'Yellow-Bellied Cowards’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31143, 20 August 1966, Page 15

' Yellow-Bellied Cowards ’

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) WASHINGTON, August 19. The chairman of the House of Representatives committee on un-American activities said yesterday that Americans who try to stop troop trains and munitions shipments to Vietnam are “yellow-bellied cowards.”

He was speaking during testimony in the third day cf hearings on legislation to make it a federal crime to impede military operations or aid forces opposing United States troops. The first hour of the hearing was free of the incidents that have marked the previ as sessions. The chairman, Mr E. Willis, a Democrat from Louisiana, had interrupted a Californian deputy county attorney who was testifying about the activities on the Vietnam Day Committee of Berkeley, California. Mr Willis interrupted the county attorney, Mr E. Meese,

to say he wanted to make clear that the committee was not aiming its hearings at dissent against the Vietnam war, but against overt acts. “In my humble opinion people who do these things fall short of loyalty to the United States,” he said. “Let’s call them what they are—-yellow-bellied cowards.” Committee members appeared weary from the tumult and shouting of two days of disorder and demonstrations. Witnesses whose lawyers had marched out of the previous day’s hearing insisted yesterday that they would act as their own legal representatives.