Weltner Talks of Deep Pessimism in South

When former Representative Charles Longstreet Weltner of Atlanta, the 39-year-old great grandson of the author of the Confederate Constitution, gave up his Democratic nomination for a third term in Congress rather than abide by a party loyalty oath that would have required him to support Lester Maddox, a colleague in the House commented, "We may have to wait another 50 years before we get another Charlie Weltner."

That was in 1966, when Weltner was known as one of the South's leading moderates, a man who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the first time around, changed his mind and voted for the final version, and was reelected. He was assigned to the House Un-American Activities Committee and then startled its members by calling for an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Currently, Weltner is spending a month at Harvard as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Politics.

Young and handsome of aristocratic birth, Weltner has managed to combine Southern courtliness with a Northern education (Columbia Law School) and temperment.

Yet the only people who seemed very

impressed by Weltner's dramatic announcement were the editorial writers of the New York Times who called him a "candidate of conscience." They urged his constituents to write in his name that November.

Weltner was soundly beaten by Republican Fletcher Thompson when he tried to win back his old Fifth District seat in 1968. He decided against running again in 1970, and the Democratic nomination went to Rev. Andrew Young, a former aide to Martin Luther King who lost to Thompson by an even wider margin last November.

Aside from speculation that he was going to run for Mayor of Atlanta in 1969, Weltner dropped out of active Georgia politics, and spent his time practicing law and writing a column for the Atlanta Constitution.

Most recently, Weltner was in the news as defense attorney for Sgt. Esquiel Tonres, who was charged with murder in connection with the Song My massacre of March 16, 1968.

Although Charles Weltner was out of step with the South in the 1960's, the results of last fall's Congressional elections indicate a new era of Southern politics where Weltner's moderation would be right at home. Last November, unknown moderates like South Carolina's John West, Florida's Lawton Chiles and Georgia's Jimmy Carter defeated their more conservative Republican opponents, and the national press once again heralded the emergence of a new South.

But Charles Longstreet Weltner is no more at home in the South today than he was five years ago. The optimism with which he might once have looked on last November's gains is not there, nor is his faith in liberalism or the Democratic Party. He has come to Cambridge, he says, to try to find some answers about what to do next.

"I just tend to think that things aren't much different in the South," he said in an interview last week. "You can make a case that things are getting better, but the case you can't make is that Southern whites are willing to change their lives. When people start talking about all the line things that are happening down South, they're not happening for the reasons they think.

"The people who won last fall didn't do it by talking about the new South," Weltner said, "but because they were expressing dissatisfaction with government institutions. The results of those elections bespeak a sense of frustration over national institutions."

He is pessimistic about building any political majority of poor whites and blacks that would appeal to this dissatisfaction. "I don't think that any Southern majority is going to be based on blacks and poor whites," he said. "They don't mix. It will be the man who conveys that sense of frustration with their lack of control over their lives who's going to have a majority."

Weltner blames his defeat in 1968 on an inability to appeal to this frustration, and compares his campaign to the one for governor run last year by millionaire Carl Sanders, who had the slickest, most professional campaign ever run in Georgia. "I ran exactly that type of campaign," Weltner said. That old JFK rhetoric, still. It didn't sell and it shouldn't."

A sense of frustration is evident in Weltner's voice when he talks about the future of Southern politics. He has little faith in the effects that increased black voter registration will have ("They go from 5 per cent of the electorate to 34 per cent, and then the whites win by 66 per cent instead of 95 per cent.") or of efforts to rebuild the Democratic Party.

He no longer sees the problem simply in terms of the South. "I think the whole country pretty much has the same attitude as the South. It's not a Southern problem at all. It's what you do with the people in Washington, D.C." Liberals, he feels, have been discredited forever by the eight years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. "We just blew it and it's just blown forever," he said, "because we just couldn't come across. We made all those promises and in eight years it just got worse."

Weltner's opposition to the Vietnam war was the main reason he took on the case of Sgt. Torres. "I felt there was a possibility to raise some issues about the war," Weltner said. "And there was the basic question of the hypocrisy of trying a teenage soldier for death and destruction plotted not by the soldier but by the highest U. S. officials."

The case was dismissed by an army court in January after Weltner had succeeded in serving subpoenas on three OIA agents who had operated in the Song My vicinity. Several CIA officials had suddenly appeared in Atlanta one day to protest the way Weltner had been attacking the intelligence agency in his defense of Torres.

"They came to tell me the truth," Weltner recalls. "We're only part of it, they said." And to prove it they gave him a remarkable eight page memo describing the "Phoenix" program, a U. S. operation designed, as Weltner ironically described it, to eliminate the "Viet Cong Infrastructure, which has prevented the pacification program from taking hold of the hearts of the people."

The memorandum said that under the program over 8000 assassinations had been carried out in 1968 and 1969. Weltner feels that fear of disclosure by the CIA witnesses led the court martial to dismiss the case.

The Secretary of the Army also dismissed a war-crime charge against Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, the former and present U. S. commanders in Vietnam, which Torres had filed last October.

"I think the Song My massacre had a big effect on the country." Weltner said. "Gradually there was a feeling that it's a shame to try these soldiers boys and not go after the big ones."

Since he arrived last Monday, Weltner has spent his time at Harvard reading books by Herman Hesse, Phillip Berrigan, and Nicos Kazantzakis. "It's easy when you're 18 to say, 'Yeah, that's right,' about these books." Weltner said. "It's when you're 40 and you have four kids that it really counts."