Correspondents' Correspondence

...I return to Hong Kong a bit apprehensive about what I will find the next time I come home.--Arnold Abrams Image Projection Washington--Recent Administration civil-rights activity once again points up a basic distinction that politicians generally prefer to obfuscate--the difference between hard reality and "image...

...The weekly news magazines, on which most Americans 12,000 miles from home must rely, report the situation here but fail to convey the deeper meaning...

...Well, maybe...

...Texas is awfully far from Washington in many ways...

...But the film's climax--a symbolic, murderous confrontation between middle America and rebel youth--left me overwhelmingly sad, not hating...

...Laugh I did, for the dialogue and actor Peter Boyle's portrayal of the pathetic Joe are priceless...

...Of course, the telephone is still a. potent tool for a Washington exile...

...It's bad," says one source, "very, very, very bad...

...He implicitly branded me "Establishment" because I was not fully for his cause...

...My God," I said to my wife, "it looks like everyone has gone crazy...

...No, the Sovs want to continue the twilight struggle of war-no war and thus stay several steps ahead of peace, the U.S...

...I asked him...

...Perhaps she has persuaded the President that at a time when the Russians are using their armaments and military personnel to establish political influence, if not control, in the Arab world, it makes little sense to restrict the flow of U.S...

...Or, if negotiations fail and fighting starts again, pull a Pontius Pilate...

...I found this ironic in light of my relations with some military officials in Vietnam, and various stories I have written from Laos, Thailand and Taiwan about American involvement in those countries...

...Several weeks later, my feeling is that the face of this society is the least of its ills...

...Similarly, seeing the full texts of Agnew's addresses illuminates the division in the country more starkly than any compressed, paraphrased account published abroad...

...Even muddier is what Nixon will do...

...Having read and heard and thought so much about the place, I was intellectually prepared for what I saw...

...Shortly afterward, the still continuing discussions began on a possible move by Arthur A. Fletcher, the Negro Assistant Secretary of Labor responsible for the Philadelphia Plan, to a more important post, probably in the White House...

...The voices 1,200 miles away are flat and sad: "Oi Vey" in spades...

...Coming Home New York--Returning home for a vacation after a two-year stay in Southeast Asia reminded me of my first visit to Vietnam...

...Friends' first-hand accounts of the hardhats' Wall Street attack did, however...

...Explaining the military reasons for the Cambodian incursion, or pointing out factors behind--but hardly condoning--My Lai, led to questions about whose side I'm on...

...Phone calls to Israeli friends in Washington do little to alter these gloomy Texas-based assessments...

...They know only what they do not want and where they will not go...

...Meanwhile, the Administration's most renowned Negro, James Farmer, an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, has made his dissatisfaction well known...

...I went to the movie Joe prepared to laugh at and vent contempt for the central character, a larger-than-life representative of the hard-hat mentality ascendant in the country...

...arms to Israel in the hope that this tough line will force it into peace talks the Russians don't really want anyway...

...He has never seen a person killed, but I'm not sure it would change things if he had...

...They were bright, well-informed, involved --but, unfortunately, for the most part directionless...

...some cried, while others shouted "kill the fuckin' pigs...

...I'd rather not answer that," he said...

...The conglomeration of long hair, wide and bizarre ties, incredibly striped pants, micro-minis and maxis all moving together was mind-blowing...

...The theater was packed, though, with high school- and college-age moviegoers...

...Yet if this much is clear, exactly what they will do is far less so...

...they chilled me with a sense of the blind hatred and violent potential I have come to associate with the patrols in Vietnam, not political demonstrations in America...

...I saw too many things explaining the other side, too little hope for narrowing the huge gap between two worlds...

...Small comfort in ignorance, though...

...Over the last several months, Nixon officials have repeatedly asserted that more Negroes have been employed in high-level (meaning senior civil service and low-level appointee) positions by this Administration than by any other...

...This was a measure, it seemed to me...

...The Israelis want desperately to enlarge their Air Force, not maintain a status quo at last year's level...

...This theory ain't what it used to be...

