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Monday, September 17, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commen
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Unleash the Dogs
Two crucial and related issues are arousing a great deal of interest on the hill this fall. One question, unfortunately, has little chance of being resolved, although everyone agrees that undue amounts of rhetoric and newsprint will be expended on the subject. The other problem, however, may be solved if the University Senate Executive Committee (SenEx) acts with justice and reason.
The first issue, of course, is the question, "What problem?" The second is the problem.
The latest incident in the dog controversy involved two pooches picking in front of Fraser Hall. Security and Parking rushed to the scene. The city dogcatcher was alerted and the protesters were hauled to the local pound and charged with disrupting a funeral.
The chancellor, anticipating the disturbance, had discussed the issue at a staff meeting before the incident. He passed the ball to SenEx for action at the committee's last meeting, according to SenEx's executive secretary, to make the matter happen and make the agenda. The committee talked about tenure instead.
The dogs, by the way, were hailed out by friends.
The law does not allow dogs to run at large on campus or to panchandle in buildings where food
is prepared or served. These points
arp, not in question.
The crucial issue is dogs in classrooms, which is also what the tenure question is all about.
One would expect that the majority of sentiment in SenEx favors throwing the dogs out. It would be a small price to pay if the tenure question could be resolved in similar bold fashion.
Why, just the other day, a faculty member addressed his entire lecture to a dog, which affirmed each point by wagging its tail and grunting in all the right places. Someone suggested the professor might have him sit on a dog bed so he couldn't support the thesis because the animal wasn't wearing blue jeans nor was it belly button showing.
But why penalize good classroom dogs for the transgressions of bad ones? The bad ones don't spend much time in classrooms anyway. Is education served by policy without values?
—Don Ashton
Red-Tape Safeguard
Has SenEx considered taking Buildings and Grounds to the pound for making too much noise? Regardless, whatever SenEx's opinion is on the dog issue, the rule has he wise in keeping its decision completely secret. There's enough howling going on already.
By MIKE CAUSEY The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—Now that the President has settled back from successful trips to Peking and Moscow, he ought to take a witch at an erasing the curtain of suspicion and ignorance that has grown up between the Eastern White House and Washington's federal triangle, on which wedge of land the career bureaucracy dwells.
Convinced that the government he inherited was a hotbed of Democrat wolves clothed as newborn GOP lamb, featherm merchants and fatheds who sat on their briefcases, key Nixon advisers began in 1969 to set up "little governments" within the White House to make sure that things got done the proper way.
While talking decentralization, the White House in fact grabbed more power, revamping the Office of Management and Budget into a giant overseer and decision-maker that took away even petrigers from key federal agencies.
One Watergate team player with a fair for the dramatic left of the office of a key White House aide convinced he had been ordered to liquidate an "enemy" of the administration. He was chased down and given a translation from the Madison Court, in order to assist his assignment, much to the later relief of the White House and the "enemy" in question.
AFTER THE BITTER PILL of the Waiter Hickel letter, which apparently was drafted by a young senior nurse at the White House Department bureaucrat, the White House decided to place key political operatives in each department to ensure that office officers who might be feeling their oats.
The result, as we have seen and read from the Watergate hearings, was an incredible number of super-smart corporation types who did stupid, sometimes very illegal, things, because they thought they knew who had ordered them. No right-thinking bureaucrat would have moved on such an assumption.
INSTEAD OF USING GIFTED amateurs and high-paid refugees from private industry as its Watergate operatives, the administration would have been wise to the churce to some agency of government. Then it wouldn't have happened.
It wouldn't have happened not because the bureaucracy is all that inefficient, but because various people who have protected their General Schedule rears for years would have demanded written authorization before they jimmied anybody's locks or
attempted to put Love Potion Number Nine
milk cocktail of some starry-
McGonagh cocktail.
The bureaucracy, for better or worse, wouldn't have played the game—whether you think it a high crime or routine dirty politics—that has brought this administration to the brink with Congress and the public.
All this is by way of leading into an important "white paper" recently put out by the bipartisan, business-financed National Civil Service League.
The league, with a board of directors composed of well-known past stars of Democratic and Republican regimes, wants the President to rely more on the "donothing" bureaucracy and less on men who are totally suspicious of it.
The league's executive director, Jean Courturier, thinks the President would have known about Watergate sooner if he had relied upon career federal employees for information about the case, political servants who apparently didn't want to tell the President unpleasant things.
"BUT THE SAD FACT is that the presidency and the career bureaucracy are now more closely related to their relationships with each other these past few years." Courtier said recently.
Courtier thought the Nixon administration had "had itself by accident" to the service.
