A THIRD FRONT FOR LIBERALS

...Louis Post-Dispatch calls it "a catchall of potential repression," and notes that it would "repair the useless Smith and McCarran Acts, overrule the Supreme Court decisions that riddled them, establish what amounts to peacetime treason, restore the Government's arbitrary right to tell citizens where they can travel, create a vast new bureaucracy to detect heresy among public employes, and require Federal subsidies to assure Communist defectors a good American standard of living...

...Bombs are thrown...

...One possible solution would be an annual holiday for a great sacrificial ceremony of burning, except that air pollution is pretty bad already...

...If anything is the hallmark of a police state, it is the citizen's inability to speak freely at home, in the office and even in the street...

...Congress demands firm Federal action to preserve law and order...

...The likelier prospect, however, is that they will soon be confronted with the necessity for opening a third front— a battle for the preservation of basic liberties in America...

...Knoll has been a reporter and editor in Washington for eleven years...

...Voting to accept the Senate bill were 152 Democrats and 165 Republicans...

...The more somber thinkers, however, feel nothing serious will or can be done until the world runs out of trees for making paper...

...These," said the Washington Post, "are not trivial matters...

...The "Internal Security Act of 1968," a measure designed to regenerate and reinforce the sleaziest discarded components of McCarthyism, has been introduced by Senator James O. Eastland, Mississippi Democrat...

...It is deeply disturbing," The New York Times commented, "that so many politicians appear to think of Federal subsidy of students as an indulgent uncle's benefaction...

...There are riots...

...They look with longing to an era of peace and prosperity that will signal the success of their two-front war...

...That, of course, will create other problems, but that is the nature of progress...

...On the left, there are strident demands for action to meet domestic needs that have been too long deferred...

...The St...

...They failed to obtain a majority vote for the bill's most damaging provision—one that would have stripped the Supreme Court of the power to review a defendant's claim that a state court had violated his Cbnstitutional rights...

...Warehouses cannot be built fast enough to take care of existing governmental and corporate records...

...It has been clear for some time that this country would not be done down by racism, arsonists, television commercials, Communism, or Bonnie and Clyde, but by paper...

...the telephones of civil rights leaders have long been tapped on this basis...

...Chairman Emanuel Celler of the House Judiciary Committee argued in vain that the Senate bill was "a cruel hoax . . . bursting at the seams with unconstitutional provisions...

...It requires no great feat of imagination —or reminiscence—to conjure up some future Great Debate on the momentous question, "Who gave away Vietnam...

...Attorney General Ramsey Clark immediately declared that no detention camps exist, are contemplated, or are needed...

...In the final vote on passage the next day, only seventeen votes were cast against the bill...

...In a veritable orgy of resentment against the Bill of Rights, Senators of both parties took to the floor to vent their contempt for the requirements of due process...

...Sooner or later, someone will be blamed for the Vietnam fiasco, and the blame won't necessarily fall on those who directed the American intervention and nurtured it along each step of escalation...

...The fight will be no less fierce for having the sanction of precedent...

...It was drowning in the forms and records and notations consequent upon heavy trading in securities...

...The Paris talks between the United States and North Vietnam had scarcely begun, the faintest glimmering of a possible settlement had not appeared, when columnists and commentators on the right began to warn their readers and listeners against the likelihood of an American "sell-out...

...But they succeeded—by substantial majorities—in overturning the Supreme Court's landmark Mallory, Miranda, and Wade decisions on the rights of criminal suspects to be secure against undue delays in arraignment, involuntary confessions, and lineup identifications made in the absence of a lawyer...

...Among many of those who have fought against an unjust war abroad and an unjust society at home, President Johnson's, withdrawal and the opening of the Paris peace talks have already induced a case of anticipatory euphoria...

...These gloomy ruminations on events of half a century ago—and on the equally applicable and much more recent phenomenon of McCarthyism— are prompted by the Senate's deliberations this spring on the omnibus crime control bill...

...by the growing impatience—in the public and in the press—with the student militants who are, themselves, increasingly impatient...

...Some believe that even genocide may be on white America's agenda—and unequivocal official denials have not succeeded in laying such speculation to rest...

...The economy, no longer bolstered by war expenditures, is in disarray...

...The Attorney General, who has been known for his deep dedication to the Bill of Rights, hesitates for a while, but then decides the threat to the Republic is too grave to permit nice scruples about due process...

