The Torment in the Land - Senator Frank Church

 THE TORMENT IN THE LAND 

Taken from the Congressional Record, pages 72-75 of February 21, 1968 Vol. 114, Part 3

Mr. CHURCH:  Mr. President, the war in Vietnam enters its fourth year since we commenced the bombing of the north, its fury intensified, and no end in sight. As though fascinated by the baited trap, we are poised to plunge still deeper into Asia, where vast populations wait to engulf us and legions of young Americans are being beckoned to their graves. 

Confounding our construction of the Vietnamese war as an aggression from the north, the Vietcong remains primarily an indigenous force of the south, honeycombed through every city and village, capable of striking from nowhere, moving with relative impunity among the people. Without a single area immune from enemy penetration, where he cannot obtain local cover, it should be obvious that we can find no magical answer to our dilemma in South Vietnam by striking out elsewhere. I listen, dismayed, to the reckless talk of "hot pursuit" into North Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos, where, presumably, we shall deny the Communists their "sanctuary," when all of Asia behind them is their sanctuary.

The involvement of the United States in Vietnamese affairs, we should remember, began as just another foreign aid program. Our purpose was to help certain anti-Communist elements in South Vietnam strengthen themselves. But when we commenced to take over their fight in their country, converting their political struggle into an American war, I could no longer support the policy. As early as September 1964, I began to speak out against it.

In the intervening years, I have seen my worst fears confirmed. Step by step, we have been caught fast in a precarious Asian bog. Into its quicksands, we can readily stray farther and sink deeper, but out of it there is no quick or easy path of extrication.

Can unheeded warnings over many years now be used to unmake a war? Clearly, they cannot; the questions must be reframed. The victims of events, we must now ask if the premises of 1958, which have brought us to the realities of 1968, will be relevant in the world of 1978.

As America now ponders the price of its policy in Asia:

“The quest for any healing wisdom must begin with the facing of one truth; the reckoning has been inevitable, for the policy was forever fatally flawed. Such a truth is almost too bitter to bear. For many, it will be so much easier to explain away the Vietnam tragedy in terms of cruel misfortunes or chance misjudgments. But this kind of history has not been decreed by blunders–but by premises. It has not been ruled by anguishing circumstance but by avowed purpose. And its full warning is not to be read as a matter of what America failed to do but what America tried to do.”

~Emmet John Hughes

 It is with what we have tried to do, not only in Asia but in the world at large, that I would speak today. I am deeply concerned about our concept of the world around us and the proper role that we should play in it. It is my belief that the time has come to search our souls–to ask what, indeed, is the true condition of our country, and how that condition relates to the course we are embarked upon abroad.

There is a story making the rounds of an airline pilot who announced to his passengers that he had two pieces of news for them, one bad and the other good. The bad news, he said, "is that we are lost. The good news is that we are traveling at a recordbreaking rate of speed."

The United States, without doubt, is traveling at a recordbreaking rate of speed. Our gross national product now exceeds an annual rate of $800 billion; for an unprecedented 84 months we have enjoyed a steady, upward trend of growth. More Americans are living better than ever before.

Yet, something is seriously wrong. Many of our thoughtful citizens sense that we are somehow off course, that we may have even lost our way.

For the first time, in my memory, a sizable segment of our young people have actually repudiated the country. The "hippies" have simply withdrawn from our society, seeking psychedelic escape by drug-induced hallucinations. We can deplore them but we cannot dismiss them–for they are there.

The activists among the angry rebels vent their contempt in public displays of brazen insolence. They defiantly tear up their draft cards; they shout, as the President passes by, "Hey, hey, L. B. J., how many kids did you kill today." They have gone so far as to mutilate the flag.

I recognize, of course, that these extremists do not typify American youth as a whole. Still, we deceive ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that a multitude of bright and sensitive college students–young men and women who refuse to participate in the abusive conduct I have just described–nonetheless feel profoundly disturbed about their country.

