It was Adlai Stevenson’s decision to throw the Democratic nomination for the Vice-Presidency up for grabs that breathed what for a moment looked like new life into the Stassen movement. As things turned out, though, Stevenson’s decision probably killed whatever small chances of success Stassen still had. For it would have been a very crass thing indeed if the Republican Convention had at the last minute sought to keep up with the Democratic Joneses by denying the delegates’ overwhelming favorite the office they thought he deserved. Stevenson’s act in Chicago disturbed the Republicans who were beginning to gather in San Francisco, and for a day or two they played with several ideas for having an “open” convention. The most promising of these was a scheme to put in nomination a number of other men—Governor McKeldin, of Maryland, and ex-Governor Thornton, of Colorado, were mentioned—and have them withdraw right away. But the other men didn’t take kindly to the idea of being used in this way, and almost everyone saw that anything done at so late a stage would be looked upon as bogus—although no one, it is safe to say, was happy about the contrast between Chicago and San Francisco, and the Vice-President was reported to be unhappiest of all. The collapse of the movement to unseat him made his victory on the first ballot a bit too easy to be altogether pleasurable. There is not much doubt that in the last days before his nomination he was wishing Harold Stassen luck—a little luck, anyway.
Stassen had no luck at all—except that he managed not to be drummed out of the regiment on the parade ground here—and speculation about the kind of President that Nixon would make has taken on a new meaning and urgency. The impressions one gathered here during the week were not of the sort to confirm the fears of those who thought that love for the Republic demanded his early elimination. There has always been a certain lack of specificity about these fears; people have been bothered by Nixon without being able to say precisely why, just as the author of the celebrated lines about Dr. Fell was unable to say why he disliked the man. There are doubtless many people who continue to feel that way about Nixon, despite the fact that he has lately been laboring with great zeal to remove any possible reasons for being unloved. He has been very much on his dignity. In his meetings with the state caucuses, he recommended that the 1956 campaign be conducted on the highest possible moral level, and gave the delegates his opinion that Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver were honorable and patriotic Americans who should in no circumstances be accused of having base motives. His acceptance speech was close enough to liberal orthodoxy to qualify him—ideologically, at any rate—for membership on the national board of Americans for Democratic Action. He seemed to stand far to the left of where Henry Wallace stood in 1934. He had barely sat down when his detractors began to explain that it was all subterfuge. His detractors, however, are slightly fewer in number than they were a while back, and there are some people here who think that the new Nixon is an authentic creation. They think that the temper of the times and the magic of the Presidency are at work upon him. The temper of the times seems to demand that any man in or approaching a high administrative office talk and act like some species of liberal, and the magic of the Presidency, to which he is now so near, seems capable of creating maturity and a sense of responsibility in some of the least promising of men.
Richard H. Rovere
OCTOBER 5, 1957 (ON EISENHOWER AND LITTLE ROCK)
HE PRESIDENT GAVE a full day’s notice that he might use federal troops in Little Rock, and that notice, the Washington Post said on the following morning—the morning of the day the 101st Airborne Division was flown in—was “what the situation desperately requires.” Breathing hard, as most of Washington was, and making heavy demands on its reserve supplies of outraged rhetoric, the Post went on to say that “the Faubus-inspired mob which forced the withdrawal of Negro students from the Central High School yesterday is a threat to the supremacy of the United States just as surely as if it had barricaded the White House.” Most people here saw matters that way and responded to the President’s proclamation on Monday with relief and release; the warning broke the tension, and very little was said in dispraise of Mr. Eisenhower’s proclamation, except that it might have come earlier. On Monday, most people still believed that the threat of force would make force itself unnecessary. No doubt the President, who had flown down from Newport that morning for a bit of speechmaking on fiscal problems, returned to Rhode Island confident that he had a way of fixing Governor Faubus and that one more piece of unpleasantness was at an end. Had he thought otherwise—had he thought that his cease-and-desist proclamation would be taken no more seriously than a “No Smoking” sign in a theatre lobby—he would undoubtedly have stayed on.
The militant integrationists could have been pleased with the threat to use troops, but in no quarter is there rejoicing at the soldiers’ steely presence in Little Rock. No one who sides with the President is now saying any more than that he did what he had to do, and those who oppose him are almost certainly as aware of the truth of this as anyone else. Senator McClellan and the few other Southern congressmen who happen to be in town are giving out angry statements, but for years the Southern politicians have been affecting a choler on racial matters that few of them really feel, and it is probable that most of them sensed that the President was acting—with Lord knows how much reluctance—only as the situation and his responsibilities required him to act. The Constitution, law and order, elementary justice, the prestige of the country abroad, the political demands of the Cold War, the coordinate theory of government by which he sets so much store—all these demanded the 101st Airborne. Nothing is more certain than that if there had been a less drastic alternative, he would have seized upon it. (There were alternatives as recently as last week, but they seemed drastic for their time, and he didn’t want to get into this disagreeable business at all. A few weeks ago, he said, “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops.”) He is not an ardent integrationist; unless his whole makeup has changed recently the cause moves him even less than abolitionism for its own sake moved Lincoln. It could not have been with any overpowering sense of self-righteousness that he gave his historic orders to the troops the day before yesterday. He doubtless reckoned, as almost everyone here reckons, that it was a mite better to uphold the courts with bayonets than not to uphold the courts at all. But only a mite, for it is impossible to maintain that either orderly integration or the good name of the country has been very much advanced by his decision. Senator Russell, of Georgia, may have spoken for Southern Bourbonism when he said that the President’s action would increase racial tensions throughout the South, but he spoke also for simple common sense. There is a taint on justice whenever it has to be enforced at the point of a gun. To be sure, there is a larger and uglier taint on Governor Faubus and on the mobs whose refusal to disperse forced the President to the step he took so unwillingly, but the mobs can be dispersed by well-armed troops, while the memory that will endure in the community is that it took an army to carry the day.
