[THE CENTER MAGAZINE -MARCH/APRIL 1975 - THE ENERGY BIND--BARRY COMMONER AND RALPH NADER]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100190054-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 85
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 2, 2004
• Sequence Number: 54
• Publication Date: April 1, 1975
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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THE CENTER MAGAZINE
rppTrOMET - - 4-6
The Energy Bind - Barry Commoner and Ralph Nader
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Malcolm Moos, President; Frank K. Kelly, Vice-President and Director of Continuing Education;
Gary M. Cadenhead, Secretary and Treasurer
J. R. Parton, Chairman; Joseph Antonow, Harry S. Ashmore, Arthur A. Burck,
Blair Clark, Ramsey Clark, Fagan Dickson, James H. Douglas, Jr., Robert M. Hutchins, Vesta Hutchins,
Francis J. Lally, Edward Lamb, Eulah C. Loucks, W. Price Laughlin, Morris L. Levinson, J. Howard Marshall,
Frances McAllister, Malcolm Moos, Stewart Mott, Paul Newman, Seniel Ostrow, Bernard Rapoport,
Bernard H. Ridder, Jr., Louis Emmerson Ward, Bernard Weiasbourd, Harold Willens
Malcolm Moos, Chairman; Harry S. Ashmore, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Alex Comfort,
Lord Ritchie-Calder, Rexford G. Tugwell, Harvey Wheeler, John Wilkinson
Richard Bellman, Silviu Brucan, John Cogley, Paul Ehrlich, Mircea Ellade, Norton Ginsburg,
Neil H. Jacoby, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Alexander King, Alva Myrdal, Gunnar Myrdal, Fred Warner Neal, Raul Prebisch,
Karl H. Pribram, Robert Rosen, Nathan Rotenstrelch, Adam Schaff, Carl Friedrich von Welzsacker, Herbert F. York
Chief S. 0. Adebo, Hugh Downs, Clifton Fadiman, Frank Gibney,
Robert Gordis, Bernard Haber, N. N. lnozemtsev, Clark Kerr, Joseph P. Lyford, Milton Mayer, Melville B. Nimmer,
laidor I. Rabi, George N. Shuster
Peter Tagger, Director of Promotion, Membership, and Development;
The Center Magazine: Donald McDonald, Editor; Patricia Cathcart, Editorial Assistant;
Center Report: Mary Kersey Harvey, Editor; Myrtle Goodwin, Editorial Assistant;
Audio Tapes: Patricia Douglas, Coordinator;
Wilda Osborn, Assistant Secretary; Elsa Rylander, Assistant Treasurer;
William Dodd, Special Projects Coordinator; Nancy Andon, Program Coordinator
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THE CENTER MAGAZINE
A Publication of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
The two articles in this issue by Barry Commoner (page 26) and
Ralph Nader (page 32) have much to say on energy, but they go far
deeper and raise questions concerning the proper political and economic
organization of a modern, energy-dependent, technological society
such as ours. With due allowance for the absence of any precise and
verified measurement of our oil, coal, and natural gas reserves, we know
that the period of energy self-sufficiency for the United States is limited,
at least at the levels on which Americans have been consuming energy.
President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger have said they would
not hesitate to use force to obtain foreign oil if the country is in danger
of being strangled to death for lack of it.
The articles by Mr. Commoner and Mr. Nader are not addressed to
the Ford-Kissinger threat, but they argue that, with proper leadership,
the American people can learn to accept and adapt to energy-use
alternatives. They also argue that the allocation of energy resources must
be reexamined (is, for example, the production of petroleum-based
plastic goods more important than the production of food?), and that
government must assume far greater public-interest responsibility in the
over-all direction of the production, pricing, and distribution of energy
than it has been willing to assume to date.
Several other articles in this issue are also concerned with the
government's relationship with citizens. A report on C.I.A. Director
William E. Colby's talk and ensuing discussion at a conference on the
Central Intelligence Agency's overseas covert operations (page 71)
lets in a bit of light on what until now has been virtual opacity.
The federal government's management of the nation's forests, the
subject of our Second Edition reprint of Charles Reich's article in the
last issue, comes in for some stout defense, searching scrutiny, and not a
little criticism in the Follow-Up (page 38).
Lord Ritchie-Calder's recollection of World War II and postwar
relations between the British government and scientists (page 52)
indicates that the uneasiness and compromise, as well as the satisfactions,
experienced by our own scientists in that regard were not and
are not unique.
Some of the problems of the aging in our society are examined by Alex
Comfort, Carl Eisdorfer, Harry Ashmore, and Maggie Kuhn in the
report beginning on page 10. Dr. Thomas Szasz looks critically at the
doctor-patient relationship (page 2), and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky
tells of his experience with Zen Buddhism (page 61) .
The Moral Physician 2
Thomas S. Szasz.
Aging in the American Society 10
Prescribing the Role of Oldness Often 11
Defies the Realities of Oldness
Alex Comfort
Resources for the Aged Reflect 12
Strongly Held Social Myths
Carl Eisdorfer
Commercial Television's
Calculated Indifference to the Old
Harry S. Ashmore
Gray Panther Power
An Interview with Maggie Kuhn
The Energy Crisis - All of a Piece 26
Barry Commoner
Who Benefits? 32
Ralph Nader
Follow-Up/A Precious Resource 38
Scientists in the British
Government -a Memoir
Lord Ritchie-Calder
Zen 61
An Interview with R. J. Zwi Werblowsky
The C.I.A.'s Covert Actions 71
William E. Colby
Cover
Shirley Kalish
Design
Lauri Provencher
The Center Magazine is published bimonthly by the Fund for the Republic, Inc., 2056 Eucalyptus Hill Road, Santa Barbara, California 93108, an educational non-
profit organization. It is a membership publication and is not sold on a subscription basis. Associate Membership annual dues are $15.00, of which $5.00 is set
aside for six bimonthly issues of The Center Magazine. Printing by Interweb, Los Angeles, California. Second-class postage is paid at Santa Barbara, California and
at additional mailing offices. ?1975 The Fund for the Republic, Inc. All rights, including translation into other languages, reserved by the publisher in the United
States, Great Britain, Mexico, and all other countries participating in the International Copyright Conference and the Pan American Copyright Convention.
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THOMAS S. SZASZ
THE MORAL PHYSICIAN
What is the moral mandate of medicine? Whom
should the physician serve? The answers to these
simple questions are by no means clear. Since medi-
cine has rather intimate connections with health and
illness, life and death, it is not surprising that we are
now as uncertain about the aim of medicine as we
are about the aim of life itself. Indeed, we can be no
more clear or confident about what medicine is for
than we can about what life is for.
The moral foundations of modern medicine have
a dual ancestry: from the Greeks, medicine has in-
herited the idea that the physician's primary duty is
to his patient; and from the Romans, that his primary
duty is to do no harm. The first, although quite un-
realized, is often said to be the ideal of Western medi-
cine; the second, although quite unrealizable, is often
said to be its First Commandment.
Primum non nocere. (First, do no harm.) What a
lofty prescription! But what an absurd one! For the
question immediately arises: To whom should the
physician do no harm? And who will define what
constitutes harm?
Life is conflict. The physician often cannot help
a person without at the same time harming someone
else. He examines an applicant for life insurance,
finds that he has diabetes or hypertension, and re-
ports it to the insurance company; he treats a Hitler
or Stalin - or an ordinary person, for that matter -
and helps to prolong his life; he declares that a
woman who tortures her husband with false accusa-
tions of infidelity is psychotic, and brings about her
psychiatric incarceration. In each of these cases the
physician harms someone - either the patient or
those in conflict with him.
These examples merely scratch the surface. We
may add to them the physician's involvement with
persons desiring abortions or narcotics, with the sui-
cidal patient, with military organizations, and with
research in biological warfare - and we see how
woefully inadequate, indeed how utterly useless, are
the traditional moral guidelines of medicine for the
actual work of the physician, whether as investigator
or practitioner.
Accordingly, if we wish to confront the moral
dilemmas of medicine intelligently, we must start, if
not from scratch, then from the basics of ethics and
politics.
Everywhere, children, and even many adults, take
it for granted not only that there is a God but that he
can understand their prayers because he speaks their
language. Likewise, children assume that their par-
ents are good, and if their experiences are unbearably
inconsistent with this image, they prefer to believe
that they themselves are bad rather than that their
parents arc. The belief that doctors are their patients'
agents - serving their patients' interests and needs
above all others - seems to me to be of a piece with
mankind's basic religious and familial myths. Nor
are its roots particularly mysterious: when a person
is young, old, or sick, he is handicapped compared
to those who are mature and healthy; in the struggle
for survival, he will thus inevitably come to depend
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on his fellows who are relatively unhandicapped.
Such a relationship of dependency is implicit in
all situations where clients and experts interact. Be-
cause in the case of illness the client fears for his
health and even life, the dependency relationship is
especially dramatic and troublesome in medicine. In
general, the more dependent a person is on another,
the greater will be his need to aggrandize his helper;
and the more he aggrandizes his helper, the more de-
pendent he will be on him. The result is that the weak
person easily becomes doubly endangered: first, by
his weakness and, second, by his dependence on a
protector, who may choose to harm him.
These are the brutal but basic facts of human
relationships of which we must never lose sight in
considering the ethical problems of biology, medi-
cine, and the healing professions.
As helplessness engenders belief in the goodness
of the helper, and as utter helplessness engenders be-
lief in his unlimited goodness, those thrust into the
roles of helpers - whether as deities or doctors, as
priests or politicians - have been only too willing
to assent to these characterizations of themselves.
This imagery of total virtue and impartial goodness
serves not only to mitigate the helplessness of the
weak, but also to obscure the conflicts of loyalty to
which the protector is subject. Hence the perennial
appeal of the selfless, disinterested helper professing
to be the impartial servant of all of mankind's needs
and interests.
Traditionally, it was, of course, the clergy who
have claimed to be the agents of all of mankind -
asserting that they were the servants of God, the
creators and caretakers of all mankind. Although
this absurd claim has had its share of success, it was
doomed to be rejected in time because the represen-
tatives of the most varied creeds all claimed to speak
for the whole of mankind. Gullible as men are, they
can stand just so much inconsistency. By the time our
so-called modern age rolled around, the mythology
of any particular religion speaking for all of man-
kind became exposed for what it is, the representation
of certain values and interests as the values and in-
terests of everyone. Nietzsche called this the death
of God. But God did not die. He merely disappeared
behind the stage of history to don other robes and
re-emerge as scientist and doctor.
Since the seventeenth century, it has been mainly
the scientist - especially the so-called medical sci-
entist or physician - who has claimed to owe his
allegiance not to his profession or nation or religion,
but to all of mankind. But if I am right in insisting
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that such a claim is always and of necessity a sham,
that mankind is so large and heterogeneous a class,
consisting of members with inherently conflicting
values and interests, that it is meaningless to claim
allegiance to it or to its interests, then it behooves us,
as independent thinkers, to ask ourselves: "Whose
agent is the expert?"
Plato was fond of using the physician as his model
of the rational ruler, and in The Republic he ex-
plicitly considered the question of whose agent the
physician is. Early in that dialogue, he offers us this
exchange between Socrates and Thrasym.achus:
"Now tell me about the physician in. that strict
sense you spoke of: Is it his business to earn money
or to treat his patients? Remember, I mean your
physician who is worthy of the name."
"To treat his patient."
It would seem that we have not advanced one step
beyond this naive, hortatory answer to the question
of whose agent the physician is. In the conventional
contemporary view, too, the doctor's role is seen as
consisting in the prevention and treatment of his
patient's illness. But such an answer leaves out of
account the crucial question of who defines health
and illness, prevention and treatment.
Although Plato seemingly supports the idea that
the physician's duty is to be his patient's agent, this
is not, as we shall see, what he supports at all. By
making the physician the definer not only of his own,
but also of his patient's best interests, Plato actually
supports a coercive, collectivistic medical ethic rather
than an autonomous, individualistic one. Here is how
Plato develops his defense of the physician as agent
of the state:
"But now take the art of medicine itself ... [it]
does not study its own interests, but the needs of the
body, just as a groom shows his skill by caring for
horses, not for the art of grooming. And so every art
seeks, not its own advantage - for it has no deficien-
cies - but the interest of the subject on which it is
exercised."
Having established his claim for benevolent altru-
ism, Plato proceeds to draw the ethical and political
conclusions he was aiming at all along: the moral
justification of the control of the subordinate by
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superior - patient by doctor, subject by ruler: "... this benefit, then - the receipt of wages -
"But surely, Thrasymachus, every art has authority
and superior power over its subject.... So far as the
arts are concerned, then, no art ever studies or en-
joins the interest of the superior party, but always
that of the weaker over which it has authority.... So
the physician, as such, studies only the patient's in-
terest, not his own. For, as we agreed, the business
of the physician, in the strict sense, is not to make
money for himself, but to exercise his power over the
patient's body.... And so with government of any
kind: no ruler, insofar as he is acting as ruler, will
study or enjoin what is for his own interest. All that
he says and does will be said and done with a view
to what is good and proper for the subject for whom
he practices his art."
That this argument is contrary to the facts,
Thrasymachus himself points out. But such facts
scarcely affect the force of Plato's rhetoric, which is
based on the perpetually recurring passions of men
and women to control and be controlled. Thus,
Plato's rhetoric has still an astonishingly timely ring:
it would serve, without any significant modification,
as a contemporary exposition of what is now usually
called "medical ethics."
Indeed, so little have men's views changed in the
past 2,500 years on the dilemma of the physician's
dual allegiance - to himself and to his patient -
that it will be worth our while to follow to its end
Plato's argument about the selflessness of the moral
man of medicine:
"... any kind of authority, in the state or in pri-
vate life, must, in its character of authority, consider
solely what is best for those under its care ... each
[skill] brings us some benefit that is peculiar to it:
medicine gives health, for example; the art of naviga-
tion, safety at sea; and so on."
"Yes."
"And wage-earning brings us wages; that is its
distinctive product. Now, speaking with that preci-
sion which you proposed, you would not say that the
art of navigation is the same as the art of medicine,
merely on the ground that a ship's captain regained
his health on a voyage, because the sea air was good
for him. No more would you identify the practice of
medicine with wage-earning because a man may keep
his health while earning wages, or a physician attend-
ing a case may receive a fee."
"No."
does not come to a elan from his special art. If we
are to speak strictly, the physician, as such, produces
health; the builder, a house; and then each, in his
further capacity as wage-earner, gets his pay....
Well, then, Thrasymachus, it is now clear that no
form of skill or authority provides for its own
benefit."
As these quotations show, Plato was a paternalist,
or, as Karl Popper - with whose important analysis
of Plato I am very largely in agreement - puts it in
The Open Society and Its Enemies, he was a totali-
tarian. Quite simply, what Plato advocates is what
many people seem to need or want, at least some of
the time: namely, that the expert should be a leader
who takes the burden of responsibility for personal
choice off the shoulders of the ordinary man or
woman who is his client. This ethical ideal and de-
mand, characteristic of the closed society, must be
contrasted with the ethical ideal and demand of the
open society in which the expert must speak the truth
and the client must bear the responsibility of his own
existence, including his choice of expert.
I shall have more to say later about this fundamental
alternative between authority and autonomy, noble
lies and painful truths. For now, I want to follow
Plato a little further in The Republic to show how
inextricably intertwined in his thought are the no-
tions of authority and mendacity - indeed, how it
is power that renders lying virtuous, and powerless-
ness that renders it wicked:
"Is the spoken falsehood always a hateful thing?
Is it not sometimes helpful - in war, for instance,
or as a sort of medicine ...? And in those legends
we were discussing just now, we can turn fiction to
account; not knowing the facts about the distant
past, we can make our fiction as good an embodi-
ment of truth as possible."
In this Platonic program of fictionalizing history
we recognize, of course, another much-applauded
modern "scientific" enterprise - in fact, a species of
psychiatric prevarication which its practitioners pre-
tentiously call "psychohistory." As the modern psy-
chiatric physician is entitled, by his limitless benevo-
lence, to use mendacity as medicine, so, according
to Plato, is the Ruler:
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"If we were right in saying that gods have no use
for falsehood and it is useful to mankind only in the
way of a medicine, obviously a medicine should be
handled by no one but a physician.... If anyone,
then, is to practice deception, either on the country's
enemies or on its citizens, it must be the rulers of the
commonwealth, acting for its benefit; no one else
may meddle with this privilege. For a private person
to mislead such rulers we shall declare to be a worse
offense than for a patient to mislead his doctor...."
Plato also uses a metaphor of mendacity as medi-
cine to justify his eugenic policies. All the mischief
done ever since in the name of genetics as a means
of "improving the human race" has been perpetrated
by following the policy here proposed by Plato:
"... Anything like unregulated unions would be
a profanation in a state whose citizens lead the good
Plato's dictum "supports
the most disreputable
medical, eugenic,
and psychiatric policies"
of modern governments
life. The rulers will not allow such a thing.... We
shall need consumate skill in our rulers ... because
they will have to administer a large dose of that
medicine we spoke of earlier.... We said, if you
remember, that such expedients would be useful as
a sort of medicine.... It follows from what we have
just said that, if we are to keep our flock at the high-
est pitch of excellence, there should be as many
unions of the best of both sexes, and as few of the
inferior, as possible, and that only the offspring of
the better unions should be kept. And again, no one
but the rulers must know how all this is being
effected; otherwise, our herd of guardians may be-
come rebellious."
on modern medicine, it is hardly surprising that we
now face moral dilemmas attributable directly to
the medical arrangement advocated by Plato and his
countless loyal supporters, past and present.
Lest it seem that I have overemphasized the Pla-
tonic physician's allegiance to the state, even at the
cost of being the unconcealed adversary of the so-
called patient, let us see what Plato says about phy-
sicians as physicians, not as the models of rulers.
What he says may seem shocking to some of us -
because it sounds so modern and because it supports
the most disreputable medical, eugenic, and psychi-
atric policies of twentieth-century governments, both
totalitarian and free.
Revealingly, Plato begins his discussion of the
duties of doctors by reviling malingerers and persons
now usually called mentally ill. Admittedly, Plato's
objection to medicalizing ordinary miseries - prob-
lems in living - is a position I myself support, but
for a reason and an aim which are the very opposite
of his: he wants doctors to persecute such people,
and persecuted by them they have been.; whereas I
want doctors to leave them alone, if that is what the
"patients" want.
"Is it not [asks Plato rhetorically] also disgraceful
to need doctoring, not merely for a wound or an
attack of some seasonal disorder, but because,
through living in idleness and luxury, our bodies are
infested with winds and humors, like marsh gas in a
stagnant pool, so that the sons of Asclepius are put
to inventing for diseases such ingenious names as
flatulence and catarrh?"
"Yes; they are queer, these modern terms."
"And not in use, I fancy, in the days of Asclepius
himself.... In the old days, until the time of Herodi-
cus, the sons of Asclepius had no use for the modern
coddling treatment of disease. But Herodicus, who
was a gymnastic teacher who lost his health, com-
bined training and doctoring in such a way as to be-
come a plague to himself first and foremost and to
many others after him."
"How?"
"By lingering out his death. He had a mortal
disease, and he spent all his life at its beck and call,
with no hope of a cure and no time for anything but
doctoring himself.... His skill only enabled him to
reach old age in a prolonged death struggle."
Clearly, the Platonic physician is an agent of the
state - and, if need be, the adversary of his patient.
In view of the immense influence of Platonic ideas
Plato clearly disapproves of such use of medicine
and the art of the physician. He all but calls poor
Herodicus a "useless eater. And he minces no words
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in asserting that a physician ministering to such a
sufferer is a bad man - a traitor to the community
and the state.
"... if Asclepius did not reveal these valetudi-
narian arts to his descendants, it was not from ig-
norance or lack of experience, but because he real-
ized that in every well-ordered community each man
has his appointed task which he must perform; no
one has leisure to spend all his life in being ill and
doctoring himself."
What, then, should a chronically ill person do? He
should die - "get rid of his troubles by dying," is
the way Plato puts it - for his own sake and the sake
of the state. But what about persons who feel sick,
who are preoccupied by their own ill health and its
care, but who are not sick enough to die? Physicians
should turn their backs on such persons: "They
should not be treated," he says, thus unmistakably
identifying the sufferer's own desire for medical care
as a wholly irrelevant criterion for legitimizing such
treatment.
It seems to me that never before - not just in
totalitarian societies but in all societies - has West-
ern medicine been so dangerously close to realizing
this particular Platonic ideal of medicine as today.
Here, again, are Plato's own words on this subject:
questions: Do we support or oppose the view - and
the policy - that the expert's role should be limited
to providing truthful information to his client? Do
we support or oppose the view - and policy - that
the expert's duty is to decide how the nonexperts
should live, and that he should therefore be provided
with the power to impose his policies on those so
unenlightened as to reject them?
If we are not skilled at analyzing Plato's argu-
ments, if we do not realize that choices such as these
confront us with the necessity of rank ordering our
values, and if we blind ourselves to the conflicts in
life between bodily health and personal freedom,
then we may become geniuses at manipulating the
gene, but we will remain morons about trying to
manipulate our fellowman and letting him manipu-
late us. Plato had no hesitation in judging, and in
letting physicians judge, whose life was "worth some-
thing" and whose was not, who should be treated and
who should not:
. if a man had a sickly constitution and intem-
perate habits, his life was worth nothing to himself
or to anyone else; medicine was not meant for such
people and they should not be treated, though they
might be richer than Midas."
"Surely, there could be no worse hindrance than
this excessive care of the body.... Shall we say,
then, that Asclepius recognized this and revealed the
art of medicine for the benefit of people of sound
constitution who normally led a healthy life, but had
contracted some definite ailment? He would rid them
of their disorders by means of drugs or the knife and
tell them to go on living as usual, so as not to impair
their usefulness as citizens. But where the body was
diseased through and through, he would not try, by
nicely calculated evacuations and doses, to prolong
a miserable existence and let his patient beget chil-
dren who were likely to be as sickly as himself. Treat-
ment, he thought, would be wasted on a man who
could not live in his ordinary round of duties and was
consequently useless to himself and society."
Implicit throughout this dialogue is the identity of
the person making the judgment about who is useful
and who is not, who should be treated and who should
not: it is the physician, not the patient.
Herein lie the main lessons for our present ethical
predicaments in genetics. They are best framed as
It seems to me difficult to overemphasize that Plato's
proposals are political remedies for perennial moral
problems. How should society treat the sick and the
weak, the old and the "socially useless"? How should
the services of healers be employed: like those of
soldiers, of priests, or of entrepreneurs? We should
beware of flattering ourselves by believing that new
biomedical capabilities necessarily generate genu-
inely new moral problems - especially as we haven't
solved, haven't even faced, our old problems.
I shall not belabor the idiocies and horrors pro-
posed or perpetrated in the name of medicine, specifi-
cally genetics, in recent decades. A single example
will illustrate the point that medical experts, like all
human beings, may easily identify themselves with
the holders of power, may eagerly become their
obedient servants, and in this way, may suggest and
support the most heinous policies of mayhem and
murder against suffering or stigmatized individuals.
The following words, written in 1939, are not
those of a Nazi physician but of a distinguished scien-
tist who must have been thoroughly familiar with
Plato:
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"Eugenics is indispensable for the perpetuation of
the strong. A great race must propagate its best ele-
ments. However, ... women voluntarily deteriorate
through alcohol and tobacco. They subject them-
selves to dangerous dietary regimens in order to ob-
tain a conventional slenderness of their figure. Be-
sides, they refuse to bear children. Such a defection
is due to their education, to the progress of feminism,
to the growth of shortsighted selfishness....
"Eugenics may exercise a great influence upon the
destiny of the civilized races.... The propagation of
the insane and feebleminded ... must be prevented.
... No criminal causes so much misery in human
groups as the tendency to insanity.... None should
marry a human being suffering from hidden heredi-
tary defects.... Obviously, those who. are afflicted
with a heavy ancestral burden of insanity, feeble-
mindedness, or cancer should not marry.... Thus,
eugenics asks for the sacrifice of many individuals.
... Marriage must cease being only a temporary
union.... Women should receive a higher education,
not in order to become doctors, lawyers, or profes-
sors, but to rear their offspring to be valuable human
beings.... There remains the unsolved problem of
the immense number of defectives and criminals.
... As already pointed out, gigantic sums are now re-
quired to maintain prisons and insane asylums and to
protect the public against gangsters and lunatics.
Why do we preserve these useless and harmful hu-
man beings? The abnormal prevent the development
of the normal.... Why should society not dispose of
the criminals and the insane in a more economical
manner? ...
"Criminality and insanity can be prevented only
by a better knowledge of man, by eugenics, by
changes in education and in social conditions. Mean-
while, criminals have to be dealt with effectively....
The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip,
or some more scientific procedure, followed by a
short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to in-
sure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while
armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kid-
napped children, despoiled the poor of their savings,
misled the public in important matters, should be
humanely and economically disposed of in small
euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.
A similar treatment could be advantageously applied
to the insane guilty of criminal acts."
The man who wrote this was Alexis Carrel (1873-
1944), surgeon and biologist, member of the Rocke-
feller Institute in New York, and the recipient, in
1912, of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine
for his work on suturing blood vessels. The quotation
is from his book, Man, the Unknown.
Besides being an agent himself, which, of course,
the medical scientist or physician always is, and be-
sides being an agent of his patient, which the physi-
cian is more and more rarely (hence the disenchant-
ment with medical care among both physicians and
patients, despite the remarkable technical advances
of medical science), the physician may, and indeed
often is, the agent of every conceivable social insti-
tution or group. It could hardly be otherwise. Social
institutions are composed of, and cater to, the needs
of human beings; and among human needs, the need
for the health of those inside the group - and, fre-
quently, for the sickness of those outside of it - is
paramount. Hence the physician is enlisted, and has
always been enlisted, to help some persons and harm
others - his injurious activities being defined, as we
have already seen in Plato's Republic, as helping the
state or some other institution.
Let me offer a very brief review - really only a
bird's-eye view - of how physicians have, through
the ages, not only helped some, usually those who
supported the dominant social ethic, but also harmed
others, usually those who have opposed the dominant
social ethic.
During the late Middle Ages, physicians were
prominent in the Inquisition, helping the inquisitors
to ferret out witches by appropriate "diagnostic"
examinations and tests.
The so-called discipline of public health, originat-
ing in what was first revealingly called "medical
police" (Medizinapolizei), came into being to serve
the interests of the absolutist rulers of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe. George Rosen says, in
A History of Public Health, the term was first used
in 1764 by Wolfgang Thomas Rau (1721-1772);
"This idea of medical police, that is, the creation
of a medical policy by government and its imple-
mentation through administrative regulation, rapidly
achieved popularity. Efforts were made to apply this
concept to the major health problems of the period,
which reached a high point in the work of Johann
Peter Frank (1745-1821) and Franz Anton Mai
(1742-1814)."
The medical police was never intended to help the
individual citizen or sick patient; instead, it was
quite explicitly designed, as Rosen wrote in an article
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in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, "to secure
for the monarch and the state increased power and
wealth." Since increased power and wealth for the
state could often be obtained only at the expense of
decreased health and freedom for certain citizens, we
witness here a collision between the Platonic and
Hippocratic medical ethics - the former easily tri-
umphing over the latter. Rosen's summary of Johann
Frank's work shows its undisguisedly Platonic char-
acter:
"Carrying out the idea that the health of the peo-
ple is the responsibility of the state, Frank presented
a system of public and private hygiene, worked out
in minute detail.... A spirit of enlightenment and
humanitarianism is clearly perceptible throughout the
entire work, but as might be expected from a public
medical official who spent his life in the service of
various absolute rulers, great and small, the exposi-
tion serves not so much for the instruction of the
people, or even of physicians, as for the guidance of
officials who are supposed to regulate and supervise
for the benefit of society all the spheres of human
activity, even those most personal. Frank is a repre-
sentative of enlightened despotism. The modern
reader may, in many instances, be repelled by his
excessive reliance on legal regulation and by the
minuteness of detail with which Frank worked out
his proposals, especially in questions of individual,
personal hygiene." (A History of Public Health)
remark, in his last will, "It is difficult to do good to
men without causing oneself some unpleasantness."
The ways in which the National Socialist govern-
ment in Germany used, and Communist governments
continue to use, medical knowledge and technology
is familiar enough.
In our own day, in the so-called free societies, vir-
tually every group or agency, public and private, has
enlisted the physician as an agent of its particular
interests. The school and the factory, employers and
labor unions, airlines and insurance companies, im-
migration authorities and drug control agencies,
prisons and mental hospital systems, all employ phy-
sicians, The physician so employed has a choice only
between being a loyal agent of his employer, serving
his employer's interests as the latter defines them, or
being a disloyal agent of his employer, serving inter-
ests other than his employer's, as the physician him-
self defines them.
The expert's allegiance
to the agents
he serves
must be made explicit
Among Frank's more interesting proposals was a
tax on bachelors - this was a part of the medical
police's effort to increase the population to provide
more soldiers for the monarch - a proposal we have
still not ceased implementing.
The French Revolution helped to further cement
the alliance between medicine and the state. This is
symbolized by the healer aspiring to perfect more
humane methods of execution. In 1792, the guillotine
- developed and named after Dr. Joseph Ignace
Guillotin, a physician, member of the Revolutionary
Assembly, and creator of its Health Committee
(Cornite de salubrrite) - became the official instru-
ment of execution in France. Again, revealingly, the
first guillotine was assembled at the Bicctre, one of
the famous insane asylums in Paris; and it was tried
out on live sheep, and then on three cadavers of
patients from the asylum. After the first flush of
enthusiasm for this medical advance wore off, Guil-
lotin's contribution to human welfare was viewed,
even in those days, ambivalently- leading him to
The principal moral decision for the physician who
does not work in an ideal private-practice situation
is to decide what organization or institution he shall
work for; more than anything else, this will determine
the sort of moral agent he can be to his patient and
others. It follows from this that we should pay more
attention than has been our habit to the ways institu-
tions and organizations - whether the Central In-
telligence Agency or the United Nations or any
other prestigious and powerful group - use medical
knowledge and skills. Although these considerations
are simple, their appreciation is not reflected by what
seems to me to characterize the recent burgeoning of
literature on problems of medical ethics, especially as
these relate to genetics. To illustrate this, let me quote
two remarks from an international conference in
1971 on Ethical Issues in Human Genetics, devoted
mainly to problems of genetic knowledge and coun-
seling.
One participant, a professor of genetics in Paris,
in a discussion of counseling parents who might give
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birth to a child with Tay-Sachs disease, said: "I think
the question is whether I would like to suppress a
child or not. My simple answer is definitely not, be-
cause we have to recognize one thing which is very
frequently overlooked: medicine is essentially and
by nature working against natural selection. That is
the reason why medicine was invented. It was really
to fight in the contrary sense of natural selection....
When medicine is used to reinforce natural selection,
it is no longer medicine; it is eugenics. It doesn't
matter if the work is palatable or not; that is what
it is.,,
There are two things seriously wrong here. First,
this expert's remarks about the antagonism between
medicine and natural selection are nonsense - and
remarkable nonsense at that for a biologist to enter-
tain and expound. Second, by speaking about "sup-
pressing a child," this expert equates and confuses
advising a parent not to have a child, performing an
abortion, and killing an infant.
Another participant, a professor of sociology in
Ithaca, New York, in a discussion of the "implica-
tions of parental diagnosis for the quality of, and
right to, human life," said, ". . . the best way of ex-
pressing its [society's] interest is through the coun-
selor-physician, who in effect has a dual responsibil-
ity to the individual whom he serves and to the so-
ciety of which he and she are parts.... We will all
certainly be diminished as human beings, if we are
not in great moral peril, should we allow ourselves to
accept abortion for what are essentially trivial rea-
sons. On the other hand, we will, I fear, be in equal
danger if we do not accept abortion as one means of
insuring that both the quantity and quality of the
human race are kept within reasonable limits."
If this is how the experts reason about the ethical
problems of genetics, we are in a bad way indeed.
The priest, the accountant, and the defense lawyer
do not try to serve antagonistic interests simultane-
ously; the politician, the psychiatrist, and the expert
on genetic counseling do. This at least, must be one
of the preliminary conclusions of a survey of the
present state of the art in the ethics of genetics.
values which they are likely to try to realize in their
professional work as well as in their private lives.
^ In general, we should regard the medical man,
whether as investigator or practitioner, as the agent
of the party that pays him and thus controls him;
whether he helps or harms the so-called patient thus
depends not so much on whether he is a good or bad
man, as on whether the function of the institution
whose agent he is, is to help or harm the patient.
^ Insofar as the biologist or physician chooses to
act as a scientist, he has an unqualified obligation to
tell the truth; he cannot compromise this obligation
without disqualifying himself as a scientist. In actual
practice, only certain kinds of situations permit the
medical man to fulfill such an unqualified obligation
to truthtelling.
^ Insofar as the biologist or physician chooses to
act as a social engineer, he is an agent of the particu-
lar moral and political values he espouses and tries
to realize, or of those his employer espouses and
tries to realize.
^ The biologist's or physician's claim that he repre-
sents disinterested abstract values - such as man-
kind, health, or treatment - should be disallowed;
and his efforts to balance and claim to represent
multiple conflicting interests - such as those of the
fetus against the mother or society, or of the indi-
vidual against the family or the state - should be
exposed for what they conceal - such as his secret
loyalty to one of the conflicting parties, or his cynical
rejection of the interests of both parties in favor of
his own self-aggrandizement.
^ If we value personal freedom and dignity, we
should, in confronting the moral dilemmas of biology,
genetics, and medicine, insist that the expert's alle-
giance to the agents and values he serves be made
explicit, and that the power inherent in his special-
ized knowledge and skill not be accepted as justifi-
cation for his exercising specific controls over those
lacking such knowledge and skill.
I conclude by briefly summarizing my views on medi- Dr. Szasz is a professor of psychiatry at the State Uni-
cal ethics in general, and on the ethical implications versity of New York at Syracuse, and author of a
of genetic knowledge and engineering in particular. number of books on mental illness. This article is based
on a talk given at a conference on ethics and genetic
^ The biologist and the physician are, first and fore- engineering sponsored by the Gottlieb Duttweiler In-
most, persons; as persons they have their own moral stitute of Switzerland.
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aging in the american society
Prescribing the
Role of Oldness
Often Defies
the Realities
of Oldness
Aging in the Western world today is not a demo-
cratic institution. It should be, for it happens to all
of us. The biological changes which impair our
health and finally bring about our death with the
mere passage of time affect all of us and have not
changed in rate since the start of human history. We
get old at the same age as Moses and Pharaoh. The
only difference so far brought about by the advance
of medicine and civilization is that now more of us -
many more - survive to reach old age. The rate of
biological aging, like other biological rates, can be
altered, and most of us in the research field are
fairly sanguine that it is going to be altered reason-
ably soon. A . great stride in this direction has been
taken with the setting up of the new National Institute
of Aging, with the assignment, in simple terms, of
developing ways of making it take seventy years to
reach sixty.
But aging is not only biological, it is also socio-
genic. The role of oldness is not biologically fixed,
it is something prescribed by society, and our society
prescribes it foully. This country by reason of its big
immigrant population has always been a youth-
oriented culture, and never more than now. If you
decree that once achievement is over, so is worth, if
you prescribe that older citizens must retire at an
arbitrary and decreasing age and condemn them to
poverty, and if you then repeat often enough that
older people are ineducable, unemployable, asexual,
unintelligent, and as the Greeks say "a burden to the
soil," you will generate some of the problems which
the older citizen now faces. It is no wonder that the
over-sixty-five group have come in America to re-
semble an underprivileged minority - but this is a
minority we are all going to join.
It is also a growing minority. By the year 2000,
more than twenty per cent of Californians will be
over sixty-five. These new old - who, let me remind
you, are going to be us - will be very different from
those now old. They will be higher in expectation,
better protected against the mythology of useless and
valueless age, more militant, and a lot less willing to
have laid on them the sort of garbage which is laid
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on the old today. They are going to be a sizeable and
vocal audience.
Media are very important to the old, as they are
to all of us. The old are big users of radio, of
television, and of the press: as a lifeline. as a source
of information and enrichment of their environment
(something which in itself combats social deteriora-
tion with age), and as a substitute defense against
the loneliness which many experience as their chief
problem. Media can inform not only of current
events but of rights and facilities; they can enter-
tain; they can activate and educate, No group in
society is in greater need of continuing education
than the retired and about-to-retire, who face an
identity crisis imposed by society and who need new
skills to handle it. Media, however, also address the
whole citizenry and can project a true and a valuing
image of what aging is and is not. They are therefore
crucial in correcting the sort of black magic which
has been generated about the useless, brainless.
sexless old.
There are problems. Not only are older people
too experienced to make a good advertising target.
but they are very diverse (as all people are), and,
until recently. unvocal, so we don't know what they
want or how best to supply it. We would like to find
out two things: what questions we need to ask so that
media can serve the old, and how we can answer
those questions. Our aim is to better the service they
receive, and also to correct society's attitude toward
aging.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institu-
tions is interested in the study and actualization of
the inalienable rights set out at the start of American
democracy, rights on which the old have much too
long been shortchanged, We have a great opportunity
to use modern technology to correct this bias. Media
can address people who are cut off by illness, isola-
tion, or simply fear of the streets and of getting
mugged., from full participation in citizenship. For
these people, the television, the radio, and the news-
paper may be the only friends they have, and the
only sources of enrichment and information avail-
able.
This responsibility is being taken up, but we want
to see it taken up better and faster, and to that end
we need research.
Dr. Comfort, a Senior Fellow of the Center, served as
head of the Medical Research Group on Aging at Uni-
versity College in London. lie is a clinical lecturer in
the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University.
l
aging in the american society
Resources
for the Aged
Reflect
Strongly Held
Social Myths
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It is almost impossible to talk about the problems
of the aged unless we talk about the problems of
people more broadly defined. The aged are people
and, from maturity on, become less and less alike.
Thus "the aged" are actually the most heterogenous
group in our population.
We see some aged persons who are intensely in-
telligent, capable human beings involved with the
problems of their time. We see others living on the
edge of a vegetative state.
Aging - a unilateral process for the living - is
a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. We have really
only begun to understand the biological processes
of aging, and we need much more research in this
area. Not only are some of the professionals who
work with the aged insensitive to the need for bio-
logical research, but we appear to have a government
which has been almost totally unaware of the tre-
mendous needs in this field.