"Certainly every president needs a political support staff. But he also needs a career civil service in the agencies to advise him, to protect him and to see that no one around him uses the Justice Department, the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service or any other public agency for partisan purposes.
Every recent president has surrounded himself with men "he could trust" only to discover later that, in their zeal to protect him or for fear of angering him, some of his former advisers were called in his name. Nixon may well be a victim of that sort of protection.
"The career civil service offers dedication, skill, loyalty, experience and, yes, even the ability to independently 'blow the whistle' on political hanky-panky. Every president needs this kind of support," said Courtier.
Had it been in charge of the Watergate and related matters, the career bureacracy, by its timid, plodding, self-survival nature, would have fallen on its face. That sort of prevention is worth a ton of later cures.
Will 1900s 'Belong to Chinese'?
By H. D. S. GREENWAY
HONG KONG—Associate Justice of the Supreme Court William O. Douglas came out of China recently after a three-week visit, saying the 21st century will probably
The Washington Post
The problem in the next century, Justice Douglas said in an interview with the Washington Post, is going to require much of the developing world is the migration of farmers from the land, fleeing poverty and starvation only to congregate in large urban areas.
China, despite its huge population and past history of endemic hunger, has made enormous strides in food distribution and public health. Douglas said. China has shown her ability more than any other country, to keep people well fed and healthy.
Douglas said that his visit was private and that he had not asked to see any high officials. He did meet with the vice president of China's Supreme Court, Tseng Han-chou, and he discussed legal proposals on state constitution with provincial officials.
HE SAID PROCEDURAL REFORMS were being debated in terms of the right to be confronted by an accuser, public trial and a suggestion of the right to counsel.
A draft version for a new state constitution, which was first written and circulated in 1970, is now under debate and discussion at all levels of dialogue in China. In this regard, the draft represents a legal reform contained a whole new conception (for China) of due process.
China resisted a codified legal system, and ideally, magistrates were supposed to decide cases on the basis of justice, rather than law, much in the way the Biblical King Solomon is alleged to have decided the case between two women who claimed the same baby.
of Western society is based on the Roman concept of rule of law. In China no such tradition exists. Magistrates were the traditional authorities, the Conquitans conceived of moral authority.
Although the Communists have made many changes since they came to power, courts in China still wield an authority that has been described as more parental than
DOUGLAS SAID THAT the people he talked to were not sure that the legal reform being discussed was really given, or given the impression that a decision was not likely this year.
As Justice Douglas described it, there's a tradition of "arbitration and mediation" where the courts try to reach a compromise. But many of the proceedings where two lawyers argue their case under a given set of rules. The courts play an inquisitory role, and, as Harvard professor Jerome A. Cohen has written, there is probably not a practicing lawyer in the job.
Chou En-lai told the Communist Party Congress, which concluded on Aug. 28, that a fourth National Peoples' Congress would take place soon. There has not been a National Peoples' Congress since 1964 and the promulgation of a new state constitution for China would in all probability be one of the first orders of business, according to the State Council. The disputes that might end in court in the West are, in China, handled by street committees. These organizations coordinate such wide ranging activities as health care, education and welfare and adherence to party doctrine. Douglas said that they could not exactly be compared to the other Communist parties, but they did give people a participation in their government which did not exist in any other socialist country that he'd seen.
Besides the law, one of Justice Douglas's great interests and concerns is conservation and ecology. In these areas, he said, the Chinese are also making progress—from a single oil pipeline to a smoke-filled atmosphere of some of the big industrial cities such as Shanghai, he said.
THE CHINESE ARE NOT abreast of the pollution problem yet, he said, but they are now much better. "The factory is better, for example, was equipped to take 85 per cent of particulate matter or fly ash out of the smoke. Some factories in America could do better, he said, but it is not."
The Chinese have been very impressed with Japan's pollution problems, Douglas said, and are making progress in the country in industrial wastes that go into rivers and bays.
Like most visitors to China, Douglas was surprised that thousands of new trees have been planted for the vast reforestation projects. Douglas was also impressed with the Yellow River irrigation projects that ran the muddy water off at a slow setting and would eventually flood thousands of acres of new rice paddies have been created this way, he said.
The Chinese have stopped using DDT except for spraying cotton, Douglas said, and the new insecticides are reportedly herbal and therefore biodegradable.
"There is lots of competence and planning in China," Douglas said. He did not think it likely that the Chinese would repeat the strategy Japan in the process of industrialization.
