The Ultimate Self-Interest

(See Cover)

All week the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been listening to the Secretary of State and other top officials as they explained--and defended--the current state of U.S. policy abroad. Then Senator William Fulbright left room 5116 on the Capitol's first floor, with its marble fireplace and crystal chandelier, and headed for Miami, there to address a meeting of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. He talked about foreign affairs, but not much.

Mostly Bill Fulbright talked about education, about the pursuit of excellence, and about the improvement of American life. The trouble with foreign affairs, he said in effect, is that they have been interfering with these goals far too long. "The Cold War, it seems clear, has been an excuse as well as a genuine cause for the diversion of our energies from domestic well-being to external security," he told the teachers. "It has encroached upon our sovereignty; it has given the Communists the major voice in determining what proportion of our budget must be allocated to the military and what proportion therefore cannot be made available for domestic social and economic projects."

But in the long run, "the solution of our domestic problems has a vital bearing on the success of our foreign policies. Armaments are only one aspect of national security." It is time, suggested Fulbright, to turn to the "problems of slums and crime and poverty and inadequate education."

Mounting Concern. The implication was that since the Cold War is clearly less icy than it used to be, the U.S. might as well reap some domestic benefits. Not long before Fulbright made his Miami speech, he had assessed the world situation in moderately optimistic terms. "We Americans need patience, along with some other things like wisdom, but when you think back to 20 years after World War I and compare it to our situation 20 years after World War II, I'd say we are in a lot better shape today." As for President Johnson, "he has been very cautious, which I approve. He hasn't done anything wrong. He hasn't yet done much affirmative either, but it is quite in his favor that he hasn't done anything foolish."

Remarkably enough, Fulbright said these things at a moment of growing debate about U.S. foreign policy. Fulbright himself helped to start the debate ten months ago with a speech entitled "Old Myths and New Realities," in which he urged Americans to shake loose of some of the foreign-policy feelings and sentiments that had settled in their minds in the anxious years since World War II. At the heart of that debate right now is the suggestion that perhaps the U.S. has overextended itself, that it is trying to do too much, that its power is spread too thin across the world. The notion was recently advanced by Columnist Walter Lippmann, who deplored "scatteration" of U.S. resources and suggested that the U.S. concentrate on the "vital" areas of Europe and the Americas, and more or less ignore Asia and Africa. The notion that it may be in the U.S.'s "self-interest" to retrench crosses both party and ideological lines.

"I think we've overreached ourselves," says Johns Hopkins' Arnold Wolfers, reflecting widespread sentiment in the academic world. "In the Kennedy era, the idea was that we had to be everywhere. It's no longer possible to control every situation."

"We have mutual security agreements with 42 countries, and if we were called upon to honor several of them at once, we'd be in a pretty precarious situation," declares Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. The G.O.P.'s George Aiken complains: "We're trying to police the world, and we can't do it."

The U.S., of course, is not really trying to do exactly that. It is trying to maintain order--not necessarily its own order--in vast areas of the globe. In this sense it faces an infinitely harder task than any imperial power because it cannot, and does not want to, employ imperialist weapons. The military reach of the U.S. across the world is awesome --neither capital nor continent, neither jungle nor village, and no quadrant of the sky is beyond the range of its missiles or its reconnaissance planes. And yet in a nuclear age, the weapons are there mostly in order not to be used, except in crucial self-defense. The most immediate tool of U.S. policy around the world remains money--money springing from apparently bottomless prosperity, money which, in its ultimate use, the U.S. cannot really control.

Yet, within these tight restrictions, the U.S. has built and maintained its global system with enormous patience, which Americans are so often accused of lacking, in the fundamental belief that the ultimate American self-interest requires the preservation of freedom wherever possible.

Dead-End Street. Wherever the talk about American "overextension" ranges, it always comes down to Viet Nam.

