LETTER TO HONORABLE STANSFIELD TURNER FROM DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80M00165A001800060019-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 27, 2004
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: October 7, 1977
• Content Type: LETTER

DANIEL P,. MOYNIHAN
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's~UCrrif ?b '$fafez '$enaf e
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20510
Dear Admiral Turner:
We had a good talk bin
Tuesday and I look forward to
the next chapter. Here is the
Podhoretz article i promised.
Honorable Stansfield Turner
Director
The Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D. C. 20505
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THE CULTURE OF APPEAS11pblAMENT
A naive pacifism is the dangerous legacy of Vietnam
HAS THE UNITED STATES re-
covered from Vietnam? The
general feeling seems to be
that it has. Just this past In-
dependence Day, for example, Tom
Wicker of the New York Times deliv-
ered himself of the view that it was
"a familiar sort of Fourth"-the kind,
he said, "that was commonplace, even
predictable, before the long, succes.
sive traumas of Vietnam and Water-
gate brought Americans a decade of
self-doubt, self-criticism, self-loathing,
on the one hand, and responding de-
nials, anger, and chauvinism on the
other." Of course, Wicker's rhetoric
loads the case; it is in fact so reminis-
cent of the fevered atmosphere of the
Vietnam era that in itself it casts doubt
on the return to normalcy he then
goes on to celebrate. But such subtle-
ties aside, many people would agree
that we have recovered from Vietnam
and that we are back to normal again.
I am not one of those people. I think
that, far from having put Vietnam be-
hind us, we are still living with it in
a thousand different ways. It is there
everywhere, a ubiquitous if often eerily
invisible presence in our political cul-
ture. And it has left us a legacy of
influence which threatens to have an
even more destructive effect on
future than it has already had on
past.
our
our
Perhaps the most obvious evidence
of this influence is in the new Ameri-
can attitude toward war. The idea of
war has never been as natural or
glamorous to Americans as it used
be to the English or the Germans
the French. We have always tended
this country to think of war as at best
a hideous necessity, not as a "contin-
uation of politics by other means" or,
alternatively, as an opportunity for
heroism, glory, and honor. War to
Americans is a calamity when it hap-
pens, it is a dirty business while it
lasts, and the sooner it can be gotten
over with the better. But negative as
this attitude may be, it is still a far
cry from the undifferentiated fear,
loathing, and revulsion that the pros-
pect of war now seems to inspire in
the American mind.
No doubt a rise in pacifist senti-
ment is inevitable in the wake of any
war, especially a war that ends, as
Vietnam did, in humiliation and de-
feat. No doubt, also, the way the war
in Vietnam was reported as well as
the way it was opposed (a distinction
more easily made in theory than it was
ever observed in practice) helped to
stimulate a vaguely pacifist response.
All one heard about and saw was the
horrors of war-unredeemed, as it ap-
peared, by any noble purpose. No he-
roes emerged, only villains and vic-
tims, and nothing good was accom-
plished by American troops and Amer-
ican arms, only evil: only destruction,
misery, murder, and guilt.
Norman Podhoretz is the editor of Commen-
tary and the author of Making It and Doings
and Undoings.
by Norman Podhoretz
This is how pacifist ideologues look
upon war in general, and the promi-
nent position of pacifist organizations
in the protest movement against Amer-
ican military involvement in Vietnam
probably influenced the way the war
came to be conceived and described.
(It is worth noting, however, that the
pacifist world was split between those
who, in the traditional pacifist spirit,
regarded all wars as equally evil and
those who, in a newer spirit, were will-
ing to justify and even celebrate "wars
of national liberation" and to con-
demn only "wars of imperialist ag.
gression," such as they imagined the
United States was waging in Vietnam.)
