The Politics of Actionism
OVERSTREET, HARRY A.
The Politics of Actionism FREEDOM AND FOREIGN POLICY By Thomas J. Dodd Bookmailer. 325 pp. $5.50. Reviewed by HARRY A. OVERSTREET Author, "The Mature Mind"; co-author, "The War...
...but it is equally certain that we face a far greater danger if we do nothing at all...
...nevertheless, they are speeches, and like all alerting communications, they call for the follow-up of more extended consideration...
...Speeches are always subject to a difficult limitation: They must take account of the attention-span of a listening audience...
...By their nature, then, they are precluded from unraveling the full complexity of the matters with which they deal...
...Most incredible of all, it did not warn the Kremlin that "any new attempt to intervene in Hungary would have the gravest repercussions...
...Yet it hardly makes sense to believe that a public servant who is intrinsically generous on the home front suddenly turns reactionary when he looks across the ocean...
...I say that we cannot defend freedom if we limit it to mean only our own freedom...
...No one who has followed the record of the Democratic Senator from Connecticut can question his liberal position on domestic matters...
...I say that if we declare peace with the tyrants, morally we are declaring war on their victims...
...The best antidote to nuclear paralysis I have discovered can be found in two of Dodd's speeches reproduced here...
...co-author, "The War Called Peace," "What We Must Know About Communism" In a peculiar way, Thomas J. Dodd is a test figure among us...
...His warning words tell of grave mistakes the U.S...
...Senator Dodd's power to cut through complexity to the nerve centers of issues makes his speeches masterpieces of analysis...
...They contain warning and guiding words that have come out of long experience with the most explosive issues of our time...
...He reminds us, for example, that when the Berlin frontier was sealed in August 1961, it took Washington three whole days to make even a mild diplomatic protest...
...What was most disconcerting was that we had apparently learned nothing from our worried indecisiveness during the Hungarian Revolution, when we had similarly been caught unprepared...
...According to Dodd, not only did the U.S...
...the second to the United States Senate ("The Berlin Wall: The Imperative Need for Action...
...And, for a more recent example, it was Dodd who this summer introduced a bill to prohibit racial and religious discrimination in employment in the District of Columbia...
...There is no doubt, of course, that we face danger if we do anything whatever in freedom's behalf...
...In America today the nuclear threat has seemed to effect a kind of paralysis of mind and will...
...leave undone things it should have done...
...Among other things, Washington failed to accept at once the government of Imre Nagy as the legitimate government of Hungary...
...it did at least one thing that, in the light of what even then we knew about Communists, seems unthinkable...
...This book, mainly a collection of the Senator's speeches, demonstrates that his basic philosophy is not reactionism but actionism-informed alertness in behalf of a freedom that is in imminent danger of being lost by default...
...This is the job the Senator passes on to us: to think through with a determined thoroughness the vital issues which now confront the country...
...In almost so many words, President Eisenhower assured the Kremlin that we looked upon Eastern Europe as its legitimate sphere of influence and that we had no intention of interfering...
...It is worth remembering, for instance, that in the difficult days of the 1950s the Senator, a Catholic, went on the air three times to condemn the practices of Joseph McCarthy...
...Dodd learned the worst about Nazi tyranny when he took part in the Nuremberg war crimes trials: he has learned the worst about Communist tyranny through his work on the Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees...
...For resoluteness, he says, we substituted "pious declarations of sympathy...
...The satellite empire was seething with discontent...
...It also failed to insist on the immediate dispatch of a corps of UN observers...
...has made in Korea, Laos, Cuba, British Guiana, Berlin and other parts of the world...
...Evidently the U.S...
...The U.S., Dodd believes, is now suffering the consequences of its double unpreparedness...
...The first was made in Manila to the Asian People's Anti-Communist League ("Southeast Asia: The Dangers of Appeasement...
...When Dodd spoke to the Southeast Asians, he in effect asked them not to forget the past...
...Those who argu?« for a d?©tente with the Kremlin, he said, are urging that for the sake of preserving our own skins, we forget the agony of the hundreds of millions enslaved by Communism...
...had made no plans to meet such a contingency...
...There are 17 other notable speeches in this volume, plus a committee memorandum and an article, but these two speeches are particularly significant...
...Curiously, in some circles the Senator is automatically branded as a reactionary in foreign affairs...
...There would, I venture to say, have been no Berlin crisis at all, had we followed the course of resoluteness in Hungary...
...I say that we cannot forget their agony...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 21
