Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 102, No. 22, Ed. 1 Sunday, January 27, 1980 Page: 18 of 44
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2—SECTION 2-THE NEWS-TELEGRAM, Sulphur Springs, Texas, Sunday, Jon. 27, 1980
^ Olympic boycott
has much merit
One of the nation’s most respected track coaches, one
.. who worked three years with the Mexican Olympic
Committee in staging the 1968 games in Mexico City, is in
favor of an immediate United States boycott of the 1980
event scheduled for Moscow.
Bill Easton, who has turned out eight Olympians trr his
college career and who has worked with U.S. track groups
traveling to Europe and to Russia, believes such a boycott
would have a very strong impact upon the Russian
government and the Russian people.
But he goes beyond that to question just how successful
U.S. athletes will be in these particular games anyway.
“I believe that the one thing that would put the Russians
in a real bind is for us to boycott the Olympics — to take a
firm stand right now and not change it unless there is a
drastic change in events,” Easton says. The impact, he
• says, would be in loss of show and loss of face for the
■ Russian government — two very big factors with them.
“There’s no evidence we’ll get a fair shake anyway, the
way we’ve been slighted in the past,” Easton says. “They
don’t play by the rules, internationally or athletically.
Their ideology is foreign to our thinking and we just don't
seem to understand people like that."
Easton’s point is well taken. Russia is out for No. 1.
Anyone who doubts that lives in an idealistic dream world.
Whether or not athletes believe the Olympics and politics
don’t mix, Russia does. The Russian attitude toward
foreigners has never been good. Why should that suddenly
change if there is not a political motive?
Easton says he is sympathetic with athletes who have
been working and planning for the Olympics. But it would
be far better, he believes, to take the stand now rather than
to have the games interrupted or cancelled at the last
minute.
The United States made a mistake in 1936 when Hitler
used the Olympics as a German showcase. It should not do
so again.
They don't like
news reporters
The expulsion of United States newspaper reporters,
wire service employees and television and radio personnel
from Iran and Afghanistan should serve as a reminder to
some U.S. citizens - and to the rest of the world — of the
unique and fortunate free flow of information that exists in
this country.
In spite of the desires and intentions of some selfish,
: ■‘'tWri'skiimed or crooked public servants, the United States
;; does have a free press. There are many fewer public of-
ficials in these categories than there might otherwise be
simply because of this freedom of information.
In Iran it was the American press that became feared
because of its determination to report events and facts
rather than a selected “government line.” In Afghanistan,
the Soviet-controlled government was displeased by
reports that things are not as favorable to the Russians as
they would like the world to think.
Not every reporter is factual, honest and unbiased in
each and every dispatch — although that is a goal highly
desired. The great majority are.
When a government is wrong, only the suppression of the
fatjte can support its actions. The Iranian and Afghanistan
governments do not like our reporters. The reasons should ,
be obvious.
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Low voter interest
will hurt some day
The City Of Sulphur Springs has eased quietly through
another annual municipal election with 90 percent or more
of the eligible voters ignoring that fact.
It’s a pattern that has been repeated time after time in
this community. As in the past, it again probably won’t be
harmful.
But some day it well might be.
There are two ways for interest to be developed in
Sulphur Springs municipal elections: the public can accept
the responsibility for its role in managing public affairs, or
the city government can get into such a mess that a great
uprising of the citizenry results at the polls to try to set
matters right.
Hopefully, the former will occur before the latter
develops.
It is nice to believe that low voter interest means that
people are satisfied with the way things are going — as is
probably the case here. But it is a dangerous habit for a
community to adopt.
ForUm A Page for Opinions
IN WASHINGTON
Robert Walters
Over-organized
candidate?
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa i NEA) - The
delivery is labored, the syntax snarled and
the.grammar-garttRTas^eVi. Edward M.
Kennedy, D-Mass., struggles through
another uncomfortable . rendition > of hi?
standard campaign speech.
In the audience gathered at a high
school gymnasium in this western Iowa
city are voters who range from curious to
receptive to firmly committed — but
Kennedy lights no fires with his con-
voluted rhetoric and stilted delivery;
late the following night Kennedy is in
Davenport, on the eastern edge of the
state, fatigued after a 16-hour day of
* campaigning but relaxed and loose
enough to abandon his- conventional
speech at a rally in a college dining hall!
It's 11:55 p.m., but the hoarse, punchy
'candidate is in fine form. - Relax, don't
look at the clock,’’ he says with a big grin.
“They’ll serve us breakfast here in the
morning.’’
