In Class Today

We had a really interesting activity today in Government. Mrs. Schieffer, our teacher, assigned us each to different countries, and then we had to negotiate as if we were in the U.N.

One half of the class was good countries, like the United States and Britain, and the other half was bad countries, like the Soviet Union.

My group got the United States, and I was Secretary of State while a boy named Daniel was President. In any decision we made, both he and I had to sign for authorization, which meant that there was some negotiation going on within as well as between groups.

One of my initiatives was to bring the three good countries, the U.S., Britain, and West Germany, into a mutual defense pact. The Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam made their own defense pact against us.

Halfway through, Mrs. Schieffer broke the Vietnam group in two, with one side as North Vietnam and the other side as South Vietnam.

Daniel, the President of the United States, wanted to send our troops in, but I said that then we might wind up going to war with the Soviet Union, a situation I felt we should avoid at all costs since we both had atomic weapons.

I wouldn't go along with the declaration of war, so we reached a compromise: we brought South Vietnam into our defense pact and gave them economic aid. The biggest threat to our side was that the Soviet Union would invade South Vietnam, because if a democracy falls during the exercise then the democratic bloc loses the simulation.

I figured that since the people of South Vietnam wanted to be free there was no threat of the government being overthrown from within, and that the best thing we could do was protect against a Soviet assault. Because the Soviet Union side didn't want to go to war with the U.S., Britain, and West Germany just to gain South Vietnam, the plan worked.

The South Vietnam group took the foreign aid we gave them and invested it in capitalism, and at the end of the simulation they had a good economy.

I wonder if President Johnson could do that in real life, and then we wouldn't have to have a war there. Maybe someone should tell him that.