Shifts In Johnson Policy

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30976, 4 February 1966, Page 13

Shifts In Johnson Policy

(N Z. Press Assn — Copyright) WASHINGTON, Feb. 1. The power of the President to do w’hat he likes on questions of war and peace has seldom been dramatised more sharply than in President Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam war, writes James Reston of the “New York Times.”

Reston wrote:

President Johnson has done almost everything in Vietnam he vowed publicly not to do. He has done it all legally, and in the process he has demonstrated that the American President now exercises personal power in the field of foreign affairs unequalled by any other political leader in the world. He was against taking the Vietnam issue to the United Nations Security Council for judgment but he presented it to the United Nations this week nevertheless. He opposed bombing North Vietnam when he ran for the Presidency, but he ordered the bombing after he was elected.

He was at first against defining his war aims publicly, against committing a large expedionary force to Vietnam, against a peace offensive, against committing his troops to offensive strategy of seeking out and destroying the enemy, and emphatically against risking a major ground war against superior numbers on the Asian continent —but he has done all these things in the face of sharp opposition within his own party and the nation. This decisive Presidential power is best illustrated by his main argument for renewing the bombing in North Vietnam. His central argument was that the enemy was building up its forces during the bombing pause, and that unless the bombing was renewed, the cost in life—Vietnamese lives, American lives, and allied lives—would be greatly increased.

In saying this, he made no reference to the much greater build-up of allied power during the pause, and implied that unless the United States renewed the bombing and stopped the flow of enemy arms the balance of power would be changed in favour of the enemy, and the American command would be put in danger. On this basis, ob-

viously nobody could challenge his thesis. The facts before the Senate, however, do not support this proposition. The Viet Cong, it is true, get most of their arms from North Vietnam.

They have gone over to a new weapons system that gets all its ammunition from China, and cannot be supplied by capturing supplies from the United States and South Vietnamese forces, whose ammunition does not fit their new weapons.

But the Viet Cong are fighting mainly with small arms, and can keep up the present level of fighting with no more than 12 tons of supplies a day. The official line in Washington is that the Viet Cong need 200 tons of supplies a day, which is a lot: and, therefore, that bombing them will cripple their operation. But 200 tons a day is an estimate based on the assumption that every Viet Cong unit will be engaged all the time, and this never has happened in the Vietnamese rar and is not likely to happen. Nevertheless, when this picture of North Vietnamese trucks delivering 200 tons of arms every day to attack our positions is presented as the factual situation, the

opposition to President Johnson does not know what to say.

The President’s legal argument is equally difficult. He says that the Congress ai thorised him to take any action “he,” the President, deemed necessary, not only in South Vietnam but in all of South-east Asia, to oppose the aggression of the Communists, and in this he is absolutely right.

But the President asked for this power in the midst of the crisis over the Communist attack on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin last summer, when the Congress really had no choice but to give him whatever he requested publicly or repudiate him and thus help the enemy.

The President may be right in what he has requested and what he has done, but the constitutional point is perfectly clear. The system has changed dramatically in the last generation. The President is now able to get the legal authority he wants if he chooses the right time to ask for it publicly, and he is able then to exercise that power to bomb or not to bomb, to commit 100,000 men or 500,000 men to the battle to carry out his policies if he so chooses.