Notes in the News
Congress Immutable The Ninety-second Congress convened only a few weeks ago, but already it seems safe to predict that in performance and style it will bear an astonishing resemblance to the...
...As the major organized opposition to the Nixon Administration, the Democrats have a momentous responsibility for proposing viable alternatives to the President's dreary and dangerous programs...
...In due time, we suppose, the generals and the Nixon Administration will find it necessary to open a fourth front in Southeast Asia, and a fifth...
...For the moment, however—and the moment means the next two years— Congress has turned its back on reform...
...They have earned the right to tell that Government and the American people what they have seen, and both the Government and the people have a duty to listen...
...The veterans who had gone through so much to bring out their stories were virtually ignored...
...Their testimony was deeply disturbing, often heartbreaking...
...As the party in decisive control of Congress, they have an opportunity to enact their alternatives into law...
...It will take a massive effort in the United States to persuade corporations to relinquish these profits, but the effort deserves the fullest support...
...The blunt fact is that American companies seem to find South Africa's racial climate congenial...
...f "I got the message," said General James to his audience, including the student waiters...
...When it comes to positive action to end racism, the North has slowed its campaign against bigotry while the South has enlarged the scope of its efforts to combat prejudice and discrimination...
...A secondary speaker previously announced, Air Force Brigadier General Daniel James, a black officer, would take up Mr...
...In his bid for reelection this year, President Thieu does not need the Messrs...
...Gallup or Harris to conduct polls for him—our Government provides that little service without charge...
...But because news coverage was so poor, few Americans even knew of the hearings...
...The University community and the whole nation are gravely concerned about the war," he said...
...officials, said Winslow, told him: "It has been decided at the very highest levels that Thieu's reelection is essential to the national interest of the United States...
...A Chrysler spokesman explained that if wages were raised, "you'd only have more drunkenness and more absenteeism...
...One reason that the Administration can widen the war in Indochina, confident that it can ride out protest at home, is that the mass media minimizes in their treatment of the news the national hunger for peace which runs wide and deep, as all the polls disclose...
...The state media^ear-ried the story but elsewhere the demonstration was a non-event as far as newspapers and television were concerned...
...Youth "Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence: it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes...
...Then came the phony photographs of billboards warning American ground forces against setting foot on J^aotian soil—as though it made any difference to anyone whether death was being dealt from helicopters, bombers, tanks, or artillery batteries...
...Many had locked their agonizing memories of Vietnam deep within themselves and had tried to forget...
...Hope for a 'New South' The coming of a "New South" that will reject race and regional prejudice has been heralded prematurely a number of times, but now, at last, it may be nearing a reality—if some new Southern governors keep the pledges they made at their inaugurals...
...f University Chancellor H. Edwin Young, who introduced the general, also must have gotten the message, and not for the first time on a campus long wracked by angry, sometimes violent, protest against the war...
...The two U.S...
...Neither was it easy for the veterans to tell what they knew...
...The image-conscious Polaroid Corporation has been embarrassed by a drive among its own black employes against the company's dealings with the racist regime in Pretoria...
...Correspondent Emerson quoted from a letter by Richard Winslow, who resigned his post as a U.S...
...There was legitimate news in what took place in Madison—by any journalistic standards other than those depicted in The Front Page, the newspaper melodrama of the 1930s...
...The Winter Soldiers They came to Detroit by the scores over a recent weekend...
...For more than a week Americans were kept in the dark by a Pentagon "embargo" on the news from the Laotian frontier, though the Communists—and most of the rest of the world—knew precisely what was going on...
...The performance of recent weeks offers little promise that the challenges will be met...
...It is not pleasant to examine one's country and one's self and find so much that is shameful...
...mission's polls before deciding what dictatorial measures he may need to guarantee his reelection...
...Although greatly disappointed, the protesters went ahead with their plans...
...They were Vietnam veterans against the war, come home to tell the American people what they had experienced in the war they had been sent to fight...
...In other ways, as well, the new Congress has displayed its disregard for the needs of the times...
...The system's durability, in defiance of all decency and logic, was dramatically symbolized in the House by the reaffirmation of Representative John L. McMillan, South Carolina Democrat, as chairman of the District of Columbia Committee—a duty he discharges in callous contempt for the welfare of the Capital's residents...
