The Choice We Face
The Choice We Face FoR nearly two years the Republican Party throbbed through one of the most monumental hangovers in American political history. Many were the political doctors who came from near...
...But neither Mr...
...And former President Dwight D. Eisenhower put the grisly finishing touches to it all when he demanded that the United States use "as much force as we need to win" in Vietnam, and this, he emphasized, would not "automatically preclude anything," including the use of nuclear We Face weapons...
...With this inspiration from its three most celebrated leaders, the Republican Coordinating Committee sounded its party's official campaign strategy when it demanded that President Johnson "take every practical step" to achieve victory in Vietnam—presumably whatever the cost...
...It is a curious paradox that nearly all of the articulate, effective opposition in Congress to the Democratic President's policy on Vietnam comes from Democrats...
...Earlier in the year it was widely agreed by the political pundits that the war in Vietnam would be the issue of the 1966 campaign...
...Richard Wilson, writing from Des Moines in The Washington Star, quoted a leading Iowa Democrat, who happens to like the President, as saying: "People are distrustful and suspicious of the President's motives and his looks...
...Eisenhower nor the Republican Coordinating Committee had a word to say about getting at the cause of the curse—the continuing absence of equality of opportunity for Negroes in education, employment, housing, and recreation...
...Too expedient...
...Eisenhower lashed out at what he described as "deliberate riots, engendered for no other purpose but to hurt the rest of us by this defiance of law and order...
...The feeling is widespread that he is much too devious and domineering, too crafty and calculating to capture the admiration and affection he so passionately desires...
...Bomb the devil out of Haiphong harbor," cried Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen...
...We know this position will be rejected by our friends of the New Left and other purists who profess to find no difference between the two political camps...
...For all their occasional bravado in nipping at the Democrats as "the war party," which it has been in this century, the Republican leaders recoil from the prospect of offering themselves to the country as the peace party...
...The Republicans propose a greater—and more expensive—escalation in Vietnam...
...The Republican high command, for all its pledges of reform, has returned to Goldwaterism on the home front as well...
...This is a significant consideration that we hope Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow will keep in mind when they ponder the election returns...
...The Republicans, who promised American voters a new and progressive look after their miserable performance in 1964, have mangled their chance to appeal to independent voters by returning to the sterile cliches of the Gold-water campaign...
...They are confused, too, and understandably, about how their vote can be made meaningful in support of whichever approach to peace they might believe in...
...From time to time an errant Republican is tempted to strike out at the Johnson Administration's betrayal of the moderate, anti-hawk position it embraced in 1964, but he is usually either a loner or one who can be quickly summoned back to the hawk's nest after his brief fling with the doves...
...And many were the prescriptions written and many times was the vow taken, "Never a drop, never again...
...Many were the political doctors who came from near and far to examine and diagnose the historic hangover...
...given, too, the clearly demonstrable fact that the Democratic Party, with all its faults and all its Dixiecrat liabilities, stands for a significantly more affirmative program at home than do the back-to-Goldwater Republicans—given these considerations, we are convinced that in most Congressional districts the independent, progressive-minded voter does have some kind of choice, however narrow, on some of the more meaningful issues...
...Too often, in the opinion of many Americans, he appears to rank politics ahead of policy, as James Reston of The New York Times put it...
...Johnson carried many a Democrat to victory on his expansive coattails...
...Most of the domestic Federal programs that the GOP would slash are designed to help the country's disadvantaged citizens, largely Negroes—such programs, for example, as the war on poverty and aid to education...
...The answer to the problem of inflation, said the GOP high command, is reduction of Federal expenditures...
...Far from providing an affirmative alternative to the Johnson Administration's policy in Vietnam, they propose the same policy of escalation—only in deadlier doses...
...That has not turned out to be true...
...On the issue of Vietnam, the GOP strategists scorned the opportunity to denounce the Johnson Administration for failing to achieve peace...
...Ordinarily, if one opposes the policy of the party in power, he would turn to the opposing party...
...Today the situation is reversed...
...They are sick of the frightful mess and they want it ended at the first possible moment, but many of them are not sure whether escalation or negotiation or withdrawal is the most effective way to finish the fiasco...
...President, I'll tell him he can't intimidate you' said that "there is something faintly absurd and self-contradictory about Americans virtually calling upon Asians to settle an Asian war so largely of American making...
...Many Democratic members of Congress seeking reelection find themselves more popular in their districts than the President is, and they prefer not to have him campaign among their constituents...
...Burck in the Chicago Sun-Times Johnson has chosen to do his campaigning in Southeast Asia during the closing weeks of the campaign...
