The High Point Enterprise from High Point, North Carolina • Page 2

THE HIGH POINT ENTERPRISE An Independent Newspaper RANDALL B. TERRY, President, Co-Publisher D. A. RAWLEY, Co-Publisher DAVID A. RAWLEY Vice Pres.

MRS. C. H. LOCKWOOD, Vice Pres. JOSEPH P.

RAWLEY, Gen. Mgr. JOE BROWN, Editor WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND Intelligence Bad On Saigon's Last Days 4A Friday, May 16,1975 Shopping Center Dilemma Councilwoman Rachel Gray wonders at "what point can we say that we have enough shopping centers?" There is no surprise in her posing of the question. Mrs. Gray and her family operate a business in downtown High Point.

They are persistent supporters of programs which might restore some of its diminished vitality and business to downtown, and Mrs. Gray is an advocate for downtown on the City Council. More than just public interest may be present in her question. Nevertheless, the question has its own validity. At what point can a city say it has enough shopping centers? Should it say enough is enough? The question by Mrs.

Gray was prompted by a Council discussion, during its committee session last Monday, about a subdivision plat for a new shopping center on S. Main Street near W. Fairfield Road. Council wondered about the runoff of water from the paved parking area for the center. Its concern was not sufficient, however, to block the development.

The plat appeared to meet all the technical requirements, and the site is in an area where the zoning classification allows the presence of a shopping center. In its regular session on Thursday, Council routinely approved the subdivision plat. Mrs. Gray voted in favor of approval. The proper runoff of water from large paved areas is but one of the problems created by shopping centers.

Traffic problems are another, and, although located in areas zoned for their construction, shopping centers can and do have adverse effects upon surrounding areas, particularly residential neighborhoods which might be close by. Shopping centers can aJso lose trade and begin to deteriorate in the manner of downtown business districts. High Point's College Village Shopping Center is in such a transition stage, with many of its stores empty and one of its supermarkets preparing to open a new and larger store in a newer shopping center in the same quadrant of the city. Will cities now have to consider urban renewal for shopping centers as they have had to consider urban renewal for their downtown districts? The possibility is there. As there are no easy answers to the problems of downtown, there will be no easy answers to the problems posed by shopping centers.

Once zoning standards have been established and complied with, the city cannot tell a developer he cannot construct a shopping center on his property. Neither can shopping centers be denied for fear of competition to other merchants. But the city, can have as its goal the guiding of such developments, through zoning classifications and other regulations, for the benefit of the community as a whole. For this purpose the planning department ought to be continuously active in providing long-range projections about the impact of various kinds of developments and their locations upon the city now and in the future. It may be that the time will come when the city will somehow have to find the way to say no to a shopping center.

By JACK ANDERSON United Feature Syndicate WASHINGTON The swift collapse of South Vietnam badly surprised President Ford who was misled, according to White House sources, by the national intelligence estimates. These estimates are supposed to provide the President with the best possible analysis of what is likely to happen. He was assured, for ex-' ample, that the South Vietnamese army would be able to hold off the advancing Communists for several months. Even after the Saigon defenses began to crack, the national intelligence estimate predicted that Hanoi would negotiate with Saigon and form a coalition government. The beleagured Central Intelligence Agency was the first, say our sources, to warti that a Communist victory was imminent.

The CIA recommended tha.t the United States use its leverage to persuade the Saigon leaders to form a "peace government," which could negotiate a truce. This would have given the United States more time to arrange an orderly and dignified evacuation. The CIA was overruled, however, upon the advice of U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin who called upon President Nguyen Van Theiu instead to form a war cabinet supposedly to stiffen the resistence. Although the Joint Chief correctly predicted more than two years ago that President Thieu would not survive and that the Communists would win the final struggle for Vietnam, the Pentagon badly misjudged the South Vietnamese army's ability to hold the line.

The Pentagon was that the South Vietnamese would battle the Communists to a standstill along the approaches to Saigon'. The only exception was the Air Force intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. George Keegan, who warned that the defenses would collapse. It was the Pentagon's assessment that the South Vietnamese infantry divisions on the line were as good as any U.S.

division. They why did they buckle? From the secret cables, here is a thumbnail analysis: President Theiu was shaken by the capture of Ban Me Thout in the Central Highlands last March. He concluded that his troops were spread too thin and ordered a strategic withdrawal. But Theiu was indecisive. He would issue orders, then cancel them.

