# The Fund's Study of the Free Society

The major program of the Fund for the Republic is a study of the basic issues underlying a free society. This study is directed at clarifying fundamental questions concerning freedom and justice that emerge when the forms and principles developed by eighteenth century America meet the ideas and practices of today's highly developed industrial society. One of the aims of the study is to widen the circles of public discussion of these questions. It is for this reason that the Fund is assisting in the presentation of the Mike Wallace Interviews.

The task of clarification is being undertaken by ten distinguished Americans acting as a Central Committee of Consultants to the Fund. These men are:

**A. A. BERLE, JR.**
Attorney, author, former Assistant Secretary of State

**SCOTT BUCHANAN**
Philosopher, author, former Dean of St. John's College

**EUGENE BURDICK**
Political scientist, University of California; novelist

**ERIC F. GOLDMAN**
Professor of history, Princeton; Bancroft Prize winner

**CLARK KERR**
President-elect, University of California; labor economist

**HENRY R. LUCE**
Editor-in-Chief, Time, Life, Fortune

**JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY, S.J.**
Theologian, Woodstock College; editor of Theological Studies

**REINHOLD NIEBUHR**
Vice-president and graduate professor, Union Theological Seminary

**ISIDOR I. RABI**
Nobel Prize scientist; Higgins Professor of Physics, Columbia University

**ROBERT REDFIELD**
Professor of anthropology, University of Chicago; former president, American Anthropological Association

**ROBERT M. HUTCHINS**
President of the Fund, serves as Chairman of the Committee

[LC]

The Fund for the Republic

60 EAST 42 STREET, NEW YORK 17, N. Y.

Board of Directors

**Chairman:** ELMO ROPER
Elmo Roper & Associates
New York, N. Y.

**Vice-Chairman:**
**GEORGE N. SHUSTER**
President, Hunter College
New York, N. Y.

**HARRY S. ASHMORE**
Executive Editor, Arkansas Gazette
Little Rock, Ark.

**BRUCE CATTON**
Editor, American Heritage
New York, N. Y.

**CHARLES W. COLE**
President, Amherst College
Amherst, Mass.

**RUSSELL L. DEARMONT**
President, Missouri Pacific Railroad
St. Louis, Mo.

**ERWIN N. GRISWOLD**
Dean, Law School of Harvard
University, Cambridge, Mass.

**OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN, II**
New York, N. Y.

**PAUL G. HOFFMAN**
Pasadena, Calif.

**ROBERT M. HUTCHINS**
President
The Fund for the Republic, Inc.

**WILLIAM H. JOYCE, JR.**
San Marino, Calif.

**MEYER KESTNBAUM**
President, Hart Schaffner & Marx
Chicago, Illinois

**MSGR. FRANCIS J. LALLY**
Editor, The Pilot
Boston, Mass.

**HERBERT H. LEHMAN**
New York, N. Y.

**M. ALBERT LINTON**
Director
Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co.
Philadelphia, Pa.

**J. HOWARD MARSHALL**
Vice-President, Signal Oil & Gas Co.
Fort Worth, Texas

**JUBAL R. PARTEN**
President, Woodley Petroleum Co.
Houston, Texas

**ALICIA PATTERSON**
Editor and Publisher, Newsday
Garden City, L. I.

**ELEANOR B. STEVENSON**
Oberlin, Ohio

**HENRY PITNEY VAN DUSEN**
President, Union Theological Seminary
New York, N. Y.

303

This is one of a series of thirteen Mike
Wallace Interviews, produced by the
American Broadcasting Company in
association with the Fund for the Re-
public for the purpose of stimulating
public discussion of the basic issues of
survival and freedom in America today.
This transcript has been edited. Single
copies are available without charge
from the Fund for the Republic; addi-
tional copies 10 cents each.

Reinhold Niebuhr is an eminent
theologian, vice-president and graduate
professor of the Union Theological
Seminary in New York, now on leave to
the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. He was born in Missouri in
1892, received his Bachelor of Divinity
from the Yale Divinity School in 1914,
and was ordained in 1915 in the minis-
try of the Evangelical Synod of North
America. He is the author of many
notable books, most recently "Pious
and Secular America." He is a member
of the Central Committee of Consultants
of the Fund for the Republic.

**WALLACE:** This is Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr — A Protestant minister, one of the most important and challenging religious thinkers in the world. Dr. Niebuhr is a critic of America's religious revival and he says that religion will not necessarily vanquish injustice or communism. We'll find out why in just a moment.

**ANNOUNCER:** The Mike Wallace Interview, presented by the American Broadcasting Company in association with the Fund for the Republic, brings you a special television series discussing the problems of survival and freedom in America.

**WALLACE:** Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. It's been said of tonight's guest, "No man has had as much influence as a preacher in this generation. No preacher has had as much influence outside the church." Reinhold Niebuhr is the vice-president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, currently on leave to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Through his writing he has helped mould the world's thinking in religion, morality, and politics.

Dr. Niebuhr, the first question I'd like to put to you is perhaps a very obvious one, but I would

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like a kind of capsule answer if I may. We hear
about the necessity for a separation between
church and state. If religion is good, why should
our society be based upon a separation between
the church and the state?

NIEBUHR: Your "if" is a very big one — "if religion is good." It may be good and it may be bad. The separation of church and the state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with a religious vision or with a religious prophecy. There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence. That's why there must be a separation of churches. But if religion is bad — and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause — then religion mustn't interfere with the state. So one of the basic democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.

WALLACE: Well, this brings us to the issue of possible religious infringements on freedom here in the United States. I'm going to talk about several. First off: The Roman Catholic Church opposes birth control and divorce and there is no doubt that this opposition has blocked the spread of birth control and easier divorce laws, not merely for Catholics but for non-Catholics as well. Do you consider such measures an infringement on the rights and liberties of non-Catholics?

NIEBUHR: When you say "not merely for Catholics," that is the crux of the matter. The Church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indis solubility of the marriage tie.

WALLACE: When you say enforce upon a society, how does the Catholic Church enforce its suggestions for Catholics?

NIEBUHR: No, no, no, that's the point. Whenever a church does anything for its own group it has that right.

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WALLACE: Surely.

NIEBUHR: But when it reaches up beyond its group and tries to enforce its standards upon a society that doesn't accept these standards — perhaps for good reasons, perhaps for bad reasons — this is the problem we face in a pluralistic society, that not necessarily every standard every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard.

WALLACE: Tell me this, sir, would you vote for a devout Catholic as President of the United States?

NIEBUHR: Well, I have a simple answer to that. I voted for one in 1928.

WALLACE: Then obviously you feel that a man can be a devout Catholic without in any sense owing his first allegiance as an American to the Pope rather than to —

NIEBUHR: That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America: that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say is a foreign sovereign, or something like that. In our study in the Fund for the Republic on religion in a pluralistic society we're dealing with both policies and attitudes and one of the things we have to consider is the attitudes of Protestants to Catholics and Catholics to Protestants and Catholics and Protestants to Jews. Now the ordinary Protestant, Jew or secularist has a stereotype about Catholicism. It consists of Spanish Catholicism, Latin-American Catholicism and so on, let us say, the Catholicism of O'Connor's novel, *The Last Hurrah*. Now there are all these types of Catholicism but the stereotype doesn't do justice to the genuine relation that Catholicism has had to democratic society, not only in our country but in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, in the Germany of Adenauer. These are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.

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**WALLACE:** Are you saying that we do not properly understand our Catholic brothers?

**NIEBUHR:** We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group. One of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.

**WALLACE:** We don't discriminate sufficiently. We discriminate against occasionally too much.

**NIEBUHR:** Yes, that's right.

**WALLACE:** Let's turn to some criticisms of the Protestant Church. You've admitted in your writings that the Catholics have been far more successful than the Protestants in abolishing racial segregation in their churches. How come?

**NIEBUHR:** Well, how come? I tried to analyze this in an article in a rather heretical way. I said that the churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice, by which I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, "If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you'd be a true Christian." Well, you might get rid of the Bishop and get the local Klu Klux Klan leader instead. That has been the fate of certain types of Protestantism. They get under the control of a White Citizens Council, while the Catholic Church with its authoritarian system, in which the Bishop expresses the conscience of the whole Christian community, says there are some things that you can't do. There must be equality of all men before God in a democratic society. I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very very impressive.

**WALLACE:** I imagine that you deplore, then, the comparative impotence of certain Protestant churches in this respect?

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NIEBUHR: I certainly do. I said in my article that we Protestants ought to confess humbly that the theatre and sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than the Protestant Church in certain sects and in certain parts of the nation.

WALLACE: I ask you a question now about which we could talk for many hours and ask for a simple and straightforward answer. Dr. Niebuhr, how do you account for Christian anti-Semitism in the United States? Do we sufficiently appreciate our Jewish population here?

NIEBUHR: I don't think we do. I account for it, first, on the basis of general human failing. We misjudge anybody who's different from us. The Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes. I have many Jewish friends, very creative Jewish friends, and I've long felt that the average Christian didn't realize the tremendous capacity for civic righteousness among our Jewish people.

WALLACE: What do you mean by "civic righteousness"?

NIEBUHR: Well, let me mention Stanley Isaacs here in New York — people that have a concern for the public good, Senator Lehman, Frank Altschul. Now I know there are Christians that also have this, but there is not a sufficient appreciation in the Christian community of this particular quality of Jewish life.

WALLACE: Why does the Jewish stereotype unhappily survive?

NIEBUHR: Well, that's a long story. It came out of the Middle Ages and was transferred here, according to our American historians, through populism. The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest businessman. This stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.

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**WALLACE:** It would look, Dr. Niebuhr, as though all of our major religions are becoming more influential. I say it would look that way because we hear so much about religious revivals, increasing church attendance, college students returning to religion, the apparent success of the evangelists. Yet, in large measure, you have criticized this revival. Why?

**NIEBUHR:** That's a long story, too. I wouldn't criticize the whole revival. I've criticized the revival wherever it gives petty and trivial answers to great and ultimate questions about the meaning of our life. Let me put it like this: The people who weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious in my youth had a religion of their own. They were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down. The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore, people have returned to the historic religion. Now when the historic religions give trivial answers to the tragic questions of our day — when an evangelist says, for instance, we must hope in Christ without spelling out what this means in our particular nuclear age — this is irrelevant. When another evangelist says if America doesn't stop being selfish, it will be doomed, this is also a childish answer because nations are selfish. The question about America isn't whether we will be selfish or unselfish, but will we be sufficiently imaginative, for example, to pass the Reciprocal Trade Acts.

**WALLACE:** In other words, translate religion into a kind of active morality.

**NIEBUHR:** Yes, a morality of justice and reciprocity.

**WALLACE:** Let me ask you this: We're constantly being told by our political and church leaders that in our fight against communism we are on God's side — that we're God-fearing people, the Russians, the Communists are atheists — and therefore we must ultimately win. What about that?

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NIEBUHR: I don't know whether any religious leader would say that we must ultimately win because we're on God's side. If they do say that, it's bad religion, because —

WALLACE: Well, haven't we heard from the Old Testament that "right is might"?

NIEBUHR: But in the Old Testament the God of the Prophets never was completely on Israel's side. There was a primitive national religion but there was always a transcendent God who had judgment first in the House of God. This is the true religion. It has a sense of a transcendent majesty and a transcendent meaning that puts the foe and me under the same judgment. "Judge not that you be not judged." Why do we judge each other —

WALLACE: But we do, we do!

