Correspondents' Correspondence
Correspondents' correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Leonard's Label Washington—Finding a moderate in the...
...In the meantime, a junior member of the staff can do up a precis of published opinions on the Subject, which will form the base of the Report...
...Is it Left-wing, or Right-wing, or are these terms meaningless...
...Like a successful paella, it ought to have something for everybody...
...The point, however, is that Macleod was not only a left-winger in Tory terms, but something a great deal rarer: a tough-minded liberal...
...In addition, the United States has reactivated a powerful transmitter in Munich that effectively overrides programs broadcast by the Soviet Defense Ministry to its troops in Eastern Europe...
...Thus by rhetoric alone, without his taking any official actions, Leonard succeeded in quieting an opposing editorial voice...
...For the fact is that while the Tory party is generally led from the "left," the leader cannot afford to appear committed to the left wing, when the right has an effective power of veto...
...He should be a young fellow who has taken to heart the substance of previous Commission reports, and is prepared to exceed them in por-tentousness...
...Familiar, yet piquant, is the desired effect...
...If possible, he should be William Scran-ton...
...As a great and courageous politician, this is surely just...
...Rippon, now the man in charge of getting Britain into Europe, is a different proposition...
...The Cooking: Meetings should be held, interviews conducted, lunches enjoyed, travel vouchers honored...
...Still, one may doubt that he would have won such laurels if he had lived longer: The Treasury is a fearsome beast to tame, and has broken lesser men...
...I was an editor of the Daily Cardinal, the University of Wisconsin's student newspaper, when Leonard learned that the paper's managing editor was living in a rooming house operated by the son of a former chairman of the U.S...
...Find one Executive Director...
...As a rightist, his Eu-ropeanism will help to keep the right-wing, Powellite anti-Europeans quiet...
...Petitions, protest documents and information about arrests and trials of fellow dissidents were supplied to Western correspondents...
...Long hair and beards were considered so un-Marxist and un-Leninist here last summer that the gendarmerie was assigned to cut locks and whiskers that seemed particularly provocative...
...This explains what we have been seeing here in the past couple of months...
...In particular, it ought to contain a morsel that the most ferocious anti-Establishmentarians will enjoy getting their teeth into (part of the ceremony of pacification...
...Across the border in Rumania, there is no such freedom, whatever the reputation of the Ceausescu government in political matters...
...Apparently the Kremlin leadership's current strategy is to expand trade and technological exchanges with Western Europe and the United States, but to severely restrict Western cultural influences.— Mark Hopkins Tory Trimmers London—What kind of government have the British got, now that the Tories are back in office...
...Far from policing haircuts on the streets, the Yugoslav regime permitted Hair to be produced in Belgrade, and connoisseurs of the musical's international productions pronounce it the best.—Donald R. Shanor Soviet Jam Session Moscow—Foreign radio broadcasts are now being jammed here most of the time...
...The only true rightists in the Cabinet are Sir Alec and Geoffrey Rippon...
...Yet instead of proving a political windfall, Leonard's charges led many of the state's newspapers to rally public opinion around freedom of the press...
...But then, with the exception of Churchill, Tory governments have always been led from the "left"— just as Labor governments have always been led from the "right...
...If on completion, it gives workaday journalists, trained historians and friends of the English language dyspepsia, the Report may then be counted a success.—Walter Goodman...
...After a while he quit talking about his investigation, though he never recanted his allegations...
...Certainly, this is not a government of hard-faced tycoons, rack-renting landlords, retired admirals, and Rightist mob orators...
...Throughout much of the battle Leonard, who represented a white suburb, retained his membership in the Milwaukee Eagles Club—a cause celebre because of its "whites only" membership clause—despite the conspicuous resignations of several of its prominent members...
...The jamming is most successful in large cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, and seems to concentrate on information programs...
...To overcome the Soviet jamming network, the Voice of America has doubled and sometimes tripled the number of frequencies on which its Russian-language programs are broadcast...
...Find a chairman for the Commission...
...Soviet citizens now seem more apprehensive than during Khrushchev's time about meeting foreigners or receiving books from abroad...