They question our course abroad. They resent the spreading mantle of militarism at home. They have, I must say quite frankly, greater sympathy for Dr. Spock and the ministers now under indictment, than for the Government prosecuting them. And they are skeptical about the condition of freedom in our land.

These students, though numerous, are probably not yet in the majority. But they do not care. Nor do they believe they can convince a country which will not listen. So their method is not to persuade but to obstruct, not to debate but to demonstrate. A kind of organized coercion seems to be their evolving technique, picket lines, massive sit-ins, rude resistance to established authority.

These anguished young people, in my opinion, are mistaken in the way they have chosen to conduct themselves. Disrespect for authority is disapproved by most Americans. No argument can be won by bad manners. The more shrill the shouting, the less inclined the country will be to listen.

Still, we are left confronted with the indisputable fact that a substantial proportion of our college students are estranged; they portray a poignant, visceral sense of alienation toward the "establishment," by which they mean all authority that stands for, or somehow represents, the government.

And this is a serious symptom of the torment in the land.

Another symptom, even more alarming, is the relentless growth of crime and violence in the streets. Our cities have become time bombs. We ask ourselves, in muted voices, which will be the next to explode. What horror does the coming summer hold?

For reassurance, we repeat truisms to one another. We earnestly agree that this country cannot tolerate mob rule; that riots, arson, and looting are the tools of anarchy and revolution; that the maintenance of liberty depends, first of all, upon the maintenance of order; that in a free country, anyone has the right to try and change the law, but no one has the right to break the law.

On all this we concur. More money will be given the municipal police for better instruction in riot control. Federal funds will be made available to finance special training programs for the National Guard. When the time comes, we know that many arrests will be made, and even now we demand swift punishment for the guilty.

Yet, deep down we also know that, though the police and guardsmen may suppress the violence, they cannot prevent it from occurring. And so we wait for the hot summer.

And this is another symptom of the torment in the land.

What has gone wrong? What is the reason for the dissension on our college campuses? Why, with rising affluence, are we faced with a rising tide of violence in America?

Finding the answers to these questions is the most urgent item on our national agenda. President Johnson, in his recent state of the Union message, took note of “a certain restlessness” in the country, explaining that–

“When a great ship cuts through the sea, the waters are always stirred and troubled.”

But, with all deference to the President, our troubles are not stirring in the wake of the ship; our troubles are aboard. The ferment works amidst the crew, and the anxiety relates to the course charted for the ship itself.

Many aspects of that course may have contributed to the deterioration of public morality, to the spreading disregard for law and order, but none, I submit, has had a greater impact than this country's marathon dance with war.

We bear the imprint of war prolonged and unending. The draft has become a permanent fixture in our national life. Our youngsters grow up with war, listening to their fathers' stories of excitement and adventure on a hundred battlefronts. Where is the little boy whose favorite toys are not miniature replicas of our country's vaunted weaponry?

Violence begets violence; incessant warfare becomes, at last, the accepted companion of normalcy. Every night we watch on television the gory spectacle of the jungle war in Vietnam, the latest film, in color, flown to us directly from the battlefront. Year in, year out, the brutal drama penetrates every home, until burning villages, screaming children, and flowing blood become a routine part of the typical family scene.

Each morning our newspapers carry the latest body count of enemy dead, together with pictures of our own fighting men, bandaged and mangled. The brand of war pervades and brutalizes our culture. Funny strips give way to fury strips. Violence not only dominates the entertainment we are offered on the ubiquitous tube; it is exalted there. Our video spies kill with a ruthlessness indistinguishable from that of their adversaries. One cannot really separate, on any ethical basis, the good from the bad. Nor does it seem to matter. For it is the "action" itself which is glorified, and apparently all that matters is that our side wins by the end of the program.

