Lubbock Avalanche-Journal from Lubbock, Texas • Page 5

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MclNTOSH Editorial Pa(t Editor Page Section A Lubbock, Texas, Saturday Morning, June 16,1973 Freeze No Permanent Solution THE FULL implications of President Nixon's latest move on the economic front, primarily a freeze on retail prices with a hint of further action to come, still remain to be assessed. On the surface, the mere fact that the White House has moved in the direction of halting the nation's runaway inflation is a heartening one. How much good it will do and what may be needed as a follow-up remain as imponderables. Apparently, the White House and those advising Mr. Nixon feel that the 60-day freeze on all prices at the retail level is more or less a "stop-gap" measure.

The man in the street, as well as Wall Street and much of the world, likely will look on it in the same vein. It is the "other shoe." which remains to be dropped, that may cause more problems than solutions for the next 60 days. Certainly, Mr. Nixon's publicly voiced hope that should conditions merit otherwise meaning a sharp pullback in prices then the freeze couid be halted before its two-month long deadline is not likely to be realized. However, some good should come of the freeze, particularly in the station price of gasoline and some food prices.

Particularly is this true of gasoline. MR. order puts a price lid on charges in effect during the June 1-8 period. Certainly, some gasoline prices inched, if that is the word, up in the days following that. The President's order i'or an audit of books of companies who have raised prices more than 1.5 per cent above January ceiling, to see if costs justified such increases, is commendable.

That is, if something is done where such boosts weren't justified. As might be expected, among members of Congress, there were those who both praised and condemned the latest move. "It's probably too little, probably too late," Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, commented. "Strong action was necessary, strong action was taken," responded Sen.

Robert Dole, R-Kan. The President also took another action which could go a long way toward easing prices at several levels. HE CALLED on Congress "on an urgent basis" to grant him new and flexible authority to impose export controls, particularly on food products whose prices might be pushed upward by foreign demand in this year of poor growing conditions in much of the world. It has been no secret that, in addition to heavy demands at home for everything from feed grains to lumber, foreign purchases have helped push such prices past all recent records. Particularly is this true in the lumber market, which has in turn affected the vital home building industry.

Overall, Mr. Nixon made a start. But that is all it is. However much he might like to avoid strong controls, as long as outside forces are working on the U. S.

economy, he has no choice. This "interim freeze" may help cool the inflation holocaust to a degree but we predict that a much more sweeping Phase IV will be needed. And there are those who may be justified in arguing that it may be too late for that. Certainly, for the average consumer, even the freeze at current levels leaves a lot to be desired. 'Peace Phase IP No Bargain WHAT MIGHT be called "Phase II" of the Vietnam "cease-fire" resembles, in several respects, the original arrangement which into effect in January.

For one thing, the new agreement signed in Paris contains virtually the same provisions as those of the earlier document, all designed to "insure the peace in Vietnam and contribute to the cause of peace in Indochina and Southeast Asia." If those provisions, of course, had been observed even fairly well, a new "accord" would have been unnecessary. ANOTHER RESEMBLANCE involves the fact that the January agreement was "the best deal the United States could make at the time" to achieve a "peace with honor." Then, the major concession was that, in return for release of prisoners and disengagement of American troops, the U. S. had to agree that Communist invaders could remain in place. This made cease-fire violations not only certain, but also easier to perpetrate.

Now, the U. S. has agreed to resume removal of mines from North Vietnamese waters, to immediate halt of reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam, and to renew talks about economic aid for Hanoi. ALL THIS, presumably, in exchange for $he Vietnamese Communists' promise to keep their original agreement. Negotiator Henry Kissinger notes that the U.

S. is not committed ART BUCHW'ALD: by the new agreement to cease bombing in Cambodia. This is a dubious "right," since, if they have their way, majorities in the U. S. Senate and House force President Nixon to order a halt to the bombing.

The Communists' objective remains the same: to win as many political and diplomatic skirmishes as they can until the time comes for military conquest. Let's not be deluded by "Phase II." Diane's All Right AS WE ALL know, English is the world's most complicated language. Among other things, it is loaded with words which sound exactly alike but which are spelled differently, and have different meanings. So, Diane Bryan, The Avalanche-Journal Region's competitor in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, ran into the word "brooch." meaning a jeweled ornament, which she spelled "broach," which has enough meanings to take up a sizeable segment of any dictionary. Diane is a fine speller, as she demonstrated in the early rounds, and, with better luck, might have equaled the feat of Robin Krai of Lamesa, last year's regional winner who captured the national championship.

