Correspondents' Correspondence
RUSSETT, DONALD KIRK \ PAUL WALDO SCHWARTZ \ ELIAHU SALPETER \ BRUCE M.
BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The Decline of a City SAIGON—A friend who recently visited here remarked that nothing...
...But when the armored phalanx advanced to meet the challenge, they instantly broke into flight down the boulevard...
...This tawdry neighborhood, with its hundreds of bars and brothels, had begun to flower when I arrived in 1965, and continued to expand throughout the war...
...There were good reasons for this feeling of confidence beyond mere sentimentality...
...In the latest survey, 59 per cent of those who had been to college wanted to decrease the Pentagon's allowance, as compared with 47 per cent of those with only high school or grade school educations...
...military preparedness...
...Well, you know, it's revolutionary...
...Indeed, this violent pseudorevolution might almost be called street theater, except that the blood wasn't catsup...
...Mrs...
...police: murderers...
...The Israeli Prime Minister and her entourage threw themselves into a behind-the-scenes struggle, and within two days succeeded in transforming the proposed resolution entirely...
...Already present was a two-man "guest" delegation from Egypt's Arab Socialist Union...
...Perhaps all's well that ends well, but the Helsinki International proved an especially bitter experience for veteran Socialist Golda Meir...
...There also seem to be more beggars on the street now...
...it has helped enhance the prestige of Social Democracy in the developing countries through rural cooperatives, trade union seminars, labor youth movements, and workers' health insurance programs...
...They began to chant...
...Antimilitary feeling is therefore concentrated in that part of the populace most likely to vote, to express its opinions, to make campaign contributions, and to participate in some form of organized political activity...
...in the light of the flames they very much resembled a century-old engraving of the Communards...
...Like so many Gis during their first hours "in-country," I wondered if I would hear the burst of machinegun fire and the roar of exploding plastique as we wound our way through the darkened streets to the heart of the city...
...Meir's next shock was the draft resolution on the Middle East waiting at her Hotel Marski suite...
...People often ask mc how I think the war will end and what the future of Saigon will be...
...BRUCE M. RUSSETT...
...The insurrectionaries made the first move, taking a few provocative steps...
...The cops launched a volley of tear-gas grenades, then came to a halt...
...After all, Israel is the only Middle East nation with a flourishing trade union movement and democratic labor party...
...it boasts the world's longest uninterrupted rule by a freely elected labor government...
...This development apparently is the legacy of what the public regards as ill-considered and often politically motivated acts by the defense establishment: Vietnam, unneeded abms, pork-barrel defense contracting, and gross cost overruns seem to have taken their toll...
...There I was surrounded by a flock of little street boys, some begging, others hawking peanuts and newspapers...
...For one thing, there seem to be considerably more street boys than when I first got here...
...The whole show was replayed sporadically during the subsequent week, but the best attended performance of all took place the following Saturday night...
...It's a kind of game...
...Israel always felt it could count on the friendship and support of the Social Democratic community...
...More revealing than the findings themselves, however, is the extent to which the current climate represents a revolutionary departure from the opinions of the past three decades...
...Police: fascists...
...Not, however, the residents of rue Xavier Privas, where a bonfire raged perilously close to the buildings on either side of the narrow thoroughfare...
...Yet this was attributed to their fear of offending the bear across the border—or, in the case of some Israeli correspondents, to the Presidential ambitions of Finnish Foreign Minister Vaino Leskinen...
...French-built apartment houses, shops and offices still give the street its character, and the number of bars and nightclubs has not appreciably increased...
...May gave little promise of memorable political action...
...Now it is precisely among the highly educated that the sentiment against Defense Department expenditures runs strongest...
...While I soon moved out of the Royal, I have often revisited that street to revive myself with the strong coffee served at Brodard's corner cafe...
...Congressmen and opinion leaders are beginning to demand firm evidence of the strategic, ecological and economic soundness of military projects, and advocates of greater military spending will find themselves hard-pressed to make defense defensible...
