BANKRUPTCY OF THE LIBERALS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000400550039-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 8, 1999
• Sequence Number: 39
• Publication Date: January 7, 1966
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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"They are all honorable men"
Seven months ago at the April March on Washington,
Paul Potter, then President of Students for a Demo-
cratic Society, stood in approximately this spot and said
that we must name the system that creates and sustains
the war in Vietnam -name it, describe it, analyze it,
understand it, and change it.
'Today I will try to name it - to suggest an analysis
which, to be quite frank, may disturb many of you -
and to suggest what changing it may require of us.
We are here again to protest again a growing war.
Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the habit of think-
ing that it must be caused by very bad men. But we
only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such
grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and mili-
tary power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are
waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around
us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted, We
must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this
coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiesc-
ence are creatures, all of them, of a government that
since: 1932 has considered itself to be fundamentally
liberal,
The original commitment in Vietnam was President
Truman's - a liberal and signer of the first civil rights
act. That commitment was seconded by the moderate
liberal, President Eisenhower - who mobilized the Na-
tional Guard to integrate Central High School in Little
CARL oCLBSDY is the president of the Students for a Democratic
Society. The above address was delivered on November 27 as
part of the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam.
Rock. And intensified by President Kennedy, a liberal
who gave us the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Prog-
ress, and the beginnings of the anti-poverty program.
Think of the men, who now engineer that war - those
who study the maps, give the commands, push the
buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk,
Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself.
They are not moral monsters.
They are all honorable men.
They are all liberals.
But so, I'm sure, are many of us who are here today.
To understand the war, then, it seems necessary to take
a closer look at this American liberalism. Maybe we are
in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite
different liberalisms: one authentically humanist, the
other not so human at all.
Not long ago, I considered myself a liberal. And if
someone had asked me what I meant by that, I'd per-
haps have quoted Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine,
who first made plain our nation's unprovisional commit-
ment to human rights. But what do you think would
happen if these two heroes could sit down now for a
chat with President, Johnson and McGeorge Bundy?
They would surely talk of the Vietnam war. Our
dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their
country was fighting against what appeared to be a
revolution. The living liberals would hotly deny that it
is one: there are troops coming in from outside, they
get arms from other countries, most of the people are
not on their side, and they practice terror against their
own. Therefore, not a revolution.
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What would our dead revolutionaries answer? They
might say: What fools and bandits, sirs, you make then
of us. Outside help? Do you remember Lafayette? Or
the 3,000 British freighters the French navy sank for
our side? Or the arms and men we got from France
and Spain? And what's this about terror? Did you never
hear what we did to our own loyalists? Or about the
thousands of rich American Tories who fled for their
lives to Canada? And as for popular support do you
not know that we had less than one-third of our people
with us? That, in fact, the colony of New York recruited
more troops for the British than for us?
Revolutions don't take place in velvet boxes. They
never have. It is only the poets who make them lovely.
What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Viet-
nam is a complex and vicious war. This war is also a
revolution, as honest as they come. And. this is a fact
which all our intricate official denials will never change.
. No Just Revolutions for Us
But it doesn't make any difference to our leaders any-
way. Their aim there is really much simpler than this
implies. It is to safeguard what they take to be Ameri-
can interests around the world against revolution or
revolutionary change, which they always call Commu-
nism - as if that were that. In the case of Vietnam, this
interest is, first, the principle that revolution shall not
be tolerated anywhere; and second, that South Vietnam
shall never sell its Tice to China - or even to North
Vietnam.
There is simply no such thing now, for us, as a just
revolution - never mind that for two-thirds of the
world's people the 20th Century might as well be the
Stone Age; never mind the melting poverty and hope-
lessness that are the basic facts of life for most modern
:men; and never mind that for these millions there is
now an increasingly perceptible relationship between
their sorrow and our contentment.
Can we understand why the Negroes of Watts re-
belled? Then why do we need a devil-theory for the
rebellion of the South Vietnamese? Then why can't we
see that our proper human struggle is not with Commu-
nism or revolutionaries, but with the social desperation
that drives good men to violence, both here and
abroad?
