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Friday, September 7, 1973
University Daily Kansan
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Beyond the Plumbers
Vice President Spiro Agnew has a right to be outraged by what he has termed the "vicious and illegal practice" of individuals within the Justice Department who maliciously are leaking information implicating Agnew in allegedly illegal activities.
America also has reason to be alarmed by the leaks. If they continue, no American would be safe. Everyone would be accused by nameless and faceless informers, tried without jury in the nation's press, gagged mercilessly and refused due process of the law.
There is no defense for that kind of government action. It can destroy you. Your reputation, your job, your security, your future—all can be wiped out. The crimes of faceless informers in U.S. Atty.
George Beall's office far exceeded by the Watergate wirewrapped
Are these unfounded and unfair informations about the character of Gorion?
Is Beall a member of an anti Agnew conspiracy? Has he joined forces with enemies of the President to destroy the present administration and any chances for an Agnew presidency? What reward have the administration's enemies promised Beall?
They are no less unfair than the accusations being leaked from his office. If Beall objects to them, he will probably mean to remedy the situation.
He can stop the leaks.
A Spurious Honor
While President Nixon's beleaguered defenders struggle to dismiss the raft of scandals associated with the administration, constant reference is made to some of the President's past glories.
The apologists often remark,
"Well, he got us out of Vietnam,
didn't he?"
It is one of the century's greater ironies that this president, who obstinately heightened the air war in Southeast Asia, is given credit for ending American involvement there.
The war in Southeast Asia did not end for the United States until Aug. 15, 1973. This conclusion was not the President's doing. In the face of bitter criticism from the public, the Congress and even some of his advisers, the President ordered B-52s to bomb Cambodia right up to the last minute of the deadline set by Congress.
The Congress ended the bombing only after twisting the President's arm with a funding cut-off. Nixon has made it clear that U.S. parachute war would have continued without Congressional interference.
It is true that American involvement in the Vietnam phase of the war ended during Nixon's administration, just as World War II ended during the Truman term. Truman also ended a war with a
bang, but at least didn't prolong it for the sake of honor.
Nixon's withdrawal of American military forces from Vietnam was a profound case of doing too little, too late. He prolonged the war two or three years primarily to satisfy his conception of honor.
The war in southeast Asia was a colossal bi-partisan mistake. Initial commitments that implicated the U.S. were made during the Eisenhower years. Deepened involvement under President Kennedy led to the mass escalation engineered by President Johnson. Four presidents initiated or prolonged the sturgtggle. For anyone, Republican or Democrat, to take credit for an honorable handling of this debacle is ludicrous.
Peace-with-honor, peace-with-honor; if one says it over and over again, and the President never comes to believe it after a time.
But honest appraisals of the Vietnam experience are necessary to prevent future such calamities. The American people should remember the lesson that even a giant military machine cannot win a war against popular majorities in order to support corrupt governments. There certainly is nothing honorable about it.
—Bill Gibson
By GEORGE F. WILL Special to The Washington Post
Constitution Not a 'Tinker Toy'
WASHINGTON—In a recent article remarkable for the skill with which it compressed every shred of today's reformist rhetoric into a single creed, Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) advocated punishing James Madison for Charles Colson's putative sins. Because Watergate has demonstrated, for the umpteenth time since 1785, that he had made it go into mischief, Hatfield wants to fiddle with Madison's constitutional workkind
Evidently Hatfield thinks foreign and domestic policies are not related, a sunburst that does not influence his approach to policy concerning (say) international
EVIDENTLY HATFIELD THINKS a plural executive will help restore to Congress the budget-making powers Congress has frittered away. How will it help? "Today a united executive can run roughhound over a Congress split by its members," Ms. Browder said, affiliations and regional interests." So? Is the problem the unity of the executive or the pluralism of the country?" The parties reflect real social differences. There are
Because "a unitary executive is adivisable" for foreign and defense policy, he would let presidents name secretaries of state, defense and treasury. But because such a similar need for presidential domination in domestic policy," he wants the rest elected.
