Corpus Christi Caller-Times from Corpus Christi, Texas • 12

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 17 1968 LETTEKS From Our Headers How To Help Problem-Drinkers Editor the Caller: I am the daughter of a problem drinker Through the 1 Al-Anon Program a fellowship of men and women who am relatives and friends of problem drinkers I have come to understand and have learned that alcoholism is a disease The Republicans suffer from mixed motives For one thing they consider it an outrage for President Johnson to nominate a chief justice at almost the end of his term holding that the nomination should be saved for Richard Nixon For another Republicans would rather bear with Warren the known than Fortas the unknown President Johnson has not been noticeably fore-bearing in the presence of his critics He has sharply rebuked willful senators for delaying approval of his nominees He suggested more delicately than is his wont that at least one other baser motive may be behind the opposition to the nomination of Fortas At a recent press conference President Johnson compared the present situation with that which arose in the Senate in 1916 over confirmation of Louis Bran-dcis He said that today "we had a somewhat similar situation" Those who remember their history will perceive the delicate thrust of that allusion For anti-Semitism was a strong factor in the debate which led finally to the confirmation of Brandeis Warren has promised to stay on as chief justice if Fortas is not approved to succeed him Historians may be left to ponder the question of just who won the Fortas-Warren argument If Fortas is not approved still another irony will be apparent: Liberals who strongly support Fortas will probably be better off with Warren since Thombcrry probably would not be as liberal as Warren creditors and require that consumers be notified when an adverse entry' has been made on their credit ratings That would at least help protect right of privacy' and give them opportunity to compel correction of error And that would not be an insubstantial gain for the buying public Controversy Over Fortas Spiked Willi Sharp Ironies Whatever happened to the "Impeach Earl Warren" placards and billboards? They have disappeared as an unlikely coalition of Southerners and Republicans work manfully to keep Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States It is a melancholy commentary on these heavy ham-handed times that few among us are able to appreciate and savor the delicate irony of this paradox A sense of humor of course is neither the first nor only casualty of the reception of President Johnson's nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to replace Warren as chief justice and of Judge Homer Thombcrry to succeed Fortas as justice Love of Warren alas is singularly absent from the proceedings It is not that senators love Warren more Just that they love Fortas less Perhaps the purest of the mixed motives brought to the discussion is that of Southerners: They do not want Fortas as chief justice because it would mean a continuation they believe of a Warren court by another legal libertarian Consumer Protection Diic In Credit-Rating System Sen William Proxmire D-Wis is not going to on his laurels after winning his 8-year congrcs-' sional fight for a truth-in-lending law Next session he will push a bill aimed at credit-bureau abuses and protection for consumers against arbitrary or unwar- ranted damage to their credit ratings Congress is likely to discover that Sen Proxmire will be able to enlist considerable perhaps surprising public support for such a bill Voters and taxpayers are extremely sensitive in the pockrtbook and the pocket- book has come more and more to mean a good credit rating The American middle class the vast majority of the population has come to live largely on credit For most an acceptable credit rating has became indispens- able to decent not to mention affluent living stan-dards The national economy is now largely a combination consumers and credit economy And yet despite all the regulations that now apply to business there is very little protection for the consumer against unfair credit-rating practices Unless he wants to spend a lot of money on civil suits of dubious outcome about all he can do is vent his resentment and try to get back in good graces Proxmire's bill would set standards for credit rat-' ing prohibit distribution of credit information to non- JOSEPH ALSOP Humphrey Troubles Reveal Democratic Plight Knowing this has helped me to understand my father I am so thankful that I have found friends who understand me in the Al-Anon Program that it has relieved me of my feelings of confusion anxiety bitterness guilt and hatred that I felt towards my father I thank God for helping me to have found a new way of life I would like to stress that there is a Latin group and three English speaking groups in the city If you have a problem with alcoholism please call TU3-8171 for more information THANKFUL DAUGHTER Wallace Weakens Respect for I -aw Editor the Caller: After months of reading the many letters in favor of Wallace I felt it was my American duty to speak out against this man Not only as a mother who is trying to teach her children to be unprejudiced but as a wue of a serviceman in Vietnam who feels so deeply for the many men white and black who have died there so that men like Wallace may have the freedom to preach out against all that democracy and our great nation stands for Wallace is and has always been a segregationist Never has he been known to be a just man a civil man lie is against the laws of the land that are made for one and all regardless of color Disrespect was his showing his defiance in the doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 Those repetitious speeches on