17 DECEMBER 1965, Page 7

The Public and Private Mr. Stevenson

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

AANOLD BEICHMAN has offered in these pages ,(December 3) a spirited and detailed argu- ment from the public record against Eric Severeid's assertion from private conversation that the late Ambassador Stevenson died tor- mented by the feeling that Hanoi had made a serious peace offer for South Vietnam which had been summarily rejected by Washington.

Mr. Beichman reminds us that last February 27, just after U Thant had expressed his public unhappiness because the United States had dealt so cavalierly with the Hanoi peace feeler, Ambas- sador Stevenson had written to Ambassador Seydoux of France: 'My government awaits the first indication of any intent by the government in Hanoi to return to the ways of peace.'

Mr. Beichman says that anyone who reads these words and thinks that Ambassador Steven- son took Hanoi's offer seriously must believe 'what those who knew him cannot believe: namely that he would, willingly, on orders from high officials, compromise his intellectual honour when the issue involved war and peace.'

But the public record suggests that, on several occasions in his five years at the United Nations, Ambassador Stevenson could do and quite often did just that. All of us. to take a clearcut case, heard him insistently and with deplorable crudity defend our Dominican adventure in the Security Council last spring and summer; yet no one has bothered to dispute David Schoenbrun's recollec- tion of the evening they spent together in Paris last summer which Ambassador Stevenson filled with the bitterest sort of complaint to Under- Secretary of State Averell Harriman about the embarrassment he felt at that chore.

The quarrel over Mr. Stevenson's ghost arises, it would appear, from two serious misconceptions: Mr. Severeid does not seem to understand that a public man, in the America of the 'sixties, may very well.deceive himself in private conversation; and Mr. Beichman refuses to concede that the

same public man would deceive the rest of us in an official document. Mr. Stevenson would appear, in fact, most useful to our understanding of the nation he left behind him, not as a lonely prophet torn by interior quarrel, but rather as an example of the helpless condition of a stream of American liberalism running back to Woodrow Wilson. Mr. Stevenson delicately avoided em- bodying the notions of that liberalism, but it was his charm that he evoked them and that, at bottom, he believed most of them.

Those notions have taken many and contra- dictory forms in confrontation with the history of the world for the last forty years. But their controlling misapprehension arises from their conviction that the international problem is a struggle between the forces of light and the hosts of darkness. It has been liberalism's custom to welcome every stranger as a force of light and its fate to watch him turn grey almost at once. There was even a period in 1944 when Joseph Stalin seemed part of the forces of light, by 1948 he had darkened shockingly; and orthodox liberalism turned its hopes to the non-Communist left. In the real world, of course, this meant support of the military in its resistance to Com- munist expansion. But orthodox liberalism went on insisting that no long resistance would be possible except by support of alternative popular revolutions. In that spirit American liberals successively rejoiced in Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah, and even Fidel Castro for a very little while. We tend indeed to forget that the unfor- tunate Diem was, at the outset, a liberal inven- tion; his police force, in fact, was organised for him by sociologists from our own Michigan State University.

It was a mark of the immense authority with which the liberals began that, in 1946, General MacArthur could think of no one else to whom to turn when he was drawing a constitution for post-war Japan. But they were always dependent on the kindness of strangers like him; in the real world, they were without influence with the military and by 1950 they were losing whatever influence they had with the State Department. And, by now, they have a government which they overwhelmingly support; and it is a government which, after the experience of all the revolutions since 1945, so distrusts all future revolutions as to announce its principled opposition to wars of national liberation, Orthodox liberalism has, then, for fifteen years had no real hope except in the common sense of the President of the United States, beginning with General Eisenhower, and running through Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Ambassador Stevenson served those last two presidents; if he was not the exact image of the liberals, he was their fondest hope; and the degradation of his five years at the United Nations was an index of their condition.

There is gossip that Mr. Kennedy used to refer to Ambassador Stevenson as 'my official liar;' and, even though that is too cruel to be likely as a quotation, it is too near precision not to be accepted as a definition. The best thing that could be said for Ambassador Stevenson's contributions to the UN debate on the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the dispatch of American troops to the Dominican Republic, was that he was acting on a faith in his government he had in two of those three cases no possible reason to feel.

There is no artistic reason to doubt that, in private, he felt the way he talked to Mr. Severeid and the others. If he felt that way, it would seem to have been a far better part for him to resign rather than to struggle on to the death. The reasons why he did not can be found, 1 think, less in his own nature than in the character of orthodox liberalism in the United States. All the strengths and weaknesses of our liberalism are contained in the single attribute that it is respon- sible. Ambassador Stevenson did not leave government, then, because it was his fear that whoever took his place would be worse.

The very unease he felt every time he returned from Washington seems to have determined him the more to stay in its service. He thought him- self temperate where Mr. Johnson was rash; he seems indeed to have believed that, at any moment when Mr. Johnson thought himself un- loved, he would respond with some terrible act; Mr. Stevenson seems to have talked so often, in his private moments, about the dangers of the presidential temper and the duty of anyone with access to it to appease it. There was also the fact of that loneliness which has always frightened orthodox liberalism when it thought of voluntarily turning its back on power in America. To oppose alone is to be defeated alone, which seems far worse than to be defeated in company. No one, then, keeps his private face so carefully hidden in a public place as the American liberal does. He is not a man of the resistance; the conflict between the private Mr. Stevenson and the public Mr. Stevenson is a summation of the liberal's history. And the tragedy of Mr. Stevenson's last years is not that he was not listened to but that, for so many good reasons, he preferred not to speak and therefore forfeited the right to be heard.

I do not myself pay much attention to the recollections of what he said in private; what he thought it his duty to say in public rendered all else irrelevant.