Page 4 EDITORIAL Party Reforms Republicans convening in Miami Beach next week could do their country and their party a service by initiating some of the programs the Democrats left behind. Specifically, they should consider changes now before the Rules Committee proposed by John Gardner and his citizens lobby, Common Cause, including: --An end to the corrupt influence of money in politics. One proposed solution is public financing of most election costs. --Assurance to the citizen that he receive full and equal access to party nominating procedures and the ballot box. To this end Common Cause proposes a 30-day only residency requirement for voting, an end to gerrymandering and abolition of the eleec- toral college. --Making Congress, the people’s representatives, responsive and accountable. That means abolishing the seniority system in Congress, and reviewing annually all major federal programs to determine - whether they are accomplishing their purpose. --Conducting the public’s business publicly. These four proposals don’t sound radical to the average rank and file Republican voter. But under current party rules they are hard to find. Consider the implications that can develop even under the last proposal: In making the public’s business public all committee and floor votes would be taken in open session, and recorded individually for each legislator; caucus votes would be recorded, and all votes made available to the public. The opposite is now common practice. The President, key members of the White House staff and cabinet members should disclose their full daily appointment lists. Executive privilege should be reviewed so that White House staff members could testify before appropriate Congressional committees on all matters except those involving the highest national security considerations. The President, as leader of his party, should require the Republican Party to disclose semi- annually the sources of its funding. hi While Republican delegates may think they don’t “have much party business to conduct what with the assurance of the nomination of Richard Nixon, they could do well to heed the words of a former plat- form phrase that “representative democracy fails when citizens cannot know how their public of- ~ficials conduct the public’s business.” ‘Status of Women In February of this year, the Pennsylvania Commission on the status of Women was created by executive order of Governor Milton Shapp. The commission is charged with the responsibility of developing and implementing programs to make sure that all women in the Commonwealth are able to participate equally in the economic, educational, judicial and governmental life of the Com- monwealth. In line with this, the governor has designated Aug. 26 as “Equal Rights Day.” The commemor- ative date is the 52nd anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Con- stitution, granting women the right to vote. Women throughout the state will be pleased to know that the governor is urging the Pennsylvania Senate to pass the legislation ratifying the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution---the Equal Rights Amendment---as quickly as possible. The State House passed the ratifying legislation last May by an overwhelming vote of 178-3. Since that time ithas been in Senate Committee. It is time the Senate voted on this particular piece of legislation. Although half a century, plus two years, has passed since women were granted the right to vote, unfortunately, winning the vote did not auto- matically win for women equal rights or equal opportunities in other areas. Many women still face discriminatory practices everyday---in the hiring and promotion practices of government as well as industry. There are over six million women in Pennsyl- vania, comprising 52 percent of the population. Over 1.7 million in the state are employed outside the home. It is disappointing to those of us who comprise that 1.7 million to note that the gap in earned income for men and women doing similar work was actually widened in recent years. We would hope that Pennsylvania will become aleader among those states recognizing the need to provide equal rights for women. By Eric Mayer (Editor’s Note: The author claims this is a true story which took place many years ago, and that the people mentioned no longer reside in the area.) by Eric Mayer In the local paper Betsy came across a brief item headed, DOGS MUST BE TIED POLICE CHIEF WARNS A long buried memory forced its way back into her mind and she felt compelled to relate to her husband a story that does not have a happy ending: “Twenty years ago when I was ten and living up on Elm Street the chief was a big, tall man named Brady. An impressive looking fellow with a deep voice, he was just what a child might imagine a police chief to be. ‘‘He used to come to our school and talk about obeying the law. He must have told us to cross the street only on the green light, to be courteous to teachers and policemen, and not to play hookey. I can’t recall exactly. I do remember that he carried a revolver and most years the boys would convince him to let them hold it. They were used to playing with cap pistols and the weight of the revolver awed them. “I don’t