Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 6

ALL EDITIONS May 3, 1979 Nick Thimmesch Page A-6 The Arizona Republic Eisenhower Finally Makes The Little Screen EUGENE S. PVLUAM Washington Since there is controversy over how involved this relationship was, it was best that the producers tread gently. Mamie Eisenhower, now 82, is a could turn red with anger, chocked his adrenalin, and persuaded willful leaders to tolerate each other and agree on a course of action. So now the magic screen finally gets around to doing Gen. Dwight D.

grand lady, and deserves at least this. EUGENE C. PIXUAM llt9-197." Publisher 1M6-1975 President ASON ALSH Publisher DARROW TILLY Associate PublisherGeneral Manager PAT MURPHY Editor ROBERT J. EARLY Managing Editor There is a film-biography on Bradley in the works. He was a modest, low-profile, soldier's kind of soldier, so again there is a challenge to provide a heroic dimension.

As for the other aforementioned heroes, it is doubtful whether there will be productions focusing on any of them alone. For that matter, I don't think there will ever be film or TV treatment of the dominant military and political figures of the Korean and Vietnam wars. In terms of balance and the need not to portray everything about our country in a negative light, we're fortunate to have Ike to offset the foolish fawning over the Vietnam theme films which just won the Academy Awards. Our republic isn't half-bad, despite the constant prattle from those obsessed with stains on our image. Where The Spirit Of The Lord Is.

There Is Liberty, II Corinthians 3:17 Editorials What Price Khomeini? The Allied Command and the. political leaders of the free nations were hardly a monolithic board of directors, nodding and deferring, and thus providing easy concensus. Winston Churchill was a stubborn cuss, often devious, and in his heart-of-hearts, suspicious and opposed to the Soviet Union. Roosevelt had his blind spots, quirks and prejudices. De-Gaulle was sure that he was larger than either of these men.

Stalin distrusted all of them, and harbored his own grandiose plans for postwar Europe. And can you imagine the chore Eisenhower had in mediating between Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery and Patton? Beyond the almost unnatural assignment Eisenhower had in playing the role of a super Dale Carnegie, he also had a war to direct. Since his background was not rich in experience with tactics and strategy, he had to strive to make decisions leading to military success. To provide romance, and perhaps show why Eisenhower, carrying these burdens, needed a caring woman near Eisenhower, in a biography of his life and times as supreme allied commander in World War II.

It is 34 years since the Nazi generals surrendered. Since then, Eisenhower has been president (the last one to serve two full terms), and many of the major American figures of World War II have been chronicled in films or on television. ft ft 4 WE'VE SEEN fine productions of the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. We've relished the near maniacal escapades of the one and only Gen.

George S. Pat-ton. We've seen Gregory Peck transformed into Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But somehow, the six-hour television presentation, Ike, is the first major effort to capture the man who kept the allies together for the war against Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

The advance reports are that Ike is production. It is not easy to ide pusto for a general who didn't dde ashore like MacArthur or his ar through the biuwing snow in the Battle of the H'je. like Patten. So the challenge is to how Eisenhower, whose face EISENHOWER died 10 years ago, and interestingly enough, not much has been written or dramatized about him since. His grandson, David Eisenhower, is writing a book about him as he and Ike's friends remembered him, mostly in the presidential years.

Perhaps Eisenhower was so big in the media for so long that it will be years before the essential biography is written. The argument has been made that we live in an anti-hero age, and yet films on the lives of Patton and Mac-Arthur were highly successful, Patton even winning a clutch of Academy Awards during the worst of the Vietnam period. There still is an appetite for heroes mostly because there the world has become so complex in recent years, that major figures don't come off as heroic, hence a shortage. The TV version of Ike does not deplete the last of American World War II major heroes. Still remaining are Adms.

William "Bull'' Halsey ar.d Chester W. Nimitz; and. say, Gts. him, the love story between him and -Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, and 11. M.

Kjv Summersby is properly rendered. "Howling Mad" Smith. James J. Kilpatrick Court Strikes Another Blow Against Press Washington The Supreme Court's recent opinion in the Herbert case, viewed in isolation, is not especially worrisome. What concerns many of us in the news business is the whole trend of cases before the high court.