The 1971 White House Conference on Aging was
in one sense a success, and for totally unexpected
reasons. As part of the preconference research, two
hundred thousand older people were polled. In the
process, many useful contacts were made with older
people, literally dozens of programs on aging were
broadcast on local radio and television stations, and
countless stories on the older people appeared in the
press.
But, to keep this in perspective, the total budget
for extramural aging research in the United States
in fiscal 1972 was two and a half million dollars.
That was not enough to continue the research al-
ready funded, and it meant that out of every hundred
grants on research in aging, only one was being
supported with federal money.
It is clear that there is a "politics of aging." At the
same time that we have a broadening popular under-
standing of aging - spurred by White House con-
ferences - there is an undercutting by the federal
government of funds for fundamental research on the
subject.
Regarding the psychology of aging, I have already
stated the interesting fact that, statistically, the vari-
ance in psychological experiments increases as a
direct function of age. The notion that adults, by
virtue of arriving at a certain age, such as sixty-five,
all fall off the edge and become senile and incom-
petent is both ludicrous and frightening. It is frighten-
ing because, like any other group that bears the
weight of discrimination and the deprivation of
resources by the rest of society, a rationalization
takes place among the members of the older group -
a rationalization that, in effect, accepts for itself
the, evaluation put on it by the larger society. In one
sense the most destructive part of the white society's
bigotry against blacks in this country was not what
the whites did to blacks, but what blacks did to them-
selves in terms of self-stereotyping and self-resent-
ment. In my view, the black-is-beautiful concept was
the single most important thing to come out of the
civil-rights movement. Blacks began to recognize
that blacks are not lazy, are not stupid, and do not
all tap dance.
The older person in our society must realize that
it is not at all clear what aging does to people
psychologically. Until about five years ago, psycholo-
gists thought that there was an inverse relationship
between age and intelligence. Actually that view can
still be found in most undergraduate and graduate
psychology textbooks. But in 1973, the task force on
aging of the American Psychological Association in
effect discarded that notion, not because of social
consciousness (which would have been- the wrong
reason), but because the data on which the notion
was based turned out to be wrong. When I was a
youngster, everyone thought that intelligence peaked
at age fourteen because the Stanford-Binet intelli-
gence test in those days was used to measure the
intelligence of youngsters, and it simply stopped
measuring accurately after adolescence. Then, just
before World War II, David Wechsler came along
and standardized his tests at Bellevue in New York.
The subsequent Wechsler-Bellevue intelligence scale,
which. peaks at age twenty-one, is the first adult -
intelligence scale.
When Wechsler got a bit older he revised his
tests to the now well-accepted Wechsler Adult
Intelligence Scale. That one peaks at twenty-six or
twenty-seven and goes down from that point.
The data are right, but the interpretations are
usually false since they are based on a cross-sectional
study. The mistaken assumption is that an individ-
ual's intelligence will continue to develop until his
mid-twenties, and that he will go downhill from that
point on longitudinally. It's reminiscent of our college
courses in developmental psychology in which we
spend six months worrying about the first three or
four years of human life; then we devote two weeks
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to adolescence; and, after that, well, lots of luck -
by implication it has all happened - as if we were
some sort of bullet or shell whose target velocity and
trajectory were determined in the early moments of
propulsion.
We've learned to do this culturally with our
"superfluous people." These are people for whom
we have no use and about whom we have very
little information, and so we act as if they do not
exist, and we mediate resources to them as if they
do not exist. Then we must justify our behavior and
so we close the circle by maintaining that they cannot
utilize resources because they don't have the com-
petence.
The change in our understanding of the intelli-
gence of the older people came after a half-dozen
longitudinal studies were made. That is, a cohort, a
group, of older people was followed for a period of
ten years. At Duke University, we studied a sample
of people between the ages of sixty and sixty-nine,
and we fully expected that their intelligence would
drop off after ten years. But with one notable ex-
ception, their intelligence, after ten years, was un-
diminished. The one exception was those persons
who had significantly high blood pressure: they
showed a drop in intelligence.
That raises another issue. When we talk about aging,
do we really mean sickness? The aged are more likely
to be sick than are younger people. But being old
and being sick are two quite different things. Un-
fortunately, too many of us are guilty of the cor-
relative fallacy which assumes that if two things are
correlated - for example, if aging and sickness are
found in the same people - there is an etiology. We
assume that aging causes sickness, and that the two
are somehow synonymous.
Aging is, of course, a process that is associated
with a number of losses - "associated with," not
necessarily etiologically related. What are the losses
of aging? They say you can't teach an old dog new
tricks. That's garbage. Not only is it not true of dogs,
it does not apply to people. Older people do learn
and some learn well. As a group they have several in-
teresting properties. The current older group of people
were not nearly as well-educated as are the majority
of Americans. A decade or less ago, there were
approximately a million functional illiterates in the
older group. These were largely people who were
never educated.
But older persons can learn. Their main disability
as observed by some psychologists is that they tend
to become more physiologically upset in the learning
system and more reluctant to venture possible wrong
responses than are younger persons. As a result, the
older person gives the appearance of not learning.
Older persons in our culture are so accustomed to
being put down that they want to be secure; they
would rather risk appearing ignorant by not answer-
ing than answer and be wrong.
So, the learning strategy of the older persons tends
to be different. But that strategy can be changed if
you tell older people it is all right to make mistakes.
They need a cultural system that says, "Yes, you can
act in a different way." The point is that the notion
that older people are unable to learn is a socially
mediated notion. If we believe, for example, that
only children can learn, the social consequences of
that belief are clear. We proceed to put virtually all
of our educational resources at the disposal of
children.
A wise society prepares its people for their whole
future, not a part of it. The average life expectancy
for a white male American born today is about
seventy-two years of age. The white American male
who reaches sixty-five can expect to live to seventy-
seven or seventy-eight. For a woman, it is even longer
- women live four to six years longer than men in
this country.
This situation is full of social ambiguities. If we
have a child with leukemia. for instance, how much
of our resources should we spend to keep that child
alive for, say, five years? That is a tough question,
but most of us would err on the side of saying, "Let's
pull out all the stops to keep him alive. Maybe there
will be a cure for cancer in five years." Historically,
that is the way our society has been answering that
question. We do pull out all the stops. We are sym-
pathetic; all we have to do is close our eyes and
picture a leukemia ward for children.
I t is a little more difficult to think about nursing
homes and the older persons in our society and to
make sound judgments about the resources we should
deploy for these people. It is a fact that if nursing
homes and homes for the older persons are made
into places for dying, people in them tend to die very
rapidly. If they are made places in which to live, if
we develop programs for the living, then people in
there tend to live longer. Such data have been known
for ten years now, but for some reason nobody has
made use of them yet.
The biological, psychological, and social variables
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in aging are interrelated; they affect and are affected
by each other in profound ways.
About five per cent of our aged population - that
is, about one million out of twenty million aged -
are in full-term custodial care. The U.S. Senate's
Special Committee on Aging recently produced a
report, researched and written by Val Halamandaris,
which is a heavy indictment of nursing homes in this
country. Nursing homes alone are a problem that
deserves many television documentaries. The Senate
hearings describe nursing-home staff administering
drugs on a plate to whoever the staff thinks can be
made more quiet by them; nonexistent medical care;
lack of therapeutic or activity programming; and the
fact that this kind of care of the aged is costing
taxpayers about four to five billion dollars a year,
money that could be used in so many better ways for
the older people.
But the indictment is not of the nursing-home in-
dustry. Nursing homes only reflect the prevailing
society. As I have suggested elsewhere, if saving
money is our only objective, we could save more
simply by following Kurt Vonnegut's suggestion in
Welcome to the Monkey House. He handles the aging
problem very simply. He pictures, next to some
restaurant, such as a Howard Johnson's, a parlor
where people can go between their sixty-fifth and
sixty-sixth birthdays and have their lives terminated.
Vonnegut's parlor is staffed by attractive men and
women skilled in discovering the best method to do
away with people. Sometime before a person's sixty-
sixth birthday he walks into this future Howard
Johnson's, gets a free meal, then walks next door and,
against a background of soothing music, has the
death of his choice.
Of course, an alternate solution would be to begin
by recognizing why older people are with us. They
are with us because .they are people. If you separate
out twenty million older human beings, call them
superfluous, develop a set of concepts about these
older persons which have little or no basis in reality,
and then systematically cut them off, you have com-
promised all people. What is at stake here is the
whole value structure of a society.
What are the problems that the older people them-
selves say they have? The first problem most of them
mention is insufficient money. That is not surprising.
All of us, regardless of age or income, feel our income
is inadequate.
But for older people, this happens to be largely
true. Insufficient money is indeed a cruel problem.
Anyone on a fixed income is in serious trouble during
a time of protracted inflation such as we are now
experiencing. Older people need money, and since
they are often at the botton of our economic ladder,
a lot of older people need a lot of money. The Na-
tional Council on Senior Citizens, the American
Association of Retired Persons, the National Retired
Teachers Association, and others have accomplished
a good deal by forcing the country and Congress to
take a hard look at Social Security and the Supple-
mentary Security Income program.
I might add that while we do need a careful re-
appraisal of the system, some of the attacks being
made on the Social Security program in the media are
ill-informed and destructive. Many critics of Social
Security do not know what they are talking or writing
about. Some have managed to frighten a lot of older
Americans who are not themselves too well-informed
about Social Security, how it was instituted, and how
it works. Several groups are now very carefully ad-
dressing the problem. This is a subject that could be
the basis of a most useful documentary on television,
because everybody - not just the older citizens -
is interested in what happens to the money they have
been paying into Social Security and how the bene-
fits are paid.
In addition to money, health is a critical problem
for older people. More than half the older population
is suffering from some illness or impairment. If you
define "older Americans" as those sixty-five and
older, then three-quarters of them are suffering from
some chronic disease. But the term "chronic disease,"
as used by a physician, can be anything from arthritis
to hemorrhoids. So simply saying that somebody is
"chronically ill" does not tell us much, nor does the
term "suffering" help much in that phrase.
Of more importance, about thirty-seven per cent
of older people say they have some disability in work
or leisure activity due to poor health. But then, people
of all ages have some disability. Anybody who must
wear eyeglasses has a disability. The question is, what
can be done to minimize a disability and to maintain
a level of functioning? This is a largely untapped area
vis-a-vis the aged.
In New York City and other urban centers, a
principal problem expressed by older people is neither
money nor health; it is the violence. Older New
Yorkers fear being mugged, robbed, beaten, or mur-
dered. They feel a need for protection.
Another problem of the older person is the fear of
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a prolonged, chronic, deteriorating illness. Older
people are much more afraid of that than they are
of dying. Younger people fear death. Older people
fear being dependent and incapacitated.
What can be done about these and other problems
associated with aging?
I have said that as long as we continue to devote
almost all of this nation's educational resources to
children and youth, we will continue to have a prob-
lem, not only with regard to the older people, but all
up and down the generational line. Today, medical
students know that ten years after they leave school,
much of their knowledge will be outmoded. Lawyers
realize that they must constantly keep up with the
law. Accountants are going back to school to study
changes in tax law. We live in an extraordinary time
in which knowledge is coming at an extremely rapid
rate, especially in technologically developed countries
such as ours. To limit the investment of educational
resources is to insure obsolescence and the creation
of a subgroup cut off from the mainstream. Here the
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media could play a role for which they are par-
ticularly qualified.
I believe that it is absurd to think that educating
and/or training people from roughly the age of six
to the age of eighteen - or, at most, twenty-six -
will give them an adequate educational base for the
next forty to sixty years.
In a sense, aging is a less serious problem in the
less developed countries for several reasons. First,
people die at a younger age; second, there is a trans-
mission of relevant knowledge from the old to the
young in those societies; third, often the aged control
or own the resources. In a less developed country -
usually an agrarian society - someone who has
been farming for sixty years is, all things considered,
a better farmer than someone who has been farming
for forty years; that is, until the information-base
changes. In a developed society, if you were a trolley-
car conductor, for example, and the city switched to
buses, you probably could not make it and would be
given "early retirement." Changes in production tech-
nology in a developed society will have a similar
effect.
Another difficulty facing all people in our society
is fear about what aging may be like. A recent study
of a thousand people in the Pacific Northwest was
focused on the issue of preparing for retirement. Most
of those studied were upper-middle-class technicians
between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-five. Ninety
per cent of them said their income was not adequate.
But when these same people were asked in a different
part of this quite elaborate questionnaire whether
they thought they had an adequate retirement income
in prospect, eighty-six per cent of them said, "yes,"
despite the fact that their present "inadequate" in-
come would be cut by more than half when they
retire.
This illustrates an incredible denial of what it
means to be old in our society. I try to point out to
older folks that people tend to spend more when they
are no longer busy at work.
We use the figure "sixty-five" as a social conve-
nience to designate the "older" person. But there is
no reason why any other age cannot be adopted.
People can now retire at sixty-two under Social
Security if they agree to take a little less money per
month. The United Auto Workers will retire people
at fifty-five if they promise to leave the auto industry.
About five years ago, a group of economists re-
ported to a Senate subcommittee that the present
economic structure in this country - as projected
over the next quarter of a century - would not be
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able to sustain blue-collar workers for more than
twenty years. Blue-collar workers will have to get out
of the labor force after twenty years to make room for
new workers. If they began working at age nineteen,
they would be retired at age thirty-nine, and that
will be the new entry point into aging. Sounds stupid,
silly, absurd - except that about a year ago an
officer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. said that more than
sixty per cent of the union's members had either
retired before age sixty-five or had contracts that
would retire them before that age.
A Banker's Trust study of eight and a half million
workers in the greater New York area stated that the
retirement contract of forty years is dead, the con-
tract of thirty years is becoming a thing of the past,
and that we are now seeing twenty-year retirement
contracts. So the absurd predictions of five years ago
are becoming the realities of today.
We will have to develop a new mentality about
forty-year-olds, because if we cling to the concept
that "older people" are superfluous, I predict that
we will adopt the same attitude toward forty-year-old
retired people as we have adopted toward today's
sixty-five-year-olds. The younger citizens will say
that forty-year-olds are incapable of learning; they
will be denied access to long-term health care because
it is too expensive to be wasted on older people.
Forty-year-olds will begin to shift their psychology
from a need-achievement mentality (which got us to
where we are today, because it says it is important
to try and that there is a basic need to achieve) to a
self-protective, defensive mentality based on a fear
of failure. The culture will no longer be dominated
by people aged thirty-five to fifty; it will be dominated
by those who are thirty to thirty-five, because the
thirty-five-year-olds will be only five years from
retirement.
Most of our society's behavior toward its older
people is based on rationalizations that are mental
garbage. For several years, we have been receiving
a soft-sell message. Presumably it has something to
do with another problem, but it really has to do with
aging. If you look at our soft-drink bottles, you will
find embossed the legend, "No deposit - no return."
That message has really got across, and it is one
that must be counteracted, How can that be done?
First, we must educate older people about a
variety of things. The educational process itself is ter-
ribly important. Exercising one's cognitive function
is as important as exercising one's heart. If it is not
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exercised, there will be the kind of cohort effect I
mentioned earlier.
Second, older people, typically, are deprived of
services, some of which are available but of which
they are ignorant. They must be kept informed.
Third - and this is a major issue - the attitude
of the dominant part of our society about getting old.
together with the denial about what it means to be
old, must be changed. Actually the chances are
nineteen to one that when you are old you will still aging in the american society
be mentally alert, involved, active, rather than wind-
ing up like a vegetative patient in a nursing home. I
have been trying to persuade people that there can
be a joy in aging and that many old people are happy,
particularly those who prepared for this stage of
their life.
Fourth, and this is related to the point I just made, Cwhat kinds of investments can we make so that one's
older years will be an exciting and creative period
in one's life? No one has touched this problem, but Television's
it can be met if we give it the attention and economic
support it must have. For example, what can we do
to prevent some of the deterioration of aging? How Calculated
much of it is preventable'? What are useful roles for
older persons to play'? How can we foster creativity"
The most important thing we can do is to break
out of this whole business of denying the realities Indifference
of aging and the fear of what aging involves. I
recently attended a conference on death and dying. to the Old
One of the most salient things that came out of that
conference - which was made up of about 125
health-care professionals, nearly all of whom had
worked with dying patients-was that most people HARRY S. ASHMORE
who are dying are comfortable in talking about their
death, they want to talk about their death. They are
not nearly as depressed about the fact. of their im-
pending death as are the people who are taking care
of them and who cause "the problem" by running
away from the issue. That is really where we are now
with aging and the fear and ignorance of aging.
Older people are increasing in number at a faster
rate than younger people. By the end of the century.
we will have twenty-nine million older Americans.
Older people are a tremendous untapped resource in
our country. The question is whether we will merely
create a larger pool of "superfluous" human beings
out of our older citizens or integrate everyone into
the total society.
Dr. Eisdorfer is chairman of the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University
of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
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It seems to me that the newspapers and magazines
are doing about as good a job of reporting the facts
about the condition of the aging as they are in any
comparable area. That is not a satisfactory job, by
my definition. But, considered. over-all, I do not think
the print media are guilty of special discrimination
against the aging in their news columns, their edi-
torial comments, or their investigative reporting.
The situation is different in the majority medium
- television.
Television is a game of demographics. What the
demographics demonstrate, at least to the satisfaction
of the advertising men who determine the style, if not
the content, of most programming, is that the older
age group is not a very good source of purchasing
power. Its income is, of course, reduced; its needs for
material goods presumably are largely satisfied. At
least it is reasonable to assume that the aged are only
peripherally in the market for automobiles, furniture,
perfume, foundation garments, appliances, or the
other goods television sells with . great success.
So the conventional wisdom of Madison Avenue
is that the primary broadcasting market ranges across
the unmarrieds, the young marrieds, and the middle-
aged who still think young, or at least would like to
appear as if they did. The result is foreordained, since
the primary users of TV advertising are interested in
reaching the largest number of potential customers
per dollar invested. There are exceptions, one of the
most notable being the high incidence of denture glue
advertising on the networks' evening news programs.
Some computer somewhere apparently provides evi-
dence that a merchandisable segment of old people
look in on Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.
In considering the problems of the aging as they
relate to TV, the beginning fact is that, as presently
organized, the medium is simply not capable of sup-
plying programming to meet any special minority
need. Our reliance in the United States on the
marketplace as the source of broadcast income means
that a common denominator of programming must
prevail. Whether they guess right or wrong, broad-
casters try to put on programs that will reach the
maximum number of people at any given time,
because that is the basis of their advertising rates.
The result is almost universal redundancy. There are
exceptions, but over-all you find the same kind of
programming as you flip the dial from station to
station and network to network. The result has been
a steady de-emphasis of the information function and
a corresponding trivialization of what is called in the
trade "news and public affairs broadcasting."
There is still time available for programming in
this category, but the line that once set it off from
entertainment is blurred. The television. documentary
form has been systematically trivialized because it
did not turn out to be economically profitable. The
ratings demonstrate that documentary treatment, in
its original, serious journalistic format, does not
appeal to audiences of the size broadcasters can
attract with entertainment programs. The result has
been a shift away from treatment of public affairs in.
depth toward what is called a magazine format.
The broadcasters thus can balance any serious treat-
ment of social issues by abbreviating it and incorpo-
rating it into a variety of light subject matter. This
meets the standard of entertainment while still keep-
ing the form of information, and attracts and holds a
larger audience than does the serious, single-subject
documentary.
In sum, then, the economic base of commercial
broadcasting tends to eliminate most programming -
whether entertainment or information - designed
especially for a minority audience. It was hoped -
and to some extent the hope has been realized - that
the creation of a fourth network, a noncommercial
public service broadcasting service, would fill that
minority demand for specialized programming. Un-
dernourished and imperfect as it is, I am confident
that public broadcasting will survive and expand,
because it does fill a real need.
Beyond that, for the last five years we have lived
in the hope that a great technological breakthrough
was in sight with the advent of cable television and
the development of cassette playback systems. Cable
TV, now coming on strong in the major cities, does
have the capacity to open up a virtually limitless
number of additional channels, creating a situation
in which a variety of programming could be designed
to serve special-interest groups of relatively small
numbers. Cable TV also has the potential of opening
the visual medium to communication by ordinary
people, rather than, as at present, limiting it to pro-
fessional communicators.
Neither of these potentials has been realized. The
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technology is here, so this kind of development is
possible and still may happen. But, like almost every
other initiating agency involved in our communica-
tions system, the cable companies are wholly com-
mercial, and they are afflicted by the same kind of
thinking that limits conventional broadcasters. In-
stead of trying to exploit the possibilities for diver-
sity, the cable TV people tend to rely primarily on
relaying what is already available on the air, selling
their service on the basis of providing a clearer
picture. They are talking now about piping in a few
first-run movies and sporting events - in other
words, more of the same, with a direct admission
charge in lieu of (or more probably, in addition to)
advertising revenue.
Having stated the limitations, I remain unclear
about what kind of television older people should
have if these limitations did not exist. Certain aspects
of the problem are obvious. Older people need infor-
mation about services that are now available for
them, and support in the effort to bring their plight
to the attention of the public and private agencies
responsible for meeting their special needs. But then
there remains the matter of programming that might
fill the void of aching loneliness that exists in the
long days and nights of the elderly. This means, I
think, programming of the sort now classified as
entertainment. But what kind of entertainment?
I don't have the answer, but I make bold to pose
what I believe to be a central question: Is it really
desirable to think of special cultural programming
for the old? Wouldn't that be another way of further
segregating them from the larger society? Would it
not further emphasize the fact that they now con-
stitute our latest set of social outcasts, so much so
that they require special intellectual treatment at the
end of their lives? Is the function of television to
detach them finally from reality as they are ushered
out of this vale of tears?
Mr. Ashunore is the executive vice-president and a
Senior Fellow of the Center.
USING THE MEDIA TO CHANGE SOCIETY
The media can be the best means of mass
communication and consciousness-raising
yet invented, especially when you have little
money to spend bringing your ideas to the
public. So take advantage of them if they
invite you to an interview, a talk show, or
other special-interest event....
The second thing that we have learned
about the media is that they can rip you off.
The people of the media are always looking
for ways to feed their programming. Do not
let them take advantage of you. Too much
publicity when you are not ready for it is as
difficult to cope with as too little when you
need it. You may never be able to control the
rate and flow of media interest, but do not let
them misrepresent your organization. Do not
let them box you in and use you for something
you are not. You are not merely a human
interest story about "active senior citizens."
You are a potentially powerful coalition of
young and old. Your focus is not to arouse
curiosity but to create human action and
power to change society....
The current fascination of the media with
the "senior citizen" may pass. We must not
confuse this enthusiasm, which may be tem-
porary, with the very real, frightening, and
continuous age-ism which we find everywhere
in our society. We must point to the older
citizen who is "in" with the media and to the
younger individual who is not "in," for both
are victims of this age-ism. The problems of
youth may not be so apparent as those of the
older adult, but they are just as real: minors
are as dependent on the legal system and
bureaucratic agencies as are older adults.
From the organizing manual of the
Gray Panthers,
3700 Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
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aging in the american society
An interview with Maggie Kuhn
Gray Panther Power
I Vl argaret E. Kuhn - everyone calls her "Maggie" - is sixty-nine and the
diminutive leader of the Gray Panthers which she helped found in 1970 and
which now numbers about eight thousand members. She received her Master's
degree at the School for Applied Social Science at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, and did additional graduate work at Temple
University and Union Theological Seminary. Her first job was with the
Y.W.C.A. - first in Cleveland, then in Philadelphia - where she became
interested in the working and living conditions of low-paid women workers
in offices and department stores. Ever since, she has been involved in
organizing people for social action. As "convener" of the fifteen-member
steering committee of the Gray Panthers, she helps interested citizens organize
Gray Panther units in their own communities; testifies in government hearings
on legislation for the older citizens; makes films on the problems of the older
people; takes part in nonviolent "street theater" demonstrations dramatizing
the plight of the infirm elderly in our society; and helps produce the Gray
Panthers Network, a newsletter that serves as both forum and tie-line for
members of the organization. Ms. Kuhn was interviewed by Donald McDonald
during the conference on media and aging.
Q: Ms. Kuhn, why did you organize
the Gray Panthers?
KUHN: There were six of us in the
greater New York area who were
either just retired or about to retire in
the spring of 1970, and all of us were
concerned with the war in Indochina.
We wondered how, after we retired
and were more or less isolated, we
could do anything in the way of pro-
test. We had been playing a supportive
role for both the young people who
were being drafted and those who
were resisting the war and who were
being jailed and hassled by the police
when they demonstrated and who
were getting a rough time from their
draft boards when they tried to get any
kind of alternate service. We thought,
why not form a coalition of the young
and the old? Both groups suffer dis-
crimination on the basis of age alone.
We also wanted to use our new free-
dom in retirement, we wanted to use
our experience, skills, and time to
tackle some of the issues and problems
that make our world unjust and in-
human.
Q: Who are the, young people in your
organization?
KUHN: For the most part they are
students - college undergraduates,
university graduate students, and, in
some communities, high-school kids.
Q: How do you keep the organization
together?
KUHN : Through our newsletter and
through attending meetings of local
groups. We believe in the network
principle. The network is built largely
by our own personal connections. No
matter how an organizational chart is
put together - with boxes, lines,
dotted lines, flying arrows - it all
comes down to a network of human
relationships. We build. the network,
these relationships, by the newsletter,
by publicity, by moving around the
country and speaking to local groups.
We are finding people all over the
country who want to be in a network
like this and to form their own group.
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It's rather like cells multiplying them-
selves.
Q: How do you initiate contacts with
potential members or local networks?
KUHN: In various ways. Here is a good
example. The American Baptist
Churches in Valley Forge have se-
lected for their national emphasis a
three-year focus on age. Recently they
sponsored a four-day training con-
ference in Kansas City, an excellent
area which includes two large medical
schools, a university, several semi-
naries. I was invited to speak at the
conference, so I accepted and used
the opportunity to call a meeting of
Gray Panther members and prospec-
tive members from five surrounding
states. We had seventy-five people at
our meeting, leadership people who
said they wanted to get started in the
Gray Panthers, We brought organizer-
conveners to the meeting from Denver
and Chicago to show them how to
organize. We have no dues. We de-
pend on contributions. People con-
tribute to the national group to receive
our various materials, including the
newsletter, Also, local groups raise
their own money as needed.
Q: What is the purpose of the Gray
Panthers?
KUHN: Our major objective is to chal-
lenge and eliminate age-ism in our
society. We define age-ism as an arbi-
trary discrimination against someone
or some group on the basis of age -
any age. Such discrimination happens
to be very hard on both young people
and old people. Age-ism traps people
in derogatory categories.
Q: What forms does age discrimina-
tion take?
KUHN: One of its worst effects is com-
pulsory retirement. We challenge com-
pulsory retirement. We say that peo-
ple deserve to have an option. They
should be able to retire early if they
wish. They should be able to retire at
a later time, if they wish. The retire-
ment age should be flexible; it should
be something that can be negotiated
by the workers themselves, if they de-
sire. A third option they should have
is the freedom to take on a new kind
"We would like to see
the energy, time, experience, and
accumulated skills of older Americans
released and put to work for
social change and social justice."
of work, say, a second, or even a third,
career. All of these would be positive
responses to the age factor.
Q: Are most people unable to function
well in retirement?
KUHN: Some people who have worked
hard in routine jobs all their lives are
glad to be relieved of their drudgery
and be able to just sit and fish if they
like. But research needs to be done
even in these cases. When these peo-
ple are forced to retire, we don't know
whether retirement becomes an op-
pressive and diminishing thing in their
lives unless they have some redirection
of their purposes and energy.
Q: What other goals do the Gray
Panthers have?
KUHN: We would like to see - the
energy, time, experience, and accumu-
lated skills of older Americans re-
leased and put. to work for social
change and social justice. We want to
develop a life-style of advocacy for
the other. For example, although we
may tackle things that oppress the
elderly, often, at bottom, these same
things are causing hardship and in-
justice for all people. Take the case
of mass transportation. Lack of ade-
quate mass transportation is particu-
larly hard on old people who cannot
afford a car or who are no longer able
to drive one safely. But the lack of
transportation is really tough on young
people, too, who are not old enough
to drive or cannot afford cars. And it
is tough on black people who may live
in one part of the city far from jobs,
health and welfare services, and recre-
ational facilities. If you can dramatize
such an issue for the older citizens,
who are a rapidly growing part of our
society, you have at the same time a
powerful lever for change, one that
can open things up for other groups.
Q: In one of the documentary films on
the problems of the older citizens, you
say that a major problem among these
people is their self-hatred and self-
disgust. What is the cause of that lack
of self-esteem?
KUHN: Powerful conditioning forces
in our society make a fetish of looking
young and keeping up youthful ap-
pearance - that is one factor. An-
other - and this is related to the em-
phasis on youthfulness-is the matter
of sexuality. The older person thinks
of himself or herself as no longer at-
tractive sexually. Well, if sexuality is
a basic aspect of human life, and it is,
and if we no longer think we are at-
tractive to others and can no longer
interact with them, that lowers even
further the regard we have for our-
selves. I am not talking necessarily
about cohabitation and the sex act. I
am talking about affection, closeness,
friendship. If we are conditioned to
hate ourselves, naturally we will find
it impossible to think that someone
else would want to be a friend of ours
or be close to us.
Q: Where do these images come from?
KUHN: They are found in our culture
as a whole, and, of course, in our mass
media and advertising industries
which both shape that culture and re-
flect it. They come very directly, too,
from what I call the Detroit syndrome--
the practice of building in obsole
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ence into our automobiles and throw-
ing the old models away. Well, that is
a powerful force for making people
obsolescent too.
Q: If the distinctive mark of personal
achievement in a society is how much
a person can contribute to the gross
national product and how much he or
she can consume - that is, buy - of
that gross national product, then the
older citizen who is no longer able to
do much of either will obviously be
thought of as a liability rather than
an asset.
KUHN : Precisely. The whole system
tends to be rigged against the older
person.
Q: Doesn't that raise a profound ques-
tion? In order to change a society's
attitude toward the older person, must
you not change its basic value prem-
ises?
KUHN : Yes, and, of course,, there are
no instant answers. It will take a long
time to turn our society around.
Q: What is your group doing about it?
KUHN : Our first strategy - which we
borrowed from the women's libera-
tion movement - is to raise the con-
sciousness of the older persons. We let
people express their self-hatred and
then we help them come to grips with
what it really is they are doing and
why they are doing it. They begin to
see that such attitudes are a rejection
of themselves. For instance, when
older people lie about their age, they
are wasting their experience. Through
consciousness raising, we help people
get a different understanding and re-
spect for themselves and their experi-
ence.
One of the ways both the old and
the young. can gain a deep respect for
the experience of the old is through
oral history, through tape recording
interviews of older persons by young
people. We have found that young
people are tremendously interested in
such a project. And, of course, old
people, when they are asked by a
young interviewer to recall their past
and their achievements, begin to gain
a new, positive respect for themselves.
They themselves begin to marvel at
what they have lived through. It is a
very self-affirming experience for an
old person to be asked by a young per-
son what he or she has learned in life.
Q: Have the Gray Panthers engaged in
this oral history work?
KUHN: Yes. First it was done in a
casual way. Young people brought
their tape recorders to older people,
some of whom were living alone at
home, some in institutions and nurs-
ing homes. Now it is being done in
more organized fashion. Two Bryn
Mawr College students, for example,
are working for their degrees in so-
cial work in the Philadelphia area,
and they have devised a schedule of
interview questions and have taken
their tape recorders into a retirement
community in the Swarthmore area.
These young people discovered a rich
mine of experiences among the older
people, and they have got it all down
on tape. Another student took her tape
recorder to the Jewish Home for the
Aged and had a marvelous summer in-
terviewing these older people.
Q: What other strategies have you de-
vised to get at the value system in our
society?
KUHN: We are doing social analysis
- some writing and thinking that tries
to analyze our present human situa-
tion, to look at the forces in our so-
ciety that are unjust, and to see if we
can determine where leverage can be
exerted for social change. We per-
ceive, for instance, an interlock be-
tween the built-in obsolescence and
galloping technology which has dis-
placed people and destroyed institu-
tions, creating and accelerating
changes that cannot be encompassed
by human beings without a lot of so-
cial disorder, dislocation, and destruc-
tion. We have published these analyses
in a series of Gray Papers.
We also try to demonstrate a kind
of social criticism in the way we live.
We adopt a life-style that rejects the
idea of just throwing things - and
people - away.
Q: What is your view of commercial
retirement communities such as we
have out here in California and Ari-
zona?
KUHN: A community consisting ex-
clusively of old people is not really
living. Isolating older people from the
rest of life and from any kind of inter-
action with society, well, that is just
a plastic world, not a living world.
Q: Why do some of the elderly people
prefer to live in these retirement com-
munities?
KUHN : Partly because the alternatives
are sometimes even less attractive.
These places are absolutely safe; they
have walls, locked gates, guards. Peo-
ple are afraid to live in our cities.
Partly it is because these communities
are a manifestation of the profit mo-
tive: the retirement-community devel-
opers have a great thing going for
them. They have made a whale of a
lot of money, and I am told that the
people who have bought into them
find it extremely difficult to get out.
The assumption of most people is that
they are moving into Paradise when
they move into one of these develop-
ments. But when one spouse dies, or
when a long-term illness hits, these
places certainly cannot cope and they
were not set up to cope with that kind
of situation.
Q: In a society in which the extended,
two- or three-generation families no
longer exist, what is the alternative to
the "Sun Cities"? Grandmas and
grandpas who are not welcome in their
children's homes must live either in
one of these retirement communities
or, more often because of economic
reasons, in a seedy hotel room in the
central cities.
KUHN : I've been involved in a different
kind of housing effort in Philadelphia,
one that would be a congregate living
arrangement on a cooperative basis.
It would have old people and young
people living in the same facility, with
certain parts of the facility used in
common. It would have people of all
ages, but with a concentration of peo-
ple sixty and older and youth, the
student population.
Q: How close are you to developing
such a community?
KUHN: We have a committee and a
board incorporated under the laws of
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the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
- it's called the Corporation of Sixty-
five - and we have completed a feasi-
bility study which shows that, from a
market standpoint and from a land-use
standpoint, the land we have in mind,
which is owned by one of the churches,
could be developed for such a facility.
It would be in the University City area
of Philadelphia where lots of students
live and where, interestingly enough,
a number of old people live. The mar-
ket is there for housing, and it is also
there for small shops, for a service and
advocacy center, and for a referral
and information center to serve both
the students and the older people.
Q: What is holding it up?
KUHN: The moratorium on federal
housing funds, plus the high interest
rates on mortgages. Those rates, as
you know, are fantastic. We've been
halted in our tracks. The money to
build this facility is so costly that the
rents we would have to charge would
be out of the reach of the very people
who most need this service.
Q: What are some of the major prac-
tical problems for older people?
KUHN: Housing is a major problem in
all of the metropolitan areas. The
Quakers in Philadelphia have tried to
meet this by setting up what they call
"life centers." The Jews have also.
Several of our Philadelphia Gray
Panthers now live in one of these
Quaker life centers. The Quakers sold
some valuable pieces of land in down-
town Philadelphia, and with that and
some other capital they invested in a
number of big old houses in Philadel-
phia - sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-
room mansions that have come on the
market in recent years. They have
renovated and remodeled these old
homes and made them into attractive,
multiple-unit places peopled by a new
mix of persons. In one of these life
centers, there is a young divorced
woman with her three little children,
several students, and the rest retired
older people.
Q: What are the practical arrange-
ments in such a setup?
KUHN:It is a cooperative arrangement.
We say that people who are
physically weak can be
an important part of
the radical critique of our society.
Their very weakness can be a strength.
All live on a communal basis, each
pays what he or she can afford into a
common purse. They take two meals
a day in common, and they share the
work of keeping the place up. They
meet once a month. There is a mixture
of religious persuasions, but there is a
voluntary, Quaker-reflected style of
worship in which people come to-
gether for meditation and quiet.
Q: Is this idea growing?
KUHN: The Quakers now have a group
of people looking for such properties
as they become available at a reason-
able price. Let me tell you a little more
about these centers. While the resi-
dents in each of these old homes form
a tightly knit community, the homes
themselves form a larger community,
what they call a "movement for a new
society." Within this larger com-
munity, there are people who can pro-
vide almost any service the members
need. There are several retired nurses;
there is a retired certified public ac-
countant who keeps the books; there
are lawyers; there are a couple of
students who have a pickup truck and
do light moving for the residents; there
are handymen, people who can do
simple electrical, plumbing, and car-
pentry repairs.
Q: How many people live in this larger
community-of-life center?
Q: Are the older person's problems of
living less acute in rural areas and
small towns than they are in the metro-
politan centers?
KUHN: There are certain comforts and
safety factors in the small towns. Street
crimes, of course, are almost unheard
of in rural areas. On the other hand,
there is a terrible geographical isola-
tion in the rural areas because of the
lack of cheap public transportation.
And some of the services that people
need - medical care, for example -
well, rural people are under a heavy
handicap in that regard.
Q: Have the churches generally taken
a lead in truing to provide for the older
people?
KUHN: It is a little hard to generalize.
But I think the kind of thing going on
in Philadelphia could proliferate. My
own has been a church background,
and I have served on two national
Presbyterian boards. Right here in
Santa Barbara, I was interested to
learn that the Unitarian Universalist
Church has been operating for several
years on the premise that the congre-
gation is a new extended family. They
are trying to build a community of
concern for their members, to provide
the kind of familial support and affec-
tion that people used to receive in the
extended family. Unfortunately we
don't have good neighbors anymore,
dependable neighbors. Too often, a
local religious congregation reflects
this anomie, this lack of community.
But certainly the germ, the spirit, is
there in the religious groups; perhaps
humans have not responded to it yet,
or not in sufficiently large numbers. I
do believe that the churches and syna-
gogues of America could get a new
lease on their own congregational life
if they began to see the need for doing
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something about the need for com-
munity.
Q: 1 take it that poverty is an ever-
present major problem of the older
person. Do most simply not have
enough money?
KUHN : Yes. I know that in my own
case, my retirement income is half
what I earned when I was working.
And I have a better Social Security
income than do many people. Also I
have a very good pension from the
Y.M.C.A. retirement fund: I began
contributing to that almost from the
beginning. Still, as I say, my income is
half what it used to be.
Q: Is the United States any better, or
worse, than other countries as far as
the condition of the older persons is
concerned?
