Businessmen: New Peaceniks

...In his role as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Earle Wheeler argued for this plane against many experts who regard it as unnecessary in an age of missiles...

...Lundborg said that, regardless of who is responsible for the war, "the rest of us have gone along pretty supinely...

...It would have justified a stockholders' revolt, with fortunate board members hanged in effigy, unfortunate ones in Detroit...

...Congress, which passively rubber-stamped escalating American involvement in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, has at last begun to reassert its constitutional responsibilities...

...In military intervention and arms escalation, each step has been matched by the adversary...

...These are just a few examples of the recklessness with which the military spends our money...

...Naval experts told Congress that the Mark 48 torpedo would cost $65,000 each...

...The foreign policy engineers who Americanized the Vietnam war saddled the country with a national Edsel...

...Such 1984-type tactics are direct attacks on the Constitution of the United States, the same Constitution every military officer has taken an oath to defend...

...How, he asked, "can a country whose business is business continue to be deaf to its own youth and blind to a war that is rapidly turning this country into one of the poor nations...

...An overly large, overly rich, and overly powerful military establishment was feared by our Founding Fathers and warned against by Dwight Eisenhower...

...Practical persons must perceive that peace is not a heavensent gift but a structure to be created step by step...

...As I tried to persuade businessmen that a mistaken war which was killing their sons, dividing their country, and damaging their economy was in fact very much their business, I discovered almost immediately that news media people seemed to regard anti-war businessmen as a man-bites-dog story...

...As businessmen, as fathers, and as Americans we are confronted by an inescapable choice: our children—or our experts and their myths...

...The significance of Galbraith's statement is heightened by a statistic which surprises many: during the fiscal year 1970, seventy per cent of the nonfixed portion of our Federal budget went to military-related expenditures...

...Perhaps we have already gone too far to prevent expansion of hostilities to war in Laos, repressive erosion of American freedom, or massive nuclear destruction...

...Businessmen were firmly convinced that foreign policy was the exclusive domain of politicians and soldiers...

...Apparently adhering to the theory that even an Edsel can be successfully merchandised if sold with the covering canvas still on, the Nixon Administration, like its predecessors, has tried to keep the war in Laos a secret...

...But they lack experience and influence...

...They are now involved...

...Perhaps it was...

...I base this statement upon three and one-half years of personal experience in antiwar work as well as two additional considerations...

...We have been waiting a long time for Mr...

...We cannot blame our best young people for not deferring to the experts who took us into the Southeast Asian war and kept seeing light at the end of the tunnel...

...It is worth a try...

...It is useful to remind ourselves that a billion (one thousand million) dollars can provide vocational schooling full time for 540,000 youngsters, or send over 100,000 indigent students to a public college or university for four years, including full-time tuition, room, and board...

...Some time ago, addressing himself to the problem of fanaticism, U.N...

...In looking at Southeast Asia and beyond, it strikes me that American businessmen are uniquely equipped to help avert international, national, and personal disaster...

...Such a military bureaucracy could become the most serious threat to the very democracy it is supposed to be protecting...

...We have depicted our competitor, whether in Laos, Russia, China, Vietnam, or Cuba, as totally evil...

...General Wheeler said: "The main reason for this generation of bomber was to force the Russians to spend more, spending themselves into bankruptcy...

...If enough business leaders lead, we may still find our way safely through the most hazardous period in our nation's history— in Vietnam, Laos, and beyond...

...With this in mind we can better appreciate the true cost of the $23 billion we have wasted on missiles and weapons that were built only to be abandoned...

...As a businessman who began to speak out publicly and on a full-time basis against the Vietnam war early in 1967, I hope to describe the changing public attitude toward the Indochina war and the part played in that change by American businessmen...

...time to admit that there is both good and evil in all political ideologies...

...And they are increasingly isolated by the viciousness of certain demagogues in high office...

...But the cost overruns of this plane are already substantially in excess of $2 billion...

...We are haunted by Cold War visions of a unified Communist monolith, even though clinging to that illusion means shutting our eyes to a world vastly different from that of twenty-five years ago...

...Recently it was revealed that at Fort Holabird in Maryland, the Army was filing and computerizing information on the personalities, beliefs, and lawful community activities of American citizens...

...Messrs...

...Whether the press HAROLD WILLENS Is a Southern California businessman who has served as national co-chairman of Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace...

...The Army has already spent $2 billion on just one prototype, and present estimates are that production will not begin for another four years...

...Meanwhile, to use a business analogy, our own plant (the environment, the cities, and so on) disintegrates, and our product (free-enterprise democracy) deteriorates...

...While the mutual slaughter went on, theological zealots of old were undoubtedly certain that such accommodation could never occur...

...Here, then, is the greatest crisis and the greatest challenge ever faced by American businessmen: the rigor of business judgment—pragmatic common sense—must replace unthinking orthodoxy...

...And now, military involvement in Laos could make the Vietnam tragedy seem small by comparison...

...Air Force officials, for example, called the procurement for the C-5A cargo plane "the best contract ever entered into by the Air Force...

...Businessmen: New Peaceniks by HAROLD WILLENS Try to imagine the reaction if several years after public rejection of the Edsel car the Ford Motor Company had attempted to bring it back without as much as modifying a bumper...

...The "expertise" of Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Walt Rostow— the men most responsible for depicting a national blunder as a national crusade—appears now as nakedly nonexistent as the mythical emperor's clothes...

...If anyone is to blame, it is people like me for not speaking up and not speaking out sooner—for not asking, 'What goes on here?' " The president of Formica Corporation, Wallace G. Taylor, told a Honolulu audience that the nation's businessmen are "deaf, dumb, and blind to a hydra-headed new American revolution that is tearing this country asunder, value by value...

