WASHINGTON REPORT: Impeachment-Now More Than Ever
Sisyphus
Catholics who do not agree with the Church's stand on this matter (and harried Catholic women who will undergo abortions), but we see no evidence of any significant body of "liberalizing" opinion...
...Nor were Mr...
...It was in a previous Republican Administration that the Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, removed the departmental code clerk because "Gentlemen do not read other people's mail...
...After all, Mr...
...No, too precious, despite the dark intimations about the source 31 May 1974:300 of the money of Jay Gatsby, n6 Gatz . . . . Who then...
...Flem Snopes had led his barn-burning family to Frenchman's Bend in a vicious, ruthless pursuit of power that destroyed the fabric of that village set amid the rich, river-bottom country of Faulkner's Confederacy...
...WASHINGTON REPORT IMPEACHMENT--NOW MORE THAN EVER The Watergate mess stains so much and so many in Washington...
...What recourse now for Mr...
...Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country folk...
...Nixon...
...Nixon's predecessors unacquainted with electronic eavesdropping...
...Another, one notes, in difficult circumstances chose not to resign----or to be captured...
...on balance, however, we consider such tactics unwise, for at least two reasons...
...A third party---one of decency, i.e...
...And Richard, ambitious to become the Imperious President, finds himself in the shadow of impeachment, and two dozen of his aides have been indicted...
...This necessity to cooperate with others of somewhat different views means that Catholic leaders should abandon their vain hopes for any kind of total legal ban on abortion...
...An American novelist, perhaps...
...No, too genteel...
...The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, we are told...
...There may be something in this argument that it is the fact, not its portrayal, that is horrible...
...No, the evil in their novels of totalitarianism is not basic to our country...
...In a society as diverse as ours, such an absolute ban would be impossible, as well as ill-advised, and the other members of any broad coalition of moral concern could not conscientiously accept such a total ban...
...Commonweal and the most conservative Catholic publications may and do differ sharply on what kind of legislation on this topic is needed or possible in a pluralistic society, but we are equally opposed to the concept of casual abortion on demand...
...Security Council sanctions which were imposed eight years ago on Rho31 May 1974:302...
...Nixon can not hold back the judgments rolling down like water...
...Orwell's, or Koestler's...
...SISYPHUS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PROPPING THE RHODF~IAN REGIME r VEBSu 0 VER CHBO IE In the Congressional foggy bottom of international concerns, so the quip goes, members of the Senate have "relations" while those of their counterpart committee in the House have "affairs...
...Secondly, such methods do offend moderate-minded, middle-of-the-road Americans who favor abortion in hardship cases but who are not firmly committed on the question of large-scale abortion-a group, Catholics should remember, which includes both Jews of various theological outlooks and committed Christians of other denominations who believe that abortion, like war, can be justified under certain circumstances...
...Catholics have been criticized for using shock tactics on the matter...
...The apparent ambition of the Nixon brothers, Donald and Edward, to grow up to be like Howard Hughes has brought them under the scrutiny of the law...
...The exaggerations of these transgressions have wounded our political institutions and the values taken from them by Americans...
...Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby...
...Chrome is the largest export of Rhodesia, the rump racist state created by the five per cent white minority who broke away from the British Commonwealth in 1965...
...For the Presidency, the poetry, whether that of Robert Frost, Richard Neustadt or Arthur Schlesinger, has ended...
...Careless people--Tom and Daisy --they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
...Elected politicians of a kinder purpose were also disarmed...
...Nixon, identified in the typescript as "P" as in Pauline, presumably...
...Eavesdropping grew, like Ma Bell, during Democratic Administrations...
...Life inside Ian Smith's "independent" garrison state sounds all-too-like the strategic hamlet period of South Vietnam: strangers (i.e., Blacks) seen outside hamlets may be shot on sight by security forces...
...Such claim would have been granted upon demonstration that he knew the first verse of Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy loving kindness: according unto the multitudes of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions...
...policy toward Africa as but the same holding action which advocated a bankrupt Southeast Asia policy and one which supports safe corporate investment in a militarized Latin America...
...How approach the abortion issue...
...Examples are Rep...
...There are transgressors enough, in addition to Mr...
...Nixon has moved by the sweep of events from his mountain-top Berchtesgaden to his besieged Berlin bunker...
...Those in the pro-life movement, on the other hand, defended the use of such photos and cited comparable horror pictures of Dachau and Buchenwald: no prettier but displaying hard facts men had to face...
