Banner Graphic, Volume 13, Number 100, Greencastle, Putnam County, 4 January 1983 — Page 5

opinion

LARRY GIBBS Publisher

Letters to the Editor Issue is qualification

To (he Editor: As a real estate holder and lifelong taxpayer of Putnam County, 1 am writing not about the sheriff but about the recent election for county assessor. The Indiana law, chapter 15, section 36-2-15-2, reads as follow's: The election of a county assessor must be from freeholders of the county they file in. After all, they are setting values on millions of dollars worth of property. Their judgment affects everyone’s pocketbook.

Form central dispatch board

To the Editor: In sitting in on some of the discussions of the central dispatch system, I believe everyone is in agreement that the public would be better served with a central dispatch system. I feel that the harmony that has surfaced so far may be only superficial because there is an air of distrust, principally because one branch of the government is paying half the bill and the other is retaining all of the control. I have taken it on my own to contact the Federal Communications Commission, Indiana Association of Cities and Towns, as well as some communities using the 911 number with a central dispatch. As a result of these findings. I feel the best way is to make the central dispatch a true public service and take political competition out of it by doing the following: -Form a governing board as the Board of the Putnam County Central Dispatch Dept. Board members would be the mayor, city councilman-at-large, president of the Board of County Commissioners, president of the County Council and the sheriff. The board would be similar to the present Operation Life board and is possible by Indiana statute. This board would operate the dispatch system and be independent of other governmental agencies they represent. -Secondly, the present license the city holds and the one Operation Life holds could be modified into one license under the name of Putnam County Central Dispatch Dept.; or. they can keep their licenses as a reserve base and apply for a new cooperative license for the central dispatch.

A contemporary lesson on the dangers of political witch-hunting

By ANTHONY LEWIS c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service BOSTON v — It was a sensational revelation. During World War II Franklin Roosevelt was in secret and frequent communication with Earl Browder, the Communist leader. A trusted intermediary carried messages back and forth between them. She was Josephine Truslow Adams, a former college art teacher, who in her role met the president nearly 40 times at Hyde Park and the White House. That was the gist of one of the most remarkable, pieces of testimony produced by the Senate Internal Security subcommitee in its heyday. The witness was Josephine Adams. She testified in executive session in January 1957, and the committee published excerpts of her testimony a month later. But it was fantasy. So we learn from a riveting article in the December issue of the magazine Encounter. The author, Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University, had access to FBI files, private

Who will decide artificial organ recipients and who will bear the costs?

By David B. Wilson (c) 1982 Boston Globe Dolly Parton says she hopes that, in 100 years, people will tell her she looks great for her age. And in Salt Lake City, Barney Clark’s artificial heart is, at this writing, pumping away and Clark is said to be up and, somewhat, around. Back in Massachusetts, new and better artificial hearts, power-packed and wholly implantable, are expected to be ready for insertion in a human being in about five years. Surgeons now almost routinely transplant kidneys, lungs, corneas and livers as well as hearts. The procedures have become familiar. Like space shots, surgical progress, as news, has about it a certain sameness. And one of these days, some clever person is going to patent a means of restoring youth to the brain, thereby ending the miserable fumblings for keys, glasses and adjectives that presently afflict people over 55. What we are looking at is the rudiments of immortality, Dolly Parton's mammary amplitudes as awesome in the next century as they are in this one. And what’s wrong with that, you ask? Plenty. To understand why, we must step back in time. Imagine yourself in one of those spruce-dark New England cemeteries where whole families, buried facing the eastward

[Ri: BERNSEE Managing Editor

Putnam County’s elected assessor was not qualified at election time. Not until 48 hours before swearing-in time did a big-hearted Greencastle realtor deed to the assessor 22 hundredths of an acre of bare ground out on Dunbar Hill. Qualified’? Come on, Indiana legislators and State Board of Tax Commissioners, let’s put some qualification on elected county offices. Albert Solomon rural Bainbridge