So it has happened that the American people, long gathered about the arena, have been steeped in violence. The President expresses the hope that hardened veterans, returning from the fighting in Vietnam, will join the police forces in our cities to help keep order. But even as he issues his appeal, he knows that other veterans, equally seasoned in the black arts of guerrilla warfare, are returning each day to the slums and ghettos. As whole blocks were burning in Detroit last summer, one such veteran turned to his buddy and said: "It's here, man, that the real war is."

To deal with that "real war," the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States has left us ill equipped. Since the end of World War II, our attention has been largely diverted away from the problems at home and riveted instead on distant shores. So, too, have our resources. Today, we are much more a warfare, than a welfare state. Of the $157 billion voted by Congress in 1967, an astonishing 74.7 percent went for war or war-related programs, while only 12.2 percent went for health, education, and welfare. The breakdown of last year's budget follows:

The most perfunctory examination of this budget reveals the staggering cost of war, past and present, but even these percentages fail to describe the mammoth extent of our involvement abroad.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have wrapped our arms around the world as if it were our oyster. American fleets patrol not only our home waters, but the oceans of the earth, from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. Over 2 million of our military personnel, including their dependents, are stationed abroad. We maintain no less than 132 major military bases overseas.

The cost of this unprecedented military array defies comprehension, approaching a trillion dollars since the end of World War II. Our nuclear arsenal has grown to such awesome proportions that if it were ever detonated in anger, its destructive power would be the equivalent of a thousand pounds of TNT against the head of every living inhabitant on earth.

However, even this is not the whole story. From the beginning of World War II onward, virtually every country in the world has received some form of loan or subsidy from the United States. In the postwar period alone, we have distributed more than $90 billion in economic aid to no less than 124 foreign governments, plus $38 billion in weapons, ammunition, and military equipment. OUr arsenal diplomacy encompasses the globe. We are the world's largest munitions supplier, having disbursed over six times as much armament as our nearest rival, the Soviet Union.

But even this lavish gift of arms is not intended as a substitute for the use of our own. The United States has formally pledged itself, in advance, to the defense of 42 foreign countries, a commitment without example in history.

All of this we have solemnly done in the name of living up to our responsibilities as a great power. State Department strategists. patiently explain that no other Western nation retains the capability of filling the vacuum created by the sudden collapse of the European empires. The good order they once maintained throughout the colonial world, we are told, it is now up to the United States to furnish–by subsidy wherever possible, through direct military intervention where lesser measures fail. Thus do we inherit the burden of the broken empires, assured that we shall be welcome since our motives are pure.

As a blueprint for American foreign policy, this doctrine of universal intervention is nothing less than a prescription for disaster. It rests, in the first instance, on a presumptuous misconstruction of modem history. 

Let China sleep–

Napoleon warned–

“for when she awakes the world will tremble.”

Nineteenth century colonialism awakened Africa and Asia from ancient slumbers, sewed indignation thick and deep, and reaped a bitter harvest of virulent nationalism. The resulting ferment can never be stilled by new intervention from without, least of all by another rich and powerful Western nation. The notion that we can restore stability to that half of the world which has just thrown off colonial rule, or, worse still, that it has fallen to us to act as a rearguard for the shrinking empires of a bygone day, is not even worthy of being called a policy. It is a grandiose dream of men who suffer from the dangerous delusion of American omnipotence. 

Today that dream lies shattered before our present agony in Vietnam. Whatever the eventual terms of settlement there, we have learned the chastening lesson others learned before us, that there are limits to what outsiders can accomplish by force of arms. The presence of a huge American expeditionary force in this small Asian country has reduced to puppetry, in the eyes of its own people, the very government we sought to bolster. Predictably, the banner of nationalism has passed to the Vietcong.

Moreover, as the Pueblo seizure demonstrates, we lack the manpower to extend to the rest of Asia the policy we pursue in Vietnam. For if Americans must fight Asians on a spreading Asian front, we shall soon run out of both men and money.

A general reassessment of American foreign policy is urgently needed. If we could only overcome our obsessive preoccupation with other people's ideologies, we could start asking some practical questions. What, for instance, have we bought with armaments unlimited and foreign aid dished out on a global platter?

