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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 7, 1964
The Man in the Wings
With all eyes focused on the senator from Arizona for the GOP nomination it looks as though Gov. Scranton is running an uphill race. This may be true, but there is one candidate who is not running but instead is waiting in the wings for the call to battle.
Who else but Richard M. Nixon would wait for such a call, and surprisingly enough, who else has a chance to score in this game of political Russian roulette?
HE WRITES articles in the Saturday Evening Post cutting down President Johnson's attitudes toward TV debates. He slams Bobby and the rest of the clan but still he does not campaign. He writes as a loser, not as a contender for the GOP nomination. He still seems to be licking the wounds inflicted in 1960 and 1962. It does little for him in 1964.
Nixon is obviously disappointed in the lack of support he has received so far for the nomination, but he is not finished. Not yet. He will sit in at the convention in San Francisco and wait for the delegates either to take the bull by the horns and nominate Goldwater or make a line drive for Scranton. Nixon hopes neither is the case. It is his
hope that the convention will become deadlocked and that he will be the only one left to carry the banner. He is what could be called a "stand-by candidate," or maybe the "candidate in a pinch."
IT SEEMS that Nixon, always the poor loser, is ready to take another stab at the presidency. He does not come on strong as a candidate but does come on as an anti-man. He is against everything and for nothing.
He blames (in one Saturday Evening Post article) many things for his defeat in 1960: makeup, poor health, and the most telling thing of all, the famous TV debates. He would never consider the fact that John F. Kennedy was what the people wanted. He, again, accuses and explains away his defeat with a line as old as the hills. He was "robbed" of the presidency because (he says) Kennedy used too many professional tricks. What did he expect, the Original Amateur Hour?
It now seems that the Republicans cannot win in the fall, anyway, yet Nixon still contends that he is the man for the job. If losing is the job then Nixon certainly is the man for it.
Linda Ellis
Commentators Ought to Treat Him Fairly Even Though Goldwater Is Not Their Man
By John S. Knight (In Detroit Free Press)
To avoid any misunderstanding of what I am about to say, let me declare that Barry Goldwater is not my candidate and I have done nothing to promote his Presidential aspirations.
But I do think the Arizona senator is getting shabby treatment from most of the news media.
Day after day, there are loud lamentations from the newspaper columnists to the effect that a Gold-water nomination will destroy the Republican party.
Their deep concern for the GOP's future would be more persuasive if any considerable number of them had ever voted for a Republican nominee, or perhaps, ever voted at all.
IN LIFE'S current issue, Walter Lippmann opines that, "There is only one man who at this 11th hour can save the Republican party from what may be an irreparable disaster, and that man is Gen. Eisenhower."
Poor old Ike. He has sought to stay above what Lippmann calls "the sordid and sweaty battle of the politicians." But they never let him alone, and try to use the Eisenhower prestige for their own selfish ends.
LAST SUMMER, Walter Lippmann said on "CBS Reports" that Barry Goldwater was the logical Republican Presidential candidate for 1964 if the Republicans really wanted to test the issues and give the voters a real choice.
It was not long before Lippmann had a change of heart and declared Goldwater to be a "radical reactionary." He said Goldwater's views "are a vast confusion and a recipe for panic . . . the Republican party would be a shambles after a Gold-water nomination."
LIPPMANN NOW declares that the Goldwater "adventurers" want "to seize and use the old historic name and the political assets of the Republican party . . . to take over and make over the party."
This is an idle charge since Goldwater's Republican colleagues in the Senate selected him as chairman of their campaign committee for five years. In 1960, Goldwater made 200 speeches for the Nixon-Lodge ticket.
Raymond Moley reminds us that when Goldwater resigned from this post last year, his fellow Republican senators gave him a glowing resolution of appreciation.
THE RECORD would indicate that Barry Goldwater is less of an "adventurer" than the gutless wonders who were willing to let Nelson Rockefeller take him on single-handed while they stood by hoping to pick up the marbles.