The members of the Dispatch Board would sign the license and be responsible for its use. In this way, the central dispatch would be separate from city or county and the employees would be civilian employees answering to the Dispatch Board. The city and county would budget expenditures to the system like the county does to Operation Life now. The city charge for rent, utilities and for the office space. The dispatch system would have its own retirement, insurance and payroll. Any other agencies could be added and the percentage of budget could be adjusted. The president of a twon board could be added to the board, but is probably not necessary. I do not believe it would be necessary for non-elected officers to be represented on the board because it would be non-political in nature and their superiors would be representing their interest. I also have found the 911 number is working well and is preferred in all the central dispatch systems. The only problem I found was that at first the public will unnecessarily use the 911 number for non-emergency calls and will have to be educated on the intended use. Using a central dispatch without a central dispatch number is oniy doing half of the job for the public; if a caller can’t get the call to the dispatcher, the units can’t be dispatched In conclusion, the above is only idealistic, due to my limited amount of source information I couldn’t be legally conclusive. Glen Walters Greencastle

Anthony Lewis

papers and a hitherto undisclosed interview w ith Miss Adams. The tale is of the long ago and far away, but it carries a powerful contemporary lesson on the dangers of political witch-hunting. Miss Adams was involved with Communist causes in the 1930 s and 1940 s and did know Browder. She also met Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1941. After that, as Klehr puts it, she began “bombarding Mrs.

VOU HEARD ME.DAN, fUE SOTAN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH A WAN WHO CLAIMS It) HAVE RECEIVE? THE FIRST ARTIFICIAL HEART,,, certainty of the Second Coming, lie mingled with the earth. When these people were sick, injured or wounded, they infrequently survived the therapies of the time. They bred hugely so as to compensate for the odds against growing up.

Executive privilege showdown at hand

By LESLIE MAITLAND c. 1982 N.Y. Times WASHINGTON When the House of Representatives formed a committee in 1792 to examine the failure of a military campaign against the Indians and called for the president, George Washington, to supply information, it touched off the first of many disputes over the right of the executive branch to refuse to share its knowledge with Congress. Writing about the case at the time, Thomas Jefferson noted that the “executive ought to communicate such papers as the public good would permit, and ought to refuse those, the disclosure of which would injure the public.” There was, he added, a need for “discretion.” The lack of a clear-cut basis for judging just what types of documents the executive branch should be obliged to provide Congress continues to trouble relations between the two branches. Rarely, in fact, has the issue become more divisive than it is now, since Congress voted two weeks ago, for the first time ever, to hold a Cabinet-level official in contempt for refusing to meet all the demands of a subpoena for documents. The issue this time came to a boil as a result of Congress's dealings with a strong and sometimes contentious member of the executive branch. Anne M. Gorsuch. the head of the Environmental Protection

First bill in new Congress: Another try for the ERA

WASHINGTON (AP) A second battle over ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment has begun with reintroduction of the proposed constitutional amendment as the first piece of legislation in the new Congress. “I am designating the Equal Rights Amendment HRI,” House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, D-Mass., said Monday after being re-elected speaker. Rep. Peter W Rodino. D-N.J., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told a news conference the measure has 221 cosponsors in the House. “It is a priority item of business for the Judiciary Committee and we plan to go full-steam ahead,” he said. Rep. Don Edwards, D-Colo , chairman of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, said he expected the House to pass the amendment by mid-summer. “1 challenge the Republican-controlled Senate to do likewise. Only in this way can the Senate show that it is truly committed to women’s equality. Symbolic, piecemeal measures simply will not do," Edwards said. The amendment would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. “Our biggest problem is the Senate whether we can get the necessary twothirds vote there,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo. But. she added, “the extreme right-wing got discredited