We have not bought security.

After 20 years of the nuclear arms race, the Russian and American people are not the most secure, but the most imperiled people in the world. If the funeral pyre each government has set for the other is ever ignited, both peoples will be laid out upon it. A hundred million will die, it is estimated, in the initial blast, while untold millions more–wretched victims of the insidious fallout–will vomit their lives away in the hideous aftermath.

"The survivors would envy the dead," said Nikita Khrushchev.

"The last insanity," said Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Whatever could be salvaged, the mainstream of civilization would shift, for centuries to come, to the nonnuclear lands beyond the outer limits of the holocaust.

No, we have not bought security.

If not security, have we bought peace? Again, the answer is "No." Our policy of global intervention has meant war, not peace. During the past 25 years, the United States has engaged in more warfare than any other major power.

Then, at least, have we not bought favor? Once more the honest answer is "No." OUr insistent involvement in the internal affairs of so many foreign countries meets with rising resentment and suspicion. As a delegate to the 21st General Assembly of the United Nations, I was a reluctant witness to the growing cynicism.

If I draw a bleak picture of the American predicament abroad, it is to underscore my conviction that the time is ripe for what John Foster Dulles once called an agonizing reappraisal of our foreign policy. I say this after 9 years of service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a lengthy and intensive course. I say it after extended travel into many parts of the world, where I have met and questioned hundreds of prominent foreigners, journalists, businessmen, educators, and political leaders, from Harold Wilson to Nikita Khrushchev, from Chiang Kai-shek to Charles de Gaulle. Finally, I say it as one who firmly believes that the United States must continue to play a very prominent role in world affairs.

I do not propose swinging the pendulum back to ostrich-like isolationism. One extreme need not call for the other. rational middle ground, where the limits of our intervention are drawn to correspond with the limits of our resources, and where we reserve direct military measures for those occasions that actually pose a clear and present threat to the security of the American people.

If we were to do this, I think our perspective would return again. No great calamity would occur. Instead, we would begin to see the folly of intercession without restraint. We would lift a dread burden from our shoulders and stand taller before the world.

Indeed, we would soon discover that, even as the United States cannot cap or control the endemic eruptions in the emerging world, neither can any other nation. Five thousand years of human history bear witness: it is a stubborn world, much too large and tough to be subjugated by any one country, or any one ideology or political or economic system.

What we once conceived to be monolithic communism is already cracking up under the hammer blows of national rivalry. The systems differ, one from another, Russia and China engage in bitter controversy, while the "satellite" countries assert a growing measure of independence. Slowly we have come to acknowledge, then to applaud, the disintegration of Communist solidarity in Eastern Europe. Yet we refuse to either recognize or respond to the same phenomenon in Asia.

Fear blinds us; fear of communism which transcends faith in freedom; fear of a future that we cannot shape with our own hands; fear of sudden devastation hurling down from the skies. The nuclear monster we ourselves unleashed returns, like Frankenstein's, to haunt our lives. Psychologists testify that a frightened man strikes out in all directions, a characteristic conspicuous in our foreign policy of recent years.

In the face of all this, I wish I could express some confidence that, by an act of our own volition, we might soon commence to alter this country's foreign policy from one of general, to one of selective, involvement. But I have no such confidence. Like other nations before us that drank deeply from the cup of foreign adventure, we are too enamored with the nobility of our mission to disenthrall ourselves. Besides, powerful vested interests now encrust and sanctify the policy. Were we to wait for the hierarchy of either political party to advocate a change of course, I fear we would wait indefinitely.

But events are transpiring that may force a change of course upon us. If a widening war in Asia is averted, 1968 may well prove a year of reckoning for the United States. Our lengthy binge of extravagant spending abroad is catching up with us, for the laws of economics are immune to national ambition. Half the gold has been drained from our Treasury. Less than $2 billion in unfettered bullion remains to meet some $30 billion in foreign obligations, all of which are redeemable in gold.

