Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 54

Perspective 8 Section 2 Chicago Tribune, Sunday, January 7. 1973 do Stayskal James Reston John P. Roche Washingt on hearings Farewell to Truman: link to religious past as political theater "Now do you think you could tell us which officer came into your tavern and shook you down?" Mr. Stayskal's cartoons appear Monday thru Friday in Chicago Today. the faces of the silent throng in the cathedral A silent sense of regret for something precious lost.

The celebration of qualities plain and blunt. Somehow, tho, nobody quite said so, the past seemed to be rebuking the present. The service was full of proclamations of faith in which most of the congregation probably had no faith, but even the unbelievers still seemed to believe, in believing. For here and there in the old prayers and hymns there were an- cient phrases that are more relevant today than ever before. "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," repeated the survivors of Harry Truman's time, who have been led into more temptation and faced more evil than most generations in the history of the republic.

And so it went to the recessional, when Margaret Truman Daniel, mother of Harry's four grandsons, led the congregation out into the gray January light. And yet, the interesting thing about Harry Truman's farewell, which he would undoubtedly have liked, is that it was not a-melancholy occasion. It acknowledged his weaknesses, but celebrated his integrity and somehow restored faith in common sense. "THE MEN who act," Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1890, "stand nearer to the mass of men than do the. men who write, and it is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.

"The arguments which induce popular action must always be broad and obvious arguments. The great stream of freedom, which broadens down from precedent to precedent, is not a clear mountain current such as the man of chastened thought likes to drink from: It is polluted with not a few of the coarse elements of the gross world on its banks; it is heavy with' the drainage of a very material universe." Probably no two Presidents werV more different than, Wilson and Truman in background and education, but Wilson would probably have understood and approved of his grandson's tribute to President Truman at the end. He was fair, simple, true, and in the end even noble, and Washington responded to all this at the cathedral with a quiet and reassuring pride that hasn't been seen in these parts for quite a while. Nw VoHi Times News Swvlc. Mr.

Reston's column appears weekdays In Chicago Today. FOR A good quarter of a century we liberals have been working to limit the scope of congressional Investigations. Not because we denied Congress' rjight to be adequately informed about matters of possible statutory action, but because we believed that congressional Inquests had been abused, had become in many cases simple fishing expedi-tions. Our particular area of concern was, of course, the great hunt for "subversives" where it seemed apparent that the function of, say, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was not to prepare legislation but to wander around the country collecting headlines. You can thus understand my amazement last summer when various influential liberals began a desperate search for a House or Senate committee that would investigate the Watergate affair.

No one could argue that such a safari 1 was designed to shape the alleged offenses were all amply covered by the criminal and civil laws. ITS PURPOSE WAS purely political: to find a forum where the Democrats could ventilate their accusations with- out all the clumsy rigainarole that ac- companies due process pf law. In fairness, one distinguished liberal my old sparring partner, Joseph L. Rauh the Washington lawyer who holds the first mortgage on Americans for Demo-cratic Action made precisely this point in. a letter to the Washington Post.

Rauh, who dedicated himself to the defense of those in the 1950s who were smeared by irresponsible charges, has a sense of history. Now we are again confronted with politics in a vacuum in connection with the three-way dispute between Sen. William Proxmire Roy. L. Ash, and Gordon W.

Rule. To recapitulate the bidding, President Nixon ap- pointed Ash as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Rule, who was director of the procurement control and clearance section of the Navy's Material Command, informed a Senate subcommittee headed by Proxmire that Ash was a bad bet, that Litton Industries which Ash formerly headed had a terrible track record with the Navy on cost overruns. One can assume that this testimony unsettled the President. In any event, two days after his performance before the Proxmire subcommittee, Rule was cordially invited to retire.

He refused and was then exiled to a minor position. Understandably, Proxmire-who has been a vigilant searcher after Pentagon truth-went thru the roof, denouncing the administration for silencing criticism. By the time this column appears, the Rule case will doubtless have been adduced as evidence of our proximity to a police state. But wait a minute. Without for a minute trying to evaluate the merits of the dispute, I have a curious feeling that I have been here before.

