NSA Conservatives

to the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I should like to take issue with some of the implications about NSA's 16th Congress made in the articles by Messrs. Hertzberg and Roberts in that the right wing was practically non-existent, yet somehow the Left just couldn't get their proposals off the ground.

I suggest that conservatives did attend the Congress and this year, feeling that NSA's policy statements are important, decided to influence the legislation NSA passes by working within the legislative process.

For example, the nuclear testing resolution (which erased a former NSA condemnation of all testing by the United States), the resolution condemning the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and East Germany for suppressing students, and a resolution decrying some manifestations of progressive education were all substantially written by members of the conservative caucus and assed. On the other hand, conservatives successfully opposed proposals asking colleges to withdraw from the recent civil defense program, supporting federal aid to elementary and secondary education, and endorsing civil disobedience.

In particular, Mr. Hertzberg knowingly misleads the reader by gauging the strength of the right-wing in terms of Mr. Schoeman's vote for President (nine out of 204). Mr. Schoeman was in no way connected with the conservative forces at the Congress, and I know of no conservatives who voted for him.

A better guage of conservative strength would be regional elections where conservatives were elected regional chairman in New York, New Jersey and Missouri-Kansas, and elected to the Congress Steering Committee in the above regions plus New England and Illinois-Wisconsin, the two largest regions in the Asociation.

Perhaps if the authors of the CRIMSON articles wish to call quiet effectiveness "non-existence," and noisy impotence "existence," then the right indeed disappeared at the last Congress, but those are definitions I feel few rational people would accept. Danny J. Beggs '65   Chmn, Harvard delegation to   NSA Convention