The Washington Post, by Philip L. Geyelin

They have not been dull, the Johnson years. From the first crisis in Panama to Santo Domingo and South Vietnam, from the wild campaign of 1964 to the triumphs in Congress, the protests on the campus, the riots in the cities and the sudden abdication in 1968. And they have not been unproductive, in their rich yield of civil rights and social welfare legislation. More than anything, perhaps, they have been sad, in the sense that Franklin D. Roosevelt thought of Lincoln as a "sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once—and nobody can."

Lyndon Johnson tried, you have to give him that. He brought more raw force and endless energy and craving for accomplishment to the office of President than anyone could ask. Where he succeeded, he succeeded big, in education and civil rights and all the rest. And while it can be said that he also failed big—by not being able to win his way in the war in his time, and by having to acknowledge such a division in the country that he could only carry on in his final year by foreswearing his candidacy for another term—not the least of his legacies to President Nixon is what he himself did to turn the war around and head it in the direction of a gradual American disengagement and a political settlement. Serious peace talking is to begin in Paris this coming week not so much because Lyndon Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam in October but because he stared down his generals last March and made the much more difficult decision to refuse them the massive reinforcement of American troops that they were asking for.

If this seems like a somewhat negative legacy there are more than enough that are positive. The list of legislative accomplishments runs on and on from the 1964 Civil Rights Act to rent supplements, voting rights, model cities, Medicare, control of water, pollution, immigration reform, job training, educational aid. And while some of this was the finishing of unfinished business, well begun before his time, some of it broke new ground. A landmark aid to education act, for elementary and secondary schools, cracked a constitutional and political impasse over church-school relationships, and it was brought into being not by past momentum or by parliamentary manipulation, but through the innovation and sheer determination of the President.

And yet, for all of this, how history will judge him, in the main, is going to hang very heavily on how the war evolves and what it will be said, many years from now, was lost or gained in that conflict. It is sometimes argued that Vietnam wasn’t everything, that the American commitment didn’t begin with Lyndon Johnson anyway, that the great domestic problems probably would not have been dealt with, let alone disposed of, much differently if there had been no great expansion of the war in the Johnson years. Perhaps. But the fact remains that Vietnam was, of course, the thing that seemed to be the well-spring of dissent, the issue that shook public confidence, the great preoccupation of the top men of government, the spoiler of relationships with allies and antagonists abroad, and the crisis that brought Lyndon Johnson down.

There were other sources of dissent, other spoilers; there would have been trouble anyway because there always is trouble enough somewhere, growing out of something or other, for any President. But it was always President Johnson’s firm belief that a Government which lost its mastery over Congress, and in the process lost the faith of the people, on one critical issue, was in grave danger of losing its capacity to command support or trust in anything it touched. This, in a sense, is what happened to Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam, and it happened because the President never managed until much too late to reconcile what he was trying to accomplish in the war, first with what the military men were trying to accomplish, and then with what the public thought he was trying to accomplish. He did not lead or educate or rally the country until it was too late.

And so the dissent grew and the war dragged on and finally it had to be conceded, if not acknowledged publicly, that pouring on more pressure and projecting the possibility of an ever-widening, open-ended war was not going to compel the enemy to stop doing what it was doing, in Dean Rusk’s phrase. Finally, it had to be conceded that there were limits to this new thing called limited war, and while this is progress of a kind it is not quite the same thing as success.

It is often said of Mr. Johnson that his trouble came from some incapacity to inspire, and thus to lead. He would say, on the contrary, that he was unjustly victimized by Easterners and intellectuals and liberals and the Kennedy people who scorned him for his regionalism and his roughness, his table manners and the twang of his voice. There is truth to both, and also irony, because the sad thing is that his origins are the best thing about him, the thing he has going for him whenever he is himself, and he didn’t know it. Or maybe he just wasn’t confident about it. Whatever it was, he tried to run this country the way he ran the United States Senate and it didn’t work. He wheedled and cajoled and high-pressured and over-sold, and seemed to be counting the legislation passed not so much for its contents as its bulk, and this wasn’t what people were concerned about. They were worrying about casualty figures and about how the combat troops got to Vietnam in the first place and how they got involved in combat operations when the Secretaries of State and Defense had said they weren’t supposed to; they were worrying about how it was all going to end and what it was doing to this country and whether it was worth it, and by the time the Administration got around to leveling a little more on the subject it was too late, because the confidence was gone.

