AN HOUR OF NEED

RARELY in American memory had hope and horror been so poignantly had fused men's within a actions -- single voluntary week. and in Rarely voluntary -- seemed so ineluctably inter twined. President Johnson's announce ment of a major peace offensive in Asia, coupled with his renunciation of another term, raised anticipation throughout the world that the long ag ony of Viet Nam might soon be ended.

Even as that hope blossomed, an older blight on the American conscience burst through with the capriciousness of a spring freeze. In Memphis, through the budding branches of trees surrounding a tawdry rooming house, a white sniper's bullet cut down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., pre-eminent voice of the just aspirations and long-suffering patience of black America.

The events and personalities had a Sophoclean cast. Lyndon Johnson, the world's most powerful political leader, abjured his power in the cause of world peace; Martin Luther King, the nation's most ardent exponent of nonviolent social reform, was violently removed in an act of outrage that at first blush seemed to threaten the onslaught of race war. Yet each in his manner of de parture achieved a stature that neither had ever previously attained. King became the canonized leader of his people's cause; Johnson, about to surrender his political life, gained an unprecedented opportunity to work for accord between the races, within the nation as a whole and in the world beyond.

Easter Shopping. In the aftermath of King's murder, Lyndon Johnson canceled his plans to fly to Hawaii for consultations with his military and diplomatic advisers on the delicate question of Viet Nam negotiations. Rioting and looting broke out in 62 cities from coast to coast. In manic reaction, the plunder ers went about their business in an almost carnival atmo sphere. Looting--"early Easter shopping," as one Harlem resident called it was the predominant activity, though some ghettos were burned as well.

Great streamers of acrid smoke, drifting from blazing shops in Washington's commercial center, twisted among the cherry blossoms near the Lincoln Memorial, where five years earlier Martin Luther King had proclaimed his vision of black and white harmony. Fires crackled three blocks from the White House, and from the air the capital looked like a bombed city. A three-mile reach of Chicago's Negro West Side erupted in pillage and cataclysmic flames that left an eight-block area in a state of devastation as severe as that of Detroit's ghetto last summer--yet at first Mayor Richard Daley failed, inexplicably, to impose a curfew. In Har lem, gleeful mobs cavorted and Mayor John Lindsay, though unharmed as he walked among them, was powerless to halt the orgy. Sniping, the most feared of ghetto tactics in summers past, was rare; by week's end, riot-connected deaths in the U.S. totaled more than 20.

Something of Shame. Swift action by civil authorities, as in Michigan, where Governor George Romney called up 9,000 National Guardsmen and Detroit's Mayor Jerome Cavanagh clamped down a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and restraint by police in direct confrontations, kept the lid on most communities. Into Washington and Chicago poured 25,000 troops. Baltimore, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and other cities erupted. "I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King," said the President. "There is something of shame in this," declared Vice President Hubert Humphrey. "This nation of law and order, which has its Presidents shot down in cold murder, its spiritual leaders assassinated, and has those who walk and speak and work for human rights beaten and killed --my fellow Americans, every one of us must resolve that we will never, never, never let it happen again."

In the climate of sorrow and guilt that engulfed most Americans, there was an opening for an accommodation between the races that might otherwise never have presented itself. Lyndon Johnson, looking even graver than he had appeared when he announced his abdication at week's beginning, called at week's end for an extraordinary joint session of Congress to hear "the President's recommendations for action --constructive action instead of destructive action--in this hour of national need."

It is not enough, Johnson implied, to mourn Martin Luther King. His death demands expiation, as did that of John F. Kennedy. Now, as in November 1963, President Johnson seems determined to strike forcefully at the consciences of all Americans in order to wrest from tragedy and trauma the will to make a better society.

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