WASHINGTON BALANCE SHEET
Lowry, W. McNeil
Balance Sheet on The Great Debate By W. McNeil Lowry Washington, D. C. FOR ALL their seeming differences," said an editorial in last month's Progressive, participants in the great debate on...
...became Wherry's battle-cry re Europe...
...Privately most members of Congress will welcome a Big Four meeting, but they will expect Acheson, Bevin, Schuman, and Vishinsky—or whomever the Big Four send—to go into the meeting with their pistols checked just outside the door...
...And they were raised at a time when American troops, fighting under the UN banner in Korea, were being pushed back with heavy losses, As the losses mounted, Congressional mail grew clamorous...
...A gain...
...first, that the area is accessible, and second, that a sufficient number of democratic nations join in the attempt...
...That is a terrific challenge to leadership under any conditions...
...There would be a strong plea that the first "total" was over-statement...
...When we talk about defending the free world, we are not merely talking about divisions and groups and battleships and planes...
...Douglas: Resist Communist aggression "everywhere in the world," with two provisos...
...But the clock still stands at post-Munich, regardless of the bets on ultimate war...
...defend Britain by air and enter a naval alliance with the nations bordering the Atlantic...
...Mobilize not 3,500,000 men, but 6,000,000 men, in order to support such a policy...
...in that the foreign policy issues and foreign policy symbols of 1945-50 now seem a little dated...
...Taft's speech did nothing, in short, to stem the tide of isolationist mail to Congress...
...A gain...
...The first result is obvious from the descriptive analysis...
...That was to be expected...
...What has the debate produced...
...The first great postwar backlash against the principle of collective security has been arrested and confined to the hard core of original isolationists in the Congress...
...First it was absolutely illegal and unconstitutional for the President to commit any troops to Europe or anywhere else...
...It is not too late for ideas, by the Washing-ton clock, but it is later than you think...
...We are talking about what is in the hearts, what we understand with our heads, and what we are going to do as a body...
...Robert A. Taft of Ohio called into question a principle overwhelmingly accepted for the past decade in American history—the principle of collective security...
...If the venture had gone badly in Korea, it would go badly in Europe...
...Paul Douglas of Illinois, Gen...
...It was all very well to say, and it was said, that Taft and Senate Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska led only a corporal's guard in their attempt to write off the collective defense of Western Europe, but public opinion was expressing itself in clean-cut terms...
...Dwight Eisenhower, Sen...
...probably less than a majority if he worked the executive offices...
...The "great debate" has not produced that result, but only revealed it...
...We are concerned not only with the protection of territory, of rights, of privileges, we are concerned with the defense of a way of life," said Eisenhower...
...5 than he started backing up...
...8 he suggested sending troops to Europe in a ration of one to nine, but called the constitutional issue "more serious" than any the American people had ever faced...
...The Senator from Ohio was not merely striking at the Atlantic Pact nations...
...Now even Sen...
...II With only superficial strategic differences, Taft launched the debate onto the Senate floor and added an all-out attack upon the President's constitutional responsibilities and rights to dispose of the Army, Navy, and Air Force in the interests of national defense...
...The debate leading up to Gen...
...The fourth result of the "great debate" is that adopting simpler views in foreign policy debate has not made the job of running foreign policy simpler...
...The job of a Washington reporter, however, is not to weigh an indictment but to examine whether The Progressive's analysis is accurate as reporting...
...In the short life of the 82nd Congress, foreign policy has become closely involved with military strategy...
...The wonder is not that the ensuing Congressional debate leaned so heavily on considerations of military security, and whether it was best found in collective action abroad or in erecting a Gibraltar at home, lhe wonder is that many of the participants—Sen...
...If these remarks constitute an indictment, and they obviously do, Washington can only answer "guilty as charged...
...James Cox in Ohio, Georgia, and Florida...
...He made no bones of the fact that he was still against the Pact but would support it as the law of the land...
...Note the emphasis on "acts," on "do," rather than on ideas...
...Therefore, from the wide-open mouth of Wherry, "No more Koreas...
...Eisenhower's report to Congress, it should be noted, was launched by former Ambassador Joseph C. Kennedy and former President Herbert Hoover in a backlash of isolationism striking at every assumption underlying postwar American foreign policy...
...commit no troops to the land defense of Europe, for as in Korea, the United States would "risk the destruction" of even 1,500,-000 men sent to Europe...