NIEBUHR: That's true religion.

WALLACE: We do here, sir, do we not? For instance, we're told by many of our leaders, including President Eisenhower, that we will help strengthen ourselves as a nation through religion and going to church. And I infer, from what I hear, that our political and our religious leaders say, "If we can find a religious revival, this will give us strength to fight godless communism." We do hear that.

NIEBUHR: You may hear that. I wouldn't agree with it. I will tell you, among other reasons, why: I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's primarily the matter with them is that they worship false gods. That's much more dangerous than when people don't believe anything; they may be confused but they're not dangerous. The fanatic is dangerous. The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic. All this talk

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about atheistic materialism and God-fearing America I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.

**WALLACE:** What *is* our way out? What is our solution? You have said not only that religion can't solve our problems but that our reason can't, our intelligence can't, science can't. Why can't they, and what can?

**NIEBUHR:** Well, that brings us to the ultimate question, about the Biblical and the Christian and the Jewish interpretations of the meaning of human existence. When I say that those things can't solve our problems, I don't say that they don't contribute, that you don't have to have science, a rational approach to the problems of life. The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, and the less you can do with simple good-will and sentiment. Nonetheless, I think the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism in that it believes that there is in man a radical freedom. This freedom is creative but it is also destructive, and there's nothing to prevent it from being both creative and destructive. That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates and enlarges every problem of human existence. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this but now we're living in the nuclear age, and the science that was supposed to work automatically for human welfare has become a science that gives us nuclear weapons. This is the ironic character of human history and human existence, which I can only explain, if I may say so, in Biblical terms, although I don't mean by this that I would accept every interpretation of Christianity that's derived from the Bible. Many people wouldn't accept my interpretation, but that's what Christianity means for me. There is an ultimate answer in the true religious faith. It doesn't give you any immediate answers.

One of the young physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study said to me: "I know that

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there's a general religious frame which I accept but does it give a particular answer?" And I said, "No, it doesn't give us a particular answer." You can't say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma. I think I have one answer, which is partly religious and partly secular; and that is, we ought at least to recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense of "Judge not lest you be judged." We judge the Russians because they're living under despotism and we don't like it, but we've gotten into a fix now where we're living in a common predicament. We all know it really. This doesn't mean that the Summit Conference ought to be held, or that it would succeed, but we ought to recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats — or Americans.

**WALLACE:** Let me ask you this: I think it was Bertrand Russell who fairly recently said — and other people have said it along with him — that if it came to communism or nuclear war, communism or possible incineration, they'd choose to live under communism. How do you feel about that?

**NIEBUHR:** Well, I know Bertrand Russell is a great philosopher or logical mathematician, but I think my friend Sidney Hook is right about him. He said, "All the achievements in this field are no substitute for common sense." What Bertrand Russell is saying is that capitulation to communism is better than a nuclear war. But that isn't the point. We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war. But no nation can say, "We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate" — to accept an absolute fate as alternative to a speculative one. No nation can do that.

**WALLACE:** But people say: "I would rather 'live and fight another day' than give it all up right now. I would even rather live under a totalitarian gov-

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ernment, without freedom, momentarily, in or-
der that I may live to fight for my freedom at a
later time.”

**NIEBUHR:** Well, I can see that individuals would say that. I would simply say that in terms of collective destiny it's not a live option. A nation will not say that, a complex of nations will not say it. I think that the people who say that are really too rationalistic. Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history which I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.

**WALLACE:** Dr. Niebuhr, tell me this: Is freedom necessary? The Russians, we are told, do not have freedom, and yet they have a productive society. Is freedom necessary for our society?

**NIEBUHR:** Well, I should think it was, but that's a rather searching question that I couldn't answer very simply. I'd say that freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore, we have a long history of freedom, as people have tried to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual. Secondly, freedom is ultimately necessary for a society, because every despotic society lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma. For instance, the Russian society lives on the Marxist dogma of world redemption through communism.

**WALLACE:** Implausible to whom?

**NIEBUHR:** To us.

**WALLACE:** Yes. All right. But obviously not implausible to hundreds of millions of people.

**NIEBUHR:** No, one of the great perplexities is that the dogma is implausible to the whole of European

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society because we have our own different history but it is not — as you quite rightly point out — so implausible in Asia and Africa. That's our predicament, that this despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible to decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we will have an ultimate victory in this contest with communism.

**WALLACE:** But you believe in an ultimate victory? Why are you so sure of an ultimate victory?

**NIEBUHR:** I'm not so sure. I hope for an ultimate victory, but I think that there's a serious ambiguousness about it. On the one hand, you say, because it's right it must be victorious. On the other hand, you say, it's right whether it's victorious or not. This is what I believe about a free society — that it's right, victorious or not.

**WALLACE:** What is your personal attitude about atheism? We have heard from certain atheists that the whole conception of God is unworthy of free men. They say that it's almost, in a sense, contemptible for a man to fall on his knees before God. What is your attitude toward atheists?

**NIEBUHR:** Well, you are asking two questions there. My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude I have toward Christians, and it is governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life but by the fruits of his life. And the fruits — the relevant fruits — are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I therefore have many agnostic friends. That's an answer to one question. I might say that the debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me, because the Christians say, "You must be a Christian, or you must be a religious man, in order to be good," and the atheists will say — as you quoted one of these atheists as saying — "It's beneath

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the dignity of a free man to bow his knee to a god, as if he were a sinner."

The truth about man is that he has a curious kind of dignity but also a curious kind of misery, and that is what the various forms of agnosticism don't understand. The eighteenth century always talked about the dignity of man, but I rather like Pascal's words, "The philosophers talk to you about the dignity of man, and they tempt you to pride, or they talk to you about the misery of man, and they tempt you to despair," and then, says Pascal — this was written in the Cartesian age — "Where, but in the simplicity of the Gospel, can you hear about both the dignity of man and the misery of man?" That's what I say to the atheists. On the other hand, I also say, it is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

**WALLACE:** Do you think that because you're a Christian you're a more valuable man in our society, or more worthy in the eyes of God, than an atheist like Bertrand Russell?

**NIEBUHR:** I think I've already answered that, Mr. Wallace. Certainly anybody who says "in the eyes of God" is pretentious. How do I know about God's judgment? One of the fundamental points about religious humility is that you say you don't know about the ultimate judgment. It's beyond your judgment. If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.

**WALLACE:** Dr. Niebuhr, I surely thank you for coming and spending this half-hour with us. God speed to you, sir.

Reinhold Niebuhr is a man of God, but a man of the world as well. Dr. Niebuhr would seem to be saying that if a nation would survive and remain free, its citizens must use religion as a source of self-criticism, not as a source of self-righteousness.

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**A. A. BERLE, JR.**

**SCOTT BUCHANAN**

**EUGENE BURDICK**

**ERIC F. GOLDMAN**

**CLARK KERR**

**HENRY R. LUCE**

**REINHOLD NIEBUHR**

**ISIDOR I. RABI**

**ROBERT REDFIELD**

**ROBERT M. HUTCHINS**

The Fund for the Republic

Board of Directors

Chairman: ELMO ROPER
Elmo Roper & Associates
New York, N. Y.

Vice-Chairman:
GEORGE N. SHUSTER
President, Hunter College
New York, N. Y.

HARRY S. ASHMORE
Executive Editor, Arkansas Gazette
Little Rock, Ark.

BRUCE CATTON
Editor, American Heritage
New York, N. Y.

CHARLES W. COLE
President, Amherst College
Amherst, Mass.

RUSSELL L. DEARMONT
President, Missouri Pacific Railroad
St. Louis, Mo.

ERWIN N. GRISWOLD
Dean, Law School of Harvard
University, Cambridge, Mass.

OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN, II
New York, N. Y.

PAUL G. HOFFMAN
Pasadena, Calif.

ROBERT M. HUTCHINS
President
The Fund for the Republic, Inc.

WILLIAM H. JOYCE, JR.
San Marino, Calif.

MEYER KESTNBAUM
President, Hart Schaffner & Marx
Chicago, Illinois

MSGR. FRANCIS J. LALLY
Editor, The Pilot
Boston, Mass.

HERBERT H. LEHMAN
New York, N. Y.

M. ALBERT LINTON
Director
Provident Mutual Life Insurance Co.
Philadelphia, Pa.

J. HOWARD MARSHALL
Vice-President, Signal Oil & Gas Co.
Fort Worth, Texas

JUBAL R. PARTEN
President, Woodley Petroleum Co.
Houston, Texas

ALICIA PATTERSON
Editor and Publisher, Newsday
Garden City, L. I.

ELEANOR B. STEVENSON
Oberlin, Ohio

HENRY PITNEY VAN DUSEN
President, Union Theological Seminary
New York, N. Y.

303

[L.C]

This is one of a series of thirteen Mike Wallace Interviews, produced by the American Broadcasting Company in association with the Fund for the Republic for the purpose of stimulating public discussion of the basic issues of survival and freedom in America today. This transcript has been edited. Single copies are available without charge from the Fund for the Republic; additional copies 10 cents each.

William O. Douglas has been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1939. Born in Minnesota in 1898, he taught in the law schools of Columbia and Yale and served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition to his distinguished career as a member of our highest court, he has become known for his books on American freedom, such as "An Alma-nac of Liberty," "We the Judges," and "The Right of the People," and for his explorations of distant lands, which have resulted in books like "Of Men and Mountains," "Beyond the High Himalayas," and "North From Malaya."

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**WALLACE:** This is William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Not long ago, Justice Douglas wrote: In recent years, as we have denounced the loss of liberty abroad, we have witnessed its decline here." We'll find out why in a moment.

**ANNOUNCER:** The Mike Wallace Interview, presented by the American Broadcasting Company in association with the Fund for the Republic, brings you a special television series discussing the problems of Survival and Freedom in America.

**WALLACE:** Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. America prides itself on its freedoms; chief among them: freedom of expression, freedom to exchange ideas. These freedoms have the blessings of our civic leaders, our newspapers, our politicians. But in practice, are we always granted those freedoms, and do we always use the freedoms we have? Our guest . . . Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court. . . . Justice Douglas, in your new book, *The Right of the People*, you write this: "In recent years, as we have denounced the loss of liberties abroad, we have witnessed its decline here in America." Where have our liberties declined recently here in the United States?

**DOUGLAS:** Well, after World War II we had a real problem on our hands with subversives operating for the Communist orbit of influence in the

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world and we had the necessary task of ferret-
ing them out and getting them out of important
jobs in government. But instead of going about
it as the British did, in a very discreet, rather
silent, behind-the-scenes manner, we started
having public trials of people, and the whole
question not only of what they had done but
of their beliefs and attitudes began to be looked
into. And so people became more and more
frightened and, to get a job or to keep a job,
wanted to be safe. So I think there has been a
general contraction of the feeling of being able
to speak freely and a general lowering of the
standards of free expression that we enjoyed
in early days.

WALLACE: Is it understandable that in our craving for se-
curity, if you will, in a cold war, the American
people might be willing in a sense to give up
a few of their freedoms because of the fear
that they're going to lose their security?

DOUGLAS: I don't think there is any such thing as a con-
scious choice or any imminence of that kind of
crisis developing, but I think that the trend to
conformity has been great in America for a
number of reasons since World War II. The
hunt for the subversive, I think, has been one
of them. I was sitting on a plane just the other
day riding into Washington and a lady, a
stranger, said to me that she had found a sub-
versive in her child's public schoolroom. I asked
her what her definition of a subversive was and
she said "a person who was a Socialist." She
was convinced that the man who taught art in
this public school was a Socialist and therefore
a subversive. It is that kind of non-discriminat-
ing analysis that has become more and more
common in American public life.

