NOTES IN THE NEWS

The Test of Courage At the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department the course was set for stepping up the war in Vietnam. As the war widened, some of the doves who had gathered in the...

...The Committee not only has documented an impressive case to substantiate its charges, but has also made a number of positive recommendations, which, if carried out, would put the Government in the lead in whittling away segregation and discrimination in housing...
...The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing has accused the Government of following weak and vacillating policies in administering existing housing programs, giving in to local and regional housing customs and practices, and, therefore, "under-girding a ghetto system that dominates, distorts, and despoils every aspect of life in the United States today...
...They have worked together, along with Catholic and Protestant civil rights advocates, in hundreds of campaigns designed to give the Negro the first class citizenship he has been so long denied...
...policy, then it will be quite appropriate to celebrate 1969 throughout the land as the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicole di Bernardo Machiavelli...
...Ellis says all these activities are part of a Zionist plan to make Negro scapegoats instead of themselves...
...This is a new proposal, and represents a considerable advance over current costly and time-consuming enforcement procedures...
...I am voting against the supplemental authorization," Senator Nelson stated, "in order to express my opposition to past escalation of the conflict and the future escalation that is certain to follow...
...Enactment of legislation designed to improve the plight of ghetto-imprisoned Negroes could be a significant step in reducing the tensions that explode into violence every summer...
...One out of four Americans wants the bombing of North Vietnam stopped...
...The chief exploiters in the black ghetto are the Jewish merchants and landlords...
...Second, the civil rights organizations will have to regroup and mount a unified campaign in support of the bill...
...the current Congress is more conservative than its predecessor...
...The amendment lauded the President as a peacemaker even as he committed the country ever more deeply to the conflict that Mansfield once described as an "open-ended" war...
...The Pentagon Strikes Out Since the departure of Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester, the man who believed in managing the news, the Pentagon has entered a phase where it apparently can manage neither the news, nor its own sense of proportion...
...Whatever Mansfield's intentions—or the fate of his proposal in a Senate-House conference—the practical effect of Senate adoption of his amendment is to encourage further escalation...
...Smith, did not explain anything...
...It has taken three strikes in a row, though of course it is not baseball that is being played...
...By asserting control over all non-Vietnamese civilians in Vietnam, the American military command has stepped into a jurisdiction hitherto held by the South Vietnamese government, which the State Department keeps saying is sovereign and independent...
...First came the incident of the little girl's poem in a Presbyterian magazine...
...That officer denied the charge and Goldwater then accepted the denial...
...Edith Green of Oregon...
...Finally, there is the Pentagon's action in officially declaring a time of war, in order to assume control over American and other non-Vietnamese civilians in Vietnam, up to the point of courts-martial...
...There is "an alarming trend in this country toward the use of police-state tactics," Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, told his colleagues...
...Ellis want to differentiate by passing judgment on the actions of individual Jews rather than on Jews as a people...
...Henry Helstoski of New Jersey...
...This case became controversial because Barry Gold-water, who was not present, accused another reserve officer, who was, of making a complaint that led to the commandant's relief...
...If Making it a Federal offense to interfere with anyone exercising civil rights guaranteed by Federal law, such as voting or attending school...
...The two Senate doves who stood fast and voted their convictions on this historic occasion—which was given only a fraction of the attention it deserved by any objective news standard—made their position as clear as words could make it...
...On February 21 there was a momentous change...
...At the moment, hope for passage of the omnibus measure seems dim...
...The Liberator series, "Semitism in the Black Ghetto," written by Eddie Ellis and published last year, charged that Negroes in Harlem were exploited by merchants and landlords...
...When the matter was pressed by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Secretary McNamara sent her a memo about it but marked it secret...
...A number of scientific societies have expressed their concern over, or opposition to, these nightmare weapons...
...There has been some friction, at times, between Negroes and Jews...
...Misunderstandings between Negroes and Jews, or among other elements of our pluralistic society, are best brought out into the open and discussed...
...In any case, the students and faculties of all four war colleges are now deeply perturbed by a possible threat to their freedom of discussion...
...The Government fails in many other ways to use the authority it now has to diminish racial discrimination...
...For days the Senate debated the Johnson policy, but when it came to the acid test—whether a $4.5 billion supplemental appropriation should be voted for the war—eighty-nine Senators including a dozen or more doves voted affirmatively...
...groups and individuals representing democratic ideals overseas...
...If The prohibition of discrimination in the selection of federal, state, or local juries on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or economic status...
...The pumping of many millions of dollars in CIA funds into the nation's academic, cultural, labor, church, and journalistic fields has been so comprehensive that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find organizations completely free of any taint of CIA subsidy...
...Dan Watts, editor of Liberator, denied the articles were anti-Semitic: "The object of my publishing the articles was, hopefully, to start a dialogue between Jewish leaders and the black community...
