0 At nmit
Seventy-Sixth Year
EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
July 20: Nice
-A
Where Opinions Are Free
Truth Will Prevail 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH.
NEWS PHONE: 764-0552
Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the inidividual opinions of staff writers
or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 1966
NIGHT EDITOR: CAROLE KAPLAN
The United States as
'Merchant of Death'
By LEONARD PRATT
Co-Editor
HAVING SOMEONE agree with
your ideas or general outlook
on things is a' special sort of im-
mortality, especially when you
hadn't expected it.
Just that sort of surprise greet-
ed The Daily's two summer edi-
tors-the understaffed represen-
tatives of its normal 10-man sen-
ior ,complement - last Thursday
when two members of the jour-
nalism department's Summer In-
stitute for High School Editors
dropped by to talk about The Daily
and, later and indirectly, them-
selves.
The institute has been going on
for the last 13 yearsbtaking high
school editors from all over the
country and giving them two
weeks of professional instruction
in journalism. Run by Prof. John
Field, it gives the editors a chance
to talk over common problems
and approaches to journalism.
IT'S A STRANGE feeling for a
reporter to be interviewed, but
that's just what Ron Schultz of
Farmington, Mich., and Dan Lev-
inson of Gary, Ind., proceeded to
do. The questions they asked, the
natural ones, were both disconcert-
ing and reassuring.
They were reassuring in that
they showed that the budding
writers' hearts were in the right
places. But they were disconcert-,
ing in that they were clearly un-
sure of traditions that every re-
porter ought to hold high up out
of everyday work.
In both cases they made us feel
right at home.
THEIR OVERRIDING concern
was The Daily's freedom. Was
The Daily overtly censored? No.
Then to whom were we respon-
sible? Ultimately, to the Regents
who took over the responsibility
for the solvency of The Daily
from the faculty senate in 1915.
Didn't they ever put the pressure
on? Sometimes, but indirectly and
with little success.
What about our advertisers;
don't they ever yelp when some-
one advocates free love in the
streets? Well, yes, but they usual-
lb Have.
ly reconsider.
So who pays our bills? We do.
THE QUESTIONING soon got
back to the guts of things. Just
what is the responsibility of a
newspaper to its environment?
What should the attitudes of its
administrators be? How much lati-
tude should it have in deciding
what it prints?
The disconcerting and reassur-
ing sides of our interviewers' re-
lationships to those essentials soon
came to light;in that order.
First, it was clear that no one
-except perhaps at the inistitute
-had ever made it clear to them
that ideally the responsibility of a
newspaper ought to be to the con-
science of its staff. They simply
could not believe that The Daily
was not directly answerable to
someone other than its senior edi-
tors.
THE IDEAL of staff responsi-
bility is seldom manifested in
most of the nation's press, where
the worst implications of A. J.
Liebling's belief that "Freedom of
the press is guaranteed only to
those who own one" prevail al-
most universally.
The press suffers from the lack
of such an ideal, for there are
few better principles upon which
to form a reporter's world-view.
Its absence in our interviewers
doesn't say much for the kind of
journalistic education their high
schools are giving them, for with-
out it the reporter is little more
than a technician.
That's a sad and a very dan-
gerous situation. If this is the way,
future writers are being brought
up-it certainly was the way we
were trained before exposure to
The Daily-things don't look good
for the preservation of the sacred
right of the people to know.
THE SECOND element of our
conversation was more reassuring.
It began to creep in after we had
convinced our visitors that The
Daily was in fact run by us and
no one else.
Then one of them brought up
the war in Viet Nam and his
school's refusal to allow a speaker
You Around
program on the topic. Next we got
into criticism of .a high school's
administration and what forms it
could take. A few sad tales about
friends who had been "given va-
cations" from schools for criticiz-
ing administrators or teachers
wrapped things up.
A STRANGE IDEA slowly got
across to us. Though Levinson and
Schultz may not have agreed with
us, they were, in different ways
and to different degrees, interest-
ed in the same question we were:
What was the role of a newspa-
per and how should its adminis-
trators go about realizing it?
Their interest in the idea was
surprising because it's not' one
about which people are usually
curious.
AND THEIR curiosity was heart-
ening. That students should be
concerned about the state of the
nation's press, when so few of its
publishers evidently are, is both
ironic and relieving.
Again, from Liebling : "Never
sell hope short."
