REFORM OR REVOLUTION FOR COLOMBIA

...Later, Stevenson observed Kennedy grow into the foreign policy tasks of the Presidency, and assisted him with some satisfaction...

...Goldberg is not an ordinary human being...

...To his credit, Goldberg tried desperately to induce President Johnson to prolong the bombing pause...

...He may never be given it...

...I added, 'It is that or doom—and we all know it.' "There are some, perhaps, who think that these words were just rhetorical flourish...

...Even now he has been known to have wondered aloud, to his intimate friends, if he had not been foolish in resigning from the highest bench...

...Good law cannot be static in a world of constant change...

...This was a switch: Previously the President had been furious with Thant for "meddling" in the Vietnam conflict, and White House and State Department spokesmen had not hesitated to say as much...

...The law gives form and substance to the spirit of liberty and to mankind's sacred stir for justice...

...He is fifty-seven years old and by no means a rich man...

...He tends to look upon the President as a man capable of making his own mistakes, and he still hopes to show the way to peace to President Johnson...

...How history will judge him is important to the vigorous, white-haired man in the horn-rimmed glasses, the man with the ready smile, the man with an unusual capacity to absorb punishment—fight back, and to win...

...When DONALD GRANT is the United Nations correspondent for the St...

...If Goldberg should be given the opportunity to see if the 1954 Geneva agreements can be implemented, peace will become possible...

...The Ambassador in New York, then, is at once an "employe" of and co-equal with the Secretary of State...

...Goldberg urged Stevenson to be patient...

...For many reasons one would hope not...

...He failed...

...Harper & Row has just published Goldberg's public papers, under the title, The Defenses of Freedom...

...Besides, there is a human pathos in the predicament of the son of humble Jewish immigrants, who began his career helping his father deliver vegetables: After having risen so high is Arthur Goldberg to end his public career in bitter frustration...

...The world expects more of the United States than of other nations, and we have an obligation to lead in the search for a world order under law . . ." In the same address, Goldberg, nevertheless, repeated the standard State Department arguments attempting to give legal justification to the American presence in Vietnam...

...In the ordinary course of events, Goldberg might indeed then inherit the post of Secretary of State, though it would be foolish to bet on this too heavily...

...There was, indeed, a touch of Moses the lawgiver in the first actions of Goldberg at the United Nations...

...But he has begun to unburden himself to his intimates and even to talk vaguely of going back to the practice of law...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...Not surprisingly, Goldberg came to look upon Rusk as the chief Washington impediment to peace in Vietnam—and as a destructive force and influence in the highest councils of the Johnson Administration...

...Instructions...

...He engineered a cease-fire in the war between India and Pakistan—again, without finding a solution to the dispute over Kashmir...

...he first picked up the book, with his photograph on the cover, Goldberg was moved to wonder how the man, Arthur J. Goldberg, would appear in history some years hence...

...Murphy then telephoned Lodge to demand an explanation...

...Here, between hard covers, were brave words written by Goldberg the Secretary of Labor, Goldberg the Supreme Court Justice, and Goldberg the American Ambassador to the United Nations...

...One of his first acts in office was to induce President Johnson to send a letter to Secretary General U Thant expressing appreciation for Thant's efforts to find peace in Vietnam...

...Advisers who had been consistently wrong in the past, added Schlesinger, thereby kept leading the President down various garden paths...

...Some move toward reconciliation with Communist China might help, as would an end to the bombing of North Vietnam...

...Among the State Department bureaucrats there is an understandable tendency to seek cover until this process has played itself out...

...He succeeded in getting the Johnson Administration to agree to negotiations "on the basis" of the Geneva accords, but the North Vietnamese made it clear to highly placed diplomats at the United Nations that this still begged the question...

...Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the former Presidential assistant, said recently that President Johnson had reasonably sound instincts on such foreign policy problems as Vietnam but lacked the self-confidence to stand by his own judgments...

...Goldberg has yet to embark on this positive task...

...Few would begrudge him that...

...The United States, he told a Columbia University Law School audience recently, should not "take as its standard the lowest level of international law or morality being applied by other members of the world community...

...It is possible to see, here, the beginning of an effort to find a way to implement the 1954 Geneva agreements...

...He will set you straight...

...Eisenhower made Lodge a member of the Cabinet...

