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Show The Public Forum Tribune The Salt Lake Tribune Sunday, January 22, 1384 A13 AW Readers' Opinions Understand Russia We must all know now, without doubt, that unless we, somehow, come to terms with Russia, we will all be destroyed there will be no more world. So what possible use is it to talk big" about building new nuclear weapons and say there must be "parity" that we don't trust the Russians. What earthly good does it do to be militarily strong? in my memory In my lifetime we downgraded the Germans and the Japanese as the vilest of human beings epitome of evil, as are now our accusations against the Russians. Recently, one person remarked: "We should have finished them off (the Russians) in the last war. He must have a faulty thinking apparatus. Russians fought on "our" side in the two world wars. Before Hitler went on his bloody rampage through the countries of Europe, Germany and Russia signed a pact that they would not, either one, attack the other but We forget that the Hitler double-crosseGermans marched into Russia and met their "Waterloo in the bitter cold snows around Stalingrad. So the Russians have known the horrible rigors of war on their own soil, not since the Civil something we have not War and that was between our own states. Though we find it impossible to sanction their leaders actions we should, at least try tilt of The Tribune on the basis of Anthony Lewis columns and two editorials. He might discover a whole new world out there if he were to read Buchanan, Satire, Pike, Reston, Geyer, Kraft, to name only six - Forum Rules Public Forum letters must be submitted exclusively to The Tribune and bear writers full name, signature and address. Names must be printed on political letters but may be withheld for good reasons on others. Writers are limited to one letter every 10 days. Preference will be given to short, typewritten (double spaced) letters permitting use of the writers true name. All letters are subject to condensation. Mail to Public Forum, The Salt Lake Tribune, Post Office Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. of the 22. If he has such difficulty in finding someone to agree with him about withdrawing American troops from Beirut or Lebanon, it may be that there is no consensus that such action would be "turning tail and running away." I have read and heard this policy described as honorable and wise. I compliment both papers on their broad-base- d editorial policies. Salt Lake readers are fortunate. IMOGENE W. KING I cannot understand why the conservatives are again trying to destroy the Social Security system, because some of them are going to have to rely on it to survive. I would like to show the terrible things they have done in the past. The first big attack came when conservatives under Richard Nixon, put the system under the general . ' budget. At this time the SS system had a surplus of over 170 billion, and if the government borrowed from it, they paid interest the same as if they borrowed from private re- tirement funds. This worked great to keep the deficit down, but it was not fair to the old people. If they had not done this, the system would even be able to survive without raising Medicare premiums, in spite of the Gays Can Organize Sports Fans Unite Dont Give Up Such Nice People Fixed Commendable Fortunate Readers I' vJWlWI Cant Understand greedy doctors. Now that we are blessed with the Ronald Reagan deficits (and they certainly are his), again they are turning to Social Security to balance the budget. Social Security has paid its way and has not contributed one penny to the deficit. The conservatives want to cut the benefits, thus ' build up a surplus, and use it to cut the deficits without paying interest on our money. We can thank God we have Tip ONeall and to understand why they act the v;ay they do. Ted Kennedy to at least cut the damage they After all, some of our leaders are not knights would cause if left unchecked. in shining armor. There can be no "ruling of NENO SCHENA the world in this nuclear age. Whoever is Delta stupid enough to press the button will be of rest the with humanity. destroyed With Gods help and going his way, we can reach a level that will save us all. I have to object to the letter submitted by MRS. IRIS A. ROWLAND David Victor Steele (Forum Jan. 12). His suggestion that gays be driven from campus is totally uhfair. His error of applying of the penale code (prohibiting sexual relaI would like to say a few words on the tions between unmarried people) suggests constant feuding between Utah, BYU and the Lesbian and Gay Student Union meets to their fans. I think both schools have fine ath- have sex on campus. This is absurd. letic programs. But when one of the schools Personally, as a Utah resident and taxachieves excellence, (BYU football team in I do not mind supporting diverse stupayer, Utes the Holiday Bowl and the Lady gymdent groups. Gays also pay taxes that help nastics team winning three straight champifund education. Most of them dont have chilonship titles in a row), the whole state should dren so it seems only fair they be allowed to unite and support them. use the facilities they help pay for. For all the time and effort every memGays are forced to deal with degradation ber of both schools teams put into their and rejection dished out by closed minded