OCR Text |
Show IHIodw AlbaDmut Hit? (gwnDdDiiDiiu; When did you first realize you were getting old? Richard Buck When I realized I knew all the answers, but nobody asked me any questions. Thursday, February 18, 1982 PageA2 EMitta&irnsiIl vm si Never give an inch . . . or a hose ... or a truck ... "Never Give An Inch." Our movie critic, Rick Brough, tells us that was the television title for a movie based on the Ken Kesey novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion." That also could have been the title of the confrontation which took place at last Thursday's work session involving the Park City Council and the Park City Fire Protection District. It should have been called a nonwork session. The two entities en-tities just sat there and bristled. At issue was the ownership of the firefighting equipment in Deer Valley. At the present time, Deer Valley holds the title. The Fire District says it was promised the equipment in a long-standing agreement with Deer Valley. The city says it waived $267,000 worth of impact fees in exchange for the title to the equipment. At face value, it looks like a tempest in a teapot. What difference dif-ference does it make who owns the equipment as long as the fires are put out? If the Park City firefighters will be given the use of the trucks and the building, why should they care who owns them? That's what the council wants to know. But the district has questions too. Why should the members of the City Council be interested in acquiring firefighting equipment when they are not in the fire suppression business? And is it proper to waive impact fees, designed to pay for services which the city does provide, in exchange for equipment for a service the city doesn 't provide? The issue here really isn't the ownership of the equipment in Deer Valley. It's the future of the Fire Protection District. What the City Council is doing by trying to acquire title to the equipment is holding back a trump card in case it decides to pull out of the district. "We just don't want to tie the hands of future City Councils," Coun-cils," was the argument expressed at the work session. But that argument just doesn't hold water. When the Snyderville Basin Sewer District was formed, the city didn't keep the title to the sewer lines. If there is some dissatisfaction about the performance of the Fire District, and some interest in pulling Park City out of the district, that should be expressed now instead of pushing it off on some future council. Obviously, there is some dissatisfaction with the Fire District. And it extends beyond the City Council. County officials of-ficials have complained about the shoddy way the budget is prepared. We have been frustrated by the lack of records kept by the district and the sometimes casual way in which m eetings are scheduled. On the other hand, we are impressed with the dedication of the volunteers in the department. Their willingness to answer calls, at any time, in any weather, is tough to criticize. The recent Insurance Services Office (ISO) rating of the Park City Fire Protection District is an indication that fire services are improving. But we believe that a key to continued con-tinued improvement is cooperation between the district and the city. At this point that's not happening. Somebody will have to give an inch. And then some. DH SfeSli m f OK.FDBTKEWME 3j rs!f WlLll I WIRTHE ARCADES... W U-kfthl "WEN THE CONVENIENCE it by Jack Anderson Weekly gpecfiaflKS Past presidents left legacy of recordings and a yacht Washington This is a tale about yachts and secret tape recordings. It is important because the vessel and the tapes in question were once the playthings of former presidents. The yacht is the Sequoia, which served our presidents from Franklin Roosevelt's time until 1977, when Jimmy Carter decided that a presidential presi-dential yacht didn't fit the image of a "people's president." He ordered the Sequoia sold. Now it seems that the Sequoia has fallen on hard times. In fact, on Jan. 8, 1982, it suffered the ultimate indignity: it was placed under arrest by an United States marshal. To appreciate how awful this is, you have to know something about the Sequoia's background. It's a truly elegant ship, commissioned into the U.S. Navy as the personal means of seaborne transportation for President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR used the yacht regularly. It was not only a means of relaxation for the seagoing president; it was a luxurious place to nold private talks with such world leaders as the "former naval person," Winston Churchill during World War II. Richard Nixon, a former naval person himself, was also enamored of the Sequoia. In fact, he used the presidential yacht more than anyone but FDR. Nixon used to have the Sequoia sail down to Mount Vernon, just down the Potomac River from Washington. There he would have everyone stand up and salute the home of the first president. Jack Kennedy