Lesson Fourteen

   Section One: News in Brief

   Tapescript
   1. State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb resigned today be-
   cause of the Reagan Administration's alleged disinformation cam-
   paign against Libya.  The Washington Post reported last week that
   the administration planted false information about Libya in an effort
   to destabilize the government of Muammar Ouddafi.  Kalb todav did
   not confirm or deny that such a campaign tool,-- place, but he said re-
   ports about it had damaged the credibility of the US.  The State De-
   partment would not comment on Kalb's resignation.

   2. The State Department todav criticized the Nicaraguan govern-
   ment for allegedly refusing to grant US officials access to Eugene
   Hasenfus.  He's the survivor of Sunday's plane crash inside
   Nicaragua.  State Department spokesman Charles Redmond.  'Our
   representative was not received by the Nicaraguan government.  And
   we view this with the utmost seriousness.  The rendering of consular
   services is an essential part of the function of an embassy.  The
   Sandinista government has once again taken action to make that
   function difficult and has raised the question of whether, indeed, a
   US embassy can function normally within Nicaragua.  We frankly
   cannot accept the delay in granting consular access since the
   Sandinista government has apparently gone to some lengths to pa-
   rade Mr. Hasenfus before the press, and considering the fact that a
   government spokesman stated clearly last night on American televi-
   sion that access would be granted.' Meanwhile President Reagan
   today denied that the downed plane allegedly carrying arms to
   Contra rebels was operating-under official US orders.  He also ac-

  knowledged that the government has been aware that private
  American groups and citizens have been helping the anti-govern-
 ment forces in Nicaragua.

Section Two: News in Detail

 Tapescript
      Last week the Washington Post reported that top-level offi-
 cials had approved a plan to generate real and illusionary events to
 make Libya's Colonel Muammar Quddafi think the United States
 might once again attack.  Bernard Kalb's resignation is the first in
 protest of that policy.  A similar resignation occurred at the White
 House in 1983 when a deputy quit to protest misleading statements
 given to the press shortly before the American invasion of Grenada.
 NPR's Bill Busenberg has more on today's announcement.
      Bernard Kalb had been a veteran diplomatic correspondent for
 CBS and NBC before being picked two years ago by Secretary of
 State George Shultz to be the Department's chief spokesman, offi-
 cially an Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs.  His brother, Marvin
 Kalb, is still with NBC.  Today, Bernard Kalb surprised his former

  colleagues in the news media by,quitting over the issue of the admin-
  istration's disinformation program.  Kalb would not confirm that
  there was such a program, but he said he faced a choice of remaining
  silent or registering his dissent.  And even though the issue appeared
  to be fading from the news, Kalb grappled with it privately and de-
  cided he had to act.
       'The controversy may vaiiish, but when vou are sitting alone, it
  does not go away.  And so I've taken the step of stepping down.'
       'rhe State Department has reportedly been involved in the
  disinformation issue, but Kalb said his guidelines have always been
  not to fie or mislead the press, and he has not done so.  Kalb went out
  of his way today to praise Secretary Shultz, a man, he said, of such
  overwhelming integrity that he allows other people to have their own
  integrity.
       'In taking this action, I want to emphasize that I am not dis-
  scriting from Secretary Shultz, a man of credibility, rather I am dis-
  senting from the reported disinformation program.'
       Kalb's comments suggested Shultz perhaps did not go along
  with the disinformation program, but in public, the Secretary of
  State has defended the administration's policies against Libya, say-
  ing in New York last week: 'I don't have any problems with the little
  psychological warfare against Quddafi." He also quoted Winston
  Churchill as saying, 'In time of war truth i, --o precious, it must@ be
  attended by a bodyguard of lies.' Shultz was asked about the
  disinformation effort last Sunday on ABC.
       'I don't lie.  I've never taken part in any meeting in which it was
  proposed that we go out and lie to the news media for some effect.
  And if somebody did that, he was doing it against policy.  Now hav-
  ing said that, one of the results of our action against Libya, from the
  intelligence we've received, was quite a period of disorientation on
  the part of Quddafi.  Sol to the extent we can keep Quddafj off bal-
  ance by one means or another, including the possibility that we

  might make another attack, I think that's good.'
      In a sometimes emotional session with reporters today, Bernard
  Kalb said that neither he personally nor the nation as a whole can
  stand any policy of disinformation.
       '@ I'm concerned about the impact of any such program on the
  credibility of the United States.  Faith, faith in the word of America.,
  is the pulse beat of our democracy.  Anything that liurts America's
  credibility hurts America.  And then on a much. r,.iuch, much lower
  level, there's the' question of my own credibility, both as a spokes-
  man and a journalist, a spokesman for a couple of years, a journalist
  for more years than I want to remember.  In fact, I sometimes pri-
  vately thought of myself as a journalist masquerading as a spokes-
  man.  In any case, I do not want my own credibility to be caught up,
  to be subsumed in this controversy."
       The timing of Kalb's action today is likely to add to the contro-
  versy over government deception.  And it comes at an awkward mo-
  ment for the Reagan Administration, just days before an imp rtant
  pre-summit meeting with the Soviets in Iceland and in the wake of
  official denials about a downed guerrilla resupply plane in
  Nicaragua.  One American was captured and others were killed in
  that action, but officials have said the flight was in no way connected
  with the US government.  Kalb said his resignation today had noth-
  ing to do with any other incident.  I'm Bill Busenberg in Washington.