The crowd loves it, a spontaneous “we
want Ted’’ chant erupts in the room and
Kennedy soars., through an off-the-cuff
speech whose, climax is an emotional
appeal for voter support that produces a
roar of approval from the audience.
Those contrasting vignettes illustrate
one of the most profound problems con-
fronting the Kennedy campaign more than
two months after the senator entered the
contest for the Democratic presidential
nomination.
After assembling a best-and-the-
brightest campaign staff, Kennedy finds
himself beset — if not mobilized — by
conflicting advice from a political,
organization so strong that it’s in danger
of becoming muscle-bound.
The senator initially resolved the
question of what to say and how to say it
by wisely following his own instincts. That
meant delivering a loose, unstructured
and emotional speech tha often was
sharply critical of President Carter’s
leadership.
But a pair of high-powered media ad-
visers complained that the speech was tpo
shrill and strident — too “hot’’ for the
“cool” medium of television — while a
private poll reportedly showed that the
attacks on Carter were backfiring.
Kennedy succumbed to those pressures
and began relying heavily upon prepared
texts. While fie was mangling those
speeches before slack-jawed audiences,
however, his political operatives were
building the best grass-roots campaign
organization ever assembled for the Iowa
precinct\aucuses.
That feat was especially noteworthy
because Kennedy didn’t even enter the
race until early November, while Carter’s
first full-time paid political agents arrived
in Iowa last March. The president’s
political staff numbered 30 by late 1979,
exceeded 50 early this year and topped 100
in the days immediately preceeding the
precinct caucuses.
But Carter’s aides quickly were out-
classed by sources of Kennedy organizers,
both sophisticated veterans of earlier
presidential campaigns and youthful
volunteers enthusiastically committed to
the senator’s candidacy.
In the closing weeks of the campaign
here, there was evidence that Kennedy
was dosing the gap between himself and
Carter, as voters became impatient with
the hostage situation in Iran, angry about
the president's embargo of grain sales to
the Soviet Union and upset by a foreign
policy aptly characterized by Kennedy as
“lurching from crisis to crisis,”
The Kennedy organization effectively
stressed the fact that Carter cancelled a
personal appearance at a candidates'
forum in Des Moines because he claimed
to be preoccupied with international
crises, yet he found time to make dozens of
campaign telephone calls to both in-
dividual Democrats and small gatherings
of party^,leaders throughout the state.
But in the end, much of the burden was
on Kennedy himself. “I see the crowds
coming to Kennedy, wanting to be turned
on. But they leave without buying, I
think,” noted one veteran observer, Des
Moines Register and Tribune political
editor James Flansburg.
“So far," observed Flansburg late in the
pre-caucus campaign, "Kennedy’s
organization has performed better than its
candidate.”
Jack Anderson
Copyright 1980
! niteq Feature Syndicate Inc
Zia could be a new shah
IT * ' *
lush avoids conservative tag
y
By WALTER R.MEARS
C AP Special Correspondent
Washington iap) - check their
rejSqrds and you'll find that George Bush is
juft as conservative as the next candidate
—jfeven if that happens to be Ronald
Rdigan.
Put Bush, the man on the move among
Republican presidential contenders, has
skillfully avoided the label, and it is one of
thfkeys to his early success.
ft this point in a crowded presidential
campaign, perceptions are as important
as-positions, and Bush has established
hiftfcelf as a candidate likely to be ac-
ceptable to all wings of the party.
Bfc has claimed the center without
altering policies which, on most issues, are
almost identical to Reagan’s. He has
avoided ideological labels, and that is a big
P Sere’s no doubt Bush’s superior
organization was the key to his upset
victory over Reagan in the Iowa precinct
caucus balloting Monday night. Reagan
and his managers emphasized that in
arguing that the former California
governor still is the candidate most
Republicans prefer.
He may be. But political organization is
not an abstraction apart from the appeal of
a candidate. Organizations are made up of
people, and candidates have to convince
those people to enlist them. Nobody
volunteers to ring doorbells for a can-
didate without first deciding to support
him.
Bush says he doesn’t resist the
suggestion that he is as conservative as
Reagan, but adds that he isn’t going to help
anyone put an ideological label on him.
“I am going to stay with njy position 6f
speaking as straightforwardly as I can on
the issues,” he said.
When he does, on most matters the
message is ’ not much different from
Reagan’s.
Indeed, in the Des Moines debate which
Reagan shunned, Bush talked about ex-
perience, not policy, when asked to spell
out his differences with his absent rival.
