Briefing Session; 520; Is Democracy Obsolete. Part 2

Program 20 take one first picture five seconds from wall from Washington DC National Educational Television presents briefing session the facts behind the issues in the world today the funds for the production of this program have been provided equally by the AFL CIO and the National Educational Television and Radio Center your host the noted Washington correspondent of the American Broadcasting Company Edward P. Morgan welcome to another edition of briefing session the last actually in this

series in the last session and in this one we have been grappling with the question is democracy obsolete and the experts who helped us in the other session were as they are now Senator Hubert Humphrey Democrat of Minnesota and Majority Senate Whip and Professor Arthur Slazinger Jr. eminent Harvard historian and now a special assistant to President Kennedy I'm not going to waste a great deal of time recapitulating what we talked about last week but with your rights of veto preserve gentlemen I'm just going to briefly go over a couple of points my mind is not orderly enough that I can give them off the top of it I've had to write them down it seemed to me that the biggest point in the first session was a quotation of Winston Churchill made by Professor Slazinger which went roughly in this fashion the democracy obviously is the worst form of government except all the others this is a good thing to

keep in mind at second that bigness is not a sin particularly when it has to do with government because government has grown big in order not to gobble up or squeeze the citizen but to protect him from other forces and third and this is one near the end of the half-hour session that some of us people in the United States in all ranks of life have indeed been made smug by our material progress at large s and that we do indeed need better communication between the government and the people that whom it represents with that said gentlemen if you have nothing to add or subtract from that very sort of shall we say pinheaded summation I would like to go on to this the American revolutionary idea is one of the most dynamic I believe in history and yet we seem to have a great deal of difficulty in getting that idea across not only

to our own people but to people in other lands the ideal the dynamism of communism seems to have more of a swift impact why is that so will you tackle that senator well the first observation I would make that is that we haven't always lived up to our own ideal in our own country we have grave problems of human relations right here in our own nation of what we call civil rights problems or the abuses of civil rights I think we have to understand as a people that the fulfillment of the promise of democracy at home is in essence our best weapon for extending our influence abroad or to put it another way that you can't export something that you are short of and when you run a little short of democracy on your home grounds rather difficult to tell people in

South Vietnam and Korea in the Middle East that they ought to have social reforms and before we can help them when in fact there's a great need of social reform in our own midst then I would add to that the dynamism of our way of life or of our democracy requires that we give everyone an opportunity to participate within it this means as some people put it full employment it means expanded production it means higher goals of both economic and social activity we haven't done this we we have become somewhat willing to accept five or six million unemployed is this sort of a pattern that you have to live with I noted the other day where the Soviet Union is producing as much steel as we are I never thought I'd live to see that day the only reason this is the case is because they're producing over capacity and we're producing 40% under capacity now these are some of the reasons I think that our revolutionary spirit hasn't taken hold as well as it should I would like to add a particular

point which I think is important keep in mind and that is the great appeal of Marxism of communism to the world today here's essentially to the underdeveloped countries yeah communism doesn't have great appeal in countries in countries which have already industrialized actually it's diminished somewhat since the war has it not in the super in yes very much they what and the appeal of communism is not it's precisely as a as an instrument as a technique for economic and social modernization countries which have lived for centuries in squalor oblivion and depression see in Marxism a means by which they can get into the 20th century in a single leap I think that's right a whole question of the underdeveloped world the question for example of our programs of foreign aid are so critical for the whole future of the country because unless we can show that it's possible to achieve economic growth and social progress through democratic means there means consistent with movement toward in the democratic direction then we lose this great uncommitted part of

the world to communism because of the potency potent appeal of communism precisely as an instrument of development I want to pick up a point that Senator Humphrey made and ask you about it much less and there and that is this that we can't export something that we have in short supply meaning our beliefs our convictions in our own open free society does this mean Professor Slatinger that we have got to pause not for station identification or a commercial but to really reconvence ourselves of the value of the kind of government that we've got no I don't think so nor I'm sure Senator Humphrey doesn't mean that these are concurrent activities what is involved is a a renewal of our democratic faith and we don't get that by exhortations and slogans and rhetoric and by that by words we get that by deeds I think our foreign policy has been effective in this century our leadership has had

