October 18, 1972
Page 37288
ADDRESS BY SENATOR STEVENSON ON VIETNAM
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, on October 9, 1972, the Senator from Illinois (Mr. STEVENSON) delivered an address at Northwestern University on our Indochina policy. Because the Senator's analysis is forceful, incisive, and eloquently stated, I commend it to the attention of the Senate and ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
ADDRESS BY SENATOR ADLAI E. STEVENSON III
Henry Adams once called the American presidential campaign "the dance of democracy. "
He was trying, I suspect, to suggest that our quadrennial electoral ritual is not only a contest but a festival: a celebration of our freedom; a salute to the power of the citizen.
In this sense the noise and hubbub of political campaigning have their place. The bands and bunting, the shouting and parading are appropriate features of a celebration.
But amid all the confusion, an election is a time of solemn judgment; a moment when the American citizen weighs in the balance, not only the qualities and promises of the aspiring president, but the performance and record of the incumbent.
This year, in particular, is a time to look beyond the tumult for the truth.
It is a time to hold accountable those less eager than they should be to come into the open and discuss the issues with the people. A time, in short, to ask serious questions of the men who have held the reins of political power for the past four years.
Can these men be trusted? Do they speak the truth? Are they guided by the highest principles? Does their record justify our faith for four more years?
In the case of Mr. Nixon, the answer is all too clear. For no presidential administration – at least since Harding, and perhaps since Grant – has been so hag-ridden by suspicion of deceit and scandal: From the Warner-Lambert merger to the wheat deal; from secret Mexican bank accounts to the secret $10 million political slush fund; from the ITT scandal to the charges of burglary against two men who have held positions of trust in the White House itself.
Can these men be trusted? The answer is written in their record of the past four years.
We must ask if they can manage the motive energy of our society, the economy, efficiently. The question is no idle one for academicians and mathematicians; for the answer determines whether millions of families will be able to fulfill their hopes for themselves and their children.
And here again the answer is a melancholy one. We have experienced, in the four years of Mr. Nixon's administration, the most serious economic reversals in more than a decade: Simultaneous recession and inflation; runaway unemployment; an economic strategy which seems to have been the joint inspiration of Herbert Hoover and Ebenezer Scrooge.
And through it all, the wage and price controls, a $100 million Federal deficit, the trade deficit – through all the blunders and all the empty promises of better times around the corner, one suspicion grows: That this administration, for all its energetic efforts to help its rich and powerful corporate clients, does not really know how to help the great working majority of Americans. Or care.
Can they manage the economy? The answer is written in the record of the past four years.
We should ask in this election season: Can they bring peace? Can they fulfill our deepest aspiration and the condition of human survival – peace?
Can they bring peace?
Let us not judge Mr. Nixon by too harsh a standard. Let us not saddle him with responsibility for a war he did not create. Let us simply measure him by his own yardstick – by the standard he himself laid down.
For it is four years to the day since Mr. Nixon, speaking as a candidate for the presidency, uttered these words:
"Those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance." (Richard Nixon, October 9. 1968)
Now he is asking for another chance.
It was Richard Nixon, four years ago, who campaigned up and down the length and breadth of the land on a promise to end the war in Vietnam: To bring the troops home; to achieve "a just and lasting peace."
That was four years ago; more than twenty thousand American lives ago; more than one hundred thousand wounded American soldiers ago.
That was almost four million tons of bombs ago – more bombs on the people of that tiny nation, Vietnam, in the four years than upon all the people of all the nations in World War II and the Korean war combined. That was sixty-five billion dollars ago.
History is filled with ironies. What an irony that now, four years later, Mr. Nixon presents himself as a bringer of peace. He utters, again and again, his vague promise of a "generation of peace."
What peace, we may ask? And in what generation?
In this election year, Mr. Nixon boasts that he has brought hundreds of thousands of troops home from Vietnam. Let us give him credit for that. And let us hold him accountable for the 100,000 Air Force and Navy personnel still stationed in Vietnam – still prosecuting the war he said he had a plan to end. Let us remember that the American taxpayer still pays for this war in dollars, inflation, unbuilt schools and high taxes. The American taxpayer supports more than a million and a half men in active combat: South Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, and South Korean.
We are told by Mr. Nixon that his goal in continuing to prosecute a war that should have been ended long ago, is self-determination for the people of South Vietnam – no more, no less.
Yet the regime of General Thieu, zealously protected and supported by Mr. Nixon, has made a mockery of that claim.
Gen. Thieu's election was a sham and a deception.
His claim to legitimacy is a lie. His rule is a dictatorship.
Three months ago President Thieu rammed a bill through the National Assembly giving him power to rule by decree. The U.S. Embassy in Saigon supported Thieu's efforts to get that power of tyranny. And he wasted no time in using it to install all the machinery of a full-blown police state.
He has transferred from civilian authorities to military authorities the power to "control food distribution," to "check private residences both at day and night-time," to "detain elements considered dangerous for the national security or public order," to prohibit strikes and "demonstrations or meetings harmful to the national security and public order."
