The Mail KISSINGER

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The enclosed is submitted for publication in the CRIMSON. It is a response to the Kelman-Mendelsohn letter:

Dear Colleagues:

I have just received a copy of your Open Letter. You ask me to sign it, but in conscience I cannot.

I agree with your conception of the war in Indochina, and I join you in shuddering at the evil that our government is committing in the name of our country. Also it is plain that Kissinger is one of the key architects and administrators of the government's policy. The question is whether we should write him a letter, in the style that you have used. I think not.

I am bewildered by the two long paragraphs in which you seem to be trying to explain to Kissinger what the war means. Your account of the war is accurate, but I cannot imagine what makes you think that it might be news to Kissinger. He is, to say the least, informed and intelligent. He went to the White House voluntarily, knowing what his job meant. You say that "starting with the most decent and humane intentions, a man can be caught up and locked into a set of policies that negate everything that he is trying to achieve." This suggests that Kissinger somehow drifted into his present position. This is not what happened. When you explain the facts to him, slowly and carefully, as one might to a child, you are treating him as if his delinquency were juvenile. It isn't juvenile. When you ask him to conclude from these facts that the war has got to stop, you are assuming that his moral ideas agree with your own. If this were true, then he wouldn't have been working at his present job.

The plain fact is that our differences with him are not the sort of intellectual differences that can be resolved in a friendly chat. They are moral differences, and they run deep. He doesn't need us to explain to him what he has been doing. He knows. The trouble is that he thinks it was right. It is tempting to suppose that intelligent, personally amiable men cannot work in evil causes when their heads are clear and their eyes are open; but in fact they often do. There seems to be no simple relation between private and public morals.

For these reasons, I believe that in your attitude to Kissinger as a person, you are carrying the spirit of tolerance to intransigent extremes. Toleration of opinion is a duty, even when the opinions seem profoundly wrong. It also behooves us to be tolerant of misbehavior, since we all engage in it rather often. But there are degrees. We are faced with a monstrous social evil, and with a man who is among its key architects and administrators. We are faced not with a single wrong action, which a man might regret without being willing to say so in public, but with sustained and voluntary activity, over a period of years, in a position of leadership, in the service of an evil cause. Frankly, I feel hostile to people in such a position. I make no apology for this.

Moreover, I believe that your hopes are as ill-founded as your tolerance. Sometimes a man who has been in a position like Kissinger's tries to rehabilitate himself, and tries to repair the harm that he has done. But such attempts are rare, and even when they happen, they are usually futile. The point is that the change of heart ordinarily occurs when the man has already left his position of power for some other reason.

At times like this, I get the impression that the etiquette of a gentleman's club has an absolute supremacy in the minds of scholars, just as the ideal of hierarchic obedience held an absolute supremacy in the Prussian officer corps. This leads to trouble. If we tell the truth about Kissinger, then there is a limit to how polite we can be, and the limit is low. In your letter you conveyed a false conception of the man and of the problem that he presents. Your attitude to him as a person means to me that you are being false to yourselves. Finally, I believe that your whole maneuver is the pursuit of a forlorn hope. For these three reasons, I did not sign.Conant Professor of Education and Mathematics (On Leave)