But be all that as it may, so power-
ful did the pacifist tide become that
it even reached backward to engulf
World War II, probably the most pop-
ular war in which the United States
had ever participated. To this "Viet-
namization" of World War II, as we
may call it, two immensely success-
ful novels of the Sixties, Joseph Hel-
ler's Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five, made perhaps the
largest contribution. Although written
without reference to Vietnam and pub-
lished in 1961, just before American
troops began to be sent there, Catch-
22 achieved full cultic status only later
in the decade, when it could be seized
upon to discredit the one war from
which something good had almost uni-
versally been thought to have come.
Not even World War II, the war against
Hitler, was worth fighting, said Catch-
22, to the acclaim of millions; nor,
added Vonnegut in his story of the
bombing of Dresden, had we acted
any less criminally in that war than
we were acting in Vietnam.
S THE PAST was
namized, so is the
being subjected to
thus Viet-
future now
the same
treatment. We have, that is,
reached a point at which any Amer-
ican military action, anywhere in the
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 THE CULTURE OF P 'AS
world, in support o any o'jec
whatever, has become difficult to imag-
ine. Officially, of course, the President
and those who speak in his name con-
tinue to declare that we will "honor
our commitments." But does anyone
take it for granted any longer-as
everyone did before our defeat in Viet-
nam-that we would do so if it meant
going to war?
And even short of actually going to
war, there is the matter of our will-
ingness to maintain the military forces
necessary to deter the Soviet Union
from moving any further ahead. Here,
too, just as we officially remain com-
mitted to the defense of Western Eu-
rope, Japan, Israel, South Korea, and
perhaps one or two other countries,
we are also officially determined to
prevent the Soviet Union from achiev-
ing the kind and degree of military
superiority which would make a mock-
ery of that commitment. But again ap-
pearances are misleading. Every year,
it seems, the struggle against military
spending grows more intense. While
the Soviet Union engages in the most
massive military buildup in the his-
tory of the world, we haggle over ev-
ery weapon. We treat our own mili-
tary leaders as though they were
wearing the uniform of a foreign pow-
er. Everything they tell us about our
military needs is greeted with hostil-
ity and suspicion, and when, in re-
sponse to sentiment of this nature, the
President decides to scrap the B-1
bomber, one would think from the an-
swering cheer that our mortal enemies
had suffered a grievous defeat.
Now it may be that the decision to de-
velop an updated B-52 fleet armed with
cruise missiles instead of the B-1 was
sound from a strictly military point of
view, as well as from an economic one.
But it would be naive to suppose that
the campaign against the B-1 was
fueled by a desire for the most effec-
tive possible weapons system at the
lowest possible cost. No doubt this was
what the President and some others
had in mind, but cost-effectiveness was
hardly the factor which made for the
tremendous passion over the B-1. The
real goal of the campaign against it,
according to a spokesman for Clergy
and Laity Concerned (a group which
is itself a legacy of Vietnam, having
been spawned in opposition to that
war and having survived to fight an-
other day), "was to raise fundamen-
faT questions abou[ the meaning-671-5:' idea " Tliat-yri ricans- consume more
tional security and the militarization than their "fair share" of resources.
of American foreign policy, using the From this it is concluded that a vol-
B-1 as symbol par excellence." We untary reduction in the American
can, therefore, expect that the next standard of living (a kind of unilateral
stage of the campaign will be an ef- economic disarmament) is all that is
fort to prevent development of the needed to facilitate a more equitable
cruise missile. For "to the extent that distribution of wealth throughout the
the Administration is allowed to re- world, as though prosperity were a
place an obsolescent technology (the zero-sum game and as though we did
manned bomber) with a new and even not in any case produce more wealth
more dangerous technology (the cruise than we consume. And anti-American-
missile), it can be assumed that the ism is present in the view that the
public, the press, and the Congress main threat to the liberties of the
have failed to learn the most crucial American people is the American gov-
lessons of the B-1 campaign." Those ernment itself. From this it is argued
lessons being presumably that we that preventing the FBI and the CIA
ought to have no weapons at all. from using questionable methods of
surveillance in the attempt to catch
spies and terrorists is a more urgent
N ADDITION TO pacifism, Vietnam order of business than doing anything
has left us with a legacy of native when the KGB employs the same
anti-Americanism. Obviously, the methods against American citizens in
explicit anti-Americanism which America on a vastly larger scale.
