Stevenson's Monument
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
MR. JOHNSON came to Sunday having dis- patched Mr. Justice Arthur Goldberg as Adlai Stevenson's successor—Ambassador to the United Nations—and then having sat down with his captains to repair our misfortunes in Vietnam.
So it had been a week neatly balancing hawks and doves. The consequences in Vietnam could be guessed at and no plausible guess was very comfortable. The President remains unhappy over complaints that his massive action in Santo Domingo was hasty; it seemed likely that his response in South-East Asia would end up being massive if only because he was taking such care that no one could object to it for being hasty. It is also true that he has tried dubious remedies and they have failed so far and that it is an un- fortunate habit of high strategy to know no way to make a dubious remedy a secure one except by tripling the dose.
Still, there is the appointment of Mr. Justice Goldberg, probably no more than an act of high defereflice to Mr. Stevenson's ghost but just pos- sibly an indication of a fundamental change in the President's approach to peacemaking.
It is hardly a month since the image of Presi- dent Johnson appeared at the United Nations anniversary session in San Francisco and his every syllable was heavy with his boredom with the subject. A month ago, the UN was a force of minimal authority in Washington. Ambassador Stevenson was doing Washington's best to keep the Dominican situation unencumbered by the UN's feeble essays at control; and we were thoroughly suspicious of any good offices it might tender in Vietnam.
Then 'Mr. Stevenson died. The President's hauteur melted as suddenly into overmastering sentiment; we were reminded again that we have here a force as elemental as the weather—with its Phases of heat and cold as easy to recognise and its storms and suns as hard to predict. For five days, the never-ending ceremony of his office was consumed in mourning for his departed Ambas- sador to the United Nations. The UN itself seems to have been raised immensely in the President's esteem by its mere association with Governor Stevenson. We could begin to suspect, risky as it Was to try and predict the elements, that in death Mr. Stevenson would be able to get the Presi- dent to do things he seems to have exhausted him- self trying to get done in life.
First of all, our mission to the United Nations Could no longer be the refuge to which the Presi- dent promoted exemplary foreign officers or through which he disposed of respectable, unem- ployed politicians. It has become instead a post to which are raised those for whom no other pro- tnotion is possible short of the White House itself; only a Supreme Court Justice seems worthy in the President's eyes of taking the place of Adlai Stevenson. And Arthur Goldberg is a special sort of Supreme Court Justice. As a lawyer, he was a splendid advocate for organised labour; but he was unique as a remarkably subtle and detached negotiator.
Americans do not often think of the UN as a Place to negotiate; we see it as a forum where our Way of life debates the Russian one. The Mr. Johnson we have known is American to the ex- treme; and the public Ambassador Stevenson he commanded was most conspicuous as a debater. That seems to have been in, fact Governor Stevenson's prime complaint during his tenure there; he had begun with the hope of being a negotiator; he ended mainly as an advocate. Mos- cow can be blamed for some of this; but Wash- ington can be blamed as much.
The President could hardly have persuaded Justice Goldberg to leave the Supreme Court for no more consequential task than the delivery of sPeeches to a televised forum. His is too active a temperament to be entirely content with the bench; but he could only have been seduced away from it by the promise of activity of the kind which most satisfies his nature, that is, the effort to reconcile what had until now been assumed to be irreconcilable. He first made his mark on our society as the chief bargainer for the steel workers' union and he was the major factor In the decision of the union and its employers to abide peaceably together. His appointment, then,
can be taken as an announcement that suddenly the President sees the United Nations not as the handiest arena in which to quarrel, but as the best place in which to bargain. 'Justice Goldberg either comes with the intention of settling as many of our disputes as can be settled, or, being Justice Goldberg, it is unlikely that he would have come at all. The General Assembly can ex- pect to return to its labours, and the United Nations will have the money which Adlai Stevenson seems to have tried so vainly to per- suade the President to grant it.
Could it be supposed that these events can be explained in terms of the President's sense of guilt, which, when it breaks forth, would have to be as elemental as his rages or benevolences? All of us—and he hardly the least—must have felt in the last week our part in the waste of the precious national resource we now know Adlai Stevenson was. Mr. Johnson has our national faults and virtues in larger size than common. Suddenly nothing is too good for the United Nations; it has become sacred to him as Adlai Stevenson's monument.
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