Speaking up and Speaking Out

By Thomas L. Hughes

2014 will be the 50th anniversary of the landslide victory of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in the 1964 election. This collection of speeches by my husband, Thomas L. Hughes, displays one privileged insiders unusual role during LBJs five years in office. The political courage and literary merit of these speeches were highly praised the time. Their targeted distribution usually carried a not for publication restriction. Together they cover a variety of significant foreign policy topics from the 1964-69 years.After graduating from Carleton College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School, Tom served as Senator Humphreys Legislative Counsel in the Senate from 1955-59, when Johnson was Majority Leader. President Kennedy appointed him Director of Intelligence and Research in the State Department, and he remained in that position until the summer of 1969.
In fact Dean Rusk and Tom were the only presidential appointees to serve at State from the first day of Kennedys administration to the last day of Johnsons.
Because of his long Humphrey association, Tom was also regarded by many as the Vice Presidents man in the State Department. Thus some of these speech themes were inevitably perceived, rightly or wrongly, as examples of what the Vice President himself might be thinking, if he were not obliged to toe the official line on controversial issues like Vietnam, China, and Latin America. What is unique about the speeches is that their various themes were topics deliberately chosen to influence policymakers inside the government, as well as observers outside (hence Speaking Up and Speaking Out.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483680347

Thomas L. Hughes

Thomas L. Hughes, a Minnesota native, graduated from Carleton College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School. After two years as an Air Force offi cer, he was an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill—fi rst to Senator (later Vice President) Hubert Humphrey (1955-58) and then to Congressman (later Under Secretary of State and Ambassador) Chester Bowles (1959-60.) Appointed by President Kennedy as Director (Assistant Secretary) of Intelligence and Research, Hughes remained in that post through the Johnson administration. After serving as Minister and DCM in the American Embassy in London (1969-70), Hughes became President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1971-91). He continues to serve on foundation and academic boards.

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Rev. date: 08/20/2013

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Contents

Preface by Jane Casey Hughes

I . Adjusting To The New Revolutionary Era

II . A New Year Of New Governments

III . Scholars And Foreign Policy: Varities Of Research Experience

IV . The World Looks At China

V . The World Turned Upside Down

VI . Relativity In Foreign Policy; The Storage And Retrieval Of Conviction

VII . Whose Century?

VIII . The Odyssey Of Counter Insurgency

IX . Democracy, Diversity, And The Future Foreign Service

X . Expecting The Main Things From You

XI . Thoughts On The Causes Of Our Present Discontents

XII . The Fate Of Facts In A World Of Men

XIII . Butcher, Baker, And Intellligence Maker

Tom Hughes would do particularly well (in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations) as the brilliant Director of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. Hughes was one of the few genuine intellectuals of the era, a funny, skeptical man…

David Halberstam,

The Best and the Brightest (1969)

SPEAKING UP AND SPEAKING OUT

Off-the-Record Speeches from 1964-9

by Thomas L. Hughes

Director of Intelligence and Research

Department of State

How an assistant secretary of state in the Johnson-Humphrey years repeatedly challenged audiences inside and outside the government to think more broadly, deeply, and creatively about foreign policy.

Preface by Jane Casey Hughes

2014 will be the 50th anniversary of the landslide victory of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in the 1964 election. This collection of speeches by my husband, Thomas L. Hughes, displays one privileged insider’s unusual role during LBJ’s five years in office. The political courage and literary merit of these speeches were highly praised the time. Their targeted distribution usually carried a not for publication restriction. Together they cover a variety of significant foreign policy topics from the 1964-69 years.

After graduating from Carleton College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School, Tom served as Senator Humphrey’s Legislative Counsel in the Senate from 1955-59, when Johnson was Majority Leader. President Kennedy appointed him Director of Intelligence and Research in the State Department, and he remained in that position until the summer of 1969. In fact Dean Rusk and Tom were the only presidential appointees to serve at State from the first day of Kennedy’s administration to the last day of Johnson’s.

Because of his long Humphrey association, Tom was also regarded by many as the Vice President’s man in the State Department. Thus some of these speech themes were inevitably perceived, rightly or wrongly, as examples of what the Vice President himself might be thinking, if he were not obliged to toe the official line on controversial issues like Vietnam, China, and Latin America.

