Notes in the News
Notes in the News The Scarred Land For decades and perhaps for generations after the war in Vietnam is finally ended, that unhappy land will continue to bear the scars of the massive assault to...
...Senator Buckley, of course, yields to no man in his profound respect for the principles of law and order...
...This program, closely linked to the AID program, combats hunger and malnutrition, promotes economic growth in developing nations...
...Under the new law, food stamp eligibility is denied to every member of a family if any member (except a mother of young children) refuses to take a job, even at wages that fall below Federal standards...
...The prime beneficiaries would have been those job-seekers who have been hardest hit by the Nixon recession —young people, blacks, Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, the hard-core unemployed...
...The findings of the AAAS study, released at the Association's annual meeting in Chicago last December, received a good deal of attention in the news media...
...Its key provision was the creation of Federally subsidized public service jobs for the unemployed within city and state governments...
...The New York Times critic must be bruised all over...
...The Administration continues to insist that the Geneva Protocol of 1925 on biological warfare, which Mr...
...As Representative Abner J. Mikva, himself a victim of Army surveillance, points out elsewhere in this issue ("A Nation in Fear," Page 18), the surveillance activities strongly suggest that some in the military, at least, are thinking along lines that could turn the bizarre fiction of Fletcher KnebeFs Seven Days in May into grim reality...
...It's a bad scene," said Sergeant Harry Cook, twenty-five of Pittsburgh...
...It's a different army today...
...There was, for instance, the former Army spook who testified that his colleagues considered William Buckley, the logorrheic litterateur of the regressive right, to be somewhat "to the left of center...
...The affected area is equivalent in size to the state of Massachusetts...
...Colonel Papadopoulos, as his statement makes clear, harbors no such illusion...
...Unless they are members of Congress, of course...
...he demanded angrily...
...The Government of the United States still professes to see a "trend toward a constitutional order" in Greece...
...The announcement muddled rather than clarified American policy, for the military have maintained all along that spraying activities were limited to "remote, unpopulated areas...
...The present temper of such troops was described recently by Keyes Beech, a Pulitzer prize-winning writer and Chicago Daily News correspondent reporting from Firebase Sunday Punch in Vietnam...
...Poage's colleagues, Representative Thomas G. Abernathy, Democrat of Mississippi, delivered himself of the judgment that what the food stamp program needed was "a little sand...
...Maybe we've just gotten away from the situation of primitive man...
...Senator Gaylord A. Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who was the principal architect of the manpower training bill, properly described it as perhaps the most important piece of legislation to be passed by the last session of Congress...
...Now, ain't that something...
...To continue using this program for military purposes is, to say the least, a corruption of the English language...
...The setback was even more severe, of course, for the 4.6 million Americans who find themselves in the dismal situation of being out of work...
...f About half the trees in the mature hardwood forests north and west of Saigon have been killed, and the area is now infested with worthless but durable bamboo...
...He did not explain—and we cannot perceive—how the recruitment of workers for severely neglected public services will fail to help with the problems of the 1970s...
...He said further that as the result of a GAO study he has concluded that the military aid program involves so many Government agencies and Congressional committees that he doubts that anyone has the "full story" on how much the United States spends on military aid...
...It was Staats who informed the committee of the provision in the 1954 law that legalizes this diversion of funds to military purposes...
...The piping of Food for Peace funds into munitions channels so that guns are bought instead of butter, and bullets instead of bread, is horrifying and scandalous but is, in its own way, the logical result of the Cold War mentality that has long prevailed in Washington and the country...
...They are heartily sick of the way the war drags on while they risk their lives to no purpose...
...This is what happens in most primitive societies...
...We hope he is right, of course, but his supposition points to another very serious problem: the degree to which the nation's huge military apparatus has escaped the effective supervision of civilian officials...
...According to reports in The Los Angeles Times, Gleason raised millions of dollars for distribution by the White House in the 1970 campaign...
...The longer American troops remain," he predicted, "the worse things are going to get...
...He happens to be chairman of the House's Special Committee to Investigate Campaign Expenditures...
