War Critics Answered

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31362, 6 May 1967, Page 21

War Critics Answered

(N.Z .P.A. -Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, May 2.

President Johnson hit out at critics of his Vietnam policy again on Tuesday when he said dissenters must be prepared to acknowledge the price of debate as American troops risked their lives in the war.

Mr Johnson did not define the “price,” but was apparently referring to the administration’s position that anti-war demonstrators were encouraging Hanoi and costing American lives. That sentiment had been expressed by the President and other Administration officials in the past, notably by General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, during a speech in New York 11 days ago. Honour Bestowed The President made his remarks at a White House ceremony at which the Medal of Honour, the nation’s highest military decoration for valour, was given to the wife

of Sergeant Peter Connor, who was mortally wounded when he threw himself on a defective grenade while searching for Viet Cong troops a year ago. Mr Johnson said Sergeant Connor died at a time of testing, not only for himself, but for the United States. “Thousands of miles away from the battlefield on which he fell, his countrymen debate the course of the war he fought in," he said. “Many of them are genuinely concerned to find the wisest course for their country. “Some of them have never learned, or forgotten, the lessons of this country—that no nation or people can be secure when aggression is ignored, that those who can resist aggression bear the heaviest responsibility to do so, that resistance cannot be made without pain and sacrifice.”

Price of Democracy The President said the debate would go on as long as the United States was a democracy and as long as men such as Sergeant Connor “shoulder their packs and face not hostile placards and debating points, but the bullets and mortar shell* of aggressive armies." “The debate will go on, and

it will have its price,” he added. “It is a price our democracy must be prepared to pay, and that the angriest voices of dissent should be prepared to acknowledge.”