disseminated by the lawmakers come from disciplined minds rather than from potential new McCarthys.

Fortunately, the nation appears blessed now with certain legislators willing to risk their own political fortunes by insisting on curbs against the excesses of Washington's subversive hunters. Perhaps the best recent example is the stirring fight made against renewal for the U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. With North Carolina's redoubtable Senator Sam J. Ervin leading the battle, that moth-eaten anachronism came within an inch of annihilation. Fortyone Senators voted for its demise after Senator Sam had pointed out that the Board had proved totally useless in its 21 years of existence. And the Board chairman, John W. Mahan, pathetically acknowledged before The Senate Appropriations Committee that the Board doesn't have work enough to fill its time.

The nation would be well served if the Senate did close books on the Subversive Activities Control Board. But President Nixon is trying hard to keep the unit in business. In July, he issued an exécutive order to the Board, asking it to identify and list "organizations that seek violent overthrow of the government or violent interference with the rights of others." Alert senators shot down that balloon, holding the President's action an extension of the spirit of McCarthy and an attempt by the Chief Executive to usurp legislative powers of congress.

Next year's fight to kill and bury the Control Board should be worth watching. Meanwhile, the House Internal Security Committee continues to prove that when better laws are written to keep the nation wholesome and free of genuine subversives, such bills will not emanate from that bastion of liberal-baiting. Not content with listing such people as Dr. John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary, Novelist Jessica Mitford, Paul Jacobs, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and John Ciardi as "radical campus speakers" while omitting "radicals" with opposing views but dear to the heart of Chairman Richard H. Ichord, the House Committee has voted to retain its Title II of the 1950 Internal Security Act. That provision was enacted in a police state spirit and is regarded with fear and distrust by members of all American minority groups.

[From the Anderson, S.C., Independent, Oct. 11, 1971]

RENEWED BATTLE AGAINST EFFORT TO THROTTLE A FIRST FREEDOM

If Congress hadn't been in such a hurry to quit the heat of August in Washington, Sen. Sam Ervin might have won his battle against a White House order expanding the powers of the Subversive Activities Control Board.

The Senate had gone along with him earlier, but a conference committee had knocked out the ban on using appropriations to implement the new authority of the board. Since everything was lumped into one big $4 billion money bill for the Commerce, State and Justice departments, the Senate bowed to the will of the House conferees, although by only two votes.

Now, however, with Congress back in Washington, the North Carolina Democrat is renewing his battle, and we hope he wins.

We hope it for reasons which go beyond the usefulness-or rather, the injuriousness of the SACB itself which, dormant so many years, would now be revitalized.

For in conferring upon the SACB to hold hearings "to determine whether any organization is totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, subversive" or "unlawfully advocating" subversive ideas, and then advising the Attorney General as to whether they should be added to his list of "subversive" organizations, the executive in effect usurped the legislative powers of Congress under the Constitution, as Senator Ervin points out.

If Congress wanted to confer new powers upon the SACB, we could not argue that Congress does not have the power to legislate.

In this instance, the Executive has clearly exceeded his authority, and we would find it inexcusable if Congress should meekly go along with the rationalethe executive's "inherent powers"-which the administration has again advanced. As for what the White House would have the SACB do, we think it unconstitutional, unwise and unnecessary.

We see no reason why any agency of the federal government should be able to stigmatize and penalize any Americans, however distasteful we may find their views, for advocating those views.

In a free society, actions may be punished; thoughts and speech and association may not. As Senator Ervin declares:

"I hate the thoughts of the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Fascists and others who adopted violence as a creed. But these people have the same rights to freedom of speech as I do. I will fight for their rights to think the thoughts and speak the words that I hate."

[From the Greensboro Daily News, Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 11, 1971]

FUNERAL FOR A FOSSIL

It is no mere coincidence that the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) and the frivolous Red-hunting career of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin had their birth in the same year-1950.

