A 11nd Decision
Unlike some journals of opinion in this country we are not compulsively anti-American; over the last twenty years we have, in general. supported American foreign policy, just as to- day. we support President Johnson's Vietnam policy, if we preen ourselves here on our adherence to the good old alliance, it's because I wish to draw attention to a particularly unhappy decision made very recently in Wash- ington which has resulted in the shutting of the US Information Service Library in London. The library, housed in the Embassy in Grosvenor
Square, had a magnificent collection of books on American literature, history and politics, in- cluding a very wide range of the latest US journals, and also an impressive file of the Con- gressional Record, particularly useful to writers and journalists. To readers out of London, the library would supply its volumes by post; used by so many people, it seems hardly an exag- geratio'n to say that the library was possibly the single most important focus of goodwill towards the US in Britain. Now it is shut.
It is being said, unofficially, that some of the books will be given to London University, but of course different conditions of access and of services will result; the USIS library as known for half a generation will cease to exist. The surreptitious closing of the library—no public announcement has been made, and readers are still turning up daily to be faced by shut doors— indicates possibly a bad conscience in Washing- ton. It appears that Congress has decreed a cut in the information agency appropriation for Western Europe at the expense of Africa and the Far East, and the administration itself decided that the axe should fall on London. Do we need to remind President Johnson that although we may have lost an empire and not yet found a role, we remain America's closest ally, and that our allegiance is a particularly subtle one, depending in large part on the spirit which the USIS library represented? In any case, how many divisions has Dahomey? How many carriers has Afghanistan? And one more question, Mr. President. Who was the bureaucrat who decided to shut down our library?
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