EDITORIAL Overzealous Richard Tattersall is not the only person unhappy with the tactics of the waterways patrolmen at Harveys Lake. A signed letter to the Post and a phone call from another person, indicate that per- haps many find the Fish Commission officers over- zealous, in the performance of their duties. All three sources claim an overabundance of ar- rests, an arrogant manner, and a tendency towards the picayune by the waterways officers. The telephone caller reported having counted * five arrests in a period of about 10 minutes on one Sunday afternoon. ‘At least three deserved not to ' even be bothered’’, he added. The similarity of reports from the separate sources adds credibility to their stories. All three indicate that the lake needs patrolling, but find fault with the too-tough, too hard-core, gun-carry- ing patrolmen, as they see them. The patrolmen themselves admit that they col- lect fines at the scene in some instances. For in- stance, they can tell a man that he can pay $10 now, or $20 plus costs at the magistrate’s office. This tactic borders on the illegal. The opportunities for foul play in such a system are obvious. Harveys Lake councilman Fred Merrill, speak- ing in the defense of the officers, remarked, “They are enforcing the laws as they are written. I don’t think the people here are used to that.” Perhaps Mr. Merrill has best noted the problem. Enforcing laws as they are written, without considering the circumstances can be a law enforcement officer’s biggest wrong doing. Laws, especially waterways laws, are mainly meant for the protection of those affected by the laws. A warning in many cases will contribute to that protection just as well as an arrest. Our sources report that many of those arrested by the patrolmen obviously didn’t even know that they “were in violation of any laws. Mr. Tattersall told the story of the father who was arrested for “fishing without a license,” after he had removed a fish from the hook of his son, who was legally fishing. The excited, inexperienced first-grader simply could not remove the fish him- self. This is the kind of lack of consideration for the circumstances, the kind of by-the-book enforce- ment of laws, that can give a bad name to the en- forcement officers. And, as the telephone caller pointed out, it may scare boaters and vacationers away from a lake that is desperately trying to make a comeback. The $64 Question Those of us who are old enough to have partici- pated (vicariously) in the McCarthy witchhunt are familiar with the feeling of malaise now being generated by the Watergate hearings. And no comic opera disguises used by the Plumbers could ever quite compete with the bizarre shenanigans surrounding Whittaker Chambers’ famous papers in the hollowed-out pumpkin. It was about a decade ago when the country received another dose of disillusionment, this time dealt to it by the comparatively new medium of television. At a time when quiz shows like the $64 question had millions of watchers glued to their sets as expert after expert parlayed his winnings into the top prize money, it was revealed to a shocked audience that some of the so-called experts were being coached on the correct answers to ques- tions. When the erudite son of a: member of the intelligensia became involved in the illegal promp- tings, the moneyed quiz shows disappeared under a barrage of ‘‘shame on you’’ type publicity. Older people for the most part were dismayed while many of the young fry expressed a feeling of ad- ~ miration that such a deception had been practiced on a gullible public. It is safe to say that the Watergate proceedings are reaching a far wider audience than the $64 Question. People of all ages are being given the opportunity of seeing.,and hearing claims and charges, counter claims and counter charges, as Sen. Sam Ervin takes witness after witness down to the woodshed. The only certain conclusion that can be drawn is that someone is remiss in telling the truth. One other fact emerges. As yet the $64 Question remains unanswered. Capitol Notes by William Ecenbarger There’s good news and bad news about the production record of the 1973 Pennsyl- vania General Assembly. First, the good news: -The state Lumber Museum has been named in honor of former state Sen. James S. Berger (R.. Potter). —Several streets in the city of Reading have been transferred to the Siate highways system = .Garbagemen can now legally ride on the sides of their trucks. Now. the bad news: —Pennsylvania still doesn’t have a no- fault automobile insurance law after more than two years of deliberations. In the mean- time, 19 other states have passed no-fault laws. --Despite the ongoing Watergate revela- tions in Washington, the legislature continues to dav dle on reforms in such areas as election campaign expenses. conflicts of interest and lobbyist regulation. ; --Nothing has been done on such pressing issues as capital punishment. pornography. divorce reform. milk pricing. pension reform and the energy crisis. Legislators will attempt to explain their pitiful 1973 record by pointing to the long struggle over a state budget. But rather than being the reason for the legislative non-per- formance. the fiscal crisis is just another manifestation of it. The only solid achievement of the Gener- al Assembly after seven months of delibera- tions is passage of the so-called “Taj Mahal” bill placing statutory limits on school con- struction costs. This issue had been debated extensively during the 1971-72 session. A small portion of the blame goes to the Shapp administration, which had dallied for months on many of its foremost legislative TRB from Washington We're going on vacation and would like to leave some thoughts. We've seen some sad things in Washington in our time: the day they buried FDR and the Negro woman sob- bed in a crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue and made us all sob. too; the day they