Music and Cats

Traditionally, Mr. Johnson is presented as the great champion of modern architecture - organizer of the landmark 1932 Museum of Modern Art show on the International Style, and architect of the Glass House on his Connecticut estate, which quickly came to symbolize American modernism. He is equally celebrated for abandoning classical modernism in the late 50's and adopting in the decades that followed a succession of styles that mirrored the changing taste of the time.

It hardly mattered that many of his skyscrapers were corporate schmaltz; he was an enlivening, generous figure, a man who charmingly described himself as a "whore" as he picked the corporate pocket. Always ready to challenge the earnest, Mr. Johnson, who understood Warhol as well as Mies, became both an icon and an iconoclast.

Only one aspect marred this picture: His embrace of fascism during the 1930's, which was mentioned only in passing in most obituaries. He later called his ideological infatuation "stupidity" and apologized whenever pressed on the matter; as a form of atonement, he designed a synagogue for no fee. With a few exceptions, critics typically had little interest in the details, granting Mr. Johnson a pass for a youthful indiscretion.

Then, in 1994, Franz Schulze's biography presented this period of Mr. Johnson's life in some depth. Mr. Schulze's account was as sympathetic as possible - and many reviews of the book still played down the importance of Mr. Johnson's politics - but it was clear that views of Mr. Johnson's import for American culture would change significantly.

Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20's and early 30's - years when an artist's imagination usually begins to jell - consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He worked for Huey Long and Father Coughlin, writing essays on their behalf. He tried to buy the magazine American Mercury, then complained in a letter, "The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally." He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and, after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis.

He approved of what he saw. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy," he wrote in a letter. "There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle." As late as 1940, Mr. Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war - led him to withdraw completely from politics.

Today, any debate over an important figure with a fascist or Communist background easily becomes an occasion for blame games between right and left. Mr. Johnson is no exception. Morally serious people can have different views of his personal culpability.

But what's essential is to let the shadow fall - to acknowledge that fascism touched something important in his sensibility. Throughout his life, he was an ardent admirer of Nietzsche. His understanding of the great philosopher was surely deeper than that of the Nazis, but he was overly enchanted by the idea of "a superior being," "the will to power" and Nietzsche's view of art. And he loved the monumental.

In an interview published in 1973, long after he renounced fascism, Mr. Johnson said: "The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn't the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius's time and in Justinian's time and Caesar's time they had to have dictators. I mean I'm not interested in politics at all. I don't see any sense to it. About Hitler - if he'd only been a good architect!" In discussing Rome, he contrasted the poor artistic achievements of the democratically elected Republic with those of earlier regimes. "So let's not be so fancy-pants about who runs the country," he concluded. "Let's talk about whether it's good or not."

Mr. Johnson's observation was refreshingly hard-nosed about art's relation to politics: good politics is not now and never will be a prerequisite for good art. But his emphasis on the aesthetic as the only important value in art was remarkably cold-blooded. His main regret seems to be that contemporary republics have failed to create monuments that ravish the senses.

He never became a fascist architect. But he was probably one of those artists - among them many Communists - whose philosophical sensibilities were gutted by the experience of the 30's and World War II. Afterward, he lived more than ever for the stylish surface, appearing uncomfortable with large-minded ideas even when his buildings reached for the sky.

Perhaps as a consequence, his imagination developed no particular center. Nothing was intractable or non-negotiable. He was remarkably free. He could toy, sometimes beautifully, with history. He liked a splash. He was a playful cynic, cultivating success even as he winked at its vulgarity. If someone should complain, well, the problem lay not in the artist but in the fallen world.

Philip Johnson now seems like an emblematic figure partly because he appears to have been happily, marvelously, provocatively, disturbingly hollow. It is an underlying fear of Western culture, one that has lasted since World War II, that there is no larger or ennobling content to mine. Mr. Johnson's main flaws as an artist - his tastes for razzle-dazzle and overweening scale - are equally the weaknesses of American secular culture. His main strengths - his openness to change, playfulness and urbane rejection of the Miss Grundys of the world - are equally it strengths.