WALLACE: Should freedom of speech, according to your
understanding, include the freedom to challenge
the very basis of an existing government?

DOUGLAS: In the Jeffersonian sense of freedom of speech
there should be no horizons on debate, on talk.
People should be tested not by their loyalty,

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not by beliefs, not by utterances, but by their
actions. Jefferson would draw the line between
speech on the one side and actions on the other.
He would, I think, put no limits on speech.
There would be no horizons. The way to com-
bat error, according to his classic statement,
was with reason; to fight one idea with another
idea, to fight one doctrine with another doc-
trine, to fight one belief with another belief, but
never to make any idea taboo and put it beyond
discussion or suppress it, because once you
start suppressing ideas you get a very unhealthy
influence developing in a society.

**WALLACE:** Most people who expressed fears that America was losing its liberties seemed most fearful four or five years ago, when, as they claimed, our hysteria over communism put our respect for civil liberties into the shadows. But we seem to have recovered somewhat from that period. Do you think that our regard for liberty has been declining even since then?

**DOUGLAS:** I don't know that it has been declining, but I do have the feeling that we have become a little more insensitive to inroads and that the inclination to look for a teacher who is so-called "safe," a minister who is "safe," a Congressman who is "safe" — this levelling-down process — has continued.

**WALLACE:** When you say "safe," what does that mean?

**DOUGLAS:** A man who doesn't have unorthodox ideas, who conforms to the pattern of general thought and thinking, who is not a contentious character, whose ideas are readily acceptable, who is not apt to draw the wrath of people in the field of ideas.

**WALLACE:** What you are saying, in a sense, is that this becomes stultifying to the American culture?

**DOUGLAS:** The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people

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think about what *they* are doing, the values implicit in what they are doing. Constant re-examination is a healthy thing.

**WALLACE:** One of your major concerns in the area of freedom of expression is freedom of speech, which is guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Now, in your book *The Right of the People*, you say that even this freedom is being modified, restricted somewhat. Just how — in what sense, sir?

**DOUGLAS:** The theory has developed in some circles that freedom of speech which, in terms, is *absolute* in the First Amendment, is subject to regulation, to reasonable regulation, by the legislative bodies. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion. It would be unthinkable in the Jeffersonian sense that freedom of the press could be regulated by reasonable or unreasonable regulations. The law says, the Constitution says, that an editor is free to express himself, that apart from such laws as the laws of libel — which are implicit exceptions — he does not need to submit his editorial page before publication to any board of censors; that he can write what he wants, even though it's against the opinion of the government or of the majority of the people; that he can present to his readers any point of view, whether it is a minority or majority point of view, whether it's orthodox or unorthodox.

**WALLACE:** Samuel Johnson said — and I wonder if you would give us your opinion of it: "Every society has a right to preserve public peace and order and therefore has a right to prohibit the propagation of opinions which have a dangerous tendency."

**DOUGLAS:** That was an idea that Sam Johnson had, and it is still widely held in some parts of the world. But we got away from it when we adopted Jefferson's and Madison's ideas on promulgating a written Constitution. Now the written

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Constitution that we have says that Congress shall not do certain things; the State shall not do certain things; certain things shall not be done to the citizens. Jefferson and Madison had in mind the protection of minority views — racial minorities, religious minorities, political minorities — against all forms and sorts of persecution. They put up, in other words, little "No Trespassing" signs and said: "Government shall not walk here." That is how our government is inherently different from many other governments including England, because England has no written Constitution.

**WALLACE:** If I understand *your* understanding clearly, you believe that the Constitution says no abridge- ment of speech is permissible. Let me see if I understand further exactly what you mean by freedom of speech, and I am sure that you have heard this question before. Should freedom of speech be granted to a man who, simply per- haps for the fun of it, leaps up in a theater, shouts "Fire" and thereby causes a panic?

**DOUGLAS:** That's been one of the classic illustrations in some of the legal literature. Of course that would not be protected. Of course a man who does a thing like that would commit a crime and it would be properly considered a crime. Such a pronouncement is more than speech; it is really producing a riot. It is not the dissemi- nation of ideas, it is not discourse, it is not discussion of public events or of controversial issues. It certainly would not be protected by the First Amendment. But when it comes down to sociological matters, political matters, eco- nomic matters, farm prices, criminal law, de- portation policies, foreign policy — the wide range of public affairs — then there should be no limitation or regulation.

**WALLACE:** Even in the case of a Communist or a Fascist or a racist who gets up at a meeting and says things that are repugnant to the great majority of society and even if he takes off after a minor- ity group in a vile and unspeakable way? You still believe that he is entitled to freedom of

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speech because he is talking within the area of
sociology or economics or politics?

**DOUGLAS:** That was Jefferson's view and it was covered by his first inaugural address. The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth. Brandeis made a classic statement in one of his historic opinions in the Court. Once you start saying this man shall not talk about this or this other man shall not talk about that, then you inaugurate a regime of real censorship and the question is where are you going to stop — and nobody is wise enough to stop at the right place.

**WALLACE:** I don't mean to carry this to a ridiculous extreme but, for instance, would you want to permit a Fascist then — I gather you would — to get up on a soapbox in front of the White House and call for the overthrow of our government and for its being taken over by a dictator? Do you think that's sensible?

**DOUGLAS:** Well, the front of the White House is a poor place to make a speech. We have a traffic problem, and traffic problems cannot be allowed to be disregarded by people who want to make a speech at a busy intersection. You know, the British in Hyde Park have set aside a place where anybody can get up and talk about anything, and there they are — all the crackpots that you can imagine making these stirring, moving, impassioned speeches in favor of some lost cause or other. It is a good healthy thing for a society to have a place like this. While the front of the White House would be a poor place to have it, the idea that you are talking about is, I think, a sound one.

**WALLACE:** The fact is, is it not, that some judges and other government officials, who are loyal Americans, do not fully share your views on freedom of speech? They want more restraint, more modification than you do.

**DOUGLAS:** That's right. We're in an area that is subject to a great debate and mine is one point of view.

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**WALLACE:** What is the difference in the basic philosophy between these gentlemen and yourself?

**DOUGLAS:** That the citizens, in their beliefs, in their ideas, in their consciences, are superior to government. That the great abuses through history have been when government intrudes into the privacy of a man's thinking, when government lays its hand on his shoulder and says you shall not worship this way, you shall not think this thought, you shall not read this book. Those were the great oppressive chapters in history and the great achievement of our Bill of Rights was to put up "No Trespassing" signs and indicate where government cannot intrude.

**WALLACE:** But, from the other point of view, these are men who feel that for the common defense, for the common security, perhaps it is a good idea to put on a bit of a brake from time to time.

**DOUGLAS:** Yes, but I should not represent their point of view because I do not agree with it.

**WALLACE:** The military and political analyst, Walter Millis, has tackled this issue in a Fund for the Republic pamphlet called "Individual Freedom and the Common Defense." He says that some of our freedoms are being restricted because of the cold war. But he says that another factor is what he calls "the pressures of personal ambition and partisan fury, the reactions of those who see in communism less a threat to the free society than to their own positions of power or profit." Would you care to comment about that? Do you see any of that in America?

**DOUGLAS:** I haven't seen very much of that in America. I think that the influences towards suppression of minority views — towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues — have been more subconscious or unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency among Americans to conform to the picture of the man in the Arrow collar ad — to be safe and sound and not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view; to have not much

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original thinking; to not deviate very far from
the official policy on, say, Red China, India,
Israel, the Arab world, or what-have-you; to be
safe and not get into controversial issues so
that he won't be called before his government
to be asked questions or to raise problems with
his private employer.

WALLACE: What you're saying is that we have freedoms as Americans that we don't use sufficiently?

DOUGLAS: We have a great reservoir of freedoms, the greatest reservoir of any people in the world. The great reservoir of freedom that we have is, after all, the one outstanding thing that distinguishes us from the Communist world. The Communist world, as I have seen it, would be a terrible place to live because there is no place for the spirit of man, for his soul — no place for his conscience, no place for individual utterances of dissident views. The Russians read what is on the bookstands, and the bookstands are made up of material that has gone through the Russian censor; it's all safe and secure stuff from the Communist point of view.

WALLACE: But they seem to thrive and flourish, Justice Douglas. We ask the question, "Is freedom necessary?" Evidently, freedom is not necessary to a thriving and flourishing Russian society.

DOUGLAS: I wouldn't call Russia a thriving, flourishing place. To be sure, they can put up a Sputnik, but when you get into the field of the humanities, when you get into the field of religion, when you get into the field of poetry and literature, it's a very stultifying place. There are no ideas. There's a great revolution going on silently inside Russia among the lawyers and law professors and judges to get more freedom for the courts. But they can't get anywhere with their proposals for reform because the Communist Party doesn't want reform; they want complete control, complete security, a complete monopoly of all the powers and they're unwilling to give anything up. It's not a flourishing society. The one thing that makes our

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society flourish is not only the great production lines of automobiles and other commodities but the right to worship, to believe what you think, to speak as you want to, to see on television things you want to see and not be censored.

**WALLACE:** All right, we live in a democracy and, ostensi-
bly, in a democracy the majority rules. Let's
look at freedom of speech from that point of
view. A coupe of years ago a survey showed
that the majority of the people in the United
States would not want a Communist to speak
in their community; the majority believed that
Communists should be deprived of their citi-
zenship. This is a democracy. Why shouldn't
the rule of the majority in a democracy there-
fore be realized?

**DOUGLAS:** Well, when our Court sits down to make a decision on an important case, we would never think of first taking a Gallup poll to find out how people felt about the question, because that is an irrelevancy. What people think about it is irrelevant because we live under a government of laws and under a written Constitution. Our Constitution was premised upon the sovereignty of the people. The men who drew it were wise men and knew that even a majority can be a tyrannist group, that even a majority can be as guilty of great oppressions as a king or as the Central Soviet Committee. So they set up safeguards for minorities. The greatest glory in our Constitution, I think, apart from the sovereignty of the people, is the check upon what the government, speaking for the people, can do to the individual, to the minority — whether it be a racial minority, a religious minority, or a minority in literature or radio or television or economic theory.

**WALLACE:** Let's move to another area, sir. Talking of freedom of expression in your book, you say: "Literature and morality should enjoy competitive co-existence." What did you mean?

**DOUGLAS:** I think what I had in mind was the evils that we run into when government assumes the role

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of being a censor, of imposing upon a community some official's idea as to what is right or decent or of what the people should read. You and I as parents have great responsibilities to be censors of what comes into the house for the children. We have a great responsibility to see that they get exposed to the great books, the great literature of the world, and spend their time on that — on the Bible and other great books — rather than on just the trash that is turned out. Church groups can properly become interested in things of that kind. It is when government steps in and uses the police and the powers of imprisonment to become the censor that I object. That's where I draw the line. All the Constitution speaks about all the way through is what government may not do. The authors were thinking in terms of protecting citizens against the government.

**WALLACE:** But you do feel that pressure groups of sorts — religious, social, or commercial — have the right to bring pressure to bear on books or magazines or motion pictures, let's say, which they consider offensive or lurid or immoral.