AMERICA'S POSITION as the dominant
supplier in a growing world arms traf-
fic must disturb many citizens, and Sena-
tor Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota is the
latest to express their concern. Writing in
the Saturday Review, he points out the in-
consistency of our government's disarma-
ment pleas with its active sales promotion
for weapons of all types, and calls for
"some rationalization" of our policy on
the traffic.
Through the military assistance pro-
gram we have given, traded or sold 35
billion dollars worth of arms abroad over
the past 15 years. Today the emphasis is
on sales, and the Department of Defense
has become a super-salesman for war-
planes, missiles, missile-destroyers, tanks,
howitzers and the rest. "Achievement of
objectives call for a very substantial in-
crease over past levels," the Pentagon ex-
horts its arms peddlers; and the custom-
ers are reminded that ample credit, short-
term or long, is available.
AS A RESULT our government has man-
aged to export 9 billion dollars worth
of weapons in the past five years, at a
profit to defense industries of nearly a
billion. The market is worldwide. Saudi
Arabia buys our missiles, Jordon our tanks
(Jordan being an eager customer because
we previously peddled arms to Israel).
Argentina orders 50 jet attack planes,
thereby setting up Chile as a good pros-
pect for warplanes to protect itself from
the Argentines. We push the goods to
Britain, the news nations of Africa, Pak-
istan and India, Spain and Portugal, Ethi-
opia and Libya, Germany, Iran, Iraq and
many others. -
THERE ARE, OF COURSE, plenty of ex-
cuses for our government's becoming
what, in the old-fashioned days of the
private arms traffic was called a "merch-
ant of death." If we don't sell the cus-
tomers weapons, the Russians or some-
body else will. We only supply a demand
we do not create. We have to do it to
offset the deficit in our balance of pay-
ments; and so on.
The last is the most fascinating of the
justifications. As Senator McCarthy points
out, the major reason we have a deficit
in the balance of payments is that we
are supporting so many American troops
overseas. Instead of suggesting that some
troops might be brought home, the Pen-
tagon's remedy is to unleash the arts of
highpowered salesmanship in behalf of
armament exports.
FORMER AMBASSADOR to India Gal-
braith told senators not long ago that
in his view the arms we supplied to Paki-
stan were the direct cause of the Indian-
Pakistani war over Kashmir. No Ameri-
can arms, no Kashmir war; that is how
he saw it.
And he pointed to the shocking moral-
ity of peddling high-cost weapons to
countries like Jordan which produce less
than $250 a year per capita income. If
we must act as arms salesman to the
world, Mr. Galbraith suggested that at
least we ought to exempt from our pro-
motion attention indigent lands that are
unable to feed their own people.
The traffic owes its existence, as Mr.
Galbraith said, "partly to habit, partly to
vested bureaucratic interest, partly to the
natural desire to avoid thought and partly
because to stop doing what is wrong is to
confess past error."
IN LARGE DEGREE, the traffic is an
expression of the philosophy of con-
tainment which for so many years has
dominated our foreign policy. But military
power, as we are painfully learning, does
not hold the solution to all problems.
The time has come to break the habit of
the arms traffic, to dissipate the indus-
trial-bureaucratic interest in it, and to
question the assumptions of the policy it
embodies.
We hope Senator McCarthy's concern
foreshadows a lively and critical congres-
sional examination of the whole wretched
business.
-THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Trials of War
IT'S LOOKING MORE and more like
North Viet Nam is determined to take the
last latch off the Southeast Asian Pan-
dora's Box that the United States has
gone so far toward opening. Trials of
downed American pilots would certainly,
considering the psychology operating in
Washington, provoke extensive retaliation
on North Viet Nam.
Hanoi clearly has the power to turn
this mess into a holy war. Whether they
have the right to do so is largely irrelev-
ant; they will clearly do so if they please.
THE ONLY LESSON it seems possible
to learn from all this has already been
noted by James Reston - never before
have decisions as far-reaching been tak-
en by a U.S. administration possessing so
little knowledge of how the other side
would react. If we didn't know the North
Vietnamese would try this, we should
have.
--L.P.-
Escalating the
War of Frightfulness
BECAUSE the Vietnamese war
cannot be decided by military
means, it has become increasingly
a vicious spiral in frightfulness,
Because it is both a civil war of
Vietnamese against Vietnamese
and at the same time a war of
Vietnamese against foreign white
men, it is, as such wars usually
are, increasingly ferocious and
barbarous.
