COLOR PHOTOS FROM MIRS Amazingly clear photos of the rock-strewn surface of Mars were relayed back to Earth by the VikiIfg I lander, moments after its touchdown on the Red Planet July 20. The color photo at right, showing the scene southeast of the Viking lander, captures part of the spacecraft's metallic gray structure in the foreground. A pinkish orange cable leads to one of the descent rocket engines. Orangered soil covers most of the surface, apparently forming a thin veneer over darker bedrock. A zone of large dark boulders is present in the far field. The pinkish cast of the sky is probably caused by the sun reflecting on sediment in the atmosphere. In Viking's photo of itself (below), the U.S. flag and the American Bicentennial seal can be seen emblazoned on the lander's sides as it sits on a gentle Martian slope. The pink glow of sunrise on Mars can be seen on the distant horizon. The color reference chart and the cable suggest that the intense colors of the Martian surface are, in fact, real. See pages 34-37 for more on the Viking I mission.
A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER This month's SPAN takes a close look at several topics Americans are talking about these days-the Presidential candidates (page 2), the nuclear energy controversy (page 14), Viking on Mars (page 34). We also co.ntinue our coverage of two subjects of interest to everyone-the North-South dialogue in general and Indo-American economic relations in particular (a smaller "conversation" within the larger "dialogue"). One aspect of the North-South controversy is the increasing insistence, both in developed and developing nations, on independence of action in the political sphere at a time when economic interdependence among all countries is becoming increasingly unavoidable. "These two trends need not be incompatible," says Charles Frank, Jr., the author of our article on the International Resources Bank (page 45). "But to mak~ them compatible will require ingenuity and good will." It was in this spirit, he says, that the U.S. at UNCTAD IV proposed the creation of an International Resources Bank (IRB) to bring "managed technology" to developing countries and to deal with the complex problem of foreign investment. Another aspect of the North-South dialogue is that too often its lack of success is over-publicized while its achievements go unnoticed. This was pointed out recently by Julius L.-Katz, the new U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs. During his confirmation hearings before th~ U.S. Senate, Katz said that substantial achievements have been made in 'North-South negotiations since the Seventh Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly in 1975: • The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has been established. Despite "snags" in its implementation, IF AD is an important new institution that should help expand agricultural productivity in developing countries. • A series offorums has been set up to deal with commodity policy in general and to l!Jok at specific commodity problems; two agreements in this sphere have recently been negotiated. • Resources available to the International Monetary Fund to help developing countries have been greatly increased. In sum, Katz said he was "guardedly optimistic" that in the months ahead economic relations between developed and developing countries will improve. Ever since the North-South dialogue began, the U.S. has generally been optimistic about constructing a new international economic system that would be fair to all nations. Secretary Kissinger voiced this hope eloquently when he said to the Third Wodd: "We embrace your hopes. We will join your efforts. We commit ourselves to our common success." How do Indo-U.S. economic relations fit into all this? Prominent Indian economic journalist V.K. Narasimhan says (in an interview on page 38): "Now that the U.N. is working out the basis on which a new world economic order can be '. created, it is supremely important that there should be a close understanding between the U.S., which is the leading member of the advanced countries outside the communist bloc, .and India, which is a leading spokesman of the developing countries. In fact, in my view close cooperation between the U.S. and India is more important in the multilateral sphere-in efforts to evolve a new economic order-than even in the bilateral sphere." More recently, Kewal Singh, India's Ambassador-designate to the U.S., added another note of optimism regarding Indian-American relations. He said he was going to Washington "convinced that we have every reason to be friends." He added: '7here are no basic issues on which we have fundamentally opposed points of view. . .. There is no obvious obstacle to improving our relations, and we must not let little things get in the way." ,-J.W.G.
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CARTER- AND FORD JIMMY CARTER *************************** The following excerpts from recent speeches of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, give an indication of where he stands on many aspects of American foreign policy, including those issues relating to American relations with the Third World nations. In his June 16,1976, address to the platform committee of the Democratic Party, Governor Carter said: ... In the past few years the world has changed greatly and the United States has learned several lessons. One is that we cannot and should not try to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of other countries unless our own security is endangered. We have learned that we must not use the CIA or other covert means to effect violent change in any government or government policy .... Another lesson we have learned is that we cannot impose democracy on another country by force. We cannot buy friends, and it is obvious that other nations resent it if we try .... In the future we must turn our attention increasingly toward the common problems of food, energy, environment, scarce resources, and trade. A stable world order cannot become a reality when people of many nations of the world suffer mass starvation or when there are no established arrangements to deal with population growth, energy, or environmental quality. Our policies toward the developing countries need revisions. For years, we have either ignored them or treated them as pawns in the big power chess game. Both approaches were deeply offensive to their people. . . . We must more closely coordinate our policy with our friends, countries like the democratic states of Europe, North America and Japan .... To the. Soviets, detente is an opportunity to continue the process of world revolution without running the threat of nuclear war. They have said so quite openly as recently as a month ago at their 25th Party Congress. To the Soviet Union, with our acquiescence, detente is surface tranquillity in Europe within boundaries redefined to its benefit, together with support for wars of national liberation elsewhere .... But while detente must become more reciprocal, I reject the strident and bellicose voices of those who would have this country return to the days of the Cold 'War with the Soviet Union. I believe the American people want to look to the future. . .. , It is in our interest to try to make detente broader and more reciprocal. Detente can be an instrument for long-term peaceful change within the communist system, as well as in the rest of the world. We should make it clear that detente requires that the Soviets, as well as the United States, refrain from irresponsible intervention in other countries .... Our vision must be of a more pluralistic world and not of a communist monolith. We must pay more attention to China and to Eastern Europe. It is in our interest and in the interest of world peace to promote a more pluralistic communist world .... The Middle East is a key testing area for our capacity to
construct a more cooperative international system. I believe deeply that the foundation of our Middle East policy must be insuring the safety and security of Israel. This country should never attempt to impose a settlement in Israel, nor should we force Israel to make territorial concessions which are detrimental to her security .... In the future, we should make multilateral diplomacy a major part of our efforts so that other countries know the importance the United States attaches to international organizations. We should make a major effort at reforming the U.N. systems .... We must get about the business of arms control. The Vladivostok agreement set too high a ceiling on strategic nuclear weapon systems. The SALT talks must get off of dead center. The core of our dealings with the Soviet Union must be the mutual reduction in arms. We should negotiate to reduce the present SALT ceilings in offensive weapons before both sides start a new arms race to reach the current maximums and before new missile systems are tested or committed for production .... We can increase the possibility that the fear of war and the burden of arms may be lifted from the shoulders of humanity by the nations that have done the most to place it there. As I mentioned in detail at the United Nations, we need "firm and imaginative international action to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons" and to place greater safeguards on the use of nuclear energy. The Democratic Party should put itself squarely on record as favoring a co~prehensive test ban treaty prohibiting all nuclear explosives for a period of five years. Our nuclear deterrent remains an essential element of world order in this era. But by asking other nations to forego nuclear weapons, through the Non-Proliferation Treaty, we are asking for a form of self-denial that we have not been able to accept ourselves. I believe we have little right to ask others to deny themselves such weapons for the indefinite future unless we demonstrate meaningful progress toward the goal of control, then reduction, and ultimately the elimination of nuclear arsenals. On March 15, 1976, Governor Carter addressed the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Excerpts from that speech follow: We need to enlist the cooperation of the developing nations, for when we speak of the tasks of a stable world order, we include preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, policing the world's environment, controlling the flow of narcotics and establishing international protection against acts of terror. If three-quarters of the people of the world do not join in these arrangements, they will not succeed. Our policies toward the developing world must be toughminded in the pursuit of our legitimate interests. At the same time, these policies must be patient in the recognition of their legitimate interests, which have too often been cast aside. The developing world has, of course, a few leaders who are implacably hostile to anything the United States does. But the majority of its leaders are moderate men and women who are prepared to work with us. When we ignore the Third World, as we have for so long, the extremists will usually have their way. Our program of international aid to developing nations should be redirected so that it meets the minimum human needs of the greatest number of people. This means an emphasis on food, jobs, education, and public health-including access to family Continued on page 4, column 1
ON FOREIGN POLICY ***************************
GERALD FORD *************************** The following excerpts from recent speeches of Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate for President of the United States, give an indication of where he stands on many aspects of American foreign policy, including those issues relating to American relations with the Third World nations. In his August 19,1976, address to the Republican Party National Convention, President Ford said:
. . . Two years ago, America was mired in withdrawal from Southeast Asia. A decade of Congresses had shortchanged our global defenses and threatened our strategic posture. Mounting tension between Israel and the Arab nations made another war seem inevitable. The whole world watched and wondered where America was going. Did we in our domestic turmoil have the will, the stamina and the unity to stand up for freedom? Today America is at peace and seeks peace for all nations. Not a single American is at war anywhere on the face of this earth tonight. Our ties with Western Europe and Japan, economic as well as military, were never stronger. Our relations with Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Mainland China are firm, vigilant and forward-looking. Policies I have initiated offer sound progress for the peoples of the Pacific, Africa and Latin America. Israel and Egypt-both trusting the United States-have taken an historic step that promises an eventual just settlement for the whole Middle East. The world now respects America's policy of peace through strength. The United States is again the confident leader of the free world. Nobody questions our dedication to peace, but nobody doubts our willingness to use our strength when our vital interests are at stake-and we will. I called for an up-to-date, powerful Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines that will keep America secure for decades. A strong military posture is always the best insurance for peace. But America has never rested on arms alone. It is rooted in our mutual commitment of our citizens and leaders in the highest standards of ethics and morality, and in the spiritual renewal which our nation is undergoing right now .... On March 12, 1976, President Ford addressed the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Excerpts from that speech follow:
. . . We will work to reduce confrontations and avoid nuclear catastrophe, but we must also be prepared to meet challenges wherever and whenever they occur. It is no secret that the United States and the U.S.S.R. have fundamental differences in political and economic ideology. We will never cease the defense of the principles for which we stand-freedom, individual rights, and our deep belief that government exists to serve its citizens. Our task is a dual one: to defend and promote the ideals of the American people and to seek to reduce, whenever possible, the tensions and confrontations which could lead to nuclear holocaust. ... Just as I have persistently worked to maintain elements of
America's strength, I have also diligently sought peace through strength. Three times as President, I have gone to Europe to reaffirm our NATO commitment with our Western allies, to coordinate our economic and energy policies with the industrialized democracies, and to improve our trade and contacts with the peoples of Eastern Europe and reassure them of the bond between us.... Twice as President, I have traveled to Asia to strengthen our vital partnerships with postwar Japan and our other free allies and to further improve our relations with Mainland China, which are essential to peaceful progress under our Pacific Doctrine. I also met in Vladivostok with General Secretary Brezhnev; .we reached preliminary agreement on limits to the uncontrolled strategic nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States .... The Sinai Agreement between Israel and Egypt reached last September is working well and is a milestone toward a permanent settlement in the Middle East. ... Following are excerpts from President Ford's message to the U.S. Congress on July 29, 1976, transmitting his annual report on the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency:
· .. To meet our responsibilities today we must deal with the problems of secarity in ways never dreamed of by our founding fathers. We must influence the policies of possible adversaries in two ways: by keeping our military forces strong, and by pursuing negotiations to create stability rather than a spiraling arms race in weapons of incalculable destructiveness. In both these endeavors, there are grounds for confidence. We have and will maintain a strategic relationship with the Soviet Union which preserves our security. At the same time, we will continue to pursue arms control agreements that lessen the danger of war and serve to promote a stable and peaceful international order. We are negotiating with the Soviet Union, with the Warsaw Pact countries, in the multilateral Geneva-based conference of the committee on disarmament, and in the United Nations. We are mindful that many difficult questions remain to be solved, but I can report that steady progress has been made~ · .. The Administration has undertaken a vigorous action program to strengthen the barriers against further proliferation of nuclear weapons. We have moved to increase the effectiveness of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Controls on American exports of nuclear materials and sensitive technology have been made even more rigorous. The United States has taken an important initiative to establish new cooperation with the other major nations supplying nuclear equipment and technology, and a common understanding has been reached on principles and standards governing nuclear exports . These are tangible evidence of progress .... On June 28,1976, President Ford made a speech at the conclusion of the International Summit Conference in Puerto Rico. Excerpts from that address follow:
· .. The industrialized democracies can be most successful in helping developing nations by agreeing on and working together to implement sound solutions to their own problems-solutions which enhance the efficient operation of the international econoContinued on page 4, colunm 2
*************************** *************************** CARTER'S FOREIGN POLICY
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FORD'S FOREIGN
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*************************** *************************** planning. The emphasis in aid should be on those countries with a proven ability to help themselves, instead of those that continue to allow enormous discrepancies in living standards among their people. The time has come to stop taxing poor people in rich countries for the benefit of rich people in poor countries. In our trade relations with these nations we should join commodity agreements in su~h items as tin, coffee and sugar, which will assure adequate supplies to consumers, protect our people from inflation, and at the same time stop the fluctuation in prices that can cause such hardship and uncertainty in singlecommodity countries. The burden of economic development is going to be a heavy one. There are many countries which ought to share it, not only in Europe and Asia but in the Mideast. Today, a greater proportion of royalties from oil can be channeled to the Third World by international institutions. Tomorrow, they can receive a part of the profits from the mining of the seas. The purpose of such development is not to level the economic lot of every person on earth. It is to inject the wealth-creating process into countries that are now stagnant; it is to help developing countries to act in what is their own best interest as well as ours-produce more food, limit population growth, and expand markets, supplies and materials. It is simply to give every country a sufficient stake in the international order so that it feels no need to act as an outlaw. It is to advance the cause of human dignity ....
my. Our efforts must be mutually supportive rather than competitive. We remain determined to continue the dialogue with the developing countries to achieve concrete results. We agreed on the importance of maintaining a liberal climate for the flow of international investment. We agreed to examine carefully the various aspects of East-West economic contacts so that they enhance over-all East-West relations. Together, the results of our discussions represent a significant step forward in cooperation among the industrial democracies. They establish positive directions which will benefit not only our peoples but the international economy as a whole ....
The following are excerpts from President Ford's message to the U.S. Congress on March 17, 1976, transmitting his annual international economic report: America in 1975 renewed and strengthened its commitment to pursue the traditional U.S. goals of freer trade and enhanced global economic stability and prosperity. The United States has proposed a series of major economic initiatives providing leadership in efforts to improve trade and monetary arrangements, to establish cooperative mechanisms for dealing with the problems of food and energy, and to offer effective international responses to those nations in greatest need. 1975 was a year of achievement which produced new and more effective international economic policies, as the following highlights indicate .... The United States is committed to assisting developing On June 26, 1976, Governor Carter spoke on "Relations Between countries in their efforts to achieve economic progress. Our the World's Democracies" at the Foreign Policy Association of response to the needs of the less developed countries was expressed New York City. Excerpts from that address follow: clearly and positively at the Seventh Special Session of the United ... We have all seen the growth of North-South tensions in Nations in September [1975J. We proposed a new development world affairs, tensions that are often based on legitimate ecosecurity facility in the IMF to stabilize over-all export earnings in developing countries, and numerous other ideas-including nomic grievances .... There are many ways the democracies can unite to help , trade preferences;-to achieve mutually beneficial solutions to the shape a more stable and just world order. We can work to lower problems of economic development. trade barriers and make a major effort to provide increased At the Seventh Special Session of the United Nations we support to the international agencies that now make capital indicated that we will consider participating in various commodity agreements on a case-by-case basis. We also announced that we available to the Third World. This will require help from Europe, Japan, North America, intend to join the Fifth International Tin Agreement, subject and the w~althier members of OPEC for the World Bank's softto Congressional approval. The need, value and structure of loan affiliate, the Internatiomil Development Association. The commodity agreements vary for different commodities. In considwealthier countries should also support such specialized funds ering commodity agreements on a case-by-case basis, we will as the new International Fund for Agricultural Development, oppose concerted efforts to manipulate supplies and prices which which will put resources from the oil-exporting and developed ignore the interests of consuming countries while seeking to assure countries to work in increasing food production in poor countries. developing countries adequate income from their natural reWe might also seek to institutionalize, under the World Bank, sources. a "World Development Budget," in order to rationalize and The United States in 1975 continued its vital leadership in coordinate these and other similar efforts. seeking stre!1gthened. cooperation to increase world food proIt is also time for the Soviet Union, which donates only duction and trade. We proposed an expanded international grain about one-tenth of one per cent of its GNP to foreign aid-and reserve system and enlarged our food aid assistance. We will mostly for political ends-to act more generously toward global continue our policy of encouraging maximum agricultural production, and our efforts to achieve an efficient distribution economic development. I might add, on the subject of foreign aid, that while we system to assure that hungry people will be fed.... are a generous nation we are not a foolish nation, and our people As we enter the last quarter of the 20th century, our policies will expect recipient nations to undertake needed reforms to are directed toward working with others to ensure that the world's promote their own development. Moreover, all nations must talents and resources better serve the well-being of mankind. recognize that the North-South relationship is not made easier We continue to seek a world in which all people can prosper, a by one-sided self-righte0;usness, by the exercise of automatic world without hunger or severe want, a world in which the best majorities in world bodies, nor by intolerance for the views or efforts of all nations are prized and rewarded, so that their the very existence of other nations. . . . 0 progress and health are ensured.... 0
On November 2, 1976, the American people go to the polls to choose between incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford and the Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter. The profiles on the following pages discuss the two candidates and their achievements.
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On December 13, 1974, Jimmy Carter, in the last few weeks of his four-year term as Governor of Georgia, went to Washington, D.C., to hold a press conference. To a small group of friends and reporters he announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States. A virtual political unknown outside of the Deep South, Carter introduced himself: "My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for President. ... I am a farmer, an engineer, a businessman, a planner, a scientist, a Governor and a Christian." The many facets of this soft-voiced Southerner also included "politician," one who had entered public life as a member of his local community school board and who now, 20 years later, aspired to his nation's highest office. "I had never seen a President before I was elected Governor," Carter once recalled in an interview, "except Harry Truman in 1952, when we laid the keel of the U.S.S. Nautilus) the first atomic submarine, in New London) Connecticut. I was a lieutenant working for Admiral Rickover. I saw him at a distance. "To me the Presidency was always a very exalted and very revered office. It still is. But after I got to be Governor, I began to meet people who were either President or who expected to be-Richard Nixon, Agnew, McGovern, Wallace, Reagan, Rockefeller-,-and I didn't feel inferior any more. I feel that I am as qualified to be President as anyone of them." Or, to put it as he did at the time he announced he was going to run: "I started comparing my own experience and knowledge of government with the candidates, not against 'the Presidency' and not against Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It made it a whole lot easier." Jimmy Carter first ran for political office in 1962, at the age of 37, after growing up on a farm near Plains, Georgia, serving as an officer in the Navy and running the family peanut warehouse business. He wanted to be state Senator in the 6 SPAN NOVEMBER
1976
Georgia legislature and he campaigned vigorously across the rural, red clay southwest section of the state that had been his family's home for 200 years. He was up against the candidate of the established political leaders, however, and when the ballots were counted he found he had lost by, literally, a handful of votes. The difference had come from one county where Carter suspected fraud, suspicions based on.the fact that 333 ballots had been issued to the voters and when the box was opened 420 were counted, the m::tjority in his opponent's favor. He enlisted an astute Atlanta attorney, Charles Kirbo, in his cause and won. The courts ordered a new election and Carter was elected by 1,500 votes. Kirbo today remains Carter's closest political adviser. After two two-year terms in the state Senate he decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. But when the incumbent Governor was forced to retire due to a heart attack, he instead sought his party's nomination for the governorship. Starting as an unknown even in most of his state."he-and his family-conducted an intensive campaign. But he lost the nomination to segregationist restaurant owner Lester Maddox, who went, on to become Governor. "This entire experience was deeply disappointing to me," Carter later wrote. "I was deeply in debt and had lost 22 pounds (down to 130). I waited about one month and then began campaigning again for Governor. I remembered the admonition: 'You show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.' I did not intend to lose again." During the four years between elections, Jimmy Carter continued to crisscross the state, building support and recognition as well as supervising the family peanut business in Plains. It also was during this time that he became more intensely involved with his, religious faith. A Southern Baptist, he had taught Sunday school at his home church off and on since he was 18. He and his family had led a fruitless attempt to desegregate their church in Plains in 1964 (the only six votes in favor came from his family and one other). On two occasions, in 1968 and again in 1969, Carter became one of a six-man missionary team who evangelized house-tohouse in cities in Pennsylvania and Mas-
sachusetts, in the latter with Spanishspeaking Puerto Rican and Cuban people. The small crusades had a profound religious impact on him and he recalled later that "my church life became more meaningful to me." He is remembered by those he visited as "a sincere, smiling man, imbued with the spirit of the Lord." He also had long talks with his sister Ruth, a full-time evangelist herself, and recalled in an interview years later that she asked him if he would give up everything for his faith. "I s::tid I would. Then she asked me if I would be willing to give up politics. I thought for a long time and had to admit I would not." Carter estimates he made 1,800 speeches during the four years before the 1970 gubernatorial election and that he and his wife Ronlynn (they divided the state up between them and thus were rarely able to campaign together) shook 600,000 hands. His major opponent was a former popular liberal Governor, Carl, Sanders. Some observers have criticized Carter for tilting his appeal toward the conservative and segregationist elements of the state and branding his opponent as a captive of the liberals. Carter has pointed out that he had campaigned heavily among the blacks in the state and that although he did poorly among blacks in the primary against Sanders, h~ received a majority of the black vote in the election. This time he won and when he made his inaugural address he startled both whitf and black Georgians and gained nationwide recognition for the first time when he said: "I believe I know our people as well as anyone. Based on this knowledge ... I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.... No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice." Newspaper reports ofthe address touted Governor Carter as a representative of the "New South" and propelled him onto the cover of Time magazine. But he observed: "I don't know why everybody is making such a fuss over this. I've been saying the same thing all summer. Then the New York Times comes along and acts as if nobody down here ever said anything about that." During his four years in office (limited by the state constitution to a single term), Continued on page 8.