**DOUGLAS:** They can do what they like as long as they don't enlist the arm of the law, to put the law — that is, government, the sheriff, or police — behind one social creed, behind one religious doctrine, behind one moral code, in preference to others. That's what I meant by literature and morality being competitive.

**WALLACE:** You have written, Justice Douglas, that restrictions on freedom of speech and expression have been partially responsible for the fact that we have lost ground in science. What did you mean by that?

**DOUGLAS:** That has been only one of the several reasons why we have lost ground in science, but restrictions upon communication with the rest of the world — between people from various walks of life with various points of view and ideological differences — have slowed up communication. Communication is extremely important in any

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intellectual field — communication among scholars. For advancement, rapid advancement, continuous advancement in the field of science there should be unlimited discourse, unlimited communication between experts, without putting barriers up to prevent our men from contacting others.

**WALLACE:** In other words, if I may become this specific, sir, you feel that our scientists should have the right to talk freely about science with Russian or Red Chinese scientists?

**DOUGLAS:** With everyone. Espionage, of course, is one thing. All of these things involve a certain amount of risk. England turned up with a Fuchs who was a traitor and so on. But those are risks that must be taken. Being alive is itself quite a risk. But keeping the avenues open between scholars is very important. When I was in Russia, I was amazed at the extent to which the Russian libraries are filled with American scientific magazines. Everything is there that we publish and so little of the Russian is here.

**WALLACE:** I would like, if I may, to cite another poll — this one from a recent book called *The American Teenager*. Taken a couple of years ago, the poll showed that 41 per cent of our teenagers disagreed with the principles of freedom of the press; 34 per cent were against the principle of freedom of speech; and a few other guarantees in the bill of rights were also disapproved of by a large percentage of the teenagers. Now, then, the question that I would like to put to you is: Do you believe that we are apparently failing to raise a new generation with a respect for basic freedoms?

**DOUGLAS:** Well, I think that we're not giving enough emphasis to it in our schools. Too many students come out of grade school and high school without knowing what the Bill of Rights is. They don't get it emphasized in their classrooms or in their textbooks. I think that what we need is a great educational program, an awakening of the people to the great values that are in our

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civilization. These great values are not our
standard of living, fine as that is, but our ideas
of freedom, our ideas on the dignity of man,
the equality of man, the idea that government
cannot do certain things to the individual, that
his beliefs, his conscience, and his ideas are his
own, and it is nobody's business what he thinks.

WALLACE: Are you saying, sir, that a good many of the people, perhaps even a majority of the people listening to you tonight, are insufficiently concerned with their own freedoms?

DOUGLAS: I think that we're all in default in not being alive to the encroachments that have been going on, in not being alive to the dangers of continuing encroachment, and in not being willing to stand up in the school-hall or in the auditorium or in the courtroom and saying: "This should not be done. We disagree with this man but let him speak his mind and we'll answer him with our own good arguments."

WALLACE: Justice Douglas, I certainly thank you for spending this half-hour with us talking about freedom of expression. And, if I may quote from page 54 of your book, *The Right of the People*, I believe these are your words, in the case of *Terminiello v. Chicago*. . . .

DOUGLAS: Yes, I think I wrote that.

WALLACE: "... a function of free speech under our system of government," said Justice Douglas, "is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea." . . . The life-blood of a free society is freedom of expression. Cut off this life-blood and a free society withers and dies. If we are to live as free men we must think and speak like free men. We must affirm, and not abridge, our freedoms.

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[LC]

The Fund for the Republic

Board of Directors

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[LC]

Aldous Huxley, born in Godalming, Surrey, England in 1894 and a graduate of Eton and Oxford, became famous in the 1920's for such distinguished fiction as "Crome Yellow," "Antic Hay," "Jesting Pilate," and "Point Counter Point." His prophetic novel, "Brave New World," about which he talks in this interview, was published in 1932. In recent years, and particularly since his residence in America, he has become increasingly interested in the effects on man's mind, body, and personality of the highly organized, highly technological world in which we live.

[LC]

**WALLACE:** This is Aldous Huxley, a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth. A searing social critic, Mr. Huxley twenty-seven years ago wrote *Brave New World*, a novel that predicted that some day the entire world would live under a frightful dictatorship. Today Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just around the corner for all of us. We'll find out why in a moment.

**WALLACE:** Good evening. . . . I'm Mike Wallace. Tonight's guest, Aldous Huxley, is a man of letters as disturbing as he is distinguished. Born in England, now a resident of California, Mr. Huxley has written some of the most electric novels and social criticisms of this century. He's just finished a series of essays for the newspaper, *Newsday*, called "Enemies of Freedom," in which he outlines and defines some of the threats to our freedom in the United States. Mr. Huxley — right off the bat — let me ask you this: As you see it, who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United States?

**HUXLEY:** Well, I don't think you can say who in the United States. I don't think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom. But I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces pushing in the direction of less and less freedom. And I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use them *can* use, to accelerate the process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.

**WALLACE:** What are these forces and devices, Mr. Huxley?

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**HUXLEY:** I should say that there are two main impersonal forces. The first of them is not exceedingly important in the United States at the present time, though very important in other countries. This is the force which in general terms can be called over-population. The mounting pressure of population upon existing resources is an extraordinary thing. It's something that has never happened in the world's history before. Let's just take the simple fact that between the time of the birth of Christ and the landing of the "Mayflower" the population of the earth doubled — it rose from two hundred and fifty million to probably five hundred million — but today the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century.

**WALLACE:** Well, why should over-population work to diminish our freedom?

**HUXLEY:** Well, in a number of ways. The experts in the field — like Harrison Brown, for example — have pointed out that in the underdeveloped countries the standard of living is actually at present falling. The people have less to eat and less goods per capita than they had fifty years ago and as the economic position of these countries becomes more and more precarious, obviously the central government has to take over more and more responsibility for keeping the "ship of state" on an even keel. And then, of course, you're likely to get social unrest under such conditions with further intervention of the central government. As a result one sees here a pattern that seems to be pushing very strongly towards a totalitarian regime. Unfortunately in all these underdeveloped countries the only highly organized political party is the Communist Party. It looks rather as though they will be the heirs to this unfortunate process, that they will step into the position of power.

**WALLACE:** Well then, ironically enough, one of the greatest forces against communism in the world, the Catholic Church, according to your thesis would seem to be pushing us into the hands of the Communists by being against "birth control."

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**HUXLEY:** This strange paradox probably is true. It's an extraordinary situation and one has to look at it from the biological point of view: The whole essence of biological life on earth is a question of balance. What we have done is to practice death control in a most intensive manner without balancing it with birth control at the other end. Consequently, birth rates remain as high as they were and death rates have fallen substantially.

**WALLACE:** All right, then — so much, for the time being anyway, for over-population. Another force that is diminishing our freedoms?

**HUXLEY:** Another force that I think is very strongly operative in this country is the force of what may be called over-organization. As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate and hierarchical organizations — and, incidentally, the advance of technology has been accompanied by an advance in the science of organization. It's now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than was ever possible before. You have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracies — either the bureaucracies of big business or the bureaucracies of the government.

**WALLACE:** Now the devices that you were talking about — are there specific devices or methods of communication which diminish our freedoms in addition to over-population and over-organization?

**HUXLEY:** There are certainly devices that can be used in this way. Let us take a piece of very recent and very painful history: the propaganda used by Hitler. It was incredibly effective. What were Hitler's methods? Hitler used terror and brute force on one hand, but he also used a very efficient form of propaganda. He used every modern device available at that time. He didn't have TV, but he had the radio which he used to the fullest extent and he was able to impose

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his will on an immense mass of people. And the
Germans were highly educated people.

**WALLACE:** How do you equate Hitler's use of propaganda with the way that propaganda — if you will — is used, let us say, here in the United States. Are you suggesting that. . .

**HUXLEY:** No. Needless to say, it's not being used in this way now, but the point is, it seems to me, that there are methods presently available — methods superior in some respects to Hitler's methods — which could be used in a bad situation. I feel very strongly that we mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advance in technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology's advance changing social conditions, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation they didn't foresee and doing all sorts of things they didn't want to do.

**WALLACE:** What do you mean? Do you mean that we develop our television but we don't know how to use it correctly? Is that your point?

**HUXLEY:** At present the television, I think, is being used quite harmlessly, although it's being used too much to distract everybody all the time. But imagine what must be the situation in all Communist countries where the television — where it exists — is always saying the same thing the whole time. It's not creating a wide front of distraction, it's creating a one-pointed drumming-in of a single idea all the time. It's an immensely powerful instrument.

**WALLACE:** So you're talking about the potential misuse of the instrument.

**HUXLEY:** Exactly. Of course all technology is in itself morally neutral. These are just powers that can be used for either good or ill. It's the same thing with atomic energy. We can either use it to blow ourselves up, or use it as a substitute for the coal and oil that are running out.

**WALLACE:** You've even written about drugs in this light.

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**HUXLEY:** Yes, I did. This is a very interesting subject and in the book of mine that you mentioned, *Brave New World*, I postulated a substance called "soma," which was a very versatile drug. It would make people feel happy in small doses; it would make them see visions in medium doses; I could send them to sleep in large doses. I don't think such a drug exists now, nor do I think it will ever exist; but we do have drugs which will do some of these things and I think it's quite on the cards that we may have drugs which will profoundly change our mental states without doing us any harm. This is the pharmacological revolution that is taking place. We now have powerful mind-changing drugs which, physiologically speaking, are the most costly. I mean that they are not like opium or cocaine which do change the state of mind, but they will leave terrible results physiologically and morally.

**WALLACE:** Mr. Huxley, in your new essays you state that these various enemies of freedom are pushing us toward a real-life "brave new world" and you say that it's awaiting us just around the corner. First of all, can you detail for us what there is in this brave new world that you fear so much — or what life might be like?

**HUXLEY:** To start with, I think the dictatorship of the future will be very unlike the dictatorships we've been familiar with in the immediate past. Take another book prophesying the future, a very remarkable book, George Orwell's *1984*. This was written at the height of the Stalinist regime, just after the Hitler regime, and Orwell foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical violence. Now I think what is going to happen in the future is that the dictators will find, as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you should want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get consent, and the dictators will bring this about by drugs — as I foresaw in *Brave New World* — by new techniques of propaganda. They will get it by by-passing the rational side

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of man and appealing to his subconscious and
his deeper emotions, his physiology even, and
so making him actually like his slavery. This is
the danger: that actually people may be in some
ways happy under the new regime, but they
will be happy in a situation where they oughtn't
to be happy.

**WALLACE:** But let me ask you this. You're talking about a world that could take place within the confines of a totalitarian state. Let's become more immediate, more urgent about it. We believe that we live in a democracy here in the United States. Do you think that this brave new world you talk about could, let's say in the next quarter century, the next century, come here to us?

**HUXLEY:** I think it could. That's why I feel it is so extremely important, here and now, to start thinking about these problems, and not to let ourselves be taken by surprise by the new advances in technology. For example, with regard to the use of drugs, there's enough evidence now for us to be able — on the basis of this evidence and using a certain amount of creative imagination — to foresee the uses that could be made by people of bad will. We could attempt to forestall this. In the same way, with regard to these other methods of propaganda, we can foresee them and do a good deal to forestall them. After all, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

**WALLACE:** You write in "Enemies of Freedom" specifically about the United States. You say this, in writing about American political campaigns: "All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate — the way he is projected by the advertising experts — are the things that really matter."

