THE WORD FROM WASHINGTON
The Word from Washington So accustomed has the Capital become to cheery reassurance and glossy platitude in official pronouncements that there was shock—and, in some quarters, outrage—at the...
...Freak weather effects and ever-eager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports...
...What is heard here now from middle level officials who have a role in the management of the war is strikingly different from what one heard a year or even six months ago...
...The pessimistic tone is reflected among respected senior policy makers in the State and even Defense Departments...
...It seems clear that the President, at this point, stakes his political survival on the validity of that premise...
...CIA Director Richard M. Helms has been testifying in closed session to senior members of the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees and, though there have been strong denials for public consumption, some who have sat through the Helms briefings acknowledge that they heard little to encourage any sanguine thoughts of military victory...
...The catalyst was, of course, the Communist winter-spring offensive, which exposed the fragility of the "allied" position throughout South Vietnam...
...Our Navy," he said then, "played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any...
...The military hard-liners on the Hill are laying out a case which will tax the departed Secretary with having created a major tactical gap between the Soviet Union and the United States ¦—primarily in intercontinental ballistic missile strength...
...The Joint Chiefs presented McNamara with a $101.3 billion shopping list of new weaponry and programs...
...That, I deeply regret to say, is the direction in which we now seem to be headed...
...Fulbright and Gore and not a few of their colleagues are sadder, wiser men today than they were in 1964, and the nation is better off for it...
...It never occurred to me that there was the slightest doubt . . . that this attack took place...
...Had it done nothing else—and it did substantially more—the Commission would deserve commendation for its forthright treatment of the critical problem of police-community relations in the Negro ghettos...
...Fulbright says he regrets "more than anything I have ever done in my life that I was the vehicle that took the resolution to the floor and defended it...
...All this will come as no news to those Americans who are black and poor...
...POTOMACUS...
...Against this background, it is small wonder that the Commission found that "in Newark, in Detroit, in Watts, in Harlem—in practically every city that has experienced racial disruption since the summer of 1964—abrasive relationships between police and Negroes and other minority groups have been a major source of grievance, tension, and, ultimately, disorder...
...Physical abuse," the Commission found, "is only one source of aggravation in the ghetto...
...policy has grown thin and ragged...
...In nearly every city surveyed, the Commission heard complaints of harassment of interracial couples, dispersal of social street gatherings, and the stopping of Negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis...
...The great division in the U.S...
...This may finally be the year when they bust the McNamara budget," said one unusually well-informed Pentagon student...
...When disorder comes, as the report devastatingly demonstrates, police attitudes of the kind described are often translated into death-dealing "law enforcement...
...It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the tone is mutinous...
...But we do suspect that some Administration officials might well lose their jobs if they were to express publicly their privately voiced skepticism and despair over the current stress on military victory in Vietnam...
...Suggest complete evaluation before further action...
...Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who had assured Congress and the nation in 1964 that the two American destroyers in the Gulf, the USS Maddox and the USS C. Turner Joy, were on "routine patrol" when they were attacked by North Vietnamese vessels, conceded late in February that they had been assigned to an intelligence mission...
...V Mm...
...He added: "Only one per cent of the officers expressed attitudes which could be described as sympathetic toward Negroes...
...But the Committee has now disclosed that Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the American task force in the Gulf of Tonkin who was aboard the Maddox, had specific knowledge of the South Vietnamese operations, indicated that the North Vietnamese thought his patrol was part of the operations, and therefore requested air cover before the attack took place...
...During the winter offensive, for example, the stresses at the White House and the State Department were on the high casualties of the Communists rather than the significance of the fact that these casualties were incurred in urban areas that had been proclaimed as safe and impossibly beyond the reach of enemy military action...
...In 1964, the Secretary had maintained that the Maddox and the Joy had played no part in South Vietnamese raiding operations against North Vietnam that were then taking place...
...The American people had better get ready to accept a military defeat for the first time in their history," one respected State Department officer in close touch with the cables told us recently...
...Now the Administration stands at another major watershed in the war...
...The Maddox . . . was not informed of, was not aware of, had no knowledge of, and so far as I know today has no knowledge of any South Vietnamese actions in connection with the two islands [of North Vietnam...
...It must be judged from the record that the President and his principal Vietnam policy advisers, Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow, regard the second course as nothing short of surrender...
...Indeed, close to one-half of all the police officers in predominantly Negro high crime rate areas showed extreme prejudice against Negroes...
...I want to make that very clear to you...
