The Capital Journal from Salem, Oregon • 4

4 Capitol Journal, Salem, Nov. 26, 1976 The opinions expressed in the first two columns at the left are those of the Capital Journal editorial board. Its members are N. S. Hayden, publisher; John H.

CapottaO JoyirimaD i 'i McMillan, executive editor; William Bebout, editorial page editor; Paul Jacobs of the Capital Journal staff, and Larry Roby, city editor. Elsewhere on this and the opposite page are letters from readers, commentary by syndicated columnists and news service writers, and articles analyzing current events from a variety of sources. The Capital Journal welcomes commentary from readers. Letters for the Open Forum should be as brief as possible and bear the writer's signature and address. The editors reserve the right to edit all letters submitted for publication Readers are invited to telephone.

(364-6811) or write the editorial page editor ESTABLISHED IN 1S88 N- HAYDEN, President Publisher JOHN H. McMILLAN, Executive Editor WILLIAM BEBOUT, Editor, Editorial Page 'ith ideas tor special articles. foil Editorials- dDjpeini IFaDimnnmi Limit terms for city? Column on DMV Salem Councilman Peter Courtney has a good idea that deserves careful consideration. He believes the terms of the city's elected and appointed officials should be limited by law. Courtney proposes an amendment to the charter that would limit department heads and the city manager to 10 years of service.

Mayors would be limited to three two-year terms, and council membership could not exceed two four-year terms under Courtney's plan. The councilman contends, and we agree, that officials "burn out" after several years in the same job. "Long-term types of department heads become the department and eventually their focus becomes too narrow, protecting their own turf," he said. We've observed many cases through the years of officials, appointive and elective, hanging on long after their effectiveness has been lost. With a few exceptions, these are highly competent and dynamic people.

But they lose their steam from dealing with the same old problems and people in the same way. When an official stops bubbling with ideas, it's time to move on for the rejuvenation of a new challenge. It shouldn't be necessary to put a tenure limit into law. It might not even be desirable. Not all people and circumstances are the same.

But Courtney's idea is sound policy and officials should follow it voluntarily. And the issue of officials staying too long in one job isn't limited to municipal government. County, school district, state and federal officials also should recognize that the best public service demands fresh ideas and new approaches. Ideally, officials would impose their own time limits for accomplishing their major goals. And, as Courtney put it, "either get the job done or get out.

Ten years is plenty of time to get the job done." After all, presidents of the United States only get eight years. branded unfair To the Capital Journal: I realize the effort in writing an article each such as William Bebout's "A personal view." A large percentage of the articles are most informative and interesting. However, I think his article entitled "It's bureaucracy which he takes potshots at the Department of Motor Vehicles, is most unfair! After some 25 years of dealing with the DMV in Oregon and a few months of dealing with the DMV in California, I found less problems in Oregon's DMV in those 25 years than I had problems with California's DMV in a few months. If all agencies of state government operated as smoothly as the DMV we in Oregon would be most lucky. Here's hoping the good folks at the DMV in Oregon never let any of California's screwball ideas creep into an otherwise fine operating tight ship.

I wish them many years of continued success. E. B. LAMBERT 4119 Schafer Ave. NE Salem, Ore.

West's settlement marked Not a fset' for movies By A. Robert Smith Washington Correspondent White House is the residence of the President of the United States, not a movie set. If security were not sufficient reason for keeping the moviemakers out, and it is, presidential privacy would be. If Hollywood can recreate the parting of the Red Sea, world wars, Martian invasions, and all kinds of disasters, natural and otherwise, it should have no difficulty producing a convincing portrayal of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in a movie-set White House. OCE best? Consider To the Capital Journal: Some perspective is called for concerning Bill Schaefer's articles in the Nov.

19 paper on the Linfield vs. Oregon College football title game. Mr. Schaefer concedes the Northwest Small College football title to the winner of the Linfield-OCE contest. It must be pointed out that Puget Sound lost by one point to Santa Clara which defeated Portland State and was narrowly defeated by Portland State.

Meanwhile, Portland State crushed OCE. Furthermore, Puget Sound trounced Willamette. ROBERT C. PLANTZ 1914 Manzanita St. NE Salem, Ore.

The conference also softened the impact of the mining interests' section by requiring that a withdrawal from mining activity could be blocked by Congress only if both houses disapproved. Environmentalists failed to get this stricken entirely. Generally, however, environmentalists were pleased with the final bill, chiefly because neither the stockmen nor the miners got what they wanted entirely and yet the environmentalists got one of their primary objectives: more wilderness areas. For the first time, under the new law, the national wilderness system can be expanded by the addition of units carved out of the public domain. Heretofore, units of the wilderness system came from the national forests or from privately-owned timberlands.