There is a certain amount of sentiment for getting out of Viet Nam at once and at all costs. The leading congressional spokesmen for this view had been Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska until they were suddenly and surprisingly joined two weeks ago by Georgia's Richard Russell, a heretofore generally fervent supporter of a strong U.S. position in the world and a close friend of President Johnson's. South Dakota's George McGovern recently added his voice. "We are on a dead-end street," he said, "and ours is a bankrupt approach. We ought to negotiate."

Fulbright opposes any attempt to negotiate now and declares that "neutrality talk only feeds the disease." One of his more arresting views on Viet Nam, which may shock many of his liberal admirers, is that the U.S. decision to get rid of Diem was a mistake. Fulbright contends that Diem's brother Nhu had to go but that the nation needed a leader.

Fulbright favors neutralization in the long run and hopes for an improvement in the political and military situation in Viet Nam chiefly as a way to get the U.S. to the conference table in a better bargaining position. Should present U.S. policy become untenable, leading to a choice between staying in through escalation or getting out through negotiation, Fulbright would get out--but he does not believe that the choice is imminent. He strongly opposes escalation and argues: "You can't selectively do a little bombing"--although the U.S., under the personal direction of Lyndon Johnson, is doing precisely that right now (see THE WORLD). Once the U.S. starts using force on North Viet Nam, says Fulbright, there is no telling where it might lead, because "you can't see down the road far enough."

In these views Fulbright expresses the feelings of many of his colleagues. A majority of Senators and Representatives wants to continue present U.S. policy, hoping that it can somehow be improved and that the U.S. can eventually escape what Howard University's Bernard Fall describes as the choice between "unattainable victory and unacceptable surrender." They are resigned to the prospect outlined last week by the Army Chief of Staff, General Harold Johnson, who foresees the possibility of a ten-year war in Southeast Asia.

The U.S. may be willing to carry on the war for another decade--its financial cost of $2,000,000 a day is tolerable and so are the U.S. casualties, including 358 deaths so far (compared with 20,685 French dead in Indo-China between 1945 and Dienbienphu). The question is whether the South Vietnamese in the long run will be willing or able to continue the war. The argument pushed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff-that the only way to retrieve the situation and bolster Saigon is to start punishing North Viet Nam--finds only a negligible echo in Congress or, for that matter, in the White House.

Says Senator Mansfield, in arguing against escalation: "In the end we might find ourselves in a full-scale war all over Asia." Most academic experts, blissfully without Government responsibility, also violently oppose escalation. The University of Denver's Dr. Josef Korbel, among others, fears that escalation would only drive the Russians and Chinese back together again.

There are dissenters. Occidental College's Dr. Edward W. Mill favors use of the Seventh Fleet to carry "selective air strikes" to North Viet Nam bases and supply lines. The University of Michigan's James K. Pollock contends that "complete military occupation of South Viet Nam would be preferable to withdrawal."

Preventive War. One of the toughest minds on this American dilemma is that of the University of Chicago's Hans Morgenthau, who declares that the U.S. must decide whether its basic aim is the containment of Red China. If so, this cannot be done by such peripheral actions as the Viet Nam war, he says, unless the U.S. is willing to risk a direct clash with China. Also, "you have to recognize that once China becomes a modern industrial nation, she will have become the most powerful nation on earth. Faced with that, the question is whether we should wage preventive war." While he is "not prepared to answer" that fateful question, he feels that the U.S. is right in not trading with China, and condemns other nations for doing so. Says Morgenthau: "It is certainly a paradox that the U.S.S.R. so feared the Chinese that they came to break with their fellow Communists rather than continue to supply them with goods that would make them an industrial power, while Western industrial nations--through their blindness and greed--substituted their goods for what the Russians have cut off."

Fulbright disagrees. While he does not advocate recognition of Red China, he favors probing "for areas of peaceful contact" and hopes, like onetime Ambassador to Russia George Kennan and others, that as a new generation of Chinese leaders comes to the fore, Peking will grow more tractable.

But Not in the Congo. What about the rest of the world? There are no other Viet Nams, but there are plenty of other areas of concern.

