Volume 15, Number 9 · November 19, 1970
A Feelthy Commission
By Murray Kempton
The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography
the text with Dissents and an Introduction by Clive Barnes
Bantam, 700 pp., $1.65 (to be published in hardcover by Random House in February) (paper)
It is surely odd that the only bequest of President Johnson's to be repudiated by the votes of all but five senators and to be denounced as 'morally bankrupt' by Mr. Nixon should be not his war but this report of his Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Mr. Johnson's virtues in this case seem to have occasioned more scandal than any of his vices have. And how virtuous this work ordained by him seems to us now as it lies there abused and violated, reduced almost to inaudibility except as the strangled cry of that Church of the Enlightened now in Exile—an exile that may, sooner than we think, be wholly silenced, the pursuit being as implacable as it is sullen.
Review, 2428 words
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