The beautiful Glass House will remain Mr. Johnson's signature work. It is the transparent heart of a collection of eclectic buildings in New Canaan, Conn. It's a dream house, a stylish stage set. It floats upon the land, eliding boundaries between inside and outside. It seems full of emptiness. It's not really a place to live, but was still Mr. Johnson's essential home. That uneasy stylishness deserves emphasis. Philip Johnson lived in a glass house. He threw stones, too.

Mark Stevens is the art critic of New York magazine and the co-author of "De Kooning: An American Master."
All done with Form Follows...

Soon he was drifting away from the severe and rigorous steel-and-glass boxes of his mentor and experimenting with more plastic shapes. In the process, he pushed Modernism in a new direction. Like other architects, Johnson was responding to the American public's desire for pomp and circumstance, but the result was a clumsy sort of stripped-down neoclassicism, best represented by the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Monumentality for the masses.

In the mid-1960s, Johnson veered again. Architects like Eero Saarinen worked for corporate clients, but Johnson took on the challenging task of working with commercial real-estate developers. Over the next two decades, working often for the developer Gerald Hines, Johnson popularized the signature office building. The idea was that striking architecture was good for business. Across the country, he built increasingly theatrical skyscrapers, culminating in the AT&T Building in New York City, a Chippendale-topped high-rise that got its architect on the cover of Time magazine.

Johnson ushered in, although he did not invent, what became known as architectural Postmodernism. Always generous, he promoted the careers of such notable practitioners of the genre as Michael Graves and Robert Venturi. But in less capable hands, Postmodernism quickly degenerated into a facile and repetitive pastiche of old and new.

Johnson's work became increasingly historicist, often slapdash, definitely interesting rather than good. He seemed to sense that Postmodernism might be a dead end and switched gears again. This time it was Deconstructivism that caught his eye. He took architects such as Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry under his wing, and hoping to repeat his earlier success, promoted a 1972 exhibit at MoMA. While lacking the impact of his earlier show, his imprimatur helped to propel Eisenman and Gehry, as well as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, into the limelight. Johnson himself, who had continued his practice, also embraced the new style. The ungainly Canadian Broadcasting Corp. headquarters in Toronto, was one result.

The celebrity culture of contemporary architecture is a Johnson legacy, as is a somewhat cynical aestheticism that seeks to divorce architectural design from the real world. On the other hand, Johnson's enthusiastic involvement in architecture certainly served as a stimulus to several generations of what he called "my kids." Yet, in turning away from the principle of Modernism and embracing the shaky terrain of the eclectic, Johnson ultimately lost his way. Perhaps that's why the elegant and evocative Glass House, which he built in 1949, remains his most enduring achievement.
All done with Lived in Glass House...

In architectural terms, Mr. Johnson's output was uneven. His most memorable works are almost without exception his most intimately scaled, and they evoke a remarkable range of references that with hindsight, imbues them with unexpected subtlety. The Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., for example, was famously inspired by Mies's earlier design for the Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., but its sleek Modernist appearance and slender brick base also suggested a traditional home with its skin stripped off.

That catholic sensibility was also evident in his 1950 design for Dominique and John de Menil's residence in Houston, whose blank brick facade masked a more transparent interior that opened onto flowing gardens, echoing, in its small way, the Janus-like vision of precedents like the 17th-century French estate Vaux le Vicomte.

But what most separates his work from more austere influences like Mies is its thinly veiled hedonism. The beauty of the Glass House, for example, arises from the quality of the glass, which is less about transparency than about the creation of a subtle interplay of visual images, from reflections of the surrounding trees to the movement of bodies inside. Similarly, the polished interiors he designed for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, with beaded steel curtains that conjure up a woman's slip, make it one of the sexiest rooms in the city 45 years after its completion.

That bias toward aesthetics over social issues had been clear since his 1932 "International Style" show at the Modern, which he organized at the age of 26 with Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The show, which celebrated the work of such pillars of early Modernism as Mies, Le Corbusier and J. J. P. Oud, electrified an audience that was unfamiliar with Modernist achievements in Europe. But its relentless focus on form tended to overlook the deeper social goals that inspired such architecture. While Mr. Johnson may have made such work palatable to the American cultural elite, he also emptied it of some of its meaning.

