The War: Exhaustive, Explicit–& Enough

It might, and should, have been a historic debate, a solemn, searching in quiry into the fundamental aims, origins and prospects of America’s deepening commitment to a land war in Asia.

If its five-day hearings on Viet Nam fell short of that ideal, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may nonetheless have served well to quicken public interest in the conflict and—though certainly not by intent—to bulwark the Administration’s case that it is a necessary war.

For the 30 million or more Americans who followed the proceedings each day on television, Chairman William Fulbright and his colleagues offered no compelling new arguments for or against the defense of Viet Nam. Yet the dispassionate eyes and ears of electronic journalism did help bring into focus the complex and contrasting personalities of those who chart U.S. policy and those who challenge it. On that score, at least, the hearings’ anti-Administration sponsors last week could only regret the cameras’ unblinking presence. For, unlike the previous week, when the committee’s star witnesses-retired General James Gavin and Sovietologist George F. Kennan—were convinced opponents of the effort in Viet Nam, the closing sessions were effectively dominated by two of the Administration’s most polished and lucid articulators.

Not Without Risks. First to take the stand in the marble-walled, chandeliered chamber was retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, 64, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former U.S. Ambassador to Saigon, a major architect of U.S. policy in Viet Nam since 1961 and one of the President’s most trusted advisers on the war. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division* at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, Taylor earned the sobriquet “Mr. Attack.” During the hearings, he proved that he is also a master of cool, impenetrable defense. Under heavy fire from committee members, Taylor, crisply handsome in dark grey suit and TV-blue shirt, held his ground with the grace and sang-froid of a man whose intellect and experience were more than a match for his august adversaries.

Speaking so softly that a technician had to turn up the volume on his microphone, the general began with a precise, lucid defense of U.S. purposes and policies. The objective, he said, is not “the occupation of all South Viet Nam or the hunting down of the last armed guerrilla” but rather the nation’s independence and freedom from attack. An ancillary aim is to discourage future Communist attempts to swallow “weak nations which are vulnerable targets for subversive aggression—to use the proper term for the ‘war of liberation.’ ” The importance of the conflict can be measured in part by the fact that “it is considered so important by the other side.”

Memories of Paris. Defending bombing raids against the North, Taylor testified that a major object is to weaken “the will of the enemy leadership,” added that “the warning message is getting through.” Said he: “I for one know from experience that no one derives any enjoyment from receiving incoming shells and bombs day after day.”

He ventured that Hanoi’s leaders expect domestic dissent and international disapproval to sap America’s will to fight the far-off war. “They have not forgotten that the Viet Minh won more in Paris than in Dien Bien Phu, and believe that the Viet Cong may be as fortunate in Washington.” In summary, he maintained that present U.S. strategy is “the best that has been suggested. Certainly it is not without risks—but little of value in this world is.”

Taylor had scarcely finished reading when the shelling began. At its sharpest, Oregon’s Wayne Morse declared: “I happen to hold the point of view that it isn’t going to be too long before the American people will repudiate our war in Southeast Asia.”

Replied Taylor: “That, of course, is good news to Hanoi, Senator.”

Morse: “I know that is the smear artist that you militarists give to those of us who have honest differences of opinion with you, but I don’t intend to get down in the gutter with you. All I am asking is, if the people decide that this war should be stopped in Southeast Asia, are you going to take the position that is weakness on the home front in a democracy?”

Taylor: “I would feel that our people were badly misguided and did not understand the consequences of such a disaster.”

Fulbright pressed Taylor particularly hard, cutting him off and boring in with questions whose circumlocutory sentences and strangled syntax scarcely sounded worthy of a onetime Rhodes scholar. The Senator was especially dismayed by Taylor’s suggestion that the Viet Cong might hope to win more in Washington than they could on the battlefield. Taylor patiently explained his thesis. Recalling France’s “weakening will to continue the conflict” in 1954, he pointed out that “the home front and the political front had reached the conclusion that it was hopeless and hence that they must end the struggle very rapidly.” Added the general: “I had a feeling that the leaders in Hanoi will hope that the same kind of situation will develop here.”

Bayou Bombast. Taylor, retaining his aplomb, betrayed the faintest sign of unease only when Louisiana Democrat Russell Long, the committee’s leading supporter of the war, took the floor. After chiding Chairman Fulbright for “making speeches while the witness is answering,” Long regaled the committee with pure bayou bombast. “Do you think we are the international bad guy or the international good guy?” he asked. Confronted with this particular blend of jingoism and ingenuousness, the sophisticated Taylor looked as if he wanted to hide. “I hope we are the international good guys,” he said with a weak smile.”We certainly intend to be.”

A rare blend of soldier-scholar who commands five foreign languages, Taylor sprinkled his testimony with grace notes such as a quote from Greece’s Third Century B.C. historian Polybius (“It is not the purpose of war to annihilate those who provoke it, but to cause them to mend their ways.”) and a comparison of Communist expansionism with Islam’s “flaming sword” policy.

With particular clarity, he explained the Administration’s stand on the two issues that most urgently concern the most Senators. To their criticism that Viet Nam was becoming an “open-ended” drain on U.S. resources, Taylor replied firmly that the war is “limited as to objective, as to geographical scope, as to weapons and forces employed, and as to targets attacked.”