The Congo is temporarily quiescent after its recent outburst of savagery, but the rebels are still strong, and the U.S. has only limited hopes of stopping the flow of arms to them from Communist and African nationalist countries.

Fulbright recently told Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "For God's sake, let's not get involved in the Congo as we did in South Viet Nam." Perhaps not, but total noninvolvement could also lead to later disasters.

In general, it is a rare week when some U.S. embassy in Africa or Asia is not surrounded by demonstrators hurling rocks or at least carrying anti-American placards, with the tacit approval of the local government. This suggests to many people that the U.S. ought to worry a lot less about the "neutrals." There is considerable sentiment in Congress to amend the President's foreign-aid requests (see box) to cut off funds for such countries as Egypt, which is funneling arms to the Congo rebels, and Indonesia, which keeps harassing pro-Western Malaysia.

Sharing in this sentiment, but also for other reasons (he wants foreign-aid appropriations to be split into separate and more manageable packages), Fulbright himself this year refused to act as manager for the foreign-aid bill when it comes to the floor of the Senate.

Says Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador to India: "We are badly out of date and still behave as though the neutral nations were major considerations in the cold war." Galbraith characterizes U.S. foreign policy in general as overly cautious and boring. "It seems that our policy is in the hands of men whose mothers were frightened by John W. Bricker," he says. No one knows for sure just what that sentence means, but it sounds great on the playing fields of academe.

Then there is the Atlantic Alliance and Charles de Gaulle, whose mother clearly wasn't frightened by anybody. Fulbright worries about him and complains: De Gaulle has said "the nastiest, meanest things ever said about us." Fulbright considers nationalism the world's strongest political force, and he deplores De Gaulle's use of it. He sees De Gaulle as a modern Bismarck who would "unite a small community at the cost of dividing a larger one"--that is, unite Europe at the cost of dividing the Western Atlantic community. De Gaulle's notion that a continental rather than an Atlantic-oriented Europe could include the Communist satellites and draw them away from Russia does not impress Fulbright.

But when it comes to MLF, Fulbright has suggested that it should not be pushed against the wishes of De Gaulle and other Europeans. He feels that his view has been vindicated by President Johnson, who has pulled the State Department back from the MLF crusade and seems bent on telling De Gaulle: "Man cher, il faut qu'on raisonne ensemble." Fulbright thinks De Gaulle is unshakable but would like to see Lyndon try reasoning with him.

"Unthinkable Thoughts." Beyond these questions, any debate about whether the U.S. has overextended it-- self, whether the U.S. ought to retrench, must consider the general question of how to deal with Communism. That is the question Fulbright took up in his "Old Myths and New Realities" speech, in which he urged the U.S. "to start thinking some unthinkable thoughts." Fulbright's central thought was entirely thinkable: the U.S. must stop hoping for ultimate global victory over Communism. In a nuclear world, reasoned Fulbright, the U.S. simply could not "either win the cold war or end it immediately and completely." The Communists, said Fulbright, had learned that lesson too, notably after the Cuban missile confrontation, in which the Soviet Union "tacitly accepted" American strategic superiority.

In all this, Fulbright in a sense only ratified the progression of U.S. thinking from "rolling back the Iron Curtain" to containment to coexistence. But in a similar speech he went beyond that in arguing that Communism is not only splintering but changing profoundly beneath its still-rigid ideological surface. "Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogmas to which they have sworn their loyalty," he said, but they do "rationalize, revise and reinterpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is purest orthodoxy."

On all this, Fulbright based some specific suggestions that he feels the Administration has since more or less followed. Among them: increased trade with Communist countries, a conciliatory attitude toward Panama, and relaxation about Castro, whom the U.S., argued Fulbright, was only building up through its hostility ("We have flattered a noisy but minor demagogue by treating him as if he were a Napoleonic menace"). In his pronouncements on Cuba, Fulbright can claim credit for having raised a lonely voice against plans for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which Jack Kennedy later acknowledged by saying: "You are the only person who has a right to say, 'I told you so!' " Today Fulbright feels, perhaps too optimistically, that Castro's influence in Latin America is withering.

