Seventy-Sixth Year
EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
The Assassination: Old Doubts Don 't Die
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Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers
or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1967
NIGHT EDITOR: MICHAEL HEFFER
Reagan and the U. of Cal.:
From Skirmishes to Battle
LAST YEAR the California New Left
supported the election of Ronald Rea-
gan for governor over incumbent Pat
Brown. Brown was the "good liberal";
Reagan in many ways an unknown quan-
tity, but a good bet to come out swing-
ing reaction.
The bet was won, and Reagan's first
swing was at the "home of New Leftism,"
the mammoth University of California.
Reagan immediately proposed a budget
cut, and fired another "good liberal" by
the name of Clark Kerr who got in his
way.
Now, in light of radical opposition to
both Kerr and Brown, many are grum-
bling that the U. of California disaster
is a "victory for both the far right and
the far left."
They are correct. The far right has
flexed its muscles.
But the "victory" for the far left is a
little less obvious, and needs some ex-
plaining. The problem with "good liberals"
is that they obscure the issues. Whether
the election of Ronald Reagan is a "good
thing" or not, it has served at least one
very real purpose-it has placed the prob-
lems of the University of California in
easily'definable and tactile terms.
WHAT HAVE BERKELEY radicals been
demonstrating about for these past
years?
The university is run like a corporation.
Students are assembled as freshmen, are
processed through their classes and the
campus and come out the other end as
finished products. They have no signifi-
cant say in their lives on campus, in the
classes they take, in the type of institu-
tion in which they reside.
The University is a corporation. The
men who head the universities are also
the ones chiefly concerned with the cor-
porate aspects of the institutions. The
University of Michigan's monetary assets
are phenomenal-its property and build-
ing worth is in the hundred millions, it
supports a town of 70,000, its yearly budg-
et runs in the hundred millions. This is
a fact of life.
But the men who take care of the mon-
ey also take care of the education, and
the two just don't seem to mix. In the
past, financial considerations have come
well before student considerations on con-
troversial issues such HUAC, the draft,
and handling student demands. Where
accession to student needs means loss of
outside approval, university leaders seem
to count the potential donations first.
GOVERNMENTAL PRESSURES on the
university are huge. The University
of Michigan gets over $50 million in re-
search grants alone every year, while
also depending on Washington for var-
ious other forms of aid. The situation
at California is much the same.
With that in mind, is it surprising that
university heads find it difficult to op-
pose government policy on the draft or on
HUAC? Indeed, as branches of the state
government, universities find even the le-
gal grounds for opposing Washington
often tenuous.
The firing of Kerr has made the en-
tire situation all too obvious. Though this
is the most controversial and best-pub-
licized incident of this sort, it is merely
a reflection of the type of pressures that
are felt by a university president every
day.
That is why Kerr was known as a good
president. Caught in the fantastically dif-
ficult position of having to keep his uni-
versity going while being asked to make
it more than a corporation, he did well by
contemporary standards.
But things have simply gotten to the
point where the best that the situation
could offer is not good enough-the situ-
ation itself must be changed.
IT IS SAID that the Berkeley revolts from
1962 onward have been highly destruc-
tive. In absolute terms that is probably
so, but in the long run it seems fairly
obvious that to change a system one first
must recognize the real problems. The
Berkeley revolt started people talking
about the very nature of the university-
not merely about a few isolated flaws.
In the same way the long-run effect of
the firing of Clark Kerr may be that peo-
ple will finally realize just how bad,
things are-that a governor can, in fact,
have a university president fired. That a
university is, in fact, in many ways a
branch of the federal government. And
that our campuses have degenerated to
grey, corporate machines.
Clark Kerr was a good man, a good
president. But the job of president has
disserved the real interests of the univer-
sity. Reagan has made the war between
the university and the state a declared
one the office of the university presi-
dency must now change to fight it.
It will cost the university a fortune. It
may make them unlivable for at least a
few years. But our universities are not
now autonomous, and until society and
the state realize that a university without
autonomy is not worth the investment,
then their value as institutions must re-
main in serious question.
-HARVEY WASSERMAN
Editorial Director
By CAROLE KAPLAN
and LEMAR MORRISON
IN THE THIRD winter since the
assassination of President John
F. Kennedy, a swarm of unan-
swered questions surround his
death. The many mysterious and
unexplainable events regarding the
shooting, the glaring discrepancies
in evidence collected by "reliable"
investigative bodies, and the in-
adequacy of the Warren Commis-
sion report might make us wonder
-wonder about the attempts of
those concerned with the assassi-
nation to obscure the facts, about
the chain of evidence that brings
the official solution of the murder
into question.
From the beginning, Lee Har-
vey Oswald was tabbed by the
Warren Commission as the sole
assassin and plotter. A volumin-
ous amount of evidence was cited
to support this contention.