...Phillip Burton, Don Edwards, Thomas M. Rees, and Edward R. Roybal of California...
...Although this is a minority, it does embrace millions of voters...
...But the Administration should put its own house in order by immediately implementing the many powers it already commands to break down the walls of discrimination in housing...
...House members who voted for the Brown amendment in addition to the author and Kastenmeier were: Jonathan B. Bingham, Leonard Farbstein, Benjamin S. Rosenthal, William F. Ryan, and James H. Scheuer, all of New York...
...The President's new package includes: An open occupancy housing provision—the most controversial part of the bill—which has been sugar-coated...
...Officials of a number of communities have begun to express springtime fears of summertime riots, particularly if no further progress is achieved on the civil rights front...
...At present, they are in disarray, divided, and lacking much of their former support...
...First, the President will have to pursue his fight for civil rights legislation with considerably more vigor than he did last year...
...in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people...
...No realistic observer had expected more than a dozen or so votes in opposition to the funds, and perhaps as many as fifteen in support of the amendment by Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, which declared it the "sense of Congress" that the United States refrain from military activity over, or in, North Vietnam and limit its forces in South Vietnam to a half million troops unless war were formally declared...
...The CIA web of propaganda and intrigue—spun with the generalized approval of four Presidents, the blank check endorsement of Congress, the acceptance and sometimes connivance of foundations and organizations headed by eminently respectable persons—demonstrates how cold war values threaten to transform a country founded in liberty into an authoritarian state...
...Why was there a period in the first place...
...It is not enough for the Administration to plant a proposal in Congress and leave it to chance to wither or thrive...
...To cite only two examples, it is estimated that of the 633,000 public housing units over which the U.S...
...The American way of life," he added, "does not prepare our people for continual deception...
...But obviously, the point had been made...
...Senator Morse declared: "These successive military funding bills for the war do not relate so much to supporting the boys and giving them what they need as they provide funds for new expanded forces to be sent...
...Because of the ensuing rumpus, Secretary McNamara reversed the decision...
...As a result, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, supported by Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, was able to maneuver the adoption by a heavy majority—seventy-two to nineteen—of an amendment in place of the Clark proposal...
...Author James Baldwin and actor and playwright Ossie Davis, both Negroes, have now resigned from Liberator's advisory board in protest against the Ellis articles...
...What is The Times' policy on periods anyway...
...See box on Page 6.) President Johnson, it is reported, ordered an end to secret subsidies by the CIA to private organizations— after Ramparts' recent revelations regarding the National Student Association hit the headlines...
...They should have foreseen that their secret operations inevitably would be exposed to world-wide condemnation...
...The country has a choice between the philosophy of the Machiavellians and the beliefs of those deeply concerned citizens who know that if we continue to justify ruthless means because of our professed ends, eventually democracy will be destroyed...
...Only two, Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, both Democrats, dared vote against the appropriation...
...I think it is most distinctly unhelpful, and I think it is immoral to blame Harlem on the Jew...
...The prospects would brighten, however, if the defeatist attitude that prevailed in 1966 is reversed...
...His contemporary and model, Cesare Borgia, built his power on such principles, the principles we now practice in modern fashion in Vietnam and in other countries...
...The nation needs an open occupancy law, and everything possible should be done to persuade Congress to enact it...
...Occasionally this has broken into the open but more frequently it has seethed below the surface...
...But the citizen who truly cares about the survival of the American venture in democracy should demand of his Congressman, his Senator, and the White House that the inquiry be initiated...
...With chemical weapons we can deal out agony, paralysis, and death to the enemy and with biological means we can now turn loose plant diseases in the enemy's territory to abort his crops or sow bacterial diseases among the people, including plague, encephalitis, yellow fever, and botulism toxin...
...Resale of properties acquired by the Federal Housing and Veterans' Administrations has in practice reinforced existing segregation patterns...
...Truman's Misgivings over CIA Former President Harry Truman, who created the Central Intelligence Agency, soon afterward developed the "gravest misgivings" about it, Smith Simpson, a former State Department oficial, reminds us in his forthcoming book, Anatomy of the State Department...
...Then came the incident of the Air Force War College and the transfer of its commandant to Okinawa, after a secret seminar of senior Air Force Reserve officers at which he was purportedly critical of the conduct of the Vietnam war, especially on the question of bomb shortages...
...The real issue, however, is whether the principle of academic freedom applies to the War College, whatever the nature of the commandant's remarks, and in this instance they were obviously hawkish...
...Why take refuge in the most ancient and barbaric of the European myths...
...Five thousand American scientists, including seventeen Nobel Prize winners and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences, have petitioned the White House, asking for CBW controls...
...The memo, said Mrs...