KUHN: I can't answer that with any
kind of completeness. One of our
Washington group did spend some
time a year or two ago in Sweden, and
she reported that the health care sys-
tem and living conditions in general
were quite wholesome there. She
found very little isolation of the aged.
The same thing, to a degree, exists in
Denmark. But in France the old peo-
ple fare badly. A social geographer
from the Sorbonne spent some time
with us on several occasions and indi-
cated that conditions were bad in his
country. A journalist, visiting us from
Zurich, informed us that in some parts
of Switzerland the old extended family
is still intact. Several newspaper peo-
ple visited us from Tokyo to find out
what is being done with and for the
elderly in our country, and they in-
formed us about some of the mon-
strosities in Japan, nursing homes and
the like.
Q: Nursing homes apparently are ana-
thema. But what can the older persons
do if they are not able to care for
themselves but are not sick enough to
be hospitalized?
KUHN: Our organization received a
small grant from the Presbyterian
women to do an action study and form
a citizens' monitoring guide to improve
nursing homes and develop some rec-
ommended alternatives to institutional
care, to see what can be done to main-
tain and rehabilitate people in their
own homes.
Q: Recent newspaper stories have
been revealing some of the rip-offs
perpetrated by nursing-home oper-
ators. Even Medicare in some areas
has been sabotaged by unscrupulous
doctors for their own profit.
KUHN : You see, though, all this goes
back to the value system in our so-
ciety. If profits are the main thing,
then you provide only those services
that are most profitable.
Q: It seems to me that the elderly fare
better in the so-called backward, or
less developed, societies around the
world. Is that true?
KUHN: In some ways, yes. I hope that
we can get some further insights from
other societies. We have had some re-
markable conferences with Africans,
people from Uganda and Kenya. In
those societies the elders of the tribe
still have status; they still have input
into the governance and life of their
tribe. They are still concerned with the
tribe's survival and well-being. It is
accepted and expected that the elders
will behave that way. The experience
of the elders is necessary to the sur-
vival of those people. In our society,
that is not accepted by very many of
our citizens.
Q: How long do you plan to continue
the work you are doing?
KUHN: Until I die.
Q: Or until you are physically not able
to do it, which may be long before you
die?
KUHN : Listen, even in our weakness
and in our sickness and disabilities,
we have strength. So much is made of
physical health and beauty and vigor,
as if anyone who does not have these
cannot do very much. In the Gray
Panthers we say that people without
physical health and vigor can be an
important part of the radical critique
of our society, that their very weakness
can be a strength. A year ago, we
merged with the Retired Professional
Action Group that Ralph Nader or-
ganized in Washington under his
"Public Citizen" rubric. One of his
operations looked into the nursing
homes and the hearing-aid business.
Fifty million people - most of them
older Americans - have hearing
problems, and the hearing-aid business
has become quite a rip-off. Physicians
have virtually abandoned the deaf to
the hearing-aid dealers. And who is
making the money? The dealers of
course. They are profiting from the
weakness of old people. But who can
be the powerful agents of change in
this situation? The deaf, the very
victims of the oppression. People suf-
fering this physical disability can use
their disability as a lever for social
change - in this case, to change the
way hearing aids are priced, marketed,
advertised, and distributed.
Q: Your point, then, is that you will
literally work until you die, using your
sickness or disability, if any, as a lever
for social change?
KUHN: Precisely. Here is an even love-
lier illustration of how one can use
one's weakness as a strength. We have
poor mass transportation in Philadel-
phia. The Gray Panthers were in-
volved in several public hearings with
the transportation authorities in Phil-
adelphia. Now in order to get atten-
tion in such hearings, you have to
create something of a fuss. The person
who did the most to shake up the
members of the transportation author-
ity in Philadelphia was one of our
Gray Panthers who, as a matter of
fact, died about six weeks after this
incident. This woman was suffering
from lupus, a strange disease that at-
tacks the blood vessels and the nerves.
At the present time it is incurable. Her
legs were perfectly awful, bleeding,
ulcerated; there were big lesions that
never healed. She came down to the
mass transport hearings with all her
baggage, including a wooden box that
was the exact height of the first step
on the buses in Philadelphia. And she
demonstrated very dramatically how it
was impossible, in her condition, to
get on the bus. She could not lift her
foot to that first step.
Nobody forgot that testimony. That
woman might have stayed at home
with the excuse that she was sick and
in pain. But she didn't. w
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BARRY COMMONER
The Energy Crisis-All of a Piece
We live in a time of unending crises. A series of
grave, seemingly intractable problems clamor for
attention: degradation of the environment, the rapid
growth of world population; the food crisis; the
energy crisis - rapidly mounting calamities that may
merge into a worldwide economic collapse. And,
overshadowing all, war and the threat of war,
As each crisis rises to the top of the public agenda,
we try to respond: the environmental crisis is met by
pollution controls; population growth by attempts
to control fertility; the energy crisis by efforts to con-
trol demand and to develop new supplies; the eco-
nomic crisis by proposals to control consumption,
wages, and prices; the threat of war is met by a patch-
work of negotiations.
But each effort to solve one crisis seems to founder
on conflict with another: pollution controls are
blamed for the shortage of energy; population con-
trol conflicts with the need for economic develop-
ment; energy conservation leads to unemployment;
proposals to feed the hungry of the world are con-
demned as inflationary; in the growing economic
panic we hear cries against almost any effort to
alleviate all the rest; and already there are those who
seek to end all these problems by incinerating them
in the flames of war.
All this seems to be a dismal confirmation that the
world is staggering toward catastrophe. But the very
links that make up this web of crises are themselves
a source of optimism, a clue to what needs to be
done. The close connections among them suggest
that all these problems are symptoms of some com-
mon fault that lies deep within the design of modern
society. The energy crisis is so closely linked to this
pivotal defect as to offer the hope that it can become
a guiding thread which, once seized, can lead us out
of the labyrinth. In this sense, the energy crisis sig-
nalizes a great watershed in the history of human
society. What we do in response to it will determine,
f believe, for the United States and for every nation
in the world, whether our future continues the
progress toward humanism and democracy, or ends
in catastrophe and oppression.
When engineers want to understand the strength of
a new material they stress it to the breaking point and
analyze how it responds. The energy crisis is a kind
of "engineering test" of the United States' economic
system, and it has revealed a number of deep-seated
faults.
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THIS ARTICLE AND
THE ONE FOLLOWING
ARE FROM A CONFERENCE ON
"THE ENERGY OUTLOOK AND
GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE,"
SPONSORED BY
THE FUND FOR PEACE
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE SCIENTISTS' INSTITUTE
FOR PUBLIC INFORMATION
Although energy is useless until it produces goods
or services, and although nearly all the energy that
we use is derived from limited, nonrenewable sources
which will eventually run out (all of which pollute
the environment), we have perversely reduced the
efficiency with which fuels are converted into goods
and services. In the last thirty years, in agriculture,
industry, and transportation, those productive pro-
cesses that use energy least efficiently and stress the
environment most heavily are growing most rapidly,
driving their energetically efficient competitors off the
market.
In agriculture the older, energy-sparing methods
of maintaining fertility by crop rotation and manur-
ing have been displaced by the intensive use of nitro-
gen fertilizers synthesized from natural gas. In the
same way, synthetic fibers, plastics, and detergents
made from petroleum have captured most of the
markets once held by wood, cotton, wool, and soap
- all made from energy-sparing and renewable re-
sources. In transportation, railroads - by far the
most energetically efficient means of moving people
and freight - are crumbling, their traffic increas-
ingly taken over by passenger cars, trucks, and air-
lanes that use far more fuel per passenger- or ton-
Naturally, such energy-wasting enterprises are
threatened when the price of energy increases - the
only real outcome of the illusory 1973 fuel shortage.
If they were not so serious, some of these economic
consequences could only be regarded as absurd.
When the multi-billion-dollar petrochemical industry
cheerfully bid up the price of propane - an essential
starting material in plastics production - farmers
had trouble finding the propane they needed to dry
their grain, and then had to pay triple its former
price. In order to sustain the surfeit of plastic trivia
that gluts the modern market, food production was
threatened. When, in response to urgent appeals,
householders reduced their demand for electricity,
the power companies asked for rate increases to
make up for the lost business. Automobile manu-
facturers, having scornfully rejected environmental-
ists' appeals to produce smaller, more fuel-efficient
vehicles, have lost about half their sales, throwing
one hundred thousand auto workers out of work.
The deepest fault that is revealed by the impact of
the energy crisis on the United States' economic sys-
tem is not that we are running out of energy or of
environmental quality - but of capital. As oil wells
have gone deeper, petroleum refineries have become
more complex; power plants have given up the re-
liability of coal- or oil-fired burners for the elaborate,
shaky technology of the nuclear reactor, and the
capital cost of producing a unit of energy has sharply
increased. The projected production of total United
States energy is expected to rise from about 57,000
trillion Btu in 1971 to about 92,000 trillion Btu
in 1985 (an increase of about sixty per cent) and
requiring that annual capital expenditures for energy
rise from about $26.5 billion to $158 billion over
that period - an increase of about 390 per cent.
This trend, coupled with the growing inefficiency in
the use of energy, means that, if we follow the present
course, energy production will consume an increas-
ing fraction of the total capital available for invest-
ment in new enterprises including factories, homes,
schools, and hospitals.
One projection, based on present maximum esti-
mates of energy demand, indicates that energy pro-
duction could consume as much as eighty per cent
of all available capital in 1985. This is, of course, an
absurdly unrealistic situation in which the energy in-
dustry would, in effect, be devouring its own custom-
ers. Thus, the compounded effects of a trend toward
enterprises that inefficiently convert energy into
goods and services and power plants that inefficiently
convert capital into energy production threaten to
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overrun the economic system's capacity to produce
its most essential factor - capital. This may well
explain why, according to a recent New York Stock
Exchange report, we are likely to be $650 billion
short in needed capital in the next decade, The eco-
nomic effects of the increasingly large proportion of
available capital that would need to be tied up in this
vast enterprise would be broadly felt by society. For
example, according to the recent New York Stock
Exchange report, in order to assure the availability of
capital, the following changes are called for:
"... corporate tax rates should be adjusted to permit
increased accumulation of funds ... tax exemption
for reasonable amounts of capital gains ... excessive
regulation and restrictive controls (especially in the
utilities industry) should be relaxed ... environ-
mental standards should be modified, with target
dates deferred."
The report acknowledges that federal tax revenues
will be reduced, but proposes to match this deficit
with a reduction in federal expenditures.
What has gone wrong? Why has the postwar trans-
formation of agriculture, industry, and transportation
set the United States on the suicidal course of con-
suming, ever more wastefully, capital goods and
nonrenewable sources of energy, and destroying the
very environment in which we must live?
The basic reason is one that every businessman
well understands. It paid. Soap companies signifi-
cantly increased their profit per pound of cleaner sold
when they switched from soap to detergents; truck
lines are more profitable than railroads; synthetic
plastics and fabrics are more profitable than leather.
cotton, wool, or wood; nitrogen fertilizer is the corn
farmer's most profit-yielding input; power companies
claim that capital-intensive nuclear plants improve
their rate of return; and as Henry Ford 11 has said,
"minicars make miniprofits."
All this is the natural outcome of the terms that
govern the entry of new enterprises in the United
States' economic system. Regardless of the initial
motivation for a new productive enterprise - the
entry of nuclear plants into the power market, of
synthetics into the fabric market, of detergents into
the cleaner market, or of trucks into the freight
market - it will succeed relative to the older com-
petitor only if it is capable of yielding a greater re-
turn on the investment. At times, this advantage may
be expressed as a lower price for the new goods, an
Approved
THE POLITICAL LUXURIES
... to survive the environmental crisis, the
people of industrialized nations will [not]
need to give up their "affluent" way of
life.... This "affluence," as judged by
conventional measures-such as G.N.P.,
power consumption, and production of
metals is itself an illusion....
There are, however, certain luxuries
which the environmental crisis and the
approaching bankruptcy that it signifies
will, I believe, force us to give up. These
are the political luxuries which have so
advantage that is likely to drive the competing ones
off the market. At other times, the advantage may be
translated into higher profits, enabling the new enter-
prise to expand faster than the older one, with the
same end result.
Some economists believe that private enterprise
can adapt to the rising price of energy by turning to
energetically efficient productive technologies in or-
der to save costs. Where this can be accomplished by
reducing the waste of energy within a given enter-
prise it may well succeed. But in other cases - for
example, the petrochemical industry - the intensive
use of energy is built into the very design of the en-
terprise in order to eliminate human labor, thereby
raising labor productivity and the resultant profits.
In these cases improved energetic efficiency can be
achieved only by rolling back the rapid growth of
such inherently inefficient industries - but, for that
very reason, these are precisely the industries that are
most profitable. Any attempt to reduce their level of
activity would necessarily encroach on the profit
yielded by the economic system as a whole.
Another possible adaptation is to pass the extra
cost of measures that conserve energy and reduce
environmental stress along to the consumer. Thus
the energy dependence of agriculture could be re-
duced by cutting back on the rate of application of
nitrogen fertilizer, with the inevitable result that the
price of food would rise. This would place an extra
burden on the poor, which, in turn, might be rectified
if the principles of private enterprise could accommo-
date measures that would remedy the growing gap
between the rich and the poor. Once more, this is a
challenge to the basic design of the economic system"
In a sense there is nothing new here, only
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long been enjoyed by those who can
benefit from them: the luxury of allowing
the wealth of the nation to serve prefer-
entially the interests of so few of its citi-
zens; of failing fully to inform citizens of
what they need to know in order to exer-
cise their right of political governance; of
condemning as anathema any sugges-
tion which reexamines basic economic
values; of burying the issues revealed by
logic in a morass of self-serving propa-
ganda.
BARRY COMMONER
(From The Closing Circle, Bantam Books)
recognition that in the United States' economic sys-
tem, decisions about what to produce and how to
produce it are governed most powerfully by the ex-
pectation of enhanced profit. What is new and pro-
foundly unsettling is that the thousands of separate
entrepreneurial decisions that have been made during
the last thirty years in the United States regarding
new productive enterprises have, with such alarming
uniformity, favored those which. are less efficient
energetically and more damaging to the environment
than their alternatives. This is a serious challenge to
the fundamental precept of private enterprise - that
decisions made on the basis of the producer's eco-
nomic self-interest are also the best way to meet
social needs. That is why the environmental crisis,
the energy crisis, and the multitude of social problems
to which they are linked suggest - certainly as an
urgently-to-be-discussed hypothesis - that the oper-
ative fault, and therefore the locus of the remedy,
lies in the design of our profit-oriented economic
system.
Comparable claims of service to the public welfare
are, of course, made by the Soviet and other socialist
economic systems, and insofar as such systems are
based on social rather than private decisions regard-
ing the design. of the productive system, these claims
may, at least in principle, be justified. However, when
we look at the recent practice of the Soviet Union
and certain other socialist countries we see a strange
tendency to acquire from the United States and other
industrialized capitalist countries, precisely the pro-
ductive technology that has driven these countries
down the path of wasteful consumption of energy
and capital. After all, when Fiat automobiles are
produced in Moscow they can be expected to use as
much gasoline and emit as much pollution as they do
in Rome. And when the petrochemical complexes
that are so largely responsible for the wasteful, en-
vironmentally destructive use of energy in the United
States are imported by Russia, Poland, and even
China, they will certainly impose these same perni-
cious hazards in their new locations.
We are all aware, of course, that neither capitalist
nor socialist societies will lightly tolerate inquiries
that question the basic roots of their economic sys-
tems. The environmental crisis, the energy crisis, and
all the difficult, interwoven social issues to which
they are linked is an urgent signal that it is time to
give up this taboo. Surely, those who are convinced
that private enterprise is in fact the most effective
way to live in harmony with our resources and the
natural world now have an unparalleled opportunity
to make their case and to convince a troubled
citizenry that there are ways, within the context of
that system, to right its grave faults. And for those
who see in the present situation opportunities to sup-
port socially oriented ways to organize our produc-
tive and economic enterprise, there is an equally im-
portant challenge to prove their case.
If we pay heed to the basic facts about the produc-
tion and use of energy, we can begin to find a ra-
tional way out of this tragic and absurd state of
affairs.
To begin with, we now know that we can readily
squeeze out of the productive process much of the
wasted energy that has been devoted, not to the im-
provement of human welfare, but to the replacement
of worthwhile and meaningful labor by the cheaper
and more tractable alternative of energy. A number
of studies have shown that in the United States the
nation's energy budget could be reduced by about a
third in this way with no significant reduction in the
standard of living. Every unit of energy thus saved is
reduced in its environmental impact to zero and re-
lieves the pressure for hasty adventures into dubious
and dangerous power technologies such as the
breeder and fusion reactors.
In their place we can turn to solar energy, which
has none of the faults that promise to 'cripple the
present energy system. Unlike oil, gas, coal, or
uranium, solar energy is renewable and virtually free
of untoward environmental effects. Unlike the non-
renewable sources, which become more difficult and.
costly to acquire as the rate of their use increases,
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the use of solar energy is readily extendable at no
loss in efficiency. The capture of one sunbeam, after
all, in no way hinders the capture of the next one.
Only solar energy can avoid the capital crunch which
promises to paralyze the further development of the
present energy system. Finally, solar energy is
uniquely adaptable -to different scales of economic
organization. A conventional power plant now typi-
cally requires an investment approaching one billion
dollars. In contrast, many solar collectors can be
constructed in a range of sizes suitable for everything
from a single household to an entire city.
The myth that solar energy is impractical, or too
expensive, or in the realm of future technology is
easily dispelled by a series of recent analyses done
for the National Science Foundation. For example,
a project, based on installing readily constructed
solar-heat systems in the nation's housing, could
readily reduce the United States' energy budget by
twelve to fifteen per cent, at a cost that could be
recovered in the form of fuel savings in ten to twelve
years.
Thus, we are at a crossroads. Along one path lies
the continued consumption of fossil fuels by pro-
ductive enterprises that waste energy for the sake of
extracting maximum profits out of labor; the con-
tinued pollution of the environment; an escalating
scramble for oil, which, as it diminishes in amount,
will inevitably become an irresistible lure to military
adventures. Along this path lies the increasing ex-
pansion of the size of power units, even beyond the
present billion-dollar size, so that the chief pre-
requisite to power production will become a huge
accumulation of wealth. In a country such as the
United States, this will mean that our energy system
will fall increasingly under the domination of a few
huge, wealthy corporations. In the world at large it
will favor the rich and the powerful nations as against
the small, poor nations that are struggling to develop.
Finally, along this road as the fossil fuels are ex-
hausted and nuclear reactors begin to dominate the
energy system, creating a plutonium economy that
ties power production directly to the violence of nu-
clear weapons, the threat of terroristic thefts -
whether real, or not - can be used as a pretext to
establish a system of military "protection." Already
a recent report to the Atomic Energy Commission
calls for elaborate military protection of power
plants, together with domestic espionage and all the
other trappings of fascism - all in the name of
enabling the operation of a nuclear energy system.
The other path relies on energy conservation and
the sun. Full use of existing methods of capturing
solar energy for heating and cooling could remove
fifteen to twenty per cent of the need for fossil fuels.
By this means, together with feasible measures to
conserve energy at no expense to the resulting goods
and services, within perhaps the next decade about
one-half of the present demand for energy from con-
ventional sources could be deleted from the national
energy budget -a step that with sensible planning
could readily permit us to phase out the operation of
most of the existing nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, with a research and development
effort that would be quite modest relative to the ex-
penditures that have been devoted to the develop-
ment of nuclear power, the technology for the eco-
nomic production of solar cells for the production of
electricity could be reduced to practicality. (Accord-
ing to a recent government report such a program
could, by 1990, establish economical solar-powered
electric stations for cities of one hundred thousand.)
Given the wide flexibility of solar power units with
respect to size, they could then be adapted to enter-
prises of any size and degree of centralization that
seem socially desirable. Such changes could take
place in small, graded steps, avoiding the huge ac-
cumulation of capital necessary to create conven-
tional power stations. In this way a nation's power
system could be made to serve its own particular
needs, reversing a situation now frequently encoun-
tered in which the huge size and centralized location
of power sources often dictates what can be pro-
duced. Energy can then more readily serve social
needs, rather than create them.
And finally, through the wide use of solar energy
and other alternative sources such as geothermal
energy, the energy system can be separated from nu-
clear weaponry and freed from the dead hand of
military control.
Consider, now, the implications of these alternatives
for international relations. If the industrial countries
follow the conventional path, they will have little to
offer in the way of useful energy technology to the
developing nations, which lack capital, are rich in
natural materials and labor, and are usually favored
by intense sunlight. In contrast, if the industrialized
countries were to develop new productive technol-
ogies that emphasized the use of natural materials -
synthesized from solar energy through photosynthe-
sis - rather than synthetic ones, and techniques for
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solar power, they could provide real help in the
struggle of the poor countries to develop their econo-
mies. This is the kind of help that would enable de-
veloping countries to increase both agricultural and
industrial production, and to raise living standards to
the levels that encourage the motivation for self-
limitation of fertility.
If we take this path we can begin to find also new
ways to harmonize the needs of industrialized and
developing nations and to end the growing trend
toward the creation of opposing camps of nations
that produce and use natural resources. For example,
if for the sake of environmental and energetic sanity,
the industrialized countries were to cut back on the
production of synthetic substitutes for natural ma-
terials such as cotton, their needs could be met, in
part, by goods produced from such natural products
in developing countries. Thus, Malaysia, for example,
may wish to supply the industrialized nations not
with natural rubber, but with tires; India may wish
to supply not cotton, but finished fabrics and even
clothes; West Africa may wish to supply the world
not with palm oil, but with soap.
Perhaps the most immediate threat that has been
generated by the energy crisis is the growing menace
of a catastrophic worldwide economic collapse. In-
ternational trade and monetary relations have already
felt its heavy force, and the impact of the sharply
rising price of energy has begun to disrupt industrial
and agricultural production in both the rich nations
and the developing ones. Here, too, a rational ap-
proach to the production and use of energy is a key
to restoring the stability of world economic relations,
without which no nation can hope to serve the needs
of its own people.
If for the sake of the world's ecological survival
we undertake the massive reconstruction of the
economies of both the industrialized and develop-
ing nations, clearly we are faced, as well, with
equally sweeping political changes. Thus, it is in-
conceivable that the United States could find the huge
capital resources for the needed reconstruction of
industry and agriculture along ecologically sound
lines unless we give up not only capital-intensive
forms of energy production but also our preoccupa-
tion with large-scale military activities.
But such a course would not only erode the eco-
nomic motivations for war, it would also give us
good grounds for ridding the world - at last - of
the most dangerous means of modern war, nuclear
weapons. This new course could halt the spread of
nuclear reactors and, with it, the proliferation of
nuclear weapons; and it encourages the existing nu-
clear powers to eliminate their own stocks of these
insanely suicidal weapons.
All this is described neither as a blueprint of the
future nor as a panacea for the ills of the world. I
am aware that, stated in these simplistic terms, this
picture does not take into account the numerous
difficult obstacles that lie along the path to environ-
mental and energetic sanity and peace. Rather, these
views are put forward as a kind of exercise that is
designed only to demonstrate the crucial role - for
good or evil - that energy plays in determining our
future. It shows, I believe, that we cannot hope to
develop, either in an industrialized country such as
the United States, or in the world as a whole, a
rational system of production or an economic and
social organization that fosters democracy and peace
unless we do understand that the irrational produc-
tion and use of energy is a fatal obstacle to this goal.
The energy crisis has become the world's most
dangerous political issue as it wrenches back into
open view the brutality of national competition for
survival, the basic faults in existing economic sys-
tems, and the tragic absurdity of war. The crisis
forces us to make long-avoided choices. If ecological
sanity demands the sharp curtailment of power con-
sumption and the production of synthetics and built-
in obsolescence, where in society will. the necessary
controls be localized? If nations must on ecological
grounds become more dependent on each other's
indigenous goods, how can we avoid the ancient evils
of international exploitation?
The lesson of the energy crisis is this: to survive on
the earth, which is our habitat, we must live in keep-
ing with its ecological imperatives. And if we are to
take this course of ecological wisdom we must accept,
at last, the wisdom of placing our faith not in produc-
tion for private gain, but for public good; not in the
exploitation of one people by another, but in the
equality of all peoples; not in arms which devastate
the land and the people and threaten world catastro-
phe, but in the desire which is. shared everywhere in
the world - for harmony with the environment, and
for peace among the peoples who live in it.
Mr. Commoner is the director of the Center for the
Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University
in St. Louis and chairman of the Scientists' Institute
for Public Information.
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Who Benefits?
I have observed two interesting phenomena at public
conferences. One is that speakers who represent
conflicting interest groups always seem to present
speeches that agree with each other. That is because
they focus on common objectives: everybody wants
peace, tranquillity, stability, and, in this case, energy
supply. A second is that none of them recall some-
thing Adam Smith once said: "The end of all pro-
duction is consumption." The test of any production
system is how well it benefits consumers now and
tomorrow. What we do with our technology today
will affect generations of consumers to come.
In judging the government's energy policy, our
criteria must be consumer input and consumer values.
There has to be an open information-gathering and
distribution system. Without information, the public
cannot respond, participate, make an input.
In testifying on its energy policy, American gov-
ernment officials admitted repeatedly before con-
gressional committees that they did not have an inde-
pendent capability of obtaining critical information
about oil reserves, production, refining, distribution,
marketing data; and they had very little information
about conservation potential last year. But energy
policy is critically reliant on timely and accurate
information. The government's own estimates make
it apparent that its information about oil reserves
is still much more speculative than it should be. It is
now clear that we have far more than a generation's
use of oil in our country. Estimates published in the
Wall Street Journal indicate that we have about two
hundred billion barrels of oil in our secondary and
tertiary reserves in already exploited wells. And the
Canadian government estimates that Athabaskan
tar sands, now being exploited in small part by the
Sun Oil Company, have about six hundred billion
barrels of recoverable oil. Last year, our country
consumed about six and a half billion barrels of
domestic and imported oil.
Also, as the price of oil goes up and technology
advances, our "reserves" expand, because the defini-
tion of oil reserves by the American Petroleum In-
stitute is based on a certain price for a barrel of oil
and on a certain level of technology. The A.P.I.'s last
estimate was based on a price of about $3.40 per
barrel - a little out of date. The level of technology,
which affects the estimation of reserves, was not fully
probed at the press conference when the A.P.I an-
nounced its estimate of reserves. Its next estimate
will be released in the spring of 1975, something both
the government and the public should watch for.
Nor do we have enough information about the
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 Approved
true cost of energy and power production. We are
told repeatedly that nuclear power is cheaper per
kilowatt hour than electric power based on fossil
fuels. But nuclear power is subsidized in a variety of
ways: in the development of its technology; in its
enrichment process; in the waste-disposal costs; in
the limited liability, by law, under the Price-Anderson
Act, which is an insurance subsidy; and in the in-
creasing government subsidy for protecting the whole
nuclear fuel cycle from theft and shortage. If all
these costs were taken into account, quite apart from
the costs of radioactive spills (well documented) or
any future nuclear catastrophe (which must be con-
sidered, given the Price-Anderson Act subsidy),
nuclear power is not as cheap as we have been led
to believe. And the rising price of uranium will make
the percentage of oil-price :increases modest by com-
parison.
Along with a lack of publicly revealed information
and government information verified through inde-
pendent sources, there is also overwhelming secrecy.
Recently the new Energy Resources Council, headed
by Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, met with the
auto manufacturers to discuss ways of improving fuel
efficiency of automobiles and the possible trade-offs
between this goal, emission controls, and auto safety
features. Despite citizen group protests that the fed-
eral Advisory Committee Act applied to such a meet-
ing, and therefore it must be open to the public and
the press, Mr. Morton refused to open it up. His
refusal is now the subject of a lawsuit; but they did
meet in secrecy.
Such secrecy permits, of course, an interlock be-
tween government officials and oil company execu-
tives. In that light, it is instructive to recall a state-
ment by Mr. Morton, who told oil industry lead-
ers at a White House briefing in 1973, "The Office of
Oil and Gas is ... designed to be your institution....
Our mission is to serve you, not to regulate you. We
try to avoid it. I have tried to avoid regulation to the
degree that I possibly can.... I pledge to you that
the Department is at your service."
Mr. Morton was being more than polite; he was
reflecting the historic fact that the Department of
the Interior has long been an accounts receivable for
the oil industry; it has long reflected an unconscio-
nable conflict-of-interest pattern and the practice of
recruiting important governmental energy policy-
makers from the energy industry, particularly the
oil industry.
This is real conflict of interest, not potential con-
flict of interest. For instance, not only do former oil
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company executives occupy important positions in
the Federal Power Commission, but, contrary to
regulation, according to a General Accounting Office
report, many F.P.C. officials are failing to file re-
quired financial disclosure statements and hold pro-
hibited investments in such companies as Exxon,
Texaco, Tenneco, and Pepco. The General Account-
ing Office also charged that the F.P.C. had acted
improperly and made a sham of the regulatory
process by extending the sixty-day emergency sales of
gas at unregulated prices to as much as three hundred
days. According to the G.A.O., F.P.C. Secretary
Kenneth Plumb had granted extensions beyond sixty
days to eight companies that had not even applied
for them.
Another conflict of interest: the many officials in
the Federal Energy Administration who were mak-
ing policy and drafting regulations that benefited
their former employers, knowing full well that they
would return to these employers at higher executive
levels.
One of the men hired by William E. Simon - and
if the oil companies did not have Mr. Simon, they
would have had to invent him - was Melvin Conant,
an Exxon executive. Exxon was so happy to see Mr.
Conant going to work at the Federal Energy Ad-,
ministration last winter that they gave him ninety
thousand. dollars in severance benefits to make it
easier for him to afford to take a lower-paying gov-
ernment job. When asked about this severance bonus
at a recent congressional hearing considering con-
firmation of Conant as Assistant Administrator for
International Affairs, both the F.E.A. and Conant
agreed that the bonus did not create a conflict-of-
interest problem because of Exxon's long-standing
policy of granting such bonuses to executives who
left to take government jobs. A Justice Department
opinion obediently concurred. This amounts to argu-
ing that even if such a severance bonus creates a.
conflict-of-interest problem, it is all right because
Exxon and the government have been doing it this
way for twenty-five years. But even that excuse failed
to hold up when Exxon officials were questioned by
the Senate Interior Committee and revealed that, in
fact, Exxon's decision about whether to give a sever-
ance bonus and the amount of the bonus is discretion-
ary; that it is not uniform and is not determined by a
set policy. Despite this admission, the Justice De-
partment subsequently informed Senator James
Abourezk that it saw no reason to change its opinion.
These are representative, not episodic, illustrations
of the inherent conflicts of interest so recurrent and
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intense that they have become institutionalized; they
are beginning to be accepted in our society.
The F.E.A. is willing to sacrifice public interest to
the interest of the oil companies - and, mind you,
the F.E.A. has a public trust to protect the con-
sumers. The F.E.A. has assigned 850 people to audit
oil companies and insure that price controls are not
violated. About 760 of these auditors are assigned to
wholesalers and retailers; to date they have uncovered
violations totaling about fifty million dollars. Mean-
while, only two auditors are assigned to each of the
nation's top thirty oil refiners. A report, from the
General Accounting Office says, "Considering that
many of the refiners are billion-dollar corporations
with numerous subsidiaries and multinational corpo-
rations, it is not surprising that the auditors fall
short."
Although G.A.Q. investigators estimate that price
violations by the oil refiners may total six billion
dollars, F.E.A. auditors have caught only $194
million of refiner violations to date. Of course, even
when these overcharges are documented, the individ-
ual consumers who were fleeced do not necessarily get
their money back. The F.E.A. uses several remedies
to correct overcharges. It needs to be scrutinized to
see whether, even after the government catches these
overcharges, the average level of fuel prices is
actually reduced.
Without information about the facts of the energy
situation, with a great deal of secrecy, and with in-
herent conflicts of interest, it is not hard to predict
that the policy of the government will be as it has
been in the past, one that parallels that of the oil
industry itself.
You cannot have innovation, competition, and
consumer protection as long as you have the private
energy cartel we have in this country. Our antitrust
laws have been on the books for decades. They
should be enforced, specifically by deconcentrating
the oil industry, getting rid of the vertical integration
which is possessed by no other industry that I know
of, and, through the forces of competition, getting
prices lowered.
When the price of foreign oil was set by the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the
domestic U.S. energy cartel decided, as a matter of
policy, that it would raise the price of every alterna-
tive form of energy, including domestic oil, to the
level of the O.P.E.C. monopoly price for oil. The
prices would be raised not only on domestic barrels
of oil, but also on equivalent Btu levels in other
fuels; and this pricing program is proceeding accord-
ing to schedule.
The oil industry is heavy in coal; coal is itself a
concentrated industry, The price of coal in this
country - and we don't import coal - has almost
tripled in the last three years. In spot sales in some
areas, it has quadrupled. The Tennessee Valley
Authority, which can drive as hard a bargain as any
big buyer, paid about twenty-eight dollars per ton in
its most recent contract. A little more than two years
ago, the price to T.V.A. was eleven dollars a ton.
The price of interstate natural gas has been regu-
lated by the federal government for twenty years.
During this time, the natural gas industry has grown
and prospered; it now provides about a third of our
energy consumption. The average price is about
forty-five cents per thousand cubic feet, If Senator
James Buckley and other oil-industry allies in Con-
gress succeed in deregulating the Trade Bill, it will
deregulate new interstate natural gas; within a year
and a half at the most, the price will go from fifty
cents to $1.60 per thousand cubic feet. It is now
selling intrastate in some areas - Texas and Loui-
siana - at $1.30 to $1.40 per thousand cubic feet
because it is not regulated. How such price increases
reflect cost increases is beyond comprehension. What
it does reflect is the ability of one arm of the domestic
energy cartel to boost its price to meet the "com-
petition" of its other arm, because the oil industry
obviously controls the natural gas industry.
I understand from Mayor Joseph Alioto of San
Francisco that the oil companies are now trying to
apply even to geothermal energy this principle -
raising the price of all alternative forms of cheaper
energy to the highest level. Incredibly revealing,
Pacific Gas & Electric's geothermal contract with
Union Oil has an escalation clause, raising the price
of geothermal energy to P.G.&E. if the price of oil
and gas increases. Solar energy is the one source of
energy still beyond the grasp of the cartel.
Now this raises a very serious commentary on the
structural rigidity of our investment situation in this
country. Suppose, for the purpose of clarification, we
hypothesize that someone tomorrow discovered an
energy source which you could put in your home. It
was one inch in circumference, it cost you twenty
dollars, and it would last for one hundred years.
Would this development thrill the oil industry? It
would not! Because it represents a cheaper displacing
form of energy that the industry does not control.
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viously compatible with a deconcentration of political
and economic power.
There are reasons why options of potentially
abundant technologies have not been developed in
recent decades. Technological abundance threatens
the capital investment in relatively scarce technology.
As Margaret Mead once said, solar energy's big
problem is that it can be too cheap. This is reflected
in the federal government's research strategy. The
research budget for solar energy next year will be
fifty million dollars; that is more than the govern-
ment has spent on solar energy altogether in the past
decade. But the investment in fission energy is run-
ning more than $1.5 billion -much of that in the
breeder reactor. The investment in nuclear fission
light-water reactors in past years has been many
billions of dollars. And investment in. fusion is in-
creasing.
Solar energy in all its manifestations - radiant,
thermal, wind, and tidal - is a form of energy that
escapes the requirements of monopoly investment.
The requirement of monopoly investment - and I
use that term to mean shared monopoly, i.e., com-
mon, cartelized, or oligopolistic companies within an
industry - is a source of energy that is possessed
exclusively, is difficult to reach by others (you gen-
erally can't go out and dig for coal in your back-
yard), and is relatively finite. The fossil fuels meet
those monopoly-investment requirements. But solar
energy will be fought by the fossil fuel industry be-
cause the characteristics of solar energy are super-
abundance, limitlessness, prevalence all over the
world, and a nasty capability of coming directly to
your home, bypassing your friendly power utility and
oil company.
Solar energy has another unique characteristic: it
has a healthy deconcentration trait. In solar energy
there is not a single massive complex technology. It
can be managed and distributed without tremendous
difficulty. This technological deconcentration is ob-
What determines how the research money flows? Is
the criterion consumer benefit or producer benefit?
For the most part, and particularly in the matter of
nuclear power, the criterion is a combination of
producer benefit and bureaucratic careerism. It is in
nuclear power where the most fundamental energy
problems of economics, environment, and alternative
modes of investment are illustrated.
Nuclear fission and its second-generation breeder
reactor development present the most unstable, most
uneconomic, and most catastrophic levels of risk to
humanity. The problem of nuclear power plants
begins with a mass of radioactive material within a
nuclear core that is two thousand times greater than
the fallout of the Hiroshima weapon. The analogy to
Hiroshima stops there. These nuclear power plants
do not explode, but they are susceptible to human
and machine error leading to catastrophic meltdowns,
ruptures of transported radioactive materials, spread
of radioactive materials, including deadly plutonium.
The radioactive waste disposal problem remains un-
resolved. Furthermore, nuclear plants and associated
technology are susceptible to theft, sabotage, and
terrorism. In some areas of the country they are
susceptible to natural occurrences such as earth-
quakes and tornados. The Atomic Energy Com-
mission has licensed or was about to license reactors
near or immediately over earthquake faults. The
proposed Bodega Bay reactor, for example, was
planned near the San Andreas fault in California
until civic opposition stopped it. There have been
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others - Indian Point in New York, and North Anna,
Virginia.
Nuclear power is a potentially unstable form of
energy. If you have five hundred oil- or coal-fired
plants in the United States and one, say in Philadel-
phia, has a catastrophic accident and is destroyed,
that will not greatly affect either the operation or
public perception of other coal- or oil-fired plants
around the country. But if there is one nuclear plant
disaster and if it takes out a. major metropolitan area
with its deadly radioactive cloud, what are the
American people going to say about nuclear facilities
in their area after all the assurances by government
and industry that the likelihood of such a catastrophe
is one in a billion, that it is as likely as a meteor
striking New York City?
The technology of nuclear power plants is intri-
cately interdependent. One plant's fate depends on
all of the others' fate. Dr. Alvin Weinberg, former
director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says
that one nuclear disaster devastating a metropolitan
area, whether by sabotage or accident, would spell
the end of the nuclear program. We are dealing here
with potentially hundreds of thousands of casualties,
with the contamination of an area the size of Penn-
sylvania. This is not like a fire or an explosion which
can be cleaned up and then it's "business as usual"
after a few days. A nuclear catastrophe will wreak
enormous human and property damage immediately
and continue the damage for generations to come.
