Johnson's Policy Puzzles Critics

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30981, 10 February 1966, Page 13

Johnson's Policy Puzzles Critics

Z Press Assn.—Copyright) . WASHINGTON, Feb. 9. | There is a great deal of motion on Vietnam these days ; but the central figures in the action seem vaguely unrelated to one another, like ships passing in the night, writes James Reston, of the “New York Times.” Reston wroteS The Administration’s diplomacy at the United Nations was designed to arrange a peace conference at Geneva, but the Administration's diplomacy at Honolulu seems to have committed the United , States more completely to the I Saigon Government and! therefore reduced the chances of a peace conference with re-! p'esentatives of the Viet Cong. The Senate foreign rela- 1 tions committee is holding 1 onen hearings in the hope of clarifying the issues in Viet-;; n?m. but the Administration / seems/ less interested in lis-.;

: tening to the voices in the j Senate chamber than in j drowning them out. Meanwhile, the one clear | fact is that the military buildI up is proceeding steadily on j both sides. Present plans here call for ! doubling the American manpower commitment in the i present calendar year, from '200.000 to 400.000. and going up to 600.000 in 1967. President Johnson, it is! understood, has not commit-! ted himself to carry through 1 this entire programme, but he is going along with this scale of reinforcement on a month-to-month basis, and unless the Communists agree to talk, which the escalation makes even less likely, the outlook is for an ever larger American force hunting out an increasingly larger but elusive enemy. I Everything in the Johnson ! strategy’ seems to be done in ■ twos: something for the hawks and something for the doves: ! bomb North Vietnam and go to the United Nations Security Council: step-up the military forces and increase the pacification programme and send! Hubert Humphrey to Saigon ! at the same time; criticise the j Saigon overnment in private j and commit American power

and prestige to it in public; ; assert that America cannot < police the world but proclaim 1 simultaneously that tyranny ( in the jungles of continental ( Asia is just as much ( America’s concern as tyranny . and subjugation of the peoples of industrial Europe. j Do these policies comple- , i ment one another or cancel j, each other out? Does half a t ! war offensive, and half a s ! peace offensive, excluding the ( ! enemy doing most of the ] fighting, add up to a whole t policy or no policy? Will an j American commitment to win , a military victory in Vietnam and oppose tyranny almost t anywhere in the world really f encourage the South Vietnam- q ese and the other allies to c fight harder or will it en- t courage them to leave more v and more of the struggle to Uncle Sam? t These are some of the ques- I tions that are still troubling a Washington, especially since / the recent moves by the Pre- r sident give the impression of e impulsive improvisations in- s i spired in part by domestic \ ! political considerations. s The appeal to the Security c Counqjl was made before h there was a detailed explor-

ation of the problem in the capitals of the members of the Security Council, and only a short time after our own and the United Nations officials were saying a debate there would merely increase the divisions. The Honolulu conference was called on such short notice that even the normal security arrangements for a President crossing the ocean could not be made. And the Koreans, the Australians, and the New Zealanders, who also have troops in the battle, were not even invited. The new thing here on Vietnam is not the policy but the process of deciding policy. The Administration cannot disclose all the information that leads to its decisions without helping the enemy. The critics of the Administration cannot be sure they have all the facts, but they are entitled to feel that the Administration is reaching its decision in a careful, orderly unemotional way, with some relationship between Vietnam and other world responsibilities, and this is precisely the feeling they do not have. On the contrary, the Pre-

sident has recently been giving the impression that he is not following a clear strategic policy, but that he is thrashing about, rejecting peace offensives and then trying them, stopping bombing and then starting bombing, rejecting the United Nations and then appealing to the j United Nations, sending Vicej President Humphrey to brief Asian leaders on the Honolulu conference which he did not attend —all in the atmosphere of restless experimentation and self-righteous condemnation of anybody who differs from him. Even his handling of the Senate, usually so effective, has recently been clumsy and scornful. At Honolulu his public statements left the impression that all his critics were "special pleaders” who counsel “retreat,” and that “only the callous or timid” could ignore the cause of the Vietnamese, which is a bold statement since most of the allied world is ignoring them. In short, he is leaving little room for the possibility that his policy may be wrong, and this attitude, far from silencing his critics, is merely adding to their uneasiness.