INTERNATIONAL TREATY

- VIOLATIONS

Mr. FULBRIGHT. Mr. President, the recent remarks by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson dismissing the usefulness of negotiations in Vietnam illustrate the reluctance on the part of some to discuss more fully the history of East-West relations since 1945. We are all well aware of the lack of good faith which characterized the Soviet position at Potsdam in 1945, Moscow in 1947, and London in 1948. Mr. Acheson played a vital and constructive role as a negotiating official for the West during these crucial years following World War II. The prosperity of Europe is due, in part, to his insistence that the U.S.S.R. was not to dictate the terms by which Western Europe was to exist.

However, this is not the whole story. The long negotiations which preceded the Austrian Peace Treaty of 1955 laid the groundwork for a most successful arrangement for that country, That same year, the Soviets, in good faith, returned the Porkkana Peninsula to Finland.

The matter of international treaty violation was reviewed most carefully when the Committee on Foreign Relations was considering the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August, 1963. A list of treaties to which the Soviet Union has adhered was provided at that time. It suggests that negotiations with the Communists are not always an hopeless as the former Secretary suggests. I ask unanimous consent to have this list printed in the Records at the conclusion of my remarks.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

(See exhibit 1.)

Mr. FULBRIGHT. So the record of Communist observance of international promises is mixed, and in Southeast Asia, violations have been committed by both sides. The United States shares responsibility for the manner in which diplomacy has been conducted in that region of the world if we are to have a constructive impact in Southeast Asia, our diplomatic efforts must be guided by the same principles and constraints which characterized our postwar efforts in Europe. Since this evidently cannot be done within the framework of existing accords, then new negotiations should be called for.

Mr. Acheson knows better than anyone else the results of skilled diplomacy. Peace and prosperity came to Europe because military conflict was avoided. The tragedy of Vietnam in that honest diplomacy has never been attempted.

EXHIBIT I

(From the department of State,

Aug. 22. 1963)

TREATY WHICH THE SOVIET UNION

HAS OBSERVED SATISFACTORILY

Austrian State Treaty.

Antarctic Treaty.

Statute of International Atomic Energy Agency.

State Treaty for the Reestablishment of an independent and Democratic Austria.

Convention on Road Traffic.

Customs Convention on the Temporary importation of Private Road Vehicles.

Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Relating to International Transportation by Air.

Constitution of UNESCO

International Convention for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries

Instrument for the Amendment of the Constitution of the International Labor Organization.

Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules With Respect to Assistance and Salvage at Sea

Convention on the Intergovernmental Maritime Organization.

Convention on Safety of Life at Sea.

Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea.

Convention of the World Meteorological Organization

Universal Postal Convention.

Agreement for the Suppression of the Circulation of Obscene Publications

Interim Convention on Conservation of North Pacific Fur Seals.

International Sugar Agreement.

International Telecommunication Convention.

Convention Amending the Convention Relating to Weights and Measures

Agreement on Cooperation in Exchanges in the Fields of Science, Technology, Education and Culture in 1960-61

Agreement on Cooperation In Exchanges in the Fields of Science, Technology, Education, and Culture in 1962-63.

Agreement Relating to the Exchange of Medical Films.

Memorandum for Cooperation In the Field of the Utilization of Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes.

Agreement Relating to the Reciprocal Waiver of Visa Fees to Nonimmigrants.

Agreement on the Organization of Commercial Radio Teletype Communications Channels.

_________________

THE WAR AND ITS FFECTS—II

Mr. FULBRIGHT. Mr. President, today I resume my comments on the Vietnamese war and its far-ranging effects. In the first half of my statement I questioned the assumption on which the American war policy is based and suggested what seem to me to be the principal causes of the deep and widening division among the American people. Today I shall point to some of the destructive effects of the war upon our domestic life -- to the growing militarization of the economy and the universities, to the deepening crisis of poverty and race, and to the underlying question of America's concept of herself, either as a traditional world empire as we seem to be becoming, or as an example of creative democracy, as we have traditionally regarded ourselves.

1. THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-ACADEMIC COMPLEX

While young dissenters plead for resurrection of the American promise, their elders continue to subvert it. As if it were something to be very proud of, it was announced not long ago that the war in Vietnam laid created a million new Jobs in the United States. Our Country is becoming conditioned to permanent conflict. More and more our economy, our Government, and our universities are adapting themselves to the requirements of continuing war -- total war, limited war, and cold war. The struggle against militarism into which we were drawn 26 years ago has become permanent, and for the sake of conducting it, we are making ourselves into a militarized society.

I do not think the military-industrial complex is the conspiratorial invention of a band of "merchants of death." One almost wishes that it were, because conspiracies can be exposed and dealt with. But the components of the new American militarism are too diverse, independent, and complex for it to be the product of a centrally directed conspiracy. it is rather the inevitable result of the creation of a huge, permanent military establishment, whose needs have given rise to a vast private defense industry tied to the Armed Forces by a natural bond of common interest. As the largest producer of goods and services in the United States, the industries and businesses that fill military orders will in the coming fiscal year pour some $45 billion into over 5.000 cities and towns where over 8 million Americans, counting members of the Armed Forces, comprising approximately 10 percent of the labor force, will earn their living from defense spending. Together all these industries and employees, drawing their income from the $75 billion defense budget, form a giant concentration of socialism in our otherwise free enterprise economy.

Unplanned though it was, this complex has become a major political force. It is the result rather than the cause of American military involvements around the world; but, composed as it is of a vast number of citizens - not tycoons or “merchants of death” but ordinary, good American citizens whose livelihood depends on defense production, the military industrial complex has become an indirect force for the perpetuation of our global military commitments. This is not - and I emphasize "not''—because anyone favors war but because every one of us has a natural and proper desire to preserve the sources of his livelihood. For the defense worker this means preserving or obtaining some local factory or installation and obtaining new defense orders; for the labor union leader it means jobs for his members at abnormally high wages; for the politician it means preserving the good will of his constituents by helping them to get what they want. Every time a new program, such as Mr. McNamara's $5 billion "thin" antiballistic missile system, is introduced, a powerful new constituency is created—a constituency that will strive mightily to protect the new program and, in the case of the ABM, turn the "thin” system into a “thick" one, a movement already underway according to reports in the press. The constituency-building process is further advanced by the perspicacity of Defense officials and contractors in locating installations and plants in the districts of influential key Members of Congress.

In this natural way generals, industrialists, businessmen, labor leaders, workers, and politicians have joined together in a military-industrial complex— a complex which, for all the inadvertency of its creation and the innocent intentions of its participants, has nonetheless become a powerful new force for the perpetuation of foreign military commitments, for the introduction and expansion of expensive weapons systems, and, as a result, for the militarization of large segments of our national life. Most interest groups are counterbalanced by other interest groups, but the defense complex is so much larger than any other that there is no effective counterweight to it except concern as to its impact on the part of some of our citizens and a few of our leaders, none of whom have material incentive to offer.

The universities might have formed an effective counterweight to the military - industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy, but many of our leading universities have instead joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence. Disappointing though it is, the adherence of the professors is not greatly surprising. No less than businessmen. workers, and politicians, professors like money and influence. Having traditionally been deprived of both, they have welcomed the contracts and consultantships offered by the Military Establishment.

The great majority of American professors are still teaching students and engaging in scholarly research, but some of the most famous of our academicians have set such activities aside in order to serve their government, especially those parts of the government which are primarily concerned with war.

The bonds between the Government and the universities are no more the results of a conspiracy than those between Government and business. They are an arrangement of convenience, providing the Government with politically usable knowledge and the universities with badly needed funds. Most of these funds go to large institutions which need them less than some smaller and less well- known ones, but they do on the whole make a contribution to higher learning, a contribution, however, which is purchased at a high price.

