AS EUROPE SEES US
Barry, Joseph
Letter from Paris As Europe Sees Us by JOSEPH BARRY Will President Lyndon B. Johnson and the United States ever recover the respect of their friends and allies around the world in the aftermath...
...Europe has never fully recovered from its revulsion to America's McCarthy sickness—for the simple reason that it doubts America has recovered from the malady itself...
...De Gaulle, at his most mischievous, has never been more damaging...
...Others, echoing Juan Bosch, former Dominican president, have declared that for each Communist claimed the presence of the U. S. military is creating 500 more...
...State Department's overseas credit rating is now at an all-time low), the second was the United Nations...
...Now she is less sure...
...Is it to take comfort in official British support in the U. N. Security Council...
...It is easy enough to cite illustrations from the French press: "Santo Domingo is America's Budapest...
...What is the sphere of influence in an age of global missiles...
...Far less sympathetic, on the other hand, was the response to the official American reason for firing on the rebels—¦ incidentally killing one of Colonel Caamano's aides—because "they fired first...
...policies, illustrating stories with photographs of Vietnamese atrocities or U.S...
...His book, "France," has just been published, and he is now completing another book to be called "The Public Education of a Paris Correspondent...
...Letter from Paris As Europe Sees Us by JOSEPH BARRY Will President Lyndon B. Johnson and the United States ever recover the respect of their friends and allies around the world in the aftermath of the Dominican debacle...
...German newspapers are increasingly critical of U.S...
...Fortunately for the fledgling democracy of the West German Republic, the West German press does not follow suit...
...The American in Paris, in London, and in Rome dreads reading the daily press, whether Le Monde or the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune...
...When, on May 8, President Johnson accused General de Gaulle of "narrow nationalism," the reaction here was swift and scornful, even from those usually anti-Gaullist and internationalist...
...The immediate future depends on the lessons the Johnson Administration draws from the Dominican blunder—and if or how they are applied to Southeast Asia...
...Official and press reactions are in similar conflict in West Germany...
...The Bonn government faithfully follows Washington's foreign policy, and flounders in its wake—illustrated by the waxing and waning of MLF, the multilateral nuclear fleet...
...Yes, if the President and the nation rise from it—as did a wounded but thereafter infinitely wiser President John F. Kennedy from the Bay of Pigs fiasco —and, reeducated, apply the lesson to our Vietnamese blunders...
...Now will you talk...
...That, in brief, is our image abroad— somewhat ambiguous, but benefiting from left-over good will...
...To cite a possibility, what if Cairo insisted on the Arab League's precedence over the United Nations in the Near East...
...But what were they doing in Budapest streets...
...The truth, painfully evident to the British people, is that, officially, Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson badly needs U. S. support for the belabored British pound as well as for the British position in Indonesia—and therefore voices his criticism only privately...
...JOSEPH BARRY, a former columnist for The New York Post, is a free lance foreign correspondent with headquarters in Paris...
...one heard in Paris...
...And even as I listen, the newscaster adds doubtfully, "Will this U.S...
...one heard in Bonn...
...Emphasis mine...
...The leading newspa-paper of Munich, the Suddeutsche Zei-tung, for one, ironically headlined the massive U.S...
...More to the point would have been the shrewd observation of a Latin American diplomat who thus described President Johnson's precipitious action: "like sending a German Panzer division to a trouble spot in Europe"—such is the Nazi-like image of the U. S. Marines in Latin America...
...The humor expressed in the press has been, on the whole, quite bitter...
...The most serious reproach to President Johnson is that he is doing precisely what he accuses Communist China and Russia of trying to do: impose a political regime on other states by military power...
...It is an image that strikes home in a deeply personal sense when the children of this American abroad return home from school sad-faced and bewildered...
...But what is to be made of Goldwater's hailing President Johnson—as Goldwater did on his recent tour of Europe— for the practice of his own rejected policy...
...Only two weeks previously she had fiercely defended U.S...
...And what is to be made of Johnson for his resumed bombing of North Vietnam...
...As for Dominican "Communism," would it really matter a great deal, asked retired British diplomat Lord Gladwyn in a letter to The Times of London, if such a small country "mistakenly indulged in a form of directed economy and entered into reasonably good relations with the Soviet Union or China...
...prestige is not yet lost, just as it was not wholly dissipated at the Bay of Pigs...
...Adlai Stevenson—the champion of democracy and liberty of the individual—supporting . . . the 'Johnson Doctrine.'" Further, from its Washington correspondent: "America now asserts itself as clearly and as coldly as once the Russians did...
