Dear Editor
Dear Editor Bell-Glazer Daniel Bell and I have at times disagreed. But I have not a trace of disagreement with the article by him and Nathan Glazer. "The Shame of Richard Nixon" (NL. January 22)....
...In the light of the Vietnam debacle, isn't it about time that the liberal Democrats in Congress, The New Leader writers of the early '50s and myself as well display some inwardly-directed anger that we all take off our liberal costumes, put on sackcloth and ashes and for an hour a year walk the streets, tinkle a little bell and shout "Unclean...
...The aim, they assert, was to bring North Vietnam back to the negotiating tables, but the means chosen were entirely disproportionate to this end...
...Unclean...
...New York City Harold Rosenberg The points raised by Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer in their article deserve wide attention and comment...
...had no choice, therefore, but to show its fangs...
...During the '20s and '30s The New Leader did a careful and necessary job of e\posing the accounts of many tourists and reporters who visited Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, bringing back stories of how democratic those regimes were: People in regional costumes danced before and "sat in parliaments in Moscow and Berlin with joy and freedom...
...Looking back over my file of articles by David Dallin...
...But anger is only useful when you are partially angry with yourself, and since I am a Democrat who didn't vote for Nixon I feel nothing is gained by such outbursts of indignation...
...A full measure of blame for this crisis lies with Congress, for abdicating its responsibilities to the Executive in the first place...
...One expects more sense from Harvard professors...
...Any other course of action, particularly the resumption of discussions on Communist terms, would have amounted to some form of veiled surrender, the denial of everything wo have been fighting for over the past 10 years...
...In view of the inherent malevolence of the Nixon power, the Bell-Glazer accusation could not have been made without a consciousness of risk and the courage to face it...
...It was my party that started the bombing and escalated the war...
...Herman Badillo Member of Congress Most people I know are furious with President Nixon for bombing Vietnam more than we bombed Germany and Japan during World War II...
...I believe Mr...
...A significant number of those excellent analysts of Hitlerism and Stalinism plus others in Encounter, Commentary, and Partisan Review were ex-Socialists and ex-Marxists from Germany, Poland and Russia whose legitimate hatred of totalitarianism turned into a disease, or at least into a blue-print to be blindly applied in Southeast Asia or any other place where they thought we were killing Stalinists...
...The U.S...
...Washington, D.C...
...Sol Sanders, William Henry Chamberlin, Robert Elegant, and many ethers who wrote on "French Indochina" and Vietnam for The New Leader from the mid-'40s to the mid-'50s, I have arrived at a morbidly unhappy conclusion...
...The talks had broken down because Hanoi had refused to compromise: Total victory in the South, one way or another, continued to be its goal...
...And it falls now to Congress to reestablish itself as a coequal branch of government and to enact those measures that will assure, to the greatest degree possible, that no future President will have the authority to wage war without the consent of the people and their elected representatives...
...However, describing the reason for the raids in this way merely blurs the real issue...
...By ordering the unprecedented bombing of North Vietnamese cities in December, Richard Nixon demonstrated a barbarism and arrogance even his most severe critics would have thought impossible...
...The planes that flew this last holiday season were the ghosts of the Democrats' past...
...Despite the outcome of the Paris negotiations which I hope and pray will result in a fair and lasting peace settlement nixon's conduct and philosophy in office will leave lasting scars...
...The war had reached a critical juncture, and the President was compelled either to bomb, to show the North Vietnamese that we would not permit naked aggression to succeed, or to concede that the bearded peaceniks who have been screaming at their government since 1964 were right all along...
...Nixon made the wise decision...
...His personal control and direction of our prosecution of the war in Indochina, coupled with his refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress for vital domestic programs, have precipitated a constitutional crisis that will not easily be resolved...
...The article is a firm expression of intellectual conscience, the only measure by which the quibbles of the White House and its apologists can be properly evaluated...
...And, ironically...
...Instead, my rage is directed against the Democratic party...
...Minneapolis James C. White I was certainly disappointed to see eminent men like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer engaging in such fuzzy thinking as they displayed in their article on the December bombing...
...Chicago Francis Price...
...Communism is stronger than ever from Chile to China, from Yugoslavia to the USSR...
...even Jews had their "Jewish National Autonomous Region of Birojidzhan" in Siberia...
...Now Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer have given us a clue as to why the protests against the war by Democratic Senators and Representatives are almost as much of a charade the dance of Democrats in their quaint liberal costumes before the House and Senate...
Vol. 56 • February 1973 • No. 4