To be sure, we have been most generous with our
aid, and in Western Europe, a mature industrial society,
that aid worked. But we have never shown ourselves
capable of allowing others to make those traumatic
institutional changes that are often the prerequisites
of progress in colonial societies. For all our official feel-
ing for the millions who are enslaved to what we so
self-righteously call the yoke of Communist tyranny,
we make no real effort at all to crack through the much
more vicious right-wing tyrannies that our businessmen
traffic with and our nation profits from every day. And
for all our cries about the International Red Conspiracy
to take over the world, we take only pride in the fact of
our 6,000 military bases on foreign soil.
We gave Rhodesia a grave look just now -but we
keep on buying her chromium, which is cheap because
black slave labor mines it.
We deplore the racism of Verwoerd's regime in South
Africa -but our banks make big loans to that country
and our private technology makes it a nuclear power.
We are, saddened and puzzled by random back-
page stories of revolt in this or that Latin American
state -but are convinced by a few pretty photos in the
Sunday supplement that things are getting better, that
the world is coming our way, that change from disorder
can be orderly, that our benevolence will pacify the
distressed, that our might will intimidate the angry.
Optimists, may I suggest that these are quite unlikely
fantasies. They are fantasies because we have lost that
mysterious'social desire that could make them real. We
have become a. nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-
hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.
A nation - may I say it? - of beardless liberals.
You say I am being hard? Only think. .
This country, with its thirty-some years of liberalism,
can send 200,000 young men to Vietnam to kill and die
in the most dubious of wars, but it cannot get 100 voter
registrars to go into Mississippi.
What do you make of it?
The financial burden of the war obliges us to cut
millions from an already impoverished War on Poverty
budget. But in almost the same breath, Congress ap-
propriates $140 million for the Lockheed and Boeing
companies to compete with each other on the super-
sonic transport project - that Disneyland creation that
will cost us all about $2 billion before it's done.
We have been earnestly resisting for some years now
the idea of putting atomic weapons into West German
hands, thus perpetuating the division of Europe. Now
just this week we find out that, with the meagerest of
security systems, West Germany has had nuclear weap-
ons in her hands for the past six years.
What do you make of it?
Some will make of it that I overdraw the matter.
Many will ask: What about the other side? To be sure,
there is the bitter ugliness of Czechoslovakia, Poland,
those infamous tanks of Hungary. But my anger only
rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or
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shame deposits in that ones account the vicious right-winger, Ademar Barros, supported by a
right to shamefulness.
A Brief Stock of Facts
And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-
American. To these I say: Don't blame me for that/
Blaine those who mouthed my liberal values and broke
my American heart.
Just who might they be, by the way? Let's take a
brief stock of some facts.
In 1953 our Central Intelligence Agency managed to
overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, the complaint being his
neutralism in-the cold war and his plans to nationalize
the country's oil resources to improve his people's lives.
Most evil aims, most evil man. In his place we put in
General Zahedi, a World War II Nazi collaborator. New
arrangements on Iran's oil gave 25-year leases on 40
percent of it to three US firms, one of which was Gulf.
The CIA's leader for this coup was Kermit Roosevelt.
In 1960 Kermit Roosevelt became a vice president of
Gulf.
In 1954, the democratically elected Arbenz of Gua-
temala wanted to nationalize a portion of United Fruit
Company's plantations in that country, land he needed
badly for a modest program of agrarian reform. His
government was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup.
The following year, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, director
of the CIA when the Guatemala venture was being
planned, joined the board of the United Fruit Company.
Comes 1960 and Castro cries we are about to invade
Cuba. The Administration sneers, "poppycock," and the
Americans believe it. Comes the invasion. Comes with
it the awful realization that the United States Govern-
ment had lied.
Comes 1962 and the missile crisis, and our Adminis-
tration stands prepared to fight global atomic war on
the curious principle that another state does not have
the right to its own foreign policy.
