Cadets Report 'Very Slim' Chances For Commissions After Official Talk

Chances that 35 AFROTC seniors at the College and some 3,000 throughout the country will receive their promised Air Force commissions when they graduate "appear very slim at the moment," three of the cadets reported yesterday after talks with top Washington officials.

But Joseph P. Sullivan, Walter M. Ulin, and David U. Warren, the three seniors who went to Washington, quoted Harold E. Talbott, Air Force Secretary, as saying that the decision to withhold their commissions "is not closed as yet and a better solution is still being sought."

George S. Abrams '54, spokesman for the cadets and co-ordinator of the Washington trip, expressed hope that if the AFROTC students do not become officers in June they will at least get some compensation for the loss of their commissions. "Air Force and Defense Department officials now seem interested in giving us a better deal than the private stripes they were offering us last month," Abrams said.

The cadets conferred with an assistant Air Force secretary, several Air Force generals, and a number of United States Senators and Representatives, in addition to Talbott.

The officials' chief objections to granting the commissions, the cadets reported, lies in their wish to emphasize flight and radar observer programs instead of administrative work.