In Defense of Criticism

On May 10 the New York Times carried a paid advertisement in which over seventy scholars from the Boston area urged a re-evaluation of the Government's Cuban policy. The petition, constructed as an open letter to President Kennedy, was signed by Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Lillian Hellman, Harry Levin, Norbert Wiener, Reuben Brower, Albert Guerard, David Owen, Morton White and Eric Bentley, among others. It called for an attempt to "detach the Castro regime from the Communist bloc by working for a diplomatic detente and a resumption of trade relations."

Although Massachusetts Avenue may be a far cry from Madison Avenue, the New York executives have never generated such excitement as the intellectuals with their cramped half-page of copy, buried on page forty-eight. First to express outrage and suspicion (an interesting combination), was the Hearst chain; and with various shades of anger, the rest of the national press followed suit.

The Boston Record devoted a syndicated series to the document. The first article revealed in slightly sensational terms that the seventy-odd professors who signed the statement had not, indeed, participated in drafting it! Credit must certainly go to the Record reporter who conceived this original angle for maligning the petition, which had never (nor has any petition ever) been set forth as the joint literary offspring of its signers.

The Hearst series went on to attack the small (but disciplined) band of young men responsible for writing the statement, and to announce: "Red hue seen in Cuba peace plea." Meanwhile, the New York Times' sober analyst Arthur Krock, based his attack not on innuendo, but on his own concept of the pertinent facts.

Krock unrolled one version of the Monroe Doctrine as he dismissed the charge that "the determination to isolate Cuba made the Soviet bloc Castro's only source of military and economic support." His fundamental point cites Castro's aggressively anti-U.S. posture, and the fact that he "accepted aid from outside the American continent for purposes clearly in violation of the Resolution of Caracas."

In the following paragraph, however, Krock observes "that by training, equipping and transporting the anti-Castro rebels, the United States violated Article 15, and perhaps to a degree (sic!) the Caracas Resolution requirement of prior consultation. But Castro's acts, only a few of which are enumerated above, pose the open threat of the establishment in this hemisphere..." In other words, no matter how clearly threatened Cuba may have been (and after all, they were invaded after the press spoon-fed the American public an image of Castro-the-maniac who was stirring up fears of an imminent invasion from the North simply as a means of retaining popularity) Castro had no right to import Soviet arms. Yet Krock maintains that any threat, whether clear, present, potential, or imaginary, grants the U.S. the right to break treaty agreements with impunity.

The Professors' petition, couched in explicitly anti-Communist terms, deplores the demise of civil liberties in Cuba, and suggests that the most efficacious means of precluding Communist advance in this hemisphere would be the development of alternate channels for the social change that almost seems overdue throughout Latin America. That this throughtfully conceived proposal should have drawn blood in the frightening way it has, says little for a press supposedly concerned over national security. The red-baiting, the guilt by accusation, and the cries of appeasement have not done much to advance a desperately needed discussion of a life-and-death issue.

The irrefragable facts seem to support the Professors' contention that American foreign policy created its own self-fulfilling prophesy. By blanching at the prospect of some form of socialistic organization in Cuba, this country was partially responsible for polarizing the situation and contributing to the surge of totalitarian socialism there. We who believe in the justice of competition were afraid of creating a competitive Revolution, a form of progress that could call the lie on "inevitable" Communist patterns.

As the recent attacks have proven, those faculty members who questioned the efficiency of the big stick are courageous individuals. The attacks on them, particularly those in the name of national security, show not only how difficult but how necessary it is to challenge ossified assumptions.