Comes 1963 and British Guiana, where Cheddi Jagan
wants independence from England and a labor law
modeled on the Wagner Act. And Jay Lovestone, the
AFL-CIO foreign policy chief, acting as always quite
independently of labor's rank and file, arranges with
the government to finance an eleven-week dock strike
that brings the Jagan government down, ensuring that
the state will remain British Guiana, and that any work-
ingman who wants a wage better than 50? a day is a
dupe of Communism.
Comes 1964. Two weeks after Thomas Mann announ-
ces that we have abandoned the Alianza's principle of
no aid to, tyrants, Brazil's Goulart is overthrown by the
show of American gunboats at Rio de Janeiro. Within
24 hours, the new head of state, Mazzilli, receives a
congratulatory wire from our President.
Comes 1965. The Dominican Republic. Rebellion in
the streets. We scurry to the spot with 20,000 neutral
Marines and our neutral peacemakers - like Ellsworth'
Bunker, Jr., Ambassador to the Organization of Ameri-
can States. Most of us know that our neutral Marines
fought openly on the side of the junta, a fact that the
Administration still denies. But how many also know
that what was at stake was our new Caribbean Sugar
Bowl? That this same neutral peacemaking Bunker is a
board member and stock owner of the National Sugar
Refining Company, a firm his father founded in the
good old days and one which has a major interest in
maintaining the status quo in the Dominican Republic?
Or that one of the President's closest personal advisors,
our new Supreme Court Justice, Abe Fortas, has sat
for the past 19 years on the board of the Sucrest Com-
pany, which imports black strap molasses from the Do-
minican Republic? Or that the rhetorician of corporate
liberalism and the late President Kennedy's close friend,
Adolf Berle, was chairman of that same board? Or that
our roving ambassador Averill Harriman's brother, Ro-
land, is on the board of National Sugar? Or that our
former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Joseph
Farland, is a board member of the South Puerto Rico
Sugar Co., which owns 275,000 acres of rich land in
the Dominican Republic and is the largest employer on
the island - at one dollar a day?
Neutralists) God save the hungry people of the world
from such neutralists)
We do not say these men are evil. We say rather
that good men can be divided from their compassion by
the institutional system that inherits us all. Generation
in and out, we are put to use. People become instru-
ments. Generals do not hear the screams of the bombed
and sugar executives do not see the misery of the cane
cutters: for to do so would be to be that much less the
general/
Corporate Liberalism and Anti-Communism
The foregoing facts of recent history describe one
main aspect of the estate of Western liberalism. Where
is our American humanism here? What went wrong?
Let's stare our situation coldly in the face. All of us
are born to the colossus of history, our American cor-
porate system-in many ways, an awesome organism.
There is one fact that describes it: with about 5% of
the world's people, we consume half the world's goods.
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 We take a richness that is in good part not our own,
and put it in our pockets, our garages, our split-levels,
our bellies, and our futures.
On the face of it, it is a crime that so few should have
so much at the expense of so many. Where is the moral
imagination so abused as to call this just? Perhaps many
of us feel uneasy in our sleep. We are not, after all, a
cruel people and perhaps we don't really need this su-
per-dominance that deforms others. But what can we
do? The investments are made. The plants abroad are
built.
The system exists. One is swept up into it. How
intolerable - to be born moral, but addicted to a stolen
and maybe surplus luxury. Our goodness threatens to
become counterfeit before our eyes - unless we change.
But change threatens us with uncertainty, at least, Our
problem, then, is to justify this.' system and give its
theft another name - to make kind and moral what is
neither, to perform some alchemy with language that
will make this injustice seem to ~e a most magnanimous
gift.
A hard problem. But the Western democracies, in the
heyday of their colonial expansionism, produced a hero
worthy of the task.
Its name was free enterprise and its partner was an
illiberal liberalism that said to the poor and the dis-
possessed: What we acquire of your resources we re-
pay in civilization. The white man's burden. But this
was too poetic. So a much more hard-headed theory
was produced. This theory said that colonial status is
in fact a boon to the colonized. We give them technol-
ogy and bring them into modern times.
But this deceived no one but ourselves. We were de-
lighted with this new theory. The poor saw in it merely
an admission that their claims were irrefutable. They
stood up to us, without gratitude. We were shocked -
but also confused, for the poor seemed again to be
right. How long is it going to be the case, we wondered,
that the poor will be right and the rich will be wrong?
