'NOBODY DROPPED DEAD'

...We do not propose to deal here with the substantive content of the hearings on China...

...Didn't we require, at nuclear gunpoint, that the Soviet Union remove ballistic missiles from Cuba...

...Their testimony was widely and prominently published, broadcast, and televised, and won respectful comment if not actual praise from newspapers not especially celebrated for their progressive position...

...In the light of this background, the process of reaching an accommodation with Peking will not be easy...

...Elsewhere in the Administration, however, there was less enthusiasm for the turning tide of public opinion...

...But this behavior must be evaluated against the background of some seventeen years of America's refusal to answer the phone at all, and beyond that, this country's attempt to pressure our friends and allies into cutting all lines of communication to China...

...That was seventeen years ago, but Secretary Rusk still says Peiping...

...It is the United States that has held rigidly all these years to the course of not only refusing to recognize Communist China and opposing her admittance to the world community of the United Nations, but also to the policy of persuading—or buying—as many other nations as we could to follow our lead of isolating China...

...Nations, like individuals, have their breaking point, as U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations has reminded us...

...It's like calling Leningrad St...

...Of all the many bits of evidence of changing sentiment in the wake of the Fulbright hearings, the one that intrigued us most was the report of a Congressman who had recently addressed an audience in a conservative small town in his district...

...Johnson and Rusk have described the process...

...It dared "think the unthinkable," and as Senator J. W. Fulbright, chainnan of the Foreign Relations Committee, wryly observed after the experience: "Nobody dropped dead...

...Even the Johnson Administration, which has blindly followed the path of its predecessors on China policy, seemed to budge ever so slightly...

...The "unthinkable," of course, was the remote possibility that the nation's China policy, inflexibly frozen for more than a decade and a half, might not really represent such sacred and enduring truth that it could not stand reconsideration and, perhaps, even revision...

...What the young may not realize is that for nearly seventeen years the subject of reevaluating our policy on China has been the country's number one taboo, except among a small and lonely band of scholars and publications...

...The men were members of the American Legion...

...This new position must strike any student of United States-China relations since 1949 as an extraordinary about-face on our part...

...One example is The Washington Star, an ultra respectable and conservative daily which has long been a supporter of the Administration's frozen policy on China...

...What could be more natural than to study a subject of such grave concern to Congress and the country...

...Their public hearings, to shift metaphors, were like opening the creaking door of a long-locked closet...

...After his talk, several men accosted him with the demand that it was "high time to begin thinking of reconsidering our policy toward Red China...

...China is going through a difficult stage of development," U Thant noted, "and in such a delicate stage, countries will show certain emotions, certain strong reactions, certain rigidities, and even certain arrogance...

...Alexander Kendrick CBS News, March 7 Vietnam...

...It is true, of course, that China today seems to prefer isolation and intransigence—that she "keeps hanging up on the phone...

...There were other comparable responses to the Fulbright hearings...

...Speaking of China, he emphasized recently that "when a country is obsessed with fear and suspicion, all sorts of tensions are likely to develop, all sorts of unreasonable reactions are likely to come forth...

...Yet we assume that China must remain calm, unafraid, friendly, and responsive in the face of the fact that we have ringed her, north and south, east and west, with some of the deadliest firepower known to modern mass murder...

...Hopefully, the Fulbright hearings may represent a great watershed dividing our long imprisonment in the McCarthy-Dulles dungeon and our release to the creative climate of thinking the unthinkable about present-day China...

...Why, President Johnson seems to be asking, should China feel frightened and hostile...

...When the Communists triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek, they set up in Peking again and called it that again...

...It is true, he allowed, that they "are fostering controversy," but he was not much inclined to apologize because "controversy is the condition of intelligent decision-making...

...Now, the President and his Secretary of State have taken to complaining to the country and the world that it is China that insists on isolation, that she "keeps hanging up on the phone," as both Mr...

...Far from provoking a storm of McCarthy-style vituperation and abuse, the expert witnesses were warmly received and treated with courtesy and consideration by even the most conservative Senators...

...It is time, declared this remarkable Senator, to ask searching questions, to ask "what is wrong with our side as well as what is wrong with the other side...

...The Ripon Society, a Republican research and policy organization of younger Republicans, called on its elders in the GOP to take the initiative in "a searching reexamination" of U.S...

...But there was a curious shift in approach to the problem at the White House and the State Department...

...The hearings, said Chairman Fulbright, represent "an experiment in public education...

