EDITORIALS
CORRESPONDENCE The Devil's Due Flushing, N.Y. To the Editors: I read your review of The Exorcist [Mar. 1] with some astonishment. Does not Mr. Westerbeck realize that, far from claiming a...
...Now, by a strange irony, the most astringent partisan of them all has dealt his own party a crippling blow, one from which it may take decades to recover...
...for the party to try to gloss it over, he said, would be unrealistic...
...The President took a big gamble and lost...
...Chesterton & Friends Rochester, N.Y...
...SISTER ST...
...But their concern, and the publicity given to it in the media, should not obscure what is the more important fact: not since Harding has there been such a corrupt Administration, and if this fact has understandably hurt the GOP, it has dealt the nation as a whole a far more serious wound...
...Ford told the Middle Western party leaders, could the Republican party allow the Presidential candidate to bypass the regular party organization and set up a campaign group that would make its own rules "and dictate the terms of a national election...
...Ford said in a speech that poli.tieal commentators saw as putting a certain distance between him and the President...
...Because of the multitude of scandals and unhappy revelations that have come to be lumped under the general heading of Watergate, the American people have tended to lose confidence not only in the GOP but in the very process of government itself...
...JR.: Movies JOHN FANDEL: Poetry BRIAN WICKER: Great Britain ALAIN WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Rome JOHN COONEY: Dublin EDWARD S. SKILLIN: Publisher JOHN BRUBAKER: Advertising Manager COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review at Public Aflairs, Literature and the Artl...
...Capyrlgkt 0 1974 Commonweal Publhking Co., Inc...
...If it were not such a serious matter there would be something almost comic about the efforts of GOP leaders to disentangle themselves from their Republican President...
...Printed in the USA and published weekly, except biweekly Christmas-Hew Year's and June to m/d-September, by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madison Ave., Now York...
...Until now there had not been a Democrat elected from the district since the black days of the Depression, and Mr...
...No matter what happens now, Mr...
...Until the Michigan loss, for example, Mr...
...Nixon leaves his successor a badly crippled Presidency, and the wrongdoing of his Administration has gravely weakened popular respect for the American government and for American institutions as a whole...
...14 a year...
...Although hardly heated up, the barely visible preprimary campaign amounts to a challenge to the party leadership of Democratic Governor Milton Shapp, a onetime maverick who has consolidated his political base and even somewhat soothed his constituents, who have long proclaimed via the bumper sticker medium that they live in an oppressed land of taxes...
...Never again, Mr...
...Nixon is obviously a political albatross, and he is dragging the GOP down...
...Nixon's special campaign units--as if all the wrongdoing inside the White House itself had never happened...
...The movie, I might add, was stunning...
...10016 MUrray Hill 3.2042...
...Indeed, so set is the area in its GOP ways that both Democrats and Republicans reportedly rarely bother to campaign hard there...
...PATRICIA A. PRYBIL P.S...
...To the Editors: You mean you had a new Chesterton book reviewed [Mar...
...The death leap of Father Karras precluded the devil's possessing the priest's body and his obvious desire for confession just before he died foiled, as well, any chance the devil had of taking his soul...
...But look out for BeUoc...
...Watergate shattered this placid pattern, and the candidate labeled "Nixon's man" bit the dust...
...He'll make you wish you had given the book to someone like Maisie Ward or Frank Sheed...
...Ford had always expressed confidence that the potential impeachment proceedings would not hurt Republican prospects this fall...
...On Michigan, while White House comments tended to play down the implications of the voting, Mr...
...And once again he expressed his views on the Nixon-created reelection committee: "I am disgusted with political trickery of the CREEP variety or any other creeps who are looking for an easy but unethical or illegal road to victory...
...Ford said simply that the Republicans had taken "a licking" in which Watergate played a part...
...COMING: Thomas Powers on 'right to reply' statutes and freedom of the press 0 0 O O O 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 GOD, MAN AND THE COMMONWEALTH PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC Pennsylvania may share the general malaise of most Americans in this second Spring of Watergate, but in the state's primary election this month citizens will have an opportunity not so much to vote their political discontent as to provide an expression of what the public morality as defined by its legislators should be...
...Nixon on the other, as in his Oklahoma speech...
...In the wake of their Michigan defeat, it is this aspect of the matter that preoccupies Mr...
...10 May 1974:230...
...Nixon campaigned was a traditional Republican stronghold...
...He won't haunt you...
...Those of us who grew up on the Chesterbelloc are angry with you...
...After having had time to mull over the results from Michigan, however, he cautioned his fellow-Republicans against allowing the Democrats to turn the fall elections into a national referendum on President Nixon...
