The First Four Years

...It's time to get out...

...No one spoke...

...The fact of its loss had been extraordinarily difficult for" Americans to face-from Cardinal Spellman, the first villain of American Involvement...

...Fear of losing the status, the identity of General Motors executive, Air Force officer, or White House staff member...

...The Senators have shown a bit more spine recently, but over and over again as we have looked at why the peace movement failed, at why those good things haven't happened in government, it boils down, in Suzannah Lessard's words, "to cowardice where courage is needed, people entrenched in their bureaucracies afraid to risk their security for the very purpose they supposedly hold their jobs...

...The First Four Years This is the first month of President Nixon's second term-and of The Washington Monthly's . While most people mark anniversaries by the decade, the po1itical world counts by fours...

...It is terrible things happening to specific human beings...

...He also noted in the April, 1970, article : Through the entire history of the peace politics congressional doves had very seldom spent a full day's effort on the war...

...What I do contend is that this government needs more men who are psychologically ready to resign-who, when vital issues are at stake will stand up to their superiors and fight to the point of losing their jobs...

...Within two months of the appearance of then-Congressman Richard McCarthy's article on chemical and biologica1 warfare, the Administration canceled the germ bombs...

...The Army said it was sorry and would stop...

...I arrived in Washington in 1961...

...The price of our failure to overcome these fears is not just something vague, such as bad government or poor public administration...

...If such examples lead to doubt as to whether Foreign Service Officers are capable of speaking out in a group situation, even when there is a clear invitation to do so, one can easily imagine the prevailing timidity in one-toone conversations where there is a disparity in rank or bureaucratic authority...

...to Lyndon Johnson, so pathetical19 striving to be the Churchill-Roosevelt of the 1960s...

...Our second issue contained Toni Bethell's definitive article on the United Mine Workers...

...In terms of impact-or more precisely, the lack of it-our most depressing first-year failure was an editorial on Vietnam in October, 1969...

...And we most emphatically belong to that world...

...from "More on Courage and Cowardice" by Charles Peters in the August, 1969, issue of The Washington Monthly...

...FSOs may proudly relate the vehemence with which they have rebuffed officers of other agencies notably USIA and AID-but direct argument with one's superiors in State is not a generally accepted mode of conduct...

...Conspiracy in Coal...

...And the last issue of our first year brought Christopher Pyle's startling revelation of Army spying on civilian politics...

...After several moments of silence, Bowling himself finally felt constrained to express the other side of both positions...

...But within the Senate there was no organization, no regular meetings, no commitment to get together and sublimate their egos to produce a piece of legislation, no serious intention to debate on the floor of the Congress, no effort to raise money to use television in response to the President...

...At the beginning of the Dominican rebellion in 1965, U. S. Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett declined a request to moderate the rapidly growing dispute at a time when moderate leftists were still in control of the "constitutionalist" forces...

...How could the peace movement be taking so long to stop the war...

...The impact seemed immediate...

...When John Bowling, a stimulating lecturer at State's Foreign Service Institute, suggested that flag desecrators were philosophically identical to the bomb-throwing anarchists of previous decades and that draft resisters were unmanly and cowardly, not one of the Foreign Service Officers in his audience challenged the statement, despite Bowling's invitation to do so...

...We want them to have impact to help change things for the better...

...contributed to Tony Boyle's defeat by Arnold Miller last December...

...Hugh Sidey's February, 1969, interview with Bill Moyers predicted that the Nixon who was then saying he would rely primarily on his Cabinet would end up giving more power to the White House staff...

...From "The Cost of Cowardice: Silence in the Foreign Service" by William Bell in the July, 1969, issue of 7'he Washington Monthly...

...cited the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory as the most obvious of possible cuts in the Defense budget...

...John Rothchild, in a later article on "The Senate's Lame Doves," described the legislators' reluctance to vote against defense appropriations: There is that vision of a battlefield with a few brave, young Americans surrounded by a closing knot of North Vietnamese, while a credit adjustor slips through the enemy lines to repossess our guns and declares "Senator X wouldn't pay for these...

...Of all the wrong decisions I have seen made in government, wrong ideas and information have played no greater role than the failure of men with the right ideas and information to press their case courageously...