...experts who gobble up the nation's substance by scaring us into believing that Russia is about to roll over Western Europe and that a China barely able to feed itself is about to conquer the world...

...Seeing our adversaries as human beings is a necessary first step to avoiding large-scale war anywhere in Indochina, as well as preventing our own nuclear incineration...

...But games which were seemingly lost have been won...

...Copyright © 1970 by Harper & Row...

...The fantasies of our military planners induce escalation of arms which the other side's fantasizers are then compelled to match...

...This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, "Laos: War and Revolution...

...Left alone, the tide of present events will sweep away everything we value...

...Lundborg and Taylor have said it all...

...To compound the problem, the Pentagon and its industrial partners, having been left virtually free of meaningful accountability have become accustomed to spending taxpayers' money with irresponsible abandon...

...The MBT tank was to have cost $250,000 per unit and to have been ready in 1970...

...Is it not then possible that de-escalatory steps will also be matched by adversaries quite well aware that they too are running out of time—and resources...

...It makes little sense to surround our cities with missiles while they are crumbling from within...

...After what we have already experienced in Southeast Asia, it seems inconceivable that the public will permit Laos to become another Vietnam...

...Therefore those who oppose him must be good...

...experts who are quite literally preparing to MIRV us all to death...

...Later it was revealed that the price per torpedo will be at least $1.2 million...

...And businessmen who had previously kept their silence have begun to put themselves squarely on the record as opposed to allowing Laos or any other Asian country to become another Vietnam...

...We remain blind to the significance of a break between Yugoslavia and Russia, to the Sino-Soviet split, to Rumania's enthusiastic reception of President Nixon, and to the obvious nationalistic aspirations and enmities among Communist countries...

...The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has called Laos "one of the few places worse than Vietnam to fight a war...

...cona stray sub- or sub-subcontract comes their way, and among the important indirect effects are the starved communities in which they must operate and to whose disorders and violence they are exposed, the manpower and the materials they are denied and the regulations on overseas investments which they suffer because of balance of payment difficulties which in turn are the result of military spending...

...In exposing these to the light of truth, businessmen can best withstand the attacks to which all heretics have at all times been subjected...

...Yet our children are essentially right, as were other powerless heretics, such as Galileo...

...Second, new directions depend upon discarding old orthodoxies, such as fanatical anti-Communism...

...How we choose can help determine how the nation makes this fateful choice...

...Fanaticism inevitably turns its intolerance inward...

...In this instance, the other side of the national ledger reveals that compulsive competitor-obsession keeps us from the most important business of all: preserving and improving our own national plant and product...

...On all counts a case can be made for giving up the game as lost...

...And the Secret Is Coming Out General Wheeler's words illustrate that in foreign policy we have fallen into what businessmen recognize as the deadly trap of competitor-obsession...

...The following words are almost exactly those used over and over again by some of us since early 1967: "An end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business...

...One wonders how we would respond today to Hitler, that most fervent of all anti-Communist crusaders...

...First, since most political leaders follow rather than lead, a relatively small number of enlightened businessmen—to whom people in government are apt to listen —could help bring about constructive change before time runs out...

...It is now estimated that the B-l bomber which the Air Force wants would eventually cost between $15 and $20 billion...

...Secretary-General U Thant spoke words which are not a Utopian vision but a pragmatic prescription for self-preservation: "We have seen how the great religions of the world, after lamentable periods of bigotry and violence, have become accommodated to each other...

...Our foreign policy rests more on demonology than on current international realities...

...They were proved wrong...

...The outcry in reaction to our Cambodian invasion supports this assumption, as does the clear probability that three years ago Senator Stuart Symington would have found it difficult if not impossible to release the transcript of his committee's closed hearings on Laos...

...Let us hope the contagion of intelligent involvement spreads on the wings of their words to others in the nobility of American commerce...

...We have more than adequate data to demonstrate that the escalation of the [Vietnam] war has seriously distorted the American economy, has inflamed inflationary pressures, has drained resources that are desperately needed . . . and has dampened the rate of growth in profits...

...We have thus found ourselves embracing, as though they were Jeffersonian models of democracy, the regimes of such hated despots as Batista, Chiang Kai-shek, Diem, Thieu, and Ky...

...experts clamoring for many more billions to build ABM's considered useless by the nation's best scientists...

...Our children have the courage to challenge that orthodoxy...

...He is now chairman of the Businessmen's Educational Fund...

...To a businessman, who must live with reality and review both sides of a ledger, however distasteful, it seems clear that this aspect of our foreign policy is self-destructive...

...It is an unfortunate fact that we have now so often heard expenditures described in terms of billions that the vastness of this figure has lost its meaning...

...experts who invaded Cambodia in search of a nonexistent Communist Pentagon...

...The speaker was Louis B. Lundborg, chairman of the board of the Bank of America, the world's largest private bank, and his audience was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...Lundborg and his colleagues in the top tier of the corporate hierarchy to speak out...

...To me it is especially gratifying to see more and more businessmen come forward and become visibly involved in debating national policy, for I clearly recall how deafening was the silence in the business community only a few short years ago...

...That is the great challenge and opportunity confronting American businessmen today...

...At all levels of the human enterprise there are moments of balance when a seemingly irreversible tide can still be turned...

...Fear of underestimating our competition drives us to overestimate the intentions and capabilities of others...

...For by perpetuating a foreign policy based upon ideological fanaticism we have much to lose at home as well as abroad...

...Effectively challenged, that tide can be restrained and reversed...

...what "they" might do becomes more important than what we should do...

...In our own self-interest it is time to look around...