THE LARGER ISSUE

...We do business with 115 countries," he added...

...The scapegoat theory of history is an unappealing one...

...But it is he who has told us almost everything that has proved to be wrong, from the time that he kept us out of the League of Nations to the moment when he proclaimed that our salvation rested on Communist China's exclusion from the United Nations, and a whole succession of mistakes in between and thereafter...

...There will be those who say Peking is hopelessly committed to a course of intransigence, and that the only remaining question is on what day the reckoning occurs...

...when stupid, blundering generals committed what was then and now called the "flower of youth" to massive exercises in deadend slaughter, and Woodrow Wilson was trying to avoid direct involvement in the carnage...

...His speech went over big with Mississippi's legislators...

...More important than the record of error are the signs that his attitudes become more frozen each time he is confounded by events...

...The first point may be arguable, but it was, in a sense, the crisis of confidence and credibility created by earlier American disingenuousness that made a large-scale public display of honorable intent almost obligatory...

...but if somehow we achieve any semblance of solution in Vietnam, it will not mean the sudden dawn of a new day...

...But how often have we compounded original sin...

...Perhaps the ultimate irony of history is that, if there is to be any escape from the entrapment in which modern man finds himself, the architects of the new beginning will be the world leaders of the Roman Catholic Church —Pope John and now Pope Paul— and a modest Buddhist named U Thant who heads the United Nations, with perhaps certain spiritual assists from those in the Kremlin now branded "bourgeois imperialists" by Peking...

...We send out a thousand cables a day...

...that quarantine has intensified rather than diminished truculence...

...One gets the grotesque sense that all humanity now resembles a group of basketball players abruptly halting their game to crawl on the floor looking for a missing contact lens...

...The Communist will say that, despite certain unfortunate aberrations of the Stalin era, the wave of the future clearly belongs to the Communist legions...

...For what they basically involve is whether we shall see in our lifetime, or even that of our children, anything better than a fragile, armed truce on earth if indeed we can escape the miscalculation or accident that produces the nuclear collision, making civilization either extinct or intolerable for the survivors...

...there is no audible responsiveness in his voice to the authentically revolutionary explosions of our time...

...he found morale in the countryside rising and our allies on their way to "success...

...It could be argued that the matter was settled long ago and that those of us who cling to discussion of rational solutions have lost contact with reality...

...they offer merely varying degrees of dissatisfaction...

...The second point may be far more crucial...

...One year later he was declaring: "I think that General Khanh is on the right track and the situation has shown steady improvement...

...intervention told that they were "unrealistic" (which they may or may not prove to be now) ? The reader may know more about where we are headed by the time these words appear...

...Now it is a half century later, and, as these lines are written, President Johnson has just announced the resumption of U.S...

...But it is time, at least, that we begin to look beyond the battlefields of Vietnam and ask far more reflective questions about man's destiny...

...He was wrong in his evaluation of Sino-Soviet relations...

...Whatever happens in the next interim in Vietnam (unless there is an irretrievable disaster), this is the central issue...

...THE LARGER CONFLICT by JAMES A. WECHSLER T was born in 1915, when the battle-fields of Europe were drenched with the blood of thousands of young men who would never write the poems or compose the songs they had imagined, or love another girl...

...Where Muste and his associates fail is in their reluctance to recognize that there may be intervals when the Communists offer us literally no option except surrender...

...Sometimes he becomes entrapped by a moral double standard...

...bombing attacks on North Vietnam, coupled with a plea for United Nations intervention to mediate the conflict...

...This prophecy is now increasingly murky, however, in the light of the deepening conflict between the Peking and Muscovite wings of the Marxist church...

...But this seems a far better hope than the obsolete niceties of traditional diplomacy...

...Yet in the concrete confrontations that occur each day, and now most agonizingly in Vietnam, he can only be a reminder and a restraint...

...He holds aloft the banner of the brotherhood of man, soaked in blood as it is after nearly 2,000 years of transgression by those who have defiled it with sanctimony...

...Dean Rusk is not a villain but a symbol...

...that each monstrous madness has given an aspect of reasonableness to the next, and left us incapable of viewing with any detachment the fundamental idiocy and tragedy of our age...

...He seems reconciled to an interminable era of trial by strength, and stodginess...

...Certainly Dean Rusk manifests no sign of flexibility in the matter, and Peking is outwardly obdurate in its resolve to substitute its own despotism for Chiang's harsh rule over people who have been denied the right to choose...

