Who Owns Boardwalk?

Who Owns Boardwalk? While the impact of the Pentagon papers continues to reverberate in the U.S., a Marxist explanation comes from the Soviet magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta. In the Russian view, the secret study was published because three factions of monopolists were warring among themselves.

According to Gazeta, the three factions are: 1) makers of consumer and civilian goods, 2) suppliers of military goods not used in the Viet Nam War, and 3) military-industrial manufacturers whose goods are used in the war. As the Soviets see it, the civilian-sector monopolists and non-Viet Nam military-industrial monopolists became disenchanted with the war. Upset over the inflation and shrinking revenues caused by the Indochina involvement, the monopolists then arranged for the documents to be published as an embarrassment to the military-industrial monopolists who had reaped profits from the Viet Nam conflict. Each of the newspapers that received and printed the Pentagon papers during the two weeks of court battles was simply an agent of the dissident monopolies.

After years of mutual attempts to improve Soviet-American relations, it is frightening that the Soviet Union still has so fantastic a view of U.S. affairs. But taken whimsically the novel view does help explain other puzzling developments in American life. For example, Golfer Lee Trevino's victories in the U.S., Canadian and British Opens are little more than a Mexican-American revolt against the Anglo-Saxon monopolists who have dominated the game. And the nationwide telephone strike is not a worker-boss conflict at all, but an attempt by harried parents to wrest control of the telephone from the teen-age daughters who have so long monopolized the lines.

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