The Independent-Record from Helena, Montana • 4

4 The Independent Record, Thursday, September 30, 1971 A Page of Comment inclhoinige America's Unsung Hero Mil Orv Ik I UV. vSZSfe-v The majority of Americans probably don't know the difference between a knight and a rook or a Sicilian defense and a queen's gambit in the intricate game of chess. But a young New Yorker who quite possibly knows more about the game than anyone else in the world is deserving of some long overdue notice by his countrymen. Bobby Fischer is now single handedly storming the Kremlin where Russian chess masters have built an almost impenetrable wall around their coveted world dominance of the game. The Russians have held the world championship in chess since 1937.

It is their national sport. Everyone either plays on park benches, in trains, during lunch hours or avidly follows the progress of his favorite player. They are good. But on top of that, the Russians have protected their title with a series of elimination matches and downright refusals to play that have made it nearly impossible for anyone to get a shot at their top man, World Chess Champion Boris Spassky. Now Fischer, after spectacular victories over several international grandmasters in elimination matches, is in Russia to play her number two man, ex-world champ Tigran Petrosian, in a semifinal match.

If Fischer wins he will face Spassky next spring and possibly gain a real coup for the U.S. It isn't the world title, itself, however, that deserves special notice now. It is the 28-year-old's quiet rise to pre-eminence in a country that lavishes undue praise and fantastic wealth on the "superstars" of her gridirons and courts and ball parks. Fischer is a high school dropout who taught himself to read Russian in order to study Russian chess books. Since winning his first U.S.

championship at 14 and becoming the youngest international grandmaster at 15, he has supported himself by winning tournaments, giving demonstration matches and writing books about chess. There were no lucrative college scholarships, multimiliion dollar contracts or plump endorsements. He has lived a life of lonely hotel rooms, strange towns and restaurant food. He is seldom recognized outside his own small circle of friends and today is better known and respected in Russia than in his own country. He possesses an awesome ability in a game that demands unbelievable concentration, memory, skill and ability to withstand pressure.

For all that, he is poorly reva and internationally known and respected. And he still remains America's unsung hero. i ii. r- -i i Tint Jjn-i ttmitvw. Robin Hood The Busing Dilemma By WILLIAM V.

SHANNON children with a better education Gaffe usScie By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY Jr. Concerning Senator Muskie's observation, that there would be little point in putting a black vice president on his ticket, inasmuch as both of them would froceed to lose, a few observations. 1. President i retort that Senator Muskie had "libeled" the American people is BY RUSSELL BAKER Jfr $ark WASHINGTON Before President Nixon's meeting with Emperor Hirohito, many persons here had feared that the two men would find nothing to talk about, because of the probability that no emperor of Japan will have anything at all in common with any president of the United States.

Fortunately, there was no cause for concern. Each of these two great men had been so magnificently briefed by his expert advisers that the conversation was able to flow easily and naturally. As host, President Nixon spoke first, welcoming the Emperor with an apology for the humbleness of Alaska and assuring him that it was perfectly all right to take off his shoes if it would make him feel more at home. Hirohito responded by clapping the President heartily on the back, playfully feinting a left hook at the presidential ribs, and saying, "You're looking great, Mister President. How's the wife?" Highly Flattered The President said that Mrs.

Nixon would be flattered beyond expression when informed that his imperial highness had inquired about her. He himself, the President went on, was extremely honored by the inquiry, for it was a great compliment to his own judgment to have selected for a wife a woman whose well-being might be inquired about by the Emperor. "Don't mention it," said the Emperor. The President then suggested that the Emperor slip into his kimono while he, the President, got into his terry-cloth bathrobe. He said that they could then sit on the floor and have the tea ceremony.

The Emperor said that if it was all right with the President he would prefer to sit in a rocking chair and have some hamburgers sent up from a drive-in. At this, Nixon dropped a lotus petal in a glass of water, which was the signal for aides to bring a rocker, cancel the tea ceremony and send up four hamburgers, hold the pickle. "How'd you leave things in Washington?" The Emperor asked next. The President thanked the emperor for asking about Washington, a city that would be entirely unworthy of the Emperor's slightest interest, he added, were it not for the Japanese cherry trees. The Emperor said that, personally! he could take cherry trees or leave them alone.