...The unexpected beneficiaries are its own youth, now permitted blue jeans, medium-length hair and modest beards...
...Periodic press releases will keep things poppling...
...Well, quicker than you could say Joe McCarthy, Leonard began calling for an investigation of the Cardinal and the university's regulation of it...
...Disturbed by Leonard's public comments, however, the Cardinal's managing editor dropped out of school, and the paper's board of directors chose more conservative editors for the following year...
...As usual with the Tories, it is difficult to know...
...A Western diplomat said he could pick up voa perhaps twice a week...
...Communist party...
...Other legislators jumped on Leonard's bandwagon, making ominous rumblings about subversive influences at the traditionally left-wing Cardinal...
...That success may not have been lost on the Justice Department—or the Vice President's office.—Harvey D. Shapiro Communist Barberism Sofia—Bulgaria's police officers have been relieved of their tonsorial functions this summer, to the great comfort of the local youth and young Western tourists...
...It should contain no thought that has not appeared elsewhere, while conveying a sense of forcefulness...
...There are many who believe it might have broken him...
...Humphrey Berkeley has just resigned from the party on the South African arms issue and joined Labor...
...Wisconsin's battle for open housing followed the standard scenario for that issue: Liberal legislators proposed strong bills which were defeated by conservatives...
...Czechoslovak authorities are letting hair and skirts grow longer this summer, having more important concerns...
...So much indignation was expressed at the British and other Western embassies that the state finally called off the campaign...
...The answer, I fear, is that it is the cryp-toliberals, the safe men, the 'trimmers, who have won the day.— John Mander Blue-Ribbon Recipe Washington—Ingredients for a Blue-Ribbon Commission Report: Find one large Subject that has been talked to death...
...Well, yes and no...
...Newspaper profiles of Leonard invariably report that he was a moving force behind passage of Wisconsin's first open-housing statute...
...now Lord) Butler, represented the same strand of Tory tradition, a strand running from Peel to Disraeli to Lord Randolph Churchill...
...if he gets Britain in, he could make it to the top...
...Its critical broadcasts have always been the most objectionable to the Kremlin (Radio Liberty, for instance, broadcast word-for-word Svetlana Alliluyeva's Twenty Letters to a Friend, while voa carried only excerpts, and bbc merely described the contents), bbc remains the easiest station to hear...
...the Czechoslovak affair provided a cover for resumption of the jamming without causing a separate international dispute...
...If there is any chance that the Congress or the Executive Branch is prepared to do anything about said Subject, discard it at once and turn up another one...
...Butler has given up politics for academic life, Edward Boyle likewise...
...He should be an Enlightened Person, perhaps a former governor or senator of uncertain accomplishment, decent reputation, and minimal political punch...
...Thus, the avowed liberals in the Tory party —men like Butler, Macleod, Edward Boyle, Nigel Nicolson, Nigel Fisher, Humphrey Berkeley—seldom rise to the top...
...He is very competent and, at 46, a youngish man...
...But the post-Khrushchev leadership seems to have been troubled even before then by the influence of alien broadcasts within the country...
...At that time, the Soviet jamming apparatus was reactivated, partly to prevent Soviet citizens from receiving foreign information about the activities of their soldiers...
...Although no police haircuts were administered, youths were ordered to surrender their identity cards and could get them back only when shorn...
...Only after open housing had been contested for several years did State Senator Leonard—in his role as gop floor leader—spearhead the drive for a moderate open-housing bill...
...Have the people at Rand put together a suitable number of members for the Commission, with attention to diversity of residence, race, ethnic origin, and age...
...Such direct cross-bench switches are extremely unusual in British political circles...
...Which is where Iain Macleod comes in...
...It may be served with an apocalyptic sauce of the Executive Director's own concoction...
...Leonard's role on matters of civil rights and civil liberties in the mid-1960s made him anathema to many Wisconsin liberals...
...Police cut and ripped clothing styles that seemed extreme, including maxiskirts and bell-bottom jeans...