Only there was a somewnat different cast of characters. Without pinpointing any one episode, let's take a composit. On one side pf the dais sit the mighty barons of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Before them a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is explaining his budget. A good soldier, he sticks to his brief as cleared by "SecDef," tho he displays no great enthusiasm.

THEN COMES THE question period and the senators pull out little slips of paper some queries a friendly colonel provided in case things got boresome and start working on the witness. "General, do you believe that we should permit the Communists to operate out of sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and North Viet Nam?" "Sir, I'd just as soon not comment on that it's a political matter." "Just a minute, general. We are asking you a military question. We donj want the military in politics any more than you do. But in military terms is our policy sound?" "Senator, when you put it that way I feel free to say that in my military judgment our sanctuary policy is completely unsound." The President reads it on the ticker and has a fit he knows he has been set up, but what can he do? Impose censorship? Fire a general for being "honest" with the Senate? Complain to his wife? The last is probably the most sensible course of action since First Ladies know better than to accuse their husbands of violating their, constitutional rights.

Kln Futures Syndicate Mr. Roche's column appears weekdays In Chicago Today. WASHINGTON Every once in a once in a while, something happens in the capital of the United States which reminds us of the continuity of American life, heals our tragic misunderstandings, and connects our religious past to the modern secular age. And so it was when Frank Sayre, the grandson of President Woodrow Wilson and present dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, presided the other day over the final memorial service for President Truman, or as Dean Sayre called him in a moving simple prayer, "our brother Harry." There are two hills in Washington: Capitol Hill, the symbol of our political life, and Cathedral Hill or Mount St. Albans, the symbol of our spiritual life, where the soaring gothic church looks down on the gleaming Potomac and the monuments of the founders and martyrs of the republic.

"WE DO not die separately," said Woodrow Wilson. "We do not die by corporations. Every man has to live with himself privately, and it is a most uncomfortable life. He has to remember what he did during the day, the things that he yielded to, the points that he compromised. Dean Sayre did not quote this from his grandfather, but he celebrated Wilson's principle.

Harry, he said, was indeed loyal, faithful to the simple eternal values. He lived and died privately. He remembered what he did during the day, the things he yielded to, the points he compromised. These were not Frank Sayre's words, but they suggest his meaning. 'Here in the Washington cathedral was a great congregation of all parties, ages, religions, and colors, seated under the great arches, listening to the "comfortable words" of the Episcopalian service, and the glorious soaring voices of the middle-aged men and children singing the 23d Psalm.

Every quiet civility was remembered. A prayer for those who mourn: "Look with pity we beseech Thee, upon the sorrows of Thy servant endue them with patience, comfort them with a sense of Thy goodness. A prayer for the nation: "Keep bright In our hearts, 0 Lord, the openness which Thou didst spread before our forebears upon this continent Let freedom be fresh kindled, and courage given for the new day. Who says we are not still touched by the echoes of the old American religious heritage? You could see it in Weaver of literary nooses The White House insisted portions of the interview were out bt context and "wide of the mark." KISSINGER SAID he agreed only because Italian Ambassador Egidio Ortona asked him to talk to Miss Fallaci. Miss Fallaci has roamed the world for her articles and books.

She was in Viet Nam during the dark days of the 1960s and in 1968 was shot in the right thigh, the left knee, and the back while in Mexico City during the 1968 Olympics. She had gone there to cover the spectacle of the games but ended up between students and federal police in a bloody battle that was no less terrifying than the events of the 1972 Olympics. She first gained attention in the United States with her impressionistic account of the American space program in 1966. ORIANA FALLACI, whose remarkable interview of Henry Kissinger appears in Perspective today, is a charming, diminutive writer for the. Italian rotogravure magazine, L'Europeo.

Miss Fallaci, 44, has been described by one critic as the best celebrity interviewer "this side of Rex Reed." Miss Fallaci's interviews are unusually perceptive and, as in the Kissinger interview, she lets her subjects use their own words to hang themselves. Among the hanged before Kissinger: Playboy's Hugh Hefner, novelist Norman Mailer, French actress Jeanne Moreau, entertainer Sammy Davis militant H. Rap Brown, and actor Sean Connery. In the wake of her latest Interview, there were the usual cries of outrage. SHOP ALL STORES SUIIDAY KOOII TO P.tl.

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