Bayh Urges 'New Tenant' For White House by 1973

Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) told a Business School audience yesterday, "I have a lot of reasons to want to dump Richard Nixon, but our immediate policy need is to try to persuade the administration to end the Vietnam war now."

The Business School's Public Affairs Forum sponsored Bayh to speak on "Private Industry and Public Responsibility," but the question and answer period which constituted most of his remarks centered on the political issues which may dominate the 1972 campaign.

Asked to comment on Sunday's "dump Nixon" rally in Providence at which he spoke, Bayh said, "I would prefer to have such a public outpouring that Nixon will end the war before election. But I'm not trying to hide the fact that I want another person in the White House in 1973."

When asked what he and the Democratic Party had done to end the war in the past, Bayh said, "Not enough. Hindsight is better than foresight, but nobody's hands are clean." Bayh traced responsibility for the war to the Senate's passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965 when "we gave the President all the power he could need."

During his prepared remarks, Bayh said an attack on corporations will continue if corporations do not find a place for social responsibility in their structure. Bayh said he supports Campaign GM-an effort organized by a Ralph Nader-backed group of Washington lawyers to force General Motors to accept its social responsibility through a proxy vote.

Bayh said the federal government should set guidelines on corporate investment in South Africa and Rhodesia, adding that "our economic policy needs to be more consistent with stated foreign policy."

Army Intelligence

On the recent hearings before Congress concerning the role of Army intelligence, Bayh said that it is "hard to find out the size of the problem." He said that the "availability of confidential information to the press, who has no business having it," is equally as dangerous as the stigma such surveillance creates.

A member of the Senate's Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, Bayh said that responsibility for environmental problems has switched from legislation to enforcement. "If we could enforce the standards on the books, we will have dealt with the problem significantly. But its going to cost the average citizen," he added.