This isn’t the whole story by any means but it was a big part of the story of how Lyndon Johnson lost his majority. If he was like Lincoln, a sad man, he didn’t show it and he didn’t let it slow him; he was forever driving. He wanted nothing more than to succeed—and he did, in many, many ways. But he wanted support for the war and money for a bigger antipoverty effort and safety in the streets and housing for the poor and education for all our children and medical care for all the elderly and love and respect of all the people, and it wouldn’t stretch. He wanted to get it all at once and Roosevelt was right: nobody can.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

There is something genuinely fine about the United States Navy’s strict reliance on tradition—on freedom of the seas, unchallenged for a century and a half, on a hallowed legacy from a gallant, mortally wounded ship’s captain who commanded his men, as he was carried below: Don’t give up the ship. For the good of a military service, tradition cannot be taken lightly. Honor, duty, pride, discipline—all must be served and the military concept of justice cannot be expected to be the same as civil justice, because it serves a quite different demand. So the question before the Naval Court of Inquiry in Coronado, California, does come down, in a narrow sense, to whether Commander Bucher broke existing regulations. If the evidence indicates he did, by surrendering the Pueblo while he still had the power to resist, the Navy is obligated to deal with him in its own way by ordering him to stand trial.

But the chances are slim that the matter will end there, for there are review procedures that will ultimately take the verdict out of the hands of the admirals. And that, too, is as it should be, for tradition, however hallowed, is a tricky thing to rely upon. It is recorded with pride, for example, that the ship that was ordered not to surrender, in 1813, was the Frigate Chesapeake; less is said of the fact that this same vessel was involved in a naval encounter a few years earlier in which it actually did surrender after firing just one, solitary shot. Ordered to heave to by a British warship on suspicion that there were British deserters among its crew, the Chesapeake was on this occasion simply incapable of fighting. As set down in John Bach McMaster’s History of the People of the United Stales:

"The condition of the Chesapeake was a disgrace to the government that sent her out and to the officer who commanded her. Some of the guns were not even on the carriages. The sponges, the wads, the very cartridges would not go into the mouths of the few guns that were mounted. Not a rammer could be found. Not a powder-horn was full. The matches were all mislaid. The loggerheads were cold. After 20 minutes a gun was loaded and fired with a live coal brought from the cook’s galley. Then, when twenty-one round shot had struck the hold ... when three men had been killed and 18 wounded, (Commander) Barron hauled down his colors and the Chesapeake was a prize."

What this episode suggests is not that the Commander of the Chesapeake was blameless, but that the blame was as much on the "government that sent her out" and here, perhaps, we have the beginnings of a piece of naval tradition' that might usefully be applied to the Pueblo affair. For with every new scrap of evidence, it becomes more and more apparent that the Pueblo was not much better prepared for its mission, or the risks it might reasonably be expected to encounter than was the Chesapeake when it surrendered 162 years ago.

It is said, by all hands, that nobody could have foreseen the risk of an unlawful seizure of the Pueblo in the open seas, but an article by Richard Halloran, appearing elsewhere on this page, offers some rather compelling evidence arguing otherwise. There was first of all the increasingly menacing mood of the North Koreans, and second the tragic mishap of the U.S.S. Liberty at the hands of a nation that could have logically been counted on for a lot more prudence than a country with which we are, for all practical purposes, in a state of hostilities.

So it is, first of all, fair to ask why elementary precautions were not taken, and after that the questions run on and on. When is the power to resist exhausted? When a third of the crew has been killed, or half, or the ship is on the bottom with all hands lost? What would resistance have accomplished, if the Pueblo had been sunk? What reprisals- would the American public have then demanded, and where would this have ended, and with how big a second Asian war? Was the Pueblo a warship or simply a spy ship, with no particular relevance to a tradition which could not take into account the provocation offered from outside territorial waters by electronic espionage?

Perhaps there are no clear-cut answers to these questions. But they ought to be asked, before the inquiry is closed or another spy ship sent out. And because it is perfectly clear that the Pueblo mission was a calculated risk in which a large number of Naval officers and civilian policy-makers shared, all the risk-takers ought to be heard. In short, the same high standards imposed upon Commander Bucher by the Navy at the time of his capture should be imposed in turn upon the Navy and the United States Government that put him off a hostile coast, in a mockery of a warship, with no help on call, and nothing more to fall back on in the way of a contingency plan than a regulation based on a great moment in the history of an American fighting ship whose fighting record was at the best ambiguous.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