This provision conceivably could relieve some of the pressure on the national forest system to supply more wilderness areas, but probably not immediately. It gives BLM five years to identify areas of wilderness potential, after determining the mineral potential of each one. Congress would still have to pass wilderness bills covering each area. BLM also must draw up land-use plans for the public domain, but from an entirely different perspective than prevailed during the land disposal era. BLM is charged with managing the lands for multiple uses and to assure environmental quality.

"Come and get it" is no longer the guiding rule. The rule for the new era seems to be, "Preserve and use the lands, but only in the public interest." WASHINGTON The West has been settled at last. That's the underlying message of the new Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the most historic achievement of the 94th Congress for the Western states because it marks the end of an era. For over a century the public land laws were chiefly designed to promote the settlement of the West, offering chunks of land as inducements for individuals to hit the Oregon Trail and claim a homestead, for the railroads to span the continent, for livestock operators to expand their herds, formining companies to exploit minerals wherever they were found. The new law, usually called the BLM Organic Act, formally ends the national policy of land disposal.

As such, it repealed the historic Homestead Act of 1862, except for Alaska, where a few homesteaders are braving the wilderness and can still qualify for another decade under the new law. The new law gives the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management increased authority to manage what remains of the vast public domain, all 451 million acres of it, on the assumption that most of it will remain in public ownership. The government can still turn modest chunks of land over to Western towns that request room for expansion, but there will be no more giveaways. It will be sold at the going market price. Public recreation lands will be available free.

For the first time BLM has authority to field its own lawmen to patrol the pubficfTandT rather than continue to be dependent on local sheriffs. Enactment of the new law marked the end of five years of pulling and hauling on Capitol Hill between special interests seeking advantage under the new regime. It almost died in the last week of the session last month because of conflicting pressure from cattle and mining interests and environmentalists. The Senate had approved a balanced bill twice before the House this July finally passed a different version, heavily altered to give livestock interests greater control over grazing on the public domain and to reduce their grazing fees. The House version also favored the mining interests by limiting the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to make large land withdrawals from mineral entry.

In the House-Senate conference which met for several weeks to resolve differences in the two bills, Sen. Frank Church, broke the deadlock over the grazing provision by proposing a one-year moratorium on grazing fees, which were due to go up this year, and a study to determine if they should rise and fall with livestock prices. Officials of a movie company are miffed because they couldn't get permission to film at the White House. "We not only couldn't get inside Ithe White House, officials wouldn't allow us onto the main portion the grounds," said Daniel Petrie, director of "Eleanor and Franklin: -The White House Years," which will be aired on ABC-TV. "We had to keep our equipment within 15 yards of the gate.

And when one of the trucks accidentally just a slight bit past that point, a uniformed guard reached for his gun." So most of the filming has been done on Hollywood sound stages. And what's wrong with that? The Protect him The government should provide Secret Service protection for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after he leaves office. And it should be continued until there is reasonable assurance that Kissinger's life no is endangered by terrorists. Federal law makes no provision for protection of a secretary of state once he becomes a private citizen. A State Department official said Kissinger's "life would be in danger within two weeks of losing his protection." Kissinger is a prime target of Arab terrorist groups.

Congress must act to provide protection for Kissinger when it reconvenes Jan. 4. Kissinger has served the nation faithfully, vigorously and well. It would be Unthinkable to toss him to the wolves Jan. 20 when the new administration takes over.

Worth repeating About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieveyhonestly is to steal with good judgment. Josh Billings. It is no use saying "We are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary. Winston S. Churchill.

'He has a last request. He wants to die by firing Gift to firearms chief under query A smile or two Some politicians brag that they are self-made men. That sure relieves God of a terrible responsibility. Table Talk. It's not too hard to tell mushrooms from toadstools.

Just eat some before you go to bed. If you wake up the next morning, they're mushrooms. Rough Notes. By Jack Anderson Syndicalist Columnist snatched it off, but the photographer was too quick for him. Carter's real position was that the warring factions should sit down together and talk peacefully.

He sent a telegram to the Irish Prime Minister, explaining his views. Such responsible papers as the London Times also tried to set the record straight. But the damage had been done. Our European sources tell us that the denial has never caught up with' the original story. Only in the United States has the story gone mostly untold.