A chill wind is blowing, and it gets chillier all the The Pen Is Mightier Than The Gun out with still another ayatollah named Khaqani, and this appears more serious. Khaqani is the spiritual leader of the Arabs who work in Iran's oil fields. The Arabs feel they are being persecuted by the revolutionary committees, and Khaqani is talking of leaving Iran in protest. He says this would lead to a strike arid completely halt oil production, and the consensus is that he's right. So far, the Arab minority is only complaining, but the Kurdish minority has taken up arms against the government.

They are demanding autonomy for the northwest region in which they live. Meanwhile, Western-minded Iranians are waiting anxiously to see the shape of the "Islamic republic" that Khomeini says he will create. They fear that it will plunge Iran back into the 16th century. The fear is especially widespread among Western-minded women, who wonder if they may not again be barred from the universities and from the professions, and again be forced to wear veils. Iran appears to have exchanged one tyranny for another, but, whereas the' shah's tyranny did produce law and order and a fair degree of prosperity and progress, Khomeini's so far has produced only chaos.

BY NOW, millions of Iranians must be wondering how much they really accomplished when they overthrew the shah in the name of the Ayatollah Ruhol-lah Khomeini. Iran, to all intents and purposes, has become a nation without a government. Mehdi Bazargan is prime. minister in name only. He has -no power except to compla'n iutilely about the executions ordered' by the revolutionary committees.

Bazargan htnd to fire his first military chief of staff. Gen. Mohammad Vati Gharani because Gharani proved incapable of persuading soldiers who had gone AWOL to return. Soon after, Gharani was assassinated by members of a secret organization called Forghan, about which nothing is known. At Gharani's funeral, attempts were made to kill Bazargan and members of his Cabinet, which the revolutionary committees foiled.

However, Forghan did succeed in killing Khomeini's right-hand man, the Ayatollah Mortez Mota-hari. Khomeini had a falling out with another ayatollah named Talegh-ani after "the revolutionary committees arrested Taieghani's two sons and a daughter-in-law, apparently because they are leftists. The dispute was smoothed over, but then Khomeini had a falling time. In the case at hand, CBS broadcast a report six years ago on 60 Minutes, having to do with a retired Army colonel, Anthony Herbert. The program was produced by Barry Lando and narrated by Mike Wallace.

Herbert sued in the federal courts for libel. His lawyers launched upon the process known as pre-trial discovery. In their efforts at discovery, Her No Longer KOOL bert's lawyers asked thousands of questions of Lando. The producer answered questions having to do with what he had seen, whom he interviewed, and where he found sources. Lando provided transcripts of interviews, volumes of reporters' notes, a series of preliminary drafts of the 60 Minutes telecast, and even the contents of his conversations with Wallace and other colleagues.

But after 26 days and 3,000 pages of pre-trial examination, Lando balked at questions going to his "state of mind" in making editorial decisions. The lower courts sustained his refusal to cuoperate in this kind of subjective examination. A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court reversed, 6-3, and in effect ordered Lando to answer. Most of my own colleagues of the press reacted with cries of outrage, and one infuriated publisher asserted that what is needed is "an examination into the state of mind of the Burger Court." ft ft ft when radio was the T- 1948, 1 dominant electronic medium public went together, however. In due course KOOL added an FM radio station and a television channel to the original AM station.

At midnight Mondav, KOOL 96 went out of business, the FCC, in all its bureaucratic authority, had decided a single owner could not Republic editofiol cartoonist Jenkin Llovd Jones Student Scramble Sinks Standards and television was a distant cloud the size of a man's hand, two relative newcomers in Phoenix ap-plied to the Federal Communications Commission for a radie frequency. Assigned 960 on the AM dial, they started broadcasting from elaborate studios in the basement of the old Adams Hotel, using the catchy call letters KOOL. During the next 30 years "It's KOOL, in Phoenix" was something more than a telephone operator's casual defiance of 110-degree temperature. The station soon became recognized as one of the nation's top performers in the field of public service. That's because the two founders, an attractive young businessman named Tom Chauncey and a mellowing cowboy actor named Gene Autry, were more interested in building a community than in making money.