...their minds are made up...
...Utilizing all of the strident techniques of plant shutdown scares, the loss of American jobs and a thinly-veiled anti-UN campaign, the lobby has sought to salvage the 1971 Byrd amendment, which reversed the U.S...
...Seven centuries ago in England, he could have claimed "benefit of clergy," that privilege extended to literate persons wishing to escape criminal prosecution in secular courts for alleged felonies...
...But the analogies are not reassuring-earlier corruptions are dwarfed by "Watergate," a staggering tale of wrong-doing that contains shameful chapter after shameful chapter, perpetrated by shameless political technocrats...
...Conscription of all whites has defused Smith's white immigration and settlement programs and Africa-watchers now suggest that the April 24 Portuguese revolt has only escalated the inevitable political and military success of the Zimbabwe liberation forces, the ZANLA (Angola and Mozambique provide a colonial perimeter on both of Rhodesia's flanks...
...However, flawed in this view of the social order, Ervin at the same time prized the 1st, 4th and 14th Amendments, relating to the individual's freedoms and from whose embankments he undertook to expose the "Watergate...
...Theodore Roosevelt's concepCommonweal: 301 tion of the Presidency as that "bully pulpit" has been reduced to only the bully...
...Not quite...
...Nixon's predecessors wore no haloes...
...Watergate may not be the catharsis that it is characterized as by editorial writers...
...The socalled major "national" political parties may undergo re-alignment...
...Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, once said into a desk phone as he started his day...
...The first by the family's desire to hold to what it could of its privileges and patrimony...
...Madame Bovary chez la Maison Blanche...
...First, really convinced abortionminded persons will remain totally unmoved by such pictures...
...For Doc Morgan is but one of several Congressmen from Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia districts who have recently been barraged with a concerted lobbying effort from the vociferous and well-heeled American specialty steel industry...
...Knowledgeable men could offset such skulduggery as did Attorney-General Kennedy who carried a magnetic neutralizing device with him when he was called to the White House in 1964 to be told by President Johnson that "all" Cabinet officers---meaning only Kennedy, of course--were excluded from consideration as a Vice Presidential nominee to run with Johnson in the campaign that fall...
...Climbing and climbing with their cold hearts and their concept of honor...
...without roots in the state capital in Alabama--may well emerge...
...It is to such people that Father Degnan refers in his article, and it is to them, we are convinced, that appeal should be made...
...Working together, however, it would be possible for Catholics and others opposed to wholesale abortion to map a prudent course which would permit abortion only for serious cause, while at the same time supplying full and effective help for women who are willing to have their babies...
...position backing Rhodesian sanctions...
...Nixon, as even his speechwriter/ advisor, Fr...
...These political institutions have been ill-used and the expectations Americans have of them have been seriously thwarted...
...Thackeray's...
...There are not even any token clichrs about what is good for the (American) people," Senator Packwood of Oregon complained after reading the malodorous transcripts released April 30 by Mr...
...President Johnson's use of profanity was far more artistic than that indicated by the rancid transcripts of Mr...
...Perhaps Flaubert's work...
...Rhodesia (it is Zimbabwe to Black African liberation movements) today represents more than a potential crucible in Africa, for the complexities of chrome on the world market, the crisis situations developing in Portugal and her African Colonial holdings and the game of geopolitics being played around the UN sanctions all suggest a crescendo of Vietnamese-type proportions...
...The chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in keeping with the pun, is a man who some say is not about to let the lofty objectives of international law get into the way of Congress if there appears to be any real or imagined injury to their constituents...
...Good morning, everybody...
...But, no saints...
...The ironic selfishness of the Com~die Humaine is more personal in nature, less bearing on our public natures...
...Rhodesian chrome has become a symbolic rallying point for many Black action groups with a Southern Africa independence orientation, for strong UN advocates and generally those who see U.S...
...Flem Snopes and Richard Nixon...
...Montgomery Ward, draft-dodger...
...There were these and other Snopes, but "a different kind of Snopes like a cotton-mouth is a different kind of snake," observed Ratliff, bruised by financial dealings with the Snopes family...
...McLaughlin, S.J., must certainly know...
...The disagreeable miasma of ambitious middle-class men that Balzac portrays for us...
...Members of Congress who responded most agilely to the first revelations of Watergate were those who understood, by reasons of their origins, the implications of Watergate...
...With Flem Snopes came Ab, the barn-burner...
