REFLECTIONS ON AN ANNIVERSARY U.S. POWER: IT'S SWIFT RISE AND SWIFTER FALL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100010052-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 22, 2004
• Sequence Number: 52
• Publication Date: July 1, 1976
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

a bipartisan, tax-exempt, political education organization
The Honorable George Murphy, Director
Reflections on an Anniversary
U.S. POWER: ITS SWIFT RISE AND SWIFTER FALL
Remarks of Charles J. V. Murphy on the occasion of the
50th reunion of the Harvard Class of 1926, at Cambridge,
Mass., June 16, 1976.
I have been asked to discuss American defense poli-
cies--a subject about which I wrote for Fortune and Life
and The Reader's Digest more years than I care to remem-
ber. A serious subject--too serious, possibly, for what
should be a festive occasion.
The foremost question in that quarter today is a moot
one: How does the United States rank militarily? Have we
ceased or are we only ceasing to be Number One?
The question is one that never concerned us on the 10th
anniversary of this class. In 1936, the only military tasks
that American forces had been put to after the first great
war were guerrilla harrassments in Nicaragua, Santo Do-
mingo and Haiti.
And when the class came together again for the 20th,
the nation had only just emerged victorious from the
second great war in our lifetimes. The vast fleets,
the air forces and the armies that we had known in one as-
pect or another had been scattered to the four winds, in
the mistaken belief they would not be needed again.
And our 30th reunion, in 1956, found the nation
between wars--between the grinding and unavailing or-
deal in Korea in 1950-53 and the onset in 1960-61 of a suc-
cession of untidy, vexing experiences in the Bay of Pigs,
Laos, and Vietnam and what used to be called the Congo.
The forces had meanwhile been rebuilt, the draft rein-
stituted; but now our sons were being called to serve, and
the Pentagon budget was taking some 9 percent of the
GNP.
By our 40th reunion, a scant ten years ago, war had be-
come a serious and continuing business with Americans.
In 1966, the Johnson Administration was moving tardily
and uncertainly to save South Vietnam from an aggression
supported by the entire communist bloc--China with the
that war was being fought sensibly, and whether Ameri-
cans should even be in Indochina at all, were beginning
to divide the nation.
Now, on our 50th, we meet in what President Ford as-
sures us is a condition of peace. But we know that only
yesterday we accepted a disastrous--and in the view of
some, of whom I am one--a shameless and unnecessary
defeat in Indochina. Last winter we stood aside in Angola
and this summer we are standing aside in Lebanon, ner-
vously averting our gaze from savage little wars of which
the outcome will in the first instance affect the military
balance in the Mediterranean and in the other in southern
Africa.
Governor Reagan warns us that we have fallen behind
the Soviet Union, that the military balance has swung a-
gainst us. And many good men say that he is right.
President Ford assures us that the United States is still
Number One and that the forces in place are adequate for
any likely task.
Among the Democrats there is a strange silence.
Jimmy Carter has said little on the subject of defense or
foreign policy or the power balance. He has suggested
that a cut of some $7 billion in defense spending might be
a good thing and he favors, in principle, a pullback of
American troops from Korea and the NATO line.
The other Democratic candidates, with the sole excep-
tion of Senator Jackson, have simply ignored these prickly
issues.
So the rest of us are left with two questions: Have we
indeed slipped down the power scale? And if we have,
does it really matter?
To know where we stand, it is useful to look back to the
beginnings of the present situation and to examine afresh
the circumstances that have governed national actions
in what has certainly been a ride on the roller coaster of
history.
Russians. The arme orcSs w~r~ 1h X18 : I~ ~ ~1 rer. The Eisen-
Federal deficit was s i a suc ques ions as w et er: ower years ran 41W5 61--erg t years which too
 many Americans ten A>j a fk@Teh?L agg(g g/28
off years in the American experience with world power
and influence in two historical respects:
*On the side of military policy, they began with the Armistice in Korea
early in 1953 and extended through a dramatic interval of invention that
revolutionized military technologies and settled the balance to the side of
the West.
*And on the foreign policy side, these eight years were marked by the
consolidation of the alliance first strung together by Det n Acheson under
Truman. The most important of these alliances produced in 1950 the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization--NATO. The other was the mutual
defense treaty with Japan, which had been preceded by the commitment
to defend South Korea and would soon be amplified ty the mutual de-
fense treaty with the Republic of China on Taiwan.
