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policy at the teach-ins and in the various petitions we have been asked to
sign." Of course Communist sympathizers have added their voices to
the chorus-there is one at Rutgers, I note, and I trust PR is defending
his unrevolutionary, democratic right to express such wrongheaded opin–
ions so long as he keeps them out of the classroom-but, speaking as one
who of late for the first time in fifteen years has been signing petitions,
making speeches, and even picketing, I think the protests have deeper,
more reasonable grounds than that double standard of morality I find
as repugnant as the signers of the statement do. The statement in PR
gives them: "disastrous violation of any democratic principles" (which,
as you note, makes more, not less, Communist sympathizers) and "self–
defeating military involvements [which] can be a substitute for political
foresight only if we propose to police the whole world, and to imagine
that we can do that is to lack even hindsight." The difference is that
you don't draw conclusions ("new thinking" is needed) and you object
to us doing so. But I think the evidence has been in for some time.
In less than
:a
year-from the first bombings of North Vietnam
last February through the Dominican invasion to the commitment of
American combat troops in Vietnam and the buildup of our forces
there to a projected 200,000 by the end of this year-we have become
the most feared and hated nation in the world (feared more for the
Goldwaterish recklessness than for the success of our use of military
power).
As
Russia in Metternich's time was called "the gendarme of
Europe," we are becoming the policeman of the world. "Around the
globe--from Berlin to Thailand-are people whose well-being rests, in
part, on the belief that they can count on us if attacked. . . . We will
always oppose the effort of one nation to conquer another."
So
our
President on April 7 last. At this writing, we are opposing the effort of
North Vietnam to conquer South Vietnam by stepping up our
air
bombardment of-South Vietnam. "U.S. SAID TO PLAN DAILY
B-52 RAIDS IN SOUTH VIETNAM"
(N. Y. Times,
August 31)–
each B-52 carries fifty-one seven hundred and fifty pound bombs; "a
qualified source said he had verified reports that civilians moved out of
the area of a raid in Zone D last Thursday because they could not stand
the smell of decomposing flesh." "RECORD AIR DRIVE POUNDS
VIETCONG"
(N. Y. Times,
September 4) : five hundred and thirty-two
missions in one day "against a wide variety of targets," all in South
Vietnam. In the next column, a dispatch from the U.N.: "To Peking's
propagandists, working upon unsophisticated Asian masses, the widening
use of American bombers, aircraft carriers and mechanized forces is
taken to be a godsend. Crude propaganda daily portrays the U.S. as
