AN EROSION OF TRUST
Moynihan, Daniel P.
Since the Assassination of President Kennedy... An Erosion of Trust Daniel P. Moyniban, Counselor to the President Some years ago the Al Smith Dinner, which the New York Archdiocese gives in...
...The most important thing about our society over the generations is that citizens have more or less routinely taken for granted that the appearance of things could be trusted, that their principal institutions, and the men who embody them, were truthful...
...and it has ever been a harbinger of bad times, indeed...
...If this society is to be made whole again, we need a period of sustained, systematic truth telling...
...Great American Series We are in danger of losing something solid at the core...
...I would offer an example, of no greater or lesser consequence than a dozen others that could be cited, but one for which there is rather more documentation...
...it is a recurrent one...
...One recalls Benjamin V. Cohen refer, in 1962, to Vietnam as the "Top Secret war" or Richard Goodwin leaving Washington in 1965 with a terrible certainty as to what would happen...
...it does not contemplate making such a study...
...Always, the United States was to blame...
...This is true of society as well...
...That is the least of it...
...Now it is 1970, and things are even worse than I, certainly, ever expected...
...It is rather a proposition seriously believed, or at least seriously entertained, by educated persons all across the land...
...nor has it been approached by anyone with a proposal for such a study...
...The precise danger is that this response is increasingly non-rational - even irrational...
...There has not, I think, been a time in recent history in which this phenomenon has been more in evidence...
...A very slight tilt of perception can turn a seemingly orderly and benevolent environment into a nightmare fantasy of peril and threat...
...The desire to listen to youth, who have much that is true to say, has perhaps inhibited older persons in offering other truths in exchange...
...One of the defining qualities of the period of current history that began, roughly, with the assassination of President Kennedy has been the emergence of widespread, radical protest on the part of American youth...
...Now this is not so...
...Don't you," he asked, "have any good news...
...Too metaphysical...
...But the implication of the article was that something is going on, and as the story spread to the more politically radical press, all doubts on that score disappeared...
...And evidence also for a dozen dozen not less grotesque fantasies...
...The Rand Corporation," he writes, "has not undertaken such a study...
...Here you've paid a hundred dollars apiece to see a bird of paradise, and what do you get but an old black crow in a protestant suit...
...A respectable, responsible man denies he is doing something, and that is taken as evidence that he is...
...David Riesman has recently remarked that, "it is possible that our instantaneous knowledge in the absence of instantaneous remedy increases our sense of helplessness...
...A whole generation was marked - and in ways deformed - by the crashing recognition that the world was not a safe or pleasant place at all, that the world was blind, destructive, unheeding...
...Reassuring...
...If it sometimes expresses itself as plain fury, the true emotion is surely more involved...
...Anyone who has been much involved with government or public affairs in, say, the last decade is likely, I believe, to have pondered this phenomenon...
...For example, as a young man in the White House put it to me recently, surely the argument could have been made that anyone who is orderly enough to think of such a study would be much too careful to contract it out...
...Not if you consider the possibility that Henry Rowen may be lying...
...It would then seem to be incumbent on all persons whose actions are watched for such signals to behave with a maximum sensitivity to such responses...
...For how better to conceal such an activity than to entrust it to a person with a reputation for concealing nothing...
...An almost deja vu quality to the reality as inexorably it has come to pass...
...e lecture as a commencement address at Ford-ham...
...Attend the work of Erving Goff-man...
...For years I was thought too radical to be invited to Fordham...
...This makes for insufficient passion, perhaps, but possibly also for a measure of detachment in seeking to understand what went wrong, and in trying to analyze what might make things, if not right, at least better...
...Not at all...
...What is at issue is the question of how we are to respond to the fact that a great many young persons at this moment in our history, persons to whom so much has seemingly been given, have been somehow denied the one essential a society must give to youth, which is to say trust in that society...
...Perhaps then it's not Rand that is doing the study...
...This condition is epidemic on American campuses at this moment...
...The etiology of the rumor is mildly interesting, but what is important is the degree to which it illustrates Goffman's principles, and by extension, the very great difficulty we must expect in the effort to restore confidence and trust...
...But there is something to be learned from everything, and I would like to set this subject of differing perceptions of a single reality as the subject of my address...
...The unavoidable impression of events of the past several months is that this fear has come to be a pervasive emotion among great elements of educated, or educating, youth...
...Those who seek to anticipate movements in the politics and culture of a society such as ours are exposed to the perverse danger that when, on occasion, one is right, the events anticipated arrive with something less than the impact of reality...
...But widespread distrust of society is not a modern phenomenon...
...Blame is precisely what is not at issue...
...The President of the Rand Corporation, a distinguished economist who went to Washington with President Kennedy, flatly denies it...
