The Week

Come to think of it. Isn’t the United States the only nation in history to have waged war without taking sides?

He’s just like Ike. “President Eisenhower was the biggest single influence on me in the defense field,” says this week’s George McGovern. “I admire his restraint— his willingness to settle for less than total victory in Korea, his realization that money taken for defense is by its nature wasted, his willingness to undertake unilateral actions for real world security.” Now. To be sure, Ike settled for “less than total victory” in 1952—but he got a great deal more than Nixon or McGovern can ever hope for today. South Korea survives, a viable halfnation; South Vietnam is seriously threatened by the Nixon settlement, doomed by the McGovern settlement. To be sure, Eisenhower lapsed occasionally into mealy incantations, but he never seriously believed (any more than McGovern does) that every single penny spent on defense is “wasted.” McGovern points to Eisenhower’s “hope” that our forces in Europe might be reduced to a token level of one division. What the man hoped was that our allies might beef up their own defenses enough to permit the reduction; they didn’t—so he kept the troops there. One doubts McGovern is as much of a realist. Eisenhower suspended nuclear testing unilaterally —but with serious misgivings, and in a time when the United States enjoyed a commanding lead in the quality and quantity of weapons. President McGovern wouldn’t have such a lead to free his hand; as for his misgivings, who knows? He says nothing, by the way, about other daring unilateral actions of his hero—for instance, his sending of thirteen thousand soldiers into Lebanon in 1958, to prevent a Communist takeover. Tune in next week, when we’ll hear George McGovern say: “Governor Wallace was the biggest single influence on me in the constitutional law field …”