The Very Silly Senator Morse

I always thought that this clique of Foreign Policy Scholars, who pay no attention to facts or dissenting opinions, was a new phenomenon... until I saw this (h/t Attaturk):



This is from a film called War Made Easy, from the makers of Hijacking Catastrophe, another excellent film. The featured speaker is Wayne Morse, Senator from the great state of Oregon, and much of it is from a Face the Nation episode circa 1964. Morse was one of only two Senators, both Democrats, to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And in so doing, he went up against a political and foreign policy establishment that is eerily similar to where we are today. The Face the Nation exchange is absolutely fascinating, with Morse challenging the entire notion that a President has unique and untrammeled authority in matters of foreign policy. The journalist who questions him considers this a highly unserious answer, and makes no attempt to hide his disdain. For those who can't see the YouTube, here's a transcript:

Questioner: Senator, the Constitution gives to the President of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy-

Morse: Couldn't be more wrong! You couldn't have made a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy, that foreign policy belongs to the President of the United States, that's nonsense-

Questioner: To whom does it belong, then, Senator?

Morse: It belongs to the American people, and our Constitutional fathers made it very, very, clear.

Questioner: Where does the President fit into this in the repsonsibility scale.

Morse: What I am saying is under our Constitution all our President is, is the administrator of the people's foreign policy. Those are his prerogatives, and I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy-

Questioner: You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.

Morse: Why do you say that? Why, you're a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of statement. I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them.

Questioner: It isn't a lack of faith, Senator-

Morse: And my charge against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts.

This was well over 40 years ago, when we had a President using a trumped-up event to take the country to war, and Sen. Wayne Morse was a lonely soul challenging his government to tell the truth, to trust the American people, to live up to the ideals of democracy. For this he was dismissed as extremely silly. The next time he was up for election, he lost - to Bob Packwood. He would never return to the US Senate.

This idea that the people have a say in the workings of their government clearly irritated the journalist, presumably a Washington journalist, doing the questioning. His belief in the oligarchy of self-appointed elites represents an insidious trait in American political culture that we see to this day. It is not of much interest to the Beltway that this President is arrogating extreme amounts of executive power unto himself, because they see the self-aggrandizement of power as a noble goal. They believe that government is run best by themselves and them alone; that the foreign policy "consensus" is one made in the cocktail parties and right-leaning think tanks of the capital rahter than in the country at large. And this is nothing new, as we have seen.

This is the truly dangerous outcome of vesting power in the hands of people who do nothing but talk to each other and overlook each others biases. It's been a problem in this country almost since the beginning of the Republic. The Internet and blogs afford an opportunity for other voices to connect and mass against this deeply wrongheaded, groupthought, expansionist view of the world. But it won't be easy. Just look what happened to Sen. Morse.