Correspondents' Correspondence
KIRK, JONATHAN COTTIN \ RICHARD L. WALKER \ MICHAEL BERGER \ DONALD
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Populist Long Shot WASHINGTON—Now that Senator Fred...
...In this age of computers, transistors, jet transport and a new interdependence among nations, Mao's concepts of self-sufficiency are anachronistic, as intelligent men like Premier Chou En-lai are apparently beginning to realize...
...The Mishima trial may end," he said grimly, "but its repercussions in Japan will not...
...If peace don't come, we're in one helluva shape...
...Mishima's books, meanwhile, enjoy great popularity...
...The United States has the initiative in this situation...
...Japan, which rang up over $38 billion in foreign trade last year, has become a political as well as economic giant with whom the Chinese now must reckon...
...Now that mainstay is gone, and this could help bring about a more reasonable attitude in Pyongyang and Hanoi...
...They are aware, too, that Peking continues to be the major instigator of insurgency and instability in many areas—particularly the Middle East, where Chinese leaders would like to prevent a settlement...
...At that time he also spoke of the urgent need to change the constitution, legalize the military and arm it with nuclear weapons, to insure what was to him most important—Japanese political independence and cultural integrity...
...This complex, 50 miles north of Vientiane, is the ninth he has been in himself in the past few years...
...Taiwan symbolizes an alternate Chinese path to modernity, and President Nixon will neither negotiate it away nor withdraw the American shield that has helped prevent Mao's mythology from prevailing in Asia.—RICHARD L. WALKER Mishima's Lesson TOKYO—The trial of novelist Yu-kio Mishima's accomplices in last November's attempt to mobilize a coup d'etat is unfolding like a Ka-buki play—piece by piece...
...policy toward China...
...They have little contact with their older superiors, and there is always the danger that they could act independently, just as some young officers did in the 1930s...
...Hopefully, part of the price the U.S...
...Each hearing commands intense interest and involvement...
...One reliable source close to the Forces noted: "The generals are no problem...
...The Republic of Korea is an increasingly vital and viable reality on the periphery of China...
...It is mainland China that has lagged behind the times, remaining out of step with developments in the Pacific no less than elsewhere for over a decade...
...It's very hard to know what will happen...
...We can help some of them with drugs, but many die...
...Nixon and Kissinger know that Chou En-lai must offer a quid pro quo for a change in U.S...
...When the shell starts to pop, you move out with whatever you have on your back...
...But the Chinese Nationalists, despite their understandable negative reactions to the latest turn of events, are a cool and capable people with a sense of history...
...The darkest horse in a crowded field, the Oklahoman has hitched his wagon to the proposition that the nation's wealth should be distributed more equitably...
...Currently trying out his theme in Florida and other southern points, Harris clearly does not expect anyone else in the White House free-for-all to adopt a share-the-wealth platform...
...will extract from Peking will be its promise to cease supporting violence and supplying weapons to terrorists in Burma, India, Thailand, Laos, and the Middle East...
...Much of the praise concerned Mishima's "sincerity," which in Japan supersedes legal questions of right and wrong...
...Then come additional diseases—dysentery, pneumonia and so forth...
...It is an honorable death," Mishima once declared...
...Only one part worked?the desperate group made a garrison general gather about 200 soldiers...
...MICHAEL BER-GER Refugee Plight SITE 272, LAOS?We've got people who've moved as many as 25 times," said Edgar "Pop" Buell, a grizzled veteran of more than a decade's refugee work in Laos...
...Site 272 possesses the only hospital for all the refugees in northern Laos...
...McGovern is also being advised to voice the view that inflation is not Armageddon...
...some Japanese stand in line for hours hoping to obtain one of the 42 tickets to the spectators' gallery...
...By "we," of course, Buell meant the 200,000 mountain tribesmen fleeing before the combination of North Vietnamese troops and American air strikes...
...The question is, how to capture it...
...A couple of Meos employed by the American aid mission fought off the prop wash and ran to pick up the cargo—in this case a tribesman and his wife, carrying an infant dying of malaria...
