Retreat in the Senate

...The arguments against Mansfield's proposal came from every corner of the establishment, including the country's leading newspaper editorial writers and columnists...

...This time the Administration demonstrated immediate interest in its frenzied rush to block Mansfield...

...The Senate was not wholly unresponsive to the need for change...

...As the European Common Market economy grew stronger and the dollar, attenuated by Vietnam outlays and other military exports, grew weaker, the pressure for a reduction in America's NATO costs grew...

...The likelihood is that the same Cold War rhetoric that clouded the Senate debate will defeat any negotiations that begin, unless the United States is willing to take the initiative...

...But within days he had rounded up a collection of aged and aging officials from the four previous Administrations, along with former Presidents Truman and Johnson, to rally around Mr...

...The great NATO debate this year was, of course, a victory for the President...

...In the view of Mr...

...The Administration's rigidity, and its personal attacks on Mansfield, might have helped the latter's cause rather than hurt...

...A majority of the Senators voted for one or another of the half dozen amendments besides Mansfield's, all of which recorded some displeasure with the top-heavy American contribution to NATO at a time when urgent problems at home are neglected...

...Lucius D. Clay, eighty-four, retired general and Mc-Cloy's predecessor in Germany...

...While traveling the country telling young audiences he accepts blame for his late awakening to the disastrous character of the Vietnam policy he had supported so long, the Maine Senator reaffirmed support for a European defense policy based on the same Cold War anachronisms...

...financial burden, which runs in excess of $1.5 billion a year...

...Thus, in a speech to the Twenty-fourth Party Congress in March, Communist Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev expressed a willingness to discuss force reductions, but he drew no U.S...

...To those watching the old actors, under the direction of Acheson and Nixon, putting on the Cold War melodrama of so many years ago to beguile the Senate, it seemed that the President was reliving the follies of the past...

...Before the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa had asked the Secretary of State: "In other words, are we going to be expected to send substantial numbers of troops over there as a more or less permanent contribution to the development of these countries' capacity to resist...

...For years the French, Germans, and British have argued that any U.S...

...troop withdrawal should be accompanied by a Soviet withdrawal...

...action...

...Probably because a Politburo decision had been made well in advance, Brezhnev repeated his offer two days after Mansfield announced his unilateral troop cut proposal...

...This may be just as well, for the Senate has had little success in affecting Administration policy by the threat of "sense of the Senate" resolutions...

...This was necessary, Mansfield and his supporters in the Senate argued, to cut defense costs and the critically large U.S...

...The Montana Democrat's high crime was his proposal to reduce U.S...

...But the vote was another in a long line of defeats for the notion that given energy, good will, and the intelligence to learn from recent failures, Congress and the President might be ready to forge new foreign policies to replace those that have failed so disastrously...

...It is still a cross between the nay-saying "Citadel" described by conservative columnist William S. White fifteen years ago, where racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism were as much a part of the guiding principles as was patriotism, and the newly energized forum whose senior members no longer rule quite so autocratically as they once did, where Presidential decisions and appointments are no longer accepted without examination, and where the country's priorities are most likely to be changed, if they are changed anywhere in the Government...

...What did surprise Mansfield was the panic reaction of the White House, and what he called "the gathering of the Old Guard, all the fellows who made the policies twenty-five years ago...

...balance of payments deficit...

...The Soviet defense budget, like that of the United States, is apparently coming under the inevitable pressure of the demands of the arms race...

...the President has been put on notice that he must make some such concession...

...On the night before one of Secretary of State William Rogers' infrequent public appearances before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S...

...His prospective primary opponent, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, immediately called a news conference to suggest tjiat Muskie quit talking about cutting the defense budget and reordering priorities...

...It resembled, Mansfield said, "the Spanish or Mexican armies at their worst...

...The Canadians withdrew a third of their forces...

...Meanwhile, many of the economic and social problems of the United States have dwarfed those of Western Europe...

...Mansfield's amendment was beaten sixty-one to thirty-six after a week of turmoil in which it seemed little else was discussed at the White House or in the Senate...

...He specializes on coverage of the Senate and national politics...

...Unfortunately, we have substantially maintained our force levels," Harriman told The Washington Post, and "this has become such a rigid tradition that any reduction on our side gives credence to the feeling among Europeans that we are turning our backs to them and retreating into isolationism...

...Moreover, said Mansfield, the huge American forces in Europe were no longer needed in the nuclear age...

...Acheson's eloquence on leaving the White House was limited to branding the Mansfield plan as "asinine...

...Front-running Democratic Presidential prospect Edmund Muskie of Maine voted against the Mansfield proposal...

...With surprising vehemence and with few exceptions they reiterated these points: First, NATO would be maimed or killed by such unilateral U.S...

...When Scott returned to Capitol Hill he told reporters that the Administration "will not accept any alternative that would have the effect of Congress determining the foreign policy of the United States toward NATO...

...troops in Europe from 310,000 to half that number...

...It was precisely this kind of doublethink that prompted Mansfield, after ten years of trying to nudge three Administrations toward a European troop cut, to tack his amendment on to the draft extension legislation...