**HUXLEY:** During the last campaign there was a great deal of this kind of statement by the advertising managers of the parties: the idea that the can-

8

didates had to be merchandised as though they were a soap or toothpaste and that you had to depend entirely on the personality. Personality is important, but there are certainly people with extremely amiable personalities — particularly on TV — who might not necessarily be very good in positions of political trust.

**WALLACE:** Do you feel that men like Eisenhower, Stevenson, Nixon, with knowledge aforethought, were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public?

**HUXLEY:** No, but they were being advised by powerful advertising agencies who were campaigning in a quite different way from what had been done before. I think we shall see all kinds of new devices coming into the picture. For example, the thing that got a good deal of publicity last autumn — subliminal projection. As it stands, I think it is not a menace to us. But I was talking to one of the people who has done most of the experimental work in the psychological laboratories on this and he said that it is not at the moment a danger but that once you've established the principle that something works, you can be absolutely sure that the technology of it is going to improve steadily. His view was that it may be used to some extent in the 1960 campaign but will probably be used a good deal — and much more effectively — in the 1964 campaign, because this is the rate at which technology advances.

**WALLACE:** And we'll be persuaded to vote for a candidate that we do not know we are being persuaded to vote for?

**HUXLEY:** Yes. This is the alarming danger: that you are being persuaded below the level of choice and reason.

**WALLACE:** In regard to advertising, which you mentioned just a little ago, in your writing, particularly in "Enemies of Freedom," you attack Madison Avenue, which controls most of our television and radio advertising, newspaper advertising,

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and so forth. Why do you consistently attack the advertising agencies?

**HUXLEY:** I think that advertising plays a very necessary role, but the danger it seems to me in a democracy is this: What does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance. What these people are doing — I mean both those who for their particular purposes are selling goods and the dictatorial propagandists — is to try to bypass the rational side of man and appeal directly to the deep, unconscious forces below the surface. In a way they are making nonsense of democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice on rational grounds.

**WALLACE:** You write about television commercials — not just political commercials, but television commercials as such — and, as you put it, today's children walk around singing beer commercials and toothpaste commercials. You link this phenomenon in some way with the dangers of a dictatorship. Could you spell out the connection, or do you feel you have done so already?

**HUXLEY:** This whole question of children is a terribly important one, because children are quite clearly much more suggestible than the average grown-up. Suppose that, for one reason or another, all propaganda was in the hands of one or very few agencies. You would have an extraordinarily powerful force playing on these children, who are going to grow up and be adults quite soon. This is not an immediate threat, but it remains a possible threat.

**WALLACE:** You said something in your essays to the effect that the children of Europe used to be called "cannon fodder," and here in the United States they are television and radio fodder.

**HUXLEY:** Well, after all, you can read in the trade journals and in political accounts how necessary it is to get hold of the children, because they will

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be loyal brand buyers later on. Translate this into political terms: the dictator says, "They will be loyal ideology buyers when they're grown up."

**WALLACE:** We hear so much about brain-washing as used by the Communists. Do you see any brain-washing, other than that which we've just been talking about, used here in the United States — other forms of brain-washing?

**HUXLEY:** Not in the form that has been used in China and in Russia, where it is essentially the application of propaganda methods of a violent kind to individuals; it's not a shotgun approach like the advertising method. It's a way of getting hold of the person and of playing on both his physiology and his psychology until he really breaks down, and then you can implant a new idea in his head. The descriptions of the methods are really blood-curdling, when you read them, and not only the methods applied to political prisoners but those applied, for example, to the training of the young Communist administrators and missionaries. They receive an incredibly tough training, which causes about 25 per cent of them to break down or commit suicide but which produces 75 per cent completely one-sided fanatics.

**WALLACE:** The question that keeps coming back to my mind is this: Oviously politics in themselves are not evil; television in itself is not evil; atomic energy is not evil. And yet you seem to fear they would be used in an evil way. Why is it that the right people will not, in your estimation, use them? Why is it that the wrong people will use these various devices, and for the wrong motives?

**HUXLEY:** One of the reasons is that these are all instruments for obtaining power. Obviously the passion for power is one of the most moving passions that exists in man. All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous, and that it's extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group

11

have too much power for too long a time.
What are the British and American Constitu-
tions except devices for limiting power? All
these new devices are extremely efficient instru-
ments for the imposition of power by small
groups over larger masses.

**WALLACE:** You asked this question yourself in "Enemies of Freedom": "In an age of accelerating over-population, of accelerating over-organization, and ever more efficient means of mass com-munication, how can we preserve the integrity and re-assert the value of the human individ-ual?" You put the question. Now here's your chance to answer it, Mr. Huxley.

**HUXLEY:** First of all, it's a question of education. It's terribly important to insist on individual values. You've probably read the book by Whyte, *The Organization Man*. It's a very interesting, valuable book, which describes the new type of group morality, group ethics, as considering the group somehow more important than the individual. This seems to me to be in contradiction to what we know about the genetical make-up of human beings — that every human being is unique. It is, of course, on this genetical basis that the whole idea of the value of freedom is based. It's extremely important for us to stress this in all of our educational life. It's also very important to teach people to be on their guard against the sort of verbal booby-traps into which they're always being led, to teach them to analyze the kind of things being said to them. There are many other things one could do to strengthen people and to make them more aware of what was being done to them.

**WALLACE:** You're a prophet of decentralization?

**HUXLEY:** Yes, if it is feasible. Many people have been talking about the importance of decentralization, in order to give back to the voter a sense of direct power. The voter in an enormous electorate feels impotent; his vote seems to count for nothing. This is not true where the electorate is small, and where the voter is dealing

12

[LC]

with a group he can manage and understand. If one can, as Jefferson suggested, break up the units into smaller and smaller units, and so get a real self-governing democracy. . . .

**WALLACE:** That was all very well in Jefferson's day, but how can we revamp our economic system and decentralize, and at the same time meet militarily and economically the tough challenge of a country like Soviet Russia?

**HUXLEY:** The answer to that is that production — industrial production — is of two kinds. There are some kinds of industrial production which obviously need the most tremendously high centralization — like the making of automobiles, for example. But there are many other kinds where you could decentralize quite easily, and probably quite economically. You begin to see it now if you travel through the South and observe the decentralized textile industry that is springing up there.

**WALLACE:** Mr. Huxley, let me ask you this, quite seriously: Is freedom necessary?

**HUXLEY:** As far as I'm concerned, it is, yes.

**WALLACE:** Is it necessary for a productive society?

**HUXLEY:** Yes, I feel it is; I mean, for a genuinely productive society. You can produce plenty of goods without much freedom, but the whole creative life of man is ultimately impossible without a considerable measure of individual freedom, of initiative, of creativity. All the things we value — and I think value properly — are impossible without a large measure of freedom.

**WALLACE:** Take a look again at the country which seems to be in the stance of our opponent — Soviet Russia. It is strong and getting stronger, economically, militarily. At the same time it's developing its art forms pretty well. It seems not unnecessarily to squelch the creative urge among its people; and yet it is not a free society.

13

[LC]

**HUXLEY:** It is not a free society. But here is something very interesting: those members of society — like the scientists — who are doing the creative work are given far more freedom than anybody else. It's a privileged, aristocratic society in which, provided they don't poke their noses into political affairs, these people are given a great deal of prestige, a considerable amount of freedom, and a lot of money. This is a very interesting fact about the new Soviet regime. I think what we're going to see is a people with on the whole very little freedom and an oligarchy on top enjoying a considerable measure of freedom and a very high standard of living.

**WALLACE:** And the people down below?

**HUXLEY:** Enjoying very little.

**WALLACE:** And that kind of situation can long endure?

**HUXLEY:** I think it can certainly endure much longer than a situation in which everybody is kept down, because they can certainly get technological and scientific results in such a system.

**WALLACE:** Well, the next time that I talk to you then, perhaps we should investigate further the possibility of the establishment of that kind of society, where the drones work for the queen bees.

**HUXLEY:** Yes, but I must say I still believe in democracy. If we can make the best of the creative activities of the people on top, plus those of the people on the bottom, so much the better.

**WALLACE:** Mr. Huxley, I surely thank you for spending this half-hour with us, and I wish you Godspeed, sir. ... Aldous Huxley finds himself in a peculiar and disturbing position. A quarter of a century after prophesying an authoritarian State, in which people were reduced to ciphers, he can point at Soviet Russia and say, "I told you so." The crucial question, as he sees it now, is whether the so-called Free World is shortly going to give him the dubious satisfaction of saying the same thing about us.

14

[LC]

**A. A. BERLE, JR.**

**SCOTT BUCHANAN**

**EUGENE BURDICK**

**ERIC F. GOLDMAN**

**CLARK KERR**

**HENRY R. LUCE**

**REINHOLD NIEBUHR**

**ISIDOR I. RABI**

**ROBERT REDFIELD**

**ROBERT M. HUTCHINS**

[LC]

# The Fund for the Republic

## Board of Directors

**Vice-Chairman:**
GEORGE N. SHUSTER
President, Hunter College
New York, N. Y.

303

Henry A. Kissinger is Associate Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. His book, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy," published last year, created a considerable stir with its new concept of nuclear warfare waged on a "limited" basis.

* * *

**WALLACE:** Dr. Kissinger, last year your attack on our foreign and military policies was apparently found so disturbing that *The New York Times* carried this front-page story. *The Times* said: "For the first time since President Eisenhower took office, officials at the highest government levels are displaying interest in the theory of the 'little' or 'limited' war. The theory of 'massive retaliation' is being re-examined." What has come of the re-examination?

**KISSINGER:** I think the theory has been re-examined; the practice has not been.

**WALLACE:** The theory has been found wanting, then?

**KISSINGER:** The theory has been found wanting but I don't think we have made the effort or spent the money or made the sacrifices necessary to get a capability for limited war.

**WALLACE:** In order to better understand your proposal for limited war, perhaps it would be well for you to define what you understand to be our current United States military policy. What is our military policy?

**KISSINGER:** Our current military policy is based on the doctrine of massive retaliation—that we threaten an all-out attack on the Soviet Union in case the Soviet Union engages in aggression anywhere. This means that we base our policy on a threat that will involve the destruction of all mankind. This is too risky and I think too expensive.

3

WALLACE: You obviously think it's wrong—dangerous to our security. I wonder if you would expand on that. Just because of what you call the risk and just because of the expense, it is not worthwhile?

KISSINGER: What it will mean is that in every crisis an American President will have to make the choice whether a given objective is worth the destruction of American cities. The American President will have to decide whether Beirut or whatever the issue may be is worth thirty million American lives. In practice I am afraid the American President will have to decide that it is not worth it and it will therefore encourage the piecemeal taking over of the world by Soviet aggression.

WALLACE: Because you believe the Soviets understand our unwillingness or inability—certainly our unwillingness—to wage an all-out war?

KISSINGER: The Soviets will understand our increasing unwillingness to engage in this kind of war and therefore their task will be to present us with a challenge which does not ever seem worth taking the final jump, but the accumulation of which is going to lead to the destruction of the free world.

WALLACE: In place of that policy, what do you think our military and political policies should be?

KISSINGER: Well, the first thing I would like to say is that military policy can't be a substitute for other measures. It can only be the screen behind which other measures are possible. Now, with this qualification I think that we must have a military capability which permits us to react to Soviet threats at the same level of intensity at which they present it, so that we don't always have to choose between the destruction of the United States and the defense of the countries that may be threatened but rather that we can defend the areas which are threatened at the place and time the threat occurs.

