40 cents
the harvard political review volume one
number three
Interview with Karl Deutsch Articles On : Biafra German Elections Green Berets Harrington Election New York Mets Vietnam Moratorium
november 1969
the harvard political review
Contents
editor-in-chief .••••••• Andrew S. Effron '70 managing editor •••..••• Bruce C. Vladeck '70
comment
features ••••••..•..•••• Allan B. Taylor '70
new politics in massachusetts •.••••••.• 1
assistant editors ••••.• Tom Platt '71 ..•••. Shirley Wolman '71
fighting soldiers from the sky ••••••.•• 4
••.••• Joanne Grossman '71
biafra: the dying goes on •••••••••.•••• s
associate editors .•.••• Cheyney C. Ryan '69-4 •••••• Steven E. Levy '71
let's go mets! ••••••••••••••••••••••••• 8
•••••. Hary A. ?lcCarthy '70
an emerging republican majority? •••••• 10
•.•••• Diana L. Ordin '70
is the moratorium enough? •••••••••.••• 12
•.•••. Corinne Sirna
features
business ••••.•.•••••.•. James L. Speyer '70 photo cover by Detz Darrah '70
THE SOCIAL SCIENTIST AND GOVERNMENTAL RESEARCH: WHAT ARE THE RESPONSIBILITIES? an interview with Karl Deutsch ••••• 14
graphics by THE SIRNA SYSTE:1
CAN GERMAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE THE ELECTION? by J.K. Lyon ••••••••••••••••••.•••• 18 correspondence: the harvard political review leverett d-51; harvard college cambridge, mass. 02138
1n the mail
phone; 876-0542, 876-0550, 491-2160, 876-3870 the harvard political review, a journal of fact and opinion,is published monthly at Harvard University. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of this magazine, its editors, Harvard University, or any departments of the University. The magazine is published as an undergraduate organization at Harvard College.
amencan foreign policy: another view To the editors:
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The essential failure of Bruce Wexler's "Counter Revolutionary Predispositions of American Foreign Policy," (HPR, September) is that we are not told how deeply~r institutional procedures and outlooks are rooted in American history. The author's descriptions of the evolution of "mass" American public attitudes and the ch:mging conception of the national interest are fine, but he fails to apply an historical approach to his discussions of the foreign policy bureaucracy and the conceptual tools of American foreign policy makers. Following Wexler's analysis, one might conclude that a new elite could arise within - or be educated to have - an outlook more geared to understanding the political processes at work within each nation. Such a formulation unduly minimizes the difficulty one might encounter in attempting to alter the operations of our foreign policy establishment. I would therefore adduce two qualifications to Mr. Wexler's argument.
(continued on page 25)
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new politics in massachusetts
By David R. Williams '71 and Larry White '71
~ i c h a e l Harrington, liberal Democratic dove, defeated William Saltonstall, conservative Republican son of Leverett Saltonstall, in a special election for Congress held in Massachusett's Sixth Congressional District this fall. And that is the only definite statement that anyone can make concerning that election. The Sixth Congressional District encompasses the Yankee stronghold north of Boston and stretches from Democratic Lynn in the south, through a jumble of small Republican towns, a few cities, all of Cape Ann, to the dying mill and shoe city of Haverhill on the New Hampshire border. Until Harrington, the district has had only one Democratic congressman since the administration of James Madison. William Bates, son of the previous congressman, a conservative's conservative, held the affections of the district until his death last summer. But Bill Bates' personal hold on his north shore constituents did not show the subtle changes occurring within the district. creeping democracy The registration figures show the Sixth CD to be primarily independent, with Democrats second, and registered Republicans a poor third. The district nevertheless elects Republican town officials and votes Republican in state elections. This is due, old-time political wisdom relates, to the fact that most registered independents are really Republicans in disguise. In 1960, John Kennedy carried Massachusetts with 59% of the vote; he carried the Sixth district with only 54%. This definite Republican bias (relative to the whole state) started fading in 1962, when all of Lynn was added to the district and a few Republican towns were sliced off. In the Goldwater fiasco, Johnson took 75.4% of the vote, slightly better than his statewide 74.6%. By 1968, the Sixth could no
longer be considered a solidly Republican district for, while William Bates was returned to office with a large plurality, the district went 59.5% for Humphrey, almost the same as his state average of 59.8%. The local returns reflect this same Democratic trend. Democratic Lynn went 64% for Kennedy in 1960, and 71% for Humphrey in 1968. The once Republican stronghold of Beverley gave only 49% of its votes to Kennedy in 1960 but 55% of its votes to Humphrey in 1968. Republican Swampscott showed the same trend, 45% to Kennedy but 62% to Humphrey in 1968. This Democratic trend, however, is not reflected to such a large degree on the local level; the small towns are still run by Republicans. Nor is this trend due just to population trowth. In fact, the overall voting population of the district has declined over the last decade. In 1964 there were 266,000 registered voters; in 1966, 259,000 registered voters; and in 1968, 237,000 registered voters. In Lynn, Beverley, and Swampscott, although the percentage of registered persons voting in 1968 was roughly the same as in 1960, there were noticeable drops in the actual numbers of people voting. In general, there has been a greater loss among Republicans than among Democrats across the district. The reasons for these changes are not at all clear. Republicans are either dying and not being replaced, or else they are moving out of the district entirely. The death of the shoe industry in Haverhill, Peabody, and Lynn has been a major factor in sending young people to the Greater Boston area. This has been balanced to some degree by a small influx of the young professionals and development engineers following the military-industrial complex up Route 128. One thing that is clear is that the independents are more willing now to vote independently than they have been in the past, especially in national elections where more general principles and ideals are involved. James Murphy of the Franklin Institute has suggested that the Goldwater candidacy, which drove large numbers of Republicans to vote Democratic for the first time, finally ended the time-honored habit of voting solidly Republican at every election. This theory is backed up by the above-quoted statistics on the '60, '64, and '68 elections. At any rate, in the fall of 1969, the district was to some degree prepared for the election of Michael Harrington.
help him there -- he carried the city by only a 5-4 margin. Harrington, on the other hand, had organized a solid district-wide campaign, based on local community support. Representative David Harrison of Gloucester, Chairman of the Democratic State Committee, got most of the Democratic town and ward committees active, and district coordinators were selected to organize local campaign activity. In this, Harrington had the valuable support of Citizens for Participation Politics (CPP), which had already active political organizations in 23 of the 30 communities in the district. These people, the "New Politics" factor in the campaign, had brought out a large vote for Senator McCarthy in that district in the '68 primary and were prepared to do the same for Harrington.
During his stay in the legislature, Harrington made a name for himself as an independently-minded liberal. He bucked the party leadership more often than he cooperated with it, and he was one of the only two Massachusetts state Representatives to endorse Eugene McCarthy in 1967 when McCarthy first announced. He has supported legislation setting up police review boards, allowing eighteen-yearolds to vote, extending migrant workers' rights, and generally promoting progressive government in the Commonwealth. During those years, he was re-elected by the voters of Salem not as much on these issues as on his popular family name. His father was a well-liked judge and political figure in Salem, and his cousin, Kevin Harrington, is a state Senator from the district and the majority leader of the Massachusetts Senate. Kevin has not been known to share his cousin's liberal political outlook. But Michael Harrington's image has been that of a stubbornly independent man who cannot be easily swayed from his beliefs. His Democratic primary opponents, Lynn Mayor Irving Kane and County Commissioner James Burke, labelled him an erratic "ultra-liberal," while his liberal supporters could be heard muttering, "I like Mike, but exactly how close is he to Kevin?" But Harrington stated his basic positions at the start of the campaign and stuck to them with only a few fluctuations to the end.
Saltonstall did not fare quite so well in his primary. Everyone agreed that because of his name he would trounce liberal Republican Frank Hatch. The Boston press made light of the contest by comparing it to an overly civilized and polite competition between two rival bluebloods. But Hatch had many more friends than people thought, and the few times that either candidate did mention an issue, Hatch came across as by far the clearer, more literate, and more moderate. And in some of the towns, CPP members and other liberals were pushing Harrington with one hand and Hatch with the other. The result was that Saltonstall barely squeezed by Hatch and revealed an unprecedented split in the Republican ranks. Harrington's aides were overjoyed.
inbred republicans William Saltonstall was an administrative aid to his father in Washington for several years before he returned home to run for the State Senate. As a State Senator, he has had a firm Republican voting record well to the right of center. He chose as the main theme of his campaign the services he could provide the district and the statement that he would be a loyal member of the Republican team in Washington; he was hoping by this strategy to cloak himself in the mantle of the late Bill Bates. It was generally considered that he was running on the basis of his name, his party affiliation, and his money. The primaries were interesting for Harrington and probably fatal to Saltonstall. Harrington won his primary because he was well organized and because his opponents were not. Burke decided to become a "law and order" candidate, hoping to cash in on the national hysteria over that issue. But in the Democratic wards of Peabody, Lynn, and Gloucester, where there are not yet very many blacks, his campaign was a reassuring failure. Mayor Kane of Lynn hoped to win on the basis of united AFL-CIO support across the district and a solid turnout from Lynn, which has almost 30% of all the Democrats in the district. But AFL-CIO endorsement doesn't mean what it once did, and Kane's unfortunate announcement of a heavy tax hike in Lynn the week before the primary didn't
issues and organization
2.
Harrington's strategy for the general election was to win the independents and liberal Republicans who had supported Hatch to his banner on the basis of the issues. Here, he was helped by his image as a party "maverick." It was easier for the Republicans to vote for a Democrat if he was not tied in with the regular Democrats. Harrington's literature stressed his "independent" stands on the issues, adding the statement, "He has the guts to do what's right." He kept repeating his challenge to debate the issues, a challenge which Saltonstall avoided until the last minute. Meanwhile, his organization passed out literature to every home in the district more than once and contacted every voter at least once by phone. It was the first really well organized political campaign that the North Shore has seen recently. As soon as the legislature expired for the year, about 30 state Representatives showed up to lend their political know-how to the campaign. CPP brought in Al Lowenstein, Senator McGovern, Jimmy Breslin, and Peter Yarrow as well as an endorsement from McCarthy. Senator Muskie made an election eve appearance in Lynn and Humphrey was given permission to say a nice word about Harrington at an airport news conference. Senator Kennedy decided that it would be best to stay out of the fight personally but he mobilized his staff, most notably
recently become aggressively antagonistic to anything even remotely progressive. At the same time, some of the side-effects of upper middle class suburban life, education and a more enlightened view of the world, are beginning to show in the once Republican towns, and these people can be approached by liberal politicians on the basis of the issues more and more.
Jim King from his Boston office, and his organization. Their effect was to run the election in the last few weeks in the typical Kennedy fashion, with an overnowering drive and power which left the locals breathless and just a little bit annoyed. Meanwhile the war continued undiminished, the rivers of the North Shore flowed thick with pollution, the cities were already dead, and Harrington in his speeches and his literature was the only one directly confronting these issues.
