Correspondents' Correspondence

...Indeed, some observers saw in the 1972 reelection campaign an effort to make Nixon not simply a two-term President but the Bicentennial President as well...

...and to use a LeVant phrase, there was a "de-fanging" of the ARBC...

...When it does, other democratic nations will be listening...

...Perhaps too profitable...

...The Spirit of '76 does live in Washington—in the courts, in the Senate Watergate Committee, in the press...

...wells than is known to remain in the ground, just the opposite is true in the Mideast: It still has at least 56 billion tons, a treasure expected to last another 60-70 years, whereas America's 5.9 billion tons (a quarter of them in Alaska) will be exhausted within the next two decades...

...Recently Helen Gahagan Douglas, an early victim in Nixon's career of dirty tricks, visited Washington and asked the question, "Have 200 years worn out the dream...

...And in his enthusiasm for a proposal to set up 50 state fairs in 1976, LeVant envisioned calling them "Nixon Parks...

...The language of the "eyes only" ARBC memos that eventually surfaced sounds much like that of the White House transcripts: "I suggest we keep this information carefully guarded, or, as you know, we will blow the whole ballgame," says one, discussing a huge commercial promotion of the event...

...Look to Sweden...

...Because of Watergate the brochure is right...

...The churning, cathartic political process presently under way would seem to provide the answer.—Eugene L. Meyer Oilman's Eden Sacramento, Calif.—During last winter's oil embargo the giant petroleum companies justified the politically vulnerable concentration of their operations in the Middle East by pointing out that most of the globe's proven reserves (estimates vary from 53-66 per cent) are located there...

...If that were not enough, the wages of oil field workers in the Mideast are about one-fourth of those in the U.S...

...Thus, the big question for the Parliament is not where to find the cash, but how to avoid setting up a system that would result in government interference with free expression...

...Should any man be above the law...

...These guides (which include the programs of rival broadcasters in smaller print) are closely read, making them a popular outlet for advertising, and the combined revenue from sales and ads has proved more than sufficient to keep the organizations solvent...

...and while part of this money has been employed since 1971 to compensate publications that have lost a disproportionate amount of advertising to the broadcasting companies, the remaining funds are adequate to finance a subsidy program...

...Although no question of official censorship has arisen since the plan went into effect, it has not proved entirely successful...

...Newspapers with smaller circulations than competitors in the same area became eligible to receive support based on the amount of newsprint they consumed, minus the amount used for advertising...

...Money for the plan would come from the advertising revenues of the commercially successful broadcasting organizations...

...Fortunately, one crucial safeguard already exists in Holland...

...One columnist has even pondered whether the Founding Fathers intended to bar Henry Kissinger from the Presidency because of his foreign birth...

...In Saudi Arabia, for example, only 28 dry holes were sunk from 1930-60...

...In a bold move, Dutch officials not long ago announced that they had decided to bail out De Tijd, one of Holland's oldest national newspapers, by underwriting 66 per cent of its losses for a three-year period...

...Anyone is free to launch a new company by persuading enough people to buy his guide...

...Not only has this greatly reduced drilling expenses, it has also preserved gas pressure for extracting the oil and resulted in higher output per well...

...In a draft letter written during those heady pre-Watergate days, ex-ARBC director Jack I. LeVant bubbled that the Bicentennial offered "the greatest opportunity Nixon, the party and the government have as a beacon of light within the nation and with the world...

...Two or three years ago, Maryland's thoughtful Republican Senator Charles McC...

...Mathias, coauthor of the bill that established the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), took a look at the Frankenstein-monster he had created and sternly declared the commemoration "not just a time for a party...

...Newspaper editorials on the cover-up are laced with references to the Founding Fathers...

...What was really meant by "high crimes and misdemeanors...

...In fact, the chances of not finding oil at a site are only 2 per cent, as opposed to 42 per cent in the U.S...

...It certainly does—though only by an ironic twist of history...

...Foreign exploitation practices have been a source of increasing irritation in the oil-rich Arab countries, and—even leaving aside such crises as the one caused by the development of the Arab "oil weapon"—they can be expected to result in increased difficulties for the fuel-hungry consumer.—Ayad al-Qazzaz...

