AMEmCAN OPINION

An Informal Review / SEPTEMBER, 1968 / $1.00

Lt. General Lewis Burwell (Cbest y } Pull er, U.S.M.C., Rei .
Volume XI - Number 8
Mr. Nixon Gary Allen 1
M r. Wallace Susan L. M. Huck 25
De Libris Medford E vans 41
From Sc ie nc e Da v id O. W oodb ury 55
Princi ples Of E con omics Han s F. Sennholz 57
F rom London Frank MacMiIIan 6 1
From Af ri ca George S. Schuyler 63
F rom Latin Ameri ca Harold Lord V arney 65
F rom Washi ngton R eed Benson and Robert L ee 67
From The South T om Anderson 69
From Poetry Edited by E . Merrill R oo t 71
For Students E . M erriII Root 73
P oor Excuse Medford Ev ans 81
On M anlines s Tayl or Caldwell 91
Lt . Gen. L. B. ( Chest y) Puller WiIIiam C. Lemly 113
Cover P ortrai t Daniel M ichael Canavan- Co ve r
Dear Rea der :
T he next forty pa ges of t his issue of AMERICAN OP INION
arc devoted t o t he f i rst of a co n t in uing ser ies of commen taries
on lead ing candidates f or President of the Unite d States. T he
art icl es f or this month, on Ric ha rd N ixo n an d George \Vall ace,
were com mi ssion ed month s ago with t his sing le editorial ad-
moniti on to our au t hors: T ake a hard look at t he candid at es
and " te ll i t l i ke it is. " T hen, having cho sen cons er vat i ves Gary
Alle n and Susan Huc k to prepare t he first two i n t he ser ies,
we simply moved out of t he way and let t hem get at t he j ob--
promi sing t o p ubl ish thei r f indings as th ey gave t hem to us,
Warts and all. W e arc now doing just that.
Let us emp hasize, however , t hat t he polit ical cornmcnrar ics
which you arc about t o rea d are 110t mea nt as an en dorsemen t
or a re ject ion by AMERICAN OPINIO>l of t he candid acy of ei t her
Mr. N ixon or Mr. Wallace, bu t r ep resent persona l jou rn al ism
ref lecting t he op in ions and analyses of t he authors whose
names arc affixed to th eir respect ive art icle s. As you know,
AMERICAN OPINION does not endorse polit ical ca ndidat es. Not
becau se we agree wit h Thomas J ef ferson t hat when a ma n
en t er s poli ti cs a cert ain rotten ness appears- t hou g h t he though t
docs in trude- but because we know that it wo uld be u nf ai t h-
fu l to ou r p urpose to abandon t hose con ser vat ive principles
wh ich t his magaz ine re p resen ts to ma ke a necessar ily com-
premising chase af t er insta nt heroes on horseback. Free na t ion s
arc not preserved t h at way; in fa ct they arc somet imes lost .
and by t hose who love t hem the most , fo r havin g set upon just
such a course.
To repeat : N o art icle whic h fo llows is intended as a n en -
dorsement by AMERICAN OPINION of t he presidential ca nd id acy
of either Ri ch ard M. Nixo n or George C. \Vall ace. And, lest ou r
f rie nd Mr. N ixon express his u nbou nded joy at th is fac t and
alle ge t hat i t is Vice P resi den t H umphrey who has received our
cndorsement by process of el imin at ion , let us say simply t hat
H uber t Hump hrey' s t urn no t t o be endor sed by AMERICAN
is corning next mon th .
Sinc erel y,
It
Edit or
ROBERT WELCH
Mallaging Edit or
SCOTT STANLEY, J R.
Associat e Edito rs
T HOMAS .I. ANDERSON
MEDFORD EVANS
FRANCIS X. GANNON
ROBERT H. MONTGOMERY
E. MERRILL ROOT
Contributi ng Edit ors
GARY ALLEN
H ILAIRE DU BERRIER
FRANK MACMILLAN
H ANS F. SENNHOLZ
HAROLD LORD VARNEY
Assistant
Matlagillg Edit or
MARIAN PROBERT WELCH
Publisher
RICHARD N . OBER
Business Manager
DONALD R. GRAY
Ci rcul ation Mallager
DONALD L. FOLKERS
Edit orial
Advisory Committee
The f ollowing grou b of distill -
gllished AmericalIS gives t he edit or
com ments and advice tubic]: are
bel pflll ill determining t he edito -
rial policy, conte nts, and opinions
of t hi s magazi ne, But 110 respon-
sibilit y can be att ribu t ed t o allY
members of t bis Committee fo r
allY speci fi c arti cles, ite ms, or COII -
elusions u/bicb appear in t bese
pages.
K . G. BENTSON
LAURENCE E. BUNKER
F. GANO CHANCE
MARTIN J. CONDON, III
ROBERT B. DRESSER
CH ARLES EDISON
WM. J. GREDE
CLARENCE MANION
N. FLOYD MCG OWIN
W . B. McMILLAN
LUDWIG VON MISES
ROBERT W . STODDARD
ERNEST G. SWIGERT
CONTENTS SEPT EMBER, 196 8
AMERICAN OPINION-is published monthly except July by Robert Welch, lne., 395 Concord Ave .,
Belmont, Massachusetts 02178 U.S.A. Subscription rates are ten dollars pe r year in the United
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Second Class Postage Paid at Boston, Massachusetts
MR. NIXON
A Hard Look At The Candidate
Gary Allen, a graduate of Stanford
University and one of the nation's top
authorities on civil turmoil and the N ew
Left, is aut hor of Communist Revolu-
tion in the Streets-a highl y praised and
definitive new volume on revolutionary
tactics and strategies, published by West-
ern Islands. Mr. Allen is active in anti-
Communist and other humanitarian
causes and is President of the Foun da-
tion ,tor Economic and Social Progress.
A ftlm writer and journalist, he is a
Co nt ri buti ng Editor to AMERICAN
OPINION. Gary Allen lectures widely.
T HESEEMINGLY endless search for the
"real" Richard Nixon has been a popul ar
sport of American pundits since 1948.
As wit h the hunt for Jack the Ripper,
the quarry has proved bri lliantly elusive
yet quadr ennially captivating to the
imagi nation. Every four years, by the
time the snow falls in New Hampshire,
Mr. Nixon returns to the political
scene as certainly as the recurring legend
of the Ripper lives on in the wary step
of the London shopgirl. Who is he?
Why does he do it? In the answers to
these questions are t he secrets that pro-
long the legends.
I
T HE NIXON STORY is one that begins
almost as if it had been wr itten by
Horatio Alger. Reared in a hard-work-
ing Qu aker fami ly, Richard Milhous
Nixon was early inspired by his father 's
commit ment to overcoming economic
hardship through di ligent effor t. As the
former Vi ce Pr esident has said, "My dad
was an individual- he'd go to his grave
SEPTEMBER, 196 8
before he took government help. This
attitude of his gave us pride." An d, no
doubt it did. The schoolboy Nixon
worked in t he fami ly's small grocery
store until nine or ten o'clock at night,
and after-hours would study until two
or three in the morning.
In Nixon's junior year in high school,
in keeping wit h his Quaker phi losophy
of individual responsibility and personal
dignity, young Nixon's fat her gave him
complete charge of the vegetable counter
in the family groce ry store. Dick di d
the buying, dr iving to the Los Angeles
public market before sunrise to haggle
wi th the local produce growers, then
hu rried back to arrange his displays
befor e leaving for school. All the profit
he could make was his, and all that he
could save went into a college bank
account. It was superb training for any
boy.
A good student of aggressive nature,
Ni xon became entranced wi th debating
in high school. His debate coach, Mrs.
Clifford Vi ncent, remembe rs that she
used to feel "distur bed" at his superiority
over his teammates. "He had this
abilit y," she said, "to ki nd of slide around
an argument instead of meeting it head
on, and he could take any side of a
debate.?" His teenage skill at debati ng
may have been honed by his six weeks
as a barker for a wheel of chance at
the Slipper Gulch Rodeo in Pr escott,
Arizona. There "he learned the knack
of drumming up customers and then
lett ing them have it," writes Phillip
Andrews in This Man Nixon. "His
" William Costello, The Fact s About NixOII , Vi-
king Press, New York, 1960.
1
booth, it is said, became the most
popular one in the show."
While work ing his way through
Whit tie r Co l lege, Ri ch a r d Nixon
majored in history and again covered
himself wi th distinction as a debater
and also as an actor in school dramas.
Dr. Albert Upton, who directed Nixon
in one of the Whittier College plays, is
still awed when he recalls how adept
the young collegian was at produci ng
tears. "It was beaut ifull v done, those
tears," he remembers, co n f essi ng to
having "twi nged" when he saw photos
of Nixon weeping on Senator William
Kn owland's shoulder after the famous
"Checkers" speech. Dr. Upton says he
never dreamed that his former student
would go into politi cs, but adds: "I
wouldn't have been surprised if, after
college, he had gone on to New York or
Hollywood looking for a job as an
actor."
During all four years in college> the
youthf ul Nixon doggedly went out for
football. Though he never got beyond
the bench, being possessed of two left
feet, he neverth eless refused to give up.
Hi s coach, Wallace Newman, recalls
th e weeks that would go by wi thout
Ni xon's ever playing a minute, but says
he was nonetheless "wonderful for
morale, because he' d sit there and
cheer.... To sit on the bench for the
bett er part of four seasons isn't easy."
According to Earl Maze, his most
fri endly biogr apher, "Nixon classified
himself a 'Liberal' in college, ' but not
a flaming liberal.' Like many law stu-
dent s of that per iod, his public heroes
were Justices Brandeis, Cardozo and
Hughes, then the Supreme Cour t's pro-
gressive minority."* At Duke Law
School on scholarship, he gra duated
th ird in his class. Stewart Alsop quotes
a former classmate: "My imp ression was
that Richard Nixon was not an excep-
tionally brilli ant stude nt. However, he
" Ear l Mazo, Richard Nixon, Harper and Brot hers,
New Yor k, 1959.
2
was outstanding because of his ability
to do prodigious amounts of work. He
pursued his ambition to stand at the
head of his class with an intensitv that
few people are capable of." .
Upon graduation Nixon was none-
theless turned down bv several VI!all
St reet firms and, cur iously, by the F.RI.
Shaken, he accepted a job in the bureau-
cracy of Washington, D.C., then served
in the Navy during Wo rld War I!. Mr.
Nixon described his war record in the
famous "Checkers" speech of 1952 in
these words:
My service record was 110t a partic-
ularly nnnsual one. I went to the
SO/Ith Pacific. I guess I'm entitled to
a couple of battl e stars. I got a couple
of lett ers of commendation, but I
was jl/st the re when the bombs were
falling, and then I returned.
That isn't just how it was. In fact,
Stewart Alsop not es in N ixon and
R ockefell er that ". .. Nixon had a non-
combat job far from the battle lines.
. . ." For a few weeks, though, his naval
unit was on the f rin ges of a combat
area. And, whi le he received a citation
for being efficient in providing supplies
- something he had been doing effec-
tively with cabbages and parsley since
the age of seventeen - he was cert ainl y
entitled to no battle stars.
Home from the South Pacific, Nixon
began his politi cal career as a protege
of a group of businessmen who were so
anxious to defeat Leftist Congr essman
Jerry Voorh is in 1946 that they had run
an advertisement in a local newspaper
to seek prospective cand idat es. Friends
in Whittier, no doubt regaled by Nixon's
war stori es of bombs bursting in air,
suggested that he answer the ad and
run for Congress.
Up to then, Richard Nixon says he
had littl e interest in politics, but he ac-
cepted the offer with alacrity: "Why did
I take it ? I'm a pessimist, but if I figure
AMERICAN OPINION
Richard Nixon discusses his "war record" in the nationally televised "Checkers" speech of 1952 .
I've got a chance, I'll fight for it." As
the acid Stewart Alsop observes : "Nixon
became a polit ician, in short, more be-
cause it seemed a good idea at the time
than because of any profound political
convictions. Having thus ente red poli-
tics more or less by accident, one suspects
that he though t of a polit ical career
much as another young veteran back
from the wars might think of adverti s-
ing, or meat packing, or bond selling
- as a way to make a living and get
ahead."
Young Mr. Nixon, campaigning in
his Navy uniform, won that first elec-
tion against grea t odds, using a stra tegy
described by biograph er William Cos--
tello: "... Nixon, canvassing the 200,000
voters of the district, introduced himself
as a 'liberal Republic an.' He refrained
from attacki ng t he New Deal in all its
aspects, but he pull ed no punches in
attacking Voorhis."
II
IT W AS the Hiss case in 1948 which
rocketed the young Calif ornia Congress-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
man to the headlines. Although the
actua l investigation of Alger H iss was
done by Robert Stripling of the staff
of the House Commi ttee on Un-Ameri-
can Activities, it was Nixon's persistence
which finally nailed Hiss as a Soviet
spy. The Hiss case had its origi n in
testimony given by Whittaker Chambers
before the House Committee on Un-
American Activities, of wh ich Mr. Ni x-
on was a member. Nixon recalled later
that Chambers "made charges which
at the time seemed fantastic - that
he'd been a Communist, that he had
worked with Hiss, White, Abt, Press-
man, Witt, and a group of others who
were also conn ected with the govern-
ment. "
Alger His s, of course, was a very
important man. He had long served
with the State Department , was instru-
ment al at the founding of the United
Nations, and had since become Pr esi-
dent of the powerful and prestigious
Carnegi e Endowment for International
Peace. Hiss promptly came before the
Committee to den y all. "He was an
3
amazingly impress ive witness the first
time," Nixon said later. "I would say
that ninety percent of those who were
in the committee room were convinced
that Mr. Hi ss was telling the truth ...
when he said that he did not know
Mr. Chambers." The case was almost
dropped.
Of course, Chambers too was a man
of some standing, one of six senior
editors of Time magazine, but Hiss had
a phenomenal record in government
service and came before the Committee
not as a confessed ex-Commu nist, like
Chambers, but as a man of redoubt able
credenti als. Nonetheless, and to his
eternal credit, Congr essman Richard
Nixon took the lead in urging further
investigation.
His s helped seal his own doom by
suing Chambers for calling him a Com-
munist. Now under pressur e, Whittaker
Chambers produced a thick envelope
containi ng four pages in Hi ss' hand-
wr iting and a number of typewritten
document s whi ch he said had been
copied on Alger Hiss' typewriter. He
charged the envelope contained confi-
dential State Documents which Hiss
had pilfered and passed on to him in
the service of the Interna tional Commu-
nist Conspiracy. Examinat ion showed
the papers were in fact copies of authen-
tic top-secret documents; and, other
testimon y established that the trans-
mission to the Russians of verbatim
texts of these papers woul d have en-
abled the Soviet government to break
the State Department's secret code.
So powerful were the Communists in
government that, even in the face of all
of this, there was an intimati on from
the Justice Department that the Hi ss-
Chambers case would be dropp ed un-
less additional evidence could be found.
At that point Mr . Nixon performed
his penultimate service in the Hiss case.
At a pri vate interview with Chambers
on the latter 's farm in Maryland,
Congr essman Nixon learned that
4
Chambers had in his possession addi-
tional documentary evidence. The next
evening, in a cloak-and- dagger scene
that fired the national imagination, an
agent of the Commi ttee served a sub-
poena on the ex-Communist, Chambers
led him in darkness to a pumpkin in
hi s garden, and from the pumpki n he
drew five rolls of microfilm containing
photostatic copies of confidenti al and
secret documents stolen from the State
Department.
A New York Grand Jury, on the
verge of indicting Whittaker Chambers
for perjury, reversed itself when Nixon
rushed to New York and testified that
it must have been Hiss who lied in say-
ing he had not turned official document s
over to Chambers. Simultaneously, the
F.B.I. was able to establish that the
pumpkin papers, and letters from Mrs.
Priscilla Hiss, had been typed on the
same Woodstock typewrit er. On Decem-
ber fifteent h, the Grand Jur y climaxed
its investigat ion by bringing in an in-
dictment of perjury against Alger Hiss,
who was later found guilty and jailed.
For his role in exposing Hiss, Richard
Nixon earned the undying hat red of
a vast segment of the American Left.
Hiss had been a fair-haired boy among
the "Liberals." Adlai Stevenson and
Dean Acheson had served as character
witnesses at his trial, and many another
"Superliberal" had gone out on a limb
to defend him. Umil Nixon's persistent
investigation produced the evidence, the
dapper and urbane Hiss was on his way
to being cleared. Ni xon left a lot of
"Liberal" Democrats with egg on their
faces, but he concluded the experience
as a national hero.
In 1950, Congressman Nixon emerged
victorious in a vicious campaign in
California to defeat extremist Helen
Gahagan Douglas for a vacated seat
in the U.S. Senate, capitalizing on the
considerable reputation he had earned
as an anti-Communist in dogged pur-
suit of Alger Hiss. Nixon Red-baited
AMERICAN OPI NION
the "Pink Lady" unmercifully, if quite
correctly, and introduced some interest-
ing campaign techniques no doubt re-
membered from the midway of the
Slipper Gulch Rodeo. For anyone who
answered the phone to Nixon's can-
vasses with the words, "Vote for Nixon,"
ther e would be, "PRIZES GALORE!!!
Electric clocks, Silex coffeemakers with
heating units - General Electric auto-
matic toasters - silver salt and pepper
shakers, sugar and creamer sets, cand y
and butter dishes etc., etc." Nixon also
sent every registered Democrat in the
state a handbill which began: "As one
Democrat to another. . .." Yet another
handbill, featuring a smiling photo of
the Repub lican candidate, began: "Fel-
low Democrats ..."1
Political success seemed only to stimu-
late Mr. Nixon's ambitions. Senator
Robert Taft, for one, described him as
"a little man in a big hurry." He was
in a hurry, all right . And he played his
cards carefully. Although Nixon had
built a considerable reputation as an
anti-Communist in the Hiss affair , and
as sponsor of the Mundt-Nixon Sub-
versives Control Bill, the Californian
had also been careful to remain a
vigorous internationalist.
The individual most responsible for
Nixon being confirmed as Dwight
Eisenhower's running mate in 1952 was
apparently Paul Hoffman,* the man
who was instrumental in making the
Leftist policies of the Ford Foundation
what they are today, a trustee of the
Communist Instit ute for Pacific Rela-
tions, and member of Amer icans United
for World Government. At a meeting
to pi ck a running mate for Eisenhower,
the Left ist Mr. Hoffman, as chief
spokesman for the Citizens for Eisen-
hower movement, was most persuasive.
As he said later : "I told them everything
I had heard about Senator Nixon was
" See Biographical Dictionary of the Left by
Franc is X. Gannon , American Opinion, Boston,
$1.00.
SEPTEMBER, 1968
good. I looked on him as one of the
Republicans who had an enlightened
view of foreign affairs, and I thought
that a man of his views should run with
General Eisenhower."
Nixon, you see, had moved quickly
to become a fair-haired boy to the Re-
publican "Liberals" through his efforts
in behalf of an organization known as
Republican Advance. ' It had been easy
to see that 1952 would be a pivotal year
in American history and that the Re-
publican Party was virtually a cinch
to regain control of the White Ho use.
The Nixon family: Trida, Julia, Richard, and Pat.
The Truman scandals, the Korean War,
Communis t infiltration of government,
the fact that for the first time since 1932
the G.O. P. was not faced with an in-
cumbent President - all these factors
combined to make the Republican nomi -
nat ion ta ntamount to election. Nixon
knew t hat the Lef t was thus fiercely
determined that the nomination not fall
to conservat ive Robert Taft, but to one
of their own . He joined the effort.
Russell Davenport, a devout "Liberal"
Democrat who had successfully run
5
the campaign to sell fellow Democrat
Wendell Willkie to the Republican
Part y in 1940, and who had later been
a founder of the AD.A., served as the
organizing force behind the Far Left's
move to set up the Repub lican Ad vance
movement. Working with Davenport
were Hoffman, Nels on Rockefeller, and
Sidn ey Weinberg.*
Advance made its first public move on
Jul y 4, 1950, wh en twenty-one Republ i-
can Congressmen joi ned wh at they
termed a "revolt" against the Taft wing
of the Part y. It was they who publicly
procl aimed the formati on of Republi-
can Advance, launched in semi-secrecy
the previous week with the announced
purpose of destroying Taft. An Advance
manifesto was quickly issued to supplant
a G.O.P. declaration of policy adopted
in February of 1950 by House and
Senat e Republicans, and concur red in
by the Republican Nat ional Commit-
tee. The official Republican state ment
had dar ed to declar e tha t the election
issue would be "liberty versus socialism."
Republi can Advance advocated playing
down the issues of socialism and anti-
Communism and stressing "positive"
programs in the fields of collectivist
legislation - in ot her words, to out-
"Li beral" the Democrats. As the mani -
festo declared : "The real issue against
the Democrats does not lie with the
goals. . . .r r
The move was on to shift the Re-
publ ican Party from one wh ich advocat -
ed repealing socialism to one promising
to run socialism in an efficient and
businesslike manner. By taking the heat
off the socialists and Communists,
Leftist inroads into the American Re-
publ ic were consolidat ed and assured
bi-part isan support. Now, here's the
key; According to the Los A ngeles
Times of Jul y 14, 1959, one of the
founders of Republican Ad vance, later
*Weinberg, who served as chief mo ney raiser for
Eisenhower in 1952 - 1956 , is t his year raising $3
million for t he campaign of H uber t Hump hrey.
6
re-name d Citizens for Eisenhower, was
Richar d M. Nixon.
III
AT THE BEGI NKING of the 1952 election
campaign Nixon swore he would make
Communis t subversio n and corruption
the theme of every speech . "If the record
itself smears," he said, "let it smea r. If
the dry rot of corruption and Commu-
nism, whi ch has eaten deep into our
body politic during the past seven years,
can only be chopped off with a hatch et
- then let' s call for a hat chet." The
words were aimed at the many dis-
couraged supporters of Senat or Taft,
and were design ed to get them back
int o the 1952 campaign. Even the
"Liberals" saw through the ploy. As
"Liberal" columnist Stewart Alsop wrote
at the time: "The admirati on for N ixon
among the Taft-worshippers is essential-
Iv irratio nal, since Nixon contributed to
Taft's last defea t in 1952, and since he
has none of Taft 's hankering for a
simpler past." St ill, the ploy worked.
In his new job as President of the
Senate, Vice President Ni xon labored
vigilantly to implement even the most
Leftist features of the Eisenhower pro-
gram. In an article in Colliers for Octo-
ber of 1965, enti tled " How Ike Saved
the G.O.P. " (by pu rging conservatives),
Paul Hoffman noted:
III the Senate f rom the very be-
ginni ng the President's program had
the IInqllalified and cigoro: SlIpport
of Vice President Nixon. Some liberal
Repnblicans are nncanuinced as to
the Vice President's attitllde, hold-
ing that he has SliP ported the pro-
gram only ant of personal loyalty
to the President . That his original
nltrn-conseruatioe uieios are changed.
Based on what N ixon has said both
pllblicly and privately, it is my view
that he gellllillely and deeply beli eves
that the fll ll Eisenhower program is
best f or the COl/lltl'Y.
AMERICAN OPINION
Nixon is shown in 1959 as he welcomes Khrushchev, the Butcher of Budapest, t o the United States.
Vice Pr esident Nixon, a one-time sup-
porter of Senator Joseph McCarthy,
now worked vigorously to carr y out the
directives of Ike's so-called Palace Gu ard
( Paul Hoffman, Sidney Weinberg, and
C. D. Jackson) to silence the Wiscon-
sin Senator whose investigations were
flushing top conspira tors from the
government. "Liberal" White House
correspondent William Costello even
credits Nixon with having "persuaded
McCarthy to call off his thre at to in-
vestigate the CIA," and having "talked
McCarthy out of keeping J. B. Matthews
as chief investigat or rof the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee] . . .."
Matthews, one of the most knowl edge-
able experts in the United States on
Communist subversion, had made the
mi stake of writing a magazine article
documenting the activities of subversives
inside the N ation al Council of
Churches.
While Communism in the govern-
ment was a good campaign issue, you
see, Costello says that once the election
was over Nixon "tried to guide McCar-
SEPT EMBER, 1968
thy away from the whole Communist
issue, telling him that he would benefit
by broadening his field of activity."
Nixon's role as an Eisenhower hench-
man is furt her described in The Facts
About Nixon as follows :
Althotlgh Nixon's original under-
taking as a middle-man applied pri-
maril)' to the McCarthy investiga-
tions, and altbongb Eisenhower re-
frained from giving him any f ormal
status as a deptlt), leader of the Ad-
ministration, his talents as a legisla-
tive broker were invoked f rom time
to time on a variety of problems. In
the f irst weeks of the Administration,
the President ran into trouble on the
conf irmation of two key ambas-
sadorial appointees - Bohlen to go
to Moscow and Conant to Bonn.
In both cases, it was Nixon who re-
assured the edgy right- wingers. . . .
Again, it was Nixon who dming
the Congress got Senator Pat sue .
ran to call of f a [ilibuster on the
immigration bill, and persuaded
7
Dan Reed of the House Ways and
Means Committee to swallow the
President's tax program af ter giving
vent to violent rumbl es of discontent .
Ignoring bleeding Hungar y, a Com-
munist takeover in Cuba, the loss of
the Suez Canal, the Korean stalemate,
a major recession, the gold drain, in-
creased taxes, and all-time-high peace-
time budget deficits, Nixon said that
Eisenhower had "the best eight-year
record of any Administration in the
history of this country." Washington,
Lincoln, Madi son, and Jefferson, please
take note.
Memory of the Hiss affair and Nix-
on's hard-fought campaigns, however,
still rankled uninformed "Liberals," and
Nixon was doing his best to create a
new image-to come out as the "new
Nixon." By 1958, columnist Doris Flee-
son would write of him : "Having now
' matured,' he earnestly repents and is
heartily sorry for the kind of campaigns
he waged for the House and Senate
against then-Representative Jerry Voor-
his and Hel en Gahagan Douglas
respectively." Those, of course, were
Nixon's anti-Communist campaigns.
Stewart Alsop says of this "new Nix-
on": "He want ed to be Pr esident very
much, and he knew that he had a
chance, perhaps a good chance, to be-
come President. But he also knew - for
he is anything but a fool - that a
reput ation as an extremist and parti san
would sharply reduce that chance.
Hence his change of political style. A
man's motives are always mixed, and
no doubt it is true that Nixon changed
his political style after 1954 in part for
purel y practical political reasons."
In October 1956, "the new Nixon"
told an audience at Cornell Un iversity
that investigations of Communist activi-
ties, such as those formerly conducted
by Senator Joseph McCarthy, were no
longer needed. Associated Press of
October 17, 1956 says he gave credit to
8
the Eisenhower Administration' s secur-
ity policies for taking "this issue . . .
out of the political arena." Four days
earlier Ni xon had explained in Rock
Island, Illinois, just how the Eisenhower
Admi nistration had cleaned the security
risks out of government. "The present
security program," he said, had "resulted
in 6,926 individuals being removed from
the federal service." This was quickly
contradicted by Phillip Young, Eisen-
hower's Chairman of the Civil Service
Commission, who test ified that he kn ew
of no single government employee who
had been fired by the Eisenhower Ad-
ministration for being a Communist or
fellow-traveler.'*'
As 1960 approached and "the new
Nixon" was to have his own shot at the
Presidency, he announced t hat the Com-
mun ist thr eat had all but disappeared.
Late in 1959, Nixon claimed : "Domestic
Communism is no longer a political
issue. The danger has receded a great
deal in the last few years, domestically,
mainly because we have become in-
creasingly aware of it. The Communists
used to fool an awfu l lot of well-mean-
ing people who were not Communists."
IV
RICHARD NI XON felt more than ready
in 1960 to step up to the Pr esidency. Hi s
.,After pro misi ng t o investi gat e th e Commun ist s
i n "every department," Eisenhower let stand
an Exec utive Order issued by Pr esident Truman
in 1947, whic h pr ohib ited Congre ss f rom access
to government fil es on t he loyalty of personnel.
Another 1948 direct ive by Mr . Truman, for-
bi ddi ng government officials to give informa-
tion to Congressional Commi ttees wit hout Whit e
House permission, was also lef t sta nding by
Eisenhower.
On Friday, May 17, 1954, Eisenhower issued
an orde r stopping the supp ly of any information on
administrat ive departments t o investiga t ing com-
mittees, whic h went fa r beyond the Truman
"gag" rule. Ch airman Francis Walters of the
House Commit tee on Un -A merican Activities called
this Eisenhower Executive Order "i nc redibly
stupid." Congressional Commi ttees were now, for
all practical pur poses, out of th e busi ness of
i nvesti gating Co mmunis ts and ot her subve rsiv es
in t he government- in complete repudiation of
Eisenhower' s campaign promises.
AMERICAN OPINION
onl y serious rival for the candidacy was
Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New
York. Rockefeller had run hard, but
Nixon, a tireless campaigner for the
Republican candidates across the coun-
try, was well in control of the Conven-
tion. When Rockefeller found he could
not lay claim to the actual nomination,
he moved to dictate policy from behind
the scenes. A meeting was thus arra nged
between Nixon and Rockefeller for the
Saturday before the Republican Con-
vent ion opened in Chicago.
In Th e Making of the President,
1960, Theodore White notes that Ni xon
accepted all the Rockefeller terms for
this meeting, including provisions "that
Ni xon telephone Rockefeller personally
with his request for a meeting; that they
meet at the Rockefeller apartment . ..
that their meeting be secret and later be
announced in a press release from the
Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting
be clearl y announced as taking place at
the Vice President' s request ; that the
statement of policy issuing from it be
long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary
communique."*'
As a result of the meeting, a four-way
telephone circuit was set up linki ng
Rockefeller prot ege Cha rl es Percy
(Chai rman of the Republican Platform
Committee) , a second Rockefeller
deputy in Chicago, Nixon, and Rocke-
feller. What finally emerged were the
four teen points of the famous Compact
of Fifth Avenue.
The Republ ican Platform Commit tee
had been meeting in Chicago for an
entire week, laboriously pounding out
a platform reflecting the views of Re-
publicans from all fifty states. Now the
Platform Commi ttee was hand ed the
Rockefeller-Ni xon orders : Forget the
effort and the time you have spent to
come to Chicago at your own expense,
hear witnesses, and draft a document to
" Theodore White, The Maki ng of t he President ,
1960, At heneum Publ ishers, New York, 1961,
Page 196.
SEPT EMBER, 1968
submit to the Convention- throw it all
out and accept the Rockefeller-Nixon
platform worked out, in secret, 830miles
from the Convention site. The "Lib-
erals" were ecstatic; here was their kind
of democracy in action!
The Wall Street Journal of July 25,
1960, claimed that the Fifth Avenue
meeting was not a Rockefeller coup but
a Nixon victory; that Nixon had needed
a rationalization for dumping the Party
conservatives. As a result of t he meeting,
the Journal states, "a little band of con-
servatives within the party, of whom
" Kennedy and I agree on most of the issues... ."
Senator Goldwater is symbol and spokes-
man, are shoved to the sidelines. . . .
First impressions to the contr ary, Mr.
Nixon has achieved all this without
giving Mr. Rockefeller a single impor-
tant concession he did not want to make.
"This is not to deny that the four-
teen points are very liberal indeed ; they
comprise a platform aki n in many ways
to the Democratic platform and they
are a far cry from the things that con-
servative men thi nk the Republican
par ty ought to stand for. . . .
9
"But as you go down the four teen
points, one by one, it's clear they reflect
the Nixon brand of liberalism. . ..
"Actuall y, Mr. Nixon has rather skill-
full y used the Rockef eller meeting to
get a few liberal planks int o the plat-
form which he alreadv wanted but
which he was having trouble getting
through the platform committee. . . .
"Thus it is tha t in one burs t of speed
Richard Nixon has accompli shed three
maneuvers - defied the conservative
wing of the party, cut loose from Presi-
dent Eisenhower and neatly outflank ed
his major opponent within the party.
. . . Mr. Nixon's risk is that conservative
voters will be outraged enough to stay
away from the polls and that his liberal
gesture will not in fact gain any liberal
vot es from the Democrats. . . .
"In doing so he has moved the Re-
publican party a little mor e to the left
on the political spectrum, a thing tha t
is bound to be sad not onl v to men of
conservat ive mind, but also to those wh o
would like to see the philosophic differ-
ences that divide the count ry sharpened
into clear political issues. Once more we
are going to be deprived of that kind of
a choice in a presidential election.
"As a matter of tactics, Mr. Nixon
with this platform abandons the deep
Sout h and conservatives everywhere to
whatever they can make of the Demo-
cratic plat form."
Another Wall Street [ournal article
of the same day concluded that the
Rockefeller-Nixon agreement "brings
the spotlight shining once more on a
facet of his public image he has long
labored to eradi cate; that of 'Tricky
Dick,' the politician who sacrifices prin-
ciple to expediency."
The Chicago Tribune headlined the
Nixon-Rock efeller meeting as "Grant
Surrenders to Lee." The Welfare plat-
form dictated by Rockefeller and Nixon,
which included an endorsement of the
abject ives of Communist-led sit-ins in
the South, was called by Senator Gold-
10
water "the Munich of the Republican
Party."
Republicans everywhere understood
the meaning and significance of the new
Rockef eller-Nixon alliance. Nixon had
purged himself of his ind ependence to
become acceptable to the Insiders of the
In ternational Left. As Theodore White
put it:
Nevel' had the quadrennial liberal
swoop of th e regul ars been more
Ilakedly dramatized than by the open
compact of Fifth Auenue. Whatever
bonor th ey might have been able to
cany f rom their services 011 the pl at-
f orm committ ee had been wip ed out .
A sing! Ilight 's meeting of the two
men ill a mill ionaire' s triplex apart -
ment in Bnbyl on -b y-t b e-Hndson,
eight bundred and thirty miles away,
was about to ooerrule them; they
were exp osed as cloums for all the
world to see.
Nixon confirmed his alliance by
accepting as his running mate one of
the foremost darlings of the interna-
tionalis t clique, a discredited instigator
of the smear-Ta ft maneuver of 1952 and I
of the anti-McCarthy smear of 1954,
Henr y Cabot Lodge. Cabot Lodge then
proceeded to virtually sit out the cam-
paign. Newsweek of March 23, 1964
phrased it more delicately: " His laziness
became legend."
That there was a deal of monstrous
proport ions is beyond question. In
analyzing Nixon's acceptance speech at
the Republi can Convention, the Wall
Street [ournal of August 1, 1960, noted:
H e does not reject all)' particular
Federal activity - whether it be
Federal medical help f or the aged,
Federal aid to education, or Federal
fo reigll aid - 0 11 the ideologi cal
ground that it is somethinv the
central gOl/em mellt has 110 right to
do .
AMERICAN OPINION
Of course, Nixon did throw a bone
to the dejected conservatives, proclaim-
ing in his acceptance speech : "T he only
answer to a stra tegy of victory for the
Communist world is the strategy of
victory for the fr ee world ." But , as the
[ournal commented, "Exactly what Mr.
Ni xon has in mind in this regard will
have to awai t clarification." That clari-
fication never came.
In the 1960 camp aign Nixon attempt-
ed a feat more difficult than passing a
camel through the eye of a needle. He
tried to out promise the Democrats.
News week of Jul y 11, 1960 quoted him
as saying : " We are not going to
be outbid We can reach goals the
so-called economic liberal s of the Gal-
braith-Schlesinger school can never
reach. We can show that we can pro-
duce bett er schools, hospit als, health ,
higher living standards." Wow! And
Ni xon kn ew what he was doing. He
was now advocating more of the very
same policies he had once denounced
so vociferously as socialist and Commu-
nist. The Wall Street [ournal even
headl ined an article for Jul y 29, 1960:
"Nixon Ai ms to Wed Fi scal Responsi-
bility to Welfare Stat e." As the [ournal
explained :
. , . the Republican party this year
stands on a platf orm that borrows
much from this modern liberalism,
In the area of civil rights, and ioel -
fart! legislation, in the acceptance of
big Gouernment spending, the Re-
publican party is once more seeking
to meet the Democratic part), on its
own ground, , . ,
MI' . N ixon is going to completely
ignore any distinction betuieen con-
servatives fwd liberals in wide politi-
cal areas. , , ,
He will accept it as propel' f or the
Government to interven e in the na-
tion's bnsiness, to take on f or the peo-
ple some of the obligations whi ch
were once left to them individually
SEPT EMBER, 1968
- the path is straight from social
security to socialized medi cal care, In
that sense the Roosevelt revolution
is complete; Mr , Nixon, if elected,
will not dismantle the welfare state.
The only difference the [ournal could
find between the Democrats and Re-
publicans was that the Democrats
promised socialism through deficit
spendi ng while the Nixon Republicans
promised socialism with balanced bud-
gets. Either way, America was to be
the loser.
In his campaign agai nst Senator John
Kennedy, Richard Nixon regularly
pull ed his punches. He never discussed
what informed Rep ublicans considered
his best issue : the Senat e records of
Kennedy and Johnson - including
Senator Kennedy's sponsorship of legis-
lation to repeal the loyalty oath provi-
sion of the National Def ense Education
Act, his vigorous support of Commu-
nist revolutionaries in Algeria, and his
backing of the repeal of the Battle Act
provision wh ich prohibited the sendi ng
of strategic materials to Iron Curtain
countries. And, Nixon never even men-
tioned Mr . Johnson's killing of the bill
to restore to the states the right to punish
subversion.
Instead, like Willkie and Dewey be-
fore him, Richard Nixon conducted a
campa ign using the ort hodox "New
York strategy," concentrating his efforts
on the big cities at the expense of rural
areas, the West, and the South. Nixon
failed as Willkie and Dewey had failed
before him: He simply could not wedge
the "Liberal" East and conservative
West into a single phalanx. The princi-
pal iron y of Mr. Nixon's campaign was
that he could very probably have won
every state he did win without any
effor t to project a "new Nixon." And,
had he not turned Left, he might have
picked up in the South the votes he
needed to become President.
Yes, it was very ironic indeed.
11
V
ACCORDING to his most author itative
biographer, Earl Mazo, Richard Nixon
personally "considers himself a 'radi-
cal' when it comes to the goals he would
set for the country (his defi nition of
' radical' being the 'opposite of conserva-
tive' ) ." This has become more and
more evident.
In his oft-used phrases about relying
on the private sector and the free enter-
prise system, Nixon is simpl y supporting
with cliches that which he does not
really und erstand. In economic matters,
the Wall Street Journal of April 27,
1959 reports, Richard Nixon is ", . .
trying to avoid getting obsessed with
the idea [of balancing the budget] . He
believes the real issue is not a balanced
budget so much as the danger of infla-
tion." Since deficits beget inflation, this
is like being for motherhood but
against childr en. When asked by U.S.
News & World Report how to cure an
economic slump, Vice Pr esident Nixon
betrayed his ignorance of the market
economy by answering:
. . . W e should have trin the bank"
a great number of tested and proven
pllblic-works projects on which some
of the preli minary planning work has
been done. . . . I believe we should
have a host of sucb projects which
could be P" t into motion in the event
the economy needed a shot in the
arm. (August 29, 1952. )
Of course, Nixon should know that
the economy can be "given a shot in
the arm" only when a government with
a balanced budget reduces spending and
taxes so that the taxpayers can buy more
goods and services. When a government
incr eases the spending, and hence the
taxes, it merel y spends the money that
consumers would have chosen to spend
themselves. It is thus, in the macro-
economic sense, mer e tommyrot to in-
crease the political giveaway and ex-
12
pand the role of government to try to
ease economic difficulties.
Since his first term in Congress, Nix-
on has also been an active advocate of
giving away our wealth to foreign coun-
tries, and of fighting perpetual-wars-for-
perpetual-peace. "Li beral" columnist
Stewart Alsop says admiringly of Nix-
on: "He is an interna tionalist, an
activist, and inte rventionist . . . in
foreign policy." And, that is quite true.
Whi le a member of the Herter Com-
mittee, Nixon even helped to write the
repor t that paved the way for the great
gi veaways following Wo rld Wa r II. At
a news conference in Baltimor e in 1958,
he defended American aid for Commu-
nist Poland and added :
I challenge anybody who has a
more consistent record in the fi eld of
f oreign aid, starting with the Greek-
Turkish loan, going through the
Marshall Plan, and making speech
af ter speech f or f oreign aid two years
ago during the budge; f ight when
very f ew peopl e were f or it .
Nixon's one-worl d proclivities are,
alas, notori ous. Although he has always
been clever enough never to openly join
the dangerous United World Federalists
(U.F.W.) , he has sponsored several
pieces of their legislation in Congress.
For example, the U. F.W. magazine,
World Government News for October
1948 (Page 14), noted that "Richard
Nixon : Introduced world government
resolution (HCR 68) 1947, and ABC
(World Government) resolution 1948."
World Government News of May 1951
(Pp. 8-9) lists Nixon as sponsoring on
January 15, 1951, a resolution "which
calls for U.S. initiative towards a fed-
eral union of democraci es." This was the
infamous Atlantic Union Resolution
and was co-sponsored by such "Liberal"
extremists as William Fulbright, Hu-
bert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver, and
Herbert Lehman.
AMERICAN OPINION
Stewart Alsap: "There are in fad no sharp ideological differences between Rockefeller and Nixon ,"
The Atla ntic Union Committee, whose
Resolution Mr. Nixon sponsored, was
set up by socialist Clarence Streit to ad-
vocate federal union with Western Eu-
rope as a first step on the road to world
government. Pollster Elmo Roper, in
his book The Goal is Government of
All the World, explains that : "Some of
us who have been interested in World
Government for several years now have
come together to form the Atlantic
Union Committee."
When queried by angry conservatives
on how he could sponsor the Atlantic
Union Resolution after having taken an
oath to uphold and defend the Consti-
tution of the United States, Mr. Nixon
has vehemently claimed that the Res-
olution really has nothing to do with
world government and that it only pro-
vides for a "federal convention to ex-
plore . . . within the framework of the
United Nations, the principles of free
world union." Of course, if Richard
Ni xon was really opposed to world gov-
ernment, he would hardly have called
over and over again for a convention
SEPTEMBER, 1968
which its promoters say is aimed at sur-
rendering our independence and mak-
ing the United States one region in the
new federal nation of Atlantica.