"There is no such thing as an ex-Marine," the wall posters used to say at the mustering at the stations after World War II, as if to emphasize that the Big Drill Instructor would be watching you, and former Marine commandant David M. Shoup, who did not win the Medal of Honor at Tarawa by keeping his head down, is proving the point in his own way, out there again in an exposed position, warning that "militarism in America is in full bloom," giving us his inside story of how it works. If the General had said only that this country "has become a militaristic and aggressive nation," in his recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, he would have said no more than is being said in Congress and in academia every day. The size and the political power and the economic strength and the social impact of our military establishment is becoming an issue which seems likely to engage politicians and professors in heavy combat for many months to come. Partly it is the unfinished—and seemingly unfinishable—war in Vietnam; partly it is the confrontation over the anti-ballistic missile system, the ABM. Beyond these, there is this uneasy sense that our priorities are all askew, that the military is just too big and all-pervasive and demanding upon our resources and that it cannot be contained.

But General Shoup did not deal in the sweeping generalities of congressional debate, and that is where his contribution lies, because he was talking, not as one of us, but as one of them. He talked of the excellent, but limited (neither "liberal or cultural") education offered by the service academies; the emphasis on command and the power to persuade and the art of deceiving an enemy, which naturally, even unconsciously, encourages the concealing of things, period—from friends and allies, from the public, from the President. He talked of the fierce competition for the relatively few slots in "the elite senior ranks"; of service loyalties and the equally fierce competition this produces for a bigger slice of the defense dollar—and of the natural upward push this has to give to the total defense budget.

Out of his own knowledge of war and its effect on men—those in the service and those who have left it—he knows that for those who survive it is "an exciting adventure, a competitive game" and, to be quite frank about it, the quickest, surest way for a professional military man to make his mark. "Civilians can scarcely understand or even believe that many ambitious military professionals truly yearn for war and the opportunities for glory and distinction afforded only in combat," he said. As for the reservists and the draftees, what rubs off on them is not the memory of KP or the long night watch, but the recollection of danger shared, of comradeship, of self-sacrifice, discipline, physical fitness, and of the military doctrines "used to motivate men of high principle: patriotism, duty and service to country." This is "powerful medicine, and can become habit-forming," Shoup declared. It has resulted in a "nation of veterans," military-oriented, regularly reinforced and rededicated in their beliefs by membership in veterans' organizations and service associations. Add to this another very large segment of society with a natural stake in a very large military establishment—the defense contractors, their work forces, all the people who profit from the secondary economic effects of defense industry or an airbase or a depot or a shipyard.

General Shoup does not deal in plots or conspiracies or "complexes," military-industrial or otherwise and this is the singular merit of what he has to say. It Is the difference between something "like a religion" and an Incipient Seven Days in May. "The basic appeals of anti-communism, national defense and patriotism provide the foundation for a powerful creed upon which the Defense establishment can build, grow, and justify its cost,” he said.

There is a lesson in all this, and it Is not the easy one that military men must now be put in their place or that the Defense budget must be indiscriminately slashed. The point that seems to have been missed in what he is saying is that we get about what we ought to expect from our military establishment, given the education and training our professional officers receive; the terrible responsibilities which are thrust upon them; the disinclination of civilian controllers to take risks upon themselves; the craven acceptance by a small clique of congressional elders of any demand the military may put upon them; the reluctance on the part of political leaders, in short, to use the checks and balances on overblown military influence that are readily at hand. It may please the war critics to demand, blindly, that the war be stopped, or the ABM critics to plot its defeat. But this is taking blunt instruments to a problem which can only be solved in the end by a reappraisal of relative risks, a reordering of priorities, a restoration of balance to a society whose concept of its own goals and values has clearly gone awry.

Shoup is not the first general to sound the alarm. And neither, incidentally, was President Eisenhower, in his celebrated "Military-Industrial Complex" formulation, or in his less well-known declaration in his final State of the Union Message when he said:

Every dollar uselessly spent on military mechanisms decreases our total strength and therefore our security. We must not return to the "crash program" psychology of the past when each new feint by the Communists was responded to in panic. The "bomber gap" of several years ago was always a fiction, and the "missile gap" shows every sign of being the same.