Section Three: Special Report

 Tapescript
     The history of Jews in Poland is not always thoroughly told in
 that country.  And tlte story of the World War 11 freedom fighters in
 the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw is one of the saddest chapters.  The
 ;Nazis took hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, and seven
 thousand more died defending the area when the Gdrmans invaded.
 Dr. Merrick Adelman is one of the very few who survived.  A book
 called Shielding the Flame is his story.  It was written in Poland ten
 years ago by Hannah Kroll.  It is now available in this country in
 English.  Yohannes Toshimska is one of the translators.  She says that
 Merrick Adelman's view of the ghetto uprising is regarded as
 unconventional.
     "He doesn't use the language, or even he doesn't have the atti-
 tude people usually have to the holocaust and to the ghetto
 uprisings.  One thing he's consistently talking about is the fac@t that
 people thought was the arms in the ghetto.  It wasn"t heroic; it was
 easier than to die going to the train cars.  And that people who parti-
 cipated in the ghetto uprising were actually, in a sense, lucky.  They
 had arms; they could do something about what was going on while
 those hundreds of thousands who were led to the train cars were

  equally heroic, but their death was much more difficult.'
       "Dr.  Adelman was stationed ... he was working in a clinic; he
  was not a doctor then; but he was working in a clinic that was nearby
  the train station where the Jews were taken to go off to the concen-
  tration camps.'
       'Yes.  He had an amazing position.  He was standing at the gate
  to the Hmflat Platz, which was the place from where the Jews were
  taken into the train cars.  He was a member of the underground in
  the ghetto, and he was choosing the people who were needed by the
  underground.  They were perhaps one or two in many thousands of
  them led every day to the cars.  And he would pick these people up,
  and then young girls who were students at the nurses' school would
  disabilitate these people.  He describes in the book, it's a very power-
  ful scene, how these girls, who were wearing beautiful clean white
  uniforms of nurse students, would take two pieces of wood and with
  these two pieces of wood would break legs of the people who were
  supposed to be saved for the Jewish underground.  But the Germans,
  to the last moment, wanted to maintain the fiction that people who
  were taken to the trains were being taken for work.  And obviously a
  person with a broken leg couldn't work.  So breaking a leg would
  temporarily save that person from being taken into gas."
       'So he saw in all, I believe he says four hundred thousand peo-
  ple, go aboard the train.'
       "'Yes.  He stood there from the very beginning of the extermina-
  tion action to the end.'
       'With regard to what you were saying earlier, there's a dialogue
  that develops in the book between an American professor who
  comes to visit the doctor many years later, and is critical of what
  happened.  He says of the Jews, 'You were going like sheep to your
  deaths.' The professor had been in World War 11; he'd landed on a
  French beach, and he said that 'Men should run, men should shoot.
  You were going like sheep.' And Adelman explains this, and let me

quote him.  'It is a horrendous thing when one is going so quietly to
 one's death.  It is infinitely more difficult than to go out shooting.  Af-
 ter all, it is much easier to die firing.  For us, it was much easier to die
 than it was for someone who first boarded a train car, then rode the
 train, then dug a hole, then undressed naked.' That's difficult to lin-
 derstand, but then Hannah Kroll says that she understands it be-
 cause it's easier for people who are watching this to understand,
 when the people are dying shooting.'
      ' It is something probably easier to comprehend because the
 kind of death most of the people from the ghetto encountered is just
 beyond comprehension.'
      'Explain the context of the title for Shielding the Flame; it comes
 up a bit later on.  It has to do with the reason that Dr. Adelman be-
 comes a physician, a cardilogist, after the War,     is that he wants this
 opportunity to deal with people who are in a life-or-death
 situation.'
      'He says at some point that what he was doing at Hmflat Platz
 and what he was doing later on as a doctor is like to shield the flame
 from God who wants to blow this little tiny flame and kill the
 person, that what he was doing during the War and after the War
 was, in a way, doing God's work or doing something against God,
 even if the God existed.'
      "Do you think this book is oing to be accessible to the Western
 reader reading it in English?  It is a bit free in form and in style.  It
 lacks a chronology; certain details are not there or are pre-supposed
 that one knows.'
      'This book is a little bit like a conversation of two people who
 aren't that much aware of the fact that someone else is listening to it.
 And they don't care about this other person who might be listening
 to it.  They don't help this person to follow it.  I had a hard time even
 when I read it for the first time in Polish.  However, for me, it has
 magnetic power and, despite the confusion, I always wanted to go

back and to go on.'
     Yahannes Tashimska, the translator, along with Lawrence
Weshler, of Shiel(iing the Flaiiie by flatiiiah Kroll.