U Thant of course, will hold office until the spring of 1963, when Mr. Hammarskjold's term would have come to an end. Whether the compromises -- on both sides -- that made possible the interim appointment can then be repeated remains to be seen. Mr. Khrushchev's demand for a troika is dormant, not dead; the West may or not remain satisfied with the kind of neutralism that U Thant represents. In a sense, the showdown promised by Mr. Hammarskjold's sudden and tragic death has been avoided; no precedents have been set as yet; structurally, the U.N. is still fluid, vulnerable to the pressures that its new and enlarged membership are bringing to bear upon it. But at least the pessimists who believed that the world organization had plunged to its death in that plane crash in the Congo have been proved wrong.

No one who has studied the radical Right can suppose that words are their sole staple in trade. These are mentalities which crave action -- and they are beginning to get it, as Messrs. Salsich and Engh report on page 372. Even in areas where political connotations are (deliberately?) left vague, the spirit of vigilantism is spreading. Friends, a picture magazine distributed by Chevrolet dealers, describes a paramilitary organization of employees of the Gulf Telephone Company at Foley, Alabama. ``If the day should ever come that foreign invaders swarm ashore along the Gulf Coast,'' the account reads, ``they can count on heavy opposition from a group of commando trained telephone employees -- all girls. Heavily armed and mobilized as a fast moving Civil Defense outfit, 23 operators and office personnel stand ready to move into action at a minute's notice.'' According to Friends, the unit was organized by John Snook, a former World War /2, commando who is vice president and general manager of the telephone company. The girls, very fetching in their uniforms, are shown firing rockets from a launcher mounted on a dump truck; they are also trained with carbines, automatic weapons, pistols, rifles and other such ladies' accessories.