He couldn't decide where to make a Finally, the commander of the Second Military Region, after a meeting with Theiu, returned to his men and announced: "We're pulling out tonight." They not only abandoned their heavy equipment but left the First Military Region outflanked. What was supposed to be an orderly withdrawal, thereafter, turned into a pellmell rush for the coat. Panic spread, with every man for himself, until the hasty retreat became a total rout. JACKIE'S DIVORCE: We recently reported that the last Aristotle Onassis had taken tentative steps to start divorce proceedings against his wife Jacqueline after a seven-year marriage that was founded upon an advance $3 million settlement. The New York Times published the same report on page one.

Onassis's daughter Christina, who inherited the keys to his billion-dollar financial kingdom, has not put out a statement denying that her father contemplated divorce. Sources close to the family say she was tired of seeing her father's name dragged through the headlines. She also may have wished to stroke Jackie's ruffled to prevent nasty litigation over the estate. But we checked' out the divorce report carefully. Here are the facts: The last shipping tycoon's closest associates say his outlook changed after the death of his only son, Alexander, in a 1973 plane crash.

Before the crash, Alexander had mentioned the need for new parts for the plane, but the old man had held back the money. Associates believe that Onassis, therefore, secretly blamed himself for his son's death. He desperately tried to establish that someone else had caused the crash by offering a fabulous $500,000 reward for proof that the plane had been sabotaged. But there were no takers. Thereafter, he became increasingly impatient with Jackie's overspending and other aggravations.

One day, he blurted angrily to a close friend: "Sonuva I'm going to divorce her!" He asked his associate, John Meyer, to recommend a private detective to gather evidence for the divorce. Isn't It Nice To Win? What a difference a day makes! When this week began, the United States of America was pictured in many parts of the world and by some of its own citizens as running' from Southeast Asia, its tail between its legs. As the week ends, there is a sign hanging out for all to see which reads: "Don't mess with Big Daddy!" It is fair to guess that President Ford's public stock went up a minimum of 30 points the me.rchant ship Mayaguez sailed off to the east and the band of victorious Marines returned'to the Coral Sea. Hawk and dove alike, except for a few of the most extreme, are in full applause that the nation, for once, refused to be intimidated when a crisis' arose. The main thing is, it worked! There is every evidence at this writing that the U.S.

used just enough of its strength to get the job done and in the doing said to the world that we will not be pushed around just because we happen to be nice guys. Even those who on Wednesday were counseling the utmost of caution and possibly prolonged effort to rescue the ship's crew by tortuous diplomatic negotiation joined in the congratulations to President Ford. Sen. Henry Jackson had earlier questioned the wisdom of attacks on Cambodian gunboats, but when it was over he came through with: "I iruist say, I give him (Ford) high marks for the way in which he handled it." It may be too much to hope that the "Case of the Mayaguez" will be a turning point from the recent ill fortunes that have beset us internationally, but at least for the moment the nation is riding on Cloud Nine. The Alpinist Onassis also "had lawyers working on it in Greece and in the United States," one intimate told us.

"It had been informally determined that the Greek Orthdox Church would allow him to break off the marriage on grounds of simple but definite incompatibility." At the time of his death, however, Onassis had not hired a private detective and had not made a final commitment to get the divorce. WASHINGTON WHIRL: Common Cause, the citizens' lobby, has been caught violating the campaing disclosure law it helped to push through Congress. The violation is technical, involving a dispute over the date its first report was supposed to be filed. But the House Clerk, we have learned, plans to transmit the apparent violation to the new Federal Elections Commission The General Services Administration has warned government agencies that their 1975 cars can cause fires. The new catalytic converters help keep the air.

cleaner but get almost twice as hot as conventional exhaust systems. "Because converter units are usuaUy mounted close to the ground," a GSA memo states, "a converter- equipped vehicle driven over or parked combusitible material such as dry grass could cause a fire" President Nixon's former deputy treasury secretary, Charles Walker, writes an occasional newspaper column defending big business. He is inadequately identified only as a "consultant in Washington." In fact, he is also a registered- lobbyist working for Ford, General Electric, Union Carbine, and others Equal Employment Opportunity Chairman John Powell was forced from office after his fellow commissioners voted to censure him for abusing his power. One of those voting against Powell was Commissioner Colston Lewis who, it turns out, has a few skeletons in his own closet. Despte an EEOC statute against political campaigning on time, Lewis beat the bushes across the country for Richard Nixon in 1972.