The emergency measures proposed by President Johnson are palliatives, at most. He asks for the removal of the gold cover, which contributes nothing to the correction of our adverse balance of payments, but merely throws open to foreign creditors those remaining vaults to which their access is now denied. The gold drain, constant and unrelenting, is much too large to be checked by a dubious tourist tax or limited restrictions on the investment of private capital abroad. Retrenchment of Government spending abroad is inescapable, if the calamity of the dollar’s devaluation is to be avoided. But the solution will not be found in further manipulation of our foreign aid program, salutary as that may be; the solution lies where the gold toll is heaviest, in the redeployment homeward from Europe of large numbers of American troops.

Mounting pressure on the dollar, deaf to the trumpet call, will thus force a pullback. The question is not whether, but when. Congress could face up to a reckoning this year, if it had the fortitude to retain the gold cover, the removal of which merely buys a little extra time.

The stern, unavoidable requirement, made all the more urgent by the necessary  meeting the heavy gold drain costs in Vietnam, is to drastically cut back our foreign spending elsewhere. Would it not be wiser to do so now, while we still retain the last half of our gold as insurance for the dollar, than to wait until no gold remains? Why should Senators, long since convinced that the United States is overextended and overcommitted abroad, who have seen their repeated warnings repeatedly ignored, vote now to relieve the one pressure within our control that could compel a retrenchment?

I, for one, will not do it. I refuse to vote for the removal of the gold cover. I cannot support a measure designed to give globalism, our current foreign policy, and extended lease on life. All the Congress has left, with which to influence our course abroad, is the power of the purse. If we shrink from using it, we abdicate our role, and obtain nothing in return but temporary postponement of the inevitable day when the ledger must be balanced on our international payments.

So I shall vote to keep the pressure on, knowing full well that this is the only feasible means by which Congress can force a change in American foreign policy. The advice that Congress offers will continue to go unheeded, as long as Congress keeps giving its consent.

For the same reason, and other considerations as well, I have decided to vote against the proposed tourist tax. Apart from its impact on our adverse balance of payments, this tax strikes me as being grossly unfair. It will be borne by students, teachers, and other citizens of modest means, who have skimped and saved for a trip abroad, while our cosmopolites, the rich and well positioned with foreign bank accounts, will easily escape its reach. Moreover, the tax represents still another harassment of our citizenry by a Government increasingly immersed in a foolhardy endeavor to bestow liberty abroad instead of insuring its blessings here at home.

Nothing in the Constitution suggests that the Federal Government was established for the purpose of restructuring the world.

Again, however, I confess to no optimism that the Congress will hold fast. Our habit is to yield and I expect that the gold cover will be removed. The day of reckoning for the dollar will be deferred for a few more years, while the rest of our gold is transferred into foreign hands.

But what of the human pressures, the pressures which cannot be postponed. The pressures surging up from the slums, the pressures that cannot be postponed? The hot summer looms ahead, taunting us with the paradox of squandering, on the opposite side of the world, huge sums to suppress an insurrection in Vietnam, when insurrection smoulders in every major city in America.

Must it come to guerrilla warfare on our own streets before we begin to put first things first? How long do we wait before the men who occupy the seats of power finally see, that though the responsibilities of the UNited States Government are far reaching, there are none so important as those owed the American People?

Out of such an awakening, a new age would dawn. We would begin to find spiritual satisfaction again, We would regain our composure. Turning our primary attention to the problems afflicting our own society, confident our strength is such that no other nation can ever overcome us, we might even rediscover the guidance bequeathed to us by our earliest statesmen, men who understood, from the first, that our capacity to influence other lands depends upon our moral leadership, not our military might; upon the force of our example, no the force of our arms.

Listen to the wise words of John Quincy Adams, spoken on July 4, 1821:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and by the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

These words were uttered in the days of our infancy. Now, in the days of our maturity and in the fullness of our power, we see the dire prophecy of John Quincy Adams fulfilled.