...Flames rose 10 feet into the night, tear gas fogged the air, heads were broken: Yet each morning-after the Latin Quarter streets were peaceful and the newspapers silent...
...The demonstrators were gathered some yards away...
...Past Socialist Internationals had been like family reunions for the Israelis?faces in the various delegations changed, but relations remained warm—and they looked forward to last month's gathering in Helsinki...
...When asked whether "we are spending too little, too much, or about the right amount," 46-53 per cent have answered, "too much" (the figure for the most recent poll was 50 per cent...
...The riot police, bearing shields, masks and helmets, quickly massed at one end of the boulevard, Roman Legion-style...
...This formalized game of tease-and-flee was repeated several times...
...The version finally brought out of committee called for a negotiated peace, restriction of the Mideast arms race (or at least maintenance of the military balance), and other such recommendations...
...That country's sole legal political organization, it has about as much in common with Democratic Socialism as the German National Socialist party of 40 years ago—or the Soviet Communist party today...
...Then one Saturday night late in the month a group of demonstrators lit a massive bonfire of cartons and papers in the middle of the Boulevard Saint Michel...
...Although it is now starting to decay as American troops withdraw, the Tansonnhut area will probably preserve its garish ugliness long after the last combat forces go home...
...An inquiring American tourist was told, "It's a demonstration...
...South Vietnamese, many of them refugees from surrounding provinces, will overpopulate buildings once inhabited by Americans...
...Although 1971 is the centenary of the Paris Commune...
...in fact, it didn't even make the newspapers...
...So far as I know, no one—least of all American officials and contractors, who live in air-conditioned villas protected by guards and barbed wire—has given a moment's thought to restoring the squalid corners of Saigon to their prewar condition...
...Even in segments of the population favorably disposed to the military, the proportion willing to cut the military budget remains high: 37 per cent among Southerners, 40 among Republicans, 46 among people over 50 years old...
...I remember arriving by plane from Hong Kong on a monsoon night and riding in from the airport with a French photographer and a Taiwanese reporter...
...Civilian contractors and military advisers?not to mention arvn soldiers—will keep some of the nightclubs in business...
...The street boys are still there, seemingly ageless, though they must be the younger brothers and cousins of those I saw that first night...
...The paupers and peddlers of six years ago have grown up into today's "Saigon cowboys," who roar around town on their Hondas and Suzukis...
...The time when a President had only to ask to get a new weapons system is over...
...The most acute deterioration, however, is evident on the northern fringes of the city, near Tansonnhut Air Base...
...All I can say, after six years, is that I don't have the faintest idea...
...Spectators began darting into side streets, and many who had originally been hostile to the demonstrators were shifting their sympathies...
...The decay has inevitably stirred up popular anti-Americanism...
...I just know it's time I got out of town.—DONALD KIRK Revolutionary Play PARIS—The bloody uprising that took place here last month is unlikely to make the history books...
...And gangs of pickpockets and black-market moneychangers regularly harass pedestrians...
...Chinese contractors, hoping to make quick wartime profits, have recently built a series of unsightly cement-block structures, whose flat lines clash with the ornate style of the older buildings...
...Saigon cowboys, most of them draft dodgers, brazenly grab radios and cameras from passing Americans, slit open their pockets and slip the watches off their wrists...
...Certainly the number of motorscooters, with their trail of exhaust fumes, has increased at least tenfold...
...Beginning in the late 1930s, questions similar to the one cited were asked regularly by several national polling organizations...
...Sponsored by several Scandinavian delegations, it would have met with hearty approval at a conclave in Cairo or Amman...
...In 22 such surveys the portion of the population wishing to reduce military spending never exceeded 35 per cent, and most often totaled less than 20 per cent...
...one-legged war veterans hobble along the sidewalks, asking alms from foreigners and demanding protection money from bar owners...