Senator McCarthy faded away in discredit about four years later, when his preposterous attempt to brand the Army as a coddler of subversives backfired and led to his censure by the Senate. But the Control Board, although its powers have been all but nullified by the courts, survives in fossil form to this day. Rearmed by President Nixon's Executive Order No. 11605 of last July it now threatens to assume powers to meddle with and monitor the political thoughts and associations of rank and file Americans, whether or not they are applicants for government jobs.

Before it can pursue this new role, however, the SACB must overcome the formidable opposition of two judicious North Carolinians, Sen. Sam Ervin and Rep. Richardson Preyer.

In a speech September 22 to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Senator Ervin called attention to the menace of thought-control that is implicit in the President's order:

The real objective of the order (he said) is to empower the board to brand the organizations and groups specified in it as intellectually or politically dangerous to the established order Such branding of these organizations will place a political or social stigma on their members, and tend to minimize their freedom of speech, association and assembly . . . The order brings within its coverage the organizational memberships of millions of Americans who neither enjoy nor seek employment in the federal establishment. Besides, it applies to the activities and objectives of groups past numbering which have no relationship whatever to the loyalty of federal civil servants . . . The Nixon Order also violates the First Amendment and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment by applying the theory of guilt by association and stigmatizing politically and socially all the members of all the organizations or groups branded . . . including those who may be passive or inactive members or those who may be unaware of the unlawful aims . . . or those who may disagree with those unlawful aims.

It is a timely warning, whose real value could be emphasized only by a long review of some of the idiocies and injustices committed in the name of security in the era of the 1950s. Suffice it to say that this country needs no revival of the offending practices described by Senator Ervin.

Despite his early zeal in the investigation of defunct spy-rings, it seems likely that Mr. Nixon has bigger fish to fry as President and that the flawed executive order recently effected over his signature was cooked up by Justice Department subordinates with a less than perfect sense of the dangers it involves. Nobody has heard much of the Subversive Activities Control Board, except that it has little to do and that President Johnson underscored its salutary idleness two or three years ago by appointing to the Board the unemployed husband of one of his secretaries. We suspect that more constructive places on the federal payroll could be found for the present Boardmen, if they are otherwise unemployable in private enterprise.

To that end, a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Richardson Preyer makes good sense. The bill would replace SACB with a so-called Federal Employes Security and Appeals Commission, with the limited job of screening applicants for federal jobs while properly safeguarding their rights of due process. Beyond this limited function, this country needs no roving, free-wheeling band of thought policemen, free-loading on the taxpayer, with a hunting license to maintain surveillance of private political thoughts and organizations. At last glance, the FBI had that

task well in hand anyway-and did it for the most part with far greater discretion. There is a case for an orderly and responsible agency to protect government from disloyal infiltration.

Between them, then, Senator Ervin and Congressman Preyer point the way to a sane security system that would preserve the integrity of government without duplicating the panicky and unwise measures taken in haste and alarm after the Red scare of the late Forties. The Subversive Activities Control Board is a fossil. It needs a decent funeral.

[From The Washington Post, Oct. 3, 1971]

FAITH IN ONE ANOTHER

When the founders of the American Republic dissolved the political bands that connected them with the British people and signed their names to the Declaration of Independence, they had as yet no country to which they could pledge their allegiance. For the support of this Declaration, they declared instead, "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." That kind of faith in each other served as the cement of the American society for 175 years.

