The hopes for a diminution of the “Italian factor” in the Vatican's concerns seem destined to founder. Despite new attitudes that emerged at the time of the Vatican Council, older patterns persist and impose themselves.

When the Socialists entered into a coalition with the (Catholic) Christian Democrats in 1962, it looked as if the Vatican would gradually reduce its links with Italian politics. This prospect would have been consistent with the encouragement the Vatican Council, just under way in 1962, gave to Catholics to collaborate with others in the building of the terrestrial city. Consistent also with Pope John's alleged remark: “Italy should be no more important to the Vatican than the Philippines.”

In the intense debates about the energy needs of the United States and how those needs can best be met, Americans for Energy Independence has taken a number of strong positions. Given both your truly formidable background in energy development and your own heavy schedule, why, Mr. Shaw, did you decide to serve on the Advisory Panel of AEI? What do you expect or hope it will accomplish?

SHAW: What first attracted me was AEI's objective of acting openly—as a public interest group—to stimulate policies and actions for moving the U.S. rapidly toward reasonable energy self-sufficiency. This means in fuel resources and energy supplies.

In a dark prison cell where he is probably awaiting a death sentence Kim Chi Ha, a noted Korean Catholic poet, has written a twelve thousand-word memorandum he calls “Declaration of Conscience.” The “Declaration” was smuggled out of the prison and the country, and recorded in the U.S. Congressional Record on October 22, 1975, through the efforts of Congressmen Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota and Frederick W. Richmond of New York. Since the smuggling incident of the “Declaration” took place, Kim Chi Ha has been confined in a cell surrounded by several empty cells in order to avoid any outside contact. It has also been reported that ten prison guards have been dismissed, that Kim is watched twenty-four hours a day through TV camera, and that no one is allowed to see him except assigned guards.

With the end of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Indochina attention has turned to the Korean Peninsula. For the past two decades an uneasy peace has been maintained between two Korean governments—the one Communist, totalitarian, and revolutionary; the other non-Communist, yet authoritarian, undemocratic, and indeed almost as totalitarian in its lack of regard for opposition political voices and the rights of the individual. Probably nowhere else is American power and influence so greatly exposed as on the Korean Peninsula—with all the attendant risks for involving the U.S. in a land war on the Asian mainland.

Any sensible discussion of alternatives to U.S. policy in Korea should begin with consideration of the commitment of the U.S. to the defense of Korea, as embodied in the treaty between the U.S. and Korea that entered into force in November, 1954.

Today we celebrate the fifty-seventh anniversary of the March First Independence Movement. Compelled by the aspirations of our people that resounded throughout the world on that day in 1919 and moved by the patriotic spirit of our forefathers, we take this occasion to make a solemn and patriotic declaration, both at home and abroad, concerning democracy.

The division of Korea at the end of World War II shattered the hopes that had filled the hearts of our people at the time of Liberation from Japanese rule. This tragic division once more cast a dark shadow over the future of our nation. Yet to the end our people refused to give up their cherished hope. They rose up out of the ashes of the Korean War, they crushed the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee through the Righteous Uprising of April 19, and they reestablished in every heart the hope for realization of a free and democratic society.

Aleksandr Isaech, when Mr. Brezhnev and the Politburo took the decision to exile you abroad rather than send you once more to a concentration camp, they must have believed that you would do less damage to the Communist state outside the Soviet Union than inside it. So I wonder if you believe time will prove that judgment to be correct?

In the way you put that question there is a certain false assumption. If one puts the question in this way, we assume that the Politburo is all-powerful and independent in the decisions it makes, that it was free to decide one way or another.

It's nothing new in Chinese history to impress the foreigner for the sake of the country's face,” said a young escaper last year in Hong Kong, who by no means intended to denigrate his country. “When people from other countries came to the ancient capital of Ch'ang An in the Tang Dynasty, it was so gorgeously decorated, those foreigners were astounded….If the rulers today desire not to let foreigners see anyone wearing patched clothes, that can easily be arranged. And if they want to show foreigners trees in Peking with silk hanging from the branches, that is also possible.”

Visitors from afar viewing today what B. Michael Frolic describes as “the peaceful blues and grays and whites of Chinese cities” would certainly smile at the thought of brocades waving in the breeze.