News stories from Sunday November 17, 1974

Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:

With President Ford's conditional amnesty plan now two months old, only a small fraction of the Vietnam draft evaders and deserters have responded. The war resisters and their advisers say it is because of distrust of the government, though the reasons for the distrust and intensity vary. [New York Times] The announcement last week that Chrysler, Detroit's largest employer, might shut down virtually its entire automobile assembly operations for the month of December has increased anxiety in the city, which is already suffering from a 40 percent decline in car sales and more than 80,000 layoffs of auto workers. [New York Times] Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton appeared to back away from the strong interest he had expressed last week in a big increase in the federal gasoline tax. However, other administration sources say that the tax idea is not dead and might be revived early next year, despite President Ford's repeated statements he has ruled out any such tax. The President's disapproval apparently made Mr. Morton change his mind. He said on the "Face the Nation" television program that he has "gotten the word." [New York Times] Documents obtained by Ralph Nader's Tax Reform Research Group show that a special unit of Internal Revenue Service investigators, organized during the Nixon administration, included among 99 "ideological, militant, subversive and radical organizations" the Americans for Democratic Action, the Urban League and the National Council of Churches. The documents were obtained from the I.R.S. following the filing of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. [New York Times] New Haven's [Connecticut] anti-poverty program, the first in the country and the model for hundreds of similar programs in many cities, is in deep trouble. According to federal officials who have been investigating it for months, the New Haven program has deteriorated into fiscal and administrative chaos and has become little more than a political pork barrel dominated by the city's powerful Democratic machine. [New York Times] President Ford departed for Japan, the first leg of an eight-day journey to East Asia, after defining his travels as both timely and as a step toward preserving world peace. "I think this trip has great significance, both as to timing and as to substance," Mr. Ford said in a brief departure ceremony on the White House lawn. "This I think can be defined as a quest for peace to broaden it, to strengthen it." [New York Times] The tension that gripped Israel's Golan Heights front over the weekend subsided following assurances from the United States that Syria does not intend to start an attack against Israel. Israeli armed forces remained partly mobilized and still on general alert, but the atmosphere on the Golan Heights and throughout the country relaxed dramatically. The American assurances were conveyed Saturday by Secretary of State Kissinger to Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli Ambassador in Washington. [New York Times] Premier Constantine Caramanlis of Greece won an overwhelming victory in his country's first democratic election in more than a decade. His New Democracy party, which he founded less than two months ago, received about 55 percent of the nationwide vote, and it was believed that the party would control nearly 200 seats in the 300-member Parliament. [New York Times]