Another standard bail-out used by
Nixon when confronted with his activ-
ities on behalf of the interna tional Left
is to say that he does not believe a World
State is practical at this time, but that
it will be in the future. While the pro-
posed federal union with the N.A.T. O.
nations is (as he says) not total world
government, it has always been claimed
by the Federal Unionists that such total
world government is their goal-for the
future . In a brochure called "Eight Rea-
sons Why Atlantic Union Will Benefit
You Now," issued in the I950s when
Nixon was sponsoring their Resolution
in the Senate, President of the Atlantic
Union Committee Owen J. Roberts de-
clared:
Our ultimate goal is world federa-
tion, but the way to start is with those
civilized people who recognize indi-
vidual liberty under law. Th e door
13
will be kept wide open f or all free-
dom-loving peoples to come in. . . .
It will be the first step towards gov-
ernment of all the world.
The latest Atlantic Union bill was in-
troduced in Congress by Republican
Paul Findley of Illinois, who inserted
into the Congressional Record letters of
support which he had received from
prominent Republicans. In his letter of
endorsement to Findley, Nixon wrot e:
"As Clarence Streit probably told you I
have supported this resolution for many
years and I wish you every success in
your effort ." (Freedom and Union ,
March 1966, Page 9.)
The United World Federalists' slogan
is "World Peace Through World Law. "
The New York Times of April 15, 1959
editorially congratulated Nixon for his
"important and far-reaching proposal "
to "elevate the International Court of
Justice at the Hague to a real Supreme
Court of the world with far wider juris-
diction and .. . power to make binding
decisions. . . ." Nixon has repeat edly
urged the repeal of the Connally Res-
ervation, which now prevents the World
Cour t from having sovereignty over
American domest ic affairs.
An even mor e impo rtant key to pre-
serving the sovereignty of the United
Stat es was the Bricker Amendment,
forbidding the President to surrender to
any int ernational body those freedoms
guaranteed to American cit izens by the
Const itut ion. This attempt to preserve
basic American liberti es was described
by "Liberals" as "t ying the hands of the
President in dealin g in foreign affair s,"
and "undermining the treaty-makin g
power of the President." Nixon had
or iginally supported the Bricker Amend-
ment. But , wh en he joined the Eisen-
hower team, that all changed.
In his biogr aphy of Nixon, William
Costello notes:
The Bricker Amendmen t, in turn,
14
called for Nixon's best talents. Th e
White House set itself adamantly
against the amendment's proposed
limitation on the President 's treaty
making powers, and it was Nixon
who brollght the report that sentiment
both in and ont of Congress was more
sympathetic to Bricker than the Pres-
ident had sspposed. Th e Vice Pres-
ident, after f irst proposing compro-
mise, [ound himself in loyalty to the
White House stalling, placating, in-
stmcting, and negotiating, and fi n-
ally joining Eisenhower in opposition
to Bricker's demand.
Thanks to Nixon's failure to stand
firm, the Bricker Amendment did not
pass, despite the fact that no one has yet
adequately explained wh y any President
should want to give away any of the
rights guaranteed to American citizens
by our Constitution - a Constitution
which every federal officer has sworn to
defend.
It is, you see, to the field of foreign af-
fairs that Nixon has devoted his primary
Lefti st efforts. As "Liberal" authors
Dav id Broder and Stephen Hess say in
their book, The Republican Establish-
ment,* "One senses that Nixon really
does not have his heart in domestic ques-
tions. His most carefully considered
speeches are on foreign policy." Now,
here's the point: In the Wall Str eet lour-
nal of April 27, 1959, Nixon calls him-
self "a liberal rather than a conservative
because I have an international VIew
. . . of foreign policy."
It was biographer Earl Mazo who
wrote of Nixon's foreign policy views as
far back as 1959: "He is the administra-
tion's- and perhaps the nati on' s-lead-
ing advocate of Big Aid over Big Guns.
'In the next ten years our greatest ex-
ternal danger will not be milit ary, but
economic and ideological,' Nixon insists.
" David Broder and St eph en Hess, T he Republi-
can. Est ablislnnent , Har per and Row, New York,
1967.
AMERICAN OPINION
Therefore, he believes, it is mo re impor-
tant to prov ide money for peopl e-to-
peopl e and cultural-exchange progr ams
than for missiles and submarines. 'If we
have to choose in allocating funds be-
tween mil itary programs and the eco-
nomi c, infor mation and ot her non-mili-
tar y progr ams, I would put the emphasis
on the non-militar y programs and take
a gamble on the military programs."
To handle serious confli ct, Ni xon ad-
vocates a strong U.N. army to sup er-
cede Amer ican military ind ependence.
As the Los Angeles Examiner report ed
on Oct ober 28, 1950:
A strong ef fo rt to obtain appro val
of his resolution calling f or establish-
ment of a United N ations police force
will be made by Coneressmnn Rich -
ard Nixon when Congress reconvenes
N ovember 27th, the Califomia Sen-
atorial nomi nee said today. . . . Nix-
on's resolut ion Sli ggests that a UN
police antbority be set liP 0 11 a per-
manent basis, to consist of land, sea
and air forces. It wOllld swillg into
action against aggression under deci -
sion of a simple majorit), vote of the
police autborit,
Realizing that thi s was fro m the "old
'conse rvative' Nixon," and that the
Communists control that "simple ma-
jori ty" he was talk ing about , one begi ns
to wonder just how far "the new Nixon"
can move to the Left without announ-
cing support for Mao Tse-tung. Well,
he has made a good beginning by an-
nouncing his admira tion for Secretar y
of Stat e Dean Rusk. On March 10, 1968,
in New Hamps hire, Mr. Nixon told the
N cta Yorl( Times: "I think Dean Ru sk
would be an excellent Secretar y of Stat e
under a President who had a bett er un-
derstan ding of foreign policy. He's a
gutsy guy and a fine, professional dip-
lomat."
Rusk, of cours e, was a key member of
the Institute of Pacific Relations wh ich
SEPTEMBER, 1968
the Senate Intern al Security Subcom-
mittee says "has been considered by the
Communist Party and by Soviet officials
as an instrument of Communist policy,
propaganda and military intelligence."
The work of the I.P.R. was largel y re-
sponsible for the sell-out of Chi ang Kai-
shek to the Ch inese Reds, and Dean
Rusk was one of the "China hands"
who played an impo rtant role in tha t
disaster. In March of 1950, Dean Ache-
son named Rusk as Assistant Secretary
of State for Far East ern Affairs . While
holding that position Secretary Rusk
even delivered a speech in praise of the
Chinese Communists in which he de-
scribed the Peking Reds as revolutionar-
ies comparable to the American patriots
of 1776, and declared that the course of
their agrarian reform was "not Russian
in essence." Nixon's "gutsy" friend Dean
Rusk was also instrumental in shap ing
those policies of the Korean War which
General Douglas MacArthur described
as "a cat astrophic blow to the hopes of
the Free World," including the policy
of giving the Communist Chinese a
privileged sanctua ry north and west of
the Yalu River.
Mr. Nixon's expression of admiration
for Ru sk provides a clue to the type of
man Nixon woul d appoi nt as Secretar y
of State if he is elected President. One
now begin s to realize wh y Goldwater,
shortly after the 1960 election, referred
to N i ~ o n as a "worse appeaser than Nev-
ille Chamberlain." (Joseph Alsop, San
Francisco Examiner, Novembe r 29,
1963.)
That word appeaser is a bitter and
prej udicial one . Let us simply say that- I
despite fifty years of proofs to the con-
trary-Nixon has always been a strong
believer that negotiations with the Com-
munists can be meaningful and fruitful.
He has argued that once the Commu-
nist conspirators "understand the rul es
and are willing to have them fairly en- I
forced by an impart ial umpire" [the I
Worl d Court1 then the United Stat es I
15
and the Communists can engage in
"peaceful competition, knowing that
both systems would be moving in the
direction of a world of peace. . . ." In his
book, Tile Challenges We Face, Nixon
writes: "The alternative-to have no ne-
got iations-would mean, obviously, that
we would lessen our chances of achiev-
ing agreemen ts with t he Commu-
nists...."
Nixon, who supports cultural ex-
change programs with the Soviet Union
despite thoroughl y substantiated pro-
tests from J. Edgar Hoover that such
programs are a front for Red spies, sup-
ported bringing Nikita Khrushchev, the
Butcher of Budapest, to the United
States in 1959. The invitation to Pr e-
mi er Khrushchev, who had been respon-
sible for the deliberate starvation of mil-
lions in the Ukraine, served to tell the
enslaved peoples behind the Iron Cur-
tain that America was no longer int er-
ested in their plight ; that we had de-
cided to co-exist with their masters.
Speaking in London in November of
1958, the Vice President said the Free
World should "speak less of the threat
of Communism and ... adopt as our
pri mary objective not the defeat of
Communism, but the victory of plenty
over want, of health over disease, of
freedom over tyranny." Pr emi er Kh rush-
chev declared it a "welcome statement."
(Mazo, Page 205.)
Nixon even part icipated in several
"debates" with the Butcher of Buda-
pest, including this incredible response
to Nikita's braggin g about the accom-
plishments of Communism: "There are
some instances where you may be ahead
of us: for example, in the thrust of your
rockets for the investigation of outer
space. There may be some instances in
which we are ahead of you - in color
television, for instance."
When the Vice Pr esident ar rived in
Moscow on his "goodwill trip" in 1959,
he went so far as to apologize to
Khrushchev for the resolut ion recently
16
passed by Congress commemorating
"Captive Nations Week" which de-
manded that the United States conti nue
its efforts to win the release of the "Cap-
tive Nations." Nixon told Khrushchev,
"t his was a foolish resolut ion."
No t only does the former Vice Presi-
dent suppo rt acceptance of a Commu-
nist Central Europe, but he even op-
poses qu aranti ning Mao's China, butch-
er of more than 25 million Chinese and
exporter of revolution to all Asia. Nixon
said in Hong Kong on August 11, 1966:
"There is a great desire on the part of
the American people to improve rela-
tions with Communist China." In clos-
ing his speech, Mr. Nixon declared: "At
this time the problem is not that the
United States has isolated China, but
that Communist Chi na is isolating it-
self." As in making war against Thai-
land, Burma, India, Tibet, Laos, and
Indonesia, and supplying war materiel
to kill American soldiers in Vietnam,
and aiding Reds in Tanzania, Kenya,
Mozambique, Angola . .. ?
Some isolation!
Just where Nixon stands in regard to
the Vietnam War - the key interna-
tional issue at the moment - has been
most difficult to assess. Hess and Broder
say in Th e Republican Establishment:
With respect to the Johnson Admin-
istration, while Nixon has endorsed
the American commitment in Viet -
nam and the President's statements
of America's ptl/pose there, he has
been steadily critical of the actual
conduct of the war. (Page 192.)
At this writing, Mr. Nixon supports
the major fallacy of a "no-win" policy
and aid and trade with the East Eu-
ropean arsenal of the Communist ene-
my killing our soldiers in the field, but
leaves open t he door of criticism just
enough to mak e political capital out of
the war.
Many conservatives have speculated
AMERICAN OPINION
that Richard Nixon's dangerously Left-
ist attitudes on foreign policy are a
product of his close association with
the extremist Council on Foreign Rela-
tions. At one time Nixon readi ly admit -
ted in letters to his constit uents that he
was a member of the international
Left' s Council on Foreign Relations.
Since the C.F.R. has been exposed, and
come under considerable criticism from
conservatives, the former Vice Pr esident
now engages in a great deal of doubl e-
talk whenever the subject is broached.
He has even tri ed to pass off the C.F.R.
as merely an "advisory body" to whi ch
he belonged in ord er to obtain their
magazine, Foreign Affairs. The C.F .R.
itself boasts tha t it is far more than an
advisory body, and in fact leads the
way in creating American foreign
policy; as for the magazine, it is certain-
ly not necessary to be a member of
C.F .R. to receive Foreign Affairs.
H uman Events of Mar ch 23, 1968, re-
ports that Ni xon dropped out of the
Council on Foreign Relations in the
early Sixties. The C.F.R., however, ad-
mi ts that many of its most import ant
members are forced, in effect, to "go un-
dergroun d." Nixon has never repudi-
ated nor attacked the C.F. R. nor its pol-
icy of seeki ng U.S. convergence wi th the
Soviet Union and aid and trade with
the Communist bloc suppl ying the Viet-
cong.
Although supposedly not a member
of the Council on Foreign Rel ations at
this time, Mr. N ixon recentl y authored
an articl e for the 45th Anniversary issue
of the C.F .R.'s magazine, Foreign Af-
fairs. The article, in the number for
October 1967, is entitled: "Asia After
Vietnam." In it Mr. Nixon speaks of
"the evolution of a new world order"
based on "r egional approaches to devel-
opment needs." The former Vice Pr esi-
dent suggests that "an appropriate
foundation stone" on which to build
such a regional defense pact is the Asian
and Pacific Council. And, accordi ng to
SEPTEMBER, 1968
Mr . Nixon, "its members have voiced
strong feelings that ... it should not be
made ' a body to promote anti-Commu-
nist campaigns .' '' In other words, the
organization which Mr. Nixon recom-
mends to defend Asia against Commu-
nist aggression is not even anti-Com-
munist!
Also in that arti cle, Nixon again
stressed his belief that : "We simply can-
not afford to leave China forever outside
the family of nations. . . ." Hi s solution
to the cont inuous aggression of Com-
munist China, even as it supports Com-
munist North Vi etnam in the killin g
of American soldiers, is a giant Mar-
shall Plan of foreign aid for all Asia:
" ... We have to find ways to engineer
an escape from privation for those now
living in mass poverty. T here can be no
security, whatever our nucl ear stock-
piles, in a world of boiling resentment
and magnifi ed envy. The oceans provide
no sanctuary for the rich, no barrier
behi nd which we can hide our abun-
dance." Incredibl y, Mr. Nixon was is-
sui ng a Marxist call to share the wealth
- not only in America, but in the en-
tire world . Surel y he is not unaware
that the amount of money that it would
require to per manently raise the stan-
dard of living for Asia's billion people
by any appreciable amount would strip
Amer ica bar e.
VI
IN DOl\IESTIC POLITICS, Richard Ni xon
has built a reputat ion for supporting
Republicans of whatever ideological
stripe. At the Hershey Conference of
1964, he declared: "I want all Republi-
cans to win; 1 am just as strong for a
liberal Republican in New York as 1
am a conservative Republican in Texas,
and 1 can go on and just as enthusias-
tically campaign for both, because we
need both liberals and conservatives to
have a major ity."
As early as 1958, Mr. Ni xon had be-
gun to argue vigorously in favor of
17
making "Liberals" as well as conserva-
tives feel at home in the Republican
ranks, thus breaking with those who
fought to keep the Republican Party de-
voted to its historic conservative princi-
ples. No Republican is too far to the Left
for Nixon. As far back as 1954, he even
campaigned for Senator Clifford Case
of New Jersey, who was running for
re-election and accurately accused by
his opponents of "being soft on Com-
munism." Biographer Mazo reports
that : "No cand idate got mor e vigorous
support from Nixon than the liberal,
frankly anti-McCarthy Senator Case. . .
Case was elected by only 3,200 votes.
Without Nixon' s help he would have
lost."
Time magazine of December 22, 1967
notes that Nixon even attended a recent
Manhattan fund-raising dinn er for New
York's "Liberal" Senator Jacob [avits.
"While Rockefeller and New York
Mayor John Lin dsay listened with fixed
smiles," says Time, "Nixon warmly
endorsed [avits for re-election next year."
A Republican by accident, [avit s is like
Ni xon a supporter of the United World
Federalists. He has a nearly perfect
AD .A voting record."
Nixon also supports "ultra-Liberal"
Republican John Lindsay, giving him
this warm endorsement: "John Lind-
say is the best political property to ap-
pear on the national scene in years. . . .
John . .. should run as an independent
... I am interested in his winning . . .
I will help him in any way. . . ." (Los
Angeles Times, October 18, 1965.)
Nixon has not been nearly so friendl y
in supporting conservative candidates.
Biographer Costello describes Nixon's
strategy for the G.O.P. :
*According to test imony before the Senate In -
ternal Securi t y Subcommittee by t he Communist
Party's fo rmer political leader in New York,
Dr. Bella V. Dodd. she was order ed by t he
Party to help get Javits sta r t ed in pol iti cs. She
advised Javi ts, a Democrat, to re-register as a
Republican and entered him in a race where
th e Democratic Party was badl y split.
18
In defiance of the Taft thesis, he
brushed of f the protests of reaction-
ary conseruatiue Congressmen, on the
theory that they come mostly from
rock- ribbed Republican districts
whe re they would win as a matt er of
course. If by this tactic he drove ul-
t ra-conservatives away f rom the polls,
he considered that a part of the price
he had to pay to broaden the popular-
ist image of the party. So reckl ess
were his tactics that by 1959 mem-
bers of the Republican N ational Com-
mittee admitted in ef f ect that the
party's position had reverted to what
it was eight years bef ore. . . . the
part), organization, with Nixon gen-
erally ackno wledged as its ef f ective
operating head, had f allen to pieces
as a result of the tactics that had been
pursued.
In 1962, Mr. Nix on went to Califor-
nia to run for the governorship of the
state. This was a calculated and brutal
blow to conservative Assemblyman Joe
Shell, who had been campaigni ng for
many months before Nixon entered the
race. Before launching his campaign,
Shell had checked with Nixon to see if
he was inter ested in the job, and was
told by Nixon that he had no intent ion
of running for the governorship of
California. Subsequentl y, Shell was
telephoned by Nel son Rockefeller to see
in whose corner Shell would be at the
1964 Republican Convention. The con-
servative Shell informed Rockefeller
that he would not support the New
York Governor. Soon thereafter, Shell
received a call from Rockefeller's office
announcing that Richard Nixon was
leaving New York and coming to Cali-
fornia to run for Governor. Nixon, who
was much more widely known to the
voters, defeated Shell in the primary.
Richard Ni xon's campaign against
the bumbling Pat Brown, whom even
many Democrats believed to be an oaf,
was one of the most incredible in polit-
AMERICAN OPINION
ical history - especially in light of the
fact that Nixon prides himself on being
a shrewd campaigner. Instead of turn-
ing his guns on Brown, who had been
described by Time magazine as a "tower
of jelly," the former Vice President
campaigned against the apolitical but
anti-Communist John Birch Society.
Nixon, who has regularly campaigned
for such "ultra-Liberals" as Jacob [avits,
John Lindsay, Clifford Case, and Ed-
ward Brooke, repeatedly called for the
political liquidation of conservative Re-
publican Congressmen John Rousselot
and Edgar Hiestand. In fact, Nixon,
the great uniter of the Republican
Party, refused to appear on the same
stand with either of the two incumbent
conservative Congressmen because they
were members of The John Birch Soci-
ety.
The other prong of Nixon's "fight-
ing campaign" was directed against
Proposition 24, a statewide initiative to
outlaw the Communist Party. The ini-
tiative had been carefully drafted by a
committee of Constitutional lawyers so
as to protect legitimate civil rights and
avoid conflict with Supreme Court de-
cisions. Half a million voters had signed
petitions to put this anti-subversion
measure on the ballot. As the Oakland
Tribune of October 29, 1962, remarked:
Every such law, even if perfectly
written, is challenged and subjected
to court test. . . . This will nndoubt-
edly happen again, and if Proposi-
sition 24 has faulty sections, they will
be eliminated by court action. . . .
On the other hand, the measure con-
tains certain provisions that are vital-
ly needed.
The Communists, of course, were
screaming bloody murder about Propo-
sition 24, as were Governor Pat Brown
and his comrades. Amazingly, Nixon
offended half a million voters by also
coming out against it. To top the mat-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
ter, the Brown Administration was
highly vulnerable on the issue of Com-
munism - an issue which Nixon had
used so successfully against Voorhis and
Mrs. Douglas. Mr. Nixon not only re-
fused to use it but prohibited distribu-
tion of a former F.B.I. counterspy's
devastating expose of the Red-infested
California Democratic Council.
Richard Nixon's bitter, down-in-the-
mouth, lackluster campaign astonished
both his supporters and his enemies.
What they did not know was that Nix-
on had no heart for the battle, since he
no more wanted to be Governor of
California than he wanted to be Em-
peror of the Hottentots. He had every-
thing to lose in California and nothing
to gain. Having lost to John Kennedy
by a hairsbreadth was nothing to be
ashamed of, but a loss in California
would make him a two-time loser. On
the other hand - well, Nixon was
literally in debt to Rockefeller.
While the former Vice President was
playing "Liberal" and losing by over
300,000 votes, Dr. Max Rafferty, an
avowed conservative who refused to
compromise on his conservative princi-
ples, was winning his campaign for the
key post of Superintendent of Public
Instruction in California by nearly a
quarter of a million votes. This despite
the fact that Rafferty's all-out "Liberal"
opponent had the hundred percent sup-
port of the Brown Administration,
union leaders, the California Democrat-
ic Clubs, the California Teachers Asso-
ciation, the State Board of Education,
California's powerful campus Left , and
all the Democrat organizations in the
state.
At the beginning of his campaign the
polls had showed that Nixon was ahead
by the landslide margin of fifty-three
percent to thirty-seven percent for
Brown . But, by gearing his campaign
not against Pat Brown and his Spend-
thrift Administration, but against Prop-
osition 24 and conservative Republicans
19
and anti-Communists, Nixon - like
Dewey in 1948-snatched defeat from
the jaws of victory. Four years later Ron-
ald Reagan, a political amateur who had
never before stood for public office-
running as a conservative-dispatched
Pat Brown to his political Valhalla by
a million votes, making Nixon's per-
forma nce all the mor e obvious.
Still, as the 1964 election approached,
the old firehorse Nixon began to smell
the perfumed smoke of the White
House once agai n. Since the catastrophe
of 1962, he had lain back, bided his
time, and avoided the stop-Goldwater
movement until late in the game. Then,
as "Liberals" Hess and Broder report
with approval:
lust as suddenly, Nixon switched
sides and became the selj-appointed
leader of the stop-Goldwater f orces.
A week af ter California had voted,
on [une 9th, he fl ew to Cleveland
f or the national Governors Confer-
ence. . . . Nixon . . . astounded ever)'-
one by attacking Goldwater at a
press conference. Citing the Senator's
view of the United Nations and So-
viet-American relations, his sugges-
tion that social secnrity be made
voluntary, that the Tennessee Valley
Authority be sold to pri vate interests,
and civil rights enforcement be l ef t
to the states, and a national right -to-
work law be enacted, Nixon said, "It
would be a tragedy f or the Republ i-
can party in the event that Senator
Goldwater's views, as previollSly
stated, were not challenged and reo
pudiated." (Pp. 168-169.)
Nixon was trying to set up .Romney
as a stalking horse in a last desperate
effort to produce a Convention dead-
lock from which he, Nixon, would
emerge as the nominee. Seeing that this
strategy would not work, the former
Vice President changed directions once
agalll:
20
. .. privately, the last two weeks
of [nn e, 1964, Nixon began to re-
adjllSt his sight s f rom the 1964 nom-
ination to the 1968. . . . Nixon
evolved a new role f or himself: the
apostle of party Imity who would
campaign doggedly f or the ticket in
1964 and f or all Republican candi-
dates in 1966, as a way of rebuilding
his political capital fo r 1968. ( Hess
and Broder, Page 170. )
Nixon believed that Goldwater was
"doomed to defeat," but he nevertheless
campai gned tirel essly for the Arizonan
knowing that by doing so he would
make himself appear to be the only pos-
sible candidate in 1968 who would not
divide the Party, as most other Repub-
lican leaders wer e engendering rank-
and-file bitterness by sitting out the
campaign. One week after the 1964elec-
tion, Nixon told Warren Duffee of
United Pr ess Internat ional that the Re-
publican Party had "gone too far right"
and now "most of all needs some dis-
cipline ." Nixon continu ed: "The Re-
publican party's national position must
represent the respectable and responsible
right and the responsible ultra-liberal."
The future position of the G.O.P., Nix-
on said, "must be the center. . . . The
formula [for victory] should be the
Eisenhower-Nixon formula, not because
it is more to the left, but because it is
the right position.. .."
Nixon placed himself squarely in the
"center," but failed to comment on the
fact that the middle of the road has
been moving Left for thirty-five years.
VII
IN HIS QUEST for the 1968 nomination,
Richard Nixon has assumed that con-
servatives have nowhere else to go and
has consistently courted the "Li berals."
By attending the funeral of "Civil
Rights" agitator Martin Luther King,
along with virtually every other presi-
dential office seeker and black national-
AMERICAN OPINION
ist, Ni xon made it clear that he was still
willing to crawl for a bloc vote. With
his vast contacts, Nixon certainl y had
access to the information in the F.B.I.
file on King, which full y discloses
King's close association wi th the Com-
munists .
Two former presidents of the Amer-
ican Bar Association called the Civil
Rights Bill of 1964 "ten percent civil
rights and ninet y percent federal power
grab." Ni xon, who called it a "great
step forward," even capitalized on the
hysteria following Dr. Mart in Luther
King's death to help push another "Civil
Rights" bill through Congress.
According to the Los A ngeles Times
of March 24, 1968, Mr. Nixo n had been
working behind the scenes to support
forced-housing provisions in the new
bill even before King's assassination.
Human Events noted that after the kill-
ing Ni xon played a strategic role in get-
ting Congress to adopt the hastily drawn
1968 Civil Rights Act. He nat only
pressed for adoption of the "open hous-
ing" section, which had never under-
gone proper Committee Heari ngs, but
urged House Republ icans to accept the
Senate version of the Civil Rights bill
without alteration. Such Ni xon lieut en-
ants as Representative Clark MacGregor
of Minnesota helped to persuade House
Republ icans to accept the Senate
amendments in toto. Nixon's call to
Representative John Anderson of Illi-
nois, swing man on the important
House Rul es Committee, turned out to
be a crucial move for the fat e of the
Senate bill. As Human Events noted:
The rules committee had appeared
deadl ocked over whet her to send the
Senate bill t o a Senate-House con-
ference, where House members could
rework the legislation, or to send the
bill to the House fl oor f or a vote
with a gag rule that would prevent
any amendment whatsoever. Nixon
phoned Anderson and urged him to
SEPTEMBER, 1968
send the bill to the House f loor for
a quick vote. Under pressure from
Nixon and the tense conditions in
the count ry f ollowing the murder of
King, Anderson buckl ed.
The Insiders and their puppets know
that during the psychological shock of
a disaster the public is willing to accept
measures which would not otherwise
be adopted.
In order to capture Negro support in
his 1968 quest for the presidentia l nom-
ination, Nixon has even formed an al-
liance with the revolutionary black
power fanatics of the Congress of Rac-
ial Equality. C.O.R.E. has adopted the
forty-year-old Communist cry for a sep-
arate Black Nation and its retiring chair-
man, Floyd McKissick (a violent Marx-
ist who has led e.O.R.E. in officially
repudiating non-violence) advocates a
complete redistribution of the wealth
beginning with the government subsi-
dization of certain Negro business en-
terprises. This has been mislabeled
"Black Capitalism" and is a subtle per-
version of the onl y honest answer to
economic difficulty - the genuine free
enterprise system. On May 29, 1968,
columni sts Evans and Novak reported :
In recent days, Nixon has been in
contact with CORE leaders Floyd
McKissick and Roy Innis (McKis-
sick's snccessor'y throllgh intermedi-
aries. Th us, their surprising agree-
ment on economic black power co/tid
tUI'l1 out to be Nixon 's first real
breakthrough into the N egro leader-
ship.
Subsequently, C.O.R.E. came out in
praise of Nixon for having seen "the
relevance of black power " and claimed
that Richard Nixon is the "only Presi-
denti al candidate who is moving in the
direction of CORE's program."
What the fanatics of C.O.R.E. are
advocating is not the channeling of pri-
21
vate capital into Negro-owned busi-
nesses, but non-profit co-ops which will
be financed by government loans. Tax-
free, non-profit co-ops, financed by the
taxpayers, do not constitute capitalism.
What Nixon mistakenly calls "Black
Capitalism" is in reality the creation of
Black Communes or Black Soviets.
In a further quest to attract support
of Leftist Negroes, says Parade maga-
zine of June 16, 1968, Nixon has con-
sidered naming Senator Edward Brooke
of Massachusetts as his running mate.
However, Brooke decided to throw in
his lot with Nelson Rockefeller. "Lib-
eral" columnist Carl Rowan, who served
in important capacities with the Ken-
nedy and Johnson Administrations, re-
ported that leftward forces in Massa-
chusetts "regard Brooke as one of their
own, infiltrati ng the enemy camp-and
making them like it. They regard [this]
as a contest to see whether an ideolog-
ical Democrat can go all the way to the
top in a Republican masquerade."
One of the great puppet shows of
1968 has been the Nixon-Rockefeller
contest. Many an astute observer believes
that Rockefeller may have enter ed the
Presidential race at a time when he had
little chance of winning, only to bring
some badly needed publicity to the Re-
publican Party's efforts and to solidify
conservatives behind Nixon. The Rocke-
feller announcement that Nixon would
be ideal as Rocky's running mate tends
to support this view. At the very least,
Nelson Rockefeller will have tremen-
dous bargaining power with Nixon and
would be the power behind the throne
in a Nixon Administration. As Stewart
Alsop writes in his book, Nixon and
Rockefeller :
There are in fact, it should be
noted, no sharp ideological diffe r-
ences between Rockefeller and Nix-
on, as there were betu/en Dewey
and Taft and Eisenhower and Taft .
When Rockefeller worked in Wash-
22
ington for the first Eisenhower Ad-
inistration, he often f ound an ally in
Nix011 on such issues as foreign aid.
The differ ence is really a difference
of style and background and approach
to politics. . . .
Nixon's friend and biographer, Earl
Mazo, says that in Washington, "Nixon
and Rockefeller became good friends
and supported each other consistently.
. . ." After the 1956 election, Rockefeller
wrote to Nixon on November seventh
that ". .. under you and the President
the Republican party is now emerging,
at home and abroad, as the great liberal
party of the future." (Mazo, Page 186.)
The Nixon-Rockefeller alliance is so
solid that when Nixon moved from
California to New York following his
defeat for the governorship of Califor-
nia in 1962, he was delighted to become
a tenant in the Rockefeller-owned
apartment building in whi ch Nelson
Rockefeller lives.
In discussing Nixon's financi al situa-
tion, authors Hess and Broder note :
. .. His chauffeur drives him home
to a ten-room cooperative apart ment
on Fifth Avenue . . . the venerable
building comes one apaltment to the
floor and the tenants include Nelson
Rockefeller and William Randolph
Hearst, Jr. It cost Nixon about $100,
000 [and he must pay] a yearly main-
enance fee of $9,600 to live
there. . . .
When he left government at the
age of 48, his net worth was about
$50,000, mostl y in the equity of his
Washington home and his Federal
Employees Insurance Plan.
Of course, a pension plan is a non-liquid
asset. And, as a matter of fact, Nixon
had just left California with unpaid
bills from his gubernatorial campaign.
Where does the money come from?
Certainly Mr. Nixon doesn't spend
AMERICAN OPINION
much of his time practising law. For
lengthy periods of each year he has
toured the globe on persona l fact-find-
ing j unkets. For ot her parts of each year
he has stu mped the Uni ted Stat es, restor-
ing hi s crede ntials as a poli tical leader.
W here does the mo ney for all this
come from ? T he fact is that N ixon is
paid $200,000 a year for "practising law"
by a firm of international lawyers which
sophisticated N ew Yo r k e r s say gets
much of its business from Rockefeller
interests around the world. H is stand-
ing is undoubt edl y worth $200,000 a year
to the fi rm.
Rocky's speech wri ter, Emmett John
H ughes, has written that Rock efeller
believes Nixon to be less tha n br ight.
But N ixon has been, and can conti nue
to be, useful to N elson Rockefeller-
and Rockv k nows it. Richar d Nixon
may even ' personally desp ise the New
York Go verno r after suffe ring humilia-
tion in 1960 and 1962 because of him,
but money talks and Richard Nixon
has always wanted, and never before
ha d, money.
VIII
THE SEARCH for the " real N ixon" con-
tinues. In an appar ently introspective
mood the for me r Vice Pres ident told
Stewart Alsop, "The mo re you stay in
thi s kind of job, the more you realize
that a public figure, a major public
figure, is a lonely man... You can't talk
too ' much about your personal plans,
your personal feelings. I beli eve in keep-
ing my own counsel. It 's some thing like
wear ing clothing - if you let your hair
down, you feel too naked. " Then Nixon
added : "Any kind of personal confes-
sion is embarrassing to me generally. I
can di scuss issues, ge neral subjects. I
have fun playing poker, being with
frie nds. But any letti ng down of my
hair , I find that emba rrass ing."
When the intervi ew wa s nearl y com-
pleted, Alsop said, "Well, I' ve taken up
a lot of your time alr eady. Thanks very
SEPTEMBER, 1968
much - it 's been reall y interesting."
Out of the clear sky Nixon then vol-
unteered : "You know I try to be candi d
with newspapermen, bu t I can't really
let my hair down with anyone."
"Not even with old frie nds?"
"No," ad mit ted Nixon, "Not reall y
with anyone. Not even wi th my fami ly."
Does anyone know the " real Ni xon" ?
Even his fami ly? P robabl y not. T he sad
flaw in hi s cha racter is tha t he has trie d
to be all things to all people at all times.
No one is quite sure wha t, if any, pri n-
ciples he sincerely holds. T heodore
White, in The M aking of The Presi-
dent , 1960, says he bel ieves Ni xon lost
the presidency in 1960 precisely because
he had no visible set of princi ples, and
th at "... Ni xon was above all a friend
seeker, almos t pat hetic in his eage rness
to be liked. "
A clue to wh at mot ivates the real
Ri chard Nixon is given by "Liber als"
H ess and Broder:
For Nixon, the end is power -
speci fically the incomparable power
of the Presidency. He moved toward
it in a spectacular, meteoric career;
Congressman at 33, important Con-
gressman at 35, Vice President at 39,
only two -term Repnblican Vice Presi-
dent at 43, President ial nominee at
47.
The Engl ish histori an Lord Acton
has noted that power corrupts and ab-
solute power corr upts absolutely. It may
indeed be one of the great tragedies of
our ti me that thi s man, who mi ght have
gone down as one of the truly great men
in American hi stor y, was - pr ecisely
as Senator Robert Taft observed- in too
big a hurry. Of course, the final chapters
ar e not written and we cannot yet close
the book on Richar d Milhous Ni xon.
Cert ainl y the next few months will tell
a great deal mor e about him. We hope
to one day be able to writ e a much
happ ier end to thi s biography.
23
THEY PAUSED TO REMARK:
We Americans have been running
away from the spirit and principles of
our Revolution in order to embrace an
alien program saturated with Marxism.
Weare under the delusion that there is
some safe middle ground between the
idea of Freedom on the one side, and
Communism on the other. But the dan-
ger of the "middle-of-the-road" position,
as former President Hoover once re-
marked to me, is that "you get hit by
the traffic in both directions ." If we are
really opposed to Marxism there is only
one place to take a stand and that is
with Freedom, which makes no compro-
mise with Communism, however it may
be disguised.
Admiral Ben Moreell
Fluoridation . . . is of doubtful legal-
ity; it offends deep convictions concern-
ing doctoring without consent; it is
against the medical tradition of care for
the individual; against the function of a
public water supply; against sane eco-
nomics; against the considered opinion
of eminent nutritionists, bio-chemists,
physiologists, pharmacologists, aII e r-
gists, toxicologists; above all it is against
natural caution and common sense.
Dr. C. G. Dobbs, Microbiologist,
University of Wales
*
Primitive necromancers in the dank
rain forests of tropical Africa have for
ages controlled and conquered by in-
ducing in their victims a sense of guilt
for imagined crimes, and leading in-
evitably to death.
George S. Schuyler
He [St . Paul] turned a pagan world
of vice and cruelty and slavery to the
thought of God . He raised an immortal
and imperishable Temple of the Soul in
a disintegrating world of power and ex-
24
ploitation and solicitude for the "weak,"
a world of murderous tax-gatherers and
devouring vagabonds and harlots and
bloated Caesars. And, always, every-
where, he plied his trade to earn his
shelter and his bread and cheese, and
was proud that he had now been called
by God but had been called to labor.
Never once did he say, "I'm disadvan-
taged. I never had a good school and
privileges. Therefore those who work
should take care of me, feed me, shelter
me. They're guilty because they have
what I do not have." St. Paul ... had
words for such as they: "He who does
not work, neither shall he eat!"
Taylor Caldwell
We make men without chests and ex-
pect of them virtue and enterprise. We
laugh at honor and are shocked to find
traitors in our midst. We castrate and
bid the gelding be fruitful.
C. S. Lewis,
British Theologian
I am very alarmed about the lack of
teaching courtesy, discipline, punctual-
ity and truthfulness in our schools. I'm
not so interested in a boy having a Mas-
ter's Degree as in a fellow being able to
put in a good honest day's work for a
good day's pay, and in his having some
pride and dignity in work. I am inter-
ested in children learning to develop
their potential and learning to recognize
their limitation. Weare not all equal
because we weren't all cut out of the
same cookie cutter; but ability has noth-
ing to do with race. ... If I am a sloppy,
noisy, rowdy neighbor in one part of
town, I will be the same in another
neighborhood. You don't get culture on
a movll1g van.
Mrs. Mattie Coney, Negro head
of Citizens Forum, Indianapolis
AMERICAN OPINION
MR. WALLACE
A Hard Look At The Candidate
Susan L. M. Huck is a graduate of
Syr acuse Un iversity, with advanced de-
grees from the University of Michigan
and Clarl( Uniuer-
sity. Dr. H ucl( has
taught as a universi-
ty professor of bot h
geography and soci-
ology, lectured be-
fore academic audi-
ences on four conti-
nents, acted as advis or to one of the
world's leadi ng encyclopedias, and is A n-
alysis Editor of The Review of the News.
ALL POLITICAL commentators agree
that 1968 has been, and will doubtless
continue to be, an extremely turbulent
year in domestic polit ics. The "Liberal"-
Conservat ive split has become clearer
and wider within the t wo major Parties
as the thi rty-five-year-old "Liberal" al-
liance of wildl y disparate forces has been
comi ng unstuck, with the Negroes car-
ried away by the rhetoric of militancy,
the Sout h awake at last to its bet rayal,
"labor" tiring of its Leftist shepher ds,
and the fervid tykes of the New Lef t
striving to sink their babyteeth into the
nearest soft flesh society affords them
( which is so often the "Liberal" uni ver-
. . I)
Slues . .
Comment ators also note the sullenness
of the "u ndecided," the stirrings amo ng
the middl e-class majorit y hitherto dis-
missed as too "dumb, fat, and happy"
to require further placating. There is
smoulder ing mutiny among the relative-
ly "affluent," yes. But, most important,
the hard-working, tax-payi ng, ulti mate-
burden-bearing majority-which is still
SEPTEMBER, 1968
not on Welfare, learning Leftist slogans
in college, or engage d in wr iting, shuf-
fling, or enforcing "guidelines" - is be-
gi nning to mutter darkly. It is at least
beginning to gain the att ention of the
people that all is not well - that our
leaders seem to have brought us to the
brink of actually losing a war for the
first time in American hi stor y, wh ile we
teeter on the edge of open civil warfare
at home, and a painful economic come-
upp ance.
Yet, neither major Party, understand-
ably, is willing to admit its own unques-
tioned contributions to br inging Amer-
ica to its present low and dangerous
estate; no candi date of a major Party
offers to slam on the brakes, clean out
the Communists and fools and knaves,
and move quickly and decisively away
from what more and mor e people can
see coming. When the ship of state is
headed full tilt toward a reef, "modera-
tion" is out of place, and a phil osophic al
distaste for "r eaction" should not over-
ride the common-sense comma nd of
"f ull speed astern ."
There is a great deal of discussion,
once again, of the place of "Third Party
movement s" in American hi story. On
the whole, they have not had a sanguine
history in our republic, yet both present-
day major Parti es were once "Thi rd
Par ties." Mr. Wallace of Alabama thus
sees no reason wh y hi s T hird Party
should be for edoomed, and there is cer-
tainly no law of nature to that effect.
Clearly, Governo r Wa llace has a firm
regi onal base, and sufficient national ap-
peal to "shake the eye teeth of the 'Lib-
erals,' " as he so often expr esses a desire
25
to do. The Wallace Part y could succeed.
Still, the two-Party system, in general,
se:ved the nation well, though cer-
tainly It was not conceived by those who
drew up the Constitution of the United
States. To the extent that both Parties
did str ive to include in their ranks, and
reconcile the interests of, the widest
spectrum of American society - and
then win or lose on the basis of how
well they could satisfy the greatest num-
ber of - ideological, regional,
and factional dissensions in the nat ion
were kept to a dull roar , except for the
period during the War Between the
States' . one civil war in nearly two
cent unes IS a record that most civilized
societies cannot ma tch. However, the
functio n of "loyal opposition" is impor-
tant, too, and we have been deprived of
that for too long.
What has happened is that the
smooth, smart Liberal Est ablishment
long ago captured both Parti es and im-
posed a hidden one-Party system on us
- it been mainly engaged,
ever sxice, In keeping the American
people from discovering that we are a
one-Party Stat e. Poor Barr y Goldwater
had to be smashed, in 1964, at whatever
cost to the cardboard facade of the Re-
publican Party, precisely because he of-
fered "a choice, not an echo"-a revival
of an actual two-Part y system on the na-
tionaI level. The Wallace "Third Party"
movement today is simply another at-
tempt to our traditional two-Party
system; It I S attacked by the Establish-
men t in a fur ious effort to maintain the
one-Party system.
