Hershev has been singularly unimpressed by the whole to-do over his agency, and it is unlikely that he would accept even the most humble revision of Selective Service without making a scene. It is not that the general is oblivious to public opinion. He goes out of his way to cater to it. He said of the 1955 bill to extend the draft: "Let us hope, pray or what not that the thing expires on a year not divisible by two. There are several reasons that I need not explain to you why this is so." Elections, for example, are held on years divisible by two.

The state directors of the Selective Service are another force for the status quo. Most state directors hold reserve commissions, and in a pinch they could put pressure on Congress through the powerful National Guard lobby.

Friendship aside, Rep. Rivers will have to hold public hearings on the draft sometime before the present Selective Service Act expires June 30. He last held public hearings on the topic in June, when he declared that while conscription might be "inimicable [sic] to our basic concept of individual freedom, we as a nation recognize that the alternatives can only result in jeopardizing our national security and in turn, our precious heritage of freedom."

Advocates of the volunteer army stand to lose the most from this intransigence. There is next to no support for compulsory national service in Congress, so no one there cares if Rep. Rivers doesn't like the idea; proponents of voluntary national service can take their plans to the House Education and Labor Committee, the most consistently liberal committee in the House, where they could ask for funds to finance additional voluntary agencies. Once voluntary service involves more young people, they can repeat the claim for draft exemption.

But there is a volunteer army clique in the House and it has nowhere to go but to Mendel Rivers. The group is led by Rep. Thomas B. Curtis (R-Mo.) and includes, among others, Rep. Robert B. Kastenmeier (D-Wisc.) and Rep. Ronald Rumsfeld (R-Ill.). At the hearings they will cite a report prepared by an economist at the University of Washington as proof that a volunteer army is feasible, and charge that the Pentagon is suppressing a Defense Department report saying the same thing. They will tell Rivers that if he does not at least raise soldiers' pay to see if the enlistment rate rises, they will turn the issue into a campaign slogan: "The soldier is worth his hire." The Democrats will probably have to come across with a promise of higher pay and perhaps a statement on the desirability of a volunteer army, to be established after withdrawal from Vietnam.

Rivers' big problem, though, will not come from the volunteer army, and certainly not from national service. What he must worry about is the report of the Marshall Commission, which is studying the draft for the President. The Commission will probably call for changes in the administration of the draft law, for revision of the local board system and treatment of conscientious objectors -- and those demands and the people making them are not easily put off.

('Reform in Selective Service will appear Monday.)