Our Current Crisis and the Need For Education

              Congressional Record

United States of America

PROCEEDINGS AND DEBATES OF THE 
85th CONGRESS, SECOND SESSION

Vol. 104
No. 11

WASHINGTON, THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 1958

Senate


OUR CURRENT CRISIS—AND THE 
NEED FOR EDUCATION

Mr. FULBRIGHT obtained the floor.
Mr. MANSFIELD. Mr. President, will 
the Senator from Arkansas yield, so that 
I may suggest the absence of a quorum.
Mr. FULBRIGHT. I shall be glad to 
yield.
Mr. MANSFIELD. Then, Mr. President, 
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The 
clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call 
the roll.
Mr. MANSFIELD. Mr. President, I 
ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without 
objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. FULBRIGHT. Mr. President—
If we could first know where we are, and 
whither we are tending, we could better judge
what to do and how to do it.
When Abraham Lincoln spoke those 
words in his house-divided speech, a 
century ago, the Nation was fast drifting
toward the abyss of a tragic and 
disastrous war. Lincoln sensed that a policy 
of Presidential firmness and candor 
might foster a national self-awareness—
the indispensable preliminary to any 
"saving act of Government. But, 
President James Buchanan, a tired and 
amiable man with tired policies, continued to
spread the contagion of his own 
confusion over the land.
Today, what was true in 1858 is again 
true, but on a vastly larger scale, and in 
a vastly more menacing form.
The then issue of slavery has changed 
into the global conflict of cold war: A war 
in which military strength, or weakness, 
is a consequence rather than a cause of 
how things stand on the economic, 
political, educational, and cultural sectors of 
the battlefront. Meanwhile, one 
unnerving similarity to the America of a 
century ago remains in being: It is that 
the peril of the Nation increases daily 
because of the way the incumbent 
administration has dulled, and continues to dull, 
the Nation's awareness of the danger it 
faces—the danger that is posed by two 
leading questions:
How strong is the Soviet Union today?
How strong is it likely to be tomorrow?
When Sputniks I and II rang out with 
alarming answers to these two questions, 
the national will of America was poised 
to rally around the Presidency. Indeed, 
that is the traditional American reaction
to a national emergency—as can be 
recalled from personal experience when 
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and 
when the Communists attacked Korea. 
In 1941, and again in 1950, the American 
people expected the President of the hour 
to proclaim the formidable truths of 
what the Nation faced, however unpleasant. 
He was expected to frame, to win 
approval for, and to execute the 
measures for overcoming the emergency. 
And Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, 
each in his own way, did just that.
No less was expected of the Eisenhower 
administration—if the emergency 
implications in Russia's scientific 
achievements were to be met and mastered. 
Yet months dropped-away, and what we 
received instead was the same bland diet 
of sugar-coated half-truths that has 
made us fat and immobile in the past 5 years; 5 
years when we should have been 
muscular, resilient, and ever on the move 
scouting the terrain ahead.
In the passing months, if there was 
any informed public discussion on the 
highest matters of state since the first 
earth satellite was launched, no thanks 
were due to administration sources. 
They were due, rather, to the aroused 
energy of individual Members of the 
Congress or of private persons. The highest
officials of the administration, for their 
part, continued in their old ways.
They made their own inner councils 
the judge, the jury, and the repository of 
the records of their own actions, never 
taking the people into their full 
confidence. If they asked for support for 
this or that measure, they withheld a 
disclosure of the facts material to an 
informed public discussion of the merits 
of the proposal, or they so distorted the 
meaning of the facts as to make them a
caricature of the realities they are meant 
to stand for.
As an example of this, the Gaither 
report, developed for the express purpose of 
evaluating our strength relative to that 
of the Soviet Union, was suppressed on 
the ground that its unpleasant truths 
might cause the people to panic. But in 
the next breath, Mr. Hagerty, the 
President's press secretary assured the Nation 
that the report does not say that the 
United States is weak now. If so, we 
are left to conclude that the report was 
not released because the Nation might 
panic from joy over the evidence of our 
strength. What a fantastic, dreamlike 
performance it has been.
Nor has the case changed very much 
for the better since the President's state 
of the Union message was delivered. 
The message, to begin with, is merely 
a printed catalog of good intentions. 
It is not the specifics of any action 
