ustxtxb_obs_1964_01_10_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

responsibility of the federal government to guarantee the rights of the 15th Amendment. Let me hasten to add that I would hope that it would not be done with the kind of ideological zeal which would leave us all believing that the proper thing for Mississippi, any more than for Texas, is necessarily one vote for everyone who is 21 years old or over. Kissel: Question for Mr. Dugger, please. Someone who has a question for Mr. Buckley come up. Let’s have one more Dugger question. Question: Mr. Dugger, on this apple situation . . . you spoke in terms of the Negro’s right to buy the apple. To use an example, let’s say as an owner of an apple, I don’t want to sell the apple, ’cause I don’t like liberals. Then you would say you have the right to buy that apple. What on the other hand if I as owner of the apple want to sell the apple, but you don’t want to buy it, do I have the right to sell it to you, in other words, do I a right to have you be forced to buy the apple from me, as you might say I would be forced to sell the apple to you? Dugger: Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, Negroes aren’t often selling apples, so that question doesn’t come up much. Obviously, at least presently obviously, you don’t have a situation where you force people to buy anything, and I think that’s the way it should be. I think the theory underlying the public accommodations bill lies in the word public. I understand there are going to be some exemptions for certain kinds of facilities which are not essential to public comfort, people passing through a town or living in some minimumly civilized way in it. I think your question embodies in both its parts the conception of property rights which you are asserting to be supreme over the right to buy, and that’s your right, but it’s not a real question obviously. Kissel: One more question for each one. One for Mr. Buckley, please. Question: Mr. Buckley, I believe that the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed to prevent the American public from consuming food or drugs that would be harmful to the human body. Do you think this is an infringement on the distributor’etights? Buckley: No, I don’t. But I do think it was an act of legislative superarrogation. Many years before the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, there were laws against torts, and all this was, the Pure Foods and Drug Act, was simply to reduce to an easier, more negotiable level laws that were embedded in the common law of this country. You didn’t have a right right up until the time Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to poison another man. It would have been just as easy for you to sue me if I fed you poison meat in 1800 as it became in 1915. The Pure Foods and Drug Act was simply a way to protect and to enforce an existing law against a tort of that kind and to put it into a kind of existence that conformed with the requirements of an increased international traffic. So that much of the legislation which for some reason is claimed by liberals as issuing out of their ultra-refined consciences has a perfectly natural geneology in the common law which conservatives have backed and in fact had ,a hand in developing over a period of 600 years. Kissel: Question please for Mr. Dugger. Question: I’d like to ask a question of Mr. Dugger. It’s actually a clarification of the original question asked, on the, I hate to bring it back again, but the apple. question. You stated that the Negro has a right to buy this apple and this would come under property rights. Are you therefore saying actually that property rights extend to another man’s property, that the right to buy an apple . . . you have this property Kissel: Since we have been emmeshed in the controversy of civil rights in terms of power and force, we’ll go to another topic under discussion, which was nuclear policy. To give Mr. Dugger a moment to start here, since we started with Mr. Buckley before, and he was about to go into that area a moment ago, Mr. Dugger .. . Dugger: Well, to advert to the subject we were discussing in another connection, and not to tire you with facts well known to all of us now, although not so well known two or three years ago, but nevertheless, to allude to those facts in some rough symbolic way, the United States can now destroy Russia and Russia can destroy the United Statescompletely! I believe one of the few dramatic moments I have ever experienced watching television, which I do not much watch, was when President Kennedy on his televised press conference one time was rather provoked by a question having to do with Mr. Edward Teller’s testimony against the nuclear test ban treaty, or if you prefer the nomenclature of the National Review, the Treaty of Moscow. The President’s response was, as I recall it, and I’m paraphrasing, we can s kill 300 million people in an hour now . . . of course we could improve on that. I thought I perceived in the President at that time a moment of hesitation about whether to let that stand, and it seemed to me that he decided to let it stand, because ironically, it was a true statement of the world’s situation having to do with nuclear weapons. It is a fact, loaded, of course, heavily freighted with emotional under, over, and middle tones, but it is a fact, that one bomb can wipe out all of New York City, that one bomb can wipe out all of Houston, and everyone below it, that one bomb can wipe out all of Hong Kohg, all of Moscow, that one bomb can do this thing. I haven’t acquainted myself or refreshed myself in these statistics, but I do recall clearly this one. The Polaris submarine, of which we have many: now any single Polaris submarine has sixteen warheads, right to buy an apple even if it’s another man’s apple before you bought it? This is basically what most of the, again to use the word, socialists advocatethat a man has a right to another man’s property. Is this basically your thesis? Dugger: Well, I shall try to clarify my apparently confusing thesis. I do not contend that a man has a right to another man’s apple before he pays for it. I do contend that a man has a right in places of public accommodation to buy an apple without regard to whether his color is black or white. As I understand the Garden of Eden, the apple that was forbidden was not forbidden on grounds of color. each one of which is 25 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Now I don’t mention these things to terrify anyone. I think there is an intelligent distinction to be drawn between intelligent concern and disinterest in these facts. I don’t believe we can confront a world where new powers threaten to get these weapons every year, without concern about this huge, this enormous fact of nuclear weapons. I think it calls for some readjustment in the way we think about nations and the way we think about peace and war and in the way we think about violence. What, for example, do we mean by victory? What do we mean by Mr. Buckley’s terms in the Daily Texan reprint of his editorial the other day: “truce,” “the enemy,” or being “afraid of success” in foreign policy? What do we mean by those things now? As I recall the thesis advanced there, it was one I could agree with. Our foreign policy has been designed to prevent Soviet enslavement of the United States and to prevent a war. Thus far we have had neither. But the intense feeling of the criticism mounted from some directions in American political discourse against the foreign policy that has been pursued generally speaking more or less by thenational Democrats proceeds from another desire, I think. It proceeds from a desire to destroy communist nations. Now in President Monroe’s time perhaps we could destroy Venezuela without destroying ourselves. But in these times we cannot destroy Russia without destroying ourselves. If that is a true statement, we must re-evaluate the courses of action that are indicated to us in our own interest. I am in favor, in this area, of continuing economic, political, and ideological competition with the communist nations. I think this describes the general view of the United States: the defense of the idea of liberty and of the idea of democracyof which I may parenthetically say, universal suffrage is a very important part. January 10, 1964 1 1 Weapons and War