The practical consequence of these arrangements was to
move the American defense line eastward to the Elbe in
the heart of Europe and to the 37th Parallel in Korea. The
containment policy enunciated by Truman and Acheson
was thus crystalized under Eisenhower an I Dulles as a
forward strategy sustained by interlocking coalitions on
the far side of both oceans.
Stalin was still alive, still in dictatorial charge of the
Soviet Union when Eisenhower entered the Presidency.
Truman had blocked his threat against Greece and Tur-
key, but had chosen to hold aloof in Asia in 1945-49 when
China was lost to communism. Then in 1950-52 he met
and defeated the North Korean aggression banked by the
Soviet Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. So the two systems were
in collision across the width of the world when Eisenhower
came to power some seven years after the end of the
Second World War.
A profound change in American strategy now occurred.
In 1954-55, Eisenhower directed the Defense Department
to proceed under the highest national pri )city with the
development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Sys-
tem and the various other systems required for their sup-
port and use. He did so to exploit the thermonuclear solu-
tion which Truman had put in train several years earlier.
The eventual result of these decisions was to bring into
being by the end of the 1950s the awesome panoply of
strategic range ballistic missiles that we know as the
ICBMs--the Minuteman, Polaris, Titan, A':las and lately
the Poseidon.
As matters turned out, we were none too soon. The
Soviet Union arrived at the thermonuclear solution for the
warhead almost as soon as we did, and were first with the
strategic range rocket.
But once embarked, the Pentagon and the scientific
community--all but a small minority that blamed American
bellicosity for goading the Russians into tie arms race--
rapidly outdistanced the other side. In 1960, Eisen-
hower's last year, the United States had achieved un-
equivocal ascendancy in all the decisive military technol-
ogies--in numbers otw4d I oll%K%s Obi 1 ~8
land based; in jet aircraft; in radar; in lcgisttcs; in t e
:newtp$iF1W61id0bfagiftance from our
shores.
We also developed the means, first with the U-2 air-
craft and then the reconnaissance satellite, to look
down from great heights into the Soviet Union and
communist China and photograph what was going on be-
hind their closed frontiers.
Thus when the Cuban missile crisis burst upon him in
October 1962, President Kennedy knew for sure that
Khrushchev could command no more than 70 ICBMs of
dubious accuracy deployed in the Soviet operational
forces. And he had many times that number and more re-
liable ones in place.
In fact, at that point the United States was deploying the
Minuteman at the rate of one a day., and launching a new
Polaris submarine and adding a dozen or so B-52s to the
Strategic Air Command every month.
I cite these statistics not out of a vulgar and simple-
minded obsession with numbers, but only to make the
point that 15 short years ago the United States had clear
ascendancy in the military technologies, especially the nu-
clear. and our capacity to act reflected the power situation.
Today we see Lebanon being torn apart. Only 18 years
ago, in 1958, Eisenhower put a relative handful of Marines
ashore--less than 5,000--in that country to save it from be-
ing taken over by Syrians and Egyptians armed by the
Soviet. Their mere appearance on the sunny beaches dis-
pelled the threat. It evaporated in an afternoon.
The same year, on the other side of the world, an unos-
tentatious show of force by the Seventh Fleet in the For-
mosa Straits, combined with the gift of a few sidewinder
missiles to a highly competent Nationalist Air Force,
stopped in its tracks a massive invasion of the Quemoy-
Matsu islands by communist China that was to have been
prelude to the reduction of Taiwan itself.
Here was the high tide of American influence in a world
in change. The alliances were firm. When in 1962
Kennedy dispatched Dean Acheson to Paris to show Pres-
ident de Gaulle the U-2 photographs of the Soviet mis-
siles in Cuba and to explain why the United States was
making ready to move against them, de Gaulle answered
calmly that he assumed the United States would act de-
cisively in defense of its interests.
Things worked better for us then not alone because of
Eisenhower's strength and resolution. They worked be-
cause he was able to maneuver within alliances and
means started by Truman and Acheson and supported by
the nation.
What has gone wrong? How did the power slip away?
The turn in our fortunes started in the Kennedy years
and it began with a return to isolationism wearing a new
bfA-RDTFb 810}8h 064WM~{~ ~yiof deep and far
back into American character. Wha `was new about the
 phenomenon in the ~~ltl~e~t~8
foreign involvements and heavy military investments now
came more forcefully from the intellectual community--
from the political scientists and historians who were per-
suaded that communism was a dynamic but mellowing
force; the social scientists who wanted the capital given to
defense invested instead in social programs and the physi-
cal scientists who felt they had sinned in bringing nuclear
weapons into the world.
