SENATE NOT ADVISING’ ON VIETNAM

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 13

SENATE NOT ADVISING’ ON VIETNAM

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright) WASHINGTON, Jan. 21. The process of debate in Washington, even on so solemn a business as risking war with a quarter of the human race, is an astonishing and depressing business, says James Reston of the “New York Times.”

Reston wrote: No capital ever talked so much about “great debates” or had so few of them.

The Senate has not been performing its constitutional function of “advise and consent” on the critical issues of foreign affairs during the pause in the war. It has been tugging and hauling on the President in a series of disjointed and unconnected statements, speeches and television remarks, most of them made outside the Senate chamber. No Debate

The Opposition party did not launch a debate on the President’s state of the union message. It put on a television show featuring Senator Dirksen and Representative Ford in a recitation which differed wildly from most of the things they have said about the war in the past. The Secretary of Defence, Mr McNamara, went before the Senate armed services committee yesterday and when he and the Senators emerged from the privacy of the committee chamber, the scene was about as orderly as the end of a professional football game. Senator Richard Russell, of Georgia, told the crowding reporters that the general tone of Mr McNamara’s private remarks was that time was running out on the peace offensive. “Never even mentioned it,” the Secretary said later. “Disconnected Shouts” No doubt the discussion inside the committee room was better, but ever since the start of the peace offensive the public statements . have been a babble of disconnected shouts. One day a general comes back from Vietnam and calls for a resumption of the bombing in North Vietnam, the next a Senator offers his opinion that escalating the war now would be “sheer madness.” Yet there was no reason why the two Houses of Congress could not have taken a week for a serious discussion of the President’s state of the union message. It was at least a clear picture of a perplexed man. It defined the dilemmas if not their solutions. In any other democratic country, the Parliament would have regarded such a message at such a time by the head of the government as an invitation to a debate. Private Debate It may be objected that a public debate in the midst of the peace offensive would dramatise the diVisions in the country on Vietnam—they are being dramatised anyway— I but there is no reason why

the Government, if it fears this result, cannot debate the issue in private.

This was done during World War 11, and while there were the inevitable leaks they did little damage. The present situation is remarkable in a number of ways.

President Woodrow Wilson died believing that the power

of the Senate was so great in the field of foreign affairs that it could virtually paralyse the President, but today the President alone can decide whether to renew the bombing or extend the pause, to raise or lower the level of violence on the allied side, to bomb Hanoi and mine the harbour of Haiphong or leave them alone, to attack the Soviet ships carrying supplies to the North Vietnamese or ignore them, without even listening to the Senate. There has been no real debate on the China question, which lies behind the whole war.

It is not even clear whether the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong have increased the number of attacks on our positions since the start of the peace offensive, for the Pentagon has testified that the attacks have increased and the President has said they have decreased. If the purpose of all this is

to confuse the enemy it must be a success, for the so-called debate is certainly confusing everybody else. The American people are entitled at such a time to a candid and searching discussion of the issues in Congress assembled, but this is precisely the one thing they have not had.