George Wallace is criticized for sens-
and responding to the smouldering
discontent of a sizabl e portion of the
electorate. Why should the "Liberal s"
suddenly find this subversive and dia-
bolically evil? Is it because "Liberals"
do not want the working, tax-paying,
portion of the U.S. pop-
to have any effective leadership?
Ve ry likely so! But it is right that loyal,
26
law-abiding citi zens be offered honest
represe ntation and leadership; that is
the classic symbiotic relationship be-
tween the citizen and the seeker of po-
litical office in a representative form of
government.
When candidates who are nothing
but mouthpieces for the cabal running
our one-Party Establishment declare
publicly that they refuse to have any
dealings whatsoever with Wallace, they
are the ones who are behaving in a sub-
versive manner. Why? Because they are
relegating to the status of political un-
touchabi lity that large portion of our
citizenry which supports what George
Wallace stands for. They are trying to
do nothi ng less than disenfranchise mil-
lions of Americans, make them aliens
in their own country, merely because
they "dissent" from "Liberalism"!
Wallace tells the peopl e what they
wan t to hear. That is true . But, it is not
because of him that they want to hear
it! George Wallace simply happens to
express aloud what so many peopl e
think, but cannot - or often dare not-
say for themselves. He is standing up
for what he himself sincerely believes,
and asking for the support of those who
agree with him. He senses the under-
current, and naturall y wishes to capture
the votes which are available . And vet,
he knows perfectly well why there so
littl e comp etiti on for so many millions
of votes. It is because the guns of the
Establishment are trained permanentl v
upon that particular position of leade;-
ship, and they have kept it neutralized
by blasti ng into political oblivion any-
one who has dared try to occupy it.
I
GEORGE CORLEYWALLACE was born in
1919 in the village of Clio, a little cross-
roads near the Pea River in southeastern
Alabama . His forebears are best de-
scribed as "old American stock." They
aren't pedi greed, nobody knows from
which boat they debarked, or when, or
AMERICAN OPINION
where, and none of them ever before
made a place for hims elf in the history
books. They have just been here, for as
far back as anyone can trace - the
Scotch-Irish Protestants who were "the
people" since before the United States
of Ameri ca was even invented. They
have cleared and worked the land, kept
store in the small towns, served in the
ranks in our wars, and filled the blank
spaces on our maps. Whatever variety
and embellishment has been added, for
good or ill, over the nearly two centuries
of this nation's existence, the base fabric
of the country has been composed of
"j ust folks" like Wallace's folks- never
rich though sometimes poor, neither dis-
tinguished nor no-account, neither saints
nor criminals. Their collective virtues
and vices, their attitudes, values, ambi-
tions, and activities might be termed the
ballast and keel of our ship of state,
keeping us in the water and more or
less on course regardl ess of foul weather,
heavy seas, or attempts to steer us in
radical directions.
Those for whom ideology serves as a
religion tend to glorify "democracy"
and "the common man," and ought
therefore to be delight ed when leaders
arise from the common people. Some-
how, in the case of George Wallace,
they are not.
H Wallace happened to be a qu itter
or a whiner, he could easily qualify for
some sort of federal grant these days.
He could claim that he was so "de-
prived" that he never even tried to make
it, realizing that everything was against
him from the start. George Corley Wal-
lace isn' t that kind of man . Frankly, he
doesn't understand those who are.
George is the eldest of four children
of an Alabama dirt farmer, and it is ex-
tremely likely that the fami ly's cash in-
come, even converted back to dollars of
the 1920's, "fell below the poverty line"
most of the time! He spent the fi rst
twelve years of his life in a "run-down"
house with "i nadequate sanita ry Iacili-
SEPTEMBER, 1963
ties" and without electricity. In 1931, a
"rich uncle" left his father the fantastic
sum of $5,000, and thi s was used at once
to build a new brick house with indoor
plumbing and electricity. But that was
the end of the "affluence" for a good
long while, though his father hung on-
to his land in the teeth of taxes and
mortgage payments until his death in
1937, with the country still mir ed in the
Depression. After that, there was no
way to meet payments any more; the
Wallaces lost their land . Fortunately,
the house was separate and paid for, but
the widowed Mrs. Wallace started look-
ing for work - and has been employed
ever since, incidentally.
The family "made out," and George
Wallace did not have to quit college.
He did have to work his way through
-but from the beginning he had never
had any illusions to the contrary.
We may safely assume that , by today's
standards, whatever public schools Wal-
lace had attended were appalling. The
South did not fully recover from the
Civil War and years of vicious Recon-
struction until about 1940, and it was
never onl y the Negro schools that were
poor. The money just wasn't available,
that's all - not for the white children
either. On the other hand, higher edu-
cation wasn' t an entirely new thing for
the Wallace family. George's grand-
father, who had an important influence
on him, was a doctor who practised
faith full y in rural Alabama until his
death in 1948; both of his parent s had
also attended college for a whil e, al-
though neither of them graduated. But ,
in those days, nobody thought that going
to school, at any level, was incompatible
with useful labor. Everybody worked,
and thought it normal to do so.
There are suggestions that George
Wallace was not overly fond of farm
chores, and like many a boy before and
since he may even have tried to duck
them - but they were hard to avoid.
On his own, and obliged to work, he
27
sought the kind of jobs he found mor e
congeni al - that is, those involving
contact with people; humble jobs like
selling magazines, waiting on tables, or
driving a taxicab. But if he had to drive
a dump truck for thi rt y cents an hour,
or risk his fro nt teet h in a boxing match
for fifteen big dollars, he did that too.
T he trouble seems to have been that
th ere just weren 't enough agitators
around in those da ys. Nobody ever told
Geor ge Wallace that he was so pr ecious
and beau tiful that the rest of the world
sho uld pay him just for existing, like
some ki nd of a pedigreed pet. Nobody
ever exp lained to him about th e negat ive
income tax or the g uara ntee d annual
income or his "ri ght" to be support ed
for as long as he chose to dawdle in the
Halls of Ivy.
George Wall ace's father and grand-
fat he r bot h dab bled in local politics, as
good citi ze ns are supposed to do. H is
g randfather, th e countr y doctor, didn't
have much stomach for it and quit after
a term as a count y judge. In hi s fath er's
case, app ar ently the spirit was there but
persistent ill health kept him down. H e
got as far as the county board of reve-
nu e, that was all.
H owever, Geo rge Wall ace seems to
have been a " natu ral" all along, and the
childhood excit ement of vot e-counts
which would decide whether hi s fat her
or grandfathe r had won or lost fed his
interest in politics. H e freely admits to
having wanted to be Governo r of Ala-
bama si nce he was a child. It is, after all,
not an especially sinf ul aspiration. Wal-
lace won his own fi rst "elect ion" at the
age of fifteen, when he "campaigned"
in the halls of the state senate for a
sho rt-term job as a page during the 1935
session of the legislat ur e. Gregarious
and active, he enjoyed doing wh at poli-
ticians do to get elect ed.
The personali ty, aim, and dri ve wer e
there. H e reali zed early enough that hi s
fir st big job was to get a law degree,
which is a not-quite compulsory prer eq-
28
ursi te to a career in pol itics. So Wallace
went up to th e Uni versity of Al abama
in 1937, and stayed there even after his
fath er died that November, because it
wasn't strictl y necessary for him to drop
out.
Wallace is not the academi c type. H e
prefers peopl e to books, action to con-
templat ion, the practical to the theor et-
ical. He had to work, to hustle a living
on the side, and he wanted to be out
and around, in sports and in campus
politi cs. H e was so st rap ped for money
that in some years he couldn't even af-
ford to bu y hi s text books. Bu t he had
enough honor an d inte llige nce and grit
to settle down and "grind" to success-
fully complete th e necessary courses, i I'l -
stead of whining and quitting.
On campus, young Geor ge Wallace
was handicapped because his basic in-
come was from a job which paid fifteen
do llars for fifty hours of waiting on
tables, and one of his employer's reg ula-
tions forbade joining frat ernities. H e
tried bucking the powerful frat ernity
system in campus politics. and had to
cha lk up one of his rar e defeats.
In high schoo l, Wall ace had been cap-
tai n of the football team, and twice won
th e Alabama Bantamweight Boxing
Cha mpionship. H e was also on the box-
ing team during all of hi s four years at
the Universit y. What he lacked in
height, reach, and shoc k-absorbing bulk
he mad e up for by being fast , sha rp,
aggressive and tenacious, and he won-
six times out of seven .
George Wallace received his law de-
gree in 1942, ear ly in Worl d W ar II. H e
enlisted at once in what was then the
Army Air Corps, but was not called up
for pilot t rai ning un til 1943. It was du r-
ing this unc ert ain year that he scrounged
a living tryi ng to run a boa rding-ho use,
the n driving a dump truck. H e also
happened to meet the girl he lat er mar-
ried , the beautiful Lurleen Burns. She
was clerking in a dime store at th e time,
because - a brilliant st ude nt - she had
AMERICAN OPI NION
George and the late Lurleen Wallace with their children (L.-R.) Peggy Sue, George Jr., Lee, Bobbi Jo.
graduated from high school at fifteen
and was too young to get into the nurs e's
training progr am she wanted.
When Wallace finally entered flying
school in Arkansas, the camp was struck
by an outbreak of spinal meningiti s.
Many of the young men died; George
came close to it. When he was finally
out of the hospit al, he came home on a
brief leave and took the opportu nity to
ma rry Lurleen.
Eventually, the Air Corps decided to
train Wallace as an aircraft mechanic,
and then as a B-29 fligh t engi neer. Al-
though it was near the end of the war
before he saw action, and flight engi-
neers rarely win medals, nobody has ever
claimed that those who flew thousands
of mil es to bomb the fur iously-defended
Japanese home island s, and coaxed their
shot-up planes back afterwards, wer en't
pull ing their weight.
Near the end of 1945, Wallace was
discharged with a ten percent disability
pension, due to the effects of the spinal
meningitis.
Thus, it is clear that befor e beginning
SEPT EMBER, 196 8 .
his political career in 1946, at the age
of twenty-seven, George Wallace had
shared the experiences of men of his
age in America. He had grown up with-
out a taste of "affluenc e" or "pr ivilege"
or even "permissiveness." He had
grapp led with real-life probl ems in a
period of "hard times" from earliest
adulthood; he had taken what work was
availabl e to him, in order to earn his
living and at the same time get an edu-
cation. He fought for hi s country, and
did not return from service unscathed.
There was no whining or demanding
pr ivileges or threatening the security of
his neighbors or throwi ng infantil e tan-
trums; a man does what life demands.
The tougher the fight, the more pride
there is in winning. Wallace didn' t al-
ways win, eit her - nobody does, in real
life. But he alwa ys tri ed. No opponent
has ever beaten him without knowi ng
he' d been in a fight, whether it was in
the boxing ring, the hustings, or the
courts.
II
IN 1946, George Wallace went home
29
to Barbour County and campaigned for
a seat in the state legislatu re. He cam-
paigned wit h enthusiasm and pent-up
energy, and won election handily.
In the same elections, a new political
grouping swept into office in support
of the flamboyant Governor "Big Jim"
Folsom, generally described as a "South-
ern Populis t." Wallace was loyal to his
Party and hence a strong Folsom sup-
porter during his years in the legisla-
ture; as such, he voted for somewhat
open-handed spending which inevi tably
led to higher taxes - a perennial dilem-
ma for politicians. T he expensi ve pro-
grams gene rally involved such things as
schools and highways, and the need for
emergency improvements was undoubt-
edly great after long years of economic
depression and the diversion of resources
to World War II.
While Wallace supported some meas-
ures which conservatives woul d disap-
prove, his specific efforts were focused
on the need to build up Southern indus-
try - to provide trained manpower and
a favorable climate for investment so
that factories would locate in Alabama,
thus creating jobs for those displaced
from agricul tural work, and increasing
the tax base in the state as a whole. The
Wallace Industrial Act was a long step
in this direction. Later, as Governor of
Alabama George Wallace's efforts to
encourage investment and ind ustrial de-
velopment succeeded so well that Ala-
bama's rate of development was among
the highest in the nation.
Wallace first made himself known
in the national Democrat ic Pa rty dur-
ing the tumultuous 1948 Convention
wh ich resulted in the so-called "Dixie-
crat" revolt. The battle lines were be-
gin ning to be drawn on "states' rights,"
which happens to be a principle of
American government, not an epithet.
The Far Lef t's campaign to render the
states impo tent in their own right was
moving into the open. A struggle de-
veloped in the Democratic platform
30
commi ttee whi ch eventually led to a
walkout by some of the Southern dele-
gates. Although Wallace was not among
them, on that occasion, he had fought
hard for the Southern position, both
before and after the walkout. It is in-
teresting that Hubert Humphrey was
the leader of the "Liberal" and Party-
machine group which once more com-
mitted the Democratic Party to the Left-
ist course. It was the first time that Wal-
lace and H umphrey came into conflict.
It will not be the last time .
In 1950, George Wallace was re-
elected to the legislature, but in 1952, in
the middle of his second four-year term,
he decided to run for the post of circui t
court judge in his home three-county
district. He won that election as well,
and vacated his seat after six years in
the statehouse.
Wallace moved his fami ly to Clayton,
Alabama, and settled int o a somewhat
more stable, prestigious, and better pay-
ing position for the next six years. He
decided many hu ndreds of cases, of the
wide variety which are brought to the
lower courts, and 'the experience con-
stituted a valuable post-graduate course
in law - and life.
Wallace, in common with most
Southerners, still hotly resented the as-
sault being conducted on local autonomy
and the Southern way of life by the
federal government. T here seemed to
be little he or anyone else could do about
it - especially in the long years bet ween
elections. However, much of the attack,
in those years, was being carried on
t hro ugh the courts . From his relatively
weak and insignificant position as a
state judge, George Wallace could man-
age lit tle but delaying actions, mean-
while trying to draw public att ention
to what was happening. Occasionally,
as in 1953 and 1958, he drew national
attention, but his rather consistent op-
position to federa l edicts was better ap-
preciated within the state itself.
By 1958, with his six-year term on the
AMERICAN OPINION
bench drawing to a close, Wallace en-
tered the race for the governorship. In
the first contest, he came in second in
a field of ten. In the end, however, he
lost to John Patterson . Wallace, as usual ,
had fought to win, and this loss con-
demned him to several years of political
limbo, since his term on the bench ex-
pir ed soon after the election.
Mor e than that, he had so irked the
federal gove rn me nt that he was bein g
charged with contempt of court by Fed-
eral Jud ge Frank M. Johnson. During
1958, the federa l Ci vil Rights Commis-
sion had demanded that the county
voter records be turned over to them in
Montgomer y. Wallace recognized this
as a political move, of course, and as
another intrusion by an administrative
agency in Washington into local affairs.
It also happened that Alabama law for-
bids the removal of votin g records from
the county. Therefore, Judge Wallace
impounded the records, and later turned
them over to a Gran d Jury, even after
the Civil Rights Commission demand
had been reenforced by a federal court
order. For thi s, Jud ge Wallace was
charged wi th contempt of court.
By the time the court got around to
deal ing with him, Wallace had been de-
feated in the guberna torial race and his
term as judge had expi red. The spot-
light was off, and Wallace was a defi nite
un derdog in the upcoming figh t. But ,
as usual, he mu stered his formidable
str ength and fought as hard as he could .
He said he was not guilty of contempt,
even though he had not obeyed the
court order, because he had acted with-
in the law and wit hi n his authority and
responsibi lity as a state judge. Wallace
st ubbornl y and loudly made an issue of
thi s positi on, and the federal court was
soon looking for a face-saving way out
of the conf rontation it had created.
Those who bothered to follow the ac-
tion were soon tr eated to the curious
spectacle of the court tr ying to prove
Wallace not guilt y of what the court
SEPT EMBER , 1968
had itself ch a rged him with doing.
In the end, Wallace was found "not
guilty." In George Wallace's view, this
merel y proved that determined and hon-
orable opposition need not be hopeless.
III
IN 1962, George Wallace achieved his
lifelong ambition at last; he was elected
Gov ernor of Alabama aft er a long, hard-
fought campaign, He brought renewed
energy to the capit al, and busied him-
self at once with domestic state prob-
lems, such as swift expansion of trade-
schools to train workers in skill s needed
by Alabama's growing ind ust ry, and the
creati on of new junior colleges all over
the state, so that anyo ne, for the price
of a bus ride, could be wit hi n reach of
either vocat iona l or higher educ ation.
However, at the national level, the
Far Left had by no means succeeded in
its conquest of the South, and the game
of "confrontat ion" was due to be played
in Alabama, wh ether Al abami ans liked
it or not.
The Liberal Establ ishment is at an
overwhel mi ng adva ntage in this ga me.
Fi rst, the initiative lies with those who
are doi ng the attacking; they are the
ones who choose the time, the place, and
the means, and who are able to concen -
trate their forces on one point , rather
than having to defend every point. Sec-
ondly, the Establishment has the enor-
mous pol itical power and economic re-
sources of the federal government at its
disposal, not to menti on the ge nerous
assistance of the tax-free foundations,
whic h can play polit ics wi th assets rang- I
ing into the billio ns of doll ars. As long I
as their politics are "Liberal ," they need
fear no harassment from the Internal
Revenue Service. Thirdly , the Establish-
ment incl udes in its ranks most of the
mass medi a; "Liberals" can rely on the .
television networks and most newspa- I
pers and mass-circulation magazi nes to I
back any and all "Liberal " propagan da
drives. I
31
The game of "confro ntat ion" is often
played by stagi ng dr amatic producti ons,
a kind of "t hea ter in the round," com-
plete with scripts, stage- ha nds, a "s tar
system," a paid rabble of "ex tras," cam-
era men , and of course producers and
di rectors. After all, the "Liberals" have
domi nated the theat er, motion-picture,
and television industr y for longer tha n
an yon e can even remember. They cer-
tai nlv have the "know-how" to create
theatrical "ha ppe nings" to be presented
to the publi c as ge nui ne, spontaneous
occur rences. As in all theatri cal produ c-
tions, there is the cha nce that a show
may flop, or that it will have to be
tinkered wit h at the last minute. Ther e
is also, admitt edl y, an added risk in the .
ga me of "confrontation. " The vict ims
of the performanc e may not react in pre-
cisely the manner int ended. Ge nera lly,
however, these sterling students of hu -
man nature and political tact ics and
strategy have had am ple time in which
to plan a situa tion wh ich will block all
but the desired reactions before th e emo-
tional head of steam bursts fr ee.
A great dea l of the Far Left' s "civil
rights" st rategy in the South was based
0 11 a belief that whi te and Negro
Southe rne rs could be prodded int o a
bloodbat h, or at least that wh ite South-
erners, noted for their stubborn and
prick ly pri de and sup posed ly hot tem-
pers, could be provoked into open rebel-
lion and the n crushed. Eve rything pos-
sible was done to outrage the pri nciples
and sensibilit ies of Southerners- whi ch
is one reason wh y the most bla tant pub-
lic immoralit y was always a part of t he
"show." For insta nce, considerab le pho-
tog raphic evide nce exists of perverted
sexual act ivity being engaged in by dem-
onst rators, out in the st reet in bro ad day-
ligh t, and of mass public mict ur itions
being staged outside the sta te capitol
bu ilding in the course of these "demo n-
st rations." The mass media never failed
to screen out such scenes, wh en "cover-
ing" these affai rs nationa lly, but they
32
were ready and wainng to show the
world any out raged reactions on the
part of the local peop le.
It is almos t impossible for the chose n
victims of such a perf ormance to defend
themselves successfullv. T he care fullv-
planned "con frontat io;1s" are created ~ o
tha t the victim loses no matt er wh at he
does - he can either take the bait bv
reacting normall y, and get clobber ed fo'r
it, or he can refus e to take the bait, and
get walk ed ove r wi thou t putti ng up any
resistance.
On two notable occasions, Wallace
tried to counter the "confrontation"
game . H e couldn't win on eithe r oc-
casion, but he did succeed in raising
the pri ce of victory for the Commu-
nist and "Liberal" cabal assaulting hi s
state. These occasions were the dispute
over admissions policies at the U ni-
vcrsity of Al abama in 1963, and the
demonstrations and marches staged by
Martin Luther King at Selma and
Montgomery in 1965.
In these cases and many others, Wal-
lace's first job as Governor was the
relati vely unpopular one of restraining
Alabamians from playing into the hands
of t he "Li berals" and Co mmunists bv
reactin g in the natural way. The Left-
ist playwrights and stage- m a nagers
wanted mob scenes, acrimony, confli ct,
and violence. Peopl e ar e naturall y at-
t racted to scenes of activity, places
wh ere poli ce and newsmen are mus-
tered. Sout herners wer e of course un-
sympathet ic to the aims of the demon-
st rators, and often outrage d by their
methods, which included defiance and
baiting of state and local law-enfor ce-
ment offi cials. With enough peop le
arou nd to provoke, and enough out-
rageous conduct, the Leftist conspira-
tors were confident that sooner or later
they could get some goo d thea trics out
of it. W hat with editi ng and com-
mentar y supplied by the media "Lib-
era ls," the whole up roar could be, and
usuall y had been, transforme d for view-
AMERI CAN OPINION
ing audiences into a crude morality
play, with the saints, crusaders, and
lovers-of-mankind on one side and the
brutal, racist Southerners on the other
side. It was done so well, in fact, that
the American people outside the South
ha rdly questioned army occupation of
cities and communities in the South
from time to time. They never guessed
that their turn was coming.
In June of 1963, George Wallace's
alm a mater at Tuscaloosa was about to
be converted to Nicholas Katzenbach
Universit y, as Katzenbach was sent
down from the Attorne y General 's of-
fice in Washington to escort a pair of
handpicked students through the regis-
tration procedures, even though the
University had rejected them for ad-
mission. It had boiled down to a simple
matter of who was running the Univer-
sity of Alabama-Alabama or Wash-
ington . Washington won, of course.
What Wallace tried to do was to
play "confrontation" a bit more cleverly
than had been done the year before at
the University of Mississippi in Ox-
ford. He wanted to forestall a situation
which would almost inevitably degen-
erate int o the desired scenes of wild
disorder and conflict. Wallace was per-
fectly aware of the nasty streak in cer-
tain "Liberal" humanitarians, who de-
lighted in creating situations wherein
federalized Nationa l Guardsmen, under
strict military discipline, could be forced
to turn their bayonets against their
relatives and neighbors, in support of
edicts and forces they all despised. What
Wal lace hoped to do was to take ad-
vantage of the nationwi de publ icity to
present his own case* as dramatically
as possible, but legally and without
*I n the 1964 election, the Republican presidential
candidate, Barry Goldwater, carried the South with
the Vot es of peopl e who, f or the past four gen-
erations. had never dreamed of vot ing Republican!
It marked the end of blind support for the
Democratic Party, which had done so much to
ent rench t he Liberal Establishment, and which in
turn had rarely concealed it s hatred of the South.
SEPTEMBER, 1968
violence. In addition, he figured that
it might be possible to evade the most
unpleasant aspects of "mili tary occupa-
tion" whil e allowing the federal offi cials
to harvest the widespread revulsion
every use of armed force agai nst the
South engendered.
This was the reason for Wallace's
famo us "stand in the school house door."
When Katz enbach and his charges ar-
rived, and the cameras were massed
and grinding away, Mr. Katzenbach
discovered to his considerable annoy-
ance that this was going to be Gov-
For t he Wallaees-c!evotion, honor, a nd patriotism.
ernor Wallace's big scene, not his. Wal-
lace kept Katzenbach standing there,
looking rather silly, while he read his
speech agai nst the "illegal usurpation of
power by the cent ral government," and
then Katzenbach was ingloriously sent
on his way. Of course, he returned
in no time wit h an army at his back
- the federalized Alabama National
Guard-but there was no drama and
violence as a result-just the sort of
news which caused Pr esident Johnson
to lose Southern votes as never before .
33
Then, at the beginning of 1965, more
than a year aft er Army offi cers had
"cased" the city to plan an occupa tion,
Marti n Luth er King arrived in Selma,
Alabama, with his usual entourage of
hired marchers, idealists, beat niks, and
Reds assembled from all over the nation
for another game of "confrontation."
This time, the imp resarios of Li ving
Theater expected to push th rough the
Civi l Rights bill with it, and they suc-
ceeded. Backed by unbounded resources,
hundreds of "demonstrators" did their
thing in and around Selma for months
on end, disrupting and provoking as
best they could, and occasionall y, need-
less to say, they managed a few mob
scenes despite the general attempt to
ignore and isolate the repulsiv e strang-
ers. The best anyone could do, really,
was to restrain the local population
from turning violence on the int er-
lopers-who were clearl y "asking for
it"-and eventually to force the federal
government to pick up the tab for some
of the protection and other services
which the Communist "marchers" re-
quired or demanded.
Alabamians tri ed their best to pub-
licize, nationally, the law violations,
int erference with normal life, and fre-
quent public exhibitions of depravity
taking place in Selma, but they never
really succeeded, despite the abundance
of photogr aphs and eyewit ness reports.
After the Selma-to-Montgomery march,
the crowd indulged in a mass urin ation
as another unique form of "protest,"
but somehow what the cameras re-
corded did not make its way into the
evening news broadcasts across the na-
tion. If the people of Montgomery had
reacted in understandable fur y, how-
ever, you can bet that we would have
heard about it. George Wallace had
kept the situation from bursting into
holocaust.
The more spectacular events from
1963 onward first proj ected Governor
George Wallace into the public eye
34
on a national scale. He himself had not
really looked beyond Alabama for the
fulfillme nt of his politi cal ambitions,
and of course the "image" of Wallace
which was being presented to the nation
was not likel y to enhance his popu-
lari ty. He was the "heavy," the "bad
guy," the trouble-maker. the moral mon-
ster around whose neck every real and
phony charge agai nst the Sout h could
be convenien tly draped.
Af ter the "schoolhouse door" episode
in 1963, Wallace began to receive heavy
mail from all over the country-a strik-
, ing amount of it favorable. That favor-
able mail came from people who were
just beginning to feel the claws of
bureaucratic and judicial oppression in
their own lives and neighborhoods.
They were beginning to recognize that
television does not always struggle to
tell it exactly like i t is, for instance.
Wallace also began to receive speak-
ing invitations from all over the United
States and even western Canada. In
many cases, he was not invited by sym-
pathetic gro ups at all; probably most
of his collegiate invitations were from
groups who thought it would be fun
to pillory the Governor in person, or
sponsor some sort of freak show.
Nevertheless, George Wallace took
the opportunity, from 1963 onwa rd,
to speak his piece before both friendly
and hostile audiences. In the course of
so doing, he soon learned how "Lib-
erals" treat guests who don't think right.
Organized silence was occasionally
tri ed, but thi s has too many dr awback s
-it requires great discipline, it's no
fun at all, and it allows the speaker
to be heard. Organized heckling, chant-
ing, stomping, name-calling, and the
emission of obscenities and animal
noises are activities having none of
these drawbacks. Ordin aril y, such ac-
tivities would call int o que stion the
motives, int elligence, and upbringing
of those who engage in them, but as
most people must have noted by now,
AMERICAN OPINION
everything depends upon whether the
misbehavior is in support of "Liberal"
causes or in opposition to them.
Actually, verbal abuse is the mildest
and most bearable manifestation of
"Liberal" displeasure. Some of the
gentle, tolerant folk who maunder on
about "love" and "peace" have formed
groups intent upon dismembering Wal-
lace on the spot. The "pacifists" at so-
phisticated Dartmouth battled police to a
standstill, and rocked, dented, and nearly
overturned Wallace's car - after he
had come in response to their invita-
tion! The urbane, open-minded Har-
vard men were so infuriated bv the
presence of an Unbeliever that W'allace
had to escape his hosts through the
utility tunnels. "Liberal" professors,
helpless to flunk Wallace in class for
not regurgitating the "Liberal" line,
have been known to lose their cool and
surge down the aisles screaming for
blood, instead of reasoning together,
negotiating, and compromising with
him.
After George Wallace spoke this
spring in Omaha, Nebraska, of all
places, there were two nights of rioting.
Recently, Wallace was unable to ad-
dress nearly eight thousand sympa-
thizers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the
bastion of "Liberal" tolerance, due to
rioting by folk who were probably par-
tisans of Hubert Humphrey or Eugene
McCarthy. Wallace was unable to set
foot in Philadelphia, a year or so ago,
because the chief of police said he
probably could not handle the Leftist
riots which were being planned.
The sort of people who plunge lighted
cigarettes into Wallace's hand when he
offers it are precisely the people who
prattle endlessly about our "sick society"
and the "atmosphere of hate and vio-
lence." Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy,
who was hardly the most popular man
in Alabama, could speak there without
incident.
SEPTEMBER, 1968
IV
WALLACE'S DECISION to enter some of
the Democratic primary races in 1964
was a sudden and impulsive one. He
wanted to prove that a large segment
of the electorate was being systemati-
cally deprived of any opportunity for
representation, because candidates dared
not buck the Liberal Establishment.
So he entered the Wisconsin primary
first. He had no organization, little
time and money, and a very shaky
knowledge of which end of Wisconsin
was up. He was confronted by the
massed scorn and vilification of Wis -
consin's politicians, pulpit Leftists try-
ing to date the Great Society back to
Saint Paul, labor leaders, and mass
media. Wisconsinites were informed
that they would disgrace themselves
and the state, and probably go directly
to Hades into the bargain, if they voted
for that candidate.
But thirty-four percent of them did.
The "Liberals" were incredulous. Wal-
lace had proved his point, drawing one
vote in three.
Next came Indiana. The Democratic
machine, ~ h a k e n and grim, gave Wal-
lace an interesting post-graduate course
in thumb-in-the-eye politics. But he got
thirty percent of the Democratic vote
anyway, and carried the urban-indus-
trial counties, not the half-Southern
rural counties along the Ohio River.
Manipulators of the "labor vote" real-
ized that they were losing their grip-
and, gasp-to a states' rights anti-Com-
munist.
Wallace's third and biggest triumph
came in the Maryland primary. As a
monstrous interloper, George literally
walked away with the white vote in
Maryland; he carried twenty-three
counties, losing to Maryland's own Sen-
ator Brewster the heavily Negro Bal-
timore and heavily "white Liberal"
Montgomery and Prince George's coun-
ties, outside of Washington, D.C. Wal-
lace received forty-four percent of the
35
Maryland Democratic vote; "Liberals"
were aghast.
Barry Goldwater was a front-runner
in the Republican race by mid-su mmer
of 1964. Wallace had proven his point
and didn't want to divide the con-
servat ive vote, so he withdrew hon-
orably from activity on the nat ional
scene after the Maryland race. His am-
bit ions were not personal but ideologi-
cal-patriotic, if you will.
In the 1964 general election campaign,
Democrat and Republican "Libera ls"
joined forces to crush the conservative
Republican nominee. The other un-
precedented spectacle was that of a
(choke ! gasp!) Republican carrying
the deepest of the Deep Southern
states. Southern voters finall y brok e
an old habit which had long since
ceased to serve their int erests. Things
were shaking loose and George Wallace
had shaken them.
Wallace went back to running Ala-
bama, but he had become a national
spokesman for the anti- Communist, de-
centralized point of view which he now
knew was widely shared in the nation
at large. As Barr y Goldwater gave up
and chose to fade awav as a conserva-
tive leader, the field lay' open . However,
the renewed "Liberal" grip on both
majo r Par ties made it un likely that the
"Goldwater phenomenon " could be re-
peated in either Part y in 1968.
Back in 1966, however, Wallace faced
a tough polit ical probl em at home. The
Al abama Constitution forbade a gov-
ernor to succeed himself. Wallace
needed the political base which the
governorship afforded, and he was pop-
ular enough to keep it easily, if the
state constitution could be amended to
permit this. His campaign for amend-
ment , fought in the legislature, met
opposition which was to some extent
legitimate and understandable. But the
firmest and loudest opposition reflected
a heavy investment of effort by in-
terests outside of Al abama determined
36
only to sink Wallace for good, and
eliminate him from the political scene.
The federa l gove rnment's participation
was not unnoticed.
The amendment was blocked, and the
"Liberals" relaxed to toast each other
in victory. Then the Wallaces decided
that Mrs. George Wallace would run
for Governor of Alabama. Wallace's
oppo nents were first stunne d, then ner-
vously amused. Finally, as the awful
trut h dawned that Lurleen Wallace
was going to win and George Wallace's
political power was undiminished,
"Liberals" learn ed again that he is just
not that easy to discour age or to dis-
pose of.
Governor Lurleen Wallace's tragic
death, in the spring of 1968, was a per-
sonal and political blow more power-
ful than anything Wallace's enemies
could mu ster. His beloved wife's long
illness, and the terr ible period of mourn-
ing afterwa rds, subdued the candidate
considerably, and of course interrupted
and finally suspended Wallace's cam-
paigning. He was not able to resume
it until June of this year. But, resume
it he did. Lurleen had wanted it that
way. She had told George that this
was no personal contest-this was a
crusade for every moral principle in
which they both believed. Whatever
happened, she said, George must con-
ti nue. And, he has remained faith ful
to that task. Even in those terrible days
as the end approached for the wife that
was for him the most precious thing
he had ever had, George Corl ey Wal-
lace gave his word that he would con-
tinue.
V
WALLACE IN ACTI Ol", in the flesh, does
not seem at all extraordinary. At forty-
nine, he looks like a classic man-in-the-
street-of medium height, trim, dark-
hair ed, neith er handsome nor ugly. He
has an athletic vigor about him still-
he is quick and decisive in his move-
AMERICAN OPINION
ments and gestures, restless, and an
utterly tireless campaigner; he seems to
draw strengt h from crowd contact,
rather than be exhausted by it. He has
always been gregarious and has always
"identified" with "the common folks."
Face to face, he communicates some-
thing they want , and they respond to
him to a degree which has never ceased
to dismay his rivals. Wallace knows
that he has to go directly to the people,
no matter how hopelessly enormous the
country is, because he can never match
the cost of mass-media exposure , and
because the magic just doesn't quite
come across any other way.
Wallace always seems to draw an en-
thusiastic overflow crowd; at a speech
in Maryland , for instance, ther e were
not only five thousand people inside,
but another twenty-five hundred stood
outside in a downpour to hear hi m
speak. T hat sort of thing turns rivals
gr een with envy, and adds a distinctly
nervous quaver to the "Liberal" chorus
of belittlement. Still, it is almost im-
possible for Wallace to draw the suppo rt
of professional politicians. It is not
merely that, for most pros, going on-
ward and upwar d in the Party is the
safest road for plodders to plod; the
pros are also well aware of the artillery
which is trained on anyone who makes
non-"Liberal" noises. They find it safer
to serve the Estab lishment than to repr e-
sent the mi llions victimized by it. The
pros are willing to "win wi th" the Devil
hi mself, if it comes to that, rather than
lose on the side of the angels; since the
choice is never that clear-cut , there is
no need to lose a wink of sleep over it.
The odds being as terr ibly long as
they are, the year 1968 is not likely to
see any thundering stampede of "Op-
portunists for Wallace." Such being the
case, Wallace's professional cadre is
limited to long-time personal aides
whose loyalty he considers reliable, and
who are willing to go for broke along
with him. T his is too small a group
to run a national presidential campaign,
as every member of the group is no
doubt painfully aware. Financing is
hand-to-mouth, run ning along largely
Wallace regularly challenges th e Press fo r failure to report Communist hands behind race riots .
SEPTEMBER, 1968
37
on small donations mailed in by the
"little people," while even sympathetic
potential large contributors tend to hold
back-by definition, they have some-
thing to lose, or they wouldn't be po-
tential large contributors, and they fear
the vengeance of the Establishment.
In this case, expediency is the synonym
they use for cowardice.
The long, hard struggle to meet what-
ever the legal requirements for getting
on the ballot may be, in as many states
as possible, has spurred efforts to or-
ganize a semblance of a Party structure
all across the country. Considering the
resources available for this effort, it has
been remarkably successful. And yet,
there is already some grumbling and
dissension in the new-formed ranks.
There is a tendency, many complain, to
insist upon tight control from the Wal-
lace headquarters in Montgomery, what-
ever the cost in local support. It is also
unfortunate that at a time when Wal-
lace can least afford to trust strangers,
he most needs to recruit new people,
to reach out beyond the comfortable
but totally inadequate bounds of a few
lifetime comrades and develop a real,
nationally-based organizational struc-
ture and staff. It is said that Wallace
is not a good organizer and hates detail
work. That sounds like the usual pro-
paganda. But, he cannot seriously chal-
lenge the entrenched, perhaps over-or-
ganized and overstaffed, national Par-
ties with little more than a roomful
of long-time friends to do the top level
staff work. Too much just does not
get done, period, and the effects of that
are cumulative.
VI
OKAY, but where does Wallace stand?
What does he say and do? What does
he represent?
Wallace's stand has been remarkably
consistent throughout the years in
which he has been nationally in the
public eye. He is generally labeled, by
38
his foes, as a "racist" and "segregation-
ist." He is not a "racist," but he is a
"segregationist." (So-called "black na-
tionalists" are much more outspokenly
"segregationist" and distinctly "racist,"
but they are never labeled with either
term. Curious, don't you think?) Wal-
lace plays down his segregationist views
outside of the South, knowing that he
is not going to win points that way.
He merely insists that the people of
each state have the right to arrange
their educational system according to
their lights-and, he is right. While
the South might never again have so
rigid a system as previously, there is
no doubt that Wallace is fighting for
the right of Alabama and other states
to have at least the recently "outlawed"
school system called "freedom of
choice." He points out that "freedom
of choice" was struck down by the
Supreme Court because the people did
not freely choose to go the "Liberal"
way. In truth, Wallace could not care
less whether New York adopts the
wildest schemes the mind of man can
conceive, as long as they are not dic-
tatorially imposed on everyone else.
"Liberals" are appalled to discover
that this view is rather widely shared.
Wallace also stands very stoutly
against the continual encroachment of
centralized federal power, especially the
the administrative and judicial power
which is farthest removed from popular
checks, and which has been developed
by the Liberal Establishment into a
fine-honed, efficient, and effective tool
for what can only be described as op-
pression. Wallace lashes out especially
hard at the "guideline writers" who feel
that their sacred mission in life is to
homogenize the old folks' homes in
the South, check up on who showers
with whom in the factory washrooms,
and whether everyone is integrating
properly at the bedpan level in the
nation's hospitals. Only a fanatic fringe
really cares, yet somehow the whole
AMERICAN OPINION
country is at their mercy. This is not
normal, not sane, not right. It's not
even legal, in fact. Yet George Wallace
is the only presidential candidate in the
race who dares to speak out against
it in plain, strong language .
There is an ever-broadening wave
of discontent over the shameless hy-
pocrisy of so many "Liberal" leaders,
and candidate Wall ace delights in
dancing on the exposed nerve-endings
of such leaders. He points out that
about one big percent of our Congress-
men-six out of 535, to be precise-en-
trust their offspring to the tumultuous
and even dangerous "showcase" school
system they have created in Washing-
ton, D.C. Whether whit e "Liberals"
or Negroes of varying degr ees of mili-
tancy, our mor e strident leaders tend to
place their children in safe, selected
schools congenial to their beliefs. The
increasingly low-gr ade, strife-torn pub-
lic schools, which these same leaders
are so diligentl y convert ing into brain-
washing academies, schools for hood-
lumism and crime, cent ers of social
experimentation, and arenas in which
partisan political gangs can engage in
clawing and biting contests-these are
reserved for the peasantry! Parents of
any race, if they cannot afford a private
school or a flight to the suburbs, are
simply forced to send their children
out, day after day, to schools which
resemble nothing mor e than poorly-
run houses of detention. No candidate
but Wallace offers them relief.
The "law and order," or "crime in
the streets" issue is the hottest thing
in the campaign this year-so hot that
not even the most "Liberal" candidate
can slide by without mumbling some-
thing favorable about "law and order,"
between proposals for discrimination-
in-reverse and appeasement of revolu-
tionaries by bribing them with mi nd-
staggering sums of money.
Wallace is not the man to tell his
audiences that more people are running
SEPTEMBER, 1968
I
more wild every year because they are
poor or unemployed, or have been
traumatized by the sheer horror of life
in the United States of America. People
-including Wallace's family, friends,
and neighbors - were really poor and
unemployed during the Depression, but
they did not see insurrection and an-
archy as the solution to their problems.
And it is curious to note that those
who claim that living in America
shouldn' t happ en to a dog never seem
to leave, to seek a better life just any-
where else.
No, Wallace just comes out and
blames the breakdown of law and order
on chicken-livered politicians who "re-
strain" the police, on courts which
make it either futile or impossible to
enforce the law, and on febrile Leftist
ideologues whose life work consists of
spreading lies, discontent, and sedit ion.
Even those who read no more than
the headlines, the comics, and the sports
page understand Wallace's vivid and
folksy version of these facts of life.
Wa llace wouldn't really drive right on
over those famous anarchists who lie
down in front of cars; and, maybe
soldiers five feet apart with two-foot
bayonets, to make the streets of Wash-
ington safe again, would seem a bit
impractical after a day or so-but those
oft-repeated remarks in Wallace's cam-
paign speeches draw cheers from every
crowd. They know he'd do something,
and something needs to be done.
Wallace is also the only candidate
in the race who is genuinely, out-
spokenly anti-Communist. He doesn't
approve of-or make the slightest ex-
cuse for-Communist racial agitators,
student revolutionists, traitorous pro-
fessors, or Communist defense-plant
employees. He's against them all, and
leaves no doubt in anyone's mind that
"Li beral" permissiveness toward them
would come to an abrupt halt if he
ever got into the White House. He is
fond of qu oting a banner carried reg-
39
ularly by a Negro newspaper in Ohio:
"In America our first job is to stop
and rout the Communists. Then all
other problems, including racial prob-
lems, can be worked out in peace
and freedom."
Wallace is not as strong as he might
be on foreign affairs- he is still dis-
covering America, as a matter of fact-
but the princi ples of politics are uni-
versal. He senses without difficulty that
America had better quit trying to pur-
chase "love" and start re-establ ishing
a position in the world that will be
based on healthy respect from friend
and foe alike. He favors laying down
the law to our "allies" (and debtors)
who support our enemi es, and serving
notice on pipsqueak critics that they
had best start worrying about our
opinion of them. He wants all Ameri-
can aid and trade with the East Eu ro-
pean count ries supplying the Vi etcong
stopped and stopped cold.
