The Week

■ Continuing his reinforcement of the Pentagon’s drooping upper civilian echelons, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird appointed Professor G. Warren Nutter as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Professor Nutter was for some years director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy at the University of Virginia. He was a foreign policy adviser to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign and to Richard Nixon last year. He is probably best known for his brilliant and myth-destroying studies of the Soviet economy.

■ That the word “un-American” is vague, undefinable and open-ended has long been one of the Left’s principal complaints about the House Committee on Un- American Activities. Quite right, said the Committee’s new chairman, Richard Ichord (D., Mo.), in requesting that the name be changed to House Internal Security Committee. The House approved the new, less ambiguous name—and, more important, a less ambiguous mandate: To investigate groups seeking to establish a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States or to overthrow the government by “any unlawful means.” Although the new name and mandate will not satisfy the Left, they clarify the Committee’s proper function and bolster it against constitutional challenge in the courts.

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■ Continuing his reinforcement of the Pentagon’s drooping upper civilian echelons, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird appointed Professor G. Warren Nutter as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Professor Nutter was for some years director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy at the University of Virginia. He was a foreign policy adviser to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign and to Richard Nixon last year. He is probably best known for his brilliant and myth-destroying studies of the Soviet economy.

■ That the word “un-American” is vague, undefinable and open-ended has long been one of the Left’s principal complaints about the House Committee on Un- American Activities. Quite right, said the Committee’s new chairman, Richard Ichord (D., Mo.), in requesting that the name be changed to House Internal Security Committee. The House approved the new, less ambiguous name—and, more important, a less ambiguous mandate: To investigate groups seeking to establish a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States or to overthrow the government by “any unlawful means.” Although the new name and mandate will not satisfy the Left, they clarify the Committee’s proper function and bolster it against constitutional challenge in the courts.