The Federal Communications Commission continues to battle conservative and anti – Communist broadcasters. This was the role assigned it in the infamous Reuther Memorandum to the then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—a document which set out in grisly detail ways and means to suppress all conservative thought and action through such instrumentalities as the FCC, the Internal Revenue Service, and other federal agencies. But the FCC remains benignly mute when openly pro-Communist material is given television airing by individuals of extremist left affiliation. A case in point has been The Three Faces of Cuba—an openly Castroite effusion which has been shown in the guise of “impartial” reporting by stations in making up the National Educational Television network. NET solicits the aid of those who wish to improve the quality of TV. The FCC, which roars so viciously at conservative programs, finds no reason to censure NET or threaten its member stations with loss of their licenses—the ploy suggested by Walter Reuther and his freedom gougers.
♦ Mr. Conrad Aiken, one of America’s most distinguished living poets, gets little of the kudos and acclaim so lavishly awarded to the members of the Literary Establishment. The reason is, of course, that Mr. Aiken has refused all along to play the left-wing game of literature’s satraps. This refusal was underscored in a letter published this week in the Washington Post. Mr. Aiken gently reproves Robert Lowell for his “almost unforgivable and certainly misguided” refusal to accept a White House invitation because of disagreements on foreign policy. He took issue with those people who were given the impression by the press that the Lowell position on foreign policy was shared by a majority of American writers. “The New York Times called me, read me Mr. Lowell’s letter [to President Johnson], and asked me if I would endorse a statement backing Mr. Lowell,” Conrad Aiken writes. “When I declined, saying that I was in complete disagreement with Mr. Lowell, and completely in agreement with the [foreign] policies of the President, and offered them permission to quote me to that effect, they declined.” In short, the New York Times set itself up as an advocate of Robert Lowell, to the extent of suppressing the opinions of a poet of equal importance.
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