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Monday, November 5.1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Double Take
After last Monday's Kansan was published, I was confident—a bit smug—that I had developed a logical argument about the Watergate affair. I had spoken up for the right side—Nixon's side. But I'm convinced even five people have convinced five people to believe what I had written.
But then another editorial writer asked me. Do you really believe the truth?
I quickly replied, "Of course I do. I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't."
When she or anyone else confronts me, I always have good, quick answers. But are they answers or excuses and diversions?
In my mind, I tried rationally to prove that I should support President Nixon in the Watergate crisis. I started with my basic belief that the rights of the individual are supreme, but that some limitation of rights must be imposed on society so that solutions may be found when rights come into conflict.
I would have said if I hadn’t.
I gave the matter little thought
the rest of the day. But, later in the
week, her question haunted me.
Why did I write what I wrote? Why do
I believe what I do?
For example, I thought, if one man's right to free speech went so far as to slander another man, then government should intervene. If some necessary service couldn't be provided except by government action, then the government should provide it. But, above all else, the government should be restricted to functions such as these.
In the case of Richard Nixon, the press and public have wrongfully convicted him of crimes he couldn't possibly have committed. More than a third of the people believe he had advance knowledge of the Watergate burglary. Testimony has proved he didn't.
in the recent impeachment crisis, media-mongered rumors caused the nation to think Nixon had a chance to speak, but after
Walter Crankite did speak, a scant plurality thought Nixon should be impeached. After Nixon did speak, however, his majority thought he'd just be
But I tried to look at Watergate from another point of view, too. And, to my surprise, I could develop a logical anti-Nixon argument using the same basic beliefs.
Nixon, a man in whom the nation placed its trust, may have betrayed that trust. He has acted highly suspiciously. He tried to prevent the Watergate tapes from being released. Did he do it for the reason he told the public or because he was truying to hide something?
Whenever the good of the public is concerned, the rights of an individual wane. This could be the case with Richard Nixon.
No fainting, please. The Kansas's staff conservative hasn't followed George Romney into a moderate's oblivion. I don't subscribe to the anti-Nixon theory. But, thanks to the other writer's question, I now recognize its viability.
Why, then, do I believe as I do? Probably because I am an innate Republican, an incurably rural Kansan.
I shudder to think what I would have said if Robert Docking, Kansas' Democratic governor, had been involved in the Watergate scandal instead of Nixon. I, of course, was a diligent worker in the Morris Kay (remember him?) campaign last year.
But I still think Nixon should be given the benefit of the doubt. He has, after all, proved himself a great president in the foreign processes have been achieved after seemingly irresponsible acts.
Meanwhile, I'll keep plodding away editorially, retaliating each time an assault is made on a conservative Republican.
Eric Meyer
By PAGE SMITH
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Are We Willing to Kill the King?
America Frightened by Impeachment Possibility
In other words, the double-bind places a person in a situation which has no practical resolution: "You're damned if you do and dammed if you don't."
Gregory Bateson, the well-known anthro-
lography biologist, and, following in his footsteps R. D. Laing, the English
psychiatrist, formulated a fancy
psychological theory called the "double-bind." A classic case of the double-bind would involve the mother who asks her son for demonstrations of affection that would give him another crucial relation—his love, let us say, for a father or a sister.
This is precisely the problem with impeaching the President—a course now being more widely discussed than ever. After all, the president has a duty to enforce terms, tantamount to killing the king.
The colonists invariably referred to the king as their benign father and protector and directed all their verbal missives against Parliament and the royal ministers, never acknowledging that these bodies were not of their own will. Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, Washington, when he took command of the tatterdemonial Continental Army outside
THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY AGITATION demonstrated beyond dispute the anguish that any people feel in facing the prospect of "killing the king." From the very beginning of the revolutionary struggle in 1785 with the passage of the Stamp Act down to the appearance of "Common Sense" 11 years later, the American colonists refused steadfastly to recognize what was plain as the nose on the monarch, who made that the monarch was at the root of all their troubles—that he was the implacable enemy of what the colonists conceived to be their liberties.