A puzzling question is why the financial industry
has not awakened to the economic, administrative,
technological, and risk realities of nuclear power. If
one hundred of America's leading bankers and
finance specialists listened for one day to eminent
scientific critics of nuclear power - Henry Kendall,
Harold Urey, John Edsall, George Wald, Hannes
Alfven, John Gofman, and many others - they would
conclude that nuclear technology has no future.
It is a technology that demands human and me-
chanical infallibility, a level of perfection never yet
attained by mankind. It is a technology that can
throw this country into both a radioactive and energy
crisis should there be a catastrophic accident. It is a
technology that will require a mini-garrison state to
safeguard its transportation, its reactors, its waste
disposal; we will have to have elaborate personnel
security checks, invasion of privacy, and a massive
accumulation of dossiers to make sure that every-
body who deals with it is beyond suspicion.
Dr. Ralph Lapp, a proponent of nuclear power,
posed this question in his advice to the Illinois state
government: -Suppose someone called the governor's
office, say in ten years, when nuclear power plants
provide twenty-five to thirty per cent of Illinois'
energy; this caller says that, unless the governor
meets his demands and gives him Saskatchewan, a
detonating device under a nuclear plant will go off at
a certain time." According to Dr. Lapp, the only
prudent course of action the governor could take
would be to shut all nuclear power plants down
immediately to reduce risk and to facilitate search
for the bomb. How is that for an energy crisis, when,
by 1990, Illinois may be relying on nuclear power
plants for fifty per cent of its energy?
From what we can learn about the Soviet Union's
nuclear power program, the Russians are behaving
even more irresponsibly. The Russians' safeguards
are not even up to ours. The only good thing about
the Soviet Union's program is that it has not really
got off the ground.
We need to look at this whole matter with the con-
sumers' perspective and on a global as well as na-
tional scale. We must devise an energy policy based
on consumers' needs, construct a scenario, and then
compare that policy with one developed for the
benefit of producers.
Those desiring to redefine the scale and the
premises of modern technology would do well to
read E. F. Schumacher's new book, Small Is Beauti-
ful, and the magazine of his Intermediate Technology
Development Group, Appropriate Technology.
Beyond that, here are some of the things that must
he done to protect consumers:
^ The monopoly structure of the energy industry
must be broken up. If a company produces coal, that
is all it should produce. It should not also produce
oil, uranium, and geothermal energy. Nor should any
company control production, refining, transportation,
and retail distribution of a particular form of energy.
Imagine if the drug industry - which is no innocent
- controlled the raw materials, production capacity,
all doctors, and all pharmacies.
^ There must be mandatory conservation measures.
How can a nation such as ours be taken seriously
when its leaders talk about an energy crisis and an
insufficient supply while it not is only wasting energy
but using it gluttonously? Look at the World Trade
Center in New York, which is designed to maximize
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sales by the Commonwealth Edison Company. Look
at the design of our new buildings - uninsulated,
overventilated, overlit, overheated. Look at our auto-
mobiles - we are finally turning the corner. In 1974,
Detroit-model cars averaged a trivial 13.5 miles per
gallon of gasoline. The 1975 cars, allegedly, will
average 14.5 miles per gallon! If we had cars aver-
aging twenty-six or twenty-eight miles per gallon, we
would save about fifteen per cent of our present
petroleum consumption, reduce pollution, enhance
consumer welfare, and fight inflation.
^ We must have a whole host of new federal poli-
cies. We.cannot possibly leave the pricing of energy
to a rigged market system dominated by private
monopolies. If all price controls were removed tomor-
row, the prices of every kind of energy would sky-
rocket to the O.P.E.C. level. Why the price of coal
and natural gas has to go up in Btu equivalents to the
cartel price of oil escapes many people who do not
understand monopoly power. We must maintain price
regulations of interstate natural gas until the industry
is restructured completely. We must keep controls on
domestic old oil. The oil companies already got a
$2.5 billion windfall in December of 1973, when the
price of old oil was increased by one dollar per
barrel. We must not allow our domestic energy
reserves which now provide eighty-five per cent of
our energy needs to go up to those levels: if there
are financial strains on the economy now, what would
they be if an additional twenty billion dollars in
higher energy costs were laid on us?
^ The states have a role to play. They must be
very cautious about accelerating the leasing of off-
shore oil and gas tracts. Even oil industry officials
admit they do not have the equipment to start pro-
ducing in these offshore areas. Many past corporate
leases for oil and coal on federal land have remained
unexploited. Why should more lands be leased in
such large amounts, so precipitously, with so little
public participation, and in a way that will further
concentrate leasing power in the hands of the giant
oil companies? Why not get independent producers
into the picture? Even more basically, these lands are
federal lands and belong to the people. The oil and
gas will be found on these lands, so these fuels belong
to the people. We should seriously consider develop-
ing an alternative supplier of last resort; the federal
government should command the oil and gas re-
sources found on our land, rather than engage in a
massive giveaway which will further secure the
monopoly of supply and drive prices even higher.
Also, if the federal government does not begin
giving energy-efficiency ratings to new appliances,
autos, heating and cooling systems, the states must
do so. The states can also issue energy-impact state-
ments on the construction of major buildings, high-
ways, public works projects, and electric power
plants, the last being the biggest energy wasters of all.
^ Either ban or tax non-returnable beverage con-
tainers.
^ Reduce the use of cars by levying surcharges on
downtown parking, and by car pooling.
^ We should make easily available low-cost financ-
ing for insulation and weatherproofing improvements
in existing houses and apartment buildings. The states
can lobby the federal government to do that; the
states do not do enough of that kind of lobbying.
^ States can start models of alternative energy re-
sources. When New York State, in the mid-nineteen-
sixties, started an experimental research program to
develop a safe automobile, that moved the federal
government to develop an experimental-car program.
New York did it with a three- to four-million-dollar
budget and by subcontracting work to a Long Island
aerospace company. Why can't the states begin ex-
perimenting with wind power and other sources of
power that permit small-scale experimentation for
eventual wide-scale application?
^ We must forcefully institutionalize the consumer
perspective in Washington. We need a consumer
advocacy agency staffed with engineers, economists,
lawyers, accountants, health specialists who will chal-
lenge, provoke, and petition those agencies now
making energy policy. We must get the facts out,
stop letting the oil industry collect information for
the government agencies. Such a consumer advocacy
agency must have the power to take the federal
agencies to court. A bill to that end passed the House
by a margin of three to one in April last year but was
blocked by a Senate filibuster which beat, by one
vote, efforts to break it last September.
The test of any energy policy is how thoroughly
it is discussed and then decided with the consumers'
well-being in primary view.
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FOLLOW-UP/A Precious Resource
ROGERS C. B. MORTON
Secretary of the Interior
Washington, D.C.
Like Rip van Winkle, Charles Reich's
1962 article finds itself in a far differ-
ent world on awakening in 1975.
Man has reached the moon, the Na-
tional Park System has expanded from
192 areas to 287 areas, and public
use of the parks has increased from
ninety-nine million visits a year to
216 million.
The author's call for more public
participation in natural resource de-
cisions seems somewhat incongruous
in today's environmentally attuned
society. Wilderness hearings, environ-
mental impact statements, legislation
for strip-mine controls, Earth Day
observances, the election of public
officials on environmental platforms,
and the proliferation of environ-
mental centers, institutes, defense
funds, councils, and coalitions pro-
claim public participation all over
the land.
The 1962 article and others like it
probably stimulated much of the
public action of the last thirteen
years. If the author overstated his
case a bit as to federal agency se-
crecy, let us attribute it to poetic
license. A gadfly for conservation
causes must be allowed some latitude.
However, even in 1962 we ques-
lion that decisions of the National
Park Service (N.P.S.), Forest Ser-
vice, and Bureau of Land Manage-
ment (B.L.M.) were "made in rooms
insulated from the voice of the
people." So far as the National Park
Service is concerned, Congress had
created as early as 1935 an advisory
hoard on national parks, historic
sites, buildings, and monuments to
advise the Secretary of the Interior
on prospective new areas and other
park matters. By 1962, this board
had been serving for a generation as
an important link in providing the
public an opportunity to contribute
to national park policy,
We question also the statement that
the agencies operated "largely with-
out congressional direction, executive
supervision, or public participation,"
and that thus "the people lack real
control over the management of their
own land." That statement does not
apply now to the National Park Ser-
vice, and it is doubtful that it ap-
plied in 1962. Anyone who has seen
the N.P.S. director before a House
Appropriations Subcommittee or a
House or Senate Interior Committee
in an atmosphere of concerned con-
gressional involvement would sense
the irony of such a statement.
The "executive supervision" charge
is even more baffling. Anyone fa-
miliar with the history of the National
Park Service knows the close rela-
tionship of every Secretary of the
Interior to the director of the Na-
tional Park Service and the deep
personal interest the Secretaries main-
tained in development and operation
of the National Park System. The
record shows that the Presidents also
have maintained close personal inter-
est in the parks, It is true that the
parks have rarely - perhaps never
- enjoyed such close attention as
they now receive from the Assistant
Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and
Parks. In this sense, perhaps, the
executive supervision may be at an
all-time high.
The article readily acknowledges
the three agencies' "high standard of
dedicated professional service" in
1962. Since then, the National Park
Service has broadened its executive
directorate under the director to a
deputy director, four associate direc-
tors, a deputy associate director,
seven assistant directors, eight re-
gional directors, a national capital
park director, and more than 250
park superintendents with strong exe-
cutive powers.
The author says, "There is no pro-
cedure by which the public can ini-
tiate proposals." Yet, at about the
same time he was preparing the
article, fiery public hearings were be-
ing held on the proposed Cape Cod
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 Approved
Charles Reich's 1962 Occasional Paper
on the government's management
of the nation's forests was reprinted
in the Januaryl February, 1975, issue
as our Second Edition feature, entitled
"A Precious Resource."
Copies of the article were sent
to government officials entrusted
with the responsibility for managing the
forests, leaders in the lumber industry,
congressmen, conservationists, and
environmental reporters. We asked
them to tell us in what ways, if any,
the management of the forests and
.the participation of the'American
public in decisions affecting the forests
have changed in the thirteen years since
the Center first published Mr. Reich's paper.
National Seashore and were duly
reported in national newspapers and
magazines.
Across the continent, the super-
intendent of Olympic National Park,
Washington, had marched down the
park's ocean strip with well-known
conservationists to protest proposed
construction of an oceanfront road
there. The road was never built. The
same superintendent ended timbering
in the park and blocked efforts to
turn over parts of the Olympic rain
forest to lumber companies. Was the
author unaware of these responses to
proposals initiated by the public?
Perhaps the article did help to
bring about the broad public partici-
pation which the National Park Ser-
vice and the Forest Service have re-
ceived in implementing the Wilder-
ness Act of 1964. To'evaluate fifty-
seven areas for wilderness lands by
September, 1974, the National Park
Service alone conducted ninety-five
field hearings in twenty-five states. At
least twenty thousand people (a con-
servative estimate) took advantage of
this opportunity for public participa-
tion in a major decision-making
process involving the public's lands.
Their views and those of the organi-
zations they represented were care-
fully weighed by the N.P.S. in recom-
mending to Congress that 15.7
million acres (mostly forested land)
in forty-nine states be placed in the
National Wilderness Preservation Sys-
tem.
In the National Historic Preserva-
tion Act of 1966, Congress provided
for an Advisory Council on Historic
Preservation, ten of whose members
would be nonfederal. In addition to
advising the President and Congress,
the council is directed to "encourage
... public interest and participation
in historic preservation. . . ." The
council's most important function is
to review any federal or federally
assisted action involving any place or
object listed in the National Register
of Historic Places, or determined to
be eligible by the Secretary of the
Interior. While the council has no
approval authority respecting such
federal activities, the comments must
be taken into account by the federal
agency.
Thus, when a nuclear power plant
involving federal funding was to be
built on the east side of the Hudson
River in 1968 opposite Saratoga Na-
tional Historical Park, the council
was advised. The council found that
the towering structure would be an
aesthetic intrusion on the battlefield
atmosphere and view. Reinforced by
the council report, public opposition
forced cancellation of the proposed
construction. Similar action forced
cancellation of plans for a waterfront
highway through the historic French
Quarter of New Orleans in 1969.
The council has taken action in
more than a thousand cases since the
1.966 Act was passed. Hundreds of
public meetings on threatened historic
places have been held, including field
meetings and public sessions before
the full council.
The council failed in some cases,
however, because it had not been
empowered to take enforcing or puni-
tive action. The council could do
nothing to prevent construction of
the observation tower that now looms
over the battlefield and cemetery at
Gettysburg National Military Park,
for example, despite a highly adverse
council report on the tower.
The National Environmental Policy
Act of 1969 (N.E.P.A.), however,
has more teeth in it. The Environ-
mental Protection Agency (E.P.A.)
is empowered to take swift action to
halt anti-environmental activities by
injunction. N.E.P.A. brings the public
into the picture by requiring environ-
mental impact statements (E.I.S.)
for all land-use steps taken by fed-
eral agencies. Public participation is
encouraged. Every E.I.S. is an expla-
nation to the public of the environ-
mental consequences of proposed
government action.. The statements
are in the form of large, thick books
about the size of a mail-order cata-
logue, often running five hundred
pages or more.
A draft E.I.S. must be released to
the public for review at least ninety
days before the proposed action.
The public then has the oppor-.
tunity to add its comments, after
which the agency has thirty days to
make the entire hefty package public
before taking final action.
The Council on Environmental
Quality says the E.I.S. procedure has
"opened to public participation many
government decisions that were pre-
viously made informally and without
prior public notice."
By December 1, 1974, the Depart-
ment of the Interior alone had pro-
duced 694 environmental impact state-
ments, 256 of them in final form,
since passage of the Act. The Na-
tional Park Service and Bureau of
Reclamation are the most productive
agencies, accounting for about thirty-
five per cent of the total. The Park
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Service must prepare E.I.S's in con-
nection with its park master plans,
wilderness proposals, land acquisi-
tions, and pollution controls - which
helps explain its high production.
Congress and the land-use agencies
have broadened public participation
in other fields as well as through the
wilderness hearings, the Historic Pre-
servation Act of 1966, and the en-
vironmental impact statements. These
three are among the better examples
of action which provide the objective
sought in Mr. Reich's 1962 article:
that "one final right - the right to
initiate."
We find the author's call for ade-
quate public notice of major long-
range plans in construction and land
use well-founded and worthy of
attention by all land-use agencies.
Public service is a public trust. And
more adequate public notice will
strengthen both public service and the
public trust.
In the last decade the Bureau of
Land Management has implemented
many changes in the management of
the forest resources on the national
resources lands. One of the most
significant is the B.L.M.'s Western
Oregon Allowable Cut Plan, which
was adopted by the Secretary of the
Interior in March, 1971. following a
thorough review by the public.
Basically the plan calls for an in-
tensive level of timber management
consistent with the protection and
enhancement of the environment. To
assist in carrying out the plan, the
B.L.M. adopted the guidelines set
out in the March, 1972, Senate Pub-
lic Lands Subcommittee, Interior and
Insular Affairs Committee report en-
titled, "Clear-cutting on Federal Tim-
berlands." The guidelines set policy
for allowable harvest levels, harvest-
ing limitations, acceptable clear-
cutting practices, and environmental
protection stipulations for timber-sale
contracts. Based on the guidelines,
the B.L.M. requires that a multi-
disciplinary review be made for each
sales area assessing the potential en-
vironmental, biological, aesthetic, en-
gineering, and economic impacts.
Another major event of the past
decade was the development of the
Bureau Planning System. This system
is a planning process that helps line
managers blend diverse programs and
authorities into multi-use on-the-
ground programs. Public involvement
is an integral part of the planning
process, and citizen involvement is
mandatory throughout the planning
effort. Environmental analyses arc
also an integral part of all Bureau
Planning System components and
procedures, which are designed to
meet the requirements of the National
Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
In accordance with this act, the
B.L.M. has just recently completed a
draft environmental impact statement
for the Bureau's national timber pro-
gram that will be released to the
public.
GORDON ROBINSON
Forestry Consultant
Sierra Club
San Francisco, Calif.
I have read Charles Reich's article a
number of tunes since it first ap-
peared, and am profoundly discour-
aged to say that nothing of substance
has changed in all the intervening
years. The only hope I see of ever
correcting the situation is for maga-
zines such as yours to fully air the
tragedy.
Your readers may be interested in
my statement before Senator Frank
Church's Committee on Interior and
Insular Affairs on the subject of
clear-cutting, in Washington, April 5,
1971. Since making that statement I
have made detailed examinations of
several other national forests.and find
the rate of cut grossly out of line in
all of them.
Mr. Chairman: My name is Gordon
Robinson. I reside at 16 Apollo
Road, Tiburon, California, I am a
professional forester, having received
my education at the University of
California in Berkeley. From 1939
until 1966, 1 was the principal for-
ester for Southern Pacific Company,
65 Market Street, San Francisco. I
set up and managed that company's
substaincd-yield timber-management
plan on 730,000 acres of forest in
northern California. These lands are
composed of a variety of forest types,
mixed conifer, Douglas fir, Ponderosa
pine, and true firs. They are being
managed for income under selection
and group selection systems of silvi-
culture.
From 1966 to the present, I have
been a private forestry consultant
and my principal client has been the
Sierra Club which I serve as staff
forester. In a narrow sense I am rep-
resenting the Sierra Club in my pre-
sentation. The Sierra Club has made
it possible for me to do the research
to document supporting evidence in
my efforts to improve forestry in the
United States. In a broader sense I
represent a very large number of pro-
fessional foresters who have been on
the verge of despair for many years.
The best kept secret in this period
of great concern about the declining
quality of our environment is the con-
dition of our forest lands. Concern
for our forests was the beginning of
American conservation. Forests are
the source of the bulk of our water,
the home of our wildlife, the scene
of most of our recreation, and the
resource base of one of our largest
and oldest industries. Yet, the forests
of America have been relentlessly
plundered ever since Europeans in-
vaded the western hemisphere five
hundred years ago. The destruction
continues almost unabated today de-
spite the contrary impression many
people seem to have inferred from
slick, nationally circulated tree-farm
propaganda.
Nevertheless, during the past
twenty years forest industries through
their many and varied lobbying orga-
nizations have been vigorously cam-
paigning, both through administrative
and legislative channels, to require
the United States Forest Service and
the Bureau of Land Management to
vastly increase the sale of timber
from our public forests. The reasons
they are giving now are that we have
a critical housing shortage requiring
low-cost housing which in turn osten-
sibly requires increasing quantities of
wood. The private forests, they say,
are gone and the only way we can
meet the environmental crisis is to
cut more timber from our national
forests. If they had actually practiced
forestry on their own land instead of
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pretending, they would not be fight-
ing for our public timber. Actually,
however, the amount of timber cut
annually in the United States has
been roughly constant since 1900,
and if prices are allowed to seek their
natural level there is no reason to
expect any great rise in the use of
wood in the foreseeable future except
possibly for pulp, and that increase,
while of doubtful social value, can be
easily met by the shoddy forestry
being practiced in the South.
The industries' recent and continu-
ing campaign for a National Timber
Supply Act is evidence that the wood
famine long predicted in this country
has finally come to pass. Even worse
is the relevation during the hearings
on that proposal that. over the last
two decades the Forest Service has
been yielding to this pressure by
greatly increasing the sale of timber
and is now grossly mismanaging the
national forests. A parallel situation
exists with respect to the Bureau of
Land Management lands in western
Oregon. It is very late to be taking
corrective measures, but hopefully
there is still time.
We must promptly restore the For-
est Service and the Bureau of Land
Management to their proper role of
managing our federal forests under
multiple use and sustained yield, and
we must immediately enact effective
legislation requiring good forestry on
private lands.
In order to cope with the situation
effectively, it is important to under-
stand clearly what good forestry con-
sists of. Where good forestry is
practiced, the land usually offers a
satisfactory aesthetic experience to
the visitor. It consists of limiting the
cutting of timber to that which can
be removed annually in perpetuity. It
consists of practicing a selection sys-
tern of cutting wherever this is con-
sistent with the biological require-
ments of the species involved, and
where this is not the case, keeping the
openings no larger than necessary to
meet those requirements. Finally, it
consists of taking extreme precaution
to protect the soil, our all-important
basic resource. This is multiple-use
forestry, the management of timber in
ways compatible with watershed, wild-
life, range, and recreation. And this
is what foresters had in mind when
they offered "multiple use" as a slogan
to describe the policies of the U.S.
Forest Service. There is no question
whatsoever about this definition of
good forestry; and the advantages of
such management are overwhelming.
It takes timber to grow timber. It
is not enough to have orderly fields
of young trees varying in age from
patch to patch. In looking at a well-
managed forest one will observe that
it is fully stocked with trees of all
sizes and ages. It will be obvious that
the land is growing about all the
timber it can, and that most of the
growth consists of high-quality, highly
valuable material in the lower por-
tions of the large older trees. It will
be evident that no erosion is taking
place. Roads will be stable and attrac-
tive, having the appearance of being
lain on the land rather than cut into
it. The soil will be intact, the forest
floor will be covered with leaf litter
and other vegetative matter in various
stages of growth or decomposition.
This absorbent layer holds rain and
melting snow while it soaks down into
the ground through animal burrows,
pores such as wormholes, channels dug
by ants, and tracks left by the decay-
ing roots of past generations of vege-
tation. In this way the forest becomes
a vast reservoir of water which gradu-
ally seeps down through the land and
comes out in springs in the form of
clear cool water. This is how the forest
stabilizes stream flow, and this is what
is referred to when one reads of the
forest serving to protect our water-
sheds. One also observes in the well-
managed forest that there are frequent
small openings stocked with herbs and
browse which serve as food and
shelter for wildlife. Finally one ob-
serves that such a forest maintains its
beauty and will continue to serve the
recreational needs of most people as
long as it is so managed.
This, however, is not the way our
federal forests are being managed
today. The annual cut of timber on
our national forests has been in-
creased from 5.6 billion feet in 1950
to over 14.8 billion feet in 1969. Like-
wise, the Bureau of Land Manage-
ment has increased. the allowable cut
on the Oregon and California and
other interior department lands in
western Oregon twelve times since
1937, climbing relentlessly from an
initial five hundred million board feet
to 1,170 million board feet in 1970,
with actual sales escalating as high as
1,708 million board feet in 1970. The
first revision downward is now (1971)
being considered but that, although
insufficient, is meeting with stiff re-
sistence from industry. These in-
creases have not been earned through
improved forest practices or enhanced
growth but rather have been achieved
through application of a long dismal
series of rationalizations invented to
justify appeasement of the timber in-
dustry and to obtain increasing appro-
priations from Congress.
I have not traced the history of the
rationalizations used by the Bureau
of Land Management, and have
studied only their present proposal.
Referring to the Forest Service, how-
ever, one of the rationalizations is the
continuous shifting of criteria for
classification of forest lands. In 1928,
Congress passed the McSweney-
McNary Act which, with subsequent
amendments, gave the Forest Service
responsibility for periodically measur-
ing the forest resources of the United
States. The first survey under the Act,
published in 1945, indicated a total
of seventy-three million acres of corn-
mercial forest land in the national
forests within the forty-eight con-
tiguous states. However, the second
such inventory, published in 1953 and
known as the Timber Resources Re-
view, indicated a total of eighty-one
million acres of commercial forest
land, and the 1963 inventory, pub-
lished under the title of Timber
Trends, shows 91.5 million acres of
such land. The reported increase does
not reflect any change in the area of
our national forests. That has com-
prised a total of 186 million acres
throughout the entire period of these
surveys except for minor variations
due to acquisitions, exchanges, and
withdrawals for parks and wilderness
areas. The eighteen-million-acre in-
crease is the result of reclassification
of forest from noncommercial to com-
mercial. This consists of land form-
erly classified as protection forest and
managed for watershed, wildlife, and
recreation. For example, they re-
cently changed the definition of com-
mercial forest land from "land capa-
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ble of producing twenty-five cubic
feet of wood annually," to "land
capable of producing twenty cubic
feet...."
Consequently some of the increase
in the volume of national forest an-
nual timber sales consists of marginal
species of timber growing on steep
unstable soils, scattered stands, and
timber that has taken a very long
time to grow because of poor condi-
tions such as thin rocky soil, dry
climate, or short growing season.
Another way in which the cut has
been increased on the national for-
ests has been by combining the work-
ing circles. A working circle is a com-
pact administrative unit within which
the forester balances cut and growth.
It is readily comprehensible to a for-
ester in terms of its condition, its
quantity and quality of timber, and its
capacity for growth. Its various man-
agement considerations such as water-
shed, wildlife, and recreational values
are also clear and comprehensible.
In recent years, however, these
units have been merged so that now
throughout the United States many
national forests as a whole are re-
garded as a single working circle.
This has several destructive results.
Forest statistics are gathered by sam-
pling techniques, and the people who
collect the data do not see the results
of their work. Data is forwarded to a
computer center where it is processed
and delivered to others than those
who did the sampling. Consequently
some of the most important manage-
ment decisions arc made by people
who are not directly familiar with the
forest. Basic decisions of how much
timber to sell and what timber to sell
have come to be made on the basis
of rules and regulations emanating
from Washington and depending
upon data-processing printouts. In
this manner, the practicing forester
has generally lost touch, and the for-
ests are run by people high in the
bureaucratic echelons who are closer
to industry than they are to the living
forests they control. Thus it is that
scattered timber and timber on steep
unstable soils, while showing up in
the inventory, is not recognized for
what it is by the people making the
management decisions. So, again,
allowable cuts are increased in readi-
ly accessible high-quality timber on
the strength of inaccessible timber
and timber growing on steep unstable
slopes, all brought about by gerry-
mandering the working circles.
Another destructive effect of com-
bining working circles grows out of
the fact that allowable cuts are calcu-
lated from forests' statistics applying
to each working circle as a whole. This
means that the Forest Service cannot
reserve any de facto wilderness for pos-
sible wilderness classification without
reducing allowable cut, thereby bring-
ing the whole timber lobby into action
every time the question is raised about
saving some particularly beautiful and
fragile area not already included in a
wilderness or primitive area. This is
what led to the famous Parker case in
Colorado, and is a major cause of the
great conflict between the lumber in-
dustry and conservationists through
the country.
Rotation is a technical term used by
foresters to describe the length of
time it takes to grow a tree from
logging until the next generation is
cut. This is the age of the tree plus
a period of time allowed for regen-
eration. One way of determining a
rotation is to superimpose a pair of
graphs, one showing the current
growth by year and the other show-
ing the average growth through each
year of age. Where these two curves
cross is the point of diminishing re-
turns. That point may be described as
the age of the forest at which the
annual average growth begins to de-
cline. Under even-age management,
it is the age at which long-run pro-
duction would be maximized if you
were to clear-cut and start over again.
Now the interesting thing is that indi-
cated rotations vary greatly with the
unit of measurement used for making
these determinations. To illustrate. if
you use cubic-foot content of the
entire tree, this technique will indicate
a rotation age of forty years on an
average Ponderosa pine site. If, how-
ever, you use board-feet international
sawlog rule instead of cubic feet,
which is a way of measuring growth
in sawlog sizes, a rotation of ninety
years will be indicated. Then again,
using Scribner rule for determining
optimum board-foot rotations, you
get about 125 years, because that rule
emphasizes quality slightly by under-
estimating the quantity of lumber that
can be cut from very small, low-qual-
ity logs. (The "rules" referred to are
tables indicating the contents of logs
of various sizes.) Finally, if you take
quality into consideration by plotting
value determinations rather than
quantities, or perhaps by using board
feet of clear lumber rather than total
board feet, you get a rotation in the
neighborhood of 260 years.
The Forest Service, in originally
establishing management plans, was
either using long rotations, or practic-
ing a selection system of management
in which such determinations were
mere guides for helping decide what
volume of timber to sell rather than
justification for clear-cutting and
starting over. But now they are prac-
ticing even-age management (clear-
cutting) in every kind of forest I
know of, and are basing their plans
on the shortest board-foot rotations
that can be calculated. They are even
considering the possibility of going
all the way and using cubic-foot rota-
tions. Rotations calculated to maxi-
mize pulp production are already
being used on some national forests!
This is an important point and I
wish to clarify it by an illustration.
Suppose we have a perfectly managed
even-age forest consisting of a com-
plete distribution of age classes and
being managed on a one-hundred-
year rotation. This would consist of
one acre which is fallow having just
been logged; one acre with seedlings
following last year's logging, and so
on until we have one acre now one
hundred years old which we will cut
this year. In this example, the sus-
tained yield and the allowable cut
are the same, and they consist of the
volume of timber that this land pro-
duces in one hundred years on one
acre. Now let us suppose the manager
suddenly decides to shorten the rota-
tion to fifty years. Henceforth he will
cut two acres a year instead of one
under the old plan. So now this year
he cuts two acres, one with ninety-
nine-years' growth and one with one-
hundred-years' growth. Next year he
cuts one acre with ninety-eight-years'
growth and one with ninety-nine, and
so on until finally, after fifty years,
he has again a substained yield under
even-flow, but at a volume some-
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 Approved
where around half of what he is
cutting today. He has increased his
allowable cut and is still practicing
sustained yield, but at a lower level
of management. He could also calcu-
late an amount that could be cut con-
stantly under so-called even-flow for
the next fifty years, to be followed by
a sudden decline.
This bit of deceptive logic is called
even-flow sustained yield and is being
used intensively by both the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land
Management.
Switching from a selection system
of management, as described earlier
under good forestry, to a plan of
clear-cutting and growing timber in
even-age stands is yet another justifi-
cation for increasing the cut. This
was a subject of great debate in the
Douglas fir region during the nine-
teen-forties. Throughout that region,
which is (or at least was) the most
heavily timbered portion of our whole
national forest system, the Forest
Service is now cutting at least fifty
per cent in excess of that quantity of
timber that can be sustained. In the
Douglas Fir Supply Study published
in 1969, they reported on several
management alternatives that had
been considered. The startling thing
is that they did not even consider the
alternative of limiting their cut to that
quantity which can be continuously
sustained. All of their alternatives re-
quire cutting at least fifty per cent in
excess of the sustained-yield capacity
throughout the first cutting cycle, and
for technical reasons there is even
serious doubt they are even that close
to balancing their resource budget.'
It is recommended that this Com-
mittee obtain copies of the Douglas
Fir Supply Study from the Forest
Service. You will find therein a series
of tables and charts showing the
volumes of timber being cut now, and
the volumes to be cut in the future
under a variety of plans. All of the
plans indicate an abrupt decline after
the first cutting cycle.
In a forest managed so as to main-
tain a mixture of species and ages of
trees such as we usually have in our
virgin forests, there will be many trees
beyond rotation age. If we practice a
selection system of management from
the very start in such forests, we have
the luxury of being able to keep the
forest fully stocked and producing
high-quality material without seri-
ously disturbing other values of
watershed, wildlife,, and recreation.
This involves permanently carrying
an inventory of timber beyond rota-
tion age. However, this inventory is
not wasted; on the contrary, it pro-
vides insurance against errors of
judgment in determining allowable
cuts. It provides insurance against
fire, insects, and disease. It holds
open the option of using prescribed
burning to secure national regenera-
tion.
Switching to even-age manage-
ment, on the other hand, sacrifices
this inventory of high-quality mate-
rial, introduces many hazards such
as fire, insects, and diseases, and
abandons multiple use. It provides a
justification for temporary accelerated
cutting, but it introduces many un-
desirable factors.
Clear-cutting causes rapid runoff
of water, thus upsetting the watershed
values of the forest. It causes acceler-
ated soil erosion, and the leaching of
important soil nutrients thus reducing
productivity. It introduces difficulties
in obtaining reproduction, and favors
development of competing vegetation
which all too often leads to wide-
spread use of persistent chemical de-'
foliants having unknown secondary
effects on other forms of life. On
steep slopes it frequently causes land-
slides, a matter of enormous concern
in the Pacific Coast and Alaska.
In the Douglas fir region, both the
Forest Service and the Bureau of
Land Management are selling timber
under one standard of measurement,
while computing future yields under
another. The minimum-sized tree
figured in the present inventories of
standing timber measures twelve
inches in diameter and over, and its
volume is calculated to an eight-inch
diameter at the treetop. In the case
of the Bureau of Land Management,
where sales are made for clear-cutting
within specified areas for a fixed sum
of money, trees below that size are
obviously included in the sale, but
are not included in the record. How-
ever, estimates of future yields, for
calculating allowable cuts, include
trees measuring seven inches in diam-
eter measured to a five inch top. The
difference in volume between these
two standards of measurement in a
second growth stand will be about
forty per cent of the total. In other
words, about forty per cent of the
volume of timber in an even-aged
stand at rotation age is in trees below
twelve inches in diameter and in tops
measuring between five and eight
inches in diameter. So, while the
Bureau of Land Management says
they are selling timber in annual
amounts that will never decline, there
will actually be a decline of as much
as forty per cent in their sustained
yield following liquidation of present
forests, resulting from this sleight-of-
hand alone. The Forest Service makes
use of the same rationalization, but
in a manner that is much more in-
volved.
There are many more rationalizations
used to increase the amount of timber
now being cut at the expense of
multiple-use management. Most are
too technical for this statement. I will
describe just one more, one that has
caused particular concern to people
in the northern Rocky Mountain
area. The Forest Service is immedi-
ately increasing the cut of old-growth
timber on the strength of estimated
growth rates applicable to plantations
and the like, without waiting for the
growth to actually occur. They sub-
sidize sale of submarginal timber in
areas such as shown in picture A by
constructing timber-access roads with
funds appropriated by Congress. Such
land is then terraced and planted as
in picture C. Let us say, for ex-
ample, that there are one thousand
acres treated this way, and it is esti-
mated the plantation will grow one
hundred board feet per acre, per
year, on the average, for 140 years,
or until the trees are of sawlog size.
This would add one hundred thou-
sand board feet to the annual allow-
able cut for the National Forest at
the time of the first revision of their
timber management plan after plant-
ing.
The additional computed cut will
then be taken from prime timber else-
where, such as shown in B, until the
planted trees are large enough to cut
- or as long as the prime timber
lasts. The increased cut, in prime
areas formerly logged selectively, is
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A This area in the headwaters of the San Joaquin
River of California is typical of marginal timber-
land proposed by conservation groups for inclusion
in the wilderness system. (Cedric Wright photo)
taken in the form of "overstory re-
moval" such as I have shown in
picture D.
Thus, the Forest Service takes land
as in A, treats it as in C, which is
used to justify logging as in D, on
land formerly managed for multiple
use under sustained yield as in B.
Forestry is immensely complex.
There are legitimate differences in
opinion among foresters on most of
the points I have raised. The trouble
is that all of the specific decisions in-
volved in determining allowable cuts
are coming down on the side favoring
increases in the rate of cutting. This
is not legitimate, and this is the root
of our problem.
The results of all these rationaliza-
tions are to be found in the flood of
complaints you are receiving from all
over the nation. The seriousness of
the situation can perhaps best be ex-
emplified by the absurd state of affairs,
that has developed in Alaska.
The Tongass National Forest re-
cently issued a contract to U.S. Ply-
wood-Champion Papers, Inc., calling
for sale of 8.75 billion feet of timber
to be cut in a fifty-year period from
over a million acres. In one of three
sale areas described in that contract,
known as the Yakatat Working Cir-
cle, they appear to have sold more
commercial timber than actually ex-
ists, while claiming to be practicing
sustained yield on a 120-year rotation.
A similar situation exists in the
B This selectively managed part of the Bitterroot
National Forest, Montana, has been logged three
long-term Ketchikan Pulp Company
allotment where only five billion feet
of merchantable timber is available
out of 8.25 billion contracted for
from the Forest Service.
If the U.S. Plywood contract is
allowed to stand, the experience will
undoubtedly be similar to what hap-
pened with the Alaska Lumber and
Pulp Company's fifty-year contract
where purchasers find only one-eighth
of the timber the Forest Service sold to
them is actually available. A joint sur-
vey conducted by Alaska Lumber and
Pulp and the Forest Service in 1968
indicates the Forest Service overesti-
mated the accessible commercial tim-
ber in that allotment by a monu-
mental 790 per cent, and that allot-
ment represents more than ten per
cent of the entire allowable cut in the
Alaska Region!
More appalling than these over-
sights is the devastation of the eco-
logical balance of these areas. Fish
and game habitat are destroyed. Soil
erosion and landslides become preva-
lent, accompanied by lowering timber-
growing potential. Clear-cut areas
have lost their recreation values for
many years to come. The problems
of future supplies of timber, as well
as space for non-consumptive recre-
ation, are further compounded. The
conflict between forest industries and
citizens seeking wholesome outdoor
experience will continue to escalate
as long as present practices continue.
C This subalpine area in the Bitterroot National
Forest, Montana, used to be managed for watershed
and recreation. The forest service is now subsidizing
logging of this submarginal timber on these steep
unstable soils.
^ Clearly a full-scale congressional
investigation of timber management
practices on the public forest lands
is urgently required. The Forest Ser-
vice and the Bureau of Land Man-
agement are violating the public
trust by ignoring the spirit of the
acts requiring multiple use. They have
succumbed to the demands of in-
dustry at the expense of good forestry
practices. It is vitally important that
the agencies' practices be reevaluated
and programs be developed that in-
sure the genuine practice of multiple
use under sustained yield. Cutting
rates should be reduced to quantities
that can be sustained without reduc-
tion in quality of either the timber
sold or the other uses of the forests.
^ All marginal and submarginal for-
est lands under jurisdiction of the
Forest Service and the Bureau of
Land Management should be immedi-
ately withdrawn from all forms of
development to protect watershed,
wildlife, and recreation. These lands
must be withdrawn from the category
of "commercial forest land."
^ A moratorium should be promptly
ordered on sales of public timber in
all administrative units having a
three-year backlog of sales in effect.
Administered units lacking such
backlog should be permitted to make
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 Approved
D The heavy logging shown in this area of the
Bitterroot National Forest is termed "overstory re-
moval." It is obvious that there is little regard for
multiple use with this type of timber cutting.
only sales specifying a conservative
system of selective logging. Congress
would thereby have two years to
make its investigation, and the agen-
cies would have a year after that to
implement new directives of Con-
gress, which should require excellent
forestry on our public commercial
forest lands.