Making money and serving the Tuha, Okla. Will the rising popularity of birth control produce crooked behavior among the administrations of American colleges and universities? Will institutions soon be in such fierce competition over the diminishing youth supply that standards, already gravely weakened, will go down the have two radio stations and a television station in the same area. Chauncey, Autry and another KOOL executive, Homer Lane, sold the station to Stauffer Communications a Midwest newspaper and broadcast giant. The call letters have been changed to KARZ. Change is of the essence, and few things remain the same in Phoenix's dynamic economy.

But one thing seems the same. Tom Chauncey came to Phoenix as a 13-year-old kid looking for a job; Oscar Stauffer came to Scottsdale as a nationally known publisher. They both found a friendly town lem. There, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare made it plain that a state university system must spread through its various member colleges a quota of minority students satisfactory to HEW on pain of losing federal funding. Nothing was said about the right of a university to maintain admission standards.

A quarter of a century 'after Brown vs. Board of Education in which the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be colorblind in welcoming qualified students, we have now gone into a complete reversal, and the identity of race is paramount. Faced by the birthrate and the bureaucrats, it will take a lot of hat-passing and not a little defiance to maintain the integrity of America's best schools. For the rest, slippage seems inevitable. per student? How much may be added to tuition? How will the stand-ard income tax deduction affect alumni giving? Will the attrition of retirement be fast enough to save all professors on tenure, and what happens to teaching quality if doors are slammed in the faces of eager young would-be professors in order to save the posts of some of moderate ability, or less, who were hired during the boom? These represent powerful pressures for getting the bodies enrolled.

With a shrinking clientele this could trigger lowered admission standards, easier grades, and, indeed, more flunk-proof colleges. The action of the federal government in the recent North Carolina case is bound to compound the prob where there was time enougn ana room enough to enjoy life. LOOKING AT Justice Byron White's majority opinion, I fail to see what all the hollering is about. The opinion, in my own view, does little to extend the existing law that governs the libel of a public figure. For Herbert to recover damages, he must eventually prove not only that the broadcast allegations were false, but also that the defendants published these allegations knowing them to be false or in "reckless disregard" of whether they were false or not.

That is a tall order. It puzzles me to understand how Herbert, or any other plaintiff, could hope to make his case if he were foreclosed from questioning defendants on these precise points. Did it cross Lando's mind that the charges might be untrue? That strikes me as a fair question, though most probably an unproductive one. What led Lando and Wallace to conclude that Herbert was the duplicitous fellow they made him out to be? The lawyer who embarks upon this kind of fishing trip is likely to return to dock with an empty boat, but no matter. White cited more than 40 cases in which such questioning has been accepted in defamation suits in the past.

It is not the Herbert opinion that justifies alarm. Over the past 10 years, since Warren Earl Burger became chief justice, we of the press have won a few. But against these infrequent victories for a free press, the record dis The Effluent Society Quick Comments than build badly needed sludge beds. The pipes laid from the 23rd Avenue and 91st Avenue treat drain? The way the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education sees it, the answers are affirmative. In an April 18 report to college administrators, the Carnegie group cited grade inflation, lowered admission standards, and tolerance of cheating and stealing by students as indicators that the search for warm bodies is becoming a major concern at the halls of ivy.

Pandering to students by easier standards, it is alleged, has not only thrown colleges into competition with each other, but has been known to throw departments within colleges into similar competition. You can't blame young people for searching for painless majors. It is important, of course, to keep some historical perspective. One hundred years ago, before the invention of accreditation and the requirement of standard tests in the professions, America was full of diploma mills turning out bogus lawyers, sketchy physicians and fumbling engineers. But eventually the worst of such schools either folded or improved.

In the meantime, colleges with reputations for high integrity generally prospered. On The Issues: tified by the public with leadership The thesis that yesterday's ideology and effectiveness Reagan, Connally "VriDCEXTURY Phoenix was a lyl muscle-flexing city, but as The Republic reported Tuesday-there was some small-town thinking going on at City Hail. Sewer service officials, faced with phenomenal surges of sewage from the fast-growing neighborhoods subdivisions, sometime before 1963 chose to pump some of it into the Salt River rather is losing its clarity and thus its and Kennedy. Kevin P. Phillips force is hardly new.