giving back state control to the people there would never have been any federal control if Mr Wallace had not defied the law It was of his own making His repeated attacks on our intellectuals our professors and our high-ranking public officials show his lack of knowledge diplomacy and nis true provincialism The man elected to our highest office of the land commands respect of which Mr Wallace has failed to show A vote for Wallace is regression not progression Give our fellow American citizens of many colors and cultures a chance to further our great nation so that we may have been proud of overcoming a great evil Thank you for letting me express my feelings MRS L-F DcMOUCIIE No Need To Fear Police Editor the Caller: In answer to Mrs A Clark who criticized Mr Wallace and law enforcement in a letter which appeared in the Caller of Sept 11 1 have this to say Have your hands ever rocked a cradle? If so you have experienced much love but with this experience comes an obligation for the right teachings of your child To raise this child whom you rocked to the stage of maturity demands and experts of you that you teach him (or her) respect for you as a parent first and home church and community And this Involves all In authority Above al teach him to be a patriot for his country and not ask to be relieved of his obligations when he becomes a man for without these teachings he will never mature and assume any responsibilities and you cannot truly look on him in favor Apparently you abhor any law enforcement I say to you if you breaking any laws or plan to you nave absolutely no fear of the police but will find them very cooperative just and truly friends 1 As for Mr Wallace if he made you sick then you were surely sick before you heard him I hail him as a patriot along with Mayor Daley and all Americans who are dedi- WASHINGTON When Corn-- wallis surrendered at Yorktown the British regiments marched out to lav down their arms to a mournful but appropriate tune It was called World Turned Upside Down" For the Democrats so long so comfortably so overconfi- dently the majority party in this country "The Woria Turned Upside neatly sums up their present prospects It Is not just a matter of the pollers' grim findings that Richard Nixon is leading Hubert Humphrey by a very big margin while the racist George Wallace still continues to surge forward At the moment there is not a ray of light on the Democratic horizon The Humphrey high command is so desperately short of money that it has literally been Impossible to buy tel- or radio time and there is little hope of doing so on any serious scale for some time to come This pinch in turn reflects the general estimate of the Democrats' chances Contributors like to invest In success after all In addition the public campaign waged by the vice president is as yet both formless and all over the lot for he has not adhered to the formula and strategy that were agreed upon before ne took the stump Difficulties behind the scenes are also indicated by a sudden change of the advertising agency handling the Democratic account Altogether it not surprising that campaign director Lawrence O'Brien has been begging the House leadership to pass the "equal time" bin at all costs on the outspoken ground that Humphrey-Nixon debates on nationwide television offer I i 1 TICKET rated to keeping our country a lawful nation instead of a lawless nation MOTHER OF PROUD SOLDIER (Kingsville) The HIcmmciI Slate of Poverty Editor the Caller: There have been many comments upon the rope's stand on birth control One recent remark was the church should be deeply involved with the sick the hungry and the forgotten poor of this globe" Most people fail to realize that it Is because of this very involvement that we take our stand against birth control People who suffer in sickness poverty or oppression are closer to God They are a part of liis redemption Christ suffered tor us He expects us to suffer for Him anyone would follow after Me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me" CMl-l tiiiMit LEADERSHIP JOHN CHAMBERLAIN He didn't advocate an easy way who perseveres unto the end shall be saved" His life was exemplary He was born poor and He died poor He was despised and Anarchic Lack Any Vision of Future the only remaining hope of snatching victory from defeat's hungry jaws What then the cause of this great upset in the whole established pattern of American politics which now seems to im- Bnd? The Vietnam-obsessed emocratic dissidents win of course reply "the but they will be 90 per cent wrong Certainly poor decent Humphrey has been much hurt by the vicious nastiness of the left-wing Democrats whose hero he mice was Certainly the public behavior of too many the Democratic left-wingers has caused a pretty angry conservative reaction Certainly these people have made it inordinately hard for Humphrey to reunite hb party But aU that if you look at the basic facts adds up to no more than a very small part of the real story The real story that the Democrats have been living on borrowed time for several elections In other words their position as the majority party has long been owed almost exclusively to a fairly unlikely chapter of accidents The first accident was Dwight Eisenhower On the one hand Gen Eisenhower took much trouble about hb own standing in the country but took no trouble at all about hb standing On the other hand the Eisen-hower-George Humphrey economic and fiscal policies somewhat impeded growth and retarded affluence And this went far to reinstill a little loyally into the highly diverse Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt put together so long ago Yet even with these handicaps Richard Nixon came within a mouse's whisker of victory in 1960 The second accident was John Kennedy Hb charm