Iowa City Press-Citizen from Iowa City, Iowa • Page 6

IOWA CITY PRESS-CITIZEN EDITORIAL PAGE Settlement With Hanoi Before Election Sought Nixon Sees Foreign Policy as Major Issue Saturday, July 172 Obviously, however, unforeseeable responses in Hanoi make this a much chancier prospect than was getting to China and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, it probably would be a mistake for either Capitol Scene By BRUCE BIOSSAT WASHINGTON In a year when many public figures insist the state of the economy is the big thing, President Nixon seems bent on trying to win reelection as a pre-eminent foreign policy president. We know now that his predicted fall bombshell will have "Vietnam" written on it, though we can't be sure of its size and shape. There are no more great capitals to visit, to top Peking and Moscow. Well advertised is the President's wish to achieve some kind of settlement of the Vietnam war through negotiations.

gotiate" in the public forum, by offering fresh peace proposals going beyond those of May 8, hen he suggested a cease-fire, new elections for South Vietnam, U.S. total withdrawal four months after agreement. Such proposals would, of course, have to bear at least the stamp of still broader conciliation, and most likely would be underscored by troop withdrawals cutting our residual forces in Vietnam to almost token proportions. It as wholly predictable that in the announcement of the withdrawal now of another men, the President fixed the next deadline for action at He is simply suggesting that all this is possible if they wUl only help get Vietnam out of the way. And the President is also trying to transmit to Hanoi, via Moscow, the idea that this is the time to deal and get a fair break, that if wins reelection, the terms thereafter might be much tougher.

Our air and naval power still in place is the reminder. At this stage, no one knows how Hanoi may respond, or even if the Kremlin will turn off the supply spigot. But if all Nixon's pressures fail, he still has that fallback prospect of "going public" in his peace bid. Sept. 1.

He thus reserves the opportunity to move critically on the very eve of the fall election campaign. If he were then to announce a slash to around 20,000 men, a total less than the 23,000 "advisers" we had in Vietnam before major U.S. ground units entered that country in 1965, it would leave Sen. George McGovern as 1972 Democratic nominee (presumed) with not much to talk about on the war. To be sure, we might still be keeping substantial air and naval forces handy outside Vietnam, but the Nixon people are betting this will not trouble too many Americans so long as U.S.

casualties are virtually eliminated and no draftees need go to Vietnam hereafter. Yet the President's greater desire is that the whole business be settled at the table this fall. He is pressing Moscow hard to lean on Hanoi to undertake serious peace negotiations. Moscow has the levers, since It is the big supplier to North Vietnam. Nixon knows the Russians want to get on to more important things, like a Europewide conference, more trade, nuclear arms controls which could ease defense outlays and allow new focus on domestic development.

the Democrats or anybody else to assume that if he is frustrated in his hope for pre-election negotiations on Vietnam, Nixon will have no other way to deal with the issue in a politically profitable fashion. For one thing, he could "ne Now is the time for all good men Party Suicide Threatens Fragmented Democrats tute for the welfare system it will be a millstone around his neck. A second serious error was his meat-axe cut of the defense Washington Calling mwMAmryk aww' In 1952 Stevenson carried nine states with an electoral vote total of 89. Of the nine, seven were states of the old Confederacy. Those states in 1972 will go either for George Wallace, if he runs on a third party ticket, or for Richard Nixon.

They are lost to a Democratic party of the Sevcnson or McGovern order. In 1956 Stevenson carried seven states with an electoral total of 74. Six of the seven were Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North and South Carolina. In the 16 years that have intervened the Old South has abandoned the loyalties to the party that emerged from the ruins of the Civil War. Those six states could not conceivably today vote for a Stevenson or a McGovern.

In 1)52, after 20 years of Democratic rule the party was also fragmented. The media chivvied at President Harry Truman for peccadilloes, most of them minor. Such hard-line Texas Democrats as Lyndon Johnson and John Connally sat on their hands in the campaign and Texas went Republican. Stevenson was running against a national hero. The disarray, the deep hostilities are this year much greater.

