AN HOUR WITH WALTER LIPPMANN
An Hour with Walter Lippmann Recently Walter Lippmann, America's most distinguished analyst of public affairs, was interviewed for an hour on television by Howard K. Smith of the Columbia...
...He doesn't want to do it...
...fight, threaten to fight, if anything is changed...
...Nixon has said that...
...So, we must have a treaty first...
...And I think in those cases, we ought to focus our aid, not necessarily stopping this other aid, which is really a form of bribery to keep them quiet, but focus it and do enough to do it...
...And that made very fertile ground for Communist propaganda...
...Khrushchev about this particular point, but I did to a very close adviser of his, a Soviet official...
...Eisenhower did...
...They're going to get it...
...One, a westerner, one a Communist, and one a neutral, and each of those has a veto...
...Khrushchev and Macmillan...
...Now, the nature of the method of aiding is very debatable...
...We want to improve it, and if you can negotiate with us an improvement, we'll be . very interested...
...One is, part of the agreement would have to be that China would be included and he may not be able to deliver China...
...How do you explain that...
...The future of the United Nations is very much threatened by the fact that although Mr...
...It's Brazil...
...Troika, you know, comes from a Russian thing where three horses pull a cart or a sleigh...
...I didn't speak to Mr...
...Laos is not going to be what we rather foolishly, I think, two or three years ago, tried to make it—an American satellite, whatever you like to call it...
...He wants to give legal status to the East German state...
...They haven't won it in Mexico...
...SMITH: Well, can you understand why he has not communicated...
...That's Dr...
...SMITH: Some people say our salvation is not in what we do, but what happens to the Communists...
...SMITH: DO you think we're on the right path towards meeting that threat...
...So there's no possibility of uniting them...
...That's going to be decided in the coming months...
...And I said, "And China will test for you...
...Therefore, we must stand firm and stand pat...
...It's only fair to say that up to this point, there is no evidence of any Soviet military base in Cuba...
...In other places, we've undoubtedly spent much too much money on armies that have no military value whatsoever from the point of view of our interests, but are kept there, are paid for by us, in order to keep them loyal to the king or ruler of the country so they won't overthrow us...
...I consider it the duty of the press to expose that kind of thing to the light of day, because I don't think a democracy like this should have secret training camps and secret armies and secret navies in foreign countries—all in violation of its treaties and its own laws...
...We have taken the line, conventionally, that everything in Berlin is as good as it could be from our point of view...
...SMITH: I'd like to talk to you now about the latest Russian diplomatic creation, and that is what Mr...
...It was wrong in itself...
...I hope that will be true, but that is a little bit like Khrushchev's inevitability doctrine in reverse, and I don't think things are inevitable...
...LIPPMANN: I think the next step is one which involves a change in our basic approach to the German problem...
...We have always adhered to the idea that Germany ought eventually to be reunited...
...The key country in Asia is India...
...There are no roads in it, no ports, no airfields, and I think that it's a wise thing for a country to measure—to tailor—its policy to its military powers...
...I would hesitate to say just which is the key country in Africa, but I imagine it might be Nigeria...
...LIPPMANN: Yes...
...An Hour with Walter Lippmann Recently Walter Lippmann, America's most distinguished analyst of public affairs, was interviewed for an hour on television by Howard K. Smith of the Columbia Broadcasting System...
...It's a fairly recent dogma...
...And while we seem to be very interested in developing bigger weapons...
...That's where we.have to compete with him...
...SMITH: Could you tell me now...
...SMITH: If what Mr...
...Do you find any consolation in that thought...
...Now, there are several possible explanations, and they may, all of them, be true...
...Do you think that in his legislative program he is doing the right things necessary to that end...
...I mean, putting in a government that suited us—and that is not possible...
...Do you think that Kennedy has that second sight...
...He likes to make decisions and announce them, but he doesn't explain them...
...It can't be negotiated...
...As long as it isn't engaged, we mustn't be engaged...
...LIPPMANN: I think the answer you come to is, that the advice to go ahead, the green light for doing it, or the energy demanding that we go ahead, all came from senior advisers...
