Correspondent's Correspondence
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. WASHINGTON Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James...
...In his relatively inconspicuous role on the Fifth Circuit bench, where many of the country's civil rights cases are adjudicated, Clark threatens to do greater damage than the more moderate Haynsworth might do in Washington...
...Rarely has the conflict of competing economic claims been so fraught with political consequence...
...But he asked just one question: Would Clark's background compromise him on civil rights cases...
...officials in Vientiane to put a bland face on things, Laotian divisions used considerable muscle to oust the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao from the Plain of Jars last month-probably more force than had ever been used before in Laos...
...The traveler noted that he had already apologized...
...The silence regarding Clark's appointment on the part of the naacp and other groups opposing the Supreme Court nominee is thus a continuing mystery...
...One of them came toward me," he says, "dangling the dead bird in his hand and demanding to know if I had dropped it there that morning...
...As a District Judge in Northern Florida, Carswell was repeatedly reversed by the Fifth Circuit on desegregation cases ranging from the state's reform schools to Tallahassee's theaters...
...The conventional Keynesians of the Administration, now the "conservatives," think inflation is an effect of economic boom spurred by Federal spending, and must be rigorously controlled to prevent a sudden bust...
...The only liberal present at the hearings was Senator Quentin Bur-dick, who had been sketchily apprised by Senator Edward Kennedy of the Mississippian's pungent record...
...He did, fast...
...Why, that was a joke," he said...
...experts in Vientiane give the appearance of being very self-righteous and sure of themselves...
...And that does not include the considerable and open U.S...
...But because I was a foreigner, the masses felt that not enough respect had been shown to them...
...Indeed, the indignation of cuckolded Senators over the manner in which Charles Clark was appointed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals could help bring about the defeat of Clement Haynsworth's Supreme Court nomination...
...Absolutely not," Clark replied, taking umbrage at the suggestion, which was quickly swamped in saccharine by Eastland and John Stennis, the two Mississippi Senators...
...Unfamiliar with the saying that one can be drowned in the milk of human kindness, many Jews still are a little surprised that the higher standards of living and education enjoyed by Israel's Arabs do not make the Arabs in other parts of the world see the benefits and wisdom of brotherly cooperation...
...Administration officials feel the hawkish following of George Wallace, not the peace movement, constitutes the President's chief political problem on Vietnam...
...Thus, Moslems comprise 11 per cent of the inhabitants (and all Arabs, 13.5 per cent...
...thinkers in Vientiane...
...The North Vietnamese, of course, will insist that they are simply responding to our escalation...
...The officer, a patient soul, agreed, but he suggested that the traveler do it again-with feeling...
...If not fully forgiven, the traveler at least would be allowed to leave unharmed...
...For were the welfare of the nation's Arabs not visibly progressing, its enemies would protest of cruel and barbarous treatment...
...The annual release of statistical data regarding the country's Arab citizens regularly evokes a mixture of astonishment and sorrow...
...Meanwhile in Congress, the continuing rise in prices is fomenting a major drive by trade protectionists, whose triumph would accelerate inflation in the United States and arrest economic growth around the entire world...
...Going back to face the group, the traveler repented with as much feeling as any prospective mob victim should muster...
...I said I had only intended to make a joke," the traveler recalls, "and that if they considered me wrong, then I apologized...
...The rest of the peace movement, they say, would not support the President under any circumstances...
...If there's a big push, it will undoubtedly be labeled as North Vietnamese escalation...
...It is the Fifth Circuit, for example, that is charged with the responsibility of implementing the High Court's historic decision three weeks ago ordering Mississippi to desegregate its schools "at once...
...there is no need to interfere because this is just a small scuffle with limited objectives on both sides...
...And so forth and so on...
...Hours later, returning through the same checkpoint, he was to recall it vividly...
...A recent syndicated column by Clayton Frichey adumbrates the likely line of argument, adding a new dimension to the dispute among economists recently described in The New Leader by Robert Lekachman ("The Quarrelsome Economists," October 13...
