CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE Assassination Sydney, Nova Scotia To the Editors: I read with fascination W. Carey McWilliams' justification [July 18] for political assassination. Living in a country (Canada)...
...or country helping the oppressed to do so...
...I found it strange that Mr...
...To the Editors: In his reply to his critics on Vietnam [Aug...
...But there is scant evidence that this is the interest of the assassins now so ruthlessly stalked by Senator Church...
...A case could be made that the United States does either or both of these when its economic self-interest is at stake...
...My husband tells me that the medieval moralists justified the killing of {Continued on page 415) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 387) a tyrant by the people he was oppressing...
...The final agreement signed in January 1973 differed in no substantive respect from the pre-bombing agreement of October...
...Another more persuasive theory by Gary Porter (spelled out in his, forthcoming, A Peace Denied, The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreements, Indiana University Press, 1975), is that the U.S...
...At least that's how it looks to those of us who live in economic colonies of the United States...
...The article ends with a goal which is a lofty one: "restoring a politics which provides the conviction and experience that political life can matter...
...Perhaps one could justify an outside person (Walter Pidgeon...
...Living in a country (Canada) which is dependent on the United States fosters a different perspective on the curious need the world's most powerful nation has to kill leaders of some of the world's weakest countries...
...McWilliams puts Reinhold Niebuhr's comment in a context which implies that because it is not more moral to starve people than to shoot them it may therefore be moral to shoot them...
...Yet he says judgment is critical...
...McWilliams is not concerned with the truth of the charges against the CIA in his article, but the truth about such a powerful government agency is essential in reaching his goal...
...McWilliams does not see assassination as a moral issue but as a "technique of foreign policy...
...Fantasies about Hitler's assassination provide a shaky basis for a general theory justifying political assassination...
...JOAN BISHOP Philadelphia, Pa...
...If one were to look-as the medievals would have-for Biblical parallels, Judith would have to be passed over in favor of David and Uriah...
...McWilliams kept harking back to Hitler and Tru-jillo and never mentioned Fidel Castro or Salvador Allende, though his prose style (Senator Frank Church "stalking" the assassins) had prepared me for this oversight...
...there were only a few minor verbal adjustments that represented compromises on both sides...
...I am leery of articles which begin with Walter Pidgeon and Hitler and end with vagaries about "personal dignity...
...The kind of thinking displayed in the article leads more quickly to cynicism than to the public spirit he so justly desires...
...The poor liberals take a beating because of their preference for economic sanctions...
...In sum, then, Novak bases his final rationalization of the Christinas 1972 mass killings on a blatant misrepresentation of some fairly well-known facts...
...had negotiated at length prior to the bombing and arrived at an elaborate agreement in October 1972...
...Were the assassinations of the two Kennedies and Martin Luther King small matters...
...Is this goal served by belittling a Senate Investigating Committee...
...national security is it which makes it necessary for the CIA to infiltrate our institutions and threaten or kill leaders who oppose United States' interests...
...I for one do not think that assassination is a "relatively small matter...
...simply hoped to bully North Vietnam and the PRG into still greater concessions...
...Tad Szulc's well-known theory [Foreign Policy, Summer 1974] is that the bombing was to get Thieu to negotiate...
...On what basis is judgment to be made then if not expediency...
...1], Michael Novak claims that "they may be correct who say that the bombing, more than anything else, persuaded the North Vietnamese to negotiate as until then they had refused to do" The facts are these: that the North Vietnamese and U.S...
...Or is this true only of foreigners...
...Hard cases make bad law...
...And how would he distinguish between the deeds of the CIA and any other terrorist group bent on eliminating the "politically odious...
...One would take it from the article that this is unique to them...
...In fact it is not a liberal elite but the United States Government which supports oppressive dictatorships in Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, Guatemala, South Korea, and until recently, in Southeast Asia...
...What grandiose threat to U.S...
...DIANA ROOSE Research Consultant, National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complexy Industrial Complex...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