The Link. As the current foreign-policy debate progresses, it may seem odd that liberals--so strongly interventionist before World War II and so strongly internationalist after World War II--talk about American "self-interest" in a manner that in some quarters now means "isolationism." Yet this is only a reversion to form. With the exception of the 1930s, when distaste for the Nazis and sympathy for the Soviet Union made interventionists of the liberals, they have usually been against heavy foreign commitments.

Fulbright has always been an internationalist, and yet he had every chance to become the opposite. His journey from the Ozarks to the international scene, his education in foreign affairs tells a great deal about what, in his Miami speech last week, Fulbright hailed as the key link between U.S. domestic politics and foreign relations.

Fulbright, now 59, grew up in the small (pop. then about 5,000) town of Fayetteville in the Arkansas Ozarks, rode a horse three miles to school, milked the family's lone cow each day. His parents were wealthy. His stern, business-minded father Jay owned or held major interests in the town newspaper, a lumber company, a bank, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, a railroad, an ice company, and a hotel. Fulbright's mother led most of the town's civic activities, wrote a daily newspaper column on any topic that popped into her head.

Ozarks to Oxford. He entered the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville at 16, because his father had given him a grim choice of how to spend his summers: work in the Coke plant or go to summer school. He chose school, earned strings of A's, also starred as a halfback with the university's Razorbacks.

Fulbright's awareness of the world beyond Arkansas came only when he shifted from the Ozarks to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford's Pembroke College, he took a master's degree in political science and history, toured the Continent, later got a law degree (ranking second in a class of 135) at George Washington University.

While teaching law part-time at the University of Arkansas, he impressed the board of trustees, some of whom were personal friends. When the university's longtime president died in an automobile accident in 1939, the trustees picked Fulbright, only 34, to succeed him. But two years later, when his redoubtable mother attacked Governor Homer Adkins in her column, the board, dominated by the Governor, swiftly fired Fulbright.

He did not sulk long. When a congressional seat became vacant the next the year, he personable decided to run-- campaigning and, of his aided by wife Betty he won. Two years later, in 1944 Fulbright tried for the senate and won again. His opponent: Homer Adkins.

"Powerful Prejudice." As a freshman Congressman in 1943, Fulbright astonished his House colleagues when he introduced a resolution urging U.S. participation in an international organization to maintain peace -- even though peace was not yet in sight. The House adopted it, easing the way for creation of the United Nations.

In his first Senate speech in 1945, in a curious, overstated anticipation of his later Myth and Reality theme, he described fear of Communism as a "powerful prejudice" and added that "as I read history, the Russian experiment in socialism is scarcely more radical under modern conditions than the Declaration of Independence was in the days of Declaration of George III.

This howler was overshadowed by the plan he introduced shortly afterward for exchanging scholars with other nations. The Government-financed scholarships still bear his name and, complains one Senator, "a lot of people think Bill pays for them out of his own pocket."

On the fringe of foreign affairs, Fulbright also went through some exhilarating domestic political battles. Talking to a newsman before the 1946 congressional elections, Fulbright launched out on one of his lectures about the evils of party divisions between the White House and Congress. To prevent a deadlocked Government, he suggested that if Republicans seized Congress, Harry Truman really ought to appoint Republican Arthur Vandenberg Secretary of State, then resign himself and let Vandenberg succeed to the presidency (the vice-presidency was vacant, and in those days the Secretary of State was still next in line). The G.O.P. did win, and after the election the reporter asked Fulbright if he still felt the same way. Sure, he said. "That overeducated Oxford s.o.b.," fumed Harry. "He is the best argument there is for the land-grant college."