A Golden Bridge. Rhode Island’s Claiborne Pell was dubious about the wisdom of bombing the North, wanted to know “where in history do we find other examples of where bombing has made people more willing to come to the negotiating table?” Nowhere, said Taylor. “We have never had a situation like this,” he observed. “You recall in World War II it was fight to the end or be destroyed, and many people preferred to be destroyed rather than to accept unconditional surrender. Here we are not doing that at all. We are constantly pointing out the better life that awaits the North if they will end their aggression against the South. We are deliberately keeping a golden bridge open behind them, so they are never in the trapped position that the Germans or the Japanese found themselves in.”

Another major bugaboo of the committee was its fear of Red Chineseintervention. Taylor pointed out that one reason Peking entered the Korean War was its uncertainty about America’s exact aims and its own real fear that Manchuria would be invaded. In the present conflict, he said, the U.S. has clearly stated that “it is not our objective to crush or destroy North Viet Nam” and that it is not seeking an unconditional surrender—”an Appomattox, a Yorktown, a ceremony on the battleship Missouri.”

No, with Feeling. Despite Taylor’s arguments, Tennessee Democrat Albert Gore still fretted that the Viet Nam struggle might escalate “until a war with China becomes almost inevitable.” Taylor considered that a remote possibility. When the Chinese poured over the Yalu into Korea in 1950, “we had a very aggressive Soviet Union quite capable of militarily exploiting any commitment we made in the Far East,” he explained. “We had no nuclear-weapon stockpile of any great significance. We were utterly unprepared for the land war in Korea.”

Now, he pointed out, these conditions have been reversed, and the prospects are uniformly unfavorable for China. “We are,” he said, “a far better, greater military power. We have been preparing for this kind of guerrilla-war challenge ever since 1961. We have a vast stock pile of nuclear weapons, the ultimate deterrent of any great expansion.” In similar vein, when Fulbright expressed apprehension that “the Chinese may feel very nervous about a war,” Taylor retorted: “They should. If they ever got in a war with us, it would be disastrous for them.”

Excused after 6½ withering hours, Taylor still looked morning-fresh. As he gathered up the neatly arranged pencils and index cards in front of him, a reporter asked Fulbright if he had got any satisfaction out of Taylor’s testimony. The Senator’s reply was, for a change, to the point: “No.”

Gentle Reminder. The following day could only have added to Fulbright’s frustration. After the soldier-scholar came the scholarly statesman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk. In a 50-page opening statement that filched 43 minutes of air time from camera-covetous committee members, Rusk argued in dry, dispassionate terms that the entire structure of world peace is endangered by the Communist threat to South Viet Nam. “What we are seeking to achieve,” he said, “is part of a process that has continued for a long time—a process of preventing the expansion of Communist domination by the use of force against the weaker nations on the perimeter of Communist power.”

Rusk cited two major documents as legal justification for U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. One was the congressionally approved 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing the President to take “all necessary measures” to resist aggression in Southeast Asia. The other was the 1954 Southeast Asia Treaty

Organization pact, authorizing any or all of its eight members to resist aggression against the nations under its protective umbrella, including South Viet Nam. Referring to the Senate’s 82-to-l consent to the treaty in 1955, Rusk gently reminded them: “All members of this distinguished committee who were then Senators voted for that treaty.”

Though it was his third grilling by the committee in three weeks, Rusk was repeatedly asked a question that he had answered often before: How far is the U.S. prepared to go in Viet Nam? Rusk reiterated that the Government has not set any “certain point beyond which it will not go in meeting its commitments”—nor does it plan to. “We’re not playing this hand solitaire, and we need to keep our eyes on what the other side is doing.”

Stop Shooting! Led by Fulbright, several Senators insisted that the U.S. had adopted an “adamant attitude” against a negotiated settlement of the war. Rusk, who might have been forgiven a moment of exasperation at that point, replied levelly: “We have given them practically everything but South Viet Nam in an effort to find a basis for peace. We are not asking them to surrender a thing except their appetite to take over South Viet Nam by force. Now, on that I suggest somebody had better be adamant.”

Fulbright charged that the U.S. was demanding “unconditional surrender” from Hanoi. The merest flicker of irritation showed on Rusk’s round face.

“We are not asking anything from Hanoi except to stop shooting their neighbors in Laos and South Viet Nam,” he said. “We are not asking them to give up a single acre of territory. We are not asking them to surrender a single individual, nor to change their form of government.”

Start Thinking. Rusk betrayed uncharacteristic emotion on several occasions. “If there is doubt in Congress about the policy on Viet Nam, let us vote. Let us find out,” he said ardently. But before the votes are cast, “I would hope that members of the Congress would go into a quiet corner and think very long and deeply about what we’ve been through in the last three decades, and on what basis can we build a peace —and then decide which vote is a vote for war and which vote is a vote for peace.” On that matter, there was no doubt in Rusk’s mind. “If you tell the other side, ‘We don’t want trouble, take Viet Nam,'” he declared, “that is a step toward war.”

“I think there is something wrong with our approach,” chided Fulbright. “There must be something wrong with our diplomacy.” Rusk suggested another possibility. “Senator,” he asked in a voice edged with anger, “is it just possible that there is something wrong with them?”

Thus ended the Fulbright committee’s hearings. In them and in Lyndon Johnson’s Atlantic City speech (see following story), the Administration had explicitly and exhaustively explained its stand. There will, of course, be more congressional debate, but until new events change the military equation, it will be largely academic.

* Taylor’s 30-year-old son Tom is now a captain with that outfit in Viet Nam.