A long war
President Johnson has been spending the last several months drumming up popular support for his Vietnamese war, using all the pleas to patriotism and calls to arms that his speechwriters can produce.
The American strategy now calls for United States forces to eliminate the large Viet Cong regular units, while the Saigon army moves against the estimated 110,000 irregulars.
NO ONE SUGGESTS that the war can be fought or won cheaply, and if present estimates are correct, current American casualty lists are only a short preface to those to come.
And to a large extent he has been successful. Congress gave overwhelming support for his policies this week, with only six votes opposing the $4.8 billion war expenditure. And, according to the Gallup poll, most Americans also support Johnson.
Meanwhile, hopes of successful negotiations appear to be slight. The administration shows itself to be strongly opposed to any coalition
BUT AT THE same time, people avoid thinking about how long the war could last, and how costly it could be. A recent article in the New York Times reported that American planners are considering a war lasting another three to seven years, with American casualties reaching a peak of 2,000 a month, including up to 500 dead.
The article also reported that while planners have rejected a proposal to invade North Viet Nam in order to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, no decision has been made yet on a proposed use of American ground forces in Laos, where the Air Force already operates.
government, although the Viet Cong could hardly be expected to ask for less than a share of the government.
Johnson is asking the country to fight a war that could last into the 1970's, and could be more costly than the Korean war, all in order to prop up a government so weak and so isolated from the people that to allow communists into it, would be like putting "a fox in a chicken coop," in the words of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.
AMERICANS DO express hope that sometime in the next few years of fighting, the Saigon government will reform. Great hope is expressed for the Political Action Teams, platoons of social reformers who are supposed to convince villagers to support Saigon.
But in South Viet Nam's decade of existence, hopes of social reform have come and gone with regularity, all while Viet Cong have extended their control. In South Viet Nam this month's hopeful reform is next month's dismal failure, and for the next few years each new failure will require a down payment of American dead.
A long and costly war for such a dubious goal as holding together a corrupt, inefficient and unsuccessful government cannot be supported, no matter how eloquent are President Johnson's appeals to patriotism.
If the price of American withdrawal with honor from South Viet Nam is recognizing the Viet Cong, and allowing them into a pre-election coalition government, it is a cheap price compared to the American alternative of another seven years of bloodshed.
—Justin Beck
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPU
books in review
Incredible Natty Bumppo revived
Allan Nevins has formed another singular service for American literature. Another, that is, that can be added to his great store of histories and biographies. As an old-time enthusiast of the American past he has taken those books of James Fenimore Cooper that deal with the incredible Natty Bumpo and edited them into a volume called The Leatherstocking Saga (Modern Library Giant, $3.95). It may get people to read Cooper again.
People, one might add, outside courses in American Literature and American Studies. People in those classes probably read "The Deerslayer" or "The Prairie" in their entirety. They can do it, understand, and they can enjoy it and profit from it. But most people will prefer the Allan Nevins edition.
WHAT IT IS, then, is the five novels (in the chronological sequence, not the sequence in which Cooper wrote them)—"The Deer-slayer," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Pathfinder," "The Pioneers" and "The Prairie"—emphasizing the sections pertaining to Natty Bumppo (otherwise
known by such monikers as "Pathfinder," "Deerslayer" and "Hawkeye"). It is a beautifully printed book, with illustrations by the splendid Reginald March. It deserves your strong consideration.
That's one of the new ones of the month. Next let us take a look at one by Richard Hofstadter called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage, $2.45). Already this one has received the 1964 Pulitzer prize in non-fiction. Some of you more scholarly types (who have ventured beyond "Candy") know Hofstadder for books on social Darwinism and the American political tradition. This new one is a sizable contribution to our intellectual history in another field.
Hofstadter finds the anti-intellectual vein running deep and constant through our history. Not just in Jacksonian times, either, though it was on the surface then. Certainly today, too: the victories of Eisenhower were related to this, and so was the whole nasty mess called McCarthyism. Our education, our science, our technology, our politics — all have
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been controlled in part by this strain.