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Harrington's political organization made it possible to bring issues to people. His cousin's and the Kennedy staff technicians' skillful organization of the overall campaign perfectly complemented the door-to-door enthusiasm of the "New Politics" people. The general shift of the voters toward the Democrati.c party was also a factor in Harrington's victory. It must be remembered that there had never been a really serious challenge to Bill Bates. Everyone voted for him for personal reasons; this was the first organized election in which the voters had to make a choice. The split in the Republican primary was also important. Without it, many Republicans might never have thought of taking a second look at the Republican candidate.
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ineffective students It is also interesting to note some factors which didn't amount to much. Organized labor, in the form of the AFLCIO, endorsed Harrington but was not able to produce a large labor vote. Harrington was pronounced dead when he came out against import quotas to protect the shoe industry, a position he later altered. Organized labor also went all out for Mayor Kane in the primary with dismal results. In order to make the news more interesting, the media dragged out all the rhetoric of the McCarthy campaign to describe this election, including the myth of thousands of student volunteers. But the Harrington student organization was fairly indept and the hordes of student volunteers nr.ver materialized. What few students did show up were marginal in effect and would have been useless without good previous organization.
The results are known. Harrington won. The independents voted Democratic and provided the necessary margin of victory. In a comparison of the final vote with Kevin Harrington's projected figures, Harrington did only slightly better in the cities than he had expected to, and much better in the small towns. There is some evidence that many city Democrats voted in the end for Saltonstall, only to be offset by independents and Republicans who voted for Harrington: Harrington did not do as well in some of the wards of Lynn as Humphrey did in 1968. Harrington's victory can be attributed to no single factor. Certainly the issue of the war and Harrington's political organization deserve a large share of the credit. Also, Saltonstall's wishy-washy pronouncements in support of the war made him the weaker candidate on that crucial issue. This can account for much of the Republican vote for Harrington as well as some of the blue-collar anti-liberal vote for Saltonstall. As Newsweek recently pointed out, where city Democrats once followed the liberal cliches, they have
The lessons, if there are any, of this election are varied, for if William Bates were alive he would unquestionably have been re-elected on the same platform he had always run on. It gives a boost to the theory argued in The Emerging Republican Majority that New England's Republicans are slowly becoming liberal while the big city Democrats are heading toward Republican intransigence. (See review in this issue.)
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It shows that, if the "New Politics" is going to succeed and Harrington's victory is not going to be an isolated case, the new politicians will have to learn and be willing to practice the nitty-gritty of organizational politics. Liberal, anti-
war candidates are not always going to have cousins who are professional hack politicians.
fighting soldiers from the sky
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by Dariiel Pool '69-4
n the balmy days of the early New Frontier there was an air of glamor about the commanda forces known as the "Green Berets". James Bond was in vogue then, and it was exciting to realize that the United States had its own counterparts to the adventuresome Britisher. Besides, it seemed comforting that the new administration was turning away from the brinksmanship implicit in a military strategy of "massive retaliation"; one could breathe easy at the prospect of the United States keeping the world free through "limited" means. It was in such a spirit that Congressmen and White House aides would congregate at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for an exhibition ("Disneyland" the Berets called it) by the Special Forces, as they are officially known, of -seuba-diving, hand-to-hand combat and the other skills that such units possess. The Vietnamese war - and an increasing repugnance for what it represents - have muted the enthusiasm that once existed in many quarters for such derring-do. Staff Sergeant Donald Duncan left the Army in 1966 out of disgust with some of the tactics the Special Forces were using; subsequently, Dr. Howard Levy so1;1ght to accuse the Green Berets of war en.mes in his famous trial. And now once again the Berets are in the headlines this time because eight of their men narrowly escaped trial for the murder of an alleged North Vietnamese double agent. To understand the case requires some background. Although the Berets were not officially established until 1952, former combat officers from Western Europe and American veterans beg.an training in the late forties to be the "Merrill's Marauders" of the Cold War. Then as now they were formed into ten to twelve man units and trained in advising counterguerilla forces; one twelve-man team can organize and advise a 1500 man counterguerilla unit.
The work demands considerable technical ability. Accordingly, Berets are trained in a specialized area - medical aid, radio communications or demolition and then cross-trained, should another team member be lost. At.the same time, considerable individual initiative and a certain spirit of adventure are put at a premium, since "going by the book" is apt to result in disaster. Inevitably, conflict with "conventional" army personnel resulted. Special Forces men felt that having belt buckles polished was less important than an intimate knowledge of radio transmitters; higher-ups disagreed, and the Berets lost the right to their green headgear in 1956. President Kennedy, however, was an enthusiastic advocate of counterguerilla warfare, and the size and budget of the Special Forces rose after he took office. At the same time, as part of the new emphasis on "unconventional warfare", the CIA began to expand its counterinsurgency operations. Personnel limitations, however, soon posed a problem, Who would take up the slack when "operatives" became over-extended overseas? The Berets were a natural; their activity in many cases involved quasiintelliqence operations - it was therefore only a step from there to cooperation with the CIA. Thus it was that the Berets began getting a piece of CIA's action. They trained the Bolivian counterguerilla forces responsible for the death of Che Guevara; they worked in the Dominican Republic in 1965. In addition, they have been active in training Thai police for operations against Malayan Communists crossing the country's borders.
It is in Vietnam, however, that their roots are deepest. In 1961 the 5th Special Forces began working with the Ciem government under the di~ection of the CIA. As the troop build-up took place, however, the CIA lessened its ties with the Berets; much of the present controversy may revolve on the degree to which they did so. The facts of the case are disputed. According to the claim of Sgt. Alvin Smith, Thai Khae Chuyen was accused by members of Unit B-57 of the Berets of being a double agent for Hanoi. He was subsequently interrogated, after which Col. Robert Rheault, commander of the Special Forces in Vietnam, approved the order to give Chuyen a "wet disposal": to have him killed. The CIA disclaims all responsibility for the alleged murder. At most, one official remarks, there might have been advice tendered on the case by the Saigon office - but nothing more. General Creighton Abrams was apparently furious when he heard of what had happened, and issued orders for an immediate investigation of the incident. The outcome of the probe was the arrest of Col. Rheault and seven members of B-57.
It seems implausible, however, that a compensatory trial - with the United States in effect saying, "Sorry for killing your man" - would necessitate arresting Rheault as well as some of his men. In any case, if the Army attacAed any importance to maintaining a high-morale Special Forces operation in Vietnam it would seem that incarcerating its commander can only be seen as unnecessarily drastic. It is therefore more probable that the arrests stem from the long-standing antagonism between Berets and regular Army men. It is very probable that the unshined belt buckles in the fifties are still bitterly remembered by some top brass. Nor has CIA involvement with the Berets lessened the bitterness. Some observers hypothesize that Abrams is simply sick and tired of not knowing which of his units are under his command and which under the CIA's. So the arrests, then, were an attempt by Abrams to repair control over troops nominally under his command in the first place. To paraphrase Mao, it might be said that a fish must first learn to live in his own water before he can swim in other people's; the Green Berets will have to be accepted within the Army before they will be effective against an enemy.
A number of explanations for Abrams' conduct have been offered. One suggestion is that Chuyen was actually a highup courier from Thieu to Hanoi, or a North Vietnamese granted special immunity.
biafra: the dying goes on
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by Phillip Whitten GS Ed
t has been a long time now since you picked up the evening paper and were confronted by the baleful bulging eyes of a starving Ibo child with protruding ribs and shriveled limbs. For a fleeting moment the attention of .the world was captured by his plight, but by now it has been seen all too many times and is no longer "newsworthy." Meanwhile the 30-month-old civil war which has divided the once-promising Nigerian Federation continues to produce human destruction of gigantic proportions. Each day journalists, missionaries, and relief workers dispatch to an imcomprehending and uncaring world the cold, appalling facts of the tragedy: --more than five million refugees, most of whom are wandering fearful and penniless through the bush. --attacks on hospitals, schools, marketplaces, Red Cross mercy planes, and other non-military targets, leaving hundreds dead.
--the destruction of an entire generation of Biafrans, with, by conservative estimate, more than one and a half million children dead of starvation, an equal number to die in the next several months, and the pitiful survivors mentally and physically crippled. The magnitude of the tragedy defies human comprehension. u.s. policy United States policy toward Nigeria has been a cautious one of support for Nigerian "unity." From Joseph Palmer II former Assistant Secretary of State for' African Affairs, to his cousin who writes the editorials about Africa for the New York Times, to the U.S. Ambassador i ~ Lagos, the official position has been that mass starvation, however unfortunate for the 3,000 children who die each day, would hasten the downfall of Colonel Ojukwu's rebel government and hence allow the victorious Nigerian armies to bring relief to the liberated Ibos. Indeed, last year Palmer stated categorically that it was "Biafra, not Nigeria, which was causing the major problem," for the outside world in its attempts to rush food relief to Biafra. If only the Biafrans would abandon their intransigent claims to selfdetermination and security, relief would be sped to them. British and Russian policy on Biafra has been based on a total commitment to the concept of Nigerian unity - and this commitment has been backed up with large shipments of jet fighters and bombers, armored vehicles, anti-personnel fragmentation bombs and other weapons. And, as Senator Richard Russell of G~orgia recently charged, American policy has virtually been formulated in London. But, if it was not clear before, the events of the last year have shown that Nigerian "unity" is no longer a viable possibility. Despite several well-publicized "final offensives," the war has developed into a military stalemate, neither side having won a major victory since last April when the Biafrans recaptured Owerri, now the provisional capital. Anti-government riots in Western Nigeria have become increasingly bloody in recent months, and the situation in Ibadan is reportedly verging on civil war. The Nigerian Federation, like most of Britain's
post-colonial attempts at federalism, has failed. oil Oil, ~rib~l su~r 7macy and religion are what the Nigerian civil war is really all about. And what Britain is reallv concerned with is its investment in Nigeria - estimated at more than 310 pounds - which would certainly suffer if it withdrew its support. Nigeria is the world's ninth largest producer of crude oil, producing an estimated 255 million barrels per year and 60 per cent of Nigerian oil reserves are located in Biafra. Britain is not the only country with large economic interests in Biafra. The United States, too, has banking and oil interests amounting to more than $300 million in the region. The Chase Manhattan Bank, Morgan Guaranty Company, and First National City Bank all have large investments in the area. But the three major American concerns in the region are the Gulf Oil Corporation, Mobil Oil Corporation and Phillips Petroleum. (It is perhaps because of his political debts to the U.S. oil industry that President Nixon has failed to fulfill his campaign pledge to act as "the world's conscience" in bringing relief to the victims of the war.) Earlier this year, according to the New York Times, Mobil Oil sponsored the"""vrsit to~United States of Joseph Tarka, Nigerian Commissioner of Transportation, to solicit support for a "more pro-Nigerian policy." nixon: "let us act as the. world's conscience" When the new administration took office last January it was expected that U.S. policy would be re-examined and, perhaps, altered. "The time has long passed," said Richard Nixon during the presidential campaign, "for the wringing of hands about what is going on. While America is not the world's policeman, let us at least act as the world's conscience in this matter of life and death for millions." But for months, while private citizens were donating millions of dollars for relief, the new administration did nothing. And while politicians continued to dance their minuet of disclaiming any responsibility for the problem, Biafran children continued to die of starvation at the rate of 6,000 per day. Finally, Nixon announced that he had ordered a full-scale review of existing U.S. aid for Nigerian war victims and recommendations on what could be done to "enlarge and expedite it." A high level fact-finding mission was dispatched to the scene to assess the needs of both Nigeria and Biafra. Led by Senator Charles E. Goodell (Rep. - N.Y.) and Dr. Jean Mayer, professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, the mission spent ten days at the scene of the war. Although General Yakubu Gowan, head of Nigeria's Federal Military Government (FMG), assured the group of a safe conduct pass to and from Biafra, the mission was bombed by the Nigerian Aif Force every day of ies visit to Biafra.
