MR. JOHNSON'S LOSING WARS

...At a "background briefing" with newspapermen, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, long the personification of the diplomat who plays it cool, suddenly exploded when asked whether there had been a serious breakdown of our intelligence operations...

...Both publicly and privately he had increasingly assumed the posture of all-out "war President...

...The air is filled with talk of a turbulent "hot summer" and, among police officials and social workers, one detects only a tone of grim reconciliation to the approaching storm...

...Johnson is losing...

...But his outcry was symptomatic of the frenzy on the Potomac as the war approached what some were calling another "climactic" stage...

...More recently, there have been clear indications revealed by U Thant and the de Gaulle government that negotiations could begin in "a matter of days" after the bombing of North Vietnam ends...

...For the obvious corollary is that young Americans are needlessly and pointless-ly dying at this moment, and that their ranks may be multiplied in ghastly numbers before the guns are somehow stilled...

...In refusing (inexplicably, and absurdly, in Mr...

...for many thousands of Americans—especially the most earnest and idealistic of the young—the war has evoked an intolerable crisis of conscience, extending far beyond the ranks of those responsive to the nihilism of the futilitarian New Leftists...

...The story of the scuttled peace talks, scheduled for February, 1965—with the warm sponsorship of both Adlai Stevenson and U Thant—has been often told...

...It is some measure of what the war has done to the American spirit that a leading best-seller in these critical times is a compilation of Johnson quotations which retrospectively reduce the President to absurdity—or worse...

...it may be falling apart beneath our feet...

...actually it is the repeated miscalculation of Administration officials, so often trumpeted and so swiftly disproved by events, that has intensified the unease and made disbelievers of so many of the devout...

...It has become fashionable for the President and his cohorts to damn the dissenters and to blame them for the unwillingness of Hanoi and the Viet-cong to sue for peace...

...So I don't know why, to win a Pulitzer Prize, people have to go probing for things one can bitch about when there are 2,000 stories on the same day about things that are more constructive in character...

...As dreary as the envenomed atmosphere in which brother quarrels with brother is the paralysis that grips the domestic front...

...As the casualty lists rise, the mood of random rebellion spreads in the slums of our cities...

...Not even in the darkest hours of the Hoover depression has this country been so torn by doubt, dissen-tion, and disaffection...

...There is only one framework in which a schematic defense for our apparent follies can be offered...

...In a long series of Washington dispatches came confirmation of the essence of the comment ascribed to Mr...

...Throughout America millions are still haunted by what we did at Hiroshima despite the general belief that our national cause was valid...

...From the time when then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara first visualized the homecoming of some American troops by Christmas of 1965, the country has been subjected to a shattering sequence of discredited forecasts climaxed by General William C. Westmoreland's reassuring pep-talk before Congress late last year, and the ensuing demolition of his analysis at the front—and in the cities and villages—¦ only a few weeks later...

...We are losing two wars—in Vietnam and the United States—because of what George Kennan, a man rarely given to fiery prose, has called "a massive miscalculation and error of policy, an error for which it is hard to find any parallels in our history," "Our role in Vietnam," he observes, "has clearly become as much of a burden, if not more, for those whom it was supposed to benefit as for those it was supposed to punish...

...What will the Vietnamese—South and North alike— think of us as they begin the task of reconstruction...

...But, like so many other exercises in Administration self-pity, this contention has steadily lost its credibility...

...Consider what the record in Vietnam must look like to both the Soviet and Chinese ideologists, regardless of their doctrinaire discords...

...It has simultaneously become, one must add, an indefensible, inflammatory burden for a threatened American society...

...But the logic—or madness—of that stand would actually suggest that we should have forced a nuclear showdown many months ago...

...The remark is consistent with the rising emotions that apparently permeated Mr...

...But the injury we have done to ourselves may be far more grave in long-range terms...

...Clark Clifford, whose elevation as Secretary of Defense was an apparent reward for his counsels of escalation...

...I am not referring to the military battleground...

...The frightening possibility is that we may still be headed in that direction after wasting many lives in this twilight before total darkness...

...There were the many subsequent occasions when Thant and Soviet Premier Kosygin publicly and privately insisted that a full cessation of the bombings could pave the way for negotiations "in a matter of weeks...

...None of us can state dogmatically what the outcome of such negotiations would have been in the varied circumstances under which the possibilities arose...

...we are among those who crusaded against Barry Gold water in 1964 and contrasted his reckless words with such Johnsonisms as the President's declaration in Akron during that campaign year: "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Vietnamese boys ought to be doing for themselves...

...Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a dedicated civil libertarian seemingly undismayed by despotism in Saigon, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who appears eager to establish for posterity that his anti-Communism pre-dated and was more virulent and unflinching than that of his assailant of the early 1950's, then Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...

...The Great Society has become a wry phrase, a subject of night club jokes and bitter street corner comment in the lower depths...

...we have squandered months and years which might have been devoted to useful, imaginative diplomacy on many fronts, especially in the light of the growing breach between Moscow and Peking and the changing face of the shattered Communist monolith...