...Johnson's doctrine is the second assassination of Kennedy...
...Both American interventions are now seen as Siamese-twinned ventures...
...For three days," The Observer's United Nations correspondent reported recently, "the Council has had to view the sad spectacle of the American delegate, Mr...
...bombing of North Vietnam as the only way, unhappily, to hold the line against Communism in Southeast Asia...
...Even as I write, there is a news flash that "U...
...European suspicions were reinforced by the assassination of President Kennedy in Texas and the succession of a Texan to the Presidency...
...What is Peking's sphere of influence...
...Is nationalism broader," asked a Socialist, "if it extends from South America to Southeast Asia...
...And where," one heard universally, "is the United Nations in all this...
...If this is also Washington's attitude, then what is the State Department's reaction to such responsible British opinion as Noel-Baker's, which is by no means exceptional...
...they are asked, as their heads are held temporarily above the water...
...And what did you say when the Soviets said that}" The UNESCO delegate was an Asian...
...All U.S...
...That," said a UNESCO delegate at dinner one evening, "was exactly the excuse of the Russians in Budapest: They were being stoned by the Hungarians, so they had to use tanks...
...At least one of President Johnson's problems, however, has had an appreciative audience in France...
...If the first casualty of the Dominican debacle was truth (the U.S...
...One European commentator has ex-timated that 500 American troops were sent to the Dominican Republic for each Communist claimed by the Johnson Administration to be involved in that tiny nation's uprising...
...Since the League represents a clear, if not clean, majority in that area of the world, why not sanction its actions in dealing with a maverick minority, namely, Israel...
...It is an image of America as the greatest menace to peace in the world today...
...landing in Santo Domingo, Afraid of 53 Communists...
...decision stick, unlike the others taken by Washington...
...Santo Domingo has somehow stripped the semi-legal, semi-sanctimonious mask from South Vietnam...
...History," The Guardian reminds the President, "does not remember kindly those who made a desert and called it peace...
...As for the Organization of American States, it is no longer viewed in Europe, where it was always eyed suspiciously as an arm of our State Department, as even an efficient rubber stamp...
...When U.S...
...Washington's assertion of OAS precedence over the United Nations in Latin American affairs invites other regional alliances to compete with the "parliament of man...
...On May 24 there was a letter in The Guardian of Manchester, England, from Philip Noel-Baker, Nobel Peace Prize winner of 1959, which should give chills to an American reader...
...There is a new, unpleasant concept of America being projected daily by radio—even government radio—newspapers, television, rumor, and conversation...
...The brief pause in the bombing of North Vietnam has been compared with the water torture of Vietnamese prisoners of war...
...Walter Lippmann's early and somewhat hasty defense of the Johnson Doctrine on the grounds of America's "sphere of influence" received similar comment and criticism...
...What is France's...
...It was somewhat mollified by the defeat of Barry Goldwater—but only after being scared to death by his candidacy...
...S. envoys and leaders of the Constitutionalist rebels [in the Dominican Republic] are negotiating a political settlement under the provisional Presidency of Antonio Guzman...
...Secretary General U Thant has pointed out the danger...
...units in Santo Domingo were reported to be flatly disobeying his order of neutrality, more than one Parisian suggested the American military may be no more reliable than the French since all generals tend to act on their own version of their nation's foreign policy...
...Believing itself entirely dependent on the United States for the defense of West Berlin and for ultimate German reunification, Bonn goes all the way with LBJ...
...marines frisking Dominican citizens...
...If the United States is not quite an imperialist power in the eyes of the world, it is rilore and more an imperious one, arrogant if not aggressive, with the distinctions between the descriptions becoming less and less visible all the time...
...What," he asks himself, "has Johnson done today...
...Europeans fear, moreover, that he is destroying the detente, the understanding between Washington and Moscow that if their dialogue should stop, thermonuclear war could soon follow...
...and it is a grave mistake to attribute these views, as do some of the American Embassy staff, to Charles de Gaulle's anti-Americanism...
...troops to help General Imbert to defeat the democratic movement of President Bosch, Senor Guzman, and Colonel Caamano, it will be as serious a blow to the United Nations as Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia was to the League of Nations thirty years ago...
...It is President Johnson who must go all the way—and he has a long way to go, if only to recover a modicum of respectability in the eyes of our friends around the world...
...Has he sent the Marines to Bolivia...
...the British queried...
...From his seat in the House of Commons, the distinguished Labor deputy wrote, "If President Johnson allows U.S...
...The unbound British press offers it publicly...
Vol. 29 • July 1965 • No. 7