Neither is the ft ft ft On Authority: It occurs to me that if adults are back in the saddle again, they are riding youth as if it were a bronco to be busted. What better example of this do we have than the re-emergence of the possibility of a draft. Again, the pow-ers-that-be are discussing the lives of the young as if they were, in the words of one of the protest groups, Sailing Through Suez ment plants to the riverbed, hidden from health inspectors, haven't done any damage for several years; the" federal Environmental Protection Agency saw to that. City Manager Marvin Andrews says he wouldn't even have known about them had not a new treatment-plant operator, Robert Villasenor, pointed them out to him last week. The damage has been done, and the city has enough to do in these high-growth times without indulging in a witch-hunt for the short-cutters, who probably are long-gone from Phoenix anyway.

We wonder, nevertheless, whether enough Robert Villasen-ors at an earlier time might not have obviated the need for an EPA. That's water over the dam or sewage down the river, as the case may be. Now it's time to make sure that the effluent of today and tomorrow is taken care of. The $30 million sewers portion of the bond issue facing city vot closes a steadily rising stream of cases in which the court has demonstrated its nearly total incomprehension of what a free press is all about. A majority of the court is willing to protect a right to publish, but it perceives no right to report.

This is like saying a motorist has a right to drive, but no right to acquire a car. This mindless reasoning protects a right to travel but denies a right to leave home. Reporting and publishing are indivisible parts of the same seamless web. notion that personality guides American presidential voting as much as or more than issues. What is new, though, is the almost overt national yearning for a strong leader able to push aside present executive inhibitions and inadequacies.

Unfortunately, there were no polls back in 1932 to use for comparative purposes, but under present circumstances and given the emphasis of the pollsters it would not be surprising if U.S. demand for strong, effective leadership were at its highest point since the nation turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the nadir of the Great Depression. In that era, too, the nation was looking for strong leadership more than for a specific set of issue positions. Roosevelt actually ran for the presidency supporting proposals (like a balanced budget) he would quickly abandon once in office.

However, it should be born in mind that periods of demand for strong leadership often stimulate more rather than less issue conflict. The New Deal Roosevelt launched was an era of immense disagreement over issues and ideology, and the same would probably prove true of the 1981-85 presidency of any one of the three candidates most iden- IT takes more than symbolism to convince the world that there's peace between Egypt and Israel, but an event in the Suez Canal was nonetheless encouraging. The freighter Ashdod, first Israeli flag-carrier to sail the 101 miles of Suez, was greeted by 100 Egyptians as it entered the canal at Suez City. "Salaam" was shouted from shore. "Shalom" from the ship's 22-man crew.

Twenty-two Israelis don't speak for a nation of 4 million, and 100 Egyptians don't represent their country's 44 million people. Just the same, the Ashdod crossing is a cruise in the right "so many heads of cattle or pieces of lumber." It is fascinating to see the role that the draft, the army, always seems to play in a generational conflict. It's not that I see all these events as evil, or that the value of discipline and order eludes me. But I truly question our motives. I would feel more comfortable about adult authority if I believed that we were offering youth opportunities as well as obligations.

But right now, I wish we were as sensitive to their potential as to their problems. As willing to welcome them into society as we are to keep them in their place. Ellen Goodman BUT ALL this time, American higher education proceeded on one basic assumption that it was a growth industry. Population was growing. The thirst for college training was growing.

So physical plants and faculties grew, too. No one acted as though the tide would ever ebb. Yet, ebb it has. All over America, public grade, middle and high schools are being shuttered. And as the baby-bust generation approaches college age, some very tough decisions will have to be made up at Old Main.

How will the dormitory oonds be paid off? How will half-empty classrooms and laboratories affect the cost 1 The court cannot get this through its collective head. Thus we must expose our confidential sources, we must admit the cops to rummage through our city rooms, and we may take only guided tours of prisons. Under the Herbert decision, we are a little more exposed to the ruinously expensive costs of a possibly frivolous libel suit. All this chills investigative reporting and tends to silence robust debate on public issues. ers May 22 will expand two treatment plants and make systemwide improvements.

It'll be money well invested in Phoenix's future..