84
JACK
NEWFIELD
implicit assumption about the necessities of NATO, which dominate
their attention.
The most obvious way the IACF's biases revealed themselves was
in the invitation list for the Princeton conference. The medium was the
message. No one was present from Africa. No one was present from
the Middle East. Minoo Masani, who was supposedly representing the
intellectual opinion in India, was an enthusiast of America's Vietnam
policy, but since this is a species nearly extinct even in our own coun–
try the conference managers should at least be congratulated in this
case for their ingenuity. There were two impressive exile participants
from Dubcek's Czechoslovakia - Eugen Loebl and Ivan Svitak - but
no victims of American military interventionism. Juan Bosch was
not invited. There was not even a dissident Buddhist monk there to
explain what happens when American morality comes out of the
barrel of a gun. The British representatives included no one connected
with the protest against the alleged CIA subvention of
Encounter
- Spender was absent, so was Kermode, so were the people who tried
to set up a magazine in opposition to
Encounter,
like Isaiah Ber–
lin, Stuart Hampshire, Karl Miller and John Gross. Instead, the
British representatives included the right-wing Labor M.P. Brian Walden
and Alastair Buchan, the Director of the Institute of Strategic Studies
and the editor of
NATO in the 1960's.
No Raymond Williams, no R. D.
Laing, no Richard Titmuss.
The American foreign policy experts included many of those who
were most wrong about Vietnam: John McCloy, Henry Kissinger,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, still carrying on about his technitronic society.
Expected at any moment, and head of the Ford Foundation which
lent financial support to the meeting, was McGeorge Bundy, who
probably more than any other single person, was responsible for the
decision to begin bombing North Vietnam in February of 1965. To
represent the intellectual opinion in this country presumably against
the war - were George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur
Schlesinger, who have been representing the American intellectuals
steadily at conferences for at least two decades. Sensitive enough to flee
Caligula's court early in the catastrophe, Schlesinger and Galbraith are
only now beginning to painfully re-think some of the assumptions and
institutions that led to the war: globalism, counter-insurgency, nation–
building, anti-communism. Uninvited to the meeting were the most
prophetic and passionate critics of the war,
from the beginning:
people
like Conor Cruise O'Brien,
1.
F. Stone, Howard Zinn and Paul Good–
man. Such men could not have been counted on not to point out the
