Voice from the Silent Center

The Viet Nam debate too often resembles a pingpong match between those who vociferously damn Lyndon Johnson for doing too much and those who chide him for doing too little to end the war. Yet for all the noise they make, so far, at least, the critics on both sides have been heavily outnumbered by the millions of Americans in the middle who, however confused or unhappy about the war, see no simple alternative to the Johnson Administration's present course and have no medium for their views. Last week the majority found a new voice.

At Washington's National Press Club, former Democratic Senator Paul Douglas and General of the Army Omar Bradley announced the formation of a nonpartisan Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Viet Nam. "Voices of dissent have received attention far out of proportion to their actual numbers," the committee said in a 900-word policy statement. "Our objective is to make sure that the majority voice of America is heard--loud and clear--so that Peking and Hanoi will not mistake the strident voices of some dissenters for American discouragement and a weakening of will."

Among the committee's 100 or so founders are some of the nation's most illustrious figures. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower belong; so do Dean Acheson and James F. Byrnes--thus accounting for every living former President and Secretary of State. Dwight Eisenhower's last Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates is a member, as are A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, General Lucius D. Clay, former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, ex-Governor Pat Brown of California and retired Senator Leverett Saltonstall.

Patient Resistance. "The idea was mine," said Douglas, a pacifist in the early 1930s who saw heavy combat in his 50s in World War II as a Marine officer. Disturbed that the Viet Nam debate was dominated by "extremists on both sides," he began writing friends last summer, incorporated the committee on July 31, and helped to draft a policy statement that was edited in longhand by Eisenhower.

The committee emphasized that "we are not supporters of a President or of an Administration; we are supporters of the office of the presidency." "We favor," it said, "a sensible road between capitulation and the indiscriminate use of raw power. We believe that we speak for the great 'silent center' of American life, the understanding, independent and responsible men and women who have consistently opposed rewarding international aggressors from Adolf Hitler to Mao Tse-tung." Lest Hanoi get the wrong idea from antiwar demonstrations, it added: "We want the aggressors to know that there is a solid, stubborn, dedicated, bipartisan majority of private citizens in America who approve our country's policy of patient, responsible, determined resistance."

Cacophonous Counterpoint. Whether or not the aggressors were listening, the committee had to contend with a cacophonous counterpoint at home. From the right came a demand by World War I Flying Ace Eddie Rickenbacker that the U.S. bomb North Viet Nam's ports, dams and people. "You're not fighting human beings over there," he told a Houston interviewer. "You're just fighting two-legged animals. The people are just slaves."

On the left, the antiwar demonstrators matched Rickenbacker in intemperateness--and far surpassed him in volume. The Washington marchers decamped, leaving the Pentagon mall in Augean disarray (see following story). At Baltimore's Selective Service office, a Roman Catholic priest and two laymen poured two pints of blood over 16 file drawers of records while a Protestant minister stood lookout; all four were arrested for their sanguinary ecumenicity and charged with mutilating public records. Protests took place on a score of college campuses.

In Ohio, Oberlin College students trapped a Navy recruiter in his auto for four hours and later staged a protest outside his office; one student who wanted to get inside for an interview had to vault over the sit-ins. Recruiters for Dow Chemical, a manufacturer of napalm, had trouble at several campuses, from Harvard to Minnesota (see EDUCATION). For the protesters, napalm has become the paramount symbol of the war's horror, as evidenced in a grisly three-dimensional assemblage by Red Grooms called Patriots' Parade No. 2. On show last week at Manhattan's New School Art Center, it pictured President Johnson flanked by Miss Napalm and other symbols of death.

Jn the Senate, disquiet over the war took a more reasonable form. Tennessee Democrat Albert Gore called on the President to "honorably extricate" the U.S. from the Vietnamese "quagmire" by agreeing to neutralize Viet Nam. Minnesota Democrat Eugene McCarthy urged Secretary of State Dean Rusk to resign and implied that if he did not, the Democratic Party should dump Lyndon Johnson as its candidate. In a "sense of the Senate" resolution, 56 Senators urged the President to take the Viet Nam issue to the United Nations Security Council--though the U.N. has shown absolutely no interest in handling it.

