South Bend, May 2, 1974
Miscalculations
Mutual miscalculations between America and Europe led several times to historic catastrophes of large proportions. Nothing could therefore be more important for maintaining the North Atlantic Alliance than for the United States and the European countries getting to know and learning to understand each other better.
South Bend, May 7, 1974
Brandt’s Resignation
The news of the sudden resignation of the German Chancellor Willy Brandt hit the American public, who usually takes little interest in European political affairs, like a bolt from the blue. The reason for Brandt’s resignation is hard to understand. Is the espionage incident just a pretext, or is there more behind it? Willy Brandt has given European politics direction. The gap he leaves behind will be hard to fill.
South Bend, May 8, 1974
Free Delivery
Special supplements to daily newspapers are now delivering free the dirty laundry of the White House to households throughout the country. The transcripts of the Watergate affair, recently released by President Nixon, show appallingly the low standard of the working climate, which has been spreading in the immediate surroundings of the President. The language is so cynical and full of invectives that every second sentence contains an expletive. The impact of these transcripts on the impeachment proceedings remains to be seen. Anyway, they have destroyed an American myth. The Oval Office has up to now been regarded as sacrosanct. Nobody could have imagined that in the holiest office of the country such profane language is being used. The Office of the President has been dragged through the mud and given way to a shameful disillusionment.
Sunday, May 19, 1974
Once More Barely Slipped By
Today Valery Giscard d’Estaing won the run-off election for the French presidency with a slim margin (371,814 out of a total of 26 million votes) against Francois Mitterrand. Once again, France slipped by a socialist-communist government by a hair breadth. But the deep social division, which runs through the French population, has also become apparent in this election. It is expected that Giscard d’Estaing will seek a closer cooperation with the Common Market and that he will be more open-minded toward the United States.
[From the end of May to the middle of August my family and I spent our summer vacation in Innsbruck. We had booked tickets on a charter flight of the Modern Language Association of America from New York to Paris.]
South Bend, May 25, 1974
Departure from the Watergate Troubled America
Before leaving America this year, the question remains open whether the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, the Rodino Committee, will recommend impeachment and whether it will come to impeachment proceedings in the Senate.
[Peter W. Rodino, born 1909 in Newark, New Jersey, by profession lawyer and politician. Democrat, U.S. Representative from New Jersey, 1948-80; since January 1973 Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 1974 Rodino was charged by the House to investigate the legal transgressions in the Watergate affair, and, if necessary, to initiate the proceedings of impeachment against President Nixon.]