AMNESTY: Limited Program, Limited Response

As President Ford last week unveiled his program to permit Viet Nam War evaders and deserters to earn their way back into U.S. society, he termed it "an act of mercy to bind the nation's wounds and to heal the scars of divisiveness." But the wounds bled anew. Leaders of veterans' organizations immediately denounced the plan as "a gross injustice" to those who had served, died, and suffered. Members of war resisters' groups assailed it as a "punitive" assault upon men who had been guilty only of "premature morality." Yet Ford's plan,...