in the world-there is the diplomatic, economic, cooperative effort on the one hand. If that is unsuccessful, at the other end is military action. In between is what America is just learning about, the American people, but which has been a part of world relations for a lot longer than 2,000 years. "The Art of War" is probably the most enlightened, if that is the right word, or the most detailed analysis of covert activities that you can find.

Senator CRANSTON. Whose book is that?

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. Sung Soo; he is a Chinese military expert just before the time of Christ who wrote a book which is the basic book that Mao and Stalin both built their operations on.

And this is fascinating. He says that a good general never will have to fight, that through devious means, he will destroy the will and the capacity of his enemy to resist.

Now, this goes right to your question of deceit, of immoral-all of the actions which he describes in that book are deceitful and immoral. Deceitful, he described one thing where an Army is going to invade another country and he is the general in charge andthis is in China 2,000 years ago so he has them light 25,000 campfires the first night. Then the next night they light 15,000 and the next night they're down to 5,000 campfires, or 10,000, the impression being that they are going to be under observation by the country they are invading, and they get the impression that the army is deserting, so that they relax. And then when he arrives the following day, they are unprepared and they are successful with very little fighting.

But he goes into detail on what I would call covert actions.

Now, covert actions is part of a gray world that exists today. And when Mr. Khruschev said after President Truman had enunciated the containment theory or policy that they would abandon aggressive expansion of communism by military action, but that they would support wars of liberation and then they would set up the elements in the country or support them first covertly and then overtly support them, this is part of that gray world that we live in. It exists in the world today, and you have to weigh whether you want to go from a failure in diplomatic action to military action or whether you want to use covert actions as an interim halfway measure to achieve or to prevent the loss of the achievement of U.S. long-term best interests, in the largest sense, we are talking about the preservation of freedom.

Now, this is a very tough situtation. When I said at the very beginning that I think executive and legislative have got to work together with the public. I think the public has got to understand a great deal more about this in order to understand what the alternatives are and how they want to use them.

Senator CRANSTON. It seems to me that we have had two recent examples in history where the leaders of the land, for purposes that I am sure they rationalized totally as being good and noble and valid and important to the country, practiced deviousness and deceit in covert operations as they related to not informing the American people: in Vietnam, and I say that about a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, as well as a Republican President,

Richard Nixon. In the case of the Watergate, Richard Nixon used deceit and covert operations to keep the American people from knowing what his people in the Government were doing, and that becomes the place where there has to be grave questions about the desirability of such behavior.

I am sorry, I cannot wait for the answer. I will come back. I have to run to vote.

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. I do not believe in deceit either, but this is not something that is unknown in this country.

Senator CRANSTON. Excuse me for running. Senator Glenn will be right back.

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. This is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about.

[A brief recess was taken.]

Chairman GLENN. The meeting will be in order.

I apologize once again for the inconvenience that we have caused you here with all our voting. You are familiar with our problem. Vice President ROCKEFELLER. I just kept on talking.

Chairman GLENN. I have a couple of questions that I would like to explore in the limited time remaining. I know you have to leave within about 10 minutes.

How successful do you feel that the Domestic Council has been, particularly in the area of long-term planning?

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. Not successful except in the one effort which the President asked, which he wanted, which was these hearings around the country on domestic issues which were really interesting and Governors, mayors, businessmen, labor leaders, welfare recipients, Indians, every group, appeared to testify. Then we took questions from the floor. We had about 13,000 pages of testimony and which really gave a very exciting insight into the thinking and feeling of America today and one of the tragic things that I felt came out of it was, whereas people used to feel that Washington and the Federal Government was the solution to their problems, increasingly people are feeling that Washington is the problem and that this is just as true of a Governor or a mayor or a businessman or a labor leader or a welfare recipient. The redtape, the bureaucracy, the delays, the uncertainties, and so forth. This was very useful.

Then we prepared, based on these hearings, recommendations for his consideration in connection with this in program development across the board.

This was the only integrative operation which included the economic, financial, social, et cetera, and the structure there is provided with economic advisers, the Economic Policy Committee, the Energy Policy Committee, Domestic Council, so that the Domestic Council has been largely focusing on immediate problems and crises, except for this one effort which he asked to be done, there has not been the kind of planning and thinking that you are talking about.

Chairman GLENN. Do you think any organization, such as the Domestic Council, can deal with the long- and short-range goals? Vice President ROCKEFELLER. There was an interesting conversation when I went to see President Nixon on the Commission on Critical Choices when I was still Governor when I set it up, and he and John Ehrlichman and I had a conversation about this.

I raise this simply because of your question. John Ehrlichman's feeling was that the Domestic Council could do this and it ought to do it and there was no need for a private group to be set up, and the President said, just as we have been talking here today, you cannot do this within the Domestic Council because of the pressures of the current problems and he said, I think this is a good idea. I wanted to get the cooperation of the Government, not financing, but cooperation.

So it worked out very well, but that was, to me, the contrast. There is no question that the bureaucrats want to hold on to these things and have a concern if some outside group works on it. That is why I want something that would involve the executive, legislative, and all of these outside groups sort of on a neutral ground where everybody is plugged into it. Otherwise, they are going to be opposed to it.

Chairman GLENN. Such as the Smithsonian?

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. To me, that is a unique Institution. It was set up historically by a Britisher who left the funding creating this sort of quasi-private/public Institution.

Chairman GLENN. Are there other ideas along that same line as an alternative to the Smithsonian that you've thought about? I think that is an excellent suggestion.

