Notes in the News
notes in the news The 'Bull Session' As Assistant Secretary for Public Defense, Arthur Sylvester, a former new-paperman, is charged with the top responsibility for the official release of war news...
...Edward J. Shoven, Jr...
...of the University of Cincinnati—that struck us most forcibly was a quotation from a student: "We want ideas that are worth some passion...
...Why don't you get out and cover the war...
...51 In Wisconsin, Democrats at their state convention set a national precedent...
...Benjamin S. Rosenthal, New York...
...Eric Sevareid CBS, June 21, 1966...
...Walter Reuther charged that the boycott was "a distinct disservice to the AFL-CIO, to the free world labor movement, to our nation, and to the cause of international peace and freedom...
...a civil war and a social revolution and a struggle for national identity and freedom from European rule...
...In 1966 an increasing number of Democrats campaigning for Congress and governorships have begun to feel that because of President Johnson's ever more aggressive Vietnam policy, his may be a good name to avoid in the pursuit of votes...
...When labor officials meet this fall for discussion of foreign policy issues, that role will be subjected to its first serious review in a decade...
...Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi...
...Conversely, the same poll revealed that Senator Robert Kennedy, a critic of the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policies, would defeat Romney, forty-five per cent to thirty-nine, with sixteen per cent undecided...
...One of the newsmen suggested that Sylvester "was being deliberately provocative...
...At one point Sylvester asked: "Do you guys want to be spoon-fed...
...have won a stunning victory for American farm workers...
...Scheer drew 44.9 per cent of the vote, more than twice the total that had been forecast for him...
...NSA plans call for student-faculty teams, on one hundred campuses or more, to hold periodic retreats to study the causes of student unrest and to find solutions that will aid the student by reforming and revitalizing higher education itself...
...the crucial issue is that of dynamically redefining a good education for today's youth...
...Embassy in Saigon, said it was not the usual briefing for information, but a "bull session...
...Phillip Burton, California...
...Civil War Until we got into it, the Vietnam war was essentially a civil war...
...I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States...
...But with Meany's protection he will probably go on to forge even stronger links between AFL-CIO activities overseas and CIA foreign operations...
...The 1966 Meany called a meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council which then voted eighteen to six—a smaller majority than expected—to endorse his boycott...
...and Paul Booth, national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society...
...Weiss, charging "wholesale fraud and irregularities" in the election, announced his determination to seek court review of the conduct of the election...
...He did...
...The first jolt, as Safer told the story, came when Sylvester said, "I can't understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here...
...Edward R. Roybal, California...
...Now President Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and his brother Victor have forced a showdown over the foreign policy role which Meany and Lovestone have dictated to the AFL-CIO...
...Meany ordered the AFL-CIO delegation to walk out from the ILO conference as a protest against the election of a Polish Communist delegate to preside over its sessions at Geneva...
...The indifference of Congress and the press to this incident is shockingly callous...
...Sylvester, Safer recalled, replied, "That's exactly what I expect...
...Charles C. Diggs, Jr., Michigan...
...Benjamin Sp?ck, whose books have helped millions of mothers raise their babies...
...The development leading to the test this fall was the recent furor over the AFL-CIO boycott of the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency with labor, employer, and government representatives from U. N. member countries...
...This should be the next step in the long struggle of the isolated and exploited agricultural workers to win a fair share of the enormous wealth they work so hard to produce...
...Efforts were made by Administration supporters to include lavish praise of the President for "peace" efforts and "military restraint," but the convention rejected this interpretation of what the Administration was up to...
...The prospect of a full-scale war in Asia is no longer remote," they said...
...William F. Ryan, New York...
...The sentence in the report—written by Dr...
...Before winning fifty-four per cent, Cohelan felt obliged to shift from qualified support of the White House on Vietnam to the campaign remark: "I'm a Nervous Nellie, too...
...A major conclusion of the conference was that the American college student is much more troubled about the pattern of personal relationships and educational opportunities in the college experience than about sex, Vietnam, drugs, or the bomb: "These latter issues were considered to be symptoms, secondary in importance to the greater and deeper irritations involved in the quest for a meaningful education...
...A one-time leader of the U. S. Communist Party, Lovestone is Meany's foreign policy director and greatly contributes to the growing Red-phobia of the AFL-CIO in its world outlook...
...The conference findings and recommendations have been summed up in a fascinating report, Students, Stress, and the College Experience, which is being sent to college presidents, deans of students, college newspaper editors, and some 4,000 professors...
...Vietnam's Political Backlash In 1964 a number of prominent Republicans running for office shuddered away from Barry Goldwater, the top man on their ticket...