What is unique about the speeches is that their various themes were topics deliberately chosen to influence policymakers inside the government, as well as observers outside (hence Speaking Up and Speaking Out.) They covered a wide variety of topics. But each of them had a particular purpose—to urge both officials and outsiders to expand their outlooks, to put a more generous cast upon policies being attacked, or to soft-pedal or even reverse policies that needed change.

Tom deliberately tried to use his academic, legal, military, and political credentials to expand connections and build bridges for the administration to a variety of communities outside the government, reaching well beyond his official State Department responsibilities. His speeches in many ways anticipated fundamental foreign policy problems of the ensuing decades and foreshadowed developments that have emerged with greater intensity today. Thus they resonate with considerably more than an historic interest.

Precisely because Tom held a prominent position, and was writing and speaking from inside the executive branch, the candor of his speeches attracted considerable attention from those on the State Department’s address lists. Tom’s personal files are filled with written reactions from well-known personalities of the ’60s. To add flavor in each case, I have selected a half dozen sample comments written at the time. They can be found following the text of each speech:

1. Adjusting to the New Revolutionary Era (1964). Comments by Norman Cousins, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, James King, Roderick MacLeish, and Carl Rowan.

2. A New Year of New Governments (1964). Comments by Frank Church, Allen Dulles, Fred Dutton, Tom Morgan, Myer Rashish, and Berndt von Staden.

3. Scholars and Foreign Policy (1965). Comments by Robert Barnett, Marshall Carter, Robert Murphy, William Nagle, David Willis, and James Wright

4. The World Looks at China (1965). Comments by David Bruce, Harlan Cleveland, Charles Cross, Eugene Krizek, Ted Sorensen, and Jack Thomas.

5. The World Turned Upside Down (1966). Comments by Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Niles Bond, Karl Harr, Henry Kissinger, and Henry Wriston.

6. Relativity and Foreign Policy: The Storage and Retrieval of Conviction (1966). Comments by McGeorge Bundy, Tom Ehrlich,

Dick Goodwin, Bayless Manning, Arthur Schlesinger, and Allen Whiting.

7. Whose Century? (1967). Comments by Henry Gemmill, Livingston Merchant, Robert Miner, Victor Reuther, Dean Rusk, and Warner Schilling.

8. The Odyssey of Counter-Insurgency (1967). Comments by Charles Bolte, Ellis Briggs, Andrew Goodpaster, Joseph Green, Howard Jones, and George Kennan.

9. Democracy, Diversity, and the Future Foreign Service (1967). Comments by David Fromkin, John Goormaghtigh, Foy Kohler, John Nason, Francis Sayre, and Bill Wirtz.

10. Expecting the Main Things From You (1968). Comments by David Broder, Catherine May, Robert McNamara, Hans Morgenthau, Steven Schwebel, and John Sturc.

11. Thoughts on the Causes of our Present Discontents (1969). Comments by Alistair Cooke, Max Frankel, Anthony Lewis, Ernest May, Pat Moynihan, and B. K. Nehru.

12. & 13. The Fate of Facts in a World of Men (1969). Comments on the two speeches by Robert Eichholz, Roger Fisher, Erwin Griswold, Gil Harrison, J. C. Hurewitz, Max Kampelman, Bill Leonhart, Clare Booth Luce, Ian Macfarlane, Raymond Platig, Peter Ramsbothom, and Stansfield Turner

These speeches will be of greatest interest today to sophisticated audiences in the fields of history, politics, international relations, national security, law, and bureaucratic enterprise. To Washington insiders they should demonstrate that there was an important voice inside the Johnson administration that warned early on against escalating in Vietnam, hoping too much from counter-insurgency, risking war with China, and militarizing intelligence—and that alerted his listeners as well about the risks in Pentagon-academic relations, the cultural divisions among foreign policymakers, and even potential philosophical disorientations in the Foreign Service.