the goodell report In April the mission made p".lblic its 36-page report to the President. Prepared by Professor Mayer, the report stated the group's findings on various aspects of Biafran life, with particular emphasis on the nutritional and medical needs of the people. The report contained three major recommendations: first, an immediate cessation of hostilities as the only means of guarantee-
about Biafran needs, some medical and nutritional personnel be stationed in Biafra to report possible solutions of the situation to the President. (2) That a relief coordinator be assigned to work between U.S. volunteer agencies and local physicians and food experts. (3) That, for this and possible future disasters, the President should designate a relief advisor to work in a voluntary capacity as a consultant on problems of international relief. Although Senator Goodell's name is not affixed to these specific recommendations, he writes, in the foreward to the report, "May the findings of this study mission to Biafra bestir the world's leaders. Incisive action is necessary to prevent an indirect form of genocide that will wipe out more than one million Biafran women and children in the months ahead." The report declares that buildings with Red Cross markings, schools, hospitals - any large gathering of people - are systematically bombed and strafed. Biafra's one airport, used by relief planes, is constantly bombed, cutting relief to a fraction of its potential. Most frightening is the possibility of carbohydrate malnutrition, in addition to the now prevalent protein malnutrition (kwachickor) which could increase the starvation deaths at an exponential rate.
ing the provision of adequate food and medical relief. Second, that atrocities against Biafran civilians must be ended and interference with relief flights must be halted immediately. Third, a land or sea corridor, internationally-policed, must be established since this is the only way to ensure the distribution of adequate food tonnage to Biafra. (The report did not deal with the considerable difficulties of implementing this recommendation.) The report berates the United Nations and its agencies, including WHO, FAO, and UNESCO, for failing to take a more active role in peace negotiations and relief efforts. The mission's technical team made three suggestions to the American government concerning the handling of relief operations: (1) That, due to the lack of information
humanitarian intervention The United States must be prepared to support a humanitarian intervention to save the remaining Biafrans from starvation. Humanitarian intervention is an extraordinary remedy - an exception to the postulates of state sovereignty and territorial inviolability. But it is based on principles of international law deriving from a long tradition of natural law and secular values: the kinship and minimum reciprocal responsibilities of all humanity, the inability of geographical boundaries to stem categorical imperatives and, ultimately, the confirmation of the sanctity of human life. The principle is confirmed and reconfirmed by numerous authorities on international law, as well as by the preamble and the first article of the United Nationa Charter, The General Assembly Resolution 217A of 1948 - entitled the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" - and The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. International lawyers list as precedents U.N. intervention in Palestine, Cyprus, and The Congo. Pre-U.N, cases date back to 1830. The case for humanitarian intervention by the U.N. in Nigeria is a strong one. What prevents Administration officials from advocating it is the spectre of "another Vietnam." But since the nightmare of Vietnam is so deeply etched in America's sensibilities already, it is certain that the Nixon administration would be careful not to do anything which might entangle this nation in another such long-term commitment. towards a solution Numerous world leaders, including Pope Paul VI, Haile Selassie and Julius Nyerere, have attempted to mediate between the two sides and put an end to the killing. There
last month have managed to bring together New York's disparate and warring elements and, at least for a brief while, restore harmony and civic prjde to the city. Some (not including Proccacino) have even gone so far as to argue that the success of the Mets should provide John Lindsay with a much-needed boost in his campaign for reelection, the theory perhaps being that if everyone spends the whole of October in front of their television sets they will forget the dirty streets and high crime rate and racial friction, and vote for the man who managed to be the first to shade Gil Hodge's hand after the victory against the Braves.
have been conferences in London, Aburi, Kampala, Niamey, Addis Ababa and Monrovia. But, thus far, each side has remained obdurate in its public stance. What can the United States, in its role as a world leader, do to hasten the end of the war? First, we must press for a cease-fire through the U.N. It is clear that Biafra cannot win a military victory and a Nigerian victory - an unlikely occurance would be pointless: the new Nigerian union would be so divided by tribal hatreds that it could not endure. Second, the General Assembly should consider and pass a resolution recognizing the international humanitarian obligations in the Nigerian situation. Third, the resolution, employing the mandatory power of the U.N. Charter, should direct the Secretary-General to use his good office and all the resources available to him, to expedite the conclusion of a "mercy agreement" with the parties to the Nigerian conflict. Fourth, the mercy agreement should be carried out under the auspices of the United Nations, in cooperation with the Red Cross and private voluntary agencies. Fifth, governments should actively support this effort of the U.N., and prepare to make voluntary contributions of funds, commodities, personnel and equipment, including the logistical support of ships and planes, to effect the mercy agreement. Sixth, a compromise political settlement should be encouraged. As Stanley Meisler correctly observes in the October issue of The Atlantic: "The most plausible comproiiiise is a weak union or confederation of Nigeria in which Biafra has a special autononous status, including the right to maintain its own army. "
On the face of it, none of these theories seem too improbable, but clearly none of the commentators are real Mets fans. If they were, the sheer intrinsic exaltation of success would blot everything else from their minds, and they would be unable to relate the triumphs to anything but poetic justice and perhaps divine intervention. In the oldest and truest sense of the word, the politicians have managed to profane the success of the Mets. Only the true fans, those of us who suffered the seven long and ignominious years in the cellar, can undertstand that this kind of victory is sufficient unto itself, and that such humdrum affairs as elections and civic harmony are insignificant in comparison. Politics, the philosophers tell us, is or should be the pursuit of the good in human affairs, but the Mets make it quite clear that there are some supreme goods with which politics has absolutely nothing to do. The Mets will be world champions for the next year regardless who wins the election, regardless, indeed, of whether the city burns down.
In pursuing these initiatives, President Nixon would have the support of the American people and of the Confress. America ought to act now, simply because it is right to do so. Our leaders have often spoken of the vast power of the United States. Mr. Nixon now has the opportunity to invest that power with "an extra dimension" - a moral dimension - that can only do honor to this nation.
The real political significance of the pennant race, then, is that the politicians and journalists have managed to get their hands on something that has made very many people very happy, but which is essentially none of their business. And this is a more serious problem than it would seem at first glance. For just as some baseball fans, in the face of overwhelming indifference from their friends, roomates, and family, tend to overestimate the importance of a child's game played by overgrown children and run by money-hungry entrepreneurs, so too do politicians tend to overestimate the importance of their jobs and their business. The difference is that while we write off baseball fans as hopeless fanatics we give politicians fancy titles, shiny limousines, and lots of very real power. And in the supreme isolation of the small ingrown worlds in which they do their jobs, politicians tend to forget that there are a lot of things that the government can not do, and lots of people who don't really care one way or another.
let's go, metsl everyone from James Reston to Nelson Rockefeller to Mario Proccacino has managed to attach great political significance to the recent success of the New York Mets. According to Proccacino, Reston, and the other experts, the Mets, by their stunning and totally unexpected victories of the
8
This is not to argue that political affairs are totally unimportant, or that an individual has the right to ignore them or be disdainful of them. The war is clearly a political problem, and one which
can only be ended by political means; it is only through the politicization of so many previously uninvolved people that we are as close to ending the war as we are. But it is just possible that one of the reasons we are in this mess in the first place is that Lyndon Johnson held the misguided - though perhaps noble - conception that through the use of such political means as guns and money and conscription and public lying, he could in one sure stroke save the people of Vietnam from the drab oppression of a perceived Communist menace, and remake their lives into models of peace, harmony, and prosperity. If you ever have the stomach for a truly noble and inspiring vision of what politics can be thought to achieve, try re-reading the speech Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins in April, 1966, in which he painted a vision of a Southeast Asia reborn into something bearing a remarkable resemblance to the American Dream.
In contrast to Johnson, it might be pointed out in passing that the great and inexplicable appeal Eugene McCarthy has had for so large a proportion of the voting population - not only students - may have lain not so much in his policy positions or his low-key manner, but in the impression he gave of seeming just not to care very much about the dirty business of politics; of being more interested in baseball, and poetry, and making funny remarks about his opponents. More than any other political figure of recent years, McCarthy had an acute sense of how little difference it all really makes, and while he could bestir himself to speak out and campaign on an issue where politics did matter, he seemed completely conscious of the total irrelevance of all the accoutrements of politics and political activity, and in that regard he struck a responsive chord among the voters, if not among the delegates to the Democratic convention.
Johnson's ethnocentrism can not, of course, be excused, but it is interesting to speculate just how much of the tragedy of the war can be attributed to the belief of people like Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara that political action, if well enough managed and supported, can achieve implausible. results. Certainly when one makes the "winning of the hearts and minds of the people" into a goal of foreign policy, there is a very serious misunderstanding of politics at work. The Mets have won the hearts and minds of millions of unbelievers without ever having made a speech, or bombed a village, or pacified anyone but the Baltimore Orioles. Johnson, apparently, couldn't even win the heart and mind of President Thieu.
The greatest possible contrast to McCarthy, of course, is not Johnson but Richard Nixon, who has neve~ paid very much attention to anything but politics, and who seems to care about nothing else - escept maybe baseball. Apologists for the President have argued that the man is a superior politician, a veritable master of political legerdemain, and that what this country needs in the White House is a skilled politician. It is disturbing to note that this argument runs strikingly close to the ideas of many really liberal political thinkers, such as Richard Neustadt, whose theory seems to be that it is better to have in the White House a skilled politician who has no deep ethical policy commitments, than an incompetent one who believes all the riqht thinqs, As it becomes increasingly clear that not only is Nixon nowhere nearly so competent as people seem to have thought him to be, but that he also has no policy goals much broader than rebuilding his own party and guarranteeing his re-election, the theory falls apart: the Nixon administration begins to seem not only inefficient but downright dangerous. Having an incompetent President is a tragedy; having one who seems to be totally impervious to real and very serious human suffering, unless that suffering can be translated into votes, is morally outrageous. Corny though it may sound, it is of the very essence of morality that we have as President, and in all other government offices, men who are deeply and legitimately concerned not only with politics but with such essentially non-political values as peace, harmony, and beauty, love and truth. Only these concerns can provide any kind of justification for politics in the first place, even if politics is usually totally incapable of achieving them. Which speaking of beauty, and harmony and love, brings us full circle, back to the Mets. I'm glad they won the World Series. With the way the Jets and the Patriots and the Harvard football team have been going lately, it looks like a long,
Both President Nixon and the author claim that the book's political strategy - ignoring the Northeast and blacks, browns, and Jews everywhere - is not the political strategy of the current Administration. But Kevin Phillips is John Mitchell's special assistant, and John Mitchell is Richard Nixon's chief political advTsor.
cold winter with only SDS to keep me company and take my mind off the debacle going on daily in Washington. The afterglow of the Arnazins' marvellous triumphs are all I have to help me get through it. B.C.V.