...He may tell us what we cannot do without finally destroying our souls (such as employ nuclear weapons in Vietnam) but he cannot really tell us what we should do if the Communists, confident of victory, reject all overtures for negotiations...

...It was Dean Rusk who confidently described Communist China in 1951 as "a colonial Russian government—a Slavic Manchukuo on a larger scale...

...and that any reasonable chance for stability in the Far East must start with China's participation in the United Nations...

...The case may be made that we have passed the point of no return...

...I respect him, but he is relevant only in a symbolic sense— as an affirmation of values that have somehow survived the corruption of hideous barbarism...

...The pacifist will say he has told me this all along (from the time I first attended a meeting of the War Re-sisters League when I was a Columbia University freshman, and before the headier wine of Marxism was offered...

...The super-patriot will tell me that American nuclear power can still impose its will on the universe if we will only show the strength and resolution to issue an ultimatum on the rest of humanity...

...to avoid the nightmare of larger war, he acquires a certain permissiveness about "small" aggressions and even a hyper-critical view of his own government's resistance to them...

...Frankel reported that "one of the most interesting but least apparent aspects of President Johnson's diplomatic campaign to demonstrate good faith on Vietnam policy has been its lack of appeal to his principal diplomat, Secretary of State Rusk...

...Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi has just assured us that we must be prepared to risk full-scale war with China—including the use of nuclear weapons—to achieve "victory" in Vietnam...

...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a regular columnist for that newspaper...

...That means that not more than one-third of it is asleep in any twenty-four-hour period...

...Rusk is a conscientious, gracious, and earnest man who has labored long, exhausting hours in an unrewarding, exposed post (as did John Foster Dulles...

...Only the pacifist offers any troublesome challenge, because I share his loathing for those cold practitioners of realpolitik to whom human lives have too often seemed arithmetic in this half-century of blood-letting...

...at least those who sponsored the latter act could plausibly maintain that many thousands of lives would be saved if the war were swiftly terminated by one ghoulish extravaganza...

...But the authentic pacifist is a member of a holy order—and I say this without irreverence—rather than a legitimate counsellor to those who face the burdens of daily decisions...

...The arduousness of his task is incontestable...

...He is also a man who has at times been appallingly wrong...

...Whether some of the activists of the "New Left" are prepared to concede it or not, Vietnam is not merely an obscene, dirty war...

...Irretrievable events may now be in motion...

...I find no real answers in any of these camps...

...But where Rusk has so abjectly failed for so long is in his incapacity to differentiate between 1937 and 1965 and in his repeated assertions that there is some deadly parallel between Vietnam and Czechoslovakia—as if General Ky bore even some faint resemblance to Jan Masaryk...

...At about the same moment the Defense Department solemnly issues the text of a labored legal opinion by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach justifying the exclusion of Communist Robert Thompson's ashes from Arlington Cemetery, thereby demeaning our country and perversely proving that, in this case, it was no better to be dead than red...

...In the interval when this is being written, there comes the news that we are still searching for a hydrogen bomb lost during a plane crash near Spain...

...The world is round," he observed on a recent occasion...

...I would not intellectually equate the premeditated murders committed by the Nazis (or the Communists) against their victims with the calculations involved in the nuclear bombing of Japan...

...For if a nuclear struggle is the end of this road, let neither William Buckley nor anyone else tell me that we shall be the chosen people who rebuild the ruins...

...He will settle for nothing less...

...A month later his antenna detected "a steady movement" in South Vietnam "toward a constitutional system resting upon popular consent...

...It is our misfortune that it may seem to many that we have no other alternative...

...For he is operating on a separate sublime level of existence, often valorously enduring the taunts of the community but enjoying the luxury of worldly non-responsibility in the area of day-to-day judgments...

...Yet the fact that our own leadership rejected the alternative of a demonstration of the bomb over some unpopulated area before unleashing its horror on the defenseless is perhaps the harshest measure of the degree to which serious men have allowed matters to get out of hand, or mind...

...That occurred when they took over Czechoslovakia in 1948 with the Soviet Air Force—rather than any expression of popular sentiment ¦—as their real weapon...

...Wasn't it only yesterday that we were told by Defense Secretary McNamara that American troops would be home by December, 1965...

...I do not doubt that Lyndon B. Johnson will welcome their efforts, and I trust their unorthodox strivings will not upset Dean Rusk's sense of diplomatic propriety...