In the 1950s, however, Sen. Joseph McCarthy began to make a cult of distrust among Americans. Fear of communism, fear of subversion, fear of non-conformity-fear of each other-replaced mutual confidence to a terrifying degree. The superb self-confidence that had been an identifying trait of Americans all but disappeared. Instruments such as the Subversive Activities Control Board and the House Committee on Un-American Activities were forged to keep an official eye on Americans, to search out disloyalty among them, to penalize unpopular opinions and associations, in short, to protect the people from themselves. It was always a funny thing about the heresy hunters that they never supposed that they themselves were going to be subverted by Communist propaganda or by other dangerous ideas; it was always and only the loyalty and good sense of their fellow-countrymen that they doubted. They had so little confidence themselves in the gospel according to Thomas Jefferson that they were forever fearful that "ordinary" Americans would easily be won over to the gospel according to V. I. Lenin. They had so little faith in freedom as a way of life that they could never bring themselves to rely upon the free institutions established by the American Constitution.

The bluntest instrument of the heresy hunters was the Subversive Activities Control Board. A menace to individual liberty at its inception, this clumsy agency collapsed of its own ineptitude as soon as the political health of the American people began to be restored. It was in a state of innocuous, if costly, desuetude when President Nixon for some unexplained reason, chose this summer to revive it by giving it a thoroughly totalitarian duty to perform-the compilation of lists of officially disapproved organizations which Americans could join only at their own political peril.

That inveterate believer in freedom, Sam Ervin, has taken another swing at the Subversive Activities Control Board and the odious task the President has assigned to it. In a recent speech to the Association of American Publishers the senator gave a moving expression of his own faith in Americans and in the American dream. "I affirm my faith," he said, "in the sanity and steadfastness of the overwhelming majority of all Americans. I shall not fear for the security of my country as long as love of liberty abides in their hearts, and truth is left free to combat error.'

That faith needs to be restored to America. It is time for us to take a new pledge of allegiance to each other.

[From The Federal Times, Washington, D.C., Oct. 13, 1971]

SACB IDLE DESPITE NEW BESTOWED POWER

(By Jay Swartz)

WASHINGTON.-Congressional and courtroom pressures have idled the controversial Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), despite a recent White House Executive Order which many thought would give the Board a new, more active future.

The Board's new presidentially bestowed powers will apparently remain in limbo until the dispute over their constitutionality is settled.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.), long an SACB opponent, is sponsoring legislation to make it illegal for any federal employee to use the new authority President Nixon gave the SACB last July. Since that bill faces an uphill journey in Congress, Ervin is sponsoring another measure that is more likely to pass-merely a simple Senate Resolution which, in effect, says publicly that one-half of the Congress believes Mr. Nixon's directive to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, another long-time foe of the SACB, has asked a federal district court to issue an injunction to prevent the Board from acting under the new executive mandate.

President Nixon's order gives the Board authority to conduct hearings on organizations it feels should be added to the Attorney General's subversive list, which has not been updated for 16 years.

Additionally, the order specifies that the Board can determine whether a group is "totalitarian," "Fascist," "Communist" or "subversive."

Among those who say they fear what might happen to them under the new Presidential directive are the National Peace Action Coalition, the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, the American Servicemen's Union and the Communist Party of the United States, four of the nine organizations that have joined in the ACLU suit.

Another group some sources say would be the No. 1 target of the newly strengthened Board, the militant Black Panthers, is not among the nine plaintiffs. ACLU legal director Melvin Wulf, an author of the suit, has charged that the SACB would be able "to blacklist political organizations almost at whim and to require federal agencies to fire any employee who joins these organizations." The Board disputes this, contending there are adequate safeguards available.

Both the ACLU and Ervin argue that the July order is an invasion of the Executive Branch of powers vested solely in Congress.

Senate observers predict the simple resolution will pass the upper house by mid-October for presentation to the President. The bill is not expected to be voted on until several weeks thereafter.

The reasoning behind that strategy, officials say, is to force President Nixon to explain why he issued the order before resorting to legislation. Should the President act unfavorably on the resolution, Ervin and his colleagues would increase their efforts to pass the bill.

Originally, under the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, the Board was to determine-subject to judicial review-whether organizations were communist-related and whether individuals were members of such organizations. Passed during the height of the Cold War, the act was predictably aimed at the communist party.

