Fulbright Sees Erosion Of Democracy

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31994, 22 May 1969, Page 15

Fulbright Sees Erosion Of Democracy

f.V.Z. Preu Ann.—CopvrightJ WASHINGTON, May 20. Senator J. W. Fulbright argued yesterday that the nation’s far-flung military commitments were eroding the democratic process and leading the Government down the road to authoritarianism, the New York Times News Service reported. c The Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Gelations Committee told the student body of the National War College, composed of the elite uf the military, that the military had acquired “inordinate” influence, with the result that democratic values of the society were being “subThe Defence Department, he said, ‘"has become a vigorous partisan in our politics, exerting great influences on

I the President, on the military committees of the Congress, ’ on the ‘think tanks and universities to which it parcels out lucrative research contracts, and on public i opinion.” 1 At the same time, he said, : “millions of Americans” had acquired “a vested interest in 1 an economy geared to war.” In large measure, however, .Senator Fulbright’s indictment was dircted not so much at the Pentagon as at the whole trend of United States foreign policy since World War 11, with its reliance upon “the threat or the use of force” abroad. “Quite as inevitably as if it were deliberate,” he said, “our imperial role in the world has generated a trend toward authoritarian government.” What has happened, he contended, was that foreign policy had become “an end in itself,” instead of “an istrument toward the central, dominating goal of securing democratic values within our society.” The political cost, he said, “is reflected in the steady!

concentration of power in the hands of the national executive, In a long-term trend toward authoritarian government.” The moral cost, he said, “is reflected in the unhappiness of the American people, most particularly in the angry alienation of our youth.” And the economic cost, he continued, was reflected in “the disparity of almost 10 to one between Federal military expenditures since World War II and the regular national budgetary expenditures for education, welfare, health and housing." Contending that “a foreign policy of chronic warfare and intervention has its own irreversible dynamic” toward authoritarian government, Mr Fulbright made the “fairly confident prediction” that “if American democracy is destroyed within the next generation, it will not be destroyed by the Russians or the Chinese, but by ourselves, by the very means we use to defend it.’ ’ “We cannot, except in the most exceptional circumstances, allow foreign policy to take priority over domestic and constitutional requirements,” Senator Fulbright said. I The Senator said that given

a choice between using force with efficient emergency procedures or cumbersome democratic procedures, the United States should “gamble on the latter—-in full consciousness of the possibility that our democratic procedures may cost us embarrassment or worse in our foreign policy.” The United States made the wrong choice in Vietnam, by involvement in the abortive Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion and by intervening in the Dominican Republic, he said, adding: “We have perceived more menace in the world around us than is actually there. “Until the war in Vietnam is ended, there can be no prospect of the nation’s more sober and generous instincts reasserting themselves, no prospect of a renewal of the nation’s strength at its vital domestic source,” he said. Senator Fulbright criticised military commitments to foreign countries by past administrations without Congressional approval, as required by the Constitution.

As an example, he said the presence in Thailand of 50,000 United States troops “assigned there by the Johnson Administration acting entirely on its own authority, creates a de facto commitment [to Thailand] going far beyond the S.E.A.T.O. treaty.” A resolution by Senator Fulbright attempting to reassert the Senate’s role in foreign policy moves by the Administration is expected to go before the full Senate within 10 days. The resolution declares that a national commitment by the United States to a foreign Power requires a treaty or other legislation specifically designed to extend such a commitment.