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. We studied, frankly, trying to find a home for the Commission on Critical Choices after I came down here. They are going ahead by the way, and publishing these reports; we made a contract with the publisher, there will be 14 volumes that will come out from that.

Chairman GLENN. When will those be out?

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. The first one is by Lloyd Free, "How Others See Us," which was a polling operation of other countries as to their attitudes on the United States.

The second one is an Irving Crystal, edited 15 essays of America: 1976, of how people see us today from different points of view and different writers, and it goes into these other panels that I talked about, energy, raw materials, and so forth.

In five or six volumes, we did it two ways, we did it functionally and interrelated, then we did it geographically, so there were five or six findings on different continents of the world, Asia, Africa, Latin America, England, and so forth interrelating the military, political, diplomatic, economic, social problems in those areas.

I think it will be quite interesting.

We could not figure out any other body that existed today that has the kind of three-way ties that the Smithsonian does-four-way, you could include the court. The chancellor of the Smithsonian is the chief justice.

Chairman GLENN. How much do you think we can learn from other nations who have done a lot more planning? I want to add right at the outset that no one on this committee, and it is certainly not my intent, to have us setting up a 5-year commisar or czar-type program. That is the farthest thing from our desires. Other nations have gone in various directions as far as planning and looking at goal-setting for their nations.

Is there anything we can learn from them, or anything we can learn to stay away from?

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. Well, I am doing a little free-wheeling here, but I think the Japanese have developed some very interesting relationships between the government, finance, labor, business, et cetera, national and international.

I am not deeply knowledgeable about how it works, but it has been pretty successful. They moved very rapidly.

On the other hand, the Soviets who have certainly planning, but at the same time, they also have had to keep central control because of their political situation. And therefore, they are now, after 50 year of Communism, coming to the capitalist world to get their consumer industries built by us, organized, staffed, and manned, train them, and they have had to come to the capitalist world for their food. So it has got to say something that that system-often it is not in a military sense, in a propaganda sense, but in terms of domestic needs has not been able to achieve their goals.

Chairman GLENN. Would you have any suggestions as to what might be set up a permanent Commission on Critical Choices or a Commission on National Goals, as we had in the Eisenhower years, the Council of the Future, a technological ombudsman approach to things? How would you suggest structuring this, quite apart from the Smithsonian, whether it was put there or not, what would be the structure and how would it interface with the Government and the private sector?

That is about five questions in one.

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. I understand what you are saying. I do not think that it ought to be an institution that becomes rigid and institutionalized. I think it ought to be one in which real live leaders from labor, from business, from agriculture, from government, et cetera participate and not left, like so many of these institutions, they have a board of directors, but the actual work, the board does not participate and therefore it gets staffwork, which may be excellent, but does not give the mature and integrative judgment of the people who are running the country or phases of the country.

So that somehow, one has to get, I think, involved, actually intimately involved like these panel discussions in the substantive issues themselves and that the final reports in any area could be on a continuing basis, come out and keep on and come out additionally as times change.

It ought to be a growing, evolving thing with the board members changing, but I feel it very important that men and women of deep experience in science and technology, in industry and government and Congress and so forth, are actual participants.

Chairman GLENN. Could there be regional commissions that are part of the national

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. The hearings are awfully good. Chairman GLENN. I wonder, along those same lines, maybe regional commissions that would then be a part of a national setup of some kind.

Vice President ROCKEFELLER. I had not thought about regional commissions. I think people have got to come from all over the country.

But our problems, the big problems we are not solving are global, international. If we are moving along constructive lines there, then the regional problems would follow more easily within that framework, I would think.

But that is just a reaction.

If I could go back, now that Senator Cranston is back, to his question I think that he is raising that we as a nation have to face very realistically, that is this whole question of deception and acts that he describes as immoral.

This is a real problem and we have to face this problem, because the whole intelligence community is involved in acts which, under our statutes—acts abroad which under our statutes at home would be barred. They would be violations of our statutes, privacy, and yet we have to be frank.

I was Chairman of that Commission looking into the CIA charged with massive violations—and there were massive violations-but all of the things that people were worried about that the CIA was doing are being done in the United States by the Soviet Union, yet for some fascinating reason-massively by the Soviet Union-there is very little interest or concern.

Senator PERCY. Before we recess

Senator CRANSTON. May I comment on that?
Senator PERCY. Go ahead.

Senator CRANSTON. There certainly must be concern about the Soviet Union doing those things in our country, and we have to have appropriate, responsible agents of the Federal Government under appropriate congressional supervision dealing with that to the best of our ability.

I do think, taking into acount Bill Brock's question about what America means and what its purpose is, that we are defending not just the population of our country and not just the geography of our country. We are also defending the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and certain freedoms that we seek through those means. If we emulate dictatorship and other forms of government too much in order to defend ourselves, we destroy what we seek to defend.

That is the dilemma we face in dealing with a violent world. Vice President ROCKEFELLER. I agree absolutely, and when we talk about freedom, I think that when one analyzes what was fought for, and they were fighting for: individual freedom and economic freedom and the economic freedom is inseparable from individual freedom, and that is a lack of it, a control from London of the Americans that really was one of the stimuli that brought about the Revolution. As we come into this 200th year anniversary, we have to reexamine that combination.

I do not think we can have this country an island of freedom in a world of centrally controlled social and economic nations.

Senator PERCY. Mr. Vice President, I would like to ask for your comment on one thing before we recess.

There has been discussion recently about simplifying our income tax returns and just having a standard deduction-for instance removing contributions to charities. I happen to think that would be very dangerous, because we would dismantle a large number of