by I. F. Stone
The political folly of our latest move is not limited to Cambodia. The newly enlarged war must add to the shaky character of the Thieu regime, which has had to close down all the South Vietnamese schools in a rising student revolt much like our own. The idea of South Vietnamese troops being used to bolster a government which has been massacring Cambodian citizens of Vietnamese origin must add to Thieu’s unpopularity. The bitterness between the Viets and the Khmers of Cambodia is incomparably older and more bitter than the recent animosities of the Russo-American cold war. It is only two centuries since the Viets seized the Mekong delta from the Khmers. Sihanouk, unlike his successors, never stirred up the mob against the Vietnamese and the VC and NVA intruders, unlike our forces, did not bomb and devastate Cambodian villages. This new shift strengthens the forces opposing our puppets on both sides.
This has been a political war from its very beginning against the French. We go on believing as they did that a political problem can be solved by military means. The annals of their war, like ours, is full of sensationally billed search-and-destroy operations which were finally going to cripple the rebels, like this latest “Operation Total Victory” across the Cambodian border. The Communists under Ho Chi Minh seized national leadership in the war against the French, as the adroit Sihanouk did in Cambodia. Now they both are allied against us. Sihanouk will now make it possible for the other side to implement the basic strategy of a People’s War on a wider scale. The strategy is to force maximum dispersion upon the hated foreign invader to make him widen the area of his activity and stretch his lines of communication so that the guerrillas can pick and choose the most advantageous weak points for their concentrated attacks. We have picked up their treacherous gambit by invading Cambodia and sooner or later unless we get out of Indochina altogether, we must send ground troops into Laos and Cambodia, perhaps even into North Vietnam where a fresh army of 250,000 or more awaits our landing. Nowhere has airpower, however overwhelming and unchallenged, been able to win a war.
What will happen when the country wakes up to find that instead of withdrawing troops we are going to send in fresh divisions? What happens to inflation, the budget and the stock market? To student and racial unrest? Nixon, in a mood of self-pity, complained in his April 30 address that past war Presidents did not have to face a nation “assailed by counsels of doubt and defeat from some of the most widely known opinion leaders of the nation.” He seems to attribute this to some perversity. He takes it as personal. He does not stop to consider why this war has aroused so much more opposition than any past war, and done so in every class and every region and every age-group, from Wall Street financiers to campus radicals. Even National Guardsmen give the V-sign to students, and soldiers go into battle with peace amulets around their necks. He seems to think there is something wrong with the critics. He will not face up to the possibility that there is something wrong with the war. Certainly this generation of Americans would prove no less patriotic and brave than any other if our country were really in danger.
It is a measure of our stupid leadership that the Cambodian war was started on the phoney pretext that just across the border was a kind of enemy Pentagon and that we could cripple the enemy by smashing it. One measure of the mendacity may be found in an intelligence briefing the New York Times reported April 4, two weeks after Sihanouk’s overthrow. It said COSVN, the enemy HQ, had been moved from Cambodian to South Vietnamese territory. The story even carried a map showing the old location at Mimot—which figures in recent accounts of the Cambodian operation—in the “fishhook” and the new location in a thick jungle area described as “virtually inaccessible to ground troops” and “probably not seriously vulnerable to air attacks.” It is difficult to believe that Nixon and his aides are such idiots as not to be aware of this intelligence information.
The Eichmann trial taught the world the banality of evil. Nixon is teaching the world the evil of banality. The man so foolish as to talk to protesting students about football and surfing is the same man who (like Johnson) sees war in the puerile terms of “humiliation” and a challenge to his virility. He doesn’t want us to be a “helpless giant” (which we are in Indochina) so he is plunging us into a wider quagmire where we will end up more helpless than ever.
