LETTERS
Plastrik, Stanley & Wakefield, Dan & Pachter, Henry & Pachter, Henry & Miliband, Ralph
While the undersigned have their own disagreements and varying emphases in interpreting the Cuban affair, we join in finding the Roger Hagan article on the Cuban crisis incorrect and...
...Mills, as a sociologist and as a socialist, was deeply interested in the Soviet world, particularly from the middle fifties onwards...
...The latter would involve taking precisely such risks as were offered us in the crisis last fall, for significant advances will not be made without similar risks...
...One cannot let this situation go without criticism...
...Mr...
...and again one of the undersigned built his argument on the Cuban crisis around such a rejection...
...Why then does his essay breathe spite and venom...
...Naturally the war-hawks looked bad...
...A lawyer of my acquaintance has recently pointed out a simple distinction between those who see international events from a national interest viewpoint and those who see them from an international order viewpoint...
...Having told the voters that there was no danger in the Cuban build-up, but that a blockade might bring war, Kennedy risked looking foolish when he turned around and now said in effect: "yes, I was all wet, there is danger in Cuba, and we must risk a blockade...
...Hagan has resorted...
...He was not...
...For the United Nations today is nothing but its member states...
...who thought that he admit ed the Cubans for all kinds of good socialist reasons...
...Or did I say that the mis siles we emplaced would have been useless to defend her...
...Hagan relates to Khrushchev...
...Swados has declined to comment on Mr...
...Pachter and Plastrik seem to differ here...
...Polls in early October indicated that more than 10 per cent of the electorate wanted an invasion, and more than half endorsed strong action short of war...
...It is unfortunate that the Cold War has left so many socialists in its wake whose primary orientation is to the national interest rather than to international order, let alone to justice or morality...
...The primary evidence of this seems that I did not "stress the overwhelming evidence that points in the other direction—that the President had striven, all through September, to minimize the Cuban danger...
...Next: "Our missiles are counterforce...
...I consider this letter, signed by two editors of DISSENT, to be an important one, and I would therefore like to deal with it at length...
...Hagan's reply which require a statement of personal belief, quite apart from the particular controversy, and such a statement follows.] ON A POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE: I would say nothing more if Mr...
...It is nonsense to suggest that all this was with out effect...
...Let me inform Mr...
...As to the Republican advisors, the President has listened to them before and since, so it is not a sufficient explanation of the Cuban affair to suggest he was in their thrall...
...By October 17 a Gallup Poll reported 24 per cent backing invasion...
...Hagan that my aim is neither to conform nor to nonconform, but to speak the truth as I see it, no matter who agrees or disagrees...
...Our protest is directed against the kind of argument he injects into the discussion...
...This modesty is precisely what made discussion with him so fruitful and exciting...
...Why then does he think I have been involved in publishing DISSENT...
...He could take a course that would risk war, or a course that would risk his political future and that of his party...
...This is amusing...
...It was a hypothetical exercise, however...
...the Soviets had backed off...
...Castro needed missiles to defend herself, but Turkey did not...
...I fail to see why Hagan's youth should excuse him from observing decent rules of debate, or why the few things I have learned should be a handicap to a reasonable discussion of the issues, and I can see even less why his way of sweeping arguments aside should pass for "originality...
...There is much else in Mr...
...I may be mistaken, but this is part of my analysis...
...For that reason, however, I don't accuse him of betraying pacifism, and I must earnestly say that I consider his inference (he is cagey enough to put it in the mouth of a "lawyer of my acquaintance") as slanderous...
...If we are to have any kind of international order, we must evolve from national policies toward international policies...
...This is the distinction Pachter and Plastrik will not acknowledge...
...Nothing is so difficult as writing personally about a man you have known intimately and whom many people know publicly...
...These have to do with the fact that Mills decided in the fifties that a dogmatic condemnation of Soviet communism would not do, either in relation to the Soviet regime itself, or to the Soviet Union's role in the world...
...It is fashionable now to be a non-conformist, and to cow under the pious rectitude of these dogmatists who accuse of conformism anyone who does not conform to their views...
...Mr...
...I wish merely to offer a few corrections of a personal nature...
