‘Cold War Is Not Over’

The Jerry Falwells, the Richard Vigueries, the Jesse Helmses, the Norman Podhoretzes, the cold warriors, the Republican right-wingers who voted for George Bush and their Democratic counterparts are all dancing in the streets.

And well they should be. For in the very first hours of his Administration our new President has brought joy to the hearts of the members of the American political right-wing and has established his credentials as one of them.

Two days after the President’s inauguration, his security adviser says in so many words, and surely not without the President’s blessing, “the Cold War (with the Soviet Union) is not over.”

Why must the nation be kept in constant fear that peace with the Soviet Union might break out? No one with any sense suggests that Gorbachev’s “peace offensive” is motivated by anything but his belief that peaceful coexistence with the United States is in the best interests of the Soviet Union. But does not that objective of normal, peaceful relations between the two countries coincide with the best interests of the United States?

President Reagan in his last year in office recognized this very fact and, to his credit, helped move it along despite the cries of the right in his own party. Why then, if not to satisfy that right, does President Bush, through the rhetoric of one of his chief advisers, take such a giant step backwards as evidenced by Scowcroft’s ominous words?

On Jan. 23, his first working day in office, President Bush, in the words of Dan Rather, “goes to the jugular on abortion” by urging the Supreme Court to reverse its 1973 landmark Roe vs. Wade decision which permitted legalized abortion. He suggests “adoption instead of abortion.” Has the President ever considered the number of simply teen-age pregnancies, let alone the total number of all unwanted pregnancies, every year as compared with the number of adoptions in our country during the same period? Any such comparison would immediately prove the total inadequacy of adoption as a solution to the problem of unwanted childbearing.

Yes, President Bush has, indeed, hit the ground running. It is too bad that he is running backward, not forward.

GEORGE SLAFF

Los Angeles