That price is the surrender of independence, the neglect of teaching, and the distortion of scholarship. A university which has become accustomed to the inflow of government contract funds is likely to emphasize activities which will attract those funds. These, unfortunately, do not include teaching undergraduates and the kind of scholarship which, though it may contribute to the sum of human knowledge and to man's understanding of himself, is not salable to the Defense Department or the CIA. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, expressed it:

The real problem is not one of Federal control but of Federal influence. A Federal agency offers a project. The university need not accept, but as a practical matter, it usually does . . . Out of this reality have followed many of the consequences of Federal aid for the universities; and they have been substantial. That they are subtle, slowly cumulative and gentlemanly makes them all the more potent.¹

From what one hears the process of acquiring Government contracts is not always passive and gentlemanly.

One of the dismal sights in American higher education—

Writes Robert M. Rosenzweig, associate dean of the Stanford University graduate division—

is that of administrators scrambling for contracts for work which does not emerge from the research or teaching interests of their faculty. The result of this unseemly enterprise is bound to be a faculty coerced or seduced into secondary lines of interest, or a frantic effort to secure nonfaculty personnel to meet the contractual obligations. Among the most puzzling aspects of such arrangements is the fact that Government agencies have permitted and even encouraged them. Not only are they harmful to the universities—which is not, of course, the Government's prime concern—but they insure that the Government will not get what it is presumably buying; namely. the intellectual and technical resources of the academic community. It is simply a bad bargain all the way around.²

Commenting on these tendencies, a special report on government, the universities and international affairs, prepared for the U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, points out that—

The eagerness of university administrations to undertake stylized, Government-financed projects has caused a decline in self-generated commitments to scholarly pursuits, has produced baneful effects on the academic mission of our universities, and has, in addition, brought forward some bitter complaints from the disappointed clients.³

Among the baneful effects of the Government-university contract system the most damaging and corrupting are the neglect of the university’s most important purpose, which is the education of its students, and the taking into the Government camp of scholars, especially those in the social sciences, who ought to be acting as responsible and independent critics of their Government’s policies. The corrupting process is a subtle one: no one needs to censor, threaten, or give orders to contract scholars; without a word of warning or advice being uttered, it is simply understood that lucrative contracts are awarded not to those who question their Government’s policies but to those who provide the Government with the tools and techniques it desires. The effect, in the words of the report to the Advisory Commission on International Education, is—

To suggest the possibility to a world—never adverse to prejudice—that academic honesty is no less marketable than a box of detergent on the grocery shelf.⁴

The formation of a military-industrial complex, for all its baneful consequences, is the result of great numbers of people engaging in more or less normal commercial activities. The adherence of the universities, though no more the result of a plan or conspiracy, nonetheless involves something else: the neglect and, if carried far enough the betrayal, of the university’s fundamental reason for existence, which is the advancement of man's search for truth and happiness. It is for this purpose, and this purpose alone, that universities receive—and should receive—the community’s support in the form of grants, loans and tax exemptions.

When the university turns away from its central purpose and makes itself an appendage to the Government, concerning itself with techniques rather than purposes, with expedients rather than ideals, dispensing conventional orthodoxy rather than new ideas, it is not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students: it is betraying a public trust.

This betrayal is most keenly felt by the students, partly because it is they who are being denied the services of those who ought to be their teachers, they to whom knowledge is being dispensed wholesale in cavernous lecture halls, they who must wait weeks for brief audiences with important professors whose time is taken up by travel and research connected with Government contracts. For all these reasons the students feel themselves betrayed, but it is doubtful that any of these is the basic cause of the angry rebellions which have broken out on so many campuses.

It seems more likely that the basic cause of the great trouble in our universities is the student’s discovery of corruption in the one place, besides perhaps the churches, which might have been supposed to be immune from the corruptions of our age. Having seen their country’s traditional values degraded in the effort to attribute moral purpose to an immoral war, having seen their country's leaders caught in inconsistencies which are politely referred to as a “credibility gap,” they now see their universities— the last citadels of moral and intellectual integrity—lending themselves to ulterior and expedient ends, and betraying their own fundamental purpose, which, in James Bryce’s words, is to "reflect the spirit of the times without yielding to it.”

2. POVERTY IN AMERICA

Students are not the only angry people in America, nor the only people with cause for anger. There is also the anger of the American poor, black and white, rural and urban. These are the dispossessed and neglected children of the affluent society, the 32 million Americans whose hopes were briefly raised by the proclamation of a war on poverty, only to be sacrificed to the supervening requirements of the war on Asian communism, or, more exactly, to the executive preoccupation and congressional parsimony induced by that war.