program. The experiences of the past 5 
years should teach us by now that we 
would be well advised to withhold any
hosannas about a proposed program 
until we see it in concrete form, and until 
we see whether the administration is 
willing to go the limit in fighting for 
its adoption. For the evidence of the 
past is that this administration has a 
chronic habit of not following through.
Anyway, from what administration 
sources have already put out about the 
details of their space-age program, it 
is, at bottom, a program calling for a 
minimal instead of a maximum effort 
on the part of the United States. For the 
ruling principle to which it is tailored— 
as administration sources have made 
clear in conferences with congressional 
leaders—is this: That the Soviet 
Union—our challenger—is a warped 
society, wracked by internal strains, and 
fated for an early and inglorious 
collapse. In the circumstances, all we have 
to do is the very little that is required 
to keep our own motors idling until the 
inevitable crackup occurs to the Soviet 
Union.
Mr. LONG. Mr. President, will the 
Senator yield?
Mr. FULBRIGHT. I yield to the 
Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. LONG. As a matter of fact, is it 
not true that from time to time some 
of us have been advised by administration 
sources, particularly by the Secretary 
of State, that we can almost expect 
the Soviet Union to crack up any day?
Mr. FULBRIGHT. In his testimony 
before the Committee on Foreign 
Relations 2 years ago, that was clearly the 
implication to be drawn from his 
testimony. I shall refer to that in the next 
paragraph of my prepared statement.
Mr. LONG. My impression of the 
Secretary's statement at that time was 
to the effect that the fact the Soviet 
Union had lasted that long was a cause 
for wonder.
Mr. FULBRIGHT. I think the 
Senator's statement is well taken.
It is worth remembering that the 
doctrinal line here was laid down by the 
administration less than 2 years ago. 
Shortly after the 20th Soviet Congress, 
that is, we were told by Secretary Dulles 
that the Russian system was a failure; 
that they were reexamining their creed 
from A to Z; that the Soviet Union was 
making no progress in penetrating the 
Middle East; and that all in all, their 
policies had miscarried. Since this was 
said, any fact, however, random, has 
been seized by administration sources 
and woven into the design if it can be 
made to fit the doctrinal theory of Soviet 
weakness.
Thus we are told that so much of the 
Soviet effort has gone into heavy industry 
and so little into consumer goods that 
its economy is out of balance; that its 
people are dissatisfied and will become 
disaffected. After all, they have only 
100,000 automobiles a year, compared 
to our 6 million. It is suggested, furthermore, 
that Russian intellectuals cannot 
be regimented and controlled forever; 
that their demands for freedom may 
cause the government to turn its 
attention to some solution of Russia's internal 
troubles, thereby halting the push 
toward external aggression and subversion. 
Additionally, it is suggested that the 
proof of internal political tension and 
instability is to be found in the dismissal 
of Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and 
Zhukov. Each of these men represent 
sources of power that Khrushchev has 
alienated—so the argument goes—with 
the result that they are now merely 
biding their time for a disruptive counter
attack on his present rule.
It is neither pleasant nor popular to 
contest this theorizing. The man who 
does so, by pointing to the facts of Soviet 
strength, risks every manner of false 
charge. Inevitably, it will be said of him 
that he has lost faith in America; that 
he is an apologist for the Soviet way of 
doing things; that he wants America to 
make itself over along Soviet lines; or 
that he means to panic America into a 
preventive war designed to smash the 
Soviet Union before its power increases 
any further. Nevertheless, precisely 
because I feel that the stuff of greatness 
has not gone out of the bones of 
Amer¬ica; precisely because I feel that our 
democratic society is equal to the 
emerg¬ency it faces, provided it knows what it 
is dealing with, let me here try to sketch 
the character of Soviet strength, and 
the specific areas of weakness in the 
American establishment, for the tests 
ahead.
I would admit straight off that the 
Soviet system may, in fact, have to be 
altered. In the long run, it may even 
collapse. But, as the saying goes, in the 
long run too, all of us shall be dead.
Anyway, what counts most of all in the 
life of nations, is the pace and timing of 
events. And right now, when the world 
all around us is being hammered into 
new shapes, nothing on the line of 
vision points to a collapse of the Soviet, 
system. True, the Soviet ideology has 
been, can be, and may be further 
repudiated by events. But the Soviet power 
system is something else again. Within, 
and external to, Russia, that power system