...And if foreign relations are not passing affairs to his House Committee, then the particularly foggy status of the United States defiance of the United Nations sanctions against the outlaw Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith is a case in point for limited-duration attachment without long-range considerations...
...Nixon's conversations with his chief assistants...
...Forthcoming issues will be dated June 14, June 28, July 12, July 26, August 9, August 23, September 6 and September 20...
...the prose has begun...
...Senator Ervin of North Carolina, in whose Piedmont region Faulkner would also have felt at home, had previously been most noted for his justification of societal bondage, despite the existence of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution...
...One reaches for an analogy as if to reassure oneself that, having survived a Credit Mobilier and a Teapot Dome, then this time of troubles, too, shall pass for the nation...
...President Kennedy's favorite curse was different from that of Mr...
...But, in political terms, there being no martyrs in this situation, the future for our political institutions that have held together our disparate nation is not bright...
...Two men, each moving into a community already flawed and ruining it thoroughly by opportunism...
...Summer Sehedule In keeping with the usual practice, Commonweal will again appear on'alternate weeks during the summer months...
...Lessened participation in elections is a possibility...
...Thus many pro-abortionists deeply resented the wide circulation given to pictures of aborted fetuses already showing clearly recognizable human characteristics, some of which become visible quite early...
...The novelist whose canvas is most congenial for "Watergate" is, of course, Faulkner and his most contiguous novel is The Hamlet, peopled by the Snopes family...
...LBJ was not happy when he later tried to replay the tape for the amusement of his associates...
...Excessive claims of executive privilege have lowered executive respectability...
...Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee...
...A man after his time is Mr...
...Among our Presidents, we've had Old Hickory and Old Kinderhook and now we have as incumbent President, Old Deleted...
...The legislation that would come from such cooperation would not, it should be emphasized, be allornothing legislation, but it would be worth working for...
...Secular liberals, captives of legends of progress, lack an understanding of evil and, somehow, believe that should it exist, it may, like temporal evils, be legislated out of existencemjust as technicians rely in full hubris upon their technology to remove error...
...The chrome controversy which has again erupted in Washington, and which has triggered the actions and passions of some within the small but strategic specialtymetal industry, can be traced to U.S...
...and I.Q., who placed his mules in the path of a train so he could collect damages...
...the Nixons by political merchants past their prime...
...From then on we will resume our normal weekly publishing schedule...
...Like Gresham's Law, bad politics drives out good...
...Better Polly Adler...
...Not apropos of the Senator, the situation nevertheless recalls a remark by a French resistance leader that during World War II the most effective work was performed by priests and prostitutes...
...Political Luddites may soon be prowling about...
...Previous Presidents and their men had committed transgressions similar to those perpetrated by the Nixon Administration...
...Isaac, idiot...
...Ervin has been joined most prominently in both bodies of the Congress not by the media political personalities, inflicted upon us ordinary folk, but by modest men known more for their saving realism and small enthusiasms for grand projects...
...Nixon's--perhaps a character clue, clinically speaking...
...the political merchants by their own familiarity with the dark corridors of money and influence...
...Only if Catholics and such men and women of moderate views join forces can there be any hope of stemming the rising tide of abortion on demand--indeed, of preventing abortion from becoming little more than simply another form of birth control...
...But the extent of these transgressions is one of degree--the policy difference between sending American military advisors to South Vietnam and sending half-a-million troops...
...it would, hopefully, save hundreds of thousands of lives, end the growing identification of the anti-abortion cause with the right wing, and in general call a halt to the national drift toward what many already consider an abortion culture...
...There, too, one finds no reassurance, but a guide does suggest itself...
...Doc" Thomas E. Morgan, chairman of the House Committee and thus a counterpart to Senator J. William Fulbright, is an affable but astute onetime general practitioner from a southwestern Pennsylvania hamlet...
...Nixon...
...Both the Sartoris family and the political merchants were disarmed in their opposition, however...
...Dissatisfied with the inadequacies of American historical analogies, one reaches for art--to the novel---for parallels...
...John Anderson, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, and Rep...
...A most introverted President now stands more exposed than any of his predecessors...
...The Snopes were opposed by the flawed Sartoris world...
...Catholics who do not agree with the Church's stand on this matter (and harried Catholic women who will undergo abortions), but we see no evidence of any significant body of "liberalizing" opinion that would take a passive attitude on abortion on demand, without grave cause...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 13