WALLACE: How is that actually translated into more simple language? Are you simply talking now about a policy which includes limited war?

4

**KISSINGER:** Yes, that we are ready to engage in limited war —that we have troop transports, air transports that enable us to get into position quickly, and that we have the forces to engage in limited war which we do not now have.

**WALLACE:** Can you give me an example of how this might actually work out?

**KISSINGER:** Well, at the moment we have thirteen divisions. It is clear that with thirteen divisions we are incapable of resisting Soviet attacks when the Soviet Union has one hundred seventy-five divisions. If we had more divisions and if we had air transport, then in case of a Soviet attack, say on Iraq, we could airlift a few divisions into the area and, together with local forces, attempt a defense.

**WALLACE:** You advise limited war—or you suggest the use of limited war—limited nuclear war. President Eisenhower said about two years ago: "War in our time has become an anachronism. Whatever the case in the past, war in the future can serve no useful purpose. A war which became general, as any limited action might, could only result in the virtual destruction of mankind." Now, that's the rub, it would seem—that any limited nuclear war might boil over into a total war and so the question we must put to ourselves is: "Dare we take the chance?"

**KISSINGER:** Let me answer this question in two parts. You say I advise a policy of limited nuclear war. I do not advise that we initiate war. The question of war will arise only if the Soviet Union attacks. Then if the Soviet Union attacks—and, in fact, we are very much more afraid of total war than they are—they will gradually blackmail the free world into surrender. Everything I say is based on the assumption that we are as willing to run risks as the Soviet Union. If this is not the case, we are lost, and I think we ought to face that fact.

**WALLACE:** Let's look at some of the measures which you propose for keeping a limited war limited. You

5

[L4]

say, for instance, that in the midst of a limited war each side could be required to list its strategic air bases, which would then be immune from attack. All cities within 500 miles from the battle zone would be immune from nuclear attack if they were declared open and certified so to be. It could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. And so forth. Now two nations which up until now have been unable to agree on armament control during peacetime, according to Dr. Kissinger, are expected to engage in fairly complex Marquis of Queensbury rules in a nuclear war. It doesn't sound sensible, sir.

**KISSINGER:** I know it doesn't sound sensible nor does the destructiveness of modern weapons sound very sensible. What is required here is a completely new order of thinking. I hold no particular brief for the specific limitations which I recommend. What I am saying is this: Both sides, if they know one thing, know that an all-out war will mean the destruction of civilization, of their own as well as of the others. They also know they will therefore have an interest in keeping any war that does break out to the smallest possible proportions. If they are looking for an excuse to expand it, they will expand it. I am assuming they are looking for an excuse to limit it. What we have to do is bend our ingenuity towards finding means to limit any war that might break out either through accident or through design. Whether these particular limitations are absolutely the right ones, I wouldn't maintain, but the great difficulty has been that the traditional military thinkers, trained in conventional strategy, have simply dismissed all new forms of thought and have not addressed themselves to what seems to me to be a very real and serious problem.

**WALLACE:** Then you think American strategy should be re-evaluated to restore war as a usable instrument of policy?

**KISSINGER:** American strategy has to face the fact that it may be confronted with war and that if Soviet

6

aggression confronts us with war and we are unwilling to resist, it will mean the end of our freedom. It boils down then to a value choice. In these terms, yes, I think war must be made a usable instrument of policy.

**WALLACE:** Let me throw another argument at you, if I may, Dr. Kissinger. I would like to quote from a study that was released just a few hours ago by the Fund for the Republic, written by Walter Millis and Father John Courtney Murray, called *Foreign Policy and the Free Society*. In it Walter Millis writes as follows: "The concept of limited war presents a simple fallacy in logic . . . we can resort to limited war only when the objective is not vital to either side, in which case we would be unlikely to resort to war in any event, as happened in Indo-China, Suez, and Hungary." He obviously is talking about the United States when he says "we." What about that?

**KISSINGER:** I am a great admirer of Walter Millis. I cannot agree with him there. Every one of these instances were instances where the Western position was eroded. If it is really true that we can never engage in limited war while the Soviet Union can engage in limited war, I can only repeat that our expulsion—the collapse of the free world—is inevitable. Moreover, to say that limited war is a logical fallacy does not mean very much if you look at the period from 1945 to 1958, when you had the Berlin blockade, the Korean war, Indo-China, Suez, Hungary—constant threats of nuclear attacks on other countries. The fact cannot be explained away on simply logical grounds.

**WALLACE:** Tell me this, sir. Suppose the Communists were to march in to West Berlin next week. Would you personally—and do you think the majority of Americans would—want to take a chance on protecting West Berlin with a limited nuclear war?

**KISSINGER:** I am not saying that every Soviet attack must be answered with nuclear war. In an attack on West

7

Berlin I would certainly react in some manner, and in some manner that involves the use of force. If we do not, no one will ever believe in our protection again, or in our word again. Whether the American people would support this or not would depend to some extent on their leadership. If you had taken a public opinion poll on June 20, 1950 whether the American people would support the defense of Korea, you might have gotten an entirely different answer from the one you got one week later when the President said it was essential to our interests to defend it.

**WALLACE:** Then I take it what you envision is: If the government were to follow your point of view, they should announce publicly that from now on the possibility of limited nuclear war should be seriously considered by all Americans and all of our potential enemies?

**KISSINGER:** I would announce that our primary purpose is to avoid war but if we are forced into war through Soviet aggression, we would attempt to keep it to the smallest proportions necessary, we would not use more force than was absolutely necessary to defend the safety of the free world, but we *would* use the amount of force that *was* necessary to defend the free world.

**WALLACE:** As long as we're in the realm of speculation here, let's speculate a little further. What do you think the reaction of the Soviet government would be to an announcement of that kind?

**KISSINGER:** Well, they would be very likely to deny that war can be limited because atomic blackmail is one of the most effective means of expansion. If they can create the impression that any resistance to Soviet aggression inevitably leads to the destruction of the country concerned, then many countries would prefer surrender to defending themselves. If they were faced with the real situation, however, all past experience indicates that this is not a regime that gambles everything on one throw of the dice.

8

**WALLACE:** In the field of foreign policy and military affairs, Dr. Kissinger, you're acknowledged to be one of the most penetrating minds in the country. Last year, as I have mentioned, you published a military analysis which rocked Washington. Yet you devoted it almost exclusively to framing a war policy rather than a peace policy. Couldn't this be indicative of what is happening to our thinking here in America? Isn't this indeed what many of our allies criticize us for?

**KISSINGER:** Well, I would reject this description of my book. I did not frame a war policy. I framed a policy which I think is the only one that is going to preserve the peace. I am afraid that weakness is certainly going to lead us into a position where finally we will be forced to engage in very extreme measures to defend ourselves. I would therefore reject the description of my recommendation as a war policy. Our problems abroad are more complicated than this because, on the one hand, we are accused of an overemphasis on military factors and, on the other hand, the fact of the matter is that we are not strong enough to defend most of our allies. I would at least suggest that one of the difficulties is that our allies are both worried about our general political posture and at the same time feel that we are not capable of protecting them if a showdown comes.

**WALLACE:** Let's move from war policies to positive peace policies. What policies do you believe, generally, we should adopt to help keep the peace and at the same time contain communism?

**KISSINGER:** I hate again to differ with you but again I cannot accept the distinction between war and peace policies. Defense policies are essential to maintain the peace. They are not, however, going to solve the political problems of the world. They are only going to give us a shield behind which we engage in constructive measures. What is essential right now is that we identify ourselves with the tremendous revolution that is sweeping across the world, that we have some image for

9

the construction of the free world which is based
on other motives than simply defending the
world against communism. We must make clear
what we are for rather than what we are against.
If we were clearer about the kind of world we
want to bring about, if we could project this
concern to other people, then we wouldn't al-
ways seem so intransigently militant, then we
would be identified with positive measures rather
than simply with military alliances.

WALLACE: Well, let's talk about some specifics. How do you regard our conduct in regard to the Algerian situation of the past few years?

KISSINGER: I think the Algerian situation is an extremely complicated and difficult one. In general, we should stand for the freedom of people. In general, we should oppose colonial regimes. On the other hand, an independent Algeria cannot survive as a purely independent state. The great paradox of this period is that, on the one hand, you have a drive towards more and more sovereign states and, on the other hand, there is no such thing as a purely independent state any more. The thing that has always attracted me, therefore, is that we could advocate a North African federation which could be tied together economically and for other development projects and that Algeria would find its place as part of that rather than as a purely independent state.

WALLACE: Do you look to the inclusion of Nasser and his people in this North African federation?

KISSINGER: Well, initially, I would recommend grouping Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There might be another group of powers in the Middle East which includes Egypt and some of the other states which have had a somewhat different history from Algeria's.

WALLACE: Would you say that our posture vis-à-vis Egypt has been a realistic one? Do you not agree that the peoples of Africa would seem to respond to Nasser and that we seem to support govern-

10

ments in the Middle East which do not always
have the support of their actual inhabitants, and
that perhaps Nasser has more support from the
other governments and from the people them-
selves?

KISSINGER: Our policy vis-à-vis Nasser has suffered from indecisiveness. We have neither been conciliatory enough when we were conciliatory nor intransigent enough when we were intransigent. We're not friendly enough to make him a friend and not hostile enough to put him down, with the result that we have suffered from the worst of both.

WALLACE: What you're saying is that we have no policy—

KISSINGER: That we have been governed by events rather than attempting to shape them. I would say, however, that Ibn Saud does not represent the force with which we should be identified in the Middle East.

WALLACE: Let me come back again to the study called *Foreign Policy and the Free Society*. In it, Scott Buchanan says: "Our problem here in the U. S. is to exist as a capitalist society in, possibly, a completely socialist revolutionary world." Now, it would seem, to a certain extent anyway, that that's the way the world is going. Is it possible that we cannot exist in such a world?

WALLACE: Well, you know, you could argue that the iden-
tification of socialist and revolutionary is not a
very good identification. You could well argue
that a capitalist society or, what is more inter-
esting to me, a free society is a more revolution-
ary phenomenon than nineteenth century
socialism, and this illustrates precisely one of
our problems. I think we should go on the
spiritual offensive in the world. We should iden-
tify ourselves with the revolution. We should
say that freedom, if it is liberated, can achieve
many of these things.

WALLACE: Well, what is keeping us from going on the
spiritual offensive, as you see it?

11

KISSINGER: Because we have been suddenly projected into a situation for which very little in our history has prepared us and because, I am afraid, many of the leadership groups that are engaged in foreign policy have had a set of experiences which makes it rather difficult for them to come to grips with a really revolutionary situation.

WALLACE: Well, now, in that regard, you told our reporter earlier this week, as far as current leaders are concerned: "We have an administration of old men, happy with the life they have led." And you considered this dangerous. You smile now. What did you mean, and why is it dangerous, and why are you smiling?

KISSINGER: I made this statement. I think that the groups I was referring to are very well-meaning, very sincere, very patriotic people. The difficulty they have is that they think that the world in which they grew up is the normal world. Their tendency is, when a crisis arises, to try to smooth it over and then to expect that the normal forces would reassert themselves. Therefore, they conduct policy a little bit like small-town bankers who think one can always draw interest on a good situation. We conduct our policy as if Adenauer would live forever, despite the fact that he's 82 years old. When there's no crisis, it's always very difficult to get agreement on a constructive step. Conversely, it often requires a crisis to make us engage in any action.

