THE BIG FEAR
The Big Fear Debate on the great issues of American foreign policy—issues which have a life-or-death urgency for all of us and involve the survival of civilization itself—has all but died out in...
...The contem-porary forces of the far Right have invested and managed their McCarthy inheritance well and, though they are unable to win elections— yet—they have succeeded, with the assistance of parts of the press, in maintaining the McCarthyite climate of fear and suspicion...
...The corrosive fear of being falsely labeled as "soft on Communism" shows up not only in the absence of debate in issues of foreign policy but in the conduct of members of Congress in the one area in which they feel secure in challenging the Administration—appropriations for armaments...
...Their response, invariably, is to raise the ante, sometimes by hundreds of millions of dollars, above even the astronomical totals requested by the insatiable Pentagon...
...There are those who believe the issues have become so numerous and complicated that some can only be left to executive determination and some resolved in com...
...Much the same situation prevails in other significant areas of foreign policy...
...There is only a strange silence that mocks our claim to be the most open society on earth...
...They concerned the whole concept of American foreign and military policy...
...there have been Republican cries that the Kennedy Administration is "soft on Communism" and Democratic replies that it ain't so...
...The President speaks of a second-strike capability...
...This is one minute more than either the House or the Senate has given to formal debate of the issues involved in the resumption of nuclear testing, the crisis over Berlin, armed American intervention in South Vietnam, or the struggle for Laos...
...Total conformity has become so prized an ingredient in political life that we no longer have our little bands of wilful men to speak out on the floor so the country might hear the other side...
...Although a mounting number of individual members of Congress privately express misgivings about our sterile policy toward the most populous and, potentially, the most powerful nation on earth, they keep their mouths shut except to vote "aye" when Congress tiresomely adopts each year, without debate or dissent, a resolution reaffirming our repugnance of that nation...
...it was primarily a political problem, involving a fundamental issue of American policy...
...mittee...
...We are currently embarked on a major military adventure in South Vietnam, but nobdy in Congress we know about has wanted to debate the issue, or even, at the very least, to ask why we chose unilateral military intervention or what, if anything, we are doing to build the social and economic foundations of a democratic society in a corrupt autocracy we have committed ourselves to defend against Communism with our money, munitions, and manpower...
...The vast and challenging subject of Communist China is off limits for Congressional debate...
...There are no debates because there are no debaters, and there are no debaters because Senators and Representatives who have grave reservations about some current policies—and their number is more numerous than you may think—are literally afraid to speak up because they would be pilloried as pro-Soviet not only by the idiots of the far Right, but also by that considerable segment of our press that has criminally taught much of our populace to believe that anything less than total inflexibility toward the Soviets represents an unpatriotic policy of "no-win" appeasement...
...Hanson Baldwin, the distinguished military editor of the New York Times, put it this way: "What is not clear is what our strategic concept is...
...But they are secondary considerations, far less decisive, in our judgment, than what seems to be an obsessive need on the part of members of Congress to adhere to such rigid rules of conformity and orthodoxy that no one could possibly accuse them of being "soft on Communism...
...When is enough enough...
...Senator William Proxmire, Wisconsin Democrat, who soxn#j times dares to buck the power of the Pentagon, observed recently that "there is in Congress today no disposition to challenge military spend-, ing, no matter how vast the sums involved or how eloquent the testimony that they are patently unjustified...
...Not one...
...Here was the heart of the matter...
...It was not so much a complicated scientific problem from which members of Congress might understandably back away...
...But there has been nothing in the current session of Congress resembling the great debates of the past in which fundamental issues were debated by men who had mastered their subject, cared deeply about the outcome of the debate, and were not afraid of being falsely labeled...
...Others are convinced that the mass news media, by emphasizing the spectacular and ignoring the significant, discourage members of Congress from undertaking the considerable preparation required for serious debate...
...Some 1,200 bombers, 1,200 land-based ICBM's, and 656 submarine-launched missiles—each capable of destroying a city—seem to add up to a nuclear 'over-kill' capacity, not a finite deterrent...
...There have been random speeches, to be sure, some quite good...
...Consider the case of resumption of nuclear testing by the United States after the Soviets, with a cynical contempt for the opinion of mankind, renewed testing last fall...
...And yet as far as we know, from our daily chore of struggling through the Congressional Record, no Senator or Representative rose to question the President's decision or experienced the urge to debate this basic issue...
...the few creative speeches on the subject proposing a less rigid stance failed to spark a major exchange of views, although we were perilously poised on the brink of war over that issue less than a year ago...
...The issues involved ran far more deeply than the immediate decision whether to have another round of testing...
...There was clamor from some quarters in both houses for the immediate resumption of United States testing, but there was no debate on the issue—certainly there was not a single voice raised on the floor of either house to question the need for further testing...
...There is often not even a single voice of dissent on issues that are warmly and continuously debated in the other democracies of the world...
...The Big Fear Debate on the great issues of American foreign policy—issues which have a life-or-death urgency for all of us and involve the survival of civilization itself—has all but died out in the Congress of the United States...
...This silence was all the more remarkable because there was powerful scientific testimony, including the judgment of the very scientist appointed by the President to head the evaluation study of the Soviet tests, that further testing on our part was not necessary for technical, scientific, or military reasons, and could be justified, if at all, only on political grounds...
...Thoughtful Americans who have brooded over the disappearance of debate have come up with a variety of answers...
...We are still living on our legacy of McCarthyism, whose Big Lie spawned the Big Fear...
...The fiasco of the attempted invasion of Cuba last year would have been the subject of sharp questioning and full-dress debate in the legislative body of any other major democracy, but it was smothered here under a vast and confusing display of bipartisanship...
...One day recently, the House of Representatives passed a $13 billion military authorization bill in one minute...
...These and some of the other theories advanced to explain the decline of debate on foreign policy doubtless have some validity...
...Why is there a total absence of responsible Congressional dialogue on foreign affairs—or, as Representative John Lindsay, New York Republican, put it, why is there "no real examination of the guts of the thing...
...There has been no meaningful debate in Congress on the crisis of Berlin and the larger question of Germany...
...The issues were sufficiently grave to keep President Kennedy brooding and groping for a long time...
...This is thought to be sure-fire medicine for politicians worried about the need to nail down their true-blue patriotism...
...But not so Congress —at least publicly...
...yet behind the scenes the advocates of 'pre-emptive attack' are still strong...
...It is this oppressive climate of the Big Fear that has withered creative challenge and meaningful debate on foreign policy in Congress...
Vol. 26 • June 1962 • No. 6