...News and World Report—that President Johnson has privately declared his determination to achieve a Vietnam settlement that he can herald as proof of our national virility...

...Johnson's sub-missiveness to the military establishment and its civilian puppets and press agents was his undoing...

...But those who contended that the risk of halting the bombings to achieve such negotiations was smaller than the peril of continued escalation can find abundant justification—if small comfort—in the cumulative disasters that have marked the opposite course...

...How will we look back upon Vietnam if we finally impose our will there by destroying most of that country...

...Johnson's reported view) to recognize that their cause is hopeless, these intransigents have remorselessly drained American resources and blood, creating a psychological civil war within the United States...

...Johnson—he would be "damned" if he would be the first President to lose a war...

...Johnson's inner circle as the third year of our escalation in Vietnam drew to an end in mid-winter amid the melancholy created by the Vietcong's Tet offensive...

...Indeed, few events have so ruthlessly caricatured the overriding consequences of the war as the publication of the Commission's solemn report on our domestic dangers and the pervasive cynicism about whether its message will be heeded...

...There were further amplifications of Hanoi's overture last December...

...It is not the divisions within the United States—cutting across all political, racial, religious, and economic lines—that have perpetuated the war...

...too many of us have clung to the furtive hope that we will somehow muddle through, or that Mr...

...There is greater likelihood that—if and when peace ever comes—they will remember our presence with resentment, not because we refused to pull out unilaterally (a step few Americans have urged) but because we so tenaciously resisted the path to the peace table in what we professed to be our concern for Vietnamese "self-determination...

...Johnson and his associates delude themselves when they cling to the dream that our muscle and tenacity will ultimately confound the "defeatists" and "Nervous Nellies...

...it surely affronts the American intelligence to believe that the enemy's resistance can be attributed to any wide circulation among the Vietnamese of skeptical American editorials, or protest advertisements in The New York Times...

...Just a few days before these words were written, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy was blandly declaring that Hanoi was "hurting" as a result of our bombings...

...In the private imaginings of some Pentagon warriors, Vietnam is merely the opening skirmish in the long-range, inevitable collision between the United States and Communist China, and anything short of "victory" in this first round would be intolerable...

...Those who remain in his entourage are those who have been accomplices in the long chronicle of blunder and bluster—Secretary Rusk, Walt Rostow (with his Orwellian gift for depicting defeat as victory and chaos as the first stage of progress...

...what is important is not whether such gloom is vindicated but that it was voiced by a paper that had been editorially disposed toward charity in discussing the Administration's justification of our Vietnam investment...

...Yet all of this primarily emphasizes the gap between the Government and the nation that has so significantly widened...

...The Award, made by the New York Civil Liberties Union, goes annually to the "individual, organization, or group who, by word or action, has displayed consistent and outstanding courage and integrity in the defense of civil liberties, whether in the performance of duty, or above and beyond the requirements of duty, and by so doing has made a significant and constructive contribution to civil liberties...

...Now they see us split by a war that millions loathe and they see us facing new, incendiary domestic turmoil because, despite all the promises of a brave new world he hoped to build at home, Mr...

...When the final returns are in, the record appears almost certainly destined to show that Mr...

...Johnson is waging a war that has been irretrievably lost for many months...

...Wechsler Honored James A. Wechsler, editorial page editor and columnist for The New York Post who writes regularly for The Progressive, was honored this month with the presentation of the $1,000 Fiorina Lasker Civil Liberties Award...

...it is a direct consequence of the fatal folly of our Americanization of the Vietnam struggle...

...Amid some derision I have long asserted that Lyndon Johnson's entrapment in Vietnam should be viewed in tragic dimensions rather than in the malice of MacBird...

...It was a favorite maxim of John F. Kennedy that any national wisdom requires an ability to conceive how events appear to our antagonists...

...Yet the small Communist regime in North Vietnam, in alliance with the deadly, dedicated, and elusive Vietcong units, has been able to hold out against the massive application of American manpower and firepower begun in February, 1965...

...The President's demeanor was no less strident...

...I remain convinced that his initial self-portrait was that of a populist President who would carry out the unfinished business of social reform at home and build new bridges of peace in the world...

...Again this involves military speculation...

...I'm the Secretary of State and I'm on our side...

...but it is difficult to discern any expectation in high or low places that they will stir any dramatic counter-offensive against the roots of potential disorder...

...Some of those associated with the document estimated that the cost of translating the group's recommendations into anything approaching reality would be $2 billion a month—less than the amount being invested now in Vietnam...

...Rusk had in mind...

...Too many of us have been intimidated in some degree by the warning that a full acknowledgement of our predicament would "give aid and comfort to the enemy...

...In plunging ever deeper into the Vietnam morass, he has acted out, one might say, the commitment to error that would have been involved if President John F. Kennedy had tried to salvage military success rather than admit defeat at the Bay of Pigs...

...For many of us who write or speak it is a highly personal matter...