...My article was entitled "The Administration in the Cuban Blockade Crisis: Triumph or Tragedy...
...DISSENT has often enoufih given hospitality to opinions which some, even many, of its editors considered foolish, and it is customary to let contributors have the last word...
...But I don't believe in gimmicks to change the balance without abolishing it...
...He remains unpersuaded by the fact that in these days the President was surrounded by Republicans— Lovett, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, McCone, in addition to Dean Acheson, Taylor and others whose "cold war" posture certainly needed no prompting by party politicians...
...We have to defend the present precarious peace, pre vent it from further deterioration, and work for its improvement...
...and "eager to be shown that the pro-Communist Australian—and other— Sinologists whom he read, underscored, and filed, were indeed right," Mills "itched to be off to China to see for himself...
...Immoral" and "cynicism beneath contempt" are Pachter's and Plastrik's phrases, not mine...
...And how much credence should be given the "amazingly frank disclosures" when some of the most amazing parts appear to have been an attempt to carry out a longstanding vendetta against Stevenson, and when parts of the article in which they appeared were soon discredited...
...But to suggest that it was "the decline of the revolution, atop his personal pains" which proved too much for him is an impudent piece of myth-making...
...I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this is no longer a permissible luxury...
...Hagan never seems to doubt his moral superiority he thinks that one has the right to demand independent, autonomous "judgment" whereas apparently I don't...
...Or, how does on read it...
...Hagan has picked up his knowledge of human nature or of the way decisions are made in government...
...Swados knows better...
...Because Mr...
...Hagan must refute his opponent like anyone else, on the level of ideas and facts...
...Concerning the spirit and aims of this debate I will have something to say later...
...Lucky Mills...
...he had avoided war...
...I happen to think that a deterioration in the international position of either of the big power vis-a-vis the other is not just an ordinary risk but (under the unfortunate circumstances of the unresolved power conflict and given the internal structure of both big powers), is the major threat to peace...
...RALPH MILIBAND [Mr...
...They are a bit more subtle than the writers suggest...
...It may be too much to ask, but I hope that DISSENT can stop beating the bushes long enough to get out of the woods and assume a role of leadership appropriate to radical intellectuals...
...He grudgingly admits that perhaps under the circumstances Kennedy might have had no choice but to act as he did...
...Beyond this obligation to analyze, however, we have the additional obligation, and at very least the right, to demand more than analysis would lead us to expect of our own government...
...So we come to the core of Pachter's and Plastrik's letter, which explains much of what precedes it: Hagan is inferred to be a Khrushchevite...
...Did I say Turkey did not...
...even if we add some liberal innovations to this arsenal, such as massive development aid and frequent recourse to the United Nations, that does not leave much room for pseudo-radical phrase-mongering...
...Hagan's contention...
...It is here that our voice and vote mean something...
...Republican Chairman William Miller declared of the 1962 campaign that "If we were asked to state the issue in one word, that word would be Cuba—symbol of the tragic irresolution of the Administration...
...Hagan uses the phrase "spurious consensus" to clobber timid souls into a consensus of another kind...
...Mr...
...I am convinced that the notion of sovereignty has become obsolete...
...page 18...
...Where have they been...
...but neiwill do to go on with...
...Since Hagan makes slanderous allegations about my position, I am forced to use this privilege and I shall not abuse it...
...To the contrary, my view is that the need to act was part of a politician's way of seeing such a situation...
...However, his reply goes considerably beyond a defense of his article and contains opinions as to the general character and nature of DISSENT, which remain open for possible future discussion...
...Hagan shall not doubt my concern with peace...
...I know, too, what a loyal and valuable friend Swados was to Mills and his family, despite all disagreements either personal or philosophical...
...Mills is not enther would he shut his eyes to all that was creative, fruitful and promising in the restless experimentation he encountered in the communist bloc...
...But he surely disqualifies himself as a serious judge of Mills's work when he writes that White Collar and The Power Elite would have been "paltry" books "if they had not been informed throughout with a sense of the magnetic self-assurance of their author...
...When we started DISSENT, at the height of the McCarthy terror, fighting for intellectual freedom, and even defending the right of free speech for Communists— where then were the people with whom you are now associated in righteousness, Mr...