In our preoccupation with foreign wars and crises we have scarcely noticed the revolution wrought by undirected change here at home. Since World War II our population has grown by 59 million; a mass migration from country to city has crowded over 70 percent of our population onto scarcely more than 1 percent of our land; vast numbers of rural Negroes from the South have filled the slums of northern cities while affluent white families have fled to shapeless new suburbs, leaving the cities physically deteriorating and financially destitute, and creating a new and socially destructive form of racial isolation combined with degrading poverty. Poverty, which is a tragedy in a poor country, blights our affluent society with something more than tragedy; being unnecessary, it is deeply immoral as well.

Distinct though it is in cause and character, the Negro rebellion is also part of the broader crisis of American poverty, and it is unlikely that social justice for Negroes can be won except as part of a broad program of education, housing and employment for all of our poor, for all of the great “underclass” of whom Negroes comprise no more than one-fourth or one-third. It is essential that the problem of poverty be dealt with as a whole, not only because the material needs of the white and colored poor are the same—better schools, better homes and better job opportunities— but because alleviating poverty in general is also the best way to alleviate racial hostility.

It is not the affluent and educated who accounts for the “backlash" but the poorer white people, who perceive in the Negro rights movement a threat to their jobs and homes and—probably more important—a threat to their own meager sense of social status.

There is nothing edifying about poverty. It is morally as well as physically degrading. It does not make men brothers. It sets them against each other in competition for jobs and homes and status. It leaves its mark on a man and its mark is not pretty. Poverty constricts and distorts, condemning its victims to an endless, anxious struggle for physical necessities. That struggle in turn robs a man of his distinctly human capacities— the capacity to think and create, the capacity to seek and savor the meaning of things, the capacity to feel sympathy and friendliness for his fellow man.

If we are to overcome poverty and its evil byproducts, we shall have to deal with them as human rather than as racial or regional problems. For practical as well as moral reasons, we shall have to have compassion for those who are a little above the bottom as well as for those who are at the bottom. We shall have to have some understanding of the white tenant farmer as well as the Negro farm laborer, of the urban white immigrant workingman as well as the Negro slum dweller. It would even benefit us to acquire some understanding—not approval, just understanding—of each other’s group and regional prejudices. If the racial crisis of recent years has proven anything, it is that none of us, Northerner or Southerner, has much to be proud of, that our failures have been national failures, that our problems are problems of a whole society, and so, as well, must be their solutions.

All these problems—of poverty and race, jobs and schools—have come to focus in the great cities, which, physically, mentally, and esthetically, are rapidly becoming unfit for human habitation. As now taking shape, the cities and suburbs are the product of technology run rampant, without effective political direction, without regard to social and long-term economic cost. They have been given their appearance by private developers, builders and entrepreneurs, seeking, as they will, their own short-term profit.

Rivers and bays are polluted and the air is filled with the fumes of the millions of cars which choke the roads. Recreation facilities and places of green and quiet are pitifully inadequate and there is no escape from crowds and noise, both of which are damaging to mental health.

At the heart of the problem is the absence of sufficient funds and political authority strong enough to control the anarchy of private interest and to act for the benefit of the community. Despite the efforts of some dedicated mayors and students of urban problems, the tide of deterioration is not being withstood and the cities are sliding deeper into disorganization and demoralization.

The larger cities have grown beyond human scale and organizing capacity. No matter what is done to rehabilitate New York and Chicago, they will never be places of green and quiet and serenity, nor is there much chance that these can even be made tolerably accessible to the millions who spend their lives enclosed in concrete and steel. Ugly and inhuman though they are, the great urban complexes remain nonetheless a magnet for Negroes from the South and whites from Appalachia. Crowding the fetid slums and taxing public services, they come in search of jobs and opportunity, only to find that the jobs which are available require skills which they lack and have little prospect of acquiring.