...Although McGovern has yet to embrace any of the ideas advanced by his task force, a participant at a recent skull session with him said the former history professor from South Dakota is "intrigued" with some of the concepts...
...If Richard Nixon's new China venture succeeds in bringing an early Vietnam settlement, McGovern could find himself without an issue and be forced to turn to populism...
...that's why I stay in my home...
...One radical proposal under study calls for a 100 per cent tax on individual inheritances of more than $100,000...
...Last year we had 30 there...
...That it was only half full reflected how difficult it is for the refugees to get here from their villages...
...We are not militarists and have no connections with Rightists...
...No less engrossing than the details, however, is the reaction of the Japanese people to Mishima's mission and the trial...
...Here we are sick all the time...
...A group of young economists at MIT, Princeton and Yale are preparing a series of populist papers for Senator George McGovern, Harris' only rival for support from the left in the Democratic party...
...The Continental planes bring American workers in from the capital each morning...
...Malaria can't touch them over 3,500 feet, but when they're driven to a lower altitude they have no immunity...
...the others are members of a dozen groupings who also have lived for centuries in northern and northeastern Laos, mainly at altitudes of 3,500-6,000 feet...
...He is one of three student members of Mishima's now disbanded Tate no kai (Society of the Shield) who face five charges, including assault and battery and abetting murder (by assisting Mishima and another student adherent to commit hara-kiri...
...Despite the seeming futility of Mishima's scheme, there have lately been uneasy rumblings within the Self-Defense Forces...
...We may have to move again...
...Leaving the hospital, Beery and I went to nearby Koua Lek Nam Meuy—Village of the Iron Bridge on the Meuy River...
...James Tobin, a former member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Kennedy, has become a leading advocate of this economic heresy, and McGovern is listening...
...Difficulties lie ahead, to be sure, and certainly at the top of the list are America's sensitive relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan...
...Not only is too much generally expected from these talks, but too frequently the heads of state make decisions that affect the fate of smaller nations without consulting them...
...In large measure their posture has drawn its inspiration from Peking, from the feeling that the Chinese Communists would never go soft toward Washington...
...Savings Bonds bearing adjustable interest payments that escalate with the cost of living...
...They fly on Continental planes when there's space," Beery said...
...More than 400 people crowded outside a recent hearing: young office workers...
...Malaria hits one village after another...
...a few university Leftists...
...His last novel, finished and delivered to the publisher on the morning of his death, has been on the best-seller lists for weeks...
...in Tokyo more than 2,000 came to hear the eulogies...
...Thiel and Beery showed me around the hospital, capable of holding a few hundred patients...
...diplomacy could further defuse the threat Communist insurgency poses for the democracies...
...But Mishima's dramatic speech failed to move them, and the double suicide followed...
...It is easy to expect a satisfactory climax on the stage, but to be involved, this is dangerous...
...We entered one of the thatch huts where he introduced me to a Meo paid by the aid mission to serve as village chief...
...Though Mishima was mocked by many as, in one critic's words, "an astounding anachronism," several impressive rallies were held to mourn him...
...The ultimate "sincerity" is hara-kiri, an act of responsibility and/or protest...
...Thus the Chinese Communist system, based on an outworn ideology, must make a greater adjustment in its contacts with a dynamic outside world than those contacts will occasion for the world...
...We've gone back as far as we can go...
...And despite the dismal forebodings here in America, the war in Vietnam has not gone at all well for the Communist forces—they have not been able to launch a successful offensive for more than three years...
...Indonesia is no longer a source of support or hope for Peking...
...They are old tigers . . . tame tigers...
...Rightist students wearing traditional rising-sun headbands and carrying banners calling for acquittal...
...I have malaria now...
...Secondly, the power equation in the Pacific has altered significantly, allowing the United States greater diplomatic maneuverability...
...It is the untamed ones, the young officers, whom we must watch...
...and selling inflation-proof U.S...
...Given proper safeguards, Tobin has argued with Leonard Ross of Harvard in the New York Review of Books, "anticipated inflation is harmless inflation...
...Sam Thong was much better," the chief insisted, referring to the main site near the Plain of Jars from which the North Vietnamese drove the Americans and the Meo soldiers over a year ago...
