The War: Riding the Tiger

Addressing 3,500 guests during the annual Al Smith dinner at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria last week, Ambassador Goldberg enjoined them: “In this debate, let us shun intolerance like the plague. As our sons and daughters would say: ‘Let’s cool it.’ ”

What Goldberg hoped above all to cool was the increasingly intemperate and illogical verbal donnybrook over Viet Nam. Other referees weighed in. In the Senate, Washington Democrat Henry Jackson said that both sides “ought to be engaged in reasoning together, not in cutting each other up.” In the House, Ohio’s Robert Taft called for “a pause in verbal bombing.”

There was scant hope of dialectical deescalation. The New York Times’s James Reston and other columnists helped keep the temperatures high. They accused Secretary of State Dean Rusk of having revived the dreaded specter of the “yellow peril” when he told a news conference two weeks ago that the U.S. was in Viet Nam because “within the next decade or two there will be a billion Chinese on the mainland, armed with nuclear weapons, with no certainty about what their attitude toward the rest of Asia will be.” Minnesota’s Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, a former college economics teacher, echoed the charge. Pundit Walter Lippmann adduced a more directly racial argument with a proposal that the U.S. “pull back from the Vietnamese mainland to continental islands inhabited by Western white men”—namely, Australia and New Zealand.

Outraged by the yellow-peril charge, Rusk went to the unusual length of issuing a formal statement to challenge the accusation. “The Secretary wholly repudiates the effort to put into his mouth or into his mind the notion of the yellow peril,” the statement began. His comments on the looming threat of a nuclear-armed China, it added, “have nothing to do with race.”

To the Barricades. Continuing the counterattack that he mounted earlier in the month, Lyndon Johnson sent several members of his official family to the barricades with speeches criticizing his critics. On an educational TV show, Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that the U.S. does not seek “to make China our enemy,” but “to contain the militant instincts or aggressive patterns of Communist China’s conduct.” Both the second-and third-ranking men in the State Department defended the Administration’s policies—Under Secretary Nicholas Katzenbach in a speech at Connecticut’s Fairfield University and Under Secretary for Political Affairs Eugene V. Rostow during a regional foreign-policy conference in Lawrence, Kans. Even Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman ventured into the relatively unfamiliar field of foreign policy. In Syracuse, he declared that Asian leaders “are desperately concerned over the Chinese threat” and “almost without exception back what we are doing in Viet Nam.”

The Administration had little to show for its efforts. Pollster George Gallup estimated that 20 million Americans—more than one out of every six adults —who once approved of the war have come to consider it “a mistake” during the past two years. A total of 46 million Americans, or 41% of the adult population, now disapprove of the war, Gallup added.

Mincing Machine. To be sure, Johnson did muster some significant support during the week. In London, Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the House of Commons that while he was opposed to proposals for intensifying the war, such as an invasion of North Viet Nam, he was 100% convinced of Washington’s genuine desire for peace. In Washington, Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma declared during a White House luncheon that he, for one, was “grateful that you came to Indo-China to help us survive,” for “if tomorrow South Viet Nam became Communist, all that would be left for us to do would be simply to pack up and go.” Added the neutralist leader: “We are grateful that you came, as you came to France in 1917-18, as you came to Europe in 1944. If it were not for your presence, Laos, and indeed all of Southeast Asia, would fall under Communist influence.”

Another visiting Asian statesman, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, called for U.S. “patience, perseverance and prudence” in an effort that is designed, “in a world full of bears and dragons,” to help the nations of Southeast Asia maintain their independence. If the U.S. were to withdraw too hastily from Viet Nam, he warned, internal subversion with outside support would quickly run Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore through the Communist “mincing machine.” The President assured Lee that the U.S. “has the resolution and the restraint to see the struggle through.” He added: “You have a phrase in your part of the world that puts our determination well. You call it ‘riding the tiger.’ You rode the tiger. We shall.”