The WEEK

A dreamy young lady of our acquaintance was momentarily intoxicated by the Peace Corps calliope of last January and fired off an application to Washington. Months passed and nothing happened. Then one day her boss called her in, told her he had received an inquiry about her from the Peace Corps, and showed her a letter of recommendation he was about to put in the mail. Never mind, she told him, having in the interval dried out: I’m no longer interested. So the boss dropped the letter in the waste basket. In due course, our friend received a formal notification of where and when to report for her entrance exam. With a passing sigh at bureaucratic bungling, she in turn dropped the notice in the waste basket, and thought no more about it. Until last Sunday, at 3:00 A.M., a peremptory ring of the doorbell jolted her awake. A telegram, from Washington, D.C. Greetings from Sargent Shriver. She had been accepted by the Peace Corps! Report at 8: 00 A.M., Monday, at…

On the first day of the hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary McNamara declared that, to the best of his knowledge, he had not ordered cancelled a single anti-Communist strategy seminar. Senator Strom Thurmond observed that somebody had cancelled six such seminars to date: in Indianapolis, Fredericksburg, Glenview, San Antonio, Shreveport and the Canal Zone. Mr. McNamara then recalled that all speeches by military personnel, come to think of it, must be cleared with Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester. (Said Sylvester turns out to be the former Washington Bureau Chief of the Newark Evening News who, while serving in that capacity, directed his energies primarily to attacking congressional investigations of Communism.) In addition, said Mr. McNamara, any speech by military personnel containing “foreign implications” must of course be cleared by the State Department. By whom exactly in the State Department? That, said Mr. Secretary McNamara, I just don’t really know. Among the statements with intolerable foreign implications State has recently blue-pencilled from a speech by General Arthur Trudeau: the phrases “Communist conspiracy, directed toward absolute domination of the world”; “the insidious ideology of world Communism”; “nothing has happened to indicate that the goals of international Communism have changed.” Washington insiders predict that against the combined weight of the Administration, including the civilian heads of the Pentagon, the bureaucracy, and its servile legislators, the Senate investigators will not get far. At all costs, the New Frontier is determined to maintain the morale of its military censors.

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A dreamy young lady of our acquaintance was momentarily intoxicated by the Peace Corps calliope of last January and fired off an application to Washington. Months passed and nothing happened. Then one day her boss called her in, told her he had received an inquiry about her from the Peace Corps, and showed her a letter of recommendation he was about to put in the mail. Never mind, she told him, having in the interval dried out: I’m no longer interested. So the boss dropped the letter in the waste basket. In due course, our friend received a formal notification of where and when to report for her entrance exam. With a passing sigh at bureaucratic bungling, she in turn dropped the notice in the waste basket, and thought no more about it. Until last Sunday, at 3:00 A.M., a peremptory ring of the doorbell jolted her awake. A telegram, from Washington, D.C. Greetings from Sargent Shriver. She had been accepted by the Peace Corps! Report at 8: 00 A.M., Monday, at…

On the first day of the hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary McNamara declared that, to the best of his knowledge, he had not ordered cancelled a single anti-Communist strategy seminar. Senator Strom Thurmond observed that somebody had cancelled six such seminars to date: in Indianapolis, Fredericksburg, Glenview, San Antonio, Shreveport and the Canal Zone. Mr. McNamara then recalled that all speeches by military personnel, come to think of it, must be cleared with Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester. (Said Sylvester turns out to be the former Washington Bureau Chief of the Newark Evening News who, while serving in that capacity, directed his energies primarily to attacking congressional investigations of Communism.) In addition, said Mr. McNamara, any speech by military personnel containing “foreign implications” must of course be cleared by the State Department. By whom exactly in the State Department? That, said Mr. Secretary McNamara, I just don’t really know. Among the statements with intolerable foreign implications State has recently blue-pencilled from a speech by General Arthur Trudeau: the phrases “Communist conspiracy, directed toward absolute domination of the world”; “the insidious ideology of world Communism”; “nothing has happened to indicate that the goals of international Communism have changed.” Washington insiders predict that against the combined weight of the Administration, including the civilian heads of the Pentagon, the bureaucracy, and its servile legislators, the Senate investigators will not get far. At all costs, the New Frontier is determined to maintain the morale of its military censors.