...Thus, this year's report that the life expectancy of Israeli Arabs has almost reached that of Israeli Jews (68.4 and 69.9 years, respectively) was proudly reported by the press...
...WASHINGTON Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland and Attorney General John Mitchell may have outsmarted themselves when they exploited the Vietnam Moratorium to railroad a die-hard segregationist through the Senate...
...Stalling, the traveler pretended to have forgotten...
...he represented Mississippi in District proceedings leading to that state's school desegregation slowdown earlier this year...
...Economic crash is understandably regarded by politicians as an unacceptable risk, even in the quest of knowledge about pecuniary aerodynamics...
...That he hadn't became clear when the delegation's self-appointed head threw the bird at the traveler's feet, demanding to know what he had said earlier to the children...
...According to the latest government statistics, at the end of September 1969 Israel's total population of 2.9 million included about 320,000 Moslems (as well as another 70,000 Christian Arabs...
...nobody wants this thing to get any hotter...
...Moderate war opponents currently dissatisfied with Administration policy will be mollified by the massive troop withdrawals planned over the next two years, Nixon advisers reason...
...The figures were juxtaposed with the 50 years' expectancy on the West Bank, and 52 years in Egypt...
...Key Administration advisers are amused by the widespread belief that the President's November 3 Vietnam speech was a poorly conceived effort to appease moderate war opponents...
...He admitted that if both parties had been Chinese, the whole thing would have been treated as a joke...
...The members of the expedient coalition of monetarists (like Milton Friedman) and Liberals (like John Kenneth Galbraith) differ on the desirability of wage and price controls but concur that the level of Federal income and expenditure has little effect on the problem...
...resolve to prevent Communist victory in South Vietnam...
...So he now sits on what in some quarters is considered the second most important bench in the land...
...The Chinese saw only a white foreigner mocking them, disparaging the nation and, in effect, insulting their great leader Mao Tse-tung...
...I admitted as much, wondering whether I had innocently killed some rare species...
...But Nixon is determined to withdraw in any case...
...In fact, nearly a week after it was accomplished, the New York Times ran a story on Southern judgeships that assumed Clark was still unconfirmed...
...There was a nodding of heads...
...and he defended the state's segregated jury system at the time of the Philadelphia Klan trial...
...But the inquisitor refreshed his memory: "You told them the dead bird was hao chiM" he shouted...
...As Mississippi's chief legal adviser in the effort to exclude James Meredith from the state university, Clark recommended that Meredith be charged with a felony and proscribed as a criminal suspect...
...Liberal lobbyists should have been alerted by Nixon's previous appointment to the Fifth Circuit, George Harrold Carswell...
...The continuing failure of the Nixon Administration's anti-inflationary campaign (unemployment and prices rose last month) is likely to stimulate a strong anti-Keynesian movement among liberal Democratic politicans who had, until lately, regarded aggressive fiscal policy as indispensable to the maintenance of economic stability...
...Stopping later at a security checkpoint, he removed the dead bird from his vehicle's grillwork...
...Then one of the security officers at the checkpoint stepped forward and summoned the traveler into the guard shack...
...These appointments come at a time when moderate judges appointed by President Eisenhower are retiring, and when the Administration is relying on the courts to enforce civil rights...
...Then he resumed his trip, forgetting the matter...
...What concerns many observers here about the present situation is the attitudes of top U.S...
...The official lectured at length on the importance of showing respect to the masses...
...That clinched it...
...Reported as leading candidates to fill Fourth Circuit vacancies are Charles E. Simons, Jr., a former law partner of Strom Thurmond, and Edwin M. Stanley of North Carolina, Sam Ervin's favorite District judge...
...The Administration believes the situation in the South is moving so strongly against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, the next Southern election could establish a durable non-Communist regime...
...TEL AVIV When "progressive" Arab leaders at September's Moslem Summit Conference in Rabat, Morocco, extracted an invitation for India, on the strength of its substantial Moslem minority, one furious Pakistani delegate ironically remarked: "If things go on like this, at the next Moslem Summit we will have an Israeli delegate representing their Arab minority...
