The Week

• The editors of national review wish Prime Minister Wilson a speedy recovery from the injuries he received when a young boy hit him in the eye with a stink bomb contained in a glass phial, and offer a reward to the first Hawkshaw who can explain how it was determined that the odor came from the phial.

• Birchers beware: In the spring of an election year few things are more predictable than that ye shall be attacked. This year’s spring offensive was launched by the Anti-Defamation League’s massive broadside (theme: anti-semitism). Sen. Gale McGee (D., Wyo.) stirred the grass roots with the prediction that the election campaign would bring “the largest and best-financed right-wing extremist assault on the sensibilities of the voters in American history.” McGee pinpointed a Birch front, uncovered in Denver, and simultaneously denounced by every other organization in the phone book. In New York, where Mayor Lindsay introduced the Birch issue into his war with the police force, city officials were lining up to see who could spit farthest. The winner: City Council President Frank O’Connor, who compared the JBS to the “Hitlerian Nazi Party.” In a significant reversal Lindsay’s new police commissioner, Howard R. Leary, called the Society “abhorrent” (a month ago it was “harmless”) and said he would remove members from the force “if I had the authority” (a month ago it was only if their beliefs impaired their “efficiency”) . Irony: standing up for the JBS in this round was the New York Civil Liberties Union, on the grounds that “the views a citizen entertains . . . are no concern of the government.”

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• The editors of national review wish Prime Minister Wilson a speedy recovery from the injuries he received when a young boy hit him in the eye with a stink bomb contained in a glass phial, and offer a reward to the first Hawkshaw who can explain how it was determined that the odor came from the phial.

• Birchers beware: In the spring of an election year few things are more predictable than that ye shall be attacked. This year’s spring offensive was launched by the Anti-Defamation League’s massive broadside (theme: anti-semitism). Sen. Gale McGee (D., Wyo.) stirred the grass roots with the prediction that the election campaign would bring “the largest and best-financed right-wing extremist assault on the sensibilities of the voters in American history.” McGee pinpointed a Birch front, uncovered in Denver, and simultaneously denounced by every other organization in the phone book. In New York, where Mayor Lindsay introduced the Birch issue into his war with the police force, city officials were lining up to see who could spit farthest. The winner: City Council President Frank O’Connor, who compared the JBS to the “Hitlerian Nazi Party.” In a significant reversal Lindsay’s new police commissioner, Howard R. Leary, called the Society “abhorrent” (a month ago it was “harmless”) and said he would remove members from the force “if I had the authority” (a month ago it was only if their beliefs impaired their “efficiency”) . Irony: standing up for the JBS in this round was the New York Civil Liberties Union, on the grounds that “the views a citizen entertains . . . are no concern of the government.”