Liberalism faced a crisis. In the face of the collapse
of the European empires, how could it continue to hold
together our twin need for richness and righteousness?
How can we continue to sack the ports of Asia and still
dream of Jesus?
The challenge was met with a most ingenious solu-
tion: the ideology of anti-Communism. This was the
hind: we cannot call revolution bad, because we started
that way ourselves and because it is all too easy to
see why the dispossessed should rebel. So we will call
revolution Communism. And we will reserve for our-
selves the right to say what Communism means. We
take note of Communist enormities and say: Behold
Communism is a bloodbath. We take note of Commu-
nist reactionaries, and say: Behold, Communism is a
betrayal of the people. We take note of the -revolution's
need to consolidate itself, and say: Behold, Communism
is a tyranny.
It. has been all these things, and it will be these again,
and we will never be at loss for those tales of atrocity
that comfort us so in our self-righteousness. Nuns will
be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled. In-
deed, revolution is a fury., For it is a letting loose of out-
rages pent up sometimes over centuries. But the more
brutal and longer-lasting the suppression of this energy,
all the more ferocious will be its explosive release.
Far from helping Americans deal with this truth, the
anti-Communist ideology merely tries to disguise it so
that things may stay the way they are. Thus, it depicts
our presence in other lands not as a coercion, but a
protection. It allows us even to say that the napalm in
Vietnam is only another aspect of our humanitarian
love - like those exorcisms in the Middle Ages that so
often killed the patient. So we say to the Vietnamese
peasant, the Cuban intellectual, the Peruvian worker:
"You are better dead than red. If it hurts - sorry about
that."
This is the action of corporate liberalism. It performs
for the corporate state a function quite like what the
Church once performed for the feudal state. It seeks to
justify its burdens and protect it from change. As the
Church exaggerated this office in the inquisition, so
with liberalism in the McCarthy time - which, if it
was a reactionary phenomenon, was still made possible
by our anti-Communist liberalism.
Corporatism or Humanism?
Let me then speak directly to humanist liberals. If
my facts are wrong, I will soon be corrected. But if
they are right, then you may face a crisis of conscience.
Corporatism or humanism: which? For it has come to
that. Will you let your dreams be used? Will you be a
grudging apologist for the' corporate state? Or will you
try to change it - not in the name of this or that blue-
print or ism, but in the name of simple human decency
and democracy and the vision that wise and brave men
saw in the time of our own Revolution?
And if your commitment to human value is uncondi-
tional, then disabuse yourselves of the notion that state-
ments will bring change if only the mighty can be
reached, or that marches will bring change if only we
can make them massive enough, or that policy proposals
will bring change if only we can make them responsible
enough.
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"We are dealing now with a colossus that does not
want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not
cooperate with those who want to change it. Those al-
lies of ours in the government -are they really our al-
lies? If they are, then they don't need advice, they need
consiiituencies; they don't need study groups, they need
a movement. And if they are not, then all the more
reason for building that movement with a most relent-
less conviction.
There are people in this country today who are trying
to build that movement, nothing less than a humanist
reformation. And the humanist liberals must under-
stand that it is this movement with which their own
best hopes are most in tune. We know the same history
that you know, and we can understand your occasional
cynicism, exasperation and even distrust. But we ask
you to put these aside and help us risk a leap. Help us
find enough time for the enormous work that needs
doing here. Help us build. Help us shake the future
in the name of plain human hope,
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'SAN 2 1966
tuloor's Cold Warrior-IV
Loveston~'s Aid Program.
olsters U.S. E'oreign Polic
'RGH
Last in a series
By Dan Kurzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
director of AFL-CIO oversees
operations, Is helping to
}.