Roosevelt with innumerable long letters.” She got mostly perfunctory replies. Then there was a complicated exchange about someone who Miss Adams said was pro-Nazi. The FBI investigated and found no credible evidence for the charge. Mrs. Roosevelt forwarded this negative report to Miss Adams, and she used the letter to convince Browser that she had an in with the White House. Browder believed. Between 1943 and 1945 he talked to Miss Adams, and she wrote letters to Mrs Roosevelt filled with his views and political gossip. Mrs. Roosevelt even said in one reply that she passed the letters on to the president, though except for one comment there is no evidence that he read them. But Browder believed not only that he had a pipeline to the president but that the president was replying. What happened was this. Miss Adams would talk with Browder. Then, after an interval, she would reappear, say she had seen the president and relay his supposed

Agency. Her commitment to enforcing the laws under her jurisdiction has been widely questioned on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House. Many House members who voted to hold her in contempt said they suspected she was covering up a failure by the EPA to be as rigorous as Congress would like in enforcing the law requiring the cleanup of toxic waste dump sites. But other legislators, including some of the 55 Republicans who voted to hold her in contempt, indicated they also thought the sanction was needed, as much as anything, to preserve the basic integrity of the powers and functions of the legislative branch as opposed to those of the White House. They noted that Mrs. Gorsuch had argued that her refusal to turn over documents could be traced directly to her instructions from President Reagan. Whether this fight derives from environmental concerns, from personality clashes or from dogged convictions by all parties that their potential for fulfilling their roles is being threatened, the battle seems far from over, and, in fact, is heating up. In accordance with law, the House has certified its contempt citation of Mrs. Gorsuch to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia so that he can present the case, a criminal law issue, to a grand jury. But the Justice Department, now representing

This is Mary ... She's underpaid, sexually harassed, passed over for promotion and stuck in a stereotyped r01e... - She's also > against the ERA ... why?

severely (in the Senate) during the lameduck session” so should be less of a stumbling block. . President Reagan has opposed the amendment, saving that while he favors

comments and requests. Browder was so convinced that, through a lawyer, he confirmed Miss Adams’s account to the internal security subcommittee. Years later he said he could not believe that she had made it up. But she had. Records show no visits by Miss Adams to the White House between 1943 and 1945. and none to the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park. In 1951 an FBI agent, after examining documents of hers, said there was "no indication” that she had "acted as a liaison between Earl Browder and President Roosevelt.” When she volunteered to be an FBI informant. J. Edgar Hoover found her disqualified because of her unreliability and her "exaggerated statements concerning her relationships w'ith the Roosevelts.” The skeptical FBI view of Miss Adams was almost certainly available to the Senate committee staff when it produced her as a witness. By then, moreover, men-

The health care delivery system was ineffective; but it was cheap. (So were funerals.) It cost about what it was worth. Because it was cheap, it was also relatively fair and democratic. Almost anybody could afford a strip of flannel, a hot rock, a pot of tea or a shot of brandy. Besides, these people were, so to speak, self-insurers. Today, Dolly Parton can spend an endowment as formidable as her bustline on its preservation. The costs of Barney Clark’s historic procedure are perhaps justified and subsidized as research at the cutting edge of progress. But perpetual care, a concept ordinarily applied to the cemetery business, is becoming an element ol the thriving health services industry. How in the name of Alan Greenspan. Claude Pepper and Frank J. Manning is society going to deal with the questions of cost, fairness and equity quite urgently posed by these cases 0 Right now, about 36 million Americans are drawing Social Security benefits; about 12 percent of Gross National Product consists of health-related goods and services; and already the economy is hard put to pay for existing therapies. 'Once the headlines and television coverage have subsided, who is to decide who is to receive these extraordinarily expensive passports to eternity? How about developing clones for organ banking’.’ If you had just one artificial heart to implant.