Unable to subdue the other side
by conventional military actions,
each side tries to overcome the
enemy by destroying his will to
fight. Frightfulness begets fright-
fulness and anger demands veng-
eance, and all that remains is a,
Fury which, insofar as it reasons
at all, thinks that by topping
frightfulness with more frightful-
ness the enemy will be silenced
and paralyzed.
THE WORLD is now confronted,
with this escalation of frightful-
ness. To the American threat to
bomb closer and closer to the pop-
ulated regions of North Viet Nam,
Hanoi is replying by increasing its
mobilization, by evacuating the
civilian population from Hanoi
and Haiphong and by threatening
to try the captive American fliers,
humiliate and use them as host-
ages in the war of frightfulness
and, in the end, perhaps even to
execute them.
There is no doubt that this treat-
ment of the fliers would evoke dire
reprisals. The warning of Secre-
tary-General U Thant and the
declaration of the senators who
have dissented from the Johnson
policy in the war are accurate.
They are telling the truth in
calling the attention of Hanoi to
the fact that the punishment of,
the prisoners of war would make
the war, frightful as it is already,
still more frightful. For the ulti-
mate weapons of frightfulness are
in the hands of the United States,
and no one who knows this coun-
try and the character of the Pres-
ident can be sure that they will
not be used if the escalation of
frightfulness continues.
IN THIS escalation we are ap-
proaching the point of no return,
the point .where the war becomes
inexpiable, where it becomes in-
capable of rational solution, where
it becomes a war of endless kill-
ing, a suicidal war of extermina-
tion.
The war is not yet at that point.
But the war will pass that point
of no return if the prisoners are
executed and the North Vietna-
mese cities are destroyed in retali-
ation.
There is great honor and glory
to be had by anyone speaking for
the civilized conscience of man-
kind who interrupts and breaks
the vicious spiral.
THE WHITE HOUSE has taken
the view, which was confirmed
in the Louis Harris poll publish-
ed on Monday, that the sharp de-
cline in the President's popularity
Today
/ and
r
Tomorrow
By WALTER LIPPMANN
is due to a growing desire to get
the Vietnamese war over with by
stepping up the attacks on North
Viet Nam. At present, the White
House is reading the polls to mean
that the President is pleasing no-
body, neither the doves who want
to negotiate an end to the war, nor
the hawks who want to end it by
a military victory.
There is truth in this view. For
the President is trying to conduct
the war on the assumption that
there is some middle ground be-
tween fighting it and not fighting
it, that there is a way that can
split the difference between the
hawks and doves. This is a reason-
able way to act in making a poli-
tical or a business deal. But the
50-50 principle does not apply
everywhere.
Just as it is no good building
half a bridge across a river, so to
conduct a war on a 50-50 princi-
ple is likely to mean, as in Viet
Nam today it does mean, that the
attempt to negotiate and the at-
tempt to defeat the enemy are
both halfhearted and indecisive.
THE HAWKS are quite right
when they complain that they are
fighting with one hand behind
their backs. And the doves are
quite right in complaining that in
spite of all the peace gestures the
President has never made a gen-
uine realistic move to bring about
a negotiated settlement.
The reason why the President
has not been genuinely serious
about negotiation is that a nego-
tiated peace would inevitably re-
flect the fact that he has not won
the war-that the Viet Cong and;
North Viet Nam are undefeated. A
negotiated peace would not mean
that we had been defeated, but it
would mean that we have failed to
win.
The reason why the President
has displeased the hawks is that
he shrinks, quite rightly, from the
risks and consequences of an un-
limited war. For while there is no
doubt at all that the United States
can demolish North Viet Nam, the
crucial consideration is that the
destruction of North Viet Nam
would not bring the war to an end.
We are compelled to assume that
just as China would not accept an
American victory in Korea, so it
will not now accept an American
victory in North Viet Nam.
IF THE PRESIDENT adheres to
his method of conducting a 50-50
war he will now appease the hawks
by bombing closer to Hanoi and
Haiphong. But this will not help
him, for his dilemma will remain.
If he goes all out against the
North he will arrive at a point
where China will intervene and
not, most probably, without some
support from the Soviet Union.
If, on the other hand, he con-
tinues with his partial war he will
find it impossible to negotiate an
honorable end to it. He will have
been failing both in war and in
peace, and the polls will reflect his
failure.
SINCE THE PRESIDENT can-
not win the victory, his only course
is to prepare himself to adopt for
the first time a genuine and real-
istic, a sincere and perceptive poli-
cy to bring about a negotiated
peace. Though it takes moral
courage tb espouse them, the in-
gredients of such a policy are well
known.