...A draw...
...Joseph McCarthy has to wind himself up again...
...Rightly or wrongly, in the Congressional mind we are not in 1951 at the Mukden incident, German reoccupation of the Rhineland, Ethiopia...
...But the terms in which that struggle is portrayed are more appropriate to a last ditch stand than to a long range hope...
...Taft had hardly finished his 10,000 word speech of Jan...
...If Gallup polled Congress, he would probably find a majority considering war inevitable in the next five years...
...As the debate proceeded, however, it began to look like poor defense strategy to abandon Europe...
...Sen...
...Gain or loss...
...What I have written thus far is intended to be a report, entirely neuter, on the "great debate," and an explanation why the debate, in the words of last month's Progressive, revealed "reliance on one form or another of military strategy . . ." What follows is opinion...
...Then Taft was "not so much interested" in the Constitutional question as in how many troops...
...It ended as it began, concerned with the principle of collective security: We had better have Europe on our side (the opposite face of Hoover's coin...
...The first, the deployment of Mao's crack Red Chinese divisions, is well known...
...The significance is that he backed up on that part of the debate dealing with military strategy...
...It was no particular foreign policy, let alone Dean Acheson's, which ended the torrent of Congressional mail...
...But the coincidence of the two themes in the debate, punctuated every day by news of American losses, swept the decks clean...
...But two momentous events have occurred since McMahon and Tydings made such proposals...
...It is an even greater challenge when the mood of Congress is as this article has described, when every "Korea" will bring new demands for "all out or get out...
...Thus the alternatives underlined in the debate, true enough, were put in terms of collective defense...
...If we have faith in the essence of our society, namely, respect for the individual and a deep desire to improve human life, and if we translate such a faith into acts, we will survive...
...Sixty-six per cent, Gallup reported, wanted those young men pulled out...
...We are somewhere post-Munich—on the clock of the Thirties —and the chances for war or peace are as controversial as they appeared in this country after 1938...
...The executive branch of government appears to doubt war in the next eighteen months if ever, Eisenhower ditto, Taft even more so, Douglas not at all confident of that, and scads of Congressmen expecting it at any time...
...The third result will be more permanent in its effects...
...And we were not necessarily getting out of Korea anyway (the opposite of the news which had first prompted Hoover and then supported Taft...
...A loss...
...A gain...
...The anxious weeks in which the nation seemed fated for a war in Manchuria did much to clean the decks...
...In fact, both Ache-son 's friends and Acheson s critics agree that his current policy—punishing aggression where one can not prevent it, fighting aggression to the finish where one must—is going to be very hard to manage...
...On Feb...
...Wayne Morse of Oregon—dwelt so pointedly on the moral and ideological struggle with world Communism...
...far from it...
...The 82nd Congress is in a different position from that of the 81st, the 80th, and the 79th...
...And so on...
...The second, an aggressive, threatening national revolt against the principle of collective security, especially as it emerged in UN resistance to Red aggression in Korea, has been obscured by the very debate it launched...
...It lies within our power," said Douglas, "to prove them [the Communists] wrong...
...Such a diagnosis of the temperatures in the "great debate" is strengthened, furthermore, by results of the debate to date...
...All out or get out...
...A gain...
...Taft and Hoover had brought into question the underlying prinW. McNElL LOWRY, The Progressive's Washington correspondent, ranges over a wide field of the top news producing areas in the nation's capital in his role as chief of the Washington Bureau for the four dailies owned by former Gov...
...became the slogan of Congressmen fighting the United Nations...
...The significance is not that Taft backed up...
...But as Taft and Hoover spoke, the mail ran 50-to-l against the principle of collective security in American foreign policy...
...Eisenhower: Because the American system would wither and die if Europe and its industrial productivity were given up to the Russians, the United States must "get out in front and lead" in the effort at collective security...
...Had there been only the Brussels arms agreement or only a military policy toward Korea to decide in Congress, there would have been less involvement between foreign policy and military strategy...
...The second result is also obvious, indeed, is an assumption underlying the description...
...Within a ratio of equality of sacrifice, the United States should send additional ground units to Europe soon, but the greatest imperative is all-out production, as plentiful as if the world were on the eve of total war...
...Exploring the gulf is intensely interesting, since presumably both Washington observers and the editor of The Progressive have, during the "great debate...
