ustxtxb_obs_1968_03_15_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

.1,1,…#4.1716,4,4600**64110.4..4.1 v.4411414.4440. ,4. ning to ease just the least bit.” Gladden was permitted, as a special courtesy, to appear before the delegates. He was escorted to the rostrum by a five-man committee. He was greeted enthusiastically by the delegates, who gave him a standing ovation. “I have worked long and hard in the last several weeks lining up my friends to win the endorsement of this convention,” he began. “I am satisfied that if the people in this convention work as hard in the precincts as they have in this convention on this issue we can win this race . . . I could have come forward on the floor of this convention but it would have been somewhat damaging to this organization and to the chances of candidates we support. . . . With the friends I’ve got within and without organized labor I’m satisfied we’re going forward and win,” Gladden said, to more cheers. On the voice vote as to endorsing Yarborough and recommending Gladden there were a few scattered no’s. Brown said, “Now 1 see some of you smiling who were not. It’s a lot easier now than it was two hours ago.” Brown told the Galveston newspaper that a floor fight vote could have gone either way, depending on what time of day the vote was taken. He said the majority kept switching throughout the convention and noted that one delegation had held eleven caucuses one day. He said he had never seen such “an emotional stirring of so many people.” COPE has $100,000 or so ready to spend on Texas political races, not counting local area council money that also will be spent as those councils see fit. Another $100,000 will be sought. Most of the state COPE Money will go for legislative and Congressional campaigns. It is understood that funds already committed include: $25,000 for Don Yarborough, $75,000 for legislative races, and $15,000 in four Congressional campaigns, against Cong. Bob Casey of Houston, John Dowdy of Ath ens, Joe Pool of Dallas, and to help Cong. John Young, Corpus Christi. In the hours following the convention Gladden was given more than $2,p00 from various labor sources. The next day, addressing the CWA local presidents, Gladden said, “Most likely I could’ve gotten a demonstration of strength on the floor. . . Yesterday at noon [when the crucial decision was made with the executive committee against a floor fight] I was physically exhausted and possibly didn’t exercise my best judgment,” said Gladden, who had gotten two or three hours’ sleep each of the two nights before the vote. “Are you happy and satisfied with the outcome?” a CWA man asked. “I’m more content than satisfied,” Gladden answered. “We did what we came here to do,” he said, indicating he believed his candidacy would be taken more seriously now. “But there was a time or two yesterday afternoon when I wasn’t sure I was either satisfied or content. . . But I believe we did the right thing.” G.O. YD’s Debate Vietnam, Rangers Galveston Some 450 Young Democrats representing approximately 4,500 members throughout Texas traveled to Galveston last weekend for the 17th annual bash Kaye Northcott Joins the Staff Austin Kaye Northcott joined the Observer staff on March 4 as associate editor. She was editor of the Daily Texan at the University of Texas, Austin, holds journalism and literature degrees from UT, and has worked for several news publications. Miss Northcott, 24, is a native of Kansas City, Mo., and, at age seven, moved to Houston, where her parents still live. Her first professional journalistic job was in Detroit during the 1964 newspaper strike in that city; she was assistant editorial page editor of the Detroit Daily Press, an interim newspaper which gathered a circulation of 280,000 before folding at the end of the strike. Since then Miss Nor t h c o t t has worked with the Houston Chronicle, the Capitol Bureau of Newspapers Inc. \(the Austin, Waco, Port Arthur, trainee for Newsweek magazine, and with the Houston Post. fl 4 The Texas Observer known as the state YD convention. The YD’s ranged in age from late teens to late thirties but their generations didn’t seem to gap. To the last one they were straight. They dressed straight \(suits, Sunday if at times unintelligibly in the parlance of the Panstraight \(beer drinkers, not pot smokers, despite the fact they passed a platform asking that alcohol and marijuana be strated a belief in the efficacy of the democratic process and in their Democi-atic party. There was little talk of Lyndon Johnson at the convention. A number of delegations displayed McCarthy stickers, but when the showdown came on Vietnam the majority supported the president’s policy. The convention passed by a vote of 424 to 109 a moderate resolution on Vietnam similar to those passed by the last two state conventions. The statement, written by the North Texas State Univer sity delegation, read in part, “America’s interest, the interest of peace, cannot be furthered by expanding the military conflict in Asia. Such a goal can only be brought about through a negotiated peace …. Today, while we have grave misgivings for the validity of our original commitment, we see no practical alternative to our basic positinn of now being in Vietnam. “The Young Democrats recognize the sincerity of the president in searching for a meaningful solution of the conflict.” As a basis for negotiations, the platform suggested a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam, efforts to deescalate the war, recognition in negotiation of all parties involved in the conflict, including the National Liberation Front, massive land reform programs in South Vietnam and an international conference of all concerned parties in Vietnam. The minority report, presented by the University of Texas at Austin, did not mention the president. It criticized “ruthless bombing of industrial and population centers” in North Vietnam and the bombing of Laos. “An ineffectual policy has thus been relentlessly expanded in its application,” the report said. “America cannot remain indifferent to the suffering exacted upon the civilian population of Vietnam by a war which perpetuates a corruptly inefficient and reactionary regime which has little support among the people of Vietnam. Such a government cannot win the war, and such a government ought not to win the war …. We must come to grips with the human and ideological aspects of this horrible, brutalizing war.” The UTYD’s recommended negotiations with the NLF and a reconvening of the Geneva Cony en t i o n. If negotiations should fail, the delegation recommended “cessation of efforts to control the countryside of Vietnam in favor of concentration on safeguarding the major cities and securing the lives of those who depend on the United States’ military force for their safety, and giving increased attention to the formation of a civilian Saigon government which has rapport with the population.” Because the convention was behind schedule, debate on the Vietnam issue