...it's negotiable, but I don't know how negotiable— there just won't be a Secretary General, and if there's no Secretary General, the U.N...
...I don't agree with the people who think that we have to go out and shed a little blood to prove we're virile men...
...will be reduced to a debating society, or the Security Council will meet, but it won't be able to order anything...
...The next danger of Castro is that, through his embassies in Latin America, there is a funnel through which propaganda agents—> propaganda and agents and money gotten from the Soviet Union, or China, or somewhere—can be pushed into these various countries of South America, and the subversive propaganda supported: That is a problem about which we can't do anything...
...But there's nothing to prevent us from watching it...
...But in the last run, I've got to do it...
...LIPPMANN: Yes...
...Do you still feel that way...
...Yet, recent events don't seem to have borne out that relative optimism...
...Now, that's his argument and that's why he's in a hurry...
...LIPPMANN: I put it to this: that he is a very quick and intelligent man, himself—reads very fast, understands very fast, and it bores him to explain things...
...It depends on the example we set to the world, and if we set the example, of a very brilliant active economy and society, in which we were dealing with all our problems actively, our prestige would rise in the world...
...that those planes that Castro used were old American planes...
...Nobody will have any agreements...
...I think there are some things the press might do better or differently or not at all than it does...
...If India can be made to work as a successful, democratic state, the influence of that will spread all over Southeast Asia, no matter who takes over in Laos in the next few months...
...If he can succeed there and our friends and other Latin Americans fail, then his example is far more dangerous than anything he himself can do...
...And I hope and believe that there is a movement on foot to reform some of its worst abuses...
...LIPPMANN: They're very confused about all that...
...SMITH: Well, if Mr...
...Adenauer's view...
...LIPPMANN: I do...
...SMITH: Well, the one question on which Khrushchev and the President seemed less pessimistic than on other questions was on Laos...
...In spite of Castro, I don't believe they're going to win it in Brazil, which is going to determine more than anything else what happens in South America...
...What do you think about that...
...SMITH: Well, Mr...
...And if that comes, then the great danger for Europe exists, because either by their attacking East Germany and overruning East Berlin— or the other way around, that the East Germans rise and they go to their defense—either way, there'll be nothing to stop it...
...If France doesn't sign it she'll test for you...
...It hasn't sent its troops anywhere...
...I asked him, "Why are you in such a hurry...
...If one horse sits down then the two can't move...
...SMITH: Well, people who say that you can't reach an agreement with the Russians generally cite the fate of the nuclear test ban talks in Geneva...
...We can't break up the relations between, let's say, Brazil and Cuba...
...They are winning it in the most backward and reactionary places, but I don't consider that they're winning it in Europe...
...But I think that's his way of saying that he can't deliver China, because when he talked about France to me, he said, "Well, what's the good of an agreement...
...Don't negotiate...
...SMITH: Well, what's the next stop...
...And that means that you must focus your energy, your aid, on key countries...
...LIPPMANN: Well, that's the dream of our age...
...They haven't got the warheads, but they're going to get them, and they surely will get them in four or five years...
...I think, there, he didn't feel that he knew enough to overrule the CIA, the Chiefs of Staff, what there was of the State Department, and so on...
...He said, "We really mean that everything must be done by agreement between the United States and the U.S.S.R...
...I think that President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, as he calls it, a rather fancy name for helping, is basically right...
...LIPPMANN: I think the answer is that Laos is not a primary vital interest to the Soviet Union...
...SMITH: The Communist nations appear to be winning the competition we call the cold war...
...SMITH: Well, what has President Kennedy demonstrated so far...
...When it came to negotiations he might stall, as we know from the experience with the nuclear test ban and everything else...
...This is too serious a business for that kind of thinking, and in regard to Cuba, my feeling was not only that it was illegal for us to do it, and we cannot go into the business of violating treaties...
...Despite the overriding public significance of the hour-long interview, 135 of the 250 affiliated stations of CBS declined to carry the Lippmann interview, prefering to substitute the convential fare of television...
...You won't intervene— and there we'll be with a very dangerous war on our hands...
...Rusk mentioned takes place, that is, a crisis is provoked in the summer or fall, and the Russians hand over control of our communications with Berlin to the East German puppets, what would you be in favor of doing...