...But when The New York Times—whose punctuation and other style practices are guidelines in the trade—demonstrates confusion, heaven knows where the periods and commas and colons will be put in and left out on the pages of lesser publications around the country...
...We shudder to contemplate where this will all end no period On the Brink of Horror During the past six years the military has stepped up its development of the ghastly weapons of CBW—chemical and biological warfare...
...Apart from the question of morality involved in the secret practices that have been disclosed, the Government, and many cooperating members of the Establishment, have demonstrated an abysmal lack of common sense...
...On the other hand, the masthead carries the slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print," and omits a period at the end...
...Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota...
...Once again events have demonstrated that when it comes to making undeclared war— and widening it when it suits him— President Johnson has Congress in the hollow of his hand...
...The talking can be constructive if it is honest...
...And beyond that the Pentagon has stirred up a first-class row with the South Vietnamese government...
...Then the children flamed...
...Baldwin asked in a letter recently published in Free-domways, a Negro quarterly...
...Third, the churches and civic organizations, and labor and industry, will have to bring to the housing issue the kind of pressure they did in backing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965...
...Housing Assistance Administration has jurisdiction, ninety per cent are segregated because of shoddy policies in site selection and tenant placement...
...The rules of punctuation are difficult enough to apply properly, as any copy editor knows...
...and Sidney R. Yates of Illinois...
...But entirely aside from the housing fight in Congress, there is a great deal that the Federal Government can do right now, without further legislation, to open up new opportunities for Negroes to enjoy decent housing...
...Now it will seem to them that the occupation is under way already...
...We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society...
...It should not be too difficult to differentiate...
...More than ever before, American delegates—whether students, professors, labor leaders, lawyers, or churchmen—to international conferences will be viewed with suspicion as possible hirelings of the U.S...
...He cited CIA subsidies, wiretapping and eavesdropping by Government agencies, and the financing of supposedly legitimate books by the U.S...
...It can promote new understanding between Negroes and Jews as well as illuminate the many facets of prejudice that still separate Negroes from whites no matter what their religious faith may be...
...For that reason, the disagreement that has developed over a series of articles appearing in Liberator, a Negro monthly, could prove to have positive value...
...The White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon were quick to interpret the amendment as the most generous blank check handed over to them for military purposes in Vietnam since the Senate's Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964...
...Furthermore, I am voting against it to express my deep regret that we have failed to explore adequately the possibility of reaching the negotiating table by the cessation of bombing for a sufficient time to test the real intent of Hanoi...
...John Conyers, Jr., and Charles C. Diggs, Jr., of Michigan...
...End of a Period The masthead of The New York Times used to display the name of the world's most comprehensive daily as The New York Times, with the period in the form of a diamond...
...We cannot play international games, said Walter Lippmann, as if we were a totalitarian society...
...To press for such an inquiry may be futile in view of the disposition of the Administration and many Congressional leaders to whitewash the CIA...
...Describing himself as "a black nationalist," Davis attacked the Liberator articles for "their wild and unsupported contentions," called the series "racist," and added: "Whatever Jews are guilty of exploiting Harlem are not guilty because they are Jews, but because— along with many Catholics, Protestants, Negro and white—they are exploiters...
...They are not lethal but their employment suggests that the military has moved at least one step toward the unleashing of the lunatic horrors of the kind of warfare long outlawed by international convention...
...There are now some searching questions that need to be answered...
...Private foundations should be encouraged to provide their own funds for similar activities and to make full disclosure of these activities...
...What would follow such an exploration, it is hoped, is new legislation specifically limiting the CIA to the gathering and evaluation of intelligence...
...espionage apparatus...
...the period was dropped...
...Information Agency among examples of "un-American practices...
...In the House approval of the appropriation came by voice vote after it had defeated, 372 to eighteen, an amendment by Representative George Brown of California which was similar to the Clark anti-bombing amendment...
...This pressure was noticeably lacking in last year's losing effort to gain open occupancy...
...He said further that the articles "were valid in the sense that the dilemma of the ghetto is: How do we differentiate between the Jewish community that supports the civil rights movement and the shopkeeper on 125th Street who hides behind the fact that he may be Jewish...
...It is true that the United States is doing most of the fighting in Vietnam, and paying the freight, and many Vietnamese fear it will be there a long time, even after hostilities end...
...Since Congress has made no declaration of a state of war, for international reasons the President and the State Department consider adequate, the Pentagon has not only assumed a legislative function, but its action could lead to military censorship of press dispatches, radio reports, and television pictures—hitherto un-censored because there is no formal state of war...
...Simpson recalls that Mr...
...We had better make up our minds to play the game from the American strength and not from American weakness, and to stamp out lying as a public policy...
...In his struggle for civil rights and equality of opportunity the minority Negro often has had the support of the minority Jew...
...I . . . would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere...