Armageddon by Installments. Particularly disturbing to the Administration was the effect the protests might have on Hanoi--which last week hailed them as "valuable support" and "a great encouragement." As Lieut. General Lewis Walt, former Marine commander in Viet Nam, told an Oakland, Calif., audience: "In June, I was an optimist. Now I am concerned that we will win the war out there and lose it here at home."

Once again, top officials fanned out to defend Johnson's policies. Rusk was in Los Angeles, where picketers toted signs with such atrociously tasteless slogans as RUSK KILLS CHILDREN FOR PROFIT and RUSK--L.B.J.'S SECRETARY OF HATE. To withdraw from Viet Nam without a "just and peaceful settlement," said Vice President Humphrey in Washington, would be to defer "today's manageable troubles until they become unmanageable--a policy of Armageddon on the installment plan."

Twice during the week, the President mounted rostrums to defend his stand. At the Shoreham Hotel he told the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical and Technical Employees: "In every way we can, we search for peace in Viet Nam. But we appear to be searching alone. Those who began the war are not willing to explore ways to end it. They cling stubbornly to the belief that their aggression will be rewarded--by our frustration, our impatience, our unwillingness to stay the course. It will not be so."

During a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House, he dismissed as absurd the charge that the Administration is reviving fears of the "yellow peril" by naming Peking as the real threat to U.S. interests. "We fought side by side with Asians at Bataan and Corregidor, in Korea and now in Viet Nam," said the President. "We have utterly repudiated the racist nonsense of an earlier era. Indeed, we have made a commitment in Asia because we do believe that no men, whatever the pigmentation of their skins, should ever be delivered over to totalitarianism, that freedom is not a prize reserved for white Europeans or Americans in our private enclaves of affluence."

Coalition of Retreat. Nonetheless, the latest Gallup poll showed that 46% of Americans now believe by hindsight that "it was a mistake to have become involved in Viet Nam"--compared with 24% two years ago. Perhaps more significant was Gallup's reckoning that 57% of Americans believe that the U.S. should not involve itself in another situation "like Viet Nam."

Both reactions are a portent of the growing mood of neo-isolationism in the nation. Thus far, the feeling has been most clearly evident on Capitol Hill, where an influential coterie of Senators led by Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen and Majority Whip Russell Long are pressing for the tightest protection of U.S. goods since the bad old days of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff.* If the protectionist Senators--dubbed "the coalition of retreat" by Hubert Humphrey--were to succeed, they would impose strict quotas on more than 75% of dutiable U.S. imports.

Dirksen and Long are among the strongest supporters that the President has on the war. In many other cases, the neo-isolationist mood may well feed on popular discouragement over Viet Nam. But, as Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach noted recently at Connecticut's Fairfield University, it would be "a grievous and dangerous delusion to believe all our problems would be solved if we withdrew from Viet Nam, or from Asia, or from anywhere else." From Latin America, New York Times Columnist C. L. Sulzberger wrote last week: "Our humiliation in Viet Nam would persuade guerrilla nuclei here of the efficacy of 'national liberation' wars. Our adversaries know, even if we do not, that revolutionary warfare in Viet Nam is directly linked to the fate of South America."

In fact, there is hardly a place in the world, from Bogota to Berlin, where the American will to persist in Viet Nam is not being closely eyed. If the silent center in the U.S. can find an effective voice, through the new Citizens Committee or any other channel, American foreign policy will carry considerably greater authority with friends and foes alike.

*Whose coauthor, Reed Smoot, inspired Ogden Nash's 1930 poem "Invocation": Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.) Is planning a ban on smut. Oh root-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut. And his reverent occiput . . . Smite, Smoot, Be rugged and rough, Smut if smitten Is front-page stuff.

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