was another sailor who enjoyed the Sequoia. He and Jackie redecorated the yacht's bedroom bed-room and installed a king-size bed that was built specially to accommodate the president's back problem. Lyndon Johnson was basically a landlubber from East Texas, but he put the presidential yacht to good use. Almost too good, in fact. One time Johnson had so many people aboard for a barbecue on the upper deck that the Navy officers in charge of the yacht were afraid it would capsize. They asked Johnson to limit the number of people he asked aboard after that. Despite this glorious history, the Sequoia is now ice-bound in Baltimore harbor while lawyers fight over its future. The people who bought it when Jimmy Carter put H up for auction sold it to somebody else, and there has been a dispute over who owns the title. So the pround Sequoia is under arrest, like any common purse-snatcher or embezzler, until the matter is settled. The tape recordings in question are those that were secretly made by several recent presidents. The taped conversations of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy have been the subject of headlines in recent weeks. Lyndon Johnson was also known to have secretly taped some conversations in the Oval Office. He used buttons that supposedly dispensed dis-pensed soft drinks to activate the recording device. Two other presidents had secret recording devices installed in the White House. There are transcripts of tapes that Dwight Eisenhower had made from time to time in the Oval Office. And there are some relatively primitive 16-inch discs that show that Harry Truman at least tried to record some conversations during the early years of his presidency. The Truman discs should be no surprise to our readers. Nearly five years ago, we reported that Truman had been made aware of secret recording equipment in the Oval Office, even before he took over from FDR. A salesman for a recording equipment equip-ment company demonstrated the hidden device to Truman's aide, Gen. Harry Vaughan. The salesman told Vaughan and Truman that the only legal way they could use the recorder was to notify the other party to the conversation that the device was being used. Shortly after Truman became president, presi-dent, the salesman was summoned to the White house by Gen. Vaughan. He was told that the gadget didn't work. Vaughan instructed him to get the thing working or "get it the hell out of here." Gen Vaughan denied the whole thing. The salesman said he didn't know if Truman had in fact ever used the secret recording device. But a spokesman for the Truman Library told us that in the mid-1970s it received 10 16-inch discs from the FDR library. They were apparently made during Truman's occupancy of the White House. Unfortunately, tapes made from the Truman discs are unintelligible. As best the library people can guess, the recordings were of conversations in Truman's office and did not involve intercepts of telephone conversations. There are apparently no logs or transcripts of the recorded conversations. conversa-tions. As for the Eisenhower years, summaries of secretly recorded conversations con-versations indicate the Ike taped about two dozen Oval Office meetings. Some of the dignitaries Eisenhower wanted to capture on tape were then-Vice President Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Queen Fredrika of the Netherlands and the late Sen. Everett Dirksen. Officials of the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan., said there are no tapes available of the Eisenhower conversations in the Oval Office. There aren't even any transcripts. Only summaries. It should be noted, of course, that these earlier secret recordings of Oval Office conversations were selective. The recorder was turned on only when the president wanted a record of what was siad. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, went to extremes. He recorded everything and the secret tapes eventually brought him down. Copyright, 1982 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Ranie Giltner I don't recover from my hangovers nearly as fast as I used to. 1 V f Dick Haskin When I realized my family was getting older. Betty Jannott Please don't remind me! ii. Val Thurnell When I remember back to a time when there was no traffic on Park Avenue and I could hear the birds singing over the construc tion noise. Con Riley When the things I used to do all night now take all night to do. by Stanley Karnow (IlnIlD&Il iw Reagan rhetoric on El Salvador sounds ominously familiar Washington Viewing the Reagan administration's growing involvement in Central America is to observe much the same process that propelled the United States into the Vietnam tragedy. This is not to suggest that Central America is a replica of Southeast Asia. The problems that sparked the rise of the Viet Cong bear little resemblance to the conditions that underpin the insurgency in El Salvador. But what is remarkable, in