What he would really like Japan to send to America, he said, was a right-handed slugger who could hit .340. Nixon asked the Emperor's permission to tell him something extremely personal. Didn't Make It "What's an emperor for?" the guest replied, with a wink. The President confided that when he was at Whittier College as a young man his consuming ambition had been to become a great Sumo wrestler. One of the saddest days of his life, he said, was the day his coach told him he would never weigh 385 pounds and be only four feet two inches tall and could, therefore, never wrestle Sunn on the first team.

He had had to be consent sitting on the edge of the mat as a stretcher bearer, he told the Emperor. Hirohito said that, well, nobody could win them all. Nixon asked the Emperor who he thovght was going to be number one this year in Sumo wrestling. The Emperor said that it was always a mistake to bet against Notre Dame. He asked the President how the weather was in Washington, how the weather had been on the flight to Alaska, and whether the President thought it would rain tomorrow.

The President congratulated the Emperor on the quiet grace and simple beauty of those questions and said that he was unbearably embarrassed by his inability to answer them, as he wculd like to, wi'h one penect haiku, but that unfortunately his ghost writers had been unable, to compose even so much as a pedestrian although the Emperor's questions had been anticipated for weeks and the poor wretches had been laboring at the haiku bench for days. Labor is Noble The Emperor became very grave at hearing this news and said that labor was a splendid thing, even when it bore no fruit, because laboring made people good and pleasant-tempered and enabled them to live in dignity. He had gotten where he was today, the Emperor went on, because he had followed the inspirational example of his father, who, although aa emperor, had never hesitated to work overtime and weekends at the imperial chores. He added that he had no patience with loafers who sat around dogging it at the lens factory or on the transistor-radio production line and then went home and complained to their famlies that they hadn't been given a fair chance at being emperor. Nixon said he was a great admirer of Japanese art and asked the Emperor's permission to inform him that he liked "Rash-omon" almost as much as "Patton." The Emperor said that King Kong was the greatest monster ever filmed, adding, "and that includes Godzilla." The time allotted for their meeting had been exhausted 15 seconds before the Em-peror's remark and, on this note of mutual understanding, the meeting ended.

William F. Buckley Jr. militants are in a sense right when they argue that black students who get along well in a white-dominated integrated school are being made into 'chocolate covered white men." But competing notions about "soul" provide no basis for any integrated education. If white parents believe their public schools are not providing the education of academic quality when they want, they will shift their children to private schools or move their families to the suburbs. White" Students Declining The situation in Washington, D.C, sadly demonstrates the power of this white veto.

The number of white children in the public schools here has steadily declined since 1954. The few remaining academically i-gious public schools are in a white section in the far northwest corner of the city and their future is precarious. Meanwhile, the city's mayor, congressional delegate and many of its other black leaders have ab a the public hool system for their own children for the same reasons as th i white middle-class counterparts. I fashionable Georgetown, which is overwhelmingly white, the few remaining public schools are almost solidly black. "I believe in busing," one white liberal Georgetown matron remarked the other evening.

"I bus my children four miles every day to a private Unless integrated education proves itself to be quality education, this dinner party witi-eism may become the epitaph of the public school system in every large city in America. than they have been getting in a 1 1 -b 1 a schools. The black children benefit in two ways. They have whatever stimulus is provided by classmates of diverse backgrounds. Secondly, in some communities, busing ena-.

bles them to have better teachers and better facilities which are there because white parents had the political muscle to achieve quality schools. If these white children are to stay in the schools and the white financial and political support is to continue, the newly integrated school must continue or in some cases begin to be thought of as a "white school." To that end, racial quotas are probably necessary, obnoxious though they may seem at first glance. Values at Stake Experience suggests that if a school's student body and faculty are approximately two-thirds white, its future is probably viable as an integrated school. But once a school "tips over" and has a black majority, the black students begin to feel themselves once again in a black school while the number of whites begins rapidly to diminish toward zero. What is at stake are the values that are honored in the particular school, and these in turn depend on family backgrounds, career aspirations and the emphasis placed on doing well academically.

As long as most blacks in American society are perceived as lower on the social and economic scale than whites, then most whites are going to resist sending their children to schools where blacks are in the majority. Expressed another way, black GRIN AND BEAR IT fork fflimtjf WASHINGTON In many communities across the nation there are sharp disputes over the busing of children to achieve racial integration in the schools. The controversies evoke so much anger and generate so much confusion because two valid aspirations are in conflict. Each family wants the best possible education for its own children. But, at the same time, as good citizens most parents want to obey the law and help this country end the shame of racial segregation.