Although Douglas has applied for a visa every year since 1950, this was his first visit to China. He has advocated the recognition of the People's Republic as early as 1850, he held that place until 1962. Come the Then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an arch foe of the Communist regime, said it would be against America's interest if he were to go and "since I was on court I didn't want to do anything my government didn't want me to do," Douglas said.
"I CAN LUCK MY MAN IN THE PLACE!"
To the Editor:
Readers Respond
'Retrograde Morality'
The editorial by C.C. Caldwell in last Tuesday's Kansan, titled "One Shortage Abates," is a clear indication of the moral syphilis pervading American government.
The very administration that perpetrated the Watergate crimes is telling us to get on with things, + let others wail in vain. There were only two deaths had hoped, some are swallowing the line.
"The indecisive, long, cold summer of 73? Caldwell writes about was the beginning of a revelation. What we have here is an administration that ranted and rawd "law and order" in 1968 only to have its ranks found teeming with feelings in 1973; that preached peace in Indochina in 1968 only to have its Kansas combines run short
of fuel for the harvest while the giant B52 bombers flew in scores over Cambodia, burning up the fuel needed for bread in 1973; that symbolically left the White House in disarray against the barbarian blood bath in Vietnam in 1968 to assume a White House armchair view of the Redskins vs. the Dolphins on TV in 1973; and that continues to fight hunger and despair in American cities with higher costs of goods and exotic weapons developments.
Talking About Watergate
special to the Washington Post
Bv MALCOLM BOYD
Special to the Washington
For some time now, Americans have been in the process of refining their values to fracture and have been turned into tiny parts of the 35 per cent "for," the 47 per cent "against" or the 20 per cent "undecided" about single-sentence questions (keep them simple) that often become the basis for deciding the nation's fate.
it sometimes seems, particularly when listening to White House pronouncements, that those making the decisions have almost forgotten that behind the seas of statistics are people who do not think in "yesses" or "nos" or "maybes" or "could-bes," people who are far more troubled than the sum of the narts suggests.
This is the administration that telling Congress to get some work done (the 1973 Congress' record compares fairly favorably with the records of recent years) and the people of the country to forget about the Watergate mess.
It only takes talks about Watergate with people across the country in the summer of 1973 to bring this point home. They are not scientific, these conversations with America, but they do say something that the surveys and studies cannot.
"THE AMERICAN DREAM of possibility has just about run out." The speaker is a black graduate student from Alabama who is enrolled in a school of social work. Husky, in his 20s, he looks at me through his glasses.
"I'm trying to evaluate what is happening. I'm very much into school. I'm working hard. All I trying to do is get someone where I can have something."
"But I find myself asking: am I hustling for nothing? Confronting the situation as it is, and seeming to be caught up in it. The system is so corrupted and rotten. Who is honest? Who is telling the truth about anything? I can't see how there will be any way to man to be successful."
"It's like the prophetic talk about Jeremiah and Watergate last Friday night Jeremiah and Watergate last Friday night
Griff and the Unicorn
"I FEEL UNHOLY GLEE," she says, laughing. "I feel as if there has been an unvelting—not just an uncovering. The whole rotten mess is open to public view.
A woman lawyer in Los Angeles is of a different mind.
by Sokoloff
at the temple. I don't know who the prophets are right now. But somehow the drive and the forces are here to get our problems out of the underground. It's what the kids, the liberals, the blacks had tried to do for years, that needs to be a pulling together of forces."
But an artist employed in Hollywood scoffs at the idea of moral cleansing.
"The idea of a purge of cleansing is like witch burning," she says. "The zealots do burn that they don't understand and say that Americans could do no wrong. Now the new fellows playing the good guys are coming up, striving for power. They'll get smered
1. "I was in the Navy when Roosevelt died. Tears came to my eyes, more than when my father died. I am one of those real loyal Americans who loves his country. I've been a Democrat all my life. I voted Republican the first time for Nixon."
"I don't have a feeling of love for Nixon. He's too aloof or something. You can't get a kindly vibration toward him. This country needs a great leader now. A man whom we could say about, "This is our man." However, I remember during the Depression when Hover was wooed. I thought, You bastards! That's what the President!" He been proven guilty yet. Oh, I'm hurt. That people in government would do this to us and to themselves. Honesty has to be a basic life."
'My god, you get a claustrophobic feeling, Denseness. Heaviness. I'm tired. I'd like to run away and I can't. I can't find anything.
A RETIRED DENTIST describes himself as an oontist.
"When the star-spangled banner is played, I get a lump in my throat. But I don't see young people now feeling that way. I don't think they'd fight for the country if they had to. I don't see them fighting their neck for the country," she says.
