Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 64

Perspective 12 Section 2 Chicago TnDune, Sunday, October 7, 1973 John P. Roche James Rcston Stayskal I lh. Hi Politics undercut in history series Family argument not hard to solve X1 FOR MORE than 15 years, Prof. Daniel J. Boorstin who was most recently director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution, and professor of history at the University of Chicago for 25 previous years has been at work on his special vision of the development of American civilization.

The first two volumes: "The Americansthe Colonial Experience," and "The Americans the National Experience" Random House took Boorstin's story up to the 20th century. Now the final volume, "The Americans the Democratic Experience," is out, and predictably the center of controversy. It has been denounced as an annotated catalog of the Museum of Science and Industry, and Boorstin has been criticized as an eccentric who simply doesn't know what history is all about. AT FIRST reading, there is a certain persuasiveness about the critiques. What can one make of a volume about the "Democratic Experience" that never remotely touches on politics? If one confined his historical analysis of our social history to a reading of Boorstin, Thomas Alva Edison would loom over Franklin D.

Roosevelt as a principal figure in the transformation of American society. xt ft ii i in v.v.-. TO, 173 This raises some staggering questions for an administration that is trying to get all these Watergate and constitutional questions behind them so that they can concentrate on the "public's business." Are we therefore now going to move from the Ervin committee's interrogation of the Watergate and the "dirty tricks" of the 1972 Presidential election, to an interrogation by Agnew or his lawyers of his own colleagues in the Justice Department? Is Petersen or even Atty. Gen. Richardson to be put on the stand under oath to swear that they didn't try to destroy their own Vice President? And what about members of the White House staff, some of whom have also been suspected of leaking the charges against Agnew? There is also in this thicket of suspicion the awkward question of summoning the newspaper, magazine, and television reporters who publish the leaks.

Are they also to be commanded under oath to disclose the sources of their information, under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court? There must be some better way to resolve the Vice President's suspicions that he is being shafted by his own buddies. After all, this is not a conflict between political enemies. The President says he accepts the Vice President's proclamation of innocence to the charges of political corruption and has appealed to the nation to do the same. ALREADY, THE nation is involved in more than a dozen investigations, court cases, grand jury investigations, and interparty squabbles, all of them unavoidable on the evidence, so who needs splashy, new, avoidable rows within the administration itself? The problem for the moment seems to be that everybody is looking out for his own hide and seems willing to leave the country in a scrape rather than to risk being in a scrape himself. There are many problems the President cannot relieve these days merely by getting a few people together in a room and talking sense, but the present family argument would not seem to be one of them, and so far there is no evidence, that he has even asked Agnew, Richardson, and Petersen over to the White House for a quiet private talk together about their dilemma.

New York Timet Newt Service If there is any reference to ideological conflicts in this volume, I have missed it and I am a very close reader. Does Boorstin really then believe that the "packaging revolution" in foodstuffs was more significant than the Fair Labor Standards Act? Simple-minded reviewers seemed to think so, but their problem is that they have never grasped Boorstin's overview, which is most cogently presented in his volume on "The Colonial Experience." There is a fundamental theoretical posture: Boorstin is one of the most talented anti-intellectual intellectuals since St. Augustine. He considers ideology to be clap-trap, and is convinced that the strength of American society has precisely developed from the average American's total lack of interest in high theory. Americans, he persistently emphasizes, are "go-getters," people ready at the drop of a hat to chuck historical luggage overboard and start from square one.

Put in its proper conceptual context, what Boorstin has written is an underground history of American civilization. Never a man to hedge his bets, he has, with, one suspects, a certain perverse joy, ruthlessly put down the political process. This at times leads him to fall out of the other side of the bed and sound like a technological determinist like Karl Marx, who observed a demonstration of electricity in 1851 and wrote his friend Engels, "Electricity will give us But the fundamental thrust of his argument is clear: Americans achieved what they did by pragmatic techniques, not by cosmological insights. ALTHO I OBVIOUSLY disagree strongly with a number of Boorstin's premises, I have always found his work fascinating and some of his incidental insights which are casually thrown off positively stunning. This series is not easy reading, but I strongly recommend it as an antidote to the works of others including me who tend to treat the development of American civilization as a process conducted almost exclusively in the political arena.

Besides, who knows? In the year 3000 Edison may in retrospect seem to have been a far greater figure than F. D. R. Kim Features Syndicate John P. Roche appears regularly in Chicago Today.

THE CONTROVERSY within (he Nil-on administration over Vice President Agnew is getting sillier by the day, and the courts, which are supposed to impose reason on silliness, seem to be compounding the confusion. Consider the facts: President Nixon is in charge of the executive branch of the government. His principal assistant, Vice President Agnew, is informed by the President's own attorney general that Agnew is being investigated on charges of extortion, conspiracy, tax evasion, and other felonies, and these charges are now being presented to a federal grand jury in Baltimore. All this is made public the source of the information is still obscure but the Vice President announces that he is innocent, that he will not resign even if indicted, that he is the victim of a "malicious, immoral, and illegal" attack against him by prosecutors of his own administration, and he puts the finger on Henry Petersen, head of the criminal division at the Justice Department, as the source of the leaks. SO WHAT does the President do about this public row within his own official family? He doesn't settle it but confuses it.

He supports the Vice President's right to the presumption of innocence. He says it is "altogether right" for the Vice President to stay on his job, even if indicted, but he adds that he has no "clear evidence" that Assistant Atty. Gen. Petersen was responsible for the leaks or the "malicious, immoral, and illegal" anti-Agnew attacks attributed by the Vice President to Petersen. Enter now the courts.

Either the Vice President's charges against Petersen were inaccurate and unfair or leaked by somebody else; or Petersen's denials, backed by Atty. Gen. Richardson, were false. But In either event, this was a controversy within the administration which the President had the power to resolve unless, of course, you assume that both the Vice President and the Justice Department are now beyond his control, which may be true. Not being resolved within the executive branch, however, the issue was left to the judiciary, and Federal District Judge Walter E.

Hoffman has now ruled that Vice President Agnew's attorneys, with the full power of subpena, may now command testimony under oath about who within the NLxon administration is responsible for leaking information detrimental to their own colleague, Agnew. "I've just been handed this late-breaking leak Wayne Stayskal's cartoons appear weekdays in Chicago Today. Between the lines The Reformed Church in America, the denomination whose best-known preacher is Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, is thinking positively about following the example of Col. Sanders and other drive-in successes.

The denomination has chosen drive-in religion as its major vehicle for congregational growth in the '70s. A Reformed Church pastor pioneered in drive-in preaching in 1955 when he clambered to the roof of a California drive-in theater's snack bar and preached, thru the in-car speakers, to a congregation on wheels. The church now has 15 drive-in churches, most in Southern California and Florida where mild weather encourages worshipers to park and pray year-round. Count Dracula, the Transylvanian vampire who mainly stalks his victims on late night television these days, has emerged from the tomb in his native Romania to help lure foreign tourists and their money. A new government tour takes visitors to crumbling castles, torture chambers, and similar scenic sites linked to Vlad Tepes IVlad the Impalerl, the 15th century noble identified as the "real Dracula." Vlad's zeal for suspending enemies, thieves, and other malefactors from spikes didn't inspire respect elsewhere in Europe but in Romania Vlad I left 1 is still a national hero, a Robin Hood figure who earned enduring respect for his skillful warfare against Turkish invaders and his ruthless treatment of avaricious land owners.

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