THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
A Harvard professor—one of those academic busybodies who presume to second-guess their government—wrote to a Boston newspaper about the American military involvement in Southeast Asia. We quote from...
...We are destroying down to the root every germ of a healthy national life in these unfortunate people...
...On the issue of the Dominican Republic, he refrained from direct criticism of his brother's successor...
...We- heard Schlesinger discuss his Kennedy biography, A Thousand Days, on "Meet the Press" a few Sundays ago, and admired his reply to the inevitable first question about his controversial report that the late President planned to replace Secretary of State Dean Rusk...
...This was John F. Kennedy's way of prevailing over the stifling inertia of the bureaus and their careerists who are obsessed with what Schlesinger described as a "deep commitment to past policies, whether good or bad...
...How, after all, can it compare with the astonishing productivity of the first session...
...In an age of narrow specialization, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...I thought it was important to record it," Schlesinger said, "because the object of history is to come as close as possible to a truthful reconstruction of the past and this seemed to me part of the record...
...For each of these careers he has a guiding principle...
...As a movie critic, we have been told, Schlesinger confesses to an inordinate esteem for Greta Garbo...
...The next session of Congress will be the main theater in the coming debate over Vietnam, a debate that may dwarf in scale and bitterness all the teach-ins of 1965...
...The vexatious issue of Taft-Hartley revision will unquestionably haunt the Administration after labor's humiliating first session defeat on right-to-work...
...But those steeped in Washington's by-zantine ways could not miss the significance of the carefully-leaked story on Senator Kennedy's private, pre-tour wrangle with the State Department bureaucracy...
...The letter, which exhorted opponents of the war to "creep from cover" and make themselves heard, was the celebrated William James's protest against the United States Army effort to suppress the Filipino insurrection led by Emilio Aquinaldo...
...During the brief era of the Kennedy Presidency the White House was the center of creative energy and decision in matters of world diplomacy...
...But Republican Congressional leaders—and some top-ranking Democrats —have sought to titillate public opinion with the prospect of a cheap "ultimate solution" to the war through air power—one they say would end the war and reduce casualties...
...On the issue of nuclear proliferation, which remains unresolved, Kennedy has been a persistent gadfly to the Administration...
...Kennedy was reported to have angrily refused to play the role of apologist for the Johnson intervention —a role that the State Department suggested to him...
...but I have been cheered and encouraged at the almost unanimous dismay and horror which I find individuals express in private conversation over-the turn which things are taking...
...His jour-neyings through mobbed city streets and among plantation workers in the countryside seemed to generate fresh and buoyant political emotions...
...He deplored the burning of villages and destruction of lives, but these, he said, "are the smallest part of our sins...
...Senator Robert Kennedy, New York Democrat, came back from Latin America looking, as the sports writers say, tanned and fit...
...President Johnson has followed a more conventional design in ordering the machinery of diplomacy, enhancing the role of his Cabinet members and the agencies...
...In Lima and Santiago, as in the Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bobby ran hard...
...The excitement of battle, this time as always, has produced its cowing and disorganizing effect upon the opposition," he began...
...But it would be dangerous for the Administration to trust to these impressions...
...What happened, of couse, was, at the time of the Bay of Pigs, various people who were likely to talk to the press were given a cover story, a cover story designed to minimize the significance of the operation and [it] involved saying that only three or four hundred men landed rather than 1,400 and so on...
...I will not say that I have been amazed, for I fully expected it...
...Potomacus...
...And so, in the emerging drama of the making of the Presidency, 1972, Robert Kennedy is deftly exploring the opening to the left in American politics...
...But one by one the fertile idea men of the Kennedy White House have trickled out of official life...
...The story, which was broken by a newsman who happened to be along on the tour, showed Kennedy to have been sharply at odds with the Administration on the Dominican intervention...
...An observer who should judge solely by the sort of evidence which the newspapers present might easily suppose the American people felt little concern about the performances of our government...
...Several days earlier, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., speaking on "Meet the Press," voiced his own impatience with Foggy Bottom bureaucrats and their feeling that "foreign policy is their personal property to be preserved against meddling and interference from the White House...
...The badge of the bureaucracy prevailed over the uneasy currents of dissent at the conference...
...The great initiatives of the Kennedy years, Schlesinger insisted, would have remained stillborn if matters had been left to the State Department—such achievements as the Alliance for Progress, the partial test ban treaty, and the conduct of the Cuban missile crisis...
...Johnson has also taken the position that the bombing of Hanoi would bring China into the war...
...The Administration has been adhering to the line, both publicly and privately, that it wants to keep Hanoi's governmental nerve center intact in order to have someone with whom to reach eventual agreement...
...It appeared in the Boston Transcript on March 1, 1899...