The fashionable view was that it was the American ob-
session with nuclear supremacy which had inspired
Soviet fears of the West and that the way to stop the arms
race was for the United States to stop accumulating stra-
tegic nuclear weapons.
That reasoning gripped the Kennedy planners hard.
It gave rise during Kennedy's second year to two crucial
decisions largely constructed by Defense Secretary McNa-
mara.
Under the first decision the growth of the strategic
forces was halted in 1964-65. The idea was to let the
Russians catch up and achieve parity with us, if they
wished.
Under the other, the U.S. strategic forces were moved
into what was called a second-strike or strictly retaliatory
posture. They would be left durable enough to emerge
from a first strike by an aggressor with remnants strong
enough to inflict in riposte destruction far too severe for
any rational enemy to accept. Hence the term mutual as-
sured destruction--the think tank jargon for Robert Oppen-
heimer's colorful figure of speech, Two Scorpions in a
Bottle.
The confident expectation that went with this shift in
strategic emphasis was that once the Soviet Union moved
up to nuclear parity--to stalemate, that is--the Kremlin's
fear of American perfidy would be removed, tensions
would relax, and the arms race would slow down.
That is the reasoning that gave direction to American
security policies in the middle 1960s--about the time of
this class's 40th reunion.
Now the consequences of the Kennedy reasoning are in
view.
What went wrong is that the Russians were not content
with parity. They arrived at parity in purposeful momen-
tum and went on accumulating more and heavier stra-
tegic weapons. They are proceeding on to full ascen-
dancy.
This is what the SALT negotiations are about.
It supplies the principal issue between Reagan and
Ford.
It made for the breach between Schlesinger and Kis-
singer--graduates together in a Harvard class, professors
(5 e1 9P8l le34%R0bc1 31dN2-7
The mathematics of the balance as they relate to wea-
pon systems involve factors beyond the experience of most
of us. But there is one fairly simple way of judging how we
have fared.
It is to look at the map.
The dominos have fallen. True, they did not all stand in
a single line. But some are certainly down.
South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are gone.
Thailand has asked us to fold our tents there and depart.
It is no secret that the Ford Administration would like to
dissolve the commitment to Taiwan and move on to full
diplomatic relations with communist China.
Our intervention in the struggle for Angola was covert,
feeble, brief and failing.
Now Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa--their
white populations, their minerals and other natural re-
sources, and their strategic geography--lie quite naked
and exposed to communist-supported aggression. And
who among us today is calling out as Winston Churchill
did some 40 years ago, when another totalitarian imperial-
ism was in the flood, "Stop it ! Stop it ! Stop it nowt "
It is hard to mark a place in the world where the Ameri-
can government of the hour would make war in defense of
principle.
For that matter, it is hard to think of a principle af-
fecting foreign policy that would unite Americans again
for serious work abroad.
How profound has been the change in our former vision
of ourselves that few of us care to dwell on may be judged
by contemplating the spectacular improvement in Fidel
Castro's fortunes.
Only 14 years ago, he stood by, seeming helpless and
humiliated, while some 20,000 Soviet troops and technic-
ians sailed home with the nuclear missiles which they had
sneaked into Cuba in a gamble to redress the nuclear bal-
ance.
Last year a Cuban expeditionary force, almost as large
as that one, armed by the Soviet bloc, crossed the South
Atlantic and took up an imperial task halfway into Africa.
There it provided, with some considerable dexterity and
resolution, the principal means of an important conquest.
What are older Americans to make of the present un-
willingness to act and to risk? Can the United States safe-
ly and in good conscience turn away and let the rest of the
non-communist world go, too?
My good friend the late Arthur Krock concluded sorrow-
fully toward the end of an honest and wise career: "the
tenure of the United States as the world's foremost power
may well be the briefest in the annals of history."
both, one an economi t the othg nStp for one, would
apart in their judg ip~"2~`~eth oi~~A * ~ 1 8 : r el`}fa a a-rno eT o peg'#I' 1 66 o&il
f view.
 Where matters hav~,gc?~;ggMM-7- $
in the failure of our po ca le~-a' lie course
of the intellectuals on the liberal side of poli:ics to recog-
nize a change in Soviet strategy that occurred after Stalin.
