THE POLITICS OF VIETNAM

...Some, like Representative Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Republican Conference, demand greater escalation of the conflict...

...All in all, the politics of Vietnam this campaign year will be as confusing as the war itself...

...If one agrees to become number-two man, he must serve the number-one man without quarreling in public, or get out— an inconceivable alternative for a Vice President...

...Our own hunch, based on past experience, is that the Republicans will take both positions, although perhaps not on the same platform the same evening...

...This was—and is—understandable...

...All believe the United States should stop offensive operations there and turn to negotiations, in which the Vietcong would be represented...

...Some convention delegates booed mention of President Johnson's name...

...The deep-going split within the Democratic Party is dramatized most strikingly by the clash between Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York...

...Their cheers were muffled a bit in the days that followed as Kennedy seemed to waver and wobble and then water down his original statement...

...Ferency, who may be a candidate for governor, said that as party chairman he felt he was compelled to support the President's Vietnam position...

...Then, in a statement February 17, he created a national sensation by embracing a position previously enunciated by other, less publicized liberals...

...Some will doubtless denounce the Democrats as "appeas-ers" and "soft on Communism" because the Johnson Administration has not escalated the war sufficiently for their tastes...

...Recently, Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan and Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, the GOP leaders in Congress, piously disclaimed any intention of playing politics with the crisis in Vietnam and then went on to assert that "the American people are aghast that the Democratic Party is not unified in its position on our policy in Vietnam...

...Liberals cheered Kennedy's recognition of the central issue in Vietnam...

...Until last month Kennedy had confined his comments on the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policy to a few suggestions that he was not altogether happy with every aspect of that policy...

...The clash between Democrat and Democrat as the nation sees it in Congress is mirrored in countless communities across the land...

...It was Humphrey the White House unleashed as its hatchet man when Robert Kennedy proposed his affirmative approach to a negotiated settlement in Vietnam...

...We remember that shortly after he became Vice President he vowed that "come hell or high-water, I will be at President Johnson's side...

...But this interpretation of the man and his motives has undergone gradual revision over the fifteen months he has served in the Senate—with us as with many others who identify themselves as progressives -—although we still find ourselves holding back from a genuinely enthusiastic embrace...

...During the past few months, we have been informed, Humphrey has abandoned his pressure on the President for a more creative approach to the mess in Vietnam and has become a true-believer of the Johnson-Rusk policies...

...In a subsequent statement, without mentioning Humphrey by name but quoting one of his comments, Kennedy emphasized: "I think statements that are made that we will never deal with assassins and we will never deal with murderers make it difficult for them [the Vietcong] to believe that they are being asked to come to the negotiating table other than through surrender...

...Item—In Michigan, Zolton A. Fer-ency, state Democratic chairman for three years, resigned because he could no longer support President Johnson's Vietnam policies...

...Newspaper headlines and television cameras do dramatize the clash among Democrats in Congress, but little has been noted of the extent to which this division runs deeply into the grass roots...

...This state of mind is bound to have a significant if not decisive impact on the outcome of the Congressional elections this fall and, if the war goes on, as the experts predict it will, on the Presidential race in 1968 and, perhaps, even in 1972...

...Some Wisconsin Democrats have returned their Democratic membership cards to state headquarters with the notation: "We voted for Johnson but we got Goldwater...

...This process of changing over is all the more remarkable because until recent months the liberals' esteem for Humphrey was as great as was their rejection of Kennedy...

...It is true, of course, that his name enables him to command far more attention for his proposals than can other freshman, or even many senior, Senators, but it is equally true that few Senators have been so diligent in urging forward-looking approaches to the problems of foreign policy...

...This personal experience of many Senators and Representatives ratifies the "findings of every poll of public opinion—that the anxiety of the American electorate over the conflict in Vietnam is so overriding that it dwarfs its concern on all other issues combined...

...The heart of the hope for a negotiated settlement," he said, lies in admitting the Communist-dominated Vietcong "to a share of the power and responsibility" in South Vietnam...

...It is true, of course, that the Republicans, and the Independents who hold the balance of political power, are hardly more united than the Democrats, but it is the Democrats who command executive and legislative responsibility and will be held accountable by the electorate...

...The New York Senator has not been one of our political heroes...

...We do not doubt Humphrey's sincerity of purpose, and this in a way makes it harder to take him as he is today...

...Kennedy's record on domestic affairs is excellent, but it is in the area of foreign policy that he has provided creative direction...

...But it was always thought by those who had clung to their old admiration for the man that, whatever he might feel obliged to say publicly, he was doing everything in his power, privately, to persuade the President to embrace a more progressive position...

...The new-found enthusiasm for the New York Senator among the liberal disciples of the late Adlai E. Stevenson is echoed among members of the Democratic left in states around the country and in the capital itself...

...It is too early to tell where the Republican candidates will wind up in the fall campaign...

...Item—In New York City, four reform Democrats are battling for the right to challenge the incumbent in their district, Representative Leonard Farbstein...

...The Vice President leaped to the assignment with the same boundless enthusiasm that he expends on any project that is dear to his heart, and soon, we are obliged to report as a friend in distress, he sounded like both Richard Nixon and Everett Dirksen—with his reference to the Kennedy proposal as a dose of arsenic...

