Since election day, committees have tossed sheaves of paper on to the desk of President-Elect John F. Kennedy. The papers give him advice on how to reshape, readjust, or revitalize America. Kennedy asked for it. The committees are the special task forces he assigned to recommend ways to solve such problems as distressed areas, defense needs, and overcrowded schools. Kennedy appointed some before election day. The President-Elect asked prominent public officials to head some task forces. He named professors to head others. In one case, the task force comprised one man. Not all the reports have been made public. Not all have been endorsed. But, in general, the reports seem to follow Kennedy's campaign promises and may give some indication of the future course of his administration...

IN 1975, Americans will have 111 million cars, trucks and buses. To keep these wheels rolling, the federal government has embarked on the biggest public-works project in history, spending billions of dollars for 41,000 miles of superhighways crisscrossing the nation. Millions of this money already, have been spilled over into waste, inefficiency and fraud. There is nothing secret about this. Newspapers and Congress have uncovered scandal after scandal. But the revelations have not evoked the same indignation and outcries that scandals like the Dave Beck plunder of the Teamsters treasury have caused. Instead, much of the public has a boys-will-be-boys attitude about corrupt highways. When you spend 41 billion dollars in a public program, influential and impatient people say, you have to expect some tomfoolery, so let’s get on with the show. Americans want their highways in a hurry. “When you have a program of this magnitude,” Rep. Gordon H. Scherer, (R.-Ohio), told the House last July 1, “you are bound to attract the chiselers and the grafters.”...

IN THE SPRING of this year, Martin Burke, Gilbert Bauer and David Figlestahler, pupils of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School in Portsmouth, Ohio, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. In the event of war, Russian troops “will be landing inside our borders,” they told the Secretary. If that comes to pass, “the American people will defend this country in a last ditch, to the death stand, along with the military.” The civilian population must train itself for this future. “Please send us any able weapons,” the schoolboys asked. They listed recoilless rifles, antitank guns, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, browning automatic rifles and submachine guns. Martin, Gilbert and David said the weapons would help them learn about arms and would “help us prepare ourselves for our future military service.” The boys closed with a compliment: “We the senders of this letter are in full accord with your conduction of your duties so far as Secretary of Defence” [sic]. Although the schoolboys had not learned their spelling, they had learned other lessons well, for they are growing up in a time when all the channels of communication and education overflow with images of war and might and glory, images that tend to obscure the views of death and destruction that linger from other times and other lands...

THE CAPTURE of military personnel, and of key civilians, is vital to a Pentagon publicist, but his more exciting, perhaps more significant, work centers on the capture of the mass media — Hollywood, television, the press, even the comics. The Department’s Office of News Services has an Audio-Visual Division which, among its other duties, sees to it that some movies and television shows have good chunks of military propaganda. The division examines scripts and then lends aid to those deemed worthy of cooperation from the Department of Defense. Cooperation can save a producer a good deal of money. Indeed, if he plans a movie based almost entirely on the activities of the armed services, cooperation can determine whether he will have a movie at all. For a producer clutching a script blessed by the division, the services may provide military equipment that he can’t get elsewhere: modern tanks, weapons, ships, planes. An officer, acting as technical adviser to insure the movie’s authenticity, often is sent along...