...That is why we close this group of excerpts and articles with "The Burn Ward...

...During most of the time since then, most of the people I have known here have been against any large-scale American air or ground involvement in Vietnam...

...The Washington Monthly doesn't give its readers trave1 articles or film critiques...

...it's good to play a part...

...But bureaucratic momentum was such that it took many more articles by Pyle as well as other writers and extensive hearings by Senator Sam Ervin to bring the scandal under control...

...So, as we put together this fourth anniversary supplement, we decided we wanted to emphasize our exploration of the theme of cowardice and fear...

...After briefly describing the situation as he saw it, Bennett made it clear that U. S. military forces, if summoned, would be ordered to thwart the attempted revolution, not just "protect U. S. lives and property...

...At least one senior officer with the temerity to play devil's advocate on this issue received word that the Undersecretary no longer desired to share the same room with him during policy discussions...

...In this, as in our other causes, we have had many allies often with much more influence than our own...

...We don't publish articles just because we think they are interesting...

...The book fails to relate, however, a scene in which Bennett summoned a large portion of his staff and told them that he was planning to call for help...

...This was particularly galling right after the Carswell vote in April, [ 1970,] when these same Senators had come from nowhere to beat him with hard work and internal organization...

...the diet is strictly politics and government...

...One of them asked the recruitment director what they should say to students who were interested in the Foreign Service but had qualms about the American role in Vietnam...

...Some of our first-year predictions turned out to be embarrassingly wrong--Mayor Kevin White has not risen to national political prominence, the Model Cities program has been far from central to the Nixon Administration's urban strategy...

...A number of young officers, some of whom had been expressing their misgivings in private conversation, were called together at the State Department for a briefing before setting out on campus recruiting trips...

...The primary emotion behind that editorial was incredulity...

...Another first-year article, David Hapgood's "The Highwaymen," a very funny attack on the road lobby, was used by anti-highway forces in the successful fights against New York's Lower Manhattan Expressway and New Orleans' Riverfront-Elysian Fields Expressway...

...Within six months the program was dropped...

...Still...

...It read in part: This is the editorial we never thought we would have to write, because this war was lost in 1954...

...Yet peace will have taken at least 11 years to attain...

...The answer-in no uncertain terms was that there was no place in the Foreign Service for persons who do not support this war...

...In an early article on the subject, "The Politics of Peace," author Sam Brown pointed out that the primary tactic of the peace movement-the mass demonstration, with its inevitable fringe of violence-was uniquely suited to turning off large segments of the potential anti-war constituency...

...Take our first year for example...

...Fear not only of losing one's job, but of losing the special privileges and exemptions-the tax breaks and the draft deferments-that seem to distinguish the governors from the governed...

...But to save other men from dying, we have to admit that those who have died have not died for nothing, but to bring America to its senses...

...No one spoke...

...For instance, another article is on our second issue, Robert Benson's "How the Pentagon Can Save Sine Billion Dollars...

...This failure of the anti-war movement has become a central preoccupation of The Washington Monthly as part of our general interest in why the right things don't get done in government...

...I think the same has been true of the country as a whole...

...And the politics and government come with a point of view...

...not with saving of face but with saving of life, for their people and ours...

...It led to five other articles in hope...

...He then asked his staff if there were any alternate views or proposals...

...The Editor I do not contend that the true path to good government lies in everyone's threatening to resign publicly, although I am convinced that there should have been more such resignations in recent years...

...In 1966, when the commitment of American ground forces in Vietnam took its greatest leap forward, criticism of U. S. policy became widespread among Foreign Service Officers, or at least among those stationed in Washington...

...One can understand him-as one can understand all the American Presidents who have sent men to die in Vietnam-you can't tell their families they died for nothing...

...Bennett's predecessor, John Bartlow Martin, states in his book, Overtaken by Events, that Bennett, having missed this chance at conciliation, probably had little choice but to bring in the Marines...

...Former Undersecretary of State George Ball enjoyed a reputation as a courageous devil's advocate on the subject of Vietnam, but anyone who opposed Ball's hard line vis-a-vis General de Gaulle had to be wary of the consequences...

...They gave speeches on occasion...

...Now Richard Nixon has dreams of a peace that will justify the lost American lives...

...We must believe that on the whole they are right...