The Debate

The crayoned sign on the door of Georgetown University's glass-and-concrete Hall of Nations in Washington announced a coming event: SOCIAL MIXER-- BEER, PEOPLE, DANCING. But what went on inside the hall one night last week was hardly a mixer. It was the televised debate between Special Presidential Assistant McGeorge Bundy and critics of the Administration's firm Viet Nam policies, originally scheduled for May but postponed when the President ordered Bundy to the Dominican Republic.

Risks & Costs. Supporting Bundy were Polish-born Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, director of Columbia's Research Institute on Communist Affairs, and the Rand Corp.'s expert on Asia, Guy J. Pauker. On the critics' side were the University of Chicago's German-born Political Scientist Hans J. Morgenthau; ex-Foreign Service Officer Edmund O. Clubb, chairman of Columbia's Seminar on Modern Asia; and Michigan State University Anthropologist John D. Donoghue, who recently spent two years in South Viet Nam's villages.

Moderator Eric Sevareid started the hour-long debate by saying: "The cost and risk of fighting this war have to be measured against the risks and costs of not fighting it." As five TV cameras rolled, the Government's critics explained why they thought the risks were too grave and the costs too high.

The war, said Clubb, cannot be won "without virtually annihilating the Vietnamese people," and besides, it is "alienating both Asian and other world sympathies." Morgenthau could not think of a single justification for it. "I am opposed to our present policies in Viet Nam," he said, "on moral, military, political and general intellectual grounds." Said Donoghue: "I view this as a civil war, with most peasants against the government that we support."

Bundy & Co. took heated exception. "The policy which the United States is now following is the best policy in a difficult and dangerous situation," said Bundy. "We have a commitment matured through time, made for good reasons and sustained for the same reasons." One of the reasons, offered Brzezinski, is to keep Red China from gaining supremacy in Asia. "A great many Asian nations," he said, "see a major interest for themselves in an American continued presence in Viet Nam as a bulwark." As for the notion that the Viet Nam war is a civil war, Pauker said: "This is aggression from North Viet Nam, but carefully staged so as to make Communist revolution ary war appear as a spontaneous grassroots revolt."

When Morgenthau argued that the U.S. attempt to contain Communism was "eminently successful in Europe against the Soviet Union," but "is bound to fail in Asia against China," Brzezinski said caustically: "I would like to suggest, respectfully, that Professor Morgenthau is wrong." Were the U.S. to pull out of Asia, Brzezinski added, "the Chinese will have been proven right, and this would be a highly destabilizing condition for world peace."

Later, when Morgenthau began to cite foreign magazine articles (from France's L'Express and Britain's Economist) and figures on South Vietnamese desertion rates, Bundy, his voice edged with sarcasm, cut him short. "I'll simply have to break in, if I may, Mr. Sevareid, and say that I think Professor Morgenthau is wrong on his facts as to the desertion rates, wrong in his summary of the Express articles, wrong in his view of what the Economist says, and, I'm sorry to say, giving vent to his congenital pessimism." As an example of this pessimism, Bundy quoted a 1961 article in which Morgenthau wrote that "the Communist domination of Laos is virtually a foregone conclusion" and that "the Administration has reconciled itself to the loss of Laos." Said Bundy flatly, "Neither of those things is true."

Morgenthau smiled weakly. "I might have been dead wrong on Laos, but that doesn't prove that I'm dead wrong on Viet Nam," he said.

Apocalyptic Predictions. What alternatives, Sevareid asked, does the U.S. have to its present policy? Brzezinski noted that one alternative is to cross the 17th parallel, but immediately rejected it. "We're not trying to overthrow the North Vietnamese government," he said. "There is no effort here to roll back the Communist world." What the U.S. must do, he added, is "to make it very clear that we ourselves are not going to be thrown out of South Viet Nam. And I believe we can do this in spite of the apocalyptic predictions by some people that this will lead to a world war with China or with the Soviet Union or to a homogenous Communist world."

Bundy also noted--and rejected--the alternative of carrying the war "ever further northward without regard to cities or population or boundaries or what country you are choosing to attack." That, he said, "is not the policy of the Administration." Its position, he went on, "is that we should stay there, that we should do our part as may become necessary, do only what is necessary, and seek constantly, as we have for months and months and months, to find a way to get this dangerous and difficult business to the conference room."

Morgenthau, admitting that his position "must come as a surprise to some listeners here," did not call for an immediate U.S. pullout. Instead he suggested that the U.S. try to hold a few coastal enclaves to show the Viet Cong that they cannot win a complete military victory. "I think our aim must be to get out of Viet Nam," he said, "but to get out of it with honor."

As soon as the debate went off the air, students and teachers swarmed around Bundy, trying to keep the argument going. "What about the napalm?" American University Government Professor Daniel Berman kept demanding. "I've answered you now three times, politely," said Bundy. "Oh, you have, have you?" snapped Berman. "Yes," said Bundy wearily, "I have."

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