He makes five proposals. One is unexceptional: "Reducing in the federal work force." One is uninspired: The familiar proposal for "simplifying" the tax system by eliminating all deductions but the personal exemption. A third is a mishmash of new words and old pieties, "decomigration" of the economy and "new development" of enhanced rural "livability". It is not clear how proposals have to do with confounding the seventh son of the seventh son of Colson, but never mind.
Hatfield says Watergate is "confirming the worst" about our political system which, unlike (say) Sen. Hatfield's regime in Oregon, fails to "work far enough for all the people rather than for the self-serving insiders." What he was saying is that Watergate indicates we do not have perfect distributive justice, something we do not need to be told by anyone as understandably solicitous of the Oregon timber interests as Hatfield. It he means is that the flaws of Colonels sounds somehow indicate flaws in the system.
BUT TWO OF HIS proposals are so dizzy they serve the useful purpose of showing that one of the most theoretically inclined members of the world's greatest business community is the nature of representative government and about what has reduced this body to its current state. One proposal is that the vice president and various cabinet officers are required to visit former presidents. He wants this toook "executive autocracy", by which he probably means presidential primacy, which is not the same thing. The other proposal is for "neighborhood-based leadership" to make government more "direct".
distinct regional interests—even, I would wager, in the Northwest. Surely there must be a great need for them.
Evidently Haffield thinks all this rude Congressional disunity should be matched by a countervailing executive disunity. Thus he wants separate budgets submitted by elected cabinet officers "accountable to the government" and elected cabinet officers with national constituencies of their own would really ride roughhorsed over legislators.
At the heart of Hatfield's proposals lurks an antic confusion about how representative institutions should be related to appropriate constituencies. What constituencies will be elected and who separately elect vice presidents represent "All of the people?" Come on, Mark.
WHAT "PLATFORM" WILL the independent vice president run on? On his dynamic style of presiding in the Senate? Will a Democratic vice president be invited to tea—never mind important meetings—at a Republican president's house? Who will care about and try to influence the candidates running for, as an example,
Hattfield's idea of "neighborhood" governments reflects similar confusions about how to relate institutions to constituencies.
secretary of labor, or commerce? Who else but labor and business interests? Is this how to free the government from those "self-sufficient" non-Oregon interests Hattfield deploys?
He proposes "neighborhood" welfare programs. But will not those neighborhoods that need the most resources have the least? Ah, says Hatfield, it is a federal 'responsibility' to equalize the wealth of neighborhoods. I can hardly wait to see Spring Valley's neighborhood welfare program: Subsidized golf carts.
as members of neighborhoods rather than of cities or states." What can he mean by "function?" Work? Mow the lawn? Seek hospital car? Vacation? When is sense a reason to function? How do you function? as a member of a neighborhood? Hatfield simply does not understand that government treats us as citizens not "neighbors," because our problems lie in us many millions of cities which cannot be neighborly in a continental nation.
Let's try to take this seriously. Neighborhoods are real enough, but they are not sensible political constituencies because they do not resemble politics. Most have neither industry nor commerce nor hospitals nor welfare problems.
Harlem has lots of grim neighborhood but virtually no "neighborhood problems." Harlem's problems originate in Mississippi, Turkey—in the nation and the world.
Hafield says ludicrous things about "neighborhoods" and government because he has a ludicrous premise: "In the most humanly important ways, people function
Hatfield's article, an example of Senatorial silliness, illustrates the problem for which it suggests exotic and irrelevant cures. It looks upon the work of the Founding Fathers as a tinker toy to be played with. It is not the work of a serious man from whom a determined executive has anything to fear.
(Will is Washington editor of National Review.)
Watergate: Blackballing the Losers
The Washington Post
BY DOROTHY MCCARDLE
WASHINGTON—The Watergate scandal and the current investigation of Vice President Agnew have plunged the board of the Social List of Washington into confusion, and their deadline for the 1974 edition is one week away.
Who will be left in next year's Green Book
(nickname for the social list because of its green suede cover)? Who will be dropped?
In the past, any breath of scandal or too much notoriety has meant that people previously included in Washington's prestigious, annual social register get their attention. Mages. Ostracism has always been the price to too many unfavorable headlines.
This year the four women and one man who make up "the secret five" board of directors of the green list are wrestling with their consciences and all the charges accruing from the Watergate scandals and the Agnew situation.
