The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 8

SATURDAY MORNING, MARCH 18, 1972 Hie A terrible injustice VJr i Pfl I'! have gone too far, in some cases beyond the requirements laid down by the Supreme Court in ordering massive busing to achieve racial balance." Doing all this by a constitutional amendment "deserves a thorough consideration by the Congress," he says, but has "a fatal flaw. It takes too long." And so what he proposes is a law calling "an immediate halt to all new busing orders by Federal courts, a moratorium on new busing." It is bad enough for a Chief Executive to contravene the ruling of our highest court, but in this case he is asking the legislative branch of government to join him in dictating to the third branch established by the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. And in what case pending in a lower Federal court would he have the Justice Department intervene, not on the side of the Constitution, but on the side of those charged with v'oMing it? Would it be similar to the case involving Charlotte, N.C., and its surrounding county, decided last April 21 in a unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice Burger? Iri case, the decision approved a new busing plan that meant less busing, not more, to achieve racial desegregation. Under the old, dual school busing system, pupils at all grade levels had averaged 15 miles of busing one way, for an hour a trip. Under the new system, an elementary school student would average only seven miles, and not more than 35 minutes.

And it is not alone a matter of how far Congress, already divided, go on this spurious and divisive question of" changing the law of the land. Mr. Nixon says he will have the Justice Department intervene in "selected cases" in which lower courts have exceeded Supreme Court requirements on busing. Is he not willing to recognize that final arbiter of lower court decisions that exceed its own is the highest court itself, and that so intervening in the judicial process is to load the judicial dice? i No amount of words, under such attractive headings as "The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1972," can -hide the terrible injustice of what is being proposed. All in all, was a demeaning day for our country.

FREE RIDE MARY McGRORY The saga of the document DONALD D. WILLAKD American oligarchies During the famous Depression, when all institutions were being questioned, someone wrote that pos- session of a few shares of stock in a company would get its owner nowhere. "It wouldn't even let him in the plant gate," was the line. Things in this respect havent changed much, as may be seen from current stories about ITT and Penn Central. In an early time, a corporation had an air of democracy about it.

A group of investors, inspired by a chance to make money, would pool their resources to establish the corporation, which was deemed to have an individual existence of its own. As the corporation was a separate entity, its individual owners were practically exempt from responsibility. The corporation had, and has, officers and a board of directors. Theoretically the officers are re-', sponsible to the stockholders and conduct the business in their behalf. There is an annual meeting at which the stockholders may air their opinions and may, if so inclined, vote old officers out and new ones in.

This is the way the institution is supposed to work, and often, of course, it does. Many American corporations have been run efficiently and honestly for generations. Yet when a company becomes' huge, like a modern conglomerate, with billions of capital, an intricate financial structure, thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of stockholders, something else may happen. An individual may acquire, say, 100 shares, in ITT, General Motors, -the. telephone company or any other big institution; Ownership of the 100 shares may represent several thousand but against the billions of total stock value it is as nothing.

This stockholder will be invited to the annual meeting, but if he lives in South Dakota and the meeting is held in New York, he won't go. He will receive a proxy which 'he is asked to sign, giving certain of the company officers authority to vote his 100 shares as they think best. At this annual meeting there is no such thing as one man, one vote. Two shares count twice as much as one vote, and 1000 shares 10 times as much as 100 votes. Before corporations got so big, one or two or three men could own enough stock to dominate.

Nowadays, nobody is rich enough to own a majority of the shares of, say, the telephone company. But anyone with a large block of stock may be chosen a director and thus exert a certain influence. What often happens is that the directors, the become a self-perpetuating group. In our political democracy, reporters are present' at the sessions of Congress. Meetings of a board of directors are strictly pri-: vate.

Any publicity will be in the form of a carefully worded statement, issued formally. And that's all the South Dakota stockholder will ever hear about it. In truth, he doesn't care muchr He buys his 100 shares for an income from dividends', or in hope the price will go up. If these prospects are realized, he is indifferent to what may go on in the directors' room. He is also unconcerned as the nature of the company's business, or its practices.

Only recently have questions been raised publicly as to ethics or morality. See the black crosses in Harvard Yard, protesting the alleged alliance of an oil company with an oppressive colonial regime. To put it bluntly, what is dirty money, or is there any such thing? For sure, we have political democracy. Economic democracy we do not have, except in rare cases. The "managerial revolution" means that the huge corporations are run as oligarchies, by insiders, and that the small stockholders have, in practice, no influence on activities or policies.

Whether this is bad or good is a question. Whether the public interest is well served is another. Theoretically, there is representative government of the corporation. Actually, there is something which resembles de facto feudalism. Or the old political system in which only property holders could vote.

Monkey business by insiders has caused loss in the past Britain finally had to put an end to the famous East India Co. Speculative bubbles have been blown up and punctured. Small investors never knew what the Insulls were up to, before the Depression. Only recently the Penn Central went bankrupt while its directors continued to issue optimistic statements. Whatever the ITT management was doing, its thousands of stockholders had no knowledge of and no part in.