^ Congress should firmly resist all
attempts from industry and the
agencies to finance timber manage-
ment out of timber-sale receipts, such
as was attempted in the recently de-
feated Timber Supply Bill. Such fund-
ing encourages escalation of sales to
obtain appropriations.
FRED E. HOLT
Director
Bureau of Forestry
State of Maine
Augusta, Me.
Yes, the professionals do have limita-
tions, as well as the public, and yes,
they can tell us whether an "over-
mature, spike-topped, catfaced, conky
old veteran" should be saved for fu-
ture generations. In fact, my experi-
ence on the White Mountain National
Forest Advisory Committee tends to
indicate they are doing it much better
than some of the public special-inter-
est groups.
I am sure the review process has
improved in these past thirteen years.
There is evidence all about us. The
Advisory Committee noted above is
getting into decisions well ahead of
final action. There are some good
modifications initiated by outside in-
terests. Through the elective process,
attention is being given to public re-
view. In many cases, I am not sure the
process is worth the cost - twenty-
eight million dollars for manpower
and printing of environmental impact
statements within the U.S. Forest
Service last year.
That is a high price to provide the
public the chance to be heard in a
public forum rather than writing or
beating on one's congressional dele-
gation. And it would be much more
productive to pry loose at least part
of that cash for improved manage-
ment or services on the ground in
behalf of the public interest.
The planning process involved in
1973-74 for the National Forests'
place in New England, the White
Mountain National Forest Plan, and
now the development of unit plans
for that forest has been most open
and productive of ideas. It has more
than answered the needs of the aver-
age person. Those representing spe-
cial-interest groups have had full
opportunity for second review before
final drafts were prepared. I am fully
persuaded that if a person desires to
participate, he is being provided a
genuine opportunity..
JOHN R. McGUIRE
Chief, Forest Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture
Washington, D.C.
Reading the reprint of Charles
Reich's article "A Precious Resource"
made me realize how much progress
has been made during the last thirteen
years in bringing public awareness
and public involvement into decision-
making on the present and future of
America's public forests. I speak
specifically about the 187,000,000
acres of national forest lands adminis-
tered by the Forest Service. But many
of the changes apply to all federal
lands.
First, I'd like to discuss legislative
changes that have drastically altered
the climate of resource management
in the last thirteen years. One of the
major ones was the National Environ-
mental Policy Act (1970), which re-
quires agencies to file an environ-
mental impact statement on proposed
"major federal actions significantly
affecting the quality of the human
environment." The proposed action
is spelled out in each impact state-
ment, along with alternative actions,
and the environmental impact of
each is discussed. The impact state-
ment provides for a public airing of
the decision-making process, along
with discussions of the building
blocks for those decisions, such as
general environmental descriptions,
consequences of proposed action,
discussions of alternatives to the pro-
posed action, and intentions for miti-
gating adverse impacts. The N.E.P.A.
also requires public notice of a na-
tional scope by means of a no-
tice of availability of draft and
final environmental impact statements
published in the Federal Register.
The public then has a period of time
to respond to the proposals. Although
the process is about five years old,
the "shakedown" is still occurring,
with judicial reviews and court cases
aiding in fixing the firm bounds of
duty and of reasonableness. While
some have feared that an agency's
program could be forced to a halt by
bringing suit on every decision and
its N.E.P.A. processing, recent court
decisions have tended to provide
balance.
As of mid-December, 1974, the
Forest Service had issued 566 en-
vironmental impact statements. Al-.
though this has been a valuable tool
for involving the general public, it is
also a very costly one. For example,
the estimated cost of implementing
the N.E.P.A. by the Forest Service
alone was twenty-eight million dollars
nationwide for fiscal year 1974. But
the process does assure that the
public express its desires before an
action is finally decided. And review
by the Council on Environmental
Quality of the action adds the ele-
ment of objective review. In its 1974
annual report, the Council on En-
vironmental Quality said that "the
Forest Service had taken a broad and
positive view toward implementation
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of the act, went far beyond a narrow
concern with the Section 102 re-
quirement, and integrated each step
in the N.E.P.A. process-from initial
environmental analysis through prep-
aration of draft environmental state-
ments, involvement of the public,
analysis of comments, and prepara-
tion of final statements - into the
planning and decision-making pro-
cess." I can heartily say that I am
very proud of this acknowledgement.
The Wilderness Act had not passed
at the time Mr. Reich wrote his
article, and that Act of 1964 pre-
empted many of the "agency" pre-
rogatives he described. No longer
may the Secretary of Agriculture or
the Forest Service designate an area
as "wilderness," "wild," or "primi-
tive," only the Congress may now
exercise that power. A review process
includes direction for public hearings
in the vicinity of the area to be pro-
posed, special notification and invita-
tion to comment to specified officials,
public notice, and other elements of
public involvement. The hearings in-
elude a verbatim transcript, and this,
along with letters received subsequent
to the hearings, constitutes the official
record of the hearings, which must be
made available to Congress.
The Congress has conducted public
hearings, in the nation's capital and
elsewhere, on the proposals before
they have been enacted into law. This
has afforded a "national" overview, a
need recognized by Mr. Reich.
The Wilderness Act officially desig-
mated fifty-four wildernesses of the
national forests that had already been
set aside administratively by the For-
est Service during the previous forty
years. Today there are eighty-five
wilderness tracts in the national for-
ests that cover more than eleven
million acres. I might add that fifty
years ago we pioneered the wilderness
concept by setting aside thousands of
acres of the Gila Wilderness located
in the Gila National Forest in New
Mexico.
There is one final aspect of the For-
est Service commitment to informing
and involving the public. In August,
1974, we issued a draft program
called "Environmental Program for
the Future." This is a long-range view
of potential national forest programs
which we had prepared prior to pas-
sage of the Forest and Rangeland Re-
newable Resources Planning Act. We
have given nationwide distribution
and publicity to the draft and re-
quested public comment by Decem-
ber 15th of last year. Today's indi-
cations are that the public is genu-
inely interested; we have received
wide and varied comments. We wel-
come them and they will be seriously
considered as we move ahead.
Mr. Reich's 1962 article men-
tioned the growing demands on the
nation's various forest resources.
These demands have greatly in-
creased since the article was written.
More and more, the various uses for
the forests, particularly the publicly
owned national forests, are resulting
in tremendous demands. These may
be timber producers versus wilder-
ness proponents; miners versus en-
vironmentalists; wilderness propo-
nents versus recreational vehicle en-
thusiasts; or backpackers versus the
mobile campers who want developed
recreation sites. The simple truth is
that the national forests cannot pos-
sibly meet all the desires of all the
people, but our job is to involve the
public so we can make long-range
decisions that benefit the most people
over the longest period of time. Un-
fortunately, many people will not
even realize their own demands on
the national forests. An individual
may want as much area as possible
placed under a wilderness designa-
tion. Yet, this person may also want
the lumber and minerals that come
from national forests, the meat ob-
tained from cattle grazing on national
grasslands, and, certainly, water that
flows from watersheds in the national
forests. The task of setting priorities
on resources and determining trade-
offs and looking at the balance is not
an easy one.
The public has a right and an obli-
gation to make its collective voice
heard in land-management decisions.
The Forest Service has set up the
machinery to facilitate the voicing of
public opinions. I feel that we are
succeeding in our continuing Inform
and Involve Program, initiated in
1971. 1 don't mean to imply per-
fection is imminent. It's not. But, we
feel certain we are heading in the
direction which will provide the full-
est possible opportunity for public
participation in public land decision-
making. Through this program we
hold public meetings, workshops, and
hearings, and issue draft documents
on proposed Forest Service plans to
inform the public what our proposals
are and what other alternatives exist.
Some public meetings are called on
the potential uses of areas inside a
national forest without any proposal
in mind. A second series of public
meetings may be held to review the
draft plan created by ideas collected
from the first meeting. There are
several cases where interested citizens
and groups have themselves initiated
proposals for resource planning and
use. Our Inform and Involve activi-
ties on proposed planning or projects
occur at the national, regional, and
local levels. For example, at the local
level the national forests are airing
draft unit plans, or are asking the
public for their feelings and ideas
about creating a plan for a recreation
development, timber management, or
other resource uses. In involving the
public, advance publicity for such a
public meeting requires public no-
tices, press releases, the purchase of
advertising space in newspapers,
letters to groups and organizations,
and advance distribution of docu-
ments. In many cases, these publicity
projects have spawned additional news
stories in both the print and broad-
cast media prior to meetings. At the
meetings we receive oral and written
comments from the public and ana-
lyze these to determine what the re-
sponding public wants. A lot of time
and effort goes into preplanning such
public meetings. Our managers are
aided by a Forest Service national
publication, "A Guide to Public In-
volvement and Decision-Making."
An excellent example of public in-
volvement was shown in the Forest
Service's national effort on the Road-
less Area Review and Evaluation,
which inventoried 1,449 roadless
areas, totaling 55.9 million acres, for
potential wilderness and other uses.
It was the most extensive public in-
volvement effort ever undertaken by
a government agency. We held over
three hundred meetings nationwide in
urban, suburban, and rural areas,
which were attended by more than
twenty-five thousand people. We re-
ceived more than fifty thousand
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written and oral opinions. This study
resulted in a final list of 274 new
wilderness study areas, totaling al-
most 12.3 million acres. These areas
will now be studied for possible wild-
erness additions, again with public
involvement as a key element.
We benefited and the public bene-
fited from this national review of un-
developed roadless areas. When the
interest in a subject is high, there is
no assumption of what the interested
public wants. We go to the public
and ask. As might be expected, nor-
mally only an extremely small per-
centage of the population becomes
either informed or involved. Gen-
erally, the greatest number of re-
sponses. are from special-interest
groups such as members of preserva-
tion organizations, workers and man-
agers in the forest products industry,
or citizen groups brought together to
support or oppose a particular ac-
tion. However, our efforts do, as Mr.
Reich suggests, give the public the
opportunity to participate in the
planning for action.
Our Inform and Involve process is
not a popularity contest in which the
highest number of votes takes the
forest resource prize. It is one that
sorts out recommendations and weighs
the long-range benefits, while looking
at all the alternatives and their rami-
fications. It still leaves the final de-
cision with the land manager, but he
has a far broader and sounder basis
on which to make that decision.
The 1962 article claimed that the
land-management agencies had the
power to make "bitterly controversial
decisions, choices between basic val-
ues, with little or no outside check."
I would like to mention two very
powerful checks in our democratic
system. One, of course, is Congress,
which in the last thirteen years has
become very active in exercising its
"checking" duties. I've already men-
tioned several major pieces of legis-
lation made since 1962 .which laid
out the ground rules for various as-
pects of federal forest management.
Nor has Congress hesitated to use
another check-its budgetary au-
thority.
There is a second check on federal
forest management: the judicial sys-
tem, which, as a cornerstone of our
democracy, has always provided a
check against the other two branches
of federal government. The court sys-
tem has modified its "standing to
sue" philosophy, and various interest
groups and private citizens have been
quick to accept the opportunity to
judicially question a federal land ac-
tion. Gone is the day when a group
or individual felt it could not possibly
win a case against a federal agency.
In the last ten years, various pub-
lic groups, especially environmental
groups, have effectively used the
power of the courts to protest de-
cisions-and in a number of cases to
reverse them.
As you can see, the situation has
changed measurably since 1962. The
professional land managers' ability to
interpret and manage the land, com-
bined with the public's continued
interest in the environmental crusade,
will. bring about a lot more changes
in the next- thirteen; year period. I,
for one, cannot now conceive of ad-
ministering public lands without re-
view, advice, and assistance from the
public. It does slow the federal de-
cision-making process, but I feel the
resulting decisions now are better and
more effective because of the public
support they engender.
GLADWIN HILL
National Environmental Correspondent
The New York Times
New York, N.Y.
The onset of the Environmental Rev-
olution about 1970 unquestionably
brought some profound changes in
the orientation of the Forest Service
to its duties.
The National Environmental Policy
Act and court decisions under it have
forced these changes. The Forest Ser-
vice now, of course, has to apply the
environmental impact criterion to a
lot of its activities where it didn't
before. (The 1974 report of the
Council on Environmental Quality
goes into this in detail.)
But most indicators still seem to be
that the Forest Service is still too
heavily the handmaiden of the com-
mercial timber industry, and the latter
is as rapacious as ever.
(The industry, within the space of
a few months in 1964, suddenly re-
versed its tune from "The govern-
ment must chop down more trees to
help solve the housing shortage". to
"The government must stimulate
housing to bolster up the timber in-
dustry." This manifestly is economic
sophistry. Lumber prices are not a
critical element of housing costs, and
to the extent they are a factor, the
way to help housing obviously would
be for the timber industry to put
brakes on its constantly rising lum-
ber prices. The sudden reversal of
the propaganda line flouts basic eco-
nomic principles. One minute, ac-
cord to the industry, there is not
enough timber; the very next minute
there is too much. There is never a
moment in the transition, according
to the way they play the game, when
supply and demand are in equilibrium
and all parties are reasonably con-
tented. It is a perpetual game of
"Gimme-gimme-gimme" -out of the
public purse, in one way or another.)
I'll believe the Forest Service isn't
subservient when its spokesmen stop
going along with this charade and
speak out loud and clear in the public
arena for what they must know is
true and right.
.The Forest Service has erroneously
sought survival down the years in the
strategy of playing off timber interests
and. the recreation interests, bending
according to which direction the most
heat is coming from, using the de-
mands of one as a lever to temper
the demands of the other. In the
process, the public is ill served.
I see little evidence of a change in
this pattern, and ofthe Forest Service
pursuing a truly balanced course
among its multiple responsibilities --
timber, mining, grazing, recreation,
watershed, and wildlife. Repeatedly
in the last few years it has had to be
curbed' by lawsuits from rushing land
into logging before it could be seques-
tered for wilderness-status study. The
Forest Service's spokesmen seem to
maintain sedulous silence when they
should be speaking out - either pro
or con, wherever their convictions lie
- on issues like mining in sensitive
National Forest areas. Implicitly they
pass the buck on decision-making to
politicians and commercial interests
rather than functioning as. the spe-
cialists the taxpayers hired them to
be.
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In sum, I think a historic process
of change has started, but the Forest
Service, while going along grudgingly
to some extent, still seems bureau-
cratically resistant to recognizing the
totality of the new ball game. It seems
to feel it has to march to the drums
of interest-cliques - commercial and
petty self-serving members of Con-
gress - rather than the rising new
arbitrar, the public interest.
I am sure thoroughgoing reform is
going to come eventually, but it is
going to take constant pressures.
One basic problem, for which the
Forest Service can't be blamed par-
ticularly, is the nation's failure to take
all the public lands - National Parks,
National Forests, and Bureau of Land
Management land - and consider
them integrally in terms of a long-
range use program. It is idiotic to have
three identical trees or plots of
ground only a few yards apart sepa-
rated by imaginary lines and managed
by three different agencies under
three different sets of ground rules.
An integrated approach - which was
not blueprinted by the Public Land
Law Review Commission - would
do a lot to get the multiple monkeys
off the Forest Service's back and en-
able it to operate more to the public
satisfaction.
RALPH D. HODGES, JR.
Executive Vice-President
National Forest Products Association
Washington, D.C.
There has been a significant improve-
ment since Mr. Reich wrote his 1962
paper, in the consideration by federal
land-managing agencies of public in-
puts and participation in their de-
cision-making process.
The main thesis of the article was
that these agencies were making
policy and major administrative de-
cisions significantly affecting the pres-
ent and future use of the nation's
public lands without the benefit of
adequate public participation in these
decisions. This was held to be against
the basic principles of a democratic
society, although Mr. Reich also
stated that the decisions reached after
soliciting public inputs may be of no
higher quality than those arrived at in
seclusion by professional managers.
Mr. Reich suggested a variety of ways
by which the agency decision-making
process could be made more respon-
sive to public inputs. My own sum-
marization of his recommendations is
as follows:
^ Adequate public notice of major
long-range plans and significant land-
use decisions.
^ Public hearings on these decisions
if warranted.
^ An opportunity to submit written
views on a particular decision.
^ Public participation in the formu-
lation of long-term land management
plans. These long-term plans must be
reasonably definite and specific and
not so general that they leave real
issues undecided.
^ A procedure by which the public
is allowed to submit for agency con-
sideration and review proposals for
future management of the forest.
^ Appointing internal "watchdogs"
within the agencies charged with the
duty of protecting a particular interest
or use of the forest such as wilder-
ness, grazing, or recreation.
The National Environmental Policy
Act (N.E.P.A.), which became effec-
tive January 1, 1970, has had a
significant impact on the way federal
land-management agencies conduct
their business. This Act, along with
subsequent court interpretations,
would seem to meet most of Mr.
Reich's recommendations. Under the
Act, federal agencies must file an
Environmental Impact Statement
(E.LS.) for any proposed major ac-
tion "significantly affecting the qual-
ity of the human environment." In
this statement there must be a de-
tailed description of the -environ-
mental impact of the proposed ac-
tion, any adverse environmental
effects which cannot be avoided if
the proposal is implemented, alterna-
tives to the proposed action, the re-
lationship between local short-term
uses of man's environment and the
maintenance and enhancement of
long-term productivity, and irrevers-
ible and irretrievable commitments of
resources involved if the proposed
action is implemented.
In conjunction with the develop-
ment of an E.I.S., the agency is re-
quired to use an interdisciplinary
approach in the planning and de-
cision-making process, insuring the
integrated use of both the natural and
social sciences. Under the N.E.P.A.
and subsequent Council on Environ-
mental Quality and court interpreta-
tions of it, the economic and social
consequences and local community
impacts associated with the action in
question, as well as reasonable alter-
natives to it, must be evaluated in
addition to the environmental im-
pacts. Evaluation of the economic
impact of proposed actions has been
given woefully inadequate attention
by the Forest Service.
Under Section 102(2) (b) of the
Act, federal agencies are directed to
take action needed to "insure that
presently unquantified environmental
amenities and values may be given
appropriate consideration in decision-
making along with economic and
technical considerations" (emphasis
added). In Section 204(4), the
C.E.Q. is directed "to develop and
recommend to the President national
policies to foster and promote the
improvement of environmental qual-
ity to meet the conservation, social,
economic, health, and other require-
ments and goals of the nation."
Present C.E.Q. guidelines require
that each alternative analyzed "be
sufficiently detailed to permit com-
parative evaluation of the environ-
mental benefits, costs, and risks of the
proposed action, and each reasonable
alternative." Present C.E.Q. guide-
lines also require that the impact of
the proposed action on community
stability must be evaluated. Item
8(a) (i) states, "Agencies should also
take care to identify, as appropriate,
population and growth characteristics
of the affected area and any popula-
tion and growth assumptions used ...
to determine secondary population
and growth impacts resulting from the
proposed action and its alternatives."
The Secretary of Agriculture's guide-
lines, effective May 29, 1974, state:
"This requires analyses and descrip-
tions of both the anticipated favorable
and adverse impacts of the proposed
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action as it affects the environ-
ment.... The environment in this
case includes both the natural en-
vironment and the social and eco-
nomic environment."
The public is normally given at
least sixty days to comment on a
draft Environmental Impact State-
ment preliminary to agency prepara-
tion of the final E.I.S. Public hearings
on an E.I.S. often are held. The U.S.
Forest Service presently applies the
N.E.P.A. process to significant plan-
ning actions including most timber-
management plans for individual Na-
tional Forests, detailed land-use plans
(unit plans), and major programs
such as chemical control of insects,
type conversion, etc., to public review
and scrutiny through the N.E.P.A.
process. Although an agency's han-
dling and responsiveness to public
input on a specific issue can always
be criticized, there is no doubt that
the performance of the Forest Service
in this area has improved since 1962
when Mr. Reich prepared the article.
A recent and very significant de-
velopment which holds promise for
greatly improving the management of
the National Forests to meet the
needs of the public has been the
passage of the Forest and Rangeland'
Renewable Resources Planning Act
of 1974.
The core of the new Act is a sys-
tem of successive statements - as-
sessment and program, budget-for-
mation policy, explanation in event
of short-fall in budget request, and
accomplishment evaluation. The suc-
cess of the Act depends on the effec-
tiveness of this system to provide the
means for funding the program that
it calls for. Even though the Planning
Act does not deal with policy issues
or management directives, it must be
classified as major forestry legislation.
The assessment and program portions
of the system will result in compre-
hensive Forest Service reports to the
Congress which will set up a frame-
work for inventorying and analyzing
all renewable resources of the Na-
tional Forests, developing present and
future supply and demand relation-
ships for these resources, and initiat-
ing a long-range program for meeting
the future needs of the American
people. The Act also sets up some
unique budgetary procedures to in-
sure that the public is informed of,
and given proper justification for, any
significant deviation from the an-
nounced program. It is difficult to
imagine any process of planning
which would be more open to public
participation, scrutiny, and review,
than those procedures that will be
invited under the Planning Act.
In summary, the enactment of the
N.E.P.A. in 1969 significantly in-
creased the level of public participa-
tion in policy, administrative, and
planning decisions of land-manage-
ment agencies. When the initial stage
of the land-use planning process for
the national forest is completed, the
Forest Service will have prepared
about three thousand detailed and
specific land-use plans on specific
units of land. All of these plans will
go through the N.E.P.A. process and,
therefore, will require public partici-
pation at the draft stage. Many of
these plans will have also incorpo-
rated considerable public inputs dur-
ing their preparation. Although an
agency will always receive criticism
by various individuals and groups for
not conforming to what was desired
by that individual or group, a formal-
ized set of procedures for public in-
puts has been well developed. These
procedures would seem to satisfy
many of the recommendations for im-
provement suggested in Mr. Reich's
article.
Although it is much too early in
the implementation of the Planning
Act to make even a preliminary
evaluation, early indications are quite
encouraging. It appears that there will
be a high degree of public participa-
tion in all stages of the development
of both the assessment and the pro-
gram.
TOM McCALL
Former Governor
State of Oregon
Salem, Ore.
"An inspiration" is the phrase to de-
scribe your decision to reprint Mr.
Reich's article on the nation's forests.
It was exceedingly well done and its
general thrust stands up nearly as well
in 1974 as in 1962.
Possibly an unperceived value of
reprinting the article will be to remind
us that the bureaucracy is every-
where, not simply in the forests, and
that we need to have all governments
open to public access. Well-known
other examples of where advocacy of
special interests replaced the public
interest are in the Food and Drug
Administration and the now-defunct
Atomic Energy Commission.
Back in the forests, I think Mr.
Reich would find today that this par-
ticular bureaucracy has opened up
the decision-making process at least
a little. And I know of many well-
placed professional foresters and
parks specialists who are trying to
open it up more, and to be respon-
sive. We used to have to get attention
with a peavey and a blazing ax; now
we get it by literally camping on the
bureaucracy's doorstep, or by brand-
ishing our lawsuits, or by convincing
the professionals that the people
really do have rights and ideas.
If I were to dig as deeply as I'd
like to, and report my findings, my
letter would become the size of one
of the Center's Occasional Papers.
Feeling and wishing to be limited,
though, let these few examples of the
new openness serve to say that some
progress has been made:
In the last session of Congress,
the House Appropriations Committee
finally succumbed to pleading and
heated demands by adopting a pro-
gram for reforestation. It is not ade-
quate, but it's an improvement. At
last, the forest-congressional bureau-
cracy has recognized that if the federal
government is going to maintain its
profit margin some of the profit has to
be sunk into development. Because
reforestation is so fundamental to
Oregon's economic and environ-
mental self-interest, we've nearly
blown out our collective lungs for
acceptance of the principle.
Another example of how the forest
bureaucracy is now more willing to
listen could possibly have found its
roots in the final paragraph of Mr.
Reich's article: "But can they [ex-
perts and professionals] tell us
whether an `overmature, spike-topped,
catfaced, conky old veteran' should
be saved for future generations?" The
example is the Pacific Northwest Snag
Conference conducted several months
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ago in Portland. No agreement was
reached on which snags where should
be saved, or even whether. Environ-
mentalists admitted they didn't have
all the answers, despite their predilec-
tion toward saving snags for nesting
and bird-food sources. The impor-
tant note is that it is a matter of pub-
lic discussion now; I can't recall that
public snag conferences were routine
in 1962.
The best example of which I am
aware of how responsive the forest
bureaucracy can be is the way in
which the Oregon "French Pete"
controversy was resolved. French
Pete has been described as the last
low-lying virgin forest in Oregon. It
is on the west edge of the upper Wil-
lamette Valley. Environmentalists
wanted to preserve it for recreational
and scenic purposes. The Forest Ser-
vice wanted to log it.
My own inclination was to come
down on the side of the environ-
mentalists, but that would have been
largely an emotional reaction. So
Oregon state government asked the
Willamette National Forest super-
visor to make a land-use plan for the
entire forest to determine highest
and best uses, to discover what should
and should not be logged, and
whether means existed to obtain a
rational yield from the Willamette
Forest without logging French Pete.
The people had an opportunity,
and used it, to participate in the
process.
The planning was done, and while
there is still an occasional call for
protecting French Pete by congres-
sional action, I think the decision has
already been made. French Pete will
not be logged because it cannot be
justified.
Mr. Reich was right then, as he is
today, in saying: "Professional man-
agers and planners cannot be dis-
pensed with." We must expect them
to make plans so there is something
on which we the people may com-
ment. The problem at the time of
Mr. Reich's article was that the
bureaucracy was casting its plans in
concrete. That is still the case in
many ways, but I have taken heart.
Occasionally today we find the plans
are cast in putty, and the people are
in there with fingers and trowel.
GEORGE A. CRAIG
Executive Vice-President
Western Timber Association
San Francisco, Calif.
There have been meaningful changes
from policy development as described
by Mr. Reich in his excellent 1962
article. While "popular participation
in decisions affecting the disposition
of our forest land" has not increased
to the extent lie suggested desirable,
it probably never will. However there
now is greater opportunity for such
participation. The National Environ-
mental Policy Act of 1969 (N.E.P.A.)
and the Forest and Rangeland Re-
newable Resources Planning Act of
1974 (P.L.93-378) are providing
opportunities for recorded formal
public expressions, requiring agency
explanation, and should result in an
assumption of greater responsibility
by the Congress. The courts have
gone well beyond Mr. Reich's under-
standing of their responsibilities in
some questionable decisions. The net
results of all these changes should be
a move toward better policies for
public forests.
The. changes have been unneces-
sarily painful at times, and abuses have
occurred. Examples can be cited of
the following difficulties anticipated
by Mr. Reich in his article:
^ "Courts are out of their clement
when they try to pass on the merits
of policy judgments. And when they
attempt to supervise in detail the pro-
cedures that are followed in the mak-
ing of such judgments, they are likely
to produce not better results but a
procedural mire in which participants
flounder and action stagnates.... .
[1 "Hearings might not be warranted
for every type of action; they could
easily pull everything to a dead
stop... .
^ "Procedural reforms may also
have too strong an effect. They may
cramp an agency into an arthritic
stiffness. It may come to believe that
it can do nothing without months or
years of procedure, and as a con-
sequence it will do nothing most of
the time. The public thus exchanges
a vigorous, if unrepresentative, pro-
fessional government for drift or
maintenance of the status quo by
default....,"
When the Forest Service has tried
to move toward an organized public
review of policy questions there have
been attempts to frustrate the process,
as in the review of roadless areas that
began in 1971. Further, the wilder-
ness advocates have made inappro-
priate gains but are still not satisfied
and are using a variety of tactics to
accomplish their objectives. For ex-
ample, the Regional Forester reported
July 10, 1972, that more than four
thousand comments had been re-
ceived regarding the review in Cali-
fornia, and sixty-nine per cent ex-
pressed the opinion that there was
enough wilderness in California and
that no more was needed. Only
twenty-three per cent supported more
wilderness. Without the public review
there would not have been expres-
sions of this magnitude. However,
the Forest Service announced in July
that the allowable cut was being re-
duced in California because twenty-
one areas involving 1.3 million acres
are to be studied for addition to the
approximately two million acres al-
ready a part of the wilderness system
in California National Forests. Now
the Sierra Club is going to court and
taking other actions to tie up great
additional acreage essential to the
support of the timber industry and
other resource programs in California.
Experience under the N.E.P.A.
has been disturbing in some cases. Its
implementation in relationship to go-
ing programs without causing unrea-
sonable delays has been difficult.
Problems are compounded when
those opposed to partially completed
programs use the N.E.P.A. as a de-
vice to delay and otherwise interfere
with such programs, even though
fully funded by the Congress and not
differing substantially from past pro-
grams that have also had congres-
sional financial blessings. There is
need for the application of a rule of
reason to these interim programs,
most of which have had an environ-
mental review but not in the form
specified under the N.E.P.A. If the
N.E.P.A. is ultimately used to assure
full consideration of alternatives, to
evaluate, and to disclose reasons for
selection of courses of action "to
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foster and promote the general wel-
fare ... and fulfill the social, eco-
nomic, and other requirements of
present and future generations of
Americans," all ' without excessive
cost, it will achieve considerable
value. It is a tool that can be used
properly or improperly.
Some of Mr. Reich's other con-
cerns should be reduced under P.L.-
93-378. He was troubled that "Con-
gress has told the Forest Service to
`best meet the needs of the American
people' but has left entirely up to the
Service to determine what those needs
are...." He noted: "Plainly, Con-
gress could draft new forest statutes
spelling out `public interest' in specific
detail and deciding, to some extent at
least, the relative `values' to be placed
on exploitation of resources, recrea-
tion, water power, wilderness, and
other uses." The assessment, the pro-
gram, the statement of policy, and
the annual performance report should
all contribute to a public policy that
better fits the needs of the nation as
expressed by the public.
As Mr. Reich said: "The public
can be shortsighted and ill-informed
and indifferent." (I found some of his
comments about "lumbering" to be
"ill-informed.") However, I agree
with his general proposition that the
best hope for a sound public policy
relative to the National Forests lies in
the development of management
goals of a more specific nature
through the Congress. This should be
done with the aid of the professionals
in and out of government. The Re-
newable Resource Program is to be
prepared in accord with the N.E.P.A.
This should mean full disclosure of
Forest Service information relative
to the program, an opportunity for
public comment, Forest Service re-
sponse to all reasonable recommen-
dations, and an evaluation of eco-
nomic and environmental conse-
quences of proposed alternatives -
and there should be alternatives
offered. Unit plans should be pre-
pared to accomplish the national
goals and should be developed by
professionals with due environmental,
economic, and public involvement
considerations under the N.E.P.A.
As Mr. Reich noted: "Ventilation is
basically healthy."
I am optimistic that the transi-
tional pains and frustrations of the
present will be overcome and we will
eventually have the National Forests
managed to meet more specific goals
developed through the democratic
process.
T. F. ARVOLA
Deputy State Forester
Division of Forestry
Department of Conservation
Sacramento, Calif.
It seems almost incongruous to pub-
lish an article on this subject that was
prepared thirteen years ago. As you
should know, this period has probably
been one of the most dynamic in
history in terms of public concern for
the nation's forest resources. How
much better it would have been had
the author updated his views in light
of the many developments that have
occurred since 1962 and have had
those evaluated.
At the federal level there have
been many major accomplishments
that have corrected or ameliorated
the criticisms of Mr. Reich about
forest resource managing agencies,
their administrators, and profession-
als. To name a few, there have been
the finding of the Outdoor Recreation
Resources Review Commission in
1962; the 1963-70 work of the Public
Land Law Review Commission; the
Wilderness Act of 1964; the Wild and
Scenic Rivers Act of 1968; the Na-
tional Environmental Policy Act of
1969; and, more recently, the Forest
and Rangeland Planning Act of 1974.
At state and local. levels, there
have been comparable actions. For
instance, in California we have the
State Environmental Quality Act of
1970 and the Z'berg-Nejedly Forest
Practice Act of 1973. And the part
played by the courts in these matters
has had an enormous effect on public
decision-making.
Having evolved from a greater in-
terest shown by the citizenry in for-
ests,these legislative accomplishments
have provided more opportunities for
popular participation in decisions
affecting the management of not only
public forests but those in private
ownership as well. The forest re-
source agencies have sincerely tried
to abide by the intent of these laws.
However, meeting these new respon-
sibilities has been fraught with diffi-
culty because the extent and quality
of public involvement have been more
often than not both skewed and
polarized by almost exclusive inputs
from organized conservation groups
having special interests versus those
from economic sections. Consequent-
ly, agency administrators and profes-
sionals are faced with a dilemma
in trying to obtain the views of the
silent majority who are apathetic or
seem to be willing to leave the deci-
sions to be made without citizen par-
ticipation.
This lack of truly representative
public involvement makes it neces-
sary for agency officials in their
planning processes to consider fac-
tors and opinions that may be unex-
pressed but which definitely reside in
the minds of the vast majority of the
public. These planners, usually by
experience and training, have some
feel for this public thinking, and to
ignore it would not be right, espe-
cially when the issue may be split
widely by diverse special interests.
Professional foresters especially rec-
ognize that the use and management
of forest resources must be deter-
mined in a large measure by the ob-
jectives, policies, and means of the
owner, whether public or private. Our
role is to use our expertise in forestry
and related sciences to advise and
give leadership in planning and im-
plementing programs relating to for-
est resources to improve the quality
of the environment and to meet the
material and spiritual needs of man-
kind, recognizing that the ultimate
decisions for management of these
resources largely rests with the people
who engage our services.
Despite the progress that has been
made in attitudes, legislation, and by
judicial cases to obtain procedural
reforms in formulating resources de-
cisions, certainly there still remain
some problems. The central one is
how does a public administrator ob-
tain truly representative public view-
points? If Mr. Reich or your organi-
zation can provide administrators and
professionals with constructive, prac-
tical, and specific ways to do this, a
real service will have been rendered
to them and the people at large. w
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Scientists in the British Government
- a Memoir
W have the science of science which provides a
two-dimensional pattern - a blueprint - of rela-
tionships within science, between science, and tech-
nology, between science and business, and between
science and government. That is S. There is, how-
ever, another dimension, beyond the numbers men
and the systems analyzers, and that is expressed in
the question "What's it all in aid of?" That is, S' _
the science of the science of science.
The concept of the science of science goes back to
the Congress of the History of Science in 1931 in
which the Russians took part. The Soviet Union was
then the one country which had systematized science
in its national planning. In the laissez-faire, or, as we
now say, "market economy" countries, "planning"
was a naughty word which identified the social
planner as a Marxist. The scientists and historians
taking part in the Congress, however, could accept
the idea of scientific methodology being applied to
science itself. And it could be, and was, extended to
the function of science within society.
Recall that the Western world was then in the
throes of the Great Depression and that scientists,
with or without social awareness or social conscience,
were shivering in their ivory towers from the econom-
ic blizzard outside. Government subsidies, where they
existed - as in Britain - had never been abundant
and were then cut back in the panic measures to
balance budgets. The universities where academic
research was practiced were in bleak financial diffi-
culties. Endowments by private individuals or foun-
dations had gone out through the windows along
with the defenestrated financiers, jumping from Wall
Street skyscrapers. Industries, even where science
through applied research was the wellspring of their
development, decided that research teams were a
luxury which the market economy could not afford
and that they would make do with what they had.
Scientific groups were being broken up, long-term
projects were abandoned, and scientists were left
with no illusions about their being a privileged class
to whom the world owed a living. They were not
immune from economics or politics. They were func-
tional citizens with social responsibilities. They were
pretty bewildered, most of them, as they came blink-
ing out of their ivory towers. Nothing in their scien-
tific education had equipped them to make social
judgments. They were politically naive.
There were, of course, conspicuous exceptions to
that generalization. In 1926 - the year of the Gen-
eral Strike in Britain - young scientists at Oxford
and Cambridge decided that, in their preoccupation
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with science, they were losing touch with the world
outside and they formed a remarkable dining club,
the "Tots and Quots" ("Quot sententiae tot homines")
("As many opinions as there are men"). The Latin
tag was to show that, though scientists, they were on
speaking terms with the humanities. They met as a
monthly dining club on neutral ground in London.
They invited outsiders: politicians, diplomats, and
divines. They were concerned even then with the so-
cial relations of science, with the use, abuse and non-
use of science.
We got the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science to discuss social problems scien-
tifically. John Boyd Orr's report on "Food, Health,
and Income," was delivered from the B.A.A.S. plat-
form; it led to the "marriage of health and agricul-
ture" in the form of the Mixed Commission of the
League of Nations and the Hot Springs Conference
during the Second World War which gave birth to the
Food and Agriculture Organization of which Boyd
Orr became the first director-general. Our campaign
persuaded the B.A.A.S. to set up its division of Social
and International Relations of Science. We got also
a joint committee of the B.A.A.S. and the Trades
Union Council which, with an impressive roster of
world-famous scientists, was prepared to advise the
T.U.C. on the industrial changes which were bound
to come from the discoveries then being made in the
laboratories.
The war came and the British Association's annual
meetings were mothballed for the duration, but the
Division of Social and International Relations went
on under the presidency of Sir Richard Gregory, the
great editor of Nature. With the bombs falling
around, we held an international conference on "Sci-
ence and the Postwar Order" with the Russians, the
Chinese, the Indians, etc., participating and with
H. G. Wells promoting his "World Brain" which was
to emerge as UNESCO. We held another on "Science
and Natural Resources," proposing an international
resources authority as part of what was to become
the United Nations. We held another international
conference on "Postwar Education for Science and
Technology." And so on.
The Tots and Quots, under the chairmanship of
. Solly Zuckerman, probably had a more direct effect.
It included the names which had become or were
becoming scientifically famous and publicly conspic-
ppus - J. D. Bernal, who had already written The
mi.?sal Functions of Science, still the Bible of the
science of science movement; Lancelot Hogben, who
had written Science for the Citizen; Julian Huxley,
who, apart from his own individual books, had col-
laborated with H.G. Wells on The Science of Life;
Patrick Blackett; J.B.S. Haldane, who was writing
some of the best ever popular science articles in the
Daily Worker, which made the scientists of the
Athenaeum splutter into their vintage port; Joseph
Needham; C. H. Waddington; J. G. Crowther; and
a lot more.
When the war broke out, we members of the Tots
and Quots went on dining regularly, and in the winter
of 1939-40 we had an historic meeting. We decided
that, once again as in World War I, science would be
misused and that scientists would be drafted into the
infantry and so on. We .discussed what a- proper
policy should be and, as we talked, we saw what we
had to do - write a book! That very moment Allen
Lane of Penguin agreed to bring out a book -
a Penguin Special - as fast as we could write it. The
subjects and chapters were divided out across the
table and at the next dinner the paperback Science in
War was on our side plates.