The past week is the week in which the Nixon Administration began to come apart. Letters like Hicke’s showed how isolated he is even from members of his own Cabinet, where there seems to be a silent majority against him. The antiwar round robin signed by more than 200 employes of the State Department shows how deeply the Cambodian affair has stirred even the most timid, conformist and conventional section of the bureaucracy. Nothing Nixon says can be taken at face value. Even when he said on April 20, in his troop withdrawal announcement, that a “just peace” was at last in sight, he must have been planning this expansion of the war. Indeed, General Westmoreland as Army Chief of Staff had already begun to lobby for a Cambodian invasion in off-the-record briefings.
There were two remarks of the deepest significance in the Nixon press conference of May 8. One was that if we withdraw from Vietnam “America is finished insofar as the peace-keeper in the Asian world is concerned.” This revealed that he is still committed, despite that vague “low posture” talk on Guam, to a Pax Americana in Asia. If we are to police Asia we are in for many years of war and internal disruption. The folly is as great as if China were to try and become the “peace-keeper” of Latin America. The other remark was that unlike Johnson he would not escalate step by step but “move decisively.” This is the Goldwater-LeMay thesis that we could have won the Vietnam war if we had smashed Hanoi and Haiphong in one great blow, perhaps with nuclear weapons. Hanoi, especially after the recent big bombing raids, expects something of the kind. Moscow and Peking are already trying to patch up their differences in expectation of it. If Nixon goes to nuclear weapons, the end result may well be World War III. Unless an army of students can fan out to the grass roots and make the country aware of these dangerous possibilities, terrible days may lie ahead.
Part Seven
HEROES AND OTHERS
Thomas E. Dewey
A caustic, entertaining sketch of New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican candidate for president in 1944 and a man who, in Stone’s memorable phrase, “reeks of self-assurance . . . small stuff and cold fish.”
. . .
May 20, 1944
ALBANY FASCINATES ME, but I can’t say the same for Dewey. The capital of New York would inspire Dreiser and depress De Tocqueville, but its Governor is a Republican Presidential candidate, very standard model. I’ve waded through a foot-high pile of Dewey messages, speeches, and statements kindly supplied by his affable press secretary, James C. Hagerty. I listened to the Governor address the American Newspaper Publishers’ meeting in New York and watched him being charming to the hopeful on the platform after it was over. I’ve read almost everything written about him, except the Rupert Hughes work, which seems to have confused him with George Washington and Lucky Luciano with a cherry tree. I’ve talked to people who work closely with him and to people who hate him, the latter being easy to find in Albany and New York where Dewey has been seen in close-up. And all I can report is that for the first time since becoming a Washington correspondent and on one of the few occasions since I became a newspaperman, I found myself with an assignment that bored me.
On international affairs, Dewey might be Warren G. Harding, an internationalist but—. On domestic affairs, where straight Hooverism is no longer possible even for a Republican, Dewey might be Alfred Landon, unalterably opposed to the New Deal, four square against its threat to the American way of life, but in agreement with its basic principles, though he thinks they are poorly administered. As a public figure, he is as familiar a type—the “clean government” reformer who is death on all crooks except the really big and respectable ones of our society. As a man, he is competent, courageous, hard-working, but extraordinary only in his drive, his singleness of purpose, the intensity of
his ambition. I don’t think he is wicked, sinister, dishonest, or fascist, though I suppose he will have such epithets thrown at him when the campaign gets heated; I think he is a good American, very far removed from anti-democratic crackpots, racial bigots, and Bertie McCormicks. But the man is uninteresting because he presents no complexities, deviates in no way from type. I can see nothing but the commonplace in his mind. I sense no lift of idealism in his spirit; his motivations seem to me wholly self-seeking. And the personality is completely lacking in human warmth.