Donald B. IVillard is a sane cf Sudbury, and a retired but active Globe editorial ttritcr, filling in while George Frazicr takes a brie) vacation. 1 i Boston (Slobf shredder asked ITT president Harold Geneen if he did not realize that an "inference was created" by the, shredding spree. i Geneen, who had earlier described ITT's contribution to San Diego as "part of a community effort," replied that' the Washington staff were only "reviewing their files" and did not know the contents of Mrs. Beard's memo.

In any case, ITT thought it had put' itself above suspicion by hiring four lawyers to investigate the wholesale document destruction. One of them reported complacently that the finger on the button was not that security officer from New York but a chauffeur-handyman who was not hired for the operation. "Now don't go and fire the shredder," said Marlow Cook of Kentucky, a Republican who is trying to defend the Administration amid the proliferating coincidences. The man in the-room with Mrs. Beard was John Ryan of the Washington office.

The mention of his name brought the hearings back to the first day when acting Atty. Gen. Richard Kleindienst, his recollection refreshed, testified that Ryan had come to him at a neighborhood party and beseeched him to see "someone in the company" who could tell him what dastardly things the antitrust division was doing to poor ITT. A traveling troupe of six senators will go to Denver on Monday to talk to' Mrs. Beard in her hospital room.

One of the first questions they may want to ask her is if she really enjoyed the shredding of her documents. 'Mary McGrory is a syndicated columnist Alcohol and marijuana may indeed invite comparison. The conviction that arises, however, is not that the legality and acceptance of alcoholic beverages demands a similar legal attitude toward marijuana. To the exact contrary, it is plairf that we need to adopt much more restraint toward any and all substances that cloud reality and prey on human frailty. San Diego Union The case of a 14-year-old English boy sentenced to more than six years in jail (in Turkey) for drug offenses has received much prominence.

There is a moral here for the many young people who travel abroad every year. There may be confusion or disagreement (at home) surrounding the morality or criminality cf drug use. In most European and Middle Eastern countries there is no such confusion. It is quite definitely and seriously against their laws, and punishable by severe prison terms. The Globe and Mail, Toronto Letters to the Editor are on Page 10 President Richard M.

Nixon has, as he likes to say, made one thing perfectly clear in his 15-minute television address Thursday night end in his special message to Congress on Friday. He has adopted the busing issue as a prime vote-getter in his campaign for reelection. The Southern strategy is in full bloom again. And what is not so clear is where this leaves Alabama Gov. George C.

Wallace, who may have thought that he had the issue all to himself. Yet it is becoming quite clear where all this is leaving or could leave the nation back in 1954, before the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in the public schools is unconstitutional. The President's action was both political and opportunistic two adjectives that are not necessarily contradictory. Before the returns from Florida, Mr. Nixon had planned only a written message to Congress on busing.

But with Wallace polling 42 percent, and 74 percent of Florida's voters favoring a constitutional amendment to ban school busing, the President changed his mind and took to the airwaves. It was a blatant piece of free campaigning and the Democrats would do well to demand equal time. "Busing" has become a code word, and the President surely had to know this and take advantage of it Forty percent of all schoolchildren in this country are bused every day to regional, parochial or private schools with no protest at alL But when busing for purposes of racial balance is involved, it becomes another matter. When the President took office he also took a solemn oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution, which vests in the Supreme Court the judicial power to inter- t-pret the Constitution. The Supreme Court has ruled and unanimously that busing is one of the tools not the only tool, but one of them that may be required to desegregate public schools.

Mr. Nixon has now gone farther than he went last Aug. 3 when he opposed "the busing of our nation's schoolchildren to achieve racial balance," which in itself seemed to call into question the Supreme Court's ruling. He will now, he says, take action to stop such busing, because "a number of lower Federal courts The demand for Rep. Michael Harrington (D-Mass.) has made all of the concessions that can decently be made in his request that the Defense Department come clean in the appalling number of bombs of every description that are being dropped on troops and civilians alike in Indochina.

All that he asks is that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird explain the reasons fr Administration secrecy on the air war at a private meeting of the House Armed Services Committee. If the Department's reasons are sensible, Mr. Harrington will drop his demand that the channels of information to the American people be unclogged. Unless and until Mr. Laird cites other reasons for almost unparalleled secrecy, Mr.

Harrington and the rest of the nation will have every right to conclude that the "sensitivity" which Mr. Laird mentions is "political" rather than military that the Administration dare not acknowl Shame Emotions run high at most sports events, with cheers and groans punctuating the drama. But there always seem to be some rowxlies in the stands who revel in leather-lunged abuse of the players andor officials and, whether the game goes "right" or "wrong," littering the playing surface with any missile that comes to hand. The lowest point in the sad rec-erd of this kind of audience participation, if that it be, came last Monday at Boston Garden where, during an outburst by spectators at a high school hockey game, a human fetus was thrown on the ice. This cannot be argued away as an Podunk, tourist Podunk, Iowa, which everyone talks about and few have ever seen, burned down the other day.