...And they'll get it from you, or they'll get it from the French, who'll be able to make them by that time...
...LIPPMANN: Yes...
...What do you think about that...
...because in the last analysis, American prestige depends not on arms, although we must have arms...
...that any change in the situation of Berlin would be for the worse...
...Now, the other view, which is the one I share, is that the situation in Berlin is not good, that Berlin is in a state of chronic crisis...
...I think men have to act to make the inevitable happen...
...I don't like warlike old men...
...The junior advisers, the men who've come to Washington with Kennedy, were not strong enough, perhaps not wise enough, all of them, although some may have been, to tell the President to overrule people with such eminence as the people who advised him to do it...
...LIPPMANN: I think that's an exaggeration, really, and somewhat of an optical illusion...
...There is not a sign of a missile base, and of course, it stands to reason if they can shoot missiles from Siberia to the moon, why should they come ninety miles away...
...What we're going to have to do is going to take a lot of money, and it's going to take a very strong government...
...I would like to see the position of saying to Khrushchev, we don't like Berlin the way it is...
...Furthermore, I think the reasons for doing what I advocate are based on the soundest, strategical principle, and is this: T h e Soviet Union is not engaged in any of these places...
...SMITH: NOW, the most mysterious of all the events that have happened is the Cuban debacle...
...What do we do now...
...Well, that is that almost everything, nuclear test bans and the United Nations and everything else be controlled by three people...
...Now, if that is applied, wouldn't that stagnate all international activity...
...You'll just ask her to go and test them in the Sahara Desert...
...There's no use building half a bridge across a river— you've got to build a whole bridge...
...I know it'll create tension...
...Hammarskjold has another two years, I think, he couldn't be re-elected at present, and nobody else like him could be elected, and there's quite a good chance that if there is n o understanding reached with the Russians on this point, which is—I wouldn't regard it as inflexible...
...The President sounded very pessimistic about that...
...that weigh less, he has these enormous rockets...
...He needs money to do that...
...And he sort of looked slightly amused, because he likes to b e challenged sometimes, and he said, "That's a fair question, but China isn't able to test yet...
...Anyway, we'd match that...
...If we get ourselves involved in a Korean war in Indo-China, and all our reserves begin flowing that way, or get ourselves involved in a thing we can't finish in Cuba, because the guerrilla war may go on forever, then we will weaken ourselves for what is really the issue, which is to keep the balance of power between ourselves and the Soviet Union intact...
...He has not explained what his economic challenge is, and what it is going to require in the way of much stronger measures...
...Yet [Kennedy has] spoken more than Mr...
...But what they were complaining about was something there's no criticism being made of, namely that [news of] the Cuban expedition was published to the world before it happened...
...SMITH: Well, do you believe in what's called the domino theory, and that is that if we lose Laos, then we'll lose Thailand, and so on, until we've lost all Southeast Asia because of this one country...
...Now, I think that in the next year, he will make the great decision, whether he can afford to balance the budget in the Eisenhower sense and allow the economy to remain at a fairly quiet level...
...And I'll tell you, if you like, later, why he thinks he's got to d o it...
...How do you explain that...
...They're already being trained how to use it...
...Change nothing...
...SMITH: NOW, the President, in his speech to the people afterwards, said that the most somber aspect of the talks [with Khrushchev] was the discussion about Germany and Berlin...
...Khrushchev said, when I talked to him, "I would agree to a united Germany if it were Communist, but you won't agree to that— and I won't agree to a united Germany if it has to give up Communism and become like Adenauer's Germany...
...And he said, "I'm in a hurry because I want the frontiers of Germany, and the status of Berlin, and the demarcation line between the two German states settled in a treaty before"—and then he said—"before Hitler's generals in West Germany get the atomic bomb...
...I want to avoid it...
...I think it's going to be done too—I hope with- as little bloodshed as possible, but I think the CIA, itself, may disappear and be dissolved into its parts taken over in different directions...
...It was foolishly handled...
...That's the focal point where, if there's going to be a third World War, it will come...
...That's up to Brazil...
...He said, "Well, we really mean two...