...In more than twenty years of reporting from Asia," he wrote, "I have seldom seen American troop morale as low as it is today in South Vietnam...
...Lehmann-Haupt was not only pierced, that is to say, transfixed by the book, but seized by it, seated violently, and held under duress for 672 pages...
...He and his assistants > testified that nowhere in the Federal Government was there a complete record of all the billions spent each year on U.S...
...that its spending limits are utterly unrealistic...
...Under this provision nearly $700 million of Food for Peace funds—a sizable portion of the program's total outlay—have been used by foreign governments since 1965 to buy the weapons of war...
...Another former agent who had been assigned to spy on a memorial service for Dr...
...War Is Peace The Food for Peace law passed by Congress in 1954 included a section, apparently little noted at the time, that authorized the use of some of the program's funds for the procurement by foreign countries of "materials, facilities, and services for the common defense, including internal security...
...Laird and other Administration officials have, to the date of this writing, been remarkably reticent about discussing the questions raised by the recent disclosures...
...No Change' in Greece The Greek military junta, ever solicitous of the welfare of its subjects, has taken pains to shield them from the volatile uncertainties of these troubled times...
...ground combat forces would be out by May 1; that "U.S...
...Marijuana, which is literally almost as available as chewing gum, is smoked openly by well over fifty per cent and probably by two-thirds of the troops at one time or another...
...Nixon did not make clear—and we fail to comprehend—how "individual opportunity" will be expanded by continuing and rising unemployment...
...Triplespeak The volume and variety of statements pouring out of the Nixon Administration on current and future prospects in Vietnam boggle the mind...
...bases and "remote, unpopulated areas...
...Trapped in an endless war, he turns to drugs...
...All this would be fine stuff for a funny film, or for a slapstick television series, were it not for the perilous implications of these cloak-and-dagger enterprises...
...The lawmakers who flout the law can argue, of course—and do—that the Corrupt Practices Act is a singularly obsolete statute...
...And any housewife can testify that there is no sign of a return to "price stability...
...aircraft over South Vietnam, treating about one-seventh of that country's land with herbicides...
...In addition to the growing number of combat refusals, Beech reported a widening gap between draftees and career officers, and sharply rising anti-Americanism among the Vietnamese...
...For the balance of 1971, at least, the Greeks know exactly where they stand: "As far as the question of the regime and the constitution are concerned," says the head of the junta, Colonel Papadppoulos, "there will be no change in the coming year...
...In the same front-page dispatch readers were treated to this smorgasbord: The first paragraph quoted President Nixon as saying that he "has set May 1 as the deadline for removal of all American combat troops from Vietnam...
...troops should get out of Vietnam without further delay are a number of Gls serving in combat zones...
...They're out to make points...
...George Orwell's "doublespeak" has been surpassed more than a decade before 1984...
...Hampered by the refusal of military authorities to furnish precise data on the types and quantities of herbicides sprayed in specific areas, the AAAS investigators were unable to arrive at firm conclusions on possible damage done to human health by the chemicals...
...Unless and until the Administration reveals the full details of the military's domestic spying, the services will have every reason to assume that their efforts enjoy at least tacit support and can safely be resumed once the heat is off...
...The Manpower Veto When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last month that unemployment had risen to six per cent in December—the highest level in nine years —press reports described the increase as "a setback for the Nixon Administration" and "dismal news for Government economists...
...Anybody who kills a gook gets a case of beer and a four-day pass to Firebase Snuffy...
...f The military program of crop destruction has been a "failure" in its alleged purpose of denying food to the enemy, but has deprived some 600,000 civilians of food...
...Major General George W. Putnam, Jr., division commander, compared the present rate of combat refusals with the experience of his fifteen months tour of duty with the unit in Vietnam during 1967-68: "A combat refusal was a rare thing in those days," the general told Beech...
...A Washington Post study of Capitol Hill records disclosed in December that at least fifty members of the House of Representatives—and more than 150 unsuccessful House candidates—had ignored the reporting deadlines established by the Corrupt Practices Act...
...No one can gauge today the full dimensions of the devastation which has been visited on Vietnam, but some preliminary and fragmentary data point to a crime of monstrous dimensions...
