Less Than Best?

The great question that stalks the '60s is whether the U.S. has the plan and purpose to hold its lead against the threats of the Soviet Union. The President of the U.S. devoutly believes that the nation has both. Last week three top businessmen and a leading educator, all veterans of public service, publicly disagreed.

Manhattan Investment Banker Robert

Abercrombie Lovett, 64, Truman Administration Under Secretary of State (1947-49) and Defense Secretary (1951-53), laid down the common theme in an exchange with Washington's Senator Henry M. Jackson during the initial session of Jackson's promising new subcommittee on National Policy Machinery.

Jackson: I want to ask, Mr. Lovett, whether in your judgment the threat now confronting our country is sufficiently serious to require a greater effort than we are now making.

Lovett: In general terms, Mr. Chairman, my answer to that would be yes. While I am not familiar with the details of the military requirements ... it seems to me that the country's security lies in fields that embrace things other than sheer military end-products themselves--our position in the world, the psychological image which we present to the world as a whole. I feel that we are doing less than our best."

Republican Lovett elaborated on his broad statement of the issue in a carefully thought-out statement: "National security depends on many things. Some of them, to be sure, are material things. But the more important ones are matters of national spirit. It depends on our belief in the future; it depends greatly on our sense of values; and it depends on our willingness to give up a little of today in order to have a tomorrow. While the challenges of the moment are most serious in a policymaking sense, I see no reason for black despair or for defeatist doubts. We can do whatever we have to do in order to survive and to meet any form of economic or political competition we are likely to face. All this we can do with one proviso: we must be willing to do our best."

Testifying next day, blunt-spoken Robert C. Sprague, Massachusetts electrical manufacturer, co-chairman of the 1957 Gaither Committee study of U.S. defenses (which the Administration refuses to make public--TIME, Dec. 2, 1957), declared that the U.S. must be awakened to the scope of the overall Russian threat. "There is only one man in the United States that can do this effectively, and that is the President," said Sprague, a Republican. "I believe, and this is a personal belief, that the danger is more serious than the President has expressed himself to the American public."

Maine's Senator Edmund S. Muskie: "I gather that you consider our present military program inadequate to the needs?"

Sprague: That is correct, Senator.

Muskie: And I gather further that you consider the deficiencies a threat to our survival?

Sprague: I do.

More soft-spoken but just as convinced was Dr. James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams College, also a Gaither Committee veteran and a Republican. "It is really tough business for a nation to sustain the prolonged effort that cold war demands," said he. "But I think that we are right up against it, and we are going to have to do it." To understand the need for sacrifice, the U.S. must rid itself of complacency based on false hopes. "I have spent several years of my life studying the history of disarmament, and it is gloomy reading indeed for a lover of peace," said Historian Baxter.

The last of the four took aim at the President's defense policy. Said Thomas Watson Jr., president of International Business Machines Corp.: "We may gain comfort and peace of mind by mixing our own doubts about our abilities in rocketry with thoughts of the superiority of our Air Force and other weapons. However, this kind of thinking is not conducive to long-term world leadership."

Asked if he felt the military budget adequate, Watson pointed out his system of priorities. "I do not believe the adequacy of our defense posture can be discussed in the same context as inflation," said he. "I do not agree with people who suggest that we must not push our economy to any point necessary to win in competing with the Soviet because we then might lose what has made our country great. Our national goal should be clear superiority over the Soviet Union in all possible areas, and we should believe enough in our democracy so that we will not be reluctant to enter fully into the contest."

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