Correspondents' Correspondence Radical Playpen

...One, named Super-joel, was campaigning from the county jail at Santa Rita where, his friend explained, he was serving "one to five for tearing out a phone booth during People's Park...

...But politics in Berkeley bears very little resemblance to politics anywhere else, as was proved again in February when more than 1,000 supporters of the radical April Coalition met to choose their four-member slate for this month's City Council election...

...Then another tense hour passed while the vote was counted for the first slot to be filled...

...Italian Communists, moreover, feel an ideological and emotional reluctance to withdraw from the WFTU, and would like to bypass this obstacle altogether...

...they cannot do more with less...

...Yet without adequate funding, the general revenue sharing envisioned by the Administration will prove nothing...

...The ideologues have been chiefly active in neighborhood organizing, the pragmatists in political campaigns and policy planning...

...Perhaps his years in New York as a lavishly rewarded corporation lawyer failed somehow to bring home to him the realities of life in the big city...

...Several days later, the moderates announced their slate: the black vice-mayor, a black law professor, an incumbent councilwoman, and a male graduate student...

...the woman acting as chairperson screamed into the microphone...

...But before Nixon can educate the country about the cities, apparently we are going to have to educate him...

...We'd hate to have any resemblance to other conventions we know of," the chairperson quipped...

...John Lindsay, of whom much bad can and has been said ("He gave good intentions a bad name"), at least has made a vigorous effort to educate the country about the plight of its cities...

...They," charged an ideologue, glaring towards the other side of the hall, "only care about winning...

...The two are now waging an election battle that, in Berkeley, is billed as Armageddon.-Susan Cohen Nixon for Mayor New York-So John Lindsay is to relinquish the helm of Fun City, and in much the same atmosphere that Robert Wagner took his leave seven years ago...

...This is especially tragic, since he is the one man who might be able to significantly upgrade the quality of American urban life...

...Identifying themselves as liberal Democrats, they proclaimed their purpose was to head off the April Coalition...

...From the back of the gym came the reply, "Let the liberals do the work...

...Taking a geographical view of the problem, Secretary Mario Dido argues that the CGIL operates in Western Europe, and that its ties to the WFTU, the result of an ideological choice made in an early phase of the Cold War, no longer have any justification...

...City governments are no longer on the verge of financial catastrophe," Nixon says, even as schools in Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia totter on the edge of bankruptcy...

...in fact, many mayors welcome the increased autonomy that will come with the phase-out of its categorical grants...

...An April victory would give the radicals control of the council and a chance to try to enact a platform that includes rent control, affirmative hiring of women and minorities, city-funded health care and insurance, a cutback in police weaponry, and community ownership of utilities and sewerage facilities...

...The radicals would not compromise with the moderates and liberals whose four seats are currently up for grabs and whose political connections have often been virtuously Left (they endorsed George McGovern's Presidential bid...

...To emerge triumphant from the crowded field of 28 contenders, however, they must appeal to radical minorities and to large numbers of students who are well-known ideological hair-splitters...

...the pragmatists decided to "allow everyone to vote their own conscience...

...Instead, they persuaded their weakest candidate to drop out and returned...

...The slate with the broadest base will win," said Mayor Warren Widener...

...Probably the most sensible thing we could do is elect him mayor of New York...

...A spy reported that the ideologues had dropped all but their leading contender, a graduate student in economics named Lenny Goldberg...

...The reactions of the CGIL Communists are more complex...

...Mayors aren't magicians...

...Despite the sometimes unintended humor, the pervasive smell of incense, the noisy rock band, and the frequent obscenities, the convention faced a serious question: Would it compromise its more adventurous principles to choose a slate with a chance of winning or would Berkeley, as one speaker asked, "remain the radical playpen...

...As the assembly dragged through the day it became clear that two camps had tried to pack the hall, each with its separate slate of favorite sons and daughters...

...With the dismantling of OEO, the Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation is currently operating on a "no cost extension," meaning that no Federal support has yet been allocated for 1973...