Miss Bryan has been a worthy representative, and The Avalanche-Journal is proud to have sent her to Washington. A Stall In White House Suggested For Secretariat WASHINGTON One thing that oven-one in this country seems to agree on is that we must restore faith in the executive branch of Ihe government. Although President Nixon has ap- pointfd new people to the White House, most of them are old faces that just have been moved around from one post to another. What the nation needs desperately is snmconf in the White House who has thr complete and unequivocal hacking of all the American people -someone who has never been touched bv scandal of any kind; whose credibility is unquestioned and who is a symbol nf everything Americans believe their leaders should be. THE ONLY ONE on the American scrne in do this is Secretariat, the triplr-crown winner of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.

If President Nixon would appoint Secretariat to an important position in the White House, he would be going a long way toward hi? promise of cleaning house and restoring the image of the Presidency. Mr. Nixon would be saying to the American people. "You want new faces in the White House. I'm giving you a winner." NOW BEFORE you scoff at my suggestion I would iike to point out there is a precedent for such an appointment.

The Roman Emperor Caligula appointed his own horse as a proconsul to Rome. It's true Caligula did this to show his contempt for the Senate, but I don't think any self-respecting person believes that Mr. Nixon would appoint Secretariat for the same reason. As a special assistant to the President. Secretariat could accompany the President to Camp David and San Clemente.

Mr. Nixon could confide in him without fear that his conversation be leaked to the press. And when the Prcsi- riraf iired and weary Irom all the affairs of state, he" could ride Secretariat around the White House lawn. The 3-year-old stallion couid also fulfill ether functions in the White House. When Press Secretary Ron Zicgler, or his assistant Gerald Warren, receive a particularly tough question they could say, "We'll check that out with Secretariat and pot bark to you later." Or if Secretariat can't answer it, they ran always reply "That's a horse of a different Secretariat could show up for political fundraising dinners and at Congressional hearings.

He could get involved in the energy crisis and go to Pans with Henry Kissinger. BIT HIS MOST important function would be that when the President's enemies call for his resignation or impeachment. Secretariat could warn the country that you don't change horses in midstream. As President Nixon has said many times he would go to any lengths to clear Watergate, Secretariat could supply him with 31 lengths to start with. I have given reasons why President Nixon would want Secretariat in his Cabinet.

But why would Secretariat take the job at this time? THE ANSWER is that Secretariat is being retired from racing this year and therefore would have no conflict of interests. Also. America has been good to Secretariat and he would Like to pay it back with some public service. At three years old, he feels he still has a lot to give to this country. When I suggested my idea to friends in the White House press corps, they were quite skeptical that Secretariat could restore faith in the Presidency.

One said, "We've had horses in ihe White House before." "Aha!" I said, "But this one has a head." ROWLAND EVANS ROBERT NOVAK: Connolly Will Exit WASHINGTON The flat refusal of John B. Connally to consider postponing a 60-day private trip around the world starting early next month with his wife, Nellie, is the conclusive piece of evidence that his one-month tour of duty as a White House consultant has been unrelieved disaster. MARIANNE MEANS: 'Majority' Has Gone WASHINGTON One immediate political casualty of the Watergate crimes is President Richard Nixon's dream of a new Republican majority. The President's massive re-ciection victory seven months ago welded for the first time in 20 years large numbers of independents and Democrats to the traditional Republican base of partisan regulars, prosperous suburban and agricultural area residents, conservatives and businessmen. The newcomers were drawn primarily from Catholic ethnic groups, conservative Democrats from the South and West, and labor union families.

President Nixon's long-range political strategy was to translate this personal victory into a permanent majority for his party, which would produce GOP Congressional victories in 1974 and a GOP Presidential successor in 1976. BUT THE WATERGATE scandal, and its damage to the President's credibility, have shattered that strategy. Polls now indicate that public disapproval of him is strongest among those groups he had been counting upon for his new GOP majority. He has, in effect, lost the personal coattails on which he had expected to rebuild his party. Nixon's fall from grace with his new supporters over Watergate is compounded by the fact that many of the issues that attracted them to him last fall are no longer operative.

The pressure is off the busing question because the Supreme Court has upheld a lower court reversal of the controversial Richmond school decision ordering busing between inner city and suburban classrooms within the entire metropolitan area. THERE JS A CEASE-fire in Vietnam, albeit an imperfect one, and the prisoners of war are safely home. Sen. George McGovern and his wild economic theories are gone from the national scene; instead, economic inequities and instabilities are being blamed upon Nixon. The campuses are relatively quiet.