...The Chinese, after all, are the most numerous, potentially one of the most powerful, and presently the most provocative people on earth...

...The map shows that we have encircled China with bases in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Okinawa, Thailand, and South Rusk's 'Peiping' In his public appearances before Senate committees, at news conferences, and in speeches, Secretary of State Dean Rusk is always deliberately careful to refer to the capital of Communist China as Peiping, instead of Peking, its correct and official name...

...It is China's own position...

...Until recently, the avowed position of our country has been for us to isolate mainland China as much as possible...

...Most of the major witnesses testifying before the Committee emphasized the need to end the isolation of China, to admit her to the United Nations, to speed trade and travel relations, and, generally, to persuade her to join the international community as a full-fledged partner...

...It may take the Chinese a sizable spell before they come to believe we are parting with our past, if indeed we are...

...It will require boundless patience and involve many frustrations and reverses...

...We would respectfully suggest that the Chief Executive do two things: One—Consult the history books in the White House library to learn how the great powers of the Western world cruelly exploited, ravaged, and humiliated China for more than a century before the Communists captured control in 1949...

...It is noteworthy that Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey called the Fulbright hearings "a new omen, scarcely imaginable a few years ago...

...Responding to an attempt by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to cold-shoulder efforts to work with China on the ground that it is impossible to get along with her, The Star said: "The fact that Peking may refuse at present to enter the United Nations on any terms acceptable to the majority of the members does not mean that an invitation should be withheld...

...Petersburg again...

...The Progressive has developed the relevant issues in countless articles and editorials over the years and publishes a brilliant commentary by Charles Taylor on "The View from Peking" on Page 14 of this issue...

...Wouldn't we of the United States feel hostile, frightened, and perhaps even a bit paranoid, if Communist China's military power were as great as is ours—including the nuclear capacity to destroy the world—and that power was poised for instant action against us in Canada, Nantucket, Stat-en Island, Bermuda, Mexico, and Cata-lina Island...

...What concerns us here is the response to the hearings—a response that demonstrated, as The New York Times noted, that "the country is far ahead of the Administration in its willingness to adopt new approaches" to the problem of China...

...During those decisive years when the new China was feeling its way in the world, the United States responded to the whiplash of McCarthyism and the bland assurances of Dulles by building an American wall of ignorance, suspicion, and hostility around Communist China—a wall which stood un-breached until Senator Fulbright and his colleagues dared to penetrate it last month...

...As far as I am aware," he said at his March 23 press conference, "it is not the position of this country that creates the problems with China...

...policy toward China that would emphasize "a less hostile attitude" and that would call on our government to "discontinue its efforts to deny mainland China a seat in the United Nations...

...We have, he said, "shaken the iceberg of frozen opinion on China...

...The fact that it may prove impossible to establish diplomatic relations with China at this point does not change the fact that American interests in Asia would be served by trying...

...The result was to provide a refreshing airing of the realities about China instead of a replay of the stale myths and cliches on which our rusty policy has rested these many years...

...The most valuable public servant, like the true patriot, is one who gives a higher loyalty to his country's ideals than to its present policy and who, therefore, is willing to criticize as well as to comply...

...In keeping with tradition and what he had always regarded as the hard realities of politics, he had made no mention of the China problem...

...Two—More importantly, the President should examine the enormous map of the Far East that he has readily available...

...Moreover, President Eisenhower's Secretary of State, the late John Foster Dulles, repeatedly assured the nation during that period that Communist control of China was no more than "a passing phase" that would disappear in good season if we simply ignored China diplomatically, quarantined her economically, and encircled her militarily...

...The point is that Peking, the historic capital of China through many dynasties, was renamed Peiping by the Nationalist Government when it moved its capital to Nanking...

...A rampant McCarthyism in the early Fifties branded every critic of our China policy as an "appeaser," a "dupe of the Communists," or a "traitor...

...But it took us in the United States nearly seventeen years before we dared think out loud about the self-defeating character of our policy of isolating and encircling Communist China...

...Like individuals, countries have nervous breakdowns"— and it is the duty of the world community to try to understand and find some remedy...

...Jerome D. Frank, the distinguished psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, added medical corroboration to U Thant's political psychiatry when he said: "Frightened, hostile individuals tend to behave in ways which aggravate their difficulties instead of resolving them, and frightened, hostile nations seem to behave similarly...

...The younger generation doubtless found nothing unusual in the fact that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted public hearings on our approach to the problem of China...