It wasn't much of a fire because it's a imall place, and the population of six persons, all cf noble heart, will rebuild. A free suggestion to these folks Is that they advertise their town a a tourist center. Americans, great that will the it WASHINGTON When a Great Power is alerted that' one of its bbmbs has fallen into the bands of the enemy, it. moves quickly to protect itself from further harm. So it was in" the country of ITT when word was brought that a nuclear memo, written by one of its lobbyists, was in the grip of columnist Jack Anderson.

At once, the local commander notified Supreme' Headquarters in New York, which at once dispatched a security officer to the Washington outpost. The troops were called in. Orders were barked. The document- shredder was wheeled into position. The scene that unfolded in the office on Feb.

24 was extremely painful, according to Brit Hume, Anderson's partner, who had an eyewitness account from Dita, Beard, author of the strayed While she wrung her hands, the papers of her daily life including some relating to her family were reduced to ribbons before her eyes. The security officer presided. It sounded comparable to the cashiering of an Army officer, with epaulettes and brass buttons being ripped off to the roll of disapproving drums. But the rulers of ITT told a different story to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Howard Aibel, a senior vice president and general counsel, depicted it as a merry occasion, wholesome and joyful as the burning of leaves or a community anti-litter drive, with everyone joining the fun.

Mrs. Beard herself quite enjoyed it, said Aibel, who smiled a great, deal at the committee. "When she got into the swing of things," he reported, "she said why don't we do this and why don't we do that?" Actually, the Anderson threat, according to Aibel, was a blessing in disguise. It was a sharp reminder to the garrison that they were shock- ingly out of compliance with a headquarters directive on the "records retention and disposition program." Directive E. R.

241 instructs the troops in the disposition of. files in a "systematic, timely, and economical" manner. Strictly speaking, the belated cleanup cannot be called "timely," since the Beard memo exploded in an Anderson column a week But the cause of ecology," at least, was served. "Man has a squirrel-like instinct," Aibel told the senators with a regretful smile. Nothing of significance went into the machine that day, he assured the members.

Yellowed clippings, dated speeches and easily obtainable tourist brochures from the city of San Diego, which has received a pledge of up to $400,000 from ITT against the expenses of the Republican Convention to be held there next summer. Two criteria for destruction were applied: age and "unwarranted embarrassment." Mrs. Beard's memq.was young by the standards of E. R. 241 it was composed last June 25 but on the "embarrassment" scale it ranks high, and had it been found on the day of the' big tidying-up, it would surely have been chewed up.

Sen. John V. Tunney (D-Calif.) war details edge a stepped up war while it is telling the nation the war is being wound down: "The ritual invocation of the security argument without any demonstration of its applicability demonstrates that the Administration is covering up for political purposes The coverup is clearly out of phase with the President's recent announcement of policies which he said are designed to loosen the flow of information to the public." Mr. Harrington is not witlessly demanding that prospective bombing activity be disclosed. He demands only that information be periodically released after the event, rather than merely sometimes and, at that, 30 to 45 days after the end of the month in which the raids occur.

When three nations are being devastated in their name and countless tens of thousands of persons killed or maimed, the American people are entitled to know what is going on. act of emotional release due to anger, frustration, or exuberance. It could only be a premeditated and degenerate act. Fortunately for the thousands looking on, the aborted fetus, small enough to be carried in a popcorn box, was not recognized for what it was until after the wildly-strewn ice had been cleared, and the game resumed. But the stain on the mind remains, and deep in some person's heart is this sick, dark secret Fans of this breed may be only a relative few, but they are a few that any civilized person can do without.

attraction? Editorial comment on various issues Too much secrecy in government breeds error and deception and undermines public confidence upon which a democratic government rests. But the ideal of no secrecy presupposes a different kind of world than the one we live in. The people must be as fully informed as possible; the government must protect the confidentiality of some of its processes, especially in foreign affairs and in matters affecting national security. The problem, is to reconcile these two equally valid principles. Los Angeles Times while the Administration is finally showing some encouraging interest in this matter, President Nixon's plan has a major shortcoming.

By terms of the order, it is the "White House and only the White House that will decide what items will be de-classified. The problem with that arrangement, cf course, is the public will never know what it's missing. Xrmsday, Long Island The classification system is based on such a flimsy legal foundation and has been so flagrantly abused that the whole concept ought to be overhauled not just by executive order but by a congressional statute limiting the kinds of data that may be kept secret 57. Louis Post-Dispatch Miss Davis is the only significant member of the insignificant American Communist Party. She is also black.

Many of her revolutionary friends believe she doesjiot stand a chance of receiving a fair trial in what they regard as a fascist political system. Miss Davis does not have to worry about justice. The whole wrirld is watching. The Guardian, London To put cocktail-sipping in the same league with the use of marijuana, opium derivatives, and the abuse of clinical drugs could have extremely unfortunate results. It confuses the nature of chemicals with the way they are used.

Already, the concept of alcohol as a legal and socially acceptable "drug" is a part of the argument for the legalization of marijuana. This vkw holds that if it is all right for Dad to have a martini before dinner, why is it wrong for Junior to smoke pot? travelers, go to Paris and Rome by the thousands. But how many can boast to their friends that they have seen Podunk, the very symbol of the one-horse town? A glimpse of Podunk, and a-glimpse should be to take all in, would justify a detour on anybody's cross-country trip. 1.