New York, June 16—Richard Nixon’s big speech of a fortnight ago was very possibly the best he has ever delivered, which is why the critics of it are so anguished. Most wounded of all, as one would expect, was Senator William Fulbright, who cannot bear to be confronted with the consequences of his policies, which is the best that can be said about Senator Fulbright. He always acts as though he would be horrified if what happened as the result of following Fulbright policies, happened—he is as much opposed to the communization of Southeast Asia as Neville Chamberlain was opposed to the nazification of Western Europe, and he cannot stand it when someone interrupts his reveries to say crisply, Who says A must say B. That, essentially, is what Nixon said. I cannot think how he could have wounded Senator Fulbright more deeply, short only of going to Little Rock and declaring that Senator Fulbright was a friend of civil rights.
Senator Fulbright asserted that President Nixon’s speech was “a form of demagoguery that was very fashionable in the time of his old colleague, Joe McCarthy.” Now, apart from the disreputable invocation, just what was demagogic about what President Nixon said? What he said was that there are those in America who are in fact neoisolationists.
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