To the Editor:

You deserve high praise for publishing Edmund Stillman’s scurrilous article [“Dean Rusk: In the American Grain,” May], Up to now I had not been able to perceive the greatness of our Secretary of State, thinking of him as a mere time-server who unfortunately had to respond to events which were not of his making. Mr. Stillman, however, makes it abundantly clear that Dean Rusk has a vision worthy of any of the great statesmen of the past. He does believe in a world order guaranteed by international law and international organizations. Never mind that Mr. Stillman calls such commitment “an obsession” or “conventional wisdom”; never mind that he thinks it funny to call a liberal a “liberalist” and a “meliorist” or that he perversely thinks the mere mention of “supporting the forces of freedom in Indonesia, Iran, and India” will bring forth peals of laughter from his readers. He has succeeded in convincing me, and for that I thank him.

I wish to make only one minor correction in his splendidly documented article. Mr. Stillman repeats the oft-repeated charge that Dean Rusk fails to distinguish between Soviet and Chinese Communism. Surveying the first two years of the Johnson administration, I recently came across dozens of statements by the President, the Secretary of State, and his subordinates, all emphasizing the fact that “there are as many Communisms as there are Communist countries,” and that “we have as many foreign policies as there are members of the United Nations.” Even more specifically, he said in the Senate Hearings on February 25, 1964: “It is not enough to ‘contain’ Communism. . . . In these last years some Communist governments have been receptive to our overtures. The Communist world is not like a herd of sheep blindly following one leader.” In these hearings he also spelled out the three aims of this administration vis-à-vis the Communists: (1) to convince them that a policy of expansionism is dangerous and expensive; (2) to conclude agreements preventing the danger of atomic war; (3) to promote within the Communist orbit tendencies toward national independence, peaceful cooperation, and an open society. I have been unable to find these purposes as funny as Professor Stillman does. On the other hand, when it comes to the charge of being obtuse to distinctions, I am amused by his assertion that isolationists and internationalists are essentially birds of a feather. It so happens that I have serious disagreements with the present policy, but I don’t believe, as Mr. Stillman does, that an opponent’s different point of view or even serious error can be explained only by moral or intellectual decrepitude.

H. M. Pachter
Department of Political Science
The City College
New York City