...An American official in Saigon denied to The New York Times correspondent that Thieu or his government had requested the survey's political questions...
...For decades much of American industry has found a handsome source of profits in South Africa's exploitive apartheid laws, with their built-in assurance of an ample supply of incredibly cheap and docile African labor...
...When that hunger is demonstrated non-violently, as it was at Madison, it is not judged to be "news...
...The American firms are careful to "follow the South African pattern" of apartheid...
...The politics of race and divisiveness fortunately have been soundly repudiated in South Carolina," said West, a Democrat who defeated Albert W. Watson, a Republican who has been charged by some members of his own party with running a racist campaign...
...Today the situation is just the reverse...
...Laird's burden...
...In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter declared, "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over...
...He cancelled his appearance, giving other more pressing concerns as his reason for not delivering the speech scheduled for his own home state...
...These are the men whose lives their Government was prepared to sacrifice in a war they came to despise...
...He asked the Air Force general to convey the community's sentiments to Secretary Laird and the President...
...House Democrats, confronted with a rare opportunity to revitalize their leadership after the retirement of Speaker John W. McCor-mack, chose instead to draw their new leaders from the same old clique ofSouthern-oriented stand-patters...
...According to the Reverend George Houser, director of the American Committee on Africa, similar protests will be mounted soon against such major corporations as IBM and American Airlines...
...The change in the South has been achieved through decades of pioneering effort by the liberal forces among the South's press, clergy, and educators, by a few courageous political figures, and, most important of all, by the dedication of hundreds of thousands of black Americans of the region who risked their jobs, their homes, and often their lives to win those incomplete civil rights they hold today...
...it is another ominous sign that we are going to help General Thieu rig another election and retain his power, no matter what further outpouring of blood and treasure it costs the people of Indochina and the United States in a war being waged for the survival of his military junta...
...Nothing remotely like the bombing at Madison last August that destroyed part of a university building, killed a graduate student, and made worldwide headlines...
...No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice...
...The report (available from the Council, 1028 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, D.C 20036) notes, for example, that Chrysler pays African workers an average of $81 a month —$3 less than the South African government's poverty datum line for an African family of five...
...Perpetuation of the seniority system means more than merely preserving the oldest members of Congress in power...
...In mid-January of this year the Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary injunction against further canal construction...
...On behalf of our community, we urge the most rapid withdrawal [from Indochina] within the national interest...
...The military analysts report that American generals have been lusting for the last five years for an opportunity to strike at Communist supply lines in Laos...
...Prior to World War II," the liberal Democratic Study Group recently reported, "about three-fourths of all House committee chairmen were under sixty years of age...
...It was an effective way of delivering their message...
...As Senator George McGovern noted, the testimony at the Winter Soldier Investigation widened the Administration's growing credibility gap on the war in Indochina...
...The most depressing manifestation of Congressional unresponsiveness—the seniority system, which awards the inordinate power of committee chairmanships solely on the basis of longevity—remains well entrenched in both chambers...
...But a young American pacification worker, who asked that his name be withheld, said some of the questions were designed to insure Thieu's reelection...
...Their testimony dealt with the deeds of an ugly America embroiled in an ugly war...
...They told all this and much more for three days of bitter testimony designed to enable the American people to see their war for what it is...
...What's a Little Poll...
...H.L...
...Chairmen over age seventy are commonplace (eight out of twenty-one at present), while chairmen in their thirties and forties have been nearly extinct for the past two decades...
...This time around, General Thieu apparently hopes to test the political mood of the Vietnamese people through the U.S...
...In Florida, as elsewhere, the flash of green money too often triumphs over the appeal of green vistas...
...A "surgical strike" into Thailand, where the Communists also have supply lines...
...Their committee posts will provide them, at least, with a forum in which to air their views, though they will be heavily outnumbered by their conservative colleagues...
...Ford's American managing director in South Africa, R. John Scott, when asked whether he had any friends or acquaintances in the African, Asian, or "Coloured" communities, replied: "I didn't mix with them in the States, I don't mix with them here, and if I move back to America, I wouldn't mix with them there either...
...Dollars for Apartheid American corporations that maintain investments and affiliates in South Africa are finally coming under attack at home for the contributions they make toward maintaining and reinforcing the ugly and barbaric system of racism known as apartheid...
