42
JACK NEWFIELD
budgets and rhetorics. Now the rhetoric, the hysteria, the lack of cool,
is concentrated on winning, or not-losing, on leaving-while-forever-com–
mitted, on talking peace, firing up for war, mentioning eventual troop
withdrawal while boasting of kill ratios, the permanence of installations,
the vast numbers who might yet be brought into the battle in Vietnam;
A short while ago two hundred thousand men would have seemed
inconceivable, yet four to five hundred thousand may be in Vietnam
by
this time next year. In the President's counsels not a voice has questioned
any figure, no matter how high. And the commitment to Vietnam
is
equated with loyalty, love of country, responsibility, manliness, construc–
tive policy, maturity, true understanding of the Communist conspiracy–
everything, in short, the Right has been saying all along.
The cliche of "responsible alternatives" has been used (by Humphrey,
of all people) to try to kill, or mock, dissent. The frat boy, the jock, the
crewcut, the YAF are Johnson's boys now. I need not point out where
that leaves the young. The bright question-asking anti-jingo easy Ken–
nedy-worshipping young man will do what his counterpart did in the
bad McCarthy-Eisenhower days-say screw you to the Establishment.
His dissent will be ridiculed and may go underground, or, if things get
worse, be stilled. His mind will not be available to those government
departments which need independent tough criticism most. Unanimity,
uniformity, infallibility, partisanship need Moyers; if there hadn't been
a Moyers, Johnson's style could certainly have created one. That is
Johnson's effect upon the young.
Jack Newfield
1.
I
think
that within a narrow policy range it matters only
slightly who is in the White House. Greater powers reside in nonelective
elites like the mass media, industry, unions, the church and the permanent
technocratic bureaucracy. But I think it does matter considerably
in
the
realm of character and style who is in the White House. Existence alters
essence. The personal, nonpolitical qualities of Castro, Churchill and
de Gaulle have had a profound effect on their countries. Johnson's per–
sonal qualities--his egotism, his deceitfulness, his pettiness, his vindictive–
ness, his provincialism- are poisoning the country. To see the President