...If Mr...
...Hagan wishes to compete with the patriots for the use of patriotic phrases, that is his privilege...
...The trend was clear and no politician would have ignored it...
...DisSENT, Winter 1963.] Hagan writes, ". . . the President was confronted with two alternative kinds of risk...
...If ever an incident demanded that the role of cheap politics in dictating or restricting policy be isolated [as I believed and still believe the way the Republicans were campaigning was restricting it], it was the Cuban missile showdown...
...Hagan does not make the slightest effort to prove it...
...Had he been primarily concerned about the impression made on the electorate, he would have tried to postpone the crisis until after the elections, for the Gallup poll showed that the Republicans had not succeeded in making Cuba an issue and, as the elections were to show, the super patriots were defeated...
...But Mr...
...As for Mills and Cuba, the explanation of his involvement is, according to Mr...
...If it is a question of maintaining peace, I will risk being unpopular both with the authorities and the sectarians...
...but fail to stress this one and you fail to confront the structural problems of our political order, which, I presume, is what socialists and radicals are about...
...One can love one's country and want it to use its leadership to establish with all possible speed an international order in which it will take its place with appropriate sacrifice and dignity...
...The very occurrence of such a crisis is a matter of supremely moral import...
...Remaining strictly within this self-set limit, I must forego the temptation to denounce the distortions and other polemical devices to which Mr...
...That is one thing, to say the opponent is wrong...
...Furthermore, Henry Pachter, one of our editors, feels that there are elements concerning himself in Mr...
...At times I am ready to admit that this is naive, but now is not one of them...
...But I think he was entitled, as a man, as a writer and as a friend, to something better than this bitter and unworthy essay...
...Most of this explanation I must leave to students of Soviet affairs, but I insist that, with regard to all power plays by all sides in the Cold War, we have the obligation to analyze beyond safely patriotic or party slogans so as to find the dynamic at the root of international crises, and this includes necessarily analyzing misperception by each side of its antagonists...
...On the contrary, he had a wonderfully probing, questing mind and he was remarkably open to new ideas and deeply conscious of his own zones of ignorance...
...I believe that Kennedy has gone way beyond many of his advisors in his concern for a test-ban and in trying to normalize relations with Cuba...
...Is he unable to concede bona fides to an opponent...
...The implication seems to be that Kennedy risked war to win the election...
...And if that failed...
...So long as we have no collective security, this must be done largely with traditional tools of diplomacy...
...but I have not fought the terror of the right to become a victim of selfstyled radicals...
...The self-righteous Mr...
...Swados has paid Mills the high compliment of treating him as a man instead of a monument, and if I disagree with this or that point I know that this remarkable essay is as honest, as brilliant, and as tough-minded as Mills was himself...
...These are not necessarily exclusive perceptions, but as matters of emphasis they do seem to divide many people...
...Deep down, it was because they reminded him of those motorcycle drivers...
...I wish he had gone similarly beyond them last fall, and continue to fear that one reason he did not was politics...
...Our missiles are counterforce...
...theirs, when similarly displayed, are not...
...I hope the day is close when socialists can once again think of themselves as citizens first, and without having to prove it, so that they can be citizen intellectuals, critics, and radicals as well...
...If I did not believe that peace depends on this balance, I would advocate unilateral disarmament which I think is less risky than piecemeal appeasement...
...While the undersigned have their own disagreements and varying emphases in interpreting the Cuban affair, we join in finding the Roger Hagan article on the Cuban crisis incorrect and slanted...
...There is not a glimmer of truth in these imputations...
...but Turkey did not...
...I have never met Mr...
...I indulged myself once in the luxury of associating only with the simon-pure...
...Seek other reasons, of course...
...Hagan, we must point out that he himself draws back more than once before the sense of things he seems to be communicating...
...From the point of view which I have outlined, the propagandistic aim is precisely to destroy patriotic phraseology and to teach the abandonment of all provincial concerns...
...I cannot recall why I was so optimistic about history.] The point is not that the National Security Council consciously contrived a false rationale while pursuing hidden purposes...
...Likewise, Mr...
...While everybody in the West seems to be motivated by the most narrow and selfish cynicism, Khrushchev "staked his reputation on proving that peaceful coexistence is possible," and while Mr...
