Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (July 3, 1973)
-Outrider— The right in service of the left By GARY WILLS There is a well-attested story that Teapot Dome had a great impact on the young Richard Nixon. Yet Teapot Dome was a small affair compared to Watergate, which will leave a deep mark, one way or another, on many Americans now growing up. It is strange to hear people say Watergate is getting too much attention. In future years, people will wonder how men could have been interested in anything else during this period. If no other defendant is tried, no charge given further con firmation, still this will go down in history, on the record of things already established, as the largest and highest reaching ideological conspiracy of our politics. The strange thing is that defenders of “the system” want to dismiss this ex traordinary chain of actions as the same old stuff, “just politics,” no different from what others have been doing all along. If that were true, it would constitute the worst possible assault on our country. It would confirm every charge made by the worst radical critics about the cynicism and repressiveness of our rulers. Indeed, that is just what is happening. The far Left, suspecting the FBI and CIA of plotting all kinds of domestic crimes, has come back to life. All the dirty work and political offenses of the last decade and more are being woven into a vast conspiracy of those in power. The assassinations of Wallace and the Ken nedys, the conviction of Hiss and the Rosenbergs—they are all called “business as usual” for a government whose everyday routine is breaking and entry. If the White House will frame President Kennedy, even posthumously, for the death of Diem, what would it not do to a living threat? I happen to believe the CIA and FBI were not behind any domestic assassinations, and that Hiss and the Rosenbergs were not framed. But it will be hard to make this sensible position hold if the kooky Right plays into the loopy Left’s hands, shrugging off Watergate as an acceptable part of political life. No, the only defense of “the system” is to recognize that this was a monstrous departure from it, that no White House administration before this was so secretive, paranoid, and vindictive. Unless Watergate is a huge exception, then our “normal” politics is beneath even minimal respect. That is why the defenders of Watergate are the enemies of political civility. (C) 1973, Universal Press Syndicate On the right Nixon impasse: A precedent 1 By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. The President’s veto of the bill depriving him of funds with which to continue the bombing of Cambodia is, on my reading, justified. It is the use, by a Commander-in Chief, of the powers at his disposal to permit him to execute his duties as he sees them. Specifically he believes that the Paris cease-fire, and then our entire in volvement in the Vietnam war, and finally our credibility as a peacemaker, are threatened. But critics of the Vietnam war are as anxious by any means to paralyze the Executive, as the Executive is to complete what he views as the American mission in Indochina. The rhetoric is, to say the least, escalating, and the New York Times London encephalophone is getting very nearly hysterical. “Unless events somehow dissipate the clash between the President and the Congressional majority, the talk of impeachment must now take a new and more immediate ground. For in the ultimate, if there is no other resolution, Congress is faced with an attempt at a Presidential coup d’etat. It must consider its own ultimate weapon.” These are grim and menacing words. One is tempted to discount them on the grounds that Anthony Lewis’ opposition to the use of force in Indochina is so total, he would no doubt himself vote for bombing the White House if necessary to stop it. But we do have, rolling in towards us, a Con stitutional crisis. Although the President’s veto was sustained in the House of Representatives, the Senate, completely dominated by doves, instantly reiterated its veto of funds for Cambodia as a rider on a general money bill necessary for the extension of government life. And it is left now for Nixon to maneuver. He could, according to one Con stitutional view of the matter, use funds appropriated for the military in another theater, to continue the bombing in Cambodia — on the grounds that as Commander-in-Chief he must assert the priorities. Reduced to battlefield proportions, you cannot have yourself a general and then instruct him to fire only against the enemy perched on the left flank, and not at all on the enemy perched to the right. You do not then have a general, you have a courier of sorts, and the Congress has become the Commander in-Chief. Critics of Nixon are saying, in