One wonders whether this urban migration is irreversible, whether it may not be possible to create economic opportunities in the small towns and cities where there are space and land and fresh air, where building costs are moderate and people can still live in some harmony with natural surroundings. The technology of modern agriculture may inevitably continue to reduce farm employment, but we have scarcely begun to consider the possibilities of industrial decentralization—of subsidies, tax incentives and other means—to make it possible for people to earn a living in the still human environments of small town America.

A decent life in a small town is not only very much better than slum life in a big city; it is probably cheaper too. The Secretary of Agriculture has suggested that it would be better to subsidize a rural family with $1,000 a year for 20 years than to house them in a cramped urban “dwelling unit’’ at a cost of $20,000. In New York or Chicago $2,500 a year of welfare money will sustain a family in destitution; In the beautiful Ozark country of Arkansas it is enough for a decent life.

Aggravating the material ills is the impersonalization of life in a crowded, urban America. Increasingly we find wherever we go—in shops and banks and the places where we work—that our names and addresses no longer identify us; the IBM machines require numbers—ZIP codes, account numbers, and order numbers. Our relevant identity in a computerized economy is statistical rather than personal. Business machines provide standard information and standard services and there are no people to provide particular information or services for our particular needs.

The governing concept, invented I believe in the Pentagon, is "cost effectiveness,’’ which refers not to the relationship of cost to human need or satisfaction but to the relationship of cost to the computerized system. Technology has ceased to be an instrument of human ends: it has become an end in itself, unregulated by political or philosophical purpose. The toll which all this takes on the human mind can only be guessed at, but it must surely be enormous, because human needs are different from the needs of the system to which they are being subordinated. Someday the human requirements may be computerized too, but they have not, thank God, been computerized yet.

The cost of rehabilitating America will be enormous, beyond anything we have even been willing to think about. When Mayor Lindsay said that it would cost $50 billion over 10 years to make New York a fit place to live in, his statement was dismissed as fanciful, although $50 billion is less than we spend in 2 years in Vietnam. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal has ventured the guess that it will cost trillions of dollars to rehabilitate our slums and their inhabitants.

[T]he common idea that America is an immensely rich and affluent country—

He says—

is very much an exaggeration. American affluence is heavily mortgaged. America carries a tremendous burden of debt to its poor people. That this debt must be paid is not only a wish of the do-gooders. Not paying it implies the risk for the social order and for democracy as we have known it.⁵

Before we can even begin to think of what needs to be done and how to do it. we have got to reevaluate our national priorities. We have got to weigh the costs and benefits of going to the moon against the costs and benefits of rehabilitating our cities. We have got to weigh the costs and benefits of the supersonic transport, which will propel a few business executives and Government officials across the Atlantic in 2 or 3 hours, against the costs and benefits of slum clearance and school construction, which would create opportunity for millions of our deprived '‘underclass.”

We have got to weigh the benefits and consider the awesome disparity of the $904 billion we have spent on military power since World War II as against the $96 billion we have spent, out of our regular national budget, on education, health, welfare, housing, and community development.

Defining our priorities is more a matter of moral accounting than of cost accounting. The latter may help us determine what we are able to pay for, but it cannot help us to decide what we want and what we need and what we are willing to pay for. It cannot help the five-sixths of us who are affluent to decide whether we are willing to pay for programs which will create opportunity for the one-sixth who are poor; that is a matter of moral accounting.

It cannot help us to decide whether beating the Russians to the moon is more important to us than purifying our poisoned air and lakes and rivers; that, too, is a matter of moral accounting. Nor can it help us to decide whether we want to be the arbiter of the world's conflicts, the proud enforcer of a pax Americana, even though that must mean the abandonment of the Founding Fathers' idea of America as an exemplary society, and the betrayal of the idea of world peace under world law, which, as embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations, was also an American idea. These, too, are matters of moral accounting.

THE AMERICAN EXAMPLE

Rich and powerful though our country is, it is not rich or powerful enough to shape the course of world history in a constructive or desired direction solely by the impact of its power and policy. Inevitably and demonstrably, our major impact on the world is not in what we do but in what we are. For all their worldwide influence, our aid and our diplomacy are only the shadow of America; the real America—and the real American influence—are something else They are the way our people live, our tastes and games, our products and preferences, the way we treat each other, the way we govern ourselves, the ideas about man and man’s relations with other men that took root and flowered in the American soil.

