Responsibility and the Critic

...Clearly any further assertions by Freedom House, or those who signed its appeal for responsible debate would be dismissed by Morgenthau as a further surrender to power and obvious betrayal of "truth...

...He can play with truth, deform and discard it at his whim...

...The powers-that-be concern themselves with the voice of truth...

...Another question to Morgenthau: If even the President in our society "cannot still the voice of truth" as you said in the New Republic, do you really believe that Freedom House can, as you said in The New Leader...

...in his pursuit of power, the politician at best will use truth as a means to his ends...

...The same thing was said in a different context by naacp Executive Director Roy Wilkins when he repudiated the "Black Power" concept, without invalidating for a moment his position as a critic of a social order that permits discrimination and segregation to exist...

...Both President Nyerere and the Times yield nothing to Morgenthau in their disapproval of the American role in Vietnam, but they are much readier to recognize that unprincipled means cannot achieve principled ends...

...This Morgenthau doctrine conveys three things that seem to me to mark the nadir in this discussion...

...Frankly, we did not have the good Professor in mind when the Freedom House statement was prepared...

...Is it in the service of truth to urge responsible and fair debate when Fascism is the enemy, and in the service of power when Communist aggression is involved...

...I do object to my name being so used...

...Others have found it possible to oppose American actions in Vietnam without resorting to terms like "indiscriminate killing...

...Or do we still not understand it...

...Then it heard one of Morgenthau's associates make the statement that everything that was wrong in Vietnam was entirely and exclusively the fault of the United States...

...He has simply transferred their aims and objectives to the nation's leaders, contemptuous of the fact that Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson have all resisted such proposals as stoutly as has Morgenthau himself...

...Targets of air and ground action have always been, and still are, selected to avoid civilians as much as possible...

...If government rewards are ineffective against one group of intellectuals, is it in the service of truth to suggest that all have been raped...

...The equally critical New York Times has gone even farther, calling the whole charge "Communist propaganda," and warning against "sweeping deductions and false conclusions . . . that Americans are deliberately murdering civilians...

...To avoid this, as well as to make dissent more meaningful, responsible critics of Administration policy were urged to dissociate themselves from such wild charges as "genocide," "white man's race war against colored peoples," etc...

...This statement is demonstrably untrue...

...Indeed, my own association with him over the years would have led me to expect not that he would discontinue his sharp criticism of U.S...

...The following quotations are not only in context, but their sequence has also been preserved: "The intellectual seeks truth...

...Morgenthau's facts and how he interprets them, his conclusions and recommendations and how others exploit them, and his conduct on behalf of his own case, these are all subject to the scrutiny of his critics...

...And might not these totals of assent and dissent make hash of Morgenthau's thesis that dissent is silenced?that Freedom House's plea for responsibility is limiting free debate...

...That is bad enough...

...Two sentences further on he says "members of the Armed Forces who would rather be relieved of their command or court-martialed than be responsible for indiscriminately killing civilians . . . are the real moral heroes of this war...

...Freedom House can no more limit free speech or establish political orthodoxy than it can plan the economy or operate the railroads...

...What he [the intellectual] has to say about politics may have political consequences, which he may welcome or deplore as the case may be...

...they never are in any war...

...One cannot help feeling that such a misreading is not a scholar's analysis of American war policy, but an expression of the author's self-confessed vendetta with the policy-makers...

...But it is he, not we, who has chosen his present colleagues...

...Morgenthau has only to ask the bomber pilots to discover how much this selectivity restricts them...

...In his search for the truth, the ideal type of intellectual is oblivious to power...

...Freedom House asks that reasonable critics dissociate themselves from the merchants of fantasy...

...They are indiscriminate killers or their accessories...

...Truth is not the consistent visitor to the campus any more than to the White House...

...Then he not only claims the right of free speech to make such charges (which I do not dispute), but also claims immunity under the same right from any counter-dissent that his charges are irresponsible...

...But to say that they have no effect is to ignore the plain facts of the case...

...Not for one moment do we doubt Professor Morgenthau's democratic convictions...

...Morgenthau, of course, has an inalienable right to dissent from American policy (as the Freedom House statement very carefully points out), and in any way he chooses...

...Then, when he is told he is succeeding, he protests that his influence applies only to his listeners in Washington and not to those in Hanoi or Peking...

...If he doesn't know this, he hasn't bothered to read the papers for the past year or more: The question has been and continues to be the subject of hot public debate...

...Morgenthau says, "I know of no proposition of this kind put forward in connection with the war in Vietnam...

...And what, finally, can be said of the scholar who invokes "truth" not only to make the same kind of low-level attacks on the man in today's White House and his policies, but also to shield himself from any answering disapprobation...