brought hack Jack Kennedy's body and we watched the fountain playing behind the White House. a steady stream, something that you could put your hand through. something without substance. but never ending—like demo- cracy. ‘ We've seen stirring things, too :the night we waited under the portico of the White House andiwatched the grim-faced members of the isolationist Senate Foreign Relations Committee go in. and come out. after Pearl Harbor. in preparation for the speech next day. Way back, we remember the gas hissing out of the cannisters when they drove the bo- nus veterans out from Hooverville on Penn- sylvania Avenue, and a soldier had to come up and lead us down from the second floor of a half-demolished skeleton structure, because we were blinded. We can remember (or think we can) when Albert Fall came in to the marble Caucus Room of the Senate in the Teapot Dome scandal, all shrunken and collapsed: the formerly arrogant Secretary of the Inter- ior who scorned the Walsh committee the first time he came. We can remember Borah standing in front of the lion house at the zoo one fall day and how leonine he looked (like John L. Lewis), and we gave him a lift in our Model T. Wry things, too: Calvin Coolidge with an In- dian headdress on: any speech in the Senate | Rustlings by Russ Williams The Senate Watergate Committee started out aptly named, but as more and more dirt has been uncovered the name has come to less and less cover the committee's work at hand. The synecdoche will no doubt continue to stand. however. ‘The Senate Committee on the Illegal Bugging of Political Opponents. Conferees and Just Plain Friends. on Enemy Lists and Improper, Revenge-Type Use of the Internal Revenue Service. on Illegal Use of Taxpayer Monies for Payment to Convicted Felons and for Improvements to the Pre- sident’s Private Home, on Illegal Campaign Pledges and Promises, on Suggested Use of Prostitutes and Kidnappers as Part of a Poli- tical Campaign. and Perhaps. Someday. on the Whole Executive Privilege Question. with Side Considerations into the Areas of Unde- clared. Presidential-Continued Wars and Fal- sified Bombing Records is a rather cumber- some title. Even simoly calling it the “SCIBPOCJPFELIRTUSIUTMPCFIPPHIC- PPSUPKPPCPSWEPQSCAUPCWEFBR" will probably never catch on. It's ironic that John Mitchell has come up with the best name so far for the committee— the ‘Senate ‘White House Horrors’ Com- mittee". It's really a much better name than my rather long-winded one because. with the way that more and more horrors are becom- ing known. mine would probably have to be lengthened on an almost daily basis. Enough different horror trails have already appeared to keep the committee following them for darned-near the rest of Mr. Nixon's programs before sending them down from the Front Office. One looks around for reasons to explain the pervasive underachievement of the Gen- eral Assembly. On at least one occasion this year, they have displayed the ability to act when disaster impends. That was last March when the bars in center-city Philadelphia al- most had to close for a day because of a spe- cial election to fill a vacant state Senate seat. With Napoleonic swiftness, the lawmakers passed a bill permitting them to stay open despite the election. But on more substantial matters. the le- gislature simply isn’t doing the job. Although there are many reasons. they all can be lump- ed under a single heading: That’s always the way it's been done. Clearly. this isn’t good enough. There's no reason for legislators to be part-time em- A Greenstreet News Co. ployes whose private pursuits divert their attention from the public’s business. There's no reason for legislators to cast their votes the way the party caucus tells them. Public apathy to the General Assembly has been well-documented. and there are per- iodic attempts to ascribe its miserd le per- formance to that very apathy. But surely this is to place the cart before the horse—or. some would say. the jackass. keeps our country free. by J. Ham Lewis; the circus midget climbing into the inadequate lap of J. Pierpont Morgan as a publicity stunt, and he thinking it was a little girl. Yes. and recently, LBJ. What a character he was! —as indigenous a folk figure as little fox terrier Harry Truman; how we interview- ed him one time when he was majority leader. and he said nobody was going to treat him like a child-in-arms! And by golly, in an instant he was bounding out of his chair behind his enor- mous desk in a palatial room that looked like the Sistine Chapel with floating nymphs painted on the ceiling; bounding out of the chair and striding up and down the carpet with arms bent, indignantly rocking an ima- ginary baby. The pay in Washington ain’t much, but the show’s swell. After a while, though, things begin to repeat. James McCartney writing in the current Columbia Journalism Review wonders how the press let the White House story on Watergate go so long. Well, here is the comment of a great reporter, the late Thomas L. Stokes (‘‘Chip Off My Shoulder’) looking back at the time he served in the White House press room: “The irony of it all to me—the amazing disclosures that came later—was that we newspapermen at the White House sat, all the time, at the outer gate. so to speak, and had known nothing.” Watergate?—no; Teapot Dome of course. McCartney and Stokes agree that for the or- dinary reporter, the worst place to find out scandals of an Administration is in the White House press room: ‘the world ot Ronald Ziegler,” as McCartney puts it, ‘‘of the handout, the announcement, the state- ment, the official view.” Things repeat themselves in other ways. The Supreme Court has just taken another crack. 5 to 4, at deciding what’s ‘‘obscenity’’. already causing a Virginia sheriff to discover that the girls in Playboy aren't clothed. and opening up a probable new chaos of ‘‘contem- pory community standards.’’ Dear me. we've seen it all before; who's this grim figure stalking about the Senate, offering to show lascivious foreign imports, and asking per- mission to read aloud to his colleagues, in sec- .ret session, excerpts from the new novel by D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Why tall, dignified, humorless: Reed Smoot, to be sure, demanding to save the public morals and inspiring my favorite of all editorial cap- tions, ‘Smite, Smut, Smoot!" Here’s another issue coming up now. so repetitive that I have a file on it, ‘‘Executive privilege". Yes. the Constitution would prac- tically fall apart if President Nixon invited a Senate Committee to the White House to tell what he knows about Watergate, let alone if he went himself to Congress to testify under oath. Well, Old Abe. didn't talk much about executive privilege. They set up a committee to watch him in 1861 a group of suspicious. hate-ridden super-patriots (‘‘Radical Repub- licans” they called then)—the Joint Commit- tee on the Conduct of the War. They felt they knew how to run the war better than he did. But he didn’t appeal to separation of pow- didn’t retreat inside the White House. One time, according to Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln: The War Years’ (—vol. 2) the committee met in secret session to consider Mrs. Lincoln’s loyalty. Suddenly, as they sat, the orderly came in with ‘‘a half-frightened expression’ and. before he could speak. there at the foot of the committee table ‘‘standing solitary. his hat in hand. his form towering, Abraham Lincoln stood.” Sandburg says that Lincoln came voluntarily, took oath of family loyalty. and departed. The story may be aporcyphal but there's no question that Lincoln met with the committee many times. In“Lincoln Day by Day’ an authoratative chronology, issued here in 1960, the President is shown to have conterrea personally with the committee 10 times. 1861- ~ 64. He didn’t fear loss of dignity or constitu- tional collapse by dealing directly ith a committee of Congress. » That's the difference between $qen and Po in these pre-vacation musings. The new! tone is monarchical; it varies from the bizarre to the beserk. At one minute it’s the light-opera uni- forms the President proposed for his White House palace guard. At the nest it’s the sinis- ter suggestion that the people are ‘‘children”’ and that critics are subversive. A sympathetic White House witness, under oath, quotes the President’s dismay at discovering what practically everyone else already knew: “I have racked my brain. 1 have searched my mind. Were there any clues I should have seen that should have tip- ped me off?’ Well, the answer is, Yes. Fur- thermore. for the first time in history we've had a quasi-conspiracy to grab an election. And for the first time in history we’ve had burglars on the White House paydl..We trust the President’s new economic poricy will be more successful than all this. term in office. Many side paths are probably still undiscovered. The Senate Watergate Committee may be with us for a very long time. It might become a permanent committee to act as the Senate's check on Presidential power in our govern- ment’s system of checks and balances. A thinking youngster in the future may ask. “Daddy. why do they call it the Watergate Committee?’ His father will then have to tell him the story. It won't be the best story the kid's ever heard. but it will have a moral...the old ‘‘crime doesn’t pay,’ because at least some of the bad-guy lawbreak- ers do get caught, we know. (**You see son, once upon a time some very bad men snuck into our country's govern- ment. They sneaked and snooped and used their positions to feed their greed and power- hunger. rather than to serve the people who they were put into office to...) The story wouldn't be nearly the fairy tale that some of those lawbreakers are now tell- ing the present Senate committee. None of these men. all learned, well-versed in govern- ment and law, several big lawyers, realized that what they were doing was illegal. they would have us to believe. (“I didn’t know it was wrong to lie and steal and snoop and cheat to get my President re- elected.” these very bad men wailed when they were caught.) A father telling the story to a young son would have to skip some ‘“‘R’’ and *‘X"’ rated parts of the tale. The chapter on the ‘Enemy List" could frighten a youngster into fearing that his name might appear on a similar list...with himself marked for harassment (whatever awful thing that,might be) by the IRS (whatever kind of enforcement outfit they might be). “The Liddy Plans’ is definitely “‘R’’ mater- ial, and some might find it rated *“X". The idea of kidnapping political-demonstration leaders and roughing them up is perhaps too violent for a young audience. and the pros- titute idea is rather advanced material. Per- haps the father could brush over that part very quickly and generally. (**One of the very bad men went as far as to plan to hire certain professional women to compromise members of the opposing... ‘What does ‘compromise’ mean, Daddy? And how were those ladies going to do that?’") But the father. probably. should just skip that part. There's enough left of the story. without it. to keep the kid interested for a long time. I have this little story-telling episode placed. in my mind, about eight or nine years in the future. The Senate Watergate Com- mittee is still chopping its way through the now overgrown, jungle paths of the White House Horrors trail. And this administration. always interested in earning ‘‘firsts’ (the first Presidential trip to China, the first ad- ministration to witness the daughter g% the President married to the grandson of pe President. etc.), has recently earned another It has eight years from now, become the first administration to have its misdeeds stu- died for a longer amount of time that it served in office. per year. 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