The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 11

keeps his income plan BACKGROUND Saturday, July 1, 1972 AND OPINION 11 Pf POCKET $1000 football cGovern By CHARLES BARTLETT WASHINGTON. Some years ago in the House, George McGovern became concerned with the political consequences of a receding hairline, so he went out and bought a toupee. "How do you Lke it?" he asked his colleagues, one after the other. Some days lie would leave it tome and ask friends if they thought he looked better without it. His canvass was so exhaustive that it became a cloakroom joke and one friend suggested it might be best for him simply tc poll his constituents on the question.

McGovern finally rejected the toupee but he has not ceased his tireless search for a winning political aspect. He was not propelled by vanity in testing the toupee's acceptance. He was simply doing what he is diing now, bluntly and objectively seeking the best way to attain the voter's favor. In the same spirit he queried a long list of friends and political experts on the income redistribution plan which has served as a handle for those out to mark him as a radical. Buttressed with fragile computations and too complex to be easily understood, the proposal could usefully be jettisoned many thought, in clearing the decks for the big battle ahead.

Mike Royho plan 'I think I'll take my thousand now, the calculations are being closely checked. In the new version, adults will draw more than children, but the essential policy is still a payment of $4,000 to a family of four. Projected nationally against 1975 estimates, this means the Federal Government will require one-third of the GNP to make the payments and meet its expenses. But unlike the toupee, the Tobin plan is a sound bet for McGovern because it will only damage families with incomes above $18,000. Some $40 billion will actually be transferred from the rich to families with incomes under $12,000 and all taxpayers reporting under $18,000 will enjoy a tax credit.

This fits the pattern of the "new center" which McGovern is attempting to stake out. The candidate's instinct, now that he is feeling the heat of his new political eminence, is to shake off or reshape the positions which promise to bring him more controversy than votes. But there are three issues on which there is little give in McGovern: the tighter squeeze on the rich, the war in Vietnam, and the military budget. He is characteristically tough and inflexible on issues which he deems important and he is ready to make his stand on these three. The rest are like the toupee.

They can be discarded or kept, trumpeted or soft-pedaled in the light of pragmatic political judgments. This degree of flexibility is proving to be a cohesive force as the party nears its convention. McGovern is making a cautious peace with the party regulars and his aides, except for the free-wheeling Stewart Mott, are bowing to the national committee's decision to apply the 'receipts from the Miami telethon against the 1968 debt. The painless execution of the platform was a testimony to the healing power of the McGovern style. Big tests loom ahead in Miami but McGovern and his people are managing to get across the point that they are not embarked on a heedless crusade but a very canny and pragmatic political and he'd better keep Daley Fischer vs.

Spassky Chess is as a By RICHARD L. WORSNOP Editorial Research Reports Championship chess is a contest that calls for prodigious amounts of physical as well as mental exertion. To determine how much energy is actually expended by a chess player in a tournament game, a bio-kinetic experiment was conducted at Temple University in 1970. Pulse, heartbeat and other physiological measurements were taken on 12 volunteers during play. The surprising result: Chess is as physically taxing as a strenuous session of boxing or football.

Thus, both Bobby Fischer of the United States and Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union are keeping their bodies in fighting trim as they prepare for their world championship chess match in Reykjavik, Iceland, starting Sunday. The close-lipped Spassky has declined to reveal details of his training program, although it is known he likes to play tennis. Fischer's daily regimen includes morning calisthenics in front of his television set, followed by swimming, tennis and bowling. By the same token, professional football players find that chess sharpens their mental agility on the field. Ron Johnson and Bob Tucker, both of the New York Giants, are engaged in a marathon match that has been in progress for several years.

But Harold C. Schon-berg argues in Harper's that class brings greater rewards: "It is an affirmation of personality. The game requires imagination and creativity the ability to see, or sense, possibilities hidden to less refined minds." Despite the need for brawn as well as brain, chess is regarded with indifference, at best, by most Americans. As a result, the United States ranks about as poorly in world chess circles as it does in international Ping Pong competition. The Soviet Union has around four million chess players who compete in tournaments, the United States only about 25,000.

Still, the unofficial world champion of chess in the mid-19th century was Paul Morphy of New Orleans. Since organized international competitoin began in 1948, the Russians have had a monopoly on the title. Not only that, all challengers in the final rounds have been Russians, too. Now, Fischer is given a slightly better than even chance of dethroning Spassky. as taxing game BOBBY FISCHER expending energy But skeptics point out that Spassky has beaten Fischer in all five of their previous meetings.

The two finalists already have jousted over a site for their showdown match. Fischer wanted Belgrade, while Spassky favored Reykjavik. The entire match, consisting of a maximum of 24 games, will take place in the Icelandic capital. As challenger, Fischer must amass 12y2 points to win, while Spassky needs only 12 to defend his title. (A win counts one point, a tie one-half point.) Iceland may seem an odd choice for a championship sporting event of any kind.