...Sitting in a narrow hallway, the pragmatists debated, sometimes viciously, whether to compromise and allow an ideologue on the slate or to go for broke with their last candidate...

...A trumpet in the back of the drafty gymnasium shrieked like bad opera...

...The former have identified openly with Socialism and its jargon...

...As funds dry up, the project's momentum is being lost...

...Another woman in the pragmatist camp, Ying Lee Kelley, a former McGovern delegate who wears her hair in a long black braid, finished so close behind that she was given the second seat without a separate ballot...

...The winner was a pragmatist leader, Peter Birdsall...

...113 in London) and 78,202 robberies (3,167 in London...

...Thus we begin the process of exchanging an old mayor for a new one, though most of us are resigned to the administrative scandals, the slums, the noise, the dirt, the fear...

...We're going to have to break with those people sometime...

...And this is only one neighborhood in one borough of one city...

...Yet to uplift even one decaying area requires massive new infusions of money...

...Two years ago the coalition, consisting primarily of university students and blacks, captured three of the nine council seats and helped carry the winning candidate for mayor, who was not on the radical list...

...Leaving aside the question of the other half, in 1972 we still had 1,691 murders in New York (vs...

...He takes great comfort in the fact that the crime rate has dropped "in more than half of our major cities...

...The project, financed primarily by the Office of Economic Opportunity, has helped improve 61 blocks-a good start, but the Brooklyn community is spread over 653 blocks...

...Unhappily, Richard Nixon does not share it...

...Rejoined a pragmatist, "Rhetoric will not organize people...

...There remains the stench not only of carbon monoxide above and canine droppings below, but of chronic corruption among those who administer, interpret and enforce the law...

...Both sides caucused before the last ballot...

...By and large they, too, would like to enter the ETUC...

...The French are reportedly lukewarm on ETUC membership...

...No fewer than 17 potential candidates vied to carry the radical banner...

...And a soft-spoken man, wearing a red bandanna, blinking behind wire glasses, said that as a bisexual male he could represent feminist women, gays, and gentle men...

...A shy young man, hair down to his shoulders, orange socks glowing in black shoes, read from a trembling sheet of paper: "Many years in encounter groups and communicating with those less cognizant of socioeconomic realities have made me non-authoritarian...

...declaring his support for the nonradicals...

...The two radical factions, who were able to agree on a common platform, differ more in method than purpose...

...Ilona Hancock, the only member of the City Council who has remained loyal to the coalition, countered: "If we do this to them, we will confirm every paranoid fear they've ever had of us...

...In the past five years, for example, the Federal government has spent nearly $30 million on a much-publicized community restoration project in Bed-ford-Stuyvesant...

...a banner ("Power to the Neighborhoods") bounced in the aisle...

...True, this was partly political ("An Urban President for the Urban 70s"), but his firsthand concern was obviously genuine...

...The old centrali internazionali (the WFTU and ICFTU) are now outdated, announced Communist leader Giancarlo Pajetta, adding that affiliation with either group should neither qualify nor disqualify an applicant to any European association...

...In the end...

...his radical supporters were still grumbling...

...This includes the predominantly Communist General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL...

...Though the differences between them are nebulous, the radicals view liberal politics as reformist and old fashioned, while the liberals regard radical politics as disastrous...

...blond-haired, blue-eyed graduate student in public policy and former campaign worker for McGovern and Berkeley Congressman Ronald V. Dellums...

...Probably nobody can without far more Federal aid than Richard Nixon is talking about...

...Of course, the President is now asserting that "the hour of crisis has passed" in American urban life (whereas a Peter Hart survey reveals that 82 per cent of the New York electorate believes the city is going downhill...

...Among a large and undistinguished field of mayoral candidates, not one stands out whom many New Yorkers believe can (in the vernacular of would-be mayors) "turn the city around...

...A tall, stately black woman pledged to use her candidacy to "focus on the struggle in South Africa and Latin America" (she drew loud applause-Berkeley is accustomed to having a foreign policy...

...Statistics like that have made us a city of paranoiacs, which tends to get in the way of our scuffling pursuit of happiness...

