On the Right

There is a shift in the making—a shift in public opinion on the question of Vietnam, and in a strange way it relates to the Negro problem, or rather is being made to relate to the Negro problem. There are signs everywhere, and from very important people. The most significant, in my judgment, is the recent declaration of Bishop Fulton Sheen that we should unilaterally pull out of Vietnam. Bishop Sheen is neither senile nor loose-minded. His anti-Communism is unalloyed, and his knowledge of the strategic realities is unsentimental. I put off for another day an analysis of the Bishop’s reasoning—for the present purposes it is significant to note merely that he has taken that position, and that he is an enormously influential priest.

Moreover, a priest who is grimly engaged at the moment, as Bishop of Rochester, in attempting a substantive reconciliation between the Negro and white people in that tense city. Notwithstanding his great urbanity and learning, he is at heart an evangelist—and he is asking for nothing less than reconciliation, between white and Negro: but also between white and yellow.