It may be, of course, that integration in the schools will be more quickly accomplished because of what has happened in Little Rock. Amid the encircling gloom, this now seems the unlikeliest of possibilities. But as much paradox and wayward logic exist in politics as in anything else in life, and there is at least an off-chance that in the litigation that is now bound to occur it will be revealed that the militant resistance movement was organized in the Governor’s office and had no real roots anywhere else. It is known that integration in schools and in transportation elsewhere in Arkansas has taken place without undue disturbance, and it is also known that close associates of Governor Faubus were busy rousing the rabble outside Central High School. It is at least conceivable that no more showdowns will be required and that something workable will come out of next week’s conference with the Southern governors. Right now, though, the melancholy prospect is that the President’s action, no matter what moral and Constitutional justification may be found for it, has made everyo
ne’s life, including his own, more difficult.
· · ·
In 1952, on the eve of Mr. Eisenhower’s first election, Dennis W. Brogan, a leading British authority on American affairs, wrote that the besetting intellectual sin of our politicians and of a fair number of our people was a refusal to come to terms with the fact that “a great many things happen in the world regardless of whether the American people wish them to or not.” In an article in Harper’s called “The Illusion of American Omnipotence,” Mr. Brogan, mindful of our discouragement and bitterness over the course of events in Korea, said that the basic fallacy in our thinking was the assumption that “the world must go the American way if the Americans want it strongly enough and give firm orders to their agents to see that it is done.” We would suffer less, he went on, and perhaps accomplish more, if we abandoned this view and, in particular, its dangerous corollary, which is “the idea that the whole world, the great globe itself, can be moving in directions annoying or dangerous to the American people only because some elected or non-elected Americans are fools or knaves. When something goes wrong, ‘I wuz robbed!’ is the spontaneous comment—the American equivalent of that disastrous French cry ‘Nous sommes trahis!’ ”
Whatever else may be said of the last five years, they have seen the shattering of the illusion of American omnipotence. At least in administration circles, there is today an acute awareness of the limitations of American power (which is, of course, distinct from force, of the kind displayed this week), and there are times when it appears that the false pride—if that is what it was—of a few years ago has given way to a conviction that such power as we have is a poor and feeble instrument for dealing with the causes of American distress. Mr. Dulles, for instance, who in 1952 was saying in the Republican platform that sound American policy could have defeated Communism in China, has lately spent much of his time pointing out that there are many parts of the world and many world problems that are beyond the practical reach of American policy. Hungary was last year’s leading example; Mr. Dulles’s own passion for liberation was well known, and the American will to assist was almost boundless, but the situation, as the White House and the State Department saw it, was one in which there simply wasn’t any role for American power except the unacceptable one of going to war with the Soviet Union. The Suez crisis was another example; it grew, according to the administration’s analysts, out of conflicts in which we had had no part, and could not possibly have been averted by any American action. (The cry of betrayal was heard all over Washington at the height of the Suez crisis, but it was directed mainly at Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet.) And in recent weeks there have been the cases of Syria and Thailand, where things have been going not at all as we would like them to go. Anyone who now asks at the State Department about the Syrian coup d’état and other developments in the Middle East is likely to be read a long Toynbeean lecture on the culture and tradition of the region, on its ancient history of instability, and on the folly of supposing that we Americans can do everything we wish; a Southeast Asia variant of the argument covers the Thailand situation. It is not only beyond the seas that American power has apparently become attenuated; even on our own soil there are areas where it is held to be inoperative. Before the President reluctantly went to the extreme of using federal troops in Little Rock, he repeatedly gave as his reason for failing to intervene in some other way his belief that there was nothing effective he could do. Administration economists protest the unfairness of holding the government responsible for the current inflation; this is a free society, they say, and while the Treasury prints the money and the Federal Reserve Board, which is theoretically independent of the administration, has some control over the discount rates and the amount of money in circulation, the ultimate value of our currency is determined by private citizens—as makers and purveyors and buyers of commodities and services. The President, taking a somewhat different tack in his speech before the directors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund earlier this week, said that there is inflation the world over, and that it has to be approached as an essentially global problem. Either way, there is no illusion of omnipotence; the United States government is quick to acknowledge that its ability to control events is far from absolute.