...To understand the real nature and depth of this accusation, however, it is necessary to examine both the argumentation he offers in his New Leader article and his much longer and more far-reaching thrust in the New Republic of last November 26...

...If the latter, what is the attribute????monetary, social or psychological????which distinguishes these intellectuals from their colleagues in political science or history...

...That is not the last use of "indiscriminate killing" by Morgenthau, nor perhaps the worst...

...Whatever Freedom House had to say about those extremes it said in the statement signed by those Morgenthau identifies as "among my friends...

...Was Freedom House serving truth or power when it urged support of England in 1940, opposed the Communist seizure of Korea in 1950, and the butchery of a free government in Budapest in 1956...

...Or does this somehow only become a disservice to free debate when Communist ambitions are exposed, Communist purposes opposed...

...He has only to look across the 17th parallel at North Vietnam, or across the 38th at North Korea, or at mainland China, Soviet Russia or half a dozen other countries...

...Yet, the truth-seeking historian would have been compelled to recall, as Perkins and Van Deusen did in 1962: "It was the smart thing for intellectuals in general and writers in particular to hold the President up to ridicule, thereby proving that they themselves were sophisticated...

...the politician, power...

...On this business of "truth," we must confess larger reservations than those that seem to cloud the Professor's vision...

...His right to do this is protected by the First Amendment, and properly so...

...No one has practiced the arts of dissent more fully or been welcomed into more newspapers and before more forums, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, than Morgenthau...

...Morgenthau now insists that the Freedom House statement "effectively limits free speech...

...In fact, it is almost standard procedure for responsible critics to repudiate their irresponsible allies at some necessary point in all contemporary debate on major issues...

...First, it suggests to any young man in or not yet in uniform that his duty to morality is to get out or stay out...

...Now there...

...Abraham Lincoln combineu a commitment to power and a dedication to truth, crowned with political success, of which history knows W ~ther instance...

...The Freedom House statement warned against the fantasy that military service was an option a young man could decide for himself...

...but many of them have looked forward to the experience and are enjoying it...

...What is truly extraordinary is Morgenthau's casual dismissal of that judgment...

...Was Freedom House limiting free debate when, for seven years, its officers sought to expose the extremist demagogy of Joseph McCarthy, suggesting that he was serving the Soviet Union and betraying American lives and purpose with his false accusations...

...A few questions to him, therefore, may better serve the cause of truth...

...It tends to be attracted to those places which respect the assembly of complex facts and the assessment of complex forces, governmental and scholastic...

...It is difficult not to be in agreement with Morgenthau's view of Abraham Lincoln...

...With this fact firmly in mind, let us look at the Professor's description of the struggle in Vietnam as part of an "ideological war in which we |the United States] consider 'legitimate' only those aspirations that are anti-Communist...

...his reiteration of his long-held "realist" argument that national leaders everywhere are guided solely by narrow, raw power considerations, and not by what "some Americans may or may not say about the policies of their government...

...The intellectuals of America have indeed been raped...

...This is serious...

...If one examines, for instance, the lists of intellectuals who have gone on record against the war in Vietnam, one is struck by the relative paucity of political scientists...

...Say that Freedom House is mistaking your sincerely-held convictions for lack of self-control, but don't pretend that self-control has no place in a free society's dialogues beyond the libel laws...

...Morgenthau might consider the words of President Nyerere of Tanzania: "Lord Russell may not object to his name being used for other people's purposes...

...All of these invidious charges have one thing in common: They convey the assurance that every fault and failure, every evil purpose is the exclusive burden of Washington...

...Morgenthau is entitled to insist that the Communists make war according to his rules, but this places him in curious position...

...If these weapons hurt, it is not because Freedom House possesses any power to impose orthodoxy through totalitarian instruments of punishment, but because the ideas advanced have found their mark in his own vulnerabilities...

...Freedom House's attack on extremists is impermissible, the Professor says, because it puts them on the moral defensive and any argument which seeks to call them to account morally limits free debate...

...for it puts power on the intellectual and moral defensive...

...We know him to be as determinately anti-Communist and anti-Fascist as any of the members of the Freedom House Board...

...Now let us take up????and dissect????still another point raised by Morgenthau: the role the dissenter occupies, considered apart from the substance of what he says...

...Signed by 145 prominent Americans, the statement especially warned that extreme attacks on national policies and leaders might well delude Hanoi and its allies as to the true state of American public opinion, leading them to delay negotiations in the hope of an American withdrawal...

...Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, a critic no less than Morgenthau...

...Not only is this to dismiss what a substantial body of his fellow specialists of all shades of opinion on the war hold, but it is also to disregard what Communist "liberation warfare" managers, from Mao Tse-tung to Vo Nguyen Giap have repeatedly told us...

