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- i ''r,,.-,r. : _ , } 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 ;I IMM