August, 2013 Jane Casey Hughes

(The context: This speech was delivered before an assembly of high-ranking Latin American military commanders. A military coup had toppled Goulart in Brazil two months earlier, Panama itself was in turmoil. and the crisis in the Dominican Republic was just ahead. TLH was a Kennedy appointee who had been retained in the Johnson Administration. Despite LBJ’s obvious swerve to the right on hemisphere issues during his first seven months as president, this was a Kennedy-like speech with a liberal approach to the revolutionary situation in Latin America.)

*     *     *

I

Adjusting To The New

Revolutionary Era

Keynote Address by Thomas L. Hughes

Director of Intelligence and Research

Department of State

Conference of the Latin American Armed Forces

United States Southern Command

Panama Canal Zone

June 8, 1964

General O’Meara, distinguished officers of the armed forces of the Americas, and fellow citizens of the American Republics:

Any overview of the current international political situation is bound to consider the new complexities that are now evolving in the communist and non-communist worlds alike. I was asked to try to give you a glimpse of that new world as it is viewed from Washington.

Impressions of Diversity

It is, of course, undeniable that we are still confronted with an authoritarian communist ideology which seeks our destruction and which is inventive in pursuing it. But there are newer facts as well. There is the human fact of the revolution of rising expectations that is sweeping the southern continents. There is the psychological fact of Cold War battle fatigue. There is the physical fact that we are riding the crest of a revolution in science and technology. And there is the frustrating fact that all of this is occurring in a world of some 120 countries, with some 120 foreign policies, amid some 120 sets of national goals and appetites.

New forms of nationalism are expressing themselves, just when international organizations are both more plentiful and more necessary than ever before. In many parts of the world the psychological awkwardness of the contest continues between the communists, who say they will uproot the status quo, and the rest of us, who say that we don’t really favor the status quo actually.

Differing views of the world are seen from different national capitals—the big pictures and the little pictures blurring one another, as they overlap in the varying perspectives of Mexico City, Tokyo, Baghdad, Ottawa, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Saigon. In some parts of the world, old ideologies are dying. In other parts the assertion of new ideologies is a prime political fact.

Leaders, governments, and people, responding to their own political necessities and national needs, are moving ahead on different historical schedules. Internationally, there are no generally accepted political timetables. Many of us function daily in situations where political leaders are out of phase with one another. These asymmetries, incidentally, have a lot to do with the relevance that one nation’s military, scientific, technological, and economic experience has for other nations, even for its good friends and allies.

In Washington the illusion of American omnipotence is an illusion that we have long since overcome, if indeed it ever existed. Some people in the past have thought that we North Americans tended to look out on the world seeing only two kinds of people: Russians and potential manpower that we and the Russians might compete for. If that was ever true, those days also are gone. Thoughtful citizens of the United States increasingly understand that it is a rather honorable thing to find ourselves in an historical situation where we cannot save ourselves without helping others save themselves as well.

Two years ago the world was preoccupied with the threat of a nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR over Berlin and Cuba. Today, while we should never neglect the possibility that such a crisis might abruptly return, we nevertheless worry much more about crises where the US and the USSR are less directly involved—crises like Cyprus, Zanzibar, the Congo, and Kashmir, not to speak of Laos and South Vietnam, where the Kremlin claims to have little involvement or influence.

In a sense the tide of the Cold War has definitely turned. There is an unmistakable movement away from a bipolar confrontation of the superpowers toward a more diversified world. We are moving from a period of dangerously abnormal simplicity into a period of relatively normal complexity.

But freedom’s struggle against communism is far from over, and far from won. Indeed, to the extent that the communist threat and the danger of nuclear war once unified the free, non-communist world, our very success in completing Phase I of that struggle threatens to erode our unity for the new phase which has now begun. I should like to examine some of the problems posed by the decomposition of the bipolar world. This phenomenon is very much on our minds in Washington, and I suspect it is on the minds of your governments as well.

Containment: Its Success and Obsolescence

In the wake of World War II, the issue was stark and clear. We were directly and imminently threatened by Stalinist-directed expansionism. Hence our concept of containment was designed to muster the necessary strength to bar the way to communist aggression. While Moscow saw its historic mission as making over the world on a communist model, the United States and those who joined it in a series of defensive alliances set themselves the opposite goal. Our objective was not to force our institutions upon other countries, but to help preserve freedom of choice.

