Foreign Relations: On the Couch

As one of the few hawks present and participating, Iowa's Senator Bourke Hickenlooper was befuddled. "I am not going to ask any more questions," he admitted after several moments of groping for what he called a "handle." "I don't know quite what to ask you." Alabama's John Sparkman was even more to the point. "I find myself pretty removed from this discussion," he announced—and soon proved it by falling asleep, his horn-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose.

In fact, the only member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who seemed to enjoy what was going on was Chairman William Fulbright. Which was understandable, since the three experts invited to testify at his marathon foreign-policy hearings were his personal choices. The mission of the three-two psychiatrists and a psychologist—was one of the oddest in years: to put U.S. foreign policy on the analyst's couch.

Dual Delusion. All three, naturally, were critical of U.S. policy in Viet Nam —but in terms that were either so abstract or so oversimplified that the hawks were scarcely ruffled and the doves not much comforted. Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist Jerome Frank pointed out the truism that nations in conflict tend to ascribe the noblest of motives to themselves, the worst of intentions to their enemies. This dual delusion, he said, has given the war in Viet Nam "an ideological character similar to the holy wars of former times." In such a conflict, punishment has "particularly little likelihood of success." The notion, he added, that one can "cause people to abandon their ideologies by inflicting pain on them should have died in Rome with the Christian martyrs."

Arguing against further escalation, University of Illinois Psychologist Charles Osgood declared that "an opponent can be bombed into surrender or even into nonexistence, but he cannot be bombed into honest negotiations." Up to a certain point, he said, escalation actually increases an opponent's resolve, and this "critical point" is difficult to predict.

Don't Be Gushy. Both Osgood and Frank agreed that Communist China's aggressive big mouth may be a result of its fear of American power—sheer "bluster and growl" to ward off a powerful competitor. Frank even suggested therapy. "In approaching a deeply suspicious person," he cautioned, "it does not pay to be too friendly. Since he is convinced that you mean him no good, he is prone to misinterpret an overly friendly manner as an effort to put something over on him. So a firm, reserved, but not unfriendly manner makes more headway than effusiveness." In many ways, Frank's description was a fair presentation of the present U.S. stance vis-a-vis Red China.