...Edward A. Schwartz, president of the National Student Association, decried the House action as "a response which only will contribute to the polarization of campus political life...

...Eric Sevarejd CBS News the role of apologists for lawlessness even as they attempt to preserve the integrity of the law...

...He is co-author with William McGaffin of "Anything But the Truth," a book about the credibility gap which has just been published by Putnam...

...But that assumption collapsed when the House, in a paroxysm of punitiveness, decided to "honor" the memory of Senator Robert F. Kennedy by accepting the Senate bill without change...

...When the votes were cast, only fifty-five Democrats and five Republicans favored sending the bill to conference...

...An aide to a prominent Northern liberal Senator wondered aloud last month whether his boss was "doing himself any good" by publicly supporting the aims of the Poor People's Campaign...

...by the House's headlong rush to enact the Senate version of that bill, on the day of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's death...

...The outlook now is for taps and bugs to become "standard procedure for any low level prosecutor," as Herbert Mitgang observed in The New York Times...

...It is an appropriate time for deep-thinking national leaders to think deeply about an event in New York City, a little noticed event which future historians are likely to identify as the first sure sign of the collapse of modern civilization, the tiny beginning of a vast movement of people who gave up and took to the hills...

...The effect of the thousands of illegal arrests he authorized, said The New York Times at the time, would be "far-reaching and beneficial...

...A business firm in Wall Street has quit, gone into liquidation, because it cannot cope with the paper work...

...You can't confine them without a public hearing, a trial, and an opportunity to appeal...

...their misgivings about the war...

...The assumption was that a Senate-House conference would delete or at least soften the more onerous provisions of the Senate-passed version...

...The common assumption in Washington is that Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago spoke for a majority of Americans when he directed his police force to shoot and kill arsonists, to shoot and maim looters...

...But for the most part, they were silent...

...This has been one of those dull, rainy, depressing Washington days, bad enough to confine midweek golfers to the clubhouse and many poverty marchers to their plywood lean-tos, hardly enough spirit around to work up a respectable revolution...

...The "provocations" cited by the advocates of repression are likely to increase before they diminish...

...You can't arrest people in this country without a warrant...

...Ominous echoes of the old Mc-Carthyism are becoming audible...

...It is only a cloud on the horizon, but it is somewhat larger than a man's hand...

...The year, of course, is 1919, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer is about to launch the raids to which history will permanently affix his name...

...You can't—but on occasion we have...

...by the sobering fact that the wars America has fought seem to have been followed, almost inevitably, by formidable assaults on freedom at home...

...The advent of the miraculous new copying machines was the real break in the dike holding back the deluge...

...It was, said Representative Robert Kasten-meier, Wisconsin Democrat, "the legislative equivalent of a riot...

...The law so overwhelmingly approved will provide legal sanction for the first time in American history for wiretapping by Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers investigating murder, robbery, organized crime, drug abuse, and other offenses involving danger to "life, limb, and property...

...In two more years, the figure will be up around seventy billion copies...

...The American system of government makes the idea of a secret system of detention camps absurd," Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, told his constituents...

...It's getting worse...

...The press accuses officials of "coddling" rioters and radicals...

...In 1965, these duplicating machines produced about ten billion copies of stuff...

...History offers no assurance...

...or to visualize the plight of Government careerists called before a latter-day Joseph McCarthy to explain ERWIN KNOU, Washington correspondent for The Progressive, was formerly White House correspondent for the Newhouse papers...

...When the House of Representatives debated aid to higher education in May, it adopted an amendment by Representative Louis C. Wyman, New Hampshire Republican, barring Federal loans and grants to any student who refuses to obey "a lawful regulation or order" of the college he attends if the refusal is deemed to be "of a serious nature" contributing to campus "disruption...

...To turn Federal stipends into a device to regulate student views and behavior is to stoop to methods generally associated with totalitarian states...

...But Senator John L. McClellan, Arkansas Democrat, thundering against a Supreme Court majority that "has invoked dubious technicalities to turn loose on society known, confessed criminals," carried the day...

...But with only a few changes in scenario, the year could be 1969...

...In a parallel gesture a few days later, the Senate voted sixty-one to nine to impose a five-year ban on Federal employment for "anyone convicted of inciting, participating in, or aiding others in a civil disorder...

...They will be challenged to remember and preserve the most fundamental but most fragile libertarian principle: that the safeguards of the Constitution are intended—are most specifically intended— for the troublesome, the unpopular, yes, even the dangerous...