courage and power to Inspire both high and low soon made people forget how nearly he had been beaten When Kennedy was tragically lost to us Lyndon Johnson undoubtedly inherited a party that once more commanded a label of majority That majority was then artificially Inflated by the third accident the Republican choice of Barry GoWwalcr in 1964 Yet throughout this whole period the composition of the electorate was changing in ways that were eventually bound to cause a strong trend to the right As of today if you count only those who are at all likely to go to the polls 75 per cent of the voters are 35 years old or more with the average well above 40 And 85 per cent of the voters live above the poverty level again the average well above the poverty level And 90 per cent of the voters are white Add that enormous numbers of the affluent whites have been frightened or outraged or both at once by the rioting of the tiny minority or black extremists by the excesses of the youthful flag-burners and by the sentimental permissiveness of so many of the professional Democratic liberals You can then see why the state of Michigan for example is now judged to be a tossup between Nixon and Wallace with Humphrey far down in third place A good many weeks must pass before election day All sorts of things can happen But it already clear that Nixon not only has an excellent chance of being elected but also has an excellent chance of making the Republicans the majority party for a long time to come INI WtahMgton Pwt Co hated but lie never lost faith In the book of Luke Christ blessed the poor the hungry the weeping and promised them joy in heaven He also warned the rich the well-fed and the laughing stating that they are having their comforts now We are propagating our families not for the comforts of the world but for a larger eternal kingdom God created us for Himself MRS HENRY CL MORAN (Fulton) Meaning of Editor the Caller: The double-talk of the press strikes one as so funny because it has named the hard-core Communists of Russia East Germany Poland Hungary and Bulgaria as conser-vatives Is it to be conservative to want censorship of the press? Ja it to be conservative to procure the end of all political activity? Is it to be conservative to attack the rightist anti-hard-core forces? Is it to be conservative to resort to naked military force to send 100000 invaders to rape a country that wants freedom to govern its own destiny? It hurts me every time I read this double-talk of the Running Roles To Veil Inconsistency v- WASHINGTON Vice presidential candidate Spire Ag- new Is portraying himself as tougher and blunter than his number one man Richard ML Nixon Vice presidential candidate Edwin Muskie comes on with an Intellectual aloofness that contrasts visibly with hb chattel? boss Hubert II Humphrey But if either or both of these cases offends your natural thirst for consistency you're a mighty unusual observer why it seems such a logical strategy Republican voters who want a hard line on crime and an old-fashioned approach to communism can find it by looking past Nixon at Agnew Those Democrats who yearn for the quiet manner of Eugene McCarthy can find it if they shut their ears to Humphrey and listen to Muskie Psychologists call it selective perception You see and hear what you want to see and hear In the Republican case this strategy calculated WUh the Democrats it is mainly accidental and involves style more than :1 substance Muskie doesn't say different things than Humphrey he just makes them sound different -v But Agnew the self-styled has been as- signed "the hard line" and told to "do a lot of attacking" according to Herbert Klein director of And so we have gotten description of Humphrey as someone who "begins to look a lot like Neville hb use of epithets like "squishy soft" and hb insistence on using the phrase and order" despite complaints that the term has racist overtones Lany O'Brien campaign manager describes the Republican strategy as one of trying to travel the middle of the road while to the right1' Meanwhile while Humphrey busy denouncing and attacking (he called Nixon "a wiggler and a his running mate refusing to denounce and attack In Indianapolis last week Muskie got impatient with report--- ere who tried to needle him into saying something direct and catchy that would fit into a headline business of always trying to cast people in an either-or framework is a disservice to rational debate" he said And in words that McCarthy might have chosen he wondered must we always denounce or attack? It seems to me we ought to be able to just Conventional political wisdom holds that these contrasting images are good for a ticket because they it But 1 though the use of contrasting stances by vice presidential candi- dates may be psychologically sound there no evidence that it changes many votes Besides "selective perception" there something else that keeps voters from noticing mat vice presidential candidates are being inconsistent It the fact that voters ordinarily don't notice vice presidents at all Dr Angus Campbell who has studied the behavior of voters in five presidential elections from hb base at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center calls the vice presidential candidate "a in voter decisions However another social psychologist Hadley Cantril of Princeton University thinks it could be different this year (1964 GOP vice presidential nominee William E) and Barry Goldwater said the same thing and so no one paid any attention to Miller" he said these guys (Agiew and Mu- skie) may get noticed" Psychologists generally agree that voters find it easy to swallow inconsistencies Some of the Survey Research more recent surveys have asked voters to tell where they stand cm an issue and then which candidate has views