The image we managed to impose on Washington we have tried to impose on his successors, and it has often been a trying task, because none of them have measured up to the original as men, let alone as demigods.
THE PRESIDENT of the United States has been required, since the days of George Washington, to be father-king as well as chief executive officer of a democratic republic. As father-king he is expected to be an immaculate figure, as close to a semi-identity as ostensibly democratic principles will allow.
We have, thus, never been able to regard George Washington as a real human being with human faults and frailties. Even in retrospect we regard him as a demipl
This brings us to what may come to be seen as one of the most serious flaws in the American political system: the fact that under the Constitution the principal power rests also on function as the king-father, however unsuited he may be for this latter role.
Americans are growing painfully aware of the advantages of the parliamentary system, especially in view of the prospect that now confronts the country; either impeachment or more than three years of a discredited administration.
it, and we are probably saddled, in turn,
with him. I suspect that, faced with the
king, killing the king" by impachment,
will waffle, equivocate and finally back off.
IN ENGLAND, FOR EXAMPLE, a prime minister and his government as deeply implicated in scandal as the Nixon administration would fall at once and be replaced by a new government. Indeed, this would have happened in any country where a prime minister or nominal head of state and a prime minister who functions as the chief executive officer.
Distasteful as the Watergate revelations and the special prosecutor's dismissal are, we seem unprepared for that venture into politics. That is why we must peachment-killing of the President must involve, especially at a time when the office of vice president is vacant. Like our ancestors, we are going to cling to the killer;erge III Nixon — as well as we can possibly
In resignation, he may find the only way to preserve the positive accomplishments of his administration in the eyes of the posterity that so concerns him.
President, we realize subconsciously and perhaps even consciously, is the symbolic killing of the king-father, which brings all order into question. Regicide—the killing of a man—as old as history, but it has always been the most traumatic experience man.
(Page Smith is a prize-winning author and historian with a special interest in the American Revolution. He lives in Santa Cruz, Calif.)
Threat Used in Mideast
In America, the occupant of the "most powerful office in the world" is trapped in
Listening to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's press conference after the alert began, I was struck by his repeated references to the potential of a nuclear weapon. Mr. Kissinger pleading tone in which he addressed the Kremlin leadership in hopes they would not lead the world to the brink as in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. In short, here was a clear reflection of the altered nuclear balance of power from one of American presidents to some of parity with the overtone of a later American infer讳, if we let it come to that.
BUT THERE ARE NOW some in Washington who profess to see what might be called the beginning of a new Soviet strategy, a strategy of compelling rather than defending it, the use of the implied threat of nuclear war to compel actions by the United States.
It may not be a bad guess to say that Moscow did not really intend, whatever its words to President Nixon, to intervene but only to use that threat, with the spector of the American response to compel American response. The essence of the American response Moscow wanted—
It has long been fashionable to say, and I have said it in print, that the two superpowers have become musclebound by the use of the gloves they neither dared to use the mass of such weapons it had created for fear of devastating retaliation. This is the essence of the doctrine of mutual destruction and the doctrine on which both nations basically rely.
In the first place, I believe we have had the first demonstration of the political fallout of the changed strategic nuclear threat between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Shift Seen in Nuclear Relations
Editor Bob Simpson
Business Manager Steven Liggett
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
WASHINGTON- It seems a reasonable deduction that the Soviet maneuvers that produced the recent American military strikes in Syria and Russia, the rescue of the Kremlin's Egyptian ally at a moment of peril and thus the preservation of the Russian position in the Mideast. But it seems to me that there are some highly visible signs of this likely to spring from these maneuvers.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
By CHALMERS M. ROBERTS Special to the Washington Post
The answer is obvious enough. One of the most profound of human needs is for a symbolic figure of great power and goodness—be he God, king, father or a combination of all three. It seems that we all, or the vast majority of us, yawn for such a figure. Moreover, the king, as the earthly representative of the power and authority that represents us, orders order in the world—social order, political order and moral order.