Phillips advocates ignoring the Northeast because he believes it will fulfill its historic role as the defender of the Establishment. The liberal Establishment will join with the Yankees, the Negroes, the Jews, and the Puerto Ricans to insure Democratic majorities. The author's only explanation for the Yankees' move to the Democratic Party is that they have traditionally served as an advance guard for the Establishment. In response to the movement of these groups to the Democrats, he goes on, the Northeast's non-Yankee rural Protestants and middle class Catholics will become Republicans. As with the Yankees, Phillips can offer only tradition dating back to the Civil War to explain the counter-movement of the non-Yankee Protestants; he is much more explicit when discussing the trend among Catholics. They will vote Republican, he says, because
it can't happen here ~he upcoming cycle of American politics is likely to match a dominant Republican Party based in the Heartland, South and California against a minority Democratic Party based in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest (and encompassing Southern as well as Northern Negroes).
• •• across much of the Northeast the economic and geographic frontiers of the restless black ghetto impinged on Catholic trade unions and neighborhoods; rising taxes for escalating welfare bore down on small home-owners; soaring crime rates jeopardized bluecollar and middle-class lives; new sociological concepts hamstrung the police and undermined the neighborhood school.
Kevin Phillips has written The Emerging Republican Majoritl to document this prediction. Its 74 pages and confident prognostications have one theme: "The political future of Negroes is likely to be nearly unanimously Democratic, an allegiance which in turn will ingrain the Republicanism of conservative groups." Conservative groups are defined as all whites except the Liberal Establishment "research directors, associate professors, social workers, educational consultants, urbanologists, development planners, journalists, brotherhood exe9utiyes. foun~ation staffers, communications specialists, culture vendors, pornography merchants, poverty theorists, an~ ,;o forth" - Yankees and Jews.
By appealing to these fears, Phillips argues that the GOP can win the Catholic vote as long as it does not give
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Nixon
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I~·; fil Wallace from book jacket
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Finally, we come to the Pacific states of Washington, Oregon, and California. As in the Heartland, the influence of Yankee origins will carry one state for the Democrats; ~n this region, the anomaly is Washington. But the big state, California~ is becoming safely Republican. Again, the population explosion in the sunbelt area is largely responsible for the trend. Southern California, the home of Sam Yorty and countless defense plants, now dominates the state and it is growing rapidly. Populated ' by people fleeing from city blacks into the crowded but comfortable suburbs, it is unlikely to vote for the candidates of the older cities.
the voters reason to think that it will jeopardize their economic security. After analyzing these trends, Phillips concludes that all of New England and New York will be safe for the Democrats. Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland will be political battlegrounds. The author expects that his party will usually succeed in the latter three states, where Southern influence is strong. He evidently cannot explain why the three states of southern New England, dominated by Catholics, will not join the Republican majority. His sense of political reality here conquers his political analysis.
an answering strategy Phillips' image of the future of American politics is realistic enough to be frightening, but it is not quite convincing. He assumes that color will override all other differences, causing a white majority to coalesce against liberal programs of "taxing the many on behalf of the few."
the south and the heartland Phillips repeats the pattern established by his examination of the voting trends in the Northeast throughout the rest of his book. Thus, in the South, the movement of the newly enfranchised blacks into the national Democratic Party will drive the whites into the GOP. Poor whites, traditionally populist and suspicious of the Deep South conservative barons, will forget their narrow class interests in a surge of racial solidarity. Accordingly, maintaining Negro voting rights is an essential part of the Republican political strategy, as enunciated by Phillips. As the blacks become increasingly more pow,rful in the Democratic Party, the whites will be forced to realize that their traditional political home is no longer their castle. Were the enfranchisement of Negroes to be slowed or stopped, the whites might decide to stay with their established party. In the Heartland - defined as all states without a coastline - everything is coming up Republican except Michigan, where old Yankee settlements and new black concentrations will create a solid Democratic base. In the rest of this huge area, the Republicans can count on majorities built around the oldest and the newest population groups. Phillips sees no reason to doubt that the farmers will retain their traditional conservative, Republican inclinations. Agrarian radicalism, according to Phillips, won its demands in the New Deal. In any case, he says that it has been rendered "irrelevant" by the "Negro socioeconomic revolution," which now dominates political liberalism. The farmers will be joined by the new, white collar cities of the Southwest. These sunbelt cities are the country's fastest growing urban areas, and they are populated by people who want only to protect what they have. As in the Northeast, the white, blue collar workers of the industrial centers will join the Republican "popular conservative" movement to express their opposition to the blacks.
Thus, the emerging Republican majority will unite the Texas oilmen with the New England Catholics who must pay exorbitant prices to heat their homes; the industrial workers of the Midwest with the Chambers of Commerce in the South who attract new plants by fighting unions; the old in need of medical aid with the AMA; constuction workers with the proponents of high interest rates. These are strange alliances. Phillips recognizes the potential weakness of his coalition when he warns that Nixon will have to disprove labor's economic fears of a Republican Administration before the emerging majority can blossom in full glory. But he never considers the possibility that the Democrats themselves could split the Republican majority by aggravating its contradictions. Aggressive Democrats could formulate programs which favor the consumers of petroleum and medical care over the monopolistic producers of those goods. They could make clear to the members of the crafts union that their choice is between jobs for blacks as well as whites or an honored position as cannon fodder in the fight against inflation. They could change their rhetoric from quiet displeasure to loud outrage when a Republican President endorses a large cut in corporate income taxes as he proclaims a cutback in federal construction expenditures.
If
In other words, the Democrats must be willing to increase economic polarization in order to prevent racial separation in American politics. If they are not, Kevin Phillips' new Republican majority just could control the country for the next decadP. - A.B.T.
line of negotiations. In retrospect, the focus of much of the anti-war movement on negotiations rather than on total unconditional withdrawal was clearly disastrous. When negotiations came (and they were inevitable, considering that the NLF was winning), liberals told opponents to the war that a great victory had been won, and that now the proper thing to do was sit and wait to see what happened. In fact, no victory had been won, for negotiations were used to keep people at home quiet while the war was waged more viciously than ever. Furthermore, no victory could be won at the negotiating table, for despite all liberal assertions to the contrary, the U.S. has no right to be in Vietnam, and has no right to be negotiating there. Any compromise between the NLF and the U.S. had to be a sellout for the Vietnamese people. Now we have a Vietnam Moratorium, brought to you by the same people who brought you the McCarthy movement and numerous other "responsible" organizations. Like other "liberal" fronts, it is as mild as can be: it takes no sides in the war, it deplores killing and destruction in the abstract, and it asks the nation to beat its chest in moral repentance. To everyone, from garbage collector to businessman, from blue collar worker to slum-lord, it says "do your own thing for peace, let us join hands and right this wrong which is the fault of no one, but the moral failing of us all." Its pamphlets and leaflets echo the message of the liberals' now-discredited champion of six years past, Lyndon Johnson, in saying "let us reason together," let us end this tragedy which is a weight around all our necks.
is the moratorium enough?
~n the last issue of the Harvard Political Review, one of my fellow editors expressed the belief that the Vietnam Moratorium might help build enough pressure to persuade the President to pull out of Vietnam. Such a strateav is based on the same misdirected hopes as past efforts. In the mid-sixties, Students for a Democratic Society organized a march on Washington to demand total and unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam. Drawing 25,000 people, this march in October '65 was the first mass demonstration of opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. Some days after the march, liberal groups such as Turn Towards Peace and National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and eminent liberal spokesmen such as Martin Luther King, began a campaign for "Negotiations Now," asking not that the United States pull out of Vietnam, but rather that it begin negotiations to reach a settlement in which neither the U.S. nor the NLF would be totally victorious. While all of these groups had opposed the sos march because it allowed for the participation of groups that were "openly communist," none was hesitant in capitalizing on the stir caused by the march to push its own politics.
In asking us to blame no one for the Vietnam war, the Vietnam Moratorium serves to cover over the real causes of the Vietnam war with a liberal sugar coating. Join hands with the businessman, it says, as if it were not in the businessman's interest to defend the bulk of Southeast Asia against the takeover by socialist forces. Join hands with the college president, it says, as if the college president had not fought tooth and nail against the expul~ion of ROTC and other military-related programs from his campus. Be blind to the realities of political and economic power in this country, it says, and see the Vietnam war as merely a mistake in a foreign policy which is otherwise correct in wishing to keep Asia and the rest of the world free from Communist tyranny, open to the economic programs of the "free world."
In late 1967, Eugene McCarthy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and said at the outset that he hoped to channel much of the youthful dissent against the war back into "responsible channels." Like most other perceptive observers of the American scene he recognized that there was a substantial' segment of the American population, growing larger with each day, which opposed the American presence in Vietnam and wished to bring it to a halt. Instead of calling for immediate withdrawal, however, McCarthy called for a negotiated settlement, and criticized the Vietnam war as weakening our defenses against communism in other areas of the world. McCarthy painted himself as a dove, but in the end he was an albatross; many flocked to McCarthy, feeling that, even though McCarthy did not question the fundamental nature of American policy, still he was a minute step in the right direction. For all their licking envelopes in the campaign head9uart7rs, the kids got a.blast of teargas in Chicago, and the realization in November that their white knight McCarthy and all his assorted pawns (Lowenstein, Brown, Hughes, McGovern) were supporting Hubert Humphrey, the man who had called Vietnam "our greatest adventure." Of course, the emergence of McCarthy on the scene was not so important as the role he played in continuing to push the liberal
The Moratorium asks us to ally with those who we know are not our allies in the struggle against American involvement and American oppressions overseas. This is evident in its politics, and it is evident in its sponsor list. You can tell much about a person by who his enemies are, and you can tel,l much a')out a political organization by its friends. Note for a moment who the supporters of the Moratorium are: 12.
--Fred Harris, National Chairman of the Democratic Party, campaign manager for Hubert Humphrey;
Vietnamese no better off than when they began. And what does the Moratorium have to say about Thailand, Laos, and the rest of Southeast Asia? Nothing at all. The Moratorium does not advance the antiwar struggle; it merely uses the anti-war sentiment that is already there. "Uses" is the correct word, I think, because the Moratorium has become less a protest action than a political bandwagon for every "liberal" politician, and some not so liberal, to jump on. Is the Moratorium a trick, a ruse, a "liberal" smokescreen? If you do not ascribe to the conspiracy theory of society, then you will no doubt answer no. Yet it is hard to deny that in the past the "liberals" have continuously misled the anti-war movement into phony demands for negotiations, or an end to the bombing, or the like, and that now they may be misleading it once again in asking, not that the U.S. withdraw entirely from Vietnam, but that it withdraw only its troops while continuing to support in numerous other ways those elements of f&scism which are home-grown. How then do we really fight against the war, the Vietnamese war and the wars to come in the rest of Asia? The Socialist Workers Party says that you delude people into thinking that what they are doing is not so radical, and then once you've got them into the street (or onto the Boston Common, as the case may be), you feed them a radical line. Not only is this fundamentally dishonest, but it doesn't work. The act of organization itself must be conducted with a political line which recognizes the realities and the necessities of the situation. People must be mobilized around the demand that the U.S. get out of Vietnam, out of Vietnam in every way, and no negotiations, because negotiations are both a fraud and a sell-out. With this line, of course, you will not build a movement which Muskie, Harris, and McGovern will support. But you will build a movement which will insure the self-determination of the Vietnamese people, and perhaps the selfdetermination of their neighbors in Thailand and Laos.
