Robert Kennedy
and his brother had chosen the two chief
cabinet members Johnson entrusted with
administering the war in Vietnam, Secre-
tary of State Rusk and the recently re-
tired Secretary of Defense McNamara. At
the news conference announcing his can-
didacy, Kennedy told reporters that he
favored stopping the bombing of North
Vietnam to get negotiations started. But
he added that "if the negotiations are un-
successful or if they use that period of
time in a way adverse to our military |
forces there, then I think that we can
take retaliatory action."
At the same time both men are run-
ning on a platform of seeking to extri-
cate the United States from the bloody
mess in Vietnam. Kennedy declared that
the only way to dispose of Johnson's
"disastrous, divisive" policies was to
change "the men who are now making them."
Although the "dump-Johnson" drive
has picked up steam, it will not easily
attain its objective. The ruling class
has two ways of doing this within the
framework of the two-party system. One
would be for Kennedy to take the nomina-
tion from Johnson next August (McCarthy
is not so formidable a contestant). The
other would be for someone like Rockefel-
ler to beat Nixon for the Republican
nomination. Neither of these alternatives
is assured.
This uncertainty makes it possible
that, on top of the military, economic and
social crises that have spurred Kennedy,
McCarthy and Rockefeller to make their
bids as presidential nominees, a crisis
of political leadership for the American
ruling class may be added.
A number of public figures and news-
papers are saying that the country has not
confronted an emergency of this magnitude
Since the Great Depression and even since the Civil War.
This observation was confirmed by Fred Halstead, presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers party, at a press conference in New York March 11 (on his return from a nationwide speaking tour). He said that the surge of radicalism he encountered in the places he visited, and especially on the campuses, was already in some respects as strong as that of the 1930s. While it centers around opposition to the war in Vietnam, this radicalism extends to questioning the basic premises of American society today.
Kennedy and McCarthy have consciously undertaken the assignment of keeping this dissidence within the confines of the capitalist two-party setup and preventing it from engaging in or supporting what the senator from Minnesota calls "irregular political movements."
The purpose of the Socialist Workers party campaign, on the other hand, is to give the antiwar activists and young rebels a clear-cut anticapitalist alternative to all the upholders of the system responsible for the current crisis.
NOVOTNY