The Presidency: More Light, Less Heat

THE PRESIDENCY

It has become a truism in the U.S. today that the public is confused and uneasy over the war in Viet Nam. The disquiet results in part from President Johnson's failure to justify the conflict in terms that Americans can readily understand and believe. But if there has been too little enlightenment from the top, there has been too much obfuscation from the nation's academic and intellectual communities, whose present chorus of dissent has reached a volume unparalleled since the antiwar diatribes of the '30s.

Last week at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Government and International Affairs, Lyndon Johnson, venerably capped and gowned for the occasion, made a determined attempt to enlist the support of academe. At the same time, he delivered a few more oblique shafts at his chief tormentor, Senator William Fulbright, a whilom hero of the intellectuals.

"Cool It." In a low-key speech before an audience of 2,000, the President discussed the role of the intellectual in the complex society of 1966. He argued equably that dedicated men of education must indeed search for the truth but must also understand that if the truth does not conform with their opinions, truth itself is not altered. Said Johnson: "More than one scholar has learned how deeply frustrating it is to try to bring purist approaches to a highly impure problem. They have learned that criticism is one thing, diplomacy another. They have learned to fear dogmatism in the classroom as well as in the capital."

On the other hand, he continued, in a thinly veiled critique of Fulbright's power-is-arrogance thesis: "Strident emotionalism in the pursuit of truth, no matter how disguised in the language of wisdom, is harmful to public policy —just as harmful as self-righteousness in the application of power. The responsible intellectual who moves between his campus and Washington knows above all that his task is, in the language of the current generation, 'to cool it'—to bring what my generation called 'not heat but light' to public affairs."

"Recklessly, Never." For the U.S., the President declared, "the exercise of power in this century has meant not arrogance but agony. We have used our power not willingly and recklessly ever, but always reluctantly and with restraint. The aims for which we struggle are aims which, in the ordinary course of affairs, men of the intellectual world applaud and serve: the principle of choice over coercion, the defense of the weak against the strong and aggressive, the right of a young and frail nation to develop free from the interference of her neighbors."