Telluride Newsletter

Telluride Newsletter I I 1972 November Volume 60, Number 2 Whiting Views Progress of US-China Detente by Joe Schwartz, TA72 because they believed that Chinese territorial integrity was An Alumni Weekend, virtually sans alumni, turned out to being threatened. He also asserted that CIA-aided reconnais- be one of the intellectual highlights of the House's fall term sance and counter-insurgency efforts in Tibet and China's as Professor Allen Whiting's (TA46) public lecture Friday eastern provinces had only aided hardliners in Peking. October 6 and House seminar Saturday night October 7 gen- While praising the Nixon trip as a significant turnabout in erated much discussion on the direction of American foreign American policy towards China, Whiting said that the ad- policy in the Far East. A lack of available hotel rooms, due ministration had yet to carry out all the steps necessary to to that weekend's Watkins Glen Grand Prix, necessitated the bring about a real detente. He said the administration should transformation of Alumni Weekend into a House affair. De- take the political risks involved in attacking the myths gen- spite a steady rain more than 100 people attended Professor erated about Chinese aggression in the 1950's and early Whiting's lecture. On Saturday night housemembers were 60's, so that the American public would be prepared to ac- joined by Alumni William Cowan (DS43) and family and cept the withdrawal of American troops from Taiwan and John Blackton (CB 66) for a stimulating seminar. South Korea. Whiting feels that only when such troops are Whiting, a professor of political science at the University withdrawn and the peaceful reintegration of Taiwan and of Michigan and a former Director of Research for the Far mainland China is accomplished will tension between the East in the State Department, utilized his inside knowledge United States and China be significantly reduced. of the workings of State in his discussion of the role of At the house seminar Whiting reasserted many of the bureaucratic processes in the shaping of both United States themes of his public lecture, while going into greater detail and Chinese foreign policies. In addition, his service as an about the nature of the bureaucracy in both Washington and Peking, and their respective roles in the recent China trip. adviser to Henry Kissinger on the President's China Trip ! provided him with many intriguing accounts about the inter- The end of the insularity of the Cultural Revolution and the action, or lack of it, between State Department officials and emergence of crisis-level tensions with the USSR generated the most influential man in United States foreign affairs. a Chinese offer of a treaty of peaceful co-existence as early At his public lecture Whiting portrayed China as a de- as November 1969. Shortly thereafter the United States of- fensively oriented power desiring to gain world prestige. fered to raise the ambassadorial talks at Warsaw to a higher level, but, Whiting feels, the President's continued restric- He believes that China has wished to improve relations with tions on travel to China and the Cambodian invasion delayed the United States ever since Mao Tse-Tung tried to contact the President Roosevelt in 19U. As portrayed in greater detail fruition of China's initiatives. Then in early 1971 the in his work, China Crosses the Yalu (1960), Whiting feels administration (after refusing to officially debrief Edgar that Chinese intervention in Korea came as a great sacrifice Snow after his last trip to China) learned purely by chance to Chinese industrial development, and was undertaken only that Mao had told Snow that he would be willing to meet Nixon in Peking. Planning for the trip was limited to a small Professor Whiting at post-lecture reception, group of advisers around Kissinger, and Whiting said that with John Blackton and Professor Harold Shadick. the slighting of more experienced State Department officials had led to such errors as the failure to notify Japan. At the time, Whiting had expressed his doubts that the President was willing to make the sacrifices necessary for any substan- tive agreement with China and had questioned what, lacking such an agreement, the President would be able to bring home. Whiting had suggested to Kissinger that perhaps an exchange of animals would suffice. In a wry digression, he surmised that his suggestion of a panda-bison swap had ma- terialized as a panda-musk ox exchange because of the possible identification of bison with the American Indians and thus American genocide. Questions about the significance of the partial nature of the detente provided the starting point for an hour and a half of discussion that followed Whiting's narrative. Whiting asserted that Nixon truly does desire a full detente with China, but is not willing to make the domestic political sacrifice involved in withdrawing