...He merely reacted, we suspect, in accord with the perennial Republican hostility toward cause of a loophole in the law, campaign committees established in the Capital are not required to report where their money comes from or how it is spent...
...In Indiana, the campaign coordinator for Republican Richard L. Roudebush, who mounted an unsuccessful challenge against Senator Vance Hartke, admitted recently that Roudebush had received $114,000 in campaign contributions channeled through a White House political aide, Jack A. Gleason...
...It was reported that use of existing stockpiles would be confined to the perimeter of U.S...
...Notes in the News The Scarred Land For decades and perhaps for generations after the war in Vietnam is finally ended, that unhappy land will continue to bear the scars of the massive assault to which American technology has subjected it for the past ten years...
...We suspect the Congressman was mistaken...
...Mr...
...Who will Johnny believe, and what will he believe in, when he comes marching home ? Sooner or later we will know the answer, and it shapes up as a grim one...
...committees contributed $12,000' to Representative Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., a Boston Democrat who was unopposed for reelection...
...President Nixon, anticipating the AAAS report (of which he had received advance notice), announced in December that authorities in Vietnam were "initiating a program for an orderly, yet rapid, phase-out of the herbicide operations...
...Yet his own report indicates that his District of Columbia committees constituted a sixteen-fol4 violation of the Corrupt Practices Act, which imposes a limit of $25,000 on the campaign expen-tures of a Senatorial candidate...
...Nixon's decision to veto the $9.5 billion manpower training and employment bill—a measure that could have provided swift and substantial assistance to hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans...
...Martin Luther King Jr., and who had dutifully reported references to Dr...
...With hundreds of thousands of American soldiers still bogged down in Vietnam, with the Pentagon pressing for substantial increases in its swollen budget, it is utter deception to blame the woes of the economy on an imaginary transition to "peacetime...
...Instead the new law continues the current level of assistance—up to $106 monthly, or twenty-nine cents per meal—which nutritionists regard as barely enough to furnish an emergency diet...
...He compared the public service jobs to the New Deal's WPA, which has long been unjustly maligned, and declared they were no answer to "the problems of the '70s...
...The second paragraph quoted Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird as assuring the nation that "nearly all U.S...
...After a year's study, a special commission of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reported recently on the "extremely serious harm" that has been done by the American military's indiscriminate use of herbicide chemicals to destroy crops and timberlands in Vietnam...
...military assistance programs, the Wisconsin Democrat exploded...
...Their lack of candor severely undermines the confidence that can be placed in their assurances that these obnoxious and dangerous practices have actually been stopped...
...Is this a Food for Peace program or Food for War...
...It is no rare thing in America for citizens to be tried, convicted, and jailed for violating unfair or outdated laws...
...The "must work" requirement in the new food stamp law enacted in the last days of the Ninety-first Congress is about as unspeakably mean-spirited a piece of legislation as any we can recall...
...Thus, in one news dispatch, based on statements inspired by the Administration, we are told that "the deadline for removal of alt American ground combat troops" is May 1; that "nearly all" U.S...
...Senator J. William Fulbright, first witness at the hearings, estimated that military assistance would total $7 billion in the current fiscal year...
...Far more frightening is the big jump, in addition, to hard drugs, mainly heroin...
...Such a program, the President argued, "would limit, not expand, individual opportunity...
...One of the hidden D.C...
...The bill was the product of careful study in both houses of Congress, and the compromise version which the President chose to veto had the strong support of mayors, labor unions, and social welfare agencies...
...If jobs are what we need, and I don't believe anyone would question that any longer, the logical place to create these jobs is in the public sector— in schools and libraries, police and fire departments, recreation programs, public health agencies, hospitals, and programs to protect the environment," Senator Nelson pointed out...
...Representative Mikva finds it unthinkable that high civilian officials of the U.S...
...Both were guilty of understatement...
...Representative Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, called it "a vicious, vicious section...
...The decision to carry on the fighting is made in the White House, but the detailed orders issue from the "lifers," the career officers: "It's a lifer's war," Gordon Galfo, twenty-one, of Milton, New Jersey, told Beech...