...A favorite ploy even before Michigan was to shift all Watergate blame from the GOP to Mr...
...US and Canada...
...Marty Mullen has two decades in the state legislature, but his real accomplishment is that he has become something of a Wilbur Mills to that body and as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee is the bread man for any state project, whether urgent or porkbarrel, needed or foolish...
...Belloc was a hard and dangerous fighter...
...The devil, upon demand from the frenzied Karras, leaves the body of the child he had vowed to possess until she should "lie stinking in her grave...
...Westerbeck realize that, far from claiming a victory, the devil was soundly defeated...
...The dimensions of his defeat are significant...
...22] that he "can't exactly recall reading any Chesterton," but I am puzzled as to why Commonweal should assign such a reviewer to Dudley Barker's GKC biography...
...To the Editors: I admire Dennis O'Brien's honesty in confessing [Mar...
...Ohwand even the exorcism was effected although in somewhat unorthodox fashion...
...His challenger, though, has chosen morality and the decline of the family as the crux of his gubernatorial campaign, and many political sophisticates in Harrisburg and Philadelphia are taking notice of the campaign...
...If this can happen in a district that has been held by the Republicans without interruption for 40 years, small wonder that GOP Senator Robert P. Griffin of Michigan, assistant minority leader, said after the voting that "no Republican should assume he has a safe seat any more...
...Ford and the party leaders for whom he speaks are surely right...
...Ford and the party professionals, and this is understandable enough...
...It is this fact which is tragic, not the lost confidence in the Republican party...
...Nixon from the very beginning of his career has been one of the nation's most partisan Republicans...
...Thus Vice President Ford, appearing before thousands of cheering Illinois Republicans, denounced the Committee for the Reelection of the President as "an arrogant, 61ite guard of political adolescents...
...They have to, because Martin Patrick Mullen is not just another candidate of an outraged morality...
...Although they don't go far enough in ascribing blame, in this limited condemnation Mr...
...Thus to an increasing extent the Vice President seems to be speaking for the GOP as much as for the Administration, balancing the growing conviction in Republican ranks that disaster looms ahead for themselves and the party unless they can somehow dissociate themselves from their scandalplagued President, on the one hand, with affirmations of personal support for Mr...
...It was this role, in fact, which awakened Mullen to the fact that he need not be an obscure head of a donothing rubber stamp committee for the budget wishes of the Governor's office, described by old Harrisburg hands as "a $2-billion pie-cutting-and-eating contest...
...If there are any more cliques of ambitious amateurs who want to run political campaigns, let the Democrats have them next time," Mr...
...Like Vice President Ford's old district where the GOP had previously lost, Michigan's 8th District in which Mr...
...Go read his lines to "the Don who dared attack my Chesterton," and beware...
...239 REVIEWING TRE REVIEW (NY): Raymond A. Schroth 240 BOOKS: Nathan A. Scott, Jr., John Druska 242 ILLUSTRATIONS: Front cover: photograph o~ Walker Percy by Franke Keating JAMES O'GARA: Editor JOHN DEEDY: Managing Editor RAYMOND A. SCHROTH: Associate Editor ANNE ROBERTSON: Editorial Asslttamt COLIN L. WESTEREECK...
...22] by a man who has never read GKC, and has no intention of beginning now...
...Foreign $16...
...233 IIEINRICII BOLL ON WORK, FAITII, GERMANY: An ~nterview 330 VERSE: Michael Paul Novak 238 THE SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...It is inconceivable that a journal of (Continued on page 246) NEWS & VIEWS: 228 CORRESPONDF, NCE: 220 EDITORIALS: 229 PENNSYLVANIA GOTRIC: Russell W. Gibbons 230 SPRING IN TIlE LAND---AND IlUNGER: Abigail McCarthy 232 WALKER PERCY AND TIlE SELF: Lewis Jerome Taylor, Jr...
...Nixon carried it with no trouble in each of his Presidential efforts...
...In 1976, the Vice President said, the Republican party should demand a pledge from all candidates that they would not set up such Commonweal: 229 committees without the party's consent...
...Single copies S0c 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 KFTER MICHIGKN Now that the dust has settled, what picture emerges from the Democratic victory in Michigan...
...GKC was the most genial of men...
...FRANCIS Milwaukee, Wis...
...Not at issue, however, is the presence of highly-placed tax dodgers, special interest bag men or influence peddlers in government, but rather the security of the Commonwealth and its people as it involves the electric chair, colonial-era laws relating to fornication and adultery and the abortion debate...
...We must never again permit CREEP or any creepy successor organization to spoil the name of the Grand Old Party...
...Second class postage paid at New York...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