...There is no time to waste," it said, "on hair-splitting over infringement of liberty...

...They may deplore the violence in the cities, the tactics of the demonstrators, the arbitrary destruc-tiveness of the students, the contempt for due process even among those who are most in need of its protection— they may deplore all this but every effort will be made to cast them in Paper Washington, D.C...

...Some of its clerks fled to avoid a nervous breakdown, and the management concluded there must be a better way to live...

...One need not walk to the brink of paranoia to comprehend the origins of these fears...

...soundings among the Senator's constituents, he said, indicated widespread hostility to the campaign...

...Even without the benefit of legal authority, Federal investigators have felt free to interpret generously their self-claimed right to invade privacy in the interest of "national security...

...Disaffected Negroes will riot, alienated students will rebel, impoverished slum-dwellers will turn to crime until America takes meaningful action to eliminate the root causes of disaffection, alienation, and poverty...

...They are of the very essence of liberty...

...There was, for example, the recent report on "mixed Communist and black nationalist elements" issued by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which noted that "the McCarran Act provides for various detention centers to be operated throughout the country, and these might well be utilized for the temporary imprisonment of warring guerrillas...

...If the Senate's performance on the crime control bill is a guide to the esteem in which Constitutional safeguards are currently held in the world's greatest deliberative body, Eastland should find it possible to recruit additional supporters...

...But the fact remains that such facilities were authorized by Congress during one hysterical binge, and could be activated in another...

...A broader charter for big brotherism hardly could have been conceived...

...The liberals, to be sure, were distressed and dismayed by the "excesses" of Mc-Carthyism...

...When freedom and repression are poised in dramatic confrontation, moderates are wont to assume a moderate stance somewhere in between...

...Will the challenge be met...

...Most of the men and media who were to come, in time, to deplore Mc-Carthyism were more discreet when the Senator from Wisconsin loosed his witchhunt on the nation...

...During any "guerrilla uprising," the report asserted, "most civil liberties would have to be suspended...

...The Eastland bill is given no chance of enactment in this session, but its potential for repression in the future cap be judged by the fact that it went to the Senate bearing the names of no fewer than nineteen co-sponsors...

...The courage of liberals has not been unflinching...

...In the cities, the poor—especially the minority poor—take to the streets...

...If all this points to a trend toward resurgent authoritarianism, it is a trend that may well accelerate in the immediate future...

...by the reaction of many members of Congress to the Poor People's Campaign in Washington...

...Historic analogy has its limitations, of course...

...All in all, a view with alarm, not a point with pride, sort of day...

...The detention camp provision of the McCarran Act was drafted by the Senate's liberals—Vice President Hubert Humphrey was one of them—as proof that they, too, were anti-Communists...

...The country, one hopes and believes, is more sophisticated, more mature than it was in 1919 or 1950-1953...

...But an atmosphere of recrimination and repression seems, once again, to be taking hold...

...Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was known as a staunch Wilsonian Democrat when he began papering the country with mimeographed arrest warrant blanks for "anarchists...

...Even as Washington's negotiators refused to budge, they were being accused of playing into the hands of Ho Chi Minh...

...Atomic blasting for great underground container caves is another thought, if Moscow can be reassured ahead of time...

...critics on the right charge that the President has betrayed the boys who fought and died on foreign soil^ for freedom, that he has agreed to terms that will undermine the nation's security...

...The mood of the House—the mood, one suspects, of the nation—was summed up in the impatient assertion of the Republican leader, Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan: "Surely there can be no further quibbling about the urgent need for tougher law enforcement leg-lislation...

...The President, who has earned by word and deed a prominent place in the pantheon of Liberalism, remains silent...

...Among the more alienated members of the black community, rumors are rife that secret Government concentration camps have been prepared against the day of mass arrests...

...The greatest intellectual discovery of this generation is that the real cause of problems is solutions...

...The Washington Post, which called the first series of seizures "a serious mistake," had come around within two months...

...The House disagreed with this judgment by a roll-call vote of 306 to 54...

...For those Americans concerned with the preservation of liberty, the challenge of defending their cause will be a formidable one, fraught with embarrassment...

...Much more immediate, however, is the danger of a fiercely repressive response to continued urban disorders, campus insurrections, or even militant (though non-violent) expression of Black Power demands...

...Depriving rioters of Federal jobs, students of scholarships, criminal suspects of due process, and citizens of their privacy will not restore domestic tranquility...