Admittedly, it is possible to dis-
count the testimony of any one
>erson if it does not jibe com-
pletely with the Warren report.
But all of the bits and pieces that
havearecently come to light cast
some doubt on the theory.
THERE IS no record of any of
the interrogations of Oswald that
took place during his two days
in prison. Immediately after the
assassination, when Oswald went
back to his rooming house, his
landlady claimed to have seen a
police car stop in front of the
house, honk, and move on When
police records were checked, the
only patrol car unaccounted for at
that time belonged to Officer Tip-
pet, the policeman who was shot
by Oswald a few hours later.
Both the cab driver and the
landlady have since died. Oswald
himself was killed two days after
the assassination by Jack Ruby,
the owner of the Carousel Club,
a dingyrstripteasenightclub. A
Dallas lawyer, in fact, said he saw
Oswald talking to Ruby at the
club about a month before the
Dallas tragedy.
The WarrentCommission insist-
ed that all of the shots were fired
from the Texas Schoolbook De-
pository where Oswald was em-
ployed. However, according to Es-
quire, out of 121 eyewitnesses to
the assassination, 32 said the shots
came from the depository, 38 had
no opinion, and 51 said the shots
came from a grassy knoll to the
right of the motorcade. A man
on a nearby railroad tower said
he saw a "puff of smoke" rise
from the grassy knoll when the
shots were fired.
A woman reported that before
the shots were fired she saw a
man carrying what appeared to be
a gun case up the slope. An article
the autopsy show President Ken-
nedy's back wound in a different
place than that described by the
Warren Commission.
Why did FBI men who were
present at the autopsy report both
a different position and depth of
the first wound than was describ-
?d in the commission's report? And
with the President's shirt and
jacket supporting the doctor and
the FBI reports, why has the com-
mission not explained the incon-
sistency?
Most important, why are more
than one-third of the documents
'elated to the case, about half of
the FBI reports and 90 per cent
of the Central Intelligence Agen-
vy reports still classified and with-
held from the public? Hasn't any-
one, including the Warren Com-
mission, examined the photo-
graphs and X-rays taken at the
autopsy?And why didn't the com-
mission even request these vital
>ieces of evidence during the in-
vestigation?
WE ARE FORCED to ask our-
selves how it could be possible
that the Warren Commission pre-
pared a report so lacking in thor-
oughness. competence and, to a
large extent, credibility.
Some have expressed the opin-
ion that the only possible explana-
tion for the inconsistencies in evi-
dence and the mysterious occur-
rences surrounding the assassina-
tion is the existence of a conspir-
acy including in its ranks men in
powerful positions. These people
believe 'that the suppression and
disappearance of evidence and the
failure of the Warren Commission
to seriously consider the possibil-
ity of an Oswald accomplice could
only be the result of pressure from
the highest ranks of government.
There is, however, a "conspiracy
of silence" operating to prevent
the truth from coming to light. It
is neither organized nor hidden-
it does not need to be. It consists, '
simply enough, of the primary in-
stinct of our government officials
o avoid embarrassment and con-
tradiction of official doctrine at all
costs.
AND SO the "conspiracy" oper-
ates. The men in high positions
would much prefer to forget the
whole thing than remedy it. The
public is expected todremember
John Kennedy with pride and sor-
'ow, and not ask embarrassing
questions about what happened to
him.
With Jack Ruby dead and buried
and memories fading fast, the
Kennedy assassination will, in all
likelihood, become the great un-
solved mystery of our time.
hi
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in the Saturday Evening Post said
that a deputy sheriff raced up the
knoll after the shooting and halted
an unidentified man who showed
Secret Service credentials. Later,
the Secret Service said all men
were accounted for at the time,
and that the unidentified man
could not have been a Secret Serv-
iceman.
ABRAM ZAPRUDER'S famous
film footage, recently displayed in
Life, shows President Kennedy's
head moving backward and to the
left after the fatal shot. This
suggests that the gunman fired
from the right front of the motor-
cade, rather than from behind
where the depository was situated.
The azsertion of the Warren
"ommission that there was only
one assassin-Oswald-rests on
the "single-bullet theory," which
claims that the first shot fired
went through President Kennedy's
neck and hit Texas Governor John
Connally. As a commission lawyer
said, "to say that they were hit
by separate bullets is synonymous
with saying that there were two
assassins." Oswald's gun simply
could not have been fired fast
enough, even by the most skilled
rifleman, to have pumped two sep-
arate shots into the two men in
the short time span.
The Zapruder film of the assas
sination shows only a second be-
tween the reactions of Kennedy
and Connally, but Oswald's rifle
takes more than two seconds to
refire. There are, then, two possi-
bilities: either both men were hit
by the identical bullet, or there
were two gunmen and dual shots.
The commission accepts the for-
mer explanation.