...rising to an anticipated $4 in Alaska), and 80 cents in the Soviet Union...

...Because of the essentially monopolistic terms under which the Mideast concessions were originally obtained, the producing companies have not had to drill as many wells as would have been the case with more competitive exploitation...

...We are only at the beginning...

...This kind of scheme would satisfy the large minority in Holland (30 per cent of a recent poll) that believes any journal unable to attract sufficient public interest should be allowed to fail...

...The cautious Dutch are only too aware of the role newspapers played in uncovering the Watergate scandal and exposing less spectacular corruption at the top elsewhere in the Western world...

...We never thought we'd be able to get anyone to read the Constitution...

...a Congressional probe was launched...

...Nuances of words are debated, precedents scrutinized...

...The average yield in the region is 6,500 barrels a day, compared to 351 in Venezuela, 52 in Canada and 19 in the U.S...

...The problem that concerns members of Parliament is the same one that is developing throughout the West: Because of free market forces, newspaper production has become too expensive an operation to cater to minority tastes, yet the airing of minority opinions remains a crucial feature of the democratic decision-making process...

...For thanks to Watergate, the sober reassessment sought by Senator Mathias and others is now going on...

...in contrast, about 90 per cent of U.S...

...How much easier things would be if Richard Nixon could be toppled with a vote of no-confidence...

...And while more crude has been drawn out of U.S...

...The doctrines and documents of the Revolutionary Era are being discussed with fresh fervor...

...Funding was brought to a halt...

...Obliged to explain its philosophy on the mass media, the administration has promised to make a policy statement on the subject some time in the future...

...Virtually all the wells are free-flowing...

...The Senator's admonition was prompted by the fact that a frivolous, directionless agency seemed on its way to muffing the country's one and only Bicentennial...

...The odds are that the present ruling coalition of Socialists, Roman Catholics and Protestants—already committed to insuring that enough newspapers survive to publicize the views of all major groups in the country—will adopt a system similar to its arrangement with De Tijd...

...That is why, they said, Nixon arranged for the official observance to climax in 1976, although it was originally intended to last until 1987, the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention...

...Under the circumstances, the parliamentary system, with its inherent limits on executive power, excites a kind of envy among many Americans, who see Canada's Elliot Pierre Trudeau forced to face his electorate again for the "high crime" of inflation...

...It's a time for national reassessment of where we are and where we want to go...

...This is the first time a Dutch newspaper has ever been awarded a government subsidy and, predictably, there is now a queue of other journals seeking the same treatment...

...In return, De Tijd must maintain a circulation-minimum set well below a commercially viable level...

...Behind the scenes, however, the organization's planners included types akin to the advertising men around the President, and they viewed the Bicentennial in essentially political and public relations terms...

...With drilling costs running about $10-30 a foot, and many wells going several thousand feet deep, the savings involved are enormous...

...The ARBC staff also maintained ties to the White House and the Committee to Reelect the President that belied its apparent lack of direction...

...Readers expecting the press to scrutinize people in positions of power are of course justified in being suspicious when journalists are even indirectly in the pay of the government...

...Don't expect us to pull a solution out of a hat," a well-placed Dutch official told me...

...And since most of the fields are located around the Persian Gulf, the oil is economically transported by tankers to the major importers, Europe and Japan...

...Yet, while the form of the celebration no longer commands much attention, the event itself has taken on unexpected meaning...

...Today the issues that stirred the colonials ring with new timeliness...

...It lives outside of Washington, too, among such grass-roots groups as the People's Bicentennial Commission, which, last December, transformed the commemoration of the Boston Tea Party from an exclusive blue-blood affair into a massive rally for impeachment and against the big corporations...

...oil companies have had another, less publicized reason for steadily shifting their efforts to the Arab countries since 1950: Production costs are lower in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world...

...Can a President be impeached, as Madison contended in 1789, for the actions of his appointees...

