The Week

• On July 23 the Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Ramsey S. Clark, having consulted his conscience, addressed a letter to the Congress in which he gave out his opinion that capital punishment is unworthy of the Great Society. On that same day the Senate, at the President’s urging, passed a bill similar to one already passed in the House, which would make the assassination of a President a federal crime, punishable by death. Thou shalt not kill Lyndon Johnson.

• On July 26 the President appointed a nineteen-man national crime commission to study the causes and cure of crime, and the administration of criminal justice. The same day the Department of Justice released statistics showing that since 1958 the number of crimes has been increasing six times as fast as the population. In 1964 alone, the number of “serious crimes” (murder, rape, assault, auto thefts, burglary, etc.) was up 13 per cent to 2,604,426. If the trend continues, there will be more crimes than people within two generations. Three days before the President’s announcement Washington began another day in what has become the normal manner. The 48-year-old wife of a State Dept. official, walking her dogs at 9 A.M. in a Georgetown park alongside a boulevard with rush-hour traffic, was seized and raped by four young sports. Let us hope the new commission’s deliberations are finished before we are.

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Crime

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Martin Luther King Jr

William F. Buckley Jr.

• On July 23 the Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Ramsey S. Clark, having consulted his conscience, addressed a letter to the Congress in which he gave out his opinion that capital punishment is unworthy of the Great Society. On that same day the Senate, at the President’s urging, passed a bill similar to one already passed in the House, which would make the assassination of a President a federal crime, punishable by death. Thou shalt not kill Lyndon Johnson.

• On July 26 the President appointed a nineteen-man national crime commission to study the causes and cure of crime, and the administration of criminal justice. The same day the Department of Justice released statistics showing that since 1958 the number of crimes has been increasing six times as fast as the population. In 1964 alone, the number of “serious crimes” (murder, rape, assault, auto thefts, burglary, etc.) was up 13 per cent to 2,604,426. If the trend continues, there will be more crimes than people within two generations. Three days before the President’s announcement Washington began another day in what has become the normal manner. The 48-year-old wife of a State Dept. official, walking her dogs at 9 A.M. in a Georgetown park alongside a boulevard with rush-hour traffic, was seized and raped by four young sports. Let us hope the new commission’s deliberations are finished before we are.