...When the problem of the credibility of American officials was brought up, Sylvester responded: "Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid...
...If Sylvester made a single one of the remarks attributed to him he merits dismissal...
...Among suggestions for reform offered were these: Students should be more responsibly involved in the management of college affairs...
...Not long after— probably because of Administration pressure—Meany approved the return of AFL-CIO representatives to the ILO...
...Congress has the power to avert otherwise inevitable conflict and hasten the process of bringing farm workers into the mainstream of American life by simply placing farm labor under the protection of the National Labor Relations Act, from which it has senselessly been excluded...
...Although Mr...
...The late start and modest beginnings of the National Conference for New Politics may prevent it from exercising a significant influence in the 1966 election, but there can be little doubt that the organization represents a mounting frustration among those liberals who are turning away from the Johnson Administration because of policies in Vietnam and its failure to sustain the early promise of the Great Society program at home...
...For legal and diplomatic reasons, Washington must argue that it is not a civil war at all, but an aggression and an invasion by an external power...
...Action on the Left In an effort to channel public opposition to the President's Vietnam policy into support for peace candidates, a number of New Left and Old Left liberals and radicals have established the National Conference for New Politics...
...The Conference seeks to raise $500,000 to aid the campaigns of some fifty candidates from coast to coast and plans to provide them with personnel, research, and vote-getting techniques...
...Victor Reuther has called special attention to one of the most alarming developments of all—the infiltration of the American labor movement by the CIA...
...Donald M. Fraser, Minnesota...
...It placed American labor on display in the world's window as a "sore loser" when ILO members, in a democratic election, chose a Communist delegate by one vote as their chairman at Geneva...
...Safer's account of what immediately followed this threat is astounding: "At this point, the Hon...
...Don Edwards, California...
...Reforming Higher Education For too many of our young people their college years may turn out to be lost years during which they are processed through an educational apparatus rather than informed, inspired, and educated...
...When the Overseas Press Club published the Safer article, Representative Durward G. Hall, Missouri Republican, entered it in the Congressional Record and told the House that "if Mr...
...Robert Kastenmeier, Wisconsin...
...This most sensitive task demands, among other qualities, an appreciation of the people's right to know a great deal more than they now do about the war they are paying for with their taxes and the lives of their sons...
...Did you hear that—stupid...
...We are not going to fall into a Soviet trap and aid them in destroying this organization...
...The Meany action also was contrary to the position of the Administration and U. S. business, whose representatives remained in the ILO meetings, and it contradicted the George Meany of 1955 who said, on the occasion of an employer walkout from the ILO: "We are not going to walk away from the ILO...
...The effect, as described by Safer: "It was a jarring and insulting remark...
...Faculty members and students from thirty-three colleges and universities participated...
...But when men speaking the same language, living within the same cultural context, raised in the same cities and villages fight one another by the thousands, that is civil war...
...Dick Gregory, Negro entertainer and civil rights spokesman...
...In New Jersey, a survey by The New York Times disclosed that "a number of Democratic leaders, alarmed by an apparent growing, grassroots dissatisfaction with President Johnson's Vietnam policy, are seriously considering breaking with the President on Vietnam in the fall election campaign...
...A network television correspondent said, "Surely, Arthur, you don't expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government...
...The conferees found that "The liberating, growth-inducing, moral purposes of education have fallen into rather ruinous state...
...In his letter to Riesel, the Assistant Secretary referred to Safer's account as a "gem of misrepresentation," and charged him with distortions and "self-created quotations attributed to me...
...Johnson's endorsement has yet to become the millstone for Democrats that Goldwater's was for Republicans, it can be likened to a two-inch coattail covered with burrs— something a Democratic candidate might find painful to cling to in primaries and the general election...
...The Assistant Secretary, according to Safer, replied: "Look, I don't even have to talk to you people...
...This group of anti-poverty and civil rights leaders—and some reform Democrats—will not be a membership organization but a clearing house for money, manpower, research, and campaign ideas...
...If Safer still stands by his story, as we understand he does, his description of the official Pentagon position on the handling of news in Vietnam, especially the Sylvester notion that the people are entitled to only that news which makes the United States look good, should be the subject of a comprehensive Congressional investigation—and the sooner the better...
...A few minutes later, two more correspondents left...
...Meany and Lovestone should not be permitted by the representatives of the international unions to decree simplistic anti-Communism as the central policy for the AFL-CIO, which represents 13.5 million American union members...
...51 In New York City, Leonard Farbstein, a veteran Democratic Congressman who supports the President's Vietnam policies, won by a bare 151 votes in his party's primary over Theodore Weiss, a reform candidate who had demanded an immediate cease-fire in Vietnam and negotiations with the Vietcong...