...It was no longer a question of the Marshall Plan and its extension, or of arms aid, or of what policy best suited the interests of America or of peace in Asia...
...But it added to it "constitutional" justification for the pent-up horror over continuing American losses in Korea...
...Then it was not so much how many troops but whether Congress put a ceiling on their commitment...
...Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Republican John Foster Dulles—these and other opponents of the Taft-Hoover thesis— understood that the American people were weighing foreign policy in terms of the bullets fired at their young men in Korea...
...That fact profoundly affects the atmosphere in Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill...
...What follows is merely an attempt to explain Washington's reaction, by which is meant the reaction of its most vocal instrument, the Congress...
...The Congressional clock is running at a faster pace...
...It was this attack, both direct and indirect, which confronted those members of Congress who prepared to answer the most respectable of the attackers, Taft...
...Taft: Depend on island air and sea bases, particularly air bases, for whatever protection is afforded the Eurasian land mass...
...The chilly reception given Sen...
...First it was no troops and no American commander to Europe...
...The intervention in Korea by the President last June 25 was openly assailed on both sides of the Congressional aisle...
...Balance Sheet on The Great Debate By W. McNeil Lowry Washington, D. C. FOR ALL their seeming differences," said an editorial in last month's Progressive, participants in the great debate on foreign policy showed "one common denominator" —"total reliance on one form or another of military strategy and total absence of any suggestion for new efforts at negotiation with the Communists . . . "[The] people of Europe and Asia conclude to their sorrow that 'The Great Debate' is not over possible terms of mediation, but rather over how, where, and when we can best make our military power dominant in the world...
...The 81st Congress, if it had been polled, would have shown no very great optimism toward the limits of "possible terms of mediation" in dealing with world Communism...
...Constituents' mail, even to Douglas, at first ran 50-1 for Taft's views...
...If the President had no right to send troops in peacetime to Europe, he had had no right to send them last June to Korea...
...The Hoov-er-Taft revolt did much...
...Brien Mc-Mahon's fifty billion dollar world peace plan and former Sen...
...Daily News, and taught for a while at the University of Illinois...
...Sitting isolated in Washington, a reporter reading the remarks quoted from The Progressive has the distinct impression that the seriousness of the revolt against collective security has not been thoroughly explained by the hundreds of newspaper and radio men covering Capitol Hill...
...Hoover: Fall back on the Western Hemisphere, with one frontier on Japan, the other—perhaps, but grudgingly—upon the British Isles, and protect the mammoth Gibraltar with a mighty navy and a mightier air force...
...Finally, the debate has brought no black-out on considerations of the moral and ideological struggle with world Communism...
...Therefore, from the old China hands and the anti-Nehru, anti-UN Congressmen, "All out or get out...
...Douglas, Morse, Eisenhower, Republican Sen...
...reacted to the same external stimuli...
...Millard Tydings' global disarmament plan bears witness to the prevailing lack of faith in alternatives to major rearmament...
...The gulf between the attitude of mind in The Progressive editorial and the dominant atmosphere in Washington exists in the fact that Washington pretty generally takes the "one common denominator'' of which The Progressive complained, for granted...
...Before going to Washington he was associate editor of the Dayton (O...
...III If you assume the possibility of more "Koreas" (Indo-China, Malaya ), you place upon leadership the job of retaining public support for military adventures that may ultimately be hopeless while reminding public opinion that the big test (Europe) is still to come...
...There was nothing in what Kennedy or Hoover said which would have supported the long list of policies beginning with the Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey and running through interim aid, the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Pact, and arms aid...
...No more Koreas...
...After Eisenhower reported, Gallup said people thought it looked very poor indeed...
...protect Africa from Suez to Dakar by air power...
...ciple of all foreign policy—the principle of collective security...
...On the eve of the convening of the 82nd Congress and immediately thereafter, the important voices of former President Herbert Hoover and Sen...
...The atmosphere generated by Korean casualties, played upon by the "retreatists"—Hoover, Kennedy, Taft, Wherry, ef al—made inevitable a reexamination of American foreign policy in terms of military strategy...
...Then it was a few troops...
...the Gallup poll only stimulated the assailants...
...The decks had been swept clean...
...If we do not, we are likely to fall...
Vol. 15 • March 1951 • No. 3