...I do not know what we are to do about this, but I think it well that everyone understand that this is where things have got to...
...By late May the rumor hardened -barely six weeks having passed - and the belief was to be encountered on just about every campus in the nation...
...Rather it has to do with a gestalt of politics in which the summation of the same set of events for one individual or group produces a wholly different result than that for another...
...A central problem, as I saw it, was trust was eroding...
...For all the seeming aggression, there is a mood of fear and helplessness abroad that we simply must respond to, as individuals and as a society...
...Increasingly it is not anything government does, or anything that actually happens, that triggers responses of rage and anxiety, rather it is imagined events that do...
...He told me that "if the report were secret the Rand Corporation would have called me and said 'we are doing this thing and this is how we're brushing off inquiries' so that we could get our stories straight, but Rand called me and said they had been getting calls they didn't know anything about it...
...John F. Kennedy once mat presumption eroues, or disappears, all things are changed...
...I decided it would be futile to ask him whether, assuming the report did exist and the Rand Corporation did call him and say "this is how we're brushing off inquiries," he would then tell me, "Yes, the Rand Corporation called me to tell me it exists and this is how we're brushing off inquiries...
...People do...
...Secretary, there is an item here that the Aswan Dam is leaking...
...And this is the point...
...But these, too, are among the truths that need to be told...
...And that, alas, is true...
...It is the clash of perception just as often as the clash of interest that shapes the politics of a society such as ours...
...The erosion of trust in the nation has reached the point that the most confirming, cleansing events are the ones most feared, most misinterpreted, precisely because if they were other than they appear, they would be so dangerous...
...That the idea of conspiracy is a vulgar idea...
...A quite striking instance of this phenomenon, or so it seems to me, occurred early in the life of the present administration...
...And so outrage and distrust mounted...
...It is possible to think this way...
...Everywhere, everything was going wrong...
...What went wrong, what is going wrong, is that the fund of public trust has been grieviously depleted...
...If you are a revolutionary, you will not think that...
...From the student's point of view there is, as it were, evidence that a study is being made...
...We are losing that Pilgrim spirit of initiative and in-dependence-that old-fashioned Spartan devotion to duty, honor and country...
...I refer to the belief, now rampant on American campuses, that the administration, using radical student protest as a pretext, is planning to cancel the 1972 elections...
...The Newhouse reporter stuck to it, adding that "the wife of a Rand Corporation executive had been overheard talking about such a study...
...It is not just a matter of one man's gain being another's loss...
...A year ago at Notre Dame, I said it all over again, adding only that our institutions were beginning to be changed by the fear and anxiety around us...
...Equivalent statements have been forthcoming from others in similar positions...
...I can attest to something of this sense with respect to the matter of youthful protest...
...The Village Voice reporter then called the White House, where an assistant press secretary allowed that he had received some -queries on the subject, but had checked it "and I haven't found anything to this story at all...
...There are doubtless many and complex sources of this state, but at bottom it derives from and manifests itself as a growing distrust of all social institutions...
...Much begins, more than we yet know, with the assassination of President Kennedy...
...One wonders if there has not been, for them...
...More and more it is seen as a conspiracy...
...You might well be thinking similar thoughts of your commencement speaker...
...It commands our concern...
...Certainly it confirms it...
...An Erosion of Trust Daniel P. Moyniban, Counselor to the President Some years ago the Al Smith Dinner, which the New York Archdiocese gives in support of its hospital program, took place on an occasion that Cardinal Spellman's presence was required in Rome...
...The wire service had reported, "The White House is ordering up several hush-hush security studies and one of them is reported to address the question: What would happen if there is no Presidential election in 1972...
...Father Gannon substituted as host and upon rising confronted at the outset what had to be the disappointment of the bespangled, affluent assembly gathered at the Waldorf for the annual ritual...
...Of these, the transcendent one is that to think of the world in paranoid terms is a form of work avoidance...
...I had been shaken - I believe that is a fair word --by the intense distrust even of Kennedy that one encountered among students...
...And there is at least one other possibility...
...The story concluded that we won't know whether the November 1972 elections will be cancelled - until November 1972...
...But I would ask that you consider my plight...
...It is by definition true...
...It is a subject worthy of greater attention...
...He called Washington and got hold of the reporter who had filed the story...
...It is, I further believe, an essential clue to the nature of the American crisis...
...This is the situation that confronts us...
...But it is not, as some seem to believe, and others behave as if they believed, an instantaneous crisis, the work of a very few men, and a very few events...
...Daniel P. Moynihan is the author of BENIGN NEGLECT...
...In the spring of 1967,1 gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard University...