A WORD EDGEWISE Payers Payees Who Speaks Up On Cambodian Genocide? Can you situation? pick the fall guy in this Egypt owes Russia three billion dollars. Russia is demanding payment of the debt, but Egypt is unable to do so. Egyptian President Sadat has appeal- PROJECTING THE NEWS ed to the oil-rich Arab nations for help, but their response has been negative. The hard-pressed Sadat says he will seek three billion dollars in loans from, the United States so Egypt can pay its three-billion dollar debt to Russia. Now, do you have it figured out? School Vandalism Violence The administrator called the students and teachers together to share his "sense of outrage at the vandals and the cult of vandal- worship on our campus." The day was April 16 and the speaker was Alan Simpson, president of Vassar College.

The setting was far removed from the slum schools of America, where one might expect to hear such remarks. But even'Vassar has not been spared the mindless destruction that plagues the nation's schools, from kindergarten to university, from inner city to suburbia and beyond. Simpson spoke of defaced portraits, of theft in residence halls, of damage to elegant Victorian parlors. "If 2,000 Vassar students, in search of a liberal education, cannot create a civilized community, what can we expect from the rest of the country or from the rest of the world?" Simpson asked. incidence of homicide in schools increased by 18 per cent, rapes and attempted rapes by 40 per cent, 1 robberies by 36 per cent, assaults on students by 85 per cent, and on teachers by 77 per cent.

On and on goes the recitation of violence and vandalism in classrooms, corridors and playgrounds. It is estimated that malicious damage caused by students amounted to almost $600 million last year, three times higher than in 1971. That cost represents more than was being spent on textbooks. In regard to the country, not much. That is the implicit answer of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee.

In a recent preliminary report based on a survey of 516 public elementary and secondary school districts across the nation, the subcommittee said: "It is alarmingly apparent that student misbehavior and conflict within our school system is no longer limited to a fist fight individual students or an occasional general Instead our schools are experiencing serious crimes of a felonious nature." The body count reads like this: 69,000 teachers physically attacked by students in the 1972-73 school year and 155,000 subjected to personal property damage, according to estimates by the National Education Association; 100 studentw. murdered in 1973 in schools surveyed by the Senate committee. From 1970 to 1973, the subcommittee said, the What's the cause of it all? It can be and often is argued that the schools merely reflect in exaggerated form the various ills of society. Congress has heard a variety of proposals to stem the tide of school crime. These include gun control, better housing, federalization of welfare, manpower training and employment of youth, and federal grants to the states to provide school security and alternative forms of education.

Others suggest that the schools are currently the victims of demography that youth traditionally is a major source of crime and schools are where the majority of youth is found. While youngsters between the ages of 10 and 17 make up 16 per cent of the U.S. population, they account for 45 per cent of all persons arrested for serious crimes. If this reasoning is accepted fully, it follows that the, beleagured schools must look to the dwindling birth rate for a full measure of relief. The public schools, holding a mandate for mass education but possessed of inadequate resources and involved in social crises beyond their control, have been in for a rough time for more than a decade.

And as the rising level of vandalism and violence attests, their proorems have grown rather than diminished. By JOHN P. ROCHE King Features Syndicate Well, the "progressive" forces of. the Khmer Rouge have just provided the world with a case study of how totalitarian deal with urban renewal. Forgive me if my tone is harsh, but I have been receiving a good deal of hate mail because I remarked here some time ago that Communist regimes are "barbaric," while a number of commentators literally heaved a sigh of relief as the curtain fell in Indochina.

Now I suppose they will explain that throwing over two and a half million people out of Phnom Penh (yes, 2,500,000) in 24 hours doesn't prove anything one way or the other after all, those Orientals, you know, have always been rough on the opposition, Ghengis Kahn, Tamerlane, and all that. Given the cynicism that dominates all of 'these questions, I -wouldn't even be surprised if someone pointed out that country air was good for city folk. For the last decade we have been constantly exposed to the cries of the permanent floating band of ideological hemophiliacs who deplored American brutaility in Indochina, Greece, Chile, Antarctica and (Fill in the blank.) This is a difficult assault for decent people to cope.with because, if you defend American behavior, you find yourself accused of immorality, of being a "war criminal" and of other forms of wickedness. About a month ago, when I was trying to make the point that, there was a real between inefficient authoritarianism of the late Thieu government and the ruthless, organized totalitarianism of the Communists, someone said, "So, you justify the tiger cages?" As it happens, he picked the wrong boy, because I saw the "tiger cages," which were not underground pits (as a trick photograph in one of our former unlamented weeklies suggested) but aboveground and covered by a roof to keep out the rain and sun. After the great howls went up, the prisoners were removed from the "tiger cages" to other quarters and the "cages" were eagerly taken over by South Vietnamese troops and their families because of the superior ventilation.