And in view of the indictment of its former Attorney General, the Nixon Administration is no longer in a position to beat the drums for law and order. So there are fewer compelling reasons for Democrats and independents to stay in Nixon's camp, while there is a new reason to desert. The recent Gallup Poll showed that public approval of the President's performance in office had slid to 45 per cent, its low point to date. The survey was taken after the President's televised speech appealing for public support. His popularity was lowest among manual laborers (41 per cent); younger people (41 per cent); those with less formal education (39 per cent) and persons at the low end of the income scale (38 per cent).

These groups tend traditionally to be Democratic and independent but supported Nixon heavily in 1972. A SIMILAR survey taken recently by Lou Harris showed that 50 per cent of the public believed the President lied when he said he didn't know until March of any effort by his own staff to cover up White House involvement in the Watergate affair. In the poll breakdown, three groups on whom Nixon had counted registered more suspicions of him than most of the other groups. Fifty-four per cent of union members, 56 per cent of Catholics, and 51 per cent of independents said they did not believe him. In addition, when voters were asked which party they would support for Congress, Democrats led by 56 to 28 per cent among union members and 56 to 25 per rent among Catholics.

Thanks to Watergate, the liberal Democratic establishment that blossomed in the Sixties and which the President had planned to demolish has been handed a reprieve. EVANS Uninvited to the White House for the long, private chats that used to be a normal routine of his life as Secretary of the Treasury, Connally has been cut off from the flow of traffic so vital to the business of top-level government. Mr. Nixon has found neither the time nor inclination to receive Connally's criticism and recommendations. ACCORDINGLY, John Connally, object of the President's unstinting admiration when he developed the new economic policy in 1971, is joining the high heap of Nixon advisers who fell because their advice w-as unpalatable.

Connally's resignation as consultant now seems certain and his return to the Administration in Mr. Nixon's second term doubtful. Thoughts of seeking the Republican' Presidential nomination in 1976 seem far from Connally's mind. After his dramatic switch to the Republican Party May 2, Connally had not the remotest intention of accepting any assignment in Richard M. Nixon's White House, just then starting to feel the hest of Watergate.

BUT WHEN the White House publicly announced he had agreed to become a "part-time" consultant. Connally was hooked. He accepted it in good grace, even though he was forced to take leave from his law firm and resign from corporate boards of directors. Connally assumed he would move into a lofty, obviously powerful perch in the White House, from which to help Mr. Nixon find a way out of the Watergate wilderness.

"It seemed like an attractive challenge," one- Connally intimate told us. "It took him hack to 1971, when he saved Nixon by finding a way out of the wilderness." If that in truth was Connally's mood, it lasted only until his first day in Washington, May 10. On that day, he spent close to one hour with Mr. Nixon in the total privacy of his office. SPEAKING FROM his experience as an uncommonly shrewd political operative, Connally pulled no punches with the President.

Watergate was potential administration-killer, he said. He warned Mr. Nixon with polite but Dutch-uncle frankness that he could "turn the situation around" only if he acted immediately to let out the facts and only if he took immediate "minima! steps" to show that his administration was still functioning. That was more than President Nixon apparently bargained for, from Connally or anybody else. It was the severest critique of Mr.

Nixon's deepening predicament ever heard by a President whose dislike for either advice or bad news is notorious. AS A RESULT, according to friends of both Mr. Nixon and Connally, the President has not seen Connally alone for a single conversation since that first day. Thus, when the President asked Connally to study a new anti-inflation program with the regular White House and Treasury economic advisers. Connally found himself without staff, without statistics and without a factual basis for recommendations.

Too proud to ask for special aid from the White House, he worked the past month, often alone and lonely, from suite 681 at the Mayflower Hotel. IT HAS BECOME an abhorrent situation for Connally, strongman in the 1971-1972 Nixon Administration. In that context there is nothing surprising in Connally's decision not to postpone his leisurely round-the-world tour. On Memory Lane (Taken from the files of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche, June 16. 1953.) SECY.

OF STATE John Foster Dulles warned today that the new Communist offensive may delay a Korean truce by making it more difficult to define a cease-fire line as Allied diplomats became more and more confident that South Korea will withdraw its opposition to the truce plan. WASHINGTON The Supreme Court in a dramatic series of rulings today refused to block the execution of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg but Justice Douglas agreed to study a last-ditch appeal for a stay. WASHINGTON The Defense Department announced today that in case of a Korean armistice, the estimated 5.000 American prisoners in Communist hands will be returned to the United States by ship. Relief On A Binge SEN. WILLIAM V.

ROTH is the un- thanked father of an eigf' month official survey of Federal handout programs. The study finds more than 1,000 such programs. In Oakland, alone, for example. Washington is operating an incredible 126 different ones. Oh, Mama Mia! Public money must come from you and me the struggling taxpayer.