However, Conally said, "There
is my absolute knowledge . . . that
one bullet caused the President's
first wound and that an entirely
separate shot struck me."
IN ADDITION to Connally's dis-
sent from the commission's find-
ings, there is the matter of the
mysteriously undamaged bullet
found on "one of the two stretch-
ers." If it had been found on
Connally's stretcher, it would have
been planted there. Doctors testi-
fied that more fragments were
found in Connally's body than were
missing from the unexplained bul-
let. Alternatively, if it were found
on President Kennedy's stretcher,
it could not have passed through
him-and the single bullet theory
would have been refuted. The War-
ren Cdmmission failed to answer
the various questions raised by
these considerations.
More disturbing questions can
be posed. Why were tape record-
ings of a press interview of the
doctors at the Dallas hospital lost?
Why did one of the doctors per-
forming the autopsy on President
Kennedy burn his preliminary
notes? Why did a sketch made by
one of the doctors who performed
Letters: Opposing View on The Silent Slaughter'
An American on Viet Nam
To the Editor:
I WOULD LIKE to make a num-
ber of observations on Warren
Zucker's views on "The Silent
Slaughter."
1. If every conscientious person
or group avidly believes in pur-
suing what is held to be morally
right, I thank Mr. Zucker for prov-
ing in his article that the Catho-
lic Church at least takes a stand,
while other groups remain silent.
And judging by the exhaustive
"show of power" evidenced con-
tinually on this campus, it seems
unrealistic to state that a single
body such as the Catholic Church
has "succeeded in imposing its
morality on the remainder of
society."
2. Mr. Zucker complains that
the causes stated by the ALI would
render abortions legal only for
causes with "the most severe phy-
sical, psychological, and moral
reasons." In other words, women
who simply don't want to be
,bothered with a pregnancy should
have the same rights of termina-
tion as the women who have suf-
fered deforming diseases during
pregnancy or were raped, both
through no fault of their own.
I BELIEVE the true beauty and
essence of conception lies in the
correct and natural use of the act
-the procreation and continua-
tion of the human race. For ma-
ture human beings with a sense of
responsibility and a pervading
spirit of giving, conception is a
gift to them-a child, a product
of love.
To me the real moral dilemma
lies in the knowledgible person who
attempts to enjoy the pleasures
of sexual love while by-passing
the end-product. I'm not talking
about the sensibility of spacing
children for the benefits which
will ultimately come to them.
I mean those married and un-
married women who deliberately
plan not to have children, and
then futiley seek an abortion when
Plan A fails. Plan B is murder.
3. I THINK the AL's ten-year
study shows the fruits of their
labor and the diligent reasoning
behind what constitutes for most
conscientious people, grave reasons
for legal abortion. How can one
delete the primary purpose of love
-the child-first by giving it life,
and then by taking it away so
easily?
In every dilemma the gravest
reasons must be considered, but
what intelligent person could be
so selfish as to turn an unwanted
pregnancy into a necessary reason
for an abortion, obviously because
she considered the possibility of
getting pregnant impossible?
4. I say that those women who
would suffer "the tremendous psy-
chological torment that comes
with an abnormal or unwanted
birth" are without the totality of
womenhood which would enable
them to perform as a satisfying
love partner and as a potential
mother.
AND TO MR. Zucker who ad-
THE ONLY POSSIBLE humane justifi-
cation for our presence in Viet Nam
lies in the hope that we are wanted there,
that the Vietnamese people actually want
their country to be made "safe for de-
mocracy." This is a doubtful proposition,
however.
I received a letter early this week from
a war correspondent who spent a good
deal of time in Viet Nam. Her words were
far from reassuring.
" MET A LOT of Vietnamese," she wrote,
"and they all detest us, with reason.
The Daily is a member of the Associated Press and
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Published at 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich.,
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Editorial Staff
MARK R. KILLINGSwORTH, Editor
BRUCE WASSERSTEIN, Executive Editor
CLARENCE FANTO HARVEY WASSERMAN
Managing Editor Editorial Director
LEONARD PRATT ........ Associate Managing Editor
JOHN MEREDIITH ......Associate Managing Editor
CHARLOTTE WOLTER ... Associate Editorial Director
We have destroyed that country pretty
thoroughly . . . The man in the street is
a poor peasant (as is 80 per cent of the
population) and he is lucky to be alive,
not to have been bombed, burned by na-
palm or otherwise destroyed. The ones I
saw were the uprooted.
"I imagine we have made between three
and four million refugees, though we
have not made proper camps for them
nor given them adequate food. So, they
get the dread diseases (notably tuberculo-
sis), and give their starved, excess chil-
dren to orphanages. There is only one
children's hospital in Viet Nam, in Saigon
-overcrowded, two and three to a bed,
like everywhere else.