surfaced on the radical Left in the late Indeed, immediately after the news
Sixties has receded into virtual invisi- broke this past summer that the Soviet
bility. No longer do we see the name Union had been monitoring an untold
of the country spelled with a k to sug- number of phone conversations in this
gest an association with Nazi Germany. country, that this had been known to
Nor do vilifications of American so- the authorities for at least the past four
ciety fill the papers and the airwaves years, and that nothing had been done
to the exclusion of any other idea as about it for fear of endangering de-
they did only a few years ago. Eldridge tente, Tom Wicker rushed into print
Cleaver has become a born-again to express his outrage at electronic
Christian and a patriot. Rennie Davis eavesdropping-by American law-en-
has become an insurance salesman. forcement agencies. The next day,
Tom Hayden has joined the Demo- while the President was denying that
cratic Party. Jerry Rubin is off the there was anything "aggressive" about
streets and "into" the pursuit of ma- this Soviet activity, the New York
turity. Abbie Hoffman has disappeared. Times reported on another page that
But this does not mean that the anti- civil suits had been filed against
American attitudes they and others agents of the FBI associated with a
like them did so much to propagate former colleague named John Kearney
have also disappeared. These attitudes who had "headed an internal security
are still here and, in the subtler forms unit known as Squad 47 [and who]
they now assume, are perhaps even has been charged with five felony
more widespread, and certainly more counts stemming from allegedly illegal
respectable, than they ever were be- mail-openings and wiretaps that his
fore. men conducted in a search for fugitive
They are present, for example, in members of the Weather Underground,
the notion that the main obstacle to a terrorist group."
nuclear disarmament is the American The third major legacy of Vietnam
military establishment. From this it is with which we are still living is the
concluded that unilateral "restraint" altered American attitude toward Com-
in the development of weapons by the munism. Before Vietnam the spread of
United States is all that is needed to Communism was regarded as the sin-
make the Russians follow suit, as gle greatest danger to American se-
though the only reason they have con- curity and American values. .Today
structed so awesome an arsenal is that no less an authority than the Presi-
we have set them a bad example which dent of the United States stigmatizes
they have been forced to imitate. Anti- this old attitude as an "inordinate fear
Americanism is also present in the of Communism" and congratulates
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himself and his fellow Americans on
having overcome it.
One may wonder how the fear of a
totalitarian system armed, as Solzhe-
nitsyn puts-it, "to the teeth," aggres-
sively on the move, and sworn to de-
stroy the political system to which we
ourselves are presumably committed,
could ever be inordinate. But Mr. Car-
ter is almost certainly right in observ-
ing that no such fear is widespread in
America today. A few individuals like
Henry Jackson, Paul Nitze, and Elmo
Zumwalt, and a few small groups like
the Committee on the Present Danger
and the Coalition for a Democratic Ma-
jority keep trying to alert American
public opinion to the unprecedented di-
mensions of the Soviet military build-
up, but they are rewarded for their
pains with accusations of hysteria,
paranoia, servility toward the Penta-
gon, and worse. While the number of
strategic nuclear missiles in the Soviet
arsenal increases, while Soviet war-
ships now appear for the first time in
distant waters which no Russian navy
ever thought necessary or desirable to
patrol, while Soviet conventional forces
are strengthened and multiplied on the
Western front, while Soviet probes are
made into Africa through Cuban sur-
rogates with the evident intention of
enabling the Russians to control sea-
lanes vital to the commerce of the en-
tire West, and *hile Communist par-
ties move closer and closer to power in
Italy and France-while all this goes
on, elaborate exercises in statistical
manipulation and sophistical rationali-
zation are undertaken to explain it all
away as unreal or as insignificant or
as understandable or as unthreatening.