...Indeed, Washington never appeared more helplessly caught in its own devices as when it confronted Soviet cheating on the cease-fire lines...

...Yet there it was, and here was my friend talking about fomenting revolution in America...

...I leveled as best I could...

...Wash thy hands of the entire mess, with plenty of Nixonian hand-wringing staged for the Jewish populace--a scenario some Israelis suspect and fear...

...The hope, apparently, is to project an image of tackling the broad range of racial problems facing the country--without actually moving on too many fronts during this pre-election period...

...Advocated by Samuel J. Simmons, the Negro Assistant Secretary for Equal Opportunity in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the plan calls for linking all Federal housing subsidies, insurance and loans to a developer's promise to sell a certain percentage of his houses to Negroes...

...What's more, you no longer matter, so they speak more frankly The Middle East, for instance...

...From Texas, it seems the Israelis are facing the most difficult crisis in their stormy existence, complicated by the restlessness of the Arao commandos...

...It is as if I had wandered into a sick ward on the way home, and found everyone I knew in it...

...I left a divided United States in the fall of 1968, and the lines seem to have been drawn even more sharply since then...

...The new jets will replace planes lost during the long months of sorties over the Suez...

...Most dangerous of all as the situation stands at the moment, however, is Washington's insistence upon using the old carrot-and-stick technique to keep Israel in line...

...A curtain then fell between us...

...Whether that is the case or not, the word seemingly has been passed within official ranks to put this issue on the back burner until after November...

...You've been gone six months, but they still remember you...

...1 thought them admirable but found them saddening...

...I had not seen a movie audience react so strongly since Randolph Scott led last-minute cavalry charges at Saturday matinees in Brooklyn...

...You can pick it up and call your old sources...

...First there were the evidently futile negotiations to attract Whitney M. Young Jr., head of the Urban League, to Washington...

...Simmons is believed to have the support of huo Secretary George Romney, who tried--and failed--to solve similar problems in Warren, Michigan...

...The sadness, I recognized, was a reflection of my own disappointment: These kids represent our finest hope, yet they too are stumbling blind, with no answers...

...Their reaction to the film--a typically slick and hollow Hollywood effort that concluded with a long, brutal depiction of a police bust--was explosive...

...Russia, so the theory goes, does not want another all-out round of fighting, nor does it want to destroy Israel, which is, after all, the focal point for Arab acceptance of the Soviet presence...

...I replied that I'm against anyone who refuses to recognize complexities in the mess over there...

...The kids roared with outrage and shook their fists at the screen...

...what I thought of them...

...Soviet pilots have been in the air against the Israelis, several migs have been shot down, and arms shipments to the Arabs continue at an astounding rate despite the cease-fire...

...of how much Chicago and Kent State have cost the country...

...At the very least, it no longer seems likely that the Russians, with their increasing number of "advisers" on the scene, will allow the Arabs to be humiliated again when the shooting starts...

...This reaction, strictly gut, was synthesized in a memorable moment on my third day back...

...So does a movie like The Strawberry Statement, based on 1968 events at Columbia University...

...there was no way to impart my feeling that while so much of what he seeks is necessary, violence will negate everything...

...I found the hardened lines cutting into my friendships as well...

...at the end...

...He is reported to have told friends that he is delaying his resignation only to give the new Secretary, Elliott L. Richardson, time to get hold of the reins and fill a few of hew's longstanding vacancies...

...By far the most important and controversial civil-rights proposition under consideration right now is a scheme to compel integration of suburban housing developments...

...Washington's recent announcement of an agreement to sell Meir's Marauders 18 Phantoms was actually a decision reached before the cease-fire...

...Meir is a remarkably resourceful and relentless woman, as I learned while covering every step of her visit to this country a year ago...

...Seeing it, however, was something else...

...I never saw so many flag decals, never saw so wide a chasm between young people and their elders, never imagined that headgear worn by construction workers could come to signify so much...

...Only they do not know where that Utopia lies or what it holds...

...Touching base with campus moderates was more rewarding, albeit still depressing...

...They simply reject most of this society and speak, in effect, of dropping out--of doing their own thing and milking some private, postgraduate Utopia for whatever happiness it will yield...

