Radical Law Students Square Off With Former Official of C. I. A.

A group of radical law students staged a mock award ceremony for one prominent member of the Law School Visiting Committee yesterday afternoon, and were rewarded with an appearance by the recipient.

Robert Amory Jr., a former professor at the Law School and Deputy Director (Intelligence) of the C. I. A. from 1952 to 1962, left a luncheon for the Visiting Committee in a second-floor room overlooking the demonstration after the students exhibited their award, and parried a series of questions from students about his activities in the C. I. A.

Two students from the Harvard Radical Law Students Group draped a brightly decorated white sheet from the fire escape of Langdell Hall to "honor" Amory with the PIG (Profit of Imperialist Greed). Award for his contributions to the C. I. A. and the Law School.

Visiting Committee

About 30 students gathered initially at the demonstration, which was called to demonstrate their "rejection of the Visiting Committee and the interests its members represent, and the Law School's servicing of their interests."

The Visiting Committee included a number of other prominent alumni, who met in subcommittees all day with students and faculty. Among them were Francis T. P. Plimpton, president of the New York Bar Association; Judge Henry Friendly, of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals; Joseph A. Califano Jr., a former aide to President Johnson; and Thomas G. Corcoran, a prominent Washington lawyer and New Deal official.

The crowd grew to about 250 when Amory, at the request of several students, came to speak to the group.

Dove From Way Back

"I don't know how old you were in 1955," he began almost immediately after mounting the steps of the fire escape on Laugdell Hall, "but that's when I became a dove. I'm sick of the damn war, too."

"If I had had my way, we would have abided by the guidelines of the Geneva Convention for a referendum in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh would have won, and we'd have a Yugoslavia in Southeast Asia-which might be too conservative for you," he said.

Amory, who said later that he felt as if he were "in a batting cage with three pitches coming in at once," then answered a steady stream of questions about issues ranging from C. I. A.-engineered coups in Guatemala and Iran to the covert C. I. A. funding of the National Student Association.

He defended the C. I. A.'s intervention abroad and said that the agency has stood up for liberal causes in the past-in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for instance-in opposition to such conservative forces as the F. B. I. and the State Department.

Refering to Amory's justification of secret C. I. A. operations, one student shouted, "Doesn't that offend your values of democracy?"

"Oh no," he replied, "I'm a pragmatist."

In another exchange, he called the Bay of Pigs incident "a terrible bumbling mess."

"Only because it didn't work?" one student asked.

"If one major division of the Cuban army had gone over, the operation would have looked like a brilliant decision," he said.