As the Saigon armies in the north flee the revolutionary advance, abandoning U.S. arms and equipment in their path, it is worth recalling that hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives have been spent for the sole purpose of stabilizing this army. An this is not to speak of the unutterable toll of horror brought about in Indochina by the most intensive bombing in the history of warfare.

For the past five days, the Nixon administration has gone out of its way to give the appearance of calmness in the face of the new offensive. It now appears that this was one of the reasons for regularly predicting a revolutionary advance since the beginning of January. But the apparent calmness is as phony as everything else the administration says about the war.

Nixon interrupted a vacation to get back to the White House for a series of secret top-level meetings. The "Washington Special Action Group" under Henry A. Kissinger has been meeting daily since the offensive began. "The group," says the April 5 Times, "which is composed of senior officials from the State and Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, meets during emergencies." In fact the only thing Washington accurately predicted about the offensive was that it would be launched. The intelligence estimates failed to pinpoint the time, place, and strength of the attack.

April 12, 1947
APRIL 8 - In the mightiest upsurge of the communications industry, some 350,000 telephone workers set up picket lines at dawn yesterday in a virtually complete tie-up of the nation's long-distance and manual phones. Switchboard plugs were replaced with picket signs; "numbers please" became transformed into songs of solidarity; "the voice with a smile" was saying "Ma Bell must give us a living wage."

This is the first nation-wide phone strike, involving tens of thousands of newly unionized workers and a total of 230,000 women, the greatest number ever participating in a single strike. Yet not a single major instance of wide- spread scabbing has been reported.

The bulk of the strikers were members of the independent National Federation of Telephone Workers which accepted the challenge flung down by the huge 7 1/2 billion dollar AT&T monopoly. AT&T owns and controls the long-distance lines, the Bell phone subsidiaries throughout the country and the Western Electric manufacturing units. For months the phone trust had arrogantly refused to meet or even arbitrate the union demands which include $12 a week raise, union shop and other long-needed improvements.  
 
 
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