SCHOLARS ON ASIA

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

We write to express our dismay at the recent statement of fourteen "leading scholars," including two from Harvard, about American policies in Asia. To see Professor Handlin's signature on this document was hardly surprising, as his position on the war is well known; we were surprised only to find that he has now been elevated to the rank of "Asian scholar"--at least in the eyes of the New York Times. The case of Professor Reischauer, however, troubles us more deeply. It is true that the statement warns that not all its signers accept all its provisions. Still, Professor Reischauer has lent his considerable prestige to a position that seems to us radically inconsistent with the views that he was endorsing only a few weeks ago as a sponsor of the petition of the Ad Hoc Committee on Vietnam.

The petition, in support of which Professor Reischauer addressed a letter to his colleagues on the Faculty, declares that "the earliest possible achievement of a negotiated settlement should be a primary objective of American policy in Vietnam." The wording here is deliberately ambiguous. Our own position is that there is little to negotiate except immediate American withdrawal and perhaps reparations to the Vietnamese people. We never expected Professor Reischauer to espouse this particular interpretation, but we did believe that he was sincere in his plea for some kind of negotiated settlement. Thus we find it difficult to understand how he could sign his name to a lengthy statement on Vietnam that, as printed in the New York Times, does not once mention negotiations. Here in Cambridge he declares that an early negotiated settlement must be a first objective; transported to Tuxedo Park, N.Y., he discovers that, "the strengthening of the South Vietnamese military and police forces must receive top priority."

The Ad Hoc Committee's petition also urges de-escalation of the war. On this matter Professor Reischauer's in-consistency is somewhat less blatant, for the scholars' statement does include a suggestion that U.S. policy ought to "show a capacity for innovation of a de-escalatory nature." But Reischauer and friends are quick to reassure us that "such steps need not--indeed, should not--be massive." In fact, the only specific recommendation in the statement is that "an increasing emphasis must be placed upon 'seize and hold,' rather than 'search and destroy' operations." One wonders whether Professor Reischauer really believes that such "de-escalation" would constitute the kind of "serious and sustained effort...to reach a negotiated settlement" that the Ad Hoc Committee's petition demands. Indeed, in context it appears that the scholars are recommending this small gesture not in the hope of thereby bringing the war to a speedier end, but rather as a token concession to mollify the anti-war movement here at home: "Nothing would do more to strengthen American support for our basic position," they write, than modest de-escalation.

Finally, the Ad Hoc Committee's petition calls for the participation of the National Liberation Front in the future government of South Vietnam, while the Tuxedo Park delegation does not so much as hint at this possibility. The phrasing of the statement, in fact, leads one to suspect that in the eyes of its signers, communism is the worst of all evils, the elimination of which justifies almost any amount of cruelty: "putting the matter succinctly," they applaud American policy in Southeast Asia for having "bought time for some 200 million people to develop without their being ceaselessly confronted with combined external-internal Communist threats of growing proportions." There is not the slightest suggestion that the Vietnamese people might just possibly prefer the NLF to the rule of Marshal Ky and his cronies and to the wholesale destruction of their country. Such simplistic treatment of the Southeast Asian national liberation movements is paradoxical in a statement that condemns the mass media for "inducing the fears and stereotypes that inhibit rational thought." To take the signers of the statement at their own word, "Let us cease defining and defending American foreign policy in grossly oversimplified terms."

We were also puzzled by the scholars' "feeling that the moderate segment of the academic community must now be heard, lest other voices be mistaken for the majority sentiment." The implication--that those who are deeply dissatisfied with American policies in Asia are only a minority--is clearly untrue, at least in this part of the academic community; to prove it untrue was precisely the purpose of the Ad Hoc Committee on Vietnam. We find it ironic that Professor Reischauer should be endorsing such statements in one place while attempting to disprove them in another. Besides, even if the contention were true, repeating it would not contribute much to the public dialogue: as even the eminently moderate New York Times (Dec. 27, 1967) felt constrained to point out in response to the statement, to attack the views of a minority, instead of facing the issues squarely, is to "take the easy route, much traveled by the Administration."

In the petition Reischauer argues that the Administration's conduct of the war has not been sufficiently directed toward the earliest possible attainment of a peaceful settlement. In the Tuxedo Park statement, he and his colleagues declare that the American record in Asia is "a remarkably good one, worthy of support"--one "of which we can be proud." If Reischauer is indeed proud of a policy that by his own admission has not done everything possible to end a war that is costing hundreds of lives every week, then his values are very different from our own and from those that would prevail, we would assume, in any decent democratic society.

Henry Norr '68

Member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Vietnam

Barrington Moore Jr.

Lecturer in Sociology