--Edmund Muskie, author of the "hawk" platform at the Democratic National Convention, early supporter of Humphrey; --George McGovern, who played the "moderate" role at the Democratic Convention between McCarthy and Humphrey. Supporters of the Moratorium argue that they are engaged in coalition politics, and thev criticize groups on the left (specificallySDS) for not joining their venture. The fact is that coalitions are formed to fight a common enemy, and to the Moratorium there is no enemy (unless it be in the person of Richard Nixon, in which case the leaders of the Moratorium are more naive than anyone expected). The enemy is the war, they might say, but the war did not appear out of thin air; it is the result of very definite political and economic objectives which the Moratorium would like us to ignore. SDS has criticized the Moratorium, and does not support its organization, because its rhetoric is exactly the same as all those liberal groups of the past who have diverted and diluted the anti-war struggle, and kept that struggle from striking at the roots of the Vietnam conflict. It would be too kind to the Moratorium to suggest that they oppose American involvement in Vietnam. What they oppose is the presence of American troops, and it would be perfectly consistent with their politics for the U.S. to withdraw its troops, and continue to supply the reactionary forces of Ky and Thieu with massive economic and military aid, in the form of weapons, advice, and even atomic weapons. Because of this, the leaders of the Moratorium would support a quick negotiated settlement, even if it were a settlement like the one in 1954 which left the South
--c.c.R.
13
THE SOCIAL SCIENTIST AND
An Interview With Professor Karl Deutsch best of my knowledge, computers are not doing our thinking for us, but they can very often help us to ask questions which could not be asked ~nn answered in our social science without the aid of computers since the main job wouia oe ~oo ianorious. If we wish to ask these questions, which will be of fundamental importance, we have to develop computer techniques to see how computers can help us to get them answered. This is all a long way from applications, and my personal view is that if we get really proficient in the social sciences, there will be a greater capability for helping us to learn how to avoid wars and how to solve social problems peacefully. Therefore, these implications of fundamental progress in social science will, in the long run, be much bigger and much more important than any temporary assistance the Defense Department may derive from this knowledge. So far as I know, the Project Cambridge is not concerned with specific application of fundamental knowledge to any particular problem except in one sense -- scientists are expected to develop new methods of dealing with concrete and specific data on real problems. We invite the behavioral scientists to bring real problems to the project and exrlore how improved computer programming capabilities would help them solve these problems. The projects I have seen are not military projects, nor are they counter-insurgency projects. Personally, I do not think a counter-insurgency project would get any benefit from corn-路 puter application at this time. If the army has to wait for computers in Cambridge to help it get ahead in Saigon tomorrow, the computer would probably be down half of the time, and the other half of the time the program would have to be debugged. I do not see, I do not know of any work connected now with project Mac that would have anv substantial effect on military capabilities in the short run, in the theater such as Vietnam. I could imagine that in the long run a project of that sort would help us to think very carefully and faster and
HPR: Professor Deutsch, how did Project Cambridge originate? KD: To the best of my knowledge, Project Cambridge is a successor of an earlier project, Project Mac, which involves the development of methods for the use of a time-sharing multiplex system developed at MIT. It ~lso developed with an increasing interest of the government and indeed of the Defense Department in fundamental social science research, because they realized that there was no knowledge anyone could apply to anything before the knowledge existed. This has happened in part therefore with the development of the social science section of the Defense Department, staffed by bona fide behavioral scientists. ~~ ~~ HPR: How will the Harvard faculty be involved in this project? KD: At the moment, it is uncertain. The project had an advisory committee, including.Harvard social scientists, on the question of what would be the kind of fundamental work that should be done. Most people talking about the Cambridge ~reject have no idea what it eventually is supposed to do. Its work is fundamental in the sense that it is trying to find tools and techniques for developing what I should like to call computer-assisted social science. To the
Karl W. Deutsch, Professor of Government at Harvard, has been involved in the planning of Proj~ct Cambridge. Former chief of the research secions of both the Office of Strategic Services and "'he Department of State, Professor Deutsch has also !taught at Princeton, IIIT, and Yale, and is currently ~resident of the American Political Science Associiation. His many books and articles include Nationalism and Social Communications and The Nerves of Government.
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GOVERNMENT RESEARCH: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? better as to whether we ever should have got there. I think actually a better social science might have kept us from getting there in the first place. HPR: Could you give an example of a past policy decision that might have been altered if such information and data were available? KD: I think the Vietnam war would be a very good example. I think a computer could have told us what Professor Fairbank essentially told the government: that sending so many soldiers into distant theaters with so little knowledge of the country and the people was illadvised to the utmost degree. I think also that a better computer could tell people to check the quality of the data used for evaluating the program and the primary information available to the government. Take, for instance, the days of Secretary Komer and his famous calculation of how many villages could be considered secure by U.S. army personnel on the eve of the Tet offensive, which merely revealed how little many of our brave men in Vietnam really knew about the country and the people among whom they found themselves.
KD: I would put it this way. A fundamental increase in social science capabilities will make us more informed about the truth. From what I know about the truth of international relations, I think it will make us realize that the more truth we find out, the more we will realize that the world in the 1970's is too big to be pushed around by any one nation, no matter how large, or to be converted to any ideology, no matter how intently held by the adherents. I don't think the United States can do what Walt Rostow once wanted us to do, to arrange the world in such a way as to make it suit our national preferences and requirements. I don't think the Russians can change the world comple_tely to suit their desires. Nor can the Chinese. The world cannot be fixed around any single
HPR: In other words, the data might have told us not to send large numbers of troops into Vietnam. KD: That would have been good, I think. Or .else,. at least a better checking procedure might have told us to distrust the data which we then had, which the government had already accepted.
HPR: Then if a foreign policy of multiple options continues, do you see projects like Project Cambridge as essentially making that policy less bellicose?
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* n, , , THE WORLD IN THE 1970 S IS TOO * ** BIG TO BE PUSHED AROUND BY ANY ONE * * NATION,'' : 1
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country, and I think the Cambridge Project, if it does anything to improve social science, will accelerate our discovering of that fact. HPR: Before, you spoke of this as being a long term goal of the Cambridge Project. Is there any chance that in the short run, on the other hand, the Cambridge Project will be used primarily in counter-insurgency research, as some groups have charged? KD: I have no knowledge of this and I don't think so. You may want to ask this question to the people closer to the organization. From all I know about social science, I should feel quite willing to bet that any effort to convert or pervert any application of this project to a short run counter-insurgency purpose would be misleading and ruthle.ss. That would be a s.hortcut perversion of social science. And I think this is not at all the conception of the Cambridge Project as I understand it. Any fool can try to pervert a project or to use an installation built for one purpose for a very different one. But I don't think that this project is at all suitable for being applied to short run counter-insurgency purposes. Simply in the next few years, I think, on the contrary, it would tell us much more to see that we have pushed countries to the point that insurgency becomes an important political issue. What were the omitted opportunities for timely reform? What were the
HPR: There are those who will charge, however, that. such action merely serves to coopt radical groups to developing countries and produce short term reforms of limited benefit to the people, which in the long run serve to stifle revolution. KD: The notion that a very large scale war or revolution is beneficial to the survivors is based on the tacit assumption that the survivors will be numerous. This is an assumption that does not hold beyond a doubt in the nuclear age. In a very serious sense, the theories from Marx to Lenin to the others, and the theories of the nationalists, by the way, from Cecil Rhodes to Hitler, that there are irreconcilable conflicts among social groups according to the Marxists, among national groups according to the nationalists or racists, are obsolete. In a very fundamental sense, men can live on a very small planet in danger of being very badly contaminated by very powerful weapons. We all have a very common interest. That does not mean that we do not also have very strong adversary interests. But world politics
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"THE (PMBRIDGE PROJECT IS SPECIFIC-* ALLY OBLIGATED TO ENGAGE ONLY IN UN-* CLASSIFIED RESEARCH, AND IF ANYTHING* IS CLASSIFIED IT HAS NC'lTHING TO 00 * WITH THE PROJECT. II :
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improvements made that could have kept the policies of the .country short of civil war if engaged at an earlier stage? This was once the fundamental conception that President Kennedy had, when he wanted a shift to economic and social development and political development in forming the Alliance for Progress. The knowledge ha had in social science may not have been quite adequate. The political will to back Kennedy's conception was missing to a large degree and the cooperation of the Latin American end was, let us say, very uneven. But the fundamental conception that we must help the world to modernize itself without killing large parts of its population is, I think,
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"IF A GOOD CCJ,!PUTER SIMULATION HAD * TOLD THE PRESIDENT THAT HALF A MIL- * LI ON THEN WOULD PRODUCE A REruEST * FOR ANOTHER 200,(U) LATER, THE CHAN-* CES ARE THAT EVEN f·l~ "Ja-tNSON WOULD * HAVE THOUGHT lWI CE I *
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force any other advanced country to resort to nuclear war. This would be a response of madness, not of reason. And I do not think that any country would deliÂťerately inject itself into a civil war, if it had no compelling reasons in its own country. This would ruin the peaceful consensus and the capabilities of its political system for a non-
since 1945 is no longer a zero sum game. It is a mixed motive fame, a variablesum game, in which even antagonists in international politics have important interests in common. That some students have not caught on to this yet should not surprise us. Very often ideas become held most intensely in the decades just after they have become obsolete. HPR: Does that mean that the goal of nuclear stability and deterrence is equal to the goal of reform in the developing countries-- that in seeking radical change, the chance of violent action in developing countries is so great that it will lead to nuclear war? Does this mean that we must use counterinsurgency to stop radical actions?
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violent solution. I do not think that any shift in any under-developed country today, singly or all of them together, could produce enough of a change in the world to justify an all-out nuclear war in the interests of either Russia or China or the United States or any other country. HPR: That seems obvious-- yet it also seems that the U.S., conducting, as you described before, a multiple-option foreign policy, has sought in the-past to cut off such violence in the developing nations. KD: Sometimes we have done it successfully-, sometimes we have made it worse. In Vietnam I think that our intervention on the whole increased the violence rather than cutting it off or foreclosing it. The question of how to intervene in other countries has many zealots and few people who know what is really involved. The actual ability to achieve controlled results in foreign countries by means of foreign intervention from abroad is very small and vastly over-estimated. Professional communists and professional anti-communists both over-estimate it; they are both united in underrating the power of nationality and nationalism.