...No one's beliefs are protected, beyond their holder's right to express them freely...

...It is even more astonishing to be told that Freedom House is in fact emulating "the governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...Deception—deception of others and of self????is inseparable from the exercise ot power...

...He should either produce evidence that such orders to "obliterate" the traditional distinctions between combatants and non-combatants have been given, or publicly retract this slander against the Armed Forces and their commanders...

...A global audience listened because this was "big-name" debate...

...For precisely that reason we urge now, and have always urged, that responsible advocates and critics of any policy distinguish their positions from the views of the knaves and fools who always cluster at each extreme...

...It is astonishing, therefore, to read that "The Freedom House document . . . effectively limits free speech . . . [and] is trying to establish a political orthodoxy with regard to our policies in Vietnam...

...oriented purposes of Bettina Aptheker, or the "war crimes" trial in which Bertrand Russell sits as prosecutor, judge, jury, bailiff and broadcaster, we can only conclude that our shaft, more narrowly aimed, quite properly found a wider mark...

...The Professor could serve "truth" no better at this point than to join the Senator and the newspaper in their demarche for responsibility...

...Come now, Professor Morgenthau, face up to what you are doing, to all the consequences...

...I also object to a serious matter like the Vietnam situation being dealt with by trickery and dishonesty...

...But these consequences are a mere by-product, hoped but not worked for, of his search for the truth...

...Morgenthau had an opportunity to take a similar stand when he was the leading opposition speaker at the first of the big "teach-ins" at Washington in May 1965...

...It is the heart and soul of those dialogues, the free man's voluntary discipline which has replaced the one imposed by the tyrant...

...Instead, he responds with hurt and surprise that he is being asked to make them...

...Since nowhere in his response to the Freedom House statement does Morgenthau find the slightest flaw in the racist posturings of Stokely Carmichael, the partyLeo Cherne, a long-time contributor to these pages, is chairman of the Executive Committee of Freedom House...

...Neither the fact that Morgenthau agrees with the most extreme characterizations of American policy, nor the fact that he wraps his academic authority around the shoulders of the draft-card burners would merit this rejoinder...

...As the Professor concedes in passing...

...Take the credit due you for "getting through," but don't try to legislate whom you are getting through to...

...Conversely, truth, by unmasking the pretensions of power, at the very least, disturbs the powers that-be...

...But there is one thing he cannot do: he cannot still the voice of truth...

...Like this one...

...It does not, like a faithful parakeet, perch on the carriage of the critics' typewriter more readily than it sits on the end of the speechwriter's pen...

...Other factors explain this reply to the Professor and its occasionally acerb tone...

...Second, it tells all the others who don the uniform and serve that they are the opposites of "moral heroes" ????that is, they are immoral villains...

...It appears that here Morgenthau has allowed himself to be blown far afield by the wind of his own rhetoric...

...His defense will be that this war kills indiscriminately, and his authority is Hans Morgenthau...

...These precautions, to be sure, are not entirely successful...

...Might not accurate totals of these pro and con expressions even have suggested that status on the campus is a far more prestigious lever than a soiree in the White House...

...To paraphrase Talleyrand, "He is intolerable, but that is his only fault...

...First, he makes a criticism of American policies which I can only label untrue, unjust and patently extremist...

...Or is it not possible that their own pursuit of truth in the context of their own academic discipline leads them to a view contrary to Morgenthau's...

...I am tempted to conclude, therefore, that what really stung Morgenthau was not any threat the statement posed to his opportunities to criticize, but its reminder that his criticisms????when they take the extreme forms quoted above????may be helping to prolong the war...

...As he himself remarks about the enemy, "As long as it thinks it can win or get better peace terms by continuing the war, it will go on fighting...

...The President of the United States can do almost anything...

...the Administration has tried to discredit, silence and corrupt, and it has in good measure succeeded with the support of the intellectuals themselves...

...What he finds "extraordinary" is the Freedom House judgment that those expectations are heavily influenced by the way Communist conflict managers read the state of American public opinion...

...Your article of January 2 shows how urgently it is needed...

...in four different ways: they can heed, silence, discredit, or corrupt it...

...Morgenthau allowed that to pass unchallenged...

...To imply, as Morgenthau does in using the word "indiscriminate," that the precautions are no longer even being attempted is a startling accusation...

...All are examples of "aspirations" the United States considered "legitimate" enough to leave undisturbed????except when they turned into aggression...

...If the names of few political scientists appear on public statements opposed to our presence in Vietnam, does this suggest they have "sold out...

...He is free to think and say the worst about that policy and the men who make and manage it...