History testifies to this. A hundred years ago England was dominant in the world, just as America is today. Now England is no longer dominant; her great fleets have vanished from the seas and only fragments remain of the mighty British Empire. What survives? The legacy of hatred survives—hatred of the West and its arrogant imperialism, hatred of the condescension and the exploitation, hatred of the betrayal abroad of the democracy that Englishmen practiced at home. And the ideas survive— the ideas of liberty and tolerance and fair play to which Englishmen were giving meaning and reality at home while acting on different principles in the Empire. In retrospect, it seems clear that England's lasting and constructive impact on modern India, for example, springs not from the way she ruled in India but, despite that, from the way she was ruling England at the same time.

Possessed as they are of a genuine philanthropic impulse, many Americans feel that it would be selfish and exclusive, elitist and isolationist, to deny the world the potential benefits of our great wealth and power, and to restrict ourselves to a largely exemplary role.

It is true that our wealth and power can be, and sometimes are, beneficial to foreign nations, but they can also be, and often are, immensely damaging and disruptive. Experience—ours and that of others—strongly suggests that the disruptive impact predominates, that, when big nations act upon small nations, they tend to do them more harm than good. This is not necessarily for lack of good intentions; it is rather for lack of knowledge. Most men simply do not know what is best for other men, and when they pretend to know or genuinely try to find out, they usually end up taking what they believe to be best for themselves as that which is best for others.

Conceding this regrettable trait of human nature, we practice democracy among ourselves, restricting the freedom of individuals to impose their wills upon other individuals, restricting the state as well, and channeling such coercion as is socially necessary through community institutions. We do not restrict the scope of Government because we wish to deny individuals the benefits of its wealth and power; we restrict our Government because we wish to protect individuals from its capacity for tyranny.

If it is wisdom to restrict the power of men over men within our society, is it not wisdom to do the same in our foreign relations? If we cannot count on the benevolence of an all-powerful Government toward its own people, white needs and characteristics it knows something about and toward whom it is surely well disposed, how can we count on the benevolence of an all-powerful America toward peoples of whom we know very little? Clearly, we cannot, and, until such time as we are willing to offer our help through community institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, I think that, in limiting our commitments to small nations, we are doing more to spare them disruption than we are to deny them benefits.

Mr. President, I might add that it has struck me as rather inconsistent that some of my friends who are most devoted to the rights of the States in domestic affairs are, at the same time, very determined to project our Nation’s power into the affairs of peoples abroad.

Wisdom consists as much in knowing what you cannot do as in knowing what you can do. If we knew and were able to acknowledge the limits of our own capacity, we would be likely, more often than we do, to let nature take its course in one place and another, not because it is sure or even likely to take a good course but because, whatever nature's course may be, tampering with it in ignorance will almost surely make it worse.

We used, in the old days, to have this kind of wisdom and we also knew, almost instinctively, that what we made of ourselves and of our own society was far more likely to have a lasting and beneficial impact on the world than anything we might do in our foreign relations. We were content, as they say, to let conduct serve as an unspoken sermon. We knew that it was the freedom and seemingly unlimited opportunity, the energy and marvelous creativity of our diverse population, rather than the romantic nonsense of “manifest destiny,” that made the name of America a symbol of hope to people all over the world.

We knew these things until events beyond our control carried us irrevocably into the world and its fearful problems. We recognized thereupon, as we had to, that some of our traditional ideas would no longer serve us, that we could no longer, for example, regard our power as something outside of the scales of the world balance of power, and that, therefore, we could no longer remain neutral from the major conflicts of the major nations.

But, as so often happens when ideas are being revised, we threw out some valid ideas with the obsolete ones. Recognizing that we could not help but be involved in many of the world's crises, we came to suppose that we had to be involved in every crisis that came along; and so we began to lose the understanding of our own limitations

Recognizing that we could not help but maintain an active foreign policy, we came to suppose that whatever we hoped to accomplish in the world would be accomplished by acts of foreign policy, and this—as we thought—being true, that foreign policy must without exception be given precedence over domestic needs: and so we began to lose our historical understanding of the power of the American example.