For once, the authorities paid attention. Scientists
were recruited for work for which they were reason-
ably suited. More extraordinarily, many of them
found themselves in positions of real influence in
military affairs.
In 1941, when I became Director of Plans and
Operations of Political Warfare in the British Foreign
Office, I wanted to get myself a scientist. My appoint-
ment was a strange one. The Foreign Office had
never gone in for planning. Foreign policy was based
on treaty and expediency, and treaties were only
invoked as matters of expediency. Planning, no. I
suspect that they were looking for someone familiar
with methodology but they were too scared to have
a real scientist so they decided to compromise by
having a science writer who was an expert on experts.
I found myself surrounded by 49,999,999 people,
including Winston Churchill, who considered them-
selves experts in propaganda. What I needed to give
me support was someone who was a sceptic and a
devil's advocate. I needed a scientist.
So I turned to the Tots and Quots. At the next
dinner, everyone turned their cards face upward.
None was available to me because each was in a key
job. The generals and admirals had found their
"Tame Magicians." Patrick Blackett, the cosmic ray
physicist, was scientific adviser to the Admiralty,
fighting the Battle of the Atlantic with a slide rule.
Waddington was chief scientist with Coastal Com-
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mand. Neville Mott, the solid-state physicist, was
with the antiaircraft command. Zuckerman and Ber-
nal had moved from Civil Defense to Mountbatten's
Combined Operations.
Scientists now sat with the top planners and with
the War Cabinet. This was something different from
acting as specialists in new weaponry or, as many
other scientists were doing, organizing the effective
use of scientifically produced systems, such as radar
and antiaircraft predictors, the forerunners of the
computers, or, in Tube Alloys (the code name for
Britain's nuclear activities) devising the atomic bomb.
What had changed was the role of the scientist.
When Blackett was given the top military award of
the United States, his citation said that he had shown
"how the scientist can encourage numerical thinking
on operational matters and so avoid running the war
by gusts of emotion." Measurements and calculations,
methodology, had replaced hunches. We called it
"Operational Research" (the Americans adapted it
as "Operations Research").
It began with radar. Sir Robert Watson Watt and
his team had produced the instrumentation and the
system for detecting incoming enemy aircraft. In the
laboratory, in the workshops, and in the hands of
physicists on location, the equipment was efficient,
but in practice things were going wrong. Watson
Watt sent out physicists to check up. Sometimes they
found the physical answers, but often the exact sci-
entists were baflied. Then Watson Watt started rely-
ing on biologists, more used to a greater number of
variables, and gradually the answers were found. The
gremlins were not in the equipment. They were more
often in the military setup, the book of rules, or the
breakdown of human relationships - the failure of
the mail delivery at some remote antiaircraft battery,
or not enough sugar in the mess tea.
The scientists just looked at everything and asked
the right questions. They found strange things. For
instance, there was always an extra man on the bat-
tery strength. He was a leftover from the horse ar-
tillery - the man who held the heads of the horses!
A geneticist, taken away from his banana flies, was
turned loose on Coastal Command. He doubled the
number of sorties flown without adding a man or a
machine or overtaxing the personnel. He just went
through the book of rules and the system of inspec-
tions and he asked, why this? and why that? Blackctt
produced the methodology for the Battle of the
Atlantic. Zuckerman reduced the island of Pan-
telleria, on the flank of the invasion of Sicily, without
any troops fighting their way ashore, merely with
pencil and paper and a system for calculating fire-
power.
Operational Research was the forerunner of Or-
ganization and Method and Systems Analysis. It was
the application of method to complicated situations
and, considerably, to human relationships.
At the end of the war, the scientists were riding high,
wide, and handsome. They had made their mark.
They were right inside the military and government
establishment. The generals were positively deferen-
tial; they were ready to buy any new ideas, and there
were scientists only too ready to dream them up
without much regard to cost or benefit, and with ex-
pensive mistakes. Governments set up their scientific
advisory units and science policy councils. The Sci-
ence of Science = S= was accepted, and C.P. Snow
could write The Corridors of Power.
But having gained access to the corridors of
power, scientists could not find their way to the men's
room. The civil servants, knowing nothing about
science, were prepared to humor them but not to let
them run the show. The politicians in office were
deferential, even gullible, but, by and large, they did
not know the right questions to ask. When the British
House of Commons set up its Select Committee on
Science and Technology I welcomed it as a piece of
adult education, on-the-job training for Members of
Parliament, but I said it would not be really effective
until the M.P.'s instead of saying, "Excuse me, pro-
fessor, I know you are a Fellow of the Royal Society
and you know all about the Theory of Thingummy
and 1, Uriah Heep, M.P., am just a poor ignorant
critter when it comes to science. . . ." could get to the
stage of saying, "Come off it, Smith, you've got your
figures wrong...."
In Britain, scientists who have got into Parliament
or into government have not been much of a success.
Indeed Lord Cherwell (Professor Lindemann of the
Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford) in Churchill's War
Cabinet was a disaster. He could silence any opposi-
tion with a slide rule. He blinded his colleagues with
figures. He was responsible for area-bombing which
meant that if the military targets, such as industrial
plants, could not be pinpointed, the bombing of
workers' homes would serve just as well in reducing
production. He produced figures to prove it. Both
Henry Tizard at the Air Ministry and Blackctt at the
Admiralty countered with figures which showed that
Cherwell was out by orders of magnitude. From
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political warfare, I fired in a memorandum showing
that during the blitz of London, Coventry, Clydeside,
and elsewhere, bombing of civilian targets increased
instead of reduced morale. The homeless workers
would travel tens of miles from their evacuation
centers to put more into the job on a to-hell-with-
Hitler principle. Production went up. The same thing
happened in Germany, but, Cherwell's strategy led to
the fire storms of Hamburg and the horrors of Dres-
den which in terms of casualties were worse than
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the other hand, I heard Clement Attlee, who
as Prime Minister was made a grace-and-favor Fel-
low of the Royal Society, boast at the Royal Society
banquet, "Of course, I know nothing at all about
science." And next day he went off to argue about
nuclear energy with President Truman.
Earlier, Churchill, in a memorandum to the Chiefs
of Staff approving the atom bomb project, had said:
"Although I am not dissatisfied with our present ex-
plosives, I suggest we proceed along the lines of Lord
Cherwell's proposals." The bomb he was endorsing
was a thousand times more powerful than the chem-
ical explosives with which he was not dissatisfied.
Then there was the famous confrontation between
Churchill and Niels Bohr, the doyen of the nuclear
scientists. We had smuggled Bohr out of occupied
Denmark in a rowboat with muffled oars and had
flown him in the bomb bay of a Mosquito aircraft
from Sweden to Britain. He had gone to the United
States to see, in the Manhattan Atom Bomb project,
the effects of the work to which he had importantly
contributed. He was appalled by the prospects and
approached Roosevelt with a plea for the interna-
tionalization of atomic energy before any dropping of
the bomb should be considered. Roosevelt gave him
a sympathetic hearing but said he must go to London
and convince Churchill. The interview was a failure.
Churchill wrote a memorandum after it saying that
Bohr should be warned that he was "on the verge of
mortal crimes" merely in discussing the bomb and
added, "How did Professor Bohr get into this busi-
ness anyway?"
After the war, when the scientists had acquired
authority and glamour, governments appointed scien-
tific advisors (in Britain, Solly Zuckerman succeeded
Sir Henry Tizard) and set up science-policy councils.
I won't speculate on how this worked elsewhere, but
in Britain I was disappointed. I said that most of my
adult life I had been trying to get science into politics
and, instead, had got politics into science. My com-
plaint was that the scientists, now in a powerful posi-
tion to influence decision-making in the public inter-
est and with social wisdom, were the salesmen of
science itself.
I made myself thoroughly unpopular with my
scientific friends when I opposed the nuclear super-
accelerator. In 1945 the safebreakers had broken
open the secret of the nucleus before the locksmiths
knew how it worked. But they had produced the
fission bomb and the H-bomb, and governments were
awesomely impressed. The nuclear physicists were at
the top of the hierarchy of science and, for a long
time, could ask for and get what they wanted. They
wanted to know the structure of the nucleus - the
wards of the lock they had broken - and to identify
the subatomic particles, and the giant accelerators
by which they did this got bigger and bigger and they
got more and more particles. I remember at the
Weizmann Institute in Israel Robert Oppenheimer
rushing backward and forward along the podium
covering the blackboard with all the particles. There
were so many that they did not know what to do with
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them. They were like a small boy dismantling a
watch and finding when he reassembled it that he
had enough over to make another one. They could
not produce a unified theory. So they were asking
for an even bigger accelerator which was to be a
joint European venture costing #130 million.
The Americans and the Russians each had such
an accelerator. I asked a physicist friend of mine
what he wanted it for and he said, "To find the
quark," and I innocently asked, "What's a quark?"
He answered, "Isn't that a silly question! If we knew
what it is, we wouldn't need 9130 million!" I op-
posed it in the House of Lords. I said that research
was becoming a substitute for thinking. When they
got into a jam, they asked for more equipment. I
suggested that their nuclear dilemma was like the
crisis in conventional physics in 1900 when Max
Planck, with pencil and paper, got the physicists out
of their jam by propounding the quantum theory. I
thought we had, lost our sense of proportion and our
sense of values just as I thought the immeasurably
more expensive man-on-the-moon project was a mis-
take, when there were so many human survival prob-
lems needing investigation here on earth.
I could write a book on what the scientific estab-
lishment did to the World Health Research Center.
Let me recall the proposal and its history:
At the Sixteenth World Health Assembly, the
director-general of WHO, Dr. Marcolino Candau,
pointed out that there were fundamental health and
biomedical problems which were of immediate con-
cern to the present generation and might well de-
termine the future of mankind. He cited examples:
the great potential dangers of chemical contamina-
tion of air, water, and foodstuffs; the possible ill
effects of new medicaments and biological products
(of which the thalidomide disaster had already pro-
vided a tragic instance); and the problems of indus-
trial wastes and the indiscriminate use of pesticides.
He pointed out what was true then - ten years ago
- and is still true today: that we know comparatively
little about the effect of such substances on the living
body or on unborn generations.
There was, Candau insisted (years before Stock-
holm), a most important need for a world communi-
cations center to disseminate information about the
work, and the results of research on these matters.
The center would require the very latest systems of
computing and communications. To promote such
knowledge, nations would have to cooperate in pool-
ing knowledge without duplicating or superseding
national activities. Within this framework, the basic
health and biomedical problems which concern the
whole world related to the health and disease patterns
of population groups and include the range of com-
municable and noncommunicable diseases. There
had to be fundamental biological studies of genetic
and molecular mechanisms and their effects on living
organisms. There had to be a clearinghouse for such
concerns, with a special relevance to the neglected
problems of developing countries. He was asking for
a World Center of Medical Research on a tripod of
communications epidemiology research.
I became a vociferous advocate of the World Health
Center wherever it might be sited, but I was then the
professor of international relations at the University
of Edinburgh and I wanted the U.K. government to
commit itself to the idea and not just give lip service
and, if it came about, merely pay its dues. I went all
out to get the World Health Center in Scotland. I
could argue, for the edification of my colleagues in
the University of Edinburgh, that we did have one of
the more famous medical schools in the world; that
we had a cluster of medical research units; and that
we had ready access to medical library facilities.
The lay response was immediate. I had the offer of
five magnificent sites - county councils competing
to offer them freely - within easy reach of Edin-
burgh.
I then carried the case to the government and ran
into opposition of the most devious kind. The first
hurdle was the objection, which had existed since the
beginnings of the United Nations, to giving the U.N.
or its agencies any management of, or facilities for,
institutionalized research. Governments in the ad-
vanced countries with their own national research
institutes and substantial research and development
budgets had taken the line that if the U.N. and the
agencies wanted to know they had only to-ask. The
U.K. Medical Research Council line was that such
funds as WHO might acquire would be better spent
in "investing in excellence" - endowing individuals
or units already producing results (in other words,
backing certainties). This had been, of course, sub-
stantially the practice of the Medical Research Coun-
cil - with spectacular results in the case of the
M.R.C. group at Cambridge which collected six
Nobel Prizes in the DNA and molecular biology
field. But as I pointed out at the time, this ignored a
fact in M.R.C.'s own history: it had had to establish
the National Institute of Medical Research because
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medical serendipity and flashes of insights and genius
just were not covering the broad base of recognizable
problems. In other words, pure research - natural
curiosity while indispensable and praiseworthy - is
no substitute for basic, or oriented, research, which
deliberately provides the reservoir of research for
definable problems. That was what Dr. Candau was
explicitly asking for.
Another argument was that it would mean a diver-
sion of high-level scientists. What Dr. Candau was
proposing was a convergence of high-level scientists,
the best that could be got. I have no doubt at all that
that was the crux of the M.R.C. opposition - that
M.R.C. would lose several of its blue-ribbon scien-
tists. Indeed, several outstanding ones had declared
their willingness.
With great restraint, I shall not pursue the who-
dun-it-to-WHO. (Hilary Rose in Minerva followed
it through and the British role was deplorable.) But
the United States with the National Institutes of
Health followed suit. General de Gaulle created a
major diversion by offering half of one per cent of
the French arms budget to finance an international
cancer research center and, without any reflection on
the intrinsic merits of the proposal on the subsequent
work at Lyons and its international composition and
relationship to WHO, it provided the coup de grace
to Candau's grand design. More regrettable was the
persuasion of the less developed countries that the
center would have been at the expense of public-
health assistance to them, when, in fact, it would
have been doing research into their still unsolved
problems.
Looking back, looking at Stockholm which un-
derscored what Dr. Candau was anticipating, and
looking at the still unanswered questions for which
he was seeking answers, I regard the history of the
World Health Center as the corruption of science
policy and an affront to human reason.
Reverting to the man-on-the-moon program: I know
you cannot eat space hardware nor turn electrons
into food calories so, as I have been told so often, to
equate the space program with the hunger problem
seems to be the contradiction of unlikes. But is it?
The human ingenuity which goes into the one could
go into the other. A pupil with a scientific bent will
be making his choices at school. He can be influenced
to go into physics or chemistry or biology, into engi-
neering or into agronomy, but his career is likely to
be determined by the prevailing cult or the job op-
portunities of a crash program.
I had occasion to deliver an oration at the theater
of Apollo at Delphi where Pythia, the soothsayer,
delivered her prophecies. My theme was the modern
oracles, alias the trend-setters. I called them the
Pythons of the Pentagon and the Sibyls of Systems,
the numbers men and their numbers machines. Their
self-fulfilling prophecies derive not from trance-
making effluvia from the rocks at Delphi, but from
the computer. They extrapolate their statistics and,
if .they are in a position to influence the decision-
takers by the oracular authority of numbers, they
confirm the trends they are predicting.
I had in my audience the Python of the Pentagon,
Herman Kahn, who wrote Thinking About the Un-
thinkable and who applied the games theory to nu-
clear war, with the terrifying gobbledygook of "first
strike," "second strike," and "acceptable casualties."
He and others like him set the strategy of the balance
of terror. They give to their calculations the authority
of science. My native poet Robert Burns wrote "Facts
are chiels that winna ding" ("You cannot argue with
facts"), but he also wrote "The best laid schemes o'
mice and men gang aft a-gley." In the same way,
trends which seem numerically inevitable can get us
in a mess. We do not have to accept trends which are
socially undesirable; we do not have to plan for
them; we can plan against them. But if we abdicate
our judgments to the computers we have only our-
selves to blame. We need the third dimension S'-
the social and moral evaluations.
The philosopher David Hume made the distinction
between the "is" and the "ought"; science is the "is,"
and moral philosophy is the "ought." We don't have
to use a discovery or a technological invention just
because it is available. We can decide what we ought
to do about it. But the scientists and the moral phi-
losophers so rarely sit down in the same room. The
fault is less with science than with the humanities.
I was at a conference on the future of the Ameri-
can humanities at which only two papers defined the
role of the humanities in a technologically oppres-
sive world, and both of them were written by scien-
tists. The others were trying to find "relevance," in
the young people's sense. They were trying to find
interdisciplinary projects which would prove that
they were still "with it," but they deplored the fact
that, in all their efforts, the two parties - science
and the humanities - were barely on speaking terms
because they did not speak the same language. That
was because they were isolating and artifacting situ-
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ations. Interdisciplinary work must be self-evident,
not frivolously contrived. The cooperation on the en-
vironment is a good example of genuine interdisciplin-
ary work and it is a going concern.
That was when I suggested the. science of the sci-
ence of science. Science is knowledge, not wisdom.
Wisdom is knowledge tempered by judgment. But
wisdom cannot be exercised without knowledge. If
the humanities plead ignorance of science, then sci-
ence must instruct the wise men.
Let us consider a profound ethical dilemma which
must be resolved. It concerns the biocnginccring rev-
olution. I use the word "engineering" deliberately.
We can reconstruct a human being from spare parts.
Even before kidney transplants, people had an
ethical unease about renal dialysis, the artificial kid-
ney machine. Unquestionably it was a great technical
advance, making it possible to treat kidney dysfunc-
tions from which thousands die. The machine was,
and is, expensive and involves intensive care of the
patient by doctors and nurses. For whom the ma-
chine? In the United States the dilemma was evaded
but not solved by having lay panels, like clinical
juries, making life-or-death choices. In Britain, where
the National Health Service entitles everyone, rich or
poor, to have access to any necessary treatment, the
responsibility rests on the medical staff. It was, still
is, and will continue to be, a difficult decision. Assume
that some V.I.P., a famous man of advanced years,
and a boy of say, fifteen, both require the only avail-
able machine, to whom would it be allocated - the
living "museum piece" whose obituary would thus be
postponed, or a boy with an unpredictable future: he
might live to be a Nobel Prize winner or a criminal.
A cynic would give you the answer.
With the discovery of chemical means of counter-
acting immunological rejections, it became possible
to transplant actual organs. The natural defensive
system by which the body - just as it can repel
germs - can reject alien, genetically incompatible
tissue, could now be repressed so that the graft would
"take." Thus a stranger's kidney could now be trans-
ferred to a patient. Again, to whom a suitable kid-
ney? That led to heart transplants and to heart and
lung transplants. An essential condition of the oper-
ation was that the organs must be "fresh." To the
point of scandal we have had a near Burke-and-flare
situation. (Burke and Hare were the Edinburgh grave
robbers who supplied Knox, the university anatomist,
with cadavers for dissection and finished up by pro-
viding warm corpses.) Doctors, collaborating with
heart surgeons, would remove the heart at the mo-
nient of "death" and rush it to the heart-surgery
theater.
But what is the moment of "death"? The old
method of holding a mirror to the mouth to get the
mist of breathing has long been discarded. The pulse,
or the beating of the heart, is no longer the test. The
test now is the encephalograph to detect the brain
waves. If the signal is weak in a hopelessly injured
casualty, then death is imminent and the patient ex-
pendable. If there is no signal, then the patient is
dead. Thus the seat of life has become the brain. Ac-
cording to the signals of the encephalograph, the in-
stant for removal of the heart can be determined and
the organ rushed to the heart surgeon.
Apart from the ethics of the decision, this raises
the question: What is the ultimate object of the en-
tire exercise? Assume, (and it is a safe assumption)
that any and every organ presently will be capable
of being transplanted and that a human artifact could
be reconstituted out of spare parts. To what end?
Presumably to service the brain, the vestigial re-
mains of life. But the brain, however marvelous, is
a biological computer. One can debate whether it is
the mind. It is certainly not the human personality.
Our personality is compounded from the chemistry
and the responses of the whole body - not just the
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endocrines, but our lymph glands and our gastric
propensities as well.
I have still not got a satisfactory answer from my
organ-manipulative friends as to what would happen,
for instance, to me, an entirely nonbelligerent per-
son, if I received a kidney from a pugilist, complete
with an adrenal gland which provided the aggres-
siveness. We are not only remaking a machine of
cells and tissues, we are remaking a personality. The
question arises as to the identity of a person modified
by surgical plumbing. What is the legal, moral, or
psychiatric identity of a human so altered by medical
manipulation that he has become an artifact?
There is another severely practical but profoundly
important question: What is the cost in money, and
also in human sacrifice, of the diversion of scarce
facilities and scarcer medical manpower to the in-
tensive care of those "interesting cases"? Even those
who get it are a tiny fraction of those who may need
it. Meanwhile, thousands, tens of thousands, hun-
dreds of thousands and, in the wider world, millions
of useful lives are being wasted, and an immense
amount of suffering is being endured because of the
lack of conventional treatment.
There is another dilemma. With all this "doing
over," with plutonium pacemakers being implanted
and attached to the heart; with the promise of minia-
ture computers to be attached to our brain to com-
pensate our failing memories; with electronic stimu-
lators promised to enliven our "pleasure centers";
with all the advances in biochemistry and geriatric
care and with the protection against and treatment of
infectious diseases we can extend the span of life. We
can keep people alive indefinitely. This is a social
problem of the first magnitude. It is also a personal
problem for all of us because it involves a basic hu-
man right - the right to live or die with dignity.
There is a need for a consensus of conscience; an
international tribunal of ethics; a surveillance (which
need not be suppression) of the kind of things that
are happening; and a new personal ethic for doctors
and medical scientists. The Hippocratic oath, noble
in its intention, is no longer adequate. It has been
overtaken by events. The doctor, under the oath,
pledges, "The regimen I adopt shall be for the bene-
fit of my patients, according to my ability and judg-
ment and not for their hurt or any wrong."
Today, the doctor's abilities far exceed his judg-
'vnt because medical science and technology have
given him means to treat or operate on conditions
which would have been intractable a few years ago.
Indeed, he could construe his Hippocratic oath as
making it incumbent upon him to apply any knowl-
edge he has, down to the most recent discovery re-
ported in the latest medical journal, or the newest
drug offered him by a pharmaceutical firm. In present
circumstances, it is possible that he might be sued for
professional incompetence or malpractice for with-
holding an up-to-date form of treatment. In the
United States, a medical practitioner was success-
fully sued for damages for not prescribing a new drug
of which he had never heard. The judgment which
innovation imposes on a doctor exceeds the profes-
sional common sense on which the "good doctor"
would rely in good conscience. In the words of the
biophysicist, Leroy Augenstein, "the doctor is being
asked to play God."
By our irresponsibility today we are reducing the
options for posterity. We are mortgaging man's
family estate, and nature may foreclose.
In the House of Lords, I have said, "pollution is
a crime compounded of avarice and ignorance."
Avarice because of the reckless use of resources and
destruction of amenities and the environment for the
sake of quick profits. Ignorance because industrialists
do not bother to find out and anticipate the effects of
their activities. But we who protest against such
things are also accessories to the crime. If more and
more people want more and more goods and want
them cheap, then the abuses become more and more
exaggerated. It is a question of cost. Pollution can
be prevented by industrial precautions which are
costly. When we insist upon them, industrialists tell
us, "but you will price us out of business because our
foreign competitors are not under those restrictions."
Or the community picks up the social costs.
But I also try to remind businessmen that pollu-
tion is gross mismanagement, incompetence, and the
squandering of real wealth. What we call fumes or
effluent or slag heaps contain valuable materials.
Even eutrophication, which we hear so much about,
is too much nutrient (from domestic or industrial
sewage) in the wrong places.
Suppose that by improving our behavior as ten-
ants we get an extension of our lease of planet Earth,
what sort of "posterity" do we see frequenting our
secular hereafter? There are some people who would
be prepared to write out the prescription now.
Hitler's Reich, which was to last a thousand years,
was to be peopled by blond Aryans by the simple
expedient of eliminating or discouraging the propa-
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gation of unwanted strains. With better intentions,
and with more recent insight into genetic methods,
there are those who would seek eugenic man by
manipulating hereditary traits to remove those which
are deleterious.
To me, the DNA or bioengineering age is even
more portentous than the atomic age. We know what
we did with the secret of matter. the energy within
the nucleus; we exploded it as an apocalyptic bomb.
Now we are dickering with the secret of life with no
real understanding of the moral and ethical, or in-
deed the practical, consequences.
There is a "prescription for posterity" so funda-
mental that it transcends all such considerations.
That is DNA. In DNA, the basic chemical of the cell,
there is the genetic code which not only determines
the construction of existing tissues but holds the in-
structions for heredity. The code can be deciphered..
The effect of this manipulation of the genes by
giving them different DNA instructions can drasti-
cally alter the nature of cells and of the next genera-
tion.
It is true that with increasing knowledge of specific
elements in the code - like deciphering a secret code
in espionage - we could produce beneficial results.
We could change the messages to cancer cells and
make them harmless. We could change the genetic
instructions which at present produce hereditary
diseases. We could alter the coding of plants so that
they would yield more food. But we could produce
man-made viruses and bacteria for use in biological
warfare against which there would be no immuno-
logical protection. The nature of men and women
could be changed.
Who will write such prescriptions? Not the origi-
nal discoverers nor the Nobel Prize winners. They are
dismayed by the possibilities of what they produced
in pursuit of human knowledge and have turned to
other researches, saying in one way or another, "Do
not tamper with heredity. The mistakes will be ir-
reversible." But knowledge once given cannot be
taken back. There will be others who will try to
write prescriptions for posterity, spelled out in the
DNA code. There must be another kind of code -
a code of conduct for those who tamper with codes.
the abuse of their discoveries. Einstein, whose equa-
tion E_ me--' spelled out the release of atomic energy,
said, when confronted with the horrific consequences
of the bomb, "I wish I had become a blacksmith."
Scientists arc the trustees of knowledge but in the
words of the Latin tag "Quis custodiet ipsos cus-
tocles?" "Who takes care of the caretakers?" The
answer is "No one."
Science is a human right. Unless one is super-
stitious there is nothing wrong with natural curiosity.
It is what is done with the knowledge inquisitively
acquired which creates the difficulty. For knowledge
is not wisdom; wisdom is knowledge tempered by
judgment. We go back to David Hume's "is" and
"ought."
Sir Macfarlane Burnet, who won the Nobel Prize
in 1960 for his work on tissue transplants and who
developed a crisis of conscience about the possible
applications, said: "It seems almost indecent even to
hint that, as far as medicine is concerned, molecular
biology may be an evil thing." The scientists who
won the Nobel Prizes for DNA have similarly re-
coiled. James Watson, appeared before a United
States congressional committee to urge that restric-
tions be imposed on human cell manipulation.
Francis Crick, confronted with the wilder genetic
possibilities, urged people "not to stand for them."
Maurice Wilkins became president of the British So-
ciety for the Social Responsibilities of Science.
George Beadle pleaded with his colleagues in the
DNA field not to lend themselves to gene manipula-
tion because "the effects will be irreversible." Salva-
dor Luria declared "geneticists are not yet ready to
conquer the earth, either for good or evil." Max
Perutz warned against fertilizing human eggs in test
tubes because of the great and quite unjustified risks
of producing a. defective embryo. One Nobel laure-
ate after another has served notice. The operative
phrase is "unjustified risks."
Somehow we must bring together a body of wise
men from all over the world and, from diverse philos-
ophies and cultures, consider the inventory of op-
portunities but also of mischief, actual or potential.
They must give us the basis for establishing the "is"
and the "ought." They must produce instruments and
institutions, legal and professional, which can apply
ethical restraints. They must know, but in that knowl-
edge they must judge in the best interests of mankind.
The medieval alchemists (actually much maligned)
were accused of black magic. Their propensity for
evil was far less than the best-intentioned scientists
of today because they were too innocent to foresee
Lord Ritchie-Calder is a Senior Fellow of the Center.
This article was the Medal Lecture at the World Health
Organization Medical Society meeting in Geneva.
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An interview with R. J. Zwi Werblowsky
ZEN
R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, professor of comparative religion since 1956 at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was born in Germany in 1924 and studied in
London and Geneva. He has been a visiting professor at Brown University,
Harvard University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago,
and the Institute of Japanese Classics and Culture at Kokugakuin University,
Tokyo. He has translated Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, by Gershom
Scholem. His latest book Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions
in a Changing World, will be published this year, and he is now writing a
history of Judaism. He spent part of his sabbatical leave from Hebrew
University as a Visiting Fellow at the Center last year. This interview was
conducted by Donald McDonald, editor Of THE CENTER MAGAZINE.
Professor Werblowsky, given
Q.-
your background and work, how, and
under what circumstances, did you get
interested in Zen Buddhism?
WERBLOWSKY: I am officially listed
as a professor of comparative religion,
but that term is a barbarian neolo-
gism. I admit that it is also a con-
venient shorthand for the more cum-
bersome "comparative study of re-
ligions." As a student of the subject,
I am interested in all religions. Theo-
retically and ideally, I should be
equally interested in all religions, and
up to a point there is little difference
in my interest in Christianity, Judaism,
Nepalese Hinduism, and the religion
of the Bororo tribe in Brazil. Never-
theless, in the course of one's life and
studies, one develops special interests,
special likes, very often special dis-
likes, for particular cultural, artistic,
and religious phenomena. I have al-
ways had an interest in Far Eastern
religions, not least for purely method-
ological reasons. Unlike the so-called
primitive religions of Africa, Austra-
lia, or South America, Eastern reli-
gions are in some respect like Western
religions: they possess a highly devel-
oped and sophisticated literary tradi-
tion that goes back thousands of
years. Moreover, the Orient, in spite
of its relative tolerance, has had com-
peting religions in India as well as in
China: just think of Taoism, Con-
fucianism, and Buddhism. Buddhism
was experienced by the Chinese as a
foreign religion, a kind of invasion,
just as the Japanese, with their orig-
inal religion subsequently called
Shinto, experienced Buddhism as a
Chinese cultural invasion, and just as
many non-Western countries think of
Christianity as a Western invasion.
Q: So your interest in Zen began as a
scholarly inquiry.
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. Last but not least
because Oriental religions illustrate
the cultural process often called syn-
cretism. How do people try to pre-
serve their own religious traditions in
situations of culture-conflict? How do
the old and the new forms of religion
amalgamate? How have Eastern re-
ligions reacted to the impact of
modernization since the nineteenth
century?
I came to study in Japan because
for most of us China was a closed
country. I was fortunate to have good
personal and academic connections in
Japan, and this also enabled me. to
live for long periods in Zen monas-
teries there and to study them as a
participant observer.
Q: When did you start this?
WERBLOWSKY: I started my Zen
studies in 1960 or 1961. Since then,
I have been going back to Japan regu-
larly, keeping up my contacts with
these Zen circles. Of course, Zen is
just one among many Buddhist (Ma-
hayana-type) denominations. Yet its
emphasis on meditation, its relatively
less magico-ritualistic character, its
emphasis on direct experience and
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spiritual realization, its unique aes-
thetic tradition all these make it
sufficiently distinct from other forms
of Buddhism to merit the special in-
terest of the comparative religionist
who wants to understand why Zen has
had such a strong impact on the West.
Zen has become a significant element
in certain forms of Western cultural
and spiritual protest. The entrance of
Eastern ideas into the West and the
reception of those ideas by disaffected
and alienated Westerners adds to my
interest in Zen.
Q: What accounts for the attraction of
Zen to the West? Psychologists such
as Erich Fromm, Carl Jung, and
Karen h orney, and philosophers like
William Barrett have been attracted to
Zen. Why?
WERBLOWSKY: There are several ex-
planations, and they are not mutually
exclusive. Let me begin with the nasti-
est and most uncharitable ones. In the
first place, fascination with Zen is
based on ignorance. We all tend to be
easily impressed by the outward ap-
pearance of anything strange, foreign,
and exotic. Nobody who lives in a
Christian environment believes that
simply by looking at some of the out-
ward manifestations of Christianity,
or listening to edifying talk about faith
and hope and charity, or making an
occasional reference to Saint Francis
of Assisi and Pope John XXIII, we
have come anywhere close to the his-
torical reality of Christianity. West-
erners are aware of the enormous
amount of Scholastic philosophy and
dogmatic theology in Christianity, as
well as all its implications - in terms
of worldview, philosophy, and moral-
ity - which many of us refuse to ac-
cept, whether it is birth control, ec-
clesiastical hierarchy, or whatever -
not to speak of the Crusades, the In-
quisition, and religious wars. You just
know too much about Christianity to
be able to swallow it all, hook, line,
and sinker, and go mooning about this
wonderful religion of love and peace
and forgiveness.
But when a religion is strange and
exotic, one can be taken in easily by
its aesthetic appearance. I don't think
that even one per cent of the Western-
ers who write on Zen know that Zen
Buddhism has a Scholastic philosophy
that outdoes that of Saint Thomas
Aquinas and all the other Christian
Scholastics. Struggling in the strait-
jacket of their industrial and mechan-
ized society, Westerners are also taken
in by the allegedly direct spontaneity
of Zen life, but they do not realize
that life in a typical Zen monastery is
as strictly regulated and disciplined as
in any Catholic monastery. So a great
deal of the attractiveness of Zen in the
West is based simply on ignorance
and on the fascination with the exotic
which one interprets in one's own
terms without bothering too much
about how Zen really functions. That
is one explanation. It certainly is not
the whole truth.
Q: What other reasons do you see for
Zen's attractiveness in the West?
WERBLOWSKY: Zen strongly empha-
sizes the spiritual direction in human
life, but it does so in terms that are
different from the traditional forms of
spiritual expression with which West-
erners are acquainted - and dissatis-
fied. Whenever people look for a form
of expression, they not only need an
idiom of affirmation but also, to quote
the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils,
an "idiom of rejection." So they fasten
on something new, and that makes it
easier to reject the old. There are peo-
ple who want to reject certain Western
norms - e.g., "achievement," "suc-
cess," "making it," the whole rat
race. Also, in terms of spirituality,
commitment to a very personal God
becomes difficult, if not downright im-
possible, for many people. For them,
spirituality is a relatedness to a cosmic
reality rather than to the oversized
father-type of figure which traditional
Christianity tended to encourage.
Some Westerners feel that in Zen there
is a possibility for a deepened spiritu-
ality because, ideally, all the aspects
of one's personality - which Western
life tends to scatter all over the place
- are brought together, enabling one
to penetrate to the essence of one's
being.
Q: Zen's attractiveness, then, is not
due .solely to protest and alienation in
the West.
WERBLOWSKY: That's right. And, of
course, the comparative religionist will
ask whether this is unique to Zen.
Why do people bother more about
Zen than about certain forms of
Theravada Buddhism, or of any of
the other sects of Mahayana Bud-
dhism? For one thing, Zen has been
lucky; it has had a very eloquent and
persuasive propagandist in the person
of the late Professor D. T. Suzuki. I
certainly do not believe that what
Suzuki wrote represents traditional,
orthodox Zen. It is Zen refurbished
for export and for consumption on the
Western market.
Q.- Do others in Japan feel that way
about Suzuki, too?
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. But, still, in fair-
ness to Suzuki, there is no reason why
a religion, or a form of spirituality, in
order to exert an influence - even a
positive influence - must remain an
unchanged, orthodox article, exactly
as it used to be practiced and taught
two hundred years ago. All religions
change. After all, the Christianity of
Luther or Calvin is different from that
of the Christianity of Saint Thomas
Aquinas, but nobody, except perhaps
a very dogmatic and intransigent
Catholic diehard, would say it is less
Christian because of that. So why
shouldn't a religion - in this case
Zen Buddhism - change in the twen-
tieth century? It changes because orig-
inal minds reinterpret it to make it
acceptable to others. It is only pedan-
tic professors of history who say that
because twentieth-century Zen is not
identical to eighteenth-century Zen, it
is not Zen. Religion is open-ended,
and professors of history have no busi-
ness telling a religion how it ought to
develop.
Q: Cardinal Newman's essay on the
development of doctrine raised the
question of whether there is such a
thing as an unchanging doctrinal core
and how one can have doctrinal devel-
opment without doctrinal erosion.
WERBLOWSKY: The doctrinal core is a
difficult business. Zen has, as I said, a
highly developed "Scholastic philos-
ophy," it has its own doctrines which
almost none of the Zen practitioners.
in the West know. Buddhist philos-
ophy is a most intractable and diffi-
cult subject. It is far easier for Western
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THE CENTER MAGAZINE 62
 students to deal with Islamic or Chris-
tian philosophy than to understand a
Buddhist philosophy.
WERBLOWSKY: They are not clear at
all. A Sutra can be a very long or a
very brief text; sometimes very repeti-
tive, sometimes very dense. The ques-
tion is, what are the commentaries on
the text that determine your under-
standing? You can use a Sutra the way
you use Saint John's Gospel. A read-
ing of Saint John's Gospel does not
give you a clue to what two thousand
years of subsequent Christian theology
have made of that text. Saint John's
Gospel does not explain to you the
difference between Paul Tillich and
Karl Barth, although both men used
the same text.
The curious thing is that Western
people are far less interested in the
doctrine than in the discipline and in
what one might call the "atmospher-
ics" of Zen. A different kind of spiri-
tual atmosphere has enveloped them;
that is especially noticeable in the case
of great Christian spiritual figures. I
am talking not about superficial syn-
cretises, but about very committed
Christians, among them many monks.
These are people who do not fool
around; they get up at four o'clock
every morning to celebrate Mass, peo-
ple like the late Thomas Merton, and
so many others. They are fascinated
by Zen and feel that Zen can enrich
their Christian. spirituality. Obviously
their reference is not so much to doc-
trine, but to a style of life, to a men-
tality, to a kind of atmosphere in
which, if I may say so, the spiritual
metabolism functions.
Q: The fact that Christian monks are
attracted to Zen also indicates that
they are not satisfied. You knew Mer-
ton personally, did you not?
Cistercian tradition with which he was
not completely satisfied. Otherwise he
would not have been looking for a
completion, fulfillment, an integration.
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. I always come
back to this idiom-of-rejection busi-
ness. Every society, every civilization,
every culture reaches critical moments
when people are seized by an acute
sense of dissatisfaction. That is the
nature of human existence. It is the
nature of every culture.
Q: Is that true of the Buddhists in gen-
eral, and of the Zen Buddhists in
China and Japan?
WERBLOWSKY: Yes, they, too, are
aware that they are passing through a
crisis.
Q: One does not see them attracted to
or adopting Christianity, though.
WERHLOWSKY: There were periods,
until the Japanese government
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clamped down, when many Japanese
seemed to adopt a very positive atti-
tude to Christianity, in spite of their
traditional xenophobia. This was due
in part to the fact that Christianity
represented the modern world and, as
such, it symbolized for them the re-
jection of the old-fashioned, feudal,
traditional, hidebound, petrified Japa-
nese system. The Japanese went
through such periods, just as in the
average nineteenth-century French
village the bulk of the population was
Catholic but the local "progressive"
intellectuals - e.g., the notary, the
doctor, the pharmacist - were agnos-
tics. There were periods in nineteenth-
century Japan when the equivalents
to the notary, pharmacist, and doctor
were Christians, or pro-Christian.