But as chess columnist Harry Golombek of The Times of London pointed out "There is a long tradition of the popularity of chess in that country, going right back almost to the beginning of the game in Europe." The oldest known European set of chessmen, now on display in the British Museum, is believed to have been made in Iceland in the 12th century. Dfi) jst Jr, ailing army ciated by the people of the nation, whose current life-style is not theirs. The Army, In a word and not entirely without cause finds itself gripped in a dark mood which oscillates from self-pity to paranoia. And that is a mood which, on several counts, is dangerous and will become more so if Sen. McGovern is elected.

Few chiefs of staff in history, in short, will have faced a more delicate and demanding task than Abrams when he takes over from Westmoreland. Special to The Inquirer and Chicago Daily News CHICAGO. The Democratic Party'! reformers really have Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago in a corner now. They are closing in for the kill.

And when they get down with him, trey won't know what in the hell hit them. George S. McGovern, who wrote the party's reform rules, which are being used to give Daley's delegates the boot, is wringing his hands and wondering how to get around them. His chief aide, Frank Mankiewicz, is murmuring, "compromise, compromise." But Daley doesn't have to budge an inch. He doesn't have to compromise on anything.

They've chased him so hotly that now he has then. You see, Daley kr.ows something that many of tie party reformers seem to have forgotten. All they will do in Miami Beach next month is choose a candidate. They can throw Daley's machine delegates out, and the candidate will be McGovern. Or they can seat Daley's people and the candidate will probably still be McGovern.

If they throw Daley out, Negro leader Jesse Jackson will be happy, and Chicago alderman Bill Singer, actress Shirley MacLaine, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the clear-eyed college kids, and the people who are still nursing their hurt feelings from 1968 in Chicago. They will have won! The real victory will come if it comes at all, next November. That is when we elect a President In order to be elected President, you have to carry Illinois. That's not an absolute rule. But for the present, let's say it is about 99 percent absolute.

For a Democrat to carry Illinois, he has to carry Chicago and Cook County Not by a narrow margin, but very big. Now, when you tak about piling up Democratic votes in Chicago and Cook County, whose name comes to mind? Shirley MacLaine? Jesse Jackson? George McGovern? Ho ho. That's rich. Even though the machine isn't what it used to be, even though it is in its twilight years, there is no way McGovern can have a prayer against President Nixon without a strong effort by Daley. So for that reason alone, Daley knows that the Democratic Convention be committing a delayed suicide if it humiliates him by throwing him out.

The Democrats who really despise Daley are going to vote for McGovern regardless of how thj credentials flap turns out. But the voters McGovern needs if he is to win the working man vote, the ethnics and all those who applauded Daley's police. in 1968 aren't going to like Daley getting the bcot. The rest of the country's Democratic professional politicians won't like it either. They'll figure that if McGovern did it to Daley, he'll do it to them next.

Daley really doesn't need McGovern's election. Pennsylvania Press The stage is set for the Democratic Convention. And America waits for Ted Kennedy to make his move. Though he says he would not accept the nomination, Ted just might wind up somewhere on the ticket. Is Ted Kennedy fit to run as a major candidate? A new Inquirer series, "Ted Kennedy: Days of Decision," provides the evidence for the answer to that vital question.

It's from the highly praised new book. "The Education of Edward Kennedy." by Burton This Inquirer series discloses many dramatic human incidents many never before published in the life of Ted Kennedy. It probes the horror of Chappaquiddick, tells why it might never have happened if Bobby Kennedy had been alive. It follows Ted's careening course through alcholic grief after Bobby's assassination. And describes Ted's remarkable rebound from tragedy after tragedy.

It's an intimate, in-depth portrait of a political enigma the last of the Kennedy brothers. ble idea, a reform whose costs will largely be borne by the 4 percent of American families with adjusted gross incomes over $20,000. The numbers are being shifted and House. However, he and his doorbell, pushers won't bother if the convention tries to strip Daley of his politician's pride. If they mess around with Daley too much, McGovern had better start writing something besides the acceptance speech for his nomination.

He might as well start writing that telegram of con- cession to President Nixon right now, inherits an mising the security of the nation, the problem of morale and hence of effectiveness unquestionably is the more serious. Each of the services has morale problems. But these are more serious in the Army, which lacks the glamor of the Navy, the Air Force or the Marine Corps. The Army, which has had to depend heavily on the draft, is the service-of-last-resort for most young Americans. By the same token, the Army i3 the most representative of the services and hence the one which mirrors most exactly and terribly the ills which afflict our society as a whole.

