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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (July 16, 1973)
---Outrider Praying in the bomber's house By GARRY WILLS Congress moved not only tardily but in a cowardly way to end the illegal bombing of Cambodia. It bargained lives away, as the President wheedled from it another face saving kill count or two, a few extra weeks of frenetic aimless air raids. Nixon has his monument to complete with corpses—it was too much to make him “cold turkey” it as he came off his killing streak. Congress gave him Cambodia to ravage for another five weeks or so, a last presidential fling at destruction and death. No one seems to care that our bombers have flown maximum missions daily all this summer, and that people are dying. They are not Americans. They are not even white. This last spasm has to be in dulged, more as a concession to the President than for any tactical purpose. No one cares? That is not quite true. In the patriotic days around the Fourth, certain people came and fasted near the White House. Then, during a White House tour, four nuns knelt and invited others to pray with them for those dying, in Cam bodia. How dare they pray in the White House. Who do they think they are—Billy Graham? You have to be invited to pray in the White House, and your prayer had better be flattering to the President. God is another excuse for self-gratulation around there. The nuns were arrested. But then a priest and three Catholic Worker laymen did the same thing. And then another group. The shame of the war, dragged on, still brings protesters to our jails, the one redeeming feature of our time. When the priest and his friends began the “Our Father,” children on the tour chimed in, not knowing it was against the law to pray in this national shrine. The children were not arrested. Perhaps it was granted that they did not understand the words they were saying. They were presumed to be innocent of the Lord’s Prayer. It is ironic that some of this renewed religious protest to the bombing may have grown out of recent trials of activists in Washington. The more the government punishes, the more people feel obliged to stand up against its official illegalities. At one trial, involving two people who poured out phials of their own blood in the White House, the prosecution showed charts of the tour route followed, and some people in the audience drew maps for their use in the “prayer raids.” Those two who poured blood said they were just making visible a blood that already stained that house. The stain is still there, and those praying and fasting for its removal are the best friends this country has in its day of shame and in famy. <C) 1973, Universal Press Syndicate -On the right Is It all over? Bv WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. A shrewd observer in these parts says about Watergate that it is all over. I am not committed to his conclusion, but I find it interesting. Surely the salient datum, tending to corroborate it, is the Gallup Poll. It is quite startling on the subject, reaching to a decisiveness seldom seen in the polls. It says simply this: Nixon is guilty, and should not be removed. Seventy one per cent of the people believe that Nixon knew about Watergate and the cover-up. But only 18 per cent believe that the condign punishment is removal from office. Assuming that the figures stand at more or less that level, it wouldn’t make any difference if Mr. Nixon appeared on television and said that he had just come out of a bout of paramnesia that had so disordered his memory on all matters that pertained to Watergate, that come to think of it he had commissioned the bugging, and decommissioned the investigation. It wouldn’t appear to matter, according to Gallup, except that conceivably the public would be all the more pro-Nixon in gratitude for his confirming their intuition that he was guilty. It wouldn’t matter, according to Gallup, if the Senate Committee uniformly con cluded that Nixon was guilty. Granted, the House of Representatives would have the power to hand down a bill of impeachment, which the Senate would be required to try. But the people’s spokesmen are unlikely to proceed athwart the wishes of a people so resolutely aligned against impeachment. The people seem to be saying what I have contended for several months, namely that the impeachment clause of the Con stitution is to be used nowadays only in order to remove a President, not to-punish him: because to punish him, in most circumstances, is to punish the republic at large, and the republic at large is not guilty of Watergate. Could it be that the dilemma is in some way responsible for a certain listlessness that has overtaken the Committee? Is it the imagination that sees an overlay of tedium coming down on the proceedings? It isnlt seriously suggested that the Senators’ interest in legislative reform justifies all that commotion. All that commotion is justified only by the people’s curiosity on the question: will Nixon be brought down? If it is pre-established that he will not, for the simple reason that the public doesn’t want him to, then the whole of the Watergate investigation becomes something of a venture in supererogation, a vast enterprise in ordering and re ordering the footnotes to a drama already consumated. If one had to put it on a fever scale, I would say that by the end of the first day of John Dean’s testimony, the anti-Nixon fever chart reached, say, 85 out of a possible 100.lt had reached, say, 60 the day Nixon fired Haldeman and Ehrlichman, gave a television address affirming his innocence, which had the result of in creasing by 20 per cent the people who thought he was guilty. Jeb Magruder ran it up to 65, or 70. But by the time Dean was through, it had already begun to slide. And then the Committee, in another fit of insouciance, gave itself one of those prodigious holidays they give themselves every fortnight or so, and when ten whole days later John Mitchell was examined, the business seemed headed for a hopeless ambiguity. A single issue of the New York Times transcribed no less than five times (in five different stories) Mitchell’s high emotional moment of the day, when he said that Magruder’s testimony to the effect that he, Mitchell, had read the transcript from the first Watergate bugging, was “a palpable, damnable lie.” Well, it may very well have been a lie And it may very well have been a dam nable lie. But a palpable lie it most cer tainly was not, because there is no ap parent way of disproving what Magruder said, certainly no concrete way of doing so. What it was, then, was an impalpable, damnable lie. And there is so much im palpability going around that, at this rate, the factual intricacies of Watergate will disappear in the mist of history, like the French Affaire des Fuites, in 1956. That got so complicated, that people became resigned to the impossibility of un derstanding it and, not long after, the curiosity fell down, and died. <C) 1973, Washington Star Syndicate, Inc. Letters Why? Is there any reason why, when reporting the results of the recent men’s USLTA tournament in Eugene (Monday, July 9 Emerald), you choose to ignore the women’s finals? Elizabeth Downs Graduate Student Editor’s note: The USLTA did not give us any information of the fact that the women’s finals were happening that day and so our sports writer missed covering the event. It was an unfortunate oversight. Pope PEOhuman sez: PROman had to announce candidacy for the governorship of Oregon 1974 because we need the sooner the better, to have a PROman governor, the best possible. But a surrogate must take over. Let some young Oregonian say: “I will 100 per cent defensive of the interest of homo sapiens, PROman, and am running for Governor on that one-plank platform. This is the best possible for all good living things in our planet; and I am determined that we Oregonians embrace it and institute “the Earthwide Rule of Law” that men of law sometimes speak of. If I am elected Governor, my first executive order shall be: “No antiman life may live with the borders of our state of Oregon.” This be destined to produce a warless world, ar maments mfg. terminated at an annual saving earthwide of $200-1- billion annually in eliminated expenses.” Vote PROman in your own best possible self-interest. Union of church and state, outlawed by constitutions, is immoral because it is against law for one man to try to do two men’s jobs. Only lust for power ever causes it. The folk saying warns truly: “Jack of all trades & good at none.” As Pope PROman 1, I have my hands full. Montini (self-styled “Paul” 6) “reigns” over the Worldchurch part of Vatican City; PROman 1 leads the Earthchurch portion. Each of us 525 million baptized Vatican City Catholics is an adherent of one or the other or neither. Truly, PROman I, Pope fMYWE \mm, _ KYouY * \ ■ Evaythii Sex.frui.icnt ln& '«(■