In contrast President Nixon has with great political shrewdness welded his party together, bringing liberals and conservatives into what is at least a working coalition. His successes in foreign policy have won overwhelming approval. About the feuding in his party Stevenson once had this to say. Sure, those cats are fighting, clawing, yowling, but remember they are making more cats. Whether that is true in 1972 is the great imponderable.

By MARQUIS CHILDS WASHINGTON Hope, gun, poison the Democrats have several ways of committing suicide and in the deepest trough of gloom on the eve of the convention at Miami Beach the only decision seems to be how it will be done. The surest way is to deny the nomination to George McGovern after he has taken 10 primaries with a delegate total, omitting the California division, of more than 1200. That would make the re-election of President Nixon a certainty barring the accidents that defy all certainties. It would also turn the convention into a bloody shambles, a match for the horrendous performances in Chicago four years ago. In a party divided and in disarray with fractions old and new clawing at one another, McGovern and his followers represent the only sizable coherent force.

The fragments that have been glued together in the stop-Mc-Govern government could not by the wildest stretch of imagination cohere around another candidate. They are ego tripping, sustained by fantasies of what might happen if a thousand ifs. McGovern has made serious errors of judgment in campaigning to win those primaries. The worst boner was his $1,000 a year to every man, woman and child with a complex formula to take it and a lot more away from the middle and upper income brackets. That was the surest way to alienate not just the affluent tax payer but a lot of hardworking men and women in revolt against taxes.

And however far he may back off from this Rube Goldberg substi budget with a proposed $30 billion reduction. The swollen military budget is a vulnerable target. The mistake was to use a flat figure that could be shown not only to damage the defense structure but to enforce cuts in a wasteful and impractical way. Yet wrhen these and other errors are added up the fact is that McGovern and McGovern alone has strong, active support from a sizable force among the young and among many of their elders. They believe the system is not working and they look to McGovern as a radical surgeon who can change it.

However unrealistic this may be in terms of American politics the McGovern forces should have their inning. They represent a choice and not, in that fateful phrase out of 1964, an echo of the established order. The parallel with Adlai Stevenson comes to mind. While McGovern is no Stevenson, the senator from South Dakota inspires something of the same enthusiasm that a generation of intellectuals and the young gave to Adlai, the brilliant campaigner who infused his speeches with a warm, splendidly phrased idealism. But a look at the Stevenson record in 1952 and 1956 shows how formidable a task McGovern must face as the nominee of a party so sadly fragmented.

iP JSjuX irlMMSi til Back Room. Gone In the past, disputes which threatened the health of a political party the way current wrangles do the Democrats have been referred to operatives in the back room. They'd try to work put a compromise, papering over the differences that wracked the party, hoping the patch wouldn't come unstuck until sometime after the elections. Because they represented so many diverse elements and because intense intra-party squabbles were so common, Democrats achieved a particular skill at this. They had greater experience, and they regularly had to call on all the expertise the party could muster to survive.

The question as this 1972 convention begins is whether the differences can be patched up again. A lot of observers doubt that they can. All of which makes the scheduling of the party's fund-raising drive on television before the convention, rather than after, even more fortuitous than it looked earlier. Since the Supreme Court declined to bail the Democrats out of their immediate bitter dilemma over California and Illinois delegates, the opening of the convention Monday seems likely to be a public demonstration of existing differences. But even had the court ruled in the dispute, it would have forcefully confirmed Democratic dissesion so severe it had to be taken to the judiciary in hopes of a resolution the party seemed unable to reach.

It still is possible that an effective back room operation can be hammered together with the illusion of party harmony, if not the actuality, being presented to the convention and nation. This is not likely, however, since the back room may have been eliminated from this Democratic convention by party reform rules. (The reforms are not bad, but it takes time to learn how to make them work). Almost certainly, most of the people who once worked in the back room have lost much of their power even if they did make it to Miami Beach. So now, while the party reforms have tended to sharpen divisions over candidates and issues, the institutions and forces which tended to smooth over differences have been weakened or destroyed.