This may sound harsh and it may be unjust, but it is said only after much thought and consideration, and it checks with the reactions of people who are his friends as well as with those of his enemies. Dewey has been called “a boy scout,” and he is one in the sense that he sees the problems of our society purely in the obvious and elementary terms of personal morality; I say obvious and elementary because he would not see the profounder immoralities in our customary ways of living and doing business. But he is not a boy scout in the sense that he would let a naive but praiseworthy and wholesome sense of duty stand in the way of personal aggrandizement. He chose the law as a profession because he thought it offered the prospect of greater and more secure financial rewards than singing; none of those who have written of him or who know him claim that he was attracted to the law as a useful way to spend one’s life, or because he was inspired by the example of some great judge or advocate. There is nothing in him of the Galahad or the Quixote. His sensational splurge as prosecutor in New York was a quick stepping-stone to the Governorship, not the beginning of a job that he felt had to be completed in the interest of civic duty or clean government, and the Governorship is a stepping-stone to the Presidency. He is a kind of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford in politics, a man who plays for the quick rise and the big profit. That the profit is in personal advancement rather than money is a detail, not an essential. Dewey’s eye has always been on the headlines, not the stars. The men who worked with him as D.A. will tell you that the press was as constantly in their thoughts as the jury.
A certain humility makes a man lovable and marks him wise. Dewey reeks of self-assurance. You look at him on the platform and think of Brownings line, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” but only because the two spring from such different worlds. It is only in the most superficial sense that Dewey would ever think of himself as unfit; he is said to be busy boning up on American history now in preparation for the Presidency. He would never think of himself as unworthy. Big men usually have a sense of fun. Roosevelt has it, Churchill has it, Lenin had it, so saintly a figure as Gandhi jokes and frolics. Dewey would never dream of making a joke at his own expense. His humor, or what passed for it, is heavy-footed, as when he referred to newsboys at the publishers’ dinner in New York as “purveyors of your products.” (I was there; I heard it.) He is not what we call a regular guy. There is nothing in him of Willkie’s rich curiosity, human interest, or careless vitality. Dewey is small stuff and cold fish, handsomer and physically robust but really a good deal like Coolidge, frugal spiritually, a man who does not give himself freely.
I saw Dewey for the first time at the publishers’ dinner, a trying event for most of those present because so many long-winded speakers preceded him, a trying occasion for him because Eric Johnston of the United States Chamber of Commerce tried to steal the show, and almost succeeded. Johnston’s speech was the improvisation of a shrewd highschool boy, and I remember it chiefly for its gorgeously mixed metaphors, but it went over big with the publishers. Dewey seemed restive until his moment came. He went forward like a singer, chest out, enormously self-possessed. He sounded like a man who had studied with a first-rate elocutionist in a smallish town. One could have written a musical score for the speech. His gestures, the modulation of his voice, the measured emphasis and stress, were too perfect to be pleasant; the manner was conceited. When he praised Secretary of State Hull, it was with the gracious condescension that he might have used in patting a small boy on the head. The speech was expertly prepared and made Johnston’s seem as amateurish as it was. Dewey gave an orotund solemnity to such hollow stuff as “When we have ceased to wage war, we shall have to wage peace,” with the air of a man delivering an epigram.
In Albany I found those close to Dewey devoted to him. Four investigations are going here full blast, and the town is overrun with racket-busters who used to work for Dewey in New York. They like him, irrespective of political differences, for Dewey is competent, a good executive, and the young lawyer’s ideal of a prosecutor. The young men in his immediate entourage are capable rather than brilliant, and already envisage themselves as the Harry Hopkinses and Louis Howes of the next Administration. It is a giddy thing to be on a Presidential band-wagon, and those few of them who have New Dealish backgrounds are rapidly throwing earlier ideas overboard as excess baggage. Even in this innermost circle one has the feeling that Dewey inspires fear and respect rather than affection. “He’s very self-centered and never seems interested in you personally,” said one racket-buster reflectively in answer to a question. But outside the circle of Deweyites, one encounters only dislike of the Governor.