...In some respects it is stronger than the bill that passed the House last year but was filibustered to death in the Senate under the leadership of the minority leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen...
...The damage done to free institutions in this country may be even greater...
...Democracy Betrayed If two years from now our Government—with the tacit and sometimes outspoken approval of some segments of the Establishment—is still employing force, deceit, and corruption as tools of U.S...
...Negroes and Jews Eleven out of one hundred Americans are Negroes and about three out of one hundred are Jews...
...Tf Giving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the right to order the end of discriminatory practices...
...In a later statement—expressive of the views of the eighteen Democrats, including himself, who voted for the Brown amendment — Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin said he had voted "no" in the voice vote on the appropriation because he could "not support a measure that promises only to continue the present course which will send still more troops to Vietnam, widen the land war in Southeast Asia, and further increase American casualties...
...Alexander Kendrick CBS Commentator...
...Watts and Mr...
...For the Florentine statesman and political writer, in his work The Prince, sought to justify the use of violence, dishonesty, and corruption in statecraft...
...Three chemical agents, says a report in Science, the publication of the Association for the Advancement of Science, are already in use by U.S...
...forces in Vietnam...
...It would take effect in stages over two years in an effort to soften opposition...
...Not only is this poetic, but it sounds like objective reporting, and therefore the Pentagon dropped the magazine from its approved list for chaplains...
...A next logical step would be for the President and Congress to initiate a policy of openly declared and openly administered aid to U.S...
...President Truman, under whose Administration the CIA was established, warned after he left office that the agency's growing power must be curbed...
...Patsy T. Mink of Hawaii...
...They urged that the President order a halt to the use of anti-personnel and anti-crop chemical weapons in Vietnam, institute a White House study of Government policy on CBW weapons, and "re-establish and categorically declare the intention of the United States to refrain from initiating the use of chemical and biological weapons...
...Except for Senators Nelson and Morse in the Senate and eighteen members of the House, these millions had no Congressional voices courageous enough to cast clear-cut votes against the bombing and other escalation measures which block the road to peace...
...Truman wrote in a syndicated newspaper article in late 1953: "With all the nonsense put on by Communist propaganda...
...Destroyed not by Communism but by the witless and reckless policies of the Government itself and the acquiescence of the uninformed and the unconcerned...
...The scientists warned that "The employment of any one CB weapon weakens the barriers to the use of others," and that "If the restraints on the use of one kind of CB weapon are broken down, the use of others will be encouraged...
...Davis also wrote to Freedomways: "Mr...
...It may help clear the air of some of the misunderstandings that have been developing between Negroes and Jews...
...In the struggle for men's minds we have been caught cheating, and it is in the cheating and not the exposure of it that we betray our ideals...
...This is not an issue to be buried but one to be "talked out" among—and between—Negroes and Jews and other Americans...
...And was it dropped because the punctuation experts on The Times finally decided that a title was not a sentence, which would require a period...
...most of the exploiters, the author wrote, were Jewish...
...But most of the doves seemed to lack the courage of their often stated convictions and they failed to organize the strategy by which they could register their unmistakable disapproval of the Johnson policy on a key roll call...
...Mansfield's amendment contradictorily declared that Congress firmly intends "to provide all necessary support" for the military effort in Vietnam, and supports the efforts of President Johnson and "other men of goodwill" to prevent the expansion of the Vietnam war and to achieve a negotiated peace...
...If there is to be a halt to the process by which the Government and some of our institutions are being subverted to practices which mirror the Communist tactics we condemn, the first step must be a thorough-going Congressional inquiry into the CIA's activities and the relationship of the executive and legislative branches to this dangerously powerful agency...
...The practice of a Machiavellian national policy has been clearly exposed to public view by the latest series of revelations on the Central Intelligence Agency's penetration, over two decades, of nearly every type of free institution operating in this country and abroad...
...Our credibility in the eyes of other countries and peoples has been severely damaged by the CIA's infiltration of our institutions...
...But where the hell is the proof...
...The jungle burst into gold, and sent up little birds of fire," it read...
...The little animals with fur aflame...
...It was about the use of napalm in Vietnam...
...The real question is—do Mr...
...There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it...
...This frightful and frightening policy the Government pursues—that the end justifies the means—has boomeranged...
...If the President does not heed these warnings from so massive a segment of the scientific community, but instead follows the Pentagon's policy on chemical and biological warfare, he not only will continue to alienate concerned scientists in the country but will deserve the angry censure of mankind...
...He also claimed that "Zionists" dominated Negro colleges and Negro organizations and manipulated the civil rights movement...
...As the war widened, some of the doves who had gathered in the Senate cloakroom grumbled—privately —against President Johnson's obsession with a military solution for Vietnam...
...Ways to Open Housing President Johnson's proposal to Congress for civil rights legislation is a good one...

Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4


 
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