...While there have been sporadic scuffles, no serious violence has erupted, even after it was announced that the accused would be freed on bail of $833 each...
...To begin with, neither National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who conducted the preparatory negotiations for the trip, nor the President had any illusions about the people with whom they are dealing...
...Mishima's design, the three testified, was to capture a Japan Self-Defense Forces base, seize an arsenal, compel the base commander to assemble his troops, and then win them over...
...North Korea and North Vietnam are currently the most inflexible Communist nations...
...DONALD KIRK...
...Tobin believes a system of "cushioned inflation" can be devised to protect those hurt the most, people living on fixed incomes —primarily the elderly and welfare recipients...
...We're feeding approximately 168,000 of them within a 30-mile radius of here," said Galen Beery, one of Pop's assistants...
...More than half of them are Meo...
...removing the ceilings on savings deposit interest rates...
...Then we've got some more at five sites north of the Plain of Jars...
...Fred Harris might not appreciate that, but Huey Long would.—JONATHAN COTTIN Nixon's Peking Ploy COLUMBIA, S.C.—Remembering President Roosevelt's meetings with Stalin at Yalta in 1945 or President Kennedy's sobering confrontation with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, Americans have ample reason to question the wisdom of summit conferences with Communist leaders...
...Possible approaches include establishing Federal cost-of-living supplements of the type Congress has appended to Social Security...
...they have lived to see their prediction of disillusionment with the Soviet "big brothers" become a reality in mainland China...
...So far, he is all alone on that issue...
...We planned this village for the refugees, but they built it themselves," he told me as we walked along the fetid dirt streets...
...While a doctor attempted to pump fresh blood into the baby's anemic veins, a male nurse, Jack Thiel, talked of the mountain tribesmen's medical problems...
...But he could be wrong...
...The notion of making the superrich somewhat poorer will find few adherents among the wealthy doves who are paying for McGovern's candidacy, but it has undeniable appeal among people at the lower rungs of the economic ladder...
...There are not days but weeks between hearings...
...Populist Long Shot WASHINGTON—Now that Senator Fred Harris has entered the Democratic Presidential race, the pundits are waiting for him to open a back-woodsy campaign of the kind popularized in the 1930s by Huey Long, who proposed a "Share-the-Wealth Society" that would make every man a king...
...Tobin and other members of McGovern's economic task force contend that an unemployment rate of 6 per cent is too high a price to pay for controlling inflation...
...We took the action independently because we wanted the people to recognize the real status of the Emperor," said Masayoshi Koga...
...and, with their fellow Chinese in Hong Kong and Singapore, they have demonstrated in their own manner that the Chinese civilization does not have to adjust to the "technetronic age" via Marxist-Leninist violence and hostility...
...it will be months before the trial is completed and Mishima's bizarre plan to turn back the clock is fully understood...
...Both are sophisticated students of the world Communist movement, fully aware of what has transpired in the People's Republic of China during the more than 21 years Mao Tse-tung has been in power...
...We don't have enough aircraft to put on special missions to pick them up...
...We're looking for fresh leaders, and an important lesson of the Mishima incident may be that if his timing was wrong, his instinct was right...
...Just as the Sino-Soviet dispute has broken the myth of Communist solidarity, deft U.S...
...Japan, and even Taiwan, stand in striking contrast to the inefficiencies of the Communist economic system in the 1970s, and they are already locked into the new international order...
...They have watched with no little satisfaction as their culture has frustrated Mao's grandiose schemes...
...imperialism...
...The Sino-Soviet dispute has Mao's government facing a million Russian troops dug in along its borders...
...In the case of President Nixon's forthcoming visit to Peking, however, there are good reasons for optimism...
...Since the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution is also a thing of the past, Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues clearly must seek a different sort of relationship with what they call "U.S...
...I know Westerners find it hard to understand...
...That moment," he said to me in an interview a few.months before he took his life, "will be most dramatic...
...As Beery spoke, a Continental Air Services plane, flown on contract with the cia, landed amid a swirl of wind and dust...
...There is still another factor that justifies President Nixon's diplomatic demarche...
Vol. 54 • August 1971 • No. 16
