THE OVERRIDING ISSUE
Morgan, Edward P.
THE OVERRIDING ISSUE By EDWARD P. MORGAN This guest editorial by Edward P. Morgan is contributed during the absence abroad of Morris H. Rabin, the Editor. Mr. Morgan is now in his second year of...
...Creampuffs, Khrushchev called us in effect at the February Communist Party Congress...
...Imbedded in this question, I think, is the overriding issue of 1956...
...are banking on...
...You might argue that therefore a great wad of that outlay goes down the drain, but in his assignment General Partridge could not argue that way for a second...
...If we really believe in the American Dream and our capacity to grow into its bigness, then it follows that we must realize and recognize the things* that make us look small to the rest of the world and to ourselves...
...Sometimes it appears doubtful that we are planning beyond the November election...
...Tie Communists are already busy trying to shrink and conceal their evils...
...There are slums to be cleared, classrooms to be constructed, technicians to be trained, teachers to be trained to train them...
...Sometimes, under such circumstances^ it is useful to cock an ear to the utterances of a sympathetic outsider, and bounce them around for comparison...
...That doesn't justify our skidding to the rail in panic or pretending in smug criticism of policy-makers that the problems we have will yield to simple solutions if we'll just face them...
...That we'll slip, that we won't be able to stay the course...
...The Administration's voice is throaty-rich with confidence, with calm and (or so it sounds) with complacency...
...When the venture of tidying up our own backyard is put in this context it would be almost unthinkable that such a fearless defender of the constitution as a Senator Eastland, such a scrupulous crusader for political morality as a Murray Chotiner, and such exemplary exponents of decency and delicate propriety in the functions of free enterprise as a Dave Beck or a Howard Keck, would not go along...
...And ironically, when the Party does make the noise of responsible criticism, the country seems to turn a deaf ear as if trying to shut out a whimpering nuisance disturbing its nap in the hammock of contentment...
...And yet there is so much to be done...
...For if we don't learn how to cope with life and enlarge its meaning for ourselves and for everybody, the multiplication of the machinery of our own comfort will only cause us to get our shirttails caught in the fly-wheels...
...Ex-Senator Benton, head of the Encyclopedia Britannica, brought back from his recent trip to Moscow staggering evidence of Russian strides to expand education...
...We have developed the material sinews of progress almost to perfection...
...which Americans are expert at creating in quantities not only for home consumption but for export in abufr-dance, providing we put pur minds to our work, and can distinguish .tlie voice of leadership from a gargle...
...safety but of an atmosphere in which it is reasonably safe for minds -to bfc free...
...However, they, along with the rest of us, need to be roused to the responsibilities at hand...
...See Stuart Chase's article on Page 5—Editor's Note.] By 1960 every youth in the Soviet Union up to the age of 17 will be compulsorily in school...
...One wonders if austerity and adequacy are the measures of defense this abundant and ingenious nation should settle for...
...On a recent quick visit to New York and Washington, the leader of the British Labor Party, Hugh Gaitskell, had time to talk what many of his listeners thought was good clear sense about the world in general and about the problems of the West in particular...
...keeps hearing a Babel of voices: "Everything is booming but the guns...
...He has served as director of news for the Columbia Broadcasting System and has had 20-odd years of experience in newspaper, magazine, and radio work...
...The change of Russian policy is a sign of bankruptcy and proof that we have won the cold war...
...President Eisenhower believes in People, and, using the advertising arsenal of Madison Avenue, the Republican National Committee moulds that into explosive campaign ammunition...
...For there are those of us who have come to feel that material accomplishment is an end in itself, forgetting that the real objective is the never-ending improvement of the minds and hearts and bodies of people, and that in the forgetting lurks the danger of our destruction...
...We are losing to the Communists and don't know it...
...The Democratic Party is painfully torn and adds up to less, mathematics notwithstanding, than the sum of all its bickering parts...
...This requires the voice of leadership, and its conscientious tones are not always easy to detect in an election year...
...We have only just begun to fortify the battle line of research against disease...
