NOTES IN THE NEWS

...These measures were aimed at the crackpot, the sniper, the deranged conspiracy of the few who would resort to murder to end a President's rule...

...Fifty-eight per cent now support some kind of "get tough" policy, and a record high of sixty-three per cent oppose stopping the bombing of North Vietnam to encourage negotiations...

...The two Representatives pointed out to Secretary Rusk that "the Vietcong have eliminated landlord domination and reallocated lands owned by absentee landlords and the government of South Vietnam to the landless and others who cooperate with Vietcong authorities...

...New York Times News Service PARIS, January 6—The French government warmly endorsed Saturday the policy announced by President Johnson last Monday for combatting the outflow of dollars from the United States...

...It is a tragic moment in our history when the President cannot appear freely among his people without fear for his personal safety, regardless of how unpopular his policies may be...

...General Accounting Office (GAO) also did extensive evaluation for the subcommittee...

...On other trips within the country the President moves in virtual secrecy —no advance fanfare, no precise information on arrival or departure times, no motorcades, none of the ceremony that customarily surrounds a Presidential appearance...

...Between 1962 and 1967, land distribution came to a virtual standstill...

...Vietnam policy as stooges of Hanoi, might take a close look at the Gallup findings...

...When House Republicans, including Representative Ogden R. Reid of New York, ranking minority member of the subcommittee, pressed for its release, Representative John E. Moss, a California Democrat and subcommittee chairman, finally responded by joining Reid in a letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk...

...An extreme, but real, example is a recent article in the newsletter of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee by a black power advocate who advised that anti-Vietnam protesters spit at President Johnson and make him "afraid to leave the White House...

...In another Brutus-like thrust at his old friend in the White House, the Senate's most wordy defender of Administration policy in Vietnam cried out that there is "no prospect of peace, no promise of stability, no hope for the better" in the policies of President Johnson...

...Greece under the Colonels What the military junta that rules Greece means by "guided democracy," the form of government it says it plans for the Greek people, was made all too clear by recent developments...

...ambassador in Saigon...

...The parent committee bottled up the report for two months —at the Administration's request, it is believed...

...Among those who are known to reject Mr...

...Senate...

...For others whose circumstances permit the learning of job skills, this form of Federal payment, with only a partial reduction to offset earnings, would hold out incentives to seek training and employment—and escape from poverty...

...In spite of this gap in his own knowledge, the Secretary challenged the Congressmen's contentions as "not fully reflecting the land situation in South Vietnam as it is known to us...

...On another front, Robert M. Shel-ton, Jr., Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, reported at year's end that membership in the Ku Klux Klan had risen sharply in 1967, partly as a reaction to the racial disorders of last summer...

...Since the end of World War II the United States has contributed so much more to the growth of the Greek military and rightist forces than to the emergence of moderately democratic elements that the success of Greek military fascism became inevitable...

...According to Saigon and U.S...

...Johnson's Vietnam policy to the role of peace advocate was as ludicrous as it was sudden...

...Beyond that, we urge the Johnson Administration to employ all its diplomatic resources—including withdrawal of U.S...

...Johnson was flown by a smaller jet to Floyd Bennett Field and lifted by helicopter to Central Park, just a few blocks from St...

...Under the negative income tax plan, as Mr...

...But he offered no indication that the Saigon regime was serious about its "intent...

...Rusk's letter, prepared at White House direction, acknowledged that a secret report by the GAO, which included information on which the Moss-Reid letter was based, had not been available to him or his staff...

...In a much grimmer display of continued repression, the regime, although it had announced a Christmas amnesty expected to include most of the junta's 2,500 political prisoners and, specifically, to free composer Mikos Theodorakis, instead held on to him and freed only several hundred of its political captives...

...Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach...

...Notes in the News McCarthy's Challenge In the opening days of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Senator Eugene McCarthy was derided by some Johnsonian journalists and other critics for his low-key, measured tones...

...The Congress and the people," declared the Senate minority leader, as if he believed what he was saying, "have seen all too little evidence of genuine effort to explore and exploit the diplomatic opportunities available to us in this [peacemaking] regard...