Nonetheless, that narrow devotion to aesthetics may also have been what allowed Mr. Johnson, in his later career, to slip so easily from one architectural style to the next. When the glow of late Modernism began to fade sometime in the early 1970's, Mr. Johnson was one of the first to abandon that vision in favor of postmodernism, a movement that he helped spawn and that eventually landed him on the cover of Time, clutching a model of his AT&T tower with its granite Chippendale top.

A decade later, Johnson was exploring the more fragmented forms of architects like Frank Gehry, which led to a short-lived collaboration on an unbuilt guest house for the insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis. His forays into so-called deconstructivism yielded the canted walls and curved shapes of a visitors center at his estate in New Canaan.

Mr. Johnson's fickleness often led to accusations that he was more an arbiter of architectural tastes than a creative groundbreaker. And in truth, few of his buildings from the 1970's and 80's could be considered distinguished. Most - banal corporate towers done on the cheap - seemed a winking testament to his famous quip that all architects are whores.

Yet there were exceptions. The angular glass surfaces of his 1976 Pennzoil Place, for example, frame a thin sliver of sky that gives a palpable tension to what are otherwise a pair of conventional corporate towers. His Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., completed in 1980, is a mesmerizing composition of faceted glass planes.

And in many ways, Mr. Johnson's restlessness may have been his greatest asset: not so much as an architect as in his effect on the culture of architecture. During his long reign, no one was a more eloquent advocate for architecture, and few were more open to new ideas. Nor has any American architect been more indefatigable in promoting new talents, many benefiting from his patronage.

Mr. Johnson accomplished much of this through his position at the Modern, where he continued to curate shows until he was into his 80's. The 1988 show on deconstructivism, which he organized with Mark Wigley, may not have had the impact of his earlier successes, but it underlined Mr. Johnson's zest for exploring contemporary architectural ideas at an age when most would be content to play the role of dignified figurehead.

His connection to the Modern was only the most visible aspect of his stature as architectural tastemaker, a position enhanced by his aristocratic charm and social connections. It was Mr. Johnson, for instance, who famously introduced Mies to the Seagram heiress Phyllis Lambert in the early 1950's; soon afterward she commissioned Mies and Mr. Johnson to design the landmark Seagram Building. Later, he was an ardent supporter of emerging talents then like Peter Eisenman and Mr. Gehry. His dinners at the Century club, meanwhile, were coveted as a means of entree into the tight-knit world of New York high culture, the kind of circles that guaranteed large-scale, high-profile commissions.

Conversely, the architects he ignored sometimes felt as though the power he wielded could be devastating. But Mr. Johnson felt free to follow talent and ideas wherever they led him. That blazing openness to the new - that ease in gliding from style to style, from one milieu to another - seems virtually impossible to replace.
All done with A Tastemaker Propelled...

Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98; Architecture's Restless Intellect
By PAUL GOLDBERGER

Published in the New York Times, January 27, 2005

Philip Johnson, at once the elder statesman and the enfant terrible of American architecture, died Tuesday at the compound surrounding the Glass House, the celebrated residence he built for himself in New Canaan, Conn. He was 98.

His death was disclosed by David Whitney, his companion of 45 years.

Often considered the dean of American architects, Mr. Johnson was known less for his individual buildings than for the sheer force of his presence on the architectural scene, which he served as a combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader. His 90th birthday, in July 1996, was marked by symposiums, lectures, an outpouring of essays in his honor and back-to-back dinners at two venerable New York institutions he had played a major role in creating: the Museum of Modern Art, whose department of architecture and design he joined in 1930, and the Four Seasons restaurant, which he designed as part of the Seagram Building in 1958.

His long career was a study in contradictions. He first became famous as an impassioned advocate of Modern architecture, and his early writings helped establish the reputation of European Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in this country. He began his architectural career as Mies's leading acolyte. But what fascinated him most was the idea of the new, and once he had helped establish Modernist architecture in the United States, he moved on, experimenting with decorative Classicism, embracing the reuse of historical elements that would become known as postmodernism, and finally returning again to Modernism, yet one with an expressive and highly emotional energy.

