The G.O.P. Hears a Voice

Last summer, Congress' Republican majority rammed a frog down the throat of the "Voice of America," and left it croaking. The Voice is the short-wave radio section of the State Department's Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs. Suspicious that OIC might be as much a spreader of Democratic propaganda as the democratic way of life, Congress lopped 40% from its requested appropriation, gave it only $12.4 million to operate on this year.

Since then a lot of Republican Congressmen have been to Europe. They realized, as one Democrat put it, that they had "left us wide open with no comeback for the Red campaign of misrepresentation which is sweeping Europe." Last week there were indications that Congress' feelings had undergone a change.

A $300 million, six-year program for OIC was proposed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee by South Dakota's Karl E. Mundt, one of the few Republicans who had fought the curtailment. Recently returned from a tour of 22 European nations, he told the committee: "We are filling their stomachs while the Communists are filling their minds."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.