The Pueblo Affair-Three Articles With Trembling Solicitude

...With Trembling Solicitude' By Charles Burton Marshall the Pueblo affair has been far more cruel So far they have rattled not at all I have heard only one captious comment on their style A colleague suggested that by asserting at once the illicitness of the seizure they had overreacted instead of playing it cool Nonsense What should we not have said of our leaders' credibility if in a fit of wariness, they had suppressed that simple basic truth...

...One has a right to expect prudence but not unmanly misrepresentation at such a moment Reaction after all, is a kind of action Our spokesmen verbalized They met They briefed each other They invoked procedures They sent and received messages Policy wheels were set spinning It is perhaps stretching matters, however, to speak of action It is hard to imagine how men could have played it any cooler Our diplomacy was a prodigy of underreacting This time there was no shrugging off negotiations Parleying gave the prospect of a stultifying choice between falsely confessing culpability in order to ransom the shanghaied crewmen and writing them off to ignominious and prolonged captivity Nevertheless, it was deemed necessary to importune for negotiations, and to importune reluctant intermediaries to importune for them One remembered President Johnson's thrice-given pledge of the 1964 campaign Never under any circumstances would he issue an ultimatum No one could claim he was not honoring that pledge "All I can say is that things take time," the President reassured the nation Someone remarked favorably on our magistrates' moderation Another retorted that it was rather the restraint of Prometheus bound Our case was incontestably so right Yet...

...on their own profession, there was so little of substance that our leaders could do about it And nothing arouses compassion as much as helplessness in a good cause Unlike the U-2 scrape no respectable person has tried to wring a drop of humor from our plight over the Pueblo The mood, as observed in my ambit, calls to mind Edmund Burke's admonition "Approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe, and trembling solicitude " At dinner last week a lady said how sorry she felt for the President Everyone around the table concurred Someone wondered aloud whether such a response if general, would not redound to the President's political benefit Another guest, politically astute, said no Not since Hoover's time, he added, had so many people felt so sorry for a President in office, and the one thing a President could not afford was to Washington The midnight capture of the USS Pueblo by four North Korean gunboats provides Joseph Heller with enough material to fill another novel and another play Consider this In the days immediately following the incident, President Johnson supposedly had a number of military options from which to choose However, seizing a North Korean vessel of comparable size was not one of them, the reason being that the North Korean Navy does not include a ship as large as the 179-foot Pueblo Or this One reason that U S aircraft were not sent to assist the be felt sorry for Anger, derision, scorn, hatred—those feelings a competitive politician might absorb and turn to account, but not pity If people in large numbers still felt sorry for the President by next November, he would probably be in trouble The observer likened the electorate to a coach intent on his team's performance When he begins to feel sorry for the quarterback, he usually ends up thinking it is time for a substitution This is not a question of blame or retribution Unjust as the breaks and outrageous as the knocks may have been, a fresh mind and a new ring of authority simply seems to be needed in the huddle Maybe even a whole new lineup Pueblo in her hours of need was that the jet fighter-bombers closest to the scene carried only nuclear pay loads It was the virtual impotence of such seemingly absolute power that helped make the situation so frustrating for most Americans Combined with the terrible swift forays of the Vietcong that belied the Administration's sanguine Vietnam line, the capture of the Pueblo left the nation stunned, angry, and bewildered Reactions in the House of Representatives ranged from mild hysteria to less mild hysteria One Congressman said he would ask...