Nor are such exercises confined to
articles in the liberal press. They even
come out of the CIA and the Depart-
ment of Defense, whose reassuring es-
timates of the Soviet-American mili-
tary balance are obversely reminiscent
of intelligence reports which also told
a series of Presidents what they wanted
to hear about the progress of the war
in Vietnam. What Presidents Kenne-
dy, Johnson, and Nixon wanted to
hear was that the war could be won
and that it was going well; what Pres-
ident Carter wants to hear is that de-
fense spending can be cut without en-
dangering the security of the United
States. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
were given wishful intelligence anal-
By this logic, the spread of Commu-
nism into non-Communist countries
ought to be encouraged by the United
States rather than resisted, and Amer-
ican power used not to make the world
safe for democracy but to make it safe
for Communist regimes which declare
their independence of Soviet control.
Yet no Communist regime outside the
Soviet orbit, not even the one in Yugo-
slavia, countenances any political lib-
erty at all within its own borders,
while some independent Communist
regimes, notably the one in China, are
more totalitarian than the Soviet
Union itself. Jean-Francois Revel, the
distinguished French political commen-
tator, puts it with characteristic sharp-
ness when he says in his recent book
The Totalitarian Temptation that "de-
Russification does not mean democrati-
zation"; to which one may add that it
does not mean any lessening of hostili-
ty to the cause of liberty in international
affairs either. But, clearly, Revel's view
is on the defensive nowadays in the
United States, where we seem to be
moving beyond our new freedom from
the "inordinate" fear of Communism to
an even headier freedom from any
fear of Communism at all.
Or is it perhaps the opposite which
is true? Have we, that is, been plunged
by Vietnam into so great a fear of
Communism that we can no longer
summon the will to resist it?
j N SPECULATING ON this possibil-
ity, I have been struck very forc-
ibly by certain resemblances be-
tween the United States today and
Great Britain in the years after the
first world war. The British, of course,
were on the winning side in that war,
whereas we were the losers in Viet-
nam. But World War I took so great
a toll of lives and ideals that for all
practical purposes it was experienced
by the British as a defeat. Especially
among the upper-class young-as Mar-
tin Green shows in his brilliant "Nar-
rative of `Decadence' in England After
1918," Children of the Sun-there de-
veloped many of the same tendencies
we see all around us in America today.
Thus, for example, words such as sol-
dier and fighting, which had previous-
ly carried a positive charge, now be-
came so distasteful that the Iliad, with
its celebration of the martial virtues,
yses and inflated body counts; Carter the Soviet Union than it is to the West. could no longer be comfortably read.
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is given the CIA Team A and the De-
partment of Defense Presidential Re-
view Memorandum 10, whose contents,
in William Safire's description, "feed
the hopes for a smooth road to peace,
with reduced American military ex-
penditures leading to easily balanced
budgets."
But denying the realities of the So-
viet military buildup is only one of
the forms our new freedom from the
old "inordinate fear of Communism"
has been taking. Another variant ac-
knowledges that this buildup is real
but regards it as a development to be
welcomed by the United States rather
than feared. The reasoning behind this
bizarre notion is that only when the
United States and the Soviet Union
are equal in strength-when, in the
jargon of arms control, "parity" has
been achieved-will both sides feel se-
cure enough to put a halt to the arms
race and even to begin cutting back.
In accord with these assumptions,
Richard Pipes, the former director of
the Russian Research Center at Har-
vard (who also headed a team of non-
governmental experts appointed during
the Ford Administration to review the
CIA's estimate of Soviet military ca-
pability), writes, "The United States in
the mid-1960's unilaterally froze its
force of ICBM's at 1,054 and disman-
tled nearly all its defenses against ene-
my bombers.... The Russians were
watched benignly as they moved to-
ward parity with the United States in
the number of intercontinental launch-
ers, and then proceeded to attain nu-
merical superiority."
