Diary 1963 - Murshid Sam's Living Stream

Diaries 1963November 2Dear Vocha:The overthrow of Diem came just before my visit with J. Eugene Wagner. He is a disciple ofPhra Sumangalo with whom I worked closely for 35 years and never one harsh moment (which is arecord for SL). If complaints were in order, and they are, the case of JEW makes that of Sam Lewisbecome very simple. He followed all the rules which Eugene Burdick laid down for everybody else.He became a second “Anna” teaching English to the family of the King of Thailand. He has beenboth Theravadia and Mahayanan monk, he has lived in every part of S.E. Asia, to wit Malay, Burma,Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Annam, Tonkin and he has betted exactly 000 in trying to reach the pressor State Department. It is his marriage and ordination vows which prevent him from giving up hiscitizenship like Phra Sumangalo, and it is this sort of thing, rather multiplied, which keeps me plugging.Since my birthday things are coming more and more favorably socially and one may hopeotherwise. My manuscript is complete but needs to be indexed, edited and appendixed for foreignwords. The end was very hard because of the events of the day, the appearance of new literature andthe visitors encountered here. But I’ll write some stories:Foreign Aid for Pakistan. This was the subject, and I am guilty of speaking on it. Before methree men spoke: one for more FA, one for less and one against all FA excepting aptitude and drafttraining. They were all VIPs and did not agree with each other. So the chair announced this subjectand as nobody else volunteered, I did—and got lost in the shuffle. One of the VIPs said my ideascould not apply to Guinea and Yugoslavia which he had visited and he, being a VIP, that was whatwas discussed—and as there were naturally three camps he had two camps against him, annoyingeven for a VIP. Then one little old lady arose: “Gentlemen, this is all very nice, but you aren’t discussingAsia and Asians. In fact what you have been saying can’t apply to Asia at all. I have livedmany years in Asia and what you are debating are your ideas and Asians don’t think that way.Well Sam Lewis escaped and toward the end there was a hair-pulling contact between educatedVIPs, which got very personal. And the man who did the best was out-argued because he was opposedto the “experts,” i.e. the big man who had never been there and a world problem was nearlydecided on a committee report of VIPs, all the sociologists to the contrary!Foreign Aid for Pakistan. I visited Guy Atkinson, who is in charge of the engineer projects.The results were foreseeable. Tell me a man’s profession and I can make the predictions. It was alove meeting from beginning, middle and end. I told the industrialist I was for nobody for presidentexcepting perhaps H. Cabot Lodge because we had gone for “realism” and was spurning realities.“Everybody is a dialectician today, all the candidates, being merely anti-Marxist Hegelists. The goodold Jeffersonianism and Pragmatism are gone. Why should we accept “left,” “center,” “right.” Theinteresting thing, Vocha, is that all the industrialists and formerly military men are for this point ofview. They are horrified by this compulsory, left-center-right, and want to get things done. After allFascism was forced on capitalists by anti-communist dialecticians.