...Johnson's war escalation—but who continue to pay lip service to his leadership—are such state chairmen as Charles Warren of California and such national committeemen as David Carley of Wisconsin, Leif Erickson of Montana, and Til-ford Dudley of the District of Columbia...

...The three earlier ones, highly critical of the aid program in Vietnam, and the commodity-export and port facilities operations there, do not seem to have moved the Administration to significant remedial action...

...About 7.5 million persons, said Ford's president, are now covered by some form of welfare assistance, but there are thirty million Americans in the poverty class...

...Ill health, advanced age, illiteracy and lack of job training, the widowed or unwed status of mothers, racial discrimination in employment—these are the important factors that make many poor Americans unemployable...

...Reporting his poll findings, Dr...

...In our time of television, one can only hope that the cameras and the microphones will show them doing what they do most: working both sides of the street...

...Such lightning-change artists would have won applause in old-time vaudeville...

...a limit "of seven to ten acres would appear to be more equitable...

...Miller, "the present welfare and manpower programs are making unsatisfactory progress—they are failing to reach many of those who need help most, and they have not sufficiently improved the welfare of others...

...Thus, the Athens censor struck from the New Year's message King Con-stantine sent from his Rome exile to the Greek people these words: "We Greeks hold freedom and democratic government dearer than life itself...

...Lightning-Change Artists With the election campaign season warming up, leading Republican hawks like Richard Nixon and Senator Everett Dirksen are muting their harsh cries for more escalation in Vietnam and are beginning to utter cooing notes suggesting their election year disenchantment with the war...

...Instead he campaigns comfortably from the front porch of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and his overwhelming reelection victory is largely ascribed to the frustrated tack sprinklers and car rockers outside the gates...

...Saigon Blocks Land Reform "To win the war in Vietnam," the Johnson Administration is fond of saying, "you have to win over the people...

...Backfire One of the fundamental laws of physics is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction...

...Much of the subcommittee's data was gathered by its staff on the spot in Vietnam...

...Our suspicions were well-founded...

...Miller advocates would provide a significant measure of honorable assistance...

...There are a few, I suspect, who are waiting for a kind of latter-day salvation...

...Johnson's overall performance in the White House, compared to forty-six per cent approval on this score nationwide...

...One such "undue use of personal liberties," presumably, would be any form of protest against the junta...

...For them, the negative income tax Mr...

...Johnson than are President George Meany of the AFL-CIO and the upper echelons of labor...

...We expressed this view in spite of the way the AFL-CIO convention at Miami shouted its acclaim for President Johnson and his Vietnam policy and even though the labor leaders offered the findings of a private poll to argue that union members overwhelmingly backed the President's military escalation...

...The war at home is a war for survival of a free society...

...This business tycoon has put to shame the members of the Republican-Dixiecrat coalition in Congress who sought to cut Federal funds for poverty and welfare programs, and who pushed through Social Security revisions which freeze the level of Federal participation in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) and compel their mothers to take jobs or work-training, whether or not this separates them from small children...

...We agree there is solid reason for the growing dissent over the Administration's course...

...McCarthy has expressed a charitable understanding for the silence or equivocation of some Senators who share his views on Vietnam but face hard re-election battles this autumn...

...Secretary Rusk, a specialist in hollow responses to brutal facts, replied in a letter to Moss and Reid that a promise of land reform made by Nguyen Van Loc, the new South Vietnamese premier, was "an encouraging statement of intent...

...His limousine," the article went on, "will find the street filled with tacks and thousands of people will surge around it, smashing the windows and rocking the car until it is turned on its side...

...A recent Gallup Poll discloses that discontent among union rank-and-file with President Johnson's handling of the Vietnam situation is almost as great as that of the general public...

...A few examples: Tf In 1967, the only extensive Presidential speaking tour was a Veterans Day weekend inspection of military bases, where military power screened him effectively from the civilian population...

...Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the short drive to the Cathedral "drew the heaviest police escort in the memory of veteran correspondents...

...These figures disclose the huge gap in meeting the needs of the poor...

...The "overnight abolition" of a free press by the military junta in Greece, said the International Press Institute recently, is the "most dramatic suppression" of press freedom in the last fifteen years...