That was their way of protesting
what they considered to be the petri-
fication and medievalism of Japanese
social structures. Nowadays this
danger is less great in the East, be-
cause they are shielded from Christian
influences by one very important emo-
tional element - anti-Westernism.
The West now stands for everything
evil, wicked, colonialist, capitalist,
imperialist; and Christianity is identi-
fied, to a large extent, with the West.
Q: But Japan has become Western-
ized, at least in her industries.
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. But most anti-
Western nations now distinguish
between Westernization and modern-
ization. For them, the challenge is to
demonstrate that they can modernize
their technology without Westernizing
other areas of their life. One can dis-
cern this even in such matters as
clothing fashions. There was a time
when everybody in Japan wore West-
ern dress. Then you got periods when
the kimono made a comeback, be-
cause people wanted to demonstrate
and preserve their own cultural sym-
bols. Such things are useful sociologi-
calindiccs.
Q: Is part of the attractiveness of Zen,
in the West, that Westerners see it as a
total view, a comprehensive philoso-
phy and religion? Perhaps in these
terms it has been oversold, or over-
bought. In other words we have
people like D. T Suzuki, who say,
"the true object of Zen is the unfold-
ing of man's inner life." But that can
be said of any religion. Again, Nancy
Wilson Ross will say that the core of
Zen, the key, is "direct inunediate
perception, direct seeing into the ob-
ject." That sounds to me like the
function of the poet, of the artist - to
look directly into things. Others cite
the intuitional approach of Zen, con-
trasted with. the Western approach
which is dualistic, dialectical. The in-
tuitional is attractive to the West be-
cause it seems to promise that one will
experience directly and immediately
all of reality without having to go
through the laborious process - iden-
tified with the West - of scientific
observation and logical, syllogistic
reasoning. Zen seems to offer, if not
an instant wisdom, a unitive concept
of life and self that is appealing.
WERBLOWSKY: Your observation
brings us back to the subject of Zen
Buddhism's specific doctrines. That
life feeling; that general attitude of re-
latedness to things; and that penetra-
tion to the inner core of one's being -
all these are claimed to be non-
Western because people are hung up
on the idea that the West has be-
come too rational and intellectualized,
whereas Zen tries to make you live
from the center of your being, or, as
the Japanese would say, from your
belly.
But if you follow up this argument,
you discover that the doctrine be-
hind the Zen approach to reality is
radical monism. And monism is a
philosophical doctrine which is well-
known in the West. On the basis of
Zen monism you say that there is
only one Buddha nature; it is every-
thing and in everything. You remem-
ber the famous koan: "Does a dog have
Buddha-nature?" The point here is
that you cannot answer "yes." The
question does not invite a silly pseudo-
monistic reply. The question is a koan
- to be solved in an experience of en-
lightenment and not in philosophical
affirmation. But I wonder how many
of the Western Zen addicts - I would
not call them adepts, but addicts -
have ever bothered to find out whether
this is, or is not, more or less the same
as Spinoza's Deus sire natural But,
then, if you quote Spinoza you are still
in the Western tradition, and that, of
course, will not serve those who need
an idiom of rejection. To be sure,
Spinoza was a philosopher and he did
not create a spiritual or religious dis-
cipline, whereas Zen is a spiritual
discipline. But you are right. There is
in the West a revulsion from all kinds
of dualism - spirit and flesh, mind
and matter, body and soul. There is a
quest for a new unity; it is a very
strong desire.
Of course, any variety of radical
monism poses serious problems. The
experience of good and evil - and no
century has had more experience of
evil than ours - brings every human
being up, bang, with his nose against
an irreducible dualism. Either you dis-
tinguish between good and evil, or you
claim that you are beyond good and
evil. It is a fact, for instance, that the
leaders of the Japanese military clique
during World War II prided them-
selves on being disciples of Zen mas-
ters. The relationship of the Samurai
class to certain teachers of Zen is
generally admitted. And the man who
wrote one of the best-sellers on Zen
(Zen in the Art of Archery) which
was eagerly gobbled up by all Zen-
enthusiasts, Eugen Herrigel, was a
convinced Nazi and follower of Hitler.
Can you be a genuine Zen disciple, or
claim to have experienced enlighten-
ment, and at the same time follow a
"leader" who murdered millions of
human beings in gas chambers? The
moral dimension of the whole ques-
tion of dualism and monism is a
serious one.
Q: One of the claims one keeps run-
ning into in Zen literature is that it is
an "everyday" thing, that it is very
concrete, very practical. Historically
how has Zen worked out in the areas
of social morality, social justice? Has
it had any directive, ameliorative, or
therapeutic influence on personal and
social behavior?
WERBLOWSKY: On the spiritual be-
havior of individuals - and the spiri-
tual spills over into moral behavior -
yes, it has. But I don't think Zen has
had an effect in any socially signifi-
cant way, which is not to say that it
has not profoundly influenced Japa-
nese culture.
Q.? One can encounter a lot of injustice
in a Buddhist society?
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WERBLOWSKY: Yes, That is the one
question which serious Christians ask
about Zen. Of course, this kind of
problem arises within every religion.
Some religions grapple with it by
descending to the most pedestrian
details of life and regulating them the
way certain forms of medieval Cathol-
icism, or the Jewish religion, with its
halakhah (the application of the
Torah as God's law), regulate every-
thing; or the way Islam, with its doc-
trine of the figh and sharik (the law of
Allah, as interpreted and administered
by the 'ulama, the learned men of the
law), has been trying to do. Here,
"religion" includes and regulates
everything from liturgy and ritual to
criminal cases and the law of divorce.
But unless you have that kind of re-
ligion, the norms and details of one's
behavior are left to one's spiritual
maturity. And then you get such things
as the social sphere (including social
injustice) remaining unaffected by the
spiritual life of religious individuals.
It would be unfair to suggest that
Zen alone has that problem. Take a
man like Martin Luther, who held that
faith in Christ and in redemption
through the cross was everything and
that consequently all legal considera-
tions fell away. Luther said, in so
many words, do whatever you want to
do and have faith in Christ.
Q: Saint Augustine said, love God and
do as you please.
WERBLOWSKY: That's right. Luther
merely took up and reemphasized
Augustine's phrase. Luther's motto
was, "sin boldly," because, after all,
what else can you do? So the moment
you pitch to a very high level of spiri-
tual attainment and of self-realization
in Buddhist terms, or of faith in Christ
in Augustinian or Lutheran terms,
you are bound to face the problem of
immorality in social life. It is the
theme of "moral man and immoral
society" which was the title of one of
Reinhold Niebuhr's books. But cer-
tainly Zen does not have a very good
record in that respect.
Q: I suppose Marx's criticism about
religion being the opiate of the people
would apply to Zen as well as to any
religion, to the extent it can be ap-
plied at all - that, whether intended
or not, religion can be a kind of for-
getfulness pill which will get one over
the misery of living in an unjust
society.
WERBLOWSKY: Unfortunately that is
true. If your ultimate goal is to attain
inner liberty then the injustices you
suffer become unimportant, but so
also become the injustices which
others suffer. I do not think that this
is a necessary corollary of Buddhist
Zen philosophy, but historically this
has been one of its results.
Q: Do you think that even sophisti-
cated and knowledgeable Westerners,
such as the philosopher William Bar-
rett, have rejected too much of the
Western tradition, Western philoso-
phy and rational thinking? In one of
his books, Barrett says that the West
does not have much to recommend it.
He says the Orientals have never suc-
cumbed to the Western error of divid-
ing reality, to that dualism stemming
from the Hebraic and Greek traditions
-God and creature, law and member,
spirit and flesh, mind and senses, rea-
son and will. Barrett says the Orien-
tals favored intuition over reason. He
quotes Tillich, who said that the God
"offered us by rational theology is no
longer acceptable."
WERBLOWSKY: Many of the critics of
Western spirituality do tend to throw
out the baby with the bath water. They
are far too selective in their descrip-
tion of the vices of the West, just as
they are far too selective and one-
sided in their description of the vir-
tues of the East. That is why, at the
risk of being a bore, I always come
back to the notion of the "idiom of
rejection." Many critics of the West
do not even bother to give a fair and
balanced history of Western thought.
They select the most one-sided ex-
pressions, overemphasize them, exag-
gerate them, and then use them as a
foil. It is all very nice to speak about
the unity of nature, the sense of unity
of all beings, but no civilization is as
bookish, as dry, as intellectualist as
the Chinese. If you look at certain of
the Taoist or Buddhist elements in it,
then you can emphasize some of its
attractive points. If you look at cer-
tain elements in the Confucian tradi-
iton, well, Confucianism is three times
as rationalist as anything Europe has
ever produced.
Another example is the Western
enthusiast who returns full of admira-
tion for Japanese gardens. He sees the
unity of nature and of man in the way
Japanese architects eliminate all de-
marcation between house and garden.
But the fact is that industrial America,
even at its worst, has never exploited
and polluted nature the way the Japa-
nese have. Whole villages have died or
become ill and disabled because of
mercury pollution of Japanese rivers
and coastal waters. And if in a few
years there are no more whales in the
seas, it is because the Japanese whal-
ing industry has systematically dis-
regarded all international agreements.
Frankly speaking, I am sick and tired
of this childishly foolish, and at times
even intellectually fraudulent, playing
off of the exploitative, objectifying,
manipulative, rationalist, Western
mentality against the allegedly more
intuitive and profound "unity with
nature" ascribed to Oriental civiliza-
tion.
Q: It seems obvious that no country or
culture or civilization is pure.
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. I say this not in
order to accuse the Japanese of ruth-
lessness, although other Asians them-
selves make such accusations. I simply
give this example of the folly of West-
ern enthusiasts coming back mooning
about the "sense of unity of being" in
the East and condemning the exploi-
tation of nature in the West. Japan is
the source of all Zen wisdom, but it is
also the country in which such eco-
logical mayhem, more appalling than
anything in the West, is occurring.
Q: You have written that there has
been a decline in the vitality of Bud-
dhism in Japan. Why is that?
wERBLOwsKY: Some Japanese Bud-
dhists asserted that the degeneration
of Buddhism dates from Japan's
modernization and the changes that
were introduced in the wake of the
Meiji restoration. At that time, Bud-
dhism in Japan lost the special status
and protection it had enjoyed for
many centuries. In actual fact, Bud-
dhism had degenerated in many ways
long before that. To put the blame on
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the Meiji reformation is sheer apolo-
getic. The degeneration of Japanese
Buddhism goes back at least three
hundred years.
Q: But why?
WERBLOWSKY: In the main it was be-
cause of Buddhism's privileged status
and its amalgamation with Japan's
other traditional religion - Shinto.
Hence it descended to a religion of
folkloristic, as well as superstitious
and magical practices.
Q: Is this not the history of any re-
ligion, that it has its moments of
vitality and decline?
wERBLOWSKY: Yes. There are periods
of rejuvenation, usually accompanied
by the appearance of great spiritual
geniuses. I suspect that today it is
mainly the interest of the West in Zen
which makes Zen people so conscious
of their own spiritual heritage. It chal-
lenges them to bring out the best in
Zen. But the real contribution will be
inade ultimately by the sane and sober
middle-of-the-roaders, those who see
the weaknesses as well as the
strengths of Zen, and who try to get
the best of both traditions, or some-
how to make that which is best in one
tradition fruitful for the spiritual life
of the other.
Here we come to the big question,
which applies not only to Zen but also
to Yoga and many other things: Can
one simply separate the sociocultural
and the spiritual aspects of a phe-
nomenon and say, "I will accept this
aspect, but not that one"? Cultural
phenomena often possess an integral
wholeness, so that. it is difficult to
separate out, or cut off, one part and
say, "We will adopt that part but not
the other." Yoga, for example, is an
integral part of the total Indian phi-
losophy and religion. So, in one view
unless one becomes a Hindu, there is
no point in going in for Yoga. Another
view is that Yoga is simply a useful
technique which may help to pep up
one's physical and mental capacities,
sharpen one's spiritual awareness of
certain dimensions of existence, and
that one can achieve this without
committing oneself to any of the
Hindu philosophy underlying Yoga. If
one uses Yoga merely as a technique,
then it becomes almost another form
of manipulation; it is no longer that
ultimate, all-embracing, life-giving
totality.
I have much sympathy for people
who try to use Zen, who see it as a
type of spirituality and existential
awareness that can be injected into our
Western civilization, rejuvenating it,
making it more dynamic, vital, and
meaningful, without adopting Bud-
dhism as a total culture, a total re-
ligion, or a total philosophy. There is
much that is attractive in this attitude.
But I would not dare to predict
whether it is feasible.
Q: So you do not go along with even
the tentatives of someone like the
Benedictine monk, Dom Aelred
Graham, who thinks that one may be
able to combine Zen Buddhism and
Catholicism.
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THE CENTER MAGAZINE 66
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WERBLOWSKY: Yes, That is the one
question which serious Christians ask
about Zen. Of course, this kind of
problem arises within every religion.
Some religions grapple with it by
descending to the most pedestrian
details of life and regulating them the
way certain forms of medieval Cathol-
icism, or the Jewish religion, with its
halakhah (the application of the
"Torah as God's law), regulate every-
thing; or the way Islam, with its doc-
trine of the fgh and sharici (the law of
Allah, as interpreted and administered
by the 'ulama, the learned men of the
law), has been trying to do. Here,
'`religion" includes and regulates
everything from liturgy and ritual to
criminal cases and the law of divorce.
But unless you have that kind of re-
ligion, the norms and details of one's
behavior are left to one's spiritual
maturity. And then you get such things
as the social sphere (including social
injustice) remaining unaffected by the
spiritual life of religious individuals.
It would be unfair to suggest that
Zen alone has that problem. Take a
man like Martin Luther, who held that
faith in Christ and in redemption
through the cross was everything and
that consequently all legal considera-
tions fell away. Luther said, in so
many words, do whatever you want to
do and have faith in Christ.
Q: Saint Augustine said, love God and
do as you please.
WERBLOWSKY: That's right. Luther
merely took up and reemphasized
Augustine's phrase. Luther's motto
was, "sin boldly," because, after all,
what else can you do? So the moment
you pitch to a very high level of spiri-
tual attainment and of self-realization
in Buddhist terms, or of faith in Christ
in Augustinian or Lutheran terms,
you are bound to face the problem of
immorality in social life. It is the
theme of "moral man and immoral
society" which was the title of one of
Reinhold Niebuhr's books. But cer-
tainly Zen does not have a very good
record in that respect.
Q: I suppose Marx's criticiser about
religion being the opiate of the people
would apply to Zen as well as to any
religion, to the extent it can be ap-
plied at all - that, whether intended
or not, religion can be a kind of for-
getfulness pill which will get one over
the misery of living in an unjust
society.
WLRIILOWSKY: Unfortunately that is
true. If your ultimate goal is to attain
inner liberty then the injustices you
suffer become unimportant, but so
also become the injustices which
others suffer. I do not think that this
is a necessary corollary of Buddhist
Zen philosophy, but historically this
has been one of its results.
Q: Do you think that even sophisti-
cated and knowledgeable Westerners,
such as the philosopher William Bar-
rett, have rejected too 'much of the
It 'estern tradition, Western philoso-
phy and rational thinking? In one of
his books, Barrett says that the West
does not have tnuclt to recommend it.
He .says the Orientals have never sac-
ctrmbed to the Western error of divid-
ing reality, to that dualism stemming
from the Hebraic and Greek traditions
-God and creature, law and member,
spirit and flesh, mind and senses, rea-
son and will. Barrett says the Orien-
tals favored intuition over reason. fie
quotes Tillich, who said that the God
"offered its by rational theology is no
longer acceptable."
wVERtuLuwsKY: Many of the critics of
Western spirituality do tend to throw
out the baby with the bath water. They
arc far too selective in their descrip-
tion of the vices of the West, just as
they are far too selective and one-
sided in their description of the vir-
tues of the East. That is why, at the
risk of being a bore, I always come
back to the notion of the "idiom of
rejection." Many critics of the West
do not even bother to give it fair and
balanced history of Western thought.
They select the most one-sided ex-
pressions, overemphasize them, exag-
gerate them, and then use them as it
foil. It is all very nice to speak about
the unity of nature, the sense of unity
of all beings. but no civilization is as
bookish, as dry, as intellectualist as
the Chinese. If you look at certain of
the Taoist or Buddhist elements in it,
then you can emphasize some of its
attractive points. If you look at cer-
tain elements in the Confucian tradi-
iton, well. Confucianism is three times
as rationalist as anything Europe has
ever produced.
Another example is the Western
enthusiast who returns full of admira-
tion for Japanese gardens. He sees the
unity of nature and of man in the way
Japanese architects eliminate all de-
marcation between house and garden.
But the fact is that industrial America,
even at its worst, has never exploited
and polluted nature the way the Japa-
nese have. Whole villages have died or
become ill and disabled because of
mercury pollution of Japanese rivers
and coastal waters. And if in a few
years there are no more whales in the
seas, it is because the Japanese whal-
ing industry has systematically dis-
regarded all international agreements.
Frankly speaking, I am sick and tired
of this childishly foolish, and at times
even intellectually fraudulent, playing
off of the exploitative, objectifying,
manipulative, rationalist, Western
mentality against the allegedly more
intuitive and profound "unity with
nature" ascribed to Oriental civiliza-
tion.
Q: It seeers obvious that no country or
culture or civilization is pure.
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. I say this not in
order to accuse the Japanese of ruth-
lessness, although other Asians them-
selves make such accusations. I simply
give this example of the folly of West-
ern enthusiasts coming back mooning
about the "sense of unity of being" in
the East and condemning the exploi-
tation of nature in the West. Japan is
the source of all Zen wisdom, but it is
also the country in which such eco-
logical mayhem, more appalling than
anything in the West, is occurring.
Q: You have written that there has
been a decline in the vitality of Bud-
dhism in Japan. Why is that?
\v R13LOWSKY: Sonic Japanese Bud-
dhists asserted that the degeneration
of Buddhism dates from Japan's
modernization and the changes that
were introduced in the wake of the
Meiji restoration. At that time, Bud-
dhism in Japan lost the special status
and protection it had enjoyed for
many centuries. In actual fact, Bud-
dhism had degenerated in many ways
long before that. To put the blame on
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 Approved For Release 2004/09/28 : CIA-RDP88-01314R000100190054-6
WERBLOWSKY: I think that that is
worth trying. However, I am not a
spiritual leader, but merely an his-
torian of religion, and I would want
to wait and see, and then judge how it
works out. Sometimes it works, some-
times it doesn't. I wouldn't want to
say one should not try it. Maybe it
can work.
Q: What is your feeling about the re-
lationship in Zen between disciple and
Zen master? The Zen master seems to
exert a strong, a total influence on his
disciple. To the extent that that is true,
does this not set up a potentially un-
healthy dependency of disciple on
master? At what point does the disci-
ple stand on his own feet and free him-
self from this relationship?
WERBLOWSKY: The relationship can
be unhealthy. I would agree that there
is a very strong personal bond. I cer-
tainly do not wish to mix psycho-
analysis and Zen; that creates awful
muddles. Zen has nothing to do with
psychoanalysis, and I think the book,
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, by
Erich Fromm, Richard de Martino,
and D. T. Suzuki, is one of the worst
books ever produced. But one thing
we must all learn from Freud and
psychoanalysis, and that is that no real
transformation of personality is pos-
sible unless there is what in psycho-
analytic terminology is called a trans-
ference. One of the most decisive ele-
ments - and it is the turning point -
in any analysis, as Freud well realized,
is the transference phenomenon,
which, in the modern slang of Ameri-
can youth, means being "hung up" on
your psychoanalyst. The big problem
in the analytical process is how to
dissolve the transference so that the
patient can stand on his own feet.
Many people never do get rid of their
transference. I think there is a similar
problem in religious life, when you de-
velop a dependence on your master.,
Thousands and thousands of people in
the West, mostly youngsters, make a
fetish of their absolute dependence on
the guru.. And it does not matter
whether the guru is a wise old man or
a seventeen-year-old youngster.
There certainly is a kind of de-
pendence on the Zen master. You are
free to choose your master. You may
actually try out several monasteries
until you find someone, and you say,
"Hah! Here, I've hit it off. This is the
man whom I accept as my master."
It's still up to the master to accept you
as his disciple. So there is undoubt-
edly a very strong element of de-
pendence. But the thing about the
really great Zen master is that he plays
his role responsibly, he does not abuse
his authority, he tries to discern at
what point the dependence should be
reduced and when the bond of de-
pendence should be severed. That is
a real problem. The ultimate test of a
great Zen master is whether he knows
how to handle it.
Q: Is there a tradition of rules and reg-
ulations handed down, or exchanged
between Zen masters in this matter? Is
it recognized as a problem?
WERBLOWSKY: It is recognized as a
problem, but in a very different way
than it would be in the West. Zen Bud-
dhism is highly stylized and hierarchi-
cally organized. It has none of that
semi-anarchic freedom which Zen
Westerners believe it has. There is, for
instance, the question of ordination,
or the proper "apostolic succession"
(if I may use a Christian term), in
which the master not only accepts a
pupil, he also recognizes that pupil's
degree of illumination, and at the ap-
propriate time sets him free, perhaps
even appointing him to be his suc-
cessor.
Because Zen is Far Eastern, a cer-
tain amount of dependence always re-
mains. This is not subservience or
pathological dependence. Zen is high-
ly influenced, almost impregnated, by
Confucian traditions, so the notion of
filial piety to one's master and. to one's
parents is strong. The question is,
where does dependence begin to para-
lyze the integrity of one's personality?
As I say, here is the test of the really
great Zen master, and I think only very
few are really great in that respect.
Q: Can you say something about Zen
monastic discipline?
WERBLOWSKY: Let me skip the early
rising at three-thirty or four o'clock in
the morning, and say something about
the daily beatings in a Zen monastery,
especially during periods of intense
exercises. When I emerged from my
first period of so-called spiritual exer-
cises - an eight-day sesshin - my
back was black and blue and green.
I valued that. I, for one, would refuse
to attend a session in a "modernized"
Zen monastery where I would not get
my beating. That is not because I am
in any way masochistic. The beating
is a valuable and useful part of the
exercise.
Q: Who administers the beating?
WERBLOWSKY: A supervising senior
monk, appointed by the superiors,
marches up and down -- I would al-
most say patrols - in the meditation
hall. Whenever he considers it appro-
priate, he administers a beating with
his stick. It is a highly ritualized affair.
I used to refer to the head monk in our
meditation hall who administered the
beating as our drill sergeant.
Q: Are the beatings ever just light,
symbolic taps on the back?
WERBLOWSKY: No, they are always
sound trouncings.
Q: Why were the beatings admin-
istered?
WERBLOWSKY: Their purpose is to
help you get into or remain in a state
of maximum mental alertness and
wakefulness. I believe they also have
an important physiological function,
which is why most serious Zen prac-
titioners want them. During periods
of prolonged and intense meditation
and. spiritual training-especially dur-
ing the week-long exercises taking
place several times a year - you sit
for many hours in the lotus position.
The lotus position is not, by any
standards, a comfortable position.
Sometimes you must sit that way
seventeen or eighteen hours a day for
a whole week. It is very difficult,
mentally as well as physically, to sus-
tain that. I and many of my fellow
novices felt that a good beating kept
our blood circulating. It enabled one
to go on with it.
Q: Is there a resemblance to the beat-
ings and flagellation of the Penitentes
in New Mexico?
WERBLOWSKY: No. I would very
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strongly insist that it is not flagella-
tion; it is not masochistic. It is simply
one additional method for keeping
your physical and mental alertness
when, otherwise, you might just doze
off or perchance "snap." The beautiful
part of it is that it is not just a matter
of a superior administering a beating
to an inferior. It is not just a sergeant-
major thrashing or knocking about a
private. It is a highly ritualized affair.
Before you receive the beating, the
head monk taps you lightly on the
shoulder, so as to prevent a sudden
shock. He waits until you raise your
hands in the attitude of reverence, be-
cause you are to focus your mind on
the Buddha. Next he bows to you,
which is a profound way of showing
that the relations between him and
you are not simply those between au-
thority and subject. He then admin-
isters the beating. After it is over, you
bow to him and he bows back. This
ritualized context in which the. beat-
ing takes place gives it a unique
quality.
Q: In Christian monasteries novices
have to undergo other kinds of disci-
plines - silence and fasting.
WERBLOWSKY: Silence is essential in
a Zen monastery, and discipline is
essential in any spiritual training. You
must subdue your body, but you must
also subdue your spirit, your mind,
your imagination, and your ideas.
There is what I would almost call an
artistic equivalent in religion, the need
to impose some kind of form on an
inchoate matter. It is present in all
religions. Without prior discipline,
there can be no creative spontaneity.
Q: Is the solving of a certain number
of koans, or riddles, a kind of stan-
dard, whereby the Zen master can
finally say, "You are now able to go
forth, you are no longer a disciple,"
and dissolve the relationship?
WERBLOWSKY: That depends on the
various Zen schools. Some, mainly in
the Rinzai tradition, do emphasize the
koan. My original training was in a
Soto monastery, where they do not
have koans, or where at least a koan
was considered of secondary impor-
tance. Later I changed to a master
whom I would describe as semi-
Rinzai, and there the koan played a
greater role.
Q: The ability to see the point of a
koan is not the only criterion of one's
Zen mastery.
WERBLO4vsKY: No, no. There may be
ever so many other things, including
some you yourself do not realize. The
master-disciple relationship is highly
intuitive. Very often, instruction is
given without words, simply by a ges-
ture, or by doing something.
Q: How often does one see one's Zen
master?
WER13LOWSKY: That depends on many
factors, the size of the monastery, for
example. Some monasteries are huge
establishments, almost factories. Some
are very small, in which the abbot and
the master might be the same person.
Some monasteries have several Zen
masters, but the abbot is a kind of su-
perior administrator whom you sec in
his own quarters only very rarely. In
the smaller monasteries, you will see
the master and the abbot three times
a day, at mealtimes, because you have
your meals together in the same re-
fectory. Sometimes days will pass
without any conversation passing be-
tween you. Then, there are special
weeks of spiritual exercises when you
are called to the master once a day,
for dokusan, which means "going it
alone" - a kind of private interview.
At those times you would have a con-
versation which may last from three
minutes to half an hour, depending on
his mood or on his reaction to your
spiritual state.
Q: You have written that the West
tends to swallow Zen folklore uncriti-
cally. Among the things you men-
tioned as part of the reality of Bud-
dhist life in Japan is that there are
more temples in Japan than there are
monks, and that often these temples
are handed down from father to son,
so that they have become a kind of
sinecure; perhaps they are even the
chief reason why some young men de-
cide to become monks. When I read
that, it reminded me of some of the
corruption that occurred in the medi-
eval period - in England, for ex-
ample, in connection with the inon-
asteries and the wealth and privileges
that began to accrue to the monastic
life. The more one reads these things,
the more one is impressed by the simi-
larity as well as the differences be-
tween religions.
4VERBLOtvsKY: Although you are not
a professional comparative religionist,
that is a sound remark. Some people
assert that all religions are basically
one, that there is a fundamental unity
of all religions, and that only because
of historical, cultural, climatic, and
other reasons, religions express them-
selves in different symbols and in dif-
ferent kinds of social institutions and
liturgical patterns. An eminent British
psychologist, Robert Thouless, who
wrote a psychology of religion, made
the opposite point which is of the
greatest importance and is similar to
what you have just suggested. Thou-
less said that all religions are prob-
ably different in their origin, in their
spiritual thrust, and in their intention,
but that the fascinating phenomenon
is how, as they develop, they all be-
come alike. It is not that they are
originally similar and then spread out
in different directions, but that they
are basically different at the start and
ultimately all develop in the same way.
Q: Why?
WERDLOwsKY: Because human nature
has the same wishes, the same fears,
the same anxieties, the same hopes,
the same weaknesses; so religions
do tend to develop in the same direc-
tion. But, as I said earlier, if you are
a foreigner and you are enamored of
something, then you just fail to see
that truth. You engage, instead, in
selective perception.
May I tell you a little anecdote to
illustrate what I said before, and be-
cause it partly answers your question
about dependence on a master and the
problem of transference? It also illus-
trates how a great deal of teaching
can be transmitted without any words
being spoken. Certainly for a West-
erner who is used to professorial lec-
tures in a classroom, the "transmission
without words" makes a particularly
strong impact. I had finished a period
of training at the monastery to which
I belonged, and I went up to the
master and asked him for a farewell
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present. I wanted to take home with
me that stick, the kyosaku, with which
we got our beatings. The master said,
"I can't give it to you, but Hakuin will
give it to you." Hakuin was one of the
great eighteenth-century Zen masters,
one of the greatest in Japanese history.
He is well-known also to non-Zenists,
because he was one of the great paint-
ers and Haiku poets of his day. Genu-
ine Hakuin paintings are very rare
museum pieces and fetch enormous
prices nowadays. The monastery I was
at was founded by Hakuin, and hence
the master, with whom I was con-
nected, is in the direct line of apos-
tolic succession of Hakuin himself.
That night, the master put the
kyosaku on the altar dedicated to
Hakuin. The next morning, he pro-
ceeded very solemnly to the altar, took
the stick and gave it to me, saying,
"Hakuin gives this to you." He was,
as it were, removing himself from that
line of apostolic succession and refer-
ring back to the great master. It was
an act of symbolic self-effacement.
Then he called me into his room and
ordered me to lie down, whereupon
he administered a beating, not a very
serious but rather a symbolic one.
Then I had the biggest surprise of my
life. The master knelt down and said,
"Now you give me a beating."
The whole point of this incident is
that one must not fall into the illusion
that there is an eternal and authori-
tarian master-disciple relationship. I
may be your master, and you may be
my disciple now, but, more profound-
ly, we are both simply two human be-
ings searching for self-realization,
which, in Zen language, is called Bud-
dha-hood. As a consequence there is
no distinction between us. But instead
of writing a book about it, or lecturing
me about it, the master simply knelt
down and said, "Now you beat me."
That was all, but it said more than a
whole volume on Zen.
Q: A friend of mine who spent some
time in Thailand years ago was struck
by the sight of elderly people who
spent much of their time in their last
years close to the Buddhist temples in
prayer and contemplation. They
seemed to him to be deeply content.
Old age, he said, seemed to be a pe-
riod that was. eagerly anticipated in the
Buddhist culture of Thailand because
it meant more opportunity to meditate
and pray and simply think about the
meaning of life. He contrasted this
with the dread and the anxiety with
which so many in America approach
their old age which too often is an age
of loneliness, poverty, and meaning-
lessness because the elderly in a highly
competitive, materialistic society are
looked upon as liabilities rather than
assets. How pervasive is Buddhism in
the Eastern countries? Does it really
penetrate all of their social life, from
cradle to grave? Or was my friend
seeing only what he wished to see?
WERBLOWSKY: It depends on where
one is. It depends, for example, on
whether one is in a village or a city.
There are countries, societies, civiliza-
tions, where religion is indeed per-
vasive. India is one such. That does
not make India necessarily a better
civilization. The callousness one finds
in India toward human suffering -
the starvation, the poverty, the caste
system - is appalling. But you get
the feeling that religion in India -
modern secularism notwithstanding-
is an all-pervading factor. In Japan,
on the other hand, it is not pervasive
at all. Japan appears in some ways to
be a nonreligious country, in spite of
its many temples and its rich folklore.
In Thailand one will find a very great
deal of popular piety.
And we must not forget that for
two thousand years, or more the Bud-
dhist countries, as well as Hindu In-
dia, have been conditioned to the
worldview that the most important
and valuable persons in society are
those who do not contribute anything
in direct economic terms. This is un-
like the medieval Christian monastic
ideal, as embodied by, e.g., the Bene-
dictine and Cistercian monks. Their
motto was to pray and to work. They
were good agriculturalists, cultivating
fields and clearing forests. They made
a large part of Europe habitable and
civilized. Or think of the many teach-
ing and nursing orders. Even the Fran-
ciscan mendicants, who originally
were meant to wander about to preach
and beg, would occasionally turn to
cultivation and labor, as graphically
illustrated by the California missions.
In contrast, a monk in the Buddhist
tradition is not allowed to work at all,
let alone engage in agriculture. He
must meditate and he must beg, and
the very fact that he accepts gifts from
the layman is the greatest favor he can
bestow on the latter, because the lay-
man thereby accumulates merit. So
there are societies which do not have
the notion that those of its members
- they might be monks, or the aged
- who are no longer "productive"
can be thrown, either socially or psy-
chologically, onto the scrap heap.
Also the Hindu tradition, at least
in theory, is based on the idea that a
man must fulfill his duties as a house-
holder and head of a family until a
certain age, when he hands all of his
possessions over to his son, while he
himself retires or goes off to the forest
as a recluse, a hermit, and the family
provides for him. There is in these so-
cieties, then, a positive appreciation. of
the personal and spiritual values
which do not directly contribute to
the "gross national product."
Q: How did you happen to meet
Thomas Merton?
WERBLOWSKY: That is a curious story.
I had had a very close relationship
with the psychologist C. G. Jung when
I was very young, and I remember
Jung once saying to me, "I am not
superstitious, but I do take hints." I
happened to be on the East Coast,
making travel plans in connection
with a lecture I was to give in Ten-
nessee. Well, when a clerk at the travel
agency said to me, "You've got to
change planes just once, in Louis-
ville," I suddenly had this hallucina-
tory experience of hearing Jung's
voice next to me, saying, "I'm not
superstitious, but I do take hints."
And I said to myself, "Damn it, if
that's not a hint, what is? I am going
to take it!" You see, Tom's monastery,
Gethsemane, is near Louisville, Ken-
tucky, and, although a friend had
urged me repeatedly to visit him, I had
always refused, until that "hint" from
a travel clerk.
So I wrote to Merton. He had
known about some of my writings. He
had become interested in Zen from his
reading, and by that time I had some
practical experience in Zen. Tom's
little hut in Gethsemane was full of
Zen paintings and things. There was
a time when I hoped to arrange for
him to visit Japan, but he began to
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live for quite a period as a hermit, on
the monastery grounds but not in the
monastery. Until then he had been
living what was for a Trappist an al-
most scandalously extroverted life, and
he evidently needed a period of seclu-
sion and introversion. He would come
into the monastery only for concele-
brated Mass on Sundays.
Tom Merton was very much aware
of certain limitations which his own
tradition had developed, The best
spiritual traditions petrify. Everything
has only one brief moment of genuine
vitality, after which it grows a shell
and petrifies. Then one lives not out of
the substance of the tradition but out
of the notion of tradition. Tradition
can become a fetish. Tom felt this very
strongly. I think that much of his
thinking was very muddled; he was
still trying to sort out his ideas. His
encounter with the East, which had
just begun on that fateful trip to the
Orient in 1968, could have been a
fruitful beginning, one that would lead
to a further clarification of his
thoughts. His death was a tragedy. I
think his friends made a big mistake
publishing his diary.
deal of it. I am just sorry that that
book was published.
But Merton's was a great mind. Part
of the moving quality of Tom's life is
that he was a true contemplative and
yet also sensitive to the great moral
and social issues of our time. Many of
these issues erupted at a crucial period
of his life: there was the Vietnam war,
and Merton's relationship with the
Berrigan brothers. On the other hand,
Toni had a firm conviction that the
monastic vocation really meant re-
nouncing the world, not being part of
the world. Merton was caught in this
dilemma. He saw his social responsi-
bility as part of his Christian responsi-
bility, but in a monastic and contem-
plative setting.
I disagree with those who say that,
sooner or later, Tom Merton would
have broken with the Church, or at
least with his religious order. There
have been very few people, in my ex-
perience, who were so profoundly con-
vinced of the meaningfulness of the
monastic vocation, of what it means
to be a monk, and what it means to be
torn by this tension than Merton. One
of the most beautiful essays that Tom
ever wrote - this was still at the time
Q: The Asian Journal ? of the agonizing Vietnam war - was
his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,
WERBLOWSKY: Yes. He knew that as a monk he could not
but be a bystander. But instead of
Q: These were only notes to himself, praising his estate as a monk as the
so to speak. highest form of Christian life and ex-
WERBLOWSKY: Yes, notes to himself;
and I think one does a person a great
disservice if, by a mistaken kind of
piety, one publishes every single word
that one has written.
Q: Could the Asian Journal have some
value, even as notes, of somebody
struggling, as Merton struggled, to try
and snake sense out of the East and the
West and the possible relationship be-
tween the two?
WERBLOWSKY: Obviously at some fu-
ture date, a biographer or a Ph.D.
student researching the life of Tom
Merton will want to see everything he
has ever written. On the other hand,
so many of the things jotted down in
this Journal are so trivial that it is
really a disservice to Tom to publish
them. If he had edited the Journal
himself, he would have deleted a great
istence, he felt that thereby he in-
curred guilt. He felt that somehow he
had to maneuver between these two
demands.
Q: Some Buddhist monks in Vietnam
play active social and political roles.
Do they experience the same tension?
WERBLOWSKY: The better ones do so
very much. The Buddhist renounces
the world, drops out of the world
completely. Still, many of them, espe-
cially in Vietnam, presented the world
with a contemporary version of the
phenomenon of the "political monk."
I have a friend in Saigon who once told
me that he, as a monk, felt that situa-
tions might arise in which a monk was
in duty bound to take part in political
activity. But, he added, in that case
the monk would have to disrobe first,
that is. he would have to leave the
monastic order and become a layman.
Q: Was the protest of the Vietnamese
monks against Saigon a reflection of
their Buddhism or their nationalism?
Or perhaps both?
WERBLOWSKY: I think it was a reflec-
tion principally of their nationalism.
Political monks are a well-known
phenomenon in the Buddhist world,
though the history of this phenomenon
varies from one country to another.
Burma is different from Ceylon, and
both are different from Vietnam and
its political monks. But in all cases
there is a strong element of national-
ism, one that is fed by a background
situation in which the nationalist pro-
test is focused on the "alien" non-
Buddhist elements. Thus, national
protest in Ceylon or Burma was trig-
gered off by the presence of the
British Empire; and if the British Em-
pire is identified with Christianity,
then, obviously, Buddhist and nation-
alist elements merge in the protest. In
Indochina, the Catholic Vietnamese
were originally the pet children of the
French colonialists. That led to a cer-
tain polarization, and so, again Bud-
dhism and nationalism merged into a
special type of protest configuration.