influence on the world when our activities abroad reflected our performance at home it was the men who've had such impact have been leaders like theodore Roosevelt Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and they got it because they earned the right to talk to the world in terms of of of splendid aspirations was Wilson's new freedom which validated his 14 points as it was Roosevelt's new deal which validated his four freedoms and when we go before the world and talk about equality of opportunity when we have in the background of Bill Rock and Montgomery when we talk about equality of about economic growth at a time when our own economy is lagging behind when in other words our performance at home undercuts our profession of raw then obviously no one's going to believe this it's only as our foreign policy expresses the visible realities of our of our performance at home that we're going to have impact in the world can I add something to this it all means it seems to me also that all

too often we fail to identify the message of our society of our country with the people that it ought to mean the most to in other words the Marxist the communist he keeps identifying himself with the poor with the with the needy with the hungry with the sick this is his line when in fact these are the very people whom they exploit all too often here we are a society that has been able to that has afforded more people the opportunity for the benefits of modern technology than any society in the history of mankind and yet we we downplay this to put it another way we are not identifying ourselves with the peasant or the farmer overseas we're not identifying ourselves with the working man need to organize or unorganized we fail to identify ourselves all too often with the student with the teacher with the university with the arts and the humanities we have constantly talked in America in terms of our foreign aid and many of our great national goals in terms of the high and the

mighty of industrialization of wealth we all too often deal with the privileged classes now I recognize that there has to be balance in this but it seems to me that we ought to interpret our democracy as being the the message of hope for the for the for the masses there's not just the message of opportunity and privilege for the few this is fine and I can't quarrel with either one of you on a single point of your of your past answers but both of you please answer me this how do we keep this large and wonderful and polygon society with all its tensions within itself how do we keep it at a high degree of shall we say intellectual responsibility so that we won't undercut ourselves as you said that we do sometimes and are in some degree doing now how do we how do we achieve what we haven't achieved enough we've got all of the technical qualifications we have the brains we have the material we have the communications

and so forth but we don't seem to be getting across to ourselves even as well as we should well we do it in the in the usual way that the free society is due to this that is through a combination of national leadership on the one hand and I mean put it this way national power ship on the other that is they we've elected a president in the congress the president of the congress are our commission in the sense to interpret and articulate our national aspirations they should do so in a way that it's convincing to the people and everyone in every community through the country who cares about the future of our nation has a responsibility on his or her part to carry out carry forward the information and the ideas and the interpretations required to have the kind of informed citizenry which is a basis for national policy I would hope that we were doing it in a tiny way ourselves right now and that

leads me to this point senator Humphrey is it possible that we have scared ourselves a little too much in terms of the toughness and the efficiency of the totalitarians well I I've often felt that sometimes we interpret these Russians to be 10 feet high when in fact they're ordinary men they're not giants but they are dedicated people that is their government and their society calls upon them to fulfill certain goals and objectives and I believe that it is fair to say that the the communist of today is a dedicated and dedicated person and a ferocious competitor I don't believe that we have frightened ourselves at all in one we try to we talk about it a little bit but I wonder if we're really frightened I think we might well ought to be you think we've been frightened of the wrong things well I think we tried to talk

ourselves into it without realizing just exactly as I tried to indicate the nature of the competition I think we have every reason to be deeply concerned and in a sense frightened but I would hope that we would do what we ought to do simply because it's the right thing to do and not merely because there's a communist or a Marxist or somebody else standing around frightening us into it I don't really believe that enough Americans take this challenge of the Soviet Union seriously I think they they are primarily concerned about the fact that the the Soviets have big armies and powerful weapons when in fact that is only part of the Soviet challenge their example of production their propaganda ability their ability to subvert all of these things surely should give us cause for concern and I think if we understand what we're up against we will do a whole lot better and this is where I go back to what Arthur Slesinger was saying it is right that a president in the Congress are elected and that they should give leadership but sometimes I wonder if the call to leadership is is broad enough if it's deep enough I wonder if we're really being alerted to

the as much as we ought to be alerted for example does the free world have any way of competing against Soviet dumping of economic goods we have none we have an organized any mechanism for it we don't even have in the free world today any kind of understanding how we'll compete against Soviet propaganda we haven't as yet in the free world decided to pool our efforts economically in terms of economic aid for the underdeveloped areas we're still operating somehow as if this whole thing we're going to fade away and that it was a bad dream this gets back in a larger measure to this question that I put to you both a while ago we were talking then about our our own American response but now you've broadened it quite properly into the response of the non-communist world as a whole we know or we think we know that these are sensible measures to take the unification of the Western European economic and hopefully political community and yet we don't take them we quarrel among ourselves we can't afford it and yet there we are what do we do to motivate that let's just let me go