...Even travelers returning from such exotic places as Nepal and Afghanistan (Bulgaria is a favored transit route between Western Europe and the East) were taken off trains and barbered...
...The transmitter had been inactive since 1963, when Nikita Khrushchev agreed to stop Soviet jamming...
...Leonard's Label Washington—Finding a moderate in the Justice Department is no mean feat these days, so, in desperation perhaps, several reporters have awarded that title to Jerris Leonard, the assistant attorney general for civil rights...
...He lost the Tory leadership 10 years ago when he handed British Africa its independence—not because he was vacillating by nature, but because he was decisive...
...The Digesting: The Report is intended mainly for the newspaper columnist in need of a topic for an early edition and for banquet-circuit speakers expected to comment upon the great issues of the day...
...The Executive Director should agree not to sell any articles on the Subject for three weeks after completion of the Report...
...Another is the mounting repression of dissidents through harassment by the kgb, secret trials and "psychiatric" examinations...
...As in other fields, Yugoslavia is way ahead of the Warsaw Pact nations where grooming is concerned...
...then a series of compromise measures were introduced and one moderate bill was seized upon by the legislative leadership and passed into law...
...In the obituaries following his sudden death on July 21, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer was unanimously and even extravagantly praised...
...As for civil liberties, there Leonard struck close to home for me...
...The Dish: The Report's style may be modeled on a New York Times editorial chosen at random, but it should be less humorous...
...But Butler was no toughie: His policies may have won three elections for the Tories, yet the man himself proved a loser (to Eden, to Macmillan, to Sir Alec Douglas-Home...
...The same very nearly happened to Nigel Fisher—a loyal senior Tory who was offered no post in the new government...
...Their stories were then picked up by voa, bbc and Radio Liberty and relayed with varying completeness back to the Soviet Union...
...A recently concluded police campaign in Bucharest featured on-the-spot tailoring...
...A variety of state organizations, including several Young Republican groups, expressed disapproval of Leonard's tactics...
...Late evening news, for example, is transmitted on 16 frequencies simultaneously...
...They worry about youth resistance to the Soviet occupation turning into further rioting on the pattern of August '69, and are glad to make such unimportant concessions...
...What, finally, of Edward Heath and Anthony Barber, his new Chancellor of the Exchequer...
...Iain Macleod, too, was a loser, albeit in a quite different way...
...And Macleod could not overcome the charge that he had "betrayed the Empire," even though it was known that Harold Wilson feared him more than any other possible Tory opponent...
...Nigel Nicolson (son of Harold) went out of politics when his constituency party refused to back him...
...Speeches and articles recently published in Soviet periodicals have contained references to the news-gathering efficiency of foreign radio stations, and the influence the broadcasts may have on a few "politically immature" minds...
...Kremlin officials have also been disturbed about the general effect of Western broadcasts...
...Interference with foreign broadcasts is but one measure of the increasingly orthodox cultural policy under Brezhnev...
...Comments of Soviet citizens indicate that they can still hear Voice of America occasionally...
...Of the three main foreign stations heard here, Radio Liberty is the most difficult to receive...
...His mentor, R.A...
...Although veteran Western diplomats say the interference is neither as intense nor as absolute as it was in the 1950s, the airways were completely free of obstruction from 1963 until the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...In contrast to John Mitchell, Richard Klein-dienst and Kevin Phillips, Leonard may be something of a progressive, but for those of us who knew him when he was a state legislator in Wisconson, such labels are rather suspect...
...Be careful not to spend too much time on this...
...Sir Alec has probably already blundered his way out of the Foreign Office—'though everyone is too polite to tell him—since the price of selling arms to South Africa seems to be the breakup of the British Commonwealth...
...One reason for the concern of the Brezhnev regime was that Soviet dissidents were using the bbc, the Voice of America and Radio Liberty as channels to circumvent state controls on the mass media and disseminate their views inside the Soviet Union...
...Some months after the Soviets resumed radio interference, the Munich transmitter was deliberately started up and Moscow was indirectly advised of the reason...
Vol. 53 • September 1970 • No. 17