Although he says almost nothing
about defense policy, he has made it
clear that he woul d not wager the sur-
vival of our nation and people on the
presumed "good intentions" of the
world's leading mass-murderers in Mos-
cow and Peking. As for defense, the hor-
rible truth is that former Defense Secre-
tary Robert S. McNamara's years of
studied, met iculous "bad judgment"
have left us behind the eight-ball, not
only in the field of nuclear weapons and
our phased-out first strike with inter-
continental missiles, but in missile de-
fense and a nuclear-powered fleet. Then,
too, the multi-billion dollar flop of
McNamara's "flying Edsel," the F-l11
(nee T .F.x.) leaves an enormous, jag-
ged, gaping, and long-predicted hole in
our defense system, whi ch now has
nothing with which to replace destroyed
or obsolete aircraft of the many types
the F-l11 was supposed to replace. Wal-
lace has not yet mentioned these prob-
lems, preferring to fight on his chosen
ground of earthy domestic issues. The
40
move is purely tactical, not ignorance.
Wallace started out, not to take on
the ent ire Liberal Establishment singl e-
handed, but to get in a few licks for
his constituents, who were being run
over roughshod by rather int olerable
enforcers of the Fa r Left's doctrines.
The Bantamweight boxer did not
climb in there with the big boys and
expect to get away unscathed; Wallace
knew he might get pret ty well thumped
before the thin g was over, but he has I
always been a courageous, opti mistic
scrapper. So, even when he didn' t win,
he managed to surpri se the dickens
out of his opponents and get carried
clear to the Capit ol on the shoulders
of his fans.
The performance pleased larger
crowds than he had expected, and at
the same time, Wallace was discovering
certain points of vulnerabilit y in Go-
liath's massive but somewhat flabby
anatomy. He was able to do what
very few other politicians in the game
have the courage to do- he was able to
take the heaviest barrage of smears
and vilificat ion without giving up, or
even making a quie t little deal in ex-
change for an improved "image."
Wallace being a tough, practical poli-
tician, one does not expect quixo tic
crusades from him, or fanatical suicide
attacks. Yet here he is, staking just
about everything on a campaign which
every political pundit insists is abso-
lutely hopeless, useless, a waste of time.
And yet, if Wallace is worried about
wasting his time, he doesn't show it,
and, meanwhi le, there is the powerful
smell of fear in the frantic attacks on
him.
Win, lose, or draw, whatever hap-
pens, George Wallace is goi ng to knock
the Establishment's neat little plans
base over apex. They find this prospect
utterly intolerable. It's so good for that
small, collective Establishment soul to
get the devil knocked out of it. It's so
very good for America! - -
AMERI CAN OPINION
[))JE
I L l l ~ l R l l
McCarthy
by Roy COHN. New American
Library, New York, N.Y.; 292 pages,
$5.95.
IT IS A MEASURE of McCarthy's his-
torical importance that books about
him since his death have been as con-
troversial as opinions about him during
his life. There can hardly be a "defini-
tive" biography of Joseph Raymond
McCarthy until the issue he raised is
resolved - until, indeed, the Chair-
man of the Universe rules on the Wis-
consin Senator's "point of order."
McCarthy told Americans that their
government was infiltrated by Com-
munists - as, of course, it was, and is.
The trouble was that so many Amer-
icans promptly believed him - and
that was what provoked against him
such an unparalleled ferocity of retalia-
tion. Well , I should not say unparallel-
ed. There is a parallel in the book of
Acts, chapters six and seven, in the
story of Saint Stephen and the "syria-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
gogue of the Libertines" - the latter
being parallel to the National Council
of Churches. You will recall that when
"they were not able to resist the wis-
dom and the spirit by which he spake,"
that "they suborned men . . . and
stirred up the people, and the elders,
and the scribes . . . and set up false
witnesses" who accused him of blas-
phemy. Saint Stephen's defense was
simply to recite to them much history,
all of which was true, and with which
his accusers were in their hearts quite
familiar. The Scripture gives the
sequel:
"When they heard these things, they
were cut to the heart, and they gnashed
on him with their teeth.... Then
they cried out with a loud voice, and
stopped their ears, and ran upon him
with one accord."
So complete was this hysterical ac-
cord in the modern instance that it
fixed the dictionary meaning of the
term McCarthyism, defined as follows
in Webter's Seventh Collegiate: "a
mid-twentieth-century political attitude
characterized chiefly by opposition to
elements held to be subversive and by
the use of tactics involving personal
attacks on individuals by means of
widely publicized indiscriminate alle-
gations, especially on the basis of un-
substantiated charges."
Millions of us prefer the Senator's
own definition: McCarthyism: The
Fight for America.
One thing is certain-the charge that
McCarthy made unsubstantiated
charges is unsubstantiated. I remember
when McCarthy was at the peak of his
paradoxical influence-notoriety of, say,
1952-1953. I was living in the Washing-
ton, D.C. , metropolitan area and both
my children were in high school. They
were, I am proud to say, McCarthy
fans. Observing that not everybody
was, they set out to conduct a poll. Of
teachers, neighbors, classmates, and
41
strangers on the street they asked thr ee
questions. The remarkable thing about
this poll was that t he results were unan-
imous. Fi rst question : What do you
think of Senator McCarthy? Answers
(100 percent): I like what he is trying
to do, but I don't like his methods.
Second question : Wh at are his meth-
ods? Answers (100 percent, after a cer-
tain hesitation, which was also 100 per-
cent): He smears innocent people.
Third question : Which innocent peo-
ple has he smeared? Answers (100 per-
cent , after hesitation): I don't know.
Had my children moved then in
more sophisticated circles, as eventually
they would do, they might have re-
ceived the answer, Owen Lattimore, or
- a year or so later - Annie Lee
Moss. Both answers would have been
false. As the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee was to make plain,
Owen Lattimore had all the innocence
of a king cobra. As for Annie Lee
Moss, the Negro woman employed in
the Pentagon Code Room, whom the
McCarthy Committee identified as a
Communist, and whom Senator Stuart
(Sanctimonious Stu) Symington per-
sonally offered to employ, such was his
confidence in her - well, Annie Lee
Moss turned out to be a Communist,
just as Committee Counsel Roy Cohn
said she was. There was no mistaken
identity, there was no error of any sort
by McCarthy's staff or McCarthy him-
self, except the error of underesti-
mating the brazen effrontery of the Sy-
mingtons, the Ed Murrows, the Drew
Pearsons of this world .
If ever a man was the victim of
"widely publicized indi scriminate alle-
gations," it was McCarth y himself, and
documentation to prove that assertion is
solidly presented in Roy Cohn's book
on his most distinguished employer.
Roy Cohn is an historically impor-
tant person himself. Brilliant , preco-
cious (he was a law-school graduate be-
42
fore he was old enough to vote) , un-
tiring, and audacious, he was onl y
twenty-six years old when in 1953 he
became Chief Counsel for Senator Me-
Carthy's Investigating Subcommitt ee.
He already had a reput ation as a Com-
munist-fighter, for in 1951 he had been
one of the Government's prosecuting
attorneys in the trial of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg, the "atom spies." To his
credit, he was so disliked by Bobby
Kennedy that the latter resigned from
McCartli y's comm ittee staff when
Cohn was put in charge. It must, how-
ever, be noted that Cohn 's "method"
of working with and for his friend
David Schine furni shed the pretext for
the Eisenhower Administration' s
lynching party which, with 'the unani-
mous support of Minority Leader
Lyndon Johnson's Democrats, "con-
demned" McCarthy in December 1954
by a Senate vote of sixty-seven to
twent y-two. (That sixty-seven was
forty-four Democrats, one Independent,
Wa yne Morse, and twenty-two Repub-
licans; the twenty-two pro-McCarthy
votes were all Republicans. Eisenhower
split his Party right down the middle,
and Minor ity Leader Johnson resound-
ingly carried the day.)
Actuall y, the preposterous "charges"
on the basis of whi ch McCarthy was
"condemned" were not the Army's alle-
gations that he and Cohn had used im-
proper influence in behalf of Cohn's
friend , and the Army's draftee, Mr.
Schine. The Republi cans stuck together
and "cleared" McCarthy of those ac-
cusations. But the televised "Army-
McCar thy Hearings" immediately pre-
ceded th e Watkin s Committee hearings
on "censure" and provided the public
confusion in the midst of which half
the Republican Senators were per-
suaded it would be to their political ad-
vantage to help Lyndon cut Joe's
throat.
Sad as it is to think of the personal
AMERICAN OPINION
inj ust ice done Joseph McCarthy by his
colleagues, it was from the national
point of view even more ominous that
the United States Senate should in the
"censure" vote on McCarthy reveal it-
self, as it did, as a body completely
without moral principle. Not that every
individual Senator was without princi-
ple. Probably all who voted for Me-
Carthy were sincere (since the pressure
was the other way), and some who
voted against him were since re. But the
swing vote was corrupt.
"McCarthy t old me," Cohn writes,
"that Symington visited him in his
home du ring the censure hea ring, and
said he fel t terrible about it. So did
ot he r senators, but all had to vote strict-
ly along party lines. [This was non-
sense, for the Republicans split down
the middl e.] 'Symi ngton told me [this
is McCarthy, quoted by Cohn] he
hoped I don't get sore at the individ-
ual s participating because there was
nothing anyone of them could do
about it.'
" McCarthy told me that at least
twelve others had said much the same
thing to him while the hearings were
in progress. N ot one claimed to be
moved by principle, or that he would
vote censure becaus e h e bel ie ved
McCarthy had brought the Senate into
disrepute. 'Each of them said, "Look,
Joe, this is the story. You know it as
well as I do. This is a top-level deci-
sion."'" ( Page 239, italics added.)
Of course, in nocent students of the
Consti tution bel ieve that the Uni ted
States Senat e is the top level of the
Legislat ive Branch, which is supposed
to be "firs t among equals" of the three
bran ches of our government. Pres um-
ably, however, the top level referred to
meant Eisenhower and Johnson - and
the Establishment which controls them.
You understand tha t the decision made
was to condemn the outstanding oppo-
nent of Communism in the world at
that time.
SEPTEMBER, 1968
I shoul d say that despite certain am-
biguities, both of conduct when he
worked for McCarthy and of writing
in the present book, Roy Cohn does un-
derstand what McCarthy stood for, and
how the ground was cut from under
him. Also Cohn's appreciation of the
essential magnificence of McCarthy's
stand, an d of the viciousness and/or
meanness of his enemies, is positive if,
as it is in my judgment, a bit too "ob-
jective." (Maybe I'm' being too "objec-
tive" about Cohn, but I never worked
with him.) Here is part of Cohn's sum-
mary judgment of the pivotal figure in
contempor ary American history :
Looking back with whatever ob-
jectivity I can muster, I believe that
even after all the excesses and mis-
takes are counted lip, Senator Mc-
Carthy used the best methods avail-
able to him to fight a battle that
needed t o be f Ollght . . . . The
" methods" attack on McCarthy sllf -
fers f rom a credibility gap because
of the double standard of many crit-
ics, particularly the press, radio, and
television . . . .
He may have been wmng in de-
tails, but he was right in essentials.
Certainly f ew can deny that the Gov-
ernment of the United States had in
it enough Communist sympathiz-
ers and pro-Soviet advisers to twist
and pervert American foreign pol-
icy for close to two decades.
* * * *
W hat is indisputable is that he
was a cOllrageolls man who f Ollght
a monumental evil . He did so
against opposition as determined as
was his own attack - an opposi-
tion that spent far more time, mon -
ey, and print seeking to expose him
than Communism.
Since his day, Cuba has fallen to
the Communists. The free u/orld was
rocked in 1967 by the Harold Philby
revelation of Communist infiltration
43
in high Gouernment seCl/rit)' posts.
Nuc lear explosions echo over China
and the Soviet Union. American men
are defending the borders of Soutb
Vietnam against Communist aggres-
sors. North Korea has laid down the
gauntlet to us.
Has not history already begsn his
vindication?
Such an appraisal of McCarthy does
much to vindi cate Cohn, who after all
can plead yout h at the time as an excuse
for having had a high opinion of an
old mountebank like Joseph N. Welch
- and for having made a deal with
him, the details of which are part of
the unfailingly interesting material in
this book (material not onl y of histor i-
cal import ance but also of human in-
terest in the glimpses it gives of Me-
Car thy's character, and of Cohn's too,
for that matter).
This is a book that very much needed
to be written, and for which we should
be very grateful , though it is far from
the last word on McCarthy. As an al-
most random example of omissions,
there is no ment ion in the book of
Howard Rushmore, the pictur esque
ex-and-anti-Communist who prior to
working for McCart hy in early 1953
had been a reporter for the New York
Journ al-American, who after working
for McCarthy became editor of Confi-
dential magazine, and who eventually
shot and killed his ex-wife and himsel f
in a taxicab in New York . It was in
Apri l 1953 that Howard Rushmore,
then on McCarthy's staff, told me : "We
are really going to go to work on your
friend Oppenheimer." (He knew what
kind of friend of mine Oppenheimer
was.) Nothing about the McCarthy
Committee is more interesting than the
fact that it did not investigate Dr. Julius
Robert Oppenhei mer, and I think there
were good reasons for that - for Me-
Carthy woul d not have laid off Oppen-
heimer unless he had been convinced
44
there were good reasons to do so. Cer-
tainly, however, as Chief Counsel for
the Committee, and as an anti -Com-
munist hero of the Rosenberg atom-spy
case into the bargain, Roy Cohn could
well have touched on this subject. I do
not find Doctor Oppenheimer's name
anywhere in the book. Forgive me for
saying that I find such an omi ssion more
than mildl y curious.
But it is ill-natur ed of me to com-
plain of a book which is certai nly one
of the most interes ting and important
published this year. No student of con-
tempo rary history can afford to miss it.
It is at once a primary source and a
significant commentary . It is the be-
gi nning of the restorat ion of McCarthy
- which I think is a necessary part of
the restoration of Amer ica, for if we
have not the national character to re-
pent of the inj ustice we did him, nor
in high places the intelligence to see
that he was right, then it seems unlike-
ly that we can or ought to survive.
The reassurance is that the majority
of Americans did not reject McCarthy,
though they tolerated too many Sena-
tors and a President who did so. Most
Americans intuitively knew that Me-
Carthy was right, just as George
Wallace's cabdriver knew that Castro
was a Communist. But most Americans
have of late been too deferential to the
experts - to the "Establishment," to
the "Academy."
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy became
involved - after World War II, which,
comparatively, was a breeze - in three
tough fights : with the Communists,
with the Establishment, with the Acad-
emy. The significant fact is that only
against the Communists was he the
aggressor. He jumped the Communists,
the Establishment and the Academy
jumped him.
I just read that last bit to my wife.
She said, Yes, he stepped on the rattle,
and was struck by the fangs and the
ven om .-MEDFoRD EVANS
AMERI CAN OPI NION
America Is In Danger
by GENERAL CURTIS E. LEMAY. Funk
& Wagnalls, New York, N..; 346
pages, $5.95.
I HAVE the reprehensible but ordinar-
ily handy habit, when reading a book
for review, of turning down corne rs of
pages and scribbling not es in margins
for ready reference and reminders
while writing. I have just about ruined
this book. Almost destroyed the useful-
ness of my system, too, for when you
mark something on every other page as
especially important you still have a
prob lem of selection when you want to
quote or cite wit hin limited space.
Of course, wha t Genera l LeMay has
to tell is not entirely new. Eighteen
mo nths ago General Nat han F. Twi-
ning, in his book Neither Liberty nor
Safety, mad e many of the same points
and essentially the same overriding
point, that America is indeed in danger.
Very shortly before that, Indianapolis.
N ews editor M. Stant on Evans de-
scribed the hobbles in which our mili-
tary men have had to work , in his
sharply focused analysis, The Politics
of Surrender. Reviewing Twining's and
Evans' books in A ~ I E R I C A N OPINION
for January 1967, I referr ed to their
"emphat ic agreement on the catastroph-
ic incompetence of the pr ev a il ing
leadership in Washington." Earlier
criticisms of identical th rust could be
cited, going to the classic comment by
General Douglas MacArthur regarding
Korea: "Never before has thi s nation
been engaged in mort al combat with
a hostile power without mi litary ob-
jective, wit hout policy other tha n re-
strictions governing operations, or in-
deed without formally recognizing a
state of war." (Quoted by LeMay, Page
224.) It is possible, however, that of all
the soundly based and well aimed at-
tacks to dat e on the "Potomac Pretend-
ers" (as another military man, General
SEPTEMBER, 1968
Edwin A. Walker, has called them)
none has been more devastati ng than
this book, this megaton salvo, by the
creative first commander of the United
States Strategic Air Command, Curtis
E. LeMay.
America Is In Danger pounds relent-
lessly at (1) the physical danger result-
ing from our critically inadequate
system of national defense , and (2) the
fiscal danger. This grim play on phys-
ical and fiscal should be blamed on me,
not General LeMay, but I do not apol-
ogize for it if it jogs memory. The fiscal
danger of total bankruptcy, of course,
results from extravagant commitments
(such as Vietnam) and gross tact ical
mismanagement (such as using B-52's
to bomb single-lane makeshift bridges
in the Asian jungle) . T he physi cal
danger comes from the fact tha t, as
things are now run from the Pentagon,
we simply cannot win any war (for to
win would be contrary to policy) and
we are therefore liabl e to sustain total
defeat whenever we are massively and
abruptly attacked by an enemy who
does intend to win . Meanwhile, an ap-
parently aimless operation such as our
anomalous venture in Vietnam affects
our nat ional vitality prett y much as
phlebotomy would affect a victim of
anemia. The dr ain in blood and treas-
ur e is more than any nation can In-
definitely stand.
The third, and greatest, danger in-
dicated by General LeMay is that of
leaving national power in the hands
of men who deliberately incur the
perils of bankruptcy and impotence
wh ich menace America NOW. It is
impossible to tell whether this danger
grows out of ineradicable pub lic folly
or excusable and remedi able public
ignorance and confusion due to delib-
erate deception and misinformation
from such official spokesme n as Arthur
(Right to Li e) Sylvester and his master,
Robert Strange McNamara. If, as hope
must have it, it is the latter (i.e., igno-
45
ranee, not folly) then forthright books
such as this one by Curtis LeMay, with
appropriate consequences at the polls,
can yet salvage the situation.
General LeMa y has obviously pro-
ceeded on the more optimistic assump-
tion; if you and I don't heed him and
spread the word, the American people
are very likely to re-establish an Ad-
ministration in Washington which ,
whether Democratic or Republican,
will perpetuate the doctrine and con-
tinue the policies leadi ng to an "end
to nationhood." That last phrase comes
from Wal t Whitman Rostow, who, to
be sure, is now the right- hand national-
security man of Lyndon B. Johnson,
but who was - various high-level lies
to the contrary notwithst anding - an
und ercover C.I.A. operations chief (his
cover, a professorship at M.LT.) in the
Eisenhower Administration. I'm sure
I don't have to remind you that Wa lt
Rostow said that an end to nat ionhood
would be a good thing for the United
States. With national-security experts
like that, who needs traitors?
No use kidding ourselves, a nation is
a war-making body. If you reject war
entirely, you are not just a pacifist, you
are an anarchist. Believers in world
government may say they reject war,
but they simply incorporate the war-
making function into the police func-
tion. As John Locke said, government
may be defined as the custodian of the
right to kill. A national government
which is not capable of making sucess-
ful war against its enemies will cease
to exist. (So will any government
which is not capabl e of maint ainin g
order within its own boundaries.) With
the foregoing und erstood, we are ready
for the following basic paragraph from
General LeMay :
At the very heart of u/ariare lies
doctrine. It represents the central be-
liefs for waging war in order to
achieve victory. Doctrine is of the
46
mind, a network of faith and knowl-
edge reinforced by experience which
lays the pattern for the utilizat ion
of men, equipment, and tactics. It is
the building material f or strategy.
It is [nndamenta! to sound judg-
ment. (Page 23.)
Having thus established the primacy
of doctrine, LeMay proceeds to dissect
in detail the false doctrines which have
dominated defense strategy most of the
time since World War II . General Le-
May has an understandable preference
for the Eisenhower Admin istration
over the - as he calls it - "Kennedy-
Johnson" Administration; but, that
what is involved is not Party politics
is plain enough from the fact that Le-
May's own career was at its brilliant
best in the T ruman years, when he
mastermi nded the Berlin Airl ift and
- most important - forged the sword
that was the Strategic Air Comman d.
My own belief is that the same forces
were at work throughout the years
from World War II to the present, that
they scored solid anti-American points
both under Truman - e.g., "civilian
control" of atomic energy - and under
Eisenhower - e.g., a moratorium on
nuclear tests in 1958, two years after
Ike had been re-elected on a platform
that included denunciation of Adlai
Stevenson for having proposed such a
moratorium. However, the almost final
victor y of these indefatigable forces
was not achieved until the Kennedy
Admi nistration, with the establishment
of the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency in 1961 and the ratification of
the Nuclear Tes t Ban Treaty in 1963.
Then, of cour se, wit h Lyndon came
the debacle. The "arms controllers," as
LeMay sarcastically calls them, got to
the top under Kennedy-Johnson, but
they had been climbing upward ever
since the conclusion of World War II .
The fallacious doctrines which Gen-
eral LeMay refutes most fully and
AMERICAN OPINION
forcefully are those of "Deterrence"
and "Limited War." Both are based on
what seems to be a psychopathic fear of
nuclear weapons - psychopathic be-
cause the doctors in question are sup-
posed to be Americans, and it is Amer-
ican nuclear weapons which they seem
to fear most. Granted that their op-
position is to their own country's nu-
clear weapons which, as LeMay says,
"constitute our greatest capability for
military victory," if one assumes that
their opposition is not psychopathic, one
realizes immediately that it is kinder
to suppose that it is. It is, one immedi-
ately understands, not necessarily psy-
chopathic. It may, in fact be of the
highest order of revolutionary intelli-
gence for an American to gain such
control of America's most important
arms that he can guarantee they will
never be used - if he is one of those
Americans who believe that what we
need is an end to nationhood. This be-
lief could sustain such an unwilling
American in whatever deception of the
American public was necessary to keep
himself in office. But so far none of this
type has been found capable of deceiv-
ing former Air Force Chief of Staff Cur-
tis E. LeMay-which doubtless explains
why he is a former Chief of Staff , Lyn-
don having got rid of him on February
1, 1965, just as the expensive (in blood
and materiel) "escalation" was about
to get really under way in Vietnam.
"Deterrence" by itself is an ambig-
uous word. It may, when used by a
loyal American, mean deterrence of any
aggressive enemy of America, most pre-
sumably at this stage of the game, the
Soviet Union. Such use, joined with
willingness to fight if deterrence fails,
expresses a legitimate U.S. military con-
cept. But in most of the more sophis-
ticated literature of the "defense in-
tellectuals" the use is otherwise. In
think-tank circles the idea is not for the
United States to deter the Soviet Union,
but for America and Russia to deter
SEPTEMBER, 1968
each other. To a certified Santa Monica
or Cambridge doubledome, America is
more to be feared than the Soviets be-
cause, frankly, America has more nu-
clear capability than the Soviets and
thus we (no trickier word in the Eng-
lish language than we - never mind
about my identity or your identity, the
real crisis of identity these days is: who
are 1/ we"? - we are the ones who
upset the balance, who may fail to be
deterred.
Maybe you don't realize how dread-
ful we Americans are - but I'm sure
you do, since you've read Fail-Safe and
Seven Days in May and other such
elaborations written by Americans,
oddly enough, of what may be called
the anti-LeMay thesis. That thesis
is that America is not in danger from
the rest of the world so much as the
rest of the world is in danger from
America, and shouldn't we Americans
do something about that, such as may-
be whooping it up for the Vietcong or
denouncing all American generals ex-
cept Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin.
I know that Fail-Safe and Seven Days
in May were not written by certified
defense intellectuals, but by certified
literary hacks; however, they got the
ideas from the think-tank boys who
are themselves not quite sure whether
they are unwilling or unable to com-
municate with the masses.
Mutual deterrence of America and
Russia is, or has been so far, to Russia's
advantage, since if both give up use of
their own nuclear weapons America is
giving up more than Russia is. Should
the time ever come - and in Gen-
eral LeMay's opinion it is approaching
- when Russia has as much nuclear
superiority as we have had in the past,
then the Left will quickly revise its
position on deterrence. We shall then
hear advised the most solemn respect
for the inviolability of Soviet sovereign-
ty. The only consolation of the mutual-
deterrence, nuclear-stalemate, balance-
47
of-terror propaganda is that so long as
we keep hearing it we can be sure
America still has superiority in nuclear
hardware - for all the good it does us,
since we cannot use it.
The mutual deterrers do not want
us to have a greater nuclear capability
than Russia's. They want parity. Gen-
eral LeMay is solidly opposed to such
military nonsense, and wants America
to have clear-cut and decisive military
superiority over Russia or any other
potential enemy. To this end he maxi -
mizes the estimated nuclear capability
of the Soviet Union (but his maximiza-
tion is legitimate, not fraudulent), and
he shows that Robert McNamara has
(fraudulently) maximized reports of
our own opera tional nuclear capability.
General LeMay accepts a high esti-
mate on Russian capability; he discounts
McNarnara's estimate on American ca-
pability. Now with all due respect, I
think General LeMay knows more
about McNamara than he does about
Russia. In fact, I think he knows just
about all he needs to know about Mc-
Namara. And Lyndon Johnson. And
the "defense intellectuals." Me, I'm for
LeMay.
But it may well be asked how I, who
have for years declared my skepticism
concerning Soviet (not to say Red Chi-
nese) nuclear capability, space-Sputnik
capability, apartment-elevator capability,
just about every kind of precision-indus-
try capability - how I can now so fer-
vently endorse the overall judgments of
even a great Air Force General who
states flatly, for example, that "there
are thousands of high yield nuclear
weapons in Soviet arsena ls." How can
an l-just-don't-believe-they've-got-it nut
like me go along with a guy-patriotic
general or what have you - who says a
thing like that?
Well, I do, strategically speaking, go
along with him, and I'll tell you why:
(1) I never said the Russians cannot
have a formidable nuclear arsenal. I
48
said they cannot have produced one, un-
aided, from their own industrial re-
sources. This was also true of jet air-
craft, but they got considerable aid, and
they have jet aircraft. Unfortunately,
they can have a formidable nuclear ar-
senal, though until our "Disarmament
Lobby" (to use M. Stanton Evans'
phrase) has been at it a bit longer, I
don't see how Russia can have anywhere
near the equivalent of our inert nuclear
arsenal. They can have a lot of stuff that
they have begged, borrowed, or stolen
from us and from Western Europe-
or had thrust upon them by "peace-
loving" scientists "who have known sin"
-but they can hardly through these
channels have yet achieved physical
parity. (2) The essence of General Le-
May's position is that we should cease
to be shackled by phobias such as "De-
terrence" and "Limited War," and move
confidently to achieve and maintain
clear Military Superiority. In a brilliant
passage he writes:
As to the question of escalation to
general nnclear war, it would seem
that this is a matter which should
concern the Communists more than
it does the United States, provided,
of course, we maintain superior over-
all fighting capability in the strategic
nuclear area, and provided also that
we express determination not to yield
where the nation's vital interests are
at stake. With United States saperior-
ity, the crossing of allY threshold of
escalation presents an outcome pro-
gressively worse fOI' the Communists.
Lacking a capability to fight and win
a full- fledged war with the United
States, they are obliged, in their own
interests, to keep allY tuar at a low
level of intensity.
If we are determined to lise it, our
milital'J strength gives liS the means
by which to control the course of any
conflict. With that control we can
establish the level of conflict at which
AMERICAN OPINION
we can achieve our objecti ves. And
by a pllnishing retaliation we can in-
hibit the enemy f rom carrying the
conflict to higher level s. With an
over-all f orce superiority we can thus
lise escalation as a tool f or achieving
0 111' own objectives, while denying it
to the enemy. (Chapter VI, "Lim-
ited War," Page 160.)
Notice that General LeMay's couns el
assumes a decisive U.S. superiority in
nuclear capability, which we should
maintain, increase if necessary, and ex-
ploit . If his recommendati ons as to the
desirable exploitation are corr ect (and
I certainly believe that they are) - if
they are correct on the basis of his own
assumptions about Russian capability-
then they are simply the more readily
prac ticable on the basis of my somewhat
different assumptions.
I could go on indefi ni tely (being a
bit prolix by nature anyhow) extolling
and promoting Gen eral LeMay's book.
Best you should just get it and read and
study it for yourself. If, that is, you are
a serious and studious type (which you
must be, or how would you have got
thi s far in this review?). On the other
hand, if you just happened to start read-
ing at this point and are too frivolous
and ligh t-hearted (bl ess you!) to read
reviews like thi s or even Gener al Le-
May's book, then promote the book
anyhow. It is great. Get others to read
it. But you can read the following.
Everybody can read these concluding
paragraphs of America Is In Danger.
And should. And should take them to
heart:
The measures we must take to re-
gain and maintain 0111' military snperi-
ority are crystal clear. The ver y first
step, of course, is to rid onrseloes of
those false prophets who have de-
ceived ns and who have gllided liS
into the dangerous waters where we
now fi nd ourselves. They have been
SEPTEMBER, 1968
responsible for placing America in
danger, and each day that they hold
high office America comes closer and
closer to oblivion.
The defense of our country has
never been easy. Bnt it has been worth
any diffi CIIlty. And it is worth it to-
day.
N o hardship is too set/ere, no ex-
pense too mucb, and no life too deal'
to def end this America, the greatest
collntry the world has ever known.'
That 's a student of war that wrote that.
And a fighting American. - MEDFORD
EVANS
Manhattan Project
by STEPHANE GROUEFF. Little, Brown
and Company, Boston and Toronto ;
372 pages, $6.95.
CONSIDERING turnover and subcon-
tracts, a million people worked on the
wartime atomi c bomb - while 179 mi l-
lion Americans knew nothing about it.
Of the ma jority in this case I cannot
speak, but for us million secret workers
I will say that Stephane Groueff has
written a fascinating book . You are th ere
- if you were ever there. ( And if you
were not, it's hard to tell you about it
anyhow.)
You who were at Oak Ridge will read
here of familiar things : cemesto houses
design ed by Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill; prefabs hauled in on trucks;
Alpha racetr acks at Y-12; the castle and
Townsite; K-25, X-lO, and S-50; con-
struction contractors such as Stone and
Webster and J. A. Jones; operating con-
tractors such as T ennessee Eastman and
Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corpo-
ration, a subsidiary of Union Carbide.
The full name, of course, was never
used. I remember the newly arrived
wif e of an Eas tman employee, puzzled
and somewha t distur bed to hear , You
can't get any of those houses; th ey' re
49
going to put Carbide into them-never
daring, because of "security" to ask
what that meant.
Oak Ridge was for several hundred
thousand people the adventure of a life-
time - vast, turbulent, mysterious, and
charged with purpose. Some may, how-
ever, be moved to sarcasm by part of
Groueff's list (actually quite an accurate
list) of site characteristics which
prompted General Leslie R. Groves to
put the "Clinton Engineer Works" at
this particular Tennessee location: "It
answered all the necessary requirements
for the future atomic plants: an isolated
area with plenty of electrical power,
abundant water supply, almost no pop-
ulation, good access by road and train,
and a mild climate that permitted out-
door work the year round."
Power from TVA, yes - though at
that Groves soon had to order construc-
tion of the world's biggest coal-burning.
steam-generated electric-power plant.
Water, yes, illimitable water, down
your neck and under your feet; it was
nice to know, or suspect, or hope, that
it was helpful to the project. As for "al-
most no population" - you didn't tell
that to the natives. They were, by met-
ropolitan standards, few in number, but
extraordinarily sturdy. There was popu-
lation in Dogpatch before the longhairs
came - or even the construction work-
ers. But "good access" and "mild cli-
mate" - brother! Though it did permit
outdoor work the year round. In the
miserable cold mud and winter drizzle,
that was the damnable part! Just a little
bit worse and you couldn't have
worked. Same with the two-lane black-
top roads to the Area gates (quaint
names they had: Elza, Oliver Springs,
Solway, etc.). Any worse roads, and
75,000 ridge-hopping daily commuters
couldn't have gone to work at all. It
was really great. And this book brings
it all back.
Oh, does it ever.
The same goes, I'm sure, for Hanford
50
(State of Washington) workers. About
Los Alamos I'm not so sure. There they
had a special breed of cats. Much smaller
total numbers, far higher percentage of
longhairs (scientists, to you). I visited
Los Alamos, lived in Oak Ridge. The
latter much bigger, the former quite
deadly. Reminds me (I read Orphan
Annie) of Punjab and the Asp. Of
course, it was Daddy Warbucks who
built the Manhattan Project-using the
technical genius of American industry
supported by the vast capital resources
of our free economy.
Just that is the salient point of
Groueff's book. "The magnificent sci-
entific discoveries leading to the first
nuclear chain reaction," he writes, "are
by now relatively well known.... on
the contrary, the public still [does] not
know how the first bomb was built, by
whom and under what circumstances.
It was surprising to me that the Amer-
icans themselves were still unaware of
the prodigious adventure into which
their country's industrial power was
launched, secretly and boldly, at a co-
lossal cost and with an unprecedented
effort, in order to produce the bomb."
(I must say it is surprising, and gratify-
ing, to me that Groueff, a Bulgarian by
birth, expatriated since the Communist
takeover of 1944, knows so much of our
enterprise.)
The story of the industrial giants-
DuPont, General Electric, Eastman,
Union Carbide, Allis-Chalmers, West-
inghouse' Stone and Webster, and the
others - this is "The Untold Story of
the Making of the Atomic Bomb" (the
book's subtitle). Not just intrinsically
fascinating, Groueff's work has this
overriding historic implication: Nuclear
science, theoretical and experimental,
has been and is international; but the
variety, flexibility, and power of Amer-
ican industry which translated that sci-
ence into production are not matched
elsewhere in the world . - MEDFORD
EVANS
AMERICAN OPINION
A1r(QVlE
ILllJEIRllS
The Last Unicorn
by PETER S. BEAGLE. The Viking
Press, New York; 218 pages, $4.95.
WE SUFFER today from the Outer
Conspiracy of collectivism and the In-
ner Hypnosis of nihilism. The Con-
spiracy can never fully be defeated and
abolished until the Hypnosis is broken
and dissolved. A certain obsessive mood
that combines a false "philosophy" with
a sick "art" has made men subject to a
bleak "Liberal" conformity that is sel-
dom challenged and more seldom tran-
scended. In literature, the dominant
creed is one of unscientific "science,"
unrealistlic "realism," and a barebones,
cadaver negativism that knows nothing
of truth. We and the world need most
a bold, non-conformist, imaginative,
myth-making art of transcendence, of
joy, of color, of the glory of Romance
where magic casements open on the
foam.
This book is a bugle (if not a trum-
pet) blown before the walls of Jericho.
SEPTEMBER, 1968
It amazes me, it heartens me, it opens
for me a magic casement, it breaks the
pattern of conformist "realism" and of
fashionable skeletal existentialism. The
book is a noble, daring commando raid
by Romance, into the dull dreary Valley
of Dry Bones where Norman Mailer
(et al.) lies in a sprawl of sun-bleached
ribs.
There are certain noble symbols that
are forever eternal truths. Such is the
word, such is the symbol: Unicorn .
J. B. Priestley, in one of his finest essays,
"The Unicorn," writes: "the Unicorn,
just because he is not a creature of this
world, escapes the withering process of
time. Unlike the Lion, he is young as
ever he was, as swift and strong; his
eyes are undimmed; his single horn as
tense and unyielding as it was many
centuries ago. He was magical then, he
is magical now." And Priestley con-
cludes, "The only future we can have
worth living in is the one we greet,
bravely and triumphantly, riding on a
Unicorn." Unicorn, indeed, is a great
word, a great reality, a creature of
legend that we should feed on pure
grain in an ivory manger and on a
golden forage of daffodils. Here Peter
Beagle boldly introduces us to that
legendary, noble creature:
The Unicorn lived in a lilac wood,
and she lived all alone. She was very
old, though she did not know it, and
she was no longer the careless color
of sea foam, but rather the color of
mow falling on a moonlit night. But
her eyes were still clear and unwear-
ied, and she still moved like a shadow
on the sea.
The Unicorn suddenly realizes that
she is alone - the last of the unicorns,
but that she should not be alone. For
there had been hundreds of unicorns
once in the world, and unicorns are
immortal . . . so they can not be dead.
Where are they? (And where, in our
51
world, are they?) Her heart is lonely
for unicorns; and the world is perishing
for the beauty and wonder of unicorns;
and so she sets out on a one-unicorn
quest of the last unicorn for the lost
unicorns.
That quest leads her through many
adventures. She is captured by a witch-
in-charge of a circus, till she is freed
by a good magician who too often
doubts (and so destroys) his own
power. She finds Molly, a faithful
woman of the woods, who accompanies
and succors her. And she finds that the
unicorns whose wonder and beauty
could save the world are herded into the
surf of a desolate sea in the Kingdom
of King Haggard (a sort of fungus land
where men grow old and dead), by a
Red Bull who is the outward arm of
Haggard whose soul is an inward sick-
ness. I believe that Beagle makes no
conscious realization of the Conspiracy
and the Hypnosis - but what matter?
He writes from the super-conscious,
whence come eternal truths; and he is
nobly right in making the blind brute
- a Red Bull!
The style here, after the sawdust-and-
lysol of most corrtemporary, and all con-
formist, writers today, is beautiful like
the perfeot curve and the gorgeous colors
of the rainbow. Savor the phrases :
"After these came the slower heights
of summer and the baked plains where
the air hung shiny as candy . . . the
vast form of the Red Bull came charg-
ing out of the moon. . . . Fear and
hunger have kept me young . . . a small
copper-and-ashes cat with a crooked ear.
. . . It was a small smile, like the new
moon, a slender band of brightness on
the edge of the unseen the daylight
gaiety of his voice " And, of the
Red Bull: "A terrible light poured from
him like sweat, and his voice started
landslides flowing into one another. His
horns were as pale as scars...."
But anyone who loves a pen from
which flow beautiful phrases can find
52
them for himself on every page of Mr.
Beagle's book. Yet I must quote a
passage where beauty of style coheres
with wisdom of vision - Prince Lir's
words, thus: "Anyway, since you and
I must ohoose one road to follow, out
of the many that run to the same place
in the end, it might as well be a road
that a unicorn has taken. We may never
see her, but we will always know where
she has been."
One thing here is so rare and so mag-
nificent that it is unique in "modern"
literature. The magician, suddenly
seized by a power beyond himself, calls
forth a processional of figures - Robin
Hood, Maid Marian, Friar John, Allan-
a-Dale, and all the rest go marohing,
taller than men, nobler than men,
through the greenwood. The shabby
"real" robbers of the wood first pursue
to join them, then return to deny and
curse them as shadows . But Molly says:
"Nay, Cully, you have it backward ...
there's no such person as you, or me,
or any of us. Robin and Marian are
real, and we are the legend!" This is
spiritual dynamite under "realism" and
existentialism and egalitarianism: The
shabby "factual" figures that claim to
be "real" are actually legend, and the
great noble archtypes of essential man
- poet and hero and prophet - are
reality. I have always believed this, but
I never expected to live to find it in
contemporary literature!
There is a beautiful love story here.
To save the Unicorn from the Red Bull,
the magician turns her into a lovely
human girl. She cannot quite forget,
she longs to be the Unicorn again, but
she more than half falls in love with
Prince Lir - who falls wholly in love
with her. Yet only as a girl can she love
him ... and she is essentially - uni-
corn. The end I will not tell, for - past
all sentimentality and higher than all
happy endings - that wonder of grief
and glory must be yours to read.
Amid all the political victories of the
AMERICAN OPINION
Conspiracy and the Hypnosis that dis-
figure and dismay, here is a brave trum-
pet blown by a new Roland before the
Dark Tower. Here, to hearten and de-
light us, is myth and beauty and Ro-
mance. This is a rare and beautiful book
that all conservatives should read. And
one final loveliness, after the Red Bull
is routed and King Haggard over-
thrown, is this marvelous saying: "They
will need time to feel comfortable with
flowers, he said." Let us cherish this
and know that after the Conspiracy and
the Hypnosis are broken, the world will
indeed "need time to feel comfortable
with flowers."-E. MERRILL ROOT
The Accidental President
by ROBERT SHERRILL. Pyramid Books,
New York; 251 pages, 95.
Ir's REFRESHING now and then to read
a book where both Leftist author and
Leftist hero talk and act like knaves.
Such a treat is The Accidental Presi-
dent, by a seasoned old Washington
hand-a Left hand. If you would enjoy
a banquet of ill-disguised hate, it's set
out for you here, on the damask of an
able writing job, and composed of vic-
tuals that will satisfy the hardiest con-
servative appetite.
Many people, I imagine, would buy
this book for the fun of being told that
our retiring President is every four-
letter word in the language. But as the
story unfolds the reader discovers that
Mr. Johnson may not be quite so much
of a bum as the man who is calling him
one. Mr. Sherrill's skill in associating his
victim with every conceivable shady
deal, is unquestioned. But it is worth
the ninety-five cents to find him, I am
sure without his intention, condemning
himself with his own radical hate.
It is hard to read the book without
visualizing it as a grudge job. Spraying
nasty cracks like a machine-gun, the
author drops a whole lot of big game
SEPTEMBER, 1968
beside Mr. Johnson. I seem to detect,
in Sherrill's resentment, the surprising
idea that the President is really a fascist,
involved with grand schemes which in-
clude just about every industrialist of
note in Texas. The author readily ad-
mits that the Lone Star State is a' poor
pasture for "Liberals"; Br'er Johnson is
The Fox, in a country of foxes, that
has things his own way.