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"There is no real preparation for the job of President of the United States," a journalist once wrote. "It is mostly all on-thejob training, which iswhy so few Presidents have turned out to be as predicted." Gerald R. Ford is one of those few exceptions. In the two years since Vice 'President Ford took the oath of officeas President on August 9, 1974, he has remained very much the man known for a quarter century to his colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives and to the citizens in his home state of Michigan who elected him to the lower chamber of Congress 12 times. On his record, therefore-as Congressman, House Republican Party leader, Vice President and as the first President not previously elected to a national office-it now appears safe to predict that there would be no major changes in the style and content of his political leadership during his first full four-year administration. That is, if he defeats the Democratic Party's Presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter. Politically, Gerald Ford best characterized himself in late 1973 when the U.S.
His honesty and integrity have gone unquestioned even by his political opponents. Neither a dramatic figure nor an intellectuai, he is deliberate and commonsensical rather than inspirational or charismatic. He speaks plainly, too plainly, some people feel ("I'm the first to admit that I'm not an accomplished public speaker," he concedes). One can readily appreciate why Gerald Ford has so admired the square-rigged forthrightness of a former Democratic Party President, the late Harry S. Truman, the first Chief Executive under whom he served. (In the White House's Presidential office, there are busts of three PresidentsWashington, Lincoln, Truman.) President Ford feels himself to be "of" and "for" the people. He equates his own undoctrinaire political outlook with that of the majority of his fellow citizens. Speaking candidly of the "right wing" of his own party, he told a Time magazine correspondent recently that its members "don't represent the broad spectrum of the middle road, where I think most Americans are-most Americans in the Republican Party and most Americans in the Democratic Party." Of his own record as President, he has said simply but without self-effacement: ''1have a deep belief that historians of the first 24 months will say that the decisions were good and the results effective.''" Gerald Ford became the 38th President
Voices were raised in Washington and elsewhere calling for massive government intervention, but President Ford insisted on restraint and moderation. Economists continue to debate what has happened and why, and where the country seems headed. One of them, however, Dr. Herbert Stein of the University of Virginia and former chairman of the President's Council ofEconomic Advisers, recently summed up President Ford's strategy this way: "What was his duty? Confronting the worst recession of the postwar period, after a decade of accelerating inflation which had reached a frightening rate, he had to resist temptations and demands for strong action to pump up the economy. He had to be willing to accept, and to lead the people to accept, sacrifices in the form of unemployment in order to avoid the continuation of double-digit inflation, or its revival after a short lull. He did what had to be done, directly through his approach to the budget, and indirectly through his support of the restrained policy of the Federal Reserve [Board]. We now seem to be well launched on a healthy recovery, the inflation rate has fallen, and there is a good prospect of avoiding a rise of the rate if we continue this cautious policy." By mid-1976, analysts were hesitant to contradict the Administration's forecast that by the end of the year inflation would be under six per cent and unemployment
resignation of Spiro T. Agnew. He called himself "a moderate in domestic affairs, conservative in fiscal affairs, but a very dyed-in-the-wool internationalist in foreign affairs." So he had proved to be as a Republican Party Congressman during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and so he has proved to be as President. As an individual, Gerald ("Jerry") Ford, at the age of 63, is thought of by nearly everyone who has known him as a public figure in Washington in the same terms as those who knew him as a boy and young
the Watergate affair. He vowed to restore trust in government and to deal with the country's chief domestic problem-inflation. In the foreign sphere, he declared he would "fully support the outstanding foreign policy" of the former President because, he said, "successful foreign policy is an extension of the hopes of the whole American people for a world of peace and orderly freedom." It has been his measurable progress in those two fields that, his adherents believe, supports his self-appraisal that his' "decisions were good and the results effective."
President Ford has been pleased about the way the economy has recovered, he remains neither self-satisfied nor complacent. Moreover, he is aware that the American economy does not function in isolation from the rest of the world. Keenly appreciative of growing economic interdependence, the Ford Administration has sought further economic expansion while controlling inflation. Its policy is to foster cooperation among the industrial nations of Western Europe and Japan as the best way to further cooperative relations between the developed and the devel-
~ . ~:~::e~a~:e~~ ~;:~~, Rs~~~~~,~~~~~~::~ tious, loyal-these are the terms in which he is commonly described; homely qualities they may be, but ones that evoked a tangible aura of reassurance in the public : after a period of domestic political distress.
we: ~~~:~::~~~t~~~ ~~~~~:~~~~~:;~ ing the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war. By late 1974, inflation in America had reached alarming "double-digit" proportions, 11.7 per cent. By June 1975, unemployment climbed to a dismaying high of9.2 per cent.
;r~~=l ~::~~~~m~~;: ii~ ~~ic~a~t ~~t~er: may participate and benefit, as Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has put it. Consequently, President Ford attended the June Economic Summit in Puerto Rico with the leaders of Britain, Canada, France,
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he points with particular pride to having reorganized the state government (consolidating some 300 agencies and bureaus into two dozen), instituted prison reform, restructured the budget, and introduced blacks widely within the state government. He clashed frequently with his state legislature and developed a reputation as a tough, if stubborn, Governor. Much of his program was passed. One notably symbolic act, which attracted a Ku Klux Klan picket line, was his unveiling in the state capitol of a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., six years after the death of the Atlanta minister who was a leadcr and martyr of the civil rights movement. During his governorship Jimmy Carter also made two major trips abroad (he had gone ashore at points in East Asia during submarine duty as a naval officer in the late 1940s but otherwise had not traveled outside the United States). Leading a trade mission for businesses in his state, in 1972 he visited some two dozen cities in South America, Europe and Israel. Meanwhile, by 1972 Carter was becoming involved in national politics. He attended conferences of the 50 state Governors and also found himself being courted by such Presidential aspirants as Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, George McGovern and Henry Jackson. He wound up opposing McGovern at the 1972Democratic Convention and delivered the nominating speech for Jackson. At that point, he later recalled, "I decided I knew as much as they did. I started to think about the Presidency in human terms, not historical ones." He went home to Plains after the 1972 election to think. One night he paid a visit to his mother, Mrs. Lillian Carter, in bed with a broken arm, and she asked him, "Jimmy, what are you going to do when you're not Governor any more?" His reply, she recalled later, was: "I'm going to run for President." "President of what?" was her mystified reply. Carter had laid the basis for a nation-
wide campaign during 1973 and 1974 inated by unspoken, unwritten, but powerwhen he toured the country as chairman ful rules, rules that were almost never of the Democratic Party's 1974 campaign challenged." committee in a mid-term effort between One person who challenged the rules, Presidential years to strengthen and re- and who molded Jimmy Carter's modern organize the party-particularly in the perception of them, was his mother, a wake of two consecutive losses of the staunchly liberal and independent woman White House to the Republican Party. who was also a registered nurse and who That December he formally announced tended any who needed help in Archery his Presidential intentions and during 1975 regardless of color. "Miss Lillian," as she is called by he traveled around the United States buildfriends and casual acquaintances alike, ing a political organization-frequently alone or with Jody Powell, a young man capped a busy professional life at the age who had joined him as his driver in 1970 of 67 when she joined the Peace Corps and and who has become his press secretary spent two years as a medical worker in and, to some, his "alter ego." When the India. Now a hale 77, it was she who actual selection process for the delegates to fought racial prejudice by example. She the party's national nominating convention would receive the young son of a local black bishop in her front parlor while her began in January 1976, he was ready. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on conservative husband would shake hands October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, and but leave the house. was to be the oldest of two sons and two Jimmy Carter was the first of his line daughters of James Earl Sr. Neither man to attend college. Inspired perhaps partly has ever used the full name; it has always by a sailor uncle captured by the Japanese been "Earl" and "Jimmy"-and, indeed, during World WarII, partly by his father's will remain that way. Carter even signed admiration for the military (having been legislation when he was Governor as an Army lieutenant in World War I), and "Jimmy Carter" and he expects to do the partly by the anticipated expense of a same if elected J;lresident. private college education, he aspired to the He grew up in a little community three . U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. In miles east of Plains (population today': 1942 he took a year of preparatory work 683) called Archery, a scattering of 30 at Georgia Tech and in 1943 received an families, all but two of which were black. Academy appointment. The Navy was to His father ran a farm-Jimmy is the fifth be his life for the next 10 years. generation of Carters to live on the landThe only variation in the rigorous curand also owned a small general store. riculum of seamanship, gunnery, navigaJimmy grew up as any farm boy in the tion, engineering and naval tactics at the South would, rising at 4 a.m. to fetch the Academy was in the choice of a foreign mules by lantern light, helping with the language. Midshipman Carter chose Spancrops, walking to and from school, play- ish, a facility he retains to this day. He also ran cross-country for the Navy and ing. All his playmates were black. "We hunted, fished, explored, worked, played on the under-140-pound football built tree houses, robbed bee trees of team (standing five-feet-eight-and-a:half honey, rode horses, played cards," he inches at that time, he weighed 121 once recalled. "We ground sugar cane, pounds). He and his classmates took made syrup, plowed mules, pulled corn summer training on an obsolete battleship fodder, pruned watermelons, picked down in the midst of a World War II they never from geese, sheared sheep, chopped cotton, saw, cruising in the Caribbean, to Jamaica, milked cows, fixed fences, fed chickens, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. He was at sea when President Truman and hauled cotton together." He and his black friends did all this in the dusty red announced, first, the use of the atomic clay and along the banks of the Chocta- bomb and then, a few days later, the end of the war. A year later he received his watchee and Kinchatoonee creeks. "But when it was time for church or commission. school," Jimmy Carter said recently, "we The high point of Carter's naval career went our separate ways, without really came in 1952 when he applied for a job understanding why. Our lives were dom- in the nuclear submarine program then Continued
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Germany, Italy and Japan, and a similar meeting last November in France. The basic issues discussed were: how to consolidate economic recovery while heading off a resurgence of inflation, East-West eco~ nomic relations, and the status of the dialogue with the developing nations. More specifically, the Ford Administration has undertaken several major initiatives. The United States was instrumental in establishing the International Energy ..,...- Agency and its program for providing ,.. emergency oil sharing, conservation efforts, and the development of alternative energy sources. The U.S. proposed a $2,500-mil~ lion special financing facility to assist the industrialized countries in dealing with balance-of-payments difficulties. At the World Food Conference in Rome, the United States proposed several means to deal with the world food problem, including creation of an international system of grain reserves. ~ Last December the Congress passed the Trade Act to strengthen international trade relations by enabling the U.S. to work with other nations toward reducing tariff barriers and improving access to supplies. "The strengthening of international trade ~ and financial cooperation," said the Pres ident in his budget message to the Congress ,.. this year, "is essential if we and other nations are to cope successfully with current economic progress at home and abroad." In the field of foreign affairs, there is little doubt at this time that President Ford would continue to seek improved relations ~ with the People's Republic of China and with the Soviet Union. Last year he traveled to Peking for his first meeting with the Chinese leadership since becoming President. In late 1974, in his first trip abroad as Chief Executive, he met in Vladivostok with Soviet General Secretary Leonid ,.. Brezhnev and reached an important under~ standing on specific and equal limitations ~ on strategic nuclear weapons (SALT-II), ~ the terms of which are under negotiation. The U.S. also entered negotiations between memoers of NATO and the Warsaw Pact
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on mutual and balanced force reductions. President Ford led the U.S. delegation to Helsinki in the summer of 1975, one of 35 leaders attending the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. They signed a document declaring the basic goals of "peace, security, justice and cooperation." Speaking in plain terms, the American leader said: "History will judge this conference not by what we say today, but what we do tomorrow; not by the promises we make, but by the promises we keep." He also told the conference that detente was "an evolutionary process, not a static condition," and that there must be acceptance of "mutual obligation" for it to succeed. Regarding nuclear proliferation, he said that ways must be found for all to enjoy the benefits of nuclear power while "safeguarding the world against the menace of weapons proliferation." In his two years as President, Gerald Ford has dealt directly with a problem inimical both to economic recovery and peace-the problem of achieving a Middle East peace settlement. Building upon the work of his predecessor and the continuing diplomacy of Secretary of State Kissinger, which facilitated the 1974 Egypt-Israel and Syria-Israel disengagement accords, he has¡ striven to promote additional agreements. In June 1975, after attending a NATO Summit in Brussels, President Ford journeyed to Salzburg for talks with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat. In September, Israel and Egypt signed their second Sinai disengagement-one hinging finally upon the decision of the President and the consent of the U.S. Congress to assign American civilian peace monitors in the desert between Egyptian and Israeli forces. In affairs at home and abroad, Gerald Ford, if he is awarded the mandate of an elected rather than a successor Presidency, is expected to press forward to his objectives with new energy and determination. Last year he was asked how he would like to be remembered after he leaves the White House. He replied: " ... If I can be remembered for restoring public confidence in the Presidency, for handling all these transitional problems responsibly, for achieving decent results domestically as well as internationally, regardless of how long I serve, whether it's two and a half years or six and a half years, I think that's what I'd like on my tombstone."
