The Week

The Department of Agriculture has stopped its 29year-old Plentiful Foods Program on the grounds that there are no plentiful foods. The newest team in the Southern Hockey League is named the Macon Whoopees. A Lexington, Kentucky family bought $1,000 worth of beef for their freezer and didn’t notice until weeks later, when they had the misfortune to open it, that somebody had unplugged the freezer. Federal officials in Massachusetts expect to indict a ring of fishermen engaged in smuggling swordfish to consumers (swordfish smuggling is a federal crime). Carol Edmiston, 26, caught swimming nude in Baker Hot Springs National Park, refused to dress and was promptly arrested by a park ranger because she “had no identification at that time.” The price of cow gallstones has more than doubled, to $1,000 a pound, wholesale. The Army has failed to reach its recruiting goal for the sixth straight month. Can’t we please have the hearings back?

Evans and Novak report that the purpose of the nowcanceled Peking trips of Henry Kissinger and Mike Mansfield was to be the search for a Cambodian compromise settlement, involving the restoration of Sihanouk. But the congressionally imposed bombing ban drastically undercut President Nixon’s freedom to negotiate. “Continuation of the bombing was judged no less in Peking than in Washington as an essential part of the complicated formula to slow the pro-Hanoi Khmer Rouge Communist revolutionary movement in Cambodia, paving the way for Prince Sihanouk. . . . Peking must wonder how the party that was repudiated in a historic landslide last November now finds its policies accepted in Congress, while the big winner, President Nixon, becomes the big loser. . . . Hideous dangers lie behind the ambiguities of subtle change in the way Peking—and all other nations—must now be studying the trust and durability of the U.S. as an ally. These are dangers blithely ignored by the faithless who gave the nation Watergate.” Or more precisely, by those who make Watergate the occasion for McGovernizing American foreign policy.

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The Department of Agriculture has stopped its 29year-old Plentiful Foods Program on the grounds that there are no plentiful foods. The newest team in the Southern Hockey League is named the Macon Whoopees. A Lexington, Kentucky family bought $1,000 worth of beef for their freezer and didn’t notice until weeks later, when they had the misfortune to open it, that somebody had unplugged the freezer. Federal officials in Massachusetts expect to indict a ring of fishermen engaged in smuggling swordfish to consumers (swordfish smuggling is a federal crime). Carol Edmiston, 26, caught swimming nude in Baker Hot Springs National Park, refused to dress and was promptly arrested by a park ranger because she “had no identification at that time.” The price of cow gallstones has more than doubled, to $1,000 a pound, wholesale. The Army has failed to reach its recruiting goal for the sixth straight month. Can’t we please have the hearings back?

Evans and Novak report that the purpose of the nowcanceled Peking trips of Henry Kissinger and Mike Mansfield was to be the search for a Cambodian compromise settlement, involving the restoration of Sihanouk. But the congressionally imposed bombing ban drastically undercut President Nixon’s freedom to negotiate. “Continuation of the bombing was judged no less in Peking than in Washington as an essential part of the complicated formula to slow the pro-Hanoi Khmer Rouge Communist revolutionary movement in Cambodia, paving the way for Prince Sihanouk. . . . Peking must wonder how the party that was repudiated in a historic landslide last November now finds its policies accepted in Congress, while the big winner, President Nixon, becomes the big loser. . . . Hideous dangers lie behind the ambiguities of subtle change in the way Peking—and all other nations—must now be studying the trust and durability of the U.S. as an ally. These are dangers blithely ignored by the faithless who gave the nation Watergate.” Or more precisely, by those who make Watergate the occasion for McGovernizing American foreign policy.