DICTATORS BEWARE: With Jimmy Carter in the White House, several Democratic congressmen will seek next year to strip Latin American dictators of their military aid. The group, led by Rep. Edward Koch, says that the military governments face no threats from external enemies and are using American weapons to oppress their own people. Carter has indicated that he will consider human rights in dealing with foreign nations. Koch expects to have his support, which he will solicit after the new foreign policy team is appointed.

Koch, a key member of the Appropriations subcommittee that dispenses foreign aid, succeeded earlier this year in pushing through legislation embargoing military aid to Uruguay. He cited Uruguay's use of U.S.-supplied weapons to torment its own people. Next year, he plans to concentrate on the military outlays to such repressive governments as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Nicaragua. There are a "lot of Uruguays in Latin America," he told us. tions to the Kansas City mission, denied that it was illegal.

Henson declined comment. CARTER DONNYBROOK At the height of the presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter inadvertently stirred up a tempest in Great Britain an old-fashioned Irish donnybrook that was overlooked at home. He met in Pittsburgh with Irish-American leaders, many of them dogmatically anti-British. A militant priest read Carter what purported to be a copy of the Democratic platform on Ireland and asked whether he supported it. The platform was carefully calculated to offend neither side.

But the priest spiked the noncontroversial platitudes with some language of his own. Between two innocuous sentences, he inserted the words: "The U.S. should encourage the formation of (a) united Ireland." These are trigger words, which disregard Protestant views and uphold the position of the Irish Revolutionary Army. The unsuspecting Carter, groggy from the grueling campaign, overlooked the inflammatory sentence. The British press, however, focused on the quote that Carter hadn't noticed.

Within a few hours, the British and the Irish Protestants were in a rage. Carter was denounced by several English parliamentarians, one of whom called him an peanut politician." To make matters worse, one sensational English paper reported that Carter had backed the Irish terrorists' position while sporting' a pro-IRA button declaring "Britain Out!" In fact, a photographer had caught him with an anti-British button. But it had been pinned on him at a St. Patrick's Day parade months earlier. He immediately WASHINGTON The Treasury Department is secretly investigating charges' that the host of a Las Vegas casino presented an illegal gun to the official in charge of enforcing the federal firearms laws.

Rex Davis, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, allegedly accepted the gun in violation of the laws that his agency is supposed to uphold. Under these laws, firearms can't be presented as gifts to residents of another state. Davis categorically denied the allegation. He told us that he had visited Las Vegas only once, had stayed long enough to make a speech and had never accepted an illegal firearm from anyone. The allegation against Davis filtered out of a Justice Department investigation of Charles Baron, the "greeter" at the fashionable Riviera Hotel on Las Vegas' strip.

Baron is a retired brigadier general, who has lived in Las Vegas for 20 years. He is known to be an avid gun collector. Reports reached Washington that he was passing out weapons to visiting celebrities. One of Davis' own agents overheard a conversation indicating that a high ATF official, possibly Davis himself, had accepted a gun from Baron. The investigation eventually focused on Davis.

Treasury officials told us that internal investigations usually are made into any charges of impropriety against Treasury officials. A spokesman said the preliminary investigation has produced no evidence that Davis took the illegal gift. Footnote: Baron did not return our repeated calls. SECRET SURVEILLANCE In a memo intended for the eyes only of Deputy Attorney General Harold Tyler, a Justice Department official has charged that the department conducted "improper and perhaps illegal" surveillance at the Republican National Convention last August. The official, Lee Henson, reported that an 11-man team was assembled in Kansas City to keep close watch on "yippies, gays and other persons and groups." The "spies" were drawn from the Justice Department's Community Relations Service, which is supposed to resolve civil rights disputes.

InHenson's opinion, the spying was "improper and unlawful" because it was "unrelated to discriminatory practices." He contended that the Community Relations Service has "no surveillance or intelligence-gathering authority." Nevertheless, the 11 civil rights officials were ordered into action, with all drama of an undercover mission. They carried "walkie-talkie radio equipment and were required to make hourly radio reports." The language was straight out of military operations. They were issued "orders." They were "dispatched," "detailed" and "briefed." After a full day's spying, they were "debriefed" and "secured" for the night. It was a strange assignment for civil rights specialists. Footnote: A Justice Department spokesman told us Henson's protest is being reviewed at the request of Tyler.

Community Relations director Ben Hol-man, who overruled Henson's objec Elementary my dear Watson They couldn't pay their property.