...We wonder where Mr...
...At least I found it so, in innumerable marathon sessions...
...What Gallup Poll do you read...
...Yet among the men in the top ranks of the Administration, none of them cheap politicians, there is probably not one who could separate out the several kinds of motive and say which most moved him or his chief into what history will probably record as a panic reaction...
...What else can these clumsy formulations be taken to mean but that Mills had lost his critical faculties in relation to the Communist world, that he only wanted "to see for himself" that which would confirm him in his "fascination...
...I find the crisis caused, if we strick to short-term causes, by the Soviets making an irresponsibly dangerous (but not stupid) power play (it was a power play whether or not its intention was to protect Cuba) which failed...
...One may accuse him of being influenced by advisers who think only in terms of power politics...
...One may disagree with the course the President chose, as one of the undersigned specifically did...
...If they find it beneath their charity to observe that in 1960 the President won no Southern state except Georgia with more than 52 per cent of the popular vote, I think they are abandoning the task of the analyst...
...This is a terrible thing to say, but Mr...
...He is, of course, entitled to his dogmas, his hatreds and his reproaches...
...Do Pachter and Plastrik really want to draw their conclusions from such evidence...
...Mills and I talked much about Cuba in those last months...
...Pachter and Plastrik seem impressed by the "amazingly frank disclosures" about the ExCom, as if a narrative of who said what in the "think tank" brings us to the root of the American response to the missile crisis...
...The answer was soon to come, but first, a few more examples of sloppy paraphrasing designed to establish my tendentiousness...
...I apparently find "nothing impeachable in Khrushchev's use of Cuba as an unsinkable carrier...
...With Mr...
...There are surprises in human affairs...
...He says the opponent is immoral and imputes to him motives and a cynicism beneath contempt...
...And yet, in fairness to Mr...
...if they mean "aggressive weaponry for first strike use," the reason why one missile can and another cannot easily be interpreted in this way is that to undertake such a strike demands considerable weapons superiority, and only one side can have that...
...In facing up to the complexities of Mills' personality and accomplishment, as well as to the complexities of their own relationship, Swados has given us a living portrait of a human being who was one of the important men of our times...
...Check it...
...But their letter indicts them of something more serious: of self-indulgence, of permitting themselves an old and wearisome manner of discourse which has done immeasurable harm to socialism in America, starved it of originality and courage, deprived it of a program, and linked it nearly indissolubly with the forces of spurious consensus in American life...
...Hagan is satisfied that his judgment of the situation is grounded in concern for peace while mine, apparently "found nothing to criticize in the American share of precipitating matters," and hence he goes "beyond this obligation to analyze" while I apparently am stuck in the mire of pure political science...
...Swados, he will know better than I. But I believe there are in any case more specifically political and ideological reasons for the character of his essay...
...At one point he acknowledges Kennedy's moderation which he finds in keeping with that American tradition which has kept this country from "tripping over its own feet...
...It was peripheral to the main point, "the real argument begins on page eight...
...This is not to say their pres...
...Far from being irresistibly drawn to it, he was savagely critical of many of its aspects...
...Nor is it, as Mr...
...Hagan do not have the courage to conclude from this premise that we need a system of collective security strong enough to make aggression risky for any power...
...The writers may not be clear on the meaning of counterforce, which is not all bad...
...As I read through the letter of Pach ter and Plastrik it became harder to place our differences on the plane of forthright disagreement...
...The picture of two good minds bending their efforts to this tiresome game is not a pleasant one...
...They wish to establish that my discussion is "slanted...
...DAN WAKEFIELD I wish I could have left Harvey Swados's "Personal Memoir" of C. Wright Mills (Winter 1963) alone...
...I have always been an internationalist and intend to stay so...
...Hagan can muster up considerable indignation in judging Kennedy's actions, it completely fails him when analyzing Khrushchev's strategy...
...Do they believe there would have been the same urgency to those days, that the "hawks" would have been so vociferous or influential, had the Republican party taken the Cuban matter on the President's terms...
...But he should not have allowed them so to blur his vision...
...it will come as a surprise to anyone who talked to him about it that "the Great Leap Forward excited him enormously...