sport, they deserve a pat on the back wheth- people like Mr. Steele who refuse to live and er their uniforms are red and white, or blue let live. Unlike the rest of us however their and white. rights are not guaranteed by law. Homosex- CRELLY HOLT uals like any other group have common interests, concerns and problems. They have the right to organize to discuss these shared concerns. It would appear Mr. Steele wants Since I usually agree with your editorito reserve the right to organize for prople als, I was surprised and disheartened to read who share his views. That is not the sort of the editorial of Jan. 12 on school reform. The freedom this country is based on. Legislature has been in session but three, CURT R. WARD days and youve given up. . . .should Utah legislators stymie public educations chance to reform . . .more and more Utahns seem to be joining the reWe have been in Utah two months after : sistance. in Germany for four years. We have living So what else is new? The time is now for already experienced two exceptional acts of putting our money where our mouth is, if we courtesy. really value our children. "All the flowers of The first time was when we were caught all the tomorrows are in the seed of today! in the first snowstorm of the season on the JUDI RAUSCH road between Clover and Tooele. We went off the road into the snow and could not get Was out. Within minutes two cars stopped to help us. One, a pickup truck with a man and a Your editorial of Jan. 7 took Sen. Jake young boy were laughing because our license Gam severely to task for his statement replate was from Hawaii. The man brought a specting the release of Robert 0. Goodman, chain and attached it to our car and within credited to the efforts of Rev. Jesse Jackson. minutes we were back on the road and could Letters to the editor have since concurred only wave our grateful thanks. with you. Again, just recently, in Salt Lake on West Aside from the release of Goodman, Temple, we tried to park our car and slipped which pleases everyone, Sen. Garn has good into the hardened snow and ice at the curb. A company. It appeared on your editorial page red and white pickup truck pulled up behind the day after you denounced Sen. Garn. Your us and pushed us out. It was a very spontaneheading was "Jackson Trip: Heroism or Opous and unsolicited gesture of typical Utah portunism? The writer was William friendly folks in action. Schneider, Special to the Los Angeles I hope that we will be able to do our share Times." The following are direct quotes: in helping in distress when we can and Jacksons mission served his own interthanks those who have helped us. ests and the interests of Syrians. SAMSON AND RADHA FRANCIS The interests of the Syrian government Dugway and the Democratic candidate converged on embarto another point: they both wanted rass President Reagan. It is now clear that the Syrian ambassaGov. Matheson should be commended for dor to Washington was actively involved In his efforts to understand the crisis in educaencouraging Jackson to make the trip and in tion in Utah and his submission of a tax inholding out the prospect of success. crease aimed at improving the plight of our Rev. Jackson allowed himself to be seen educational system. much as a knight in shining armor from King The majority of people who speak out Arthur's Court who set out to kill the dragon against this proposal are the same people where others, and in this case President who speak out against any taxes. Do these Reagan, had failed. It now appears. the fight people really believe a tax increase would was fixed. Goodman, Jackson and Syria have stop an economic recovery or are these comgained; the United States, and particularly plaints another face of greed. the president, have lost. Syria will not be Legislators in years past tried to present more, but less amenable in trying to solve tax packages that would have solved our the Mideast problem. crisis, but these proposals were represent PAUL B. CANNON as being antibusiness. The mineral jected severance tax and other business taxes are examples. Business has always been held as a saI am addicted to reading the editorial cred cow in Utah. The businesses of Utah pages of newspapers. One of the pleasures of pay less in taxes than in most states, and if elsereturning to Salt Lake City after visits you are not aware, they pay their employees where is to find that both of our leading less in salaries than other states. The personnewspapers respect the intelligence of their al income tax and property tax in Utah, howreaders enough to publish columnists with ever. are quite high. differing points of view. Gov. Matheson realizes he can't tax busiIn six recent issues of The Tribune which ness to any great degree so he has had to turn had accumulated on my desk, I counted 22 to the common people for understanding and different columnists. By my subjective criteaction. The people should, however, accept the governors concern but put pressure on ria, seven are consistently conservative, seven are consistently liberal and eight express the Legislature to modify tjie tax increase personal views depending upon the issues, iroposal where business and the common or situations, aborer will both pay a fair and reasonable problems George T. Finlinson (Forum, Jan. 10) share. JAMES R. SCHILLER doesnt know what he is missing when he Tooele