Mr. Johnson's own architecture received mixed reviews and often startled the public and his fellow architects. Because of his frequent changes of style, he was often accused of pandering to fashion and of designing buildings that were facile and shallow. Yet he created several designs, including the Glass House, the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and the pre-Columbian gallery at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington that are widely considered among the architectural masterworks of the 20th century. And for his entire career, his engagement with architectural theory and ideas was as deep as that of any scholar.

He was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, the $100,000 award established in 1979 by the Pritzker family of Chicago to honor an architect of international stature. In 1978, he won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest award the American profession bestows on any of its members.

As an architect, he made his mark arguing the importance of the aesthetic side of architecture and claimed that he had no interest in buildings except as works of art. Yet he was so eager to build that he willingly took commissions from real estate developers who refused to meet his aesthetic standards. He liked to refer to himself, with only some irony, as a whore. And in the 1930's, this man who believed that art ranked above all else took a bizarre and, he later conceded, deeply mistaken detour into right-wing politics, suspending his career to work on behalf of Gov. Huey P. Long of Louisiana and later the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and expressing more than passing admiration for Hitler.

Mr. Johnson's foray into fascism was over by the time the United States entered World War II, and in the mid-1950's he sought to publicly atone to Jews by designing a synagogue in Port Chester, N.Y., for no fee. But to the end of his life the contradictions continued. With his dignified bearing and elegant, tailored suits, he looked every bit the part of a distinguished, genteel aristocrat, but he played the celebrity culture of the 1980's and 90's as successfully as a rock star. To the public, he was far and away the best-known living architect, and his crisply outlined, round face, marked by heavy, round black spectacles of his own design, was a common sight on television programs and magazine covers.

Except for his brief involvement in right-wing politics, all of his careers revolved around architecture. He began his professional life as a writer, historian and curator and did not enter architecture school until he was 35. Even when he became one of the nation's most eminent practicing architects, he continued to be a major patron of institutions and of younger architects, whose work he followed with avid interest.

He began his career as an ardent champion of Modernism, but unlike many of the movement's early proselytizers, he changed with the times, and his own work showed a major movement away from beginnings that were heavily influenced by Mies. In the late 1950's, just after he had collaborated with Mies on the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, he introduced elements of classical architecture into his buildings, beginning a long quest to find ways of connecting contemporary architecture to historical form. It was a quest that would begin with highly abstracted versions of Classicism in the 1960's and culminate in a much more literal use of the architectural forms of the past in his revivalist skyscrapers of the 1980's.

That phase of Mr. Johnson's career included such well-known monuments as the classically detailed pink-granite AT&T Building (now the Sony building) on Madison Avenue, which he completed in 1984 with John Burgee, then his partner; the Republic Bank tower (now NCNB Center) in Houston, which used elements of Flemish Renaissance architecture; the Transco Tower (now the Williams Tower) in Houston, which recapitulated the setback forms of a romantic 1920's tower in glass, perhaps his finest skyscraper; and the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, a reflective glass tower whose Gothic form copied the shape of the tower of the Houses of Parliament in London.

Focusing on Historical Form

Institutional clients also received their share of Mr. Johnson's fixation with historical form: he designed a Romanesque structure in brick for the Cleveland Play House and a Classical building based on the designs of the French visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée for the architecture school of the University of Houston.

In the late 1980's Mr. Johnson's restless mind, having played a major role in shifting American architecture toward postmodernism, with its reuse of traditional elements, moved on yet again. Fascinated by the intense, highly abstract work of a group of younger Modernist architects who were to become known as the deconstructivists, Mr. Johnson began to incorporate elements of their architecture into his own work.

He was particularly entranced with the buildings of the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry, whose complex, seemingly irrational forms would appear to be the antithesis of the cool, rational, ordered architectural world of Mr. Johnson's first mentor, Mies, and much of his late work reflected Mr. Gehry's influence.

