A top aide to Sen. Walter Mondale (D.Minn.), bluntly denied to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Mondale was prepared to withdraw his support to the Jackson Amendment.
Mondale, in Minnesota for the weekend, was personally unavailable here to respond to a statement by Prof. Fred Warner Neal of Claremont Men’s College in California where he is international relations professor, and who is a prime organizer of a pro-Soviet American detente committee, that “Mondale has already indicated to me his disenchantment for support for the Jackson Amendment to the trade bill and is hopeful that our committee can give him some ‘protective coloration’ if and when he backs off publicly.”
“It is just unbelievable,” said David Aaron, Mondale’s foreign policy advisor. “I am infuriated by this attempt by Neal to exploit the Senator. I saw Neal Thursday morning (July 10) and he thought it would be good for Mondale to take this line.” Aaron said that he told Neal that Mondale “supports the Jackson Amendment and is personally committed to it. He feels very strongly about its purposes. He wants a trade bill but he wants the Jackson Amendment in it. I made this clear to Neal.”
Aaron said that Mondale has never met with the committee. Neal’s statement was in a memorandum dated June 28 to “members” of the American Committee on United States-Soviet Relations, regarding a news conference June 10 here. On that date, a group listing 38 prominent Americans among its founders announced it had organized to support “the present trend toward improvement of American-Soviet relations.”
The statement said it sought to combat what it called the anti-detente views of Sen. Henry Jackson (D.Wash.) and others. Among the sponsors listed were Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith; MIT president Jerome Wiesner; former IBM chairman Thomas Watson; Donald M. Kendall, chairman of Pepsico; Harold J. Berman of Harvard Law School; Prof. Marshall Goldman, Wellesley University; and Rabbi Stanley Rabinowitz of Washington.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