At the height of Joe McCarthy's power, Fulbright was one of the first Senators to protest his tactics. In 1954, he cast the lone vote against an appropriation for McCarthy's investigating Committee, blistered him in a speech at the University of Minnesota: "Thoughtful and informed people know that demagogues, who debauch the institutions of representative government, help Moscow." McCarthy thereafter referred to Fulbright as "Senator Halfbright."

Fulbright developed a bitter animosity toward Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over Dulles' brinkmanship policies and his cancellation of funds for Egypt's Aswan dam. "He misleads public opinion," Fulbright said, "confuses it, feeds it pap."

Conversion of the Heart. Critics contend that Fulbright's reputation for intellectual honesty can be questioned on one glaring basis: his public position against civil rights legislation and court-ordered school integration. Although he has been perhaps the least belligerent Southern Senator on such topics, Fulbright voted against civil rights bills in 1957 and 1964, raised no objection when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus defied federal orders to integrate Little Rock public schools in 1957. Fulbright also filed a brief with the Supreme Court in 1958 urging delay in the integration of Arkansas schools. "I would suggest," he wrote, "that the problem of school integration is more likely to yield to the slow conversion of the human heart than to remedies of a more urgent nature"--a sentiment that almost exactly echoes his hopes for the slow conversion of Communism.

The only member of the Arkansas congressional delegation who spoke out against Faubus was Congressman Brooks Hays, who was defeated in the next election by an arch-segregationist. "What could I have done to control the Governor?" asks Fulbright. "What did Brooks Hays accomplish? Hays was lauded as a statesman--but he isn't a statesman any longer. I'm in politics. This is the sentiment of my state. I would not like to retire from politics with the feeling that I had betrayed them."

In late 1960, rumors spread that Jack Kennedy was seriously considering Fulbright for his Secretary of State, and Negro groups began to protest. Many people thought Fulbright's stance on race had knocked him out of consideration. But Fulbright had sent word to Kennedy that he did not feel he possessed the temperament for the job.

Book-Reading Gadfly. Fulbright sees himself as a gadfly. He has never been a member of the Senate's select establishment. As Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson once noted Fulbright's reluctance to join others for a sundown, back-room Scotch and scoffed: "Why, he'd rather sit in his office, reading books." His national reputation is based mainly on his neatly turned, tightly reasoned Senate speeches. He works them over laboriously, then rapidly mumbles through them in a near whisper across the Senate's mostly vacant desks. "The Senate as a forum to speak to other Senators is the most discouraging place in the world," he says. "I feel like a fool mouthing words to an empty chamber." Next day, however, because of his eminent position, his words often get front-page newspaper play and are attentively read the world over.

Fulbright has developed a certain serenity, an almost 18th century trust in reason and argument that delights his admirers and irritates his critics. He hates abstractions, including ideologies that are worshiped beyond and above "the wishes of individual man." He wants to build "bridges" to Communism and warns his countrymen that in an imperfect world, "the best is the enemy of the good"--meaning that the U.S. must settle for imperfect solutions to problems that will not disappear in this or the next generation.

Fulbright's--and others'--talk of U.S. retrenchment often smacks of wishful thinking. The position, declares an Indian official in New Delhi, is best described by a Chinese saying: "The trees want to be still, but the wind doesn't stop." Contemplating the supposedly scattered deployment of U.S. strength in the world, Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper observes: "That scattering has saved the world situation up to now--it has stopped many a Communist adventure." Says Columbia University's Zbigniew Brzezinski: "The real problem is not overextension but nonassertion of leadership by America. The U.S. is still the No. 1 power. As such, it can't turn away from the responsibilities of its power because things around us are said to be too complicated."

Fulbright would not necessarily disagree with that, although he and other Americans might disagree as to the meaning and extent of "responsibilities." His own formulation: "We need not toughness but tough-mindedness, that is, the willingness and ability to look facts in the face however bitter they may be, to appraise them at their true worth and then to act calmly, judiciously and determinedly."

That seems like sound advice on U.S. foreign policy--as long as everyone agrees on just what the facts are.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.