He has transferred from civilian courts to military courts the power to try demonstrators, strikers and ordinary civilian offenders.
He has abolished hamlet elections, decreeing that officials will be appointed instead by military province chiefs under his control. He has decreed that the public prosecutor may invade the headquarters of a political party "to protect public order and the national security."
He has instituted press censorship which makes it a crime to publish any unfavorable statement about Thieu, even if the statement is true. Ten papers have been shut down in less than two months. The editor of one was convicted of violating the press censorship decree by printing widely-known, unclassified statistics about U.S. bombing of Indochina. The penalty? A year in jail.
He has decreed that "special punitive measures will be applied against unlawful acts that seriously harm the national security and public order." The "special punitive measures" include mass arrests, imprisonment of eight-year-old children, and torture of women.
We are witnessing nothing less than a ruthless and systematic campaign to destroy, or silence. legitimate opposition in disregard of the popular will and of individual liberties.
So much for Mr. Nixon's campaign for self-determination. He bombs one totalitarian regime in the north and subsidizes another in the south.
The fact is that Mr. Nixon has sought to justify the war effort more zealously than he has sought to end it. Now, after four years, his efforts to negotiate a settlement are reaching a crescendo of frenetic activity. But we must face an unhappy fact: Whatever settlement he achieves will be bought on terms which could have been negotiated long ago, had Mr. Nixon accepted the fact that more bombs, more napalm, more invasions, more military posturing by the United States simply cannot win this war for a corrupt and autocratic regime.
We are told that Mr. Nixon's prolonged pursuit of military victory is a matter of national honor and prestige; that Vietnam is a vital pawn on a vast world chessboard; that he is fighting to save America from isolationism; that he is fighting to prevent our nation from becoming a "pitiful, helpless giant."
Does anyone yet believe that the United States has anything to gain in honor and prestige by remaining in Vietnam? Can anyone doubt that our honor and prestige by now would be far better served by scaling down the killing?
We do not need the Vietnam war to prove our strength as a world power. Indeed, each day the war goes on our prestige and power diminish.
Each day the war goes on in Vietnam, we become more isolated, not less: We isolate ourselves from the community of humane nations; we isolate ourselves from our own disapproving allies; we isolate ourselves from our own best instincts and traditions.
Each day the war goes on in Vietnam, we become more like Swift's giant, Gulliver, tied down fast by tiny enemies. And by continuing the war, and not by ending it, we become the apparition Mr. Nixon fears: A pitiful, helpless giant, brought low not by weakness, but by its misuse of strength.
Can they bring peace? The answer is written in the four years of waste and destruction. So let us judge Mr. Nixon according to his own standard:
"Those who have had a chance for your years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance."
The greatest tragedy – greater perhaps than the tragedy of Vietnam – is that Mr. Nixon sees the world of the twentieth century through nineteenth century eyes.
He seems to believe that brokering among the great powers can bring stability to the world – and that is a nineteenth century notion.
He seems to believe the bribing, bombing and bullying made America great.
He seems to believe that power – raw military power – must be the touchstone of international policy. And that is a nineteenth century notion.
That is a notion far older than the nineteenth century – and one that has always been morally bankrupt and empty. Its repudiation gave us birth as a nation – and strength as a nation.
It is notions like these that have brought us to our present low estate – and that must be repudiated once again.
The world is not a vast chessboard; it is a fragile and unstable community. It is not a universe whose center is the White House basement; it is a multiplicity of men and nations with widely differing aspirations, conflicting hopes, colliding ambitions. It is a brotherhood of men seeking bread and hope.
Mr. Nixon's notions simply do not fit the world he faces.
So he sustains Mr. Thieu's dictatorship in South Vietnam. He makes deals with the one remaining colonial power in Africa. He abets the genocide of Yahya Khan against the innocent people of Bangladesh, all the while preaching the ideals of the American revolution. All the while making of us a pitiful, helpless giant.
It is easy to see how Mr. Nixon, with his alien perception of the world, could consider his opponent "radical."
There is nothing radical, or new, about calling America home from a reckless and destructive adventure abroad. John Quincy Adams warned America that if she sought to become the empress of the world. she could "lose dominion over her own soul."
There is nothing radical about a foreign policy which seeks to join morality and self-interest. That idea is at least as old as Lincoln who exhorted his countrymen not to ask whether God was on their side, but to ponder whether they were on God's side.
There is nothing radical about a foreign policy which seeks to export decent ideals rather than guns and bullets. We once provided the world with great ideas – ideas of liberty and equality and a decent standard of living for all men – as early as 1776.
We have come to a sad day if now it is radical to suggest that the United States should harmonize its actions in the world with its own best ideals.
We are, after all, a great and generous nation. We have given much to the world, from the Declaration of Independence to the Marshall Plan. We have stood. for the greater part of our two centuries of histories, for something better than military adventurism and power politics.
George McGovern's appeal to you and me and to our countrymen is not that we depart from our best traditions but that we return to them: That we be the greatest power on earth, and what Lincoln eloquently and truly called "the last, best hope on earth."