IT TOOK AN ENGLISHMAN—Thomas Paine—to "kill the king." "Common Sense" was, above all, a fierce and shocking attack on George III and the whole institution of England. And it is true that 1776, was so vivid and powerful that it not only "killed the king"—that is to say, freed the minds of the colonists from the hold that the image of the father-king had on them—it knocked the whole notion out of their heads. It was in this way that Thomas Paine, king in the Declaration of Independence,
and got—was the greatest U.S. pressure yet on Israel in its history.
Boston, continued to toast the king at every official meal.
Here we must stop and ask: "Why is the one of killing the father-king so desperate for his survival?"
THUS IT IS NO WONDER that
Americana flinch from the prospect of
a real job in the U.S.
More likely it gave a sense of assurance in the Kremlin that the risk was worth taking. The former foundation for such risk-taking, Mr. Obama, was also more willing to take the risk of an eventual nuclear confrontation, was the Soviet sense of the new strategic nuclear relationship between Russia and China.
IN HIS CONFERENCE, Kissinger made much of the opportunity for reaching a permanent settlement between Israel and the Arabs. He told the Israelis they now have achieved what they so long have sought—face-to-face talks with the Arabs.
At the moment, the outcome of all this
But it seems to me that is a more procedural gain (which, I believe, Israel should avoid any changes in boundaries) whereas the Arabs now have, in effect, the first firm American commitment from Washington to pressure Israel into pulling back toward, if not ultimately, the Israelis.
would seem to be that Israel will now come under intense pressure to come to terms with the Arabs over boundaries, if the Arabs are clever enough to go through the faces of those who live there. Do we do that? Does Washington, that the Arab oil squeeze on the United States adds to that pressure. It may take a cold winter here with attacks from Israel; or it may publicize to create the final pressure on Israel.
Doubtless IT WILL long be argued that the Soviet leaders were emboldened to this manure because they perceived it as a weapon against the United States. Kissinger doubtless was correct in saying "one cannot have crises of authority in a society for a period of months without paying a price somewhere along the way," but that was not the whole basis for Soviet action.
IT CAN BE ARGUED, of course, that in the end this will be all to the good, that Israel will get what it has so long wanted—that secure boundaries and a new relationship with its Arab neighbors. But it likely will be more painful for Israel than for the Arabs to reach that conclusion. Thus Israel must develop such a solution goes far beyond past rhetoric of the Nixon or any prior administration in that respect.
It is evident, too, that those in the United States who combine a deep suspicion of the Nixon-Kissinger effort to create detente between them and the United States will protect protective attitude toward Israel will work hard to prevent the outcome that now seems at least a possibility. But I suspect that, given the combination of Kissinger's stated determination and the domestic oil squeeze, they will be in the minority, however vocal, in recent weeks to back that judgment.
It may be that the Kremlin game plan, at least once its Egyptian client got into real military trouble, was to compel just such a result by its maneuver. It may be that the Egyptians sent troops in unilaterally. It may be, too, that the threat to do so, if what it really was, was designed to force the creation of the new United Nations force to keep a ceasefire until the political pressures work on Israel through the United States.
All this brings one back to the fundamental Soviet-American strategic nuclear relationship and how it has been changing. The SALT accords were an effort, at least on the American side, to create a stable relationship, but BALT II talks have been complicated while both nations continue to try for advantage where it can be had.
The Kremlin, it seems to me, has exploited the new nuclear relationship to its potential gain in the Mideast. As of now, it may say in the sports pages, a new ball game.
Gurney a Nixon Loyalist
From Page One
He said that the United States should "bomb the hell out of Haihpong."
He urged police to shoot rooftops and proposed criminal penalties for violators of passport regulations, this was aimed at radicals like Stokley Carmichael, who had addressed an international Communist rally in Cuba.
"FACED WITH two years in jail and a $10,000 fee, these pals of Communists would think twice before undertaking a coup against our own country," he said in a press release.
Gurure said that increased federal spending was the cause of the country's inflation and that President Johnson had sent the sucker with his (the sucker's) own money.