The illusion of omnipotence lies shattered today because the Republican Party has once more grown familiar with authority and responsibility. Out of office for twenty years, and ravening for the kind of issues that would restore them to office, the Republicans created and spread the particular myths that Mr. Brogan deplored in 1952. They were not specifically Republican myths, however, or even specifically American ones. In all countries, out-of-office politicians scour the world for disasters they can charge to the ruling party’s account, and if the Democrats should be kept out of the White House as long as the Republicans were, they will create a set of their own myths. Some of them had a go at it in the last campaign, when they talked as if the President were responsible for the presence on earth of Colonel Nasser, and Harry S. Truman has recently argued that a vigorous administration in Washington could have foiled the so-called Captains’ Plot in Damascus. Not all Republicans accepted the illusion they sought to create; at the national convention in 1952, Mr. Dulles conceded to reporters that the fall of China to the Communists was an event of somewhat greater complexity than he had made it out to be in the Party platform, but for justification he appealed to the part of the code of political ethics that holds those in power liable for both the credit and the blame for whatever occurs during their tenure. Some Republican politicians, though, did come to accept the illusion, and it was a realization of this that led a number of people here to feel that one excellent reason for giving the Republicans a turn at the helm was to let them learn by experience that the ship of state could not go everywhere its masters and its passengers chose to go.
The Republicans learned with almost breathtaking speed. One of the President’s first and most popular acts was the negotiation of a Korean truce whose terms were a denial of omnipotence, and almost every settlement the administration has made or accepted since then, in both domestic and international affairs, has betrayed an acknowledgment of the imperfect and incomplete nature of sovereignty. At Geneva as well as at Panmunjom, in Indo-China and Suez as well as in Korea, in a whole series of appropriations bills as well as in the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Eisenhower and his associates have accepted compromise without apology and have often proclaimed it as victory. A fact that Mr. Brogan, and perhaps the Republican leaders themselves, did not appreciate in 1952 was that the illusion of omnipotence was really alien to the spirit of most Republicans. They could use it as a political gambit, but they could not possibly be governed by it in their political decisions. The core of Republican philosophy is that government is of very limited value in human affairs, that it is generally an impediment to the growth and development of a society, and that political virtue consists largely in the restraint and hobbling of politicians. Republicanism at its most characteristic holds that politics is the art of the possible and that not very much is possible. Robert A. Taft used to say that he actually had no principled objection to government intervention in the economic and social affairs of the country; he simply believed that the federal bureaucracy was too large and unwieldy and remote from the people to be able to do anything the way it ought to be done. Mr. Eisenhower’s reasoning may follow a somewhat different line, but he comes out at the same place, and in this sense his credentials as a Republican of the classic breed are unchallengeable.
It is reassuring to know that illusions of omnipotence cannot flourish for very long in American politics, but what alarms some people now is the development of something very much like an illusion of American impotence. Especially in foreign policy, the administration has lately been acting not as if only a few things were possible but, rather, as if nothing were possible. The State Department loudly deplores adverse developments in far parts of the world and then learnedly explains why nothing could have
been done to prevent them. The sensible view of history that Mr. Brogan urged on Americans has its political as well as its intellectual advantages (it reduces political hysteria, in addition to being, in all probability, true), but when it is combined in large quantities with the view that the future is almost certainly going to be as refractory as the past, it becomes a kind of soft Machiavellianism, a Realpolitik of inaction. We couldn’t help what happened in the Middle East last month; ergo we can’t help what is going to happen there next month, particularly since the policy that covers the area—the Eisenhower Doctrine—requires that we take no action until we are formally requested to by some Middle Eastern power. In the early stages of the Eisenhower administration, disengagement—especially from the Far Eastern conflicts of the period—was a conscious and vigorously pursued policy, whose aim, most people believed, was to permit a more effective engagement in the parts of the world that the President considered more important from the point of view of national interest. We got out of Korea, we stayed out of the war in Indo-China, and we narrowed the range of our commitments to the Chinese Nationalists because we wished to use the strength we had to better effect. But the tempo of disengagement never slackened; we have reduced our commitments not just in a couple of strategic places but very nearly everywhere, and because our commitments have become fewer, we have drastically reduced the power that is our primary resource in foreign policy. Military spending for all services is on the decline; hardly a week goes by without an announcement from the Pentagon of a necessary retrenchment in some program or other. Foreign aid has become almost wholly a matter of military aid to a few Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Aid for economic development consists of little more than a demonstration program here and there. It is not, as some people suppose, a resurgent isolationism that accounts for this. Mr. Eisenhower is not an isolationist of any sort, nor is Mr. Dulles. The President unquestionably believes as earnestly as he ever did in NATO, the United Nations, disarmament, and many other worthy things, and the Secretary of State is as ardent as he ever was about making the world a fit place for the righteous. But they have conducted foreign policy in such a way as to destroy the illusion of omnipotence and to encourage its replacement—in the administration itself, in Congress, and evidently, to a large degree, in the country as a whole—with the illusion that because we can do relatively little with our power, we need relatively little power.
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