Many men of passionate convictions have sought the office of President of the United States. Not Gerald Ford. Though his name had been put forward in Republican Party circles several times as a possible Vice-Presidential candidate, he was content to be the Representative of the people of Michigan's fifth Congressional district from 1949 to 1973-with one exception. "My ambition was to be Speaker of the House someday," he said, "but things did not break that way." The Speaker, who is presiding officer of the House of Representatives, is elected by the party that has majority membership. But the Republican Party remained in the minority. Gerald Ford's emergence from the ranks was more than luck, a commentator has observed: "Articulation is respected in liberal circles as a measure of intelligence. But there are a great many talkers in Congress who are sorely deficient in Ford's shrewdness and judgment." His talents were long appreciated in western Michigan and its hub, the industrial city of Grand Rapids where he grew up. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, July 14, 1913, and named Leslie King, Jr., but before he was two his parents were divorced. He was adopted by his mother's second husband, the late Gerald R. Ford, Sr., a Grand Rapids civic and Republican leader and owner of a paint company. Young Ford's boyhood was rather typical for the times, though he was a mite more energetic than many. He worked at odd jobs after school, attained the top Eagle rank in the Boy Scouts and became captain of his high school football team. Then he went to the University of Michigan and in 1935 graduated with a degree in political science and economics. A member of the university's football team, he was voted its "most valuable player" during his senior year and received several offers from professional teams. He turned down a football career to go to the Yale University Law School, where he worked part time as a football and boxing coach. He graduated in 1941 in the top third of his class. Returning to Grand Rapids, the young man joined a reform Republican group and began law practice. A few months later, America entered the Second World War. He joined the U.S. Navy and eventually became an aviation operations officer aboard the light aircraft carrier U.S.S. Continued on page 11
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being created amidst controversy by Captain Hyman Rickover. After graduation from Annapolis and two years of routine surface duty, Lieutenant Carter had joined the submarine force in 1948and served on a succession of boats-including ~ duty in East Asian waters-for four years. His most recent assignment had been as executive officer on the U.S.S. K-I) an experimental but conventionally powered ..,..- craft. Carter's interview with Rickover is often recalled by the Georgian. It left him with an impression-and a slogan-that he still carries. He recalls it this way: "We sat in a large room by ourselves for more than two hours and he let me choose any subjects I wished to discuss. Very carefully I chose those about which I knew most at the time-current events, seamanship, music, literature, naval tactics, electronics, gunnery-and he began to ask ~ me a series of questions of increasing difficulty.In each instance, he soon proved that I knew relatively little about the subject I had chosen. He always looked right l' into my eyes and he never smiled. I was saturated with cold sweat. "Finally he asked me a question and I thought I could redeem myself. He said, 'How did you stand in your class at the Naval Academy?' I swelled my chest with pride and answered, 'Sir, I stood 59th in a l' class of 820.' I sat back for the congratulations-which never came. Instead, he asked, 'Did you do your best?' I started to say, 'Yes, Sir,' but then I remembered who this was.... I was only human. I finally gulped and said, 'No, Sir, I didn't ~ always do my best.' He looked at me for -.L. a long time and then turned his chair l' around to end the interview. He asked one final question, which I have never been able to forget-or to answer. He said, 'Why not?'" "Why not the best?" has become one of Jimmy Carter's campaign slogans and the title of his autobiography. At the time ..,..- that question was first raised, Lieutenant ~ Carter's responses apparently had been
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sufficient. He was accepted into the nuclear program and took special graduate courses in reactor technology and nuclear physics with the projected assignment of becoming the engineering officer on the second U.S. nuclear-powered submarine, The Sea Wolf. But after a year in the program-and three and a half years before the boat was commissioned-his father was fatally stricken with cancer. After much soul-searching-and what he describes as "the first really serious argument in our marriage"-he resigned his commission and took his wife and their three young sons home to take over the family business after his father's death. In the decade between his return to Plains and his first political office as state Senator, Carter modernized and built up both the peanut warehouse businessand the family farm. He also involved himself in community affairs, serving on the school board and later becoming its president. But he remained somewhat of a social maverick in the community. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision barring racial segregation in public schools was handed down in 1954 and one reaction in the South was the formation of "white citizens' councils" to set up private schools. In. Plains Carter was one of the few who refused to join. He turned down an offer to pay his five dollars dues for him ("I told them I had five dollars but that I'd flush it down the toilet before I'd give it to them"). A threatened boycott of his business failed to materialize, however, and "eventually that altercation, which seemed so important at the time, faded into insignificance," he later recalled. By 1962 his brother Billy (11 years his junior) was old enough to take over the business, and Jimmy Carter was free to concentrate on politics. During Carter's political years his family, on the one hand, grew up. Today John William is 29, James Earl III ("Chip") is. 26, and Jeffrey is 24; all are married and there is one grandchild, John's son, Jason, age one. On the other hand, it began anew: Eight-year-old Amy today is a strawberry blonde tomboy, the proprietor of Plains's best known lemonade stand. In 1976, the Carters celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. His wife, Rosalynn, is a fifth generation Georgian whom Jimmy met in Plains
during his senior year at Annapolis and married a year later. In January 1976, when Jimmy Carter began his formal run for Presidential delegates to the Democratic National Convention, he was perceived as one of the half dozen strongest candidates for his party's nomination. But political observers frequently pointed to him as the Democrats' most likely Vice-Presidential nominee; his status as a Deep South moderate was seen as a balance to almost anybody else's ticket. But from the beginning he proved himself more than a regional candidate, taking pluralities in the first caucus state, Iowa, and the first primary state, New Hampshire. Then, when he came in first in Florida, defeating fellow Southerner George Wallace, he assumed a national prominence and a numerical delegate lead that he never relinquished. Next, in industrial Illinois, he was second only to a "favorite son" candidate; in North Carolina he became the first Democrat to take a flat majority of any 1976 primary vote; in liberal Wisconsin he edged his chief liberal rival Morris Udall; and in Pennsylvania he decisively defeated his chief conservative rival, Henry Jackson. Late entrance into the contest by liberals Frank Church and Jerry Brown reduced his victories on the "popularity contest" side of the primary ballots but-thanks to Carter's strong organization-did not stop his steady accumulation of elected delegates. Victory in Ohio on the last day of the primaries technically brought his delegate count to 1,091, some 400 shy of the number needed for nomination. But Udall in second place had only 313 and within 48 hours enough uncommitted or favorite son delegations-led by Illinois-joined Carter to assure his nomination. The culmination came for the 5l-yearold former Governor and peanut farmer when he mounted the podium at the Democratic Convention in New York City on July 15 and began his acceptance speech for the Presidential nomination. To the appreciative roar of 20,000 persons in the Convention Hall, he began with the same words that had launched his candidacy 580 days before: "My name is Jimmy Carter," he said, flashing the smile that now was nationally famous, "and I'm running for President." D
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Monterey. In his 47 months in service, he
saw battle action in the South Pacific. When the war was over he was a lieutenant commander and nearly 33 years old. He worked for two years as an associate in a Grand Rapids law firm, again engaging in local civic and political activities. In 1948 he made two decisions. One was to marry Elizabeth ("Betty") Bloomer, a fashion designer who had once studied under and performed with the modern dancer Martha Graham. His second decision was to accept the advice of a prominent internationally minded Michigan Senator and run for Congress against the isolationist incumbent in the House. Ford won, championing the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of postwar Europe and calling for deeper American participation in world affairs. Congressman Ford went to Washington in January 1949, for his first two-year office term. It coincided with the first elected term in office as President of Harry Truman, who was Vice President at the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death in 1945. Ford's first Congressional assignment was the Public Works Committee, and he performed so well that two years later he was named to the Appropriations Committee, a vital "purse strings" committee that controls money for all Federal Government expenditures. The subcommittees to which he was assigned included Defense and Foreign Operations, and his work on these bodies enabled him to gain an education in international political and military problems. Still later he became a member of the Select Committee on Astronauts and Space Exploration. As he was returned to office again and again by the voters in Michigan's fifth Congressional district, Congressman Ford began devoting himself to the internal Republican Party organization in the House of Representatives. In 1963 he became chairman of the Republican conference, which determines party policy and legislative positions. Enlarging the traditional role of chairman, hitherto somewhat cere-
monial, he helped prepare party strategy utes after noon, Gerald Ford took the oath and tactics on issues ranging from nuclear of office as President from the Chief Justice testing to an expansion of minority staffing. of the United States. He was the 15th memIn the 1964 elections, the Republican ber of the Republican Party to become Party was dealt sharp losses, triggering a President since it was formed in 1856, the movement to reshuffle party leadership in first being Abraham Lincoln. the House. As a result, Gerald Ford beDespite his strenuous and demanding came House Minority Leader. In this post, public life, President Ford has always been he attempted to hold together a diverse very much of a family man. He and Betty coalition of Republicans and similarly Ford have three sons and a daughter. Mioriented Southern Democrats so that they chael, 26, is a student at Gordon Conwell could be a center of effective political Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, power. His stature as a political leader Massachusetts, and expects to earn a degrew; he was chairman of the 1968 and gree next year. John, or "Jack" as he is called, is 24, a forestry and conservation 1972 Republican National Conventions. Congressman Ford became truly a na- student at Utah State University; he is astional figure in 1973 after the resignation of sisting his father in the current election Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was campaign. Steven, 20, is working on a facing court charges involving tax evasion. ranch near Pomona, California, and is a President Nixon offered the job to Con- student at California State Polytechnic gressman Ford, who accepted. After the Institute. Susan, 19, also aiding her father's required public hearings, he was confirmed campaign, will enroll in a photo-journalism by the Congress and became Vice President course at the University of Kansas. As he almost always finds time for famiin December 1973, the first to take the office under the new 25th Amendment to ly affairs, so does the President manage to the U.S. Constitution. (Previously, when squeeze athletics into his routine. A sixthe Vice President's post was vacated it was footer, he weighs 194 pounds, about the left so until the next national elections, as same as when he played football for the happened when Lyndon B. Johnson suc- University of Michigan. He swims, golfs, plays tennis and skis. When he hasn't time ceeded John F. Kennedy in 1963.) During the next eight months, until' a for these activities, he will exercise vigorfateful day in August of 1974, Vice Presi- ously in the White House. A journalist who dent Ford groomed himself dutifully for accompanied the President on his daily the post he never expected to hold. He rounds for a week last year found the pace visited all the executive departments of the unbelievable. A long-time friend of Gerald Federal Government, conferring with the Ford's, Melvin Laird, a former CongressPresident's Cabinet and their deputies. He man and Secretary of Defense, gave this unattended President Nixon's meetings with usual insight into the President's endurance: "Jerry used to surprise me with his stamCabinet members and Congressional leaders, and served as vice-chairman of both ina and energy. I have known him to fly the U.S. National Security Council and the from Washington in the late afternoon, Domestic Council. His routine included deliver a speech out west, return the same briefings on foreign policy from the Secre- night, and then, after three or four hours' tary of State and on military affairs from sleep, appear at a breakfast meeting fresh and relaxed. Some years ago, though, I the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Watergate." That name had been in perceived that his apparent physical the newspaper headlines for months. It was strength really is rsychological in origin. "Ford is a confident man, at peace with the name of a building complex in Washington in which the Democratic Party's himself and with his God, to whom he campaign committee had offices. The il- prays often, sometimes alone, sometimes legal entry into those offices was the origin in the company of intimate friends. This of the Watergate case, which eventually so inner security enables him to relax almost involved the White House that, under instantly, and to revive himself in a few which time he blocks all threat of impeachment by the Congress, hours-during President Nixon resigned on the morning vexations from his mind. It also explains something of the style I think he brings to of August 9, 1974. .0 Less than a half hour later, a few min- the Presidency." SPAN NOVEMBER 1976 11
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In selecting Senator Walter F. Mondale of this firm, Orville 1. Freeman had his eye on Minnesota as his Vice-Presidential running the Minnesota governorship. In 1958 Mondale mate, Jimmy Carter called him a man with managed Freeman's successful campaign for "a great feeling and compassion for people that post. who need the services of government most." After serving two years as a special assistWhen Carter was asked what had affected ant to the state's attorney general, Mondale his decision, he said: "Once I decided to just was appointed by Governor Freeman in 1960 choosethe person I thought would be the best to serve the unexpired term of the attorney to lead this country and be the most com- general who had resigned. During this time patible to me, the movement toward Senator Mondale made headlines beyond Minnesota. He enlisted 22 attorneys general to sign a Mondale was almost inexorable." Mondale said he had not been interested court brief on behalf of Clarence Gideon, in the Vice Presidency as "a ceremonial post" a Florida convict who sought-and succeedbut had accepted after Carter told him that ed-in getting the Supreme Court to reverse "he intends to use his Vice President in a very his conviction for burglary on the ground broad range of responsibilities, both in do- that he had not been able to afford proper counsel. In November of 1962, Mondale was mestic and foreign policy." Asked what Mondale's first responsibilities re-elected to that post. would be, Carter replied: "The first duty will In 1964 Mondale was a Minnesota delebe to help win the election in the fall." Asked gate to the Democratic Presidential nominatwho influenced him the most in making ing convention at which President Lyndon B. his Vice-Presidential selection, he replied, Johnson picked Senator Humphrey as his "Senator Mondale." Vice-Presidential running mate. On NovemWalter Frederick Mondale rose to political ber 17 of that year-following the Johnsonprominence by ability, hard work, and dili- Humphrey landslide victory-Minnesota gence-and seemingly by being in the right Governor Karl F. Rolvaag appointed Monplace at the right time. He was born in Cey- dale to the two remaining years of Humlon, Minnesota, on January 5, 1928, one of phrey's six-year term as Senator. Since seven children of a Methodist minister, the then he has won two full Senate terms on Reverend Theodore Sigvaard Mondale, of his own. Norwegian ancestry. As a boy he acquired Mondale currently serves on the pow.erful the nickname "Fritz," and was educated in new Senate Budget Committee; the CommitMinnesota's public school system. From 1946 tee on Finance, charged with writing tax and to 1949 he attended Macalester College in trade legislation; and the Committee on St. Paul. In his senior year, he transferred to Labor and Public Welfare. the University of Minnesota, which in 1951 Mondale is regarded by his fellow Senators awarded him a B.A. degree cum laude. as a moderate to liberal in his political phiBy 1948, at the age of 20, Mondale was losophy. He describes himself as a "centrist already in politics. In that year he served as populist." He favors tax reform as well as campaign manager in the successful bid of cuts in the U.S. defense budget as a way of Hubert H. Humphrey, then Mayor of Min- helping the "average family." neapolis, for the U.S. Senate. He has said: "I am for detente, but for After graduation, Mondale entered the U.S. defense too. My targets are waste and uniArmy, served in Korea, and was discharged lateral escalation of the arms race. To save as a corporal in 1953. He then enrolled in the a billion dollars on arms is to save it for things I want to do." Areas where he wants savings University of Minnesota Law School. In 1955 Mondale married Joan Adams of applied include education and child care. St. Paul, who at the time was a history ~Along with defense cuts, Mondale has student at Macalester College. (They have proposed reductions in foreign aid. He has two sons, Theodore, 18, and William, 14, and also suggested that funds for programs such as Skylab and the Space Shuttle could be betone daughter, Eleanor Jane, 16.) Admitted to the Minnesota bar in 1956, ter spent on domestic programs. In his recent he practiced law in the Minneapolis firm of book, The Accountability of Power, Mondale Larson, Loevinger, Lindquist, Freeman and advocates a balancing of Presidential power Fraser until 1960. One of the members of and an increase in executive accountability to
Democrat
WALTER F. MONDALE
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the Congress and the people. In accepting the Democratic Party's nomination for the Vice-Presidential slot, Senator Mondale summed up the basic beliefs upon which he will conduct his campaign. He said: "We Democrats pledge a restoration of a government of compassion because: "We believe in the dignity of work and the right of everyone to have a job. "We believe in a reformed tax system. "We believe in decent health care and good education and good housing and a secure and decent retirement for all. "We believe in strong families and we believe it should be the birthright of every American child, every child, to have the fullest possible opportunity to share in the best of American life. "And we believe in an America which prohibits discrimination for any irrational reason. "We realize that none of this can be easily ot immediately accomplished. We do not ask to govern because we are sure of the answers, but we ask to govern because we are able to look at our problems with fresh eyes. We are a new generation ofleadership. We are strong. We are experienced. And we are ready." D
ntial Candidates called Dole "a fiery jack-in-the-box in the Senate." Another described him as "a tough, ROBERT DOLE partisan political fighter with a conservative voting record, an aggressive debating style, and possibly the best sense of humor in the Senate." Robert Joseph Dole comes from the geographic center of the United States and holds political views at the center of Republican philosophy. Born in Russell, Kansas, on July 22, 1923, he was raised close to Kansas City. Bob Dole has spent his last 16 years in Washington, first as a Representative and most recently as a Senator. Coming from a farm state, Dole has interests in agriculture. He is the ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, and he has worked to support subsidies for farmers. He was an adviser to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Rome in 1965, a member of the Congressional delegation in 1966that studied the food crisis in India, and a member of a similar delegation in 1967 that studied the Arab refugee problem in the Middle East. In choosing Senator Robert J. Dole of Republican Dole was first elected to the Kansas as his Vice-Presidential running mate, House of Representatives in 1960. He was reU.S. President Gerald Ford selected a man elected to the House three successive times whose views coincide with his own and who and then won a Senate seat from Kansas in 1968. Dole was narrowly re-elected in 1974would help unite the Republican:Party. President Ford, in announcing his selec- after a rough, uphill struggle-and he credited tion, made the point that his rival for the Re- his victory in part to President Ford's campublican Party nomination, Ronald Reagan, paigning for him. In the House, Dole had been described as also endorsed his choice. President Ford was "thrilled" to make the choice and he pledged, "a resourceful but virtually anonymous back"We will be out there battling" against bencher." But in the Senate, he asserted himthe Democratic ticket of Jimmy Carter and self, taking the floor to defend the Nixon Administration and lashing out at the DemoWalter Mondale. Senator Dole said that he had not expected crats. Dole argued that President Nixon to be chosen, but he was pleased to be the should not resign during the Watergate scanVice-Presidential candidate. He pointed out dal but stay and go through with the impeachthat the President had come to Kansas in 1974 ment process. This was a lonely stand, as and helped him win an election in which the many Republicans wanted a quick end to opinion polls had preqicted he would lose. "I Watergate, but the Senator's integrity remainsay that to indicate that you can catch up if ed intact and fellow politicians view him with respect. While a Senator, he served a year as you are behind," Dole remarked. To choose his running mate, President chairman of the Republican National ComFord had consulted very widely. He had so- mittee, appointed by President Nixon in 1971. A World War II Army hero, Dole was licited opinions from members of Congress and Republican governors and legislators severely wounded while serving as a mountain around the country. The Senator from Kansas division platoon leader in Italy. He was hospiis known as a hard worker and an articulate talized for three years, discharged with the and effective speaker. A journalist once rank of captain and still suffers a paralyzed
Republican
J.
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right hand. He is a Methodist, and belongs to many veterans' and civic organizations. He was married last December to Mary Elizabeth Hanford, a member of the Federal Trade Commission. A lawyer, she was formerly Deputy Director in the Office of Consumer Affairs. Dole was first married to Phyllis Holden in 1948 and divorced in 1972. They have a daughter, Robin, 22, who is a lawyer. Dole holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Arizona and a Bachelor of Laws from Washburn Municipal University of Topeka. He served in the Kansas legislature before moving to Washington and is known to have basically one hobby: politics. In accepting the Republican Vice-Presidential nomination, Senator Dole pointed out that President Ford's Administration "began with a prayer." "The President," he noted, "accepted stewardship of our nation in one of the most difficult times in our history. With the help of God, with the good will of our people, and with his own courage, compassion and wisdom, America has weathered the storm." He added: "Today, there are those who tell Americans to lower their expectations. America was not built by men and women with limited vision and small hopes and low expectations. "It was built by men and women with tomorrow on their minds. It was built by believers-by those who could look across the broad sweep of a bounteous land of unbounded opportunity and see possibilities none before had ever even dreamed of.... "We need not ask the American people to lower their expectations. Rather let us ask them to raise their expectations ever higheras they always have in the past-and let us do so with that confidence which comes with the knowledge that we have a President who has met and will continue to meet the highest expectations-and to excite the highest aspirations of our people .... "President Ford has begun the great work of building peace, renewing prosperity, and restoring confidence in the basic institutions of freedom in America. "But there is more to be done .... "In this Bicentennial Year, we have the opportunity to restore this nation to those principles upon which America was founded two hundred years ago. It is for us now to determine whether we shall be the designers of our destiny-or the victims of it." 0
AMER CA' BIG NUClEAR ENERGY CONTROVERSY To thousands of Americans, scientists and laymen alike, a nuclear reactor is an unacceptably dangerous, expensive and unpredictable device. But the defenders of nuclear energy claim: 'The choice right now isn't this system or another, the choice is this system or less energy.' Someone had threatened a bombing. Angry farmers had filed suit to prevent dispossession of their land. When proponents and opponents of nuclear power met in the winter of 1975-76 in a court in Kansas City, Missouri, the controversy had churned on unresolved for nearly three years. The issue was the liCensing of a 1,150-megawatt nuclear power plant that two midwestern electric power companies were proposing to build in farm and ranching country 75 miles southwest of Kansas City. The forum for the confrontation was-typical: hearings before the Atomic Safety Licensing Board of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC sent out staff, attorneys, and a panel of three administrative judges to listen to arguments for and against the licensing and then go back to Washington and decide. The hearings took nearly six weeks. A 1,150-megawatt plant is a very large installation. It would cost, the utilities estimated, $948 million to build, and would be fueled with 100 tons of uranium, a third of which must be replaced during each year of operation. The hearings took so long because two intervenors against the companies raised important questions about the necessity of such a behemoth operation in a region of plentiful sun and wind and coal. The State of Kansas, where the plant would be located at a
place called Wolf Creek, and a local environmental group called the Mid-America Coalition for Energy Alternatives (MACEA) filed as intervenors. MACEA, which is informally affiliated with such organizations as the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, and the Kansas Farmers Union, includes among its 100 paid members housewives, scientists, engineers, attorneys, and physicians. Both the state and MACEA questioned the economic necessity for the proposed plant. They would have questioned its safety and the deposition of its wastes, but the NRC has ruled that issues of safety and waste disposal cannot be debated at the level of local licensing hearings. "Our position was that the plant is being built too soon," explains William H. Griffin, a Kansas deputy attorney general who represented his state at the hearings. "We think local power consumption is going to go down in the next decade because for the first time the cost of power is starting to go up. It used to get Opposite page: Stylized cross section of the containment structure of a nuclear power plant. At its heart is the reactor, where atomic fission produces heat-and, ultimately, electricity. The many layers that surround the core (as well as the choice of terrain below) are intended to guarantee that no lethal radiation can escape.