A similarly benign attitude has been
developing toward the progress of
Communism in Western Europe. In
this case, government officials, under
Nixon and Ford and now under Car-
ter, have lagged behind the "advanced"
sectors of public opinion and the for-
eign-policy establishment in continu-
ing to see the entry of Communist par-
ties into the governments of Italy and
France as a danger to NATO (not to
mention to democracy). But the in-
dications are that the gap is being
closed. Already Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance has spoken in much
milder terms about Eurocommunism
than his predecessor did; echoing the
latest conventional wisdom on the sub-
ject, he has suggested that Eurocom-
munism may be more of a threat to
 Nothing good coul be said about ers in the British Union of Fascists,
"trained up to become pseudo-homo-
war: it was wanton carnage pure and as well as prominent writers like D.H.
simple. Nor was it ever justified: the Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, sym-
things that matter, Aldous Huxley de- pathized with or actually supported
clared, can be neither defended nor Hitler and Mussolini (Osbert Sitwell,
imposed by force of arms. When war anticipating a similar fantasy of to-
comes, wrote Brian Howard in verse day about Italian Communism, once
more typical in its sentiments than argued that Italian Fascism offered an
gifted in its language, it is "because escape from the equally horrible al-
a parcel of damned old men/Want ternatives of Russian Bolshevism and
some fun or some power or some- American capitalism) ; others, like
thing." It was in an atmosphere suf- W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, John
fused with such ideas and attitudes Strachey, and Philip Toynbee, were at-
that the Oxford Pledge never to fight tracted to Stalin and to Communism.
"for King and country" was taken by And there were even some for whom
so many thousands of British under- being a democrat was so wet that they
graduates in the early 1930s. were willing to commit treason against
For England itself had been dis- the democratic country in which they
credited by the first world war in the lived. About treason, at least, there
eyes of an entire generation of the was nothing wet. Whereas "to many
privileged young. It was a wicked English people," Rebecca West later
country because it had senselessly sent wrote, patriotism had "something
the flower of its youth to the slaughter, dowdy about it," treason had "a cer-
and it was doomed because it rested tain style, a sort of elegance." More-
on obsolescent social and political over, it was understandable that trea-
foundations (by which some meant son should be committed against
that there was too much inequality and England. Thus when Guy Burgess, who
others meant there was not enough). had been a Soviet agent while pre-
Worst of all from the point of view tending to work for British Intelli-
of not a few of these "bright young gence, fled to Moscow in the Fifties
things" of the postwar period, En- just as he was about to be caught,
gland was dull and philistine. The arts Auden said that his old friend had
were more exciting in France and life become a Russian citizen for the same
was more interesting in Germany. En- reason that he himself had become an
gland was in fact so stodgy in its American citizen-"it was the only
tastes, so puritanical in its morals, and way completely and finally to rebel
so drearily middle-class in its culture against England."
that almost any alternative society was That Auden and Burgess were both
to be preferred. homosexuals clearly had something,
Politically this hostility to England perhaps everything, to do with their
could find expression equally well on need "completely and finally to rebel
the Left and the Right. Perhaps the against England." And indeed, it is
most striking example was the Mit- impossible to read books like Chil-
ford sisters, daughters of the coun- dren of the Sun or Paul Fussell's The
try's highest aristocracy, one of whom, Great War and Modern Memory with-
Unity, became a Nazi and another, out being struck by the central role
Jessica, became a Communist. In his homosexuality played in the entire
recent book on Unity, David Pryce- rebellious ethos of the interwar pe-
Jones tells the story of a British dip- riod in England. Much of the litera-
lomat who was set upon by the two ture of the first world war itself, says
sisters during a visit to their country Fussell, who has made a very thorough
estate in the early Thirties. Are you, study of it, was "replete" with homo-
they demanded of him, " `a Fascist or sexual passion. Soldiers had been a
a Communist?' and I said, `Neither, common object of fantasy and desire
I'm a democrat.' Whereupon they an- for Victorian homosexuals because of
swered, `How wet."' "their youth, their athleticism, their
There were a good many others in relative cleanliness, their uniforms,
the upper reaches of British society and their heroic readiness, like Adonis
who also thought that being a demo- or St. Sebastian, for `sacrifice.' " It is
crat was "wet" (or, as I suppose we therefore not surprising that young
would say today, square). Some, like officers fresh out of schools where, ac-
Sir Oswald Mosley and his follow- cording to Robert Graves, they were
sexuals" (Graves's name, by the way,
was stricken from the rolls of his own
school, Charterhouse, for revealing
this in his great memoir of the war,
Goodbye to All That) regularly fell
in love with each other or, more fre-
quently, with the lower-class "lads"
under their command.