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VERY OFTEN IDEAS BEroME fv'OST INTEN-* SELY HELD IN THE DECADES JUST AFTER * THEY HAVE BEC0'1E OBSOLETE, 11 : ******************* 0
over-estimated. That is to say, if there is a revolutionary civil war in, let us say, Burma or Bolivia, its main cause is with Burmese or Bolivian and the main determinants of the outcome in the long run are likely to be internal. This is less true for the small countries, but the British could overwhelm the island of Anguilla if they so chose, and we can and we did overawe the Dominican Republic. But this is certainly true of the larger countries of the world, and it turns out to be true of the middle-sized countries. The realistic policy of most countries is not to interfere by force in those countries and to know that in the other interference-the propaganda, psychology, economic subsidies and the like-- they can have only limited effects. The Russians are putting several hundred million dollars a year into India; we have put in just under a billion dollars. But neither the Russians nor we should have any illusions that we are controlling the fate of India. If anybody does it will be the people of India. I do not think therefore that the outcome of any political upheaval in a third-world country would
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KD: No, I don't think so. First of all, the different nations of the world, though they are linked and coupled to each other, are much more loosely linked across national boundaries and much more tightly linked within the countries than most traditional social science has assumed. And since traditional social science of half a century ago is the enlightened common sense of armies and state departments in the present -- just as obsolete economics used to be the common sense of the next generation of businessmen-I think that the connections are vastly
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HPR: Then to get back to our earlier questions, so long as there are people in responsible positions in the American government who are anti-communists or zealots for interventionism, is it not possible that something like Project Cambridge could very well be a tool for counter-insurgency? KD: This is quite true. So long as there are fools in the world, anything that increases human capability could in the hands of fools do evil. But on the whole it is not well suited to the purpose. It could fall into the hands of a fanatic ideologue of the left or the right, but the fanatical gentleman would not get much out of the project that he did not have already in his gleaming eye, that he • will not already expect to be happening.
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can grrman bemorrat !' ,t,urbibe t be election? n
t by James K. Lyon
~tentially, what follows could be as embarrassing to the author as Nixon's precipitous congratulations to Chancellor Kiesinger when his Christian Democrats tallied a 46.1% plurality in the recent West German elections. Nixon failed to wait while the Socialists (42.7%) persuaded the Free Democrats (5.8%) to form a fragile coalition representing a 48.5% plurality. Because of a press deadline this article cannot wait until the October 21st selection of a new chancellor by the Lower House. If only five Free Democrats break ranks that day in a minority party racked by dissention and not especially well disciplined anyway, Willy Brandt will not be elected Chancellor, the Christian Democrats might continue to govern, and Richard Nixon could come up looking very good after an incredible blunder. At the moment, however, the world, the Germans, and this writer expect to see Willy Brandt, a figure more popular and better respected in America than among Germans, lead the first Socialist government in nearly forty years.
weapons, stationing of foreign troops on German soil, and so forth. Historically,the Germans have manifested an almost pathological sense of self-pity and an over-whelming need for recognition. If enough causes are present to feed the first and thwart the second, Nee-Nazism could become a serious threat. Or if, for example, the large block of avowedly Marxist-Maoist students and socalled "Extra-Parliamentary Opposition" continue to behave so extremely, many already essentially conservative German voters will find themselves being polarized toward the Nee-Nazis with their appealing talk of "good old German values", the rough equivalent for a traditional German way of life. the other extreme The Socialists have promised to -- and must -- turn their attention quickly to reforming the structure and modus operandi of the once-great German university system. Whether they can in time to head off the mounting unrest at these incredibly overcrowded and antiquated institutions is uncertain, but they are certainly more reformminded than their predecessors. But even with reforms, they will find increasing opposition from the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the SOS that could become a major factor in their ability to govern. The leftists correctly identify the "phony liberal" party as their worst enemy because of their committment to "reform", which to them means palliatives. In other words, beware of moderate leftists bearing gifts. If, as I suspect, the violence and attacks from the left become even more extreme and widespread (and in typical German fashion, everything which has its counterpart in America seems to assume more extreme forms there), the Socialists may be faced with the choice of using severe repressive measures to maintain stability or of losing their mandate to govern.
neo-nazism: down, but not out The failure of the Neo-Nazi party (they are called the "German National Party" and resent any other label) to poll 5% of the votes and thereby get parliamentary representation relieved most observers and drew more attention than it warranted. This defeat by no means spells that party's demise. It should be around for some years and should continue to draw from four to ten percent of the vote in local and regional elections. Their success will depend in part on what the Socialists do. The Socialists must, for example, respect the taboos surrounding the Oder-Neisse line and Germany's lost eastern provinces, though the so-called Hallstein Doctrine will probably end completely under their administration. If they flaunt their acknowledged goals of achieving a rapprochement with Eastern Europe without reassuring voters that they are not selling out former German territories, they could drive many voters for whom this is a highly emotional issue into the Neo-Nazi party. The same applies to emotionally charged issues relating to national identity, such as Germany's role in the Common Market, control of nuclear
the slightly left of middle
James K. Lyon, Assistant Professor of German, teaches Social Sciences 113: The Civilization of Germany.
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This mandate was long in coming. Even today the pejoritive designation "Sozi" triggers vague associations in the minds of solid citizens, evoking the unrespectable revolutionary leftist workers of the last century, and until recently voters reacted correspondingly at the polls. Because very competent Socialist statesmen and governments were undermined and forgotten in the chaos of the Weimar Republic, many Germans still have an
image of Socialists that is six decades old. Brandt, ex-Communist Herbert Wehner, and others have done a remarkable face-lifting job on the party in the past decade by transforming it from a pure workers' to a "people's" party with broader appeal and a wider base. While they disenchanted many party faithful when they joined路 the Grand Coalition in 1966, they proved that they had competent politicians and that they could govern without fulfilling Adenauer's prophecy of turning Germany to Marxism. The Socialists made their biggest gains in Protestant regions, in the north, and in cities of over 100,000. As the German population. continues to shift to urban areas and as religious factors lose significance in society, the Socialists may within the next de~ade be able to pull together an absolut majority in Parliament. To the disappointment of all its critics, the Grand Coalition succeeded rather well, and the Socialists profited most from it. But optimism now by the Socialists is premature, since they could meet great difficulty in carrying out their mandate to govern. Their slim five-seat majority in Parliament is based on the loyal cooperation and solidarity of the Free Democrats, a party whose capriciousness in past parliamentary action bodes ill for the Socialists. Further, the Christian Democrats are incensed at seeing the reigns snatched from them when they clearly outpolled the other parties, and they are likelv to vent their anger in other than reasonable forms of opposition (the temper of the election campaign, where Christian Democrats resorted to utterly childish remarks about their fellow coalitionists, presages what can be expected.) Further, Germany has little experience in or tradition of a "loyal opposition" in Parliament, to say nothing of parliamentary democracy. When not forced to get along together, as they were in the Grand Coalition, German politicians can manifest that kind of individualism which led many voters to welcome a dictator who put an end to the squabbling, divisiveness, and turmoil of the Weimar political era. Here the characteristic German inability to set aside personal differences for a common good, or their selfrighteous refusal to compromise makes them curiously inadept political animals by American standards. This is also the first time the Christian Democrats have been cast in the role of the non-ruling opposition. It may be that, without the benefit of governmental offices to hold their party structure together, the diverse elements within it that barely managed to adhere through the Adenauer era might fragment in several directions. Though this would perhaps help the Socialists, it could also create an opposition united only by their desire to torpedo government programs. coming of age -- growth and pains Most political pundits see this election as a large step toward a clear twoparty system where the Socialists and Christian Democrats will one day represent the majority of voters' views. This may be true, but it seems to overlook the essential po/3
litical immaturity of the Germans, who have barely twenty years of semi-democratic practice behind them. They have no tradition and feel no need of reconciling differences within a two-party f~amework. German individualism will always make fertile soil for smaller fringe parties, and changing circumstances may provide grounds for new parties to spring up and seize new banners. The magic 5% percent mark for Parliamentary representation is not difficult to achieve, given a popular-enough
cause, and many such causes can or will exist. But I believe this past election does spell the effective end of the Free Democrats, the only third party on ~he scene at the moment, who have declined steadily since garnering 12.8% of the vote in 1961. Because their platform consists of planks taken about equally from the Socialists and Christian Democrats, they seem to have lost almost any raison d'etre, except the German voter's inherent desire to express his discontent with the two big parties. I suspect that by 1973 most German voters will respond to the Free Democrats with a shrug and a "so-what?" All this does not mean that the past election represents great progress in the political maturing of the traditionally apolitical German electorate. Public opinion polls shortly before the elections registered either massive indifference or resignation that politics is inherently evil, but that someone, after all, probably should govern. The number of undecided voters in any poll was two or three times what we could find in this country. The average German does not take his politics personally or terribly seriously. Politics is something to be left to politicians, who by definition are bad. For many,politics is also a taboo. While living in Frankfurt, during the 1965 elections, in a moderate middle class neighborhood, I made the mistake of asking both friends and neighbors about their politics. Repeatedly I was told that one just did not talk about this, even with friends. Gen-
eral political views yes, party preference no. For every German who openly acknowledged his political affiliation or inclination to :me, I met ten who refused. Democracy is making progress in Germany, and Germans are maturing politically. But one whould not make overoptimistic evaluations. For the next four years Willy Brandt and his Socialists can be expected to lead Germany a bit closer toward making democracy work. In the process, the spectre of Nazi Germany, of Germany's political extremes of absolute rulers or absolute chaos, should fade even further from American minds. Germany survived the recent election with such little dislocation that one must admit that democracy is in fact working. But given German national traits mentioned earlier, I feel democracy there is still a fairly fragile thing. Four years under the Socialists should strengthen it considerably.
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to keep from Congress or government certain information, if this information got to the Project Cambridge_, any Congressman or his legislative assistant could get it from there. Any official from Washington could get it; for that matter, so could any newspaper man or any interested student. We would even be glad to help them to read or interpret what the material is or to tell them who could help them to read or interpret it. I would very much welcome an increase in the capabilities of the socially concerned and responsible community in Cambridge to understand how to talk to computers and how to understand what they say. In the long run, people have to become more competent in handling social science, not less. Incompetence is not going to bring us to peace, and ignorance will not be strength.
Deutsch (continued from page 17) That is to say that such groups could more often use Project Cambridge as an instrument of propaganda than as one of orientation. The orientational contribution here could be marginal. What the Project Cambridge could do is this. Supposing they could simulate on a computer the development of the social, the political, the national structure of a country under the impact of economic development, the impact of various levels of foreign trade or investment, and various levels of social change inside the country. They then might find out the size of the processes involved. Most often I think you would find out that foreign intervention in order to change the probable outcome would have to be so large, so massive, so prolonged, and so costly, that it would cast doubt on the confident underestimations with which the advocates of foreign intervention usually fool their countrymen. We were told that a few instructors in Vietnam would produce great
HPR: It is interesting to hear that the project will be open to legitimate research groups. To what extent do you foresee those who provide basic research for Project Cambridge also becoming involved in policy recommendation? KD: Some of those who do that are involved in any case. I hope accommodations will be better. Those who do not spend much time on that are not likely to do more. I don't think, in other words, that a particular project or computer is likely to cha~ge the personality of people. ~n fact I.t~ink that for a while, such is the ability of people to be committed to their ideas, people who were hawks in their political prefe~ences remain so and people who were doves remain so. There are people who do not change that quickly. In time I expect that the weight of the information as i! accumulates will show that the past notions of presenting the world as a battle field between two giants who fight in orde 7 t~ manipulate it is obsolete and unrealistic. And I think that the more good work that we can do in social science, the more thoroughly bankrupt these old theories will become.
