The Week

Do you wish to know the real reason why Prime Minister Heath threw out all those Soviet spies? It took the Communist Daily World a little time to unravel the true story, but here it is: “London—The Tory government of Prime Minister Edward Heath, beset by massive unemployment, mounting working-class resistance to its antiunion laws, and a critical situation in North Ireland over its policy of repression, reacted in the traditional manner of reactionary regimes and manufactured a vast spy scare.”

A federal grand jury in Boston wants to talk to three chums of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, about those Pentagon Papers he, aah, acquired. The three, all Scholars, all violently anti-American, are Noam Chomsky (MIT), Richard A. Falk (Princeton) and Samuel Popkin (Harvard). Along with the usual parade of Amendments, they’ve found an interesting new reason not to testify: Questioning of Scholars by grand juries is a violation of academic freedom, they say—and they’ve got affidavits from other Scholars (Reischauer, Galbraith etc.) to prove it. After all, the reasoning goes, if a newspaperman can refuse to testify in order to protect privileged sources, shouldn’t a Scholar have the same right? Legal experts reply that freedom of the press is specifically guaranteed by the First Amendment, while academic freedom is governed by what the New York Times calls “an accumulation of norms.” We await the publication of a magisterial book by Profs. Chomsky, Falk and Popkin, entitled Stealing: The New Norm.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

National Review

Do you wish to know the real reason why Prime Minister Heath threw out all those Soviet spies? It took the Communist Daily World a little time to unravel the true story, but here it is: “London—The Tory government of Prime Minister Edward Heath, beset by massive unemployment, mounting working-class resistance to its antiunion laws, and a critical situation in North Ireland over its policy of repression, reacted in the traditional manner of reactionary regimes and manufactured a vast spy scare.”

A federal grand jury in Boston wants to talk to three chums of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, about those Pentagon Papers he, aah, acquired. The three, all Scholars, all violently anti-American, are Noam Chomsky (MIT), Richard A. Falk (Princeton) and Samuel Popkin (Harvard). Along with the usual parade of Amendments, they’ve found an interesting new reason not to testify: Questioning of Scholars by grand juries is a violation of academic freedom, they say—and they’ve got affidavits from other Scholars (Reischauer, Galbraith etc.) to prove it. After all, the reasoning goes, if a newspaperman can refuse to testify in order to protect privileged sources, shouldn’t a Scholar have the same right? Legal experts reply that freedom of the press is specifically guaranteed by the First Amendment, while academic freedom is governed by what the New York Times calls “an accumulation of norms.” We await the publication of a magisterial book by Profs. Chomsky, Falk and Popkin, entitled Stealing: The New Norm.