We are in a propaganda war. We have to respond with a comparable level of effort to that which is directed against us. I think the effort is much greater than it was.

NOMINEE'S INTENDED POSTURE AT THE U.N.

Senator PERCY. Maybe I could paraphrase the concern that I have heard from people associated with the U.N., columnists that follow the U.N., that they are concerned that in your role as the permanent representative that suddenly we are going to be almost in the position that the Soviet Union and China find themselves, constantly attacking each other.

This has not just come from observers. I would like to read to you Ambassador Yost's exact words. He said:

I, like Justice Goldberg, have responded very frequently myself. I don't know how Moynihan got under this misapprehension. I would differ from him only in the suggestion that crops up in one or two places in that article, and that is that we would engage in rather abrasive personalities vis-a-vis in responding. I see little advantage in that and there is too much of that in the U.N. already. I think one should respond very firmly and clearly and in defense of our positions but not in a strident or vicious tone.

Would you want to clarify how you would verbalize, because I think it is going to be a refreshing change from sometimes in the past to have a permanent representative who will really fight to say what he believes.

I think people will probably look to you to express yourself up there, but would you intend to take a strident tone? I am not exactly sure Ambassador Yost interpreted your article to mean that. He has very high regard for you, obviously.

Would you want to clarify the kind of tone that you would intend taking in order to put across a clear firm position for the United States, but not to suddenly change the total posture we have developed over a period of many years?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I agree with Ambassador Yost. You had occasion to visit out in India where we have a lot of these problems. You didn't see me going around lecturing Indians. But we would make it our business in India that when someone said something quite out of the order with respect to the United States where there was a Government connection, let the Government know we had heard it and we did not think it was helpful to India, and it wasn't helpful to us. It seems to me that the first object of American policy with respect to this kind of statement and accusation is to see that it is not made, and when it is made, the second object should be to see that it is stopped, and if that can't be, then the third necessity of responding comes into play.

Senator, it is a very simple fact that for too many years intolerable things have been said about the American Democracy in the U.N., and when the effort would be made to go back to the Nation's capital and make some refutation of it, it would get lost on the fourth or fifth floors of the Department of State. Country officers would say, "Well, we have an aid program just beginning to start up there so let's not get that into a mess."

It is exactly if you have an aid program starting up that it ought to be known, and how we ought to ask could you want to take help from

a country of which you have such a low opinion as evidenced by what your Ambassador in New York said.

Those countries can't have it both ways and many times they want to. Nor can our Government separate the affairs of the U.N. from the other practices of diplomacy.

Our Government, I think the Secretary believes this, I think the President believes this, feels that we can say, it is only words and surely you don't take them seriously. Yes, we do take them seriously, we take the reputation of our democracy seriously.

Among other things we know that there is more sustained activities and interest of the totalitarians than to undermine that reputation.

DEGREE OF ACHIEVEMENT OF SPECIAL WORLD CONFERENCES

Senator PERCY. Richard Gardner commented specifically on certain parts of your article, and he said, for instance, that he disagreed with your statement that the great global conferences on population, food, and environment were disasters.

Would you care to comment on that?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Well, he disagreed in the report of which he was rapporteur very specifically, said let's stop having these great global conferences out in nowhere and bring them, these issues, back to the General Assembly.

The specific here, Senator, which is that if you get an interesting subject and it is interesting enough and glamorous enough-environment, population, food, that somebody wants to pay attention to itthat is exactly the time not to pull it out of the General Assembly and have a meeting in Stockholm or Bucharest or Rome. Get a whole new set of delegates, delegates who never have to see each other for any other purposes, so they can come with the most strident views of their own, and if they make enemies, say, of us, then they aren't going to be the same people who have to come around in a week's time.

The way you gentlemen in the Senate have debates on Tuesday about this and on a Wednesday you are going to have to debate about something else, and so you don't end your relationship at the end of the day.

I don't want to hold to any one characterization of those two conferences but I think the proposition of keeping those important subjects close to the General Assembly is a good idea.

Senator PERCY. Did you use the word "disaster”?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I don't remember using it but I haven't read the thing.

Senator PERCY. This is not in quotes of yours, it was a quote from Richard Gardner, and I am not sure that you did say "disaster." I don't remember that. But the implication was that they didn't work out. Let's put it that way.

WORLD POPULATION CONFERENCE

As you recall, I went to India via Bucharest and the Population Conference. I was rather impressed with the fact that it was taken out of New York. It was the best attended international conference the world has ever seen, more nations were there; and they did come up with a plan of action. It was a spirited debate.

As I went through the subcontinent, India particularly, the subject of population was moving to the front pages. It was given very, very prominent space, just at a time when I was so concerned about the budget being cut in India for population planning, so I really felt the couple of million dollars spent on that conference was more than repaid by just the fact that it was given great attention. We had a chance to debate the great issues among the major powers and ultimately the conference developed a plan of action which has now been adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

I would like your evaluation of what you think of a conference like that. I was rather impressed. I went skeptical. I came back thinking it was well worth it for the tremendous impact that it had. Mr. MOYNIHAN. Well, sir, I could be wrong on this. It won't be the first time. I have a fairly clear view of the reason I was not happy with the outcome, was that it seemed to me to have dealt a very serious blow to the sort of straight out population control program which countries such as India had begun the first to do so was India for better or worse. They were plugging away, cutting appropriations here and there, but committed to the idea that that contraception is the way, is one way to lower birth rates.

The fundamental assertion of Bucharest-which was probably in the large an accurate assertion, although in the ways it was put forward I am not so sure was that population control comes in the wake of economic development. Well, I am not so sure that is true. I am not so sure that is true.