...As a result, the AFL-CIO's position on world affairs has, in the past decade, moved to the right of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and the American government...
...Sylvester should either resign, or be fired...
...Meany's Blunder When the CIO was a separate entity, American labor had at least one important liberal voice on foreign policy matters...
...John G. Dow, New York...
...Among others associated with the National Conference for New Politics are Dr...
...But when it merged with the AFL in 1955 its influence for world peace and progress was all but smothered by the reactionary policies of AFL-CIO President George Meany and his foreign policy Rasputin, Jay Lovestone...
...The report, with its summary of the Warrenton conference findings, will be the basic initial document of the NSA-organized campus action conferences to come...
...Summing up recent political developments across the country, the National Committee for an Effective Congress, long- noted for its thoughtful political analysis, reported: "The Johnson consensus is rapidly dissolving...
...A major cause is that while enrollment in centers of higher learning has vastly increased in recent years, the teaching faculty has not grown proportionately, and too few college and universities have been willing to abandon outworn attitudes and practices and devise new ways of grappling with mass higher education...
...The groundwork for the strike and its ultimate success was laid by the demise of Public Law 78, the notorious "bracero" program, which for a generation strangled American farm workers' efforts to improve their wretched working and living conditions, and earn a decent income...
...Henry Helstoski, New Jersey...
...John Conyers, Jr., Michigan...
...A great deal more than was lost can be gained if the final outgrowth is some realistic revision of AFL-CIO foreign policy at its leadership meeting this fall...
...The man who permitted, if not invited, the CIA to infiltrate the AFL-CIO (to the point where Victor Reuther dubbed it the "AFL-CIA") is Lovestone...
...The boycott was a tragic blunder which damaged President Johnson's stated program of "building bridges" to countries in the European Communist coalition...
...notes in the news The 'Bull Session' As Assistant Secretary for Public Defense, Arthur Sylvester, a former new-paperman, is charged with the top responsibility for the official release of war news from Vietnam...
...Here is a corruption of the progressive ideals of unionism which, if continued, can seriously injure American labor from within...
...The signers of the statement were Representatives Jonathan B. Bingham, New York...
...Sylvester, wrote Safer afterwards, "seemed anxious to take a stand—to say something that would jar us...
...Sylvester said that Safer was correct on only one point—that in opening the session Barry Zorthian, minister-counselor of the U.S...
...The loss to society caused by the shortcomings of higher education is incalculable, the loss to the individual student immeasurable...
...If he were a rank-and-filer, shop steward, or official in any democratic union local he would have been tried and expelled long ago for anti-union activities...
...They approved a "dove" resolution which urged a cease-fire, international supervision of free Vietnam elections, and aggressive pursuit of peace by the Administration...
...Henry Reuss, Wisconsin...
...Farm Labor Breakthrough The patient persistence and stubborn idealism of Cesar Chavez and his National Farm Workers Association, plus the full support of the AFL-CIO, Courageous Congressmen Although they soon face campaigns for re-election, sixteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives dared denounce President Johnson's newest escalation of the war in Vietnam...
...When men of the North (including Prime Minister Ky) are part of the government of the South, and vice versa, it is civil war...
...f Also in California, an all-out peace candidate, Robert Scheer, gave Congressman Jeffery Cohelan, a highly regarded liberal, a serious scare in the Democratic primary...
...If an account written by Morley Safer, a respected Columbia Broadcasting System newsman in Vietnam, is essentially correct—Sylvester has attacked it without effectively refuting it—then the Assistant Secretary holds views on the handling of war news that should horrify the press and public, and justify his removal by President Johnson...
...The prediction of one labor newspaper that the Schenley pact will "pave the way for a sweeping revolution on the farm labor front" may be true, but it should be treated with caution...
...The Congressman inserted Sylvester's response in the Congressional Record-— where it has been greeted with the same press silence that was accorded the original incident for a whole year...
...A ten-month Chavez-led strike by several hundred grape pickers in Delano, California (described in detail in the July issue of The Progressive), came to fruition recently in an unprecedented union contract between NFWA and Schenley Industries, Inc., providing a minimum wage of $1.75 an hour, a union hiring hall, a union shop, and dues checkoff...
...Diplomatic and military developments could change the picture in the fall, but as of mid-summer the evidence was piling up that the Johnson Administration's handling of the mess in Vietnam would cost it dearly in the November elections...
...and students should be encouraged to pursue independent study in exploratory courses designed by the student with the help of a professor...