...In his Columbia address, Goldberg said there were several misconceptions about international law...

...More importantly, he has begun to do some sober thinking about the situation in which he finds himself ; and there have been many reports that this thinking process^has led him to acquire strong private reservations to the position he must publicly defend as President Johnson's envoy at the United Nations...

...When a dinner guest asked him how he could expect Americans to favor withdrawal, Goldberg proceeded to make the hypothetical case for evacuation of U.S...

...Rusk also played a prominent role in the February meeting in Hawaii between President Johnson and South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky which made important contributions toward the frustration of Goldberg's peace efforts...

...Robert Murphy, who served under President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, details this problem in his memoirs...

...What did it all mean...

...Once bombing was resumed the whole United Nations exercise was doomed in advance...

...furthermore, it is not true that "the great political and ideological divisions of our time destroy completely the universal character of international law...

...Law and politics cannot be separated, he said...

...In the years of vigor which reasonably seem to be ahead he could make a tidy fortune in the practice of law...

...In private conversations, Goldberg sometimes seems to friends to envy those who are free to express their dove-like approach to the war in Vietnam...

...But the main highway leading to peace in Vietnam seems to many diplomats—notably including Secretary General U Thant—to lead through the 1954 Geneva agreements which ended the war between France and the Indochinese under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh...

...I am not bound by instructions from the State Department...

...It now comes that the President has asked me to join in the greatest adventure of man's history—the effort to bring the rule of law to govern the relations between sovereign states...

...The letter expressed the hope that these efforts would be continued...

...It is not difficult to imagine Goldberg succeeding in finding the road to peace—then resigning to resume the practice of law...

...peacekeeping costs owed by the Soviet Union and France that had paralyzed the General Assembly—without, however, solving the underlying problem...

...On one occasion, he writes, he sent Lodge instructions on the way the American vote was to be cast in the United Nations, only to discover that Lodge had voted the opposite way...

...Goldberg, it is said by some of his intimates, privately shares some of these views...

...In the lower echelons of American foreign policymaking, the folklore has it that Goldberg and Rusk are engaged in a carefully camouflaged feud...

...Murphy, in his memoirs, adds: "Once I understood that the Secretary of State did not choose to challenge the virtual autonomy which Lodge claimed for his embassy at the United Nations, I realized it was not appropriate for me to do so...

...I did not so regard them...

...He is, after all, a victim of the "Stevenson syndrome...

...Like Adlai E. Stevenson, his predecessor as chief American delegate to the United Nations, Ambassador Goldberg is forced by circumstances to defend policies which he knows to be illegal, immoral, and downright foolish...

...Throughout my life," he said on accepting the appointment as Ambassador, "I have been deeply committed to the rule of law...

...Some of Goldberg's friends, however, believe he is playing for higher stakes —peace in Vietnam, and his own place in history...

...Goldberg does not wholly agree...

...On this human level a great many people have wondered why Goldberg gave up the Supreme Court bench to enter the rough and unfamiliar arena of world politics...

...He broke the impasse on U.N...

...The trick, of course, is to convince the President that he should overrule his hawk-like advisers and alter American policy to the extent necessary to find the road to peace...

...Goldberg has not been able to wring this acceptance from the Johnson Administration, leading the best placed diplomats at the United Nations to conclude that the basis for negotiations does not yet exist...

...Peace through law, he usually puts it...

...asked Lodge...

...The North Vietnamese have insisted that the key to starting negotiations to end the war in Vietnam—once the bombing has ceased—lies in acceptance of the Geneva agreements...

...A willingness to negotiate with the enemy —including the main enemy, the Viet-cong, seems like nothing more than common sense to many thoughtful diplomats at the United Nations...

...He failed largely—or at least Goldberg believes —because of the influence of Secretary of State Dean Rusk...

...He seems frustrated, torn, and irritable...

...forces so persuasively that some of those presGoldbergs Dilemma by DONALD GRANT ent had the curious feeling that he might be more than a little convinced of its logic...

...Tf Arthur J. Goldberg were a relatively simple human being—which he is not—one could describe his predicament, which has a clear precedent, and assess the probabilities with a fair degree of accuracy...

...It is important, also, to the nation which Goldberg represents in the United Nations, and because that nation is the most powerful in the world, to a great many people everywhere...

