VIETNAM
635
make a connection, and that this connection does not proceed from
Maoism (thQugh it indeed is present too) but from an attitude toward a
revolution within this country and throughout the world. During the
I-like-Ike years the intellectual, soured by McCarthy and tired old men,
cut himself off from politics. Kennedy helped to turn students toward
possibility. A bright young tough-minded guy could see himself in govern–
ment service, either in the country, or in the State Department.
Johnson may not know, or, again, Bundy and McNamara care, but
that same kind of student is once more souring. And that, I submit, is
too high a price to pay to support Cold War oversimplification.
Those
"extremists" happen to be the brightest and best young minds I have
encountered in the country. It's a pity a stiff-necked buttoned-up debater
has been given the task of isolating them further. Someone who cared
less about scoring points might find a solution both in Vietnam, and
in Wisconsin.
Dwight Macdonald
I didn't sign the statement in PR because, despite a formal
impartiality-much to be said against both sides-it asks American
intellectuals to reopen a question many of us have come to consider
closed: whether there is any justification, moral or in terms of national
self-interest, for President Johnson's recent military adventures in Santo
Domingo and Vietnam. "Obviously, the time has come for new thinking,"
it concludes, but to me this is not obvious. I've done my thinking months
ago and it is dismally confirmed in each day's headlines. As for new
thinking, let McGeorge do it. Nor does the statement indicate any new
directions beyond such pious banalities as that we must "understand the
political and economic problems of rapidly changing countries" and
should "support democratic revolutionary groups." Amen but my own
understanding is that revolutionary groups in such countries are rarely
democratic and that the Vietnamese scene, North and South, is notably
barren of them. So we find ourselves in what the statement in PR calls
"a false dilemma" but I call a real one.
I agree that "power politics, the Cold War, and Communists" are
not "merely American inventions" and that it is "apolitical," and
stupid, to assume that "everything would be fine if only the Yanks
would go home." But I can't agree that these formulations--surely a
little broad for a sophisticated magazine?-fairly summarize what is
"simply taken for granted
[by]
most of the criticism of Administration