...The cause of democracy can only be set back, not advanced, by so mindless and sterile a doctrine...
...The remaining twenty-four per cent were undecided...
...James H. Scheuer, New York, and Lester L. Wolff, New York...
...It pointed out that of 175 of the President's most reliable Great Society supporters in Congress, more than fifty are vulnerable because they won by less than a five per cent margin in 1964, and that defeat of only twenty-five now in the House would wipe out the Great Society's working majority in Congress...
...In a statement immediately after the first bombing of the Hanoi and Haiphong oil installations, the sixteen Democrats warned that this step "further commits this country to a profoundly dangerous policy of brinkmanship," openly challenges China "to raise the level of its commitment in Vietnam," and jeopardizes "continued Soviet restraint...
...Johnson...
...pass-fail judgments should take the place of grades, at least in the freshman year...
...With the threat of imported, low-paid Mexican labor removed, Chavez proved that farm workers can successfully organize and achieve a degree of the material gains and the dignity long ago accorded labor in other fields...
...In Iowa, a poll conducted by the respected Des Moines Register showed that if a Presidential election were held now, Governor George Romney of Michigan would command forty-six per cent of the vote, and President Johnson thirty-five per cent, with nineteen per cent undecided...
...Co-chairmen are Julian Bond, the young Negro whom the Georgia legislature twice refused to seat after he twice won election, because of his antiwar views, and Simon Casady, who was ousted from his position as president of the California Democratic Council, a 50,000-member reform group, following his denunciation of the war (the Council later went on record against the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policy...
...Then he went on, as Safer described it, "to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good...
...It is a long overdue battle expected to challenge—if not revise— the AFL-CIO's opposition to U. N. membership for mainland China, its "hawk" posture on the Vietnam war, its backing of anti-democratic forces in Latin America, its resistance to East-West trade, and other cold and hot war exercises ordered by Meany and Lovestone...
...Safer's account, which appeared in Dateline 1966, a publication of the Overseas Press Club, revealed that in July, 1965, a meeting was held in Saigon between Sylvester and a group of American newsmen to discuss some of the problems involved in covering the war...
...Earlier, organizers of the Conference declared in an advertisement in The New York Times: "The killing of American and Vietnamese will not stop unless opponents of this war and of the bankrupt foreign policy which it reflects can turn their dissent into real political power...
...Safer's reporting of this meeting is accurate—and based on my own experience I have no doubt that it is —then Mr...
...The Committee expects Democrats to lose more than fifty seats this fall, largely because of the Vietnam issue...
...Two television correspondents walked out, saying they had enough...
...Otherwise, wrote Sylvester, "his [Safer's] recollection of the evening was 'bull.' " He made specific denials of only one of the comments attributed to him by Safer, and then concluded with an attack on Safer's reputation as a newsman...
...The project is an outgrowth of a four-day "National Conference on Student Stress" held last fall in Warrenton, Virginia, under the sponsorship of the NSA and financed by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Danforth Foundation...
...The situation makes it imperative that a promising new project—the two-year "campus action program" of the National Student Association—receive cooperation in the academic world, and be closely followed by U. S. education officials, governors and legislators who make decisions about how much shall be spent for public colleges and universities, and by educators and other concerned citizens...
...Here, for example, is a sampling of significant reports in a half-dozen states: 51 In California, the usually reliable State Poll found that fifty per cent of that state's Democrats prefer Senator Robert Kennedy as their standard-bearer and only twenty-six per cent want Mr...
...There are many bitter battles ahead before farm workers generally can begin to catch up with their urban brothers...
...Even the Geneva Agreements called them two "zones" of the one country, not sovereign states...
...George E. Brown, Jr., California...
...The conference expressed its central philosophy in this excerpt from its statement of purpose: "This new politics is built by people who demand that our nation fulfill its pledge to abolish racial discrimination and poverty...
...Most of these goals were achieved long ago by labor unions in almost every segment of industry, but elated labor leaders hailed the agreement as a "significant breakthrough and the first contract of its kind anywhere in the farm industry...
...Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and wiggled his fingers...
...At labor's fall meeting, Lovestone should be put on the carpet...
...We urge the President to return to a policy of restraint...
...college credit should be given for "field work" in poverty programs, civil rights activity, and the Peace Corps...
...Sylvester later wrote to Representative Hall, attaching a copy of his correspondence with Victor Riesel, president of the Overseas Press Club...
...who understand the necessity of ending the cold war and American military intervention abroad, and creating world disarmament and a decent relationship with society undertaking revolutionary change...
...Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee...
...Most of the people in that room had spent as much time on actual operations as most GIs...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