...McGovern asked...

...What was even more distressing to these former Presidents and Presidents' men was the impudence of Mansfield and like-minded Senators in seeking to advance the concept that the Senate, under the Constitution, is charged with playing a role in determining the scope and nature of U.S...

...Moreover, President Nixon had announced very early that he would veto the Mansfield amendment if it came to him...

...Nixon's "victory," most Washington observers are convinced that it is Mansfield who will be vindicated in the not too distant future as Congress and the country come to share his judgment of the massive folly of maintaining so huge an American military establishment in Europe...

...This should enhance the prospect that there will be some reduction in U.S...

...A Democratic aide said afterward, "We distracted the White House for eight days...

...Acheson's "we" included Franklin D. Roosevelt's assistant secretary of war, John J. McGloy, eighty-six, later U.S...

...He recalled that in the case of both the test ban treaty and the ban on germ warfare experimentation, U.S...

...He included Senator Hubert H. Humphrey in his criticism, but Senator Humphrey's alignment with the nostalgia of Acheson and Lyndon Johnson was hardly surprising...

...The NATO pact has always allowed for unilateral actions, and only Germany and the United States have ever fulfilled completely the commitments undertaken...

...The Europeans will not pay for their own defense until forced to, and the most credible way of forcing them to do so would be to trim the American fat from NATO...

...Second, the East-West balance of power—already threatened by Soviet expansion in the Mediterranean and a rapid buildup of nuclear missiles—would be destroyed...

...Nixon...

...It would seem time to serve notice on the major nations of Western Europe that they can no longer shirk the primary responsibility for the conventional defense of their continent...

...The United States had been bargaining and cajoling for ten years to reduce its commitment, and in fact had withdrawn 65,000 troops, partly because of the needs of the Vietnam war...

...Nostalgia—or perhaps more realistically, the need to justify the costly mistakes of the past—seems to play a greater part than reason in America's foreign policy...

...Such an amendment was offered by Senator Charles Mathias, Maryland Republican, but it failed as Mansfield and his supporters withheld their votes...

...Third, the troop reduction would be viewed as post-Vietnam isolationism...

...The basic issue involved in troop reduction is one that lies at the core of most foreign policy issues now coming before the Senate...

...High Commissioner for occupied Germany (1949-52...

...and at sixty-nine a youngster in this company, Ambassador-at-large Henry Cabot Lodge...

...Harry Truman's Secretary of State was referring to his comrades-in-arms who had been summoned to the Nixon White House that day in May to defend what was once a policy and is now a sacred cow: the American dominance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...

...The common credential for this rare reunion was that they were all alumni of and contributors to the Cold War, and they recognized that Mansfield was challenging one of its major institutions—NATO...

...troop levels in Europe before the year is over...

...treaty commitments such as NATO...

...the recent NATO debate proved once again that it is easier to start a war than to get our Government to make a decision that advances world peace...

...The plan, Harriman said, was for the European nations to build their own forces as their economies recovered, stimulated by the Marshall Plan...

...general officers, one for every 3,200 GIs...

...But the rigidity of the Soviet leadership, which was just as unable to deal with a changing situation as the United States, gave some nervous Senators their reason to vote no...

...decisions to act brought quick agreements from the Soviets to match the American actions...

...In 1969, Mansfield had submitted a "sense of the Senate resolution" calling for troop withdrawals...

...Both sides agree that the massive public campaign made no new converts in the Senate...

...That issue was put in perspective by Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania...

...In the spring of 1971, twenty-six years after NATO was organized, Richard Nixon and Dean Acheson had found a common enemy in the Majority Leader of the Senate, Mike Mansfield...

...There was strong sentiment within the Senate for at least a compromise amendment that would put that body on record in favor of a troop reduction without the numbers or timetable being specified—and without a cutoff of appropriations...

...Many in Washington saw a special irony in the re-emergence of what Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri referred to as "the cold warriors who got us in a hot war a few years ago...

...It is this same abdication of power that makes members of Congress responsible for the war in Vietnam, despite their speeches and resolutions against it...

...Portugal sent many of its troops to guard its African colonies...

...Think of how many lives that probably saved in Indochina...

...the United States had asked them for a billion dollars a year for five years...

...This political focus, added to its traditional role of advice and consent on appointments and treaties, has made the Senate the country's most important forum on foreign policy...

...contribution had not been intended, at the outset, to stay at the same high level for a generation...

...There have been many such opportunities lately, and too often they have slipped away as this one did...

...Nixon and the Cold War alumni, this was hateful heresy that had to be stamped out...

...JAMES DOYLE is a national correspondent for the Washington Star and formerly was Washington Bureau Chief of The Boston Globe...

...balance of payments deficit, to redistribute the burden of NATO equitably among all its partners, and to lower East-West tensions...

...During those years the United States has spent at least twice as much of its gross national product for defense as have these Allies...

...response...

...Finally the other NATO nations agreed to furnish $200 million a year more for five years...