I get from the account of all this the
author's concern that the one unbeatable
tyrant in America will turn out to be
a two-headed monster composed of
Texas tycoons and Johnson-type politi-
cians. If the Communists are in it at
all, Mr. Sherrill is mighty careful not
to mention it - suggesting perhaps
where his own sympathies lie. This
sinister combine, he says, owns all the
means of production, all the political
influence, not to mention all the cash
to make it churn. According to this
biographer the President, and before
him the Senator from South Texas,
single handed, managed the whole
thing, all the way from those eighty-
seven votes that put Mr. Johnson in the
Senate in 1948, to the monstrous farce
in Vietnam which we are told LB.J.
arranged because he loves to do things
big. All this his doing. Well, I sup-
pose the Far Left needs a fall guy as
much as anyone, and Sherrill is certainly
the four-letter master craftsman to make
the story plausible .
It's more; there's a sort of Through
The Looking Glass magic to the narra-
tive, with the reader taking the part of
Alice, shuttling back and forth between
that chess game and the Mad Tea Party.
Thus, we have the dual delight of con-
demning L.B.J. and his tormenter as
smearer and smeared change back and
forth, each hoist with his own petard.
It's not so often that a seasoned writer
goes gunning for ducks and comes home
in the bag with the birds. But this one
does. I recommend The Accidental
President. - DAVID O. WOODBURY
53
BULLETS
Mankind has lived in violence for six
thousand years-or, if one is a believer
in evolution, for more than a million.
So now, Johnson is going to find out
what causes it and send the bill to us.
David O. Woodbury

To admit poverty is no disgrace to a
man, but to" make no effort to escape
it, is indeed disgraceful.
Thucydides

Our greatest national problem today is
erosion, not erosion of the soil or erosion
of the national morality-erosion of tra-
ditional enforcement of law and order.
The Honorable Ezra Taft Benson

Listening to some of the faculty in
our colleges makes a fellow think we
should raise the voting age-maybe to
somewhere around forty.
Ben Levy
As soon as you can say what you
think, and not what some other person
has thought for you, you are on the way
to being a remarkable man .
James M. Barrie, Tommy and Grisel
*
Cleanness of the body was ever
deemed to proceed from a due reverence
to God.
Francis Bacon, Advancement of
Learning, Bk. II
Isn't it revealing that Liberals, in the
General Assembly and out , can mouth
the platitudes of individual freedom in
one breath, and agitate for a compulsory
school attendance law that would coerce
children in the next?
Richmond News Leader
We finally got our color TV and I
have discovered what's wrong in Wash-
ington-we have a green President.
The Restless Quill
54
Many economists recently have spoken
out in favor of a guaranteed annual
wage. If such an unsound socialistic pro-
gram is adopted, we will be in great
danger of losing our "guaranteed an-
nual America."
George H . Wagner Jr.

A bachelor is like a detergent; both
are fast workers and neither leaves a
nng.
Old Maid

At the rate we are going, the meek
will not inherit the earth, they will over-
run it.
Alice Barbee

Since we have a government with an
insatiable appetite, we have a govern-
ment with a much-abused Constitution.
John McLeod

The only kind of labor which gives
the workingman a title to all its fruits
is that which he does as his own master.
Pope Pius II

Hang yourself brave Crillon; we have
fought at Argues and you were not
there .
Henry IV of France
Those who plot the destruction of
others often fall themselves .
Phaedrus, Fables: Appendix
Unemployment as a mass phenom-
enon is the outcome of allegedly "pro-
labour" policies of the governments and
of trade union pressure and compulsion.
Ludwig von Mises
In the U.S.A. the "poverty level" is
$3,000 a year. In the rest of the world
the annual income doesn't average much
above $100 a year.
J. Kesner Kahn
AMERICAN OPI NION
FROM SCIENCE
DAVID O. WOODBURY
My WIFE and I sat in quiet anonym-
ity, not long ago, at a luncheon at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy, celebrating the completion of the
Institute's latest skyscraper , the new
Space Laboratory. The affair was in-
deed an exercise in cordial hosting -
shall we say brainwashing? - of the
individual alumnus, of which I am an
example. Beautiful decor, lovely food,
sparkling conversation with experts.
It was a momentous occasion, and a
portent.
If there was a sense of doom present
it was not the fault of my alma mater.
Not alone. You could blame it better
on Bigness, stalking like a modern
Gargantua through the hall. These
brilliant people had started something
tremendous, and were shouldering it
into the mainstream of American
affairs. But they came on light feet,
softly, in the guise of the leaders of a
new civilization.
With a very good lunch tucked un-
der our belt s, we watched the two or
three hundred guests settle down to
a mutual admiration part y between
M.LT. and the Space Agency, N. A.S.A.
for short. We were at first charmed
with honeyed words, then alerted with
the sense of urgenc y that flowed there,
and finall y we began to be concerned.
Here was emerging the precisely drawn
blueprint for the future: science, indus-
try, and government building a worl d
of their own devising, in which us chick-
ens would be roosting in a vast struc-
ture, with every perch numbered, every
moment accounted for.
Pr incipal speaker at the affair was
N.A.S.A.'s Head Boy, James Webb -
the man who will soon be administering
the moon and the territory beyond. His
SEPTEMBER, 1968
talk began as a fulsome eulogy of the
great technical establishment on the
Charles, which does, after all, supply
the government with more newl y solved
secrets of nature than any other factory
of ideas in the country. But soon he got
down to cases.
Here, for a moment, we saw the Space
Agency in a fish bowl. Humbly, it was
admitting that it, and all of government,
must rely wholl y on the giant industrial
complex of America and upon the
M.LT.s which supply the raw brain
production that is to make our future
civilization run. It sounded grand and
it sounded sinister: The Plan by which
we shall solve all our shortcomings and
all our ills. The feeling of ultimate and
overwhelming power was driven home
by one little remark that Mr. Webb
made in modesty or satisfaction :
Don't think, said the speaker, that
N.A.S.A. or anybody else really makes
decisions. No, whoever you are, how-
ever high, there is always a man who
looks over your shoulder, telling you
exactly what to do, and how.
It was as simple as that-the picture
of a tightl y integrated cartel, a monop-
olistic structur e composed of the peo-
ple who make things go in the world.
But at every level up to the Top, in
every branch and nation, there would
be a ladder of authori ty going up (the
audience instinctively looked at the
ceiling here) .
It was startling because it was so
gentle, yet so final. You could see that
everyone in the audience accepted it as
trustingl y as oxygen in the air.
The three colossi of the American
scene are lockstepping toward total
cont rol of all human existence. They
are government, big business, and
55
scientific genius, wit h the inevitable
taxpayers, thrashing in the waves,
going down in a sea of frustration.
This is the pattern for tomorrow-
an all-embracing dictatorship of once-
free citizens by the small minority of
those who can think up progress, who
can turn it into useful hardware and
then enforce its ironclad rules. Hidden
in it somewhere, of course, is the
Money Source, vital to the plan. The
speaker seemed comfortable about
that . But it won't be the old-fashioned
taxpayer any more. The majority on
the production line won't have any
money of its own, just the use of a
share-cropper's fraction of a new kind
of financial stream which circulates
like water in the plumbing, lubricat ing
and facilitat ing existence, no more.
There is nothing new about this. as
a dream, but the meeting at M.LT. did
firmly undersco re its final approach to
reality. And with it a smugness, an
inevitability, yes, a complacency that
warned the listener that we are far
along the road toward the Age of a
Technological Big Brother who wears
a locomotive engineer's cap and gog-
gles and drives the only engin e on the
road-the One World Express.
I don't believe these good people
have the foggiest idea where their Ex-
press is taking us all. The trip is to
them a scenic journey through a con-
stantly unfolding Wonderland that has
no limit. Within their framework
they are intensely practical, yet seem
to have no hold on reality at all. They
seem incredibly ignorant of people-
strikes, the fligh ts of poetry and music,
the heights of exaltation and the dis-
couragements of ordinary freedom.
For all these thi ngs must be left be-
hin d when the Express gets underway.
To this new species of dreamers, ap-
parently, there is Utopia ahead for
everyone. The technologist'S idea is
frightening: everything gigantic, every-
thing at supersonic speed, everything
56
automated and computed and cata-
logued, the only tool a push button.
Man's only friend: the personality that
stands behind him with a hand on his
shoulder.
In this fast-dawning world of mecha-
nized collectivism, there may be only
one hope : it may not work! We can
imagine that in the Twent y-First Cen-
tury or the Twenty-Second, if people re-
gain their courage reluct antly, it wiII
have become clear that there can't be
civilization without viable human beings
in it. Robots driven by pushbuttons and
discouragement won't be enough. Un-
able to fall any lower, men and women
will begin to arise, stand up, stiffen their
backs and fight. It wiII be seen then that
the beauti ful planners and givers of
commands hadn't had their way because
of their courage, but only because,
armed with endless machines, it was so
easy. Sudden ly it is easy no longer ; sud-
denl y, to maintain their authority it is
difficult , and soon impossible, for them
to deal with aroused human will. At
that moment the last pushbutton wiII
be pushed, and a normal and individual
world wiII dawn again .
It is a tragic thing that , by going only
a little wrong just now, by accepting
too much shi ny tinsel and too littl e
obligation to decency, we of today can't
seem to learn the lesson contained in
those two lost centuries. If mankind
could choose the good leaders instead
of the bad; if it could aspire to a firm
moral position instead of to no position
at all; if it could, in short, simply use
plain common sense, the horrors of
slavery to machines and to the mechan-
ics who will operate them, could be
avoided. Particularly, it is the mechan-
ic, not the hardware, that is dangerous.
The machines, once abandoned by thei r
masters, would stand mutely by while
their new owners destroyed them.
There was a powerful warning at that
luncheon in Cambridge, but the three
colossi didn't see it. Shall we?
AMERICAN OPI NION
PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS
HANS F. SENNHOLZ
'REINHOLD NIEBUHR, the towering
teacher of Christian ethics from Union
Theological Seminary, identifies him-
self as a "Christian realist" who seeks
to put "political realism into the service
of justice." Let's take a look.
"Christian Realism"
Professors Harry R. Davis and
Robert C. Good, the authors of Rein-
hold Niebuhr on Politics (Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1960) describe the
master 'as a realist "except when he is
flaying the realists for the failure to un-
derstand the normative dimension of
life," and as an idealist "except when
he is scoring the idealists for their fail-
ure to assess the resistance of all men to
the normative dimension of life." To an
unbiased observer, whether he be a
monist or dualist, idealist or materialist,
metaphysician or positivist, the political
writings of Niebuhr reveal a philo-
sophical eclecticism which is the most
common body of thought in our times.
When Niebuhr discusses the disor-
ders of a technical civilization he seems
to echo the bitter criticism of the mate-
rialists, whether they are Communists,
socialists, or Great Societists. Accord-
ing to him, the advancing technic, our
modern methods of production, consti-
tute the root of much political and so-
cial disorder. In the words of Davis and
Good, "we have not been able to devel-
op political and social instruments
which are adequate for the kind of so-
ciety which a technical civilization
makes possible and necessary. . . .The
ever increasing introduction of technics
into the fields of production and com-
munications constantly enlarges the in-
tensity and extent of social cohesion in
modern man's economic life; and also
SEPTEMBER, 1968
tends constantly to centralize effective
economic power. . . . The effect of tech-
nics upon production is to create great-
er and greater disproportions of eco-
nomic power and thus to make the
achievement of justice difficult."
In international affairs, according to
Niebuhr, European technology gave
rise to European imperialism which in
two World Wars "came in conflict with
each other over the spoils of their impe-
rial thrusts." The economic and politi-
cal injustices committed by the Europe-
an powers created resentment, opposi-
tion, and rebellion in the African and
Asian world. The instruments of a
technical civilization thus gave birth
to the anarchy of our times when the
sins of our fathers are visited upon us.
In our domestic affairs modern tech-
nology, according to Niebuhr, has
"made the worker powerless, except in-
sofar as common organized action has
given 'him a degree of social and politi-
cal power. . . . Consequently a virtual
civil war between the new industrial
classes and the more privileged and se-
cure classes and landowners and own-
ers of industrial property tended to
destroy the unity of industrial nations.
. . . The total effect of a rise of a tech-
nical civilization and an industrial so-
ciety has been the destruction of com-
munity on the national level and the
extension of conflict on the internation-
al level." (Page 6.)
It is obvious that Niebuhr uses ma-
terialistic arguments in order to con-
demn modern capitali stic society. "Ex-
istence is dependent upon matter," says
the materialist. "Whatever mental pro-
cesses man experiences, although such
entities truly exist, are caused by mate-
rial processes in general, and environ-
57
mental forces of production in particu-
lar." What distingui shes Dr. Niebuhr 's
concept of mat erial process from the
Marxian concept of "the mat erial pro-
ductive forces" ? Very little, indeed!
The state of pract ic al technical
knowledge or the t echnical quality of
the tools of production is the essential
Marxian feature of historical evolution.
It uniquely determines economic activ-
ity and thereby the stage of political
and social progress. Marx and Engels
enthusiastically awaited new inventions
and te ch no l ogica l improvements
which, they were sure, would bring
them nearer the realizat ion of their
hopes, the evolution of socialism. Of
course, Dr. Niebuhr does not share
their hopes for socialism, merel y their
philosophical and epistemological argu-
ments .
Christian idealists deny the validity
of these mate rialistic trains of thought.
We believe that technology is merely a
product of a man's thought and ideas.
True, tools and machines are mat erial,
but their creation is a mental process.
Modern t echnol ogy is the fr uit of
Western man's init iative and freedom,
enjoyed for nearly two hundred years.
Thoughts and ideas pertaining to the
political, social, and economic structure
of society induce man to expand his
division of labor, and form capital for
employment and production. They
made him fight for indivi dual freedom
and enterprise which are the inescapa-
ble prereq uisites of technological and
economic progress.
History is not moved by man's tech-
nology, but by his ideas and actions.
Hi stor y is a sequence of man's actions
and reactions, reason and prejudice,
wisdom and blindness, which are char-
acterized by their singulari ty.
To condemn European colonialism
on grounds of exploitation and injus-
tice, and explain the World Wars in
terms of competitive conflict "over the
spoils of their imperial thrusts" is to
58
repeat t he flagrant accusations made by
the exiled V.1. Leni n more than fifty
years ago. In reality, the European ac-
quisition of most colonies was moti-
vated by mercantilistic ideas dur ing the
age of Mercantilism. But during the
Ni neteenth Century of capitalism, the
most peaceful century of Western
history, the Europeans brought law,
order, and the light of Western civiliza-
tion to the dark continents, invested
many billions of thei r funds in back-
ward regions, raised economic produc-
tion and standards of living all over
the world, and created a world econo-
my with an ever-expandi ng interna-
tional division of labor. Their retreat
and the corresponding a dva n ce of
Asian and African collectivism during
the last two d ecades hav e ag a i n
dimmed the light of civilization.
The two World Wars have merely
hastened the Weste rn decline, which
followed in the wake of collectivism in
the guise of nationalism and political,
social, and economic statism. The de-
cline of the West is tantamount to the
decline of the ideas and values on
which its civilization was built.
"Chr istian realism" obviously fails
to shed light on the crucial probl ems of
our troubled age. It merely muddles
the fundamental differences between
the thought and ideas of Western civili-
zation and the world view of socialism
and commu n ism. In the name of
"Christian realism" its advocates are
peddl ing mat erialism, the sociological
doctrines of class and race conflict, of
exploitation and depri vation. They in-
cite discontent and hatr ed, civil disobe-
dience and disorder. They preach envy
and covetousness, and threaten to dis-
rupt the free society unl ess it changes
to their image.
T he ideal world in the eyes of
"Christian realists" differs little from
that of Marx and Lenin. Of course, it
would be run by ordained ministers
rather than atheist commissars. .
AMERI CAN OPI NION
CONFETTI ..
An Ame rican and his Cockney friend
were walking down the street of a mid-
western town one night when an owl
set up his ancient "W-h-o; W-h-o!
W-h-o!" Puzzled, the Engli shman
scowled : "What is that ?"
"Oh, that ? An owl," answere d the
American casually.
"Well," stormed the insulted English-
man, "I know it's an 'owl. But what the
'ell is it that's 'owling ?"
.. .. ..
If reports are true, the late Senator
James Watson (R.-Indiana) was one of
the wittiest and most colorful men ever
to sit in the Senate. Winding up one
campaign, he concluded: "Now I've
given you the facts. You know exactly
where I stand on the issues. You can
vote for me or you can go to the devil."
Calvin Coolidge, whose humor paral-
leled that of the Senator, heard of Wat-
son' s final remark. Looking out of the
window toward the Capitol, Mr. Cool-
idge said: "Watson left them a difficult
alternative."
.. ..
Joseph T. Meek of the Illinois Retail
Merchants Association report ed a short
time ago that his group has become con-
cerned over the way history and politics
are being taught in high schools. After
receiving results of a recent history test,
his concern was int ensified. The last
question read: "The Declaration of In-
dependence was written by "
One student filled in the black space
with the word, "candlelight."
.. ..
Many years ago Prince Otto von Bis-
marck challenged a German professor
to a duel because he did not like a crit-
icism made by the learned pedagogue.
Being astute, the latter waved aside the
customary dueling pistols.
"As the challenged party," said the
SEPTEMBER, 1968
professor, "I have the choice of weap-
ons. And," he smiled as he placed two
sausages on the table, "I choose these.
One sausage is infected with lethal
trichinosis. The other is not. I ask that
your Excellency choose whichever one
you wish. I will eat the other."
Exploding in frustration, Bismarck
began to laugh and the duel was called
off.
.. ..
Recently a sheriff in the western part
of the country confiscated a number of
slot machines . He did so, he explained,
on the basis of a law banning the use of
steel traps for catching dumb animals.
Cowboy : "What kind of saddle do
you want , one with a horn or without?"
Dude: "Without, I g ues s. There
doesn't seem to be much traffic on these
prairies."
.. ..
"How did you enjoy your horseback
ride?" the Westerner asked the newly
arrived Easterner.
"Frankly," replied the Easterner, "I
never thought anything filled with hay
could be so hard."
A nervous but determined rookie sol-
dier was on guard for the first time in
his life. A dark form approached him.
"Haiti " he cried, in a menacing tone.
"Who goes there?"
"The officer of the day."
"Advance! "
The officer advanced, but before he
had proceeded six steps the sentry again
cried, "Halt!"
"This is the second time you have
halted me," observed the officer. "What
are you going to do next ?"
"Never you mind what I'm gonna do.
My orders are to call ' Halt' three times,
then shoot! "
59
FROM LONDON
FRANK MACMILLAN
WHEN ARCHEOLOGISTS uncovered the
ruins of Pompeii during the last cent ury,
they discovered what appeared to be
the charred remai ns of a Roman soldier
who had been on sentry duty when the
volcano erupted above the town. This
discover y inspired a famous paintin g
called "Faithful unto Death," which
shows the young sentinel looking up at
the erupting lava, armed wi th weapons
whi ch can do nothing to stave off the
coming disaster . . . but nonethel ess
holding faithfully to his post.
Such a situation well illustr ates the
cur rent attitude of many observers of
British politics. The electorate has in
local elections shown massive distrust
for Childe Harold's Government ; and,
in Pa rliamentary elections this year,
constituency after constituency which
had for generations been Labor strong-
holds (aye, even castles) has fallen to
the Tories. Yet, Chi lde Harold continues
on his way, his pipe smoki ng like the
volcano, wh ile Britain is being buried in
the ash and lava of economic disaster.
Of course, the Childe has not lost
every castle. He still holds Barbara Cas-
tle, his Minister of Emp loyment and
Product ivity. Mr s. Castle is a vivacious
red-head, elegant, good-looking, and a
dedicated Socialist.To raise her to her
pr esent position, Childe Harold had to
remove Mr. Ray Gunter, perhaps the
only gen uine Cabinet-level representa-
tive of the Trade Union element of the
Labor Party. As Minist er of Labor,
Gunter's success was generally grea ter
or less according to whether Childe
Harold kept out of negot iat ions or per-
sonally intervened to foul up.
Mr. Gunter' s most memor able con-
tributi on to the wit and wisdom of our
times was his famous speech early this
JUNE, 1968
year when he tr ied to convi nce the
Trade Union body to persuade "our
comrades" that the concept of a business
making a profit is not to be regarded
as something worse than incest and
lechery. That was enormously funny -
at the time. But , funny though it was,
Gunter was one of the few men who
could argue that point of view in an
industrial dispute and tell the Trade
Union bosses to grow up! Still , as he
was neither an int ellectual nor a
Wilsonite he had to go. As he revealed
ingenuously on TV, he wasn 't even told
the real reason for the shif t, getting
onl y the usual Wilson doubletalk about
his own Min istry of Labor being "re-
str uctured, etc."
So Ray Gunter was moved aside for
the promotion of the Red Queen. And
do you know what Barbara Castle did?
Wi thin weeks she had gro unded every
airflight in the nationalized British
Eu ropean Airways and British Ov erseas
Airways Corporation - because she
wouldn' t even listen to the requests of
the Bri tish Ai rline Pilots' Association.
And, what is more, she managed
to antagonize the highly skilled mem-
bers of the small labor union wh ich
mans our locomotives (the Association
Societies of Locomoti ve Engineers and
Footplatemen) and the entire body of
less-skill ed railway employees (the Na-
tional Union of Railwaymen) . As a
result, our skies have been emptied and
enormous numbers of trains cancelled
or worked onl y on a "go-slow" basis.
Dynamic, for ward-looking, eager Bar-
bara had done all that!
What was interesting about Gunter's
shor t letter of resignation was its blunt-
ness. He wro te to Wilson: "I no longer
desire to be a member of your Govern-
61
ment." This recalls the phrasing of
George Brown's resignation as Foreign
Secretary, when he said that he was
resigning because he didn't like "the
way we come to decisions." In other
words, Wilson is running a Presidential
Government - not the constitutionally
British Cabinet-type Administration.
Worse, Chi Ide Harold's Castle is now
managing to prepare the way for a cosy
little police state in which Union leaders
can be fined for daring to cross Wilson
in industrial disputes - that is, if they
don't come to heel quickly enough to
please the Chi Ide. Naturally enough,
there was a considerable revolt of the
Trade Union representatives in the
Commons over this matter and at one
stage of the fracas the Government's
majority dropped to a mere eighteen
votes.
But this wasn't the only trouble
buoyant Barbara stirred up for herself.
When the Chairman of Hambro's Bank
announced that his firm was going to
increase its contributions to the Tory
Party from a mere $2,400 to $24,000 be-
cause Harold Wilson "is the worst
Prime Minister since Lord North,"
Barbara briskly declared that her De-
partment would be investigating the
"inflationary" rise in salary recently
voted by the bank to its Chairman.
Almost immediately afterwards, when
the question arose of appointing a new
General Secretary of the Labor Party
(which is independent of the Parlia-
mentary Party) the awkward fact
emerged that the man whom Harold
Wilson wanted to see nominated,
Housing Minster Tony Greenwood,
thought the salary offered was too
small - which it certainly is! Thus it
quickly became obvious that, if the
Labor Party organization decided to
raise the salary of its General Secretary,
breezy Barbara would also have to
threaten her own Party with investiga-
tion.
In the meantime, Britain continues
62
to slither quietly towards a second
devaluation. The excuse this time is that
after the weeks of chronic disorders in
France which preceded the French
General Election, and which had a
catastrophic effect on industrial produc-
tion and the tourist industry, de Gaulle
may devalue the franc - which would
eliminate the advantages supposedly
gained for Britain from last year's de-
valuation. This could be true, of course
- as far as it goes. It is, however,
primarily a pretext, for the last de-
valuation of the pound was a botch from
every technical viewpoint. It was seen
to be inevitable; it was denied; then,
when it was obviously and officially
imminent, it was delayed for four days.
When it eventually took place, of
course, it was insufficient - and, more
important, it was not followed up with
proper economic measures.
That failure to gain advantage from
the devaluation is among the many
reason Britons haven't been seeing
much of Childe Harold on our TV
screens lately. His public relations ad-
visors tell him that he is strictly poison,
and the opinion polls reiterate it.
All of this provided the background
for a double-barreled trap set by two
mischievous Tories just before the
summer recess. One asked whether it
would be appropriate for the Prime
Minister to make a "massive explana-
tion" on TV of the worsening balance
of payments, the mounting overseas
debt, rising unemployment, and Cabinet
resignations. Chi Ide Harold came back
with mouthfuls of statistics showing
that everything is lovely in the English
country garden. Then the trap was
sprung. The second Tory sweetly agreed
with the Premier that maybe this pro-
posal for a TV appearance could be put
off till some later date because, at the
moment, it would be "a melancholy
example of the unpopular explaining
the unacceptable to the unbelicoing"

AMERICAN OPINION
FROM AFRICA
CiEORCiE S. SCHUYLER
REMINISCENT of the Hitler-Stalin ex-
change of bill ingsgate prior to the 1939
pact whi ch launched World War H,
has been the recent and equally fraudu-
lent propaganda war between Peking
and Moscow. Nowhere is the Red im-
post ur e more evident than in Africa
where both Peking and Moscow co-
operate for mu tual conquest of the hap-
less cont inent . The most gla ring show-
case is Zanzibar . In the lO20-square-
mile terr itory, consisting of the two
islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, a
population of 300,000 hapless inhabitant s
is rul ed by Tanzania's First Vice Pr esi-
dent, the dicta tor Sheikh Abeid Karu me
- with the help of the Soviet Union,
Red China, and East Germanv . . . all
working toget her for the c o m ~ o n ill.
Ten years ago it was recognized by
the Int ernational Communist Conspira-
cy (just as the Egypt ians, Sumerians,
Indians, Persians, and Ara bs before
them) that whoever cont rols the East
Coast of Africa, and especially Zanz i-
bar (Zenj Bar means Negro Coast)
cont rols the Open Sesame to the wealth
of Af rica. The first wealth was gold,
ivory, and slaves, which enric hed Asia
from Bagdad to Peking; and the slave
trade continued into the late Nineteenth
Cen tury. T he current wealth is the al-
most inexhaustible mineral resources of
Zambi a, Rhodesia, the Congo and
Southern Af rica, and the vast reservoir
of black labor to exploit them.
At the beginning of the Sixteenth
Cent ury the intrepid Portuguese naviga-
tors broke up the Arabs ' train in East
Africa, only to be deposed in the
Seventeenth Century by the Omani
Arabs, who in turn came under British
protection in 1890 and proceeded to
abolish the lucrative, centuries-old slave
SEPTEMBER, 1968
trade. The last of the great traditional
slavers was the resourceful T ippu Tib,
one-time admi nistrator of King Leo-
pold's Congo preserve, who had a
statue erected to him bv Zanzibar 's
gratef ul Arabo-Af rican ar istocracy. Zan-
zibar's other claim to fame was the
rich clove ind ustry, manned by the
African majority (eigh ty percent) .
The Communist deus ex machina was
Abdubrahman Babu, an adroit hustler
who in 1957 rose to prominence in the
Af ro-Shirazi Part y (A.S.P.) as General
Secretary and immedi ately appealed
demagogically to the black majori ty.
The black A.S.P. quickl y won over the
Zanzi bar Nationalist Party, controlled
by the brown elite. Babu, a known
Communist, ran a newsletter called
Zanews on behalf of the New China
Agency (Sin/wa) , reportedly receiving
considerable loot from Peking.
When Babu's more overt appeals to
racism could not win the approva l of
the A.S.P. executive committ ee, he re-
signe d and promp tly formed the Com-
munists' terrorist U.N.M.A. Party. The
latter group infi ltrated the A.S.P.,
especially its youth section, and wooed
the Zanzibar Federation of Progressive
Trade Unions, calling for African So-
cialism. Thus, on the eve of indepen-
dence in Januar y 1964, the island was
torn with dissension between the A.S.P.
and the Z.NP., and the revolutionary
picture looked bright. T he Af ro-Shirazi
Part y was backed by Moscow whi le
Peking used the Zanzibar Nationalist
Party. This was a deal that would have
made Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat envious.
Funds having been made available
from you-know-who, "experts" were
tra ined in Moscow, Peking, and Havana
for the new world a'cornin. T he Brit ish,
63
eager to get the lodestone from around
their incr easingly scrawny imperial
neck, ignored the warning of their
police officers that a coup was coming.
On Janu ar y 9, 1964, the tipoff came
when Ko Liang, Babu 's Red Chinese
"advisor" crossed the forty miles from
Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar. On Janu ary
eleventh came Der Tag. The Commu-
nist "Fi eld Marshal" John Okello, a
Red origi nally from Ugand a ( where
another Red, Dr. Milton Obote, now
holds sway as Pr esident by virt ue of a
later coup that claimed fifteen thousand
lives) , seized power with six hundred
guerrillas, mostly from Tanzani a. A
Revolutionar y Council was set up com-
posed of A.S.P. and U.M.M.A. Part y
leaders and a People's Republic was pro-
claimed. Karume became Pr esident and
Babu became Minister of Foreign
Affairs and National Defense. A fort-
night later , after ten thousand were
slaughtered by the Red Gu ards, the
British High Commissioner and the
American Charge d' Affair es were ex-
pelled and whi te newsmen ousted. The
peace of the cemetery prevailed.
About this time an attempted mut iny
fome nted in neighbor ing Tanzania
(t hen Tanganyika) was thwarted by
the int ervention of British troops as a
gesture of Commonwealth solidarity.
T his even extended to Zanzibar where
Britain recognized the bloody Revolu-
tionary Council and extended economic
aid, even though the deposed Prime
Minister and nine of his Ministers, elec-
ted by the peopl e, had been thrown into
prison-without trial, of cours e-where
they still vegetate
Four months later came the union
of T angany ika and Zanzibar, although
the latt er has largely honored it in the
breach , and visitors are now barred -
especially newsmen. Censorship is
understandably rigid. The prisons are
packed with two thousand people from
the "wrong" side and subjected to
typical Red tortures. Where the old, bad
64
colonialists never had more than two
hundred administrators on the two
islands, their successors have installed
600 Ch inese, 190 East Germa ns, 100
Russians, and some Bulgar ians.
There are four thousand men in
Karume's army, trained by an 150-
man Chinese mil itary mission, wh ich
also sends instructors of subversion and
guerr illa fighting to adjoining countri es,
and offers postg rad uate courses in Com-
munism and the wr itings of Mao Tse-
tung. The Red Chinese have not only
imported quantiti es of ligh t ar ms but
also numerous Chinese lady Comrades
to be marri ed off to likely Zanzibaris.
and they all diligentl y study Swahili.
The Russian Comrades control the
Zanzibar defenses, which is fitting in
view of Soviet plans for domination of
the Indian Ocean. Lik ewise they control
the harb or and inspect all imports and
exports. Their man Friday is Abdulla
Hanga, former Vice Pr esident of Zan-
zibar, and so pro-Soviet that one of his
wives is Russian.
How fare Zanzibar and Pemba after
four years of "independence" ? Hunger
is endemic, except among the Establ ish-
ment cadres and the Communist inter-
lopers, with bananas up from two
shi llings to fifteen shillings a bunch and
baskets of cassavas risen from three
shillings to over fifteen. Salt is very
scarce. So is meat (so much so that
Karurne had to send to Tanga to pur-
chase fresh beef for hi s son' s wedding) .
. Forced labor is the rule on both
island s, and peopl e in their seventies
have to hit the ball - or else. Many
Pemba people spend their nights in the
bush for fear of the customary midnight
arrests first popularized by Stalin.
Having given orders to "kill all white
pri soners," and having declared that
there will be no free elections for fifty
years, Karume has furt her advised the
devout Moslems to quit praying to
Allah, who can't hel p them, and to
bow to Mao Tse-tung, who can. - -
AMERICAN OPINION
FROM LATIN AMERICA
HAROLD LORD VARNEY
THE STATE Department has long
been dangling a Latin American Com-
mon Market as the next important step
in our plans for Latin America. In
1961, we promoted the launching of a
pilot project called the Central Amer-
ican Common Market, putting $52 mil -
lion into the experiment - at least a
third of its initial resources. Early in
July, President Johnson's vacation in
Tex as was interrupted by a distress call
from President Fidel Sanchez Hernan-
dez of EI Salvador. The news was bad:
T he Common Market was staggering
on the ropes, and unless mor e U.S.
money could be pumped into the thing
it might very well collapse.
President Johnson agr eed to make a
trip to San Salvador to meet with the
five Central American Pr esident s. He
brought with him a contribution for
the Common Market amounting to $30
mill ion and a pledge of $35 million in
loans. Still, the trip amounted to no
mor e than another of Mr. Johnson's
public relations gestures. It solved ab-
solutel y nothing. You see, the problem
in Central America (and South Amer-
ica as well) is not high intramural tari ff
barriers, but low world prices for export
commodities (coffee, cotton, sugar, and
bananas) . What the five Central Amer-
ican nations were really worr ied about
was America's announced trade quotas
which wi ll squeeze them out of the rich
U.S. ma rket. Thus, President Johnson's
visit did no more than sweep the real
dust under the rug.
Of course Mr . Johnson did have an
opportunity to deliver anot her of his
speeches on the need of U.S.-style "de-
mocracy" in Latin America. The Cen-
tral Americans listened, but they know
they can't eat democracy. Adding to the
SEPT EMBER, 1968
absurdity of the matter is the fact that
three of the five Pr esidents who faced
Mr. Johnson owe their offices to do-
mestic military upri sings. All the gung-
ho boasts of the Pr esident and Ambas-
sador Sol Linowitz about the "economic
democracy" of the future sounded pret-
ty foolish at El Salvador, and the glam-
our of a Common Market for South
America is growing very dim indeed.
Uruguay: The "Liberal" Welfare State
is having rough going these days. Even
in England, its Old Wo rld citadel, it is
tottering. Harold Wilson, sitting in the
chair of the Winston Ch urchill who
once declared that he had not come to
power to preside over the dissolution of
the British Empire, is now officiating
over the dissoluti on of Great Britain it-
self. In the Western Hemisphere, the
sick man of "Li beralism" is Uruguay.
Once a rich country, Uruguay has
long been gr ipped by the madness of
Fabian concepts. One of these has been
a dangerous euphoria concern ing Com-
munism. Accordingly, Uruguay is one
of the few South American countries
whe re the Communist Party has not
been outlawed. It has members in the
National Assembly; it has been allowed
to establish a tight control over the Na-
tiona l Workers Confederation, Uru-
guay 's trade union movement; and,
Montevideo has long been a sanctuary
for agents of the International Commu-
nist Conspi racy, and a dist ribution point
for Red publications .
The Communists are now moving
most effectively to take advantage of
Uruguay's economic crisis. They are
playing on the fact that Uruguay has
established such a heavy overload of
Stat e emplo yees and Welfare benefi-
65
ciari es that the countr y is collapsi ng at
the strain : Some 250,000 of Uruguay's
900,000 wage earners are employed by
the State or by State-owned industries;
inflat ion is eating up the nation 's econ-
omy ; and, d uring the past year, the cost
of living has risen 130 percent.
The death of President Oscar Gestido
last Decembe r aggravated the situation.
His successor, Jorge Pacheco Areco,
took over a derelict nat ion on the ropes.
Lacking Gestido's prestige, Pacheco has
been unabl e to enforce the austerity pol-
icies necessary to prevent total economic
chaos. The politicians in the Assembly,
like their prototypes in Washington, are
fearful of the political reaction of the
nation's army of pensioners and relief-
ers. On July first, President Pacheco de-
clared martial law. The Communists
ignored it and instituted a one-day gen-
eral st rike of the National Workers
Federation . Meanwhile, law enforce-
ment has broken down and a nihilist
revolution has begun in the streets of
Mont evideo.
Guatemala: The terror has eased in
Guatemala, although it may be onl y a
temporary lull before the holocaust.
Pr esident Cesar Mendez Montenegr o,
who in March declared a state of siege
and suspension of the Constitution, has
now revoked his emergency measures
and even successfull y dismissed three
top officers of the Army who repre-
sented a threat to his Revolutionary
Part y. Apparently Mendez now feels
sure enough of himself to attempt to
deal with the Communist guerrillas
without an overt Army alliance. But, as
there is nothing in Mendez' past to in-
dicate that he has sufficient fortitude
to effectively deal with the Commu-
nists, this is very perilous indeed.
Brazil : The New Left student upri sings
whi ch have thi s year swept through
many other parts of the world have now
struck Brazil just as we predicted in our
66
SCOREBOARD issue. Leftist students have
been chafing under the strict controls
which the Administrations of President
Humbert o Castello Branco and now of
Arthur Costa e Silva have imposed on
the uni versiti es - controls which have
prevented Communist-led student or-
ganizations from functioning openl y
on the campuses.
To get around these requirements,
Communist and other Lefti st students
have formed ad hoc organizations built
around specific educational grievances.
Politics and anti-regime activities have
been bootlegged through these unoffi-
cial organizations. The particular target
has been Mini ster of Education Tarso
Dutra.
By mid-June, the New Left organiza-
tions felt strong enough to go into the
streets with turbulent demonstrations.
The worst of these was in Rio de Janeiro
where the demonstrations took an ugly
anti-American form, with two thousand
students marching to attack the U.S.
Embassy and being detoured by the po-
lice. Some damage to the Embassy was
done, and onl y mass arrests of students
prevented the rioters from setting up
barricades in the center of the city. On
June twent y-sixth a march of ten thou-
sand Leftists was staged on Avenida
Rio Branco, wit h many teachers and
priests among the demonstrators. The
Government did not interfere, but the
Army was alerted and in readiness.
All thi s agitation has not weakened
the anti-Communist position of Pres-
ident Costa e Silva. He has the solid
backing of the armed forces and, as long
as they stand firm, the Far Left in
Brazil can only fume .
The same wave of student protests
has also spilled over into Argentina,
though the demonstrations there have
not been as bold as in Brazil. Anti-re-
gi me marches, mostly by students, have
been staged in Buenos Aires, Cordoba,
and Rosario. They have as yet had lit-
tle influence on the Government. - -
AMERICAN OPINION
FROM WASHINGTON
REED BENSON AND ROBERT LEE
THE GUN-cONTROL legislation which
has been promoted by the anti-gun ele-
ments in Congress reminds us of the
Chinese proverb which suggests that it
is foolish to run when you are on the
wrong road. Those who claim to be-
lieve that gun registration or licensing
will significantly relieve the burden of
crime in our nation, or prevent the as-
sassination of political leaders, are travel-
ing the wrong road. And not only are
the proposals they advocate foolish-
they are dangerous as well.
Gun-control laws simply tend to de-
crease the ratio of lawfully-held fire-
arms to illegally-held firearms, and the
reason is quite simple: Law-abiding cit-
izens abide by laws, and criminals do
not.
Scripps-Howard reported recently that
in Great Britain, where hardly anyone
owns a gun, an amnesty was declared in
1961 during which those who possessed
guns illegally could turn them over to
the authorities without being prosecuted.
Approximately seventy thousand guns
were surrendered. Four years later, in
1965, another amnesty was declared, and
forty thousand additional guns were
turned over. That means that, as a mat-
ter of public record, in tiny Britain
which virtually prohibits private gun
ownership, at least a hundred thousand
guns were being held illegally .
It is of some significance to note that
it is not even possible in some instances
to keep guns out of the hands of hard-
ened criminals already in jail. Not too
long ago, for instance, two murderers
escaped from the maximum security
area of San Quentin Prison using a
machine-gun they had clandestinely
manufactured inside the prison. And
more recently, on June 11, 1968, four
SEPTEMBER, 1968
convicts in the Atlanta Federal Peni-
tentiary, one of the nation's three max-
imum .secur ity penal institutions, were
able to keep police at bay while holding
twenty-three hostages at gun-point fol-
lowing an attempted escape. Now, you
just know that there are gun-control
laws in effect at the Atlanta Federal
Penitentiary!
In areas where there are gun restric-
tions on law-abiding citizens, the crim-
inal element can, if nothing else, resort
to the manufacture of home-made "zip"
guns. This has been more than illus-
trated in the State of New York, which
has perhaps the strictest gun-control pro-
visions of any state in the Union. As
Senator Roman Hruska (R.-Nebraska)
pointed out on the floor of the Senate
on May 15, 1968:
.. . the New Y ork State Legisla-
ture' s joint committee on crime re-
ported that in 1966 the use of home-
made zip gll11S exceeded the misuse
of rifles and shotguns in murders,
robberies, and assanlts in N ew Y ork
State. Misuse of rifl es and shotguns
in crimes totaled 705 as against a zip
glm total of 976. This is a State which
has had the Sullivan Law for over 50
years.
And a further indication that crim-
inals simply ignore licensing and regis-
tration requirements is contained in the
following statistic cited by Congress-
man James B. Utt (R.-California) in a
House speech on June 17, 1968:
In New York Cit)', which also has
one of the strictest gun control laws
in our Nation, requiring a police pel"
mit to possess a handglm even in yOIIY
67
and twenty-one are fully qualified to
prop erly exercise the franchi se to run
our nation. Curious. Ve ry curious.
As another illustrat ion of inconsisten-
cy, note that Attorney General Ramsey
Clark has called for the registration of
all firearms and the licensing of all
owners, because-he alleges-it will re-
duce the crime problem. But the At-
torney General has also called for com-
plete abolition of capit al punishment,
and has publicl y refused to enforce pro-
visions of the ant i-crime bill which make
it possible, under court order, to use
wiretapping against hardened criminals
and members of the crime synd icate.
He says he fears that such a measure
may invade their privacy. Attorney Ge n-
eral Clark apparentl y has no such reser-
vations about invading the privacy of
the milli ons of law-abiding Americans
who lawfull y and Constitutionally pos-
sess firearms for sport or self-defense.
When the gun-control "Li berals" tell
you that their real concern is the re-
duction of crime in America, don't you
believe it! Their gun-cont rol proposals
represent just anot her step on the road
to peopl e control in America. Our
Founding Fathers inserted the Second
Amendment int o the Bill of Rights for a
reason. As Pro fessor Susan Huck has
put it, "They were not afraid to trust
the people with firearms because they
were not selling out their country."
