ustxtxb_obs_1963_08_23_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

The Man I Knew The Observer [on Walter Webb] is fine, and I want to thank you and his other friends. This is the man I knew. However, there is much about the earlier Walter that I had not known. You caught the spirit of the man I married and kept it up to tempo. Mrs. Walter Prescott Webb, 2519 Harris Blvd., Austin 3, Tex. No Small Events I can’t tell you how much your issue on Dr. Walter P. Webb meant to me. We were great friends. When my mother, his second wife, told him that I was thinking about getting married, Dr. Webb wrote me, “There is only one way for a man to cope with the problem of women, Maury, and that’s for him to marry one of them and let her protect you from all the rest. Get married.” Judge Jim Sewell performed the honors last Christmas Day. To have had Maury Maverick for a father and then Walter Webb for a stepfather were no small events in my life. The two men generally thought alike, but were completely different in how they went about life. For a frivolous instance: Dr. Webb told me that a man should limit his drinking for the night to a couple of jiggers of good bourbon whiskey, on the rocks, with a lot of talk. That’s how Fred Gipson came to call Dr. Webb affectionately, “old sot.” On the other hand, my natural father, Maury Maverick, told me. “The 16 The Texas Observer way to drink is to drink a pint of whiskey as quick as you can and have a fist fight over the Catholic Church.” Maury Maverick, Jr., Maverick, Tynan & Gochman, attorneys, Maverick Bldg., San Antonio 5, Tex. The Contrast Today I received the Observer for Aug. 9, which included Sen. Yarborough’s intelligent and mature statement on the nuclear test ban treaty. In the same post I received an answer to a letter I had sent Sen. Tower. In my letter to the distinguished conservative, I had asked him to take the path of reason and support the treaty. I am enclosing his answer. I find the contrast between the two Texas senators extremely interesting.Bruce Haldane, 2723 74th Ave., Hyattsville, Md. 4, Dear Mr. and Mrs. Haldane: . . . I intend to vote against ratification. First and quite frankly, I do not believe the Communists can be trusted to agree to anything that does not benefit the designs and intrigues of International Communism. History proves this without question. Competent authorities in the field of nuclear science have questioned the wisdom of this treaty, pointing out that America is likely to be frozen in a relative position of inferiority, as far as weapons development is concerned, with the Soviet Union. Administration spokesmen hint openly that this treaty is only a prelude to further `agreements’ with the Soviet Union. The preamble of the treaty itself contains the expression that the parties will seek to work for complete disarmament in accord with objectives of the United Nations. I can never agree to disarming America in the face of the expressed intentions of Communist nations, nor can I agree to a treaty that might be used, however remotely, to justify disarmament negotiations with Russia until Russia proves by deeds that it wants genuine peace in the world. Sincerely yours, John G. Tower, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 17 The Third Force Even the most casual of citizens is forced more frequently to ask what forces are at work in Congress and in most local legislatures. Our tax system, the most inequitable series of documents produced by our society, is far more controlling than the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yet seven months of hearings have produced no action to redistribute the burden with more justice. In the preceding session, on the other hand, the bill to hand the space monopoly to AT&T was passed with dizzying speed. There are constantly fewer of us who doubt that the dominant force in Congress is the self-interest of its members and their subservience to masters who are not the people. In Texas it is superfluous to add that this is twice true of local legislatures. Therefore our rightist friends are quite wrong and make themselves unwitting lib erals when they insist that this country is a republic. It is nothing so democratic as that. It has become an economic oligarchy whose servants in the legislatures divide the spoils among their masters and impose the burdens on the people. What then of the people? The people are beginning to act for themselves as a third force in the legislatures because of the failures of their legislatures to act for them. We are witnesses to a great constitutional crisis whose irony is that the people have borrowed a page straight from the oligarchs. Thus at the end of August a quartermillion or more people will demonstrate in Washington. This enormous manifestation of the third force will avoid the halls of Congress, but no one doubts who is meant to be impressed. Is that extra-legal? No, it is only a demonstration like any other. Last fall, precisely at the critical moment for the communications satellite bill, Telstar rose miraculously into space. That was a demonstration, too. And how it worked! So, in principle, the end of August will see nothing new. There is every reason to suppose that the third force in Congress will be seen more frequently on the streets of Washington. In addition to the disenfranchised minorities, innumerable categories of the people are seething with impatience for responsible decisions to be made, and in the end any individual is involved many times over. There are those who do not earn as much as a dollar on hour because they have not achieved the dignity of what is called interstate commerce. There are several million untrained and unemployed young people without a chance in the . world, including some of the servicemen since World War II to whom Congress has denied a G.I. bill for education. There are rapidly growing numbers of pathetic old people victimized by unconscionable medical costs. There are consumersall of uswho are systematically victimized by fraudulent advertising, dishonest packaging, shoddy or dangerous products, and built-in obsolescence. Then there are the wage slaves, who were freed by the Bill of Rights, yet are held in bondage by tax laws written in favor of great corporations, their lobbyists, and the wealthy few. When the third force becomes fully effective, Congress may well disappear. The possibility is not sufficiently remote to dismiss. Congress is already discredited through comparison with an enlightened and incomparably more able executive. This is the second force we see intervening more and more in Congress on the side of the people. Soon the electorate may reject their legislators for what they are, and look directly to a responsive President. The last obsolete legislature to disappear was the French Assembly, willed out of existence a few months ago by an abused and exasperated people. Who knows? Today Congress and tomorrow DeGaulle. C. D. DiGiambattista, 708 Petroleum Bldg., Midland, Tex.