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results. We were then told that 50,000 or 100,000 men would do it. If a good computer simulation had told the President that half a million then would produce a request for another 200,000 later, the chances are that even Mr. Johnson would have thought twice.
HPR: To what extent do you think a social scientist must examine the end products of his basic research and the uses to which they will be put?
HPR: And yet information is power. This leads us to the question of who will have access to the Cambridge Project. Is there a possibility that, as with CIA reports of the past, particularly about Vietnam, the information will be withheld not only from large segments of the public but also from important people within the governmental sector? KD: This is quite possible -- bureaucrats try to get power by withholding information. The Cambridge Project is specifically obligated to engage only in unclassified research and if anything is classified it has nothing to do with the project. In other words, I don't know what MIT does but it has nothing to do with the project. We are trying to assimilate research results as fast as we can, and that means that anybody can use them; on the contrary, if a public official tries
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quences of actions is an exercise in social science. There is no•other way of forecasting consequences. To state what a probable con~equence of an act will be means to ask what is the world like and how 'is the likely effect of this act in this world such as it is. To do this competantly requires science, To do it incompetantly would be useless for the moral decision. There is therefore no morality in a serious sense without a moral concern for discovering the truth. You cannot tell the differences between a doctor and a murderer unless you kno~ whether the knife that he planted in the body of a person is being used to operate on a dangerous condition for the patient's benefit or whether it is being put into a vital organ to kill him. But this is a factual question, it is in itself a question that you have to understand in a different way. To know whether DDT is good or bad requires an understanding of bio-chemistry and ecology. To know whether an economic nolicv will nrorlm,,. more or fewer employed requires a knowledge of economics; to know whether a certain policy will make war more likely or less likely would require a better understanding of international politics.
KD - I think you should take a very serious and responsible interest in them, but you should also have the realism and the humility to know that no one can control the ultimate outcome of fundamental discoveries, ·neither the sponsors who pay the money for them, nor the administrators who supervise them, nor the scientist who made them, There is no way that Columbus could have foreseen completely the effects of the discovery of the new world, neither the fact that in the short run they helped the Crown of Spain, the Hapsburg Monarchy and to some extent the Holy Inquisition, nor in the long run that they would help the process of Protestantism and liberalism, and constitutional government in the world, nor the fact that eventually the discovery of maize and potatoes would feed millions that would have otherwise not survival, None of this
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HPR - But do you think that at this point social science is a sufficiently sophisticated stage so that basic research can be used in terms of more or less rapid policy decisions, or do you think as some social scientists believe that the present development of social science is necessarily in its infancy and therefore lends itself to being misused,
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could have been foreseen, and none of this could have been contro.lled either by the Spanish monarch or by Columbus. The basic point is that the centuries of development in science show that increase in knowledge and human powers can increase the human capabilities of man for good or evil, The increase in command over truth will on the whole do more good to those whose ethics are compatible with truth--and that to me is one of the senses of goodness--and will be much less use to those whose ethics are not compatable with truth - which is one sense of evil. In tbe long run knowledge has been up to now on the side of life and on the side of good, It has helped more people than it has harmed. And we will see that it will continue to do that the future, This very basic assumption goes back to fundamental Greek philosophy, the basic assumption on which Western civilization is based, that on the whole the values of goodness of truth - and, according to the Greeks, even of beauty, - belong together, that they are not fundamental hostile or incompatible, and that on the whole major increases of one of them are more likely than not to be beneficial to the others.
KD - Now there.is another point. We should be careful not to argue two sides of an incompatible proposition at the same time. One possibility is that social science is so badly developed that it would be utterly misleading for practically everything. In. this case,
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HPR - And yet it is now argued that we have so much knowledge we are ready to destroy ourselves. Knowledge has now become such a source of power to do evil that there is a great deal of difference between the truth that one gains from the study of social science (and natural science) and the truth that one will receive from essentially moral values. KD - I do not think that this is quite right. In order to make a moral decision or to propose a morally-based policy we cannot escape a moral responsibility and the duty to try and understand the consequences of our actions. You asked me yourself a moment ago whether a social scientist should try to see the consequences of his discoveries. But to forecast the conse-
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HPR - Then it seems to be, in the end, that the fundamental questions here do not relate to the Cambridge Project but more to. the type of people who are now in power in the government. There are those who say that the people who are in power in the government are of bad intentions; that their decisions will not be for good purposes. Therefore the information that they gain from the Cambridge Project will be put to objectionable uses. KO - First of all, if you want to put the question on this level, I would say that to the best of my knowledge and conviction the U.S. government is by no means a radically evil organization. I think that that statement is simply false. I would say that by now most of the governments of the world have no predominantly evil purposes, but are rather trying to run their societies toward some general improvement as they see it and understand it. I would also say that their understanding, like all of ours, is extremely imperfect. But we are much more
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threatened by ignorance and the ignorant clashes of conflicts among different national approaches to what the nations hope to be good than we are threatened by knowledge. At the present the Chinese, Russian, and American governments each represent a very broad and sweeping philosophy designed to make people happy. We are in danger of being exterminated by conflict among these competing brands of happiness. We would need perhaps less zeal and more knowledge. The second point is, that there are actually different groups in government, there are different policies, there are also different topics to which social science can be applied. Social science may be inapplicable to one question and highly applicable to another, even in its present poor state of development. By no means all of these can be put into one box labeled good or another bad but my belief is that the potential good applications of social science are considerably more numerous and will in the long run have much more important effects than the bad ones. This leads us to a third question. What is our image of the university? The university is the speicalized organ of society to do two jobs. To
face the unknown, to make new discoveries, to produce new knowledge, to ask questions, and seek answers to questions which previously could not be asked or answered. Its certain task is to educate potential leaders for this society by educating them in this university environment where not only old knowledge is repackaged but where new knowledge is produced. If this works, these two things are the fundamental idea of the university: to educate people in a climate
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of discovery, and to help them to learn from people who are still learning themselves. There are alternatives: you can send people to divinity school or to a school of a communist party in Russia or any other place. There are people who are sure that they know the answers and people who are sure that the knowledge that they already have is abundantly sufficient and are not greatly concerned to discover anything new, let alone to doubt their earlier beliefs. They are only busily at work indoctrinating others in becoming as zealous as their masters. But that is not the university; that is a party school or a monastary or any one of many types of places of indoctrination. Our experiences have suggested places which were closer to universities produce more knowledge, and countries which took more leaders from a genuine university environment, where people are willing to discover new knowledge and new insights and new tools and are willing to doubt their own beliefs and test against evidence, have on the whole done better for their own population and for mankind. That is the belief to which universities have been dedicated, and that is what I think Harvard is here for. HPR - Earlier in our discussion, when I asked you whether people from Project Cambridge would become involved in policy recommendations you mentioned that they probably would or that they might just as now there are members of the Harvard faculty who are involved in policy recommendations ••. KD - It would not greatly increase or decrease their proportions ••• it would hopefully make the advisors, say, a touch more competant. HPR - The question that this raises regarding your last statement about the university is can the university operate freely, and freely disseminate knowledge, and will the professors
be able to freely discover "truths", suggest new ideas to their students, and lead their students through a search for knowledge, if their fundamental source of knowledge is through government contracts and they have been doing a great deal of government res.earch?
KD - I think you can take for example the history of the Harvard Observatory. It seems very clear that a good deal of the equipment that an astronomer needs to look at stars nowadays is so big and expensive that he needs government monev to do it. To the best of my knowledge? Harlow Shapley did not get knowledge of the stars through a government contract. He got it through telescopes and all the rest. The government kindly paid the bill. Politics determines neither the findings of astronomy nor the future implications of some of the discoveries that were made. I do not think therefore, that the Cambridge Project will be completely dominated by whoever pays its bills. I think, again, we are going to seek fundamental knowledge. There is another point. Quite often you can only ask questions if you have some of the means to answer them. We want to ask questions that we think are important, both for the American people and for mankind. And some of these require more evidence than one man can process. The Cambridge Project may permit us to ask these questions. Sometimes one learns from trying to apply ones knowledge; I do not think that pure knowledge and applied knowledge are wholly incompatible. You can use some applied knowledge in order to strengthen and deepen what you thought your fundamental knowledge was. What we apply knowledge to ts a matter of the ethics of the individual university professor. However, if somebody's ethics would force him to ask for secret research his place would not be on the Cambridge Project. The only type of research involving The Cambridge Project according to the entire description, the rules, and procedures that have been accepted for the Project, are to be public and available to everyone. I would only wish that all our students and faculty interested in these matters would acquire the competence to find out what is being done or that they could suggest some of the work that is worth doing. HPR - Do you think there is a possibility if, let us say, most of the social science faculty would become involved in research financed by the government, that they could only ask questions which the government is interested in, and not ask questions which may have purposes not in line with current government policy?
KD - If you take of an example of this the story of the physicists of the Manhattan Project you would find that their politics such as those of Hans Bethe or Oppenheimer by no means were exactly the policies of the government that was subsidizing their research. The notion that a university professor is a wholly dependent variable of whoever pays for his services is false. Kepler was paid by the Hapsburg Emperor who believed in astrology. This did not make Kepler an astrologer no did it invalidate Kepler's laws. It is simply not true that you can com-
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** ** ** ******* *** * * ** pletely determine the content of the human mind simply because you pay someone's bills. This is a fantastic mixture of cynicism and naive economic determinism. People are not this simple nor manipulable from the out-a outside. I woul..tl say that a university professor who was completely corrupt and completely willing to take the views of whoever happened to pay him, would of course long ago have accepted a job elsewhere. Somebody would conclude that since the Harvard Corporation does not exactly consist of the poor and underpriviledged of the U.S. he would have already become a conservative. By this reasoning no one on the Harvard faculty could be liberal or radical. And many individuals are. Conversely nobody coming out of Russia could have had a conservative view. Stalin's daughter ought to have a carbon copy of Stalin's views. After all, wasn't she supported by him? It is a fantastic misjudgment of the human mind. HPR - Though the absolute cases that others have pointed out may seem to be a misjudgment, is there not a possibility that one's perspective may be altered not necessarily in terms of his wanting to pleas¡e his employer, but simply in terms of the data he is looking for and the answers he is trying to supply for a particular employer. KD - Here a more interesting empirical question would be the probability with which this happens and to the extent to which it happens. Reasonably good university professors are trained to watch out for this and try not to get their perspective not too much distorted. But we must also remember that this kind of game can be played unfortunately in every direction. Once we begin no longer to listen to what a man says because we are so busy speculating why he is saying it and trying to find some discredited financial or career reason for it, you will of course then invite everybody to discredit every radical statement by saying that the young instructor is only radical because he was not offered tenure. Or that a man was only taking a dissident view on some matter because he did not get along with his collegues, because he was not made chairman of the department, or because
he was not given sufficient recognition for his recent theory. To be sure quite a bit of this kind of gossip can go around. I consider it regretable and intellectually not respectable. But it is not more respectable if you turn it the other way around. It involves alot of gossip and guilt by association and it does not become any more convincing on either side of the argument. Let us rather say that what a man says is true. What is the evidence for it? If it is true let never mind why he says it, If it is not true, again never mind why he says it.