”Lo6k at the experience I’ve had in
foreign affairs: being your representative
in China, your ambassador in the United
Nations, running the Central Intelligence
Agency, being the head of this party on a
full-time basis," he said. “And so I would
emphasize in answer to the question... the
breadth of experience I’ve had....
“We may be together, closer together,
as Republican candidates on issues, but
that’s good, not bad, because we need tfe
beat Democrats in the fall. ”
Reagan said he stayed away from the
Iowa debate because he didn’t want to be
divisive and argue with other Republicans.
WASHINGTON — In his haste to make a
tough response to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter may have
rushed too eagerly into the embrace of
another shah. The president has offered
$400 million m military and economic aid
to the regime of Pakistani dictator
Muhammad.Zia ulHaq.,
Critics of the administration’s headlong
rush to prop up Zia’s dictatorship feel that
he is as unpopular as the shah, was in
neighboring Iran and that American
support .of his despotic regime will result
in a similiar backlash when Zia is
ultimately overthrown:
Zia’s repression is well-documented, as
is his disregard of-world opinion. Despite
worldwide pleas for clemency, the general
' hanged his political rival, Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, and still holds Bhutto’s family in
prison.
Even worse, from a practical viewpoint,
are the doubts about Zia’s reliability as an
ally. Last November, mobs in. Islamabad
sacked the U.S. Embassy and terrorized
its occupants, killing two embassy per-
sonnel, before Zia’s troops got around to
rescuing the Americans hours after a plea
for help.
In addition to Zia's drawbacks as a
leader worthy of U.S. support,
congressional sources- say Carter's
decision to rush aid to Zia may have been
premature. Evidence that the Soviets have
picked Pakistan as their next target is “far
from complete,” congressional experts
told my reporter Lucette Lagnado.
Intelligence reports indicate that a far
likelier victim would be Iran, which has
been rendered virtually defepseless by
sectional and ethnic anarchy and
decimation of its armed forces. For ob-
vious reasons, there has been little talk of
giving aid to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
resist Spviet aggression. ,
Even Gen. Zia seems unconvinced that a
Soviet invasion is imminent, my sources
say, despite his public expressions of
alarm. They argue that if he honestly
thought the Russians were coming, he
would not be insisting that all strings be
removed from American aid.
There is, of course, the possibility that
Zia may indeed fear a Soviet attack over
the Afghan border but has simply sized up
Jimmy Carter as an easy mark who.can be
bluffed into supplying U.S. aid without
exacting any conditions in return.
A better poker player than Carter might
use Pakistan’s newly perilous situation as
a means of forcing democratic reforms on
Zia. Instead, the United States appears
ready to write Zia a blank check.
Among the military hardware the
Pentagon is considering supplying to
Pakistan are jet aircraft, tanks, armored
•personnel carriers, surface ships and
submarines, as well' as anti-tank air-to-
ground and air-to-air missiles. - And
resumption of U.S. aid. - which was c.ut off
because Pakistan was believed to be
making an atomic bomb — will give Zia
the opportunity to channel his once-limited
funds into a heretofore forbidden nuclear
program.
Footnote: A spokesman for the
Pakistani Embassy in Washington
brushed aside reports that Zia’s regime is
unpopular. The United States “is helping
the people, not the ruler," he said.
Referring to the Soviet threat, he said:
. “Leaders come and go, but commissars
are hard to get rid of.” He agreed that the
danger of a Soviet invasion cannot be
pinned down. “Who knows when?” he
asked rhetorically. He insisted that the
American aid should be unconditional. “It
is not the U.S. business to interfere in
Pakistani affairs,” he said.
GOLD GIVEAWAY? Jimmy' Carter’s
proclamation of economic warfare against
the Soviet Union is being scorned by the
men in the Kremlin as the posturings of a
peanut-patch president — and with good
reason. For 35 years, the Soviet minions in
Czechoslovakia have successfully resisted
our economic pressure in a situation where
the United States presumably had ail the
advantage.
The ease involves 2,400 Americans
whose property was expropriated without
compensation when the communists
overran Czechoslovakia. Their claims
total $105 million.
All those years, an- 18.4-ton pot of
communist gold has been available to U.S.
negotiators. But our bureaucrats, too
timid to use this bonanza as a weapon to
achieve justice for the aging claimants,
tentatively agreed to a 1974 settlement that
would have let the Czech government- off
for $24 million — less than two bits on the
dollar. Congress vetoed the outrageous
giveaway.
Since then, of course, the price of the
Czech gold hoard has skyrocketed. It’s
now worth at least $420 million.