...That excuse for cowardice and double-talk no longer exists...

...Government claims, 5,300 hamlets are under Saigon government control, 4,000 are controlled by the Vietcong, and 2,700 hamlets are being contested...

...The House subcommittee report on land reform is the fourth completed in a series of seven dealing with support operations of the Vietnam war...

...Thus a family with a member at work would always be better off than a family without anyone at work, in contrast to present situations where every dollar increase in earned income is entirely offset by withdrawal of a dollar in welfare payments...

...But he swiftly gave them reason to regret their taunts...

...Judgment and action are needed now...

...The most startling disclosure in their letter was the report that the Vietcong "have instituted their own land-reform program—distributing reportedly some five times the amount of land distributed by the government of South Vietnam—and this program has not been effectively countered by the government...

...It is at least as important, said Mr...

...Will the Real M. Debre Stand Up...

...The President as Prisoner It was reasonable and understandable in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that security measures designed to protect the life of his successor were tightened and safeguards more stringently enforced...

...Forty-three per cent of union families feel it was a mistake to send U. S. troops to Vietnam...

...Forty-three per cent of union families disapprove of what the President is doing about Vietnam, compared to general public disapproval of forty-nine per cent...

...The hope here is that after so many brave words from the White House, the commission will come up reasonably soon with plans bold enough to reduce poverty decisively—-and that the Administration will then make an all-out effort to have such plans written into law by Congress...

...Among other explosive findings of the subcommittee, transmitted to Secretary Rusk by Representatives Moss and Reid, were these: il Of 2.47 million acres acquired by the South Vietnam government only 667,000 acres have been distributed to 128,000 families since 1954, including 51,800 acres to 12,000 families in 1967...

...Nixon and Dirksen surely must be among the most flexible of American politicians...

...The Progressive reaffirms what it said last June, shortly after the coup took place: "The least our Government can do now is to stop at once the flow of arms to a military junta which opposes everything America says it stands for...

...Patrick's Cathedral...

...The results of such non-performance are fully detailed in a report prepared by a Congressional subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee...

...recognition of the military regime—to help restore the freedom of the Greek people...

...economic growth was being used to sustain the war in Vietnam instead of fighting poverty and ignorance and the causes of racial and urban unrest at home...

...One of those freed was Andreas Papandreou, son of former Premier George Papandreou...

...Some of the information in the letter, Representative Reid said later, was supplied by Henry Cabot Lodge, former U.S...

...American welfare concepts are tragically out of date...

...Ford Has a Better Idea' Support for the negative income tax has come from an unexpected quarter...

...The truth, as every knowledgeable political observer knows, is that the Democratic structure^—including the party's National Committee—is crowded with leaders who have so far chosen to play it safe despite deep personal agony about the course of the war...

...There is a pervading atmosphere of fear— well-founded fear—for the President's physical safety which has led to the increasingly rigid insulation of the President—an unhealthy development in a democratic society...

...The Progressive has long been in the forefront of the critics of President Johnson's Vietnam policies—and those of the Kennedy and Eisenhower Administrations before him...

...The cost of such a program would be considerable, but none of the estimates we have seen suggests that the outlay would be as great as the $30-billion a year we are now pouring into the destructive war in Vietnam...

...A week after the riot in Newark," Shelton said, "we chartered six units in New Jersey alone...

...The besieged President," the Post projected, "is renominated by acclamation at the Democratic convention and spared the rigors of a national campaign...

...Louis Harris, in interpreting the shift in sentiment revealed in his polls, pointed out that one of the important factors was "the deeply negative reaction of the public to the tactics of the anti-Vietnamese war demonstrations, especially the violence which has occurred...

...McCarthy's remarks were widely and correctly construed as a thrust at the silent Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy...

...Even more significantly, it became plain in mid-January that McCarthy had begun a spirited challenge to the conscience of many men in public and political office who privately share his convictions about the Vietnam war but lack the courage to defy the Johnson Establishment...

...Although The Progressive differs on some aspects of his approach, we strongly commend the head of the Ford Motor Company for a pragmatic and humanitarian program to combat poverty in the Affluent Society...

...the corresponding national figure is forty-five per cent...

