650
DAVID RIESMAN
bombardments by the Navy and later by SAC, the uneasy impression
is
created that the Vietnamese, along with a few unlucky Americans, are
being sacrificed to inter-service American rivalries, as some may earlier
have been sacrificed to the practice and search for counter-insurgency
effectiveness applicable
to
the Third World.
If
this continues, the precar–
ious detente with the Soviet Union, already damaged, may be further
sacrificed; plans for anti-missile defense and bomb shelters are again
alarmingly coming up. Secretary McNamara and President Johnson have
exercised restraint in these spheres, and in Vietilam also have resisted
Right Wing and more general eagerness to "solve" the war by bombing
Hanoi or China. The bombings in the North were a departure from this
restraint and should
be
stopped unconditionally; to do so would make
clear at home and abroad the reimposition of limits.
3. At an earlier point, we might have made clear, as Walter Lippmann
and others proposed, that we were holding a base-a temporary
Taiwan-in South Vietnam to show our good faith
to
the world;
to
protect the President and the Democratic party against the Right Wing
in this country; and above all to provide a haven for Vietnamese
Catholics and others who might fear reprisals. Such a policy might have
spared us much confusing cant about protecting freedom and democracy
in South Vietnam, while making clear our wi'llingness to protect those
who have relied on us. No one could regard such a plan as ideal: it is
quasi-colonial; it might not survive American impatience nor Vietcong
provocation; but it seems a lesser evil than th; present course.
4. In a world threatened by nuclear dispersion, the modicum of sta–
bility in the midst of revolutionary change which the great powers can
provide seems to me an international goal as essential as "the creation of a
world in which free societies can exist." I am for peaceful, competitive co–
existence of all societies, free and unfree, South African and Paraguayan,
Cuban and Yugoslav, North and South Korean. Not only can the United
States not police the whole world without arousing eventual deadly
reprisals, but we cannot even do so much as we would like to improve
it, or
"to
support democratic revolutionary groups." Perhaps mistakenly,
I detect in the statement in PR an expansive idealism of a muted, non–
military white man's burden sort. Naturally, 'I am not indifferent to what
happens in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, and consider myself both an
American and a citizen of a not-yet-extant world community. But I have
such confidence in the American example, once freed of all but a mini–
mum deterrent armory, that I am willing to wait for the spread of free–
dom---even eventually into the heart of Chinese "thought-reformed" terri–
tory. People almost everywhere want the blessings, vulgar as well as open–
handed, which America (however unevenly) exhibits.