The gold, which was seized by the Nazis
during World War II and then recaptured
by allied forces, sits in a London vault. It
can’t be disposed of without permission of
the French and British governments,
which have shown little interest in the
demands of the American claimants.
With the renewal of the Cold War, the
outlook for a settlement has diminished
rapidly.
Meanwhile, the possibility of partial
compensation for the deprived property
owners was raised last year when a New
York tax court ruled that a refugee from
Red China could claim the value of family
property seized by the communists as a
deductible loss on his income tax returns.
The same avenue may be open to the
Americans robbed by the Czech govern-
ment, and it might well be the only way
they’ll get any compensation at all.
’And don’t you DARE step across this line!
Donald F, Graff
What price Pakistan?
In the beginning there was the Indian
Empire, a political, religious and.,
linguistic extravaganza that the British
not all that reluctantly abandoned in 1947.
rThe result was not one but two nations —
India, the larger and dominated by the old
empire's Hindu majority, and Pakistan, a
bifurcated homeland for the Moslem
minority with east and west segments
separated by a thousand Indian miles.
They have not lived happily ever after,
in three decades, there have been three
wars. Pakistan lost them all — the last
time around, in 1971, also losing its more
populous eastern territories, now in-
dependent Bangladesh.
Even with the east gone, what remained
of Pakistan was still a badly divided
country — a Punjabi majority ruling
Pathans, Baluchis and others whose ties
are often firmer to kinsmen across the
borders in Iran and Afghanistan than to
the government in Islamabad.
This brings us to 1977, when the civilian
government of mercurial but reform-
minded Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was over-
thrown in a military coup led by General
Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. The latter
executed Bhutto two years later in
defiance of internal rioting and worldwide
protests. He has jailed Bhutto’s widow,
who, should a promised election which Zia
keeps postponing ever take place, would
be a likely next president.
Zia, an erratic autocrat on the order of
Libya's Muammar al Quaddafi, presides
over a puritancial Islamic republic
complete with public floggings and
summary executions. In one of the world 's
least affluent countries, he is con-
centrating developmental efforts, on a
nuclear capability which coqjd be taken
seriously by only one country — India.
So there we have it, the country that the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan has
abruptly converted from backwater to
frontline. And good old dependable
Washington is, if not rushing, as least
sidling up to the rescue.
Zia, however, finds the initial proposal
of $400 million in aid “terribly disap-
pointing.” In his view* the United States
needs Pakistan much more than vice
versa and should pay accordingly. He
delicately refrains from naming his own
price, but makes it very clear that it will
be considerably more.
Well, what’s two or three times $4(
million to beef up a front line these da)
when an auto company can pick up $1
billion to keep an assembly line movini
As a counter to the Soviet expansionism -
of which there are precious few short of
nuclear showdown available at tt
moment — it could be a bargain.
On the other hand, considering the typ
of company it would mean keeping, tl
ramshackle state of the country it woul
be expended upon and the three-time los<
army it would buy as a supposed deterrei
to the Red Army should that force actual]
decide to come down out of the mountain
the eventual price of a Pakistan coi
nection could be disastrously high. Or I
put it another way, with friends like this .
. . or an Indian connection?
Meanwhile, next door in India Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi is having second
thoughts about the Afghan situation.
Or third of fourth thoughts. By the time
you read this, it may be fifth or sixth. The
lady is changeable.
But at this writing she is evaluating the
Soviet advance as unjustified. An
evaluation that, it is to be hoped, will be
strengthened as a result of conversations
with visiting Clark Clifford, a Washington
insider and unofficial emissary of the
Carter administration whose Indian
mission has been little publicized but
could be much more significant than all
the to do over a Pakistan connection.
India is the dominant power in that part
of Asia. Its commitment to the anti-Soviet
line-up would be the most effective
deterrent. Not in a military sense, but in
its impact upon all the rest of the so-called
non-aligned world.
And it could cost virtually nothing at all,
other than a genuine American rffort to
understand India’s situation and views
and a convincing demonstration that it
does.
Mrs. Ghandhi is a difficult individual,
but a very shrewd one. She will not be sold
a bill of goods, but she can recognize
common interests when they are
presented for what they are. r
Arranging an Indian connection will not
be easy. But meaningful relationships,
which are built rather man bought, rarely
are.
(NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN)
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Keys, Clarke. Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 102, No. 22, Ed. 1 Sunday, January 27, 1980, newspaper, January 27, 1980; Sulphur Springs, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth824321/m1/18/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Hopkins County Genealogical Society.