...Some of the poor now receive help from two or more programs, while others in desperate need receive nothing at all...

...Too many such figures, McCarthy charged in one of his first major campaign declarations, "have not yet spoken as their minds and consciences dictate...

...When a member of a family began to earn income, the basic allowance would automatically be reduced by an offsetting tax, but not by a corresponding amount...

...As the family moved up the income scale, of course, it would switch from receiving negative income tax payments to paying income taxes in the normal manner...

...For the President is being fenced off from not only the occasional nut but from vast numbers of his constituents who are literally in violent disagreement with his Vietnam policies...

...His recent performance is consistent with his inconsistencies in the past—place one foot on each side of major issues, especially in leap years...

...Washington Post Special PARIS, January 6—French Finance Minister Michel Debre called America's proposed curbs on the dollar drain "discriminatory" Saturday and said that some of the "useless and unfair" restrictions in the program should be revised...

...The resort to the totalitarian techniques of physical violence, and the employment of threats to the President's person as a means of challenging his policies, debase the democratic process and endanger the very principles of freedom the advocates of violence purport to uphold...

...But in a democratic society these policies must be challenged by democratic methods, which are wide open to use—such as the recent entry of Senator Eugene McCarthy into the Presidential picture as a Vietnam dissenter, and insistence on a full-scale debate in the U.S...

...In the second week of January McCarthy called for Dean Rusk's resignation, declared that on the Vietnam issue there was little to choose between Johnson and Nixon, and said that sixty per cent of U.S...

...Not the people in Saigon especially, but the rural population in South Vietnam's 12,600 hamlets...

...Nixon last month, to prevent rioting in the cities by aiding poverty-stricken and unemployed Negroes as to press the war in Southeast Asia...

...Some recent developments indicate this law is also effective in politics...

...Labor Divided on Vietnam In our January issue we said in this space: "Despite the brave promises AFL-CIO officials have made about rallying labor behind the President, it is doubtful that they can roll up as heavy a rank-and-file labor vote for him as they have in the past...

...No matter how admirable the goal, the use of street-fighting methods to achieve it is an almost certain guarantee of failure...

...Thus the combined forces of more than a million and a quarter American, South Vietnamese, and allied troops, despite a four-to-one superiority over the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces in the field, have not yet achieved control of half the hamlets in South Vietnam...

...f When the President attended the late Cardinal Spellman's funeral in New York, instead of jetting to Kennedy International Airport in Air Force One—the big Presidential plane ¦—and proceeding into Manhattan by high-speed motorcade, the usual procedure, Mr...

...As recently as September only forty-eight per cent rejected a halt of the bombing...

...K A recent Presidential address dedicating Central Texas College was delivered on a campus surrounded by a military base, Fort Hood...

...Six months later, the pendulum had swung the other way...

...Of 566,000 acres of choice rice land which the government acquired in 1958 from French owners, 240,000 acres have been rented to small farmers but "no actual distribution of land was made until October, 1966, eight years after the land was expropriated...

...President Johnson, in effect, has become a prisoner in his own land, cut off from his people except through the press and radio and television...

...Meany, who has smeared those in the labor movement opposing U.S...

...Dedicated to military victory, the Administration is not really disposed to insist that Saigon compete with the Vietcong on land reform—the real key to "winning the hearts of the people...

...Channels of diplomacy, economic and otherwise, still remain open for our use...

...Nixon's lowering of the priority of the Vietnam war was highly significant coming from a professional hawk who has repeatedly rebuked the Johnson Administration for not sending enough troops to Vietnam...

...The St...

...The roll of those missing in action is long and disheartening...

...Nothing less than revolutionary change can meet the challenge, and it is a pleasure to welcome the president of the Ford Motor Company to the ranks of the revolutionists...

...A Harris Poll last July revealed that a majority of the American people favored de-escalation of the Vietnam war...

...But recent developments in Presidential security, however understandable, constitute a national tragedy...

...It is noteworthy that President Johnson recently appointed a blue-ribbon commission to study the negative income tax, guaranteed income proposals, and other alternatives to the present welfare system which he termed "outmoded and in need of a major change...

...In a meeting with Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, Debre took a tough, uncompromising line...

