The crayoned sign on the door of Georgetown University's glass-and-concrete Hall of Nations in Washington announced a coming event: SOCIAL MIXER— BEER, PEOPLE, DANCING. But what went on inside the hall one night last week was hardly a mixer. It was the televised debate between Special Presidential Assistant McGeorge Bundy and critics of the Administration's firm Viet Nam policies, originally scheduled for May but postponed when the President ordered Bundy to the Dominican Republic.
Risks & Costs. Supporting Bundy were Polish-born Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, director of Columbia's Research Institute on Communist Affairs, and the Rand Corp.'s expert on Asia, Guy J. Pauker. On the critics' side were the University of Chicago's German-born Political Scientist Hans J. Morgenthau; ex-Foreign Service Officer Edmund O. Clubb, chairman of Columbia's Seminar on Modern Asia; and Michigan State University Anthropologist John D. Donoghue, who recently spent two years in South Viet Nam's villages.
Moderator Eric Sevareid started the hour-long debate by saying: "The cost and risk of fighting this war have to be measured against the risks and costs of not fighting it." As five TV cameras rolled, the Government's critics explained why they thought the risks were too grave and the costs too high.
The war, said Clubb, cannot be won "without virtually annihilating the Vietnamese people," and besides, it is "alienating both Asian and other world sympathies." Morgenthau could not think of a single justification for it. "I am opposed to our present policies in Viet Nam," he said, "on moral, military, political and general intellectual grounds." Said Donoghue: "I view this as a civil war, with most peasants against the government that we support."
Bundy & Co. took heated exception. "The policy which the United States is now following is the best policy in a difficult and dangerous situation," said Bundy. "We have a commitment matured through time, made for good reasons and sustained for the same reasons." One of the reasons, offered Brzezinski, is to keep Red China from gaining supremacy in Asia. "A great many Asian nations," he said, "see a major interest for themselves in an American continued presence in Viet Nam as a bulwark." As for the notion that the Viet Nam war is a civil war, Pauker said: "This is aggression from North Viet Nam, but carefully staged so as to make Communist revolution ary war appear as a spontaneous grassroots revolt."
When Morgenthau argued that the U.S. attempt to contain Communism was "eminently successful in Europe against the Soviet Union," but "is bound to fail in Asia against China," Brzezinski said caustically: "I would like to suggest, respectfully, that Professor Morgenthau is wrong." Were the U.S. to pull out of Asia, Brzezinski added, "the Chinese will have been proven right, and this would be a highly destabilizing condition for world peace."