ASC bravura
The ASC is now going to investigate university student regulations to form a "comprehensive philosophy" of student rights and obligations.
It's a nice idea and shows that on occasion the ASC tries hard to do its job, but, in view of the ASC's recent history as a defender of students, it's unlikely to amount to much.
TWICE LAST semester on issues of importance to the student body the student government failed to support the students. Student government favored the sale of cigarettes on campus until it was discovered that the administration opposed it.
More important, the ASC supported the sale of tickets to basketball games, a move by the Athletic Department that met with such strong student opposition that the sale was canceled and the ticket money refunded.
Now the ASC is supporting student rights and is considering support of the Student Labor Organization's goals, things that we hope meet with more success than the ASC-supported ticket sale scheme did.
BUT WHAT has gotten into the council? Could it be a sign of approaching spring, when the birds flap their wings and fly north and the squirrels climb down from their trees?
Or it is a reminder that council elections are less than two months away? Or perhaps a temporary abberation, that, like yesterday's headache, will pass away after a couple of Anacin?
Whatever the reason for the ASC's interest in student rights, it's unlikely to achieve much, except perhaps some fine phraseology, such as is found in the parties' platforms year after year. The council lacks both courage and conviction to successfully defend KU students. It lacks the independence necessary to stand in the face of administration opposition. And it probably lacks the ability necessary to present reasonable alternatives to present procedures.
THIS IS not to say that the council will fail to accomplish anything. It will go as far as the administration wants it to go.
For example, it is likely that adult students living off-campus will be permitted to keep liquor in their residence. Administrators have admitted that the current regulation forbidding it is outdated, thus setting it up as a fair target for the ASC's heavy artillery.
But the ASC's present campaign is of some interest, anyway. How high will their student rights and castle get before it comes tumbling down?
Justin Beck
a kansan review—
Thomas legend forgets man
The character of Dylan Thomas has become, in the United States, a legend since his death, at 39, in a Greenwich Village hospital. The mists of this legend depict Thomas as a drunken bard, freely swinging his mad way across America in a very whirlwind of verse, and, at last, unable to keep his own feverish pace, gasping his dying breath in a sterile, white hospital bed.
The Life of Dylan Thomas, by Constantine FitzGibbon; Atlantic, Little, and Brown, publishers; 359 pages; $7.95.
Yet the legend forgets the man; and Thomas, the man, has been left behind. Constantine FitzGibbon, Thomas' long time friend and now, his biographer, has stemmed the misty tide and the real Thomas, the lonely, cruelly frustrated, Welsh Thomas, has been thrown up on the bright beach before us.
FitzGibbon's work is a Dylan Thomas chronology that traces the poet's history from his sickly childhood in Swansea and his aunt's farm at Fern Hill, through London's Bohemia in the 1930's, to his highly successful American tours and his early death in 1953. In his work FitzGibbon is as thoroughly conscientious of Thomas as Boswell was of Johnson. No small fact, no possible influence has been overlooked on
omitted, Yet FitzGibbon is constantly objective, and even his own vignettes about Thomas are carefully selected and correlated with the whole of the work.
The result reveals Thomas as a vibrant and dynamic person even in his most depressed moments—a person obsessed with the thought of death, but with a peculiar sense of death as life. Fitz-Gibbon points out that Dylan believed that he would die young and he therefore lived a life that was more constantly intense and more turbulently dynamic in all aspects than the life of his compatriots.
Thomas lived his love affairs just as he did the rest of his life with fervid intensity. His first love was Pamela Hansford Johnson who at last refused to marry him. Thomas was despondent over his failure with Miss Johnson, but he soon met and married Caitlin MacNamara. Though he often was unfaithful to his wife their stormy marriage and her love for him persevered until his death, just as did his deep, but tormented love for her.
Thomas' overall passion, however, was his poetry. He was obsessed with it—it haunted his life; his own ego forced him to write. As a result, Thomas was exceedingly prolific. During his life he wrote thousands of poems
and short stories as well as 19 film scripts, yet he was uneducated beyond grammar school.
Constantine FitzGibbon is a well qualified biographer. As a novelist (Going to the River; When the Kissing Had to Stop) as well as an historian (Winter of the Bombs, 20 July) and an essayist (Random Thoughts of a Fascist Hyena) FitzGibbon has an easily lucid prose style that constantly proposes and conjects.
As Thomas' close friend and companion FitzGibbon appears well in tune with the Thomas that not many people knew or, apparently, cared to know. And in presenting the Thomas that he knew so well FitzGibbon presents the most valuable statement to date on the often misrepresented poet. FitzGibbon is well aware of the legend that surrounds Thomas; and, if he does not destroy that legend, he gives it a base in firmly undeniable fact. FitzGibbon's The Life of Dylan Thomas is a valuable addition to literature, both for itself in its brilliant presentation, and for its content in the character it represents.