...f On the day of the luncheon, January 28, the demonstrators heard protest speakers in a university hall, then marched to the fieldhouse...
...An invasion of North Vietnam, which is, after all, the source of Communist supplies...
...Against this regressive record, a few small signs of progress must be acknowledged...
...Persons suspected of being Communist or neutralists could not run for office or vote, and the press was effectively muzzled...
...In Florida, the new governor, Reuben Askew, committed himself to "improved economic opportunities and equal rights for all our people, rural as well as urban, black as well as white...
...They told of hushed up Army and Marine forays into Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand as early as 1969...
...Mencken As quoted by Senator Mike Mansfield in the U. S. Senate...
...The Council points out that the "burgeoning investment" in South Africa's auto industry, including more than $75 million spent by the American Big Three, "has created an industry that accounted for seven per cent of the Gross Domestic Product...
...Did General James really get the message from Madison back to Secretary Laird...
...This, they are convinced, is the key to the "victory" that has so long eluded them—just as the bombing of North Vietnam and last spring's in- ( vasion of Cambodia was supposed to provide the key to "victory...
...McGovern and Representative John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, have called for an immediate full scale Congressional investigation of the charges made in the testimony...
...Continual power has made them old and smug and comfortable...
...It took courage to remember and to bring out the norror they had seen...
...At long last, all of Indochina is aflame with a war that, the Administration keeps telling us, is being "wound down...
...How do the wire services, the newspapers and news syndicates, and the networks want antiwar protests packaged—in blood and bombs...
...Senate Democrats took a step backward by shifting the Majority Whip's duties from Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia...
...What Mrs...
...Such introspection by the people would not be easy...
...Half a century ago, the average age of committee chairmen was fifty-two...
...For example: % The Madison demonstration was planned as a peaceful protest to take place when Secretary Laird was scheduled to appear as the principal speaker before a luncheon of community service club members at the University fieldhouse...
...Obviously this was the thinking behind the fact that most of them ignored a peaceful but significant event in Madison a few weeks ago when more than 1,000 University of Wisconsin students, and dozens of clergymen and housewives turned out in sub-zero weather for an anti-Vietnam war protest aimed at Defense Secretary Melvin Laird (he copped out) and President Nixon...
...They told of interrogation of prisoners of war by the use of electrical torture, of attaching wires from field telephones to the genitals of prisoners, and of "ringing them up" until the prisoners provided the desired information...
...Chairmen over seventy years of age used to be rare, while chairmen in their thirties and forties were commonplace...
...Either he did not, or the Secretary and the President, engrossed in their latest war game, the mounting of a massive allied offensive into Laos, brushed aside the message from Madison...
...In Tennessee and Arkansas, the new chief executives showed signs of recognizing that it is time to bury racial and religious prejudice...
...The Democrats control the Congress, and have controlled it almost constantly for the past four decades...
...A Candid Candidate Senator George McGovern's early announcement that he will seek the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination in 1972 seems to have offended the tender sensibilities of many Party professionals and their journalistic hangers-on...
...A handful of liberal and moderate freshmen have won assignment to such traditionally conservative committee strongholds as Armed Services, Internal Security, Appropriations, and District of Columbia...
...Carr and her fellow conservationists have accomplished in stopping the Cross-Florida Barge Canal provides an object lesson to the nation: Once the public is sufficiently aroused and organized it can stop the rape of the environment by the mindless and the money-hungry...
...I really object, very strongly," he said, "to this kind of direct political interference by the American Embassy in the upcoming elections here, especially in light of all the American claims to the contrary...
...It also means maintaining the disproportionate sway of members from safe, one-party districts—most of them rural and most of them in the South—who have no comprehension of (and certainly no sympathy for) the urgent problems of poverty, urban decay, and racial injustice which cry out for Congressional attention...
...today it is sixty-six...
...They told of the defoliation of Vietnam, of the use of the chemical agent orange and its deforming effect on human babies...
...A few newspapers provided some coverage, but the wire services largely ignored the hearings, as did the major television networks...
...Gloria Emerson, a New York Times correspondent in Saigon, recently reported that the U.S...
...In the Senate, the powerful chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee, vacated by the death of seventy-four-year-old Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, has passed, by the inexorable workings of seniority, into the hands of eighty-year-old Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana (who has already announced his intention of seeking re-election in 1972 and 1978...