Mr. Johnson, an urbane, elegant figure, was perhaps the most socially prominent New York architect since Stanford White. Born to wealth, he and Mr. Whitney, a curator and art dealer, lived well, for many years in a town house on East 52nd Street that Mr. Johnson had originally designed as a guest house for John D. Rockefeller 3d, then in an elaborately decorated apartment in Museum Tower above the Museum of Modern Art and always on weekends in the famous Glass House compound.

Mr. Johnson had lunch daily amid other prominent and powerful New Yorkers at a special table in the corner of the Grill Room of the Four Seasons. His guest was likely to be a young architect in whose work he had taken an interest, and for years his table functioned as a kind of miniature architectural salon.

In the evenings, he was frequently seen at exclusive social events, for years by himself and in the last decade, as he felt greater ease in making his relationship with Mr. Whitney public, with his companion. He was among the few architects whose comings and goings were considered worthy of notice in the gossip columns.

He had been an active art collector since the days when, as a student traveling in Germany, he bought a pair of Paul Klees from the artist. Eventually he came to be a collector of contemporary art: advised by Mr. Whitney, he filled his walls with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns when they were just gaining public attention, and he amassed one of the most complete collections of paintings by Frank Stella in private hands.

Mr. Johnson not only lived and ate in places of his own design, he also worked in them. For many years his office was in the Seagram Building. Mr. Johnson practiced alone there for some years, then collaborated with the architect Richard Foster, for a time, and in 1967 formed a partnership with John Burgee.

It was this partnership that transformed Mr. Johnson from a scholar-architect designing small to medium-size institutional buildings for well-to-do clients into a major force in commercial architecture. Mr. Burgee's arrival coincided with the firm's movement toward a number of major, widely acclaimed skyscraper projects, including the IDS Center in Minneapolis and Pennzoil Place in Houston. Mr. Johnson's leanings were always toward the aesthetic issues in design, and in Mr. Burgee he had a partner who could serve not only as a colleague in design but also as an executive overseeing the kind of large architectural office required to produce major skyscrapers.

As if to mark Mr. Burgee's role, the Johnson-Burgee firm moved in 1986 into the elliptical skyscraper at 885 Third Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets. Popularly known as the Lipstick Building, it had been designed by the partners together. But the partnership was not to last long beyond the move: Mr. Burgee, eager to occupy center stage, negotiated a more limited role for Mr. Johnson and in 1991 exercised the prerogative he had as the firm's chief executive and eased Mr. Johnson out altogether.

It proved an unwise decision: the firm, crippled by an arbitration decision unrelated to Mr. Johnson, soon went into bankruptcy, all but ending Mr. Burgee's career. Mr. Johnson, who had severed ties to his former firm, had no liability and went on to rent a smaller space in the Lipstick Building, gleefully hanging out his shingle in his mid-80's and declaring himself in business as a solo practitioner. Before long, he had several commissions, including a cathedral in Dallas, and his career had recharged itself.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, the son of Homer H. Johnson, a well-to-do lawyer, and Louise Pope Johnson. Supported by a fortune that consisted largely of the Aluminum Company of America stock given him by his father, Mr. Johnson went to Harvard to study Greek, but became excited by architecture and spent the years immediately after his graduation in 1927 touring Europe and looking at the early buildings of the developing Modern architecture movement.

He teamed up with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, at that time the movement's chief academic partisan in the United States, and their travels together resulted in their book "The International Style," published in 1932 and now a classic. "We have an architecture still," is how Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hitchcock concluded the book, which played a major role in introducing Americans to the work of European Modernists like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier, then barely known here.

In 1930, Mr. Johnson joined the architecture department at a new institution in New York, the Museum of Modern Art. He moved the museum quickly to the forefront of the architectural avant-garde, sponsoring exhibitions on contemporary themes and arranging for visits by Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies, for whom he also negotiated his first American commission.