*84%*
A BLACK TEACHER in a Midwest junior high school echoes this personal pain.
He drinks a gin and tonic as he talks.
"It's like an explosion inside of me," he says. "When I see people explaining away the whole system of justice that I grew up respecting, it says to me this could be the truth."
"I feel deep moral fatigue because of my inability to find small rays of hope. The system of violence seems to underlie everything. The crisis come and go with such force and rapidity that you can be a victim. You just wait around for the next one."
A white teacher of first grade children is atraid.
"Our society is so hollow in its moral resources," she says. "I'm fearful that we don't have the capacity to do what is needed. We operate on one another the way the Watergate conspirators acted on each other.
"I'm trying to find a purpose for my own activities. I want to do something useful. But the school system doesn't really want to deal with the child. The child is supposed to
accomodate the school. And so many older kids think they're protecting, but they have no values. The kids themselves have no control over the forces that are shaping them.
BILL, AN 18-YEAR-OLD suburban high school student, discusses hiss.
How does he manage in this situation?
"I remember watching TV, and McGovern was predicting everything that has happened under Nixon," he says. "You always hear that 20 years ago America was supposed to be so great. Now it seems like it's all kind of slipped and gone down the tube. Mostly I find that nobody is together with anybody else. It's live for yourself."
"it's kind of hard. Somebody whom you think might be a good friend tries to rip you off. In my school there is no communication. Everyone has their own little social group. Jocks, Hippies, Musicians, Smart students, Barriers are never broken."
Anger is a California farmer's feeling. He has seen his wife find himself in a fight with a working man, he says. "Ten million bucks for San Clemente and I can't afford to buy
He stands in denim shorts, stripped to the waist, in the front vard of his home.
"I voted for Nixon. But he is guilty. They told him what was going on. We have officials cheating the public. Once you break the law you should get out. We have no law and order left. This is the sort of thing that started Hitler."
An accountant describes a different kind of anger.
"I am angry at Watergate," she says. "I think it's turning the country into more of a war zone." But as the Communists taking over, I've feared communism for along time. Watergate leaves the country wide open for anything. We should stop it. Besides, Nixon didn't
She reflects for a moment.
A rabbi in New York reports a desperate yearning to believe on the part of people.
(To be continued)
A minister's wife: "I went to jail for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. I think I was doing something to let the problem be known. But that time has gone forever. Now I don't have any idea about what time has come or what I can do."
"People are saying 'Give me faith.' Yet along with this is a gawning awareness of how important it is to happen here' used to be our claim. Well, it has happened. Everybody used to say this was the greatest country in the world. Nobody can say that with a straight face
Malcolm Boyd, an Epiphanic priest, is the funniest of the running with Me, Jesus?" and "The Lover."
It was ironic to find in the same Kansas issue a front page story on the discovery of secret Laotian raids, another in a growing list of revelations of secret military operations that the Watergate administration will be remembered for.
To get on with things should mean to examine closely what has gone wrong, then you should try to correct it wrong in the future. It is too easy rhetorically to praise the system, fine a few flagrantly obvious burglaries and move on in order to perfectly clear way to peace with honor.*
Since we must swim in this cesspool, why let the mud settle? Let us shovel it out. And let us shovel the retrograde morality out of the Kansan editorial page.
To the Editor:
Darrel Wiens Inman Graduate Student
In a speech by Atty. Gen, Vern Miller at a recent fund-raiser in Topeka, Miller showed that he is doing precisely what he is condemning.
No Vote for Vern
"No public official or party should be allowed to build huge political campaign chests," Miller said. Yet he was willing to make these statements to more than 1,000 people who paid $80 a piece to attend. I see only a grave inconsistency here.
The attorney general also said that officials should "not use vast amounts of money to mold public opinion." Yet I can't forget that Miller is traversing the state by a new approach. He intentionally or not, is influencing public opinion and using public money to do it).
Another contradiction is found in Miller's statement, "inflation is caused by reckless spending at the national and state levels." Yet he did not cite the $700,000 spending incurred by Miller's Docker gubernatorial Instead, Miller lauded Docker for keeping taxes down.
Evidently, the attorney general means that 'reckless' spending causing inflation is not 'reckless' as long as taxes are not raised. To me, anything that causes inflation is reckless, regardless of the status of taxes!
My belated point is to remind voters to be extremely cautious of those candidates who have been put under the pressure mittening those same acts. This paradox shows a definite character flaw. Miller's statements show me that he is a walking man, who doesn't feel of inconsistent personality freights pea.
Vern Miller has not and will not warrant Vern who, no matter which office he decides
Michael Hitchcock Salina Senior
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