...SMITH: Well, in all these setbacks in which the CIA has been involved, the President, in a speech, has implied, and many of his aides have said quite frankly to us reporters, in private, that they consider the press to' be a limitation on our effectiveness in carrying out policy—a free press unrestrained...
...He thinks the weapons he has are really good enough...
...SMITH: In a column about a year ago, you said, in regard to the qualities a good President should have, the first thing is his ability to see through to what is permanent and enduring...
...Now, Charles Bohlen, who's probably our outstanding Soviet expert in the State Department, made a speech a short while ago, in which he said that if we can just hold things for another ten years, Russian Communism may lose its aggressive revolutionary momentum the way Islam did in the Middle Ages, and we may be able, then, to get along with it...
...He never explained why, if he wants to do all these things such as fight the cold war and win it—really outdo the Communists— it's got to be done at full blast of the American economy, with a production of fifty billions more than we produced this year...
...And coming down from being supreme to being only equal is an awful wrench for every country, and it makes people frustrated and angry...
...And he has never explained to them the very unpleasant fact which he didn't create—it's not his fault—that we have moral commitments and legal commitments, mainly around the r im of Asia, which were built up before he took office and when we were the supreme military power in the world...
...Allen Dulles told me himself, not long ago, that in the invasion there were no Russian planes...
...They have no power, of course, but they're there and it looks better to include them...
...Khrushchev regards it as quite secondary, and it's not a primary interest to the United States either...
...Khrushchev doesn't seem, now, to want any agreement on it...
...LIPPMANN: I would say that the United States can no more refuse to contribute to foreign aid in the world than the richest man in town can refuse to contribute to the community chest...
...SMITH: Well, could you summarize on the basis of your conversation with Khrushchev what he wants and what he would be willing to negotiate about regarding Berlin...
...LIPPMANN: I know, but he hasn't explained...
...The Progressive is delighted to be able to present, in only slightly abbreviated form', the interview suppressed by so many stations.—THE EDITORS...
...But the biggest danger of Castro—, much the biggest—is that he might succeed in Cuba in solving problems which have not yet been solved in a great many Latin American countries...
...Kennedy set himself one main goal in the election campaign, it was to resurrect America's fallen prestige...
...You have said you're in favor of negotiations over Berlin, which may involve making concessions to the Russians over Berlin...
...or whether he wants to give it a real push upward...
...I'm inclined to think that has a good deal to do with it, because he talks about our not being able to deliver France...
...Cuba was a wrong and a foolish thing to do...
...But I think it is too early to say that he has or hasn't got it...
...I think our position should be not that any change in the guarantees of the rights of the people of Berlin is a defeat and a surrender, but that those guarantees should be improved, if it's possible to improve them...
...SMITH: IS it possible that a free, loose-jointed, easy-going society like the American democracy can compete with a tightly concentrated, tightly controlled, secret dictatorship like that of the Soviet Union and Red China...
...who are very anti-Communist...
...LIPPMANN: My answer to that would be that you can't decide these questions of life and death for the world by epithets like appeasement...
...Lippmann, you have been opposed to taking action, military, forceful action in Laos, or unilateral action in Cuba...
...Mikoyan called the "Troika" system of control...
...Those are great abuses...
...I said, "Why three...
...And he said...
...But we don't press it because we know it's not practical...
...LIPPMANN: The thing that put Castro overall in right perspective was a thing that Senator Fulbfight said in the private discussions beforehand, which is that Castro is a thorn in our flesh but he's not a dagger in our hearts...
...None of them is gone, and I don't consider Laos gone...
...LIPPMANN: I think he is capable of having it...
...I wouldn't like, for a moment, to underestimate how formidable this competition is and this threat...
...LIPPMANN: We talked quite a lot about the nuclear test, and my explanation will have to be my guess, but the fact is that he's clearly not terribly interested in it...
...Now, at the same time, there are left in Berlin, in West Berlin, two and a half million Germans, who are not Communists at all...
...But I would not pass up the chance to do that, if we can negotiate with the Soviet Union a new treaty which guarantees the future of Germany—of Berlin...
...The fact that the Japanese don't love Americans doesn't mean that they're Communists...