...By rejecting proposals to restrict the age and tenure of committee chairmen, Congress has chosen to vest its power in an ever-older gerontocracy...
...Since World War II, about three-fourths of all chairmen have been over sixty years of age...
...Reddin, now a law student at the University of Wisconsin, recently completed his Army service...
...If the deeds of the new breed of Southern governors are as good as their words, they may well provide an example for other parts of the country...
...The winter soldiers in Detroit faced the responsibility of telling the American people about the nature of the war being fought in their name...
...When Thieu and Ky were elected president and vice president in September 1967 they received only thirty-five per cent of the vote...
...command in Saigon, and heavily supported by American military might...
...The House of Representatives, acting with customary dispatch, gave short shrift to most of the reform proposals advanced by its responsible minority...
...The rest was divided among ten opposition slates in a rigged election in which seven other slates, including the regime's two most serious opponents, were kept off the ballot...
...Said John C. West upon becoming governor of South Carolina, "We pledge to minority groups no special status other than full-fledged responsibility in a government that is totally color-blind...
...They have helped sustain an economy in which whites, constituting some 19.2 per cent of the population, receive about 73.3 per cent of all cash income—an economy in which the per capita income in 1969 was $1,591 for whites and $117 for Africans...
...Message from Madison The old-fashioned police reporter mentality still prevails in the news judgment of too many mass media executives: no blood and gore, no story...
...To answer our own opening question, "What's a little poll...
...As interest in the protest grew, Secretary Laird's interest in coming waned...
...Of the eleven states of the Confederacy, only Governor George Wallace's Alabama, and Mississippi and Louisiana remain as bastions of the Old South dominated by politically powerful white supremacists...
...The Speaker's office went to Carl Albert of Oklahoma in a perfunctory ritual...
...These efforts are tardy, but welcome nonetheless...
...They told of horrible abuses of Vietnamese women by American soldiers...
...Now the era of Laotian neutrality is over, shattered by the South Vietnamese "incursion" of February 8, which was planned in Washington, directed from the U.S...
...The failure must be recognized as first and foremost a dereliction of responsibility by Congressional Democrats...
...The Corps of Engineers was put on the defensive...
...But inside, thirty student waiters wearing large "Peace Now" signs on their white coats, had carefully folded a mimeographed peace statement into the napkins of the hundreds of banqueters...
...Administrations have expended billions of dollars and thousands of American and Vietnamese lives to support the Thieu-Ky dictatorship, what's a little poll or two, or three...
...Now the Saigon regime has been charged not only with "Vietnamizing" its own territory', but with "Vietnamizing" Cambodia and Laos as well...
...Carr, responding to his announcement, "I was bowled over...
...Jon N. Reddin (Mr...
...The event was worth a bit of space and even some commentary by the media around the country...
...The search for "victory" is endless, and so is the war...
...For reasons not quite clear to us, these worthies prefer the traditional I'm-not-a-candidate-yet-but-I'm-under-great-pressure-to-run charade—the very game, in fact, that ath had won court fights against the use of harmful pesticides, agreed to handle a suit in Washington against the Corps of Engineers for an injunction against the canal...
...The extent to which American dollars shore up apartheid is dramatically documented in a report on "Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors in South Africa" prepared by the Council on Economic Priorities, an energetic young research and information service which keeps tab on the activities of American business in such areas as pollution control, minority hiring, foreign investments, and involvement in the production of war materials...
...More encouragingly, many of the new members show no disposition to acquiesce quietly in the old ways of Congress...
...one co-ed was arrested while trying to stop the Madison police from photographing the demonstrators...
...The Episcopal Church in the United States, which owns more than 12,500 shares of stock in General Motors Corporation, has served notice that it will lead a campaign to persuade GM to cease manufacturing in South Africa...
...They told of deliberate destruction of villages, often with no prior attempt to clear the area of civilians, of premeditated murder and torture of South Vietnamese civilian men, women, and children...
...Once again they are doomed to disappointment...
...Carr, and in alliance with other groups began to turn public sentiment and Florida politicians around—against the canal project...
...They arrived too late...
...The Florida Defenders of the Environment was formed, a statewide organization headed by Partington and Mrs...
...After all, when two U.S...