...The follow-up story nonetheless appeared April 16, with two critical paragraphs...
...I had just returned from California where I had campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy...
...The story spread...
...For some time now, in his careful, quiet, undemanding way, he has been telling us that the foundations of rationality are far less secure than we have supposed...
...The Rand Corporation had "apparently" undertaken the study...
...One quite respectable West Coast newspaper, having run the original story, carried a retraction which began, "The Rand Corporation has denied any connection with a study reportedly being made for the White House on possible disruption of the 1972 elections...
...But in retrospect, it would appear that from the outset the outward, and in ways aggressive emotions and actions elicited by the war have been mixed with a measure of genuine, if often suppressed, fear...
...I began with a simple assertion...
...Life, as President Kennedy used to say, is not fair...
...And the more you think about it - if you once begin thinking this way - the more grounds there are for doing so...
...Changed utterly," as Yeats wrote...
...Easy enough...
...That there is such a crisis no one need doubt...
...After all, hasn't Harry Rowen denied it...
...Secretary Rogers arrived at the Department of State to find that part of his daily routine was an early morning briefing by a young Foreign Service Officer on world events of the preceding twenty-four hours...
...One morning the Secretary's cheerful nature rebelled...
...I cited Richard Rovere on the state of Washington, a capital he described as "awash with lies and deceptions...
...This is not a paranoid fantasy of a few unbalanced extremists...
...Less and less is organized society seen as a disaster...
...It is rather a condition that has built up over some years of the past, and which we must not expect to recede, if indeed it is to recede at all, for some years to come...
...Academic freedom had diminished on our campuses, and would diminish further, the result not of external but rather internal forces oppressing dissident opinion in the name of an increasingly virulent ideology that combined the comforts of orthodoxy with the exhilaration of seeming dissent...
...The matter may be put simply...
...Does it not then follow that the denial is evidence that the study is going on...
...Or at least I think it is not so...
...How could this have come to pass...
...More recently, a group of young White House staff men, returning from visits to campuses across the land, reported having encountered the belief, or at least rumor, in every college or university they'd been to...
...In a series of commencement addresses in 1968 I returned to the theme, this time with greater conviction...
...A reporter on the Village Voice picked it up from a "a man whose girl friend had heard about it from a Staten Island cab driver...
...I can imagine how you feel," said he...
...I do not know, at this moment do not care, who is responsible for bringing it about...
...Much of it results, surely, from the nature of electronic communications, a genuine discontinuity in human experience...
...The irrational is not opposite to the rational, it is rather tangential...
...Reporting his conversation with the press secretary, the Village Voice article reported I asked him whether, if the report-actually existed, and was highly secret, he would have to issue a denial anyway...
...Of a sudden I am not radical enough to be assured a welcome...
...The President's Advisors were said to be concerned with "the chances of radical elements disrupting governmental operations including the national elections...
...On April 5th, this appeared in the Staten Island Advance as a four-paragraph story...
...At least we can try to understand what is happening...
...It is a good rule of social science that the most important thing to know about a man is the things he takes for granted...
...The Hudson Institute...
...After all, if Rand was doing the study, it would be essential that it deny doing it, wouldn't it...
...Day after day went by, and while the principal topics of the briefing occasionally changed, the central message was singular and sustained...
...Without exception, everyone in a position to know denies that there is any truth whatever in this proposition...
...Not exactly what you paid for...
...The generation was already marked "by the belief that its government is capable of performing abhorrent deeds...
...He orginally delivered the above lecture as a commencement address at Ford-ham...
...The young Foreign Service Officer paused, shuffled through his papers, and then in a flat voice replied, "Well, Mr...
...Still, having expected them to be bad enough, the reality does have a certain disembodied quality...
...I don't think we have reached quite that point in America, but I think we are near enough to it to warrant a cry of genuine alarm and a plea for a greater recognition of what is going on...
...The story began this spring with an item in the Washington News Scope, a feature distributed by the Newhouse National News Service...
...We will not know whether the sun will rise tomorrow morning, until tomorrow morning...
...To my knowledge, it was raised by a delegation of Harvard Law School students in a meeting with administration officials...
...But I am not a revolutionary...
...Then came the war...
...That submission to nameless fears is a form of concession to those anything but nameless elements who wish very little good for this society and who are capable of doing it endless, even permanent, damage...
...For a long period the distrustful responses of youth, and of others of course, to national events and the seeming course of national policy was essentially rational...
...The same generation learned that things need not be what they seem if they are coming out of Washington...
...The Rand Corporation has done its best to knock it down, but the odds are simply against doing so in the present climate...
...I would imagine this to be the experience of those -I was not among them - who early perceived what would be the inevitable course of military involvement in Southeast Asia...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