know if he ever needed that gun. Back then, things were so placid he didn’t even have a ‘‘drug problem’’ to lecture us on. I suppose that’s why he made such a big deal over the part of the borough code requiring dogs to be tied at all times. | TRB from Washington, Harry Truman’s military aide, General Vaughn, got a deepfreeze from a grateful client and the scandal rocked Washington. General Eisenhower's assistant, Sherman Adams, received a vicuna coat; he had to resign, of course. But now under President Nixon we have five men with electronic equipment and apparently paid by Repub- licans, arrested at gunpoint in the dead of night in the Democratic national head- quarters, and we tend to smile at it. The very name, ‘the Watergate Caper,” tells how funny it is. How Puritan we all were back in the days of Harry and Ike; how our sensibi- lities have changed. Those were pretty in- nocent days, weren’t they? Those were the days, for example, before-the Vietnam war. That has been a depressing influence. There has been an ethical letdown on a lot of things as we gradually reach moral exhaustion over the slaughter and all those bombs we are dropping on naked peasants. Ugh, let’s not think of it. And the protective cynicism we have assumed over Vietnam extends into other fields of government. Hell, "it’s all politics, isn’t it? Take the dairy farmers’ political action groups who contributed $72,500 to the Repub- lican party in the last four months of 1971 through dummy organizations, during a period when the administration first an- nounced there would be no increase in milk price support levels, and then abruptly and inexplicably reversed itself two weeks later. Who can say that there was any connection? And what droll names some of those dummy corporations took: one was ‘Volunteers for Good Government,’ another was “Americans United for Safer Streets,” ha. ha- Footnotes by J.R. Freeman In the midst of the political controversy in the region last week involving Housing Secretary George Romney and Gov. Milton Shapp, a few important points were obviously overlooked: housing is desperately needed by thousands of flood victims in Wyoming Valley; there is not enough temporary housing to go around; the feds have increased the bureaucracy by hiring local people; and tempers are shorter than anticipated among those affected by the flood. After the Wilkes-Barre squabble between Mr. Romney and Mr. Shapp, both officials readily agreed that the issue dividing them was insignificant compared to the problems facing flood victims in the valley. And both urged the media, national as well as local, to focus its attention on the flood aftermath rather than on their differences. Since the squabble, however, it appears that the roots of the argument are deeper than politics, larger than both men combined, and will be here for a long time to come, no matter whether the President strolls through the valley or not. The squabble erupted in the first place when Mr. Romney accused Gov. Shapp of playing politics in suggesting full equity be provided to flood victims by the Federal Government. Not only is such a suggestion basically improbable in results, but such has never been done before. However, that did not and should not have the kept the governor from asking. The governor’s action, rather than holding a political tinge, was just the opposite. Secondly, Gov. Shapp is not a politician. The astute politician would never have dreamed of such a request. Neither is Mr. Shapp' an administrator. Rather, he is an astute idea man, whether it comes to raising taxes, protecting consumer interests, or flood relief. And it was also Gov. Shapp who, faced with a balky general assembly in the third place, saw his legislature adjourn for a holiday without giving him a budget, and then when they did, it was without the flood relief funds he had asked for. “It never fails, you know . . every year, the police chief in Village Green, whoever he may be, decides to ‘‘crack down” on stray dogs. “Now that the town is larger, more suburban, with neater lawns and more ex- pensive houses, people pay some attention. But 20 years ago it was really a joke. Dogs were free as anyone else to wander around and make friends. It just seemed natural. About the only people who objected were the mayor, whose name I either can’t recall or never knew, the police and old Crowley who lived next door to us. “Crawley Crowley, we called her. She was a witch if there ever was one—a big toad of a woman, complete with bulging eyes and warts. She was fairly old, but looked a lot older than she was, a fact she used to great advantage as long as I knew her. “She hated children and my brothers and I could hardly play in our own yard for fear she’d pop out-of her house, limping and wheezing in the most melodramatic fashion, now and then pausing to put a hand up to her heart, stopping at the fence to scold us for making noise. ‘‘Can’t an old, dying woman have some peace and quiet?” she’d croak. “I don’t know what she did, alone all day in that big, paint peeling old house of hers. Personally, I think she lurked constantly at the windows, looking for trouble. I remember that one time my brothers were playing catch in our yard and