ANOTHER SIDE OF RALPH McGILL

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Crimson's recent "profile" of Ralph McGill, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, is a true half-portrait. The full man, as any daily reader of his column can attest, looks rather different.

In particular, Mr. McGill's excellent stand on racial justice must be contrasted with his deplorable views on Vietnam. An insistent supporter of the administration's tragic policy in southeast Asia, McGill (as well as the Constitution's editorials) would make his fellow-Georgian, Dean Rusk, proud. He has often substituted ridicule for reason, and he regularly employs the notion of "reason" in a most curious fashion.

Mr. McGill's column last Saturday, entitled "The Fury of the Doves," is typical:

"In traveling about one's country one encounters some of the more extreme manifestations of the American peace cult, which is so hung up on the issue of Vietnam that many of its spokesmen will frankly admit they were hoping for a sound U.S. defeat or disaster in Southeast Asia.

"On many campuses in the United States, more especially, it seems, in the East, there are faculty members who continue to lead what amounts to evangelical campaigns urging students to turn in their draft cards and defy their government's Selective Service process. These men are, of course, well beyond the reach of the Selective Service Act. They speak from the safe sanctuary of age or physical impairments. The morality of their advice is highly questionable....

"It should have been obvious from the very beginning of Mr. Johnson's term that he more than any other man on the political scene wanted negotiations....Most Americans, as the polls consistently show, felt that the President was doing the best he could with a very complex problem. To have doubted that he and the Administration were not at all times pursuing the possibility of negotiations requires a state of mind that refuses to pay any attention to the realistic, inescapable logic in the situation...."

Is the point clear?... Yet in spite of these remarks Ralph McGill is invaluable, because the South needs his voice on civil rights. By the same token, however, Senator Fulbright, whom your "profile" writer permits Mr. McGill to criticize without rebuttal as a pathetic "sort of character with a great liberal reputation," is equally invaluable--obviously not because he votes against open housing legislation but because the nation needs his voice on foreign policy.

Ralph McGill and Senator Fulbright are faithful representatives of the South: the two men, as well as the region, suffer some kind of moral schizophrenia, though in the case of the publisher and the Senator, they represent this malady in opposite directions. They reflect the most unenviable aspects of the heritage of the political culture of the South. Jingoism and racism. Each man has been able to overcome one of these burdens in his public life, but not both.

If your "profile" were merely incomplete in failing to indicate the whole Ralph McGill, there would be little cause to object. But it fails at the same time to indicate the whole of the crucial ambiguities of southern leadership which Ralph McGill represents. It is this more fundamental problem that Crimson readers, as well as southerners, must be aware of if the South is ever to develop an integrated, constructive, and humane public morality. Charles A. Miller   Atlanta, Ga.