...McCarthy's candidacy has become a test of honor and integrity for those inside and outside his party who profess to care about world peace and national decency...

...The most effective instrument of protest, a free press, already has been silenced...

...Fifty-five per cent of all union families approve of Mr...

...Miller described it, "a family with zero income would receive a basic allowance related to the size and composition of the family unit...

...He added bluntly: "In some cases they have not spoken for reasons of personal or political convenience...

...Obviously, union families are much less jingoistic and less enamored of Mr...

...the U.S...

...Senator Dirksen's conversion from one of the Republican Party's most avid supporters of Mr...

...The report on land reform is not likely to fare any better...

...Because the family's total income would always go up, there would always be an incentive to work and to increase earnings...

...Because of a curious omission in the AFL-CIO's summary of the results of polling the unionists on the Vietnam issue, we suspected that the purported enthusiasm of grass-roots labor for the Administration's course in Southeast Asia might not be all it was cracked up—or cranked up—to be...

...After many months of egging the President on in his policy of escalation, Dirksen chose the last week of the last session of Congress to slip into the Congressional Record a statement, clearly written for use in the approaching political campaign, which seemed to take back almost everything he had been proclaiming all year...

...The French reaction emerged from a long talk between Finance Minister Michel Debre and U.S...

...The Institute, which represents 1,600 newspaper editors and executives in more than fifty countries, called the blackout of the Greek newspapers a "body blow" to press freedom because it came at a time when a "strong ferment was working in authoritarian countries in East Europe and in Spain and Portugal in favor of greater freedom of information and expression...

...Arjay Miller, president of the Ford Motor Company, recently urged adoption of this method of income assistance to the poor as a more humane and effective way of breaking the poverty cycle than many of the established welfare programs...

...Four years is too long to wait...

...In it they revealed highlights of the suppressed report, declared that "sweeping and dramatic actions must be undertaken promptly" to promote land reform in South Vietnam, and called upon the State Department "to make crystal clear" to Saigon the urgent need for such action...

...Evoking images of liberty is forbidden, even when it is done by a king who is no true believer in democracy...

...The National Conference for New Politics has threatened a massive demonstration—involving some 200,000 people—at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next summer in protest against President Johnson's renomination...

...1j The present maximum landhold-ing limit of 247 acres a person "may well be excessive...

...The poll might wake him up to the fact that nearly half of the union families with opinions on the Vietnam issue disagree with him and his colleagues among labor's elite...

...The war in Asia," he told the National Association of Manufacturers, "is a limited one with limited means and limited goals...

...Benjamin Spock, co-chairman of the group, insisted that the "demonstration would involve no violence or civil disobedience," but Paul Booth, a leader of the Chicago group that originated the idea, indicated that the demonstration might not be passive...

...The foundation of America is in "grave danger," and unless a remedy is found quickly, said the new (for that evening) Nixon, "it will not matter what happens in Vietnam and elsewhere...

...But his characterization applied to many others...

...Perhaps the most important reason for the failure to win the loyalty of millions of peasants is Saigon's long record of refusal to initiate a meaningful program of land distribution, and Washington's refusal to insist that Saigon live up to its many promises of land reform...

...On still another front, The New York Post mused that the political effects, in this election year, of the accumulating threats of physical harm to the person of the President might well be "a backlash against the advocates of violence...

...But he has vigorously suggested that it is time for others who can claim no such special immunity to follow the example of Zoltan Ferency, Michigan state chairman, and others—too few so far —who have rallied to his side and placed principle above private protec-tiveness...

...That's one of the topics under discussion," Booth commented...

...From all reports," said Mr...

...Until McCarthy declared his candidacy, many men could rationalize their compromise with conviction and their obeisance to the President by asserting that they had no real alternative...

...George Gallup said: "The solid support given President Johnson and his Vietnam policies demonstrated by the heads of organized labor at the AFL-CIO convention in Miami is not in line with the views of rank-and-file union members...

...Frustrations over Vietnam have sent emotional reactions soaring to a feverish pitch...

...The committee drafting a new constitution revealed its repressive character when it said the document will "guarantee the nation against moves to topple the existing regime or undue use of personal liberties...