For 14 years, the Board operated with little restriction, until a 1964 Supreme Court decision in favor of the Communist Party began to limit the scope of SACB power. The decision held that an organization did not have to register with the Justice Department as a subversive group unless the federal government proved that individuals were willing to waive their rights against self-incrimination in order to register with that group.

In addition to updating the order, Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian has asked Congress to change the name of the SACB to the Federal Internal Security Board.

[From The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., Oct. 29, 1971]

PLAN IS DRAWN BY U.S. TO FIRE "SUBVERSIVES"

DISMISSAL WOULD BE AUTOMATIC

(By Joseph Young)

The Nixon administration is drafting plans for the automatic firing of all federal employes who are members of any organization the government decides is "subversive" or "revolutionary-terrorist."

The plan would abolish present legal safeguards adopted following the witchhunts of the Joseph McCarthy era in the 1950's and the loyalty programs of the late 1940's.

It would apply to both "sensitive" as well as "non-sensitive" jobs in government.

Mere membership in a group listed by the attorney general as "subversive” is not now grounds to fire a federal employe. The government must prove that an employe is an “active and knowing" member of such an organization.

The proposed new standards would bring the dismissal of an employe if the government decided his continued employment "would not promote the efficiency of the service."

Apprised of the administration's proposed changes, federal employe union leaders expressed alarm that this could result in a new witch-hunt in the federal service.

They also express concern that the proposal would mean virtually any employe could be fired on vague charges.

The union leaders ask who is to determine in these rapidly changing times of social stress and upheaval which organizations are "subversive" or "revolutionary" and which are not?

Federal union leaders say there is a grave danger that government employes belonging to groups demanding an end to the fighting in Vietnam or in the cause of school and housing integration and other social issues would stand to lose their jobs if the plan becomes effective.

Asst. Atty. Gen. Robert C. Mardian, chief of the Justice Department's internal security division, referred to the proposal in remarks prepared for an Atomic Energy Commission security conference. Mardian has also indicated the administration's thinking on the matter in testimony before Congress.

Mardian described as "legalisms" federal court decisions which carefully circumscribed operations of internal security programs.

He said that "legal distractions . . . have placed an onerous, if not impossible, burden on government and industrial security officers," and that the new standards are part of several proposals to correct this.

Among others he named was a July 2 executive order from President Nixon authorizing the Subversive Activities Control Board to hold hearings and designate groups that fall into the "subversive" or "revolutionary-terrorist" category. This order is under attack in Congress. There have been bills introduced by Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., to bar use of federal funds to enforce the order.

Mardian argued that evaluating the membership in groups "dedicated to revolutionary-terrorist” principles would offer a "more realistic" test than present

standards.

agree that

Mardian argued that government agencies should be able to fire employes if membership in an offending group would diminish his agency's efficiency. Mardian added that "the vast majority of Americans would . . persons who are knowing members" of such groups "should not be employed in even non-sensitive positions, not simply because they are disloyal, but because such people are not likely to improve the delivery of governmental services of a government system they are trying to destroy."

Queried by Jared Stout of the Newhouse News Service as to which additional organizations would be named as subversive or which kind of activities by federal employes would be regarded as subversive or revolutionary-terrorist, Justice Department spokesmen declined to do so.

A Justice Department spokesman said the proposed plan could take the form of either legislation or a presidential executive order.

[From the Plain Dealer Sunday magazine, Nov. 7, 1971]

EXECUTIVE ORDERS: THE Now POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT, AND HOW CONGRESS WOULD LIKE TO KILL THEM OFF

(By Richard G. Zimmerman)

WASHINGTON.-Under normal circumstances, a president's attempt to unload enough responsibility on five $36,000-a-year bureaucrats to keep them awake past their morning coffee would be applauded on Capitol Hill. But President Richard M. Nixon's recent move giving the almost moribund Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) something to do has caused outraged howls on both the congressional right and left.