Broadly speaking, that policy of containment has both succeeded and become less relevant. The conspicuous forward motion of conventional communist armies has been stopped. Uniformed communist troops have not spilled in force over borders since June, 1950, in Korea.

The bedrock of containment has been the ability of the United States to deter any Soviet use of nuclear weapons. We have built a nuclear force that can withstand any Soviet attack and then retaliate with devastating effect. Polaris submarines, largely immune from enemy attack, have been deployed in the oceans around the U.S.S.R. The alert status of SAC bombers, both on the ground and airborne, has been further improved. U.S. intercontinental missiles, notably the solid-fueled, quick-reacting Minutemen, have been increasingly dispersed and hardened. This year we are spending about $8 billion more on defense than we were in 1960.

There can be no question today that our second strike capability is credible to the Soviets. They know as well as we do that the US Air Force has 540 strategic bombers on alert that could, in the face of a surprise missile attack, take off for their targets. In contrast we estimate that the Soviets could place over the United States on two-way missions, no more than approximately 120 heavy bombers, plus perhaps an additional 150 medium number over Alaska and our northwest. Today our Air Force has some 750 ICBMs on launchers. The Soviets have less than one-fourth that number. We have deployed 192 Polaris missiles. The Soviets have still fewer submarine-borne missiles in operation. Those they do have cannot be launched while the submarine remains submerged, and they have a range of less than a third of Polaris’s 150 miles.

Clearly a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union would have to be an irrational decision. No one can guarantee against that, but the likelihood of it keeps receding. We recognize that for the foreseeable future a major portion of our military expenditures will have to continue to be devoted to maintaining our strategic advantage. But the largest items in our mammoth defense budget are consciously being appropriated in the profound hope that the weapons systems which they finance will never be used. Thus our national leaders in both political parties remain willing to cope with the domestic problems of spending billion of dollars on missiles, which, if our policies are successful, will not be launched.

We intend our strategic advantage not only to deter actual Soviet aggression, but to limit their ability to use nuclear weapons for purposes of intimidation. The Cuban missile crisis showed to what lengths the USSR might go in order to improve its strategic leverage upon North and South America—although the relatively careless manner in which they attempted to install their offensive missiles, and the speed with which they withdrew them, suggest strongly that the Kremlin miscalculated badly the risks they thought they were running. We do not expect them to miscalculate so rashly again.

However we have no desire to amass megatons the way a miser hoards gold. We are deeply interested in probing every possible approach toward effective arms control, if it would provide a safer means to assure stability and security. Our interest in arms control is sometimes misunderstood. I can assure any of you who may be worried, that this effort is one we undertake with our eyes wide open. We know what we’re doing. The tentative steps already taken toward arms control are designed to create more security, not less. We have far too great an investment in our military strength to jeopardize it without proportionate gain. We have no intention of gambling with it amateurishly.

We will look both to continued improvement of our own defenses, and to responsible disarmament measures, when either points to our main objective: increasing the safety of the free, non-communist, world. We recognize that an unchecked arms race, together with the possible spread of increasingly devastating weapons to more and more countries, take us further away from the kind of security which might otherwise eventually be ours under an international peacekeeping system that provides a reliable means of effective, enforceable arms control.

The Need for Flexibility

In the meantime, as the likelihood of a surprise attack from the Soviets decreases, the necessity for a more diversified and rapidly reacting capability to meet local crises has become more important. A variety of threats requires a variety of possible responses. Consequently we have been developing forces capable of a flexible response to the variety of military threats which fall short of general nuclear war. As a result, U.S. military options have steadily increased, our ability to meet less-than-outright aggression is also improving, and U.S. command and control capabilities to insure reliability and conformity to our larger national objectives have become more sophisticated.

We have aided, and will continue to aid, other non-communist countries in building up their own defenses to meet the new conditions. Thus the non-communist world will possess graduated capabilities, both to deter communist or communist-inspired external threats at varying levels of intensity, and to respond to new and diversified forms of aggression.