...foreign policy, but that his scholarship would recoil from these extremist diatribes if only to preserve the integrity of his own view and effectiveness of his own posture...

...Morgenthau's actual adversaries are those other critics of American policy, the ones who do demand an ideological war, and who do urge an all-out war of rollback against all Communist regimes...

...Ground soldiers often risk and sometimes meet death because they did not fire on innocent-seeming civilians...

...now, think it largely accurate????even when sentiment and our enormous debt to the martyred President are put aside...

...He has mounted his nation's leading platforms for the express purpose of influencing, and has done everything possible to influence...

...THINKING ALOUD Responsibility and the Critic By Leo Cherne The Freedom House statement on Vietnam that was the object of a vigorous attack by Hans j. Morgenthau ("Thinking Aloud," NL, January 2), urged those debating the American involvement in Vietnam to avoid the false, irresponsible and corrosive criticisms characteristic of the simple-minded extremes...

...This is as untrue as his charge of ideological warfare, and far more vicious...

...They did not intend it that way, he says, but the war has "degenerated" into killing of everyone, guerrilla and non-guerrilla alike...

...has said that he would reject the "indiscriminate" charge...

...Indeed, many mercilessly berated him calling him such names as 'a half-witted usurper,' 'a simple Susan," 'a baboon' and 'the head ghoul of Washington.' " Does this last characterization of Lincoln seem reminiscent of those charming lines some extremists love to engrave on their campus placards: "Hey, hey, LBJ—How many kids did you kill today...

...If the shoe fits Morgenthau, there is no reason to redesign it, even if the last was fashioned by friendly hands...

...The only weapons used by Freedom House in the arena of debate are precisely the same as Morgenthau's????words on paper and in speech...

...These hitand-run tactics, if unchallenged, make a shambles of rational debate on the war and turn the debating rostrum into a privileged sanctuary for the wreckers...

...Nor does it seek to have the government or anyone else do these things...

...Morgenthau complains, "if my advice had been followed there would be no war in Vietnam today, and our interests in Southeast Asia would be the better for it...

...If he is conscious that such distinctions between responsible and irresponsible dissent are being made every day, he chose to ignore them then, and has continued to ignore them to this day...

...Indeed, might not such totals have revealed that substantially larger resources are available to those who oppose our policy than to those who approve it...

...In that 7,000-word essay entitled "Truth and Responsibility," Morgenthau variously accuses the government, the media, and particularly the intellectuals of betraying truth, intelligent debate, even freedom itself...

...Is it desirable and enlarging to the debate if the moral purpose of the advocates of policy is questioned, but damnable and restrictive if the critics are subjected to the same moral scrutiny...

...Did he fail to total the number of ads opposed to our Vietnam policy as against the handful, like Freedom House's, in essential support because this would have exploded his claim that the government has "bought" so many scholars...

...Aside from formal contractual relations with which the government is able to keep large segments of the academic community silent or render them subservient, the government disposes of a whole gamut of professional and social rewards...

...This is exactly what Morgenthau has done in his New Leader article...

...This brings me to Morgenthau's other major accusation: that the American forces are waging a war of "indiscriminate killing" in Vietnam...

...every virtue, all the heroic and sublime attributes properly describe Vietnamese Communist actions and aspirations...

...To cite one instance virtually parallel to this one, the heads of four African governments have resigned as sponsors of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation because of what the New York Times called its "grotesque plan" for an "International War Crimes Tribunal" to "try" President Johnson for his Vietnam policies...

...But nothing in law or custom protects his remarks from counter-dissent, nor by any stretch of the imagination docs Morgenthau or anyone else possess the additional right to determine what his critics may or may not say...

...Third, it tells all the civilians who, like myself, support American military activity in Vietnam that we too are immoral villains...

...Furthermore, it questions the purposes and processes of power and thereby endangers the very framework within which power operates...

...Such a position falls of its own weight...

...Is there a reason, in the service of truth, which led Professor Morgenthau to ignore the large number of "intellectuals" opposed to our Vietnam policy...

...Your former students do remain confused on this point...

...Since the preponderance of academics whose names are attached to full-page advertisements urging our withdrawal from Vietnam are not political scientists, does this suggest that fewer government research contracts are awarded to psychologists, engineers, sociologists, or is it that they more effectively resist seduction...

...others have been among my students...

...It is not an unreasonable demand, nor is it an unheard-of one...

...Then, Professor, what is there which sustains debate when the scholar puts power on the intellectual and moral defensive...

...In the service of the responsibility we seek, we wish no misunderstanding...

...As far as he is concerned, the entire war is solely the result of the "personal shortcomings of the policy-makers," and he has not scrupled to hang garments of his own fabrication on their effigies...