Mrs. Gorsuch, has countered by filing a civil suit challenging the constitutionality of the subpoena that Mrs. Gorsuch is charged by the House with failing to honor. Rep. Elliott H. Levitas, the Georgia Democrat who is chairman of the committee that subpoenaed the contested files, says he is extremely disturbed by the Justice Department position. He has asked the House Judiciary Committee to have its staff examine whether Attorney General William French Smith might have committed impeachable offenses in attempting to keep the Gorsuch case from going to a grand jury. Levitas also wants to explore the prospects for appointing a special prosecutor to handle the contempt prosecution. “The attorney general is not taking care to faithfully execute the law,” he said. “That very likely is in my opinion an impeachable offense. And if the U.S. attorney doesn't present the case to a grand jury, then that in my opinion is an impeachable offense, too.” He added that some of the documents being withheld by the EPA would prove “embarrassing” to the Administration if they were released and that he feared the White House was “stonewalling” it, because there was “something terrible to hide.” But the attorney general said he thought it “highly unlikely and very unwise for Congress” to pursue impeachment. The

|H She likes being treated special... A\ m . * JsSsaefetJ. /f 'Jlmr

equal rights, a constitutional amendment is unnecessary. The amendment was passed by Congress in 1972, with a 7-year deadline for three-fourths of the state legislatures to

tal problems that had troubled her for years were obvious. Miss Adams was a patient in the New York Infirmary when Robert Morris, counsel to the Senate committee, interviewed her in December 1956. She told Morris, Klehr says, that “Communist doctors" were performing lobotomies on her and injecting her with truth serum. The next month she w-as brought on to testify. Only an edited excerpt was ever released to minimize the rambling and disorganized character of her speech, Klehr suggests. After the testimony she signed a contract to do a book called "I Was Roosevelt’s Secret Emissary,” with the veteran anti-Communist writer Isaac Don Levine as ghost. But when she showed Levine more than 20 letters from FDR, he was suspicious. He found a 1945 note by Miss Adams listing topics on which she should make up Roosevelt letters. The letters were in fact crude forgeries. The book

would you save a drug-addicted young mother of four children under five, or would you save George Burns? Suppose your choice were Burns or Bob Hope? Ought there to be an auction? Suppose the cost of the artificial heart, including installation, is $200,000, a not unreasonable figure. If you implanted a million a year, assuming adequate staff, the cost would be S2OO billion, almost a third of the federal budget. There are, as mentioned above, 36 million persons receiving Social Security benefits, most of then entitled to medical care paid for by public or private insurance and all of them, eventually, potential candidates for heart replacement. Even if you stipulate that, somehow, the nation could afford to guarantee to everybody new organs for old, how' would you deal with the problems generated by unlimited longevity. The national public pension system already is bankrupting itself paying for unforeseen numbers of retirees who now threaten, literally, to live forever, the annual cost of their maintenance increasing faster than the Consumer Price Index. The wood-splitting, horse-riding president of the United States is, his worst enemies would concede, remarkablv young for his age. He is also well-insured and relatively rich. A couple of transplants and a constitutional amendment, and he could occupy the White House indefinitely if the voters chose to re-elect him. How does that grab you?

January 4,1983, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic

15

ANIME GORSUCH Subject to contempt vote files being sought by the House, Smith said, contain sensitive information regar-’ ding active investigations, which could be jeopardized by any loss of confidentiality. “There is an issue to be resolved over, the extent of executive privilege and whether it is appropriate to release documents when an investigation is in effect,” Smith said.

ratify it. Congress later extended the ratification deadline to June 30, 1982. However, only 35 states had ratified when that time ran out, three states short of the necessary 38.

contract was withdrawn. The story is a telling reminder of what can happen when zealots use the supposed cause of "anti-communism” to grind political axes The Senate committee used a woman suffering from delusions because it saw a chance to smear Roosevelt. Morris, who is now 67, has not changed his mind about the committee's use of Josephine Adams or his role in the affair. "She was an excellent witness as far as veracity went," he said when I telephoned him the other day. Why. then, had she not been called to testify in public? “She wasn't a very beauteous person. She was old and fat, and she tried to make it very dramatic. The senators felt she wouldn't make a very interesting-looking witness." Morris practices law now and also runs “a national committee to restore internal security. We've had eight hearings we go through all the formalities of a congressional hearing. We've just had one in Washington on the nuclear freeze," he said.

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