What's left then may be the possibilities of an effective back room in the style of the old politics or a resolution of differences developing among the diverse and inexperienced delegates. Either possibility seems slight at this point. All this, of course, would be of little consequence if the Democratic Party were not what it is, one of this country's two great coalitions, masquerading as political parties. But it is; as such it has a role to play in the political process, which it cannot do as a splintered assemblage of feuding factions. The immediate gains would go to the Republican Party and President Nixon, the immediate losses would be those of Democratic candidates and the party's nominee.

But if the feuds and divisions would continue to vitiate Democratic strength, the long-range loss would be the American system of government which demands plausible political alternatives. The Real Game If Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky ever sit down to play for the world chess title, the moves on the board will be elementary compared with those which preceded the match. Even now, with play scheduled to begin Tuesday and Spassky having won first move, only someone who would leave his king unprotected would wager much on play actually starting. Twenty Years Ago Today July 8, 1952 Visits to widely separated horse shows at Arlington, Iowa, and Platteville, in a single day this week (July 4) proved profitable to Mike Mulroney, University of Iowa student spending the summer in Iowa City. Buck, a western horse owned by Mulroney, won several award ribbons, two trophies and a purse of at the two shows.

Forty beds were opened at the VA Hospital here this week, bringing the total number of open beds to 216. The Iowa City board of education has given preliminary approval to a budget of $803,943, largest In the history of the school system here. Public hearing on the budget proposal has been set for Aug. 12, Eugene A. Oathout and John L.

Swank of Iowa City are among 180 air force ROTC cadets now taking summer training at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas. Hal Boyle, columnist and war correspondent, mixes amusing anecdotes with more serious comments as he presents the fourth lecture in the University of Iowa summer series. Boyle says tie philosophy that "every human being has a story worth telling" sums up his approach to Pundits Press McGovern To Alter Political Style the issue of abortion. It may please Ilichard Nixon to pretend that abortion is a matter within the discretion of the President of the United States, but in fact, British Ponder Limitations Upon Rights of Accused age is a major goal of the reform proposals. The major recommendations include modifying requirements that police warn suspects against statements that may be used against them, limiting a suspect's right to remain silent, admission of hearsay evidence and permitting testimony of wives against husbands.

The proposals are strongly opposed by British civil liberty organizations, again similar to the American experience. Parliament, however, is expected eventually to enact a modified revision measure. If the British do succeed in strengthening the law without doing damage to essential individual rights, Americans should be most interested in the formula. "The law should be such as will secure as far as possible that the result of the trial is the right one," declared the parliamentary study committee. "That is to say, the accused should be convicted if the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that he is guity, but otherwise not." Hasn't that been the basic idea on both sides of the Atlantic all along? By FRANK GETLEIN WASHINGTON The press panjandrums who spent the winter and early spring speculating on just how large Muskie's victories in the primaries finally would be and explaining how, no matter how large they were, he couldn't hope to defeat Richard Nixon because of the people's insatiable demand that the war go on forever, are now-explaining how McGovern.

a name they had barely heard of a few months ago, is doomed to defeat at the same hands for the same reason. There are, to be sure, other reasons invoked besides McGov-ern's dangerous leanings toward peace. Grandly ignoring the new politics, the keen analyzers of events have divvied up the reasons for McGovern's inevitable defeat in the style of Tammany Hall putting together a ticket in the old days: Strictly on racial-religious balance. The theme song of the whole analysis, applied by the analyzers to Richard Nixon, is from that classic outline of American politics, "Of Thee I sing," and, as written by the Gershwin brothers, it goes, "He's the man the people choose: He loves the Irish and the Jews." Applying the formula inversely, the war-lovers among the commentators are now claiming that McGovern hasn't a chance because the Irish and the Jews don't love him. They dispose of the Irish on Washington Close Up of course, it is not.

