Cavanagh Criticizes Budget Plans, Praises Supreme Court Decisions

Detroit Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh severely criticized the Johnson Administration's budget priorities and praised recent Supreme Court decisions regarding arrested persons' rights yesterday.

Cavanagh, speaking at a Harvard CRIMSON-WHRB interview, said that the lack of low-cost urban housing would "develop over the next six months into the most crucial (domestic) problem."

He said that priority given to space exploration programs and certain non-Vietnamese War military expenditures was making it impossible for the War on Poverty to continue at an adequate pace.

Behind the Russians

"It would not offend my patriotic sensibilities," Cavanagh noted. "if we fell two and a half years rather than two years behind the Russians in the space race."

He also called for a re-examination of the value of military aid programs to countries like Portugal and suggested that these be reduced before cutbacks were made in domestic poverty programs.

Cavanagh said that the widely criticized Supreme Court decisions outlining arrested persons' rights "should have come years ago." He agreed that police departments might not be able to prosecute as effectively as they once did. But he said that a person's rights must be protected even if it means "five detectives must do the work once done by two."

"But there is a breakdown in respect for authority, law and order," he noted.

Mayor Cavanagh, whose visit to Harvard is being sponsored by the Kennedy Institute of Politics, also said that all bombing of North Vietnam should end with the Christmas ceasefire.

"Total victory seems impossible" in Vietnam, he said, and urged a "national resolve" to fade out gradually.

Conferences with graduate and undergraduate seminars in urban politics as well as the usual round of informal meetings occupied most of Mayor Cavanagh's first day in Cambridge. He will be here through tomorrow.