Of the syndicated columnists, I can think of only a few who are not savagely cutting down Sen. Goldwater day after day.
Some of the television commentators discuss Goldwater with evident disdain and contempt. Editorial cartoonists portray him as belonging to the Neanderthal age, or as a relic of the 19th Century.
IT IS THE FASHION of editorial writers to persuade themselves that Goldwater's followers are either "kooks" or Birchers.
This simply is not so. The Goldwater movement represents a mass protest by conservatively minded people against foreign aid, excessive welfare, high taxes, foreign policy and the concentration of power in the federal government.
These people are, as Don Shoemaker of the Miami Herald has said, those many Americans who are "weary with the present, fearsome of the future and enamored of the past."
THEY ARE ALSO those Americans who yearn for solutions to what are actually insoluble problems. They are those Americans who tend to over-simplify issues and demand an end to our ever recurring crises.
Senator Goldwater's adherents may fail to understand the nature of world change and the significance of our social revolution at home.
AND SO IT IS with Goldwater. His vote against the civil bills bill and his public attitudes on TVA, the United Nations, relations with Russia and the war in South Viet Nam may give us pause but he has the right to be heard on these questions.
Yet their love of country and patriotism cannot be impugnified. If they are mistaken in their concepts of modern times and like not what they see, this is their undeniable right.
As Columnist Robert G. Spivack has said: "Whether or not Gold-water should be President, he is entitled, as spokesman for one segment of American political thought, to a fair hearing. Fair play is an inherent party of the American political tradition, and those who violate that tradition do so at their own peril."
THE SUPERIOR attitude displayed toward Goldwater by so many columnists and commentators is already resulting in a backlash of sympathy toward the man from Arizona.
When these "opinion makers" refer disfaintly to "the kind of people" who were for Goldwater in California, they insult the intelligence of more than a million voters who said with their ballots that they didn't want Gov. Rockefeller as the Republican candidate.
The pundits who are presently proclaiming that a Goldwater nomination will hopelessly divide the Republican Party should be fair enough to concede that precisely the same division will occur if he is not nominated.
And they couldn't care less.
He holds this advantage because he fought for it and won. The other candidates, excluding Rockefeller, meekly declined the issue.
THE FACT that Senator Goldwater enjoys such a long lead over his rivals in delegate strength would indicate that some people must like him.
Gov. William Scranton's challenge to Goldwater is to be welcomed. His belated bid for the nomination insures discussion of all issues prior to the convention. This can be informative and useful.
BUT I FAIL to understand why the hesitant gentleman from Harrisburg is suddenly the hero of the hour in most of the press, and Goldwater the party leper.
There was certainly nothing in Gov. Scranton's performance at the recent governors conference which would suggest that he is the strong, decisive character now being portrayed in the public prints.
Some editors are disturbed because Barry Goldwater is teeing off on the newspapers and other news media for failing to present the news of his candidacy fairly and objectively.
I can't say that I blame him
He hasn't had a fair shake.
'64 Graduates Are Change from Past
MEDFORD, Mass. — (UPI)— If Tufts University graduates are typical of the year's half-million college graduates, young men and women with their new sheepskins are a far cry from their parents.
They expect to make more money, are less religious and more impatient with the unsettled state of the world, according to a survey of Tufts' grads.
Summer Session
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BOOK REVIEWS
THE TIN DRUM, by Gunter Grass (Crest, 95 cents).
Wide critical praise has greeted this recent novel from Germany, and it was on the New York Times best seller list for three months. It is a big book, and one likely to shock many readers.
Gunter Grass tells herein the story of a child-monster who chooses to remain at the age of 3 forever, beating on his tin drum. The parallel Grass draws is with Nazi Germany's self-absorption and cruelty in the thirties and forties.
The book is not likely to be read on the level of straight literary entertainment, and it will not be to the taste of all readers. Critics point to it as a fantasy, a farce, a wild extravaganza. It will be absorbing to most, even those who find it ultimately distasteful.