questions the editorial screening or political Fight WW JIMMY CW pMP " UllalU Snfirf Reagans Secrecy Plan Too Stiff New York Times Service WASHINGTON In 1969 I was a White House speechwriter and had just finished - banging out the first draft of a Vietnam speech for the president. To keep every staff aide and his brother from fiddling with my prose, I typed across the top the impressive-lookinwords and acronyms that so frequently are used in Mr. Safire the national security world: TOP SECRET SENSITIVE. To give that a little authentic zip, I added Which has to do NOCONTRACT, with restricting the distribution from foreign allies and defense contractors. Then I sent it in to President Nixon and waited. And waited. Three days later I called Bob Haldeman, the chief of staff, said the speech needed more work and asked for it back. You bet it needs work, he replied, but we cant let you have it yoilre not cleared for Top g NO-FOR- Classifying material is easy and fun; declassifying it is a headache. Once a document has been sprinkled with the holy water of official secrecy, bureaucrats yet unborn will look it over and wonder. Maybe the classifier had a good reason. Why assume responsibility for letting the public know this? Keep it secret. That accretion of material unavailable to the public goes beyond Information that could compromise our security. As everyone in government knows, limited official use and adhninistratively confidential are stamped dn everything from budge case scenarios to main notes between and secretaries. One way this mountain of unnecessary secrets is broken up is through the revelations of people who leave office. The dullest memoires serve a purpose; informed criticism lets information flow. The Reagan administration is determined to compound the problem of closed files in an open society. Today if you are hired by the government you are presented with a "security acknowledgment, saying, I shall not publish, nor reveal to any person, either during or after my employment, any classified or administratively controlled Information To most people, that sounds reasonable enough: We don't want our federal employees to go around blabbing genuine secrets, now or when they leave federal service. The question is: How to discourage improper disclosure without putting a gag in a persons mouth for the rest of his life? Now we come to Reagan infamous National Ifccurity Decision Directive 84. In a ferocioas effort to plug The Leak That Never Was, NSDD 84 numbered with Orwellian not only inflicted the threat of aptness unreliable tests on federal goes the presumption of innocence) but made mandatory the signing of a lifetime censorship oath. Under directive 84, a person willing to serve Ms government must not only sign a legally binding promise not to reveal secrets; beyond that, he must swear to submit whatever he writes that is based on what he learns in his job to a government censorship board. Be must submit to that censorship for life, which strips him of his freedom to lambaste knowledgeably his successors in office. 1 For example, under that damnable directive, a column like this one would have to be submitted to censors before publication, because I talk about classification codes I learned about in the White House. Reagan e seeks to apply these restrictions throughout government, applying his order to more than 100,000 employees. Congress, at the instigation of Sen. Charles Mathias, put a hold on directive 84; in order to fund the operations of the State Department, Reagan signed a suspension order. Next month the Senate Government Affairs Committee will hold hearings on the lifetime censorship oath and more sensible alternatives. CIA-styl- . ... The best choice is to do nothing: Any solution is worse than the imagined leak problem. More likely to emerge is a secrecy oath as a condition of access to really sensitive stuff (Nofom, etc.), combined with a voluntary censorship board. For those eager to avoid even inadvertent disclosure of secrets, the censor's stamp would be available. But those who rejected the censorship board would be subject to the more traditional restraint H present or former government officials break their freely taken secrecy oath, they would then face government sanctions under contract law or criminal law. That would be better than the Draconian crackdown in NSDD 84; dissenters would still have the right to say no to prepublication review. The prospect of punishment, not the practice of prior restrnt, should deter security lapses. Protecting our secrets is a popular issue; neither Attorney General Smith nor White House Counsel Fielding is willing to talk to the president about protecting the Constitution. David S. Broder Learning to Live With Revolutions Washington Post Service WASHINGTON The stupidity of it!" former Sen. Frank Church of Idaho ex- - claimed. We were sitting in his Washington law office a few weeks ago, and when we had finished with the topic I had come to discuss, the conversation swung to foreign policy. The former chairman of the Sen. ate Foreign then chairman of the ForFulbright, in holding public Relations Committee, eign hearings on Vietnam. Churchs guest at the dinner was the late Hans J. Morgenthau of the Unfrerslty of Chicago, aa authority on foreign policy. The two men tried their best to make a largely skepthe pretical group of reporters vailing