"I heard Julian Bond speak in St. Louis
and he made a wonderful phrase: 'It's not
our job to make the world safe for de-
mocracy but to make American democra-
cy safe for the world.' That's it, in a nut-
shell.
"The only real way to help is to stop
this ghastly, insane and evil war ... We
have to make ourselves heard, or else
we are sanctioning it, by silence, through
cowardice. The vietnamese people long
for us to go. Quickly and forever...'
-KATHRYN GLEBE
"WIE ARE SPENDING too much on our
vocates abortion to these women
who seek a way out from their so-
cial and economic situations: if
a couple cannot support the basic
reasons for which they married,
they have no business getting
married. If a child would inter-
fere with a couple's social life,
what really. would they stand to
gain from their shallow social
worlq?
-Janice M. Guerriero, '68L
Sesqui-scene
To the Editor:
BEFORE ANY SORT of judg-
ment is passed on "Flaming
Creatures" and the directors of
Cinema Guild, some examination
should be made of two comparable
problems within our university
community, both of which concern
the citizens of Ann Arbor and so-
ciety at large as well as ourselves.
In each case, the critical terms to
be used in making an evaluative
determination are decency, self -in-
dulgence, vulgarity, and-obscenity.
President Hatcher's Sesquicen-
tennial is vulgar, but not obscene.
As this is simply a matter of bad
taste, not of moral turpitude, the
whole affair should be quietly ig-
nored and avoided.
The Business Administration
School's proposed Hall of Fame,
however, is obscene. As there is
no evidence in the proposition of
any redeeming social value, but
rather candid pandering to the
basest of unnatural desires, the
plans for this gilt brothel of Mer-
cantile Mecca should be confis-
cated and destroyed, and its
shameless advocates and purveyors
incarcerated.
Looked at in the perspective of
these two matters, and judged by
what has been said about it re-
cently, one can speculate that
"Flaming Creatures" may indeed
have been vulgar; it may have
been self-indulgent and an oc-
casion for self-indulgence; or it
may even have been decent in its
final intentions.
CERTAINLY AT ITS very worst
it can have been no less edifying
than the Sesquicentennial must
be. And the movie, at any rate,
would have lasted no more than
two hours, whereas our Sesqui-
orgy will last all year, and the
Temple of Greed might stand a
decade or more!
by Shister) is, to say at least, in-
complete.
Briefly and in part, Shister
failed to point out: that the con-
text in which all remarks were
made was a two-hour forum dis-
cussion of all the legal issues in-
volved; that statements made by
Professor Sandalow on which
Shis'cr focused his article ac-
counted for only five to ten min-
utes of the discussion; that San-
dalow spoke not necessarily as a
faculty member, but rather as an
individual in an open discussion
between various law professors and
students; that Professors Israel
and Kamisar (and several stu-
dents) took somewhat more "con-
servative" stands on issues raised.
The result of these omissions in
Shister's article is to present an
inaccurate and biased picture of
what actually was done and said
at the Law School yesterday.
IT WAS A PICTURE out of con-
text. And, although many atnthe
Law School agree with the Daily's
editorial views on the matter of
the University's failure to support
the Cinema Guild, such editorial
views should neither appear nor
be supported under the guise of
purely objective news reporting.
-Robert Flaherty
-Sharon White
Two Generations
To the Editor:
CONCERNING Mr. Whit Hillyer's
letter in The Daily of January
13, I have several comments.
Mr. Hillyer's concept of educa-
tion, and, in particular, the con-
temporary college student, exem-
plifies the "over 30" attitude which
the Berkeley radicals remind us
not to trust.
Logically implicit in his evalua-
tion of the purpose of college as
getting an education and making
the best grades possible is the idea
that education is somehow inex-
tricably related to the achievement
of grades. This relation has yet to
be made clear to me.
NEXT, what does "guts" have to
do with the position that the Viet
Nam war and ranking are intrin-
sically wrong. The depth of hu-
manistic sentiment in that state-
ment astounds me. Is he using his
"guts" in so tactfully calling us
paranoids? If this is truly his
opinion of me I cannot blame
him for his polemicism; but could
he blame me for becoming an ac-
tivist?
His letter shows that not only
does our generation have differ-
ent ideals than his did, but that,
unfortunately, he is completely un-
able toucommunicate with us -
to assauge our fears, to help 'us
distinguish between right and
wrong to explain the ambiguities
of a world he says we must ,ac-
cept.
FINALLY, in imploring those
who cannot accept this University
to go elsewhere, he is merely para-
phrasing the president of one of
the great contemporary citadels
of anti-intellectualism, Bob Jones
University. Replying to a charge
that Bob Jones was not conducted
democratically, he declared, "If
you don't like it here, you can
pack your dirty duds and hit the
four-lane highway."
-William Pardon, '69
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