...It will be increasingly contended that restrictive fiscal policies promote unemployment but fail to halt inflation, which is caused by an expansionist psychology ineradicable short of a major recession...
...He was lawyer for the segregationist regular Democrats excluded from the 1968 Convention...
...involvement in Laos-which includes training, air support, reconnaissance and intelligence control, and superspooks...
...If the masses voiced any complaints, he said, one must admit one's errors promptly and properly...
...They see no reason to reveal the true scope of U.S...
...Yet he [the delegation head] still was not satisfied...
...HONG KONG Although the Cultural Revolution is over and an air of normalcy reportedly prevails, grim reminders of the chaos that gripped Communist China from 1966-68 still linger...
...VIENTIANE Despite the best efforts of U.S...
...One recent incident involving a Hong Kong resident, who has just returned from a business trip to the mainland, illustrates the Cultural Revolution's lasting effects on Chinese behavior...
...Yet the fact of the Israeli Arabs' advancement galls them even more, since it robs them of a potent justification for their hostility...
...The Eisenhower Administration experience-restrictive fiscal policy, recession and continuing inflation?will be repeatedly cited as the Democrats seek to justify additional government spending and thus repeat their monetary successes of 1958 and 1960...
...Now, with the dry season beginning, everyone is waiting anxiously to see what the repelled invaders will do...
...U.S...
...Nixon knows he can expect little aid from the peace movement at that point, since in all likelihood it will be attacking him on other issues...
...In fact, they say, it was designed to assure both Hanoi and Saigon that planned troop withdrawals do not reflect any slackening of the U.S...
...They fail to recognize that sometimes you just can't win...
...but the Wallace forces will be sure to cause big trouble...
...The far Right, on the other hand, regarded as a key part of "the emerging Republican majority," might vote for Wallace in protest against an alleged "stab in the back" of American troops...
...And this Right-wing movement could catch fire, it is thought, if South Vietnam dissolves into bloody chaos after American troops depart...
...A delegation of 15 angry Chinese had been stolidly awaiting him...
...Indeed, to judge by percentages, Israel is no less a Moslem country than India...
...Expansionary policy will be half-heartedly resumed as the course of least political resistance, and if a new boom brings intolerably soaring prices, the Democrats will probably have a chance to try controls, hypo-thetically now popular with the public at large...
...And they had waited for hours at the checkpoint to repay this "insult...
...logistical support-playing a role that cannot be minimized...
...there is no sense in putting an end to the secrecy and denials of our actions here because we must maintain the Geneva framework...
...They are incensed by Senator Stuart Symington's statements in Washington, and by the committee hearings he's about to hold...
...He stimulated that feeling by making it clear no more help would be forthcoming from his quarter...
...Unless inflation is curbed soon, however, it seems unlikely that the Nixon Administration will persist in its current theories long enough to conclusively decide the economists' issue...
...The traveler, a Chinese-speaking European who insists on anonymity, was driving through a Peking suburb when his car struck a low-flying bird...
...Nobody laughed...
...Summarized, they are: Don't worry, because we are perfectly aware of the mistakes made in Vietnam and we're not going to repeat them...
...And little change is in sight...
...Feeling far from jovial, the traveler forced a roar of laughter as he feigned surprise...
...Then, in a brilliant move, he offered to personally transport the dead bird from the vicinity...
...I dropped it on the ground," he recalls, "and remarked jokingly to two gawking children, 'hao chih' (good eating...
...To the extent that his speech had any domestic purpose, White House aides contend, it was designed to provoke the doves and thus distinguish the President's actually dovish program from the "bug out" demanded by the Left...
...On October 15, while the press, Senate Judiciary Committee liberals, and civil rights lobbyists preoccupied themselves with Moratorium exercises, Clark, a chief strategist of Mississippi's war against the Supreme Court, was rushed through hearings in the morning and floor confirmation in the afternoon...
...The Village Voice was the one paper to report this court-stacking move by the Administration...
...It was not a question of simple apologies, he said to me, without any attempt to hide his indignation...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 21