from our forward-base posi- tions in Formosa and South Korea. This writer suggested an alternative scenario: as long as our government feels that it is in our national interest to actively combat wars of lib- eration in such under-developed countries as Vietnam, it continued on page two Cremona TASP Director Picked 19 73 Program on Drawingboard The Planning Committee for the Cremona Public Policy Program is pleased to announce that Professor Carlos Stern has been appointed Program Director, as a result of which it is proceeding with plans to hold the program this coming summer. Mr. Stem, who is Assistant Professor of Environ- mental Economics at the University of Connecticut, was one of several prospects considered by the Committee, which has full confidence that he is the highly qualified director for which it has been seeking. Professor Stern's proposals for the program will make it a significant departure from previous TASPs. In lieu of a full-time associate, he hopes to bring in for periods of a week or so a number of experts in various aspects of environmental politics-e.g. Federal and international law, legislation, and lobbying-to give the students a non-academic perspec- Professor Carlos Stern in 1966 photo tive on the questions under consideration. The program itself will proceed by the case study method, concerning itself with area of the Hope and Zuni Indians-to see what would be the representative examples of problems of national importance, ccnsequences for the environment of licensing various power and enlisting wherever possible the resources of the Cremona projects. area. Stern has long been associated with the Sierra Club,. and Stern was born in Barcelona but grew up and was educated was one of the founders of the Finger Lakes group while he in South Africa. He earned the B.S. in Chemical Engineering was in Ithaca. He estimates that he is affiliated with over from the University of Capetown and then worked for seven forty different environmental protection groups. He has also years in the export-import business in South Africa. He left gone on an expedition with Outward Bound climbing moun- that job to spend two years travelling in East Africa, study- tains in Kenya and Tanzania, including Kilimanjaro, and ing its wildlife and undertaking work in wildlife photography has spent a period on a kibbutz in Israel. He is married to which, according to his colleagues, is of professional quality. Sheila Tobias, who was assistant to the Vice President for Stem first came to the United States as a systems engineer Academic Affairs at Cornell until 1970, when she took the for LBM, but in 1966 made a formal commitment to his in- job of Associate Provost at Wesleyan University. terest in conservation by enrolling at Cornell as a graduate student in Natural Resources. He earned the PhD in 1971, writing his dissertation on the Missouri River Projects of the Alumni Weekend (cont.) Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. His specific purpose was to examine the Bureau's various will not attempt to eliminate the American public's phobias of proposals for the development of the last remaining wild supposed "communist aggression"; the rationale for the con- stretch on the Missouri, evaluating the environmental impact tinued devastation of Vietnam would be undermined if full of proposals ranging from leaving the area unspoiled to detente were achieved with China. damming and harnessing the river's water power. Whiting countered that the Nixon administration was mov- The decision-making process in environmental matters- ing away from a policy of containment of communism to what's wrong with it and how it can be improved-is cur- one of "selective intervention," as part of a larger belief in rently Professor Stem's chief concern. He is a consultant to balance-of-power theory. Whiting said that he himself fav- the ikational Environmental Protection Agency as well as to ored the policy of non-military intervention that George Mc- the Corps of Engineers and a number of privately owned Govern has been proposing. But in a long post-seminar dis- utilities, and is studying proposals for power resource devel- cussion of his experiences with the McGovern campaign, he opment in the southwest-for example, in the Black Mesa expressed a far from sanguine view of McGovern's chances for victory. Near unanimous House sentiment held that the Whiting TELLURIDE NEWSLETTER weekend was a great success, particularly because of Whiting's combination of the scholarly approach to public The Telluride Newsletter is published four times a year affairs with his wide experience as an actual policy maker. in Ithaca, New York. In the future, housemembers will undoubtedly anticipate Editors with pleasure similar seminars and discussions by Telluride Louise Hertz associates with experience in "real world" politics.

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