The War: On the Subject of Arrogance

Senator J. William Fulbright is fortunate enough to have been spared the loneliness of combat, the overcolored dreams of love and liberty that help preserve men's sanity in the mind-gnawing dullness of war. And despite his obsession with South Viet Nam, Fulbright has yet to take in that scene or see for himself how his fellow Americans deport themselves there in battle and away from it. Still, the junior Senator from Arkansas last week pursued his "power-is-arrogance" thesis with the momentous intelligence that for the fighting man, nocturnal sports are not confined to pingpong.

"Both literally and figuratively," intoned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Saigon has become an American brothel." As Fulbright pictured the situation, citing a press report, "many Vietnamese find it necessary to put their wives or daughters to work as bar girls or peddle them to American soldiers as mistresses. It is not unusual to hear a report that a Vietnamese soldier has committed suicide out of shame because his wife has been working as a bar girl."

Tiring. Fulbright's Victorian vaporings over Viet Nam stirred an immediate and indignant rejoinder from a somewhat more sophisticated observer: Mrs. Oswald B. Lord, 61, a member of President Johnson's Committee on the Status of Women, freshly returned from a visit to Saigon. Noting that womanizing "goes on everywhere," including Washington, Mrs. Lord reported that she had seen plenty of off-duty G.I.s in Viet Nam not "in town with the bar girls" but out helping in orphanages and rehabilitation centers.

Fulbright's fulminations exhausted even the legendary patience of some of his Senate colleagues. In a floor speech, New York Republican Jacob Javits finally expostulated that when Fulbright alleges that U.S. policy grows out of an "arrogance of power," he "challenges the very foundations and motives of U.S. policy without offering viable alternatives."

The heaviest artillery trained on Fulbright came, not exactly as a surprise, from Barry Goldwater. Addressing 3,000 delegates to the annual Republican Women's Conference in Washington, Goldwater declared that "no American has the right or the justification" to describe his nation as "immoral, imperialistic and arrogant."

He added: "That goes double for doing it in time of war and in a fashion that lends support and aid and comfort to our enemies. I don't care whether the American is a misguided Vietnik or chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee." In fact, Goldwater continued, Fulbright's name "lends a phony official stature to his expressions of guilt that his country is militarily powerful enough to defend freedom."