...A sister nineteen years of age, a brother eighteen, an uncle thirty-one, a grandmother in her fifties, any one of whom fails to meet in full this requirement, causes the loss of the entire household's eligibility and denies every household member participation regardless of his compliance, exemption, status, or age...
...When Cpntroller General Elmer B. Staats, head of the General Accounting Office, recently made this disclosure before Senator William Proxmire's economy in government subcommittee, which has been investigating U.S...
...They dorft give a damn about us...
...The Army is losing its intensified campaign against drugs, Beech wrote...
...Vicious, Vicious' Senator George McGovern, Democrat of South Dakota, called it "an obnoxious provision...
...King's famous "I Had a Dream" speech, told how he was instructed to go back and find out "what the dream was...
...Fortunately, Senator Sam J. Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat, has taken a strong interest in the matter, and promises to conduct a thorough investigation...
...What has made it different is fighting the same old war...
...We took a sampling one day last month...
...Both Fulbright and Proxmire pointed out that no one in the Government was assuming responsibility for the effectiveness of the confusing array of military aid programs...
...His inquiry, we hope, will not be hampered by concern about "embarrassing" the military or protecting some vague notion of "national security...
...it seized me by the lapels, forged me rudely into my chair, and held me there fascinated until the tale was done...
...The White House assurances have a hollow ring...
...The most obvious manifestation of his indifference was Mr...
...One of Mr...
...Government, or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been aware of the extent and nature of domestic spying by the military...
...military assistance abroad...
...Nixon as "concerned" about the unemployment increase, but not unduly worried...
...Taught to hate, the GI commits atrocities...
...creates defoliants" This highly significant story by Keyes Beech adds to the already mountainous evidence that we are destroying hundreds of thousands of our own young men in Vietnam—physically, morally, or both—along with the people of that country...
...We cite Senator Buckley only as an example, and by no means an unusual one...
...Among the consequences reported by the AAAS team were these: f Up to one half of South Vietnam's mangrove forests have been "utterly destroyed" and show no sign of returning to normal growth...
...Tragically, these warnings have been largely ignored by the Government, the press, and the public...
...He's right—an employment program for poor people might include some kind of WPA leaf-raking" The President's press spokesman described Mr...
...That's what the company commander says...
...We urge the readers of The Progressive to express the outrage we are sure they feel against a practice that is nothing less than a long step toward totalitarianism...
...Nixon submitted to the Senate last summer for ratification, does not apply to the use of herbicides...
...This may be the last time that people can really express their outrage effectively," Representative Mikva warns...
...Even more disturbing than the persistent failure of the Administration's vaunted "game plan" for the economy is the President's apparent indifference to the dreadful impact of that failure on the lives of millions of American families...
...ground combat responsibility would be ended after the midsummer period of 1971...
...Last year, when Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, and former Senator Charles E. Goodell, New York Republican, attempted to persuade the Senate to impose a ban on the use of herbicides in Vietnam, they managed to muster only twenty-two votes in the 100-member chamber...
...They picked him up and carried him aboard a helicopter...
...We hold to the prediction that this will be the least severe dislocation in the century as we move from a wartime to a peacetime economy and toward price stability," White House press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler said...
...This is rough handling indeed...
...Nixon was even cheerier in his television interview a few days before the unemployment figures were released...
...We have read reviews in which the critic said he was "floored" by a book, or in the case of a novel of unrequited love, "pierced to the heart," but Mr...
...No change" in Greece means that the colonels' regime, now approaching its fourth anniversary, will continue to rule under martial law, subjecting citizens to harassment, arbitrary arrest, and revolting torture...
...God creates trees, trees create oxygen, and the U.S...
...In the last days of the session, when there was still a chance of tempering the ugly features of the House version, the Nixon Administration swung its full support behind the Poage bill...
...The Poage Committee's version prevailed over a somewhat more generous Senate bill, which would have provided a family of four with food stamp assistance of up to $134 monthly—forty-two cents per meal...
...Who actually put up the money—and what they expected to receive in return—will never be known...
