in Game
The first quarter of the zaniest football game ever to be played has ended. The teams are the Nixon Followers, coached by the nation's number one football fan himself, the Destroyors, coached by John Dean.
Although the Followers are badly outmanned, they have managed to hold the first quarter score to 0-0 with a succession of third-down punts.
The crowd has watched an exciting game, but several fans suspect the referees of having accepted payoffs. Thus the fans watching a good game, clean game, or witnessing the fix in action.
The fans well remember the first game of this exciting two-game series. That game ended in a convincing 20-0 win for the followers. The team immediately rebounded its coach for four more years.
He responded by waving the "V for Victory" sign a lot and by promising another win in the second game of the series. So far that prediction seems a bit presumptuous.
The game has been confusing for the fans. They not only suspect the referees of treachery but they are growing tired of the numerous substitutions made by the Followers' coach. In the first quarter he has sent in three attorneys general, three directors of the FBI, three secretaries of defense, four Watergate prosecutors and three directors of the CIA. Since the Coach told all of them to
go in and play guard, the fans don't know who is who.
The Followers' coach has also called time out 15 times, several more times than the team is allowed. Each time the referees have pointed this out to him, he has threatened to retreat to his home at Camp David and sulk until the game is started over.
The Detractors have moved the ball well in the first quarter. They nearly scored on a long bomb thrown by player-coach John Dean to the Watergate receivers. Unfortunately the pass bounced out of the hands of the Watergate officers off the head of the Followers' coach so high into the air that everyone is still waiting for it to come down.
The Followers responded to that play by running the quarterback sneak several times, a play that didn't work well for them.
Well, the second quarter is about to begin. The Followers have stumbled back onto the field. The team appears tired. Its coach, now standing on the far sideline, obviously is brooding.
And now the Detractors have run back onto the field, each of them yelling, "Impeach the Coach!" in reference to the Followers' head man. The fans appear to be bloodthirsty.
They are shouting, "Go! Go!
Of them are shouting,
"The king is"
"shouting."
The Followers' coach is staring up at the stands. You can tell he is confident.
Chuck Potter
The Washington Post
Washington—do we dare believe him now about the tape? I don't mean that business about the crucial conversation with Mitchell being made "from an extension phone not hooked into the system" or the critical conversation with John Dean being lost due to faulty wiring.
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
But do we dare believe that the tape recordings in question really don't exist?
recordings in question really don't exist? Let me reveal the depths of my skepticism. The American people, reacting to the shock of the suddenly missing tapes, following on the shock of the preceding attack, and the lack of demand for impeachment of the President.
Of course we don't dare believe that. I don't think we're even expected to.
Solution for Nixon: 'Face Truth'
The public, the politicians, the investigators and the commentators in the press will be absolutely certain that the President should have hanged Richard Nixon. His destruction of them (and that is how we surely view it) is proof of his guilt and, therefore, a far more convincing ground for the president to deal with the Cox sacking combined.
THE LETTERS AND TELEGRAMS will flood the White House and the Congress, pointing out that the people aren't so stupid as to believe that two crucial tapes just happened to have become retroactively nonexistent.
We'll all recall that the President wanted to be clear in his mind as to what bearing the tapes may have had on the Watergate case. Mr. Trump said the White House honcho H. R. Halderman to listen to some of them. We'll say that surely the President must have thought the Mitchell and Dean tapes important to that case, but we don't know now learning that the tapes never existed?
The conclusion will be inescapable, and impachment will become not just possible.
Now suppose that just at that point, some White House aide suddenly found the missing tapes—the real tapes—and that they were relatively innocent. Not too innocent, mind you, for that would render them unbelievable.
BUT SUPPOSE THEY contained only some unexpectedly salty language, some
" I N E W E R T THIS WASN'T ANOTHER PHONY ALERT...WEYE BEEN ORDERED TO ENCYCLE CBS, NBC AND ABC!"