...I do not wish to discuss Mr...
...The article I first sent to DISSENT opened with eight pages describing in detail the President's moderation, his effort to dampen the ardor of the warhawks, and the possible interaction of this with Russian plans and assessments...
...Hagan abuses his right of reply and, in doing so, brings up new material, raises new issues and uses much more space than Plastrik and I had taken to criticize his view...
...It is even sadder that one of the writers, a socialist, found nothing to criticize in the American share of precipitating matters to this pass...
...For others, however, I add the following...
...Political judgment becomes a matter for an adding machine...
...the situation is much too serious to parade lofty feelings and to dispense with hard analysis...
...Then he finds nothing impeach able in Khrushchev's use of Cuba as an unsinkable carrier...
...and whatever else it was that he found attractive there, it was certainly not its technological efficiency...
...EDITOR'S NoTE: It is our custom to allow authors whose articles are criticized to have the last word in reply...
...to ignore it and to substitute for it nothing but the moral conviction that things should be different, is irresponsible...
...Fidel cannot have be lieved that the missiles were simply part of the Soviet force...
...Why, particularly, if you are an editor of DISSENT...
...As he well knew it would, this earned him the bitter reproof of many old friends, for whom such condemnation had been a prime article of political faith, indeed of socialist faith...
...he did fear that the revolution might go sour—but then he had expressed the same kind of fear in Listen Yankee...
...In these convictions, I go much farther than Hagan who merely wants to "strengthen international law and the mechanisms of arbitration...
...though there was also, apparently, the effect on Mills of Castro's assurance that he and his companions had been studying Mills's books in the mountains...
...One is indifferent to "international order, let alone justice and morality" unless he has precisely the shade of Mr...
...the editors took the liberty of dropping the first half of the title), but for tabulators of adjectives, my chosen focus on our government, with regard to which we have at least some rights, responsibilities and powers, was apparently irrelevant...
...There are imaginable, restricted cases which contradict this, and if the writers had read my article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to which I refer more than once in the DISSENT piece, they would have found that practically the only use to which I could imagine the Cuban-based missiles being put in a conflict was a counterforce use, as part of a graded retaliation technique...
...he has given Mills a greater tribute than he would have by taking the easy course of undiluted adulation...
...I know that Mr...
...I cannot imagine that Mills would have expected or wanted anything less...
...It is rash to speculate on what people are driven by, but I think he was driven by much more than discontent and ambition...
...If you find today a climate that is receptive to your conception of pacifism, that is in some part due to us...
...I, on the contrary, think the kind of yielding to pressure which Mr...
...The case Hagan makes out is rather weak...
...Hagan thinks this is a "national interest viewpoint...
...But Mr...
...On the contrary, he starts out by discarding the only evidence which may permit the American public to judge the situation—the amazingly frank disclosures about the ExCom and the deliberations which led to the decision of October 22...
...Hagan thinks he can teach me anything about the difference between "national interest and international order...
...Such a line of argument is irrelevant and self-defeating...
...Why let the yahoos define patriotism...
...Most of them had turned to praise him during the blockade anyway, which left them with little to distinguish themselves at election time...
...Hagan's article any further...
...The hour is much too late to adopt angelic poses, either patriotic or pacifistic...
...Swados, Mills was "egomaniacal and brooding, hearty and homeless, driven by a demon of discontent and ambition," possessed by "utter self-absorption," and so forth...
...I grew puzzled as to why they were at such pains to turn what I said into a crude accusation of cynicism and immorality...
...It is impossible for him to state that he disagrees with a specific move of his government...
...If the most intellectual Administration in our history did not do this, it is fully as disturbing as if it had done it well and acted solely from cynical arguments...
...Swados's piece which requires comment, but this titled, and he would not have wished to claim, immunity from critical considera tion and candid appraisal...
...Hagan's non-conformity to which it is necessary to conform to be respected...
...One may totally reject the entire approach to the balance of power which is characteristic of foreign policy in the atomic age...
...Unfortunately, there is too much in his essay which is inaccurate, offensive and plain nasty not to require rebuttal...
...I was told by the editor to cut this part...
...The consensus is in fact breaking down...