'You are much more likely to die by meteorite, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, toxic gas, explosion, airplane or automobile crash than by nuclear accident,' says the Rasmussen Report. cheaper or stay the same. We don't think we're going to need a nuclear power plant around here until about 1990, if ever. And if we don't need it, with all the related questions of safety and waste disposal, then we don't want it." That was MACEA's position too, according to Mrs. Diane Tegtmeier, the organization's president, a biochemist and Kansas City housewife. Mrs. Tegtmeier thinks there's reason to hope that the license will be denied. "I was impressed by the fairness of the judges," she says. "I think that if they decide on the evidence they'll reject the license." The Wolf Creek plant will almost certainly be built. The NRC rarely denies a license when a utility has adequately prepared its plans. But the lengthening hearings, the increasing vigilance of intervenors, and the mounting costs of the licensing process demonstrate how complicated nuclear power issues have become. Kansas City is only one of many cities where nuclear power is being debated. The debate comes late in the day. Nuclear power on a scale of megawatts is a fact of life in the United States of America. Fifty-eight commercial nuclear power plants have been installed, and most of them are operating. Sixty-nine additional commercial power reactors are under construction, and 101 more, including Wolf Creek, are capitalized and seeking government licensing. "Nuclear power is an industry of today," remarks Dr. Herbert Kouts, director of safety research for the NRC, "not an industry of tomorrow." (In 1975, the Atomic Energy Commission was divided into ERDA [the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration] and the NRC, ERDA assuming research and development functions, the NRC assuming those of regulation and safety.) Of all the systems of energy production operating in the United States at the present time, nuclear power is the most controversial, and laws that would effectively limit or ban nuclear power plants are now under consideration in at least 15 states. [See story on the California referendum, pages 18-19.] Nuclear power remains controversial primarily because many Americans, including a number of knowledgeable scientists, question its safety. They do so despite its remarkable past record, a record summarized in the most prestigious-and most criticized-of official NRC studies of reactor safety, the Rasmussen Report (so named, informally, for its director, Dr. Norman C. Rasmussen, professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]-its official designation is Wash-1400): "Counting commercial and military power reactors, there have been almost 2,000 reactor-years of experience with no nuclear accidents affecting the public." In the basic components of its assembly, a nuclear reactor is hardly more complicated than a fire. Its components are so uncomplicated, in fact, Jhat several working nuclear reactors were once assembled by natural forces in Africa, the result of underground water filtering through a rich bed of uranium ore. They burned on untended for 25,000 years, until their decay products shut them down about 1.8 billion years ago. French geologists uncovered the remains in Gabon last year. The fossil reactors of Gabon were assembled from water and uranium ore. Modern commercial reactors-their basic design
borrowed from the reactor that Admiral Hyman Rickover muscled into existence in the 1950sto power nuclear submarinesare assembled from water and pellets of the common uranium isotope U-238 enriched with a 4 per cent admixture of the rarer and more fissile isotope U-235. The pellets are loaded into rods half an inch in diameter and 13 feet long; the rods, in spaced bundles and with control rods inserted among them to increase or decrease the atomic fire, are then submerged in water in a steel tank shaped like a giant drug capsule. The water serves to slow the neutrons emitted by the uranium atoms in the fuel bundles, increasing the likelihood of their entering and fissioning other uranium atoms. It also serves to cool the fuel bundles. Other materials-graphite, air, helium, liquid sodium-would serve as well. But the reactor must be cooled. Otherwise, even with the control rods fully inserted and the chain reaction shut off, it would heat up and destroy itself. The uranium, a ceramic element with a melting point of about 5,000° F, would melt, taking fuel rods and reactor vessel with it. A nuclear reactor, then, is a fire with a difference: a fire that cannot, except by disassembly or slow decay, be extinguished. The accident that nuclear engineers most fear is a loss-ofcoolant accident, a LOCA. Partial LOCAs have occurred in American reactors, but they have never, in commercial lightwater reactors, resulted in the melting of fuel. (Present commercial power reactors are also called "light-water" reactors to distinguish them from "heavy-water" reactors, which use water composed of deuterium and oxygen rather than ordinary water, and "breeder" reactors, which manufacture more fuel than they consume.) Since a LOCA is potentially the most destructive of all mechanical reactor failures, pmch of the effort-and the expense-of reactor design has been devoted to its prevention or containment. Safety systems of bewildering redundancy surround a commercial reactor's nuclear core: emergency core cooling systems, backup electrical generators to power emergency pumps, heat exchangers, . decontamination sprays, primary and secondary containment structures of steel or concrete or both, and much more. One or another of these systems, at various times in various reactors, has failed, but all of them have never failed at the same time. According to the Rasmussen Report, the probability of a LOCA is comfortingly small, a thousand times smaller than the probability of a large meteorite destroying a major American city: one in a billion. The Rasmussen staff found that the most likely consequences of a reactor breaching its confinement would be not an explosion but merely a meltdown, the molten material burning its way into the earth and slowly cooling off. For 100 reactors, the report gives the chances of this event as one in 200 per year, and the results as less than one early fatality, less than one early illness, and less than $1 million property damage beyond the power plant itself. You are much more likely to die by meteorite, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, toxic gas, explosion, fire, airplane crash, fall, or automobile crash than by nuclear accident, according to the Rasmussen Report. "The report says that nuclear power is safer than other ordinary risks of life," the NRC's Dr. Kouts comments, refi~cting the general confidence in the Rasmussen Report and optimism about nuclear safety that I
found at both the NRC and ERDA. "I don't believe in the absolute safety of anything, but I'm well convinced reactors are safe. The predictions can't be far wrong. We've almost got enough hours of actual operation to give us a statistical sample rather than an estimate, and so far everything matches. The Rasmussen Report is so good that people opposed to nuclear power feel they can't make their case unless they can discredit it." I mentioned the nuclear engineers who had resigned their careers to protest reactor safety. Dr. Kouts, who is a physicist formerly on the staff of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, said, "Yes, there've been four or five over the years. I always say there's about a 15 per cent lunatic fringe in every profession." Attempts to discredit the Rasmussen Report have indeed been made, and not only by "people opposed to nuclear power." Partisanship is the first ground on which it has been criticized. The criticism may be unfair, although Dr. Rasmussen is a spokesman for nuclear power who has appeared at scientific and citizens' meetings to defend his report. The report, undertaken at a cost of $4 million to the Federal Government, required three years to complete. It was prepared under his "independent direction," according to its introduction, "to estimate the public risks that could be involved in potential accidents in commercial nuclear power plants of the type now in use." Its objective was "to make a realistic estimate of these risks and, to provide perspective, to compare them with non-nuclear risks to which our society and its individuals are already exposed." Some have argued that juxtaposing nuclear and non-nuclear risks is juxtaposing apples and oranges. "In human, moral terms," writes Dr. Barry Commoner, biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, in his new book, The Poverty of Power, "it seems to me there is no valid comparison between the risks of personally tragic individual events like auto accidents and the risk of operating a device which has the acknowledged, designed capabilityhowever improbable-of killing tens of thousands of people at once." The report's implied conclusion is that nuclear power is safer than any other risk to which mortal man exposes himself. To which Dr. Commoner responds: "It should be noted as well that the extremely small probability relates only to whether or not the accident will occur, and not to the consequences. However improbable, when an accident does happen, it is likely to be highly destructive." That risk, Rasmussen and Commoner both stress, is one that society must decide if it is willing to take. The report has also been criticized for its assumptions. It does not consider the possibility of sabotage, except to emphasize the impregnability of nuclear power plants, which is questionable, and to say that "the worst consequences associated with acts of sabotage at reactors are not expected to lead to consequences more severe than the maximum consequences predicted by the study," which is hardly consoling. It assumes, as already noted, efficient evacuation of the surrounding population. It neglects the potential dangers from what nuclear engineers call the "back end" of the nuclear fuel cycle-the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, its transportation and storage, and the handling of nuclear wastesand confines itself to commercial reactors alone. It argues that an increase in the number of operating power reactors beyond its model 100-ERDA estimates 725 will be operating by the year 2000-will not necessarily increase the risk by a factor of 7.2 because reactors, like commercial airliners and automobiles, get safer as their technology improves. The assumption is substantiated by airline and automobile data, but remains to be
proven for reactors; power reactors, at least, have been safe so far. But the reactors on line today, which are custom-designed (the industry is moving slowly toward standardization, which confers the benefits of improved safety that the report is assuming), will still be on line 20 years from now. Finally, the report uses new and still controversial methods to develop its predictions. Those methods-they involve calculating complicated sequences of possible events-have been criticized both within and outside the government. In other words, even if the data on which the Rasmussen Report founded its calculations is reliable, the report's conclusions may be wrong, and therefore its probabilities may be wrong. The NRC is aware of the deficiencies in the Rasmussen Report. A new agency, it is not burdened, as was the AEC, with the conflicting responsibilities of regulation and promotion. Its response to criticism of the report has been to tighten regulationit has forced several commercial reactors to shut down-and to accelerate its program of safety research. Its safety research budget for fiscal 1977 is $120 million. Not surprisingly, NRC's most urgent priority of study is the loss-of-coolant accident. A full-scale LOCA with nuclear fuel has never been staged, and considering the possible consequences it may never be, but the NRC is preparing to stage a smaller-scale LOCA with nuclear fuel in a test reactor in Idaho, and is conductin$ LOCA experiments with electrically heated nonnuclear cores. But even assuming that reactors are reasonably safe and that safety research and rigid regulation will make them safer, the possibility that one might blow is real. What would be the consequences? Americans accept 50,000 automobile deaths a year, grievous though the toll is, primarily because they don't all happen in the same place at the same time. How would we respond to widespread death and disease from a reactor accident? Dr. Hans Bethe, the physicist and Nobel Laureate who supervised the design of the plutonium core of the first atomic bomb, asks a' related question in a carefully reasoned defense of nuclear power in the January 1976 issue of Scientific American: The average probability that the exposed population will get fatal cancer from the released radioactivity is only about 1 per cent, compared with the 15 per cent probability that the average American will contract fatal cancer from other causes. Will the affected people in the case of a reactor accident be rational enough to appreciate this calculation? Or would an accident, if it occurs, have a psychological effect much more devastating than the real one?
And if a major accident should occur in the year 2000, when 45 per cent of America's electrical capacity is predicted to come from nuclear power, what then? Proponents of nuclear powe~, good and decent men concerned about our swelling energy needs, believe such arguments extreme if not absurd. Are they? Who is to judge? "Society," answers the Rasmussen Report. Short-term safety is not the only controversy with which nuclear power is involved. Here are some of the others: • Nuclear reactors create nuclear wastes, and the NRC has not yet found a reliable method for disposing of them. They will be dangerous to the human environment for at least hundreds of years. The NRC is studying burying them in bedded salt or . About the Author: Richard Rhodes is a magazine writer who contributes to such periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire and Redbook.
'N uclear power remains controversial primarily because many Americans,· including a number of knowledgeable scientists, question its safety. They do so despite its remarkable past record.' drilling them into granite. It is following with interest Japanese proposals to deposit them in the trenches of the deep Pacific, where, in the course of geologic time, they should be driven safely down into the purifying furnace of the earth. "Let's put wastes in perspective," says Dr. Kouts. "We're talking about a total output from all projected reactors of a 200-foot cube of solid wastes by the year 2000. That's not a huge amount." It is a lethal amount. But the problem of nuclear wastes will almost certainly be solved. • Nuclear proliferation has potentially serious consequences. But proliferation has more to do with foreign policy than with private domestic nuclear power, although one should note that the two major suppliers of power reactors, General Electric and Westinghouse, sell a significant proportion of their plants abroad, sales indirectly supported by such government "subsidies" as government fuel reprocessing and the Price-Anderson Act. • The cost of building nuclear power. plants is increasing rapidly. A 1,000-megawatt plant ordered in 1975 is expected to cost $868 million, compared to $226 million in 1969. Dr. Commoner believes nuclear power will price itself out of the market within 10 years. Harvard's George Kistiakowsky cites statistics which support that argument: "The objective and incontrovertible fact is that the enthusiasm of the electric power industry . for nuclear reactors has evaporated, at least for the time being." ERDA believes, h0wever, that the slowdown is only temporary, a result of the recession and the consequent reduction in demand for electric power. The structure of utility rates actually favors nuclear installations over less expensive coal plants. They cost more to build, but-'-theoretically-less to operate. • The cost of uranium is also going up, because the supply system is not yet geared to meet demand. Uranium is among the most plentiful elements in the earth's crust, but it exists predominately in extremely low concentrations. The proven domestic supply of good-quality ore is limited. Roger W.A. LeGassie, who is assistant administrator for planning and analysis at ERDA, is convinced the problem is not a grievous one. According to LeGassie, ERDA considers present light-water reactors to be only an intermediate necessity. "It's important to preserve our capability of nuclear power because uranium is one of the few domestic fuels that can provide significant energy over the next 20 years." This doesn't mean we won't need that capability 21 years from now, LeGassie emphasizes, but by then we will probably have other choices as well: solar power, power from thermonuclear fusion, gasified coal, breeder reactors. Without breeder reactors, however, nuclear power plants eventually must be either shut down or fueled with uranium extracted from low-grade ore. Assuming that the cost of such uranium is not the overriding issue, as LeGassie and others say, mining it would extend the life of light-water power plants by generations. But to do so would introduce another cost, a cost to the environment. "If we go to low-grade ore," Dr. Bethe cautions, "the mining would destroy vast areas of land." One solution to the fuel problem, ERDA believes (and is investing $700 million in fiscal 1977 to pursue), is the breeder reactor. To the light-water reactor system the breeder reactor
adds, around the core of nuclear fuel, a "blanket" of ordinary uranium. Stray neutrons from the nuclear chain reaction then not only generate heat by fission but also transmute some of the uranium in the surrounding blanket into plutonium. A similar process was used during World War II at the Manhattan Project's installation at Hanford, Washington, to manufacture plutonium for the first atomic bombs. Since plutonium is an element different from uranium, the uranium blanket, after sufficient bombardment and transmutation, can. be removed and processed chemically, yielding back some of its uranium and a quantity of fissionable plutonium as well. The plutonium can then be used to fuel other reactors. Breeder reactors theoretically create four units of plutonium for every three they use, and might therefore stretch out the available fuel almost indefinitely. Breeders can also be used to transmute another common element, thorium~ into U-233, a fissionable isotope of uranium and the best of all for reactor purposes because it fissions so efficiently. ERDA takes the position that the technology of breeder reactors is not yet mature. ERDA's National Plan for Energy Research, Development and Demonstration awards breeders only "an initial . contribution beginning before 2000" but "a very major contribu-
CALIFORNIANS Should curbs be imposed on the development of nuclear power? A referendum on the subject was held by the State of California on June 8, 1976. The decisive nature of the outcome surprised many: Californians voted for nuclear power by a hefty 2-1 margin. Voters rejected a highly controversial proposition that, if carried, would have meant a virtual moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants in California. However, all new plants will be built under stringent regulations controlling reactor safety and the disposal of nuclear wastes and providing for penalties for accidents. The California referendum was set up under a political process called "the initiative" by means of which private citizens, if they can get enough signatures, can initiate legislation. In this case, the opponents of nuclear power got nearly half a million people to sign their petition calling for a statewide referendum. Antinuclear groups are active in other states, and several more referendums are in the offing. Oregon and Colorado will go to the polls on November 2. "Signatlire campaigns" for a referendum are on in seven more states-Washington, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma. The battle over California's antinuclear proposition was fierce. The nuclear power industry opposed it. So did an array of prominent scientists, including Dr. Robert Hofstadter, Nobel laureate in physics at Stanford University; Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, Nobel laureate in chemistry at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; and Dr. Edward Teller, "father of the hydrogen bomb." These scientists put forth two potent arguments in favor of
tion in the post-2000 period." It is budgeting its research for solar power and thermonuclear fusion-the most important breeder alternatives-to bring their technology, neglected or underfunded in the past, up to the level of breeder technology before that time. Theoretically, the next generation will be in a position to choose among the three. Breeder reactors, with their greatly increased content of fissionable materials, would offer greater risks than .those described in the Rasmussen Report, including the theoretical risk of atomic explosion if a complete meltdown should occur and the melted fuel arrange itself into a critical mass. But breeders are not yet on line, and ERDA claims it is making a serious effort to offer alternatives before they are. "We don't want to decide what's best for the next generation," LeGassie says. "We want to give it a choice by having a number of developed technologies on hand." The resolution of the problem lies in the decisions Americans make about nuclear power today. If major dependence on nuclear power, given some degree of risk, is acceptable for the next 20 years, why should it not be acceptable at some greater degree of risk for 200 years more? The real and important question is whether or not we have any choice. ERDA says we do not if we continue using energy at our present increasing rate. LeGassie: "The choice right now isn't this system or another, the choice is this system or less energy." But ERDA bases that conclusion on the assumption that we are running out of oil, an assumption that Barry
Commoner, among others, questions. He writes: The declining rate of oil discovery per year is a result of company decisions to cut back on exploration efforts rather than of the depletion of accessible oil deposits. We are not so much running out of domestic oil as running out of the oil companies' interest in looking for it.
Nor are we running out of coal. America has more known coal resources than any other nation in the world. "By most estimates," says .the National Plan, " ... our coal resources are very large even without further technological development." And then it adds a qualification: "The present challenge is to recover and use them with minimum environmental impact." We have enough oil and gas to last at least another 20 years, and we may have enough to last much longer. We have enough coal to last until nonfossil sources of power-solar power, thermonuclear fusion-are perfected and commercialized, though the mining and burning of it present hazards to health and environment that have not yet been resolved. Practical methods of energy conservation-better building insulation, less voracious automobiles, more efficient use of waste heat from power generation and manufacturing-can at least slow the growth of our energy demands. Why then risk nuclear power at all? That is the argument Dr. Commoner and Dr. Kistiakowsky have raised, as have such local groups as Kansas City's MACEA, such national organizations as the Sierra Club and the Union for Concerned Scientists, and other thoughtful American scientists and laymen. 0
VOTE 2-1 FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY nuclear power: (1) There has never been a nuclear accident involving loss of life or injury outside a power plant facility; (2) The disruption of nuclear power will reduce California's power supply. In a full-page newspaper advertisement, the pronuclear group said: "We as scientists and engineers believe that the energy crisis is a serious and growing problem for the United States. Every day our country becomes more and more dependent on foreign nations for our energy resources. If we do nothing to free ourselves from this dependence, we will soon reach the point where another oil embargo could result in massivedisruption of our economy." The antinuclear group maintained that not enough is known about nuclear power dangers to avert a catastrophe. Therefore, the industry should be forced to adopt stringent safety measures and pay for damages resulting from any accident. Both groups were equally vociferous, and surveys conducted during the referendum campaign showed that large numbers of Californians were confused and uncertain about the complex questions involved. The antinuclear group also included many prominent Americans-physics Nobel laureate Dr. Harold C. Urey of the University of California and noted environmentalists Barry Commoner and Kent Gill-as well as such organizations as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who has made the fight to halt nuclear power one of his major goals, says: "This is only the first round on atomic energy and its expensive and catastrophic risks to present and future generations."
In California, industry and government officials were elated with the results of the referendum. Robert C. Seamans, Jr., head of .the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, said the California vote would be "very significant" in keeping the nuclear option open for Americans. "We've just got to make use of our nuclear capability to get through the next 25 years," he said. While the antinuclear group lost the California referendum, they won passage of three new state laws (enacted a week before the referendum) that gave the state the most stringent nuclear controls in the U.S. These new regulations do not apply to existing power plants; but they delay the operation of new plants until authorities are satisfied with their safety standards. Two of the measures require approval by the State Energy Commission and the legislature of fuel-reprocessing and wastedisposal methods and facilities. The third law puts a one-year moratorium on new plants pending a study of whether building new reactors underground would provide additional safety margins in case of a core meltdown-the most feared nuclear accident. It could lead to a requirement that all new plants be constructed below ground. Both pro- and anti-nuclear groups agree that California's vote, by focusing attention on the nuclear issue, will pay nationwide dividends in more sophisticated safety systems and in faster development of fuel-reprocessing and waste-disposal methods. Paul Turner of the Atomic Industrial Forum sees this benefit: "We had a safe system and an environmentally clean system to begin with. Now, because of this public concern, we'll probably have a safer and cleaner system."
WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS PICTURE MAGAZINE: THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Water spiders, otters, flamingos, gorillas, the stratosphere, undersea exploration, space travel and archeological expeditions-all these are subjects that have been covered in lush color in the pages of the 'National Geographic.' It is generally thought of as a magazine of exotic scenes. But as the following picture story shows, it is also a magazine deeply concerned with people. Frozen in minus 80° Fahrenheit at the South Pole, Thomas Abercrombie, the first press correspondent to cover the region, has also roasted in Saudi Arabia's "Empty Quarter" where the mercury shoots up to 120° Fahrenheit. In fact, the award-winning photographer-writer made a pilgrimage to Mecca, photographing for the January 1966 issue of National Geographic. Later he said: "No other experience can compare with the pilgrimage. It's very moving .... I've never seen anything that unified such a diversity of people, languages, traditions, history, customs under one banner." Such experiences-and the photographers who witness them-have made National Geographic one of America's most successful magazines. Today, the Geographic is known for its colorful and poignant photographs of people and animals and the environment that sustains them. But the 33 men-most of them scientists-who initiated the National Geographic Society in the late 1880s aimed more somberly at "the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge." The first journal of the National Geographic Society appeared in 1890, and when Gilbert Grosvenor was put in charge of the magazine in 1899, he was the only employee on the editorial staff. The society was in debt and the magazine, with a circulation of only 1,000, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Grosvenor immediately embarked upon a membership drive and then turned his attention to his other major problem: The elderly, conservative scientific members of the society's governing board wanted the Geographic to focus mainly on technical, scientific articles largely unintelligible to the average reader. "I thought of geography," Grosvenor
writes, "as a description of the world. It thus becomes the most catholic of subjects, universal in appeal and embracing nations, people, plants, animals, birds, fish. Thus we would never lack interesting subjects." The innovative, enterprising editor remained with the Geographic for 55 years, and left an indelible imprint on the magazine. From its inception, virtually every country and major city in the world-including many obscure ones-have been highlighted in its pages. Stories have focused on such diverse subjects as water spiders, otters, flamingos, gorillas, the Louvre and the Smithsonian In: stitution. Spurred by their interest in science, Grosvenor and subsequent editors have featured articles on the universe, space travel, undersea exploration and on anthropological and archeological expeditions-from Roman ruins to giant stone heads in Mexico. Grosvenor had firm rules about what type of story he would accept. One principle was absolute accuracy. Others required that each article be of permanent value and avoid partisanship and controversy. "I also decided that no derogatory material would be printed about any country or people. Too often have I seen unfair and erroneous statements made about other nations in the name of 'objective reporting' or 'constructive criticism.' The Geographic has always dealt in facts, not bias, rumor or prejudices," Grosvenor writes. The National Geographic eventually became famous for its photography as well as its articles. It began to publish large numbers of photographs and illustrations-more than any other magazine of its time. In the days before color film, Grosvenor often had blackand-white photographs "colored in" by staff artists for accurate representation. The Geographic pioneered in color photo-
graphs of Arctic life, aerial photographs of the North and South Poles, photographs taken from the stratosphere, underwater color photographs and stop-action color photographs of birds. Although the National Geographic Society is best known today for its magazine, one of its original purposes was to support scientific research. Its first grant went to American Naval Commander Robert Peary who made the first expedition to the North Pole in 1909. In recent years, the society has given some $2 million annually for research. This money is derived from membership dues and the sale of maps, globes, books and TV programs. Among many interesting research projects sponsored in part or fully by the National Geographic Society is a grant enabling an American professor of zoology to study a poison produced by the Red Sea sole in the Gulf of Aqaba. This lethal substance holds promise as a shark repellant. Often the results of such research appear in the Geographic. Indeed, the National Geographic Society today is engaged in a wide variety of publishing, cartographic and financial aid programs. The society's cartography division is famous for its distinctive, accurate maps, globes and atlases. The Geographic frequently contains a separate map keyed to a particular article. The society's profitable book division has a wealth of titles on such diverse subjects as ancient history, the Nile, religions, America's parks and dinosaurs. Branching out into all areas of the media, the National Geographic Society produces at least four color television specials a year on topics similar to those covered in the magazine. The society also produces a school bulletin, which is a simplified version of its journal. In addition, more than 2,000 newspapers, Text continued on page 25
little girl (above) is dressed in new clothes to celebrate Diwali. Her father is a well-to-do tobacco merchant.