Mr. Johnson left the museum in 1936 to pursue his political agenda, dividing his time among Berlin, Louisiana and his family's home in Ohio. By the summer of 1940, his infatuation with right-wing politics had faded, although as Franz Schulze, his biographer, wrote in 1994, it was never clear whether he withdrew because he had changed his mind or because he had failed to achieve political success. "In politics he proved to be a model of futility," Mr. Schulze wrote in "Philip Johnson: Life and Work. "He was never much of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective doer of either political good or political evil."

In 1941, at 35, Mr. Johnson turned once and for all to the field that would occupy him for the rest of his life and enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design to begin the process of becoming an architect.

At Harvard, Mr. Johnson did what few students, even those of great means, have been able to do: he actually built the project he designed as a thesis. It was a house in the style of Mies, its lot surrounded by a wall that merges into the structure, and it still stands at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Mass.

After wartime service in the United States Army - the F.B.I. had investigated Mr. Johnson for his fascist leanings, but the government decided he was sufficiently repentant to wear the uniform (he never saw combat) - he returned in 1946 to the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time he began to slowly build up an architectural practice of his own, combining it with his career as a writer and curator.

He designed a small, boxy house, also highly influenced by Mies, for a client in Sagaponack, Long Island, in 1946, but his first significant building, and still perhaps his most famous, was not for another client at all but, like the Cambridge house, for his own use: it was the Glass House in New Canaan, completed in 1949 with its counterpoint, a brick guest house.

The serene Glass House, a 56-foot-by-32-foot rectangle, is generally considered one of the 20th century's greatest residential structures. Like all of Mr. Johnson's early work, it was inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark colors and closeness to the earth marked it as a personal statement: calm and ordered rather than sleek and brittle.

A Home Becomes a Museum

Over the years, Mr. Johnson added to the Glass House property, turning it into a compound that became a veritable museum of his architecture, with buildings representing each phase of his career. A small, elegant white-columned pavilion by the lake was built in 1963; an art gallery, an underground building set into a hill, with pictures from Mr. Johnson's extensive collection of contemporary art set on movable panels, in 1965; the sculpture gallery of 1970, a sharply defined, irregular white structure covered with a greenhouselike glass roof; a library of stucco with a rounded tower that from a distance looks like a miniature castle (1980); a concrete-block tower, as much a piece of sculpture as a building, dedicated to his lifelong friend Lincoln Kirstein, the writer and New York City Ballet co-founder (1985); a "ghost house" of chain-link fence, honoring Mr. Gehry, who often used this material (1985); and finally, what Mr. Johnson called "Da Monsta," an irregularly shaped building of deep red with sharply curving walls, finished in 1995.

The "Monsta" -he could not quite bring himself to call one of his buildings a monster, but said its shape resembled it - is set at the gate of the estate and was intended to serve as a visitors center once the public was admitted to the property after his death. The compound was willed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which plans to run it as a museum.

In addition to Mr. Whitney, Mr. Johnson is survived by a sister, Jeannette Dempsey, now 102, of Cleveland.

After the Glass House was completed in 1949, Mr. Johnson received other residential commissions, including a number of houses in New Canaan. His first work on a very large scale, however, was the Seagram Building, designed with Mies. The deep bronze Seagram is considered by many critics to be the finest postwar skyscraper in New York.

But by then, Mr. Johnson was growing impatient with the limitations of the strict, austere Miesian vocabulary. He began to explore a more decorative sort of neo-Classicism, leading to designs like the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth (1961), the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (1964) and the Bobst Library at New York University, designed in 1965 but not completed until 1973. His work in that period led the architectural historian Vincent Scully to refer to him as "admirably lucid, unsentimental and abstract, with the most ruthlessly aristocratic, highly studied taste of anyone practicing in America today."

"All that a nervous sensibility, lively intelligence and a stored mind can do, he does," Mr. Scully said.

Mr. Johnson's art collecting brought him a nearly continuous stream of commissions to design museums, and his ties to the Museum of Modern Art brought him the request to design the museum's 1951 and 1964 expansions beyond its original 1939 building, including the sculpture garden. He also designed the original Asia House gallery on East 64th Street, now the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as museums in Fort Worth; Utica, N.Y.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Corpus Christi, Tex.