...Weisner presided over a disarmament panel which proposed certain gentle innovations in official policy: a moratorium on anti-ballistic missile systems, modest troop withdrawals by mutual agreement from East and West Germany, more emphasis on a nuclear non-proliferation agreement and less stress on an Atlantic nuclear force, attempts to negotiate a non-aggression agreement between the NATO and Warsaw pact powers...
...His brother had, after all, asserted in the last month of his life that the war was, in the last analysis, their war— that of the Vietnamese...
...The word 'lie,' I think, is rather a dramatic word," he said...
...Inevitably the trend has been toward cautious, conventional responses to the awesome dangers of this disordered world in a nuclear age...
...The frost was nowhere so evident as at the highly-advertised White House Conference on International Cooperation, which was stricken by intellectual famine and verbal flood from the bureaucrats...
...In fact, it did not tell us who McKinley's McGeorge Bundy was...
...Kennedy also balked at efforts by the United States to use foreign aid as a club for inducing Peruvian officials to accept "reasonable" investment terms proposed by Standard Oil of New Jersey...
...lULIIlT The second session of the Eighty-ninth Congress is certain to be, if nothing else, an anticlimaax...
...There is no small irony in the fact that this is the same man who slightly more than a decade ago was a fellow nightrider on the staff of Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...No life shall you have, we say, except as a gift from our philanthropy after your unconditional submission to our will...
...The Times, Schlesinger added, had made its own contribution in suppressing the facts about the Bay of Pigs...
...At one point mildly iconoclastic Senator Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat, deplored the "negative reaction" of the Administration's proconsuls and gibed that "the intermediate levels of the Department of State are almost allergic to any change in the status quo...
...Kennedy observed all the tender amenities of Washington political etiquette...
...President Johnson has been mysterious, as is his wont, about his 1966 program...
...We came across the letter the other day in a history text, which did not tell us what reply it drew from President McKinley's McGeorge Bundy...
...A deep, constricting freeze seems to have settled over the Administration on issues of war, peace-keeping, and nuclear proliferation...
...A few minutes later, however, when he was asked about his recent admission that he lied to The New York Times about the size and purpose of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, there was no reference to the historian's obligation in Schlesinger's reply...
...A national infamy' is the comment on the case which I hear most commonly uttered...
...Kennedy has quietly cemented contacts with the democratic left, not only in Latin America but in Southeast Asia as well...
...There will be demands for extending the scope of civil rights legislation...
...There have been hints of new transportation legislation...
...The responses of State Department and Disarmament Agency spokesmen were drearily, if predictably, negative...
...Since Congress left Washington the, war has assumed a new magnitude of U.S...
...For a moment we thought we had misread the TV log, and waited for the moderator to ask, "Will the real Arthur Schlesinger please stand up...
...But dominating all else, we predict, will be the specter of Vietnam...
...provides an inspiring exception...
...Enlargement and possibly major revision of the Food for Peace program may also be on the Congressional agenda in 1966...
...The Republican foreign policy team of Representatives Gerald Ford, Michigan, and Melvin Laird, Wisconsin, together with their allies in the military services, will undoubtedly escalate their demands for bombing of the North Vietnamese industrial and port complexes in Hanoi and Haiphong...
...involvement from the standpoint of troops, bombs, and American lives...
...As Bagehot once said, 'When a historian withholds important facts likely to influence the judgment of his readers, he commits a fraud.' " Schlesinger described himself as "a historian committed—insofar as one can—to the truth...
...And as a White House aide he lies...
...That cover story was a misrepresentation...
...He has been silently out of sympathy with President Johnson's conduct of the war in Vietnam...
...As a historian, he is committed to scrupulous accuracy...
...To the democratic, reform-minded elements of Latin leadership the reaffirmation of the Kennedy doctrine came as a welcome antidote to the dour Big Daddyism of the Johnson-Mann doctrine...
...The most formidable pressure will come from within President Johnson's own party from such eminences as Armed Services Committee Chairmen Richard B. Russell, Georgia, in the Senate and L. Mendel Rivers, South Carolina, in the House...
...We quote from his letter here as much for its elegant style as for its eloquent indignation...
...Here was a conference at which the tried-and-true Establishmentarians of the recent past were cast as the radicals—men such as President Kennedy's science adviser Jerome B. Wiesner and Arthur Larson, the Eisenhower Administration's preeminent egghead...
...One was instructed to give it out...
...Administration emissaries to the conference, led by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, performed their roles automatically as though dangling on the strings of a master puppeteer...
...Both he and The Times, he suggested, were motivated by "a sense, mistaken or not, that this was in the national interest to do...
...The professor, a philosopher and psychologist, wrote that "we see by the vividest of examples what an absolute savage and pirate the passion of military conquest always is, and how the only safeguard against the crimes to Which it will infallibly drag the nation that gives way to it is to keep it chained forever...
...He has been an eminent historian, a valued White House adviser, and an incisive film reviewer for Huntington Hartford's defunct magazine, Show...
Vol. 30 • January 1966 • No. 1