A ceiling must be placed upon
our military forces in South Viet
Nam. This will carry with it two
changes: the acceptance of ahold-
ing strategy in the field of battle
and the emergence of a new gov-
ernment in Saigon which can ne-
gotiate a cease-fire with the Viet
Cong.
THIS NEW government would
almost surely consist of a coali-
tion of Buddhists and indigenous
and moderate Catholics. While
this was happening our business
would be to make an unequivocal
decision to withdraw eventually
from the mainland of Asia and
thus to begin negotiations with
Hanoi on the terms of a general
political settlement.
(c), 1966, The Washington Post Co.
There's a Romney Behind All That Murk
LSD: Romney Is
Obviously Not Turned On
By JULIUS DUSCHA
Washington Post Staff Writer
OS ANGELES-Walking down
a dusty western street the oth-
er night with actor Fess Parker,
Gov. George Romney of Michi-
gan looked as if he had been cast
by a Hollywood director for the
role of a presidential candidate.
Romney's abundant graying hair
complements perfectly his square
jaw and tanned face. His maroon
sport coat and gray slacks hung
nicely on a still athletic body as
he toured the "Western" street
used recently for the filming of a
new version of the movie classic
"Stagecoach."
There is an all-American look
of integrity and clean living about
the 59-year-old Romney. If he
were in Westerns, he would always
wear a white hat. No one would
think of him as a riverboat gam-
bler on the sternwheeler that stood
in drydock just beyond the Old
West set.
YET AS ROMNEY and the na-
tion's other governors met here
last week for their annual con-
ference and relaxed at such spas
as the 20th Century-Fox back lot
where Westerns are filmed, one
could not help but be struck with
the similarities between the make-
believe of the movies and the pre-
tensions of politics and politicians.
If anyone is a presidential can-
didate two years before the nom-
inating conventions, it is Romney,
who this fall has little more than
token Democratic opposition in his
contest for a third term as gover-
nor. But in the make-believe of
politics, no one must admit that
he is a candidate this far ahead
of the conventions. So Romney
does what an early favorite for
the 1968 Republican presidential
nomination is expected to do with-
out committing himself.
ROMNEY ARRIVED late in Los
Angeles for the annual Governors
Conference because he had some
important Fourth of July engage-
ments to keep in Michigan. But
he hardly had time to get settled
in his 18th floor suite in the Cen-
tury Plaza Hotel before he was
on his way down Santa Monica
Boulevard to the Beverly Hilton
Hotel, where he addressed the
prestigious Town Hall Luncheon
Club.
It was the kind of performance
that revealed the strengths and
weaknesses of Romney as a po-
tential presidential nominee. He
is a good speaker whose Mormon
upbringing shines through in the
evangelistic manner he brings to
the podium.
Romney is more than just an
all-American salesman. But when
one searches beyond the rhetoric
--admittedly a dangerous thing to
do with politicians-for the Rom-
ney substance, his weaknesses ap-
pear instantly.
HERE, for example, is Romney
answering a Town Hall question
about the war in Viet Nam: "If
WHEN THE GOVERNOR used to cam-
paign at the Michigan State Fair,
when he used to meet the people, he'd
wear gray suits and ties artfully setting
off the gray wreath around his scalp.
His signature of a bill illegalizing LSD
sales, then, is understandable.
Governor George Romney is the anti-
trip.
Furthermore, two other states have
outlawed the wildly-publicized mindbend-
er.
Thus, the actions of both the governor
and the Legislature in outlawing LSD are
reasonable.
THE NEW LAW makes both selling and
possessing LSD felonies, except when
under the direction of the state Depart-
ment of Mental Health.
But one could have hoped that some-
one with political skills in Michigan would
have authorized a last inquiry providing
singular perspective into intelligent use
of the important drug.
This would have been a service to the
nation.
Professionals will not cease using the
Editorial Staff
LEONARD PRATT.....................o-Editor
CHARLOTTE WOLTER.........«........... Co-Editor
BUD WILKINSON.................... Sports Editor
BETSY COHN..................supplementManager
NIGHT T ETRS: Meredith Ei.ker. Michaelp1 Hefter.
drug. And as for laymen, all the glossy
magazines have told him he can syn'the-
size LSD in a chemistry lab and spirit it
about in a cube of sugar or slip of tissue.