—Allen Miller
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Remembering the Kennedys
Too personal, maybe. In 20 years all right, we'll be able to handle it without that sick feeling coming again, that sense of loss that we've had since November 22, 1963. All this apropos of a beautiful book of photographs by a man called Mark Shaw. Title—The John F. Kennedy's (Noonday, $1.95).
The family on the beach. The baby Caroline. The baby John. Pablo Casals and his cello. White House rooms. Picnic. A pony cart. The inauguration. The beautiful Mrs. Kennedy. The handsome young president who could have been a movie star, maybe.
A book to look at often, and,
just looking, not say much.
2
Daily Kansan Friday, February 25, 1966
Buchanan: a study of presidential failure
It's beginning again. Lyndon Johnson put on a remarkable display of presidential leadership in the first session of the 89th Congress, and now a few voices are beginning to mutter things that sound like "one-man rule," "highhanded." and even "dictatorship"—things we've heard before under presidents like F.D.R. and Harry Truman.
Strong presidents have always moved swiftly enough, in leading the United States, to leave a considerable number of citizens spinning a little dizzily in the backwash and none too happy with the feeling of vertigo.
Americans have become so accustomed, though, to having their presidents accused of autocratic pretensions (and to joining merrily in the accusations) that it is difficult to imagine what a genuinely weak, ineffectual president would be like. The suggestion, which comes along now and then, that there have been men who were complete flops in the White House piques one's curiosity.
Pick a time of national crisis, one of those times calculated to call forth a man who will live in the memories of Americans, a time when the country was on the brink of disintegration and the American people looked to the White House for leadership and wisdom (let's presume they did, at least, although they had had little reason to expect leadership from the White House for many years).
And there stands James Buchanan, one of the presidents whom historians almost unanimously adjudge a failure.
Few men have come to the presidency so well equipped by experience as he. Two years after he was admitted to the bar in 1812, he became a member of the lower house of the Pennsylvania legislature. Seven years later, he went to the House of Representatives of the United States Congress, where he served with some distinction for 10 years.
As U.S. minister to the court of St. Petersburg for a year in the early 1830s, he negotiated an important commercial treaty. He came home to serve a little more than 10 years in the Senate as an ardent Jacksonian Democrat, and then became secretary of state for President Polk.
President Pierce appointed Buchanan minister to Great Britain in 1853—a post which kept him conveniently out of the heated dispute over the Kansas-Nebraska Act debate, and therefore made him a "neutral" candidate for the Democratic party's presidential nomination, which he won in 1856.
It was, perhaps, his political ambition which had led him away from an early opposition to slavery to his later accommodations to the Southern view. He opposed the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, which would have prohibited slavery in the territories of California and New Mexico, won in the Mexican War. He supported the Compromise of 1850 which, though bringing temporary peace in the struggle between North and South, contained the Fugitive Slave Law provisions so bitterly hated in the North and the enforcement of which was so avidly insisted upon by the South as a condition for preserving the Union.
Had Buchanan had the strength of purpose and the courage to face the crises of his time, he might have become one of the great presidents of our history.
But Buchanan's greatest mistakes were those he made as president. In his inaugural address he expressed his hope that the forthcoming decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case would forever solve the problem of slavery. His naivete in this is almost unbelievable, for he knew what the decision was to be; that Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because Negroes could not be citizens of the United States, and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, with its limitations upon the spread of slavery in the territories, was unconstitutional.
His lack of insight was similarly and woefully lacking throughout his administration. He thought that each new crisis, once settled, would solve the problem once and for all. Most remarkably, he thought the best way to preserve the Union was to prevent Northern agitation and enforce the fugitive slave law.
His lack of judgment was perhaps most clearly shown in the conflict over the constitution for the proposed state of Kansas. Against the ten-to-one wishes of the settlers, and even the advice of the Southern governor and secretary he had appointed for the territory, Buchanan fought for the proslavery Lecompton constitution.
It was not until the end of his administration that President Buchanan displayed any of the courage and leadership we have come to expect of our president today.
Lincoln already had been elected. The Southern states were one by one, voting to secede from the Union. The Southern members of the cabinet, who had for so long dominated Buchanan, had resigned and left Washington. The United States were rushing headlong into disunity and civil war.
The South had little to fear from Buchanan, for he had made known his belief that although it was unlawful for the Southern states to secede, the federal government had no authority to prevent them from doing so by force. Perhaps if they made good their independence before Lincoln took office, the Confederate states of America would stand secure in their independence.
For once—but far too late—Buchanan spoke as a president of the United States: "This I cannot do; this I will not do."
But the lines of Civil War had been drawn. Opportunity for saving the Union had passed. In little more than a month after Buchanan left the White House, Confederate guns were firing on Fort Sumter. Walt Blackledge