...Though that area of the world did not surpass the United States in oil production until 1966, last year it extracted over 1.2 billion tons, or 43 per cent of the world total...

...wells and 60 per cent of Venezuelan wells require pumping...

...A publication would have to meet a minimum-readership requirement to qualify for financial assistance, and it would automatically lose its subsidy if it turned a profit...

...It failed, for example, to save one of the finest and most influential Swedish newspapers...

...Indeed...

...For despite endless reports compiled by numerous committees of inquiry, no Western country has yet resolved the central dilemma of state sponsorship versus freedom of comment...

...This resulted in an informal conspiracy with corporate America, aimed at turning the occasion into a big business bonanza...

...Excluding royalties and local taxes, it now costs approximately 12 cents to extract a barrel of crude there, as against 62 cents in Venezuela, $2-3 in the U.S...

...The Federalist Papers, those old campaign tracts for adopting the Constitution, have been dusted off and reexamined...

...based on a combination of circulation figures and balance sheets...

...As a long-frustrated Bicentennial agency staffer put it, "Nixon, by accident, has made the Bicentennial a great success...

...The dull and obedient daily exhortations of Pravda illustrate where such a trend can lead...

...Furthermore, the plentifulness of the Mideast deposits eliminates the necessity of digging large numbers of "dry holes" for each productive well...

...Still, rapidly rising production costs have accelerated the concentration of newspaper ownership here, and have compelled the Dutch to confront the delicate question of media subsidies...

...Handelstidningen, from expiring last September at the age of 141...

...Consequently, the additional income from sponsors using the airwaves has been withheld by the government...

...Aside from the matter of supply, however, and such things as the depletion allowance and foreign tax credit, U.S...

...Under Holland's unique operating procedures, six companies share the use of four radio and two television stations owned by the state...

...Rescuing the Press The Hague—With 10 national and more than 100 regional daily publications serving a population of 13 million, Holland enjoys one of the most diverse newspaper industries in the world...

...the last one was formed two years ago with 100,000 subscribers...

...Shall we have a monarch...

...The White House wanted a staged Disneyland production...

...The Dutch, obviously, are going to have to come up with something better...

...it is getting a "New American Revolution"—one that may culminate in the dethroning of a President-King...

...The new administrator, ex-Navy Secretary John W. Warner, is currently trying to decide whether commercial enterprises selling Bicentennial products should be allowed to use the official logo, an irrelevant exercise since corporations will capitalize on the commemoration in any case...

...This would be impossible if newspapers felt themselves constrained by official handouts...

...The "Commission" became an "Administration," with authority to do little more than keep a calendar of other groups' Bicentennial activities...

...Sweden, which claims the highest newspaper sales per capita in the world, introduced state subsidies for the press three years ago, after long and heated discussion...

...Indeed, the statistics seemed to speak for themselves...

...Their air time is allocated according to the size of their audiences, as measured by the sales of their program guides...

...For all these reasons, oil production in the Middle East has been a very profitable enterprise...

...In 1972, some 54 papers were granted subsidies totaling $14.2 million...

...The death of such a journal," commented another daily, "is a political scandal in Europe's most affluent nation...

...This alone, though, is not enough to solve the problem the Dutch are wrestling with.—Thomas Land Spirit of '76 Washington—With the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence a mere two years away, a tourist brochure for the nation's capital announces in boldface red and blue letters: "The Spirit of '76 lives in Washington, D.C...

...On the other hand, the unrestricted flow of information is too important a matter simply to be ignored: It is no more reasonable to define newspapers as mere free-enterprise commodities than it is for a community to try to make a profit from its water supply...

...On most journals in the country ordinary reporters have a say in the appointment of editors and in the formulation of major policy decisions...

...They are years ahead of us...

...Did the men who wrote the Constitution genuinely object to the British system, or was it simply that it was British...

...Lower production costs, naturally, translate into higher profits...

...and today that nation's total of 418 wells produces 80 per cent as much oil as America's 756,000 wells...

...The publication in August 1972 of hundreds of secret ARBC documents, "The Bicentennial Papers," disrupted White House plans for the agency...