Weltner blames his defeat in 1968 on an inability to appeal to this frustration, and compares his campaign to the one for governor run last year by millionaire Carl Sanders, who had the slickest, most professional campaign ever run in Georgia. "I ran exactly that type of campaign," Weltner said. That old JFK rhetoric, still. It didn't sell and it shouldn't."

A sense of frustration is evident in Weltner's voice when he talks about the future of Southern politics. He has little faith in the effects that increased black voter registration will have ("They go from 5 per cent of the electorate to 34 per cent, and then the whites win by 66 per cent instead of 95 per cent.") or of efforts to rebuild the Democratic Party.

He no longer sees the problem simply in terms of the South. "I think the whole country pretty much has the same attitude as the South. It's not a Southern problem at all. It's what you do with the people in Washington, D.C." Liberals, he feels, have been discredited forever by the eight years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. "We just blew it and it's just blown forever," he said, "because we just couldn't come across. We made all those promises and in eight years it just got worse."

Weltner's opposition to the Vietnam war was the main reason he took on the case of Sgt. Torres. "I felt there was a possibility to raise some issues about the war," Weltner said. "And there was the basic question of the hypocrisy of trying a teenage soldier for death and destruction plotted not by the soldier but by the highest U. S. officials."

The case was dismissed by an army court in January after Weltner had succeeded in serving subpoenas on three OIA agents who had operated in the Song My vicinity. Several CIA officials had suddenly appeared in Atlanta one day to protest the way Weltner had been attacking the intelligence agency in his defense of Torres.

"They came to tell me the truth," Weltner recalls. "We're only part of it, they said." And to prove it they gave him a remarkable eight page memo describing the "Phoenix" program, a U. S. operation designed, as Weltner ironically described it, to eliminate the "Viet Cong Infrastructure, which has prevented the pacification program from taking hold of the hearts of the people."

The memorandum said that under the program over 8000 assassinations had been carried out in 1968 and 1969. Weltner feels that fear of disclosure by the CIA witnesses led the court martial to dismiss the case.

The Secretary of the Army also dismissed a war-crime charge against Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, the former and present U. S. commanders in Vietnam, which Torres had filed last October.

"I think the Song My massacre had a big effect on the country." Weltner said. "Gradually there was a feeling that it's a shame to try these soldiers boys and not go after the big ones."

Since he arrived last Monday, Weltner has spent his time at Harvard reading books by Herman Hesse, Phillip Berrigan, and Nicos Kazantzakis. "It's easy when you're 18 to say, 'Yeah, that's right,' about these books." Weltner said. "It's when you're 40 and you have four kids that it really counts."