His opponent was former Florida Gov. Leroy Collins, whom Gurney called "Liberal Leroy" for his record in the statehouse and during the campaign.
Collins charged that Gurney had missed early nearly 41 per cent of the roll call votes in the 1967 session of the House and more than two-thirds of the meetings of the Committee on Education and Labor, of which Gurney was a member.
He campaigned through televised debates with Collins and through a heavy national campaign.
Gurney responded that he had been present at enough votes to accomplish his own objectives. He said he hadn't attended education committee meetings because they often had conflicted with sessions of his other committee, Space and Aeronautics.
In his financial report on the campaign,
Griff and the Unicorn
by Sokoloff
Gurney told reporters last summer that the committee should have access to any
"I WANT to see that the investigation is a nonpartisan as possible, but I certainly want to bring out every last piece of information he said in a news conference last spring.
More than 14 per cent of Floridians are at least 65 years old, and Gurney has supported increases in Social Security payments tied to inflation, widows' benefits, Social Security earning limits and medical expenses.
He asked to be appointed to the Senate Watergate committee.
Gurney improved his attendance record after entering the Senate in 1989, voting in 90 seats.
Gurure listed the sources of only $150,000 of the funds.
As the seventh Republican in seniority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was appointed as the acting chief of staff.
Gurney told reporters that he had won because of "a strong conservative trend in Florida and a big rejection of the Johnson-Humbrive administration."
"The rest," concluded the Ralph Nader Congress Project in 1972, "came from sources that loopholes in laws permitted him to withhold."
1
Veterans voted against Senate bills to ban use of military activities in Cambodia, to ban use of defoliant chemicals in South Vietnam and to force withdrawals all of U.S. forces.
'I want to see that the investigation is as nonpartisan as possible, but I certainly want to bring out every last piece of information.'
terviewed International Telephone and Telegraph lobbyist Dita Bard last year during the investigation of the Justice Department's handling of an antitrust suit. (AP)
"Gurury has seldom deviated from a absolute support of President Nixon on the issue," he said.
GURNEY BELIEVED Atty. Gen.
Richard Kleindienst was innocent of wrongdoing and joined a bipartisan group of senators to end the investigation.
"It was such a highly partisan investigation," Gurney said at the time. "Someone had to play the role of defending the President, and I did."
Gurney also is a member of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. He has consistently opposed committee efforts to promote independent consumer protection agency.
Gurney supported President Nixon on Congressional votes over the Anti-Ballistic Missile program, the C-5A military transport aircraft, and the American European spending and troop levels in Europe.
"I URGED years ago that Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia be destroyed," Currey said in 1971 in supporting President Nassar's action of sending troops into that country.
"He did not disappoint the White House" at the hearings, R. W. Appl. Jr. of the New York Times.
Demonstrators occupied Gurney's Senate office during the May Day protest in 1971.
document that was relevant to the Watergate investigation.
He has expressed a pro-farmland stand, possibly influenced by the large Jewish settlement.
Apple said Gurney "threw fat pitches at many of the witnesses" and openly jouted with the committee chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C.
SATURDAY NIGHT Gurrey proposed a six-point plan for a "domestic truce" between Nixon and his critics. Speaking before the crowd, the Builders Association, Gurrey suggested:
-independence for the new special Watergate prosecutor,
- availability of tapes of presidential conversations to the Witmergan Committee (800) 239-7560
- accesse to Watergate-related material by company "wholly trusted" by Nixon and Clinton
-immediate Congressional action on the nomination of Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Mich., to serve as president of the United States.
-a halt to all impachment proposals until all criminal investigations related to WWI end.
—a call to the American people to re-ceive with reservation the request for support of the squabble
Gurney has expressed optimism over his chances for re-election in 1974, but his campaign was not successful.
HE ACKNOWLEDGED Thursday that the Justice Department is investigating allegations that staff members established a secret fund to handle $300,000 in unreported contributions in 1971 and 1972. The contributions allegedly came from contractors seeking help with the Federal Housing Authority.