The always perceptive Wall Street Journal recently printed a chilling report on the mood of Lyndon Johnson and the White House staff. While the administration promises up and down — even including the Hitlerian tactic of getting written guarantees from his generals — that Khe Sanh will hold, privately they are beginning to concede that Khe Sanh might well fall to the Viet Cong. The parallels between the 6,000 Marines trapped and surrounded at Khe Sanh and the 15,000 French troops trapped and captured at Dien Bien Phu fourteen years ago, are too numerous and too close to overlook.

This is an Olympic year and, like every Olympic year, it is a good time to contemplate the curious relic of “amateurism” that threatens to wreck every Olympics and many sporting events.

How is it that the overwhelming majority of the people of South Vietnam support the National Liberation Front, the “Viet Cong”? A look into this question will help Americans who are bewildered at seeing so much of the world’s population supporting what we simply regard as “Communist totalitarianism.” If it were as simple as that, the Communists would find precious little support, and precious few members.

In the welter of discussion (mainly abuse) on Jim Garrison’s conspiracy case in the Kennedy assassination, an important story has been overlooked: the inspiring and knowledgeable devotion to individual liberty that has shone through Garrison’s statements.

Ever since the massive demonstration at the Pentagon on October 21, the growing anti-war movement in this country has escalated its confrontations with the police and, on occasion, with federal troops. The highly militant and turbulent demonstrations against Dean Rusk at the New York Hilton and at the Oakland Induction Center embody an important and dramatic shift in the strategy and tactics of the anti-war movement: in its phrase, it has shifted “From Protest to Resistance.”

After three years of putting the English people unmercifully through the wringer of “austerity,” of ever-more crippling taxes and governmental wage controls; after three years of protesting to everyone up and down the country that the pound sterling would never, never be devalued, and that austerity was necessary to “protect the pound,” Prime Minister [James Harold] Wilson finally threw in the sponge. One Saturday morning the stunned British public awoke to find that their sacrifices had been in vain and that the pound was now devalued.

Most economists have thought that “It Couldn’t Happen Here” — not, in mighty America, the home of high productivity and, therefore, the home of free international trade. But is has happened, and because of the chronic inflationary policies of the U.S. government, we are now boxed into a situation where the administration has adopted that despotic and tyrannical method of rule hitherto confined to despised backward countries: exchange control.

For at least two decades we have been living in a society that has taken on all the characteristics of fascism. At home we have the fascist corporate state economy: an economy of monopolies, subsidies, and privileges run by a tripartite coalition of Big Business, Big Unions, and Big Government; and we have a military garrison state, with permanent conscription, tied to a permanent war economy fueled by armament contracts.

Well, this month marks our fourth full year of the presidential rule of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and it is high time to sum up his reign. These four years have been years of enormous frustration and resentment on the part of America’s liberal intellectual community. Here was a man who looked and still looks upon FDR as his political mentor — a man who ran with the support of the ADA [Americans for Democratic Action], of old and new New Dealers, of all authentic liberals — and here is a man who is now universally reviled by those former supporters.

In recent years the nation’s conservatives, bitter and angry at Supreme Court decisions preserving the rights of the individual against the police, have begun to demand a new Constitutional convention which could totally rewrite our present document.