A Self-Corrective Process

Dissent--its nature, its acceptance, and what to do about it--was the issue of the week.

Said Essayist Paul Goodman, a self-styled anarchist, in the current New York Review of Books: "Some kind of martial law and thousands of arrests for sedition are quite thinkable."

Said Wyoming's Democratic Senator Gale McGee: "I have not noticed that those who oppose our policies in Southeast Asia have been coerced into silence. If anything, the tempo of their vocal exercises has been increased."

Said Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse: "There has obviously been let loose in this country flag-waving propaganda designed to silence dissent."

Said University of Chicago Historian Daniel Boorstin: "Dissent is now in the hands of men who cannot bear to be embraced by authority, who are at their unhappiest when their ideas, as in the case of civil rights, are accepted by the authority they have railed against."

Ambivalent Attitude. Lyndon Johnson, the man around whom much of the talk swirled, seemed ambivalent in his own attitudes. At times, he has instinctively defended a free exchange of views, at others deplored the fact that Hanoi may misjudge dissent as proof of a divided people. For the most part, however, his public posture has been to acknowledge his critics' right to disagree--and his own right to disagree right back (see ESSAY).

Thus, in a speech last week to White House Fellows, the President lauded their generation for its "questioning, critical spirit, skeptical of promises and rather impatient with results." He reminded them that they enjoyed "enormous freedom--freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression--yes, freedom of dissent." And that freedom, he said, "can never harm us if we remember that it is a two-way street."

The very next day, to be sure, he seemed to take a narrower view. The occasion--the posthumous award of a Medal of Honor to Marine Sergeant Peter Connor, who saved his comrades by hugging a grenade to his body--was hardly an appropriate one for a speech aimed at the Administration's critics, but Johnson seized it nonetheless. "Thousands of miles away from the battlefield on which he fell, his countrymen debate the course of the war he fought in," said the President. "The debate will go on, and it will have its price. It is a price our democracy must be prepared to pay, and that the angriest voices of dissent should be prepared to acknowledge."

"We Won't Go!" Not likely, or at least not very soon. On campuses from Harvard to Berkeley, a "We Won't Go!" movement is spreading swiftly. In the past three months, no fewer than 16 members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee have refused induction, echoing Stokely Carmichael's complaint that the draft is "calculated genocide" aimed at exterminating Negroes. Across the nation, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is trying to mobilize 10,000 volunteers for his "Viet Nam Summer," aimed at "organizing and educating against the war." When the President was asked during his first major press conference in nearly two months about King's recommendation that young men defy the draft, he paused a long time before replying. "We regret when any person asks the young people of the country to refuse to serve what we believe to be the needs of the country," he said in scarcely audible tones. "We regret it very much."

At one point, the President picked up from his desk a copy of a Law Day speech delivered by oldtime New Dealer Thurman Arnold, 75, at Indiana's Valparaiso University Law School. A lawyer who helped Owen Lattimore and a number of low-level Government employees who came under attack during the McCarthy era, Arnold has impeccable credentials as a defender of dissent. Yet his speech was a blistering denunciation of "alienated intellectuals" who take the position that "dissent deserves special consideration, immunity from criticism and the right to shout down persons who disagree with them." Arnold recalled that Columnist Walter Lippmann, who thinks that the U.S. had no business sending ground troops to Asia in the '60s, also objected to American intervention in Europe in 1940 after Hitler's conquest of France. "Had Mr. Lippmann's advice been followed," said Arnold, "Hitler might have won the war." Arnold also noted that Chairman John Kenneth Galbraith of the Americans for Democratic Action recently bemoaned the possibility that a prolonged war in Viet Nam "could mean the death and burial of the Democratic Party." Snapped Arnold, a lifelong Democrat: "In other words, the Democratic Party is more important than the enforcement of international law." Replying to Senator Fulbright's well-worn charge that the U.S. is "arrogant," he asked: "Is it arrogance when we permit ourselves to be lectured by a Burmese citizen named U Thant and, instead of resenting his criticism, encourage and cooperate with him?"

"Even after the defeat of Hitler," said Arnold, "the intellectuals who are now condemning our efforts to enforce the international principle outlawing aggressive war failed to understand the role in international affairs which destiny had imposed on the United States." He witheringly attacked those who "think it is their function to portray the U.S. to the world as a stupid and brutal power unnecessarily killing thousands of people and burning villages. Their military advice is to stop shooting the enemy on the theory that if we did, the gratitude of the enemy would be so great as not to take advantage of us."

"Diplomatic Darwinism." The Republicans, who have been giving the President more support on Viet Nam than his own party, also became embroiled in the debate. A 91-page staff paper drawn for the Senate Republican Policy Committee--but not approved by the committee members--posed two questions about the war: "What precisely is our national interest in Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Laos? To what further lengths are we prepared to go in support of this interest?" The report attempted to disassociate Dwight Eisenhower from any connection with the current massive U.S. involvement and accused Johnson of "diplomatic Darwinism" in saying that his policy in Viet Nam is "part of a steady evolution from commitments made by earlier Presidents." In fairly general terms, it also criticized the conduct of the war.

Iowa's Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, chairman of the committee, said that he had released the report without reading it because he was worried that it might be leaked piecemeal and distorted. But G.O.P. leaders were aghast. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, recuperating from pneumonia, left Walter Reed General Hospital and hurried to Capitol Hill with a statement: "We reiterate our wholehearted support of the Commander in Chief of our armed forces." House Minority Leader Gerald Ford seconded Dirksen, declaring that an "overwhelming majority" of G.O.P. Congressmen agreed that "we're not going to throw Viet Nam into the political arena."

Forget the First! But it will be hard to keep it out. During House hearings on the draft, Louisiana's Democratic Congressman F. Edward Hebert went so far as to ask whether there was any way to "get around" the First Amendment in order to prosecute "the Carmichaels and the Kings" for urging defiance of the draft. When he was told that there was not, Hebert impatiently cried: "Let's forget the First Amendment!" Mendel Rivers enthusiastically supported him, and chimed in with a few unilluminating comments of his own. "There are only two ideologies in the world," he said at one point. "One is represented by Jesus Christ and the other by the hammer and the sickle."

There seems little chance that the debate will become more muted, even as the American involvement in Viet Nam deepens. Meanwhile, the President's advisers are prevailing on him to stump the nation or at least take to TV in order to remind Americans of the reasons for the war and to rally support for it. So far he has made no decision. It is clear, however, that whatever arguments Johnson offers will have to be both eloquent and candid if he hopes to sway any appreciable number of dissenters to his side. It is even clearer that he can never hope to win them all over. Nor should he, if it is true that democracy's great self-corrective is reasonable dissent and debate.

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