For many parents, predominantly those who are white but also some who are black or Chinese, these values contradict one another. They believe they are being asked to sacrifice in some degree the a i of their children to achieve a hypothetical public good. We're" Not Unique It is not useful to denounce these concerns as racist. America is a racist country, but unfortunately so is practically every other human society. In India, men advertise for light-skinned brides.

In Indonesia, the Chinese are persecuted. In Kenya, a black government has expelled Indians. Political demagogues get voles out of tlte racial problem in Birmingham, England, as they do in Birmingham, Ala. Where racial relationships are concerned, Americans have no grounds for complacency, but neither are they uniquely guilty. Can private anxieties and public ideals be reconciled? No one can answer with complete confidence but certainly if racial concerns about the schools are to be eased, the limits and difficulties of integration have to be candidly faced.

Not all of the ideals of racial integration are likely to be achieved in the near future. For example, one of the virtues of integration is that it enables children of both races to rub shoulders together in school and thereby gradually learn the pluralist values which this heterogeneous society needs to survive as one nation. That goal is not likely to be achieved in the elementary grades by busing. Need Other Contacts Children who do not ptev to-g after school and on weekends are not really learning to live together. Dividing them into groups by race at the end of the school day and busing them away in opposite directions is more likely to heighten rather than diminish racial differences.

For integration really to work, there has to be a carry-over by the children themselves from the formal situation of the school room to the informal situations of the playground and the sidewalk. Integration is still worth pursuing if it provides black stimulated against that particular block. Consider a formal construction of the syllogism: John is a Republican. John doesn't like Democrats. Most Negroes are Democrats.

Therefore John does not like most Negroes. Is that a racist conclusion? But consider: the syllogism tells you nothing about John's prejudice, being racial in origin. Racial bias takes off from an ethnic point. If approximately half of the American Negro community voted Republican, and the other half Democratic, ithere would be a considerable lessening of the prejudice one here dicusses. 3.

The most frequently cited data intended to "document" American racial bias as it touches on politics are inconclusive. Congressman Dellums and others cite the presence in Congress of a mere 13 black members of the House, and one Why shouldn't there be he asks 50 black congressmen, and ten senators, reflecting the population figures? Because, (a) although there are twenty-two million blacks, the black population does not in fact exceed the white population in any single state, or in any cities except Washington, D.C. and Newark, N.J. It is a more significant datum by far that Senator Brooke was overwhelmingly elected from Massachusetts, notwithstanding that only two per cent of the population there is Negro. It.

is, however, probably true that the majority would not have voted for him for JYesident. The Real Problem And, finally, what the commotion is all about is that the Negro in America began behind way behind. That is the meaning of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People The Negro people's disadvantages, though distinctive, are not unique. A Jew has yet to be nominated for the presidency, though the Jews are half as numerous as the Negroes. And this notwithstanding that the spectacular Jewish contribution to American civilization is merely suggested by the fact that 30 per cent of the undergraduate body of Harvard is (my figures are a few years old).

It is not to be anti-Negro to recognize that the same politicians who until a few years ago were afraid to name a Catholic, arc still afraid to name a Jew, haven't even considered naming a woman, as a presidential candidate, should cavil at naming a BY LICHTY both disingenuous and misleading. Disingenuous because we have all been told that when Henry Cabot Lodge, running lor vice president on Richard Nixon's ticket in 190, promised somebody somewhere that if Mr. Nixon were elected he would name a Negro to the cabinet, Candidate Nixon almost fainted. And no wonder. Misleading Which brings us to the misleading aspect of Mr.

Nixon's criticism. To say there is no race prejudice in this country is about the same as saying there are no rivers that run, or grass that grows. But it is not anti-Negro to observe that there is aniti-Nogro prejudice. It is not anti-Semitic to say that there is anti-Semitic prejudice. Anybody who wants to become president begins by disencumbering himself of any positions or associations which he believes arc net liabilities.

When, in late Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh announced flatly that he was opposed to nominating John K. Kennedy because there was loo much Catholic prejudice in the country to make possible his election, nobody called Mr. Lawrence anti-Catholic. To be sure, he was himself a a 1 i which was a good hedge against that charge. But even if he hadn't been, he could have made that statement without disgracing himself.

Counting on Negro Vote 2. Senator Muskie counts on getting the Negro vote to begin with, for no better reason, nor worse one, than that the Democratic Party has for quite a while now won the overwhelming majority of the Negro vote. Acknowledging that that is the way Negroes tend to vote is to acknowledge that a political prejudice will inevitably be ij 'At "Always complaining about me having one too manyl Did it ever occur to you that maybe you had one too few?".