The loss is manifest in Vietnam. There at last we have embraced the ideas that are so alien to our experience—the idea that our wisdom is as great as our power, and the idea that our lasting impact on the world can be determined by the way we fight a war rather than by the way we run our country. These are the principal and most ominous effects of the war—the betrayal of ideas which have served America well, and the great moral crisis which that betrayal has set loose among our people and their leaders.

The crisis will not soon be resolved, nor can its outcome be predicted. It may culminate, as I hope it will, in a reassertion of the traditional values, in a renewed awareness of the creative power of the American example. Or it may culminate in our becoming an empire of the traditional kind, ordained to rule for a time over an empty system of power and then to fade or fall, leaving, like its predecessors, a legacy of dust.

Mr. GORE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. FULBRIGHT. I yield.

Mr. GORE. I have followed with the greatest interest and with close attention and appreciation the very eloquent and provocative address which the able Senator has just concluded.

The Senator has approached not only one problem, but several though many of our problems today seem to stem from war. From a philosophical standpoint, the Senator's address merits the consideration not only of all Senators, but all citizens of learning and responsibility throughout America. It is one of the ablest treatises I have heard in a long time. I sincerely and wholeheartedly congratulate the junior Senator from Arkansas.

Mr. FULBRIGHT. I appreciate very much the comments of the Senator from Tennessee. As one of the senior members of the Committee on Foreign Relations, he has followed our hearings and the studies on these matters as closely as anyone in the Senate. I value his words and comments about these remarks very highly indeed, and deeply appreciate his attention.

Mr. GORE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield further?

Mr. FULBRIGHT. I yield.

Mr. GORE. On a somewhat unrelated matter, now that the Committee on Foreign Relations will be having an executive session tomorrow with the Under Secretary of State on possible efforts at conferences between and related to developments with respect to the U.S. Government and the National Liberation Front, and other related matters, about which, as the Senator knows, there has been a good deal of publicity recently, I remind the Senator that last year I suggested to him that one subject of possibly fruitful inquiry of an informative and educational nature would be a committee hearing in the nature of an inquiry, not an investigation but a study, if we could find scholars learned in the field, as to the nature of the National Liberation Front and the Vietcong organization, its infrastructure, to what extent it is a government, and by what means that government or quasi-governmental organization exercises its influence and control.

There must be something extremely tenacious about it; there must be some binding element, some methods of discipline and order. If, as Ambassador Goldberg has indicated, there is a willingness to do, their representatives may be invited, or possibly to be invited, to come to the United Nations, I suggest to the Senator again that if scholars and authorities in this field can be obtained, it might be a subject of fruitful and informative inquiry.

Mr. FULBRIGHT. I appreciate very much the suggestion of the Senator. I would be very much interested in such an educational hearing. We have had very little in this field, and I think there ought to be considerable interest. I have read books about the subject by scholars, but we have never really had a hearing directed at this matter.

Speaking personally, I intend to suggest to the committee that we have some educational hearings during the coming year. I think they are more needed than ever, inasmuch as the Secretary of State has declined to discuss our policy in public; and therefore, I think the committee is under even heavier obligation and responsibility to hold hearings and try to develop, as best we can, what our policies ought to be.

To do that, we surely ought to know the nature of our enemies, especially the Vietcong. I think the Senator from Tennessee has made a very good suggestion, and I personally will support it.

----------------

¹Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1964), pp. 57-58.

²Quoted in: Walter Adams and Adrian Jaffe, Government, The Universities, and International Affairs: A Crisis in Identity, Special Report Prepared for the U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, 90th Congress, 1st Session, House Document No. 120 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), pp.5-6.

³Ibid., p. 6.

⁴Ibid., p. 8.

⁵Gunnar Myrdal, ‘‘The Necessity and Difficulty of Planning the Future Society,” Address to the National Consultation on the Future Environment of a Democracy: The Next Fifty Years, 1967-2017, called by the American Institute of Planners, Washington, D.C., October 3, 1967, p. 15