BUT IF HOMOSEXUAL feeling
was aroused by the war, ho-
mosexual feeling also ac-
counted for a good deal of
the pacifism which rose out of the
trenches and into the upper reaches
of the culture after the war was over.
In war poem after war poem and in
memoir after memoir, the emphasis
was on the youthful, masculine beauty
so wantonly wasted by the war, the
bodies meant for embrace by their
own kind that were consigned so early
to the grave. Fussell writes of Wilfred
Owen, possibly the best of the English
war poets and himself a homosexual
and a casualty of the war: "What he
encountered at the front was worse
than even a poet's imagination could
have conceived. From then on, in the
less than two years left to him, the
emotions that dominated were horror,
outrage, and pity: horror at what he
saw at the front; outrage at the inabil-
ity of the civilian world ... to under-
stand what was going on; pity for the
poor, dumb, helpless, good-looking
boys victimized by it all." And the
way "the sight and touch of beauti-
ful lads ending with their frightful
death in a wanton slaughter" gave
rise to the new postwar surge of hos-
tility to British society is altogether
explicit in the case of one Capt. Ralph
Nicholas Chubb, who, in the words of
his biographer,
watched the slaughter of a boy, a
creature such as those he had al-
ways mentally, and once physically
loved. He was the curly-haired, sev-
enteen-year-old son of a blacksmith.
... His death symbolized for Chubb
all the horrors and taboos of socie-
ty. The boy, a beloved object, was
not only forbidden by law to be
loved by an adult male but was le-
gally sacrificed by the same laws in
the service of his country.
No wonder, then, that so many of
those who resented their own country
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to the point of pledging never to fight ual apologists described by Fussell
for it and even, in a few instances, to and Green, even when he is being
the point of joining forces with its most up to date. For example, review-
enemies, should have been, or should ing a recent book by Christopher
have chosen to become, homosexuals. Isherwood (who figured centrally in
For whatever else homosexuality may the culture of England during the inter-
be or may be caused by, to these war period before he emigrated to
young men of the English upper class America, and who is thus a living link
it represented-as Martin Green so between that culture and our own),
convincingly demonstrates-the refusal Vidal praises homosexuality for serv-
of fatherhood and all that fatherhood ing the alleged ecological need to con-
entailed: responsibility for a family trol population growth. But even this
and therefore an inescapable implica- trendy rationalization echoes one of
tion in the destiny of society as a his English forebears, John Addington
whole. And that so many of the privi- Symonds, who once wrote: "It would
leged young of England "no longer not be easy to maintain that a curate
wanted to grow up to become fathers begetting his fourteenth baby on the
themselves" also meant that they were body of a worn-out wife is a more ele-
repudiating their birthright as succes- vating object of mental contemplation
sors to their own fathers in assuming than Harmodius in the embrace of
a direct responsibility for the fate of Aristogiton."
the country. The great influence of this complex
The list of these young men is al- of attitudes in the mid-1930s provoked
most endless, ranging from dandies George Orwell to an outburst against
and aesthetes of the Twenties like Brian "so-called artists who spend on sodomy
Howard and Harold Acton, to expatri- what they have gained by sponging.