Flower-bedecked
Pied piper in a cowboy hat (top), an itinerant flutist vainly tries
to captivate a toddler in Aspen, Colorado. The town's famous summer festival draws top musicians from all over the world. Young fisherman from Kerala (left) welcomes a visiting photographer with a broad smile and the gift of a crab. The coastline and backwaters of Kerala teem with various kinds of sea food.
Ungainly and uncommon steeds (below) gallop in ostrich races held yearly in Virginia City, Montana. In an earlier running of the tourist-oriented event, some entries bolted into the desert, and one driver took three days to return. Today, a fence prevents such mishaps.
Blanket of light covers a volunteer (left)
in time-exposure demonstration of a cancer-detection technique at the Associated Universities Hospital in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Similar to a Gei/(er counter, the machine locates radioactive isotopes that have been injected intravenously and that later collect in malignant tissue. Boys in brand-new summer hats (right)
turn an antique farm machine into an improvised merry-go-round. They are visitors to the annual Folk Festival in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, held to preserve and pay tribute to the Dutch way of life.
In the Golden Temple at Amritsar, a worshipper reads a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib, which contains the wisdom of the Sikh saints. Every morning, Sikhs begin their day with the prayer: "There is one God. He is the Supreme Truth."
magazines and radio and television stations receive its weekly newsletter on the society's research and on curious scientific facts. Its popular lecture series, held in Washington, D.C., offers some 20 talks a year. Speakers have included American Presidents, famous explorers, statesmen and scientists. For all its success and popularity, the Geographic has its share of critics. Journalists have criticized its style of writing as too juvenile, too simplistic. Although the National geographic prides itself on its accuracy, it suffers from errors of omission. If certain facts about a country or city are "unpleasant"-:racial prejudice, dictatorial government-they are often left out. This is in keeping with Grosvenor's philosophy-but that philosophy is changing. The magazine's most recent departure from this policy is its stories on the "unpleasant subject" of pollution. From its modest beginning, the journal has expanded to a staff of 50 editors, 15 photographers, 21 cartographers and 815 other employees. The striking National Geographic Society headquarters near the White House in Washington, D.C., offers unusual exhibits of equipment used in research expeditions. The National Geographic Society, now the largest scientific organization in the world, is a nonprofit organization exempt from paying almost all income taxes as part of the U.S. Government's policy of promoting scientific. and educational activities. Today, the cornerstone of the entire National Geographic Society is its journal. One does not subscribe to the magazine but becomes a member of the society and then receives it each month. To join, it was once necessary to be nominated by someone who was already a member. Today, anyone can join the society by filling OLltan application form and paying the $8.50 annual dues. In India subscriptions can be sent. through such organizations as the. Central NeJVs Agency., New Delhi. About 80 per cent 9f the dues are used for the magazine. ~, With some nine million members spread across the globe, the National Geographic) with its distinctive yellow border, is un, doubtedly.,:'the world's most famous picture magazine. " About the Author: Margaret A. Sood, afree-lance
writer living in New Delhi, formerly worked for Newsweek magazine. She has an M.A. in Indian studies from American University in Washington, D.C., and has written seJ'eralbooks on Indian military history. She also authored a booklet onfamiTy life in India for the State University of New York.
Youngsters carrying specimen nets (above) set out on a nature-study walk along Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts. They are led by a tame herring gull that has been raised ,in Cape Cod's Museum of Natural History.
Bengali poet Subhas Mukhopadhyay (below) appeared in the Geographic's April 1973 issue, which carried the article "Calcutta: India's Maligned Metropolis." It called the city' 'a confluence of many rul tural streams."
Marigold tips the sword of a Sikh festival goer in Jaipur. A 60-page article on India in the Geographic's May 1963 issue covered the entire country-from the snows of the Himalayas to the sands of Cape Comorin.
With her crinkled-,'elvet visage, Mrs. Pearl H. Angstadt ( left) is the quintessentialgrandma, as she rocks and knits without pause. She lives in a small town which keeps alive the arts, crafts and traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Stubble sprouts from the face of a trail-riding ranch hand (above) during roundup time in the American West. Living in true cowboy style, he rides hard from dawn to dusk. At night he finds relaxation in a drink or a game of poker.
Handlebar moustache, gold earrings, necklace, and silver bracelet deck a. Rajasthani dandy (below). He is one. of thousands of visitors to the famous Pllshkar mela, where herds of cattle and camels come to be raced and judged.
'Never generalize about a people, never believe in the stereotype .... Every time I go to the United States it seems like the first time.'
I had met many Americans before I met America. The first encounter was in Paris. I was 18. She was 21. I was brown. She was browner. We were the only two colored people in a class of 30 attending a course in French literature at the Sorbonne. Soon we were learning more about each other than about Moliere or Rostand. She was a good six inches taller than I and beautifully built. She had a mop of fuzzy hair which she was for ever trying to straighten out, thick lips, a full bosom and a coffee complexion which she was for ever trying to lighten with creams and
unguents. She wore the most outrageously loud clothes: large hats, rainbow-colored dresses and garish pink sashes around her slender waist. With my turban and beard I looked outlandish enough; the two of us together made quite a sight. People stared at us, nudged each other with their elbows and sniggered. We didn't care. She called me "honey." I gave her an Indian name, "Chameli," because she was as fragrant as the jasmine. I saw America through Chameli's eyes. She was Negro, a product of Columbia University, and had just landed ajob as a teacher in a
high school. She introduced me to .Richard Wright's novels and lent me copies of Ebony. She was often sarcastic about the whites but seldom bitter. For some years after we had bidden each other a tearful farewell, we wrote to each other and exchanged magazines and books. Then the correspondence dwindled to an annual Christmas card with an abbreviated chronology of what we had been doing. She married a lawyer. I, who became a lawyer, married a teacher. We ceased to correspond. I caught up with Chameli 15 years later in
Detroit. I had my wife and two children with me. Chameli had two husbands behind her and I wasn't sure if she would find a third. I discovered the answer when we met for a private chat before I took my family to the reception she was giving for us in her mother's home. We met in the cafeteria of a department store specializing in clothes for oversize women where she went to buy herself a new dress for the party. The woman who greeted me bore little resemblance to the Chameli I had known. She had become massive. I told her she hadn't changed one bit. She guffawed heartily. "You lying ole Oriental! I love you. You've not changed much yourself except for your paunch and the gray in the beard." The reception gave me a new insight into a section of American society. I had believed that all Negroes were poor, deprived and discriminated against. Chameli's mother's double-storied house with two garages was in a salubriollsgarden suburb. Outside were parked limousines including a few Cadillacs. I had believed all American Negroes were like Chameli-chocolate colored. After I had shaken hands with the guests I learnt that only one couple was white; half a dozen others who looked as white as they were in fact black. Her mother was lighter skinned than the lot. "Let me see you," she said as she embraced me. "I've been hearing about you all these years from my daughter." With her fingers she ca: ressed my beard, nose, eyes and turban. Some years earlier she had lost her vision. Expensive cut glass and sterling silver, champagne and caviar and pate de foie gras; color television in every room. They talked of¡ the younger generation of colored writers and poets. Instead of Negro, the word they used for themselves was black. They told jokes against themselves, the Black Muslims, Elijah Mohammed and the Panthers. They used words like nigger and Uncle Tom for each other. It was the first time I heard the word "honkie" used for a white man to his face. No offense was meant or taken. It was a community overflowing with self-assurance, able to laugh at itself and at everyone else. My picture of the American Negro had been somewhat blurred; Chameli's party with the black elite of the city put that picture completely out of focus. It took many visits to the United States to rid my mind of all preconceived notions I had of the country and its people. During the first sojourn, Americans seemed to be the parody of everything that I had heard about them. I still recall the sense of disbelief when I switched on the radio. Brought up on the BBC pattern of a flat
monotone to emphasize its objectivity, the American's announcement sounded like a circus clown's invitation to see the lion tamer. "On the air, everywhere in San Francisco, introducing your favorite telecaster-AI or Bud something-or-the other," followed by the telecaster's avuncular greeting: "Hi folks! How's that cup of kawfee this morning? Noos is good and bad. Ole Fidel Castro's having a spot of trouble. I told you he would, didn't I? That's good noos. But the weather's bad. Snow flurries have jangled the traffic on the main routes. Be sure to keep warm." And so on. It was the same with most of the newspapers. Bizarre headlines, pages and pages of ads, local gossip and sports-the rest of the world relegated to obscure columns. Same with the television-all the 13 odd channels, devoting most of their time to commercials about new gadgets, pizza, coke, smoke, automobiles, airlines-the lot. How seriously could one take this nutty, nonserious conglomeration of peoples? How was it that while they seemed to spend more time having a good time than working, they produced almost half the wealth of the world? And though seemingly uncouth, unsophisticated and naive, they produced the world's greatest scientists, writers and doctors, and even their politicians could outsmart the wiliest Europeans and Orientals. I found my answers in the groves of academe; Rochester, Hawaii, Princeton and Swarthmore. I could make very little of the Rochester lot, even less of those at Hawaii where most students combined surf-riding and working in restaurants with lectures on exotic subjects which caught their fancy. Invariably a few dozed off during my lectures on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Sikhism. It was different at Princeton and Swarthmore. I found that the American campus had an ethos of its own, unlike anything I had experienced in Indian, English or French universities. It was more relaxed, the professor-student relationship more cordial, the classroom atmosphere less formal. Students smoked, girls wore the briefest of dresses and often had their legs on the desks. There was less adulation of sportsmen, less awe of the intellectuals, less fear of examinations. Nevertheless the American collegiate seemed to extract more out of his years at college than his counterparts elsewhere. Lectures were at a discount; emphasis was on dialogues with the guru or seminartype discussions on papers written by them. American boys and girls spent longer hours in libraries than the Indian, English or French students. Although there was considerably more mingling of the sexes-and perhaps cohabitation-young Americans consumed less
liquor and tobacco and put in longer hours of work. On my last assignment at Swarthmore College seven years ago, I saw the change that had taken place in the black-white relationship. All the white students were for integration; most of the blacks I met were for settling scores for past discriminations. As a brown I was in the invidious situation where although my emotional sympathies were with the blacks I found it difficult to understand their point of view. My voyages of the discovery of America have not ended. The last time I was in the States I was a guest of an old friend, Dr. John Hazard, Professor of Soviet Law at Columbia University. He had written advising me to take a cab from the airport: "It will be between eight and nine dollars. Don't let the cabby take you for a ride. You know what cabbies are!" Mine had an Italian name and what I later learnt was known as a Brooklyn accent. It didn't take him long to sense that I was not familiar with the sights. He started pointing out the various landmarks. I didn't pay much attention because my eyes were glued on the meter. I would pay up to nine dollars; not a cent more. "You noo?" he asked me. "Yeah," I replied in my best Yankee. "Foist day! Foine city, Noo Yok. I live on the way. Come and meet the missus. She's never met a Hindoo with a toybon." He was a sharp one. I said no thank you. I was getting late. The meter showed $8.50. Another 50 cents to go. Just as he pulled up he slammed down the flag. He couldn't trick me because I had seen it read 8.50 and Dr. Hazard was at the door waiting for me. "How much?" I demanded in a not too friendly tone. "Nuttin," he replied. "Its your foist day in my country. Let it be on me." I was taken aback. Was this some kind of confidence trick? I insisted on paying the fare. He gave in. "Okay, we'll call it four dollars." I learnt my lesson; never generalize about a people, never believe in the stereotype-not even the cab driver.l recalled a cryptic remark made by the late Prime Minister Nehru on the eve of his visit to the United States. "I have been advised by my friends," Nehru had written to a friend in Boston, "that no one should be required to see America for the first time." It sounded very clever but I did not understand what it meant except that every time I go to the United States it seems like the first time. 0 About the Author: Khushwant Singh, the distinguished Indian writer, scholar and diplomat, is editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India.
Abandoning his ivory tower, John R. Coleman, president of Haverford College, found employment successively as ditchdigger, salad chef and garbage collector. Why? To know how 'the rest of the world lived.'
ANOTHER.DA~AN Part of the folk wisdom of the American Indians holds that you can never understand a man '.'until you have walked a mile in his moccasins." It was a similar philosophy that impelled John R. Coleman, president of a small, highly regarded college in Pennsylvania -Haverford-to embark on a most unusual sabbatical. Such leaves of absence are customarily granted to college teachers and administrators to allow them to do research and to write on projects in their field without the distraction of their daily tasks. But Dr. Coleman, an economist, fulfilled his ambition to experience an entirely different way of life. Unlike the popular writer George Plimpton, who feeds the fantasies of readers by participating in professional sports or movieacting and describing what that is like for an amateur, _Dr. Coleman sought the least glamorous employment he could imagine. For three months he worked as a ditchdigger, a salad man in a restaurant and as a trashman. He kept a diary-initially for his own satisfaction-which he later published as a book to share the insights he had gained through his experiences. His account of manual labor in three different cities-Atlanta, Boston and Washing-
ton, D.C.-is totally free from sociological colades were common for just about anyanalysis or condescension toward the un- thing I did. educated workmen and foremen who were "Yet even in the first year in office, well his colleagues. He concealed his true identity before the honeymoon ended, r felt some and lived within the wages (which amounted subtle changes in myself that I didn't like. to a fraction of his salary as college president) . In one way my contacts were broader than he earned during the period. He is under- ever; the title of college president opens standably more contemplative than the typi- up a lot of doors and brings a lot of invitacal worker; his perspective is drastically dif- tions in the mail. But in other ways the ferent. His mind is an interesting place to contacts were narrower than r had had-for visit. example, in the urban employment programs John R. Coleman was born in Copper at the Ford Foundation, in my extracurriCliff, Ontario, Canada. He graduated from cular work in race relations, labor arbitration the University of Toronto, served in the and television in Pittsburgh, or in the years Canadian Navy and moved to the United I spent on labor-union research in Boston. States to earn his master's degree and Ph.D. Neither in my social contacts nor in my limitin economics at the University of Chicago. ed community activities was I meeting as After several teaching jobs, he was an execu- broad a spectrum of Americans as I once tive in charge of social development pro- knew. The campus was idyllic. r was settling grams for the privately funded Ford Founda- too comfortably into talking with other tion. Coleman has written seven books on people who thought about as I did on most labor and economics and has also taught a issues. That scared me more as each year course on television on these subjects. went by, because r became increasingly aware Why did he choose to do manual labor? of how often we in academia were wrong in "This leave was a long time in taking our solutions to the problems of the day. We shape . .The idea of doing manual labor came had so much to be humble about each dayas long ago as¡ 1968, but it was vague in my especially in economics-but we didn't act mind then. I loved the Haverford job more that way. We saw ourselves as the'saviors than anything else I had done and I desperate- of mankind rather than as just some more of ly wanted to do well at it. The first year and its servants. more were a honeymoon period when ac"I thought too that I, as president, was
OTHERLIFES getting an inflated picture of who I was and undoubtedly arrogances on both sides. There what I could do. When you hear your- must have been deep fears on both sides too. self praised enough, you begin to take the There may also have been some envy flowing students envying the praise seriously. I had no one to play the back and forth-the role that Alben Barkley (a Senator who skills and power of the construction workers, would later become Vice President) played the workers envying the economic opportuniin President Truman's first days in the ties of the students. I wished that I underWhite House. Barkley is supposed to have stood more of what both sides were saying told the new President that people would and feeling." now change toward him and tell him that Because Dr. Coleman is divorced and his he was the greatest person around. 'But children are grown, he had relative freedom you and I both know you ain't,' Barkley to establish temporarily an identity as a , concluded." laborer seeking work. He quickly learned that Dr. Coleman was also influenced by other unlike in the academic world, where credenconsiderations beyond a striving for humility. tials are indispensable, in the world of work, He had challenged his students "to seek a employers were willing to take on a new hand deeper blending of the world outside aca~ . with no questions asked about his backdemics and the world inside," and he felt it ground. To find work, he simply answered somehow cowardly to shun his own counsel. help-wanted advertisements in the local newsHe admits to recognizing an aura of adven- paper, the way most American laborers find jobs, or applied to employment agencies, ture about the unaccustomed experience-a tonic to prevent becoming stale. Perhaps most where firms seeking laborers post job opsignificantly, Dr. Coleman had been puzzled portunities. (Dr. Coleman preferred to tell a and distraught when construction workers minimum of lies when applying for a job. For attacked a group of students in New York example, he would say his experience had who were demonstrating against the Vietnam been in "sales," since fund raising is a major part of a college president's duties.) War in 1970: "There had to be a reason why both groups His quest began in Atlanta in the early. did what they did. I couldn't accept the idea spring when he got a job laying sewer pipes that it was a clash between angels on the one in new residential communities. Although he side and devils on the other .... There were had some fears that he could not manage the
arduous labor at the age of 51, he soon found a contentment in the aching muscles that served witness to a good day's work. "I had time too to watch the cars that raced by all morning. Many of the drivers in them were salesmen, I felt sure. I found myself feeling sorry for them and imagining that some of them would surely be happier raking on the slope rather than rushing to make the same sales pitch again. I jump in my thinking from the conceit that no one is quite like me to the bigger conceit that everyone is just like me. This morning I was at that latter point. I was sure I had found a rhythm in my life that men and women in those cars must envy. My job didn't have much status or pay, but it had a sense of immediate utility and also of peace.". Coleman also absorbed small lessons in leadership. The foreman of his sewer-construction crew drove the men with an unending stream of obscenities and offhand abuse. But he was evenhanded in his treatment and he knew the work well. Although this approach, Coleman concedes, cannot be transferred intact to the ivied halls of Haverford, it is effective and Coleman would gladly work for the foreman again. He learned some of the attitudes of workers he had hoped to discover: "Then we talked politics .... There wasn't
'A society that lauds its philosophers, whether good or bad, and scorns itsa radical thought in the crew. These men had jobs, they didn't expect government to make those jobs much better, and they were more concerned about future tax bills than about future public aid. On this one work site. at least, the ground is barren for the seeds of change.And the political rhetoric I sometimes hear at home would blow away in the wind. "The boredom of the day got to all of us. I had heard each of these men complain about the heavy work we had done earlier in the week. I saw now that that was a different kind of complaint. What I had heard before was as much a boast as a gripe; it was a reminder to ourselves of how much we could do when pushed. Today's moaning was the real thing, a call to be spared from doing nothing. Perhaps it is true, as some writers have said, that the work ethic in America is on the decline. Yet, on the basis of what I have seen on this one job, I cannot agree. These men go on acting as if they want to work when they are at work and to play when they are at play. Just don't mix up the parts of our lives, they ask." Just as Coleman had been hired with no questions asked, he was able to leave the job at the end of two weeks, collecting a paycheck with considerable overtime pay. The crew foreman expressed regret that Coleman was leaving, saying he was a good worker. The timing of Coleman's departure from the construction crew was dictated by a duty connected with his eminence as an economist, not simply his position as a college president. He is a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, a branch of the central government bank. This duty called on his expertise and one day a month of his time for a meeting with the other directors to set monetary policy for the banks in the region. Coleman felt that, in good conscience, he should attend the monthly meeting despite his experiment. So, like Cinderella in reverse, he took off his mud-spattered coveralls and donned the striped suit, shirt and tie of a proper bank director to attend the meeting. "The Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia has an austere front. Its white marble and heavily guarded doors tell the passers-by that this is a no-nonsense spot. I was aware of a switch in roles as soon as I went into the building. The guard greeted me with 'Good morning, Dr. Coleman.' That's not the way they said hello at the construction trailer. Yet I didn't feel myself a better person on account of the title or politeness today. I know that I still have to prove myself at the