the ball went flying over the fence. Old Crowley was nowhere in sight, but no sooner had the ball touched her lawn than she was scooping it up and scurrying back to her lair. When she wanted to be, she was the -and this one really was a scream: ‘Citizens United in Pursuit of the American Dream.” Roguish, eh? And then there is the ITT caper. We can all chuckle over that. The huge corporation with John Mitchell’s Justice Department allowing it to keep the Hartford Fire Insur- ance Company, and simultaneously it agreed to guarantee $400,000 to the Republicans for their convention in San Diego. The Anti-trust Division suddenly and inexplicably reversed its position. The head of the division was quickly made a judge. A little later Jack Anderson published a private memo from ITT’s top Washington lobbyist, Dita Beard, declaring that “Mitchell is definitely helping us, but cannot let it be known. Please destroy this, huh.” Under the Federal Lobbying Act of 1946, ITT is supposed to make a report on the money it spends for lobbying, but the law is a farce. ITT doesn’t even register. Dita Beard reported personal expenditures under the law in 1971 of $7,030. So that’s the entertaining ITT story. ¥ Then there was the cute trick of the Repub- licans of collecting $10 million in campaign funds from fat-cat contributors just before the new Federal election disclosure law took effect April 7. Of course, after April 7 they could stand on moral principles about not violating their clients’ right to privacy. It was hilarious. Who knows what shy and blushing oil and steel and ITT donors are behind the sacred veil of anonymity? McGovern made public all his contributors, of course, both before and after April 7, but that man is a dangerous radical, without any sense of humor. Entertaining, eh? Well, now we come to the and Order nimblest dying woman I've ever seen. “In order to get back at her my brothers used to go to a friend’s place, two houses down from the old witch. The three of them would use slingshots to shoot pebbles high up over the intervening houses. The pebbles came down with an awful racket right on old Crowley’s roof. She’d hop out onto the lawn, livid with wrath but, of course, she couldn’t see anybody. It was strictly a’ long range bombardment. “Once, out in Amos Stuart’s woodpile, the boys found a big ‘“V’’ shaped piece of apple wood—Ilike a slingshot three feet tall. They discussed harnassing a deflated inner tube to the wood in order to hurl bricks, but the technical problems proved to be in- surmountable, which is too bad, considering . “I had a dog then, a little terrier named Ginger. She was harmless and we let her run loose like all the other dogs. Old Crowley complained because Ginger would crawl under her fence, which was beat up and hadn’t been repaired for years, and try to make friends. “‘One winter Chief Brady, having nothing better to do since school was out for Christ- mas and there were no truants to round up, inserted his annual ‘‘getting tough with stray dogs” proclamation in the local paper. No one had ever taken the proclamation seriously and Brady must have known it because he decided to keep Ginger in the house for a few weeks until Brady found other things to do but one snowy day she got out without our knowing and ran into old Crowley’s yard. “The first thing Crowley did, being a law real laugh, the Watergate caper. Just to make it easier to follow here are the dramatis personae: There’s Frank Wills, the watchman, who got $5 added to his $80 a week income for calling the police, Saturday night, June 17. And there’s Ernie Prete, the straightman you need in any detective mystery, who arrested five intruders wearing rubber gloves in the seventh-floor suite of Democratic head- quarters, all equipped with bugging and camara apparatus. James W. McCord Jr., security coordinator for the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP), one of the arrested five intruders. Fired by CRP. Bernard Barker, head of the five; records show how he made at least 15 phone calls to CRP; had in a bank account $89,000 ap- parently from CRP, plus $25,000 from a cashier’s check apparently intended for Mr. Nixon’s campaign chest, made out to Maurice Stans, former Commerce Secretary and now GOP national finance chairman. Stans says he gave the check to Liddy (see below) E. Howard Hunt Jr., novelist and man of mystery, former CIA agent, former $100-a- day White House consultant; two intruders carried papers with his name, and ‘“White House.” He has disappeared. Charles W. Colson, special counsel of Mr. Nixon, described in the Wall Street Journal last October as ‘‘Nixon Hatchet Man-Chuck Colson Handles-President’s Dirty Work.” He ~ recruited Hunt as White House Assistant. Still at White House. ; G. Gordon Liddy, ex-FBI agent; once ran for Congress; counsel to CRP finance com- mittee; refused to answer questions; fired. abiding woman, was to call the chief. We didn’t realize Ginger was outside until my mother heard a car door slam. We all ran to the kitchen window in time to see Chief Brady, big and tall, climbing out of the patrol car and looking at Ginger who was nosing around in the snow by old Crowley's back porch. Under normal REE would've have been