...Since half a year has passed, let me quote the salient lines from my article...
...Whether this has any relevance to Mr...
...and a more significant admission, he acknowledges the desirability of the missiles being removed from Cuba, although, of course, negotiations would be the only acceptable procedure for effecting this...
...There is of course the fact that Mills had a very disturbing effect on many people—his vitality, his intensity, the extraordinary diversity of his skills all seemed to pose a challenge to friends and associates, and so did the recognition he gained in his last year...
...As to international politics, the real issue, and one which I would think the traditional internationalism of socialism would help decide for Pachter and Plastrik, is whether one supposes that international order will or should be estab lished by American superiority, or by strengthening the system of international law and the mechanisms of arbitration...
...and he was distressed by the garbled reports he read of Castro's alleged "I-have-alwaysbeena-Communist" speech...
...Perhaps, appearances notwithstanding, I have more faith in the President, in his capacity for greatness, than those who defend him on grounds of context...
...While I deny having made the precise kind of moral accusations the writers al lege, I also find it sad that they object to the criterion of morality being intro duced into an assessment of a crisis which found top government officials—we know in Washington, presumably similarly in Moscow—ready with packed bags to be flown to deep shelters in Maryland and the Virginia hills while millions waited dumbly in cities for the morning paper...
...The President had by then acted...
...Swados notes, and evidently endorses, attacks on Mills's "unrefined methodology," "his grandiose generalizations," his "gross inaccuracies...
...I cut it out and substituted a mere allusion— a country boy, apparently, in the hands of city slickers...
...There remains the question of how Mr...
...As a friend, former student and research assistant to the late C. Wright Mills, I was deeply moved and gratified to read Harvey Swados' personal memoir of him in DISSENT [Winter, 1963...
...Since I first met Mills in 1954 I have sat many times and for many hours listening to Mills and Swados talk, debate, argue and plan, in the rough and open kind of dialogue that only is possible between two men who have a deep trust and respect for one another...
...who could command such interest and admiration for trashy books, merely because of his magnetic self as—surance...
...I concluded that to a limited degree they could, in connection with emerging doctrines of limited war...
...He is not satisfied with proving Kennedy wrong, he must say he is immoral and even petty...
...theirs, when similarly deployed, are not...
...Hagan would have no case...
...Now I have incurred the moral strictures of some pacifists by saying that no meaningful action for peace can ignore this framework...
...the temptation, especially in grief, is to offer up a one-dimensional eulogy...
...He disqualifies this as "Hollywood" and "fan magazine" treatment...
...We used to proclaim our devotion to peace while looking on when the powers went to war, confident that the war would open the gates of revolution...
...When I say this, Pachter and Plastrik pretend to hear me talking about an explicit tactical decision...
...The same applies to questions of foreign policy, and most urgently to those involving great risk of nuclear war...
...The radical thing today, as always, is to speak the truth and to avoid phraseology...
...But we are not simply concerned with disproving Mr...
...First, and most distasteful, the personal side: according to Mr...
...This raises the question of my "knowledge of human nature or of the the way decisions are made in government...
...It is truly ironic that Mr...
...The point is rather to remind us that the task of intellect is to dispel fog, to clarify and evaluate the sources of action—hopefully in time to affect it...
...he must blow his disagreement up to a morality play...
...Swados also suggests that "in his last months," Mills felt that he had been "terribly wrong" about the Cuban revolution, and that "in his last weeks" he was becoming "more and more impressed with the psychological and intellectual relevance of non-violent resistance and absolute pacifism...
...But in that case, Mr...
...To say that numerable marathon sessions...
...at the time, there was no evidence that Soviet military men thought in such terms...
...Swados can say that Mills was "absolutely sure of his own insights and analysis...
...and though there was too much personal tragedy in his life to make it easy for him to forget his troubles, I did not find him incapable of interest in, and concern for, other people's troubles and problems...
...I regret that he and Mr...
...Hagan does not say that...
...The difficult point to establish is apparently that the international order orientation does not involve a lapse of patriotism...
...As for nonviolence and pacifism, what echoes in my mind is Mills's insistent question: "How can one tell people in Latin America that they should not take up arms...
...This is the most amazing part of his article...