I don't think there's any any mysterious magic formula which would be suddenly got hold of is going to transmute all the motives of men it's the usual way that any society operates which which relinquishes the brutality of coercion and command and that is through the process of persuasion and any kind of move like the unification of Europe is something that has to operate against a whole series of vested interests and the vested prejudices it takes time to dissolve those interests and prejudices and actually considerable progress has been made in the years since the war much more than one might have anticipated and moving in those directions yes I sometimes think that we shortchange ourselves on that we've talked incessantly and properly about the menace that we face in terms of a different kind of system the totalitarian system the the concept of angles and marks I assume you both would agree that even if that fell into the middle of the earth or went out to Venus and

stayed that we would still have a great deal of problems to solve internally and externally now this may sound like a little bit of Sunday supplement but I'm raising it anyway is it possible that as these African and Asian nations emerge and the great enigma of China comes out that what we're faced with is a Caucasian versus a colored challenge I would necessarily a challenge of political ideologies but a challenge of white versus brown black and yellow I would certainly not think so I think it'd be a great mistake to to construe the world conflict in any such terms as those I think the problem is is there all sorts of problems in the world but I think the direction in which the world is moving is not toward that of kind of of two-party conflict and the direction in which the world is moving is toward much more of a plural world a world of the multiplicity of nations and interests and I think one of the great development in the in the underdeveloped world is not toward the the

racist unity of Africa or Asia the great development under developed world is toward the freedom and independence of a whole series of separate new nations that I interpose there that it seems to me that this is the most important development within the last two to three years I mean it's come in the sharper focus it's always been here since the war the postwar period and the the communist Mr. Khrushchev and company are attempting to resist this very development Mr. Khrushchev has made it quite clear that insofar as he sees this world the way he would like it is a world more or less divided up between himself and the United States and which there are no neutrals in which there is no pluralistic society he'd like to divide it up that way because he thinks he can win the whole world that way and I say that one of the most encouraging developments at our foreign policy and in the understanding and the progress of free nations is the fact that we are now willing to recognize that so-called

neutralism is not the same that we accept a world in which there is a pluralistic society in which there are many customs and traditions and peoples and that we are seeking not to put it into either into one or two compartments or into a monolithic structure but rather into let it develop on its own and I think this is all to the advantage of what we seek namely freedom that's what our objective is not domination but freedom what you both seem to be saying to me is that we should look ahead to the development of the world not in in terms of the pigmentation of skin but in terms of a large collection of different kinds of neighborhoods some of them quite different from others and I suppose then that our problem is how best we can deal with these neighborhoods deal in the best sense we've got about ten minutes left to discuss it and I would like to to concentrate on your answers to begin with on how we could perfect our

approach to the other countries of the world so that we can prove to ourselves and to them that democracy as we understand it in terms of a free society is not indeed on the decline and obsolescent well the first step in this I think it's something that we shouldn't neglect is it just as we reject the notion of remaking the world in our image we equally reject the idea of the world being remade in the image of any other power and therefore the first thing that's necessary to preserve the capacity in other countries for development according to their own genius is to make sure that they remain independent and this means inevitably a military dimension in our effort an effort which will provide a shield behind which the constructive purposes of these nations have a chance to unfold I think that's an excellent point and I assume Senator that you agree with that I do I strongly agree but let me go one step further that I think that as long as we want to have a world in

which there can be independence of peoples and nations which can lead to their freedom and their full and their emancipation that we need a large of framework in which this independence can be preserved over and beyond just the the military shield that we can give to them and this is where I would come to the United Nations again and the important role which the UN is designed to serve and can fulfill now the Soviet understands that the United Nations is the milieu is the environment in which this mosaic of neighborhoods and of free people and independent nations can find a way of communicating and of developing in concert policies for their own betterment and therefore the Soviet is trying to interpose now this this massive veto their veto in other words if I can't have it my way we will destroy we will stop we'll stop all progress that seems to be the immediate design it's to our advantage it seems and when I say our I don't mean just the United States but I mean the advantage of people who

love and cherries freedom to have an instant an international frame of reference or an international environment in which these independent nations these neighborhoods that you speak of can grow can find communication can agree upon certain political economic and social developments and I I feel that the UN is just coming into its own many people have said well it's weakening it's been threatened it's been threatened at the most critical time of the history of new people I mean of new nations and that's why it's so very important that we not permit the United Nations to be eroded either in its strength or in its influence at the same time the United Nations has operated in these last months somewhat in a straight jacket in terms of its problems in the Congo and elsewhere and it's quite plain that the Soviet Union has been trying since Mr. Cruz Charles visit to the glasshouse on the East River last September trying