assumptions about Vietnam. The struggle taking place there, tfcey asserted, from China or was not aggression-by-prox- y Moscow but an indigenous revolution, led by who tpeared to be Ho Chi Minh a man the only authentic Vietnamese leader on the scene. The French bad tried and failed to halt that revolution by military intervention. If Americans were so steadfast ignorant of forces at wortc in that part the of the world that we went down the path the French had followed, Church and Morgenthau said, then we would pay a terrible price. I went home thoroughly' unconvinced that night, but had many occasions in the next dozen years to recollect the warning. There was the same passion in Church's voice as we talked in his law office as there had been that night, almost 20 years ago. He knew he was ill and indicated in the conversation that it might be aerkgis. But more than the gravity that fact infiarted to his words, it was the recollection of the earlier occasion that gave them weight Remember, Church said, "how many years we pursued stupid polcies in Asia, based on ignorance and an irrelevant Ideological view of the world. The stupidity of it' All those years of trying to cotgain China, a pygmy nation beset by problems of its own. And then we finally woke up one day and - Rela- tions Committee began speaking with such passion that I had trouble keeping up with my notes. I pulled out those notes the other day, when I read that Church was in a New York hospital after exploratory surgery for a seriillness. ous, perhaps Over the years, I had watched Church in some dramatic moments: during the civil rights debates in the 1950s, when he played a key role; in a Democratic convention keynote speech; an Idaho campaign; and in his try for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. But sitting in his law office, interviewing Church for the first time since he lost his Senate seat in 1980, what I remembered was a dinner he organized for a group of reporters in a Capitol Hill restaurant about 1964. American forces were in Vietnam, but the issue was certainly not at the top of the nation's consciousness. In fact, the reason for the dinner seminar, as I recall, was that Church had been unable to interest Sen. J.W. - dnti-coloni- al The Way It Was Here are briefs from The Salt Lake Tribune of 100, 50 and 25 years ago. in the use of the malls by Utah business bouses will do much to prevent extension of the federal economy cut on Utah postal workers salaries, Carl T. Frfcvold, of San A Lake City Dispatch of the fourth says: Framsico, vice president of National FederaThis evening Mr. Wilson came home from tion of post office clerks said at a meeting the Hotchkiss mine, and told your correspon- attended by Utah postal darks. dent that a strike was made in a shaft which Jan. 22, 1959 was started last week about 30 feet from the Utah Engineering Laboratory is Sperry entrance of the top ditch and that the ore 105,000 sijuare feet of using considering would 4W and about run was feet wide, body Naval Supply Depot Clearfield at the space 3800 a ton. for manufacturing its Sergeant guided misJan. 22, 1934 sile, said Paul Vestige, Sperry resident Purchase of stamps locally and a rtvlval Jan. 22, 1884 V recognized the reality, through the eyes of two very unlikely witnesses, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. "Yet we seem unable to learn from the failure of our Vietnam policy, or the equally. evident failure of our hard-lin- e policy toward Castro in Cuba. U is this idea that the communist threat is everywhere that has made our government its captive and its victim. Somehow, some day, this country has got to learn to live with revolution in the Third World. Its endemic. Its relatively easy to suppress revolution in Grenada, so we congratulate ourselves. It's more difficult to suppress it in Nicaragua or Central America, so we fret about thaL But it will be Impossible when it comes to Brazil or Argentina. This country has become so conservative so fearful that we have come to see revolution anywhere in the world as a threat to the United States. It's nonsense. And yet that policy we have followed has cost us so many lives, so much treasure, such setbacks to our vital interests, as a great power ought not to endure. "Until we learn to live with revolution, we will continue to blunder, and it will work to the Soviets advantage. It will put them on the winning side, while we put ourselves on the side of rotten, corrupt regimes that end up talng. And each time one of those regimes is overthrown, it feeds the paranoia in this country about the spread of communism. It furthers the premise of the national security state, which means more militarism, more censorship, more spending, more deficits and more casualties. The thing that is so discouraging is that no one seems to challenge the premise of our policy. What does it matter to us, really, the nature of the government in Lebanon? And yet we've reached the point in Lebanon where our troops are hostage and we can't even define their mission. but I think those There was more quotes suggest the challenge Frank Church was raising. Considering the source and the circumstance of his life it is a challenge worth pondering. ( How come football pools are Illegal, but swimming pools arent? Scientists say the earth is getting warmer, a thought that may help you survive the winter. |