...My contact with the American "third world"--the Radical Left--gave even less cause for hope...

...The Silent Majority's emergence as Nixon's prime constituency was particularly disconcerting from afar...

...I had a lengthy reunion with a college friend who is now a dedicated revolutionary...

...The Administration's most significant recent success in this recruitment effort came late last month, when Secretary John A. Volpe announced the appointment of Benjamin O. Davis, the retired Negro Air Force lieutenant general who resigned last July as Cleveland's Public Safety Director, to the new Department of Transportation post of Director of Civil Aviation Security...

...Intelligence sources have uncovered massive fortifications for various kinds of missiles far behind the Suez lines...

...In short, Jerusalem is much further away from Washington than is Texas, but the view from that vantage point may now be brighter than it is from this one.--Roger Kingsbury...

...I keenly felt the 10-year gap between, us when they asked me...

...And it will probably get worse...

...hope for winning back the economically deprived and technology-starved Arabs...

...Would you plant a bomb...

...It is certainly true that switching Posts, from the Washington to the Houston, over breakfast coffee has the advantage of sharply diminishing one's awareness of what is happening anywhere outside Texas borders...

...Not that I haven't returned with the same tendency toward domestic affairs...

...The carrot is jets...

...It suggests the following alternative: Drag the Israelis, kicking and screaming, to indirect negotiations and force-feed compliance to a shaky settlement...

...There are, moreover, those in the Administration who argue that the 1968 civil-rights act and the 1969 housing act leave the President no choice but to force the issue of housing integration...

...Hints that the White House might broaden its civil-rights attack to include housing were dropped obscurely into the President's March statement on school desegra-gation...

...I came away from an evening session in a Morningside Heights apartment admiring the cool intelligence and caustic concern of six undergraduates I had met...

...In facing the difficult problems that shape the realities of discrimination, however, the government is deferring rather than accelerating action...

...Nixon's fear of a big-power confrontation in the Middle East is well documented, perhaps too much so for his or Israel's future good...

...Anxious to sound me out about the situation in Indochina, some acquaintances grew annoyed when my accounts did not jibe with their opinions...

...A former Washington journalist in Texas is in the position of an isolated painter, who can splash on canvases while oblivious to the mainstream...

...But this may also explain why, despite the many jobs offers made to both prominent and anonymous Negro figures, there have been relatively few takers...

...An old and cherished State Department assumption has the Russians co-opting the Arab military and preventing them from getting too frisky, while keeping tensions high but under firm control...

...At that time, he said that schools should not be forced to carry the full burden of integrating a segregated society...

...Prime Minister Golda Meir's trip to Washington, combined with the events in Jordan, may have loosened the Administration's apparent uptightness about arms supplies to the Israelis...

...Sooner or later, like the fall hurricanes tracked by radar far out in the Gulf, the storm hits land and proves its existence...

...Aside from a new-found awareness of Americans' physical size, and feeling strange seeing so many white people in the streets, I found myself goggling at their very looks...

...I saw it on a Saturday night in the Long Island community of Valley Stream, hardly a hotbed of student radicalism...

...Far more unsettling is the sense of crumbling institutions, inadequate services and widespread discontent...

...Another round to the endless war seems certain...

...But there is something to be said for not being conned by various government spokesmen or passing rumors sprung by the "in group" of journalistic colleagues in the capital...

...The Administration strategy is to increase the visibility of minority appointees in the weeks preceding the November elections...

...Soviet intentions are unclear and so are President Nixon's...

...The bear is arming to the tooth...

...It came at the corner of Third Avenue and 50th Street, while waiting for the light to change and watching a small segment of mid-Manhattan humanity surge past the windshield...

...I was struck first by surface differences...

...Then, the Nixon Administration may very well allow the reality to correspond a little more closely to its projected image in the area of racial equality.--Walter R. Gordon 'Oi Vey' in Spades Houston--One of the supposed advantages of living 1,200 miles from Washington, where I lived and worked for 13 years, is the opportunity for a new perspective on the old hometown...