It is strictly a matter for state legislatures to decide in the making or repealing- of laws about it, and for the courts to decide in the matter of judging such laws constitutional or not. The president, whether he be Nixon, McGovern or Cardinal Cooke, has absoluely no legitimate official interest in it. Beyond that, the war-loving columnists are making the large assumption that the Irish and the other Catholic ethnic groups are motivated primarily by the passionate urge to impose their own moral standards on all Americans in this matter. On the record, the principal Catholics so obsessed seem to be limited to the hierarchy and a few rich ladies, mostly connections of the Kennedy and Buckley families. Things used to be different, to be sure, but at this point in the evolution of American Catholicism, one archbishop has one vote, his own.

The Buckleys, through their various propaganda outlets, can doubtless influence a few votes, but it is much to be doubted if those Catholics who still regard themselves as Kennedy followers will vote for Nixon to save the country from the dread threat of women making their own decisions about their own bodies. Larry O'Brien, for instance? Daniel Patrick Moynihan? In moving the Jews Into the Nixon camp, the mad bombers among the commentators are even more interesting. They do so by invoking Israel. This is rather shameless because, by and large, that segment of the punditry most committed to having the Vietnam war become a permanent feature of life in these United States is also the segment that, over the years, has felt this country was dangerously neglecting its true interests in the Middle East namely, the Arabs and their oil for the sake of a sentimental concern for a bunch of Jews planting orange trees in Israel. Nevertheless, they easily make an identification between U.S.

involvement in Vietnam and U.S. support for Israel and argue that the Jewish vote will be heavily influenced by the analogy. It would if Jews were as dumb as the war advocates. But they are not. What Israel wants from the United States is the sale of some weapons.

The last thing it wants is anything remotely resembling the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Had we gone into Israel at the time of the Six-Day War in the way we have gone into 'Nam, the war would now be the Six-Year War and no end in sight. The Arabs would hold large parts of the country. Those painfully cultivated orange groves would have been defoliated long ago, by us.

Israeli girls, now soldiers and farmers, would be prostitutes in large numbers. There would be a flourishing trade in heroin and a black market in everything. Golda Meir would have been assassinated and replaced, eventually, by an Arab air marshal recently converted. At home, to complete the analogy, there would be a strong revival of old-time anti-Semi -tism. Is this what the "Jewish vote" really wants? By DON GRAFF "It is high time that society stopped running away from the problems of crime and wrongdoing and began to tackle them intelligently and courageously," declares a top law enforcement official.

"The surest and the quickest way to reduce crime and to achieve a more humane and enlightened penal system is to increase the likelihood that the guilty will be convicted." Those are the sentiments, and could be the words of any number of lawmen from the Justice Department down to local prosecuting attorneys during these recent years of soaring crime rates in the United States. They are, however, the ords of Commissioner Robert Mark of Britain's Scotland Yard supporting proposals for major revision of criminal law procedures. After an eight-year study of the state of British justice, a parliamentary committee is proposing changes designed to correct an imbalance which, in the concerned view of law enforcers, has been weighted too heavily in favor of the lawbreaker. Sound familiar? Not too surprisingly, considering the common origins of the two systems and the increasing homogeneity of the western world in general. Britain has been WTestling with many of the same moral and legal dilemmas as has the United States.

This is the Britain of the popularly pictured law-abiding population, low crime rate, judicial system combining efficiency with scrupulous respect for individual rights and the unarmed bobby who is everyone's best friend. Not entirely so, it appears. Crime and the exploitation of the law's omissions and ambiguities have been escalating. And, in fact, buffing up the bobby's somewhat tarnished public im -j A 17 Today in History Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned when his boat capsized in the Gulf of Spezia off Italy. In 1898 William Jennings Bryan pleaded for his silver money policy in his famous "Cross of Gold" speech in Chicago.

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson received a tumultuous welcome in New York as he returned from the peace conference at Versailles. In 1940. the government of Norway moved to London after 62 days of fierce fighting against Nazi invaders in World War II. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Today is Saturday. July 8, the 190th day of 1972.

There are 176 days left in the year. Today's highlight in history: On this date in 1835. the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia cracked as it was being rung during the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall. On this date: In 1663. King Charles II of England granted a charter to Rhode Island.

In 1822. the English poet. 'My ytifa Am start4 etfWng conscimnan-raisina tssiorn. I axpect sftt7 ba har'ma me any day now!".