All the News That's Fit to Protest

Washington, D.C., Mar. 13 -- Dean Rusk sang and danced on national TV for some seven hours today. Some of his most repeated routines were "The Common Danger to Us All," "The Yellow Peril Polka," "Halt Hanoi, Harry," and the old old standby of the Johnson Administration, "Lies, Lien, Lies."

That's the way one newly formed news service began its story on Dean Rusk's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. Considering the makeup of the Liberation News Service, that sort of performance can only be expected. The service is the undertaking of two unruly firebrands: Marshall Bloom, 23, who graduated from Amherst and later was temporarily suspended from the London School of Economics for organizing a student protest meeting; and Raymond Mungo, 21, who kept Boston University in a constant state of nerves when he edited the campus paper.

The service supplies some 200 New Left, hippie and student papers with bits and pieces of news that may have been overlooked or "misinterpreted" by daily newspapers and magazines. It reported, for instance, that 40% of the soldiers guarding the Pentagon during last fall's peace march sympathized with the demonstrators; some, said L.N.S., actually shed their uniforms to join the flower people. Campus police at Wayne University, the service disclosed, plan to curb demonstrations with rifles, shotguns, and a tractor that converts into a tank. A lead to a story about counterinsurgency research at a subsidiary of Stanford University said: "Stanford has gone to war on the side of the elitist military dictatorship in Thailand."

For this kind of information provided in three mailings a week, subscribers pay $15 a month. Steadily signing up more customers, marginal as they may be, Liberation is trying to appeal to Black Power papers and underground high school sheets as well. Eventually, it plans to convert from a mail to a wire service. Its telex machine already links Washington to New York. Detroit and Berkeley.

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