...He now sees the war in Vietnam not as having any of the elements of civil war or social revolution, but wholly as a struggle between good guys and bad guys, between the murdering villains of the Vietcong and the peace-loving democrats who make up the Saigon government this year...

...The deepening division within the Democratic Party has provided the Republicans with their basic strategy of the moment: silence on the real issues of Vietnam and thunder on the split in Democratic ranks...

...Last year's record is all but forgotten in the anxiety-ridden preoccupation with the frightful business in Vietnam...

...In many instances the new Kennedy partisans expressed their disillusionment with their former hero, Vice President Humphrey...

...But it is not too early to conclude that the Democratic Party, as the party in power, is hurting badly right now...

...President Johnson, whose course has placed him in the middle of a bruising crossfire between those who want escalation of the war in the hopie of achieving a quick victory and those who pin their hopes for an honorable conclusion on enlarged efforts toward a negotiated settlement, finds his popular support on the issue of Vietnam dropping sharply...

...Outside of Congress, Republicans like Richard Nixon insist on a harder line, while others like New York City's Mayor John Lindsay and Michigan's Governor George Romney oppose escalating the war...

...We long regarded him as too cold, callous, calculating, and cynical —as a political operator more interested in power for its own sake than as the instrument for the achievement of progressive goals...

...Thus, he has called for reevaluation of our policy toward Communist China, for greater efforts in the field of disarmament to prevent nuclear proliferation, for a return to the neglected principles of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and for a greater concentration on the social, political, and economic rehabilitation of South Vietnam...

...Thus, Republicans in Congress have gone underground on the substantive issues while raising a great clamor that the Democrats are too divided to govern effectively...

...And so he did, we are told on excellent authority, until recently...

...Humphrey, indeed, has become more royalist than the crown, more aggressively committed to Ky's military dictatorship than the President is publicly...

...It is too early, of course, to evaluate the nature of that impact...

...much will depend on the military and diplomatic situations that prevail when voting time comes...

...But there could be no doubt that for all his reluctance to clash head-on with the White House, he had staked out a position of leadership to the left of the Johnson Administration and especially Vice President Humphrey...

...Some estimate of the magnitude of the political problem confronting the divided Democratic Party may be gained from this sampling of recent reports: Item—In Wisconsin, Louis Hanson, chairman of the Democratic Party, predicted: "As the fighting escalates in Southeast Asia, as the casualty lists lengthen and the draft calls increase, Wisconsin Democrats will find growing hostility to our candidates because it is the Democrats who are in power in Washington...

...I am not happy with continued escalation...

...Item—The California Democratic Council, largest volunteer political organization in the nation, denounced the Administration's policy on Vietnam and demanded direct negotiations with the Vietcong to end the war...

...The election outcome may be determined less by what both parties have to say than such considerations as growing casualty lists, draft calls, tax increases, inflation and other home-front dislocations, and, perhaps most decisive of all—by how hopeful or hopeless are the prospects for peace at election time...

...Our affection for him as a friend remains untouched, but our admiration for him as a liberal leader has been battered and bent—and almost broken—as he has moved to the center of the stage as a strident advocate of the hard-line policy in Vietnam and as a bubbling apologist for the miserable military dictatorship of General Ky...

...But as a private citizen and a person deeply concerned with our involvement in that tragic war, I hope and pray for a change in Administration policy...

...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Politics of Vietnam A lmost all members of Congress we know around the country report an identical experience: When they return home to address their constituents, they discover that no matter what the subject of their speeches—the Great Society, conservation, the world population problem, civil rights, or whatever—the audience, in the discussion period that follows, proceeds to ignore the topic of the talk and to bombard the speaker with questions and comments on only one subject—• the war in Vietnam...

...Johnson's handling of the war declined in six weeks from sixty-three to forty-nine per cent "as a result of policies that fail to satisfy completely any of the rival positions," The polls do not measure the extraordinary conflict within the Democratic Party itself...

...The latest Harris Poll, published in March, revealed that public approval of Mr...

...As The New York Times expressed it: "All four are extremely critical of the Johnson Administration's conduct of the war in Vietnam...

...Ford and Dirksen might have gone on to say that the Republicans are also far from unified...

...David S. Broder, political writer for The New York Times, summed it up this way: "Senator Kennedy is becoming the new hero of the Democratic left...

...Others, like Senator George Aiken of Vermont, support a greater emphasis on a negotiated settlement...

...The result was to deplete further his rapidly dwindling reserve with the liberal forces of the nation...

...If the reactions of readers of The Progressive writing to us in growing numbers, the comments of informed observers we are in touch with, and the reports we read around the country are meaningful signs, the New York Senator is beginning to replace the Vice President as the hope and standard-bearer of both the liberal intellectuals and the home-grown progressives of the countryside...

...We of The Progressive have known Hubert Humphrey for nearly two decades—with great affection and admiration...

...The decline of Humphrey as a spokesman for American progressivism has been paralleled by an almost corresponding rise in the stature of Robert Kennedy...

...Others will want to indict the Democrats as the "war party" that has dragged the nation into war four times in our century...

...The great unifying force for the Democratic Party last year—the Johnson Administration's impressive Great Society achievements of the first term of this Eighty-ninth Congress—no longer holds Democrats together...