A Farewell to Spirits?
By JACK SMITH
The Los Angeles Times
Fig. 92- No direct references to beverages here, but you can tell he's setting thirsty.
Fig. 72 "The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink."
Fig. 133—This is the first page of a new chapter and Heringway is talking about how much better Russian writers are than American writers, so you need a drink pretty soon, probably饮料。
Pg. 83.."The water stood there and Ford told him he would have a Chamberw Cassia.
Now and then someone writes to reproach me for some ambirable reference to beer or wine, or even spirits. It is their contention that children are the eyes of children and rain their lives.
Fig. 39. "I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drink a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawnill."
As if that wasn't enough to worry me, a man named Harry Partridge, of Manhattan Beach, Calif., recently tried to prove to me that he ruined the late Ernest Hennauw.
I have enough worries, without worrying about poor Hemingway. But I wondered if Partridge was right. Just as a matter of literary curiosity I finally took "A Moveable Feast" from the shelf and opened it at "The Mystery of Jane Austen." I always gave me the natural end-de-vie, insisting on refilling my glass and I looked at the pictures and we talked."
"I challenge you," he wrote, "to open any book by Hemingway and read more than five pages at random without running into...; wines, liquors, brandies, whiskies, etc., and other gardens. ... it's merely an interest with me as I a testetator myself."
RAPIDLY I FLIpped ON to other pages at random, with the following results:
'No. Make it a fine L'Eau', Ford said.
'M. Like Eau or mousseline, the waiter con-
firmed.'
SO PARTRIDGE HAS a point. But "A Moveable Feast" is a collection of sketches about Hemmingway's life as a young man in Paris in the 20s. An Anglican bishop is sent to about life in Paris in the 20s without being eau-die. Perhaps it was an unfair test.
I especially like that one because Hemingway gets three drinks into one paragraph while poor old Maddox Ford is only getting one out of it.
I looked for my copy of "The Sun Also Rises" but couldn't find it. Anyway, though I hadn't read the book since high school, I recollected that Jake Barnes and his buddies did enough boozing to last most authors a lifetime.
he was in an Italian hospital much of the time with a nurse whose name I could remember only as Helen Hayes. I don't know about Italian hospitals, but it isn't easy to get a snort of anything drinkable in an American hospital.
I did find a copy of "A Farewell to Arms." like Jack Barnes. Henry was also associated with the book.
BY PURE CHANCE I opened the book to see 98 and intruded on this dialogue:
Out of context, that isn't fair to anyone. It's the end of a truly poignant scene. But I wouldn't be decided not to have another drink. In the masterpieces, when Hemingway could resist the temptation to put another drink on a page, he kept us all intoxicated, but never
"You are sure you don't want more?"
"Yes."
"Should we drink some more? Then I must dress."
"Have we finished the champagne?" "Almost."
"Perhaps we'd better not now."
longer believe anything that comes out of the White House. There has been too much of that trend already. The Mideast crisis, for instance, may have been real enough to have landed us in a nuclear war. But how many people believed there was any Mideast crisis at all?
unflattering characterizations of important people, and some ambiguous implications of Presidential involvement in the Watergate cover-up?
What would be the result? Assuming he could make us believe the tapes were authentic, he would have exonerated the least enough to avoid impeachment.
I'm not saying that the President will try to pull such a rabbit out of the hat. I'm saying that it is dangerous to preclude the possibility. The main reason I bring it up at all is that to say publicly that it could may serve to keep it from happening.
The real effect of this latest bombshell, however, goes beyond such Machiavellian tactics as the attack on a base.
EACH NEW INSULT to the public intelligence will make it harder for us to believe anything the President is saying, and our survival may depend on taking him seriously.
President Nixon, then no longer just an incipient tyrant, fluster of the Constitution and criminal suspect. He is a clear and present danger to our very security. I believe he will be killed in our not believing him, then we could cure it by believing him. It's not that easy.
though. By misleading us so often when it has suited his purposes, he has made it impossible for us to believe him, even when it would suit ours.