...And its long-range effects on Israel's relations with the Social Democratic family may be greater than first reactions have indicated.—ELIAHU SALPETER Deflating the Military NEW HAVEN—Five nationwide surveys taken by the American Institute of Public Opinion between December 1968 and March 1971 have found approximately half the voting-age population ready to reduce American military expenditures...
...The Israelis were appalled to find that their Finnish hosts had invited the Cairo officials, and even more distressed that the other delegations did not protest...
...Soon the American was confidently explaining the situation to another tourist...
...The number replying "too little" has ranged from 6-20 per cent (the latest figure being 11 per cent...
...The Finnish foreign minister called a press conference to denounce Eliav's speech urging the Soviet Union to end its persecution of Jews and grant them the right to emigrate...
...As someone in the crowd explained, "The movies cost money, the nightclubs are expensive, but the police are free...
...The police moved in with clubs and without mercy: Any head would do...
...But the trip was quiet, until I was let off at the Hotel Royal...
...PAUL WALDO SCHWARTZ Socialist Family Feud TEL AVIV—Although in recent years a few Socialist governments have criticized its foreign policy...
...Yet even Tu Do has sulTercd...
...In the pre-World War II isolationist period and during the cold war, the better-educated were the staunchest supporters of U.S...
...and kept up their cry until the patrol wagons had a chance to wheel in from the headquarters just across the Seine...
...A kind of nostalgic replay of the 1968 revolt, the latest version was unrelated to current issues, unarticu-latcd in its motives, futile in terms of any practical objectives...
...You march down the street, and when they come toward you...
...And the Finnish delegation spent two more days in futile efforts to prevent adoption of the revised Middle East resolution...
...Sai-gonese were never particularly fond of Americans, always seeing us primarily in terms of how much money they could make from our presence...
...American aid officials may view the paving and widening of some streets as "progress," but such improvements have spoiled the appearance of a neighborhood that once exuded old French charm...
...Several minutes later, though, the tourist was himself a casualty...
...No one viewed it as the preliminary to a full-fledged attack at the conference...
...For a time both sides remained immobile...
...The distribution of today's opposition is as unprecedented as its scope...
...The Decline of a City SAIGON—A friend who recently visited here remarked that nothing had really changed since he first passed through about five years ago...
...Yes, but for what...
...True, the Finns had indicated they would prefer not to have any resolution condemning Soviet repression of Jewish national rights...
...The trees that once lined the downtown area were said to be dying off because of the soot, and most of them have been cut down...
...It is hard to determine the greater evil, our coming here in the first place or our leaving before we have solved the problems we thought could be overcome with blood and dollars...
...Now that I'm about to leave the city, uncertain if I will ever return, I have begun sorting out my own impressions...
...But upon arriving in Helsinki, the Israeli delegation—led by Prime Minister Golda Meir and Labor party Secretary General Arie Eliav —was confronted by an unmistakable sign of what lay ahead...
...combat troops in 1965,1 understood his reaction, though I couldn't really agree with him...
...Tu Do street, in the center of the city, continues to be dominated by the cathedral Graham Greene has described as "hideous," but which I always found rather charming...
...The sense that nothing has changed downtown is deceptive...
...Now that we're going home, they arc more inclined than ever to maKc insulting remarks, to throw rocks and to rob gis...
...The unpleasantness was not over, however...
...It is ironic that the Vietcong have inflicted so little lasting damage on Saigon, and the Americans so much...
...Yet those who welcome this new mood would be wise to restrain their joy, for public opposition to defense spending could become nearly as un-discriminating as was past approval...
...As one who has been in and out of Saigon for varying periods of time beginning with the introduction of U.S...
...The remarkable stability of the pollsters' results since the end of 1968 reinforces the view that a fundamental change has taken place in the American attitude toward national defense policy...
...When military programs are truly necessary for American security, it may be difficult to persuade the people—or its legislative representatives—to pay for them...
Vol. 54 • June 1971 • No. 13