...As one Commission witness said, these strip the Negro of the one thing that he may have left— his dignity, 'the question of being a man.' " Professor Albert Reitz, director of the Center for Research on Social Organization at the University of Michigan, told the Commission of one city he had surveyed where, "in predominantly Negro precincts, over three-fourths of the white policemen expressed prejudice or highly prejudiced attitudes toward Negroes...
...Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins was one of the eleven Commissioners...
...But some truths have emerged from the record recently released by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the first of these truths is that the Administration lied...
...The whole truth may never be known about the incidents that took place in the Gulf of Tonkin early in August, 1964—the incidents that prompted a panicky Congress to issue a blank check to the Johnson Administration and triggered a massive escalation of the Vietnam war...
...There are signs that he was as surprised as anyone when his appointees, apparently overwhelmed by the evidence they compiled, produced a searing indictment of white racism and official apathy...
...McNamara says his 1964 statement may have been "ambiguous," and was misunderstood...
...There are many in Government who question whether even a million men would be enough to carry out offensive military action while at the same time sealing off the borders against reinforcement from the North and also keeping conquered territory "pacified...
...Senator Albert Gore, Tennessee Democrat, told the Foreign Relations Committee, "I feel the Congress and the country were misled...
...I know I have been misled...
...The Word from Washington So accustomed has the Capital become to cheery reassurance and glossy platitude in official pronouncements that there was shock—and, in some quarters, outrage—at the comparative candor of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders...
...When he appointed it last summer during the Detroit riot, President Johnson was criticized for naming an Establishment group...
...There will be strong pressure on the Hill to add money to the carefully pruned Administration request for manned bombers, nuclear carriers, nuclear submarines, multiple warhead ICBMs, more of a military role in space, and a full scale $40 billion antiballistic missile system...
...Word has circulated on Capitol Hill that the Central Intelligence Agency is far more pessimistic in its assessment of the American position than the White House policy office presided over by Walt W. Ros-tow...
...The issue may now be joined over General Westmoreland's latest reported request for more than 200,000 reinforcements in Vietnam, which would bring the total American troop presence there to about three quarters of a million...
...The Committee record also shows that Captain Herrick informed the Pentagon, a few hours before retaliatory strikes were ordered against North Vietnam, that "review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful...
...Even before Secretary McNamara left the Pentagon last month his achievements of the past seven years may have begun to unravel in the super-privacy of the Congressional hearing room...
...But it has paid a frightful price for their education...
...If the United States continues to follow the same strategy that is based on attrition of opposing forces through steadily expanded military pressure in South Vietnam, then Westmoreland's request is far too modest...
...The other course, the one that is quietly being pushed now within the Government, is toward a return to the concept of limited military response in Vietnam with emphasis on political and diplomatic action...
...intelligence community is one of emphasis rather than differences of fact...
...Washington put on a bold face but the degree to which the Viet-cong and North Vietnamese forces seized the tactical initiative during the offensive against the cities and kept U.S...
...The skeptical half of the official family saw the obverse of the enemy losses as a far more important indicator of how things really are in Vietnam...
...These, together with contemptuous and degrading verbal abuse, have great impact in the ghetto...
...But the rest—those whose sole contact with the police is an occasional parking ticket and an annual contribution to the Police Athletic League— need to read all of the Commission's report before another violent summer brings a new wave of revulsion at Negro "unreasonableness...
...One report that has already made its way into print is that there may be some high level departures from the CIA because of the agency's increasingly bleak internal view of the war...
...forces pinned down at Khe-sanh shocked the Administration...
...The report is a frightening document, and it is, to borrow a phrase from H. Rap Brown, as American as cherry pie...
...They describe them in terms of the animal kingdom...
...No actual visual sightings by Maddox...
...The selling points will be that the Russians are coming and McNamara has gone...
...The Armed Services Committees were laying the groundwork for a major thrust through the $78 billion budgetary ceiling that McNamara sought to impose on Defense Department expenditures in the new fiscal year...
...In the aftermath of its monumental report, the Commission stands revealed as a mathematical freak: a whole substantially greater than the sum of its parts...
...What do I mean by extreme racial prejudice...
...To an unprecedented degree in the history of the war in Vietnam, the consensus within the Administration on the direction of U.S...
...Along the present course lies the path of unlimited infusions of additional manpower in the indefinite future and beyond that the fateful issue of tactical nuclear weapons, which the Pentagon's military leadership would not shrink from proposing in the Vietnam conflict...
...I mean that they describe Negroes in terms that are not people terms...
...Official Washington has reason to be uncomfortable...
...If I had known of that one telegram," Senator J. W. Fulbright commented, "if that had been put before me on the sixth of August, I certainly don't believe I would have rushed into action...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
