Unipill for the G.O.P.

Through months of tension heightened by the Billie Sol Estes scandal and the defeat of his farm bill, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman has managed to keep surprisingly cool and collected. Last week he exploded with a loud political bang--and sent his shrapnel spraying over the Republican Party.

It happened at Freeman's first press conference in ten weeks and came with surprising suddenness and violence. After answering several routine questions, Freeman bridled at "Mr. Secretary, do you think you and the department have now weathered this Estes storm?" Answered Freeman testily: "I suppose what you mean is that the Secretary is going to be driven out of office. I have no intention of resigning and no reason to think that the President is going to ask me to."

That was only the beginning. After months of frustration, something inside Freeman said "to hell with it." Flailing his hands and pouring out a torrent of angry words, he pushed on: "We know that the Republican Administration left agriculture in a first-class mess. The biggest mess they left in Washington was agriculture. And it's even more their responsibility that they're being completely negative and trying to frustrate every effort to clear up that mess." The G.O.P. position now, he said, was " 'Let's leave it in a mess because it's going to make a real good political issue.' They're playing the narrowest, most partisan, bitter kind of politics with agriculture."

When a reporter tried to get in a question. Freeman cut him off imperiously: "Wait a minute, let me finish. I'm making my speech; then you can make yours." He charged the Republicans with "inconsistency" and "total irresponsibility," scalded them for criticizing him as a "czar" who sought "regimentation and centralization. Well, the same people turned around on two different days and voted for a sugar bill and not for a farm bill. And the biggest piece of centralized regimentation in American agriculture is the sugar bill." Furthermore, cried Freeman, "they voted against a farm program that would save a billion dollars a year, and then they run up crying about fiscal responsibility."

Finally Orville wound down, and color began returning to his cheeks. A reporter tried to break the tension. "Is this," he asked lightly, "the result of a vitamin shot this morning?" Said Freeman: "I did have a--what do you call them, a unipill? or univac?--vitamin pill at breakfast. Maybe that's it." Maybe it was, but it seemed more likely that it was just the bitter pill of being the current custodian of the scandalous U.S. farm mess.

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