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*****
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THE MOONFLOWER VINE, by Jetta Carleton (Crest, 75 cents).
There aren't many books like this in the sophisticated sixties. It is a simple story, even sentimental, a tale of a Missouri family whose members come from widespread parts of the country to be caught up in a life that is elementary and different from the hectic life of the cities.
The moonflower vine is the basis of a ritual for the Soames family, which hurries home on summer evenings to sit in the dusk and watch the flowers open. The novel has a pronounced feeling for human emotions—in the mood of novels of a quieter age, say the twenties or thirties—and will attract the kind of audience that has found appeal recently in "The Reivers" and "To Kill a Mockingbird."
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**
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THE DIXIE FRONTIER, by Everett Dick (Capricorn, $1.95).
Everett Dick has written extensively about the American frontier, and this book is a particularly important contribution, for it gives a picture of the southern frontier before the Civil War. It is well-documented, but it is not stuffily so, and should be of interest to many readers.
Dick offers a picture of the settlers themselves, where they came from, how they traveled to the frontier, their homes, their work, their play and their customs, their schools and churches, their relationships with the Negro and the Indian. The book is an excellent social history in an area that has needed treatment.
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***
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PROMETHEUS BOUND, by Aeschylus, translated by Paul Roche (Mentor Classics, 60 cents).
Here is a new translation of the great play, a translation already labeled by one critic as the best she has read. Production notes, background information on the period, and a commentary by Roche are included. Roche formerly taught at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and left there on a fellowship to translate Greek tragedy. The play deals with Prometheus, condemned to suffering because he stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. It is generally considered one of the greatest of classic tragedies.
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THE CRUSADES, by Henry Treece (Mentor, 75 cents).
This is a comparatively recent history of the Crusades, a book much more likely to be read by today's readers than the massive work by Harold Lamb. Henry Treece sets the stage for the great treks of the Middle Ages by describing life in the Mediterranean areas and in Europe, Constantinople and the Holy Land. He then describes the four Crusades from 1095 to 1204 and the Children's Crusade in 1212.
The latter episode is one of the best known stories in history, and one of the grimmest. Of the 30,000 children from France who went on the crusade, only one returned, the rest being auctioned off in Algiers or sold into slavery in Cairo. Only one-tenth of the 20,000 German children returned.
**
THE PIONEERS, by James Fenimore Cooper (Signet Classics, 60 cents).
In the Leatherstocking series this novel was written first but comes next to last chronologically. Its appearance early in the 1820s heralded the coming American novel, and it remains a significant book in our literary tradition.
Though Natty Bumppo is an old man in "The Pioneers," his forests are still full of deer and passenger pigeons still darken the sky (providing one of the most powerful descriptions in the novel). But the city is encroaching on Natty's beloved wilderness, and the old woodsman is about to move again. Cooper gave us both an entertaining story of adventure and a novel full of meaning in a country already yielding to industrial civilization.
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McTEAGUE, by Frank Norris (Signet Classics, 60 cents).
This is a dark, gloomy, sometimes brutal and always penetrating story of San Francisco. It also is a critical book in literary naturalism, the young writer Frank Norris offering a story of a dentist, trapped by his heredity and environment, his wife and the lust for gold that commands both of them.
"McTeague" became the classic silent film, "Greed." Its climactic scene in Death Valley has great power, and its pictures of grim urban life were shocking to readers 64 years ago. Though the novel is slightly dated it remains one that will prove absorbing to many readers.
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OUR EMERGING UNIVERSE, by Allan Broms (Dell Laurel, 50 cents).
This book is by a scientist who endeavors to explain to the layman (and it gets pretty complex at times) the story of the creation of the universe, and the solar system. Broms considers the story of Genesis and comes right down to a modern hypothesis known as "continuous creation."
He describes the evolution of the earth, from swirling gases to solid and liquid substances, and considers theories of the birth of the planets, the making of oceans and the movement of continents.