...LIPPMANN: I would think it dangerous to find consolation in that thought...
...SMITH: Just after the Cuban debacle, you said that the Joint Chiefs and the head of the CIA had to go...
...SMITH: NOW, Mr...
...Is there a good case in favor of foreign aid that isn't being made...
...But I want to get those frontiers fixed so that if either Germany moves, in a military sense, in the next four or five years, it will be the aggressor...
...What would be your answer to those who would say that this is a policy of appeasement...
...Well, that's the way he started, but that isn't the way he's going to go...
...You just can't live in the world community—we couldn't live—refusing to aid anybody...
...I think it's their business to try as best they can, by whatever wisdom they can find, to avert what would be an absolutely irreparable calamity for the world...
...It's a country which is remote, very difficult to get at, very unsuited to American type of military power...
...On the other hand, if the world isn't going to go into that landslide into Communism which Khrushchev predicts, there have to be anchor points in all the continents which show that prosperity and a certain amount of social justice can be achieved by another way than the Communist way...
...In fact, on that, there is a curious agreement between Khrushchev and de Gaulle, for instance...
...SMITH: Well, does this not threaten the entire future of the United Nations...
...I think we must keep the thing under really close watch, and it's perfectly easy to do...
...He said that half a dozen times: "I don't want the tension...
...It's like the Eisenhower Administration thirty years younger...
...I would call the establishment of a missile base or a submarine base, in Cuba, as marking a threat...
...The key country in Latin America is not Cuba...
...Do you agree with that...
...And then behind that lies a very personal and human feeling—that I don't think old men ought to promote wars for young men to fight...
...And a weakness of Kennedy is that he never explained these things to the American people...
...It is true, as some of the liberal critics in the Congress have been saying, that a lot of this money, as in Laos, simply enriched the upper class who exploited and flaunted their riches all over, and increased the hatred of the poor for the rich...
...They haven't won it in Japan...
...And that is what I'm pressing for...
...SMITH: NOW, judging from the mood on Capitol Hill, this is not a good year for foreign aid...
...LIPPMANN: AS I understand Khrushchev, a separate peace treaty is a last resort...
...LIPPMANN: All I can tell you is that Khrushchev says he wants to negotiate...
...LIPPMANN: I don't believe he's really got started doing that, because he is not sure of himself, because he is conscious that he doesn't have a really effective working majority in Congress for important measures, and because, I take it, he judges that the mood of the country is not in favor of doing the things which would really create a new sense of prestige...
...We brought in the third because they're there...
...Senator Fulbright has said that, and you have said that...
...The question is, is Cuba a military threat to the United States in view of the fact that it is so closely connected with the Soviet Union...
...That's never been explained to our people, so they have no sense of urgency...
...This second sight is the quality of great leaders...
...whose sympathies, whose ties, whose economic connections, whose culture, whose everything is with the West, and who are democratic people, and we have an absolutely unquestioned obligation of honor to see that they are not crushed, or not enslaved, or not starved out...
...LIPPMANN: Oh, well, I think there's no doubt at all that the central problem is Germany and Berlin, and that all these other things they discussed— Laos and nuclear testing and disarmament, and the general movement of Communism in the uncommitted lands—are all related to this central issue, which is the focus of the cold war...
...The interview was based in considerable measure on first-hand information Lippmann had obtained in earlier private conversations with Premier Khrushchev, President de Gaulle, Prime Minister Macmillan, and President Kennedy...
...LIPPMANN: What he has done in the four or five months is, first, to carry on in all its essentials the Eisenhower economic philosophy and the Eisenhower international commitments, while never explaining to the country that those can be changed...
...LIPPMANN: I think we are...
...That's the question, and that is why many of us think that the Kennedy Administration has to get going and moving rapidly, or we won't be able to do it...
...SMITH: Well, now, what should we do about Cuba and Castro...
...We're not that kind of country...
...LIPPMANN: I remember the domino theory first was brought up in the Middle East, and I remember when people said Nasser made a deal with the Soviets about arms, and they said, "Ah, Egypt's gone"—then Syria was gone, and t^en Iraq...
Vol. 25 • August 1961 • No. 8
