Senator Fulbright: From your remarks, you think our policy is disastrous for our country?

MR. THOMSON: What I am concerned about is really a contemporary manifestation of a theme in American history. You know it was Jefferson who said that the American Revolution was "intended for all mankind,"

In the many decades since that vision was projected, there have been some--there have been basically two types of strategies. One was that we should stand more or less as a beacon and an example--a more passive form--of demonstrating to the world one form of development and hopefully the form of development that they would emulate in due course.

There has been, however,--particularly toward the end of the last century--been a more activist thrust, a hope that we could not only show them from after but help them do it; and that moves awfully close in due course to doing it for them.

I would say that in general I am speaking about a tendency within our social sciences and our development-minded people, in conjunction with tendencies within some of the more enlightened of our miltary people. I think it was this conjunction that gave birth to the concept of counter-insurgency as a constructive, both military and economic action that could help transform revolutionary situations in our direction.

All I am asking, all I am suggesting, is that on the basis of experience, and particularly Vietnam experience but also elsewhere, we stand back a few paces and re-examine how successfully applicable that strategy,born as I say, of gifted social science minds, techniques, technology, how really applicable it can be in these highly alien cultural, historic and geographic situations that we so barely understand.

MR. THOMSON: I think many of the steps we took from 1949, 1950, onward seemed plausible at that time within the immediate circumstances although had we had better expertise available to bring to bear on the problem even in those early periods, I think that many of these decisions could have been avoided, would have seemed less plausible even in the light of the expertise at that time and, of course, in terms of hindsight this is a process of really collective error, cumulative error, collective guilt by both parties, a long and tragic and deep involvement, and at each stage the error and the guilt is compounded.

We could and should learn from the past. I would just throw in one comment, and that is that we don't always learn the right lessons from the past, and one of the lessons we may learn from Vietnam which may not be the right lesson is that we should never get that deeply involved in an underdeveloped far-away country. I am not sure that this is the appropriate lesson. The real lesson is the uniqueness of the Vietnam situation, the unique complex of forces there, which made success in that enterprise so highly improbable even if you looked at it in 1949.

I would add that we must learn not that we should never get quite so deeply involved in an undeveloped country, but learn rather that each of these situations is unique.

Our universities were similarly limited in their Vietnam understanding until recent years.

SENATOR CASE: If this was a lesson in the broader sense it means we had better get busy in similar activity in Africa and other places and develop as much as we can a real understanding of the problems of each area and its locality, is that not true?

MR. THOMSON: Absolutely.

The role we are playing now very much serves Mao Tse-tung's purposes: the maintnance of courselves as the enemy he needs.