WALLACE: Do you see any political leaders in the U. S. who you believe have a clear grasp of America's current place in history?

KISSINGER: I think one of the very worrisome features of the situation is that I don't find any great moral dynamism on either side.

WALLACE: When you say on either side, you mean—

KISSINGER: Either in the Democratic or in the Republican party.

12

WALLACE: How do you account for that?

KISSINGER: First of all, we're a nation of specialists. We tend to think that a problem is either economic or political or military. Many of your questions earlier in the program seem to me to indicate this—when you said *this* is a policy of war and *that* is a policy of peace. It is hard for us to understand that we have to do military, economic, political, and psychological things all simultaneously. Then, we have been rather satisfied with the situation in our country as it is and with the world in which we have lived. Our response to the world has usually been to an overpowering threat from abroad. Therefore, even when we have engaged in constructive steps like the Marshall Plan, the Greek-Turkish Aid program, which were very great efforts, nevertheless we have always justified them on the basis of a Communist threat, very rarely on the basis of things we wanted to do because of our intrinsic dynamism. I believe, for instance, that we reacted very wrongly to the riots in Latin-America. Rather than saying, "These are Communist-inspired and we must keep Latin-America from going Communist," we should have said, "This recalls us to our duties. These are things we want to do because of the values we stand for, not because we want to beat the Communists."

WALLACE: But the question is: Why are we as unaware, as unavailing? Is it because we have been projected into world leadership in too much of a hurry? Unprepared for it? Is that one of the reasons?

KISSINGER: Yes, one of the very basic reasons is that we have been projected in too much of a hurry. And it must also be said in fairness that we have done rather well considering all the challenges that have been thrown at us. It is too bad that rather well isn't good enough. Another problem is that the people who emerge in leadership positions in this country usually come from a lifetime of experience which doesn't prepare them for the conduct of foreign policy. They may come from business or from law or even from the universities.

13

[LJ]

WALLACE: Well, certainly not in the case of John Foster Dulles. How would you evaluate the over-all impact of Mr. Dulles on the world position of the United States?

KISSINGER: I think that Mr. Dulles is a very skilful tactician and that he shows extraordinary ingenuity in escaping from specific crisis situations. Unhappily, the real problem in the world at the moment is to prevent the crisis from arising. It is to project an image of American concern and of American purpose. This he is much less successful in doing. He often gives the impression of being so infatuated with the mechanics of foreign policy and with the negotiation aspect of foreign policy that he has not succeeded in projecting the deeper things we stand for and so has often created great distrust abroad.

WALLACE: Who, if any, are the men in public life whom you admire and look to for leadership in the United States?

KISSINGER: Well, I must say, first of all, that I am here as a non-partisan, that I am an independent. I don't stand for either party in this. I have respected Mr. Stevenson in many of his utterances, respected Mr. Acheson in many of his utterances, although I have disagreed with him very much on other things. It is very difficult for a party out of power to prove what it can do.

WALLACE: But there is no Republican who comes readily to your mind, in whom you have the confidence that that man has the understanding that we need to lead us at this time.

KISSINGER: I hate to engage in personalities. I think that Mr. Nixon in his public utterances lately has shown an awareness of the situation. But I'd rather not deal in personalities.

* * *

14

**CLARK KERR**
President, University of California; labor economist

The Fund for the Republic

Board of Directors

161

THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW

SUNDAY, JULY 13, 1958

GUEST: DR. HENRY KISSINGER

WALLACE: This is Professor Henry Kissinger, a military and political analyst with a revolutionary concept of nuclear war and a constructive concept for peace. He's a man whose ideas have prompted the highest officials of our government to re-evaluate our defense policies. We'll get his criticisms of our current strategies in war and peace in just a moment.

ANNCR: The Mike Wallace Interview, presented by the American Broadcasting Company in association with the Fund for the Republic, brings you a special television series discussing the problems of Survival and Freedom in America.

WALLACE: Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. Tonight we'll tackle the immediate issue that will decide the fate of our freedom, certainly, and possibly even of our survival. We'll discuss the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the chances of war. Our guest, Professor Henry Kissinger, Associate Director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the man whose recent proposals substantially influenced President Eisenhower's plan for military reorganization. Dr. Kissinger, last year your attack on our foreign and military policies was apparently found so disturbing that the New York Times carried this front-page story: The Times said, "For the first time since President Eisenhower took office, officials at the highest government levels are displaying interest in the theory of the little, or limited, war. The theory of massive retaliation is being re-examined." That was a year ago. What has come of the re-examination?

KISSINGER: I think the theory has been re-examined; the practice has not been.

WALLACE: The theory has been found wanting, then?

KISSINGER: The theory has been found wanting, but I don't think we have made the effort, or spent the money, or made the sacrifices necessary for -- to get a capability for limited war.

WALLACE: Well now, in order to better understand your proposal for limited war, perhaps it would be well for you to define what you understand to be our current United States military policy. What is our military policy?

KISSINGER: Well, our current military policy is based on the doctrine of massive retaliation: that we threaten an all-out attack on the Soviet Union in case the Soviet Union engages in aggression anywhere. This means that, against almost any form of attack, we base our policy on the threat that will involve the destruction of all mankind. And this is too risky, and I think too expensive.

WALLACE: You obviously think it's wrong, dangerous to our security. I wonder if you would expand on that. Just because of what you say - the risk, and just because of the expense, it is not worthwhile?

KISSINGER: No, it is -- what it will mean is that in every crisis, an American President will have to make the choice whether a given objective is worth the destruction of American cities. The American President will have to decide whether Beirut, or whatever the issue may be, is worth about 30,000,000 American lives. In practice, I'm afraid the American President will have to decide that it is not worth it, and it will therefore encourage the piecemeal taking-over of the world by Soviet aggression.

- 3 -

WALLACE: Because you believe the Soviets understand our unwillingness or inability - certainly our unwillingness - to wage an all-out war?

KISSINGER: The Soviets will understand our increasing unwillingness to engage in this kind of war, and therefore their task will be to present us with the challenge which doesn't ever seem worth taking the final jump, but which - the accumulation of which is going to lead to the destruction of the free world.

WALLACE: In place of that policy, what do you believe our military and political policies should be?

KISSINGER: Well, the first thing I'd like to say is, that military policy can't be a substitute for other measures. It can only be the screen behind which other measures are possible. Now, with this qualification, I think that we must have a military capability that permits us to react to Soviet threats at the same level of intensity at which they present it, so that we don't always have to choose between the destruction of the United States and the defense of the countries that may be threatened. I'd rather that we can defend the areas which are threatened at the place and time the threat occurs.

WALLACE: How is that actually translated into, if I may, into more simple language? Is this - are you simply talking now about a policy which includes limited war?

KISSINGER: It's a policy that -- yes, that we are ready to engage in limited war, that we have troop transports, air transport that gets -- enables us to get into position quickly, and that we have the forces to engage in limited war, which we do not now have.

- 4 -

WALLACE: Can you give me an example of how this might actually work out?

KISSINGER: Well, at the moment we have thirteen divisions. It is clear that with thirteen divisions we are incapable of resisting Soviet attacks when the Soviet Union has 175 divisions. If we had more divisions, and if we had air transport, then in case of a Soviet attack, say on Iraq, we could air-lift a few divisions into the area and, together with local forces, attempt at a defense.

WALLACE: President Eisenhower -- you advise limited war, or you suggest the use of limited war, limited nuclear war, indeed. President Eisenhower said about two years ago that war in our time has become an anachronism.

"Whatever the case in the past, war in the future," he said, "can serve no useful purpose. A war which became general, as any limited action might," he said, "could only result in the virtual destruction of mankind." Now that's the rub, it would seem: that any limited nuclear war might boil over into a total war; and so the question we must put to ourselves is, dare we take the chance?

KISSINGER: Well, let me answer this question in two parts. You say I advise a policy of limited nuclear war. I do not advise that we initiate war. The question of war will arise only if the Soviet Union attacks. Then, if the Soviet Union attacks and, in fact, we are very much more afraid of total war than they are - they will gradually blackmail the free world into surrender. Everything that I say is based on the assumption that we are as willing to run risks as the Soviet Union. If this is not the case, we are lost; and I think we ought to face that fact.

WALLACE: Let's look at some of the measures -- let's look at some of the measures which you propose for keeping a limited war limited. (MORE)

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WALLACE:
(CONT)

You say, for instance, that in the midst of a limited war, each side could be required to list its strategic air bases, which would then be immune from attack. All cities within 500 miles of the battle zone would be immune from nuclear attack if they were declared open, and certified so to be. It could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed, unless the enemy uses it first, and so forth. Now, two nations which up until now have been unable to agree on armament control during peacetime, according to Dr. Kissinger are expected to engage in fairly complex Marquis of Queensberry rules in the midst of a nuclear war. It -- it doesn't sound sensible, sir.

KISSINGER:

I know it doesn't sound sensible, and -- nor does the destructiveness of modern weapons sound very sensible. What is required here is a completely new order of thinking. I hold no particular brief with the specific limitations which I recommended. What I am saying is this: both sides, if they know one thing, they know that an all-out war will mean the destruction of civilization - of their own as well as of the other. They also know they will therefore have an interest in keeping any war that does break out to the smallest possible proportions. If they're looking for an excuse to expand it, they will expand it; I am assuming they're looking for an excuse to limit it. What we have to do is to bend our ingenuity toward finding means to limit any war that might break out, either through accident or through design. Whether these particular limitations are absolutely the right ones, I wouldn't maintain; but the great difficulty has been the traditional military thinkers, trained with conventional strategy, have simply dismissed all new forms of thought, and have not addressed themselves to what seems to me to be a very real and serious problem.

WALLACE: Then you think American strategy should be re-evaluated to restore war as a usable instrument of policy.

KISSINGER: American strategy has to face the fact that it may be confronted with war, and that if Soviet aggression confronts us with war, and we are unwilling to resist, it will mean the end of our freedom. We will -- this is -- it boils down, then, to a value choice. In these terms, yes, I think war must be made a usable instrument of policy.

WALLACE: Let me throw another argument at you, if I may, Dr. Kissinger. I'd like to quote from a study that has been released just a few hours ago, called "Foreign Policy in the Free Society", written by Walter Millis and Father John Courtney Murray. In it, analyst Walter Millis writes as follows: he says, "The concept of limited war presents a simple fallacy in logic. We can resort to limited war," he says, "only when the objective is not vital to either side; in which case, we would be unlikely to resort to war in any event. This happened in Indo-China, Suez, and Hungary." He's obviously talking about the United States when he says "we". What about that?

KISSINGER: I am a great admirer of Mr. Millis; I cannot agree with him there. Every one of these instances were instances where the Western position was eroded. If it is really true that we can never engage in limited war, while the Soviet Union can engage in limited war, I can only repeat that our expulsion - the collapse of the free world - is inevitable. Moreover, to say that limited war is a logical fallacy doesn't mean very much if you look at the period from 1945 to 1958, when you had the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, Indo-China, Suez, Hungary, constant threats of nuclear attacks on other countries. The fact cannot be explained away on simply logical grounds.

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**WALLACE:** Tell me this, sir. Suppose the Communists were to march into West Berlin next week. Would you, personally - and do you think the majority of the American people would - want to take a chance on protecting West Berlin with a limited nuclear war?

**KISSINGER:** I am not saying that every Soviet attack must be answered with nuclear war. In an attack on West Berlin, I would certainly react in some manner, and in some manner that involves the use of force. If we do not, no one will every believe in our protection again, or in our word again. Whether the American people would support this or not would depend to some extent on their leadership. If you had taken a public-opinion poll on, say, June 20, 1950, whether the American people would support the defense of Korea, you might have gotten an entirely different answer than the one you had a week later, when the President decided that it was essential to our interests to defend it.

**WALLACE:** Then I take it what you envision is, if the Government were to follow your point of view, they should announce publicly that from now on the possibility of limited nuclear war should be seriously considered by all Americans, and by all of our potential enemies.

**KISSINGER:** I would announce that our primary purpose is to avoid war; but if we are forced into war through Soviet aggression, we would attempt to keep it to the smallest proportions necessary - that we would not use more force than was absolutely necessary to defend the safety of the free world, but that we would use the amount of force that was necessary to defend the free world.

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KISSINGER: Well, they would be very likely to deny that a war can be limited, because atomic blackmail is one of their most effective means of expansion. If they can create the impression that <u>any</u> resistance to Soviet aggression inevitably leads to the destruction of the country concerned, then many countries will prefer surrender to defending themselves. If they were faced with the <u>real</u> situation, however, all past experiences indicate that this is not a regime that gambles everything on one throw of the dice.

WALLACE: In the field of foreign policy and military affairs, Dr. Kissinger, you're acknowledged to be one of the most penetrating minds in the country. Last year, as I've mentioned, you published a military analysis which rocked Washington. Yet, you devoted it almost exclusively to framing a <u>war</u> policy, rather than a peace policy. Could this be indicative of what is happening to our thinking here in America? Isn't this indeed what many of our allies criticize us for?

KISSINGER: Well, I would reject this description of my book. I did not frame a war policy; I framed a policy which I think is the only one that is going to preserve the peace. I am afraid that weakness is certainly going to lead us into a position where finally we will be forced to engage in very extreme measures to defend ourselves. I would therefore reject the description of my recommendations as a war policy. Our problems abroad are more complicated than this, because on the one hand we are accused of an over-emphasis on military factors; on the other hand, the fact of the matter is that we are not strong enough to defend most of our allies. And one of the -- I would at least suggest that one of the difficulties is that our allies are both worried about our general political posture, and at the same time feel that we are not capable of protecting them if a showdown comes.

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**WALLACE:** What policies -- let's move from war policies to positive peace policies. What policies do you believe generally that we should adopt to help keep the peace, and at the same time contain Communism?

**KISSINGER:** Well, I hate again to differ with you, but I cannot accept the distinction between war and peace policies. Defense policies are essential to maintain the peace. They are not, however, going to solve the political problems of the world. They are only going to give us a shield behind which we can engage in constructive measures. What is essential right now is that we identify ourselves with the tremendous revolution which is sweeping across the world - that we have some image for the construction of the free world which is based on other motives than simply defending the world against Communism. We must make clear what we are for rather than what we are against. If we were clearer about the kind of world we want to bring about, if we could project this concern to other people, then we wouldn't always seem so intransigently militant - then we would be identified with positive measures rather than with simply military alliances.

**WALLACE:** Well, let's talk about some specifics. How do you regard our conduct in regard to the Algerian situation of the past few years?

**KISSINGER:** I think the Algerian situation is an extremely complicated and difficult one. In general, we should stand for the freedom of people. In general, we should oppose colonial regimes. On the other hand, we should come up with ideas which... Independent Algeria cannot survive as a purely independent state. The great paradox of this period is, that on the one hand you have a drive toward more and more sovereign states; on the other hand, there is no such thing as a purely independent state any more.

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**KISSINGER:** The thing that has always attracted me, therefore, would be that we would advocate a North African federation which would be tied together economically and for other development projects, and that Algeria would find its place as part of that rather than as a purely independent state.

**WALLACE:** Do you look to the inclusion of Nasser and his peoples in this North African federation?

**KISSINGER:** Well, initially I would group -- I would recommend grouping Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There might be another grouping of powers in the Middle East which includes Egypt and some of the states which have had a somewhat different history than the -- than Algeria.

**WALLACE:** And would you say that our posture vis-à-vis Egypt has been a realistic one? Do you not agree that the peoples of Africa would seem to respond to Nasser, and that we seem to support governments in the Middle East which do not always have the support of their actual inhabitants, and that perhaps Nasser has more support than some of the other governments from the people themselves?

**KISSINGER:** Well, our policy vis-à-vis Nasser has suffered from indecisiveness. We have neither been conciliatory enough when we were conciliatory, nor intransigent enough when we were intransigent. We're not friendly enough to make him a friend, and not hostile enough really to bring him down, with the result that we have suffered from the worst of both worlds.

**WALLACE:** What you're saying is, that we have no policy.

**KISSINGER:** That we've been governed by events rather than attempting to shape them. I would say, however, that Ibn Saud does not represent the force with which we should be identified in the Middle East.

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**WALLACE:** Let me come back again to the study called "Foreign Policy in the Free Society". In it, philosopher Scott Buchanan says, "Our problem here in the United States is to exist as a capitalist society in, possibly, a completely socialist, revolutionary world." Now it would seem, to a certain extent anyway, that that's the way the world is going. Is it possible that we cannot exist in such a world?

**KISSINGER:** Well, you know, you could argue that the identification of "socialist" and "revolutionary" is not a very good identification. You could well argue that a capitalist society, or, what is more interesting to me, a free society, is a more revolutionary phenomenon than nineteenth-century socialism. And this illustrates precisely one of our problems. I think we should go on the spiritual offensive in the world. **We** should identify ourselves with the Revolution. We should say that freedom, if it is liberated, can achieve many of these things.

**WALLACE:** Well, what is keeping us from going on the spiritual offensive, as you see it?

**KISSINGER:** Because we've suddenly been projected into a situation for which very little in our history has prepared us, and because, I'm afraid, many of the leadership groups that are engaged in foreign policy have had a set of experiences which make it rather difficult for them to come to grips with a **_really_** revolutionary situation.

**WALLACE:** Well, now, in that regard, earlier this week you told our reporter that as far as current leaders are concerned, you said, "We have an administration of old men, happy with the life they have led." And you considered this dangerous. You smile now. What did you mean, and why is it dangerous, and why are you smiling?

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KISSINGER: Well, I made this statement. I think that the groups I was referring to are very well-meaning, very sincere, very patriotic people. The difficulty they have is that they think that the world in which they grew up is the "normal" world. Their tendency is, when a crisis arises, to try to smooth it over, and then to wait and then to expect that the "normal" forces would re-assert themselves. Therefore they conduct policy a little bit like -- oh, maybe small-town bankers, who think one can always draw interest on a good situation. They conduct very often our policy as if Adenauer would live forever, despite the fact that he's 82 years old. When there's no crisis it's always very difficult to get agreement on a constructive step; conversely, it often requires a crisis to make us engage in any action.

WALLACE: Do you see any political leaders in the United States whom you believe have a clear grasp of America's current place in history?

WALLACE: When you say "on either side", you mean either on the Democratic or on ...

WALLACE: Well how -- how do you account for that, Dr. Kissinger?

KISSINGER: I think we've been assuming for too long that all we had to do ... First of all, we are a nation of specialists. We tend to think that a problem is either economic or political or military. Many of your questions earlier in the program seem to indicate this, when you said, "This is a policy of war, and that is a policy of peace."

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KISSINGER: (CONT)

It is hard for us to understand that we have to be able to do military, political, economic and psychological things all simultaneously. Then, we have been rather satisfied with the situation in our country as it is, and with the world in which we have lived. Our response to the world has usually been to an overpowering threat from abroad. Therefore, even when we have engaged in constructive steps, like the Marshall Plan, the Greek-Turkish aid program, which were very great efforts, nevertheless we've always justified them on the basis of the Communist threat, very rarely on the basis of things we wanted to do because of our intrinsic dynamism. I believe for example that we reacted very wrongly to the riots in Latin America. Rather than saying, "These are Communist-inspired, and we must react to -- we must keep Latin America from going Communist", we should have said, "This recalls us to our duty; these are things we want to do because of the values we stand for, not because we want to beat the Communists."

WALLACE:

But the question -- the question is, *why* are we as unaware - why are we as unavailing? Is it because we have been projected into world leadership in too much of a hurry, unprepared for it? Is that one of the reasons?

KISSINGER:

This is one of our very basic reasons, is that we've been projected too much in a hurry. And it also must be said in fairness that we have done rather well, considering all the challenges that have been thrown at us. It is too bad that rather well isn't good enough. Another problem is, that the people who emerge in leadership positions in this country usually come from a lifetime of experience which doesn't prepare them for the conduct of foreign policy: they may come from business or from law, or even from the universities.

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**WALLACE:** Well, certainly not in the case of John Foster Dulles. How would you evaluate the overall impact of Mr. Dulles on the world position of the United States?

**KISSINGER:** I think that Mr. Dulles is a very skillful tactician - that he shows extraordinary ingenuity in escaping from specific crisis situations. Unhappily, the real problem in the world at the moment is to prevent the crisis from arising; it is to project an image of American concern and of American purpose. This he is much less successful in doing. He often gives the impression of being so infatuated with the mechanics of foreign policy, and with the negotiation aspect of foreign policy, that he has not succeeded in projecting the deeper things we stand for, and often has created great distrust abroad.

**WALLACE:** Who, if any, are the men in public life whom you admire - you personally admire and look to for leadership for the United States, Dr. Kissinger?

**KISSINGER:** Well, I must say first of all that I'm here as a non-partisan - that I'm an independent.

**WALLACE:** Understood.

**KISSINGER:** I don't stand for either party in this. This depends. I've respected Mr. Stevenson in many of his utterances, respected Mr. Acheson in many of his utterances, although I've disagreed with him very much on other things. It's very difficult for a party out of power to prove what it can do.

**WALLACE:** But there's no Republican who comes readily to you mind, in whom you have that confidence that that man has an understanding - the understanding that we need to lead us at this time?

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KISSINGER: I hate to engage in personalities. I think that Mr. Nixon in his public utterances recently has shown awareness of the situation, but .. I'd rather not deal in personalities, if you ask me.

WALLACE: Of course, we're going to have to. We're going to have to deal in personalities, because personalities are leaders, and personalities are the people who eventually have to enunciate the issues. I'm sorry, sir, but our time has run out, and I'm very grateful to you for coming here from Cambridge to spend this half-hour with us, Dr. Kissinger.

Our survival and freedom, a thorny undertaking at best, become even more difficult to hold on to in the nuclear age. For this reason, we run the danger of seeking easy answers, or of despairing that there are any answers at all. Dr. Kissinger has suggested a tough, challenging answer - part of the answer - in limited war. But as he himself has put it, "History will not excuse the inadequacy of our response because of the enormity of the challenge."

Next week is the last program on our scheduled Survival and Freedom series, and on it we shall come to grips with what's been said on this entire series by such guests as Reinhold Niebuhr, Justice Douglas, Aldous Huxley, Adlai Stevenson, Pat Weaver, Cyrus Eaton, and Henry Kissinger. Our guest next week - you see him behind me - will be Dr. Robert Hutchins, a stormy petrel on the American scene, formerly Dean of the Yale Law School and President of the University of Chicago, now President of the Fund for the Republic. That's Robert Hutchins next week. Till then, Mike Wallace, good night.

ANNCR: For a complete report of the day's happenings, watch John Daly's award-winning news roundup every weekday evening on ABC Television Network.