Legislators do not pick it off trees. They pick it out of our pockets. And these 1,000 handout plans promoted by Congress will cost us some $30 billion this year. Congress has plagued us taxpaying peasants with an immense list of subsidies and outmoded Federal programs which it has set up and about which it does nothing. EIGHT DIFFERENT Washington bureaucracies are operating vocational education programs.

One is a training center to teach people to cook. At long last it has graduated 47 cooks. Of these only 35 took jobs. The taxpayers' cost, to say nothing of a $2 million Ford Foundation 'study $11,493 per trainee who went to work. Congress has set up 470 separate Federal education programs, scattered among 20 Washington 'departments and agencies.

Congress has set up 74 economic development programs. One is ihe weird collections of medieval myths that is called the farm program. And of the $7.5 billion being spent this year by the Department of Agriculture only $3.3 billion will go to farmers. The major $4.2 billion will be eaten up by the overhead, bureaucratic salaries, domestic giveaway programs and foreign aid. IN 1950 THE Department of Agriculture had one employe for every 125 farmers.

Today there's one for every 63. At this rate there would be one bureaucrat in the department for every' farmer bv 1990. Exclusive of the poverty programs in the 50 states, of which there are about as many as quills on a porcupine, Congress has set up 170 separate poverty programs and tucked them into 150 bureaus. These are admittedly in a shambles. Is the poverty war a war or a political racket? How long can this prostitution of our workers' earnings continue to be handed out to others without wrecking every decent concept of our democratic system? BECAUSE THIS misnamed war is pushed so heavily in urban centers, the Roth study took a solid, hard fook at the largest: iVew York City.

Seeking election as Mayor in 1965 John V. Lindsay castigated the "wanton welfarism." He promised to weed out "the dcadheats among (hose on relief," some for the second and third generation. But when Lindsay was safely elected the rolls increased an average 7.100 each month in his first year (1966), then to an average 13,200 per month and finally to 17,700 more on the rolls each month. By 1969 and another election year the Roth study finds that the taxpayers were complaining. So, lo and behold, the relief rolls rate of increase BUT, ONCE Lindsay was re-elected, up went the relief rolls again.

The monthly average increase was 15,800 in 1970's first half, and the rolls went up and up while Mr. Lindsay expanded his political horizon toward New York's governorship his presidential try having collapsed. The Roth study finds that, meanwhile, New- Yorkers earn- an average annual tax load of $556, the largest individual tax load in the United States. New York State has only 10 per cent of the nation's population. It has 15 per cent of 'America's total welfare payments, thanks to the welfare abuses in New York City.

These handouts are overwhelmingly the city's largest single budget item. IS NEW YORlv City reasonably typical and are the relief programs dowsed with politics? You be the judge. The media should increase efforts to pry from the Washington politicians and bureaucrats all possible about the conduct of public affairs. With Watergate, our country is obviously demanding a lessening of the lust for secrecy and is increasingly reluctant to give a blank check to the White House or Congress. The principle of executive and Congressional responsibility for matters of great public concern and the unacccptability of claims of ignorance when the facts are available should apply to all government officials and this includes the Congress.

Spiders learn how to construct their webs by learning how to catch flies. And if we taxpaying peasants are not the flies, what would you call us? L. M. BOYD: Pass It On INCREDIBLE HOW much litter is picked up annually by the country's cleanup crews. Enough, it's said, to fill a gondola train so long it's locomotive could be in New Orleans while its caboose was in Detroit.

CRUDE OIL Q. "Ifow much of a barrel of crude oil winds up gasoline?" A. Just 44.8 per cent of it. As fuel oil, 32.8 per cent. As kerosene, 5 per cent.

As asphalt and road oil, 3.7 per cent. As jet fuel, 3.3 per cent. As lubricants, 2 per cent. And as whatever else, 8.4 per cent. THE ARMED Forces qualification test is really a basic mental examination.

That place where the largest percentage of young men regularly fail it is Washington, D.C. Where the largest percentage of men pass it is the State of Washington. ANOTHER LITTLE known fact is that many a moose feeds on the aquatic growth at the bottoms of lakes. Strong swimmer, that moose. The record shows it frequently dives deep, staying down for more than a minute, to graze underwater on a little of this and a little of that.

WHAT, YOU'VE never heard of Thomas S. Tally? He was the Los Angeles fellow credited with coining the phrase "moving pictures." In 1897, that THAT LAMINATED plastic known as "Formica" got its name simply because it was invented as an electrical insulation substitute "for mica,".