Despite his record as a museum designer and his long association with the Modern, the museum's board, of which Mr. Johnson was a member, decided in 1978 to hire a different architect to design its new west wing. The job went to Cesar Pelli, and Mr. Johnson was deeply hurt.

For some time, relations cooled between him and the museum he had supported nearly since its founding, but eventually they resumed, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Whitney moved into the apartment tower above the museum designed by Mr. Pelli. In 1984, as a tribute to Mr. Johnson as its founding curator, the museum's department of architecture and design named its exhibition space the Philip Johnson Gallery. And the Modern observed Mr. Johnson's 90th birthday with a pair of exhibitions: one of notable works of art that the architect had donated to the museum, and another of works given by architects in Mr. Johnson's honor. More recently, the architect Yoshio Taniguchi set to work on his design for the Modern's latest expansion, Mr. Johnson met occasionally with him to chat about the challenges of blending old and new.

The beginnings of his late career as a major commercial architect were not in New York, however, but in Minneapolis, through an immense project in 1972 for Investors Diversified Services, a financial conglomerate now part of American Express. A square-block complex containing a roughly octagonally shaped, 51-story glass tower, hotel and retail wing placed around a central glass-covered court, the design blended Mr. Johnson's interest in angular forms with a sensitive urbanism. It quickly became a focal point for downtown Minneapolis and was the first of a generation of what might be called social skyscrapers: towers that did not merely house office workers but also contained myriad public spaces.

Among the many observers impressed by the tower was Gerald D. Hines of Houston, a real estate developer who had begun his career as a builder of warehouses but who by the early 1970's had sought to make a mark with much larger buildings by prominent architects. Mr. Hines hired Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee to design Pennzoil Place, a twin-towered complex of glass in downtown Houston that was completed in 1976. One of the most widely known skyscrapers in the country, Pennzoil Place consists of two trapezoidal towers placed so as to leave two triangular areas open on the site. These areas were covered with steel and glass trusses to create greenhouselike lobbies; as a further formal gesture, each tower was given a slanted roof for the top seven floors.

Pennzoil Place would prove widely influential, but five years later Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee moved away from it with the design for one of the most startling skyscrapers of the last generation, the AT&T headquarters in New York, the so-called "Chippendale skyscraper" with a split pediment resembling an antique highboy.

During the 1980's Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee also designed major skyscrapers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, many for Mr. Hines. Most of them, following the lead of the AT&T. Building, were lavishly finished in granite and marble and imitated some aspect of architecture of the past.

Mr. Johnson also designed the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., and the Museum of Television and Radio on West 52nd Street in New York. With Mr. Burgee, he produced plans through the 1980's for office towers for Times Square. Widely criticized, they were never built. After the dissolution of his partnership with Mr. Burgee, he formed one with Alan Ritchie, a longtime associate, and produce several works for Donald J. Trump, including the glass tower at 1 Central Park West and projects for the Riverside South residential development; and plans for a cathedral for a gay congregation in Dallas. Mr. Johnson continued to go to work at Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects in the Seagram Building as recently as last year.

Though he gave up formal scholarship when he became an architect, he continued to write and lecture frequently. His constant theme, unchanged through all his stylistic variations, was his belief in the need to view architecture as an art, separating him from the socially minded early Modernists whose cause he once championed so ardently.

In a famous lecture in 1954 at Harvard titled "The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture," he said, "Merely that a building works is not sufficient." Later, in an oft-quoted remark, he said, "I would rather sleep in Chartres Cathedral with the nearest toilet two blocks away than in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms."

Years later, Mr. Johnson told an audience: "We still have a monumental architecture. To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it."

But he ended by arguing: "Monuments differ in different periods. Each age has its own.

"Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in."

All done!

The People's Republic of Seabrook has lots of breaking news this week. First, Jack has this photo of a cat-god taking his revenge on James for last week's Carnival. There's also a technology breakthrough: Hairball v1.0, the first feline-based Internet server.

Catherynne at Wired JAFA thought she was sending this to James, but it came to me instead. Sorry, Catherynne, I think your furry masters Ruby and Oscar are charming, and wouldn't think of saying anything bad about you, them or your blog design.

