AS THE Summer School begins its 1974 session, Watergate continues to fill the media. Each day brings new word of crime and scandal: buggings, attempted bribery of judges, suppression of evidence, executive defiance of the Constitution, presidential lies. Watergate has aroused a necessary critical spirit in this country. The domestic policies of the Nixon administration come under ever-increasing scrutiny, and in times of run-away inflation and regressive welfare policies that is as it should be. But this revitalized ability to see through the lies and deceptions does not seem to have extended to the arena of foreign policy. This is almost tragic because American foreign policy continues on its murderous course and still ignores the sanctity and beauty of human life. The crimes committed across the globe in the name of America and the support the Nixon government gives to reactionary regimes cannot escape our attention and our anger. Nor can the efforts of people from all parts of the world to win their freedom fail to stir our hearts. Sam Ervin and Archibald Cox became, with some justification, heroes in the past year. But others involved in the struggle for freedom achieved a heroism that is much greater and more touching than any produced by Watergate.

Remember Vietnam

WE remember the last year for the death of a great man, Salvador Allende Gossens. Allende was not the only person who died when Chile's upper classes decided that democracy couldn't extend to working people. But because Allende devoted his life to the oppressed, because he tried to see that the undernourished children of the slums of Santiago would have milk to drink, he stands for all the Chilean junta's victims. For more than three years, Chile held out a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. It seemed to prove that people could take power over the places where they worked--over their own lives, in the last analysis--without violence, without infringing on traditional liberties, without an abrupt break with the past. Now that beacon is gone.

Elsewhere in the world, beacons flickered, shot off sparks, were extinguished and flared out again. In Thailand, students struggling for democracy toppled a military dictatorship. Korean students rose in an effort to shake theirs. In Greece, the indomitable courage of students and workers undeterred by repression and torture brought down one dictator, though a more efficient one took his place. The ten-year independence struggle of Portugal's African colonies sparked revolutionary change within Europe's oldest dictatorship--change that isn't over yet, but whose unexpected depth and growth is testimony to the survival of people's love for freedom even under the most secure constraints.

Americans should take comfort and inspiration from the struggles of their sisters and brothers throughout the world. But most of all, the people of one area taught us what heroism means. For decades the people of Indochina have fought on--against Japan, against France, against the United States--for the right to live quietly in their own land. The American military had billions of dollars, thousands of tons of bombs, the most up-to-date electronic weaponry. The National Liberation Front and North Vietnam had less sophisticated weaponry and less practiced troops, but they also had a reciprocated faith in the people of their country. And they fought the United States to a standstill.

Americans should take solace in the victory of the Vietnamese people, for it grew out of values' that Americans share--belief in ordinary people's intelligence, charity, and ability to make important decisions by themselves. We take no pride at all in our government's refusal to accept that victory. As long as the United States continues to prop up and pay for reactionary governments without popular support, the Indochina war will continue, and Vietnamese and Cambodians will continue to die unnecessarily. General Thieu will continue to hold and to torture tens of thousands of political prisoners. The peoples of Indochina will be unable to rebuild their war-ravaged countries, unable to enjoy the all but destroyed lands they refused to surrender to foreign invaders or their native henchmen. And as long as the United States continues to help impose totalitarian governments on people elsewhere in the world, sloganeering liberals interested only in Watergate--Nixon's much more limited, watered-down march toward totalitarianism at home--will sound like hypocrites and frauds.

Impeach Nixon

LIKE President Johnson before him, President Nixon merits impeachment for a crime so high other misdemeanors pale beside it: Waging war, for years on end, against a nation whose only crime was to struggle for freedom. It's almost comical that Nixon should also merit--and conceivably undergo--impeachment for obstructing justice in the Watergate case.

Last year's Summer School students watched their T.V.'s as John Dean told of paranoia in the White House and implicated Richard Nixon in the crimes that have come to be known as Watergate. This year we will probably watch the drama be unfolded in even more detail as the House conducts its impeachment hearings.

Congress should impeach President Nixon. The United States will survive even if it doesn't, and the day-to-day business of government will go on, somehow. But the democratic spirit that once made this country the hope of the world will be dealt another in the series of blows that have reduced it to its present state of crisis.

Impeachment is a serious step. In a state ruled not by a king but by an elected representative of its people, impeachment shouldn't be unthinkable, but a viable threat to any president who steps too far out of line. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty needed the nourishment of a revolution every 20 years. Jefferson was a radical and a revolutionary, to be sure, but even the most moderate believer in the democratic safeguards of the Constitution shouldn't find an impeachment once a century at all excessive.

Impeachment would raise possibilities for self scrutiny and change in the American government in a way that nothing else has in recent years. Replacing Richard Nixon with Gerald Ford wouldn't normally represent an important change--though it might rid the presidency of the petty corruption and vindictiveness that today make it an object for laughter as well as sorrow. But an impeachment trial, with the full presumably cathartic public discussion it would inevitably entail, could help spark a rebirth of democracy and a militance about popular participation in making decisions that hasn't been seen in this country since the New Deal. Nixon is right. It is time to stop wallowing in issues of personal guilt or innocence. It's time to defend ourselves against assaults against democracy and to ensure that the fruits of that democracy are shared equally by all. By one of history's ironies, Watergate, the culmination of those assaults, offers us an opportunity to begin to move on to other issues--building a world of peace, ending racial and sexual discrimination, and redistributing wealth and power. Even the first steps--for example, fighting the inflation Nixon's economists have tried to stop by freezing wages while helping corporate profits soar--will be infinitely easier if the Watergate cancer is treated as it should be with excision.

Support the Strike

LIKE the Nixon administration, Harvard likes to ask those who can afford it least to bear inflation's burdens. This year, 36 members of the Graphics Arts International Union, with wages ranging from $110 a week for some typesetters to $240 a week for certain classes of pressmen, are striking for 10-to 14-per cent wage increases.

The typesetters' wages are about 25 per cent below Boston rates for workers of their skill level. Most of these workers are not unionized. The printers' wages are about 20 per cent below those paid to other GAIU printers in the area. Harvard has maintained that it can't afford more than a 5.5 per cent increase without forcing the University Printing Office's costs above those of commercial shops. Now it has increased its offer to 5.9 per cent.