bank as I had to do in Atlanta. I'll have it made here when I'm called Dr. Coleman with the same smile that I was called an obscenity on the pipeline." Cooking is a hobby that had come in handy to Coleman as a divorcee, so he attempted to get work in a restaurant in Boston. For three days he underwent the panic and humiliation of being rejected after referrals from employment agencies. He had worked only two hours emptying'trays in one modest restaurant when the boss fired him by handing him two dollars and saying simply, "This isn't your work. I can telL" Coleman was frustrated in attempting to get any further explanation for his discharge. Finally he found a job making salads, sandwiches and desserts at a famous old Boston restaurant. The job had the added fillip that he might be recognized by former students or colleagues from such nearby universities as Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "Probably, though, my uniform is the best disguise I could have. People in restaurants seldom look at the faces of those who wait on their table. They have still less reason to look at a bus boy or salad man. In their eyes, I become a nonperson when I put on white. There's no more color to me than there is to my clothes .... This role takes some getting used to. At the college, I have become accustomed to being noticed on entering a room .... [There] I know that part of my pride stems from having a job for which there is wide respect and which attracts attention to itself. So esteem feeds on esteem, and I become in part what people think I am." Understandably, Coleman was far more alert to the nuances of behavior, the social interactions between his bosses and the employees and among the workers, than a person would be who customarily performed the same tasks for a living. In his book he is cheerful, almost blithe, about some of the obvious hardships of his various jobs. Although he is not explicit about the reasons, he is too sophisticated not to realize that this tour was for him a temporary existence, replete with novelty that could easily have become drudgery if repeated long enough. He would leave the restaurant's crowded kitchen to return to the college president's office; others, like a dishwasher he describes, would pass through a succession of kitchen doors for the rest of their lives. Coleman, like most academics, is adept at gleaning lessons from the events of his ad-
venture for his scholarly life. When he worked behind the sandwich and salad counterwith no previous experience-orders came in from the waitresses at a dizzy pace. The chef who ran the kitchen gave few instructions, but: "He was the kind of supervisor I'd like to be. Whatever he said, the message still came across as 'Go ahead and learn the job-and call for help when you need it.' "There is a striking parallel between that and the way I was introduced into the role of teacher at MIT 24 years ago. No one said to me then that there was any special technique to teaching a class, even with some of the nation's brightest students. I was told what textbook had been ordered for the course, where my students were to meet, and when I should be there. Someone less shy than I might have asked, 'But what do I do the first day?' I didn't ask, and in the years since then no new instructor has ever asked me that question. For the rest, the message from the MIT colleagues who were soon to become close friends was 'When you need help, call us.' I thought before today that there must be no other jobs where there is so little training of the novice as in higher education. The key to survival in both situations may be the courage and sense to ask for help." Elbow deep in lettuce, mayonnaise and ,pickles, Dr. Coleman was apparently preparing the commencement address for the class of 1974. Coleman sensibly rejects the concept that his experience is universal and avoids the delusion suffered by Marie Antoinette when she and her courtiers played shepherdesses at Versailles: . "The myth of the happy worker-in earlier literature read 'the happy peasant'-Iives long and dies hard. Its theme is that those whose work seems simple to others are themselves more easily, more fully satisfied by what they do. Thus we are told to 'believe that most people were happier and more creative in the pre-industrial era and that those closest to the soil and those who make things with their hands (cooks, for example) are most content in our own time. Scholars of economic growth don't help support that myth out of the past; they tell us how hard life was for most of those who lived in 'golden ages.' But our contemporaries who attack all technology and find the root of today's evil in the machine are resolved to keep the myth alive. They tell us that the
~lumbers is in for trouble. Neither its pipes nor its theories will.hold water.' modern man (woman and child too) is the slave of the machine and the time clock; they forget that earlier man (woman and child too) was more often the slave of the shovel and the hoe than he was an artisan of cathedrals or silverware. "The higher one goes in the pecking order of our society, the more one hears the wish to find the simple joys again. That is part of what brought me here, I suppose. And that is what leads frustrated men in top jobs to dream of jumping over all the in-between jobs to land in what they see as a less demanding spot once again." In one journal entry from his salad-man days, Coleman reacts to one of the more unpleasant aspects of life without status: "One of the waitresses I find hard to take asked me at one point today, 'Are you the boy who cuts the lemons?' " 'I'm the man who does,' I replied. "'Well, there are none cut.' There wasn't a hint that she had heard my point. "Dana, who has cooked here for 12 years or so, heard that exchange. " 'It's no use, Jack,' he said when she was gone. 'If she doesn't know now, she never will.' There was a trace of a smile on his face, but it was a sad look all the same. "In that moment, I learned the full thrust of those billboard ads of a few years ago that said, 'BOY. Drop out of school and that's what they'll call you the rest of your life.' I had read those ads before with a certain feeling of pride; education matters, they said, and that gave a lift to my field. Today I saw them saying something else. They were untrue in part; it turns out that you'll get called 'boy' even if you have a Ph.D. It isn't education that counts, but the job in which you land. And the ads spoke too of a sad resignation about the world. They assumed that some people just won't learn respect for others, so you should adapt yourself to them. Don't try to change them. Get the right job and they won't call you boy any more. They'll save it for the next man. "It isn't just people like this one waitress 'who learned slowly, if at all. Haverford College has prided itself on being a caring, considerate community in the Quaker tradition for many long years. Yet when I came there I soon learned that the cleaning women in the dormitories were called 'wombats' by all the students. No one seemed to know where the name came from or what connection, if any, it had with the dictionary defini-
tion: 'any of three species of burrowing marsupials of Australia . . . somewhat resembling groundhogs.' The name was just one of Haverford's unexamined ways of doing things. "It didn't take much persuasion to get the name dropped. Today there are few students who remember it at all. But I imagine the cleaning women remember it well. "Certainly I won't forget being called a boy today." One of the more engaging features of Dr. Coleman's report of his blue-collar-Iabor experience is the fantasies he indulged to combat the workingman's greatest enemy: boredom. Some of these fantasies, as might be expected, are fairly common to the job; others are a product of the college president's unique background. For example, as he toiled behind the sandwich counter of the restaurant, taking hurried orders and occasional abuse from the waitresses, he imagined what it would be like to come back to the restaurant some day as a paying customer and order a full meal. Would he be recognized? What would the waitresses' reaction be? He is certain he can grade the service and food preparation in a manner he could not have before working in the kitchen. When Coleman worked as a trashman in suburban Washington, D.C., he imagined what the personalities and living rooms of his various clients might be like, judged on the contents of their garbage pails and the tidiness with which they prepared their refuse. He also took an altogether cheerful approach to his task that may be untypical of the trade: "We hauled trash foi: a solid four hours without a break of any sort except for about five minutes when we stopped at one street's end to talk. I suppose I may have walked further than this before, perhaps in climbs on Mount Katahdin in Maine and Mount Assiniboine in Canada, or perhaps on route marches in the wartime officers' training corps at the University of Toronto. I have carried as heavy loads as these for short times and briefly carried heavier ones in Atlanta five weeks ago. But the combination of distance and weight was a record for me. "There was every incentive to work fast. The time was ours. If we moved slowly we hurt only ourselves. If we moved quickly, we cut our day and still got our pay .... My shoulder called out for mercy each time I put another full barrel on it, and my legs occasionally shook as I started out to the street.
But all the rest of me said, 'Go, trashman, go.' I could not have guessed in advance that there would be exhilaration in this. The only past experience with which I could compare it was the cross-country running I did at Cornwallis in Nova Scotia during basic seaman's training with the Canadian Navy. I came in 19th out 'of a field of over 150 men. There were Cokes for the first 20 who finished. I wish I had saved the bottle; that is the only athletic award of my life. Those Haverfordians most committed to a more vigorous program in competitive athletics have felt in the past that they have not had a strong enough friend in the president's office. I know tonight that that may change this autumn. But it will be hard to explain that I finally learned the joy of competitive sports on a garbage run in Maryland." In his trashman persona, Dr. Coleman learned that people are persistently, though unconsciously, rude to¡ garbage collectors. When he drove through the neighborhood he had collected trash from, on his day off, dressed in his business suit, residents nodded and smiled. On duty he made it a practice to greet homeowners on the route whenever they were home when he arrived to get the garbage-and slowly, he began to receive friendly acknowledgments in his own program of consciousness raising. He concluded that the rudeness was not a result of deepseated snobbery, but rather a form of insensitivity. On the whole, Dr. Coleman came to like and admire most of the people he worked with and most of those he worked for. He was satisfied that the experience had broadened his perspective and his empathy with others. He quotes John Gardner, a one-time government official turned social activist, who says: "A society that lau4s i(s: philosophers, whether good or bad, and scorns its plumbers is in for trouble. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." Coleman adds, "He might have gone a step further and called for respect for both our economists and our refuse men; otherwise they'll both leave trash behind." Coleman undertook his personal experiment neither for publicity nor financial gain. His book-Blue-Collar Journal-which was initially his diary written solely for himself and his family, is not the stuff of bestsellers. But it is an immensely valuable look at a world that too many habitual book readers are content to pass by without examiningor even noticing. 0
WHAT IS VIKING DOING ON MARS? The Viking mission to Mars has sparked worldwide speculation about the possibility of life on the Red Planet. Dr. Carl Sagan, Director of Planetary Studies at Cornell University and a key figure in the Viking team, says that even scientists have been quoting incredible odds-like a million to one-against the chance of Viking discovering life on Mars. Says Sagan: "When I hear such odds, I always lay my dolIar down .... If I win, I win big; if I lose, I lose only a little." These scientists-and many others-are confident that the earth we live in is not a freak planet in a vast desolate lifeless universe. But even after a mass of data and hundreds of closeup pictures of Mars from Viking I and Viking II, their thesis may not be conclusively proved. Does this mean that all the time (more than seven years), money ($2,000 million on the two Vikings) and effort (more than 1,000 scientists Continued on following page
The photograph at left, the first color view of the Martian surface, was taken on July 21, the day following the landing of Viking 10n the Red Planet. The view is southeast from Viking and the time on Mars is approximately noon. The photo shows rocks on a plain of sand, with the horizon about three kilometers away. The reddish soil or sand may be limonite (hydrated ferric oxide). The photo was shot through red, blue and green filters and relayed to Earth as three black-andwhite plctures, which were then converted into one color photo. Above: The emblem of the Viking mission, designed by an American high school student, shows the lander on Mars with the u.s. flag in the background.
and engineers) expended by NASA have been in vain? "Not at all," says Dr. Thomas Vrebalovich, one of the leading experts on unmanned space missions, who played a major role in the success of America's earlier Mariner missions to Mars. Dr. Vrebalovich, now Science Counsellor of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, feels that the Viking mission, even if one looks at it only as a robot on the surface of Mars, is by any yardstick a fantastic achievement. It symbolizes, however remotely, Pascal's maxim: "By space the universe encompasses and swallows me as an atom; by thought I encompass it." How else can one describe the scientific feat of sending an artifact on an ll-month journey through 460 million miles of space, making it softland on a hostile planet, enabling it to look for every shred of evidence of life, and commanding it to report back to earth its findings-perhaps with more precision than a human being could? The final question of life on Mars (the most earthlike planet, according to Dr. Vrebalovich) may help man to determine by analogy the place of his own planet and its life forms in the universe. If life exists, he will have created a new science of biology, based on a completely new set of data. If life does not exist, he will have a new approach to understanding the problems of the earth. A negative answer, Dr. Vrebalovich believes, does not finally prove there is no life on Mars. The landing sites may have been in the wrong place; the landings may have been during the wrong season; or the instruments may have conducted the wrong experiments. Dr. Sagan has rightly analyzed the situation: "After all, we are landing in only two places on Mars. If we were landing in only two places on the earth, how likely is it that we would be able to characterize thoroughly the geology or meteorology, much less the biology of
our planet?" From several thousand kilo- Professor Fred Hoyle before him, is a meters out, Earth also appears lifeless. firm believer in extraterrestrial life. It was An amusing theoretical exercise is to Hoyle who had even calculated that in the imagine the positions reversed, and Viking . past, nearly 10,000,000 planetary systems being sent from Mars to Earth. Suppose -each one similar to the solar system in the hypothetical Martians have selected the essential features of its compositionfour places on Earth that have the same must have been formed in the Milky. Way. geographical coordinates as the two prime He estimated that even assuming one and two back-up landing sites chosen for planetary system in 10 as possible abodes the landing on Mars. In that event, the of life, it would mean that there are within prime landing site of the first Viking might the Milky Way galaxy 1,000,000 planets be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. which could be inhabited by living creaSince Viking is not equipped for operations tures, possibly some of them with a more in water, it would rapidly sink and would advanced civilization than ours. That was be considered a failure. The back-up land- the reason why Pioneer 10, launched in ing site for Viking I might well be in the 1972, carried an insignia of man and South China Sea and would represent an- woman and the configuration of our solar other mission failure. One could reason- system. It will be the first artifact to pull ably expect that the prime landing site of out of the solar system, and there is a Viking II would be in the North Atlantic: remote possibility that in the next 100 Three out of four landings in water cor- million years some intelligent civilization respond well to the ratio of ocean to land in the Milky Way galaxy may intercept it on planet Earth. Only the back-up site for and try to decipher the configuration. Viking II would be not only on land but The first indication that life may exist in an exciting place: the southwest en- on Mars came in 1956 and 1958 when trance to Yellowstone National Park. If W.M. Sinton observed distinct light abtrees could be avoided during landing, the sorption bands at. 3.43, 3.54 and 3.69 spacecraft would reap a rich harvest of micrometers reflected from the dark areas scientific results: not only microorganisms of Mars. Since carbon-hydrogen bonds in organic compounds display similar bands, but bears, rangers and tourists. it was felt that some sort of life, probably Data gathered from outer space-the amino acids detected in meteorites and the vegetation, might occur in the dark areas. observed spectra of water, ammonia and organic chemicals in interstellar spaceThis is the first photograph ever taken on the suggest that the chemical building blocks surface of Mars. It was shot by Viking I afew of life are universal. Life may be an in- minutes after the spacecraft landed on July 20. tegral, perhaps inevitable, part of the un- The large rock in the center, about 1.4 meters folding evolution of the universe. Some- from the camera, is about 10 centimeters wide. where in the solar system, chemical evolu- We see both rocks and finely granulated tion may have taken that one critical materials-sand or dust. Several rocks reveal additional step into the realm of life, just irregular surfaces with pits, and the large rock at top left shows interesting linear cracks. as it did about 4,000 million years ago on Some of the rocks show signs of weathering, Earth. The findings from both the Vikings which may be caused by granular material in have now confirmed all that had been only the wind. At right is part of Viking's footpad. inferred earlier-that Mars either did, Around the strut in the center of the footpad could, or would support life. isfine-grained sand or dust that was apparently Dr. Vrebalovich, like Dr. Sagan and thrown up there by the impact of landing.
Like the "canals" seen 80 years earlier, soil has yielded some interesting results. contact from Earth. According to Dr. Vrebalovich, Mars Sinton's "bands" (as they were called) led The soil contains 15 to 30 per cent silicon, many to conclude that Mars did indeed 10 to 22 per cent iron, 3 to 8 per cent cal- will be in solar conjunction on November support life. A rude awakening came in cium, 2 to 5 per cent titanium, less than 25, 1976, when the Sun will be between the 1965, when two of Sinton's bands were 7 per cent manganese and less than 5 per Red Planet and the' Earth. Communicafound to be caused by absorption not in cent nickel. The cohesiveness of the soil tion with. the Viking spacecraft will be inthe Martian atmosphere but in the Earth's has held out hopes of moisture and, in terrupted from November 8 until about turn, water. atmosphere. December 25. However, during this period The Mariner 4 spacecraft (which flew The brains of both the orbiter and the Einstein's Theory of Relativity will again past the Red Planet at a distance of some lander are their onboard computers. The be put to practical test, to determine how 6,000 miles) tried to solve the mystery, lander possesses two identical brains. Each much the sun's mass bends radio waves but not with much success. The 22 pictures has an 18,OOO-wordmemory. (In computer coming from Viking to earth, delaying it sent back to Earth revealed to every- language, each word has 24 bits, which is their passage. How long will the Viking mission last? one's surprise a heavily cratered surface equivalent to an eight-digit number.) Each like that of the Moon. In 1969 two space- "word" represents a different command or Dr. Vrebalovich says that if all is still working well at the end of the scheduled craft, Mariners 6 and 7, flew by Marsinstruction to Viking. one near the south pole and the other near Only one Viking computer is opera- three-month mission, a Viking "extended the equator. They found impact craters, tional, while the other is kept as a stand-by. mission" may begin early in 1977. The carbon dioxide ice, and a region of chaotic The sample arm motions alone require sev- nominal lifetime of a Viking spacecraft is terrain with little potential for life, past or eral hundred words. Only 5,000 of its words only about 90 days. But Mariner 9, which present. The photographs sent by Mariner are for functions to be performed exclusive- had a similar life expectancy, performed 9 in 1972 revealed clear-cut evidence of ly after landing. The remainder are for for a full year and eventually failed only befluid erosion and many volcanoes, giving checkout of engineering functions and cause it ran out of the gas that kept its solar rise to speculation that the planet's geo- tasks performed during descent to the panels oriented toward the sun, the source logical terrain may not be lifeless. Martian surface. The mission controllers of its electrical power. The power source of Dr. Vrebalovich feels that the Viking have devised a "primary design," according the Viking lander, however, is independent mission is a great leap forward from the , to which every six days a set of new com- of sunlight; it runs on the decay of radioearlier Mariner series. Its sophisticated mands, comprising hundreds to thousands active plutonium. If it proves to be as wellcomponents are performing two separate of words, are radioed from Earth to Mars. engineered as Mariner 9, the really interbut complementary functions. The lander The only time when virtually nothing esting part of the Viking mission may begin is analyzing soil samples for organic and can be controlled from Earth is during in January 1977. As Dr. Sagan optimistically sums up inorganic compounds and trying to detect lander's deorbit-descent-Ianding sequence, biological activity, besides sending crystal- which presents a complex control problem. even the negative benefits of the Viking clear pictures of the Martian terrain. The Even at the speed of light, a command from mission: "If we find no sign of life on the Earth will take about 20 minutes to reach planet, we will then have discovered someorbiter is continuing to take photographs, measuring spectra over large regions of the lander. It would take an equally long thing of considerable importance about Mars and, more important, serving as a time for the lander to signal terrestrial con- the unlikelihood of life on another planet relay station between the lander and Earth. trollers that it is in trouble. The only way not very dissimilar to our own, a finding The lander pictures and signals are to control the deorbit-descent-Ianding se- that will underscore the preciousness and transmitted to the orbiter which in turn quence is by automation. The lander is on rarity of what has happened here on our 0 passes them on to Earth. The orbiter's orbit its own until touchdown. In fact it has in small earth." its computer memory stored instructions remains synchronized with the lander-that is, it passes over the lander at the same which could operate the lander and con- About the Author: K.M. Amladi is a film critic time each day. The lander is also equipped tinue experiments for 60 days without and science writer for the .Hincfustan Times. to transmit pictures directly to Earth but at a lower data rate. In addition, the orbiter stores data received from the lander for retransmission to Earth when the planet's rotation carries the- lander to the side of Mars away from Earth. If Dr. Vrebalovich can speak of these details with authority, it is partly because he is in constant touch with the control center for the Viking mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he spent 27 years in various capacities. He was quite pleased that preliminary indications from the three biological experiments have been positive. None of the Viking experimenters will admit the presence of life on Mars until the organic analysis experiment has been conducted and a sterilized Martian soil "If there is life on Mars, they say it probably sample has been analyzed by biological won't look anything at all like liS." experiments on the lander. The geological analysis of the Martian
INDO-U.S. ECONOMIC RELATIONS
¡CLOSER LINKS IN THE FUTURE' In this interview, a leading Indian economic writer, V.K. Narasimhan (right), sees 'a strong basis' for the strengthening of economic ties between India and the U.S. The interviewers are S.R. Madhu, SPAN's Assistant Managing Editor, and Natale Bellocchi, Counselor for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Embassy, New Delhi.