effect, that the bombing of Cambodia is a military adventure de novo, not integrally related to the Vietnam war which was officially sanctioned by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, at least until its repeal. Nixon’s position is that in the first place that resolution was not necessary, but that the war having been launched, it remains to be completed; and in order to achieve its completion, the terms of the Paris accord must be enforced: and these can only be enforced by applying military pressures where necessary. A few weeks ago on television Senator Hubert Humphrey was ruminating about the collision course between Congress and Richard Nixon, and he said that it is a pity that there isn’t something that might be done short of impeachment and conviction of a President judged by the Congress to be unruly. He was asked whether a President had ever been censured. He replied no. A professor of history at California State University thereupon gently corrected him. Andrew Jackson was censured by the Senate in 1834. The circumstances of that censure — the exchange between Andrew Jackson, the defendant President, and Henry Clay, the chief prosecutor — are hauntingly relevant to today’s impasse. President Andrew Jackson believed that the Bank of the Tjnited States had evolved into a oowerful monopoly bent upon subverting he government. Accordingly he ordered Jnited States funds to be withdrawn from he Bank, in order to weaken it, and deposited elsewhere. His Secretary of the Treasury declined to follow the ’resident’s instructions. Whereupon Jackson fired him and named Roger Taney as Secretary. Taney proceeded to withdraw the funds. And the Senate then censured the President of the United States. <C) 1973 — Washington Star Syndicate, Inc. Letters McKenzie Disaster Those of you who are familiar with the McKenzie River valley are aware that it has been and remains one of the more beautiful areas in this state and probably in the nation. I grew up there. I played in the myriads of fields, hiked in the very near-by and yet remote foothills to the Cascades, swam in the tributary streams and just generally grew up with a feeling of security and mellowness about my homeland. I return to the area oc cassionally to memories of secret forts, long-removed friends, quiet dusty roads, and the peace of complete darkness at night. But it is not the same valley of earthy healthiness that I left behind for the city six years ago. Much has changed. The long row of mail boxes by the high way has doubled in length. The hillside next to the river where I used to live has been logged and stripped to the bare earth for the sake of yet one more housing development. On the way home from a swim in Gate Creek, near Vida, I picked up a hitch-hiker. “Where are you from,” I ask. “L A.” he says expecting me to turn green with envy. “How did you end up here?” I ask. “A friend was here last summer and told me about it.” Frustration. I am sympathetic to the need for all humans to have decent homes. I further sympathize with the state’s dependence on a timber oriented economy. I am even categorically sympathetic with the urban dweller’s impulse to flee the city. But looking at the stripped hillside, the sur veyor’s stakes for two more lanes, the real estate signs all makes me a little sick. It hurts to gaze on the Carmel Valley of the north sort of like William Buckley looking at before and after pictures of Nixon. They even had the gall to cut down my favorite climbing tree, a beautiful 100 foot cot tonwood. In its place—a FOR SALE sign. It seems that even the lowliest, slimiest, most thoroughly urbanized real estate dealer would have some tinge of ability to appreciate intrinsic aesthetic beauty. For me it is a painful realization to find that just about everything we have is for sale. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, “What has it all been for?” What is the use? We keep spreading out like a cancerous mass over an earth that has treated us far more favorably than we have treated it. Why do we sprawl irrationally when we deserve far better? Why do we continue to let the mother earth rapers buy, destroy and sell a life quality that all the prints in Washington can’t re-create? With us it always seems to be escape. Escape now from a reality that is far less hostile and bewildering than the reality we will be forced to face in the not too distant future. “I’m from L.A.”, he said and was stilll able to smile about it. I just look at the birds, feel the clean wind, smell the damp summery woods—while envisioning the parking lots of tomorrow and think to myself, “that’s too bad.” It is, isn’t it? Darrell Murray Senior, Political Science SHIS \NYXJ UKEUS7 nr—^ _ 'ANNOYED, I THINK, AT NOT MAKING THE PRESIDENT'S POLITICAL ENEMIES LIST!'
