ONCE A YEAR America dances in a comic ballet against the backdrop of a world of terror. The dance masters call their creation, Operation Alert, fitting it snugly into a continuous show entitled, Civil Defense. This year’s show took place May 3. In New York, Civil Defense authorities qualified the Men’s Bar at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as a shelter area, and 100 men continued to sip their highballs as three mythical nuclear bombs hurtled toward the city. At Yankee Stadium, bleacherites cowered under the stands while more affluent customers remained in their comfortable grandstand seats. Several Manhattan firms stopped work, but one company declared its 400 employees “automatically dead” and kept them on the job. In Washington, Congress ignored the drill, and President Eisenhower spent the day elsewhere. Only one top government official scurried from the city to his secret command post in Virginia - Leo A. Hoegh, Director of the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization. The State Department set a new record as 4,000 employees tucked their secret papers into safes and rushed from the building in eight minutes (previous record: twelve minutes). Fifty-five schools stayed out of the drill, serving as polling places for the District of Columbia’s Presidential primary...

In the world of U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics H. J. Anslinger, the drug addict is an “immoral, vicious, social leper,” who cannot escape responsibility for his actions, who must feel the force of swift, impartial punishment. This world of Anslinger does not belong to him alone. Bequeathed to all of us, it vibrates with the consciousness of twentieth-century America. Anslinger, however, has been its guardian. As America’s first and only Commissioner of Narcotics, he has spent much of his lifetime insuring that society stamp its retribution in to the soul of the addict. In his thirty years as Commissioner (Anslinger is now sixty-seven), he has listened to a chorus of steady praise. Admirers have described him as “the greatest living authority on the world narcotics traffic,” a man who “deserves a medal of honor for his advanced thought,” “one of the greatest men that ever lived,” a public servant whose work “will insure his place in history with men such as Jenner, Pasteur, Semmelweiss, Walter Reed, Paul Ehrlich, and the host of other conquerors of scourges that have plagued the human race.” But some discordant notes, especially in recent years, have broken through this chorus...

IT IS fashionable in literary circles to snicker at Arthur E. Summerfield, the former Chevrolet dealer who may have produced one of the most publicized cases of poor judgment in the history of criticism. But the Postmaster General merely carried the logic of traditional Post Office procedures to their proper conclusion. Through the years, these procedures have led to the seizure of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Caldwell’s Tobacco Road as obscene literature, and Sholom Aleichem’s Bewitched Tailor, abolitionist pamphlets, discussions of the French Revolution, the Economist (London), and a Russian chess book as political propaganda. Vested with these traditional powers of censorship, Summerfield, a man who admits to reading little fiction, decided that D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover “taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work”; literary critics and at least one federal judge decided otherwise. Snickering at this difference in judgment seems like misplaced energy. Rather than examine the critical faculties of Summerfield, it would make more sense to examine the censorship powers of the Post Office...

Evangelist Billy Graham today said he almost wept when he learned Rep. Douglas Stringfellow (R-Utah) for years told a false story of wartime service. "He lost his character. Now, he has lost his friends. How terrible! How tragic!” the North Carolina minister told 16,000 persons, the largest crowd to attend a crusade sermon here. Graham cited the example of Stringfellow in a sermon on "America's Greatest Sin." The Utah congressman last night tearfully repudiated his story of World War II experiences with the Office of Strategic Services. Stringfellow's admission substantiated an Army Times story that questioned his service record. “The great sin of America is we are putting all our emphasis on the material, the secular, the body and so little on the soul," the evangelist told the crowd that filled Pelican Stadium in the cool, sunny afternoon...