ate writers of the Thirties like Auden Even to wish to write about such peo-
and Isherwood, to Soviet agents like ple, as Cyril Connolly had just done
Burgess and MacLean- It was through in his novel The Rock Pool, was to
their writings, their political activities, "betray a kind of spiritual inade-
and the way of life they followed that quacy" and "a distaste for normal
an indispensable element was added to life and common decency." Thinking
the antidemocratic pacifism of the in- no doubt of the contribution this
terwar ethos: a generalized contempt "sluttish antinomianism" was making
for middle-class or indeed any kind of to the paralysis of British will in the
heterosexual adult life. To be hetero- face of an ever-growing Nazi threat,
sexual -was to be "an utterly dreary Orwell added, in a sentence which af-
middleclass bore." At Oxford, said John ter forty years retains every last bit of
Betjeman, it was only "state-subsidized its original force and relevance: "The
undergraduates [who were] generally fact to which we have got to cling,
heterosexual." The best people looked as to a life-belt, is that it is possible
to other men for sex and romance. to be a normal decent person and yet
Anyone familiar with homosexual to be fully alive."
apologetics in America today will rec- One wonders: to what extent did the
ognize these attitudes. Suitably up- policy of appeasing Hitler which the
dated and altered to fit contemporary British government followed in the
American realities, they are purveyed Thirties derive from the fear that a
by such openly homosexual writers as generation raised on pacifism and con-
Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and tempt for the life of its own society
Gore Vidal-not to mention a host of would refuse or be unable to resist
less distinguished publicists-in whose so powerful and self-confident an en-
work we find the same combination emy as Nazi Germany? It would be
of pacifism (with Vietnam naturally very hard to say, although we know
standing in for World War I), hos- that at least one prominent English-
tility to one's own country and its man of the day, the press magnate
putatively dreary middle-class way of Lord Rothermere, believed that "a
life, and derision of the idea that it moribund people such as ours is not
stands for anything worth defending equipped to deal with a totalitarian
or that it is threatened by anything state." We know, too, that Hitler him-
but its own stupidity and wickedness. self thought the British would never
Vidal in particular often reminds one fight. As he went from strength to
in his tone and style of the homosex- strength they seemed to grow more
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 TIDE CULTURE ftOr U Release 2004/03/16: CIA-RDP80M00165AO01800060019-0
and more fearful. Except for a few
lonely figures like Winston Churchill
who were generally dismissed by their
own countrymen as hysterical war-
mongers, they blinded themselves to his
intentions, rationalizing away his ev-
ery aggressive move, and proclaiming
that every advance he made was bring-
ing the world closer and closer to peace.
What else could this mean but that they
had already given up?
j T IS OF THE greatest interest to
note that Brezhnev today has ex-
pressed similar sentiments about
the United States. Not so long
ago, in a speech to Communist party
leaders in Prague-to which as little
attention has been paid in this coun-
try as was paid in England to equally
revealing speeches by Hitler in the
1930s-Brezhnev bragged of the ad-
vances the Soviet Union had been
making under cover of detente and
predicted that they would lead to an
irreversible shift in the balance of
power by the 1980s. One imagines that
he was led to this conclusion by the
response of the United States to the
Soviet military buildup, a response
which has uncannily followed the pat-
tern of British response to the Ger-
man buildup of the Thirties.
The historian Walter Laqueur divides
the British response into four distinct
stages. In stage one, it was claimed that
the reports of German rearmament were
grossly exaggerated; in stage two, the
reports were acknowledged as true, but
it was alleged.that Germany was so far
behind that it could never catch up; in
stage three, it was admitted that Ger-
many had achieved parity with or even
surpassed Britain, but it was also said
that this did not constitute a military
threat since the Germans had to defend
themselves against potential enemies in
the East as well as in the West; and in
stage four, when the full extent of Ger-
man superiority was finally faced, it was
said that survival now had to be the
overriding consideration, and the coun-
sels of appeasement prevailed. Com-
pare this to Richard Pipes's description
of the American response to the Soviet
military buildup of the past few years:
The frenetic pace of the Soviet
nuclear buildup was explained first
on the ground that the Russians
had a lot of catching up to do, then
that they had to consider the Chi-
nese threat, and finally on the
grounds that they are inherently a
very insecure people and should be
allowed an edge in deterrent capa.
bility.