...It was the kind of meeting-energetic, rowdy, and full of comic relief-that has inspired moderate leaders to claim the coalition means to "destroy life in Berkeley as we know it...

...The ETUC's first president, Vic Feather, secretary general of the British Trade Unions Congress, hailed the new body as a milestone on the road to working-class unity, and the Italian Communist daily UNIT A termed the birth of the organization a positive development...

...Nine hours after the convention began, Goldberg was awarded the last seat on the slate...

...the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), and the French, Belgian and Dutch Christian confederations...

...They want to legislate for people," an ideologue complained of his opponents, "instead of bringing the people into politics and raising consciousness...

...the latter have toned down their vocabulary for what they see as electoral reality...

...But the next ballot brought them more defeat...

...The group's 17 members-srawn from the enlarged European Economic Community and Free Trade Area-all belong to the non-Communist and nonreligious International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and ICFTU membership is specifically mentioned as a qualification for affiliation in the ETUC charter's first article...

...But the fear exists that without the French CGT, the CGIL would play a marginal role as the powerless Left wing of a primarily Social Democratic organization...

...We do not want a dramatic break," says Dido, "just an adjustment to a new reality, namely the need for our active presence within the bodies of the European community...

...Without a majority and with divisions and desertions (the mayor has withdrawn his support for the coalition and the two black council-men refused to come to this year's convention), the main result of the last election has been a stalemated council...

...a 21-year-old...

...Surprisingly, even Soviet labor czar Aleksandr Shelepin asked for affiliation with the ETUC for the Soviet and other Eastern European unions-a request that was given a cold reception by the Brussels delegates, much to the satisfaction of West German labor leader Heinz Oskar Vetter...

...Lindsay's 1965 campaign slogan was, "He is fresh and everyone else is tired...

...At this point, the ideologues appeared to be near panic...

...This issue is of particular concern to the Socialist component of the CGIL, Italy's largest union and a member of the Moscow-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU...

...That would show him, and in more ways than one.-Calvin Fentress The Infant ETUC Rome-Rare are the occasions when international undertakings meet with unanimous approval, but the creation of the European Trade Unions Confederation (ETUC) in Brussels last February 9 seems to have been one of them...

...The impulse among Europe's trade unions-as among the countries of the Common Market-seems clearly to be toward a European community...

...Thus for the time being not only the Eastern European unions but also Western European Communist and Catholic unions are ineligible...

...What we do ask of the President, therefore, is that he recognize the severity of metropolitan problems, confront them with a realistic urban strategy, and sell the people on the needs of the cities as doggedly as he has sold, say, himself...

...On the left, in geography only, sat the pragmatists...

...Nobody is asking Nixon to re-institute the Great Society...

...Someone mounted the stage and accused the convention, of "childless-people chauvinism" for neglecting the child-care issue...

...Now he's tired, too, and we have learned that fresh blood alone cannot rejuvenate a city...

...But whether the infant ETUC will gain the strength to overcome the national, religious and ideological differences that perennially plague all such efforts remains to be seen.-Silvio F. Senigallia...

...By the time the balloting began, after five long hours of debate and nominations, the hostility in the air was as rife as the incense...

...They called a quick and angry caucus in the school playground and debated whether to walk out of the convention...

...There remains, as well, widespread disillusionment about the way we live and the way we are governed...

...Nonetheless, the President purports to believe that the urban breakthroughs made during his first term free him to cut urban funding in his second...

...A group calling itself the ideologues sat on the right...

...He smiled weakly from the stage as he posed with the other selected candidates...

...Thus, with their opposition seeking to unite a moderate slate at a closed meeting in the affluent Berkeley hills, the potential radical candidates paraded across a school stage before a young and mostly white audience that was anything but unified...

...Finally it was announced that Margot Dashiell-a young black college instructor and a pragmatist -had won...

...one said, "their candidates aren't saleable...

...Still, Shelepin must have drawn a measure of gratification from Feather's address, which advocated future membership for all European unions regardless of ideology...

...In the not-so-short run, however, the ETUC's open-arms approach may well remain merely a verbal expression...