Pursuing this policy of graduated deterrence and flexible response, we have consciously been promoting a worldwide mobility of our forces—not only strategic, but tactical as well. Thus our naval power from either the Atlantic or the Pacific Oceans can go on short notice to patrol the Indian Ocean. The U.N. peacekeeping force now on Cyprus was transported there largely by American air power.

We know that there are harassing actions short of violence, as well as acts of suspicious but anonymous violence, that occur in much of the non-communist world. You are all aware, for example, that there has been Cuba-sponsored guerrilla training and sabotage planning aimed at Latin American countries. Actually, this can become a more sophisticated and dangerous form of aggression, when the out-of-country leadership cannot always be pin-pointed, when the sources of supply can rarely be interdicted, and when the enemy forces themselves are not necessarily outsiders. Moreover, the increased diversification and sophistication of the communist military challenge has been matched by a diversification and sophistication of the economic and political challenges as well.

The Soviet Economy: Perseverance through Strain

I mentioned the Soviet miscalculation in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. There was another, earlier, Soviet miscalculation in 1958, in the first flush of their new-found optimism over Sputnik. The Kremlin leaders apparently assumed that they would not only be able to mount a new strategic challenge to the free world, but also that they could continue a rapid and balanced rate of economic growth, sufficient to provide for consumer needs at home and effective economic aid abroad.

As it happened, the Soviet planners were wrong. Moscow’s own statistics show how, under the pressure of a Soviet-initiated arms race, and as a result of other flaws in their economic system, national income growth rates declined from an average of 9.5% per year between l956 and 1959 to 6% in 1962 and 4.5% last year. At the same time, the Soviet leadership had been promising more prosperity to its citizenry and whetting existing appetites for consumer goods.

The result has been an ongoing debate in the Soviet hierarchy over the proper allocation of resources for new investment. The principal claimants—the military, heavy industry, and consumer goods including agriculture—have tended to be relatively evenly matched. It has been a debate which no one has won. Even though the economic situation has deteriorated badly as result of recent crop failures, the tendency has been to postpone any radical changes in the structure of the Soviet economy.

It is possible that these economic strains were a major factor in the Kremlin’s willingness to conclude the limited test-ban agreement and thus initiate a period of reduced tension. At the same time, it would be unrealistic for us to assume that the Soviet Union is so poor that it has no freedom of choice in assessing its own priorities. For example, it might seem that, pressed as they are, the Soviets would cut back on foreign aid programs. Yet precisely at this time of economic adversity, Moscow is once again showing a willingness to tighten its belt if that is necessary to take advantage of political opportunities. Soviet commitments in foreign economic aid are rising again. New commitments in the first five months of this year are in excess of $600 million. The record high in the past was $859 million for all of l959.

Moreover, in the aid field, as elsewhere, Moscow’s flexibility is often enhanced by the authoritarian nature of its government. Its capacity for making rapid decisions, at tactically useful moments, contrasts with our own methodical requirements which flow from our democratic form of government, from our Congress, and from our Bureau of the budget.

Thus the USSR has the ability to offer additional credits to countries even though previous ones are not fully used, as it has recently done for the steel mill at Bone, Algeria. The USSR has agreed to aid projects, and announced firm commitments to them, even before preliminary cost estimates, detailed surveys, or feasibility studies by the Soviets are made. Egypt’s Aswan Dam and India’ proposed Bokaro steel mill are examples. In both these cases, the USSR has benefited doubly by picking up projects previously considered by the US which we, for one reason or another, were unable to assist.

In addition, the USSR aid authorities are able, when political needs require, to offer grants to recipients who, for political or economic reasons or both, hesitate to become obligated to Moscow for credits. Nepal, Yemen, and Kenya have been beneficiaries recently of this practice. Moreover there is no strong outcry in the Soviet leadership or the Soviet press when the Kremlin permits co-mingling of Soviet aid with Western assistance. Today, for instance, the Soviets are building a school in Ethiopia, which will be staffed by teachers being trained in the US.

Soviet flexibility is also illustrated by an occasional extension of an open line of credit for a fixed amount without any specific projects being mentioned. The $100 million credit extended last fall to Algeria was merely for economic development. Thus the Soviet economic offensive continues, flexible and unabated.