...It is neither easy nor pleasant to present the case for the view that we have in fact been defeated—that any rational escape now will require an acceptance of compromise terms that probably could have been achieved long ago, while reckless expansion of the struggle means the further paralysis and poisoning of our own country...

...Where and when did the calamitous turning point occur...

...But now he seems a man transformed, the captive of his own mis-judgment of other men and of baffling events, fiercely resolved to prove at any price that he knew what he was doing and that no gallant young American has died in vain under his leadership...

...This would involve the dubious premise that both Moscow and Peking were prepared to accept that result without embarking on a far larger and more explosive commitment than they have already made...

...It was in the face of so many monstrous discrepancies between officially-sponsored fantasy (no doubt usually believed by the muddled men who recited them) and the facts of real life that the long hawkish Wall Street Journal was moved to observe editorially toward the end of February: "We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven't already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed...

...Apart from everything else, we have long passed the point where even some approximation of "victory" would be hailed with any spirit by many Americans...

...There gets to be a point when the question is, whose side are you on," Rusk exclaimed angrily...

...Among the many rationalizations for the ever-expanding American presence, a persistent theme has been the claim that Communists must be taught once and for all that "wars of national liberation" waged by guerrilla bands are inevitably doomed...

...When asked whether he questioned the patriotism of journalists who offer harsh questions, his agitation increased: "None of your papers or broadcasting apparatus are worth a damn unless the United States succeeds...

...The moment has come when, for those who believe that is what has happened, it is a treason of the spirit not to say so...

...Not until many secret archives are opened will a definitive answer emerge, but there are many clues to lost opportunities...

...At any one of the long succession of points it is clear that the Administration had a genuine chance to test the adversary's intentions at the conference table, and that we repeatedly altered our stance to avoid such a confrontation...

...He did not initially take us to Vietnam...

...Even the surprising upsurge of civil rights sentiment in the Senate—welcome as it was—had a belated, hollow sound...

...Johnson is too locked in by the Vietnam war to command an authentic, inspirational battle for justice and sanity in our own country...

...To hold out the hopes of open housing in 1970 is an act of overdue rationality...

...In view of the tonnage we have dropped, his comment can scarcely be disputed...

...Virtually every politico who found words of praise for the forthright findings of the Commission simultaneously agreed that there was no prospect of the kind of fiscal revolution in Congress that financing of the program would entail...

...Ambassador Arthur Goldberg's regime assumed growing resemblance to the last tragic days of Adlai Stevenson...

...In world terms we have not only isolated ourselves from much of the "decent opinion of mankind...

...Johnson will finally listen to the peacemakers so often scorned in Washington...

...Never in its tortured annals has the Communist Party or any other Marxist sect succeeded in producing so much alienation from our Government as this widening, dead-end conflict has incited...

...This is the "other war" that Mr...

...but will it have tangible meaning this July...

...Slowly he succumbed to the delusion that the true trial of his masculinity was to stand up to Ho Chi Minh when the memorable act of valor would have been to challenge the verities put forward by the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...Now, as all the indications increase that we are losing both the allegiance of those ostensibly on our side in Vietnam as well as inviting fateful cleavages at home, there is no longer any excuse for timidity or wistfulness...

...But perhaps too many have waited too long to state the wretched truth in its starkest form...

...They are trivial compared to that question...

...Would we find true glory in the story that we had finally brought the peace of death to Vietnam by creating a wasteland there...

...No American President has ever lost a war, and I'll be damned if I'll be the first," he is reported to have said...

...Against the background of military and jingoist escalation, it is time to state the case for the proposition that, in any truly meaningful terms, Mr...

...In fact, by coincidence, the same papers that published the first summary of the far-reaching proposals quoted Representative Wilbur Mills, the guardian of the budgetary gates, as warning anew that no tax increase was conceivable unless there were further retrenchment in homefront appropriations...

...For any serious judgment of history, the evidence of the failure of this mission seems inescapable and overwhelming...

...In the developing shambles, there is little evidence that the Vietnamese will build any grateful monuments to the Americans who have perished in their scorched earth...

...Recent Senate exploration of the Tonkin Gulf incident in August, 1964, casts new and graver doubt on the American "over-reaction...

...Despite the President's mild and intermittent protestation that we can afford both "guns and butter," the obsession with the war has castrated nearly all serious social innovations...

...Despite the ominous position following the winter-spring Vietcong offensive, it remains conceivable—as is almost any possibility in human affairs—that there will be an unexpected turn that finally smashes the adversary's will to resist and secures negotiations on American terms...

...the dissidents had steadily departed from his company of advisers and U.N...

...The warnings and challenges of the Kerner Commission are clear...

...We have dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we unleashed during all of World War II...

...His seemingly final desperate strategy, as both an election campaign and new military tests near, is to resort to the kind of simple-minded patrioteering that—whatever its immediate dividends —can only deepen the wounds that afflict us...

...It was hard for even the most sympathetic reporter to imagine the nature of the 2,000 affirmative items Mr...

...Even in that eventuality, I believe it can be persuasively argued that the price we have paid for this adventure is already irredeemable by any last-minute rally and that Mr...