FAIRBANK ON THE WAR

The advent of Spring and the Reading Period offers your readers a bit of Hope and Leisure (?), both of which might well be used to try to maximize our chances of survival by expressing individual views on Vietnam. Here are my own, as one example: 1) The administration's program of escalated bombing of North Vietnam, rather than force Hanoi to negotiate on terms we like, is more likely to bring China into the war. The escalation program seems highly unrealistic in its psychological assumptions. It is apparently based on the belief that our bombing can somehow break the will to resist of a nation with a thousand-year history of independence, which has grown up in the shadow of the Chinese revolution and is now backed by both China and Russia. We should avoid matching wills directly with Mao Tse-tung, who is if nothing else one of history's top achievers in militant will-power.

2) The administration can pursue a more constructive alternative to bombing the north by trying to reconstruct the south. This will still involve casualties but at less risk of world war and with a chance of somewhat diminishing the international odium we have brought upon ourselves. While our barbarity merely rouses fear and hatred that we can learn to live with, our psychological miscalculation seems stupid. Stupidity in a leader arouses distrust in followers all around the world.

It is still not inevitable that the administration take us down the drain wrapped in the flag. You can write to your Congressman and Senators and to your home-town newspaper editor. Whatever your view, this particular Reading Period seems like a good time to express it. John K. Fairbank '29   Director   East Asian Research Ctr.