Half-Price Loading

From Manila last week, three Douglas C-118 transports and 18 men of the U.S. Air Force took off on a 57-day, 11,000-mile trip to Geneva, Switzerland. The C-118s had gone all the way from McGuire Air Force Base, N.J. to pick up 192 touring delegates of Moral Re-Armament (only 55 of them Americans) and ferry them slowly around Asia and the Middle East, winding up next September in Geneva.

How did Moral Re-Armament, whose leader, Dr. Frank Buchman, prefers to travel first-class ("Isn't God a millionaire?"), manage to pull such a prestige-building and moneysaving deal out of the U.S. Air Force? Last spring Moral Re-Armament tried to wheedle 200 free trips from the U.S. to the Far East out of Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, who referred them to commercial charter concerns. Last June some 20 Congressmen descended upon Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, proclaiming that to carry Moral Re-Armament representatives around Asia, after they got there by commercial routes, was a worthy assignment for the Air Force. Wilson and Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott finally "approved the project."

On the way, Moral Re-Armament astonished Washington by the tone of a morality play called The Vanishing Island, which it is presenting in the Asian capitals. Commented one high U.S. official: "The show ridicules the ideals of the free West . . ." Freedom is portrayed as license and self-indulgence, freedom of the press as cynical reporting to attract readers, elections as a means to avoid responsibility, free enterprise as grasping for endless profits, and liberty as a meaningless chant. The official concluded that many Government officials were "unhappy about the Moral Re-Armament movement," but were afraid to speak out be cause of its influential support.

Moral Re-Armament, traditionally no friend of military enterprises such as the U.S. Air Force, will pay for its long ride after a fashion. The Air Force normally charges two rates for transport flights --one for governmental agencies, another for nongovernmental agencies. Moral Re-Armament will pay only the Government rate. Its check will amount to about $97,000, and U.S. taxpayers will pay the rest: $135,000.

With somewhat more wisdom than he showed in "approving the project," Secretary Talbott last week said that he did not want to go into many details of Moral Re-Armament's half-price-loading, because "some other institution might want to take advantage . . . Once we start this sort of thing, everybody will be after us."

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