NEXT ANOTHER scanning of a key manifestation of our past, as represented in Frederick Merk's Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Vintage, $1.95). This one appeared first in 1963. It is a reexamination of that mood of the 19th century (or is it still an American mood?) that led congressional, editorial, and other boasters to talk about the eagle spreading its wings from Maine to California and then shifting around and reaching from northern Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego.
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Merk does not believe that all of the American people were swept up in the nutty frenzy. He does believe, however, that Americans 100 years ago, as today, seemed convinced that their way of life was such that it should be implanted on the rest of the world as a shining model.
New in paperback is a book that is really a kind of curiosity, despite the fact that it appeared in large part in the New Yorker magazine awhile back. It is Ed-Mund Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois (Vintage, $1.95). Quite an anthropological analysis. There also is a short article by Joseph Mitchell about Mohawks who are structural steel workers.
A recent winner of the National Book Award also has reached paperback—Eleanor Clark's The Oysters of Locmariquier (Vintage, $1.65). It's about Brittany, and it has charm, geographical insights, and science. Many readers will find it of considerable interest. Also new is Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea philosophical reflections made this one vastly popular when it appeared more than a decade ago.
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Daily Kansan
editorial page
Friday, March 4, 1966
"HOW COME WE WEAKED FOUR HARD YEARS TO SEND YOU THRU COLLEGE AN YOU DON'T HAVE ANYONE TO SHOW FOR IT?"
a kansan review Rock Chalk full of sex, satire, and sass
Cavernous Hoch Auditorium last night, filled with only a part of its vast capacity, shook with song and dance as a picture of entertainment throughout U.S. history passed by upon the stage in "Rock Chalk Revue."
Full of sex, satire, and sass, the production jumped from a slow start to a rollicking pitch in no time at all. The young laughed, the old said, "Oh my, oh dear!", two hours passed, and the evening ended gratified.
LAURELS GO to "Joust a Little Beat—and Then?", presented by Gamma Phi Beta and Beta Theta Pi. The skit traces the history of the College Male and Female, through medieval times, to the melodramatic era of the 18th century, and to the causes of the contemporary coffeehouse.
"Joust" is well-written and plays smoothly. Jokes are generally off-color ("Then he lays her on the saw mill") and hilarious.
The Roaring Twenties at KU, as depicted by Chi Omega and Alpha Kappa Lambda, hit the comic spot. A battle rages between the TNE's wild, wild ways and the scholarly AWS (Always Worshipipping Scholarship).
THE FREE-WHEELING, hip grinding, short-skirted drunks proclaim the superiority of their education and the bookish owls of Salvation Army inclination retort with drum and cymbal.
Mama Mohammed and her Used Harem Lot captivated the audience in "Lunch," presented by Kappa Kappa Gamma and Sigma Chi. Mama Mohammed (she says she's really Jack Mitchell disguised as a football coach) tries to con the spastic soldiers of a desert outpost.
"Where There's a Will There's a Play," presented by Alpha Omicron Pi and McCollum Hall, is bright in a few spots, very murky in others. The skit is about Will Shakespeare coming down to earth to revise "Macbeth" into a swinging contemporary piece of television.
In general, the choreography is outstanding and fairly flowing in movement. However, some of the dancers, if they continue to prance, should take caution or they'll end up in the June Taylor dance company.
One unfortunate facet of the revue was the prominence of the old Kansas twang. On the street it is hard to notice but put a microphone in front of a Kansan and all of a sudden the speaker changes into a Gomer Pyle.
The Rock Chalk Revue continues tonight and tomorrow.
— Larry Ketchum
Humphrey defects
THERE IS NO QUESTION but what the Vietnamese National Liberation Front will have to be included in any peace negotiations. The NLF controls too much of the South Viet Nam countryside to be left out of the picture.
Sen. Robert Kennedy (among others) has pointed these simple facts out only to be severely criticized for his trouble. The criticism came—shock of shocks—from H. H. Humphrey, former leader of the Democratic Left, currently part of the Establishment's Propaganda Team.
Politics, as they say, makes strange beds, fellows.
Iowa State Daily