Long before Eisenhower, and General Dynamics and Lockheed and the ABM and the Minuteman and MIRV, another soldier-President, George Washington, counseled us "to avoid the necessity of those overblown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

So we have been warned, and it will not be enough to respond in blind partisanship, or in a spasm of anti-militarism, or out of deep frustration about a war gone wrong. What is needed is a good deal more understanding and appreciation, not only of the natural forces that animate the military, but of the natural, readily available remedies, in the offices of the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and the President, and in the power of congressional right to review. What is needed is a thoughtful, nonpartisan reappraisal of how we educate and train and indoctrinate and deploy our military forces, of how we assign objectives without defining them, of how we delegate to the services the risks and the responsibilities which political leaders in our way of doing things are supposed to take upon themselves.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson has now put squarely on the record an official version of the new foreign policy which President Nixon discussed guardedly in a background meeting with newsmen in Guam in July. This is not, of course, quite the same thing as the President putting it on the record, but it is in, an old and honorable tradition—this business of laminating new policy, as it were, by successive expositions of the line, at various levels, rather than presenting it full-fashioned. The Marshall Plan, for one notable example, first surfaced, on a sort of trial basis, in a speech by then Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, before Secretary Marshall tried it out at a Harvard commencement; not until the Europeans had responded did President Truman add his official imprimatur.

So it is still probably not safe to put down as firm and final policy Mr. Nixon’s new formulation of a more flexible, less entangling approach to our commitments and involvements overseas. What is clear, however, is that the administration intends to try a new approach. "A cohesive and dynamic new policy is being crafted to fit the requirements of changed circumstances," Mr. Richardson said in a speech before the International Studies Association in New York City last Friday night, and that is one way to put it. Another way to put it is that changing circumstances, beginning with a fundamental public disenchantment with the Vietnam War, are forcing the administration not towards new policy, but back to first principles—a recognition of a certain lack of omnipotence on our part; a realization that there are some things that smaller countries, however threatened, must do for themselves; an acceptance of some outer limit on our resources and therefore on our capacity to police the world.

"The Vietnam experience has made clear the difficulties involved in applying a policy of American intervention in insurgency wars," Mr. Richardson said, and he added: "It has demonstrated that the effectiveness of any government, even with our help, in controlling insurgency is dependent on the broad-based support of its own people. And this in turn has underlined the importance for any such government of domestic programs responsive to the social demands upon which insurgency feeds. We cannot, it now seems dear, do the job of fighting insurgency for someone else. We cannot provide the indigenous will and resolution, or the toughness and durability that are needed if this kind of warfare is to be waged successfully."

There will be a need for economic aid training programs and the supply of equipment, Mr. Richardson said. "But the job of countering insurgency in the field," he declared, "is one which must be conducted by the government concerned, making use of its popular support, its resources, and its men. Large-scale intervention from abroad is, of course, something else again and must be considered against the backdrop of the total obligations and interests of the American people."

That was the essence of the President’s message to Asia on his recent trip, Mr. Richardson reported, and the first thing that has to be said about it is that it was also the message transmitted by President Eisenhower in his day, and President Kennedy in his, and President Johnson in his, each in his own way. And yet we slid or stumbled into the Vietnam involvement in a big way that hasn’t worked, and isn’t working now. So you never know about these things, except that there is, of course, a monumental difference now. For we have the bitter lesson of Vietnam before us, and the public disillusionment, and inflation, and all the other domestic pressures that are pushing the Nixon administration toward a fresh assessment of our role and our capabilities.

What Mr. Richardson seems to be saying is that next time we will do it differently. But this is simply another way of saying that we did it wrong the last time. And if that is the real implication of this "dynamic new policy," then the test of it has to be in the way the administration handles Vietnam—now. For there is no logic in saying that we cannot handle this sort of problem, except in a very limited way, and then going on trying to do it anyway, while saving the new policy for some easier, happier time, post-Vietnam.

The time to put this new policy into practice is now—by proceeding with American withdrawals, by progressive "Vietnamization" of the war, by extending more flexible terms for settlement, by finding out, the hard way, whether the Saigon government has the "indigenous will and resolution, or the toughness and durability that are needed if this kind of warfare is to be waged successfully."

We have seen only indifference on the part of the administration toward the opportunity for reciprocity offered by a prolonged summer slowdown in enemy activity. More recently, we responded only grudgingly to the enemy's three-day memorial cease-fire. A decision due in August on a further withdrawal of American troops has been postponed. The official line, from American as well as South Vietnamese sources, seems to be that nothing has been changed by the death of Ho Chi Minh, no opportunity worth testing, just more of the same.

This is not new. Still less is it dynamic. And while there may well be new and even dynamic policy in the making, there will be no way to be sure about it until it is applied in the place that gave rise to it, the only place in fact where it is currently applicable: Vietnam.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)