Running Scared has a photo of Spider hanging out in one of her fave spots, on the back of Jazz's chair.

At enrevanche, Barry has seen The Face of Evil. Mr Gato says, "You have failed me for the last time."

CatHouse Chat's Smudge and Pixel are helping Kathryn with her quilting. Smudge is supervising production, while Pixel handles quality control.

Adrienne at Ripe Bananas is Friday cat blogging for the first time. Go meet her and the handsome, golden-eyed Omni.

Respek! That's what MJ Cat is talking about over at nycbabylon.

Ferdinand T. Cat makes a proclamation from and about his castle. Bruce the Human Pet looks on quietly from the header.

Watermark poses this question: Do Blog Posts Reflect the Mood of the Writer?: You Decide.

Jeff at Athenamama helps Thalia get to the top.

Darren shows us the moods of Graylynn and Dexter.

And at bloggg, Feak tells Pippin, "I don't want to play!"

cats. iz. perverse.features photos of the lovely Suzie Q and Mickie jumping Taz.

At Cascade Exposures, Seal doesn't know that cats don't like water. Silly boy.

Steve at Blog d'Elisson shows us Hakuna and Matata thinking about dominance and submission.

Can you spot Venus the cat at Ogre's Politics & Views? (Hint: green eyes.)

Mind of Mog has three cats who have been plotting (and apparently executing) living room mayhem. It appears that Jezi wasn't in on the destruction.

At Maggie's Meanderings, Carlos and Maggie try to stay warm. And Maggie sends us to visit her friend SarahK, who loves her gray tabbies.

Another first-time cat-blogger, Paul at Ratiocination shows Sergei in pin-up pose. Think you recognize Sergei from somewhere else? Hmmmm....

Matt at Martini Pundit shows us that, where shamelessness is concerned, Chloe has Daphne beat hands down.

Sissy gives us SpongeBob in (Tiny) fur and Baby and Tiny's Nor'easter. And in late-breaking news, more of Baby and Tiny in the snow.

Ellen has photos of bubbly Olivia, who is completely oblivious to the demonic cat lurking behind her.

At CathColl.net, young Emily Frost learns of the Perils of the Tub... how embarrassing that her misadventure was caught on camera!

Mira at The Oubliette will be using her new Eep Pissed-O-Meter to gauge Eep's moods.

Over at IFOC, grand Carnival-master Laurence Simon has had an excellent cat-cam day.

At brand new blog Quite Early One Morning, doesn't this cat look familiar? Oh yeah, that's why.

Plum Crazy's new cat Portia has recovered from her injuries, and is feeling much better.

Darcy at The Magpie Instinct has figured out how to grow cats in pots.

And tottering in at the last minute (it's not easy to run in high heels!), The Secret Life of Shoes has Banga, the feline foot-warmer.

And I have a couple of cat posts around here somewhere... (There's even one of me singing to Sasha.) I'm sure you can find them if you try; I'm all out of linky energy. Now for the thank yous: to Lair for letting me host this week; to all of the cat bloggers who submitted photos; to all of you for stopping by. See you at Watermark next week.

Monday Update: Here we have a couple of late entries. Delayed because of the blizzard? They're from Houston, TX and Victoria, BC; you decide.

Blogma (dogma for the idle brain) has photos of Jerry and Dean (would that be for Lewis and Martin?) exhibiting their infatuation with glasses of water. (Ed: Sometimes I wake up late at night to hear the sound of a cat lapping from the glass on my bedside table. Maybe I should get one of those little carafes for which the glass is the lid.)

At Aptenobytes, Thom, a "proud member of the surreality based community," presents this fine photo essay on Furleigh's search for her boy toy. (Ed: Surreality based community... where cats and dogs fall in love!)

All done!

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it's always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people? "they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church-the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate-leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954.* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men-for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954-in 1945 rather-after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China-for whom the Vietnamese have no great love-but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need
for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it
must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism. Unquote.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu- Muslim- Christian- Jewish- Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word." Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood-it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message-of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.