Gun-control proposa ls such as those
being forwarded by the Admi nistration
and Senators Thomas Dodd (De-Con-
necticut) and Joseph Tydin gs (D.-
Mar yland) should be opposed vigor-
ously. As one of our AMERICAN OPINION
colleagues has said : "A blast aimed at
criminals which hits maybe fift y mil -
lion law-abiding citizens is a sorry piece
of marksmanship on its own."
own home, in 1966 not one of that
city's gun-involved homicides was
committed by a licensed f irearm.
So you see, gun registration affects
law-abiding citizens - not criminals.
It is somewhat analogous to the gov-
ernment's attempts to control narcotic s.
Robert Welch has not ed: "The Federal
Government cannot even pr event any-
body willing to pay the price from get-
ting heroin, when there is almost no
legitimate use of heroin to be considered
in connection with law enforcement.
Yet, we are to believe that it can stop
criminals from obt aining guns, when
the legitimate uses for firearms are
legion. "
Now, here is an excellent poi nt to
keep in mind when you hear the anti-
gun lobby claim that a gun-control law
would have saved the life of Senator
Robert Kennedy: Congressman Utt
pointed out in that key speech to the
House on June seventeenth that the ac-
cused assassin of Senator Kenn edy vio-
lated at least five section s of California's
stringent gun control law. W hat we
need is not stricter laws but stricter en-
forcement of the laws we already have.
The hypocrisy of those promoting fed-
eral gun controls is flagrant. For ex-
ample, the gun-control provision of the
omnibus crime bill wh ich is now the
law of the land prohib its the sale of
handgu ns to persons under the age of
twent y-one, presumably on the grounds
that persons under that age are not re-
spons ible enough to handl e such fire-
arms. But many of those who voted for
this provision are now leading the
fur ious cl amor for a Constitutional
Amendment that would lower the vot-
ing age to eighteen, pr esumably on the
ground that persons between eighteen
CRACKER BARREL------------
EAGLE ROCK-Befor e you decide to marry a genius, remember th at t he wife of
Leo Tolst oy had to copy his immense novel, W ar and Peace, in long hand- seven ti mes.
EAGLE ROCK- Ins tead of campaigning on ocher polit icians' st upi dities , a candidate
should try t o get elected on hi s own. -JAC K MOF FITT
68
AMERICAN OPINION
FROM THE SOUTH
TOM ANDERSON
THERE ARE so many images of Rich-
ard M. Nixon: the anti-Communist
hatchet-man who believes that the end
justifies the means; the ruthless cam-
paigner with an instinct for the jugular;
the sweet and pure, considerate, moder-
ate, indefatigable statesman; the pal of
the late Scottie, "Checkers," whose TV
appearance (Nixon's, not Checkers!) so
unfairly prevented him from winning
elections. Which is the real Nixon? The
answer IS simple. There ain't no real
Nixon.
Having once been a Republican for
twenty-four hours, a skeleton in my
closet to which I made public confession
in AMERICAN OPINION for November
1966, I suppose I automatically qualified
for Richard Nixon's mailing list. For a
year or so, or so it seems, I have received
a form letter once a month from Nixon.
With it there has regularly been a "bal-
lot" asking us recipients to vote on
where we stand on the issues of the day.
How else can Mr. Nixon make up his
mind? This sort of thing indicates only
too well that Richard Nixon is not a
statesman but an I.B.M. machine; not a
moral man seeking to choose right over
wrong, but a computer calculating the
angles.
Of course, like the I.B.M. computers,
there's a "new" model Nixon every now
and then-an improved calculating ma-
chine in the same plastic package. Re-
member the "old" Nixon on his first
TV debate with John Kennedy? He's
the one who said: "Senator Kennedv
and I agree on most of the issues, w ~
just disagree on methods. " Nixon lost it
right there. Those two agr eed on more
things than any husband and wife I ever
met. Remember how in 1960 both Nixon
and Kennedy proclaimed that one an-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
swer to our farm problem was to sub-
sidize needy industries like General
Motors to permit them to start factories
in rural areas? A Nixon man I know
told me he was going to get into that
himself, manufacturing the front end of
horses and shipping 'em to Washington
for final assembly.
Despite the fact that in 1960 Mr.
Nixon waged the most famous me-too
campaign since Brutus answered "me
too" to Ceasar, I have a few friends who
seem to honestly believe that the new
Nixon won't do that! Maybe so. Maybe
this time Dicky won't make a midnight
ride to New York and then wat er down
a conservative Republ ican Platform to
suit Rockefeller. But, don't bet on it.
Here in the South, folks figured it
was the same old Nixon when he joined
the mob of Yankee riffraff, carpetbag-
gers, political prostitutes, scalawags, and
crooks who descended upon Atlanta on
April ninth to capitalize on the murder
of Martin Luther King. Few failed to
notice that "the new Nixon" also
marched off for a political performance
at Robert Kennedy's funeral-just like
the old Nixon would have done. Of
course, "the new Nixon" did not attend
the funeral of Governor Lurleen Wal-
lace! With Dick, it was politics above
honor as usual.
Some come to funerals to mourn and
others come to make sure, but in Nou-
o veau Nixon's case, he went to the King
and Kennedy funerals to make votes. He
ignored the Wallace funeral for the
same reason. But "the new Nixon" must
still be using the old computer, because
the voters in the South are now firmly
convinced that where "grave" decisions
are concerned Richard Nixon has shown
himself to be gi ven to the same old ex-
69
pediency for which he is so justly fa-
mous. He missed the wrong funeral.
I used to say the Republican Party
could be saved, hut that saving the Dem-
ocrat Party was sorta like trying to make
a lady out of Liz Taylor : It's too late
now. I still think the Republican Party
can be saved. But not by the likes of
Richard Nixon. Depending on Nixon
to restore our Constitutional Republic
is like depending on the National Coun-
cil of Churches to reverse itself and de-
fend Christianity.
Okay, so Nixon is less evil than John-
son. Practically everybody is! But what
have these lesser-of-evils ever gotten us?
I'll tell you. Lesser-of-evils got us Eisen-
hower , who Norman Thomas said
brought us further toward socialism
than even Harry Truman. Vife are too
far gone for foot-dragging or small vic-
tories. We must win or lose on prin-
ciples, something that most politicians
of both Parties consider as irrelevant as
the Hairy Ainu.
Richard Nixon is no conservative. In
domestic affairs he supports every col-
lectivist scheme known to man.
When it comes to foreign policy,
Nixon is farther to the Left than was
even the late President Kennedy. The
day before the fourth debate between
Vice President Nixon and Senator John
F. Kennedy, the Senator made a strong
statement calling for United States aid
to anti-Communist Cubans willing to
free their homeland. Nixon called Ken-
nedy's recommendation "dangerously
irresponsible," and said: "If we were to
follow that [Kennedy's] recommenda-
tion. .. we would lose all of our friends
in Latin America, we would be con-
demned in the United Nations.... The
charter of the United Nations, its pream-
ble, Article I and Article II, provide
that there should be no interference by
one nation in the internal affairs of
another."
In other words, Nixon obviously
thinks that in dealing with the Com-
70
munists the United Nations Charter
should determine our foreign policy,
overruling our own Constitution and
Congress and preventing us from de-
fending ourselves against a threat on
our doorstep! Pretty conservative, right?
And, it was no fluke-he meant it.
When Senator Barry Goldwater advo-
cated an unequivocal program to bring
about the downfall of Castro through a
complete economic blockade of Com-
munist Cuba, Nixon declared: "It is
foolish to talk about an economic block-
ade of Cuba unless we can convince
our allies to go along with us."
What allies?
By allies, of course, Dick may have
meant Russia. He has even said, accord-
ing to an Associated Press dispatch of
February 3, 1964, that Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev is without qualifica-
tion the most able all-around world
leader today. Khrushchev was responsi-
ble for more murders than Hitler, but
apparently Nixon's computer wasn't
programmed for morality.
Yes, Nixon has experience. So has
Lyndon Johnson. Our crying need is
not experience but integrity! It reminds
me of the time when General-pardon
the expression-Grant expressed his con-
tempt for a certain officer. and another
general protested that the man in ques-
tion had been through ten campaigns.
Grant replied: "General, so has that
mule yonder, but he's still a jackass."
This time, folks, you anti-Commu-
nist patriots don't have to vote against
somebody. You can vote for George
Wallace. The perennial "aginners" are
like the bar fly who fell asleep in his
chair. Another drunk rubbed a bit of
limburger cheese on his moustache. The
limb urger victim awoke, staggered up
to the bartender and whispered : "Ain't
it awful? The whole world stinks!"
George Wallace smells good. Especial-
ly after a whiff of warmed-over Nixon
and the ripe odor of Lyndon and Hum-
phrey Dumpty.
AMERICAN OPINION
FROM POETRY
EDITED BY E. MERRILL ROOT
GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1632) is one
of England's great Christian poets. His
religious insights into the nature of
man's soul in its relation to God are
unique and subtle; his poetic magic in
casting the golden net of beauty over
the golden bird of life (so wild, so shy,
so elusive) is superb. For the conserva-
tive his vision of reality and his noble
and timeless art are precious and pro-
found: God must have thanked George
Herbert for such lyrics; and we can
thank God for them and for George
Herbert.
THREE POEMS BY
GEORGE HERBERT
Virtue
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright-
The bridal of the earth and sky!
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and
roses,
A boxwhere sweets compacted lie,
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to
coal,
Then chiefly lives.
The Elixir
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see;
SEPTEMBER, 1968
And what I do in anything
To do it as for Thee.
All may of Thee partake;
Nothing can beso mean
Which with his tincture, "for Thy sake,"
Will not grow bright and clean.
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass
And then the heaven espy.
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who s'weepsa room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.
From "The Flower"
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write:
I once more smell -the dew and rain,
And relish versing: 0 my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom Thy tempests fell all night.
COEXISTENCE
In this garden so many feet have walked
with mine!
Under these very trees, over these
stones . . .
I have seen the sky in the evening, and
at sunrise
Warming with its crimson this house
now called too old.
Not only old . . . too large for two alone
(How magically bulldozers change one
house to five!
. . . Shall we accept a newer house and
call it home?)
In time we might forget the fragrant
white
71
And the caged bird sang, still sang;
But her not es grew hard and pale
As sometimes the summer rain
Congeals into stones of hail.
But there are signs a rising storm
May blow the sand away!
-JAMES SA NTORELLI
But Joy flew singing back
To fold her wings and rest
In my heart , my opened heart:
Her cage became her nest.
- E. MERRILL R OOT
"I have lost her forever," I said.
Yet I would not close my heart:
How could I close it again
With its red walls rent apart?
So I prisoned the free bird fast
In the coil of those crimson bars.
(I s not the earth so held
In her vaster cage of stars?)
Then Joy flew toward the sun
(That fountain whose waters are light) :
She sang in a shadowless dawn
Past t he shut tle of day and night.
The bird still sang, though caged;
But her song was not a song,
As the music of rain is changed
When 'the hailstones beat and throng.
THE OPENED HEART
The heart is a crimson cage
For Joy, the bright-plumed bird ;
Should I open the red bars wide ?
Being fearful , I said "Absurd! "
At last, lest her heart should break,
I broke my own heart wide:
"The sky is your home. Go free.
Fl y where you will," I cried.
Of lemon bush . .. the purple-clustered
VIlle
Of grapes . . . the hordes of apricots all
golden
As the apples of He sperides, and as rich
with pride,
For Atlas never loved a garden more,
we know.
The Press heaps sand to blind their eyes,
The T.V. sand is gray;
CRACKER BARREL-------------:-
But a mocker sings from the top anten-
na-WIfe
. .. The fragile scarlet pimpernel still
grows
Beside the pool where moon and stars
at night
Reflect their peace on coexisting tree
and stone
Of this old home that we have loved a
while.
- E M M A L'HoMMEDIEU F ROST
SING ME A ROSE
While warning thunders roll from the
drum
The wind is beating;
While to the fortr ess of the earth
Red leaves are fleeting;
While from the barr en battl efield
Sun is retr eating;
And before advancing Winter
Begins repeating
Hi s iron-knuckled prose. . . .
Love, sing me a morning rose
Whose flame of courage will
Be light frost cannot kill.
-MARY M. P RONOVOST
OSTRICHES
The ostrich is a foolish bird
That hides its head in sand;
And "Liberals" are much like this
In our Great Wonderland.
I
EAGLE ROCK-{;etting a candidat e t o take a sta nd on t oday's issues is like r rying
to nail a custar d pie t o th e wall. -JACK MOF FITT
72
AMERICAN OPINION
FOR STUDENTS
On Black Flags And Red Flags
E. Merrill Root is the brilliant author
of two best-selling books, Collectivism
on the Campus and Brainwashing in
the High Schools.
Professor Root may
also be America's
greatest living poet.
His work has ap-
peared in Human
Events , Christian
Economics, Blue-
book, National Review, Freeman, New
York Times, Lit erary Digest, New York
Herald Tribune, and elsewhere .
WE LIVE in an hour when the youths
who make the publicity of TV and the
headlines of Life and Look are those
who fly, over the Sorbonne or over
Columbia, the Red Flag of Marx or the
Black Flag of Bakunin. There are,
fortunately, other young Americans who
devote themselves to sanity and free-
dom ; but, of them, one hears hardly a
whisper in the kept Pr ess of the Estab-
lishment. What you are about to read is
add ressed to all of these-to the young
who seek a "brave new world" that is
actually a cliched old world of slavery,
and to the young who seek a renaissance
of the timeless spirit of essential reality.
Perhaps it is naive to suppose that the
devotees of the Black Flag and the Red
Flag will read my words, or will heed
me if they do. They seem, alas, to
tolerate nothing but the image of their
own dated perver sion. Nonetheless, we
do not exclude them.
As for those young Americans yet
devoted to sanity and freedom, I hope
that they will find in what I am about
SEPTEMBER, 1968
to say here something to nourish and
strengthen them, though I know that,
being individualists, they will (and
should) differ in some things and bite
each idea to test its mettle.
Most especially, I would write to un-
committed youth , to youth in search of
reality, to youth who would find some
coherent pattern amid the mist and
hum of this lowland of modernity.
I would write to you all as one man
to another, as one mind to another, as
one who seeks truth by exploring what
is real. And I would ignore, as I hope
you will ignore, all mechanical criteria I
of mere youth or mere age, never
assuming either that life begins at forty
or that life ends at thirty. I say to you
young people of America and the world:
Let us forget all superficial tags of
"young" or "old," let us even forget
the easy labels of "Left" and "Right,"
and let us seek together what all men
of good will and clear reason should
seek : The thin gs that are, the truth
that abides.
I
WE HEAR MUCH today about the
"ge nerat ion gap." That gap, however, is
too often made a thing of mere quantity
of years, not a thing of quality of being.
The quanti ty of years a man has lived
means nothing till the ancient questions
are answered : "What have you done
with those years ? What have those years
done for you ?" The quality of our years
is what matt ers. A teeny-bopper who
goes int o a tizzy over the Beatles or the
Rolling Stones does indeed find a gap
between himself and Rembrand t or
73
Goya; but it is a gap not of quantity of
years but of qualit y of being. "Ripeness
is all," as Shak espeare says. And, though
Sidney Lani er and John Keats died
"young," there was no "generation gap"
between them and Shakespeare or
Goethe who lived to the fifties or the
eighti es. There was no such "gap" be-
cause they all lived in the realm of time-
less qualit y.
The wise and humorous "old man,"
who lives with every inch and ounce
and atom of his being, is closer to the
wise "young man," who lives with the
arterial blood of body and mind, than
he is to the "senior citizens" who play
shuffleboard in the retirement colonies
of St. Pet ersburg or subsist on Scotch
in the saloons of suburban Da rien.
The "gap," you see, is not deter mined
by the qu antity of years but by the
qu ality of t he human beings invol ved.
There is a gap, irr espective of age, but
it is between the fool and the wise man ,
between the brash and discourteous and
the courteous and humble, between the
human mistakes and the human achieve-
ments. In the life of a great people whil e
its life is valid, as in classical Chi na, the
gay young blade, Li Po, who waded
into the river to clasp the moon (though
he could not swim) and died with the
moon in his arms, could understand
and be understood by the poetical old-
ster, Chang Chi-ho, who was known
as "the old fisherman of the mists and
wa ters" and who put no bait on his
hook, "his abject not being to catch
fish."
Fire is fire- no matt er how long it
burns . T he "old" fire on the tomb of
the unknown soldier is closer to the
"young" fire kindled for their country
by American soldiers fighting and dying
with honor in Vietnam than either waft
of flame is to the ersatz incendiarism of,
say, the Pr esident of the National Stu-
dent Association. Even the "now-rest " of
the Now Generation would find a tri p
with Socrates at fift y more int eresting
74
than a trip with a fool of fifteen . . . I
unless they were fools too. Any "gap"
between the ge nerations is as foolish as
a "gap" between the blossom of May
and the apple of September.
Actually there is a greater gap between
the "sophisticate" of eighteen and the
unspoiled child of five than ther e is be-
tween that child and a William Blake
at fifty. It is as William Saroyan, in his
one indubitable masterpi ece, Th e Hu-
man Comedy, wrote of little Ul ysses:
He came qllickly and qltietly and
stood beside her, then went to the
hell nest to look f or eggs. He [onnd
aile. He looked at it a moment,
picked it lip, brongb: it to his mother
and very carefllily banded it to her,
by which he meant what no man can
g1leSJ and 110 child can remember to
tell.
There is the very magic and lost
Ede n of childhood - and how far,
how far, how far it is from the sophisti-
cated artificiality of the professional
"flower child" ! The "sophisticate" of
eighteen may have grown "knowledge-
able" and smart and clever at the ex-
pense of his direct spontaneous self, and
be an insufferable mental brat-but this
will be as apparent to the unspoiled child
as surely as to the vital old man.
Note that the teeny-bopper gone to
college calls it a "poem" to write :
Only knowing that within will lay
what witholtt I have not . . . and
there shall be no satisfaction no de-
pnration nor sal vation - for the
withi n continually moves [urtber
toward a distant internal . . . .*
But the child of three speaks simply
in poetry from the living "wi thin" of
his being - "The noise went by so fast
*From Death : kinds , two, by Sean O'Toole,
The Campus Forum, EI Camino College, Cali-
fo r ni a, Issue No.2, March 30, 1964.
AMERI CAN OPINION
I couldn't see it. .. ," or "The puppy
wasn't biting me at all - he was just
tasting me." This is not a matter of
age; it is a matter of something lost out
of life - and something added of syn-
thetic smartness and neon lights. Some-
thing has happened to youth (from the
outside), something intellectualized
(yet minus intellect), something artifi-
cial. The child's conscious and sub-
conscious are integral and harmonious
and one; life speaks directly to him and
through him. But the teeny-bopper gone
to college has fractured and splintered
consciousness from subconsciousness
(and superconsciousness) and tortured
life into artificiality by draining the
blood from the mind and making in-
tellect kosher. The gap is not a necessary
adjunct of "age" but a loss and a destruc-
tion that has fractured quality.
The trouble with life today is that
this slick artificiality, begun among col-
lege teeny-boppers, persists as a per-
petual adolescence in people who are
older. It is the great deficit of the Now
Generation. It is not due to quantity
(or lack of quantity) in years, but to a
lack of quality in being. C. G. Jung puts
it best. He asks of the psychological
counselor what he can do when "he
sees only too clearly why his patient is
ill; when he sees that it arises from his
having no love, but only sexuality; no
faith, because he is afraid to grope in
the dark; no hope, because he is dis-
illusioned by the world and by life;
and no understanding, because he has
failed to read the meaning of his own
existence ." (Modern Man in Search at
a Soul, Pp. 225-226.) That is the gap
that divides the Instant Generation from
Timeless Man. It is not a gap in age; it
is a gap vital and psychological. It is the
modern distemper of splitt ing mind
from soul.
Even D. H. Lawrence, in his genuine
but darkly seen way, saw this sickness
of modern man - the fracture between
abstract cerebral mind and the instinc-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
tive wisdom of "the dark blood." He
says, in Studies in Classic American
Literature : "You can idealize or in-
tellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you
can let the dark soul in you see for it-
self." Exactly! The soul, of course, is
light as well as dark; but it is surely
dark in its mystery, its magic, its depth,
and it should be left alone and not
tortured into artificial cleverness by
psychedelic lighting and a perverting
electric amplifier. And today it is so
tortured among the college teeny-bop-
pers. That is the true gap in the lives of
the Now Generation.
You want integrity? So do I. But in-
tegrity means wholeness, and wholeness
is a quality of the soul (which modern
man must find if he is to survive), of the
Inner Kingdom, of the fruitful union
of sub-and-super-consciousness with the
serene reason of the true consciousness .
This has been rendered difficult for us
largely by the Freudian superficiality
that saw the "subconscious" as some-
thing rather dirty and bestial and dark
(yet something to which we should give
full play), as the nether stew of ir-
rational impulses, as something nasty
and base. On the contrary, the sub-and-
super-consciousness, as in the instincts
of the vital animal and the intuitions of
the child and the genius, is a noble and
fruitful thing that should and can work
in harmony with the reason of the sur-
face consciousness. The child so lives;
the philosopher (not the "professor of
philosophy") so lives; the poet or the
saint whose roots of genius go down into
the depths so lives. The man who really
lives finds his center in his protopsyche,
But you will never find integrity when
you live by rationality instead of reason;
when you libel the dark side of your
own moon, yet give its splinter aber-
rations full whim and license; when you
split yourself into discord . The real gap
is not between the generations but be-
tween modern man and timeless man.
The "generation gap" as such is a cliche
75
to excuse arrogance and ignorance on
the one side or to excuse patronage and
arrogance on the other.
"The generation gap ?" Let 's discard
that stupid phrase, that hoary super-
ficiality, that easy escape from thought,
that pother of nonsense! Seek rather the
integrit y that binds the generations into
the noble search for life and life ever
more abundantly.
If you must stress the generation gap,
you narrow and destroy your own life.
If you are to be useless and untrust-
worthy once you pass thirty, you had
better get a pistol in spite of Senator
Dodd, to celebrate the dawn of your
fourth decade not with a whimper but
a bang. But this denies all richness, all
depth and width and inner wealth in
your life. It might even deprive you -
and the world - of the glory of a
Shakespeare. After all, Shakespeare had
not written King Lear or The Tempest
when he was thirty....
II
FORGET AGE and concentrate on ti me-
less reality. The questi on is - wha t do
you truly seek? If your adventure is to
fly the Red Flag or the Black Fl ag, you
seek to wallow in cliches, in old gags, in
the outmoded and the reactionary. You
think I am prejudiced ? Listen, then, to
a darli ng of the Left , to Bertrand Rus-
sell, who visited Soviet Russia and
summed it up in such postjudices as
these:
. . . a closed tyranni cal bureancracy
wi th a spy system more elaborate than
th e Tzar' s and an aristocracy as in -
solent and lInfeeling, composed of
A me ricanized Jews [sic !). No basis
of liberty remai ns, in th ought or
speech or action. . . . Imagine you r-
sel f go vem ed in every detail by a mix -
tnre of Sidney If/ ebb lind Rufus
Isaacs, and )'OU wi ll have a picture of
modern Russia.
76
And if you say: "But this is the old
age of Communism, and China and
Cuba are not so!" - you mistake the
truth. For he so wrote when Commu-
nism in Russia was "young," just after
World War I. And it is necessarily so.
For ownership in common as an ideal,
and dictatorship of the few in practise,
are very, very old concepts. They go back
to pr imitive tribes, to aboriginal peoples,
to corruption of life into collectivism,
which goes sadly back across the
centuries. And as for anarchy and the
Black Flag, that goes back to the origin
of the perennial scourges of all history,
the Catilines of histor y, the nihilists who
live on loot as long as it lasts and pre-
pare the way for the repressive emperors
who as men on horseback liquidate the
men they have driven into the gutters.
The Red Fl ag in modern times is as old
as that mid-Victorian with whiskers ,
Karl Marx; the Black Flag is as old as
Mikhail Bakunin, Marx 's contemporary
and enemy (who sought the same Com-
munist ends in a different mood and
by different means) . To seek either is
to go back, to go backward, to retro-
gress to the chaos of anarchism or the
ancient nigh t of Communism.
Free men and sane men wish, rather,
to transcend time and so to create
eternal thi ngs within time. The men
who discover fire and invent the wheel ,
who fashion speech i nto the alphabet,
who with Pasteur conquer rabies, who
as law-givers create a Constitution to
keep men free, who freeze music- into
the architecture of great buildings , who
create beaut y on canvas or preserve
wisdom on vellum, who know with
Archimedes that given the proper lever
and a place to stand one can move the
world , who with Atlas bear the world
upon their shoulders . . . these are
neither "old " nor "young" nor "Left"
nor "Right" - they are t he integral s
and the cr eators. But the nihilists, or
the monolithic spiders of the Total Stat e,
the Bureaucrats and the Power Boys,
AMERICAN OPINION
are old, old, old - cliches ambulant,
old gags who reckon themselves real,
hoary cobwebs rampant. T hey turn their
faces away from "Eternity's sunrise"
(as William Blake put it), they splash
the world with the blood of the Red
Flag, they call in the croaking ravens
of the Black Flag.
And, carr ying this to its conclusion
of logic, those who march under these
flags of reaction are not preparing or
welcoming a brave new world, but
wrapping their hate in the flags of
savages.
III
IT IS GOOD for youth to desire a fairer
world. l am as much against the present
status quo of the world of man as any
rebel anywhere. I do not uphold-s-what
civilized mind could uphold ? - the
status quo of man today - the mega-
lopolis of Mayor John Lindsay or of
Professor Harvey Cox, the smog and
legislated poverty of Welfare, the crime
made legal if committed by the "black"
or the "poor," the alcohol and sleeping
pills and LSD and "pot," the vapid TV
and stultifying commercials, the slick
sophistication of the Brainy Boys among
"capitalists" in Playboy and Look and
Lif e and Esquire and Fortune and the
New Yorker, the compromisers who
seek coexistence wi th Slave States like
Soviet Russia and who lust to loose
troops on free Rhodesia, the lakes fouled
into cesspools of deat h, the men t urned
out to past ure at sixty-five when their
unique wisdo m is most needed in Aca-
deme, the mass-univ er siti es where
classes of a thousand are "lectured at"
by invisible prof essors or subjected to
audio-visual aids, and where "teachers"
are shunted into "research," and instruc-
tors still raw from graduate schools are
turned loose on students, th e wars that
we are forced to fight but not allowed
to win, all the lies and cruelties of the
Liberal Establis hment. . . . Carthago
delenda est!
SEPTEMBER, 1968
But wha t is the climate of t hat Est ab-
lishment that I dislike as much as you
do? It is rationalism, pragmatism, exis-
tentialism - materialism and obsession
wi th the Temporal Now uncriticized by
God's Eternal Now - positivism and
the worship of the Big and the Clever
and the fashionable and the temporal
and the secular. It is the climate of the
rootless ignorance that supposes that
history began with "science" and
"democracy." It is the climate of forced
integration of "races," willy-nilly, no
matter what either race wants, but never
the integration of mind and soul within
the individuals of all races. It is the
climate of belief t hat matter is a period
after mind, not mi nd a question-mark
after matter - physics but never meta-
physics, biology reduced to necrology,
chemis try that supposes it "expla ins"
consciousness and is ignorant tha t
consciousness discovers chemistry. It is
the climate of the superficial fashion-
able Camus who declares categorically :
"I continue to believe that the world has
no ultimate meaning."
Yet, such is the "spiritual" climate of
the status quo . And how can you create
a fairer world of man until you find
the potentia qua of living Nature and
beyond it of the living God? You cannot
criticize the Establi shment if you accept
the invalid "values " of the Establish-
ment . To criticize what is wrong and
to create what is right you must tran-
scend this world and enter the King-
dom that is not of this world. Ratio nal-
ism, relativism, existentialism, mate rial-
ism - such are the valueless "values"
that have resulted in the human "world"
for which some yout hs blame their
elders. But if these same yout hs still
accept and carry out even more brashly
these same "va lues," how can they
create a different world? Ph ilosophy,
met aphysics, the spirit , or their absence
- these always determine the outer
world. Until and unless you find the
ageless and eternal spiri t of the potentia
77
qua , everything that you do will only
italicize all that you rightly loathe in the
status quo of human society today.
To fashion from wreck and sediment
a fairer world you must begin with light,
with philosoph y, with coherent thought.
And so I say to you: Discriminate, dis-
criminate, and again discriminate! Be
fastidious. Choose. Select.
You see, the beginning of a true
society lies not in society at all, but in
the individu al. We have sought for some
decades to cha nge society - and look
at what we have done to society, look
at the society we have - atoms, hard
grains of glaze-pointed sand, fragments!
As we have fractured mind from soul,
so we have fractured society from com-
muni ty and nation. Only individual s
who feel responsibility and seek not
"ri ghts" for themselves but right for
their country can restore us to the
"blissful seat of Eden."
We have splintered the nation into
what the Founding Fathers called "fac-
tions" - into classes, fissured minorities
and selfish, blind, mob-majorities, pres-
sure groups, labor union or manufac-
turers' associations, etc., etc. . . . Where
is the one nation indivisible? Grains of
sand, grains of sand . . . atoms . . .
splinters . .. and the great winds blow,
and we are blown with them. Only
living individuals with living souls, who
know t he integrity of noblesse oblige,
who seek right more tha n "rights," who
impose upon themselves responsibilities,
who pursue the impossible dream in
themselves, and not the unattainable
world of treacle that is supposed to
make "society" happy, can restore the
nat ion and create a viable "society."
Ortega y Gasset in his magn ificent
Revolt of the Masses reveals the truth
and the way:
For tbere is no doubt that tbe most
radical division that it is possible to
make of bumanity is that which splits
it into two classes of creatures: those
78
who make gl'eat demands on them-
selves, piling up di f f iCltlties and
duties; and those who demand
nothing special of themselves, but
f ol' whom to live is to be eoery
moment what they all'eady are, with-
ant imposing on themselves any
ef f ol't tou/ard perf ection; mere blloys
that fl oat on the waves.
One need only add that these human
buoys are forever calling on a perpetual
was t guard to come and tow them
ashore to Lollipop Land.
And you do not "impose on yourself
any effort toward perfection" by cultivat-
ing off-beat beards, and letting your
hair grow long, and drifting int o a
psychedelic Nirvana, and indulging in
vagrancy and flagrancy, and aping the
compulsive masquerades of conformity
to t he Now Groups. That is the stat us
qu o of the off-beat. It is the playboyism
of Shriners stand ing on their heads.
True individuality will not come
through eccentric habit s or gar bs or
manners. Dress as men normally dr ess
today, because your search is for inner
differences and so you scorn outer dif-
only distract from what
is important about you.
And do not join "groups" to "sit in"
or "love in," the gang conformities of
the pathetically unsure. Be alone, be
alone, in the crowded city or the
thronged college library. The way to
the creative society is to shun mass, to
avoid "social" groups and "reforms"
and panaceas, but rather to seek within
yourself the cosmos that is the healing
of the chaos without you. Once a wise
Indi an guide, sur prised by a blizzard
while mil es from camp, told his despair-
ing client : "Indian not lost: wigwam
lost! " As long as the Indian is not lost
the wigwam can be found. Let it be so
with you in your wider world yet
similar predicament!
The world of "society" today is a
chaos? - then be, yourself, a cosmos!
AMERICAN OPI NION
And if you are a cosmos, you are a
center of light and life and love, a sun
that, like all suns everywhere, makes
light of his despair and so brings light
to all his planets.
"Shoulder the sky, my lad. ..."
The great benefactor to society is not
the activist for "social justice," but the
individual who is justice in all he says
and does. T he greatest benefactor to the
life of the Negro was not Nat T urner,
the revolutionist (God forgive him - I
cannot), but George Was hingto n Car-
ver, alone in his labora tory, discovering
and using the secrets of Nature; alone
in the fortress of his soul and his geni us.
Alone, alone with Nature: alone with
God ; alone, alone! Only so can you be
with ot hers, creating for others; only so
are you a cent er of light and power by
which the world may live. Because he
was alone, George Washingt on Carver
could help his people, the A merican
people. How much we owe him! But
we wou ld owe nothing to him, and
Ame rican Negroes would owe nothing
to him, if he had been another busy-
body, anot her "social" agitator, another
Father Groppi in ebony. He helped
society, as we too must, by finding
himself. As Goet he said, you mus t be
somebody before you can do anything.
If yout h would have meaning for the
world, it should go into the mountains
and the deser ts and the islands and dwell
there alone until it has something to
give. Not the mountains and the deserts
and the islands of geography, necessarily,
but those of psychography. How wise
was Zarathustra! -
W hen Zaratbustra was thirty years
old, he lef t his home and the lake of
his home, and went int o the moun-
tains. There he enjoyed his spirit and
his solitilde, and f or ten )'ears did
not weary of it. But at last his heart
changed,-and rising one morning
with the ros)' dawn, he went before
the Still and spake linto it :
SEPTEMBER, 1968
Thou great star.' What would be
thy happiness if tbou hadst not those
f or whom tbo sbinest!
And so, like the sun, having generated
his wealth of light and become himself
a sun, he went back to the world to give
what he had first created in himself,
saYll1g :
Lo.' I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too
much hone)'; I need hands out -
stretched to take it .
I ioould fain bestow and distribute,
nnti! the wise have once more become
joyous in their f olly, and the poor
happy in their riches.
But Zarathustra had gone first into
solitude, and in his loneliness he dis-
covered himself and so became not an
ink-blot but a sun. And so must youth
today. In patience, in loneliness, in soli-
tude, in silence, youth must discover
itself and learn to be. Only so, after
apprenticeship to the years, after creation
of quality, in its wisdo m and its power,
perhaps it may do. Only from the fully
charged clouds fall the lightnings of
great deeds; only from the garnered and
deep fountains can flow the rivers that
never fail.
IV
L ONELI NESS AND ISOLAnON are a pre-
requisite of our eventual communion
and fellowshi p. But that loneliness is
not a tearin g up of roots (the rose, the
wheat, and the frui tful tree live by
roots) , but a thrusting of those roots
ever deeper int o the earth.
In our deserts, our mountains, our
islands (geographic or psychog raphic),
we must draw our life from our land.
The noble conti nent tha t is ours , the
America that is the land we love, the
mountai ns and the prairies and the
oceans white with foam, these must be
a living part of us; they nourish and
79
support and inspi re and give us a valid
strength and joy. There is a mystical
communion between the land where
you live and the soul which you are.
Your land is an alma mater, a cherish-
ing mother, and it is ever wit h you, and
about you, and in you - if you break
your communion with it, you wither
and die though you go on "living."
"Starting from fish-shaped Paumo-
nok," and loving "million-footed Man-
hattan" and the lilacs that bloomed in
a million door yards, Whitman
nourished his genius . Poe filled his
strange deep-purple poems with the
landscapes of t he South. Sidney Lanier
found his way to God t hrough the
unique and mysterious marshes of
Glynn. Winslow Homer nouris hed his
genius on Caribbean wat ers or the surf-
assaulted gray rock bastions of the coast
of Mai ne. T horeau found his true
phi losophy not in "civil disobedience"
but in the Concord and Merrimac rivers
and in the beloved waters of Walden.
You may differ (as 1 do) wit h the
contemporary politicians who disfigure
contemporary politics. But the continent
and the land that transcend them, and
the generations of the great dead who
are part of your love of America, and
the traditions and the garnered wisdom
and the genius that are a part of our
heritage, these remain and abide. And
these are the basis of what we call
patriotism. If you, as yout h, wave the
Red Flag or the Black Fl ag you are
alienated from your land, from the
genius of your land, from the great
dead of your count ry. So you become
thin and febrile and petul ant and
queru lous and rootless; your leaf, then,
withers, and you do not bring forth
your fruit in its season.
To lose patriotism is to lose the very
sources of your life, the very fountains
of your being, the deep roots of your
soul. It is a part of the fragmentation
that is the curse of modernity. It is a
par t of the fracture between mind and
80
soul, between the beneficent buried sub-
conscious and the surface consciousness
that must never be severed from the
whole and the integrity of being.
Professor Eliseo Vivas, in his splendid
"Apologia pro Fide Mea" (The Inter-
collegiate Review, October 1965) sees
the chief lack of the "liberal intellect ual"
- and this must include the radical in-
tellectual - in his loss of piety. Piety,
says Professor Vivas, in the old Roman
sense, means that "a pious man is one
who has grati tude and reverence for
the sources of his being, reverence and
gratitude for parents, ancestors, country
or people, earth, uni verse." The Romans,
indeed, spoke reverently of, and loved,
the Lares and Penates, the household
gods. And all great people have known
that the great dead who cannot die, the
geniuses who have spoken the genius
of their people, the frui tful loam and
the stern rocks of their land, are a part
forever of somethi ng that far transcends
any "Now Generation." The eternal
being, the timeless fabric of life that
embraces all times and all generations,
these are the love of the "pious man."
And unless you have this, you are not
really alive, and you are so poor in
memory, so underprivileged in soul, so
destitute of the wealt h of life, that you
are to be pitied. And thus comes, in
Spengle r's sense, the decline of the West.
Thence comes the end of a culture.
And then ?
Then the terrible night.
1 believe that you, as youth, do not
want this. I believe that you want life
to go on living. I believe that you want
a fairer worl d and a tru er life. And so
I believe that youth, vital youth, valid
youth, will not long wave the Red Flag
and the Black Flag, that it will im-
plement again the great Roman word,
Pietas, and that it will live for and by
its land, and the eternal verities, and
meaning, qualit y, and value. Then, and
then only, wi ll youth find and fulfill
its destiny!
AMERI CAN OPINION
POOR EXCUSE
It Was The Flood This Time
Medford Evans, a former cotlege pro-
fessor and once Administrative officer
on the U.S. atomic energy project ( 1944-
1952), hol ds his
Doctoral de g ree
from Y ale Univer-
si ty. D r. Evans'
work has appeared
in H arper's, Sewa-
nee Review, Human
Events,National Re- iii'
view, and elsewh ere. H e has long been
an AMERICAN OPINION Cont ributing
Editor and regular correspondent.
LAST FALL the most notori ous liar in
America had a drea m. T his spring the
dr eam dissol ved in disillusion-not be-
cause the dreame r died, for dreams out-
live t he dr eamer many times, but be-
cause in the sequel the substance of the
fantasy was false. Mar tin Luther Ki ng
planned a "Poor Peop le's Campaign,"
but the people were not poor, they di d
not cond uct ( in any rat ional sense) a
campaign, and a cynical onlooker could
have said in his haste that he doubted
whether they were people-paralleling
Volt aire's observation of the Holv Ro-
man Empire that it was neither 'Holy,
nor Roman, nor an Empire.
David Gumaer's report in THE RE-
VIEW OF THE NEws-and other con-
firmi ng journalistic accounts - caused
many of us who wer e spared any actual
visit to "Resurrection City," or as some
called it, the Bay of Pigs, to wonder
whether these were men or Mangalit za;
George Schuyler's early iden tif ication
of the mess on the Mall as "Insurrection
City" reminded us that it was chiefly
SEPTEMBER, 1968
the haunt of the spectre of Commu-
nism, and certainly Gumae r docume nte d
and proved that beyond any doubt.
Okay. Then wh y was this most dismal
of swamps such a failure? As an in-
veterate addict of the conspir acy theo ry
of history (indeed, histor y is largely a
record of various conspiracies), I am
tempted to sugges t that the failure was
deliberate, that Ralph Abernat hy cold-
bloodedl y avoided seizing the District
of Columbia on June 19, 1968 in order
to soften us up for a more total take-
over at some subsequent dat e. (I am
tempted, but as a matter of fact, I resist
that tempt at ion rath er readily.) Alter-
nat ely, I mi ght argue that the crusade
coll apsed, to use David La wrence's
langu age, because def iciencies in con-
spiratorial technique turned the opera-
tion into wh at the Wall St reet Journal's
Monroe Karmin called a "mammoth
misadventure." Yet, the highly success-
ful "sit-ins" of the years 1960-1961 were
hardl y the resul t of "complete staff
work" ; King himself, with whom, aft er
all, Aberna thy went every foot of the
way to the mountain top, if not over
the preoipice, seems to have played
mostly by ear. He was a lucky if well-
supported improviser, till he took a room
at the Lorraine Motel, and there his
luck died wi th him.
Ralph Abernathy had quite possibly
felt many t imes prev iously that he was
the one who did the hard work; he was
to discover in the next ten to twelve
weeks that Martin had indeed been a
useful member of the partnership. When
the divinity that had hedged King wi th-
drew, he took tha t old black magi c with
81
him for sure. When Martin went to
jail, as periodically he did, the nation
was in crisis. Now Abernathy is in jail
(isn't he ? - I don 't really know, do
you ?) , and nobod y cares.
Okay, so what was it ?
It was really the rain that ruined
Resurrection Cit y. Washingt on had
never known so much rain in May.
You going to blame the rain on the
conspiracy? The good Lord sent it,
man, the good Lord sent that rain. "He
sendeth rain on the just and on the un-
just." Well, actually, in those terms
Resurrection Citv was rather homo-
geneous. But the'stars in their courses
fought against the phony poor. T he
mule train which kicked off the affair
left Marks, Mississippi, in the rain. A
cloudburst. As an honest old Negro
said, it come a chunk-floater.
And in Washington "t he windows of
heaven were opened, and the rain was
upon the earth forty days and forty
nights." Or so, at least, it seemed. From
May tenth (when the Nat ional Park
Service's nonreflecting permit for a re-
flecting-pool shantytown was issued)
to June nineteenth (when the whole
misadventure dissolved in the fiasco of
the "Solidarit y Day Mar ch") was indeed
exactly forty days, like the action in
Noah's flood, but the rain was not really
uninterrupted in Washington through-
out that period. There were just days
like May twenty-seventh and twent y-
eighth when 2.05 inches fell in thirt y
hours , drowning memories of a solid
earth. The authentic poor departed, not
only because of the theft and rape and
filth which left them mor e wr etched
than they had ever been before, but be-
cause anyone could read in the rain the
judgment of the Lord against the
blasphemously named Res urrection
City.