...Goldberg remembers a conversation with Stevenson, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, in which Stevenson was in despair over the ineptitude of President Kennedy...

...But in the period ahead, he continued, foreign affairs would be decisive—and the United Nations would be the arena in which American policy would be shaped...

...As this incident suggests—and as Goldberg is well aware—Goldberg's problem is really not Rusk, but President Johnson himself...

...Still, as Goldberg pointed out, law and politics cannot be absolutely separated...

...Goldberg does not now intend to resign...

...On another occasion, also in Washington, Goldberg reportedly expressed the opinion that if there were more pressure in the country for outright U.S...

...I am a member of the President's Cabinet and accept instructions only from him...

...Several months earlier Rusk had had a hand in frustrating a North Vietnamese peace-feeler, sent through the former mayor of Florence, Italy, Geor-gio La Pira...

...withdrawal from Vietnam, it would help the President maintain a position of restraint in resisting the demands of the hawks for greater escalation...

...President Kennedy followed the precedent with Adlai Stevenson, and President Johnson also made Goldberg a member of the Cabinet...

...This is the sort of legal-political problem that Goldberg knows and understands...

...ordinary vegetable delivery boys do not rise to the Supreme Court, then resign to take a job full of headaches...

...to succeed Adlai Stevenson," Goldberg said at Columbia, "I said that the President had asked me to join in the greatest adventure in man's history—the effort to bring the rule of law to govern the relations between sovereign states...

...The man who started out in the United Nations feeling a bit like Moses has had more than one occasion to remember the vicissitudes of Job...

...events since 1954 must be taken into account in any real settlement...

...As the bombing was resumed, Goldberg brought the Vietnam question to the United Nations Security Council...

...I would do exactly what you are doing," Goldberg told the Senator who is so critical of the Ambassador's chief in the White House...

...He has little sympathy for the Rusk argument that if anyone else breaks an agreement the United States is free to do likewise...

...itself the highest possible standard of behavior...

...The outcome, so it is said, must be either the resignation of Goldberg from his United Nations post—or his elevation to the post of Secretary of State, vacated by Rusk...

...Senator...

...Goldberg frequently says that only the hope of being able to find the road to peace in Vietnam persuaded him to leave the Supreme Court...

...When Murphy said he would have to take the case to Dulles, Lodge replied, "Yes, do that...

...From time to time he has offered several explanations...

...Since the days when Henry Cabot Lodge was President Eisenhower's chief representative at the United Nations there has been a degree of ambiguity in the relationship between the Ambassador in New York and the Secretary of State in Washington...

...Like Stevenson before him, Goldberg is bound—so long as he remains at his official post— to go along with the official sophistries of the moment...

...It is rather my belief that the United States should set for...

...Thus, at a dinner party at the house of a Washington columnist, Goldberg was asked by a Senator who often sharply criticizes Administration policy in Vietnam, what he, Goldberg, would do if he were a U.S...

...If this situation continues, Goldberg may either resign or find his reputation destroyed and his power to influence events, at home and abroad, reduced to the vanishing point...

...Goldberg does not view with much judicial favor the standard State Department legal apologetics for the American presence in Vietnam...

...Goldberg helped induce President Johnson to end the bombing of North Vietnam for thirty-seven days, beginning last Christmas eve...

...One has the impression that Goldberg would find the task of finding such a settlement immensely more rewarding than his present role, which so badly becomes him, the role of a paid advocate of policies he knows are compounded of political opportunism and bad law...

...Some of his friends in Washington believed the Court had come to be something of a bore, though Goldberg has said in public that his three years on the court constituted "the richest and most satisfying period of my career...

...He has not been given the opportunity...

...Implementing the agreements, to be sure, will involve some bitter medicine, certainly the withdrawal of American troops and possibly the reuniting of Vietnam under a Communist government...

...In the last decade or so, he said, the Supreme Court had been a powerful factor in determining the nature of American life, particularly through its decisions on Negro rights...

...When I was appointed...

...Goldberg hopes that Johnson, too, will grow, but for the moment his satisfactions are thin...

...Not long ago Goldberg told a dinner companion that he had stepped down from the Court and moved to the United Nations because he believed this was the direction of history...

...For what...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who edited Goldberg's public papers, says in the introduction that "In his career Arthur Goldberg has been first of all a lawyer, only thereafter an advocate...