NBC Says Segment of Interview with Ford Dealing with Pressure Groups Deleted for Time Limitation Rea

A spokesman for NBC-TV said today that a segment of the interview with President Ford dealing with pressure from American Jews and others was cut from its three-hour survey of American foreign policy last night because of editorial judgement that there were more important segments to include within the time limitation. "There was no other reason," the spokesman stressed.

A full transcript of the President’s interview for the program, "New World-Hard Choices. American Foreign Policy 1976." was given to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and other news media by the White House prior to the broadcasts A White House spokesman said today that what parts of the interview should be used is "something totally up to NBC" and the segment "may have been edited out for whatever reason they may have had." The deleted segment appeared in yesterday’s Daily News Bulletin.

During last night’s program the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration was dealt with in the context of detente. John Dancey, the NBC correspondent in Moscow, said the Jackson/Vanik Amendment had "dashed" the Soviet Union’s hopes for expanded trade with the U.S. But he noted that "the number of Jews leaving the Soviet Union has dropped off sharply in the last year."

Ford also mentioned the drop in Jewish emigration as due to Congressional action. While not mentioning the J/V Amendment by name, he used it as an example of Congressional interference in the Presidential foreign policy-making prerogatives.

ISRAEL’S AIR SUPERIORITY QUESTIONED

On the Middle East, John Chancellor, the NBC special program’s anchorman, noted that Israel may no longer be able to rely on its air superiority and "that a future war would be decided by tanks on the ground. There’s also the chance that however strong the Israelis may be in the air, the Arabs may be stronger." Chancellor added, "Saudi Arabia, for example, has contracted for an air force buildup costing more than a billion dollars. The contractor–the U.S.–is helping to build up more and more Arab forces. We are doing it to keep the Russians from doing it, which doesn’t make the Israelis breathe any easier."

In an interview by Edwin Newman with Daniel P. Moynihan on the usefulness of the United Nations, the American Ambassador to the world organization said that the U.S. should distinguish between the General Assembly and the Security Council "which is pretty close to indispensable to formulating foreign policy. Just about anywhere you go in the world you will find its involvement and not the least in the Middle East where the whole structure of our policy is based upon Security Council resolutions."

As for the General Assembly, Moynihan said "I think the time has come when we should seek as much as possible to deal with as few things as possible in the General Assembly." He said the action by the Assembly declaring "Zionism a form of racism is obscene, untrue, a lie and characteristic of what comes out of the General Assembly."