Somebody dedicated a couplet to
James Baldwin : Vengeance, saith the
Lord, is mine; Your fire is out , the flood
this time!
82
I
THE STRATEGIC CONCEPT of the "Poor
People's Campaign" was to seize power
at the center of American government.
It was ridiculously premature, but it
was not without precedent. Castro from
the Sierra Maestra, Mao Ts e-tung from
Yenan, had laun ched campaigns against
their capitals from remote rural regions.
Why not move agai nst Washington
from Mississippi? When Martin Luther
Kin g was dreaming of such a "long
march" he had one advantage over his
fellow revolutionaries Mao and Fidel-
he had far mor e support in the capital
which was the object of the strategy.
There was never a time prior to
ultimate physical takeover when Castro
could have looked to Havana or Mao
Tse-tung to Peking for the ki nd of
support and encouragement which
Martin Lut her King got , or seemed to
get , from Washington, D.C., right down
to the day he died. And after that he
had the gr eat at his funeral, where the
symbolic mule train was first used to
make a show. The American Establ ish-
ment was, or at least appeared to be,
eager to help in overthrowing itself.
You almost have to feel sor ry for Martin
Luther King that he took the protesta-
tions of the power structure at face
value, when they hail ed him as it were
as the Prince of Peace-until the very
last, when the revelation came that h ~
had been led to the mountain top and
shown the kingdoms of the earth, onl y
to be hurled from the heights with his
hopes to the "freedom now" of the
grav e.
The Vice Pr esident of the United
States and his principal rival for the
1968 Democratic Presidenti al nomina-
tion appeared to be almost rivals for the
succession to the crown which sits so
(pardon the word) poorl y on the head
of Ralph Abernathy. Hubert Humphrey
and Eugene McCarthy were both
prominent in the gathering of the poor
before the Lincol n Memori al on June
AMERICAN OPINION
nineteenth, "Solidarity Day." To he sure,
a politician' s motives in such an instance
are inevitably ambiguous. Hubert Hum-
phrey was booed by some of those
present, while McCarthy got only cheers.
It has been suggested, but not docu-
ment ed, that Hubert himself sur repti-
tiously provided the anticlaque which
booed him - in order to validate his
more than faintly absurd pose on the
Right of the wrong Senat or McCarthy.
Li ke Lyndon, Hubert has on other
occasions attended meetings where he
joined in the refrai n, "We Shall Over-
come." It is the most fascinating thing
in the world to speculate on what can
be going on in the mind of a Pr esident
or Vice Pr esident who publicl y chants
a Communist slogan dir ected agains t
the majority of the people of his own
country - and against the "Establish-
ment" of which he is, theoretically at
any rate, the head or next in line. W ho m
are Lyndon and Hubert going to over-
come? The people who elected them?
It certainly is the American people and
the American government that Castro-
ites have i n mind when th ey say Ve n-
ceremos-we shall overcome . The whol e
thing is as confusing as the Cultural
Revolution in China, where the fanati -
cal Red Guard rages destructively
through the society of which their
su pe r nal lea de r Mao Tse-t ung i s
supposedly the absolute dictator. Who
is overcomi ng whom ?
II
IT IS CLEAR that some kind of struggle
for power is going on, and that Solidar i-
ty Day, Resurrection City, and the
Poor People's Campaign are part of it.
It is also clear that poor people have
little to do with the Poor People's
Campaign. Ralph Abernathy is not
poor, Hubert H umphrey is not poor,
Eugene McCar thy is not poor, and
Mart in Luther King certai nly was not
poor. The dilemma of such a campaign
is that the publ ic int uitively knows that
SEPTEMBER, 1968
the leaders cannot be genuinely poor.
If they have the ability to lead, they
have the ability to have delivered them-
selves from poverty, and will have done
so.
This is not to say that they may not
be far from having all the money they
want. Who does? But they cannot
present themselves as leaders and at the
same time be suffering from poverty.
Nor can they, gr ant ed that they are not
poor themselves, be hired by the poor,
for the poor have no money to hire
them. They must be - there is only
one thing they can be if they are
leaders of the poor - they must be
moved by religious zeal. They must
love their neighbors as themselves.
Now Martin Luther King, phony as
so many of us believe him to have been,
nevertheless had convinced many others
that he was indeed fired by religious
zeal, was a man of God, an apostle of
love, peace, and brotherhood. (Repeat,
I don' t buy that, but lots of people did.)
But, who believes any such thing about
Ralph Abernathy? Or, for that matter,
about Hubert Humphrey or Eugene
McCarthy? As for the denizens of
Resurrection City who survived the
rains and slop of the first ten days,
they qui te evide ntly had all the spiritual
exaltation and human compassion of
Mack the Kni fe.
Facts on File, no Rightwing publica-
tion, reports that Resurrection City
father James Bevel (though paterni ty
in this matter, even multiple paternity,
is hard to establish) "a nnounced May 22
that about 200 Negro yout hs, mostly
members of Chicago and Detroit street
gangs, had been sent home. 'They went
around and beat up on our white peo-
ple,' Bevel said." Facts on File conti nues:
Leaders of non-Negro groups
participating in the Poor People's
Campaign May 25 bittedy denounced
the treatment they had received from
N egro leaders and members of the
83
march. Spokesmen f or the American
Indians, the Mexicall -Americalls and
the Appalachiall whites said Ne gro
leaders had ignored them for the most
part and militant Negroes had abused
them . ( Vol. XXVII, Page 233.)
Since one of the victims wh ose feel-
ings were wou nded by the haugh ty
blacks was Reies Lopez Tij erina. the
Castroite guerri lla leader who calls
himself the T iger of New Mexico. we
mav conclude that the contumelv was
palpable. .
Mor e flagiti ous occur rences abound-
ed. As David Gumaer report s: "Three
would-be members of the Poor Peo-
ple's Campai gn were lat er arreste d in
Washington for the brutal murder of
two Marines. . . . Numerous other acts
of violence were report ed, such as the
beating of newspape r report ers and
cameramen and the mugging of curi ous
sightseers."
Fulton Lewis III , in "The Top of the
News" for June tenth, told how he had
made a tour of Resurrection Ci ty in May
and returned in early June. Lewis
commented : "The changes in the Poor
People's camp have been remarkable.
It has been tra nsformed in onlv a few
weeks from a fairlv livable cornrnunitv
of temporary housing into a filthy, v i l ~ ,
at r oci0 us-.s mel Ii ng , and da ngerous
slum." The authentic poor, Lewis
found, were gone; the ga ngste rs re-
mained. "There are the Marshals, the
Peace Brothers, the Rangers, the Rat
Patrol, the Milwaukee Commandos. and
the Memphis Invaders - to menti on
just a few." Armed with machetes
(Cuban moti f again) , hammer (So-
viet? ), or "whatever weapon they can
find," they inflicted a "multilateral reign
of terror."
In a later broadcast Lewis repor ted
his int er view with Mut ual Ne twor k's
James Hall, a daily observer of Resur-
rection City. How di d it happen, Lewis
asked, that so many of the "poor peo-
84
pie" had "cars, very good-looking cars"?
Hall had noticed that, too. Seems that
there were just some "young people"
who wan ted to "suppo rt this move-
ment," and "they are drivi ng these big
cars and they are wearing expensive
clothes."
Well, now, you wouldn' t want to
discriminate against somebody just be-
cause he was lousy rich, would you?
Especially if he was lousy enough and
willing to wall ow wi th his expensive
clothes in the mud. "So these peopl e,"
Lewis asked, "don' t even regard them-
selves as being poor?" "T hey will ,"
replied Hall, "-what do I want to say
-'identify' themsel ves with the poor
people's movement, but it is obvious
that many of them are far from being
poor peopl e." The filthy rich wer e wel-
come to Resurrection City provided they
were, literally, filth y.
III
THERE WERE OTHER rich who "identi-
fied" themselves with the "poor," but
only in a Pi ckwi ckian sense. They
stayed, if they were black like Aber-
nath y, at the Pitts Motel, or if they wer e
wh ite like Hubert and Gene at places
considerably nicer tha n even that. It
doesn't reall y matt er wh ether yOll arc
rich or poor, black or white. All that
really matt ers is if you are truly dedica-
ted to the overt hrow of existing Ameri-
can institutions. Including bath s.
Well, perh aps I oversimplify there.
Some Leftwingers, such as Senator
McCarthy himself, look physically clean
and decent. It is onl y the spirit of the
nation which they seem to seek to
destroy. Also it should be noted that
whil e the poor will gen erall y accept the
rich, the rich will not always accept
the poor, even wh en both appear dedica-
ted to erasure of any distinction between
t he two. Many rich men prefer to cur
thei r own throats in their own way.
Some will even insist on sterilizi ng the
razo r.
AMERICAN OPINION
Frankly, the Established Left, which
had for so long found Martin Lu ther
King at once diverting and convenient,
never had a stomach for Ralph Aber-
nathy. And King himself had grown
presumptuous. Took himself quite
seriously. He was certainly not the man
to manage a coup, nonviolent or ot her-
wise, in Washington. Best thi ng was to
phase out what King represented.
Overprolonged unction is a frightful
bore, really. So the man was shot -
quite fatally. The Poor People's Cam-
paign was part of his estate, a legacy
whi ch had to be liquidated. The Liberal
Establishment's attitude toward the Poor
Peopl e's Campaign in 1968 was like
Owen Lattimore' s recommendat ion for
U.S. policy in the Far East circa 1950-
to let Kor ea fall, but not look as though
we had pushed it.
Not that the Establishment had any
intention of abandoning the racial gam-
bit. Far from it. But King had served
his purpose, and Abernat hy had no
purpose apa rt from King. Abernathy,
for Establis hment taste, is really too
much of a Negro. I know it is un-
fashionable to admit that race differ-
ences exist, much less to discuss them .
Nevertheless it is obvious enough to all
who have given the matter any serious
thought that Negroes are deficient in
malice. They are capable of savage out-
bursts, yes, but they will har dly settle
upon a course of studied malevolence
and pursue it to the end.
Whether Othello, the Moor of Venice,
was a Negro or not is debatable: he
could have been. But Iago coul d never
have been a Negro, and an authent ic
Negro can hardly approximate an lago.
The devil may be black, but not Congo-
lese, not Sudanese, not Bantu. Possibly
East Indian, possibly Hami tic, possibly
Semitic. (Oh, I mean Ara b, not Jewish! )
To the great Moise Tshombe, who is
about as pure Negro as a man can
get, the Establishment prefers a Stokely
Carmichael, who is mostly East Indian;
SEPTEMBER, 196 8
an Adam Clayton Powell , who possibly
has no Negro blood at all, and appears
to be of Arabian descent ; and especially
a Bayard Rustin, some kind of hybr id
from the sotadic zone. These mixes, in
which malevolent white genes are in-
corporated, per mit the Establishment
to have its devilsfood and eat it too.
Chief executor of the Establishment's
Lattimoresque policy toward the Poor
People's Campai gn was a convicted sex
pervert n amed Bayard Rustin.
Permanently executive di rector of the
A. Philip Randolph Institut e, Rustin
was appointed by the Southern Christian
Leadershi p Conference on May twen-
tieth to organize the June Nineteenth
Solidarit y march-or "National Day of
Support," as it was called once or
twice. This appointment, announced by
Abernathy on May twent y-first, was
widely hailed as giving the Poor Peo-
ple new prestige, since Rustin had been
credited (or debited, and whether rightly
or wrongly I cannot say) wit h the
public-relations success of the August
28, 1963 March on Washington, when
Marti n Luther King had his most
famous dream. Two hu ndred and fiftv
thousand demonstrators were, it was
estimated, gat hered in 1963 before the
Linco ln Memorial for that one. It was
a well-controlled charade which spelled
Revolut ion from the Top. As of that
time and place it was t he Establish-
ment's dish of tea, and Bayard Rustin
was their boy, just as Mar tin Luther
King was their pri ma donna, though
I'm not sure I've got my genders right
in either case.
At any rate, when Rustin was made
manager of the Solidarity Day march
in 1968, the "Liberal" Pr ess in unison
sang his praises. "For he's a jolly good
fellow . . . which nobody can deny."
So firmly attached to the Establishment
is Rustin that when on June third he
announced certai n "i mmediate de-
mands" which Negro Hosea Wi lliams
said the next day were "una uthori zed"
85
and "a bunch of foolishness," the doom
of t he Poor People's Campaign was
sealed. On June sevent h Rustin resigned,
and Aberna thy appointed in his place
one Sterli ng Tucker, of whom no one
had ever heard. Abernathy for King,
Tucker for Rustin. The scrub team
was now on t he field, and the fans be-
gan leaving the stadium.
On June 19, 1968 possibly one-fift h
the number of the 1963 demonstration
assembled in the general vicinity of the
Lincoln Memorial. Still, forty to fifty
thousand is a good crowd (it would
half f ill the Yale Bowl) if they are
en t h us i ast i c. These were languid,
munching picnic lunches, dabbling and
dribbling in the Reflect ing Pool, wan-
dering, in their nearest approach to
something like purpose, away from the
speakers' voices. By the time Abernathy
began his sixty-five minutes of fustian,
his audience in the flesh had dwindled
to between five and ten thousand,
according to the N ew York Times, and
I'm sorry I can't give you a better
authority. How many of the five-to-tea
listened is anybody's guess. Ralph said
he was speaking "wit h a divine man-
date from God" and "wit h a mandate
from the people." God kno ws what
else he said. Hardl y anyone listened.
Closest to an oratorical success,
according to the National Observer of
June twenty-fourth, came Martin Lu-
ther King's widow, Coretta, who said,
qu ite unforgettabl y: "Free at last, free
at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free
at last." What do you suppose she meant
by that?
Though the Observer's report er, Wes-
ley Pruden Jr., wrote a few days before
Abernathy and associates were arrested
for trespass and the crime-ridden shant y-
town was demolished by the same
federal government which had fostered
it, he concluded perceptively: "Resur-
rection Ci ty has been a flop, perhaps
the worst since t he civil-rights move-
ment began."
86
And that is just fine with most of
us. Our joy should be tempered, how-
ever, by realization that a country where
we feel relief as if from real suspence
over whether a Ralph Abernathy can
succeed in seizing power in the capital
is a country in a precarious plight. The
Poor People's Campaign as such did
not threaten Washington ; Was hington
was threatened by the sickness within
itself which permi tted a malevolent
absurdity like the Poor People's Cam-
paign to take shape in the first place.
IV
IF THE Poor People's Campaign failed
in Wa shington because of ( 1) in-
competent leadership, and (2) a deci-
sion by the Establishment to let it
fail, it failed earlier at its princ ipal
point of origin, which was Marks,
Mississippi, because of ( 1) a decision by
the Mississippi establishment to contain
the revolut ion, and (2) competent local,
county, and state leadership. The Missis-
sippi establishment, I need hardly say,
is not the same as the Establishment,
but regr etfull y I must add that the
Establishment also operates in Missis-
sippi, and when it puts its mind to it,
as it did at Oxford in 1962, can over-
whelm the Mississippi establishment -
which would not be the case if all other
states were equally concerned to pre-
serve their own powers. (Li ke the Te nth
Amendment, I prefer "powers" to
"ri ghts.")
Frankly, one must give Mississippi
credit , both at Oxford in 1962 and at
Marks in 1968, for rational and vigorous
action. There was disaster in the first
instance, and exemplary success in the
second, because in the first Washington
supported its assault on Ole Miss with
enough militar y power to have made the
Bay of Pigs a triumph. (Cr eighton
Abrams, by the way, was in charge of
military operat ions at Oxford, as he
is now in Vietna m, but his orders were
different; he was told to win at Oxford.)
AMERICAN OPINION
In 1968, however, Washington left
Ralph Abernathy pretty much on his
own, and neither he nor his S.c.L.c.
henchmen were up to the mark in
Marks. The Mississippians of Quitman
County, of both races, conducted them-
selves with firmness and dignity.
The fires of anarchy were set in
Quitman County in late April an.I early
May 1968, as they had been set before
in Watts, Newark, Detroit, Chicago,
and so many other points in the United
States. But the blaze would not propa-
gate itself, the flame flickered and went
out. Shifting metaphors, the melodrama
scheduled for a long run in Resurrec-
tion City opened in Marks and was
really a worse flop there than in Wash-
ington. The Nation's Capital, reeling
from the riots and fires of April, was at
least palpitant with anticipatory dread
and sickened by the mess and stench
of Resurrection City. From the point of
view of the revolution, all that was to
the good. Nor, on the side of decency,
were there any compensations in Wash-
ington. There were in Marks, which
emer ged from the attack upon it
physically intact and bright with honor.
Three revolutionary caravans emana-
ted from this reticent county seat in
North Mi ssissippi, asti gmatically
described in Newsweek (May 13, 1968)
as "a shabby, one-stoplight poverty
pocket discovered by King two years
ago and , accordingly, chosen by his heir s
as a first staging area for the march."
Waiving the argument that the place
was "discovered" by DeSoto four
hundred-odd years ago, Marks is scarcely
a "poverty pocket," but a very att ractive
if slightly somnolent little town in the
particularly prosperous area of Missis-
sippi which we call the Delta. The
reason it has only one stoplight is not
that the city fathers cannot affor d an-
other one, hut that in the tranquili ty
of the area no mor e are needed - if,
indeed, that one is. (Incidentally, ther e
is probably an inverse ratio between the
SEPTEMBER, 1968
number of stoplights in a town and that
content surpassing wealth found by the
sage in meditation, but Newsweek
doesn't dig.)
Allegations that Marks is a "poverty
pocket" rest chiefly on (1) carefully
selected TV camera shots by C.B.S.
showing a marginal area where Negroes
had bought lots for fifty dollars and
built their own places to live (the double
implication that these were typical and
the work of exploitirrg landlords was
doubly false), and (2) the statistic that
median income for Negroes in Marks
was "little more than $500 annually"
(quote from Facts on File) , which is
not only highly doubtful but leaves un-
said that it is easier to live on five hun-
dred a year in Marks than on five thou-
sand as a commuter in Connecticut (I
suppose the latter is really impossible,
but the former is not) .
By the way, let me interject this
personal note, which I hope my Missis-
sippi friends will not read. I have lived
in the State since 1962, and find the
people admirable, but one thing does
bother me a bit. Mississippians tend to
run, on the average, a little heavy. I
mean physically. Fact is, they eat too
much, and the diet is so healthful that
they assimilate it well. This goes for
both races. These are big Americans. It
is typical of Leftwing propaganda
Iwhichcalls war "peace," etc. (you
know, the principle of reversal) that it
should describe Mississippi as a land of
hunger and starvation. These people do
eat. The ones with money eat expen-
sively and the ones without money eat
cheaply. Nobody starves! (If you don 't
like blackeyed peas and cornbread you
are culturally deprived, and probably a
Yankee into the bargain, but cornbread
and blackeyed peas are good for you,
as well as delicious, and the patty sau-
sages are the best in the country.)
But wealth in and around Marks is
not limited to white Delta planters wh o
publish arty magazines on the side, nor
87
to that form of wealth which depends
in some degree on a mixture of
phi losophical temperanc e and economic
relativ ity. There are Negro plante rs as
well as white. Claude Martin and
James Davis, to name two, are worth
on the order of a quarter of a million
dollars each. These, you understand,
are landowners, not ballplayers or enter-
tainers-not that there's anything wrong
with entertainers and ballplayers. There
does seem to be something wrong these
days, however, with the noblest of all
professions, and Davis and Martin have
been quoted as saying that what Marks
does not need any mo re of is Negro
pr eachers. That is bound to mean Ralph
Abernathy, but not him exclusivelv, as
seen below. .
Marks Negroes do not have as much
money as they woul d like-and neither,
I believe, do whites in Westchester
County, New York. But Marks Negroes
hav e television sets and automobiles.
They look at the same programs and
buy the same brands of gasoline that
are looked at and bought in N ew York
or California. The fact is, thev virt uallv
all have television sets and
If you ask how they do it on five hun-
dred dollars a year I will say I don ' t
know, but I'm more sure of the TV sets
and the cars than I am of that propa-
ganda statistic.
V
T OWARD THE END of June, I ran up to
Ma rks and had the privi lege of talking
to a number of the law-enforcement
officers there. I said above that in Wash-
ington nothing good came out of the
Poor People' s Campaign , but in Marks
there were severa l incident al benefits.
one of the most important being, by
common consent locallv, an enhance-
f h
"" "f'h I r
ment 0 t e Image 0 t e aw-enrorce-
ment off icer. This is a benefit whi ch
ma ny American communi ties would
like to get also; I'm sure no one has
to tell them that the way to get it is not
88
to solicit revolutionary actio n such as
the S.c.L.c. inflicted upon Marks, but
to meet it with resolution and compo-
sure if and when it does come.
I talked to Quitman Countv Sheriff
L. V. Har rison, Chief Deputy Sheriff
Marion Choat, Cit y Clerk Edwin Wag-
ner, Police Officer D. W. Jones, and
Police Officer L. C. Pride (who is a
Negro) . T hese men, together with Chief
of Pol ice J. W. Jenki ns and Mayor
Haword Langford, set an example for
America of calm, efficient, and resolut e
law-enforcement.
To do so they had to have, and did
have, cooperation-first from their fel-
low citizens in Marks, second from the
Gov ernor of Mississippi and the Missis-
sippi Highway Patrol. They did not
need, and did not get, any help from
the federal government. The ubiq uitous
pr ess and T V men wer e something!
And, at the peak of the crisis there
were as many as a hundred Highway
Patrolmen on duty at once in the area .
All these people needed physical and
moral support from the citizens of
Marks. T hey got it. Ladies of the town
prepared food and fed the Highway
Patrol at the American Legion hu t. A
Pr ess Room was set up in the Chamber
of Comme rce office, where from eight
a.m, to eleven p.m. cold drinks and
restr oom faciliti es were avail abl e -
and, most important, telephones for
filing stories. This was generally
appreciated, though the N ewsweek man
with remarkable solicitude for his own
virtue said he would try "not to be
prostituted" by such ki ndness, and he
seems to have departed as chaste as he
came.
Whi te people of the town, like Des -
demona, were at first reluctant to be-
lieve that anyone would try to do what
the Southern Christian Leadership Con-
ference did in fact try to do - i.e.,
destroy their town. In spite or because
of this skepticism, they agreed in ad-
vance to "lay low" if trouble came, and
AMERICAN OPI NION
to let local and state officers take care
of outside agitators. One duty they had,
in accordance with the principles of the
common law. That was to protect their
own property. They were told : Get your
guns. If the rioter comes to your house
to do harm, kill hi m. Otherwise, lay
low. This was done as a matt er of pre-
caution. Nobody was ki lled. No property
was destroyed except a couple of broken
windows. A Memphis Negro gang,
"The Invaders," roughed up. some of
the local Negroes, and the Highway
Patrol dispersed a crowd that seemed to
be approaching criticality. Considering
the potential, force was at a minimum.
Private possession of guns preserved the
peace.
Every family and every business
estab lishment in Marks has at least one
gun. When the marchers asserted their
right to parade en masse down the
center of the main street, their leader
was told by the officer on duty: Pro-
ceed at your own risk . I' m not going
with you bet ween that double line of
blank store windows and risk the cross-
fire when some of your boys start break-
ing glass. The marchers took anot her
route. There was no shooti ng. The citi-
zens of Marks had confidence in their
offi cers, and the officers had confidence
in the citizens.
The greatest difference between this
little North Mississippi town and Wash-
ington, a month earlier (when the
post-Ki ng assassinatio n riots occurred)
was that in Marks the law was en-
forced without racial discrimi nation. In
Was hington, of course, under the Cyrus
Vance-Ramsey Clar k policy, there was
.the most flagrant discrimination in favor
of black looters and arsoni sts. No loot-
ing, no arson in Marks - though the
ratio of aggressive "nonviolent" revolu-
tionaries to ordinary citizens was tempo-
rarily much higher than in any big
city. Everyo ne in Marks, black and
white alike, knew that if he broke the
law he would be arrested.
SEPTEMBER, 1968
As it ha ppened, the few arrests that
had to he made were allocated in accord-
ance with the most refi ned principle of
justice, "To each his own." The Marks
city police department has, under Chief
Jenk ins, a racially balanced force -
one whi te and one black. It was Officer
D. W. Jones, wh ite, who arrested the
white man who illegall y (though
harml essly) fired a gun ; it was Officer
L. C. Pride, a proud Negro, who called
Negro agitator Willie Bolden a liar to
his face on national television - be-
cause Bolden had slanderously lied
about Pr ide. .
T he period of tension in Marks lasted
three weeks. It began about April
twenty-first, when Wi llie Bolden, ad-
vance man for Aberna thy, hi t town.
Psychologicall y, he hit it prett y hard.
Holding mass meetings at Negro
chur ches, this So u th e r n Ch r i s t i a n
Leader's gospel was "go burn, burn,
burn !" It was very stimulating. Marks
Negroes, however, failed to see the
immediate advantage, and noth ing was
burned. Nobody arrested Bolden for this
inf lammatory oratory.
When he assumed a Pied Piper role
he got more action. On May first, a day
beloved of Communists everywhere,
Bolden went into the Negro school and
led out two-hu nd red chi ldren, contrary
to school regu lations. Obviously he was
guilty of trespass, contributing to the
delinquency of minors, disturbing the
peace, I don' t know what all. Willie
thus got himself arrested at high noon
on May Day.
It looked for a time as if Willie Bolden
might get that riot off the ground aft er
all. Bail was set at $500. Willie had in
hi s pocket (being poor) only $240 cash.
This he gave to one Wi llie Brown, a
local Negro who had given bad checks
in Marks, and asked him to raise the
other $260. It is not known how the
account between Bolden and Brown
was finally settled, but bond was not
made for Bolden.
89
With Willie in jail a crowd formed
on the cour thouse lawn, demanding his
release. Southern Christian Leader An-
drew Marris ett said, Let Willie Bolden
go. N o bond. N o fine . Let him go. Sher-
iff said, Willie will get a trial. If he's not
guilty he won't be convicted and a/on't
be fined. He hasn't made any bond. Get
your people out of here. Marrisett said
(here I follow Newsweek for the word-
ing) : "We prefer goi ng to jail unl ess
you turn him loose." Accommodatingly
Sheriff Harri son and Deputy Choat
arrested six leader s and put them in jail
with Willie. One local Negro, L. C.
Coleman, an ex-convict and some kind
of preacher, also a disappoint ed office-
seeker, pled with the Sheriff: " "Mr. Har-
rison, don't you want me in there too ?"
But, Colema n was not jailed. I hear he
compl ained to the F.B.I.
Now the crowd-"student s," News-
week called them-still refused to dis-
perse. So the Mississippi Patrol dispersed
them. No sweat. That was the climax
of the tension in Marks. Next day
Aberna thy came into town after some
of that mule wagon nonsense in Mem-
phis. (It costs money to get mules and
wagons to show how poor vou are.
Like, a five-year-old car means vou are
a bit strapped for cash, but a fifty-year-
old car means you are affl uent. T hese
days, to ride in a mule wagon yOLl got
to be loaded. ) Aberna thy came to Marks
Mav second, and somebodv bailed
Willi e Bolden out of jail. That was the
dav L. C. Pride called him a liar -
b e ~ a u s e he was.
They started three caravans, or some-
thing, out of Marks. Abernathy went
on right away to Ed wards, Mississippi,
and from there through Alabama. On
May eighth a "Freedom T rain" of ten
buses took off for Resurrection City.
And on May thirteenth another "Mule
Train" left Marks also headed east. It
I
took thre e days to get to Batesville,
twenty miles away. Food was delivered
by somebody in a Hertz truck. One mul e
90
died before they got to Gr enada, another
thirty mil es. The thing was absolutel y
crazy. There was no point in it. It cost
large sums of money. It did the poor
no good. It even did the revolution no
good - except to assure the revolu-
tionaries that any folly whatever is per-
missible in America today, and will get
support from the gr eat tax-exempt
foundations and the National Council
of Churches, as the Poor People's Cam-
paign did.
Negroes were recruited in Marks for
the trek with absurd promises and
veiled threats. If they went they would
each have a brick house in Washington.
If they did not go, federal aid and wel-
fare checks would be cut off. One wom-
an, Willie Hill, took eleven children
and had another in Resur rection City.
All thirteen are now back in Marks and,
like other returnees there, they don't
talk. Well, what would you say? Might
say, It sure did rain.
People in Marks who stayed home
feel prett y good about it now. The two
races there are perhaps closer than they
were-drawn together by common re-
jection of the fantastic fraud that was
the Poor People's Campaign, drawn to-
gether, too, by common realization that
Marks, Mississippi, has maint ained law,
order, and a level of economic viability
for both races in a way unknown in
Detroit.
A small fraction of the damage done
in Ne wark 1967 or Washington 1968
would have wiped out Marks, Missis-
sippi, completely. But the plague of
civil riots passed over the little Delta
town, with onl y an admonitory flick of
the death angel 's wings. My fr iend R. A.
Carson summed it up : "The story is that
ther e is no story," which puts Marks in
the category wi th the happy nation that
had no history. But Carson added,
"Marks saved Mississippi ." And I would
add, The example oj organized and
determined citizenry could save the
United States. - -
AMERICAN OPINION
ON MANLINESS
So You Want To Raise A Boy?
Taylor Caldwell is the most widely-
read living author in the world. Her
books include The Devil's Advocate;
Never Victorious
Never Defeated;
Tender Victories;
Your Sins and
Mine; Dear and
Glorious Physician;
Prologue to Love;
Grandmother and
the Priests, A Pillar of Iron , No One
Hears But Him, and many others. Her
latest is Testimony of Two Men.
GENTLEMEN! Please pass this ar-
ticle by. It is only for your ladies, scores
of whom have innocently written me
for advice as to how best to raise their
little boys to be truly manly, American,
patriotic, God-fearing, law-abiding citi-
zens of their country. I am touched by
their faith in my omniscience - I don't
have that faith, myself. Though I have
no sons, but only daughters - the
prettiest in the world, and the dearest-
I have always been surrounded by
hordes of male relatives, uncles, grand-
fathers , fat her, great-grandfathers,
cousins, and I have three grandsons
and a great-grandson who is the apple
of my eye. In comparison, I have had
few female relatives, and so I studi ed
the Boys, being the world's greatest ad-
mirer of the male persuasion.
So - goodbye, gentlemen. See you
another time.
I
AND NOW for you dear ladies: Let
us sit down and talk confidentially to-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
gether about a very important matter.
First of all, like all mothers, I once
foolishly insisted that every other wom-
an, and every man, too, love my children
as much as I did. I thought teachers, bus-
drivers, postmen, neighbors, other
mothers, and absolute strangers, should
just adore my children and feel my own
tenderness and concern for them. If a
neighbor complained that one of my
girls ran over her flower-beds or broke
a window or teased a dog or pushed
another child, I thought that neigh-
bor "didn't love children." If a teacher
said that one of my girls was inatten-
tive, rude, rebellious, giggly, and didn't
know subtraction from addition, and
she in the fifth grade, I contemplated
demanding that the teacher be fired.
You see? I was just like other mothers,
and just as absurd. Imagine thinking
that the world revolved about my chil-
dren! Thank God, I came to my senses
in time, thanks to a wise priest.
But you'd be surprised to learn that
most women, even today, enlightened
though they are, and well-educated
young ladies, think exactly like that!
They beam about our "child-centered
culture," and expect you to agree,
when you want to laugh indulgently
in their faces. You want to tell them
that civilized societies aren't "child-
centered," but only primitive and ab-
original ones - Stone Age folk. You
want to inform them that well-bred
people keep their children out of sight
except for rare occasions, that they
seldom "discuss" their children with
anyone but teachers, pastors, and doe-
I tors, and that they know that other
91
people are bored to death with the chil-
dren of others.
At one time, before America became
crude and uncouth and "Liberal," she
was a civilized country, and children
had their place and were taught to
keep that place. They were taught -
and not only in America - that as they
were immature and ignorant and noisy
and not very interesting as yet, they
had litt le or no status; though their
parents loved them even if only God
knew why. Children, being innately
shrewd, understood that and knew it
was tru e, so they had their own deligh t-
ful world. If they committed innocent
pranks they were truly innocent. Chil-
dren rarely became criminal s as they
do now, and a delinquent was practi-
cally unknown. They were thrashed
regularly, and they knew they deserved
it, and never were "emot ionally dis-
turbed" by it. Children are hardy littl e
beasts, and a blow or a whi pping means
little to them. In fact, they really un-
derstand that this is a sign that their
parents are concerned about them, and
honestly love them and wish them
well, and they are content if not pleased
by such comeuppance.
So, the first thing you do with your
children, girls, is to assure them that
some day they will be bearable adults,
but as of now they are endured by
parent s because those parents love
them. But they must not expect love
from others until they have earned
it. Their teachers are dedicated souls,
but even they would not stand the con-
stant company of children unl ess they
were paid for it - and they are not
paid enough, considering the agony
our children now inflict on them. From
infanthood, children must be taught
respect for authority, love of God, rev-
erence, qui etness in the house, in the
school, in the church, obedience, good
manners, respect and honor for coun-
try. You can begin right in the play-
pen, girls, believe me.
92
II
"THE HAND that rocks the cradle
rules the worl d." It can also ruin the
world, and is doing so merrily now,
all in the name of Loving the Children
and Giving them the Best. Worst of
all, grea t hor des of American mothers
don't seem truly to love their children.
You doubt it? I not e that a very popular
women's magazine of this month' s
issue report s on how it had asked its
readers what was their consuming
worr y these days. Were the women -
mothers mostly - concerned about
their childr en's future in this increas-
ingly terrible world ? Were they anx-
ious about the spreading irreligion?
Were they fearful of c rim e in the
streets, war , holocausts, riots, disasters,
chaos, confusion ? Were they appre-
hensive about their country? Their
husbands' health ? The draft? The
venality of evil polit icians ? The spread
of Communism ? Any other calamity
you can name ?
No, not at all! The ladies' consumi ng
worr y and const ant concern was fear of
losing their slender figures! Honest
to God, girl s, honest to God. Read it
for yourselves. Their second monstrous
terror was that they feared they were
not "handling t h ~ grocery 'money
right." But the first - their girl ish
figures! Incr edible? Yes, but true. Re-
member, these women were not illiter-
ate. Many of them had college degrees.
The magazine publishes very good
articles and occasionally an excellent
piece of fiction. But even the editors,
themselves, were aghast at the ladies'
replies, and the feverish report of their
wornes.
Now, we know that real, honest-to-
God men hardly exist any more, that
homosexualism has vastly increased
and become overt in America, and that
it has now, in Washington and New
York, taken on respectabilit y and elan
and has an air of delicate chic.
We know now that the student body
AMERICAN OPINION
of our colleges, and the faculties, too,
reek with femi nine "males" and limp-
wristed flit s. Drugs and homosexuality
are rampant among our male youth.
They seem to go together. Weare not
concerned just now - though we
should be - over the fact that our
government is permeated with deviates
who are often manipulated by our na-
tion's enemies and Communist lovers,
and are a terrible hazard to our coun-
tr y. We are mostly concerned at this
immediate time wi th a general failure
of manhood among our boys, and most
of us understand that it begins prac-
tically in the bassinet. Yet not a single
woman, replying to that magazine's
queries, expr essed her fear that her son
might not grow into a real man - in
spite of the fact that such a national
failure has brought down the great em-
pires and republics of the past and may
bring down America to ruin, too, un-
less the tendency can be reversed.
The ladi es surely know of the rotten-
ness and extent of such perversion
in America. They surel y can't have
escaped being aware, for it is the rare
magazine or newspaper wh ich doesn't
mention it regularly, and with anxiety.
They hear about it - and see it illus-
trated - on TV and at the movies, and
in books. So it wasn't blissful ignorance
that blinded the ladies, they just didn 't
think it important. No doubt many of
these females were "Liberals," and so
were mor e than half-convinced that
there is something elegant about femi-
nine men, somethi ng aristocratic. After
all, isn't so-and-so in Washington a
homo, and that eminent playwright,
and that novelist, and that professor,
and that high official? And aren't
they darling "men"?
But surely! Even lady "Liberals"
don't want their own sons to be flat-
ulent shemales. Or, do they? 0, I am
sure that even those benighted ladies
would wi sh for a masculine son. But
how do you explain the tremendous
SEPTEMBER, 1968
lack of inte rest in the subject, on the
part of the ladi es who answered that
magazine' s query? Could it be-again-
that many American mothers don 't
really care about even their own chil-
dr en and are concerned only with sex
and their girlish figures? What kind
of sons will they raise to manhood?
It should concern you, girl s, for your
own sons will encounter the sons of
those women, in school, in offi ces, on
the streets, in colleges, and in employ-
ment. Such creatures will thr eaten their
country, and thei r very lives; would
corrupt their souls and their minds;
would bring down the walls of our
cities upon their heads; would open
the gates of our nation to the deadl y
enemy, Communism. It will return us
to barbarism - this femininity of the
sons of the ladies who thought the
most important thing in the worl d was
their figures.
How can you be certain that your
son, or sons, will escape the emasculat-
ing pollution ? It is well-known that
both sexes possess latent characteristics
of the other sex, and that environment
and companions of evil intent can bring .
out the submerged tendenci es. To be-
come a man, a boy must be treated as a
man from the very cradle.
But first of all his mother must be a
woman, whose husband is her dearest
treasure above all else, whose children
are secondary to her mate in all things.
A woman must be womanl y - not just
"femi nine." She must have the strong
instincts of a woman, and a love for
her home. A mother whose first con-
cern is "sex," and clothes and personal
ind ulgence and hairdos, and her phys-
ical appearance, will not produce a
manly son.
I've known dozens of these "women,"
and invariably their sons have been
lightweights. How could they escape
the insistent picture of self-indulgence I
and self-love whi ch they saw every
day of their lives as childr en, in thei r
93
mothers? How could they not see
with what indifference their fathers
were treated, and how they were re-
gar ded as providers of goodies, and not
as beloved? The mother was the Queen,
arrogant, svelte, greedy, perfumed, silk-
en, demanding all things - and so the
little boys began to identi fy with these
creatures , these heartless, stupid, sel-
fish, grasping, inane and pretty things.
Mama was Everythi ng. She impli ed
that firmly, herself. And boys want
to be Everything, too. So they ident ified
with Mama. There is the root of this
emasculation, far beyond what the
headshrinkers call Smotherlove.
It is no accident that homosexual men
almost invariably hate their mothers.
It is the rare homo who became that
way because his mother loved him
too much and pampered him too much
and protect ed him too much. Homo-
sexuals are made at home, from the
very earliest years. Hatr ed for women-
and for Mama in particular-is the
homosexual 's most outstandi ng charac-
teristic. One can feel honest compassion
for them, and condemn their mothers.
They are trivial women-and mur-
derers of the best in their men, ernas-
culaters really.
The trivial woman considers her
children's appearance the most impor-
tant part of them, and the hell with
their souls and thei r characters! She
impresses on them that looks are all
that a person is- and noth ing else at
all. So her children learn that clothing
is more valuabl e than books, and the
way their hair is arranged mor e neces-
sary to their future than any school. She
teaches them to be postures, papier-
mache mannikins with eterna l, painted,
fixed smil es and arms crooked in a
gr aceful position. It is more porte nt ious
for a girl to know how to swi ng her
hair on her shoulders and a boy how
to make his teeth gleam than it is to
learn of the nature of God and man
and one's destiny in the world . She
94
teaches her children to prattle-even
the boys-so that for hours on end when
they are young adolescents and adults
they say absolutely nothing and re-
spond like amiable aut omat ons. They
have no personality; they are the natu ral
prey of the ruthlessly int elligent and
corrupt- these affable, enervated, and
empty sub-humans. When they have
houses of their own they resemble thei r
old home; it all looks like window-
displays of furniture where no one ever
lived.
As the trivial woman is all for style
she takes on the sur roundi ng colora-
tion, and as the sur rounding coloration
of America today is "Liberalism" she is
a "Liberal." But ask her for one sound
opinion based on reason and the facts
and history, and her mouth falls ajar,
she looks coy and peeky and flirtatious
and hastily changes the subject to one
within her range such as clothes, fash-
ions, and silly gossip. Or sex. She does
love to talk about sex, though what it
actually means she does not know. Yes,
she can chatter a littl e about Freud,
too, but who he was and what he wrote
she has not the vaguest idea.
While it is of course true that not
all "Liberals" are homosexuals, all homo-
sexuals are "Liberals." They owe it to
nit-brained Mamas.
Again, treat your son, from the very
bassinet, to be manly. He is a human
being and has dign ity from his birth;
he is not a cutesy toy; he is not "ador-
able." He is not "sweet." He is an em-
bryo man. Treat him so. Let him see
from infanthood that you respect his
status and he will acquire pride in him-
self. You ladies should read Phi l Wylie's
Generation of Vipers , and though you
will heartily disagr ee with Phil-as I
did-on many topics, and feel anger
at his shouted loathing of "Mom" and
"Momisrn," he does have a point: The
"Mom" type of woman corrupts, de-
grades and emasculates her son. How
many times have you seen it yourself ?
AMERICAN OPINION
III
AND FORGET the absurd idea that
children, even in the bassinet, are
"helpless." I've noticed that by the time
a child-a boy especially-is a month
old he has his mother's number down
exactly. He may not be able to talk,
sit up or speak, but he is extraordinarily
bright and .clear-eyed - far more than
he will ever be again. Babies have
no illusions, no fantasies, no sentimen-
talities. I've seen my great-grandson,
at one month, in the arms of his
mother, staring up at her and figuring
out-quite astutely-how to get some-
thing out of her which she did not
wish to give him, or do for him. I've
held him in my own arms and have had
him study me with the sharpest con-
centration and attention he will ever
know-and I knew very well that he
thought my baby-talk was asinine, as
it was. So I stopped insulting him with
it and spoke seriously to him and he
gave me-not the "lovely innocent
smile" Dr. Spack speaks of, and which
kids never have, anyway-but a smile
of confidential understanding. It was
almost trustful, even if kids are never
really trustful. They learn to "trust"
later on, God help them.