...What of the Democrats this year...
...But a fortnight or so ago, in the closing weeks of the 1966 election campaign, the patient tore up all the prescriptions and went back to the bottle that nearly killed it in 1964— 100-proof, Three Star Goldwater...
...Under the leadership of President Johnson the Democrats in Congress achieved some notable gains in pursuit of the Great Society in last year's session, but progress declined and all but disappeared during 1966 as the Chief Executive and his lieutenants became increasingly obsessed with the war in Vietnam...
...Although he was careful to make no direct reference to Negroes, Mr...
...All in all, the official Republican approach to the crisis in Vietnam would seem to represent no more than a re-broadcast of the dismal war tunes of 1964...
...There are many able and progressive Democrats in Congress but they are relatively ineffective in the face of the reviving coalition of conservative Republicans and Dixie Democrats and the lack of leadership in the White House...
...Seasoned correspondents who have criss-crossed the country feeling the nation's political pulse are just about unanimous in reporting this appraisal of Mr...
...This is the something-for-everybody plan under which the Asian nations would resolve the conflict in Vietnam without participation of the United States, but the United States would simply have the power to veto anything and everything the Asian nations resolved...
...This is about the only way we can summarize what has happened in recent weeks as the Republican leadership massed its Congressional candidates behind the twin themes—"Why not victory in Vietnam...
...Too slick...
...But where...
...President Johnson's stature in the country has declined markedly...
...Too clever...
...We must use stronger measures against North Vietnam," insisted former Vice President Richard M. Nixon when he attacked as appeasement the Administration's all too modest moves toward a peaceful settlement...
...Suppose the voter regards himself as pretty much a dove who supports greater efforts at negotiation or outright withdrawal...
...We feel no surge of enthusiasm as we contemplate the party in power...
...Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed this campaign gimmick as neatly as anyone we know when it Herblock in The Washington Post 'Yes, Mr...
...Johnson...
...Too smart...
...But an American who rejects the Johnson Administration's program of escalating the war in Vietnam would find that the great majority of Republicans adhere to the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dirksen demand for an even wider war than contemplated by the Democratic Administration...
...As a sop to those who might yet harbor hopes of peace, Republicans offered their support of the notion of an all-Asian peace conference...
...Most Americans are at least as deeply concerned over the war as they were six months ago, but they are more confused about what their position should be...
...in mid-October it stood at the lowest level since he took office...
...Johnson's escalating course in Vietnam: Senators Fulbright, Mansfield, Morse, Gruening, McGovern, Hartke, Nelson, Church, Kennedy, Young, and Representatives Kasten-meier, Edwards, Ryan, Rosenthal, Burton—all Democrats...
...Given this nucleus of resistance to the President in his own party...
...This judgment is typical of many others cited by a number of other writers...
...Instead, they came close to making President Johnson look like a peacenik by demanding ever more escalation of the tragic conflict...
...To vote Republican might seem at first like the only way to repudiate President Johnson's policy, but in the process the voter would be endorsing an even more belligerent program than he thought he was rejecting...
...But while we understand their fury and frustration, we persist in our belief that there is a significant difference, for example, between a Pat Brown and a Ronald Reagan in California...
...But beyond that factor there is a mounting un-happiness with the President as a person...
...Call the roll of those who have had the courage to speak up against Mr...
...To assume that an increase in the Republican vote means the ascendancy of a dovelike mood in the country would represent a tragic misreading of American political positions...
...On the contrary, in discussing another major issue of the campaign—inflation —the Republican leadership seemed to be striking at such steps as the Federal government has taken to cope with the causes of racial conflict...
...For whom does he vote—if he lives in any one of the ninety-nine per cent of the Congressional districts in which there is no independent peace candidate...
...To shrink these programs below their present all-too-modest levels could only multiply the tensions which generate the violence the Republican leadership professes to deplore...
...Former President Eisenhower again set the tone for official GOP strategy...
...The Republicans, he said, should take "the strongest possible position in their pledges to remove this curse...
...In the final month of this campaign, the Republican Coordinating Committee decided to exploit racism and the white backlash by proclaiming that "crime, violence, and mob madness" had become the major domestic issue...
...The St...
...This plunge in popularity reflects widespread discontent with his conduct of the war, both among doves and hawks...
...and "law and order at home" in almost the identical language employed by Barry Goldwater when he led them to disaster two years ago...
...This doubtless explains, at least in part, why Mr...
...Two years ago Mr...
Vol. 30 • November 1966 • No. 11
