PRESSURES ON JOHNSON

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31247, 20 December 1966, Page 21

PRESSURES ON JOHNSON

(From FRANK OLIVER, special N.Z.P.A. correspondent.) WASHINGTON, December 19. The President is in Texas thinking about his party’s defeat, next year’s Budget, the Vietnam war and a few other problems.

Washington is thinking about a lot of things too and Vietnam continues to be in the forefront, thanks partly to the three coming holidays which have been agreed to. The pressure on the President to turn these brief truces into a full-scale peace initiative is increasing. There is domestic pressure, Papal pressure, United Nations

pressure, pressure from foreign governments, pressure from such important political figures in Washington as Senator Mike Mansfield. There is also another kind of pressure. It is agreed by all who write realistically about political matters that the President is in deep political trouble, thanks to the failure of his party at the polls last month. The incredible possibility exists that Mr Johnson could become the third President in this century to lose a reelection campaign. Many believe that domestic political pressure will force the * President to try every means to get the Vietnam war ended honourably before the nation goes to the polls to elect a President in November, 1968. No-one can travel about

this country without, realising that enthusiasm for the war is diminishing. The casualty lists lengthen, the line on the cost graph rises inexorably and the desired end seems as far away as ever.

It is pretty much a certainty that if Governor Romney is Mr Johnson’s opponent in 1968 the Republican emphasis will be on peace. Governor Romney is a Mormon.

It seems likely that, whoever the Republican nominee may be, Vietnam will be a big issue. The line can easily be forecast—Johnson, the man who bombed North Vietnam and escalated the ground war but cannot make peace diplomatically and will not win the war militarily. “Only a new President, untarnished by the past history

of the struggle, can or will do either,” they can say. Republicans will not even have to say what they would do—but simply argue that Mr Johnson has failed on two counts.

This is why it is being argued that the President, to stay alive politically, simply must accomplish something in Vietnam during the next two years but preferably during 1967. The central problem in the Vietnam war still remains—that Washington does not believe a thing Hanoi says and Hanoi still refuses to believe that the President and the United States genuinely desire peace. Meanwhile people here are grasping at any straw. The agreement of U Thant to stay another five years is such a straw.