I've seen my grandsons, just crawl-
ing, sit up and ponder on how to devil
Mama and get something they want.
You could almost hear their realistic
little brains clicking as they turned the
subject over in their minds . They con-
sidered whether a spell of yelling would
accomplish things, or not. Then they
looked at Mama most thoughtfully,
weighing her possible reactions to the
demand. And quite often I've seen
them come to the conclusion that this
time Mama was not in the mood, or
the idea is hopeless, and they continued
to crawl and go about their business.
It is this clarity of understanding and
honest animal cunning which should
be cultivated and made to work for
the boy's manly future. So, no matter
SEPTEMBER, 1968
how delightful your baby is, look at
him with respect, and never-s-but
never-use comfy-cozy-chintsy language
to him. Give him your love and gen-
tleness and tenderness, of course, and
hug and kiss him when you wish-
and you'll wish far more often than
he willl-s-but again treat him with the
dignity he deserves. Let him know at
all times that you are on to him, and
he'll be delighted and amused in the
dark little realistic heart of him, and
he'll respect you and honor you. Not
even a kitten respects a burnt-offering
or a doormat or a slave. Always be one
step ahead of Jonnie, and two steps
ahead of his plottings. He'll not only
regard you with consideration when he
is a baby but will be considerate of you
when he is older, even during adoles-
cence. No man, whether ten days old,
ten years old, or twenty, has anything
but contempt for the soft touch.
When he is a man, then, properly
brought up by a proper mother, he will
detest the whining and the deliberately
helpless, the mendicant and the faker,
the malingerer and the feeble "Liberal."
He will be brave and proud and truly
masculine, scornful of those who live,
as Samuel Butler put it, "only to lick
the platter clean and leave a pile of
offal." He will demand of others that
they be men, too, and so will be a force
of strength in the world which sadly
lacks true men in these days. His voice
will be loud and clear before politicians,
and he will never be guilty of betraying
his country. Best of all, as Solomon says
of true mothers, he will "rise up" and
call his mother "blessed," and say of
her "all her ways were pleasantness and
all her paths were peace." What more
can a mother desire?
There is one hippie-yippie phrase
which delights me and which is most
expressive: "Tell it like it is." That goes
for your boy-children. (Girls are less
likely to believe Mama's homey little
lies and cutenesses, all dressed up in
95
Sweet Phrases.) Therefore, tell your
boy children the absolute tru th on any
occasion, no matt er how tragic or dis-
tasteful or horrible it is. A man should
learn the truth from his cradle.
Let us first get it firmly in mind :
Children are tough and resilient and
hard-nosed. They are not "petals and
flowers" as Dr. Spack once insisted to
me in a letter . They are saner and
colder of heart and more adaptable and
tougher than they will ever be after
they reach their majority. They have
no illusions; the dreams of children are
violent dreams, not concerned with
gardens and fairies; their aims are
strong and sturdy and ruthless, con-
cerned with self. Above all, children
like to see and hear things "like they
are." They catch on to darling euphe-
misms at once, and cooing lying voices
and tender lying smiles-and they de-
spise them.
Children are primi tive men-they are
of the cave absolutel y. We civilize them
later, but civilization does not necessar-
ily include lies. (In fact, any civilization
based on lies, euphemisms, fantasies,
unreal ideologies and refusal to face the
truth will inevitabl y die, and good rid-
dance to it.) Now, primitive man knew
all about life and death. He accepted
both without fear and with realism.
Men are born-men die. It is of one
piece, to primitive man, and your child
is long a primitive. As a realist, he de-
serves your respect and your truth.
My mother was a realist, and I honor
her that at least. When I was four years
old she told me, "It is time for you to
face the fact of death and know all
about it. You were born only to die.
We all die. Some die as babies, some
as children, some as grown-up people,
some as old men and women. It is just
as natural as living. You may die as a
child, or you may die as an old woman.
It is in the hands of God and no one
knows when or how. "
I wasn't in the least disturbed. She
96
took me to visit a friend of hers whose
baby had just died. The infant was in
his coffin among his flowers, looking
asleep and peaceful and waxen. I had
liked the baby. I touched his cold hands
and rearranged his shroud to my liking.
I felt no horror and no dread. It seemed
to me, as a very young child, that death
was a sort of self-indulgence and that
a strong-spirited person could outwit
it one way or another! (There may be
somethi ng to that, girl s. I have seen
people given up by doctors who rose
from death-beds to live a long time
afterwards and die of heart y old age.)
I was then introduced to religion, and
learned that insofar as a man's soul is
concerned there is no death . It didn 't
exactly comfort me; children need no
comfort, they are filled to the brim with
it from birth. But it did give a calm
continuity to life, did convince me that
our life here is only an interlude in
eternity. When a child is taught that
he is eternal he can take life "like it is,"
and the hell with the immediate troubl e
or pain. We may become skeptical later,
and who isn't?-but at least the idea
remai ns in our minds, immutable, and
can gIve us courage.
So, introduce your boy-chi ld, es-
pecially, to religion even while he is
in the bassinet. (Boys are far more
timid and fragile than girls, as any
mother of both can testify.) You may
think your baby is too young for re-
ligion, but he is not . My own children
at six months understood that I was
praying by their bedsides, or crib-sides,
before they could even speak. I know,
for if I neglected the ceremony they
cried and were insistent. Chi ldren are
ritualists. Well, they may not have even
understood about Whom I was pray-
ing too, but they gathered the idea that
it was One who prot ected them and
remained with them through the night,
and so they had no night-t errors . I heard
one of my daughters, then only eight-
een months old, talking over things
AMERICAN OPI NION
qu ite seriously with God after I had
kissed her good-night. And I had
thought that she still was unaware! It
was a lovely conversation, between an
infant and her Guardian and her Father,
and I am sure God listened to it with
more tenderness and attention than He
ever gi ves to sophisticated adult prayers
-for it was pure and unaffected and
right to the point. She wanted a teddy-
bear, and she described it exactly, then
fell asleep assured she would get it.
(She did.)
When I was young, First Commun-
ion was at eight or later, for it was
thought that young childr en could not
comprehend the Maj esty and Meaning
of it, nor the nature of good and evil.
But now the Church understands that
very young child ren can grasp the mean-
ing of God, and that they know all
about good and evil in the playpen. I,
myself, was not an exceptional child,
except that I was bigger and stronger
than most others, and more bellicose.
But I knew to Whom I was praying
whe n I was less than two years old,
and I knew the difference between good
and evil. I knew there were no "situ-
ation ethics" or grey places in morals
and behavior. You were either on the
side of the angels, or on the side of the
devils, and if the latt er you coul d be
absolutely certain that you would be
painfully thrashed as soon as Mama or
Papa caught you.
And that brings me to another point :
Corporal punishment. Dr. Spock and
Company think chi ldren are too in-
nocent and too lovely to be slammed,
and slammed hard. Nonsense! Again,
children are primitive man. Primitive
man knew that his parents wanted to
prot ect or warn him of danger, and as
speech was rare the blow did the work
thoroughly. Watch animal mothers:
They do not croon over their young
ones and try to "persuade" them not to
do naughty things or dangerous ones.
They slam- and the youngster immedi-
SEPTEMBER, 1968
ately learns that some things are ror-
bidden. They love and cuddle their
infants, but when a lesson in the reali-
ties of life is needed Animal Mama lifts
her paw and lets go painfully, and does
not comfort the culprit when he howls.
In fact, he learns that he has to work
hard to get back into her favor and the
kitchen.
Girls, being slightly more civilized
at birth than boys, are somet imes- I say
sometimes-open more to reason. (But
don't bet on it!) So, when a girl is
about twelve Mama can often "explain"
things to Susie, and if Susie has learned
to trust her mother she will listen. But
boys are more determined and, when
they are young, reason seems like a
silly thing to them. But they do und er-
stand the swift punishment; they re-
spect pain. Don't wait for Papa to
come home to slam your boy-child. Slam
him the moment he commi ts a crime,
and slam hard. He may yell and say
some incredible things to you, but he
will respect the lessons of that good
right hand which deals out immediate
justice, as well as cookies and caresses.
"You will only teach them physical
violence," mourn the Dr. Spocks. Well,
we have two whole generations reared
on Dr. Spock and Company, and who
is more violent on the campuses now,
and who is more savagely murderous
on the streets? Our juveni le delinquents
are the result of the Spock philosophy.
The assaulters of teachers and the old
and the helpless were given "gentle-
ness" a'la Spock in their homes. Imply
to a boy that no matter what he does
he will be "loved," and that he is the
most import ant creature in the world ,
and he will become, even as a youth
and a young man, cruel, arroga nt, sel-
fish, demanding and fierce. When he
comes up agai nst the real world of
life-unsheltered by pamperi ng Mama
- he will be outraged, for no one there
will cosset him and defer to him and
( Continued on Page 101.)
gj
listen to his vaporings. And, he will
take revenge on it. He will shriek
"Police brutality!" when he is given the
blows he ought to have had in the play-
pen. He will be uncontrollable, savage,
resentful, believing that everything
should be granted him and nothing
demanded of him. He had been treated
"democratically" by his parents, and so
he will believe, as a youth, that his
callow opinions are as good as anyone
else's, and that authority is something
to be derided. For, isn't he the Real
Authority? He had been taught that
by Spock and Company.
No one advises maltreating a child
or beating him insensible or giving him
"cruel and unusual punishments." But
a firm strap hung handil y near by, and
a good firm palm, can be used without
permanently crippling a kid-though
when one looks at some campuses today
the thought does intrude!
Teach your boy children to work,
and work ard uously, even when tod-
dlers. A two-year-old can help set a
table-though not with your best china,
as yet. He can pull out chairs; he can
dust; he can put away his own clothes
and toys. He can dig weeds. He can
hose lawns, straighten furniture, carry
out garbage. He must learn that if he
has a place in the family-an honored
place-he also has responsibilities. All
money he receives must be earned. He
should not be given an allowance just
"because." His father earns money;
therefore, his chi ldren must earn it. By
the time a boy enters his teens he should
have a summer job, no matter how af-
fluent his father.
In England, there are no long empty
holidays from school as there are in
America. There is Christmas vacation,
and Easter, only. A young person doesn't
need long holidays, full of idleness and
mischief . He doesn't need to "recoup."
He has all the vitality in the world, and
youth is the time for learning. School
should continue through the summer,
SEPTEMBER, 1968
and school plants used all year long.
The week-ends are quite enough "holi-
day" for kids . So work hard to keep
the schools open and the kids learning,
all year long. Perhaps, then, we won't
have whole generations of young people
entering high school and college unable
to read or write decently. If you can't
get your schools to stay open-send your
boy to summer school, real summer
school, and that doesn't mean camp.
Perhaps your church could be persuaded
to have summer classes in religion, his-
tory, English, etc. "Satan finds mischief
for idle hands to do."
Be honest about your boy's inherent
capabilities. If he is only average, or
less, in elementary school and high
school, consider having him taught a
trade instead of sending him off to
some liberal arts college, where he will
learn "dissent" and rioting. Good ma-
chinists' and mechanics and plumbers
are worth their weight in gold, and al-
ways will be. Don't listen to the educa-
tionists. A successful life doesn't depend
on a college diploma! Half the eminent
men and women in the Who's Who
books never went to any college-
though later they did receive honorary
Ph .D.s. Intelligence is never learned or
acquired. It is inherent in a child's
genes. No education-never mind what
the self-serving educationists say!-can
increase a child's capacities for learning
and understanding and intellect. These
things are in him or they are not.
If your children ma nifest a capacity,
through marks, for higher learning, then
go to it, but pick out a really decent
college and not a "democratic" one.
There are still religion-oriented colleges
in the United States, and private ones.
So, be realistic about your children. If
ronnie wants to be an automobile me-
chanic or plumber-and that is where
his aptitude is-don't wail about what
the neighbors will think, or what the
teachers say. Give him wha t he needs
with your honest blessing-his manhood
101
and self-respect and success will depend
upon it .
IV
To SUM UP: To make American boys
manl y, don't be cut e with your sons.
The Engli sh language is rich and vi-
brant and full of millions of shadi ngs
and meanings. Don't use a "cute" word
when a good An gl o-Saxon wor d wi ll
be bett er. Don't be "hornev" with vour
boys. Don 't handle them i ~ public!' I've
seen Speck-mothers pawing thei r half-
grown boys in superma rkets and on the
street, patting them, cuddling them,
resting their hands on the ir shoulders,
embraci ng them. Disgusting ! A real boy
hates it. Keep your hands to yours elf,
Mama. Treat your boy's manhood wit h
respect , even when alone with him.
Don't be seductive with him, but teach
him to stand when you enter a room
and remain standing until you are
seated. You can't begin too soon.
Respect your children's privacy-in
their own rooms, or when they are en-
tertaining . (That is, if you have civilized
them.) Don't "poke" your Mommy-
head into their bedrooms, nor be
"peeky" or coy. (See what I mean about
language?) Don't "slip" into a boy's
bedroom without first gaining permi s-
sion. Only snakes "sli p."
There is a sort of woman-you have
probabl y met her-who softly gro ans
about her "Maternal instincts," and
presses her hands to her bosom, rolls
her teary eyes and admits, con fesses,
that she is "all mother" and just can't
help loving up he r young SO il before
her audience. She begs you, wit h those
wet eyes, to "understand," and then
to applaud her or at least to give her a
sentimental smile in return. Funnv
thing, though : She isn' t overcome wi th
mat ernal passion when with her daugh-
ters, and doesn't manhandle them in
publ ic! If anything, that wet eye be-
comes dr y and glaucous wh en she sur-
veys her gi rls, and her voice matche s,
and not even the sweetest littl e girl-
child can overwhelm her with delight .
Especially not your s.
Winston Churchill once said tha t if
a girlie woman was distasteful a boyly
man was intolerable, and he was right.
You want your son to be a man when
he enters hi s teens, and not a girl in a
boy's body, nor the sort of male who
will be a "boy" until the day his weary
wife either shoots him or divorces him
or leaves him, nor the kind wh o will
whi mper that he won't defend his coun-
try nor his house nor his family, bu t
will only "love" an aggressor.
There is one "boy" however whom
you ma y cuddle, pamper, cosset, hug
and kiss to your heart's content, and be
rewarded handsomel y for it, and be
appreciated. That "boy" is your hus-
band. Lavis h on him all the affection
you can; delight in him; praise him
even when you'd like to kick him
where it would do a lot of good; tell
him he is marvelous, beautif ul, magn ifi-
cent . Lie in your teeth. Men have left
thei r wi ves for man y reasons, but not
one I know has left a wife who mothers
him. Pretty legs are a di me a doz en,
and so are inflat ed bosoms and mini-
skirts and perfumed hands and lac-
qu ered hair. A man likes them, but
if hi s wife is a mother to him as well
as a sweetheart he will think she is the
loveliest woman on earth, above rubi es.
beyond price, no matt er if she weighs
two hundr ed pounds and has three chins
and mousy hair, and is stupid. But then,
a woman like that is not stupid! Only
the professiona l "mothers" are, with
their feminine sons and disgusted
daughters. - -
CRACKER BARREL - -----------
I
- EAGLE ROCK- I've los t fo rty pounds since last Ch rist mas. Of course, I lost f ive
of them eight times. -JACK MOFFITT
102
AMERI CAN OPINION
THE ANZACS
Our Allies In Australia And New Zealand
PRESIDENT Lyndon Johnson' s drarnat-
ic announcement of March thirty-first,
that he was de-escalating the Vietnam
War in an ende avor to get peace talks
started with H anoi, is having long-term
political repercussions in both Australia
and New Zealand. Socialist opposition
leaders in both count ries lost no ti me in
hailing the new Ame rican policy as a
confirmation of their own policy of seek-
ing to end the war by first halting the
bombi ng. They sensed the possibility of
incr eased political suppor t as a result of
the changed situation, and even expect a
return to political power on both sicles
of the T asma n Sea aft er what has been
a long period in the political wilderness.
Clearly, the Liberal-Country Govern-
ment in Canberra, led by Mr. John Go r-
ton, and the Nationalist Govern me nt in
Well ington, led by Mr. Keith Holy-
oake, were openly shaken by the John-
son announcement. Dur ing the week
prior to Mr. Johnson's abrupt cha nge in
policy, Australian Foreign Affair s Min-
ister Paul Hasluck had stood brave ly in
the Aust ralian Parli ament and assur ed
Australians that the war was going well.
Prime Mi nister J. G. Gorton ha d in fact
just expressed his opposition to any
wi thdr awal from Vietnam un der cover
of a phony truce agreement.
T hen came the Johnson th und erbolt.
Increasing numbers of people in the
two Anzac* nations are begi nning to
real ize that bot h Lo ndon and Washing-
ton regar d them as expendable. The
British are not only ret reating from
Singapore and Malaya, bu t their abrupt
evacuation of the major base at Aden,
the center of British naval power in the
SEPT EMBER, 1968
I ndian Ocean. has left a vacuum into
which the Soviet is alr eady intruding.
And now the threat of an American
withdrawa l from Southeast Asia has
driven home the message to Australians
and New Zealanders that they are the
most isolat ed gro up of European peopl e
in the world. How they react to the de-
veloping sit uation will be determined
hugely hy how they resist the collectivist
vir us attack ing them from within.
Both Aust ralia and New Zealand have
had vigorous Socialist movements since
late in the last century. In Pa raguay to-
day there are still descendants of the
g r ~ u p of Australi ans who attempted
with disast rous result s late in the Nine-
teent h Century to establish a Socialist
Utopia there. I n the Twenti es a Queens-
land Stat e Socialist Govern ment at-
tempted a maj or Socialist program with
enormous financial losses. Then, after
electing what appeared to be a compara-
tivelv conservative Lab or Government
in 1935, New Zealanders found them-
selves being moved into the Welfar e
State under the dir ection of such ded i-
cated Social ists and internationalists as
Walter Nash.
Of course, the Wel fare State has not
had quit e the same dead ly effects in
T hi s t er m was coi ned at t he t ime of the Gallip-
el i camp aign in th e Firs t World \Var, when Aus-
t ra lian and N ew Zealand t roops foug ht toget her
in the first ma jor mil it ar y operati on for both
countr ies. Anzac is der ived f rom Australian and
Ne w Zeal and Army Cn rps . Anzac Da y ccleb ra-
rions, on April twent y- f i f t h of each year, arc th e
biggest nati onal celebrat ions in both countries.
The Gallipoli campaign was mi litarily a blood y
di sast er-but it dc monsr r nt cd t hat Australian and
New Zealan d t roo ps wer e among t he fine st shock
troops in t he worl d. T hey were used later in t his
role on t he \X' est ern Fron t in Eur ope.
103
New Zealand that it has had in some
other countries, probably because a large
number of New Zealanders are still en-
gaged in primary production . Some of
the best and most int ensive farming in
the world is to be found in that country.
A significant reflection of the New
Zealand character is the fact that there
is tremendous support there for Rhode-
sia. It is no secret that the New Zealand
Government agreed to take an official
anti- Rhodesian stand only as a result of
economic pressures from the Wi lson
Government in London. Much of New
Zealand's primary production is geared
to the British market.
The common external peril now so
obvious to Australians and New Zea-
land ers has forced them to start tryi ng
to coordinate many of their activities.
Because of Australia's much grea ter pop-
ulation and advanced industrial system,
it is clear that New Zealand's future
must be dependent to a great extent
upon what happens in Aus tralia. It is
therefore essential to devote our primary
attention in the brief space we have to
the development and influence of the
Communist Conspiracy in Australia.
The Conspiracy in New Zealand oper-
ates basically on the same pattern as in
Australia, except that the major leader-
ship there is Peking-or iented. In Aus tra-
lia there is onl y a small Peking gro up.
Led by Mr. Vic Wilcox, a prospero us
chicken farmer, the New Zealand Com-
munist Party is high ly rated in Peking
because it is the only Communist Party
in the Wes tern world - except Albania
- following the variety of lunacy bab-
bled by Chai rman Mao. But now there
is a break-away Soviet wing of the Party
called the Socialist Unity Party (S.U.P.) .
By a much more subtle approach than
the Wilcox gro up, the S.U.P. is making
some progress within the New Zealand
Labor Party through the trade unions,
where "united front" tactics are being
successfully empl oyed.
A number of promi nent professors
SEPTEMBER, 1968
and lecturers at New Zealand universi-
ties are now vigorous ly and openly sup-
porting Communist causes. Typical of
these academic hooligans is a Profes-
sor of Economics at Canterbury Univer-
sity, W. Rosenberg - nephew of the
famo us Julius Rosenberg. There has,
alas, been serious Communist penetra-
tion into all sections of New Zealand's
educational system. Even the Principal
of the famous Lincoln Agricultural Col-
lege (Christ Church), Mr. Eric D. Hud-
son, is a zealot for Communist causes.
The pro-Vietcong demonstrators have
also been active in New Zealand, staging
one of their most ambitious projects
when they "confronted" representatives
of the S.E.A.T.O. nat ions and South
Vietnam's milit ary allies at their meet -
ing in Wellingt on duri ng the last week-
end in March and the first week in
Apri l. But it must be recorded that Pres-
ident Johnson's shocking statement on
Vietnam created much more havoc
among the S.E.A.T.O. delegates than
the "confro ntation" of the squealing
anti-Vietnam demon strators!
In Aust ralia the Communist move-
ment has, since it was founded in 1921
with approximately three hundred mem-
bers, ably demonstrated how to mould
its members as Len in, Stalin, and other
Communist leaders have said they
should be moul ded. The Australian
Commu nists have fait hf ully followed
everv twist and turn of their Moscow
masters. Initially, for example, they sup-
ported Australia's declaration of war on
Hitler's Germany in 1939, only to re-
verse themselves and to try to under-
mi ne the war effort whe n they learn ed
from Moscow that the war was "im-
perialistic." But when Hitler turned
upon Stalin, his partner in crime, the
Australian Communists suddenly dis-
covered that the war was a just cause
after all.
From the begi nni ng the Australian
Communists decided that they should
concentrate upon penetrating the Aus-
105
tralian Labor Party through the t rade
union movement. Australia is the most
highl y un ioni zed nation in the world ,
with a combined trade union member-
ship of approxima tely two mill ion-
which is sixty percent of all wage and
salaried workers in the country. The big-
gest and wealthi est of the unions is the
Aust ralian Work ers Union, whose mern-
I
bers are those engaged in industries as-
sociated with pr imar y produ ction . This
union has a long recor d of opposition to
I
Communism, as do manv of the craft
uni ons. Commun ist influence IS at pres-
ent concent rated in those uni ons cover-
ing transport, communications, and
power. Ina large, sparsely populated
country like Austra lia, as the Commu-
nists realized, transport and communi-
cations are vital. This was graphically
demonstrated to Austra lians early thi s
year wh en the pro-Red-Chinese Secre-
tar y of the Postal Workers' Union, Mr.
Geo rge Slayter, stopped all mails, pro-
duci ng nat ionwi de confusion. There
was also a th reat to close down the tele-
phone system and to stop all telegrams
in an effort to test the will of the Fed-
eral Government. The Government re-
sisted rather well. St rikes in the highl y-
centra lized, State-owned power organ -
izations have also demo nstrated the
havoc which the Cons piracy can create
with a few men in keyposi tions.
However, since the defea t of the La-
bor-Socialists in the Federal Parli ament
in 1949, Austra lia has been compara-
tively free of the major ind ust rial con-
vulsions which shook the nation in the
early post-war years. Commun ist con-
trol of the trade un ion movement was
at its peak immediatel y after the war.,
T his was the period wh en the Commu-
nist Secretary of the Federated I ron-
workers' Uni on, Mr. Ernest Thornton,
could boast : "We have planned str ikes
because we have made stri kes our busi-
ness." He was, of course, only parrot ing
Lenin, who said : "Without the trade
unions, revolution is impossi ble."
SEPTEMBER, 1968
Fortunately, as a result of the defec-
tion in early 1949 of a top Communist
official, Cecil Sharpl ey, Australians
learned how the Co m m u n i s t shad
used fraudulent ballot practices to ob-
tain and hold key offices in the trade
unions. Following passage of appropri-
ate legislati on to prevent these practices,
Communist strength in the trade unions
was substantially reduced. But, like
Communists everywhere, the Aust ralian
breed is both persistent and proli fic, and
the Aust ralian Council of Trade Unions,
the parliame nt of the Au stralian trade
un ion mov ement, is constantly under
heavy pressure from the Communists,
who are assisted by the fact that most of
their opponents are themselves Social-
ists of one type or another .
The Communist virus was so success-
fully inj ected into the Austra lian Labor
Party from the very birth of the Aus-
trali an Communist Party that the dom-
inant feature in the subsequent history
of the Australian Labor Party has been
consta nt controversy about Communist
influence. Speaking at the Fourth Con-
gress of the Communist International in
Moscow, Mr. J. Garden, one of the
founders of the Australian Communist
Party, told of how at the All-Aus-
tra lia T rade Union Conference in June,
1921: ". . . we found that we were able to
cha nge the policy of the Labor Party.
. .. We cha nged the objective . . . to so-
cialization of industry by revolutionary,
political and industrial action . . . ." Gar-
clen said that Australian Communists
were also working to undermine the
Labor Party's support for Australia's
immigr ation policy, consciously de-
signed to ma intain a homogenous Eu-
ropean population.
Over the years Australia's immigra-
tion laws have been a ma jor target for
the Communist Fifth Column and its
Leftist allies. Although all Australian
political Part ies have in recent years
claimed to have modif ied their attitude
toward s what has been generally known
107
....------------ Political Advert isement ------------......
FOUND: ARARE GEM
Anti - Communist Runs For Congress
Gary Allen, a graduate of Stanford
University and one of the natIon's top
authorities on civil turmoil and the New
Left, is author of Communist Revolu-
tion in the Streets-a highly praised and
definitive new volume on revolutionary
tactics and strategies, published by West-
ern Islands. Mr . Allen is active in anti-
Communist and other humanitarian
causes and is President of the Founda-
tion for Economic and Social Progress.
A film writer and journalist, he is a
Contributing Editor to AMERICAN
OPINION. Gary Allen lectures widely.
GENERALLY, politicians are a low sort,
rating on an integrity scale somewhat
below used car salesmen and only
slightly above social workers, having
shifty eyes and sticky fingers with egos
the size of Mount Rushmore and brains
the size of a wizened pea. Their
promises should be taken as containing
all of the sincerity of those of a sailor
departing on the morning tide. There
is, praise be, an occasional exception; a
man who says what he means and vice
versa. Occasionally, there is a man who
wants to solve problems besides his own
sagging bank balance. Having found
such a man, he should be treasured as a
rare jewel, shaped and polished, then
put on display for the worl d to marvel.
Your chances of finding such a gem are
slimmer than gnats' ankles, but , alas,
I have found one for you. His name is
Mike Odell and he hangs his hat in the
North woods where trees grow tall and
men grow straight.
I can vouch for the fact that his princi-
ples are tougher than a two-bit steak
and his knowledge of Communism as
thorough as a Scotchman searching for
a lost nickel. Yet, compared with the
humor and blarney of this smil ing
Irishman, Prof. Harold Hill was no
salesman at all. Mike Odell converted
his whole family into hard-core anti-
Communists.
Mike is running for Congress. He is
a tough, tireless campaigner who was
t he yo ungest ma n elected to t he
Was hington State Legislature in 1962.
Mike has no plans for being a career
politician. He knows that if you don't
play the game (and he won't) your
chances of being re-elected are scant.
But he wants a national platform from
which to tell America the truth.
Naturally, not only the Democrats,
Washington State's
Mike Odell :
t he unpolitician
but the Rockefeller people want to stop
Mike . And you really can't blame them.
Mike is a dangerous man - to the
Lef t.
H you are frust rated by the lack of a
good candidate in your area, I know of
a Class A man in Was hington State
who would be eternally grateful for your
support. And, as a matter of fact, so
would I. Write : ODELL FOR CON-
GRESS COMMITTEE, Dick Ander-
son, Chairmanj6214 - 196th Street S.W.
jLynnwood, Washington 98036.
'------------- Political Advert isement ------------.......
as the "White Australi a" policy ( prim-
ari ly to escape the charge of being ra-
cist"), mounting race friction in other
parts of the world has convinced the
great majority of Australians that they
would be foolish to import a problem
they do not now have. The Communists
have attempted to exploit without much
success the Australian aborigines, a small
group of primitive people most of whom
live in Australia's nor th, and who are
never seen by the majority of Aus tra-
lians. In New Zealand the Communists
have a much larger native group, the
Maoris, to try to exploit. But while the
Maoris , a much more advanced people
than the Australian aborigines (a nd
wit h special representation in the Ne w
Zealand Parliament) , seem to like the
Welfare State, the Communists have
had comparatively littl e success with
them.
For thi rty years Mr. J. Garden was a
living symbol of the Communist Con-
spiracy's efforts to subvert the Austra-
lian Labor Party for its own purposes.
He held many high positions in the
A.L.P., incl udi ng that of a Member of
the Federal Parliament, while at the
same time remaining a card-carrying
member of the Communist Part y. His
Party Card was discovered when after
the war he was arrested for fraud and
conspiracy . At the time of his arrest he
was holdi ng the vital position of liaison
officer between the Chifley Labor Gov-
ernment and the trade uni on movement .
Writing in Th e Communist in 1925,
Mr. Garden, at that time officially the
head of the Communist movement in
Australia, declared that: "When Labor
gets into Federal power, the way will be
open for the revolutionaries. .. ." But
first, he not ed, "the Labor Part y should
be thoroughl y Bolshevised. . . . Not only
mus t the party be Bolshevised, but im-
media te steps must be taken to orga nize
the left wing, not only in the trade
unions but in the party itself." How-
ever, although the Commu nist virus
SEPTEMBER, 1968
was work ing within the Labor Party,
the Party's leaders found the pedd ling
of collectivist objectives a severe polit-
ical handicap and every effort was made
to "play it down" at elections. The rev-
olutionary discipline of the Labor Party
split badly when it came to office dur-
ing the Depression of the early Thirties:
The Bolshevisation had not been thor-
ough enough.
But, when the Curtin Labor Govern-
ment came to power early in World
War II, the stage had been set for Com-
rade Garden and his friends to proceed
with their revolutionary program. Their
power and influence were enormous,
even extending into the Commonwea lth
Security Organi zation, under Dr. Her-
bert Vere Evatt , whose dra matic resig-
nat ion as Chief Justice of the Australian
High Cour t to stand as a Labor candi -
date had played a majo r role in per-
suading large numbers of middle-class
Australians to help bring Labor to
power. Evatt was a close friend of prom-
inent Marxists like Professor Harold
Lask i of the London School of Eco-
nomics and Mr. Justice Felix Frankfur-
ter, and he made little effort to hide his
Marxist proclivities .
Under the Curtin Labor Government
of 1941-1945, patriotic anti-Communists
were persecuted and a number impris-
oned without charges or trial. Eventual-
ly they had to be released after a judicial
investigation established that a mon-
strous injustice had been done. Evatt of-
fered no apologies and took steps to pro-
tect himself from legal action. He talked
about the rul e of law, but attempted to
exploit the war crisis to tear up the Aus-
tralian Federal Constitution. Fo rtunate-
ly the electorate insisted upon its Con-
stitutional rights and turned back his
moves toward overt Bolshevisation.
Eventually the Communists and their
Labor Party allies pushed thei r program
too fast, and the attempt by the Chifley
Government (1945-1949) to nationalize
the Australian banking system con-
109
vineed sufficient Australian electors that
they should use the Federal elections of
1949 to remove the Labor Part y from
office. Across the T asman Sea the New
Zealand electors also decided that they
had had enough of the Socialists.
The new Australian Government of
Robert Menzies badly fumbled it'! first
attac k on the Commu nist Part y when
its legislation for outlawing t h ~ Com-
munists was ruled un-Constitutional by
the High Cour t. Dr. Evatt, the da rli ng
of the Reds, led the successful legal bar-
rage to protect the Com rades. He then
sparked a campaign which routed the
Menzi es Government's 1951 efforts to
alter the Federal Constitution by increas-
ing its power to deal with the Com-
munists. Since the Feder at ion, Aus-
tralians have been notoriously reluctant
-through a considerable number of ref-
erenda- to vote for increased Federal
power. The electorate had noted that
whi le pr ior to the 1949 elections Liberal
and Country Part y spokesmen had been
biting in their attacks on Fabian eco-
nomic advisors at Can berra ( men like
Dr. H . C. Coombs, Chairman of the
Australian Reserve Bank), these So-
cialist planners continued to hold their
positions and the Menzies Government
was accepti ng some of the very rest ric-
tive policies it had condemned while in
Opposition. As a result , many supporters
of the Government rejected the proposal
to increase Federal power, fearing that
it would be used for purposes apart
from attempti ng to ban the Commu-
nists. The Government, after all, had
adequate power to deal with the local
Bolsheviks, but unfortunately few Mem-
bers of the Government really under-
stood the nature of the prob lem.
By 1954 the Menzies Government had
caused so mu ch electoral resentment by
its failure to implement its own policies
that the Labor Opposition, led by Dr.
Evatt, had every prospect of bei ng re-
turned to power at the elections that
year. Sud denl y the bombshell announce-
SEPT EMBER, 1968
ment by Prime Minister Menzies that
a Soviet diplomat named Petrov was
seeking political asylum in Australia,
and had made sensational disclosures
concerning Soviet espionage activities in
Aust ralia, completely changed the po-
litical atmosphere. There were wid e-
spread rumors before the elections that
Soviet espionage activi ties had reached
most effectively int o the Department of
External Affairs during the Labor Ad-
ministr at ion when Dr. Evatt had him-
self been Mini ster of External Aff airs.
But in spite of the atmosphere produced
by the Petrov defection, the Menzies
Government managed to sur vive wi th
only a small maj ority.
It is certain, nonetheless, that without
the Petrov affair Dr. Evatt wou ld have
become Australian Prime Min i ste r.
Petrov therefore not only made avail-
able extremely valuable intelligence in-
formation to the whole non-Communist
worl d, he saved Australia from Labor
Government led by Dr. H . V. Eva tt, one
of the most dangerous men ever to enter
Austra lian politics. Evatt reacted wildly
to hi s defeat by chargi ng that there was
a Roman Catholic "conspiracy" inside
the Labor Partv. It was Roman Cathol ic
members of the Labor Party who had
played a major role in weakening the
Communist grip on the trade unions,
and who were concerned about Dr.
Evatt's pro-Communist foreign policy.
Evatt felt that by using the sectarian
weapon he woul d drive the most mili-
tant anti-Communists out of the Labor
Party into political oblivion, while gai n-
ing incr eased electoral support in a pre-
dominantly Pro testant Australian com-
munity. But inst ead he produced a ma-
jor split in the Labor Party and the
creation of the Democrat ic Labor Party.
Under the Australian system of pref-
erential voting for the House of Repre-
sentatives, the D.L.P. has never elected
so mu ch as a single represent ative, but
its preference votes have been decisive
in keeping the Liberal-Count ry coali-
111
tion Government in office. In the Sen-
ate, elected on a system of proportional
representation, the D.L.P. now has four
Senators who hold the balance of power.
The Democratic Labor Party is there-
fore a major factor in the current Aus-
tralian political situation, a harsh reality
which the present Labor Party leader,
Mr. Gough Whitlam, appreciates.
The Leftist Mr. Whitlam (both he
and his private secretary are members of
the Fabian Society) is determined to re-
store Labor's electoral fortunes. He real-
izes that it is essential for him to dim
the present pro-Communist image of his
Party in order to gain sufficient D.L.P.
"second preference" votes at next year's
elections. He feels that a little harmless
pebble-throwing at the Communists
will not prevent the Communist-dom-
inated trade unions from providing
their usual financial contributions to his
election campaign; and, he and his fel-
low Fabians hope that the thr eatened
retreat in Vietnam will persuade Aus-
tralians to shift their support from mili-
tary defense to "neutralism" and the
purchase of Asian friendships through
more "foreign aid."
In spite of the fact that the Commu-
nist virus has penetrated deeply into
many sectors of the Australian commu-
nity - particularly the universities, the
mass media, and the government's Aus-
tralian Broadcasting Commission- until
the Johnson statement on the shift in
America's Vietnam policy, ther e was no
evidence of a major collapse in Austra-
lian will and morale. Just prior to the
Johnson capitul ation a promine nt Mem-
ber of the Government had even tabled
a motion urging that Aust ralia should
support those Ame ricans calling for a
tougher military policy in Vietnam.
Since then, a public opinion poll has
shown that a substantial majorit y of
Australians favor an increased Austra-
lian milit ary effort to help fill the vacu-
um left by the Brit ish withdrawal from
Southeast Asia.
Clearly, the Anzacs are starting to
come under the greatest test in their his-
tory. But the old Anzac spirit remains.
It was well reflected by Mrs. 2ara Holt,
wife of the late Prime Minister Harold
Holt, when she said in April, after re-
turning home from the United States,
that she and her fellow Australians
would-if necessary- at least go down
fighting the Communists! Can you
imagine Jacqueline Kennedy saying a
thi ng like that?
CRACKER BARREL-----------
EAGLE ROCK-We' ve got a cute new puppy at our house. His mot her was a cham-
pion poodl e and his fat her was a leash law violator.
EAGLE ROCK-In marriage, a woman gives t he best years of her life. In a happ y
marriage, she gives them to t he man who made t hem the best.
EAGLE ROCK-Wh en t he onl y gleam in your eye is caused by t he sun hitting your
bifocals, you' re about ready to give up.
EAGLE ROCK-A good listener is usuall y thinking about somet hing else.
EAGLE ROCK-The perfe ct wife knows when her husb and wants to be force d to
do someth ing against his will.
EAGLE ROCK-If you st ill have your tonsils and appendix af ter t he age of thirty,
the chances are you' re a doct or .
EAGLE ROCK-A girl can look both virt uous and tremendously excit ing- if she
also looks like she has to put up a const ant fight to do it .
EAGLE ROCK-Too man y peopl e who have passed t heir dr iving tests t hink th ey can
pass anything.
EAGLE ROCK-The t rouble wi th some ser mons is th at t he aut hor hasn't sinned
enough to be able to preach about it .
EAGLE ROCK-The har dest secret f or a guy to keep is the opinion he has of hi mself.
EAGLE ROCK-A pr etty I rish girl on a quiz program was asked the other night
wh o, out of all t he world, she'd rat her be. Blushi ng f uriously, she answered, ' 'I'd rat her
be Lieute nant Milton Cohen in Vietn am-he's in the same tent wi t h my husband."
-JACK MOF FITT
112
AMERICAN OPINION
Lt. Gen. L. B. (Chesty) PuLLer, U.S.M.C. (Ret.)
~
--- -- ....
LEWIS BURWELL (CHESTY) PULLER is a soldier's soldier
who became the fightingest Leathern eck of all time. It
is not something that happened by accident , but some-
thi ng he did because of wh at he is. Character is the word
for it. Character and valor and honor - good synonyms
for United States Marine. And that iron character is
something that Chesty Puller was no doubt born with
on 26 Ju ne 1898 in West Point, Vi rginia, for he comes
from a family of justly famous Confederat e ancestors.
He grew to young manhood steeped in the tradi tions of
the South. Afte r a year at Virginia Military Insti tute, he
enlisted in the Marines on the day after his twentieth birth day and rose from
priva te to lieutenant general. In over thirty-seven years of service Chesty
Puller won more combat decorations than any Marine in history. Among
those awards was a Purple Heart for seven wounds he received on Guadal-
canal, and five Navy Crosses-the nati on's second-high est medal.
Chesty served an amazing twent y-seven years on sea and foreign-shore
dut y. As a young Mar ine he fough t his way through more than a hundred
combats in the Banana Wars of Haiti and Nicaragua, earning from the
natives there the grim nickname , EI Tigre; he commanded the famo us
Horse Marin es in Peki ng in the early Thirti es, where for diversion and fur-
ther toughening he learn ed to play polo, and ga rnered a four-goal handicap;
he comma nded a Marin e batt alion in Shangh ai in the days just prior to
Worl d War II ; and wit h the declaration of hostiliti es following Pearl Harbor,
he battled his way thro ugh Guadalca nal, and then from island to island in
the Pacific, concludi ng at Peleliu, wh ere against tremendous odds, he led the
assault on the Japanese in one of the most awesome battl es in Marine history.
In the Korean Wa r, Chesty Pull er resumed command of the Fi rst Marines,
and personally led his regiment ashore in the assault at Inchon, one of
history's gr eat est amphi bious st rikes. He mar ched on Seoul , and eventually
commanded the rear of the Fi rst Mari ne Division, wh ich had been cut off
in the area of the Chosen Reservoir by hundreds of thousands of Ch inese
Communists. It was dur ing this action, wh en Chesty was infor med that his
force was completely surrounded by the enemy hord es, that he replied:
"Those poor bastards. They've got us right where we want 'em. We can
shoot in every direction now." This from a general officer wh o never set
standards for his men that he wouldn't-and didn't-perform himself. He
persona lly led his troops, demanding that his subordinate commanders do
likewise. A favorite exclamation about Chesty originated wit h a battle-
weary lieut enant in Korea who said: "I'd follow hi m to hell - and it looks
like I'm going to have to."
Chesty Puller was often muzzled and kept un der wraps, but nonetheless
made himself heard. He readi ly expounded valid win-concepts about every
phase of Leftist failing in the Korean War (and on the current war in
Vietnam), regularly blasting the United Nations Organizat ion, and he made
himself kn own as being as hard-core an anti -Communist as he is a Marine.
Thus, on 31 October 1955, at a tough , young fifty-seven, thi s splendid and
outspoken Marine was forced to retire from active service.
AMERICAN OPI NION is proud to salute General Lewis Burwell Puller as the
living legendary exemplification of the Marines' mott o, Semper Fidelis-
Always Faithful. - BRIG. GEN. WILLIAM C. LEMLY, U.S.M.e. (RET.)