Stalin at the end of the war found himself faced in Eur-
ope by political parties sharing much th,: same prin-
ciples of constitutional government and all inherently anti-
communist. His counter was to subjugate the eastern
European nations overrun by the Red Army In so doing
he destroyed the basic Leninist principle for regulating the
relationship of the national communist patties and pro-
moting world revolution. It was Lenin's thesis that com-
munist parties should agree on common objectives for
the overthrow of capitalism but that each national party
should be left free in a life of its own.
Stalin cast that principle aside. He toot. Soviet com-
munism down the imperialist path. The Molotov-Ribben-
trop pact which ushered in the second great war was a cyn-
ical act. The German communist party was sacrificed for
Soviet security.
Soviet foreign policy from Malenkov through Khrush-
diev to Brezhnev can be read in general terms as a patient
and deliberate return to Leninism.
It took six years for the communist parties--the Soviet
party in debate with the leaders of other national parties--
to hammer out the terms of a common world strategy and
the conditions for their future cooperation one with the
other. The objectives agreed upon are now in view:
To mark the United States as the main enemy ant: to isolate it.
To neutralize the American nuclear advantage b;' political action--
whipping up world sentiment against the alleged American monopoly
that had cpased to be a monopoly--and then wipe it out with superior
means.
To weaken and divide the American alliances throw,;h political action,
espionage and deception.
To separate the underdeveloped societies of the Third World from
their European and American connections through wars of national liber-
ation--wars designed not only to jeopardize the noncommunist nations
access to crucial raw materials and commodities, but also to provide
bases for extending political action to communist appa ?atus in the adjoin-
ing societies.
*To row toward these objectives on the muffled oa-s of co-existence,
lately called detente, fostering the illusion of opennes! and reciprocity in
tactical situations, but changing nothing, yielding nothing of strategical
importance.
How close the Soviet Union has come to bringing off the
neo-Leninist strategy we are each of us free to decide for
ourselves.
You and I may differ on how independe:it of Moscow's
aims the French and Italian communist Earties are pre-
pared to be. But any one who paid attention to the recent
prolonged proceedings of the 25th Party Congress in Mos-
cow would have observed that the leaders cf the European
nationalist communist parties were as one with the lead-
ers of the eastern pg~ ~~at224fj3
leaders as well in ha ing the victories wort in The wars of
> a ~_ 1 ~ ,e, sso u on~ates the main
enemy, an in ca in, or a isso u on of the e American
alliances.
Cuba under Castro is a splendid example of neo-Lenin-
ism in early flowering. Castro did not send his people
deep into darkest Africa--troops, doctors, bridge builders,
administrators--as puppets on Moscow's strings. On the
contrary, he made his debut in that far-off place as a
Marxist international statesman-dictator possessing
collegial equality with the Moscow brethren. His technic-
ians and soldiers dominated the battle there in league with
the Soviet quartermasters. To be sure, he failed with
Allende in Chile in 1973 and earlier with Che Guevara in
Bolivia. but today his agents operate with increasing ef-
fectiveness in Puerto Rico, Panama, Jamaica and Vene-
zuela. He is a young man as communist leaders go. Dar-
ing, too. We shall no doubt be hearing more of him, but
not, I pray, as Dr. Kissinger's next friendly host.
I've refrained from any specific comment on Harvard's
current celebrity, wishing to mind my manners on these
hallowed grounds. And in any case, the debits and cred-
its attaching to his diplomacy are coming into full view.
In your middle years and mine, Dean Acheson and
Foster Dulles conducted foreign policy for strong-
willed, intelligent and experienced men. Neither courted
the favor of journalists. Neither cavorted with Hollywood
stars or indulged in the cult of personality. Neither was
known to lie or deceive and even less to consort with those
who would do the United States in. They were much
loser to each other in their faiths than their tempera-
ments ever allowed them to admit.
For me, past 70, the most grievous waste flowing from
current policies has been decay of the alliances these two
men strung, the sapping of the confidence of famous allies
in American purpose.
The United States is still far from being surpassed in
the permanent assets that determine the relative
strengths of nations over the long haul. Our unequalled
resources of capital, our unmatched skill in growing food,
our command of technology and invention leave us still
with means in reserve to close the power margin at will.
The trouble, as Dr. Schlesinger keeps telling us, is a
question of will and of moral purpose.
Do Americans have the will to return to world leader-
ship? Do we have the stamina to stay the course? Do we
have good purposes to serve in the world?
I want to believe so. What a pleasant thing it would be
for those of us still around to return to Cambridge for our
60th reunion, to find that the Charles River Basin and Har-
vard itself were again the fertile seedbed of the principles
,.fq 'oso earlier genera-
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