The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington "I came, I saw, I believed," Lyndon Johnson said on his Pacific tour. We found the Julian rhetoric curiously appropriate. This was our Caesar, inspecting Mare Nostrum,...
...And we hope that we can establish men are equal in the world, and might doesn't make right...
...the health program-twenty-three bills...
...POTOMACUS...
...a woman who saw him up close on the streets of Canberra commented...
...The headlines went to the pledge to withdraw all American forces six months after the North Vietnamese withdraw theirs and cease infiltration "and the level of violence thus subsides...
...Johnson's advance announcement that he would go to Manila "only to listen" was a subject of wry jokes among the Asian participants...
...they're out there...
...How thin the consensus was, even among "our boys," became plain while the ink was still wet on the communique...
...At the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, besieged by anti-war student demonstrators whose signs and slogans would be familiar to anyone who has visited Berkeley, the President delivered a speech on the Great Society that included his own version of the old Put-Them-All-Together-TheySpell-Mother refrain...
...So we'd better establish the rule we established in Europe when we December, 1966 went there-that no dictator just because he has power and because he has might can snuff out freedom and liberty...
...You're just a little country and you've got your problems," he told the citizens of Melbourne, "but don't let it get you down...
...And we don't ask for much, but what we ask for, we're going to get...
...The polyp in his throat made it no easier to plow through the endless rounds of arrival and departure statements, the formal speeches, the toasts to princes and prime ministers, the bullhorned "Howdys" and "Thank YOllS" to the throngs...
...Both sides lost," a weary American correspondent observed...
...In Malaysia, whose fragile social system has properly been described as "enlightened feudalism," Johnson had high praise for the Federation's "orderly and evolutionary development...
...A candid American spokesman commented, "I think it is fair to say that the sense of it is exactly what we have said before...
...I t was just about as difficult to tell the genuine from the fake news...
...As soon as the set opening speeches were out of the way, as soon as General Westmoreland had brought the unwelcome but not unexpected news that more troops would be needed in Vietnam, the participants got down to the business of hammering out a communique...
...D, the security of our nation rests on the strength of our defense, and our ability to execute our policies with dispatch and with strength...
...No mention was made of the bombing attacks on North Vietnam, of the problem of National Liberation Front representation in peace talks, or of any new initiative toward negotiations...
...Four hundred thousand of our young men, the flower of our manhood...
...In Bangkok, he discoursed at length on "ThaiAmerican cooperation"-and pledged an increase in United States military aid-without ever mentioning the 35,000 American servicemen already stationed in Thailand or the Air Force bases from which eighty per cent of the bombing missions to North Vietnam are launched...
...The President liked the placards, and ordered his staff photographer to record them for posterity...
...But it spells 'Friend,' F .R-I-E-N-D...
...He's very lifelike, isn't he...
...The Roman image came to mind as we watched one humid evening at Malacanang Palace in Manila when a crown of sampaguita flowers was pressed on the President's brow...
...We may have to show it can't be done in other areas of the Pacific...
...D. in college, giving him all the education he can take...
...We call that F. "Recreation, beautification, conservation, so our children will have a place to play, so that we can see the beauty of the land as God made it...
...We seek no military victory, he said time and again...
...Now, it's better to do it there than in Honolulu...
...And if might did make right, they'd wipe over the United States and they would take what we got-and we got what they want, don't you think we haven't," the President solemnly intoned...
...This was our Caesar, inspecting Mare Nostrum, our sea, conferring with his proconsuls-"my prime ministers," he called them at one pointand accepting the homage of the subject peoples...
...In South Korea, he referred to the "vigorous democracy" of General Park Chung Hee's regime...
...In New Zealand and Australia, where deep-seated panic over the "yellow peril" is reflected in immigration laws that make the McCarran Act look like enlightened legislation, the President spoke movingly of the two nations' commitment to a united Asia...
...we want only to prove that "might does not make right...
...We call that R. "Jobs and good wages, full employment that you have had for thirty years, income-seventy-seven million of our people are working, more than ever in history-we call that I. "Education-eighteen educational measures enacted from picking the THE PROGRESSIVE youngster at four years of age and carrying him through a Ph...
...The Manila Hotel swarmed with enterprising Filipinos who had managed to obtain counterfeit press credentials to partake of the refreshments provided for accredited correspondents...
...We will call that D. "That is really our domestic program...
...There was barely time for the formalities in the tight two-day program...
...The scar of his imperfectly healed gall bladder operation must have ached as he repeatedly halted his motorcades to wade into the crowds...
...we're going to keep...
...As Senator J. William Fulbright has so unkindly reminded us, it was, after all, a visit to "our boys," and there was no need to talk about some of the unpleasant truths that might have had to be faced if the President's itinerary had encompassed, say, Japan, or India, or Indonesia...
...On the other side of the consensus, President Marcos made it known that he had mounted a valiant effort to soften the language of the communique...
