Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR) 1964:
Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening (D-AK) were the sole wise men in the US Senate in 1964. Thirty-eight years later in 2002, when GWB wanted to destroy Iraq, there were 23 wise women and men in the Senate. At this pace of progress, it will be 2052 before there will be 51 wise women and men in the US Senate. (Can the world wait that long?)
In May 1965, Ernest Gruening participated in the thirty-six hour Vietnam teach-in at Berkeley.* In November, Wayne Morse was at the SDS-organized “March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam.”
The march had garnered a long list of celebrity sponsors, including novelists Saul Bellow and James Hersey; playwright Arthur Miller; artist Alexander Calder; actors Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Tony Randall; doctors Benjamin Spock and Albert Sabin (developer of the oral polio vaccine). During the march, Spock, Martin Luther King, and others held formal discussions with three Administration offials to air their concerns about the war. [NYT, 11/28/65]
1965. How many died between then and April 1967 when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his Beyond Vietnam speech? How many died between then and Eugene McCarthy launched his challenge to the Presidency of LBJ in late 1967. (Better late than never, I guess.)
1966 was the year Wayne Morse was forced to choose between principles and Party. The Democratic nominee, Robert Duncan for the open OR Senate seat supported the Vietnam War. The Republican nominee didn't.
For those inclined to praise the Republican Party of yore, remember those like Mark Hatfield were becoming rare in that Party by 1966. (With the resignation of Lincoln Chaffee in 2007, they went extinct.) Wayne Morse had been a Republican until 1952 and presciently resigned when Eisenhower chose Richard Nixon as his running mate.
Morse had nothing to gain personally by endorsing Hatfield. It only added one more sane voice to the Senate chamber on the question of the insanity of US military actions in Vietnam. A voice that would long out-live his as he lost his re-election bid two years later to the sexual harasser Bob Packwood in the general election after a brutal primary challenge by Robert Duncan. So, the Democratic Party elites way back then was not averse to throwing one of their own under the bus if he wasn't sufficiently pro-war. (And they did it again in 1970 and 1972.)
Looks as if nothing much has changed since then except the names and faces of those demanding loyalty to the pro-war Democratic Party over principles of peace and anti-imperialism have been replaced by new generations that continue to reject wisdom and principles in favor of banality and empty political rhetoric.
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*Participants include: Dr. Benjamin Spock; veteran socialist leader Norman Thomas; novelist Norman Mailer; independent journalist I.F. Stone.
Other speakers include: California Assemblymen Willie Brown, William Stanton and John Burton; Dave Dellinger (political activist); James Aronson (National Guardian magazine); philosopher Alan Watts; comedian Dick Gregory; Paul Krassner (editor, The Realist); M.S. Arnoni (philosopher, writer, political activist); Edward Keating (publisher, Ramparts Magazine); Felix Greene (author and film producer); Isadore Zifferstein (psychologist); Stanley Scheinbaum (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions); Paul Jacobs (journalist and anti-nuclear activist); Hal Draper (Marxist writer and a socialist activist); Levi Laud (Progressive Labor Movement); Si Casady (California Democratic Council); George Clark (British Committee on Nuclear Disarmament); Robert Pickus (Turn Toward Peace); Bob Parris and Bob Moses (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee); Jack Barnes (National Chair of the Young Socialist Alliance); Mario Savio (Free Speech Movement); Paul Potter (Students for a Democratic Society); and Mike Meyerson (national head of the Du Bois Clubs of America). British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell sends a taped message to the teach-in.