There is a way out, and its prelude has been uttered by Richard Nixon himself.
"I shall not attempt to minimize the impact of the profound shocks we experienced in this fateful year . . . , this is not time for taking refuge in comforting self-delusions. America is in more trouble, in more places, than ever in its history.
He said that as a candidate for the presidency, on July 6, 1968.
"Now is the time, I firmly believe, for facing the truth, for seeing it clearly and clearly."
But wouldn't it make a lovely beginning for a resignation speech?
Superpowers & the Mideast
Only Theology of Detente Is New
By GEORGE F. WILL
Special to the Washington Post
Washington—Like the synoptic gospels, the different versions of the current detente outlined by Messrs. Nixon and Kissinger at conferences involve significant incongruities.
Of course there are devoted exegetes laboring to demonstrate that the incongruities really are nothing of the sort. But too often theology, sacred or political, is the art of presenting logical difficulties as spiritual subtleties.
President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agree that the Mideast crisis demonstrates the superiority of detente to cold war. During the Cold War the two super powers periodically went to war, with America losing political differences, and their allies lacked the rapport that comes from personal diplomacy at the highest levels.
There was summity, but not today's support. There were wars that involved the two nations' allies and threatened to involve the United States in a threat of military force supplemented superpower diplomacy. Indeed Nixon and Kissinger agree that the distinctive and intolerable feature of the Cold War was that neither country would threaten the threat of military force by nuclear powers.
SO MUCH FOR THE AREA of agreement between Messrs. Nixon and Kissinger.
Nixon said he proved his emotional stability by keeping cool in a crisis as serious as the Mideast crisis. He said it took special savoir faire to cope with this especially nasty crisis that proved the reality of detente.
Kissinger, while desperately maneuvering recently to keep Soviet troops out of the war zone, minimized the importance of the entire crisis. Twice he said: "We do not consider ourselves in a confrontation with the Soviet Union."
Kissinger, having gone out of his way to deny that we were ever in "a missile-crisis-type situation," bristled at the suggestion that the extraordinary military alert was prompted by domestic considerations. Kissinger was arguing that detente would not cause a crisis, and that only a percious person could doubt the seriousness of the crisis.
NIXON DEScribed THE RESOLUTION of the crisis as the “result” of the several exchanges’ between himself and several of his messages was “rather rough” and, like Breznev’s, “very firm,” leaving would be threatened. Threatened news we would not see.
Nixon added: "And it is because he and I know each other and each of us are because we have been friends."
changed in that way result in a settlement rather than a confrontation."
but later he said this of Brezhnev: "What he also knows is that the President of the United States must be merciful assault, at the time of Cambodia at the time of May 8 when I ordered the bombing and mining of North Vietnam, at last. He had gone ahead and did what he thought was right."
"That," said Mr. Nixon, "is what made Mr. Breznev act as he did."
EXACTLY AS IN APRIL, 1970, and May and December, 1972, this month's crisis was resolved by the credible invocation of U.S. military force on behalf of our ally.
How did this exercise in detente differ from a Cold War event?
Today the ideological and political differences remain. The leaders meet at the summit. The wars continue, started by the supplied and incited by the Soviet Union.
Both nations are deeply involved. Rough notes are exchanged. the military force, applied and threatened, causes one side or the other to yield.
The events of the Mideast crisis fit a familiar pattern. Only the dangerously obscutating theology of detente is new. The United States, as others, the Soviet Union is atheistic.
(The writer is Washington editor of National Review.)
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Geriatric Presidents
Bv DOM BONAFEDE
A check with the history books, however, indicates that the age barrier may not be as insurmountable for Ford as implied in the article.
WASHINGTON — In an otherwise thoughtful and sensitive piece on Vice President-Designate Gerald R. Ford in the Washington Post Oct. 13, it was reported that "Ford will be 63 in 1976, almost certainly beyond the age of presidential hopes."