The Sino-Soviet Rift

The growing rift between Moscow and Peking is also, of course contributing to profound change in the communist world. Viewed broadly, their falling out is a welcome development, and one which, like so many others, calls for flexible responses on our part. But the Sino-Soviet rift does not mean that the net communist threat is receding everywhere or anywhere. On the contrary, the rift may diversify and intensify the threat, at least in some areas, just as the ingredients and forms of the challenge will certainly be heavily conditioned by it.

The Soviet and Chinese vilification of one another is having far reaching effects upon the international communist movement. Not even the epochal struggle between Stalin and the Trotskyites had such effects. The Trotskyites were outcasts from the start, without the advantage of command over the most populous state in the world.

These effects cut two ways. The dispute has seriously tarnished the image of communist unity as well as the authority and universality of communist dogma, both traditionally essential to the élan of the communist movement and its appeal to potential supporters. After all, a worldwide argument among communists about fundamentals makes it painfully clear that Marxism is hardly a scientific method, capable of producing clear answers to social problems.

Sino-Soviet recriminations have also greatly accelerated the fragmentation of control within the world communist movement. Loosened controls have permitted communist states and parties to pursue their objectives with greater freedom. Local communist leaders now have a wider range of choice and a freer hand in pursuing those policies which they regard as most effective in their own national environments.

As each attacks the other and defends its own position, Moscow and Peking are bidding for the support of communists throughout the world. The Soviets still have the backing—in one degree or another—of most party leaders and organizations, although the degree of support for Soviet tactics has tended to be more and more qualified. Even those parties most opposed to the Chinese communists’ theoretical propositions have been reluctant to support the Soviets in any effort to impose sanctions on the Chinese, lest their own freedom of action be curtailed by a resurgence of tightened control with in the movement.

The Chinese have gained the support of half a dozen foreign parties, and have been actively supporting the formation of new Chinese-oriented communist organizations. Above all, the mere existence of a rival Chinese line has weakened the established Soviet authority and encouraged greater independence among and within all parties. In Hungary the other day, Khrushchev said that communism now stood for better goulash and better ballet. While we may take it for granted that communism still means more than that to Khrushchev himself, it surely means more than that to Mao.

Thus in one country or another, we may find ourselves faced with rival communist parties—one Moscow-oriented and the other Peking-oriented—one seeking to infiltrate the existing government, or a broadly based opposition by means of united front tactics, while the other takes the road of revolutionary violence. We may face two or more antagonists in a given situation instead of one.

While the result for us may be a two-front struggle, it is not a deliberate deception contrived or arranged between the two communist capitals. Instead, the whole communist tradition of doctrinal discipline, authoritatively interpreted, of party discipline, ruthlessly enforced on an identifiable membership, of a disciplined worldwide order of battle, supported by a single power center that ultimately decides on timing and tactics—this whole tradition is on the verge of breaking up. The splinters from this breakup may become exceedingly sharp.

For instance, competition with Communist China imposes upon the Soviet Union a new need to demonstrate to critical communist audiences that the USSR is not derelict in its revolutionary duty. It is not surprising, therefore, that a new emphasis on national liberation movements has appeared in Soviet public statements in the last six months. The extent to which Moscow will translate into action its avowed support for violence for these purposes remains to be seen. But at minimum, the Soviet Union may be less likely to counsel restraint to those who champion violence, a factor which adds to the probabilities that the communist challenge will be an abiding, not a subsiding one.

The Disarray of Safety

Today holes are also being poked into the Iron Curtain from the Baltic to the Black Sea. If containment was a negative policy, we now actually have a chance to influence developments in parts of the communist world and contribute to healthier trends.

Consider the resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe. In part because of the weakening of controls resulting from the Sino-Soviet dispute, the East Europeans are increasingly able to pursue their own interests and even to seek better relations with the West. We should not expect too much. But by judiciously responding to their approaches, we can aid these countries in their efforts to detach themselves a little further from Soviet control.

In order to do so, we too shall have to pursue increasingly flexible policies. Of course, flexibility for some will mean inconsistency for others. Doubtless there will be those who will find it