...Frankel described Rusk's "rigid adherence to two basic convictions"— that diplomacy should be "quiet" and that "political compromise" should not duplicate the appeasement strategy of the 1930's...

...Moscow did not have to drop any bombs because the West chose to make the sacrifice of a people who fervently cared about freedom (and whom the democracies had similarly abandoned in 1937 to the Nazis...

...Yet whether there is a massive adventure in escalation or some Korean-type breakthrough toward peace, or whether the suspense still endures, the questions that must haunt my generation will endure...

...He cannot tell us how, in the foreseeable future, we shall cope with the possibility that China's rulers have become the prisoners of their own delusions, and contemptuous of the loss of life that adventurism may entail...

...It could be contended that more than 50,000,000 lives lost in World War II, the 6,000,000 Jews systematically exterminated by the Nazis, the darkness at noon in Hiroshima, the terror and murder of the Stalin regime so belatedly confirmed by Khrushchev—that all these and a thousand other episodes of mass violence and sadism during this half century render absurd any visions of a better day or any justification for modern man's survival...

...Whether Peking is disposed at this juncture to bid for membership in the club is far from clear...

...But there were also those who said the same things about U.S.-Soviet relations...

...His most recent book is "Reflections of an Angry Middle-aged Editor...

...but he does not tell me what the world would be like if Winston Churchill had permitted the Nazis to rule Europe and perpetuate, for even a century, their dream of a "thousand-year-Reich," or if in the period after World War II we had allowed Stalin to run wild in Western Europe without threatening to resist...

...Any serious attempt to halt the cycle almost surely must begin with a recognition that our China policy has been a disastrous failure...

...he shared the optimism that invited General MacArthur's debacle at the Yalu...

...It is part of an infinitely larger conflict which will either be resolved by great new beginnings in world relationships—the results of which no man can predict—or in a slow, deadly drift toward the Armageddon so freely forecast in the Chinese manifestoes...

...There is, moreover, the persistent refusal of a significant segment of mankind to derive inspiration from the record of one-party state oppression...

...Anyone who has pursued these reflections this far may inquire: Must we choose between Dean Rusk and, say, A. J. Muste, who has carried the pacifist message so long and so nobly...

...Whatever happened to General Khanh...

...Increasingly he imparts the sense of being a Nineteenth Century diplomat of the better breed in a world that cries out for unorthodox, unconventional, venturesome men...

...An illuminating glimpse of Rusk's mind and mood was offered by The New York Times correspondent Max Frankel during the course of the January "peace offensive...

...There were those who denied the possibility of any movements toward independence within the monolithic Communist empire...

...I do not know of any better prospect, and I am hardly recommending wagers on their success...

...There are certain groups for whom the problem of perspective indicated here will create no perplexities...

...On the day before the announcement of the Presidential decision, a Washington dispatch to The New York Times reported that the President's "senior advisers" had informed him that it might require seven more years of American investment—in men and money—to achieve a "satisfactory solution...

...As a nation we are still even capable of self-righteousness because, it is true, our evil has often been in response to wickedness...

...he is an answer to the insensitivities of such liberal statesmen as the rulers of Freedom House who seem so oblivious to the absurdity of the human predicament, and so erudite in fashioning rationalizations for new rounds of violence without end...

...Whether Washington is at last prepared to concede that Formosa cannot be forever preserved as Chiang Kai-shek's isle of dreams and that its claim to "independence" and "self-determination" is surely as valid as that of South Vietnam is equally uncertain...

...And how often were advocates of U.N...

...In March, 1963, he found himself saying that the Vietnam war "is turning an important corner" with government forces clearly commanding "the initiative in most areas of the country...

...for it confirms the impression earlier noted that Rusk too often draws a mechanical analogy between the Nazi thrust in Europe three decades ago and the far more complicated Communist challenge in Asia now...

...For the pacifist let it be said that he has remained deeply consistent...

...He suffers from what Walter Lippmann has often called the delusion of American omnipotence, a fantasy that still afflicts too many...

...But there is a macabre note in the portrait of a Secretary of State informing us at this stage in history that the world really isn't flat...

...he is capable of sounding as if he viewed the Vietcong as noisy, uncouth intruders in a tennis match, and of reciting platitudes as if they were the highest form of rectitude...

...The other two-thirds is awake and having a crisis...

...He was wrong in his assessment of the possibility of Chinese intervention in Korea...

...This may be the heart of the present matter...

...we may have missed that chance...

...Those of certain ritualistic liberal faiths may be equally dismayed by the nature of such an alliance for peace...