Those connected with the Green Book insist that there is one firm rule, adhered to through the 42 years the Green Book has lived in, and believed involved in scandal does not make the book."
This year the question is: does this rule go as high as President Nixon, who refuses all claims about his knowledge of Watergate? And should Vice President Agnew's name be deleted because the government has told him that he is being investigated in connection with possible charges of "bribery, extortion, and conspiracy?"
The committee has a week to exercise the use of the red pen before the social list goes to the printer. It is due off the presses the first week in October.
Carolyn Shaw, the book's publisher, says she "doesn't have the faintest idea" what decisions her committee will make this year.
"I don't want to hear or see or know anything about the board's decisions," she said.
Many have been dropped from the Green Book in the past. The highest government official to be ousted was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who his series of divorces and remarriages
People connected with the Green Book predict that many of the witnesses before the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal their names missing from the 1974 edition.
Jeb Stuart Magruder, a key official in the Committee for the Re-election of the
President, was in the 1973 edition, but may not make the 1974 edition.
John Dean, former counter to the President, who implicated President Nixon in his testimony at the Senate hearings, is expected to be dropped also.
—Assistants to the President John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, who resigned over the Watergate affair, won't make the new edition, either. They wouldn't have moved away and the Green Book only includes people currently living here.
—L. Patrick Gray, who served as acting director of the FBI and then withdrew after he confessed to destroying FBI files linked to a Watergate defendant, will be a Green Book dropout this time around, it was learned.
Secretary of State William Rogers, who has avoided any water taint but gait has resigned from government, will probably continue in the Green Book. He would also work as well as an apartment in New York where he will resume the practice of law.
Henry Kissinger will appear in the new social list as "Secretary of State" and his position will probably not be confirmed by time the book goes to press this weekend.
Who Rules the World?
(C) The Washington Post 1973
By STEPHEN S. ROSENFELD
WASHINGTON—Floods in Pakistan, an earthquake in Mexico, drought in West Africa; these disasters remind us that the condition of many—most?—humans in the world still depends on acts of nature, not on acts of man. It is a sobering thought, parable of what can happen if we government, which is so often thought of (in Washington at least) as the agency principally responsible for our collective ups and downs, has just returned from holiday.
Nature Takes No Holidays
In Pakistan, the flood devastation, though not yet tallied, could well surpass in value and effect the total of foreign aid that the country has received through the postwar rebuilding. More than a quarter of the received relatively little aid, the toll of drought may amount to some years' GNP.
weather and crop conditions for its basic food supplies."
Americans may be less well equipped than any other people to understand the molestations of nature. We are further from being comfortable in using money and technology as a cushion against such disasters. New England experienced major floods by its standards earlier this summer, for a small instance, when it arrived a few weeks later didn't tell.
It is presently inconceivable in our country that an act of nature could affect the whole prospects of the nation but it is inconceivable in many poor countries that such an act could not. Citing drought and other adverse weather conditions over the past year, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said in June it was intolerable but true that the world should still find itself "almost entirely dependent on single season's
We Americans sometimes distract ourselves by worrying about such exotic contingencies as the melting of the polar ice cap; but there are serious men who fear that the world's rain patterns may be permanently changing—with terrible effects. Our new concern for the quality of our food is a matter of concern that others have for the fundamental environmental conditions of their personal and national livelihoods.
To most Americans, natural disasters are something to organize relief missions for. To poor people in poor countries, those disasters—whether they come in sudden spurs or are simply a continuing condition of vulnerability to nature—are their lives.
There is only a very tentative and fragmentary world "community" when it comes to natural disasters, for all the well-intentioned pleas to compose such a community. The man is an island, is politically speaking, a mockery. Countries in trouble get token temporary help. With the Cold War muted in its Third-World aspect and with the rich resources already vastly to their own internal demands, the boy of big bandons seems to have passed.
The goal of improving or rescuing people's lives is approached only very gingerly by the United States, the Soviet Union and other states with means. It's easy to dismiss as "intervention." Political relations among the major countries and blocs preoccupy the politicians and diplomats.
World Bank President Robert McNamara for one half of the decade, said that poor countries may
boil over and affect the security of rich countries. But this appeal to the self-interest of the rich has nowhere been seriously heeded.