The Buddhist protest in Vietnam is
essentially a nationalist phenomenon,
of which Buddhism is part. In the
same way in many Middle Eastern
African countries, anti-Americanism
is not a typically Muslim phenomenon.
It is a Third World phenomenon
against the dominant West, but one
that happens to articulate itself very
effectively in a Muslim idiom because
Islam is the cultural background.
Q: What is the relationship between
Buddhists and Catholics in Vietnam?
How do they get along?
WERBLOWSKY: Very badly. There is
still an enormous amount of mutual
distrust. I don't know how long it will
take to get over that. Among the more
progressive people - certainly in the
antiwar circles - there is the begin-
ning of a genuine collaboration. Some
Buddhist monks and some progressive
Catholic priests are now engaged in a
very impressive way as bridge-builders
between the two religious groups. But
distrust is still the major characteristic
of the relationship between the two
groups. w
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WILLIAM E. COLBY
THE C.I.A.'S COVERT ACTIONS
[From a conference sponsored by the Center for National Security Studies,
a Fund for Peace organization]
If I said I am happy to be here, my statement might
be used to challenge the credibility of the intelligence
community. But I am happy to serve under a Con-
stitution which, in my view, brings me here. While I
might have constructed the program of this conference
somewhat differently, it reflects the workings of our
free society. It is thus incumbent upon our govern-
ment officials to explain to the public the functions
and activities of their particular organizations, and I
include in this, as you can see by my presence here,
the Central Intelligence Agency and the intelligence
community.
Our military forces must be responsive to our
public, but our public does not demand that our war
plans be published. Our judicial system must meet
the public's standards of justice, but our judicial con-
ferences and grand jury proceedings are not con-
ducted in public. It is even necessary for the Congress
to conduct some of its business in executive session
while remaining accountable to the voters for the
legislation it passes. Similarly, I believe it is feasible
to explain to the American. people the functions and
activities of the C.I.A. and the intelligence com-
munity while at the same time maintaining the neces-
sary secrecy of the sources and methods of our intelli-
gence, which would dry up if publicized.
In part, I can respond to legitimate public inquiry
through general discussions of our activities, omitting
the critical names and details. In other respects, I
believe I can respond to the public's need for assur-
ance by reporting fully to congressional committees,
or other bodies appointed by the public's representa-
tives to receive and retain this sensitive information
and to make value judgments about our functions and
activities. Another test of our effectiveness lies in the
opinions of those in the Executive and the legislature
who are provided the intelligence results of our
operational and analytical efforts, but not how these
were obtained and produced. There is a final control,
of course, in the fact that some of our activities, if
badly handled, come to public attention in a some-
what clamorous way.
There have been some "bad secrets" concerning
intelligence; their exposure by our academic, journal-
istic, and political critics certainly is an essential part
of the working of our Constitution. There have been
some "non-secrets" which did not need to be secret;
I have undertaken a program of bringing these into
the open. But I think that responsible Americans
realize that our country must protect some "good
secrets." It is for this reason that I am proposing
legislation which will impose penalties on those who
take upon themselves the choice of which secrets to
reveal, rather than relying on the established declassi-
fication procedures of our government. I might clarify
that my proposal would not apply to the news media
or any other persons than those who consciously as-
sume the obligation to respect the secrecy to which
they are admitted as government employees or simi-
lar, and that the reasonableness of the classification
would be subject to judicial review.
If our laws provide for criminal penalties for the
unauthorized disclosure of certain census informa-
tion, income tax information, Selective Service infor-
mation, and cotton and other agricultural statistics,
I think it reasonable that there should also be penal-
ties for the unauthorized disclosure of foreign intel-
ligence sources and methods upon which the safety
of the nation could well depend.
The title of this conference is "The C.I.A. and
Covert Actions." In my letter accepting an invitation
to appear here, I commented that I was somewhat
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ONE EMBATTLED
`,other functions," including covert
operations
in Burma, Laos, Iran,
INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Indonesia,
China, the Philippines,
Guatemala,
Ecuador, the Congo,
The Central Intelligence Agency and
the National Security Council were
created by Congress in 1947. The
C.I.A.'s mission: to gather and
evaluate intelligence of the activi-
ties of foreign governments and to
make this intelligence available to
the appropriate government agen-
cies concerned with national security.
The law does not direct the C.I.A.
to engage in covert operations
(sabotage, assassination, bribery,
paramilitary invasions, rigging of
elections) against other nations or
against groups within those nations.
But the law does say the C.I.A.
will perform such "other func-
tions" as the National Security Coun-
cil may direct. In fact, since 1947
the C.I.A. has engaged in many
Albania, Tibet, Cuba, Vietnam, Bo-
livia, and Chile.
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, the
C.I.A. was also discovered to have
operated under cover of American
universities, labor unions, book pub-
lishers, student organizations, and
cultural and religious organizations.
As the Watergate scandal un-
folded in 1973, and as details of the
break-in at the office of Daniel Ells-
berg's psychiatrist came to light, the
extent to which C.I.A. officials had
cooperated with some of the male-
factors also came to light.
Then, late last year, Seymour
Hersh, in a series of articles in The
New York Times, reported that the
C.I.A. had engaged in surveillance
of American citizens. Under public
and congressional pressure, present
surprised that there was no attempt in the agenda to
examine the need for the contribution that objective
and independent intelligence can make to policy
decisions. In fact, however, I note that there has been
considerable discussion of our intelligence activities,
such as the U-2, in addition to our covert-action role.
In this regard, I would like to clarify that the pre-
dominant focus of the C.I.A. and the intelligence
community today is clearly on our information and
analytical responsibilities. In this field, we endeavor
to serve the executive branch by providing intelli-
gence on the facts of the world about us and our
assessments of likely future developments. We also
try to serve the Congress and the public by providing
the output of the intelligence investment made by the
United States, to support them in their role in Ameri-
can decision-making. Thus, the C.I.A. has appeared
before eighteen committees on twenty-eight occasions
this year (Armed Services, Appropriations, Foreign
Affairs, Atomic Energy, and economics), testifying
on a variety of subjects. We have cleared for publica-
tion some of this testimony on the economics of the
Soviet Union and China and on the Soviet presence
in the Indian Ocean. We also produce a number of
unclassified publications and distribute them through
the Library of Congress to over two hundred libraries
and institutes around the country, as well as making
publicly available our reports of foreign broadcasts
and former officials of the C.I.A.
acknowledged that the agency had
spied on American political dis-
senters, planted informers inside
American protest organizations,
opened the mail of American citi-
zens, and assembled secret files on
more than ten thousand citizens.
The C.I.A. is thought to have
sixteen thousand employees and a
budget of three-quarters of a billion
dollars a year. By law, the agency
is authorized to conceal its man-
power, budget, and all accounting
procedures relating to the expendi-
ture of its funds.
A five-man committee, the Forty
Committee, is responsible for ap-
proving the C.I.A.'s covert opera-
tions. The group includes Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger; Undersec-
retary of State for Political Affairs
Joseph J. Sisco; the Deputy Secre-
tary of Defense William P. Clem-
ents, Jr.; General George S. Brown;
and translated documents. In addition, I have talked
with 132 newsmen in the past year; about one hun-
dred have come to the C.I.A. for briefings by our
analysts on substantive questions involving foreign
countries, thus benefiting from our accumulated in-
formation from our most sensitive sources.
It is a strange anomaly that our country makes
publicly available vast amounts of material on the
United States, whereas the corresponding material
about our potential adversaries must be collected by
intelligence techniques at a cost of hundreds of
millions of dollars. In this situation, if we cannot pro-
tect our intelligence sources and methods, I fear we
may reach a situation in which our adversaries profit
from our openness while we are blinded by their
secrecy.
Herbert Scoville has quite properly indicated the
revolution in intelligence which has been achieved
through the growth of technology over the past two
decades. This intelligence, however, is still limited to
what physically exists. It does not give us the inten-
tions, the research ideas, and the decision-making
dynamics of the countries which might pose a threat
to the United States. In today's accelerating tech-
nology, we are condemned always to be well behind
if we rely only on what has appeared in the market-
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chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff; and William E. Colby, director
of the C.L.A.
Congressional supervision of the
C.I.A. rests with subcommittees
made up, for the most part, of senior
members of the Armed Services
and Appropriations Committees of
both the House and Senate.
In practice, the Congress exercises
virtually no control over the C.I.A.
Increasingly uneasy about the
C.I.A.'s covert operations, congress-
men have introduced more than 150
resolutions, during the twenty-seven
years of the C.I.A.'s existence, in
an effort to exercise tighter con-
gressional control. All of the reso-
lutions have been either defeated or
tabled.
Last April 22nd, Mr. Colby gave
the Intelligence Subcommittee of the
House Armed Services Committee,
led by Lucien Nedzi of Michigan,
some of the details of the C.I.A.'s
activities in Chile prior to the over-
throw of the Allende government.
When Congressman Michael Har-
rington of Massachusetts read a tran-
script of the secret briefing, he
wrote confidential letters to the
House Foreign Affairs Committee
and the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee requesting a thorough
investigation into the United States
intervention in Chilean affairs.
In a news conference last Septem-
ber, President Ford acknowledged
that the C.I.A. had engaged in co-
vert operations in Chile. He justified
it on the ground that "there was an
effort being made by the Allende
government to destroy opposition
news media, both the writing press
as well as the electronic press, and
to destroy opposition political par-
ties." According to Mr. Ford, the
C.I.A.'s Chilean operations were "in
the best interests of the people of
Chile."
At about the same time, the Fund
for Peace, through its Center for
National Security Studies in Wash-
ington, sponsored a two-day confer-
ence in Washington on "The C.I.A.
and Covert Actions." Speakers and
panelists included many longtime
critics of the C.I.A., but one of the
speakers was C.I.A. Director Wil-
liam E. Colby. With the cooperation
of the Fund for Peace, we present
Mr. Colby's address and an edited
sample of the discussion that fol-
lowed. The Fund for Peace will pub-
lish the proceedings as a book later
this year. The materials include pa-
pers on the constitutional and inter-
national-law implications of covert
operations; a critique of ultra-secret
decision-making on covert opera-
tions; the C.I.A.'s operations in the
United States; the role of technology
in covert operations; and case his-
tories of C.I.A. operations in Laos
and elsewhere. -D.MCD.
place instead of what is planned for the future. In
addition, in a world which can destroy itself through
misunderstanding or miscalculation, it is important
that our leaders have a clear perception of the mo-
tives, intentions, and strategies of other powers so
that they can be deterred, negotiated about, or
countered in the interests of peace or, if necessary,
the ultimate security of our country. These kinds of
insights cannot be obtained only through technical
means or analysis. From closed societies they can
only be obtained by secret intelligence operations,
without which our country must risk subordination
to possible adversaries.
To turn to covert action, which is included in those
"other functions and duties related to intelligence
affecting the national security as the National Secu-
rity Council may from time to time direct" as stated
in the National Security Act, there is debate as to the
degree Congress intended the C.I.A. to engage in
these actions when passing the legislation in 1947.
The O.S.S. [Office of Strategic Services] precedent,
the National Security Act's clear authorization of
functions "related to intelligence" by reason of secret
techniques and frequent use of the same assets, and
the periodic briefings given to the Congress over the
years through its authorized committees clearly estab-
lish the C.I.A.'s authority to perform these functions.
The C.I.A. conducts such activities only when
specifically authorized by the National Security
Council. Thus, C.I.A. covert actions reflect national
policy. National policy has been in a state of change,
and the C.I.A.'s involvement in covert action has
correspondingly changed. In the early days of the
Cold War, when national policy-makers believed it
essential to confront an aggressive Communist sub-
versive effort in many areas of the world and in the
international organizational sphere, there was a great
deal of this sort of effort. Some was revealed in the
1967 disclosures of our relationships with various
American groups which helped their country to
present the American position and support America's
friends in this arena during the nineteen-fifties and
nineteen-sixties. The record is clear that the assis-
tance given to these institutions by the C.I.A. was to
enable them to participate in foreign activities; there
was. no attempt to interfere in internal American
domestic activities. C.I.A. aid helped such groups as
the National Student Association to articulate the
views of American students abroad and meet the
Communist-subsidized efforts to develop a panoply of
international front organizations. I might quote Ms.
Gloria Steinem, one of those so assisted, who com-
mented that the C.I.A. "wanted to do what we
wanted to do - present a healthy, diverse view of
the United States" - "I never felt I was being dic-
tated to at all."
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There have also been, and are still, certain situa-
tions in the world in which some discreet support
can assist America's friends against her adversaries
in their contest for control of a foreign nation's politi-
cal direction. While these instances are few today com-
pared to the nineteen-fifties I believe it only prudent
for our nation to be able to act in such situations,
and thereby forestall greater dillicultics for us in the
future.
In other situations, especially after Nikita Khru-
shchev's enthusiastic espousal of the thesis of "wars of
national liberation," the United States believed it
essential to provide paramilitary support to certain
groups and nations. In 1962, President Kennedy, for
national policy reasons, did not want to use the uni-
formed forces of the United States in Laos, but also
did not want to be limited to a mere diplomatic
protest against the continued presence of five thousand
North Vietnamese troops in Laos in violation of the
Geneva Accords, and their expansion of control over
communities who wished to resist them.
Thus, the C.I.A. was directed to provide support
to those communities, a duty which grew to a major
effort, known and approved by the Lao government,
but not confronting North Vietnam and its allies
with a direct and overt United States challenge. Fred
Banfman has told you of some of the terrible
human problems involved in any war when it grows
to a conventional scale involving artillery, air bom-
bardment, and so forth. What has perhaps not been
fully perceived is that the American assistance to this
effort involved a small commitment of C.I.A. Ameri-
cans and a small expenditure over the many years in
which this action was undertaken; and that, as a re-
sult of the defensive efforts of the forces supported
by the C.I.A., the battle lines at the end of the period
were essentially unchanged from those at the opening.
As with the Bay of Pigs, when the activity became
too large, it no longer remained secret. But I think
the C.I.A. people who conducted this effort deserve
the praise of our citizens for the effective but modest
manner in which President Kennedy's mission was
carried out -a mission, by the way, that cost the
lives of eight C.I.A. officers there. This activity was
reported to and appropriated for on a regular basis
by the authorized elements of the Congress - the
war was no secret from them.
But it is clear that American policy today is differ-
ent from when it was confronting worldwide Com-
munist subversion in the nineteen-fifties or Com-
munist insurgency in the nineteen-sixties. Our in-
volvement has been reduced in many areas, in part,
I might add, by the fact that many of the Communist
efforts during those years were unsuccessful. The
C.I.A.'s covert actions in many of these instances
thus assisted in laying the groundwork for the new
period of detente which we pursue in our relation-
ships with the Communist world today. As a result,
C.I.A. involvement in covert action is very small
indeed compared to those earlier periods. I do not
say that we do not now conduct such activities; I
merely state that they are undertaken only as directed
by the National Security Council, they are frankly
and regularly reported to the appropriate committees
of the Congress, and they require only a small pro-
portion of our effort at this time.
I am not being more precise on these various co-
vert actions. Some you are aware of because of
exposure, leak, or failure - such as the Bay of Pigs.
Sonic you are not aware of because they have been
effectively handled and have achieved their objec-
tives. I abide by what one President said about the
C.I.A., that our successes are unheralded and our
failures trumpeted.
It is advocated by some that the United States
abandon covert action. This is a legitimate question,
and in light of current American policy, as I have
indicated, it would not have a major impact on our
current activities or the current security of the United
States. I believe, however, that a sovereign nation
must look ahead to changing circumstances. I can
envisage situations in which the United States might
well need to conduct covert action in the face of
some new threat that developed in the world.
In 1924, we sank the brand-new battleship Wash-
ington as a demonstration of our belief in disarma-
ment. At about the same time, we disbanded an intel-
ligence element in the Department of State on the
thesis that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
During the same period, we declined the international
burdens of membership in the League of Nations. I
believe our post-World War II history, with all its
costs, constituted an improvement on our post-World
War I policies and did avoid a World War III during
these thirty years. I thus think it would be mistaken
to deprive our nation of the possibility of some
moderate covert-action response to a foreign prob-
lem and leave us with nothing between a diplomatic
protest and sending the Marines.
Bills in Congress today would amend the National
Security Act of 1947 to clarify a requirement that
the Congress be kept informed "in such manner as
the Congress may prescribe" of any "functions and
duties related to intelligence affecting the national
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security" carried out by the C.I.A. I fully support
this change in the C.I.A.'s basic legislative charter,
which would establish in law the practice we follow
today.
In announcing this conference, Robert Borosage
expressed the concern that untrammeled secret power
poses a threat to our liberties and that our program
of covert activities abroad must be reexamined be-
fore similar techniques are employed to subvert our
democracy at home. I have indicated that I do not
believe that the C.I.A.'s covert actions abroad con-
stitute untrammeled secret power in view of our
responsibilities to the Executive and to the legislature.
With respect to the second part of Mr. Borosage's
concern about these techniques being employed in
the United States, I again point to a bill being con-
sidered in the Congress, which would make it crystal
clear that the C.I.A.'s activities lie only in the field
of foreign intelligence, by adding the word "foreign"
wherever the word "intelligence" appears in the Na-
tional Security Act. I fully support this wording; in
fact I originally suggested it in my confirmation
hearings.
My predecessors and I have admitted that the
C.I.A. did exceed its authority in several instances
with respect to Watergate. We have taken steps
within the agency to insure that such actions do not
occur again. The proposed change in our legislative
charter would make this a matter of statutory direc-
tion. But the fact that a retired C.I.A. employee
becomes involved in some illegal activity in the
United States. should no more eliminate a function
essential to our nation than should the fact that a
Vietnam veteran commits a crime be used as the
basis to deprive the United States Army of its pistols.
And the concern of all of us that the C.I.A. not be
used against United States citizens should not bar it
from lawfully collecting that foreign intelligence
available within the United States.
Discussion:
COLBY: With respect to Chile, since my testimony on
Chile was given on April 22nd in executive session
of the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Armed
Services Committee, I will not discuss the details of
our activity in Chile other than to point out that
they fell within the general principles I have outlined
above.
I repeat what I have previously said: that the
C.I.A. had no connection with the military coup in
Chile in 1973. We did look forward to a change in
government by democratic political forces in the
elections of 1976. In reviewing the transcript of my
testimony, I find no reference to "prototype" nor to
the term "destabilize." The latter, especially, is not a
fair description of our national policy, from 1971 on,
of encouraging continued existence of democratic
forces looking toward future elections.
This unfortunate leak again points to the dilemma
of how we are to provide such delicate information
to Congress without its exposure and the consequent
adverse impact of that exposure on those who put
their faith in our secrecy and those who might be
contemplating such. a relationship with us in the
future. This is a matter, of course, for the Congress
to decide. I have every confidence that a fully satis-
factory solution will eventuate.
JAMES ABOUREZK (Senator from South Dakota): You say
that covert operations reflect national policy. Now,
since all covert operations are done in secret, and,
when revealed, are denied by the C.I.A., and since
such operations are neither disclosed nor acknowl-
edged to the public, how can they reflect national
policy?
COLBY: Because authorization is given to us by the
established elected authorities of the United States
government, the President and the National Security
Council, and these operations are reported to the
Congress.
ABOUREZK: They are not reported to me.
COLBY: That may be true. As I have indicated, I
believe these matters should be reported to the Con-
gress in the manner that the Congress establishes.
That is up to the Congress to determine how it shall
be done. You are correct when you say that these
covert actions are, by definition, secret. But, they
are not denied. Some years ago, the term "plausible
denial" was used. I have proscribed the use of that
term. I do not believe that we can tell the American
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people an untruth. I think we can give the American
people true statements, and keep secret other matters
which have to be secret. But I do not believe we can
tell them an untruth.
ROBERT BOROSAGE (Director, Center for National Security
Studies): You say that it is a strange anomaly that the
United States has so much information that it makes
public, whereas our potential adversaries do not. It
seems to me that the reason for that strange anomaly
is something called democracy. This is supposed to
be a society in which the legislature and the people
decide what are the policies that we undertake. The
question of what is national policy exemplifies the
point. National policy on acts of war, according to
the Constitution, is supposed to be decided at least
in conjunction with the legislature. The easy assump-
tion that national policy is an executive matter is
exactly what has taken us into all of the wars we have
fought and all the agony we have had over the last
decade.
COLBY: Like every other government employee, I
took an oath to support and defend the Constitution
of the United States. My concept of the Constitution
is one expressed through the duly established legisla-
tive, judicial, and executive bodies represented by it.
National policy is not an executive matter only. It
requires an annual appropriation by the Congress.
It is subject to judicial review of the constitutionality
of both legislative and executive actions.
HENRY HOWE RANSOM (author of The Intelligence Estab-
lishment): Will you comment further on this question
of the statutory authority of the Central Intelligence
Agency to engage in covert operations? I have read
that statute over and over and over, and it does say
what you said it says with regard to "other duties
and functions related to intelligence affecting the
national security." But you find a lot more flexibility
in that statute - and particularly in the word "intel-
ligence" - than I, as a user of the English language,
find in it.
COLBY: Over the years, history has given the deliber-
ately general phrase in that statute a great deal of
content which has been ratified by the Congress and
by the Executive. It has come to, shall we say, not a
little public attention, but no change has been made
in it.
never discussed in advance with anyone that I know
of. If they are discussed with Lucien Nedzi or Stuart
Symington, I any not aware of it. What happened in
Chile indicates that that is the case. You say that you
are prepared to discuss the Chilean operation before
any appropriate committee; but the Chilean operation
is over with. We are always talking about what the
C.I.A. has done two, three, four, or five years in the
past. Might it not be a good idea to discuss what you
are doing now, at this time, with even just the appro-
priate committees? I would like to see you go
further than that and describe the C.I.A.'s covert
activities with respect to national policy. In that case,
shouldn't the nation be brought in, if not on specific
matters, at least on the general principle of whether
the electorate approves of, say assassinations? Does
the nation approve of C.I.A. -sponsored government
coups, and many other things that I and a lot of
Americans disapprove of? You do not want to talk
about the C.I.A.s specific activities, but the C.I.A.
will not talk about even general principles. Would
that not be an appropriate matter for public de-
bate-whether a specific Chilean-type or Cuban-
type operation reflects national policy?
COLBY: I think that my presence here demonstrates
that I am prepared to talk about covert actions, and
I have talked about some of them. As for discussing
future events, many of them cannot be predicted,
but some of our covert activities have been going on
for a number of years. During those years there have
been periodic congressional appropriations, some of
which have been used for some of these [covert]
operations. When those operations get significant
enough, they must be covered in the appropriations
process. I did state to Mr. Nedzi in an open hearing
a few weeks ago that there are no secrets from his
particular intelligence subcommittee or from the
corresponding subcommittee of the House Appropria-
tions Committee. None. I also told him that, beyond
a responsibility to respond to his questions, I have a
positive responsibility to bring to his attention things
that he might be interested in. I have undertaken to
bring to the various legislative committees informa-
tion about our current activities so that they will be
informed of what we are doing.
ABO'UREZKc: Did the chairman of the oversight com-
mittee know in advance of your Chilean operation?
COLBY. Various of our individual actions in Chile
over the years were reported - at that time and in
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some cases before the funds were expended - to the
appropriate chairmen of the committees involved.
I can't say that every dollar the C.I.A. spent in Chile
was individually approved by a committee chairman.
But I can say that the major efforts were known to the
senior officials of the Congress.
COLBY: The C.I.A. must do those things that are law-
ful in the United States. I did not say that we had
any authority to commit crimes in the United States.
I deny that we have any such authority, and we have
given very strict directions to our people in that
respect.
ABOUREZK: Regarding recent disclosures of the C.I.A.'s
Chilean operation, was the knowledge of that action
provided in advance to the supervising committees of
the Congress?
COLBY: At various times during the period of 1964
to 1973, the major steps in Chile were brought to the
attention of the chairmen or appropriate members
of these committees. Now, I cannot say that every
individual instance was brought to them, but there
were a series of discussions between the C.I.A. and
senior members of Congress which brought them up
to date with the fact that this occurred and was
occurring.
ABOUREZK: A story by Laurence Stern in the Wash-
ington Post states that $350,000 was authorized to
the C.I.A., to bribe the Chilean congress which at
that time was faced with deciding a run-off election
between Allende and the opposition candidate. Were
our supervising congressional committees aware of
that?
COLBY: That falls within the category of the details
that I am not going to talk about. I do not want to
talk about the details of our operation in Chile out-
side of the duly constituted committees of the Con-
gress.
ABOUREZK: Is there anything that the C.I.A. has done
overseas that you would not do in the United States?
COLBY: Of course. We are engaged every day over-
seas trying to learn through secret, clandestine opera-
tions matters which are kept secret. In the closed
societies and countries that we work in and in some
of the other countries that we share this world with,
we do a lot of things which, according to our stan-
dards at home, are illegal. This is a natural aspect
of the fact that we live in a world of sovereign en-
tities, each of which must protect its own security.
ABOUREZK: What activities in the covert operation you
engage in overseas would you approve of in the
United States?
ABOUREZK: But you do undertake activities overseas
that would be crimes in this country?
COLBY: Of course. Espionage is a crime in this
country.
ABOUREZK: Other than espionage?
MORTON HALPERIN (Former member, Henry Kissinger's
National Security staff): I was encouraged by your state-
ment that you now think it is a legitimate question
whether, given our current perception of our inter-
ests, we should engage in any covert operations and
by your additional statement that you do not think
abolishing covert operations would have a major im-
pact on the security of the United States. Can we
assume that that statement was made with, among
other things, the current situation in Greece in mind?
If, as appears to be the case, Greece may well be
getting a government which decides to withdraw from
NATO and eliminate American bases, would your
statement still hold? Do you believe that American
security interests require or justify American covert
intervention to prevent a Greek withdrawal from
NATO? Has the C.I.A. proposed to the Forty Com-
mittee, or do you expect that it would propose to the
Forty Committee, operations designed to prevent a
Greek, government from coming to power which
would seek to withdraw from NATO and close
American bases?
COLBY: As I said in my statement, I do not think
that the elimination of covert actions would have a
major effect on our current activities, because that
is such a small portion of our total activity. I do not
think that would have an immediate adverse effect
on the security of the United States. That is a differ-
ent question than whether any particular situation
might be in the net interest of the United States. I do
not think it is very useful for me to discuss in this
forum whether any proposal should be made or
should not be made about a particular covert action.
I think that that falls exactly within the category of
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those things that I believe, if we are to conduct
covert actions, should be discussed only within those
very restricted circles in the executive branch and re-
ported to those very restricted circles in the legislature
which can enable them to be done and still be kept
secret.
HALPERIN: Did I understand you to say that, while
there might be a net advantage for the intervention
in Greece - and you are not prepared to discuss
that - nevertheless there would be no major impact
on American security if we did not conduct co-
vert operations throughout the world, including
Greece?
COLBY: The current status of the world is such that
it does not look as though we are on the brink of any
serious damage to our country at the moment. The
Capitol will still stand whether or not any particular
covert action takes place at this time.
MARCUS RASKIN (Co-director, Institute for Policy Studies):
In the last generation, as you know, the Rockefeller
family has been very much involved in different forms
of intelligence activities of the United State. Will the
C.I.A., under your direction, continue to use various
Rockefeller-owned corporations abroad in any way?
Will the Central Intelligence Agency continue to use
various corporations, including Rockefeller corpora-
tions, as covers around the world?
COLBY: 1 do not believe that that is a useful subject
to discuss. I get back to my responsibility not to talk
about the operational details of my agency.
RASKIN: Did the Central Intelligence Agency use
I.T.T. as a cover in Chile?
COLBY: Again, I do not propose to discuss the details
of our operations. I do not want to get into a situa-
tion where I say, "no, no, no, no" to a series of ques-
tions, and then have to say "no comment," because
the answer is pretty obvious at that point. I think it
is much more useful if I just say "no" to the whole
run of such questions.
HERBERT SCOVILLE (Former deputy director of science
and technology, C.I.A.): The, C.I.A. has received a great
deal of criticism because of its covert operations.
You have said that stopping these activities would
have no major effect on national security or on the
operations of the agency as a whole at this time. In
view of that, and also since one can make a case
that these covert operations are interfering with the
C.I.A.'s legitimate intelligence collection and anal-
ysis, wouldn't it be a good idea for the agency now,
once and for all, to divorce itself from these covert
operations? If covert operations must be continued -
and I think there is a real question whether they
should - let us put them in some other place, but
let us get on and have the C.I.A. do the job it
really ought to be doing and can do in collecting and
analyzing intelligence.
COLBY: In view of the world situation and our na-
tional policy, we are not spending much of our
effort on covert operations. We are keeping our
musket and powder dry; this does not divert us from
our major functions today. As to the future, I think
that there can be a legitimate need for the covert
operation. I do not have any bureaucratic feeling
about whether or not such operations should be in
the C.I.A. I do know that various considerations have
been given over the years as to whether the covert
operations could be run somewhere else, and it has
been generally believed that it is impractical to do
them anywhere else.
NEIL SHEEHAN (New York Times correspondent, on leave;
author of a forthcoming book on the war in Vietnam):
Would it hamper the C.I.A.'s overseas activities if
agents were made subject to federal laws of this
country for their activities overseas as, for example,
American military officers are subject to the code of
military justice no matter where they serve?
COLBY: You raise a complicated legal question. The
fact is that if the C.I.A. officer overseas commits a
crime against the United States government, he will
probably be punished in some fashion or other. I
think he bears a certain legal responsibility to United
States laws, even while he is serving overseas. This is
a murky legal problem, but I think that an American
C.I.A. agent is not totally free of United States law
once he leaves these shores.
JOHN D. MARKS (Former assistant to the Director of Intelli-
gence and Research of the State Department; co-author
of The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence): I believe you
would agree with the definition of covert action as
secret intervention into another country's internal
affairs. The techniques include blackmail, burglary,
subversion, and assassination. With the approval of
competent authority in the Forty Committee and the
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National Security Council, do you feel those tech- COLBY: Because you do not have to talk about them,
niques are justified in the name of national security? and you do not have to leak about them.
COLBY: I think the use of an atomic bomb is justified
in the interest of national security. Going down from
that, there is quite a realm of things one can do in
the reasonable defense of the country. The morality
of self-defense involves making one's action relate
reasonably to the need for some kind of action. An
exaggerated action when there is little need for it is
immoral and wrong.
DAVID WISE (Co-author of The Invisible Government;
author of The Politics of Lying): In the late nineteen-
fifties, President Eisenhower denied that the C.I.A.
was engaged in activities against the government of
Indonesia. Earlier, during the time of the uprising in
Guatemala, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
said that the situation was being cured by the Guate-
malans themselves. At the time of the U-2 incident
in 1960, we were told by our government that it was
an American weather plane that had drifted over the
Soviet border. At the time of the Bay of Pigs, U.N.
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had to lie to the whole
world by reading a cover story into the record of the
United Nations, something which I think he always
regretted. More recently, high officials of our govern-
ment have told us that we did not intervene in Chile.
As a citizen, I resent being lied to by my government,
and I am sure many other citizens do too. Does this
lying not make the cost of the C.I.A.'s covert opera-
tions too high? And did I understand you to say
that there will be no more lying about C.I.A. opera-
tions?
COLBY: With reference to what happened in 1950,
1960, and so forth, I have tried to indicate that
times have changed. We are aware that they have
changed. We are trying to adjust to the new world
that we have here. We are trying to respond to the
American people and to the American Constitution
in the form that is expected of us at this time. I did
say that I believe I cannot tell the American people
an untruth. On occasion, I may have to keep some
matters secret and not mention them. But I believe
it is not feasible - and frankly I don't like it either
- to tell the American people or their representatives
an untruth, either in open or in secret.
RASKIN.: In line with your attempt to readjust C.I.A.
policy, are you prepared to have the C.I.A.'s budget
for both its intelligence and covert operations "stated
publicly in the federal budget? Are you prepared to
send out other people, representing the agency and
its points of view, to debate in town meetings in
various parts of the United States on the efficacy of
having covert operations, so that you can find out,
as Congress should, what the new mood of the
American people is? In my view, if you do, you will
find that what you have been doing is utterly in-
sulated, that you have been operating within a
political and cultural hegemony that has nothing to
do with the people's wishes and needs at this time.
COLBY: With respect to the budget, the release of a
single figure, one year at a time, would not create a
serious security problem. But if you continue that
over a few years, one could draw trend lines. People
would immediately ask, "Why did it go up?" "Why
did it go down?" "What is it made up of?" Very
quickly one would be getting into the details of it.
This matter - the disclosure of a single figure-
was debated in the Senate last June, and it was
turned down by a vote of fifty-five to thirty-three.
Regarding appearing around the country, I have
appeared in a number of places. I have spoken in
Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and other places.
C.I.A. officers have appeared in various places; a
number of our officers have attended association
conferences. The answer is, yes, within the limits
of the time available, we are prepared to go out and
talk to the American people. That is what I am
trying to do right here.
FRED BRANFMAN (Co-director, Indochina Resource Center):
While you were in Vietnam, was it the frequent
practice of the South Vietnamese National Police to
carry out torture? Were many people shackled in
tiger cages on Con Son Island? I understand nobody
has a monopoly on morality, but I think we would
like to know what your morality is. Are there any
things you have done in Vietnam that you would not
do elsewhere and would not do here at home, from a
moral point of view? I understand the legal problems.
What is your morality?
WISE: Then logically doesn't that mean an end to
covert operations? How can you have them if you do
not lie about them?
COLBY: My morality is to try to help produce a better
world and not to insist on a perfect one.
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BRANFMAN: Was it the practice of the national police
to torture?
COLBY: It was not the common practice. We had a lot
of advisers throughout the police and other structures
in Vietnam. There were exceptional cases; they were
few, exceptional, and against policy, but they did
occur, and I have said that. Were there tiger cages
on Con Son Island? The answer is yes. Were there
shackles in the tiger cages? Yes. Those tiger cages
were built during the time of the French, and they
have been used ever since.
those particular committees; but in the early nineteen-
fifties those subcommittees of the Appropriations
Committee and the Armed Services Committee of the
House and Senate were established as proper over-
sight and review committees for the C.I.A. The prac-
tice grew up, over those twenty-five years, that we in
the C.I.A. would speak only to those committees and
not to the others. A series of resolutions were pre-
sented to the Senate and to the House over the years,
recommending a change in that procedure. Each of
those suggestions was turned down, so that the stand-
ing arrangement then continued.
BRANFMAN: Mr. Colby, you have just violated what
you said a little while ago: that you were not going
to lie as director of the C.I.A. It was common prac-
tice to be tortured in Vietnam, and you know it. You
have just lied after saying a moment ago that you
would not lie. I think it is disgraceful.
COLBY: I respectfully disagree.
HALPERIN: Could you explain by what authority and
by what criteria you decide what a properly con-
stituted body of the United States Congress is to
which you have to answer? The Senate's Watergate
Committee was established by an overwhelming vote
of the Senate of the United States. It was directed to
investigate Watergate and related matters. A member
of that committee asked your agency for information,
and you have said that you gave him only what you
wanted to give him and drew the line at information
that you would provide only to duly constituted and
authorized committees of the United States Senate.
Now, as far as I can tell, the Watergate Committee
was authorized to receive that information. As far
as I am aware, the Senate of the United States has
never voted that the Armed Services Committee or
the Appropriations Committee are the only com-
mittees which should get information from the C.I.A.
What gives you the right to say that one committee
is authorized to receive information, but that the
Watergate Committee is not so authorized?
COLBY: I am merely following the precedent estab-
lished by the Congress for some twenty-five years.
HALPERIN: The Senate Watergate committee was never
established before.
COLBY: You are correct. There is no specific resolu-
tion of either the House or the Senate that sets up
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HALPERIN. But that practice concerns what you have
to tell the congressional committees generally about
your operations. But I do not understand why that
practice is not superseded when a special committee,
set up by the Senate, requires C.I.A. officers to
answer its questions. By your logic, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and every other agency of
the government could have said to the Senate Water-
gate Committee, "We're sorry, we're the F.B.I. and
we only answer to our standing committees." The
F.B.I. and other groups understood that Watergate
was an extraordinary situation for which the Senate
had authorized an extraordinary investigation. That
seems to me to supersede twenty-five years of C.I.A.
practice in talking only with subcommittees of the
Armed Services and Appropriations Committees.
COLBY: I am prepared to change this process at any
time the Senate and the House direct me to do so.
I am not giving anything away. I am merely reflecting
the Constitution.
HALPERIN. But the Senate directed every part of the
executive branch to answer the questions of its
Watergate Committee. You are saying, no, you want
a specific resolution telling you to answer them.
COLBY: I am merely saying that I will comply with
the way the Senate wants to arrange the oversight of
the operational aspects of the intelligence business.
There is special legislation which indicates that the
intelligence business is a very special business. I am
charged by statute with the protection of intelligence
sources and methods against unauthorized disclosure.
I am prepared to change my procedure at any time
the Senate and the House determine to do it. Until
that time, I have to follow both the tradition of the
House and the Senate and the special directives of
the statute itself, aa+
: CIA-RDP88-01314R000100190054-6
80
 Approved For Release 2004/09/28 : CIA-RDP88-01314R000100190054-6
by Daniel Sisson with Introduction by Harvey Wheeler
(Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.)
"Sisson is one of the new historians currently engaged in reassessing
the basic assumptions of American history. Here he has taken a
fresh look at the political scene and the whole notion of 'revolution'
after 1776 and placed powerful emphasis. on the significance of
Jefferson's Presidential triumph in 1801. This, Sisson contends,
was the true end of what we have called the American Revolution
- the triumph of Jefferson's ideas of democracy as a continuing
revolutionary process and the defeat of 'elitist' concepts held by
Hamilton. and his followers. Sisson develops substantially the
ways in which Jefferson and Madison fashioned a political
organization, based on clearly defined principles, which won
popular support by arguing against the Alien and Sedition Acts,
taxes, the army, corrupt ministers-' and so made the first orderly
and democratic transfer of power in Western history. A challenging
and in some ways a landmark bdok." - Publisher's Weekly
Sisson developed much of his theory of the relationship between
constitutionalism and revolution during his years at the Center
where he was a Junior Fellow and Senior Research Assistant.
Publisher's price: $12.50. Discounted price to Center members: $10
(California residents add 6 per cent sales tax.)
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ripe to Center members:
 Approved For Release 2004/09/28
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