Corruption of the Mind

OPINION Corruption of the Mind Still cherished by many Westerners is the hope that one fine day a summit meeting will melt Russian suspicions of the West and bring about a lasting thaw in the cold war. Last week Russian Expert George Frost Kennan, 53, onetime U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, longtime favorite foreign-relations philosopher of U.S. liberal Democrats, did a thorough demolition job on the summit-meeting idea. Currently a visiting professor at Oxford University, Kennan argued in a speech broadcast by the BBC that summit meetings with the Russians are doomed in advance to failure. Reason: Soviet leaders are impervious to reasonable argument.

From the time they seized power 40 years ago, said Kennan, Russia's Communist bosses have used falsehoods as a deliberate weapon of policy. Four decades of cynical intellectual opportunism "have wrought a strange corruption of the Communist mind, rendering it incapable of distinguishing sharply between fact and fiction in its relationship to any external competitive power." Habitual abuse of truth has blurred in the minds of Communist leaders the distinction between what they really believe and what they find it expedient to say.

In dealing with such corrupted mentalities, argues Kennan, the West must accept the fact that it is futile to try to argue Soviet leaders around to the West's viewpoint. "There is nothing that can be said to Mr. Khrushchev on any occasion by any Western figures, however illustrious, that would suddenly dispel his obscurity of vision. What we are confronted with is not just misunderstanding, not just honest error, but a habit of the mind, an induced state, a condition.

"Many people would like to bypass the political issues by agreements for general disarmament. I cannot agree that the approach is very promising. Armaments can and do constitute a source of tension in themselves. But they are not self-engendering. They are conditioned by political differences and rivalries. To attempt to remove the armaments before removing these substantive conflicts of interest is to put the cart before the horse.

"The road to a safer and more hopeful state of world affairs," said Kennan. "is not to be traversed in any giant strides." The way to lessen tension between Russia and the West is to break the conflicts down into specific problems and treat each one separately. "For this, it is not the hectic encounters of senior statesmen under the spotlight of publicity which we need; it is the patient, quiet, orderly use of the regular channels of private communication between governments."

In a joint letter to President Eisenhower last week, six Democratic Congressmen urged him to consider a summit meeting with Russia. The horrors of nuclear warfare, they wrote, make the attempt worthwhile. The six: Minnesota's Eugene J. McCarthy, Montana's Lee Metcalf, Wisconsin's Henry S. Reuss, Pennsylvania's George M. Rhodes, California's James Roosevelt, New Jersey's Frank Thompson.

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