...Congress Immutable The Ninety-second Congress convened only a few weeks ago, but already it seems safe to predict that in performance and style it will bear an astonishing resemblance to the Ninety-first (and the Ninetieth, and the Eighty-ninth, and . . . ). The national legislature's response to America's desperate need for new initiatives and new directions is to keep on doing business at the same old stand...
...A liberal attempt to elect a Democratic Majority Leader was decisively defeated by Representative Hale Boggs of Louisiana...
...We strongly urge the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to look into the matter of U.S...
...All signs point to a continuing American military presence in Indochina, and perhaps one that will again increase...
...John Conyers Jr., the able black Congressman from Detroit, was able to garner the votes of only twenty of his colleagues in a symbolic challenge to Albert's foreordained selection...
...some sheriff's deputies were armed to the chest with commando knives, but apparently no network television cameras caught that little item...
...Whatever complaints they may have had against Kennedy—some critics cited his inattention to the job, though jealousy and personal animosity undoubtedly also played a part in the vote—they hardly justified the selection of Byrd, a hard-shelled conservative whose views still reflect his onetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan...
...We hope and expect that they will keep up a continuing drumfire of demands for change, and that they will in the long run persuade some of their senior colleagues...
...Nobody was killed or injured...
...Four days later the President ordered work stopped...
...interference in Vietnam's election...
...Third Front in Indochina Now it is the Laotians' turn...
...The request should be granted...
...Winslow wrote to a friend that at a lunch last November in Saigon he had been informed by two Americans heading the pacification studies group that "Thieu asked [Ambassador] Colby to send out the teams to make a study of the people's feelings toward the 1971 Presidential election so that Thieu would know where his strong points were and where he'd have to arrange something [like quickly appointing new officials] which would make sure that he'd come out ahead in a given area...
...Employment of cheap non-white labor," the Council observes, "means lower production costs—one of the factors that enables the major automobile companies to report that their profits from South African operations are among the highest in their worldwide networks...
...The basic fallacy of "Vietnamization" has been the assumption that the South Vietnamese government will be able to do alone what it has been unable to accomplish with massive American military support...
...the event was over...
...civil adviser in a delta province in protest of the use of the surveys to aid Thieu...
...Finally, there are the customary assurances—in this case from South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu —that the invasion will be "limited in time and in space," and that it constitutes no reflection on "the independence, neutrality, and sovereignty of the Kingdom of Laos...
...The Senate, in accord with its more leisurely tradition, is still debating, at this writing, a modest modification of its filibuster rule, but in all other ways has also opted for perpetuation of its ancient ways...
...The mass media made it easy for them to do so by not letting the people from the other forty-nine states know that there was a message from Wisconsin to the Pentagon and the President...
...The three day hearings were known as the Winter Soldier Investigation, a name suggested by Tom Paine's disparaging reference to the "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots" of the American Revolution...
...America has no business in Southeast Asia, and it will find no "victory" there...
...Many of the veterans have volunteered to testify under oath to enable the American people to view the true nature of the war...
...Today's winter soldiers, like those at Valley Forge, face and meet greater responsibilities...
...There is a dreary familiarity to the press reports as the war enters its Laotian phase—the same pattern of secrecy, euphemism, and deception that has characterized every new round of escalation in Indochina...
...The police were armed to the teeth...
...Their kingdom's fragile neutrality, established at Geneva in 1962, has always seemed more of a diplomatic pretense than a reality, and has been amply abused by both the United States and North Vietnam...
...Said Mrs...
...The American economic impact on South Africa is sufficiently large to provide a measure of leverage against a government that will not be moved by any consideration of common decency or respect for the outraged opinion of mankind...
...Nonetheless, the facade of neutrality has shielded the Laotians from the full measure of death and devastation visited on their neighbors in Vietnam and, more recently, in Cambodia...
...Governor West's speech drew applause eight times from the crowd of 6,000 in front of the statehouse at Columbia...
...For most it took great effort and courage to drag out old memories they would rather forget, and to relive them before the public and the press...
...mission in South Vietnam, which conducts monthly surveys in all forty-four provinces under its Pacification Attitude Analysis System, has inserted special questions to help Thieu find out how he rates with Vietnamese voters, how they rate his political rivals, and what issues concern the people most...
...Republican caucuses in both the House and Senate proved more responsive to reform than did the Democrats...
Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3
