DEFENDING THE DEFENDERS

SINCE well before Richard Nixon was elected President of the U.S., the nation's military moguls have been the butt of mounting criticism. Its chief cause has been growing disenchantment with the war in Viet Nam, which helped unseat Lyndon Johnson and install Nixon in the White House. In the nearly five months since Nixon took office, the disaffection has grown. Overspending on military items--notably the giant C-5A transport, the F-lll fighter-bomber, the Cheyenne helicopter--has drawn increasingly savage congressional fire. A newspaper advertisement suggests mockingly: "From the people who brought you Viet Nam--the anti-ballistic missile system." In a hard-hitting speech last week, the President came to the defense of the defenders--and by the aggressiveness of his counterattack almost certainly widened the polarization of American opinion.

His forum could hardly have been better chosen. In the crystalline air of Colorado Springs, amid the immaculate decorum of the U.S. Air Force Academy, the discontented rumblings of another America seemed remote. "It is open season on the armed forces," Nixon observed. "Military programs are ridiculed as needless, if not deliberate waste. The military profession is derided in some of the so-called best circles of America. Patriotism is considered by some to be a backward fetish of the uneducated and unsophisticated."

Straw-Man Issue. If his career-officer listeners should find their commitment to meet U.S. world responsibilities "derided as a form of militarism," said Nixon, they must "recognize that strawman issue for what it is." Nixon then set up his own straw men, "the skeptics and the isolationists." When the first explorers set out from Europe toward the New World, he said disdainfully, "these men would have weighed the risks, and they would have stayed behind." When pioneers set out from the East Coast colonies into the interior, "these men would have counted the costs, and they would have stayed behind."

This school of thought, Nixon maintained, "holds that the road to understanding with the Soviet Union and Communist China lies through a downgrading of our own alliances and what amounts to unilateral reduction of our arms in order to demonstrate our good faith." That, he said, is an "isolationist" view. The U.S., he insisted, cannot become "a dropout in assuming the responsibility for defending peace and freedom in the world." Neither, he added, can the U.S. go it alone. "We must revitalize our alliances, not abandon them," he declared. "We must rule out unilateral disarmament, because in the real world it won't work."

Like the Old Nixon. There are indeed neo-isolationists in the U.S. who would irresponsibly withdraw American power and influence from everywhere on the globe, regardless of the consequences. But these are not really significant in the national debate, and they certainly should not be confused with "skeptics" who question U.S. policy. Responsible critics of the Administration advocate neither unilateral disarmament nor withdrawal from foreign alliances. They merely raise the questions of what are the proper tactics and what is the bearable cost of helping maintain world order.

A day before Nixon's speech, Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith, testifying before a joint congressional subcommittee, rather fantastically proposed nationalization of any company doing more than 75% of its business with the Department of Defense. But he plainly insisted: "I am not a supporter of unilateral disarmament."* While many Congressmen have called for reduction of U.S. troop commitments in Europe, none have seriously suggested that NATO or any other U.S. military alliance be dismantled. Less than three months ago, Senator J. William Fulbright accused Defense Secretary Melvin Laird of using a "technique of fear." Fulbright has given aid and comfort to neo-isolationists at various times, but he does not advocate unilateral disarmament or the breakup of U.S. alliances. The dominant new mood in Congress is one of sober questioning, and Nixon's intemperate remarks hit the wrong note.

Much congressional reaction was bitter, and it seemed evident that he had hardened opposition to his Safeguard ABM plan into the bargain. Said Senator James Pearson, a Kansas Republican and an ABM foe: "I disagree with the President. I don't think it's isolationism to oppose excessive military spending." Some Democratic Senators were more abrupt. Said Albert Gore of Tennessee: "It sounded like the old Nixon I used to know." But Nixon won support from Louisiana's Russell Long and Virginia's Harry Byrd Jr. Noted Byrd: "I think he said some things which needed to be said."

Disservice. Nixon's first aim in making the speech was to quiet criticism of the military. In that, he obviously failed. A few of his own staff admitted privately afterward that some of Nixon's language was unfortunate. But he was concerned that if this criticism continues, the U.S military in a few years may become as weak as was the pre-World War II peacetime Army. While that seems unlikely, the President at least put himself and his Administration on the record. Finally, looking abroad, Nixon wanted to convince Hanoi, Peking, Moscow and the Viet Cong that the U.S. has not been so enfeebled by doubt that it will accept any terms in the Paris negotiations in order to get out of Viet Nam. There was no mistaking the President's hard line; it remains to be seen whether he succeeded in impressing it upon the Communists.

At home, however, by lumping all his critics together with the simplistic tag of isolationist, the President did them an injustice and his own cause a disservice as well.

* Galbraith got his usual maximum mileage out of his views on the military. He first set them forth in the lead article in the June Harper's. Then he entered the Harper's article in the subcommittee-hearing record, along with his testimony. Last week the article also appeared as a book: 72 pages in hard cover for $3.95; 96 pages in paperback for 60-c-.

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