The burden of maintaining morale and discipline and the two are so intricately interwoven as to be inseparable mis rests more heavily upon "the officer corps of the Army than upon those of the other services. And it is precisely the Army's officer corps which is the most troubled. In last Sunday's New York Times, Seymour M. Hersh reported that 33 young officers, about 4 percent of West Point's faculty and staff, have resigned in the past 18 months. The 33 include such once-future Army brass as novelist-Rhodes Scholar Maj.

Josiah Bunting and Medal of Honor-winner Capt. Paul Bucha. The Army's most decorated officer, Col. David H. Hackworth, also resigned this year.

A recent Army study of the academy's Class of 1971, according to Hersh, revealed that 40 prcent of the class, if they had it to do over again, would not attend West Point. Much has been written about the problems of drug usage and racial friction within the Army, with their concomitant of a collapse of discipline. But these officers' concerns centered more upon the broader question of whether an effective Army, given the current wave of anti-militarism in this country, could be maintained and, if it could, whether it was worth the personal sacrifice required of them and their families to try to make it so. The post-Vietnam American Army officer corps, like the post-Algeria French officer corps, tends to feel that its sacrifices on the field of battle have been frustrated by political decisions of the country's leaders and largely unappre of propagandizing, campaigning and lobbying, the proponents of abortion-on-request could muster only 14 votes out of 199 cast. On the other hand, the House seems to have overreacted to the pressures for abortion-on-request by passing an overly restrictive bill which would forbid abortions even in cases involving rape and incest.

Let's hope the state Senate will be able to frame a more judicious abortion policy for Pennsylvania. From the Uniontown Herald-Standard There is a bit of confusion over who is running the commonwealth. The government, that is the administration of Gov. Milton Shapp, thinks it is. But the union which represents many of the state's employes, believes it is.

It's time that both the administration and the union remember that the people run the state. But McGovern has decided that the is worth keeping. His inquiries, including a session with the author of the plan, Dr. James Tobin of Yale, recon-vinced him that this iff a politically via He would much prefer to concentrate his troops on retaining his county offices, which are the backbone of the machine. But he'll work for McGovern out of his politician's pride.

He does love to puff out his chest after an election and show how he brought in the vote for his par- ty's leader. He likes those phone calls of grauiuue irom occupants or tne wnne Smith Hempstone Abrams WASHINGTON. This weekend, after 36 years of service, Gen. William C. Westmoreland doffed his uniform for the last time and went into retirement.

After Senate confirmation, he will be succeeded as Army Chief of Staff by Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, the commander of U. S. forces in Vietnam.

Abrams, a convert to Catholicism and (like Westmoreland) a member of West Point's Class of 1936, is inheriting from his predecessor the smallest American army since pre-Korean War days. He is also taking command of a frustrated and deeply divided institution, one unsure of itself and of its role within the nation it is charged to defend. When Westmoreland came home from Vietnam four years ago, without, unfortunately, that coonskin President Johnson had exhorted him to nail to the wall, the Army was composed of more than 19 divisions, nearly 1.6 million men. Abrams' -army, the smallest in a quarter-century, can field only 13 divisions (many of them not ready for combat) and numbers only about 861,000 men. Although there is a floor (and 13 divisions would seem to be about it) beneath which the size of the Army cannot be allowed to fall without seriously compro- GEN.

CREIGHTON ABRAMS faces delicate task Shane Creamer has now aligned himself with the prison pre-release furlough system. This is the program under which a convicted criminal gets let out of jail to go home for a few days for some unexplained reason or other. This entire bit about taking criminals have been sentenced to prison because of crimes and trying to see how enjoyable you can make their stay there leaves us a little baffled. From the Pittsburgh Press It is obvious that advocates of abor-tion-on-request in Pennsylvania have overestimated public support for the idea that any woman who wants an abortion should be allowed to get one by simply asking for it. Last week a bill to legalize abortion on request came to a vote in the State House of Representative.

And despite months in fact, years, 5 TN jf jt 4i 4," ML A dl iminidly Beds ff Flood insurance is urgent necessity Starts SUNDAY in THE INQUIRER From the (Allentown) Morning Call It's not at all surprising that as rivers and streams went on their billion-dollar rampage across Pennsj Ivania last week, only about 80 residents of the state had insurance to cover tie cost of flood damage to their homes and business properties. Premiums have been high, and fewer than 100 communities bothered about makin gtheir taxpayers eligible to buy the special coverage subsidized by the Federal Government. Washington's immediate reaction has been to cut the insurance costs 40 percent, to $25 for the $10,000 minimum package. The maximum is $17,500 plus $5,000 for contents. Those unable to buy it because their local communities havea't met the federal standards should waste no time demanding prompt action from city and borough councils or township commissioners.

From the Vandergrift News-Citizen Pennsylvania's Attortey General J. i ttttmT-.