my estimation, is the similarity between President Reagan's rationale for deepening the U.S. commitment in Central America and the motives that prompted his predecessors to intervene inter-vene in Vietnam. For just as the decisions to "hold the line" in Southeast Asia originally were portrayed as part of a larger effort to halt the spread of international communism, so the administration is currently arguing that Central America Ameri-ca must be defended against the threat of Soviet aggression designed to create Fidel Castros throughout the Western Hemisphere. It is probable, as the State Department alleges, that the Russians and their Cuban surrogates are furnishing the rebels in El Salvador and Guatemala with weapons. But left-wing forces are gaining ground in those countries less because they receive Soviet hardware than because they offer an alternative, perhaps illusory, to the appalling poverty and repression that plague the area. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration adminis-tration primarily perceives Central America through the prism of its crusade to contain Soviet expansion, even though the real issues at stake in the region are economic and social. Outgoing President Rodrigo Odio Carazo of Costa Rica underlined this point in an interview not long ago. Criticizing Washington officials for their "almost total ignorance of the realities" of Central America, he said: "their policies respond not to the common interest, but to the exclusive interest of the United States." An even more disturbing feature of the Reagan administration's approach to Central America, which again summons up memories of the early U.S. commitment to Vietnam, it its apparent belief that military aid is the answer. That concept recalls the "investment "invest-ment trap" that led to the introduction of American combat troops into Vietnam. It began there with the expedition of a few units, followed by a bigger buildup to protect the initial "investment". Actually, the American involvement in Vietnam did not start when Lyndon Johnson landed U.S. Marines at Danang in 1965, or even when John F. Kennedy sent out military advisers and equipment three years earlier. It dates back to the days of Harry Truman. In 1950, after the Communists had taken over China, Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded Truman to TIlA Mewspaper earmark a paltry $10 million in secret funds to aid the French, then fighting to retain their colonial possession in Indochina. Acheson was uninterested in the details of the struggle of the Vietnamese Vietna-mese Communists against the French. Despite expert advice, he also disregarded disre-garded the profound differences between be-tween the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists, which have brought them into conflict with each other today. He saw communism as a monolith bent on world domination, and it had to be stopped in Vietnam. As a result, the United States provided the French with a total of $2.5 billion by 1954 to fight a cause that was lost before it began. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson picked up the fallen torch from the defeated French, inexorably carrying on and escalating the U.S. commitment still with -the conviction that they had to stop Communist expansion. And, over time, they fulfilled their own prophecy. The war that might have been averted by diplomacy and compromise eventually degenerated into disaster because the realities of the situation were disregarded. Central America may never become another Vietnam, especially with the sad recollections of Vietnam itself still fresh in the minds of the U.S. public. But the reagan administration's rhetoric rhe-toric sounds ominously familiar, (c) 1982 The Register and Tribune Syndicate Inc. Subscription Rates, $6 a year in Summit County, $12 a year outside Summit County Published by Ink, Inc. USPS 378-730 Publisher , ,,,. . Jan Wilkmg EdJ"or; David Hampshire Advertising Sales Jan mUng m Djckson Business Manager Rick Lanman Graph'cs Becky Widenhouse, Liz Heimos Staff Reporters Bettina Moench, Rick Brough, Morgan Queal Typesetting Sabina Rosser, Sharon Pain, Kathy Deakin Subscription & Classifieds w . ,, . . .. . . . . Marion Cooney D.s.r.bu..on 4 Photography Mjchae SpaDldinR Entered as second-class matter May 25, 1977, at the post office in Park City, Utah 84060, under the Act of March 3 1897 Published every Thursday at Park City, Utah. Second-class postage paid at Park City, Utah. ' Unsolicited manuscripts and photographs are welcome and will be considered for publication, however. The Newspaper will assume no responsibility for the return of such material. All news, advertising and photos must be received prior to the Tuesday noon deadline at our office, 419 Main Street in Park City, by mail P.O. Box 738, Park City, Ut. 84060, or by calling our office (801) 649-9014 Publication material must be received by Tuesday noon for Thursday publication. |