THE LEGISLATIVE decision, then, does
not provide leadership in the evolving,
notorious LSD situation. It does not pro-
vide some needed conclusions on practical
value of the drug.
It may not even provide
from LSD dangers, even if
guards are needed.
safeguards
those safe-
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this conflict really involves the.
question of stopping Communism,
the international Communist con-
spiracy, and stopping it in South
Viet Nam, if this conflict is really
being supported by the Red Chi-
nese and the Russians, anw if this
really is naked Communism, an
international conspiracy, then I
think we have to weigh the ques-
tion of how far, how much we can
escalate without their continuing
to escalate if they agree that that's
the real issue in Viet Nam."
His discussion of Viet Nam trail-
ed off into some reminiscing about
Pancho Villa. As a boy, Romney
lived in Mexico' and his family
was forced to flee the revolution-
ary Villa, who, as Romney noted,.
was pursued in pre-World War I
days by Gen. John J. (Black Jack)
Pershing but was never caught.
The relevancy between Pancho
Villa and Ho Chi Minh was lost,
however, on most of Romney's
Town Hall audience.
Romney, of course, is a governor
and not a secretary of state, but
if he is to be taken seriously as
a presidential candidate, he must
do better in discussing foreign
policy and in making up his mind
about critical issues like Viet Nam,
than he did in Los Angeles last
week.
THE DAY after his Town Hall
speech, Romney presented to the
governors a report on thevneed
for sharing federal tax revenues
with the states. It, unlike his
Viet Nam views, was a thoughtful
discussion of alternative ways of
using federal tax resources to
help meet the needs of state gov-
ernments.
Romney has been a successful
governor, and even before becom-
ing governor he was instrumental
in getting Michigan to rewrite its
antiquated constitution so that the
state could more adequately deal
with the problems of a highly
urbanized society. The concrete
problems of taxes and deficits, of
school buildings and hospitals, of
highways and state parks are
much easier for Romney to deal
with then the complexities of a
war in Southeast Asia.
THE ROMNEY image, which has
fornia, beats Brown in November,
this recruit to the citizen-poli-
ticians' army could be Romney's
principal rival for the 1968 Re-
publican presidential nomination.
Romney, like Reagan, is a card-
carrying Republican_ and a firm
believer in his party's conservative
doctrine. So he was up before
dawn one morning last week and
took a few hours away from the
Governors Conference to try to
help elect a Republican governor
in Nevada.
More than 1500 persons paid $5
a head to eat breakfast with Rom-
ney and hear him expound his
Republican gospel. Romney, who
never got near a slot machine or
a 21 table during the few hours he
was in Nevada, had a more suc-
cessful trip to Las Vegas than do
most Americans.
LATER THAT DAY, Romney
sat in his shirtsleeves in his hotel
suite here at a table strewn with
newspaper clippings, file holders
and both official and unofficial
looking papers and talked about
his concern over the growth of
big government and about his for-
eign policy views.
The same qualities of strength
and integrity that have made
Romney a public figure to be reck-
oned with come through in a re-
laxed, private conversation with
him. But his private views are the
same as his public statements, and
this is not true of most politi-
cians, who over a couple of drinks
generally are all too willing to
talk about their real ideas of a
world that is never so simple as it
seems to be from a platform. But
Romney never drinks.
Romney is acutely aware of the
difficulties a governor faces in try-
ing to keep up with foreign pol-
icy, but he said that he reads
books and magazines such as the
scholarly Foreign Affairs quarter-
ly in an effort to keep abreast.
Romney also said that he fre-
quently sits down with experts on
Southeast Asia at the University
of Michigan and Michigan State
University, including W e s 1 e y
Fischel, who recently has been in-
volved in the controversy over the
alleged CIA use of Michigan State
in Viet Nam, and talks with
them about Viet Nam and other
ori.4+nrpa.!nofAmrnan 0n 4n.
But of course, the law was needed to
put taboos on something powerful and
mysterious which abashes many citizens.
-NEAL BRUSS
Bombs Away,
Any Old Way
THE GEMINI PROGRAM is so far a suc-
cess. In the near future lies the Apollo
moon landing project. These are programs
with peaceful objectives in mind, yet in
the United States and Russia military
space weapons are being designed and
built.
The United States is launching on Oc-
tober 29 of this year a military spacecraft
known as the MOL (Manned Orbiting
Laboratory). The MOL is to be the fore-
runner of more sophisticated military
1 4
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