I can argue otherwise in five or six cultures that the reverse is true. And in any event it is a curiously debilitating argument. It says don't worry about your IUD programs and don't worry about your condom program and don't worry about this other business, because as soon as we get some steel mills here we are going to be all right.

Now look, you know the rates at which steel mills get built and the rates at which babies get born. I don't want to be invidious, but I visited Peking on my way back to the United States, and in Peking they couldn't have been more concrete to the effect that you have to be 28 years old if you are a male and 25 if you are female in order to marry, and that 1 child is thought not too few, 2 is quite enough, and 3 is not permitted.

Now, that seems to me population control and yet was that the tone of speech you heard from those delegates?

Senator PERCY. What was the question?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Did the delegates at Bucharest from that part of the world come to you and say, come to that meeting and say population control is good for you?

I thought they said population control was an imperialist, capitalist scheme.

Senator PERCY. Well, actually I met with the Indian Minister of Health and Family Planning at that conference.

He seemed really quite pleased and he was the one who encouraged Prime Minister Gandhi to write the special letter to the heads of all villages in India, but he felt this provided leverage to him.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Senator, we ought to talk about this in a year's time. I could be dead wrong, my impression was that the Indians felt that the result of the conference was to absolve them of working much harder on the programs as they had originally conceived them.

The proposition that economic development takes care of those things is curiously counterproductive. I mean I didn't see anybody come back to India saying I have got the idea, I talked to the delegate from China. No male should marry until he is 28 and no female until they are 25. They didn't come back and say that.

Senator PERCY. I didn't want to leave any misimpression with you because in my own report on the U.N. to this committee I pointed out the artificiality of our dialog in New York with, say, the Soviet Union when we do have some basic differences of opinion on issues which we don't hesitate to express on Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. They object to it but it doesn't spoil détente. They understand that we have a right to speak and they have a right to speak. And I have suggested that it could be fairly forthright.

I presume the concern is the way in which it would be done. And opinions vary.

FURTHER COMMENTS ON COMMENTARY ARTICLE

William Buckley said in testimony before this committee:

I should think what Senator Percy and I probably would agree to call-I am not sure we have always agreed on things but I am glad to see we might-we agree to call the Moynihan approach very definitely in order. It is an approach best described as saying that the U.S. has not only the right but duty to argue its own ideals in its own self interest.

But Richard Falk said:

It would not help (as he conceded what the Moynihan approach was) it will give us a warm feeling domestically. It is for that reason that Ambassador Moynihan's way of thinking about these issues has attracted, in my view, a very large following, but it is a very short-sighted attitude on how to participate constructively and effectively in international institutions.

Pauline Fredericks said:

If the idea is for him to pursue, presumably on instructions of the State Department, rhetoric of confrontation, then I think we are going backwards instead of forwards. The time has come we should lower our voices and enter into a dialogue such as we are trying to do with the Soviet Union. I wonder whether we should have one policy for the little nations and one policy for the big nations.

You have got all kinds of advice from all quarters. I must say it is one of the most provocative arguments. If it was put out for the purpose of orbiting thought and creating debate and draw attention to the U.N., it certainly has accomplished that purpose. But I think it will mean that your performance in New York will be watched with unusual interest, your words watched with unusual interest, and that I think you will draw from all of this advice.

The last comments I have is the comment that was the undertone of some of the testimony here, that the word and phrase "benign neglect" might refer to the United Nations, and that maybe that is

why you were selected by the President for this job, that really we wanted to deemphasize the U.N., not to withdraw but to not pay much attention to it, and maybe you would be the best one to do it.

IMPORTANCE ATTACHED TO THE U.N.

Alexander Dallin said, "I do no mean to imply that he necessarily would himself apply it, that is, benign neglect toward the United Nations," but the implication was running through there that maybe you would, and my final question to you is, would you care to summarize what you consider the importance of the U.N. today is in the world, what the importance of the U.N. is to the United States in its relationship to our foreign policy, and what you as a permanent representative would want to carry out as your own personal conviction about the U.N., because you are obviously accepting the nomination of the President because you attach some degree of importance to being there and saying what you want to say.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Sir, I made that fairly clear in that commentary piece and a dozen other things I have written. I have spent my life more involved in this subject than any other.

My doctoral history concerned our involvement in the International Labor Organization, I have been involved in these things for years. At different times in our post-war period the United Nations has been of greater or lesser importance to us. The huge decision was made in 1919 in the U.S. Senate. The world has never quite recovered from our failing to pursue the Wilsonian League idea, just as the world has never really recovered from the first World War.

Most of the things that have happened to us in our lives happened before we were born and there is not much we can do about it. The world is in very bad shape and the critical year was 1919, 1920, and we made critical mistakes and I don't know, I don't expect we are going to get that back.

With the U.N., I think President Roosevelt was wise in preparing the ground for the way President Wilson didn't do. He had Wilson's example. For the early U.N., remember, we put propositions into the United Nations that would have yielded our atomic monopoly. We proposed to turn it over to the U.N. Think about that. We are a long way from there.

The question of the world order is not really any longer whether you want one, but in what arena do you want one. One of the great services the U.N. has done in the world is to persuade people who want to avoid the United Nations to set up special purposes agencies to do so, some of which have been very effective.

To answer as a general proposition what our role in the U.N. should be, it is clear that there are absolutely indispensable functions which the United Nations carries out. If you forgive me, the International Atomic Energy Agency is one. If you start out with that conviction and you see what it does and can do in the Middle East, in places like Cyprus and the Congo and so forth, if you start out with that conviction, then it seems to me it takes one of two courses.

You can say because this is so important we must be excessively concerned with how we behave so as to not to annoy people and not to be offensive, and that is the way we want to work. Look at an