...Not just on the military side, indispensable as our best and constant efforts are to perfect our physical defenses...
...In manhandling the Administration's request for long-term foreign aid, the House Foreign Affairs Committee spun out a declaration of intent vaguely committing Congress to continuing such assistance as long as the threat of communism overhangs the free world...
...This is what Khrushchev and Co...
...Where but here and how but through the dynamism of the expanding American economy could a company net a billion dollar profit as General Motors did in 1955...
...This is the Twenties all over again...
...Morgan is now in his second year of broadcasting news and comment from Washington on a program sponsored by the AFL-CIO...
...One wonders with an even more brooding fear if we aren't in the process of settling for the adequate if not the austere in our national thinking, not just about military matters but about the world at large and our place in it...
...We have only just begun to split the atom for peace...
...Is this our sole role and purpose...
...Peace, prosperity, and progress...
...They are preparing to put the dragon out to pasture and break it of the habit of breathing fire...
...A similar monumental dilemma over probabilities and possibilities arises in the field of non-military atomic energy...
...His answer: $61 billion for a 15-year program from 1951 through 1965...
...Confronted by reports (if not carefully assessed intelligence) of startling Russian advances and plans in developing nuclear power for industry, Admiral Strauss blandly testified before the joint atomic energy committee of Congress that they were "overestimated...
...One was tempted to conclude that he was concerned about a preoccupation for comfort at the cost not only of our physical...
...At one point he observed that "democratic peoples are inclined to' put their standard of living above their safety...
...The opposition's voice is discordant with inner dissent...
...We have only just begun to explore and appreciate the vast potential for growth in the underdeveloped, or as somebody has more imaginatively suggested, the "growth" countries...
...ONE...
...And yet, 10 years from now our major defense may well have to be directed against not manned aircraft but guided missiles...
...Our defensive strength, testifies Defense Secretary Wilson, is austere but adequate, while at the same time the Secretary is trying to sit on the lid of a Pentagon row about the very philosophy of dtn 'defense, let alone its adequacy...
...We have dreamed the American Dream but we have not yet grown into its full dimensions...
...Have we so simplified and separated the forces of good and evil that we can go out and slay the Communist dragon and then hurry home in our Thunderbird in the secure knowledge that we can snuggle up to the latest pot-of-gold giveaway on television and live happily ever after...
...A few weeks ago Senator Symington's subcommittee probing air power asked the chief of the Continental Air Defense Command, Army General Earl Partridge, what he thought it would cost to establish the minimum effective defense of the United States against enemy manned aircraft...
...More dismaying than the existence of these dilemmas is the "let's pretend" attitude of some key government officials that they don't exist...
...Our leaders have developed a "don't rock the boat" complex, ignoring the fact that the American yacht may have struck a sand bar of over-confidence...
...This is a non-technical human exercise but one of the most vital importance...
...We cannot conceal our weaknesses, but we can remedy them—and then we will be in a far stronger position to expose the camouflage of doubletalk with which the Kremlin is trying to beguile much of the rest of the planet...
...Then, less bold, the voices of worry and doubt: "The Western alliance is crumbling...
...Still, when you stop to think of it, what is the intrinsic value of a hardtop convertible, an automatic dishwasher, an electric blanket, what is their worth in terms of human growth...
...This was the conviction propping up his boast that the Marxists, not the meek, shall inherit the earth without violence because we haven't got what it takes...
...Are there any voices of clarity, of responsibility, of leadership in the land...
...He has to assume that a thundering aerial herd of Bison jet bombers may try a nuclear attack in the interim...
...As Malenkov said with frightening patience, the Communists are sure that they'll win out in a hundred years and are planning accordingly...
...Or are we fighting the menace of Communism because we believe in what it menaces...
...And they are preparing for the long pull...
...So towering are their complications that we could easily calculate the wrong answers even if we employed the foresight of Einstein, the insight of Freud, and all the cash in Fort Knox and Las Vegas...
...This is an atmosphere...
...Perhaps, sanctimonious as it may sound, the biggest construction job of all is the building of the American character...
Vol. 20 • July 1956 • No. 7