to emasculate its strength even more is it smart under those terms do you think Professor Slazinger to continue to use the UN not only as a symbol but as a machine as a piece of machinery to to get our foreign policy across I don't think you can make any general statement about that I think obviously the existence of the UN does not for a moment suspend the requirement of the part of the United States to have its own national policy the UN is one of the media through which that national policy is expressed as to when you use the machinery of the UN you use it when you think it's going to be effective there's no point in overburdening that machinery and thereby doing setting back the whole the whole cause of the United Nations now that brings us back somewhat to a question of of this nature we admit that we have great strength both both material and in terms of of minds is that strength enough and can we apply it with sufficient point to say that we can answer the

question is democracy obsolete in the negative well I want to say democracy is not obsolete I further say that we must as a democratic people conduct ourselves within the moral framework of our of our democratic institutions and please say we want to faithful to our own ideals and not try to imitate or ape this communist totalitarian and I feel furthermore that if if we even buy the contest with the Soviets we in a sense help ourselves and help others because we're bringing the Soviet into more and more economic contact with many areas of the world causing them to pour in some of their resources and some of their talent which if these areas of the world can be guarded from being gobbled up they both blossom all the more readily and all the more quickly so it isn't all bleak and isn't all dark well if that's the case then isn't it

true that we have got to talk much more candidly with ourselves and with each other in this country haven't we got to admit that we that we have got excesses in terms of prejudice in the racial area that we've got excesses in terms of extravagance in the expense account area perhaps that we simply can't afford if as I presume it is your answer is in the positive then what do we do how do we how do we fit ourselves into the framework that the president put eloquently I thought at his inaugural address in January about asking not what the country can do for you but what you can do for the country I think we one thing we must do is to understand that sacrifice is not a sort of dramatic one shot effort I think a lot of people think of sacrifice is something which is done in a moment of glorious excitement and preferably by someone else and does do not understand that in a peacetime democracy sacrifice

is a long irritating weary sustained commitment and when we when we understand that we will understand much better the the context in which we can do things for for our country getting back to this eloquent and pointed a churchillian comment about democracy being the worst except for all the others it just occurs to me this senator Humphrey isn't it possible that we have forgotten to remind ourselves that democracy is such a very difficult form of government because we all have got to take part in it yes it is the fact and may I add we ought to remind ourselves that this very delicate and yet vibrant force of democracy does not come quickly into new societies you have to earn democracy you can't superimpose it you don't paint it on with stencils it is something that must have deep roots it must literally come from

the social fabric and the understanding and the experience of people this is why some of us have said that we start the development of democracy and some of the emerging society is not so much by the superimposition of parliamentary government as we do maybe by a credit union a cooperative a trade union public education working working at it in the soil of the of humankind working at it at the at the grassroots I believe that we are going to have to recognize that we're going through a period of basic readjustment in the whole social structure of the world at his hours this is a this is a reformation it is a renaissance it is in a fact of 30 years a hundred years war we've gone through these things before and I would hope that we are prepared for the agony and the trouble and the prevail of a decade or a generation and not lose faith not to not to give up because there is hope if you keep at it professor

slicing or what do you answer when you get a letter at the White House as I'm sure you do from a from an earnest citizen who says I think the future looks very black and things may go down the drain I answer that in critical moments and civilization the future has always looked black but that nonetheless man going to survive and the only way in which we can defeat ourselves is to assume that our efforts aren't going to produce anything somehow gentlemen these two sessions on the question of his democracy obsolete has made history to me at least look a little less black and thank you both for your efforts if you would like a copy of this program please address a card to democracy briefing session box three five three six grand Central Station New York 17 New York I'll repeat that democracy briefing session box thirty five thirty six grand Central

Station New York 17 New York now that unfortunately brings us not only to the end of this program but to the end of the session of briefing sessions as a whole for now however we would very much appreciate hearing your views on the series as a whole thank you and goodbye briefing session was produced by Joel O'Brien associate producer Joan Seaver film supervisor Bill Buckley production coordinator Barbara Sherman our guest today were U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Professor Arthur Schmessinger Jr. special assistant to President Kennedy your host Edward P. Morgan of ABC and news analyst John McVane the funds for the production of this program have been provided equally by the AFL CIO and the National

Educational Television and Radio Center this is NET National Educational Television