Saying It & Not Saying It

Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson have a history of mutual antagonism. The pages include Bobby's opposition to L.B.J. as his brother's running mate in 1960, President Johnson's performance in cutting Bobby out as a candidate for the vice-presidential nomination in 1964 and the New York Senator's recent speeches implying displeasure with the Administration's policy in the Dominican Republic and its failure to push harder for a treaty against nuclear proliferation. Last week there was another item to add to the list, and this one caught headlines all over the U.S.

Oddly enough, the news was less in what Bobby said than in what he didn't say. In a speech prepared for delivery in Washington before the 146-man graduating class of the International Police Academy, an organization run by the Agency for International Development to train foreigners--primarily Latin Americans--in counterinsurgency techniques, were these sentences about the Vietnamese war:

>"If all a government can promise its people, in response to insurgent activity, is ten years of napalm and heavy artillery, it will not be a government for long."

>"Victory in a revolutionary war is won not by escalation, but by de-escalation."

>"Air attacks by a government on its own villages are likely to be far more dangerous and costly to the people than is the individual and selective terrorism of an insurgent movement."

Those sentences had been knocked out by the time Bobby got around to delivering the speech. How come? Bobby said only that he had altered the prepared text after it had been pointed out that there was some "confusion" over his remarks. But the advance copies of the speech had already been mimeographed, distributed to the press --and featured in headlines across the U.S. Which left Senator Kennedy in the interesting position of having said it but then, in the interest of harmony, not having said it.

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