...The casual reader would have thought there had never been a debate on the subject, that no Congressional hearings had ever been held on it, and that almost all responsible officials had considered NATO troop reductions unthinkable...

...The U.S...

...Acheson replied, "The answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute 'no.' " Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, who called Mansfield's move "highly irresponsible" for all the usual reasons, admitted that in 1951, when he chaired a U.S.-British-French committee that established each country's potential contributions to NATO, he supported U.S...

...In 1952, Dean Acheson had been a major target of Mr...

...Although less military-minded than the House, the Senate still remains a place where "national security" is a dominant if not obsessive consideration, where military budgets may be trimmed but not cut sharply, and where the President, as Commander-in-Chief, can muster the votes of Senators who privately disagree with his judgment on military and foreign policy issues but line up with him when the roll is called because they fear the political consequences back home of voting against him when he is posing as the defender of the "free world...

...The United States is militarily overextended throughout the world, and it is suffering withdrawal symptoms from its orgy in Vietnam...

...Decades of NATO ministers' meetings have not produced a significant sharing of the U.S...

...But the wild charges of the 1950s are now forgotten...

...But despite Mr...

...Mansfield now has a free hand to resurrect the issue of America's NATO troops if the White House is unable to force concessions from our Allies...

...The reaction of the Eastern establishment press was equally frenetic, with The New York Times, The Wash-ington Post, and The Washington Star coming down hard and often against Mansfield in their editorial columns...

...The Soviets, who have 285,000 troops in Eastern Europe to America's 310,000 in Western Europe, will be more interested in reducing some of their satellite nations' troops than in pulling their own men out of such countries as Czechoslovakia...

...In fact, there had been at least two lengthy sets of hearings in recent years...

...If they're not willing to cut our forces in Western Europe, where are they going to cut...

...that a unilateral cutback would mean the end of alliance and the end of U.S...

...The next day Secretary Rogers told the Fulbright committee, when asked about the pending troop reduction amendment, "It is clear if we do it unilaterally we would kiss that issue good-bye...

...Dean Acheson had found the idea of removing U.S...

...The whole experience regarding Mansfield's amendment was an instructive one...

...fifty-two Senators had backed it before the Majority Leader withdrew it...

...Mansfield's challenge confronted the Senate with still another opportunity to take the initiative in a policy area where some initiative is long overdue...

...He read from an Army recruitment pamphlet which offered enlistees a guarantee that they would spend their first sixteen months in Europe...

...But in Washington, the dead hand of ancient dogma is usually more important than present realities...

...the clear implication was that this was the payoff, which would compensate for a prospective later tour in Vietnam...

...The White House response was to wage a public lobbying campaign that resembled the annual Heart Fund Drive more than a foreign policy debate...

...On the Sunday before the vote, these three and a number of other newspapers carried front page stories announcing tnat Lyndon Johnson and twenty-four other establishment luminaries had joined Nixon in opposing the Mansfield amendment...

...Balanced against those arguments were some long-standing facts...

...Rather than destroying NATO, a reduction in its American contingent balanced by an input of other Allied forces once again would make the United States a credible world power which sees the folly of defending Paris from invasion but not New York from decay...

...troops constituted a heavy weight on the U.S...

...Mansfield did his best...

...He documented the sorry record of our bloated NATO army, with its 128 U.S...

...influence...

...Ambassador Jacob D. Beam had told Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Moscow that the United States wanted to start talks on mutual force reductions...

...Fearful that Mansfield might win, he went to see the President to discuss a possible compromise...

...Acheson, Nixon charged, was one of the "traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation's Democrats believed...

...troop contributions, but "it never occurred to me that we would continue to keep such large forces for as long as we have...

...Nixon's political campaign: If General Eisenhower and he were elected, Nixon promised then, they would fife the Secretary of State for his "defense of Communism in high places...

...Neither The Post nor The Times carried more than a reference to Mansfield's lengthy comments the same day, reported by the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters, in which he challenged the Administration to accept a Soviet invitation to talk about mutual troop reductions...

...He knew that any cut the Senate passed would be emasculated, either by the House or the Armed Services conference committee...

...Mansfield made it clear to his aides that he did not believe he could write his troop reduction plan into law...

...He noted that far from being combat-ready, much of the European force consists of logistical support, and that the 225,000 dependents of U.S...

...The result was that the Senate refused, as it has before, to use its purse-string power to force the President to recognize that Congress shares the responsibility for foreign policy...

...most Washington observers are convinced that it is Mansfield who will be vindicated . . ." The tone of much of the American editorial comment was shrill with panic...

...The level of perception is higher there than in the rest of the capital...

...With a half dozen Democratic Senators considered to be rivals for the Presidential nomination, the Senate's foreign policy actions receive more attention from the news media than usual...

...It seems clear that the Senate has not yet "greened...

...As Senator Frank Church, Idaho Democrat, pointed out at the hearing, an excellent case could still be made for the unilateral initiative...

...troops "asinine," but during the recent Senate debate a transcript of a 1951 exchange on the same subject was placed in the Con-gressional Record...