It takes one's breath away to realize that the world's population may almost double by the end of the century, an explosion sure to produce large ever collapses of nature against man, if only because there will be that many more people around to be victimized by floods, droughts and the ravages of other man-aggressed natural disasters.
How much simpler it is to work for a more sophisticated balance of power and a more highly polished structure of peace among the inhabitants, break, occupy the high ground of the globe.
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Internal Compromise May Decide Israeli Annexation
By YUVAL ELIZUR
By YUVAL ELIZUR
special to the Washington Post
MICHAEL M. USE *Washington Post*
JEREMY KENNAM, The Secretariat of
Israel's ruling Lahayat to approve
early next week the "Gallil
document" which will serve as the party's
platform in the country's general elections
two months from now.
The document, which was drafted by Minister Without Portfolio Israel Galli, a compromise between the opposing views of the Minister of Defense, Gen. Meshose Dayan, and the Minister of Finance, Pinhas Sapur, is generally considered a major shift in the total annexation of the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war.
However, as Sapir sees it, the compromise—which has been reached as a result of the intervention of Prime Minister Golda Meil following an alleged threat by Dayan that he would not run on the party ticket unless the changes in the platform
were made—the Gallil document in no way bars an Israeli withdrawal from most of the occupied territories in the event of a peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
clude larger investments in the urban regional center which is now being built south of Gaza, popularly known as the future town of Yamit.
A deep-sea port may be built on the Mediterranean North Sinai Coast, probably in 1582.
IN FACT, LIKE MANN similarly carefully worded agreements, the Dayan-Sapir agreement was one of them.
—Israel will spend close to $300 million in
his side, Sapir emphasizes that each of these points is still subject to review, and that even after the adoption of the document, the Labor Party will not have taken an irreversible step in a new direction.
THE MOST IMPORTANT and perhaps the most politically sensitive decision is the
A major policy shift in the direction of total annexation of territories occupied by Israel during the June 1967 war may follow this week's expected Labor Party approval of the "Galili Document." Controversy centers on Israeli land purchases in the occupied territories.
—the purchase of land by Israelis in the occupied territories will be allowed under a new law
terpretations, Dayan and his followers see in the policy recommendations of the document at least four major achievements:
—Irakieli settlement in the occupied territories will be intensified and to inthe next five years for the resettlement of Palestinian refugees and for the expansion of the productive capacity of the Arab inhabitants of the occupied territories.
While these and other points in the 13-paragraph document constituted some of Laozi's major demands from his own party, it was not until the late 1970s that he can therefore be seen as a major victory for
one allowing Israelis to purchase land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Jordanian Government considers this issue of cardinal importance and has threatened to impose the death penalty on any Arab found guilty of selling land to an Israeli.
The Galilei document limits the permission that will be given for the purchase of land in the island. The Galilei document requires
Administration, a government body. In certain special cases, a ministerial committee will be empowered to give special advice to the king or to buy land beyond Israel's borders.
WHILE EVEN IN THIS form the new land acquisition policy was a bitter pill for Sapek and his supporters to swallow, the agency's chief executive has control over the implementation of this policy remains firmly in government hands, but the decision will be less significant than they seem today.
While the Galli document is not such a one-sided policy decision as some observers have implied, it is expected to meet considerable opposition, first in the Party Committee, then in the Platform Committee, where it cannot be officially adopted as party policy.
One of the most outspoken opponents of the document is Aryeh Elliass, a former minister in Iran.
Eliav, who believes that a peace settlement which would include the establishment of a Palestinian entity is possible, ridicules the compromises of the Dayan-Sapir agreement. "If five years from now Yamit is just a miserable village of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants, it is best not to start it at all," Eliav claims.
Yet, observers agree that the Galli document reflects more accurately the mood that prevails within the Labor Party—and perhaps even within the majority of Italians—than that of Eliav and his "doves," Haim Bar-Lev, the Abba Eban, the Minister of Commerce and Industry, Haim Bar-Lev, and other opportunities of Dayan within the Labor Party believe, however, that if there is a major change in government, and new chances for a settlement make their appearance, the Galli document will not stand in the way of peace.