JOHNSON FOLLOWING IN FOOTSTEPS OF MIKADO?
_ [Owen Lattimore, at present a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds in England, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times (international edition of April 10-11), giving his views on the current situation in Vietnam. The letter, written the day after President Johnson's April 7 speech on.the reasons for his war on North Vietnam is of interest as a sample of enlightened liberal opinion.
[Lattimore, one of America's outstanding authorities. on China and Outer Mongolia, was singled out by the late Senator McCarthy as
one of his main targets in the great witch-hunt of the fifties, As a result, this intellectual, whose writings are of high order, al-= though not Marxist, was driven into semiretirement and his name, once often seen in the U.S. press in relation to problems of Asia, now appears but rarely.
[evidently as a precaution against the McCarthyites in the U.S., the editor of the New York Times, in publishing Lattimore's observations, identified him as ‘a former adviser to Chiang Kai~shek" but without specifying when this was. The text of Lattimore's letter follows. ]
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TO THE EDITOR:
The tragedy deepens. President Johnson's generosity and humanity carry conviction. But he has accepted the distorted policy of previous Administrations. Not a word to show that the people of North and South Vietnam are one people, fighting a civil war, though other nations are involved on both sides.
Instead we are told once more that Hanoi manipulates the Vietcong and Peking manipulates Hanoi. China is presented as the great menace looming behind Vietnam, as Japan once depicted Russia as the great menace looming behind China. Most fatal of all, America -is exhorted to accept the mission, once claimed by Japan, to impose order in China.
Our march toward doom recalls that of Japan in the 1930's, Then Japan's slogan was the co-prosperity sphere -- and co-prosperity was to be whatever Japan said it was. Today we proclaim a free world ~- and free is to be whatever we say is free.
Then Japan had set up in Manchuria a regime without popular support (though it fielded an army, under Japanese advisers), which Japan said represented the "kingly way." Today we act from behind a Government in South Vietnam which is without popular support, though it can line up some collaborators and can keep an army in the field, under American advisers. We say it represents the free world.
Then Japan would not permit reunion between Manchuria and the rest of China because Nanking was "not sincere" -- which meant that it would not knuckle under. Today we will not permit union between North and South Vietnam because Hanoi has not acknowledged that it has "got the message" ~- the message to knuckle under.
Then Japan was consolidating Chinese nationalism under a pressure that made sure that, in the end, nationalism under Commun-. ist leadership would triumph over nationalism without Communism. We are doing the same thing.
Then it was essential to the Japanese calculation that China and Russia would not be able to compose their differences, Today we have made that our own calculation.
Then the Japanese Government, armed forces and university experts had more hard-fact information about China than any other country. They kept assuring the world that they knew what they were doing, that they were saving not only China but the rest of Asia from Communism (the domino theory of those days), and that other countries ought to accept Japants judgment. But though the Japanese based their analysis on more known, tested, catalogued facts than anyone else could cite, they misunderstood what was going on and misjudged the essentials that make history.
It is the same with us today. We know the facts, we pile up the facts, we cite the facts, we turn on Kremlinologists and Pekinologists to expound the facts -- and yet we don't realize what's going on, we don't know what the score is. We are misjudging what goes into the making of history.
In the end, goaded by the failure of their creeping barrage of bombing and terror to numb the "lesser breeds without the law," the Japanese advanced to the final escalation. They bombed another country. Is that to be the end, or the beginning of the end, for America too?
Is the next Pearl Harbor to be an American bombing of China? Is that the meaning of the smooth, cold, authoritative, hypnotically evasive voices of McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and the imperfectly civilianized Gen. Maxwell Taylor?
One difference between Japan then and America now is that we are more free to protest. We must use that freedom. Between here and the Pacific Coast I have heard and read enough to know that many have been ahead of me in raising their voices and many of them are more influential than I.
But unless we all unite in a great outery of horror, repudiating this obsessed policy of doom, we shall not waken from the nightmare in time.
OWEN LATT IMORE
New York, April 8, 1965