jumping all th chief, wagging her tail—she loved meeting strangers—but she must have seen a hint of grimness in the chief’s expression that the rest of us missed because she just stopped what she was doing and glared at him. “Mother shook her head, exasperated and was about to go out to fetch Ginger and apologize when, all of a sudden, Chief Brady drew his revolver and fired. By the time my brother’s and I understood what had hap- pened, Mother had drawn the shade. “I never found out what old Crowley told Brady over the phone and I still can’t un- derstand why Brady had to use his gun. Maybe he'd carried it so long it just seemed natural. Crowley died a year later. I dmit, I rejoiced at the news. Chief Brady Wed 10 years ago and I'm afraid I'll read his bituary some day and won't be able to suppress my happiness even 20 years after the senseless thing he did. “Mother drew the shade, but not before I saw Ginger lying on her side, eyes wide open and brimming with disbelief. Chief Brady was lowering his revolver, holding the heavy gun like it was a toy. The badge he’d pinned to his coat, specially for the occasion I guess,. glinted cooly in the sunlight. I'll never forget how red the blood was against the white snow. » » Hugh M: Sloan Jr., ex-White House Staff: campaign finance aide to Stans in 1968 when latter headed Nixon-Agnew finance operation as now. Treasurer of CRP. He has resigned. John Mitchell, former Nixon campaign manager; called Democratic $1 million suit over break-in a ‘‘political stunt,” then retired for family reasons. Ronald Ziegler, White House press secretary; dismissed episode as ‘‘third rate burglary.” Maurice Stans, national finance chairman; was initially unavailable as his secretary told reporters he is ‘‘a very busy man,”’ who is “tightly scheduled” with ‘‘appointments every hour.” President Nixon, who, unlike Ike who had 193 press conferences, and Trumarg who had 322--where reporters asked them %bout deep- freezes and vicuna coats--has held only 26 press conferences in 314 years and isn’t asked about the Watergate Caper. = : Some people get indignant about this. They had much better relax and keep dog ‘nn their blood pressures. Look at the seers get excited about Vietnam. A year or two ago the kids got all hot and bothered. Now they have calmed down, thank goodness. Maybe they are learning the value of keeping quiet when they can’t change things. The public doesn’t want the war; the Congress doesn’t want the war, but it has to be fought because the Pentagon and the President say so. The kids should learn to work within the system. Mr. Nixon is bringing the boys home--all, that is but the 20,000 killed while he was in office. He has a slick, marvelous reelection machine and can fly in the 100 beautiful Republican pom-pom girls anywhere, anytime, as often as is necessary Secretary George Romney Where else was Mr. Shapp to turn except toward Washington? He could not ignore Wyoming Valley flood relief and take a holiday. He could not (at least not yet) con- vince his legislature of the dire need. Sen. Hugh Scott was suggesting Pennsylvania raise taxes to the tune of $1 billion for flood relief with Uncle Sam picking up an ad- ditional $2 billion in aid. But then Mr. Scott introduced the administration’s $1.8 billion package, and saw it successfully through Congress. Gov. Shapp was lucky to get $50 million from the general assembly. The Army Corps of Engineers has already spent $13 million just on street cleanup. Caught bet- ween the rock and the hard place, it was Mr. Shapp who decided to shoot the works and seek the total bill of laden from Uncle Sam. He picked Housing Secretary Romney as a place to start because Mr. Romney was the ‘only presidential spokesman at hand. Mr. Romney, on the other hand, obviously less than pleased with Nixon policies for a long time, and walking around the valley with aresignation in his pocket, had trouble filling the gap between the wishes of the valley flood victims and those of the Administration. That gap has been getting continually wider as days pass with flood victims still living in school gyms and their autos even a good seven weeks since flood waters went away. And Secretary Romney, unaware of the feelings of people in the valley, and ill- equipped to handle the massive housing job left by the worst single civil disaster in the country’s history, was likewise caught bet- ween the rock and the hard place. He ob- viously could not go along with Gov. Shapp’s suggestion that the feds pick up the entire $3- billion-plus tab when the President had suggested only $1.8 billion. And though he tried to, neither should he have blamed Gov. Shapp for asking for more help. Meanwhile, victims still sit in front of their flood ravaged homes and wait for HUD of- ficials to’ bring them a mobile home or camper. And everyday tempers in the valley grow a little bit shorter. They shouted at Mr. Romney Wednesday that ‘‘Shapp is with us.” even louder. Gov. Milton Shapp scription, $6. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscripfions. Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin News editor: Shawn Murphy Advertising: Carolyn Brennan
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers