The New Middle

The response to Secretary of State Rusk which college students leaders will release this afternoon to the press should clarify a few of the very important questions they will be asking at their meeting tomorrow. These forty-five student body presidents and editors were invited to discuss the Administration's Vietnam policy at the State Department as a result of the letter they sent to President Johnson on December 30. That letter, a remarkably eloquent statement of widespread dissatisfaction among students across the nation, raised serious doubts which the Administration has thus far failed to answer.

Here and elsewhere, there is very considerable doubt whether this country's vital interests are sufficiently threatened to justify our increasing commitment in Vietnam. There is concern, as the student leaders accurately reported, that we may be minimizing the possibility of a viable, independent South Vietnam with our present policy of bombs and destruction. And there is more doubt--the student leaders understand this aspect--about the Administration's integrity in explaining the war to the American people.

While the Administration could afford these questions when they were raised by other young people--students who were less judicious, perhaps, in their choice of adjectives--it cannot brush off this group of leaders. They represent graphically the plea of a generation that is disillusioned with this war and opposed to further escalation. Their statements are couched in the balanced rhetoric and wording bureaucrats will understand. They ooze the qualities which policy-makers and politicians admire: reasonableness, moderation, responsibility, earnestness--and all the rest.

These critics have chosen the middle road. Their efforts represent an attempt to establish a respectable posture of opposition, an alternative to the shrill dissent of the left wing, a course of moderation which may yet attract many of their elders and dissuade the President from upping the ante. It is a desperate effort. But it might work. It could still bolster the doves within the Administration. It just might convince the President that Americans will stand behind him in efforts to negotiate or at least limit the conflict. The President--caught in a tightening vise between those who want more fighting and those who want less--wants to get out.

It should not be forgotten, however, that this reasonable middle road is possible only because some critics have taken positions which are not so moderate, not so balanced and blandly phrased. Those who have pushed out the spectrum on the left have claimed new territory for the middle, safe ground to which these "concerned" and "doubting" students may scamper. That's the way the system works, of course: push hard on the left, and make way for the moderates. Human nature abhors a political vacuum.

Dean Rusk should not suppose that he can use the leaders to show how doubters may be converted to believers with a balanced dose of expertise and banality. His most recent response to their questions was almost pathetic in its reliance on worn-out shells of ideas. There may be "no shadow of doubt" in the Secretary's mind about our present policy; but his vague recitation of the perils of Munich, the binding legality of our Treaty commitments and the duplicity of the Viet Cong will not answer the serious questions of these students.

If the Administration fails to take their doubts seriously, it may find the middle moving further and further left. And those critics whom these leaders shun may then provide more fitting expression for the dissatisfaction of this generation.