In part, this dislike is to Dewey’s credit. The town is comfortably corrupt. So is the Legislature. The Governor’s attack on the local O’Connell machine brought reprisal in the shape of an O’Connell investigation of the Republican Legislature. Dewey was forced to take the investigation over to protect his party, but the man he chose as special prosecutor, Hiram C. Todd, is forceful and independent, and there will be difficulty in keeping the investigation within safe bounds. Dewey started out to investigate favoritism in assessments in Albany, the payment of current expenses out of bond issues, and election frauds. He hoped to duplicate in Albany the success he had achieved as a gang-buster in New York and break the one important Democratic machine upstate. But an investigation of the Legislature, which has been Republican-controlled for many years, was not part of his original plan. The fears this investigation has aroused in his own party have served to make Republican legislators subservient to him, and he has ruled the Legislature like a little dictator. But the inquiry itself will not be allowed to go too far because it would hurt the Republicans more than the Democrats in an election year and would inevitably involve big money interests with which Dewey is himself allied.
To understand the political problems that confront Dewey in Albany, one must understand this old Dutch town at the head of navigation on the Hudson. It exhibits the slatternly side of the Democratic process. For the first twenty years of the century it was solidly Republican. During the past twenty years it has been as solidly Democratic. During both periods it has been corrupt, and during both the respectable elements have shared widely in the benefits of machine government. They resent these investigations. The Democratic era began with an alliance between Dan O’Connell, son of a saloon keeper, and the old-family owner of the Alleghany-Ludlum steel works. Albany’s political revolutions have not been the result of uprisings by an outraged citizenry but of internal feuds in aging political machines. A legislative investigation before the last war plus some fiery attacks by Teddy Roosevelt upon the Barnes political machine only increased the Republican vote at the next election, and there are many people here who think local resentment will enable the O’Connells to pile up a larger majority than ever before. Dewey’s unpopularity in Albany might cost him New York State and the Presidency.
From all I can see, the O’Connell machine is still united and vigorous. Unless Dewey can unearth evidence of some major crime, it is unlikely that he can shake its popular strength. But the O’Connell machine has been in power so long that it has been many years since any rough tactics were required to keep either its henchmen or the populace in line. Public standards are higher than they were a generation ago, and in some respects conditions under the O’Connell regime are better than under Barnes. The “Gut,” Albany’s old tenderloin, no longer flaunts its red-light section. The principal “crimes” Dewey has
been able to lay at the door of the O’Connell machine are not of a kind to bring ordinary Albany citizens tumbling from their beds in alarm. “Bookmaking” establishments operate pretty openly. There are plenty of slot machines around. Saloons are open all night selling Hedrick beer, the O’Connell family brew. Election frauds seem to be common, but the O’Connells have so tight a grip on grand and petit jury lists that not much could be done about them.
Albany’s city government seems to have been holding down its tax rate by paying current expenditures out of capital borrowings. Assessments seem to be adjusted to aid the deserving and teach the independents a lesson; Dan O’Connell’s first political job was as tax assessor, a post he used to good advantage in building his machine. These are dishonest practices no one could wish to condone—except the property owners and lawyers who benefit by them, and their beneficiaries are many. We Americans are for clean government in theory and political favors in practice. This makes the Dewey type popular—at a distance. One of Dewey’s advisers in Albany is a nice young Republican lawyer who represents large property interests through his father-in-law’s estate, helps run a leading real-estate firm, and does a substantial volume of business representing the Republican minority which has to take its assessment appeals to the courts instead of to the district leader. Dewey assigned him to investigate assessments, and the investigation will make it easier for a time to be a Republican in Albany, but an assessments scandal will neither break the O’Connell machine nor make dramatic headlines elsewhere.
In part Albany’s dislike for Dewey is a result of his shortcomings as a person. Other Governors were gracious and became part of the life of the town. Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Lehman lived, shopped, and entertained in Albany. Both were a familiar sight downtown. “Albanians,” as they call themselves, have the civic patriotism of a Greek city-state. “We never see Mrs. Dewey,” they complain. Albany feels that Dewey is only a man on the make, hurrying through on his way somewhere else. It is contented in its corruption, thinks it civic misdeeds no worse than those of most cities, believes it is being smeared and sacrificed to provide a Dewey triumph, resents a certain ruthlessness and self-righteousness in the Governor’s attitude toward it.