We have, then, reached stage three.
Are we about to move into stage four?
The Russians, at any rate, evidently
think we already did move into it dur-
ing the heyday of detente. In fact, ac-
cording to a highly placed source with-
in the Carter Administration recently
quoted by the New York Times, the
reason the Russians are so furious
with the new Administration's human-
rights initiative is that it seems to spell
a reversal of what they previously saw
as the inexorable decline of American
will and American power. One can
only hope that they are right; and yet
the doubts grow with every new asser-
tion by the President or the Secretary
of State that this policy is not intended
to "single the Soviet Union out," and
with every new article in the press
warning against the use of human
rights as a political weapon in the
service of a "mindless anti-Commu-
nism."
The Soviet Union, after all, has noth-
ing to fear from a policy directed no
more against them than against some
of our own allies, or against right-
wing military dictatorships which,
however viciously they treat their own
citizens, pose no threat to the United
States, whether military or ideological.
For, as Daniel P. Moynihan has point-
ed out, with the passing of Nazi Ger-
many and the disappearance of Fas-
cism as a plausible political creed, it
is only Communism-or, if one pre-
fers, Marxist-Leninism-which chal-
lenges liberal democracy in the world
of ideas, values, ideologies. Small Com-
munist or Marxist-Leninist countries
attack us as viciously as, and often
more effectively than, big ones. Of
these countries one may say what St.
Augustine said of children: their vir-
tue resides not in their wills but in the
weakness of their limbs. (Where they
are not weak, as in their systems of
internal control, they are fully capable
of rivaling the Russians and the Chi-
nese in political barbarism and cruelty,
and sometimes, as in Cambodia, even
of surpassing them.) But no such vir-
tue attaches to the Soviet Union. As
the most powerful of all the Commu-
nist states, it is by that very fact the
most dangerous enemy of liberty, de-
mocracy, and human rights on the
face of the earth.
There was a time when all this was
well understood in the United States,
but that was before Vietnam. The de-
feat of .our effort to halt the spread
of Communism in Southeast Asia has
left many who supported and even su-
pervised that effort with the feeling
that there is nothing we can do to
stem the tide of Communism any-
where, not even in Western Europe.
They have thus ironically become the
de facto allies of those who are so lit-
tle opposed to Marxist-Leninism and
so much opposed to the United States
that they think nothing should be done
by America to stem the Communist
tide. In short, these repentant hawks
(so many of whom have found a perch
in the upper levels of the Carter Ad-
ministration), having been wrong on
the one side are now making up for it
by being wrong on the other. They
were wrong in their hawkishness to-
ward Vietnam-not because they wanted
to hold the line against an advancing
Communist tide but because they failed
to see that the costs of holding such a
line in Vietnam would inevitably turn
out to be too high. And now, once
again, they are wrong, this time in their
dovishness toward the Soviet Union-
not because they want to reach an ac-
commodation with the Russians, but be-
cause they fail to see that the Russians
are after something larger and more am-
bitious than an accommodation with us.
To be.sure, how we can prudently
and effectively deter the Soviet Union
and resist the advance of Communism
generally without unleashing a nuclear
war is a serious and difficult question
-the most serious and the most dif-
ficult question of the age. But even to
begin answering it requires the reali-
zation that the democratic world is
under siege, the conviction that it is
worth defending, and the understand-
ing that American power is indispen-
sable to its defense. Until this realiza-
tion, this conviction, and this under-
standing become as widespread in the
United States as once upon a time they
used to be, I for one will regard all
talk of recovery from Vietnam as a
delusion and a deceit. Meanwhile, the
parallels with England in 1937 are
here, and this revival of the culture of
appeasement ought to be troubling our
sleep. ^
HARPER'S/OCTOBER 1977
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cn febzfofez , enccfe
ALV+IAYS
Honorable Stansfield Turner
Director
The Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D. C. 20505
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