Ing for the organization, in-
formed sources said, have
such critic:
Vaughn said U.S. ambassa-!
ate a trade union aid program
been asked to cooperate with
dors and mission directors he
in Latin America and - else-
the Central Intelligence Agen-
had met on a recent trip to
where to fight communism and
win support from international
cy. They are told, as one in-
Latin America, indicated that
'
labor for United States foreign
formant put It, that "Latin
'
the social projects program
policy.
s social revolution
America
was in trouble in a number of
This program is consistent
must be diverted into proper
countries because of over-
with his double-edged effort
channels."
p r o in otion, administrative
to push for a tougher U.S.
Some time, ago, the AIFLD
weaknesses, and failure to co-
cold war policy on the one
.r`
communicated with a certain
th
b
t
ordinate activities with the
hand, and for conformity with
e
ou
,
Michigan Fund a
U.S. Embassy.
U.S. policy by foreign., par-
a a ?;eft
availability of funds. Iowever,
AFL-CIO President George
ticularly Latin, labor on the
the connection was, severed
Meany himself said at the
other.
who at one time
Lovestone
WILLIAM C. DOHERTY JR.
after Rep. Wright Patman (D-
Tex.) charged that this Fund
same meeting that he, too, was
troubled by the AIFLD's per-
,
headed the American Corn-
complains
_ of red tape
supplied the J. ? M. Kaplan
which he
f New York
d
F
formance.
'
munist Party, wields substan-
tial control over the staunchly l
,
o
un
said was .?a.:igan, with
has
Meanwhile, criticism
poured in from Latin America.
anti - communist Inter - Amer
nancing social projects for
.early $1 million from 1961 to
Leaders of four Argentine
can Regional Organization
workers-mainly housing and
1963.
Some Institute employes
unions, who were promised,
f
f
`$10
(ORIT). But this control is di-
community centers.
concern that AIFLD
express
are, a
an
-
amidst great
million housing project in
luted by the voices of labor
leaders from other nations
Defenders of the Institute
engrossment in intelligence
April, 1964 are still waitingi
.
This limitation of power,
point out that its educational
matters at the expense of social
h
i
for the first house to be built.
however, has been offset in
program has so far reached
as
es
development activit
than
i
Doherty has replied that the
part by the establishment of
some 30,000 people, including
es
made more enem
friends among Latin American
roblem of inflationary costs
I
a strictly U.S.-operated Ameri-
almost 400 graduates from a
workers
had held up the program, not
can. Institute for Free Labor
Washington
training school in V6
.
' Lovestone s chief AIFLD
a very satisfactory answer to
Development (AIFLD).
and about 2000`. graduates of
lieutenant, bluff, - energetic
either the workers or to some
Americans close to the pro,
U.S. Backed
13 regional schools.
Director William C.' Doherty,
gram.
The AIFLD is a nonprofit
Institute backed by the AFL-
The AIFLD has completed
a $10-million, 3100-unit work-
Jr., says that delays in his so-
clal development program are
, Costa Rica Row
CIO, almost 60 U.S. business
ers' housing project in Mexi-
due mainly to the red tape
In Costa Rica, where a $1.2-
firms, and the U.S. govern-
co, and a few hundred houses
Involved in obtaining U.S.
I
million housing program is
ment. The Government
in Honduras. It has set up a
government housing loans.
being contemplated, the press
through the Agency for Inter-
Workers' Housing Bank in
Blasts From Up High
has been strongly critical of
national Development (AID),
Lima, Peru, and spent some
"
"
Criticism nevertheless has
the AIFLD for trying to lm-
l
"
"
finances or guarantees about
impact
$60 million on
come from some high souse. s?
pose
conditions. The
unjust
'
80 per cent of the program.
projects such as food distribu-
in September
ti
AIFLD says that it, and not
The Institute has two main
official function
tion and laundry cooperatives.
F 1
ng
At a mee
th~ b r
i
the Costa Ricans, must decide
0" ~5~ 9s91t is
tin American la or leaders in
to thhAIly L say a i s an
s r
mittee o n '
h embraces top U.S. gov
hi
also requiring an interest rate
democratic unionism and ii-
nounced program is suffering
c
w
from a preoccupation wi i
unannounced activity - intel-
ligence gathering.
Jack H. Vaughn, Assistants
Secretary of State for Inter-
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STATINTL
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