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the mail
american foreign policy: another view (continued from inside front cover) the care and feeding of bureaucrats Mr. Wexler's description of the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the other o.rganizations which guide and execute our foreign policy,suffers from hyper-Weberism. We are told that, "American foreign policy-making machinery and policy-implementing tools are a reflection of American political attitudes and American political domestic development .•• these institutions (e.g. the CIA, AID, the State Department, etc.) influence policy decisions by their nature." It is impossible to quarrel with this characterization· decision-making processes almost by defin.i.tion ' reflect the milieu in which they originate. However, Mr, Wexler fails to point out several considerations which must be taken into account when studying such institutions, Not all bureaucracies operate in the same way, tenets of sociology notwithstanding; Weber's ideal typology of bureaucracy is misleading if used by itself as an heuristic tool for the examination of specific institutions. While the author pays due attention to the intricacies of conflict resolution, exchange of views, and so forth, within and between our foreign policy administrators and decision-making, he fails to point out the way in which bureaucratic decisions are affected by the backgrounds and viewpoints of the men these bureaucracies recruit. Equally significant are methods of payment, criteria for advancement, the types of examinations or tests (if any) necessary for employment, and perhaps .most. important, the circumstances under which the bureaucracies are established. Why is Melvin Laird where he is? How did his subordinates get recruited? How do they view the world and why?
It is particularly instructive to consider the historical origins of an institution. The roots of the CIA in the relatively leftist Office of Strategic Services has undoubtedly shaped its reactions to world events. This brings us to an important point ably made by Barrington Moore and Gabriel Kolko: bureaucracies do not just arise out of the mysterious teleology of "rationalization." People - whether Russian czars, Egyptian potentates or Americ~n Congressmen and Presidents - consci~usly establish these agencies under conditions and for reasons which generally have a significant influence on their subsequent policies. The creation of the large American corporation by worrie<l business magnates during the strife-torn 1890's has surely exercised a considerable influence on its concern for the long-range profit at the expense of the short-range one. Similarly, George Kennan's description of the State Department at the turn of the century as a great gentleman's club does a considerable disservice to the enterprising administrators who set out quite consciously to construct an "Open Door" for American influence throughout the world - doing so largely because of their alarm at the "threat" to our internal and external security. the less-than-gay nineties Let us look more closely at some of our not so ancient history. Mr. Wexler is wrong to see current State and Defense Department views as somehow originating in the post-war period; these views go back to the 1890's. Their age, as with many ideas, is one of their principal sources of strength. If we look at the international situation as it appeared in 1890 to members of the American elite, we see colonial disputes arising in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as a signal of the end of British global hegemony, In Venezuela a few years earlier, Grover Cleveland had staved off British intervention in a boundary dispute; the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 he saw as a "disturbance of our growing commerical interests." With France, Germany, and Japan getting into the act for possession of territories, it became apparent that we could not stand idle - particularly given the increasingly violent and widespread strikes at home, the Panic of 1893, the decline of the domestic market for farm products, and the like, Later, of course, .Woodrow Wilson independently sought, through the League of Nations, a guarantee of "collective security" from other countries to protect world peace against both the imperialist designs of other capitalist nations like Germany, and the world revolution advocated by the newly-created Soviet Union. In the years immediately following, his Republican successors and their subordinates sought through the Versailles Treaty, the Dawes Plan, and the Treaty of Locarno, to build a unified, regional European bloc to withstand the Red Menace. Given - as Mr.Wexler suggests - the unquestioned goal of a global "Open Door" for the United States, it was logically viewed as attainable by use of only one of two means. The first was the s,trategy of "collective security" propounded by Wilson, which today lives in NATO, SEATO, and the other examples of the "interlocking committments" philosophy discussed by Mr. Wexler in the last part of his article.
The other strategy formulated during this era was that of "regionalism" - as epitomized in the Versailles Treaty and subsequently in the Marshall Plan - which stressed a regional federation of states along political-econo mic lines, It was of course intended that such a federation would provide a large and stable market for American goods, a socio-politica l bulwark against Communism, a possible base for American military forces, and so forth. Such a strategy minimized the possibility of involvement in innumerable conflicts which the former doctrine portended.
For various reasons, the majority of the communities in the Commonwealth have been slow to adapt to the needs of contemporary society. Under "home rule," however, communities possess a strong potential for initiating change. The first step which must be taken to modernize town government is the establishment of representative town meetings in place of open town meetings. Open town meetings were ideal for the beginning days of the colonies; in the twentieth century, however, although the theory of town government is predicated upon a high level of citizen involvement and participation, the practice is characterized by poor attendance at town meetings and a lack of citizen awareness of, and orientation toward, local elections and problems, and open town meetings can often be completely dominated by a small special-interes t group, such as town employees. Forty-two towns in Massachusetts, of a total of 312, have established representative town meetings so far, ranging in number of members from fifty in Saugus to 401 in Fairhaven.
It is important to realize that, if one assumes it is necessary for American to maintain an "Open Door" throughout the world, one of these alternatives had to be adopted, "Regionalism" and the strategy of "interlocking committments" are therefore not, as Mr.Wexler suggests, merely current idiosyncratic approaches of American foreign-policy makers - they were, and ~~i:~d:;~e;~~~ l:~:~c~~o~~ef~ ~;O~~ea:~r!~b :~::ently elaborated. And, unfortunately, when the latter fails, as it has so frequently, we resort to forcejust as surely as in the former instance in order to maintain "freedom" and "democracy" abroad,
The most important step in modernizing a town government, however, must be the centralization of executive authority. This can be accoftplished in many different ways. Some towns prefer a town manager, appointed by the Selectmen. Others choose to appoint an executive secretary or, as Watertown has, an administrative assistant Do the board of selectmen. These latter two are more experimental, middlerange range instruments for improving the quality of town administration.
It is sad to realize that we still continue to alternate the conduct of our foreing policy along these two lines. Vietnam represents perhaps the most recent and spectacular failure of the first strategy; accordingly, Mr.Nixon and his cohorts are now beginning to "lower the American silhouette in Southeast Asia," and go after a new American-Japen ese co-prosperity sphere through a federation of Southeast Asian states. "Quo usque tandem •• ?" Daniel Pool '69-4
Regardless of the title, however, the important factor remains that the citizens of a town have an individual who they know is always at the town hall, five days a week, to answer their questions and to help thP'll solve their problems. The citizen need not wait until the next selectmen's meeting in order to get satisfaction. Alienation from a governmental can multiply if allowed to brew; a centralized administrator allows the people to get an answer on the spot. Some towns in New England have progressed even further. They·'have restr!lctured their town governments to allow for the election of a town administrator with veto power over the acts of the board of Selectmen. In Connecticut, many towns elect a first selectman who has extensive powers. Especially in a town administrator type of system, this grants the executive a constituency of townspeople upon which to base hh a:uthority.
letter from dorchester To the editors: It has been nearly fifty years since the first steps were taken to modernize local government in MassachuseLls. Recently, though, through the adoption of the Home Rule Amendment, Article LXXXIX of the Constituion of the Commonwealth, and the enabling legislation, Chapter 734 of the Acts of 1966, local government has been given another thrust, a great leap forward. For the first time, cities and towns within Massachusetts have the power to determine and regulate, free from state interference, matters which are of local concern, as well as the power to determine the form and organization of local government through the framing and adopting of a local charter, a community constituion. t:..._I,()
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Another important step in improving town government is the formation of a Department of Public Works. Many towns in Massachusetts, large as well as· small, retain to this day as either elected or appointed officials separate Water Commissioners, Sewer :ommissioners, Park Commissioners, Highway Commi&i.ioners, Cemetery Commis.sioners, and Town Engineers, not to mention such heralded positions as Tree Wardens, Fence Viewers, and Members of the Town Forest, all independent of one another and all institutionallv un~nnr~•-a~~~- F.~rh nn~i~inn ia ~ small sovereignty, dear to the holder. Each requires separate appropriations and separate equipment. If in the midst of a snow storm, a Highway Department truck breaks down, the Park Department has no obligation whatsoever to loan its equipment. Due to the personal fricitions which so often exist, it rarely will. This situation merely wastee· the town's money, while depriving its citizens of vital services. 'i!t,are, IIIU9t· be, one· i>epartment of Public Works, administered by an executive to achieve coordiaationand cooperation between departments using similar equipment and facilities to perform related functions.
Towns must cease their parochialism and be willing to seek out state and federal assistance for needed projects, as well as advice from neighboring communities. Many older quasi-urban towns could qualify for code enforcement grants, which would give them the opportunity to spruce up many sections of town. Housing for路 theelderly is another essential need, which certain communities have begun to fulfill. Towns must be willing to join with their neighboring communities in councils of governments, institutionalized organs of interlocal cooperation. Some beginnings have been made in this area; regional schools, primarily on the high school level, now dominate the lesser-populated areas of the Commonwealth. Some cooperation is also evident on solidwaste disposal problems and police information. In the case of smaller towns, a council of governments could hire a professional to assist the communities involved in planning and in obtaining federal assistance. This proposal becomes even more relevant with the power recently granted the Massachusetts Department of Community Affairs to supersede many local zoning ordinances in the placing of low and middle-income housing.Councils of governments could also provide an effective base for lobbying in the community interest. A conncil of governments composed of small towns bordering a polluted river could press for a water pollution control act, 3r possibly matching state funds for cleaning up the polluted areas. Structure is necessary more than ever since the Department of Housing and Urban Development demands that a charter be submitted prior to the granting of federal assistance. This places the burden on the towns which, due to the recent Home Rule Amendment, must publish a charter every ten years. To this date, many towns have no charter, no community constitution. In many other activities, towns must realize that their rural past will never return and that their town services must be up to date with their size and population. Many towns in Massachusetts still retain only part-time libraries, a waste -..f resources, for the books go unused. Many towns retain a town ~map; garbage collection must be introduced into larger towns, for reasons of health as well as practicality. Most important of all, however, modernization must create full-time government, the prime asset of a functioning community.
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Cambridge Can be Mind-Blowing But You Can Trip Out---For Free When there's three feet of snow on the ground, five papc-rs overdue, and i,,cven chances out of nine that your room路 mate will n1urder you, it's time to think about getting out of Cambridge. You begin wishing you'd gone to Berkeley in路 l!!tead, banging around airplane terminals trying to get your car started, or flexing your bitd1hiking thumb. The prohle111 is, however, that it costs n10ney to trip out of Cambridge, and not everyone here has enough. Which is where we come iu.
We've got three trips--one around the world, one haHway around, and one a quurter of the way around-to give out to son1e Harvard students in our fall travel contest. You won't have to sell' your soul, Ol" ruin your n1i11d to get them either. In fact, you n1ight even :find that the contest alone can take your 111i11d off your troubles here.
For niore details, read the CRIMSON or contact: Harvard Travel Service Inc. Ca1nhridge Travel Consultants 1310 Mass. Ave.
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