Poet Refuses White House Invite over Vietnam

June 2, 1965 - Robert Lowell (pictured), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, today rejected an invitation to appear at a White House arts festival because of his “dismay and distrust” of American foreign policy. 

In a letter to President Johnson, the 48-year-old writer said he was reversing an earlier decision to participate in the festival June 14 because “every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments.”Lowell’s rejection was the latest manifestation of sharp discontent with American policies in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic in some intellectual circles, which seem to be torn between support for Johnson’s civil rights policies and opposition to his actions abroad.

Lowell is one of several writers who were invited to the festival, where they will read poetry and prose. A White House source, asked about the poet’s withdrawal, said there have been “no similar cases.”John Hersey and Saul Bellow, two other writers, said they would attend but expressed strong disagreement with the Administration’s foreign policy.

On May 19, Lewis Mumford, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, denounced U.S. political and military policy in Vietnam as a “moral outrage” and an “abject failure.” 

Last month, novelist Norman Mailer spoke at a Vietnam teach-in at the University of California at Berkeley, where he called President Johnson “a bully with an Air Force.”

Mailer predicted that the war would not cease any time soon. 

“No,” he said, “we would rather go on as the most advanced monsters of civilization,” pulverizing the Vietnamese with “our State Department experts in their little bow ties and our bombs.”

Last Monday, Archibald MacLeish, writer and poet, said in an address that U.S. policies in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic had raised the question whether the nation had become indifferent to the opinions of mankind and had outgrown its old idealism.

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