THE WEEK ;

• The persistent refusal of the Administration to understand is suggested by the President’s invitation to the Soviet Union to join the United States in a war on malaria. The point is that Communists are no more presumptively anti-malaria than they are presumptively anti-evil. Malaria—like fall-out, or germ warfare, or lying, or murder—is good or bad depending on whether it advances the revolution. The Communists wish long and fecund and active lives for any anopheles mosquitoes that feast on free blood. The Communists will cooperate with the West only in bringing about the West’s downfall; and this, nowadays, keeps both sides busy.

• Forrest Davis’ thoughtful article (p.81) says what needs saying about the President’s report to Congress on the state of the Union. Beyond it one asks only, What has befallen us that the message should be hailed so extravagantly? What person who heard the address last week can this week recall a memorable phrase or thought in it, or single out a proposal or observation that the President has not made one hundred times, before, during and after every Communist advance, and domestic retreat? Granted the President, presumably a sick man still, and demonstrably a man whom time and labor have ravaged, cut a heroic figure: for his courage we honor him. But must we call the shopworn new, the cliché epigrammatic, the jejune substantial? In the last analysis we have nothing to fear save the loss of our critical faculties. Must New Republicanism strip us of them too?

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• The persistent refusal of the Administration to understand is suggested by the President’s invitation to the Soviet Union to join the United States in a war on malaria. The point is that Communists are no more presumptively anti-malaria than they are presumptively anti-evil. Malaria—like fall-out, or germ warfare, or lying, or murder—is good or bad depending on whether it advances the revolution. The Communists wish long and fecund and active lives for any anopheles mosquitoes that feast on free blood. The Communists will cooperate with the West only in bringing about the West’s downfall; and this, nowadays, keeps both sides busy.

• Forrest Davis’ thoughtful article (p.81) says what needs saying about the President’s report to Congress on the state of the Union. Beyond it one asks only, What has befallen us that the message should be hailed so extravagantly? What person who heard the address last week can this week recall a memorable phrase or thought in it, or single out a proposal or observation that the President has not made one hundred times, before, during and after every Communist advance, and domestic retreat? Granted the President, presumably a sick man still, and demonstrably a man whom time and labor have ravaged, cut a heroic figure: for his courage we honor him. But must we call the shopworn new, the cliché epigrammatic, the jejune substantial? In the last analysis we have nothing to fear save the loss of our critical faculties. Must New Republicanism strip us of them too?