ustxtxb_obs_1967_11_10_50_00024-00000_000.pdf

Dialogue 4144#*# it is the state’s best-kept political secret of the 1960’s. Whitewash Relieved, we can report that the first traces of whitewash have been applied to part of the red brick fence that was recently put up around the Governor’s Mansion. I suppose Larry L. King, who mused on the wall’s meaning in the last issue, would consider the application of more whitewash to the Austin scene wholly gratuitous, but at least the paint does improve the appearance of the wall consid Mature Response Is Needed It is as unfair to accuse older liberals of squeamishness about open housing [ “Liberalism in Texas Today,” Obs. Oct. 27] as it would be to accuse youthful demonstrators of cowardice about military service. “Our news is seldom good. The heart/ As Zola said, must always start The day by swallowing its toad Of failure and disgust . . . ” \(W. H. Auden in Disgust is an easy feeling to wallow in. Confirming each other’s misgivings about what goes on in Vietnam is concentrating on one facet of a complex problem. Focusing on it does little to bring liberals to grips with the basic ignorance, impatience, brutality, and defensiveness that keep most Americans from considering preferable alternatives. If the Vietnam venture is terminated abruptly, by the administration or any other, in a way that leaves ordinary Americans feeling that this country 24 The Texas Observer erably. Might even make the thing pretty. G. O. A Practicing Citizen I’m with Don Allford all the way! His “Liberalism in Texas Today” [Observer., Oct. 27] put the real issues facing Texans and all Americans into plain-talk focus. I’m for joining an amalgam of all Dissident Democrats who know Johnson is not our man, who know we made a mistake getting into the Vietnam war, and who know we must supply new answers for sick cities and deprived Blacks. It is now that the Vietnam and race issues must ee has lost a war, the ensuing search for a scapegoat will produce a reaction incomparably more fierce and destructive than the McCarthy era, which is as little understood by the young disputants at the Houston meeting of TLD as the Great Depression. They have experienced neither. The effort to impose a military solution in Vietnam has the confused assent of most Americans. There is a minority who give it quite clearminded support. They intend not to sacrifice their own and their country’s privileged position by committing themselves to more thoroughgoing solutions. Nixon spoke for them when he announced that in Vietnam we are protecting our national interests. He offered this interpretation to a receptive audience, the National Industrial Conference Board. Winning popular loyalty away from this backward-looking, grasping outlook is a task for agile, persuasive, toughminded leadership, of the kind that the now easily ridiculed New Deal provided in the ‘thirties. The adult electorate cannot be wooed away from a callous, stupid policy by harsh denunciation out of the mouths of juveniles. The language must be found to make reversal bearable. The formulas must be proposed to make the right thing appear also to be the expedient thing. Only this kind of resourcefulness will redeem the current situation by delivering a reckless majority from the consequences of their destructive impulses. In the spring of 1955 I visited with Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler, who died in action leading a valiant, sensible campaign to cope with Lyndon Johnson’s limitations. On the wall of his office was a quotation from Edmund Burke. It read: “Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the worst fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and what is worst of all, the presumptuous judgment of the ignorant upon their design.” Margaret Carter, 2816 Sixth Ave., Fort Worth, Tex. be facedafter ’68 may be too late. In the interest of getting out from under a crawling feeling that the Vietnam war is making many Americans into a new species of Nuremberg sheep, I’m for speaking out for the kind of country I want the United States to be: A free and equal land, where all voices are heard, developing a foreign policy that is a true expression and extension of what we want here at home. For these issues, at middle age, I’m ready to become a practicing citizen. Harold V. Belikoff, 4310 O’Meara Dr., Houston, Tex., 77035. A Heavier Duty Don Allford could not be more correct in his analysis of the liberal dilemma in Texas. We, the liberals of Texas, are compounding the crime of silence by not speaking up and working against Johnson and his foreign policy of war. Goldwater readily admits that all of his war policies are being carried out by Johnson. The reason Texas liberals are especially guilty in failing to take the lead to find a new Democratic candidate for president in 1968 is that we are familiar with Johnson’s past actions of saying one thing while seeking support and doing the opposite after the support was forthcoming. World peace is the stake now and a heavier duty falls upon those of us who know the president’s past conduct best. If we remain silent with our special knowledge, our participation in the crime of silence should carry a graver penalty than those Democrats in other sections of the country. David G. Copeland, 530 New Road, Waco, Tex., 76710. On Liberalism There are many words used in the Observer, pro and con, and otherwise, on liberals, both in Texas and in the country as a whole. Liberals! Hell, man, there “ain’t” no such animal. Liberals went out of the window with the blessings of the “establishment”and the aid of same many moons ago. Liberals nowadays are nothing more than glorified Fabian Fascists, basking in the warm light of LBJ and that pusillanimous pussycat, Hubert Humphrey. The minority who failed to push through the window before it closed have now been classified as the “New Left,” but are not articulate to the point that they would be recognized with the same elements of the student revolution now raging in the land of the Washington Liars and the Home of the Brave Bombers of women and children in Vietnam. Perhaps, who knows, the student revolution may fruit with a return to the Idealistic liberalism that was the bedrock of our country’s founding. Yes, who knows? A. D. Covin, Sr., 13609 Courrege, Houston, Tex., 77037.