SPAN: What is your assessment of the strength of Indo-American economic ties?
NARASIMHAN: Indo-U.S. ties have had their vicissitudes in the past 25 years, but underlying the shifts in economic relations resulting from political factors, I feel there is a strong basis for friendly cooperative relations and for expanding trade between the two countries. SPAN: In recent years there has been a proliferation
of international agencies. Do you think the development of Indo-U.S. ties will hinge on the work of these agencies, and on the multilateral negotiations taking place there?
NARASIMHAN: I do. There is an intimate link between IndoU.S. economic relations and the activities of multilateral agencies, especially specialized agencies of the U.N. such as the World Bank, the International Development Agency [IDA], the UN. Development Program, UNCTAD and others. For instance, the World Bank's role in securing contributions from the US. to the IDA is of intimate concern to India, because India is a major recipient of the soft loans given by IDA for development projects. Again.in the Aid India consortium organized by the World Bank, the U.S. has been persuaded to contribute 50 per cent of the total aid agreed to by the consortium in previous years. In the negotiations in GATT [the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] and UNCTAD, the decisions taken regarding trade concessions and tariff preferences will be of great significance to Indo-American economic relations. The latest example is the Generalized System of Preferences [GSP], recommended by UNCTAD, which the U.S. has implemented from January 1 this year, and which the EEC [European Economic Community] countries adopted five years ago. The number of exports of Indian commodities that will benefit from the American GSP is bound to increase, though not all will benefit equally. SPAN: What is the likely effect of Indo-U.S. economic ties on multilateral negotiations? Would you say that progress in bilateral relations between India and the U.S. will set the pace for a larger
V.K. arasimhan, a veteran Indian journalist and one of the country's leading political and economic analysts, is the editor-in-chief of the Indian Express. He has written several books, which include The Press, the Public and the Administration and Democracy and Mixed Economy. movement toward better North-South
economic relations?
NARASIMHAN: Yes, I feel that closer Indo-U.S. economic ties, and a better understanding between the two countries on global economic issues, will have a significant impact on crucial multilateral negotiations-whether they relate to commodity agreements, the exploitation of ocean resources or the utilization of SD Rs [Special Drawing Rights] for development purposes. Now that the UN. is working out the basis on which a new world economic order can be created-an order fair to the developing and the developed countries-it is supremely important that there should be a close understanding between the US., which is the leading member of the advanced countries outside the communist bloc, and India, which is a leading spokesman of the developing countries. In fact, in my view close cooperation be-
tween the U.S. and India is more important in the multilateral sphere-in efforts to evolve a new economic order-than even in the bilateral sphere. SPAN: How would you evaluate the results of the UNCTAD IV meeting? Did the positions taken by India and the U.S. help evolve a constructive consensus? Do you think the Nairobi conference facilitated progress in the Indo-U.S. dialogue? NARASIMHAN: At Nairobi the views of the developing and developed countrie's diverged considerably on the major issues relating to an integrated commodity program and the debt burden of the less developed countries. I do not know how far India was responsible for saving the conference from an open breakdown. The compromise formula adopted before the end of the conference is welcome only insofar as it has helped to keep the negotiations going. There is legitimate room for doubt whether the UNCTAD secretariat's proposal for a $5,000 million Common Fund to stabilize the prices of 18 commodities exported by developing countries is workable and will achieve its objectives. There may be no escape from a commodity-by-commodity approach favored by the developed countries and the U.S. In any case, if the objective of the developing countries is to secure better prices for their exports to the developed countries, this cannot be achieved by the strength of numbers or by a process of confrontation. India's stand on this issue is likely to be midway between the stands of extremists on both sides. The U.S. has shown an interest in stabilizing the export earnings of developing countries-as was disclosed in Secretary Kissinger's address in Nairobi. So, despite the American opposition to the Common Fund proposal, there is room for negotiation and for evolving a mutually acceptable compromise. There is no need for the developing countries to reject out of hand the proposal of Dr. Kissinger at UNCTAD IV for a new development security facility to be created in the International Monetary Fund. It has to be realized that there are no simple or ready-made panaceas for the problems of the developing countries. Some of the other positive proposals of Dr. Kissinger at Nairobi did not receive from the developing countries the consideration they deserved, because of their preoccupation with the . proposal for a Common Fund for the commodities program. I hope that the U.S. will not withdraw the proposals on this account. A new structure of international cooperation must have many mansions, and there is room for any number of construc, tive ideas from whatever quarters they may come. SPAN: As you know, later on at the Conference on International Economic Cooperation meeting in Paris, some of the same issues were brought up and they led eventually to a deadlock. Do you foresee that the deadlock can be easily broken? NARASIMHAN: Well, there are further meetings to be held before March next on this proposal. I believe that this is really a question of bona fides-whether the developing countries believe that the developed countries want to give them a fair deal, whatever form it may take: indexation, a common fund for supporting prices, or Dr. Kissinger's suggestion for protecting the export earnings of developing countries from fluctuations. I think the real thing that is required today is mutual trust, and I believe this is where the Indo-American dialogue may be extremely valuable. India must be able to put across to the U.S. the real feelings of the developing countries and also in her turn
convince the developing countries that the U.S. means well by them. I think the speech of Dr. Kissinger at Nairobi made it clear that the U.S. is anxious to playa role in the development of a new economic order which does go to a large extent to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots. SPAN: Do you see India's interest best served by the multilateral concept of economic cooperation? In other words, some aspects of multilateral proposals, such as the commodity agreement, may not be in India's interest. But this may be a price that India has to pay to get something in another area. NARASIMHAN: If India looks at the problem purely from its selfish interest, bilateral arrangements or arrangements commodity by commodity may be more helpful to it. I mean an arrangement for tea or an arrangement for jute or for manganese or iron ore will be more beneficial than a comprehensive commodity agreement that may not take urgent note of an immediate Indian problem. I believe that on a reconsideration of this whole commodity approach, even the UNCTAD may discover that there are many inherent difficulties that need to be examined. A single U.N. body operating a $5,000 million fund relating to 18 commodities--each of which has its own specific problemsis not going to be an easy job. Even to manage the buying, selling, stocking and storing of a single commodity may present many difficult problems. I don't think the U.N. or the UNCTAD secretariat has given sufficient attention to all the modalities and mechanics of operating a gigantic fund like this on a global scale tCl'deal with global trade. SPAN: To come back again to bilateral relations, would you agree that trade and investment constitute the most important planks in the Indo-U.S. economicframework? NARASIMHAN: Investment is no doubt important in economic relations, but I feel that so far as Indo-U.S. relations are concerned it may be more important to concentrate on trade rather than investment. I personally do not see much scope for any large expansion in private investment by U.S. corporations in India. The reallJroblem is that the general setup in India-the dominance of the public sector and various policies relating to industrial priorities-are such that they are bound to cramp the style of American investors. They will not find the kind of freedom in business operations that they are accustomed to in their own country and in other countries where they have made investments. Though there may be specific fields such as export-oriented industries or higWy sophisticated technology industries in which they may be welcome and may be invited, this is a very marginal area. And as India develops her own technological capabilities in these fields, the area for U.S. investment may get narrower and narrower. On the other hand the scope for trade is really limitless. America is a vast expanding market. India today has less than one-third of one per cent share of U.S. imports. In fact American exports constitute a far bigger percentage of Indian imports than India's exports do of American imports. In this situation, I feel that so far as investment is concerned the only scope is for official assistance-I mean government-togovernment arrangements. There may be some room for presuming that the American Government and Congress will agree to the United Nations suggestion or to the Pearson Commission's suggestion that advanced countries should extend 0.7 per cent of their GNP as official assistance to developing countries. If
'India must be able to put across to the U.S. the real feelings of the developing countries and also in her turn convince the developing countries that the U.S. means well by them.' this happens, I do expect a very large inflow of American assistance. But private American investment itself, I'm afraid, may not have such large scope in India. SPAN: You said that the scope for Indo-U.S. trade expansion is limitless.In which areas or commodities do you see the best potential? NARASIMHAN: The adoption of the GSP by the U.S. opens up opportunities for more than 2,000 items. But there are some items on the excluded list in which India is interested. Perhaps India may be able to persuade the U.S. to bring them also within the purview of GSP in due course-or extend some other kind of concession. The list that is already under GSP is quite long. The problem, really, is how India is going to take advantage of this. Most of these items are to be admitted duty-free into the U.S., and some of our major competitors like Taiwan, South Korea or Hong Kong are being excluded from this preference because of the prominent position they already have in the U.S. import structure. India's traditional exports such as jute manufactures or tea don't require so much protection. The other items, specifically a . wide range of manufactures and handicraft products, all come under GSP and will all benefit from it.
tariffs. But even the disadvantage of freight can be overcome. I think the real problem is at the Indian end. Now that we have got these preferences, there are the problems of organizing production, of maintaining standards of quality, of keeping up delivery schedules, of continually keeping track of changes in American demand and fashion. So this is where we will need continual cooperation between the big marketing organizations and their leaders in the U.S. and some agency in India, which coordinates the work of our export houses. This I consider one of the main functions of the Indo-U.S. Joint Business Council. There is another problem in India in stimulating exports. We may have no difficulty in maintaining quality or regulating output when dealing with big organized units, but where the suppliers are a mass of small producers scattered over the whole country-like, say, producers of handloom goods or leather manufacturers-we have to deal with an unorganized sector that presents real problems. SPAN: Do you think India should set up a big trade promotion agency in the U.S.? NARASIMHAN: I think it has to be done. Trade promotion in the U.S., which is done largely through TV and the press, is a higWy expensive business. So it would be good if it could be done by a centralized agency that would take care of different products and project the image of India. The fact that our exports are growing will enable us to allocate more funds for promotion, because in the American market the sky is the limit if you know how to hit the jackpot.
SPAN: How do you view the difference between America's GSP, which is relatively new, and the GSP of the EEC or of Japan? How do you compare them? NARASIMHAN: I don't think the Japanese GSP will be of much use to us because Japan is a restricted market. We can only sell what the Japanese want to buy and I don't think it's a free market. But EEC is quite a big market for us and we have a variety of SPAN: Do you 'think that in taking advantage of opportunities to trade links with European markets. increase exports to the U.S., priority is being placed on the delivery As far as the U.S. market is concerned, if some product ap- system? On'shipping? peals to the Americans, there is scope for a very large increase in NARASIMHAN: Yes, I think the export houses that are engaged exports. Some years ago, an item like "Bleeding Madras" had a in the American trade know that the American importer is big appeal because of its novelty. But after a brief spell, exports such a stickler for schedules that if these are not kept he will of Bleeding Madras garments tapered off as our exporters were straightaway cancel orders. That is why the organization of not able to maintain the quality or because the fashion changed production and marketing at the Indian end has to be improved in the U.S. We have to take note of changes in fashion, of peculiar considerably. American marketing methods and methods of distribution. So I should say that the opportunities and the challenges presented SPAN: Do you think there is any other problem-solving export meby the U.S. GSP are much greater for us than even those in the chanism that can be set up, apart from the Joint Business Council? EEC countries. NARASIMHAN: No. I think the Business Council can set up some kind of monitoring agency at the two ends to see how the SPAN: Since the U.S. is the largest unified market, what is the export performance of Indian business houses is proceedingbest way India can take advantage of the American GSP-in and what are the handicaps. Similarly at the Indian end, some terms of marketing? planning should be done: Suppose there are some essential imNARASIMHAN: I'm glad to note that already-both at the ports of American equipment, what can be done to get them? official and nonofficial levels-intensive studies are being made It's not just sophisticated technologies that are needed. In some to explore how we can take advantage of the U.S. GSP. The fact cases, even intermediate technology used in the U.S. may be of that we get this duty-free entry into the U.S. is the biggest ad- use to Indian agriculture or the chemical industry. vantage. Some of the disadvantages are the problems of distance Luckily, the Indo-U.S. Joint Business Council has secured the and freight charges, which are big elements. Another disadvan- support of the Indian Government. Five secretaries of the ecotage, perhaps, is competition from countries nearer the U.S., nomic ministries were present at the council's New Delhi meeting which may gain from proximity what they lose on account of which means that the council is assured of attention in Govern-
ment quarters for whatever recommendations it may make. I think that is a very good augury. And I must say that in recent months there has been a tremendous gingering up of the economic ministries in India. They have been anxious to liberalize the licensing system, to quicken the disposal of applications for various licenses and so on. I should say the problems at the Government level can be easily sorted out by some agencies set up by the council. . SPAN: You have said already that you do not see a very large future for American private investment in India. But it would be interesting to learn your opinion about American investment that is already here and the kind of image it has in India. NARASIMHAN: I do not find any evidence of an adverse image regarding American enterprises operating in India-except for those people who are ideologically opposed to American enterprise and multinational corporations. American publicity itself regarding the activities of multinational corporations has tarnished the image somewhat-which, I think, is a passing phase. But what happened at the last meeting of the Joint Business Council in Delhi was more significant. Orville Freeman's talk on the role of multinational enterprises and the way he presented it seemed to many Indian businessmen to suggest that he did not think Indo-U.S. relations could improve without the medium of multinational corporations. An interesting point Freeman made was that India itself was "going multinational," setting up joint ventures abroad and so on. The image of the multinational corporation will improve with the adoption of a code regulating behavior of multinationals in host countries. It is obvious that any foreign corporation that operates in India should accept the laws of our country. There is nothing to suggest that American firms operating here have been in any way working against the interests of the country. The only criticism is that they have not been too enthusiastic about promoting research and development in India. For instance, a Swiss firm like CIBA has a big research center in Bombay. Now I believe that Pfizer may have some kind of research center. But if American firms in general encourage more research in India, then perhaps their image would improve. SPAN: Do you see good prospects for joint Indo-U.S. third countries?
ventures in
Under the Indian law relating to joint ventures abroad, Indian investment is limited to the cost of machinery that is involved. We don't allow investment in funds abroad. But the U.S. partner can bring in some financial investment that will be of help to the country concerned. Supposing we want to set up a sugar mill in Mauritius. We can't raise the capital. But the U.S. partner can do that, while we supply the machinery. I think the scope has to be studied by the Joint Business Council with reference to specific projects. There is another kind of joint venture. Take a power plant. America could provide the turbines or the generators, and we can provide the distribution equipment, transformers and so on. Such ventures are possible. SPAN: Do you see this kind of thing as growing? NARASIMHAN: Yes, I noted with interest that Freeman concluded his address at the Delhi meeting with these words: "Let us resolve to build this Indo-U.S. Business Council into a strong instrument of communication and understanding so that pragmatically and specifically we can clarify policies, eliminate misunderstandings, identify and overcome obstacles and mobilize the resources of our two great countries to benefit not only Indians and Americans but mankind everywhere." I would like to underline every word of this statement. More than effecting any immediate increases 'in the' 'exports of some commodity or other, it is in promoting understanding, eliminating misunderstanding and evolving a cooperative approach to global policies that the Business Council can make its most important contribution. SPAN: What about the Indo-U.S. your assessment of its role?
Joint
Commission?
What is
NARASIMHAN: The Joint Commission was a good idea, born after Dr. Kissinger's memorable visit in 1974. Later on things didn't develop as fast as we would have liked. The Joint Commission deals with important areas in which economic cooperation between the two countries is envisaged: economics and commerce, science and technology, education and culture. Now there has been a considerable amount of cooperation in these areas already. I should say we have had cooperation in the fields of science and technology for many decades. In fact since the days of President Truman, we have had cooperation in the technical fields and in education. Under the Fulbright program and other programs there has been an exchange of scholars. Now the Joint Commission should set up some more or less permanent body through which the whole work of cooperation can be organized. If other political factors do not intervene .to upset our relations from time to time, I expect that the Joint Commission can play a great role in promoting cooperation.
NARASIMHAN: I do not rule out joint ventures, but I don't think our Government will be very enthusiastic about such joint ventures if they are restricted to the Indian private sector. Quite a number of Indian Government concerns have also been trying to operate abroad, to tender for turnkey projects and so onincluding an organization set up by the Indian Railways for building new railway lines. Now if American corporations are willing to take Indian Government corporations also aq),CITtilers, I think we may envisage an interesting combination of American SPAN: So are you generally optimistic about the future of such capitalism and Indian state socialism. There's scope for such cooperation? ventures. NARASIMHAN: I feel that India and the U.S. are two great countries destined to play an important part in international relaSPAN: You mentioned railways. Do you see any other areas for tions in the next 25 years. India, as I said, is the leading spokesman of the developing countries and, of course, of the so-called possible joint Indo-U.S. ventures in third countries? NARASIMHAN: Yes. Fertilizer plants and chemical plants. nonaligned world. The U.S. is a great superpower, economically Perhaps, even bicycle manufacturing plants. We have consider- important, and otherwise important. There have been close links ..... able experience in bicycles, and the U.S. may be able to bring between us in the past. I don't see why we should not have even 0 improved machinery. Very often they can even bring in capital. closer links in the future.