...Survival of regime and party enter into the policy calculus more heavily than some of us would wish...
...Roscoe Drummond later wrote that "the mood of the country has been one of impatience with the apparent indecision of the Administration to act decisively...
...Miliband's communication.—Ed...
...Hagan were saying that I am wrong or stupid...
...Swados speaks of Mills's "fascination with the supposed technological efficiency of totalitarianism": of his "fascination with the totalitarian variety of the global shift to what is called socialism...
...I must laugh at Hagan's presumption to lecture the editors of DISSENT on nonconformism...
...George Gallup wrote later that "just before the President's decision to impose a naval blockade of Cuba, his popularity had slumped to the lowest point recorded by the Gallup Poll since his Inauguration, with 61 per cent of voters approving the way Kennedy was handling his job...
...That did it: "the result (sic) was Listen Yankee...
...I see nothing to defend in this, but much to explain...
...Swados but I have known him as an intelligent and sensitive writer...
...Apparently the old need to discover and isolate Soviet apologists in their own wing of the socialist cause still preoccupies them and takes precedence over their duty to act as citizens...
...Why do they suppose the President has rejected the recommendation of his Civil Rights Commission that federal aid be withheld from Mississippi...
...However, I make no claims about Mills's final views and positions: friends should not behave like greedy priests, claiming last-minute conversion and repentance...
...Frankly I resent being called on to declare my anti-Soviet purity to Pachter and Plastrik or any other exotic products of the peculiar hothouse of sectarian left politics of the past three decades...
...Incidentally, it is quite misleading to conclude that political pressure was negligible from the fact that "the super-patriots were defeated...
...Many changes are needed both inside each country and in their mutual relations before we can proceed to meaningful disarmament, disengagement, substitution of law for power politics...
...Castro needed missiles to defend himself...
...I regret that one is called names if he admits that collective security must be based on sufficient power to prevent arbitrary changes in the present power balance...
...Politics, toughness, a sense of nakedness and mil itary peril, a sense of being tested, silly rage, all were probably mingled into an unanalyzed conviction of the necessity of our action...
...Hagan advocates is the greatest threat to peace...
...a native insurgency shows signs of developing around real issues and acting for real changes...
...Swados suggests, Mills who was uneasy with intellectuals, but precisely "dyed-in-the-wool" intellectuals and academics who felt themselves obscurely threatened by this peculiarly unacademic intellectual...
...But beyond this, I am curious about the writers' shock at the suggestion that with the present Administration questions of morality and humanity might take a back seat to political considerations...
...But this is speaking in general terms...
...but (on page 25) the non-counterforce nuclear power (Russia) tried to spread its ". . . arms to local areas of tension in order to forestall a series of local defeats and humiliations without risking the destruction of its homeland...
...Where Pachter and Plastrik and I may disagree is on the question of whether one has the right to demand independent, "autonomous" judgment of the bearers of final responsibility even beyond what is likely, given surroundings, climate, advisors, quirks of personality, and other elements which suffice for the determinist...
...The article was an attempt to answer the question: aside from political uses, could the missiles in Cuba make any strategic sense...
...First I wish to commend these editors for publishing an article with which they so thoroughly disagree and arguing out their differences in print later...
...Swados, even more simple: "anyone who knew Mills's admiration for the motorcycle drivers could have foreseen his admiration for the successful Cuban guerrillas...
...ence was unimportant in creating a "dosomething" atmosphere...
...The question on which one might honestly disagree is precisely: where must we stop analyzing in order to act meaningfully...
...Poor Mills...
...Hagan's reply, the discussion of his article is now closed...
...The newly-translated Sokolovskii volume of Soviet strategic writings hints they may have been altering during the past two years their views on the possibility of limiting war, but is far from conclusive on this point...
...Meanwhile, I agree with Erich Fromm that recognition of the precarious status quo is a better guarantee of peace than appeasement...
...Since things turned out well, it seems to be assumed that he chose the right risk...
...Nor do I understand how Mr...
...Swados was one such friend...
...He does not stress the overwhelming evidence which rather points in the other direction—that the President had striven, all through September, to minimize the Cuban danger...
...Mr...
Vol. 10 • July 1963 • No. 3