...The AAAS report confirms, if further confirmation is needed, that the American position on the use of herbicides is morally indefensible...
...The other men wouldn't tolerate it...
...His judgment, unfortunately, carries more weight than that of his apologists in Washington...
...The report merely confirmed, however, the warnings that have been isounded for years by eminent American biologists...
...But they noted increases in the number of birth defects coincident with large-scale spraying, and an inordinately high rate of stillbirths in one heavily sprayed province...
...They know the war is over and this is their last hurrah...
...It can safely be assumed that all are honorable men, deeply dedicated to law and order...
...The President's view directly contradicts the decision of an overwhelming majority of the United Nations General Assembly...
...Among those who filed their reports, many indicated that they spent much more than the $5,000 limit imposed by the law for House contests...
...It was precisely this aspect of the bill, however, which the President singled out as the main justification for his veto...
...Representative Foley asked...
...Even without the regressive work requirement, there is more than a little sand in the new law...
...ground combat responsibility would be ended after the midsummer of 1971...
...If Senator Ervin can succeed in throwing the spotlight on this ugly business and arousing the American people to this clear and present danger, he will have rendered the most important public service of his long career...
...Washington's massive military aid muddle has resulted from the failure of the Congresses and Presidents over the past two decades to establish any real accountability for the vast sums poured into military aid...
...As in Buckley's case, the funds were passed through false-front committees to conceal their source...
...Spotlight on Spying The recent flurry of disclosures that military agents have been spying on domestic dissenters and other civilians deemed suspect by the armed services has provided Americans with some interesting insights into the process that is curiously called military "intelligence...
...1971, he predicted, would be "a good year" in which both inflation and unemployment would come under control...
...I recall we had one man who said he wouldn't go...
...The Gls Want Out Among the millions of Americans who believe that U.S...
...The argument, it seems to us, comes with poor grace from men who have the option every year to amend the law, repeal it, or replace it with a meaningful statute...
...They kill those drones...
...Yet we find that in the past six years nearly $700 million of Food for Peace funds have been channeled into military assistance programs...
...Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, who is not known for his antagonism to the military brass, found it necessary to specify, in his directive curtailing the activities of the intelligence services, that no new organization should be set up to carry on the activities he has supposedly curbed...
...There have been no bedside bulletins but we have learned from a nurse's aide who feeds us tips that The Times' critic is having a decent enough convalescence, all things considered...
...During the 1960s, some 19,000 individual spraying missions were flown by U.S...
...ground combat forces would be out by May 1." The third paragraph quoted Secrer tary Laird, by now in Paris, as announcing that "the U.S...
...In a futile attempt to appeal to the better nature of his colleagues, Foley said he was sure that no member of the House "would deny help to a family that came to him with precisely the circumstances this work requirement contemplates...
...that even when it was first enacted forty-five years ago, it was honored more in the breach };han in the observance...
...Book Attacks Critic In years of scanning book advertising we have rarely run across a more flagrant case of a book handling a book reviewer so violently as the one brought to light recently by Little, Brown and Company in its* advertisement for Khrushchev Remembers, The headline quoted the testimony, in large type, of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times book reviewer, to wit: "The book transfixed me...
...Writing from a firebase of the First Air Cavalry Division, he said that this unit, "considered by many to be the best division in the country, has had twenty-five to thirty men refuse combat...
...The Senate should promptly ratify the Geneva Protocol, without the reservation requested by the President, before other nations are forced to pay the terrible price that has already been exacted from the Vietnamese...
...the "must work" provision reflected quite accurately the malevolence of a majority of the House Agriculture Committee, whose chairman, Democrat W. R. Poage of Texas, has summed up his philosophy this way: "You know what happens in the beehive...
...Bolstered by last fall's decision in Washington to resume full-scale American military aid, the junta no longer needs even to pretend that it is moving toward a restoration of elemental liberties...
...What good do we do by denying a family a chance to provide nutrition for children because the child has the additional misfortune of having an alcoholic father or an addicted uncle or older brother...
...It was a peculiar way for the President to make good on his famous promise that he would "put an end to hunger in America for all time...
Vol. 35 • February 1971 • No. 2