most like their own on this issue a very strong tendency" said Campbell people to see the man they've decided to vote for as being closer to them he or All of this suggests that running mates really need to divide the labor between high-road philosophers and low-road gut punchers A presidential candidate can handle both jobs himself New I nothing political parties vious generation whom the barbarians" follow are aO those who preached a permissiveness a pragmatism that was unrelated to ends It Is not that philosophers such as John Dewey meant to unleash the devil their personal values were extremely civilized But they have bequeathed to the a delight in means that is totally unconcerned with anything the means may produce With the the quest for meaning has been totally displaced by the quest for power is Student But power for what? It turns out that the object of student power is more power The which is all of us will have to take the hindmost To skip to another magazine Bill National Review is currently engaged in a spinoff operation launching a new publication to be called Combat It will be edited by Ted Lit a veteran anti-Communist journalist with Ruth Matthews who inherited the greatest anti-Communist file in America from her husband Matthews handling the research One wishes Combat wen but Professor essay on the barbarians" makes one wonder bow the editors of Combat wffl keep up with the tergiversations of the New Left The says Boorstin characteristically belongs to a or ses and economic entennis It has nothing to with you today baby but who knows where be tomorrow?" He wants his leaders to act now for there is no longterm plan for any future The quest is for sensation for -the with LSD for the' thrill of baiting Mayor cops for the joy of setting fires in the upper stories of a Columbia University building How will the editors of Combat relate such a quest to any sickness that is the of organized We may be sura the Commit- nists are working in the background of our recent disturbances but the fact is that the new harbor inn care for communism any more than he cares for democracy He simply hurls rocks and epithets which means that he has given up thinking One saw this nihilism in Grant Park in Chicago during the week of the Democratic convention I listened to one nice-looking college student explaining himself to a reporter: like what Chairman Mao says power comes from the barrel of a gun The cops have the guns got to take the guns from them for But what would they use the guns for? In a world of who would know how to organize anything? Is the Twentieth Century It will take more than an issue of Esquire to tell us 1M King Nature Syndicate Inc The magazine Esquire in its 35th anniversary issue probes the question of salvaging the remainder of the Twentieth Century Judging by the contents one wonders whether it is salvageable on any basis that is now foreseeable The truly memorable thing about the issue dated for October is tint it has unearthed a previously unpublished essay by Scott Fitzgerald called Generation" which was apparently composed in an attempt to explain the chronicler of the jazz age to his daughter Everything that Fitzgerald ever wrote has its quality of piercing beauty and its wisdom too But this particular Fitzgerald piece is especially good It has perceptions that have escaped our historians and our sociologists such as the one that explains the hard-boiled generation of Andrew Jackson as and rougher than their fathers" because they were in a land more remote from the mainstream and all their doubt clothed them in desperation" Fitzgerald's theory is that a against the fathers" occurs about times in a and is "distinguished by a set of ideas inherited in moderated form from the madmen and outlaws of the generation before" And so let us go on from insights to another piece in the magazine that hopes to save us an essay by Daniel Boorstin called New Boorstin is talking about Yippies and hippies and the Student Fewer and Black Power movements The of the pre do with a downright invasion and a drowning of all "ideals of liberty Conservatism means freedom not slavery SYLVIA MORALES (Kingsville) Preterero wdl IN area tetter wit writer- aanw puMtalwd A writer- MMttty will ta tapt cmfidMtial aa remit ter remit tat all lilttr te ta cwmtared ter irubl Kitten mni taw HaMtun addret and piwna Mmttar ter adtter-t tntermatHii Plant keep tetter itarti lengthy tetter may ta erarpted Amnynww tetter win ta dbcardid CORPUS CHRISTI CALLER Published ovary wrak day morning at 20 Lowtr Broadway Cornu Chrtetl Tnat 7MD By The Calter-Tlmn Publlihlng Co Sunday wlitten Tht Conut ChrliH Calltr-Tknn Sound cIom postage paid at Corpu Chrltll Ttxo Edward Hart Publliher Rotart Jocksoa Editor Glitart Vetter BimIiws Manager John Stalllngt ManogWgFditor Thetna Ataartlsmg Director eland Barn Omitted Clarence Trafton Circulation I Jame WtUOffe (M(HMHIMigillBt(HIIMMMI Pertonnel Manager Jame Correau tiaiMiiitmtliMi Production Manager Philip Geyer Public Service Member el The AMOciatad Prow The Awaclated Pren entitled exclusively to the we ter publication of all local newt printed In this newt-paper at wall a all AP new dupatcha MAIL PATES: Morning Evening and Sunday 12 month 32) month 11 I month ttTS 1 month (ML Dally (Colter Times) and Sunday 12 month ST: month 112 2 month tt 1 month 2 Dally (Caller er time only) 12 month 121 month HI 2 month BTS 1 month 1171 Sunday only 12 month S12 month tt 1 months 1 I month St PATES BY CARRIES: Caller dally ana Sunday tt cent a week) Tlmro dally and Sunday cent week) morning evening end Sunday 7B cent a week ganization He has no fixed community even with his own "non-members" He does not carry a card he is not trained or tested he has no central core of beliefs be simply soys lo his fellows iv i are.