SEVERAL OFFICES passed the 60-year mark while still in office: to name only a few, George Washington, Thomas Jeferson and Richard D. Kinnon D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon.
Of the 37 men who have held the presidency, seven were at least 60 when inaugurated. These include some of our most respected presidents, among them John Adams (61), Andrew Jackson (61), Thomas Jefferson (60) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (62).
Significantly, of our first eight presidents, comprising a stretch of greatness never since equaled in American history, none was less than 57 when he assumed office. And that was in an era when 40 was considered old.
Indeed, there is little in political history to suggest that age is an obstacle to a candidate, except when he is obviously ill, disabled or senile.
Indeed, in the television era, it is still true that a political candidate is only as old as he looks. Unquestionably, Gerry Ford, the former University of Michigan football player who swims each morning in his pool, looks younger than his 60 years.
FURTHERMORE, MOST of the prospective Republican presidential candidates in 1976 are in the same age bracket. Carlyle Koehler of California, Rockefeller is 65, California Gov. Ronald Reagan is 62 and John B. Connally of Texas is 56. Few experts at this early date are
In all fairness, a case can be made against seriatic presidents.
William Henry Harrison, at 68 the nation's oldest president at the time of his inauguration, lived only 32 days after taking office. Harrison caught cold while he was in storm weather, his 8,578-foot inaugural address, taking about an hour and 45 minutes.
ZACHARY TAYLOR, who was 64 when he was sworn in as president, died one year later.
With science continually prolonging man's average life span, a person of 60 today is considerably "younger" and man has become more experienced of the same age or a more age.
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however, five other presidents who were at least 60 when inaugurated John Adams, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower), served out their complete terms.
Today, American society appears less obsessed with the illusion of age than it did a few years ago. The facts and follies of the past are still relevant today, but anyone over 30, dwarfed away with the
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Accordingly, the shallow mentality and confused morality of former White House aides, as brought out in the Watergate hearings, may well produce a clarion call in political quarters for older, more seasoned hands.
THE WATERGATE SCANAL, with the nec of iceophiles in their 20s and 30s, has convinced many that big league politics is too important to be left to downy-cheeked politicians. While their vigor, inquisitiveness and ideas are now commonplace, they are essential to modern politics, they are not enough in themselves. Just ask Eugene McCarthy.
Ford may not become a presidential candidate in 1976, but it is premature to suggest that he would preclude running because of his age. If he decides to run and is elected, he would be 63 on Inauguration Day 17-06, about the same age as James Madison when he signed the War of 1812. Fords son, Thomas Truman when he instituted the "Truman Doctrine" and as Eisenhower when he brought the Korean War to an end.
(The writer is White House correspondent or National Journal.)
Love Chooses Political Mileage
Bv MIKE CAUSEY
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—When he took over as the White House's energy czar, former Colorado Governor John Love, already something of an expert in the field, got a crash course in the fuel shortages facing the nation.
Of major concern to Love's office is the fact that prime gasoline guzzlers are new American car models that get fewer miles per gallon and adds additional horsepower and weight.
After reading government statistics that listed the worst offenders in gasoline consumption, one of Love's new staffers said they would get national exposure and maybe flash some handwriting-on-the-wall to U.S. carmakers. The suggestion: That Love buy, drive and praise the merits of a Toyota. The Japanese-made car is rated near the top in
The idea was kicked around at top staff levels, but not for very long.
It was decided that Love, a practical politician, would be unwive to buy any car other than an American one, what with the balance of payments problem and the political clout of American car manufacturers. It was further pointed out that a man who is supposed to love Love ever seek a higher position at the White House or anywhere else.
The governor, however, is doing the next best thing. He doesn't keep a car here in Washington, using instead government transportation reserved for VIPs. His own private car in Colorado is a four-square, four-door American model.