So much for the "tiger cages." But back to the main point; there is a quantum jump between the brutality of say, the Lon Nol or Thieu regimes and the systematic barbarism of their successors. Imagine for a minute that the "brutal, corrupt Lon Nol clique" had driven the population of Phnom Penh into the countryside women, children, sick, cripples included and told them to sink or swim. Can you conceive of the racket that would be launched by our ideological hemophiliacs? The very thought of it makes me shudder. Yet to date I haven't heard peep out of them. There can be only two explanations for this silence: first, they don't care what Cambodians or Vietnamese do to each other (which is another way of saying they are callous isolationists and- or racists); or, second, they approve of anything done by "progressive" forces (which is another way of saying they are pro-Communist).

They can take their choice. While they are.meditating on it (and organizing their rally of the week against the "vicious, CIA-founded Chilean two and a half million perfectly decent people, most of whom were about as political as Ankor Wat, are wandering around the Cambodian countryside in quest of something called "rehabilitation." No effort has been made to provide them with any of the necessities of life it will be several months before the next rice crop comes in and they have no experience at 'farming. The intention of the Khmer Rouge is perfectly dear: they have sentenced millions to death. There is a word for this: genocide. It seems to me that the government of the United States should begin raising hell on the subject.

Chairman Brezhnev recently made the charming observation that the fall of Indochina to the Communists would improve the atmosphere of detente. He should be informed that Communist genocide seriously impairs the atmosphere of detente. THE ART BUCHWAID COLUMN Can This Marriage Be Saved? WASHINGTON As if Washington did not have enough to worry about, it now, for the umpteenth time, is sweating out consummation of the marriage between its two pet pandas, Hsing-Hsing and Ling- Ling. Everyone knows that those of us who live, in the capital are a long-suffering people, but we're all losing patience with Hsing-Hsing who either doesn't know, or doesn't care, about fulfilling his role as a husband and a father. Zoo officials have indicated that Ling- Ling not only has been ready but eager to have a baby panda.

But she has. been unable to get Hsing-Hsing into the hay. The people in this town are so upset about this state of affairs that they have 'raised a fund to hire a sex therapist to see if he could do something about Hsing- Hsing's hang-ups. His name is Dr. Newlove and he studied under Masters and Johnson before he decided to specialize in sex therapy for pandas.

Dr. Newlove agreed to talk, but warned he would say nothing to violate a 'physician-patient relationship. "I would say Hsing-Hsing is my most interesting case. If you look into his family history, he suffered from an overbearing Mandarin mother and a weak Cantonese father. He also was born right after the Cultural Revolution in China when making love was denounced as a capitalist bourgeois activity to distract the masses.

This left a lot of scan on Hsing-Hsing." "How do yon plan to treat asked the food doctor. "Slowly," he replied. "Why don't you set up a television set in Hsing-Hsing's cage and show X-rated movies?" "I know you're not going to believe this," Dr. Newlove said, "but pandas do not get turned on by human beings making love. The few times we've shown erotic films to pandas titty started throwing petit at each otter!" "It figures," "The ideal thing," he said, "would be to get some films of pandas making love to each other, but the only ones who have them are the Chinese and they won't give them to us until we let them take back Taiwan." "I know this is probably a chauvinist remark," I said.

"But is it possible that Ling-Ling is to blame for Hsing-Hsing's impotence? Maybe she doesn't know how to excite, him." "There is always that possibility. Sometimes the female panda forgets her sensuality and does not look exciting when the male panda comes into the cage. I plan to have several sessions with Ling-Ling alone, teaching her to be more adventurous and more feeling. So far her idea of love play is to hit Hsing-Hsing over the head with her food bowl. Not all male pandas consider this a prelude to a seduction." "Have you thought about waterbeds?" I asked him.

"I'm having one made now," Dr. Newlove replied. "Also I'm trying to find a perfume that Hsing-Hsing might go for. Apparently, whatever Ling-Ling is using now is not doing the trick." "It's too bad you can't use a surrogate wife," I said. "I read that sometimes that helps." "I would if I could find one.

My biggest problem is Hsing-Hsing has no one to compare Ling-Ling with. If I could get some fat, dowdy female panda in the cage, Hsing-Hsing might realize Ling-Ling is rather attractive and he could do a tot worse. Bat since all be ever seen is Ling, he takes her for granted. Hsing. Hsing honestly believes Llng-Ling is the only fish in the "If you can't do it," I told the doctor, "no one can." "That's nice of you to say," he said modestly.

"I know if I could get Hsinf- Hsing into the marriage bed just once, he'd turn into a.