DOG
PIONEER OF INDO-AMERICAN TRADE Rising from errand boy to shipping clerk to wealthy merchant, Ram Doolal Dey laid the basis for commerce between the U.S. and India. In the 18th century, he helped American sea captains by advancing them credit, by buying their goods and by selecting choice cargoes for their holds. The ~beginnings of commerce between India and America can be traced back more than 200 years, when both nations were colonies of Britain. India, of course, had long been known for its spices, silk, cotton goods, drugs, perfumes, tea, indigo and saltpetre-all of which were being exported to many parts of the globe. By 1770 the American colonies had some 400 vessels engaged in overseas trade, and onethird of the British merchant marine was American-built. Colonial exports included tar, pitch, turpentine and rosin, and American seamen were skilled mariners . and astute traders. However, restrictive British navigation laws prevented direct trade between America and India. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Indian goods reached the American colonies through European traders-Portuguese, Dutch, French, in addition to the British. It was only around the time of the American War of Independence (17751783) that enterprising colonials began to venture out to distant lands to trade. This was a time when many economic changes were taking place in America, changes that eventually would make the new nation one of the biggest exporters in the world of commerce. Already Americans were manufacturing the goods they had formerly imported from or through England. This meant that they h~d to find new customers for their surplus 'manufactures. In 1784, the first American ship to set sail for the Orient landed in China, open-
ing th~ door to the Asian market. Three years later, the first American ship to visit India landed in Calcutta. The British merchants and trading houses in the city refused to market the goods. This was hardly surprising, as they did not want to allow American shippers a foothold in Indian commerce. (Even as late as 1792, when George Washington sent Benjamin Joy to Calcutta as the first American Consul to India, the British authorities refused to recognize his consular status. As' a result, Joy resigned his post a year after his arrival.) At this critical juncture, a man by the name of Ram Doolal Dey extended a helping hand to the American traders. So valuable was his assistance that he later came to be known as the pioneer of American commerce in India. Years earlier, when Ram Doolal Dey was in his teens, he had started his career as a humble shipping clerk drawing a salary of Rs. 10 per month. He worked for Madan Mohan Dutt, dewan of the Export Warehouse, a man who was believed to be next only in wealth to Raja Nabakissen, the dewan of Robert Clive. One day, Dutt sent Ram Doolal to buy some goods at an auction held in the office of Tulloh & Company at Old Court House Street in Calcutta. When Ram Doolal reached the office, however, he discovered that the goods had just been sold. The next lot being put up to auction was a sunken vessel with its cargo, which had foundered at the mouth of the Hoogh-
ly. A few days earlier, Ram Doolal had seen the sunken vessel on one of his casual visits to Diamond Harbour, and had casually estimated its value. At the auction he realized that the wreck was being sold at a ridiculously low price, so he raised the bid to Rs. 14,000. Handing over the cash, he retired to the smoking room of Tulloh & Company. Just then an English merchant rushed into the auction room, and to his dismay found that the wreck had been sold to the Indian. The Englishman asked Ram Doolal to make over'the purchase to him, offering him a fair profit. The shipping clerk, who correctly estimated the value of the cargo because of his speculative genius, showed a complete lack of interest in selling. Finally, after coaxing and entreating and bullying Ram Doolal, the Englishman paid him the sum of Rs. 100,000 over and above his purchase price of Rs. 14,000. Barefoot and with folded hanus, Ram Doolal approached his master, Madan Mohan Dutt, and apologized for his failure to attend the auction in time. He then narrated the story of the sunken vessel. And then he placed at his master's feet the money entrusted to him for buying the goods, plus the one lakh of rupees earned by him as profit. Madan Mohan was astonished and, with his eyes full of tears in appreciation of his shipping clerk's honesty, he gave him the entire sum of Rs. 100,000. With this capital Ram Doolal Dey started an independent business in 1775 and within a few years rose to the heights of
eminence and prosperity. . By 1787, when the first American ship visited Calcutta, Ram Doolal Dey was a very rich merchant with extensive connections both with Indian and foreign traders. His agents and brokers helped the American captains to market their goods at the highest profit. He liberally advanced money to them so that they could load their vessels with the choicest Indian merchandise. Because he had full control over the local market, he could help the Americans to select their goods and buy them at a fair and reasonable price. As a result, obscure ship captains, mates and superintendents of cargo returned to America and, in their turn, became wealthy merchants. So high was Ram Doolal's reputation in American commercial circles that the bulk of U.S. trade in Bengal-indeed the whole of India-passed through his hands. His exceptional honesty, integrity, enterprise, resourcefulness, fair-dealing and helpfulness attracted to the shores of Bengal an evergrowing volume of commerce from the ports and harbors of America. He was remembered by those whom he helped with affection and gratitude and was quoted as an authority on Indian commerce. Thus it happened that 35 American merchants of Salem, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Marblehead joined together and contributed handsome donations to present Ram Doolal with a portrait in oil of George Washington. Drawn from life, the magnificent painting measures nine feet by six and is the work of the celebrated American painter Gilbert Stuart. It was completed during the last years of General Washington's life and it reached India a year after the death of the great American patriot and liberator. Presented to Ram Doolal in 1801, the portrait was carefully preserved in his busi~. ness house for decades after his death; in fact, it was one of the treasures proudly displayed by his descendants. Toward the end of the 19th century, the painting passed on to the MuIlicks of Pataldanga and later on to their Wellington Square residence. It is believed that the portrait, with its original handsome gilt frame intact, was eventually bought by a wealthy American for Rs. 90,000 and taken back to the U.S. This particular portrait by Stuart is a distinctive one, depicting Washington in a heroic pose, his left hand resting on his sword-hilt, the right outstretched as though making a public address. The General's face emphasizes his broad brow and firm mouth, and has an expression of intensity very different from the placidity of Gilbert
Stuart's usual Washington portraits. . script. The next morning his clerks would So great was the respect and esteem in simply transcribe what he had written into which Ram Doolal was held that one rich the Roman script. Ram Doolal came to American merchant named his newly built be known for the style of his business ship after him. During the Indian's life- correspondence which was direct, simple, time, the Ram Doolal visited Calcutta port and straightforward, without any subtlety thrice, carrying consignments of goods for or deviousness. him. The very name of Ram Doolal came Through his overseas and inland trade, to be regarded as a symbol of luck and Ram Doolal became the richest Indian prosperity. merchant in Calcutta. After spending sevThis belief was probably shared by the eral lakhs of rupees in charity and noble Indian businessman himself, for one of his causes, he left behind Rs. 12,300,000 in own ships was named Ram Doolal. His cash, as well as considerable real estate in other three ships were: Kamala (named Calcutta, Banaras and other places. after his first daughter who was born blind Between 1787 and 1825, the year of and died at the age of seven); Bemola Ram Doolal's death, hundreds of Ameri(named after his best loved daughter by can ships carried merchandise to Indian his second wife); and David Clarke (named ports, and there was regular and brisk after the senior partner of Fairley Fergus- trade between the two countries. At Calson & Company, one of the leading British cutta port, American vessels were busy business houses of Calcutta which thrived loading cargoes of tea, sugar, ginger, with Ram Doolal as their broker. These pepper, gunny bags, carnelian necklaces, four ships carried Indian merchandise to fine cobweb muslins-even copies of America, England, China, Malta, Mauri- Sanskrit scriptures. Some of these texts tius, Java and the Philippines. Ram Doolal found their way to Yale University where was the sole agent of several American the beginnings of Sanskrit study were merchants, a number of leading business promoted by America's first Sanskrit houses in China, and of the Philippine scholar, Edward Elbridge Salisbury. Company. An interesting maritime event occurred Actually, Ram Doolal's success in busi- in 1833, when American ships from Boston ness was remarkable, considering the fact harbor carried to Calcutta the new and that he had had no schooling, and no astonishing cargo of hundreds of tons of English education at all. He was born in ice cut from the lakes and ponds of Maine, 1752 of poor parents in Rekjanee village, New Hampshire, Vermont, and other New near today's Dum Dum Airport. His England states. The distance of nearly father, Balaram, eked out a living by teach- 15,000 miles was covered without the ing the rudiments of Bengali and arith- cargo melting, because the ice was packed metic to the sons of peasants who paid for in fragrant pine sawdust, the vessels were their children's education in kind. It was double-sheathed, and the cargo hatches at this time that Maratha invaders plun- were kept tightly closed throughout the dered the suburbs of Calcutta. Rekjanee journey. In 1833, the Tuscany carried 180 and the neighboring villages were sacked. tons of ice to Calcutta. And Ram Doolal's Balaram left his hut with his pregnant wife sons, described by the London Times as who gave birth to Ram Doolal in a desert- the Rothschilds of Bengal, had a profitable ..ed fie1d~0rphaned at the age of five, Ram trade with the import. Doolal and a still younger brother and It is interesting to note in America's sister went to Calcutta to his grandparents. Bicentennial Year that the first person who His grandmother was employed as a brought India and the New World closer cook in the house of Madan Mohan Dutt, bymutual understanding, fair dealing and and Ram Doolal found shelter there. He cooperation was not a statesman, writer, had his elementary education in Bengali philosopher or spiritual leader, but a busireading, writing and arithmetic with Dutt's nessman. He was not an aristocrat but a children. Later, as an errand boy in the common man who rose to the height of export-import firm of Madan Mohan Dutt prosperity through hard work and integand as a billing and shipping clerk, he rity. In a sense, though, Ram Doolal Dey picked up the English language. In time was a very uncommon man indeed. 0 he was able to speak English fluently, but he could not write it because of difficulties About the Author: Madan Mohan Coomer is in spelling. Because of this he had to evolve professor and head of the Department of Bengali, Presidency College, Calcutta, and his own peculiar method of carrying on honorary secretary of Bangiya Sahitya his business correspondence. Late at night Parishad. An authority on Ram Doolal Dey, he would sit down and write his business Dr. Coomer has written a book on him which letters-in English, but in the Bengali will be published shortly.
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
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"The birthday cake we bought him had a typo in his name." © 1975. Reprinted by permission of Saturday Review and Mort Gerberg.
"Nineteen years ago I tried to plant the work ethic into Willard's mind, but his body rejected it."
THE INTERNATIONAL RESOURCES BANK: 'A RESPONSE TO NEW REALITIES What is an International Resources Bank? Why does America think that its establishment will be 'in the best interests of all countries?' Will it particularly help the Third World nations in their economic development? In this article, the author answers these and' other questions. The U.S. proposal to establish a new International Resources Bank (IRB) is an a_Hemptto deal in a mutually acceptable way with the new realities of economic relationships between the developing economies and the industrial nations. These new realities include an increasing insistence, both in developed and developing nations, on political independence at a time when economic interdependence among all countries is becoming increasingly unavoidable. These two trends need not be incompatible. But to make themcompatible will require ingenuity and good will. It is in this spirit that the United States proposed, at the Fourth United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD IV), the creation of an International Resources Bank. The U.S. invited the developing nations and other interested parties to give this proposal their careful attention and to help shape it into a joint effort-not just a U.S. proposal-to meet the requirements of all nations, particularly the developing nations. The developing nations, quite understandably, are determined to increase the economic benefits they obtain from the development of their raw material resources. To date, they have focused much of their attention on the prices their raw materials can command in world markets. No matter how favorable the price situation might become, however, they will not be able to obtain maximum benefits from their natural resources unless they can obtain the technology, capital and management needed to maintain and increase production of exportable materials. Indeed, they might not be any better off with higher prices if developed nations expand production while output in developing nations dwindles. Technology and management must be combined for successful investments in natural resources. Sometimes technology is seen as something that can be bought by governments, packaged in blueprints or other printed form, and transferred to distant and foreign locations without modification. But technology is not information
alone. It is essentially know-how plus skilled people who can apply and improve this know-how. Without the capacity to manage it, technology has little value to anyone. By management, I mean the intelligent selection, adaptation and continued improvement of technology to meet the specific conditions for its efficient application. The developing nations need "managed technology." In the near future much "managed technology" will flow with private foreign investment. The developing nations, however, determined to exercise full control over their economic destinies, have become skeptical, suspicious and in some cases hostile toward the older modes and conditions of private foreign investment. This has been particularly true with regard to the extraction of raw materials. Efforts are being made to devise new modes of association between multinational corporations and the developing economies, new kinds of arrangements that will make foreign investments more beneficial to the host country and satisfy the host government's desire for greater local control with a minimum cost to the host country in terms of missed economic development opportunities. I am confident that these efforts are and will continue to be successful. But in the meantime, I fear that the poor climate for foreign investment in some developing nations is discouraging investments in the developing nations as a group -and to such an extent that the pace of economic development has been slowed. Several features of the proposed International Resources Bank are designed to deal with these problems. A number of factors have been slowing investment in natural resource development worldwide in recent years. Investments, in developing countries especially, are not taking place at a rate that would be justified by market conditions. A number of factors are responsible: the higher capital costs of mining and processing necessitated by more sophisticated technology, increased energy costs, the increased lead time between the inception of a project and its completion,
the spreading nationalization of existing resource investments, the experimentation with new investment arrangements inv,olving shared responsibility and control by host countries, and the increased reservation of public lands in industrial nations for environmental and esthetic uses. These factors, combined with a perception of political risk, constitute a major deterrent to adequate resource investment in developing nations. Although it is difficult to doeument, conversations with businessmen and developments in industries such as copper and bauxite have convinced us that fear of harassment and possibly expropriation has already inhibited some resource development initiatives in developing nations, influencing large corporations to turn instead to expansion of higher cost facilities in developed nations. One indicator of this trend is the fact that between 1970 and 1973, 80 per cent of all expenditures on mineral exploration took place in four developed countries. The proposed International Resources Bank can playa useful role here by guaranteeing new raw materials investments against the political risks perceived by businessmen. It can facilitate a variety of modes of association between private corporations and the developing nations by acting as an intermediary in developing contractual arrangements and providing guarantees of performance on both sides. We start with a flexible concept-that a new international system of guarantees to support large-scale resource development could break loose a large variety o,finvestment arrangements. The IRB need not be exclusively wedded to traditional forms of direct investment. In fact, we see the classic form of heavy direct investment by foreign companies in wholly owned subsidiary companiesresting on extensive tax concessions and, other discriminatory inducements-as useful but likely to be increasingly less important in the future. We foresee that in the period ahead Continued on page 48
INDIAN SCIENTISTS WORI ON MARS VIIING MISSION
Landing a Viking spacecraft on Mars, 335 million kilometers away, is not easy. It takes precise navigation. Flight controllers must know at all times where the spacecraft is. A miscalculation of a few meters can later result in a miss of a thousand kilometers. Three Indian-born engineers contributed to the vital job of precision navigation of Viking I and II. They are Narendra P. Dwivedi, Navin Jerath and Prem Kumar -members of the Viking Guidance and Navigation Team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where the Vikings are controlled. Dr. Dwivedi's team was responsible for the successful maneuvers that placed both Viking spacecraft into orbit around Mars. Dr. Jerath's group, of which Prem Kumar is a member, keeps constant track of the two Viking orbiters through a new method called "optical navigation" -a technique Dr. Jerath helped develop. All three scientists say the Viking experience has been one of the greatest of their lives. Dr. Dwivedi's three-year Viking work is almost completed. His chief task was supplying information for the maneuver that placed the two spacecraft into proper orbit around Mars, while using minimum fuel and satisfying the mission's scientific goals. "The scientists would come up with some bizarre and mutually conflicting requirements. I had to study these to determine which could be done and how much it would cost in terms of fuel," Dwivedi said. Using radio signals that indicated
roughly where the spacecraft was plus the data from the optical navigation supplied by Jerath's team, Dwivedi calculated when the engine should be started, how long it should fire, and how the spacecraft should be pointed at the time. The goal: a specific orbit around Mars with correct orientation to the Sun and to the Martian surface. Dwivedi calls the first landing on Mars "an excellent engineering feat." "I knew all along we could do it," he said. "A lot of things could have gone wrong. The lander could have toppled. But it didn't." "Most of the scientific accomplishll).ents are yet to come," said Dwivedi. "We have just 'begun to examine Mars's shape, chemistry and environment. This is the first time we have had hard information about another planet. The lessons learned from Mars and its history can be very helpful to life on Earth. It will give us a new consciousness of Earth's environment." Dr. Jerath's chief job is navigating the Vikings with optical techniques never before used operationally on a space mission. The method was tested, however, on the Mariner 9 spacecraft which orbited Mars in 1971. Dr. Jerath also worked on that mission. "The technique is an intuitive method," he says. "We use our own eyes to navigateto walk and move about. On Viking, we use the camera's eyes to see our way through space." Simply put, the Viking cameras photograph Mars, its moons (Phobos and Deimos) and the background stars. Using what the cameras see with information from the radio tracking stations on earth, engineers such as Prem Kumar then can
calculate where the spacecraft is and where it is headed. The value of the new technique is its improved accuracy, says Jerath. Using radio signals to navigate involves determining where the spacecraft is by measuring the shift in the radio waves as they travel through space. The accuracy of this method, however, decreases the farther a spacecraft moves away from earth. "Radio navigation often results in errors as large as 100 to 300 kilomete~s," says Jerath. These errors are largely due to radio interference caused by solar gas that streams through space. On Viking II, the radio errors were even larger, due to the position of the spacecraft in relation to earth. But by combining the radio data with the optical method, the team was able to determine where the spacecraft was to within a few kilometers. Dr. Jerath, who was born in New Delhi in 1946, recently received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles; he wrote his doctoral thesis on navigating spacecraft with radio and optical tech-
niques. Jerath received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and his master's degree from the California Institute of Technology. While a graduate student, he received the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics "Outstanding Achievement Award." Dr. Dwivedi received his bachelor's degree in engineering from the Muzaffarpur Institute of Technology in Bihar, his master's degree from Texas A. and M.· University and his Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. While at Auburn, Dwivedi became involved in the U.S. space program. In 1969 he went to work for TR W Systems, an aerospace firm in Houston, Texas. He was a member of the Guidance and Control Systems Department for the Apollo landings on the moon. Dr. Dwivedi won the U.S. National
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Aeronautics and Space Administration's This rocky panoramic view of the Martian Lunar Landing Award for his work with surface (below) was taken by the Viking II the Apollo project. In 1971 he transferred lander shortly after its touchdown on to Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory September 3. The site is a Martian plain where his first job was analyzing the flight known as Utopia Planitia. The picture path for the two Mariner spacecraft that encompasses a wide are, starting will be launched in August 1977. He was from northwest (at left) through north soon drafted, however, into working on the (above the lander's sampler arm housing) Viking mission. past east (where the sky is bright at the Prem Kumar has just completed two center) and southeast at the far right years of work at the JPL. In September, he (above the radioisotope thermoelectric joined the University of Texas at Austin to generator cover). The landscape is strewn study for his Ph.D. in aerospace engineer- with rocks very different from those on ing. His goal is to work on the U.S. space the Chryse Planitia, where Viking 1 landed. shuttle, a reusable vehicle that will take off Most of them seem to be porous volcanic like a rocket and land like an airplane. The lava, pitted with air pockets. Some of the first unmanned tests of the orbiter will roaks have grooves that may have been begin in February 1977and the first manned eroded by fine windblown sand. The dip in tests in May 1977. If all goes well, the the eastern horizon at center is an shuttle will start operations in 1979-and jllusion caused by the lander's eight-degree Prem Kumar will be there helping guide its tilt toward the west. The terrain here is initial journey into space. D more level than that of Chryse Planitia.
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INTERNATIONAL RESOURCES BANK
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Ii there will be considerable experimentation, as the international community searches for new and more effective forms of international cooperation. The IRB would facilitate investment modes consistent with the new aspirations of the developing countries, yet attractive to corporations. We generally assume that IRB-guaranteed projects would involve trilateral agreements-among a consortium of foreign· investors, the host country government, and the IRB. Trilateral contracts would ensure international focal points for the negotiation and establishment of contractual guarantees designed to protect all participants against many aspects of nonperformance. Contracts in which the IRB participates should reflect the specific needs of the individual project and all parties concerned. Such contracts might also specify preproduction activities, financial requirements-including any loans and bonds guaranteed by the IRB-the amount and kinds qf technology that would be transferred, and performance and payment guarantees to which the host nations and private firms would commit themselves. IRB assurances would be designed to protect both the host country government and the foreign investors from arbitrary actions by the other party. They would help ensure that the terms of the trilateral contract were honored. L- __
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The IRB itself, we believe, should not determine the standards of performance that would prevail, but its guarantees should help assure compliance with the performance standards specified in the contract. Dispute settlement provisions to support the trilateral contracts-perhaps including explicit procedures for conciliation or adjudication of disputes-might be agreed upon by the parties to the contract. We do not see the JRB insisting on any particular form of dispute settlement. The IRB would not be a traditional bank. It would not make dIrect loans to investors from its general resources. However, it might help to finance investment projects by guaranteeing financial obligations in specific situations. Individual projects could be financed through production-sharing arrangements, the issuance of project bonds requiring repayment either in cash or commodities, or a combination of techniques. A loss-reserve fund of paid-in and callable capital subscriptions would be required to cover the investment guarantee program. We think the IRB should not make guarantees against purely com mercial risks, because we believe the project participants themselves-whether private investors or host governments-should assume such responsibilities to help ensure that investment funds are directed toward commercially viable projects.
The IRB, as we see it, should not duplicate the present work of existing. international institutions. Because of the interrelationships between its operations and those of various arms of the World Bank, we believe the IRB should be associated with these institutions. Such an association could avoid the creation of an entirely new organization and a new bureaucracy. These are our tentative views at this stage-and they are being extens}vely examined by many governments and in a variety of international institutions. During their July meetings, the commissions on energy and raw materials of the Conference on International Economic Cooperation indicated an intent to explore the possible functions of an International Resources Bank in more detail. We anticipate that inputs from all these reviews will round out our basic concept, and that within a fairly short period of time a more detailed charter for this very important institution will be ready for more definitive consideration and approval by all concerned. We are confident that the resulting institution will be in the best interests of all countries. 0 About the Author: Charles R. Frank, Jr., is a senior economist in the Office of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. He was formerly a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington.
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FOOTPRINTS ON THE WIND Hang-gliding in America [t's the rage of the day, and it's full of fun. Hang-gliding buffs say their sport offers more thrills than anything going. And it's simple. A glider is a sort of sail spread over a few aluminum poles with a harness slung underneath to hold the pilot. Then you hike to a. hilltop, unfold the glider, hook on the harness, run downhill against the wind, and presto-you're airborne (see back cover). One poetic practitioner of the sport says: "Being up there is an exhilarating experience-you feel you're