Prisoner of the South

...The most celebrated case of a Southern prisoner being chosen for the Vice Presidency, of course, was that of Lyndon Johnson, but he has been set free by the untimely death of a President...

...To neutralize Vietnam, as de Gaulle has proposed, would be to deliver Southeast Asia to the Chinese...

...PERSPECTIVES Prisoner of the South By Reinhold Niebuhr Almost everyone agrees that Senator J. William Fulbright offered some wise and much-needed comments on foreign affairs in his speech of March 25...

...Sheer reticence would be preferable to such an obvious evasion of the most important problem of our day in both domestic and foreign policy...

...But Russell could not be President just as Fulbright could not be Secretary of State...

...He has, moreover, committed himself to fulfilling the Kennedy program on civil rights, and now has the opportunity of becoming on his own the first Southern president of modern times...

...His attack on our "myths" in regard to China was likewise in order...

...At any rate, I do not think it is the function of "intellectuals" to measure the ounces of compromise which responsible politicians make to retain their office, or the pounds of compromise which the prisoners of the South must make...

...He had recently been satisfied, he said, that Norway, for example, was quite sympathetic to our handling of our "minority" problem...

...Johnson swallowed his pride, accepted second place and contributed to the victory of the ticket in the South...

...Senator Russell made a notable contribution to the continued authority of the civil government over the military establishment in the MacArthur incident...

...Purists may regret that Fulbright has not declared his independence and sacrificed his high senatorial position...

...Indeed, some of his admirers still regret that he was not appointed Secretary of State at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration...

...This ancient history came to mind again recently when the great hero of the nation was laid to rest in funeral rites of a week's duration...

...Fulbright is thus a prisoner of the South...

...The U.S...

...President Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela, who triumphed over Castro's terrorists when they tried to prevent the democratic election of his successor, would probably agree with Dean Rusk's quite different assessment of the problem...

...Tragedy thus seems the only avenue of emancipation available to Southerners seeking entrance into the national arena...

...Milton Eisenhower's Republican "Crucial Issues" Committee was equally wise and more specific a week later in proposing a treaty revision with Panama...

...On the subject of Cuba, Fulbright was at least partly right in criticizing our "obsession" with that country...

...Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, currently a leader of the Southern filibuster, once vainly aspired to the Presidency...

...Our policy of regarding the Nationalist regime in Formosa as the only true government of China while working to exclude the mainland Chinese from the United Nations has had less and less success, and would now have no success at all if the Sino-Soviet rift had not come to our aid...

...Even the office of Secretary of State is most likely still beyond his reach...

...Yet while the injustices suffered in these two instances are not comparable, we cannot but regret the pathos of the distinguished statesmen who are the political prisoners of the South...

...should be generous in its dealings with Panama and not quibble over words, especially since the 1903 treaty, which established our rights in the Canal Zone, is out-dated and in need of revision...

...is caught in a vacuum in Indochina and cannot get out...

...But who is to say that this sacrifice would have benefitted anybody...

...Our Negro citizens would probably be offended, and rightly so, by the suggestion that this kind of political prison is at all comparable to the ghetto prisons in which they are forced to suffer the vestigial remnants of the institution of slavery...

...He said nothing, however, about our "image" among the emerging nations of Africa...

...But some of us wish that he would not be so pathetically obvious, as he was in a recent television interview when he offered assurances that our race problem did not taint the "image" of the nation among foreigners...

...Fulbright, while obviously disturbed about the situation in Vietnam, said nothing definite on that difficult issue...

...The Senator was again correct in deploring our obsession with military security, our unchallenged defense budgets of $50 billion, and our niggardly approach to foreign aid...

...Many of us are inclined both to pity and to admire Senator Fulbright rather than castigate him...

...And the prospect of Chiang conquering China with an army composed of Formosan conscripts, who neither know nor want the mainland, becomes increasingly ridiculous...

...And he is in a prison that his own native region has constructed itself by its hysterical devotion to the vestigial remnants of the institution of slavery, which the nation as a whole has wisely marked for final extinction...

...Fulbright's candid analysis of these and other issues reminded us, then, that the Chairman of our Senate Foreign Relations Committee is a thoughtful and independent man...

...He has also given evidence of his wisdom on previous occasions...

...There is no chance of the Senator's entering the Presidential lists...

...True, Texas is not the pure South, and the President, when he was Majority Leader, engineered a strong civil rights bill through the Senate in 1957...

...And Fulbright is not the only such prisoner of the South...

...Although he is not a passionate defender of the "Southern way of life," Fulbright labors nonetheless under the necessity of winning elections in Arkansas...

...Indeed, his contribution to our democracy was certainly equal to Fulbright's...

...He will probably remain a pathetic prisoner of Arkansas in the Senate, and one hopes that he will not follow the illustrious Senator George of Georgia in being defeated...

...Southern "liberals" are sometimes nominated for the Vice Presidency, as Senator John Sparkman of Alabama was during Adlai Stevenson's 1952 candidacy...

...The assassination of President Kennedy succeeded in emancipating Johnson from his status as a Southern prisoner...

...He may have been wrong, however, in defining Castro as a "nuisance" rather than a danger...

...He rightly insisted that the U.S...

...He is obviously unhappy about the present filibuster opposing civil rights legislation, but his foreign policy address was actually a contribution to that filibuster...

...He is very likely to carry most of the South, and his victory in the North seems assured...

...But to recall the Senator's history is only to underscore the whole pathos of Fulbright's position as a Southern "Uberai.' He was not appointed to the State Department, we were told, because not only would our own Negro citizens have taken umbrage at his selection but all the African nations would have been disturbed...

...Walter Lippmann was probably right in suggesting that Fulbright's presence in the Senate is worth a few compromises...

...No one in public life had made that point before Fulbright, though it is only fair to say that Dr...

...Kennedy, defying many of his advisers, then offered the Vice Presidency to his defeated opponent...

...The South is proud of its illustrious statesmen, but not proud enough to forgive them if they are only lukewarm in defending their regional interests...

...He is a man whose exceptional abilities were vividly revealed when he chaired the committee which examined President Truman's sacking of General MacArthur...

...His devotion to regional interests—on the race issue as well as on such matters as Federal rates for gas and oil—must be demonstrated to the voters back home, or at least not seriously challenged...

...Johnson, of course, was defeated for the Presidential nomination by the young Senator Kennedy, and the most likely reason for that defeat was the Democratic party's fear that Johnson could not carry the Northern states with their strong Negro minorities...

...This is a long historical way from the case of Senator Fulbright...

...One speculates about the inner meditations which occurred in Johnson's soul, not only when he was offered the choice of the Vice Presidency but after that awful tragedy in November...