...Such mention would have made big news in Bangkok, for the Thais have been told even less by their government about the American military effort there than we have been told by ours...
...There were the timehonored assurances of progress toward democratic government and economic stability in South Vietnam, the appeal to "aggressors" and "terrorists" to "lay down their arms...
...Even in this, his most ambitious venture in foreign diplomacy, the President never lost sight for long of the domestic matters that are his prime preoccupation...
...What did it all mean, this 31,500mile exercise ~n Johnson-to-Asia diplomacy...
...His reading was considerably harder than that offered by American officials...
...He proclaimed the Pax Americana in the Pacific, dispensed LBJ ballpoint pens to the uniformed school children who lined the roads, and offered generous words of encouragement...
...We're showing right now it can't be done in Vietnam...
...The United States, he reminded the troops, has only 200 million of the world's three billion people...
...In fact, he was larger than life, sustaining an incredible pace that plunged his staff and the flying circus of American correspondents into bottomless chasms of fatigue...
...The American delegation was not shy about reviewingand revising-the speeches prepared by Asian delegates to what was somewhat extravagantly called a "summit conference...
...We had to show it can't be done in Korea...
...We reproduce the passage here because it failed, somehow, to get much attention in the news accounts: "I have said so often that if you want to know what our foreign policy is, look at our domestic policy," Johnson said...
...There were rumors that the conference documents had been delayed for hours by a wrangle between those drafters most concerned with style and those whose prime interest was in substance...
...The documents they produced-the communique was supplemented by a statement of "Goals of Freedom" and a "Declaration on Peace and Progress in Asia and the Pacific" -were wordy as well as vague...
...He strode through seven countries in seventeen days, bestowing handshakes on well-wishers and denouncing the intransigence of "the other side...
...To be sure, the President was deferential in the sessions of the seven-nation conference...
...he spoke last, and said relatively little...
...South Vietnam's volatile Premier, Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky-whom Johnson kept at arm's length, unlike the memorable chumminess of last February's Honolulu conference-wasted no time in offering his own interpretation of the withdrawal terms...
...we're going to hold...
...Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, the host and principal promoter, had wanted to call it a "peace conference," but the United States put a stop to that...
...But behind the scenes the President and his advisers worked frantically to ensure the outcome they wanted-a show of consensus that would demonstrate to the world that Vietnam is not an American but an Asian enterprise...
...At Manila, foreign correspondents were summoned one evening for an off-the-record session with Johnson...
...A few days later, in the mess hall of the 11 th Engineer Battalion at Camp Stanley in South Korea, Johnson was even more explicit...
...I described that domestic policy of some 200 measures-I believe the State of the Union Message had 171 recommended, and we will perhaps get in the neighborhood of 150 enacted-I summarized it in six letters: "Food, producing food for hungry people, ourselves and the entire world...
...We will call that E. "Then medical care for all of our senior citizens, modern hospitalization, increased nursing training, and nursing homes for all of our elderly people...
...But the convictions of international altruism seemed to desert Johnson when he was face to face with American military men...
...We have divided it into 150 detailed bills to clean up the dirty water, the dirty air and those things...
...We will call that N for nursing homes...
...Wherever he went, the President spoke of his longing for peace-with honor, of course-and his vision of a world in which America's massive resources could be devoted exclusively to social and economic development, even in North Vietnam, even in China...
...But Johnson, whose staff dubbed him with the code name "Volunteer" for the Pacific mission, made the most of every moment...
...It was inescapable during the triumphal entry into Seoul, where a multitude of two million had been turned out by a government eager to please, where the signs read "Welcome, King of Democracy" and "All Hail to Johnson...
...He also left an image of America-an image that conformed remarkably to the one people already held: an image of gregariousness and generosity and pettiness, an image of simultaneous indifference to ceremonial form and awesome reverence for the cliches of rhetoric...
...You can't tell the genuine from the fake newshound," a Manila Chronicle reporter complained...
...We thought we had a cosmic clue on the last day in Seoul, when we heard a splendid Korean Army band blare out a syncopated version of He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, followed by the melancholy strains of There's No Tomorrow...
...He stood in the officers' mess of the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing, during the dramatic visit to Cam Ranh Bay, and told General William C. Westmoreland's field commanders that they were in Vietnam to "fight a two-fisted war," and that their Commander in Chief expected them to "come home with that coonskin on the wall...
...They hoped he would shed some light on the dilemma of Vietnam, but instead he dwelled long and lovingly on the achievements of the Eighty-ninth Congress-"my Congress...
...He left a trail of specially constructed seven-foot beds behind him-in Lennon's Hotel in Brisbane, where Douglas MacArthur was headquartered in World War II, in Suite 402 of the rococo Manila Hotel, which the Beatles occupied during a stormy visit to the Philippines last summer, in the half dozen other places where he spent the night...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
