Washington
THE significance of debate in a free society has seldom been more dramatically demonstrated than in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings on Communist China. The testimony was enlightening to some of the highest officials in the government, many of whom had begun to believe the clichés and headline stereotypes that have become a part of the official line. As a result of the experts’ testimony, for example, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who sounded somewhat strident on China during his Asian tour in February, was able to speak more realistically about the problem of living with China. There appeared to be a willingness in many places to try to think rationally about this most difficult, complex, and frustrating problem.
National policy toward China is not likely to be substantially altered in the near future. As long as the Vietnam war lasts, the Administration is not likely to recognize Peking or to advocate its admission into the United Nations or to propose a resumption of trade relations. But it is progress to be able to discuss the issues calmly. Negotiations over Vietnam almost certainly must include negotiations with Peking on the wider problems that divide America and China.
To some of our friends abroad, our earlier line of hostility has sounded almost as harsh and unrealistic as the daily diatribes from Peking against us. If it is true, as the Vice President has said, that there is a body of goodwill left among the Chinese for the United States, extravagant and unsophisticated attacks on China from American spokesmen do not help sustain that goodwill. Michael Stewart, the British foreign Secretary, speaking for a government that supports the United States in Vietnam, equates Washington’s desire to contain Chinese Communist power with an unwise impulse to isolate and imprison China. He thinks we should ask whether China’s advocacy of violence will lead it to become an aggressively expansionist power. Until China clearly acts that way, he thinks it is a mistake to base Western policy on the assumption that aggression is inevitable. In addition to giving the Johnson Administration a degree of flexibility, the debate on China should help to remove the more fantastic suspicions which Peking has held regarding American policy. The scholars defined American intentions better than the Johnson Administration has ever done itself when it advocated containment but not isolation. Isolation has in a sense been part of the American objective since the Korean War, but containment much more precisely expresses the intent today.
George Ball’s new role
A clearer definition of foreign policy goals in general should emerge now that Undersecretary of State George W. Ball has been put in charge of the newly created Senior Interdepartmental Group. In an attempt to provide better coordination of both policy and action, the President instructed Secretary of State Dean Rusk to assume authority “for the overall direction, coordination, and supervision” of United States activities abroad, except for the military. The State Department is only one of many agencies conducting important foreign business. The Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Labor, and Agriculture, the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Information Agency, the Agency for International Development are involved also.
The American ambassador overseas is in charge of his country’s team; he is responsible for supervising the activities of all agencies operating in his jurisdiction. Ball will now exercise this kind of authority in Washington.
The President’s order represents a move away from the more informal lines of the McGeorge Bundy operation in the White House. Plans for the change were being made even before Bundy left the government earlier this year and are another example of the President’s desire to place responsibility in the established departments. Departments represented on Ball’s group have the right of appeal to higher authority; some of them, like Agriculture and CIA, have never liked interference from the Department of State. In the first few weeks of the operation, the group functioned well enough, according to those involved. The real test of its effectiveness will come when there are serious interagency disagreements. But the arrangement makes a lot of sense in theory.
The choice of Ball to head the group and to carry out the authority vested by the President in the Secretary of State recognizes the contribution made in the last five years by one of the most competent men in the government. And it assures that Ball will postpone plans he had made to resign later in the year. A distinguished lawyer, a lucid and imaginative thinker, Ball has at times incurred the President’s displeasure by his frankness and independence. But in the end he has gained greater confidence from the President by his candor. He has both charm and wit, and if anyone can handle the assignment of harnessing the disparate empires in Washington to the President’s satisfaction, Ball should be able to do so.
De Gaulle and NATO
Ball has carried the chief burden of the long struggle with President de Gaulle in both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Nearly a year ago, De Gaulle told Ball that he would demand withdrawal of American forces from French soil and that the question was not negotiable. So there was no surprise in Washington this year when the French President outlined his demands in a letter to President Johnson.
In the view of many in Washington, it was one more action which the French leader has taken in a series of actions hostile to the West. Some foolishly say that De Gaulle has done us a favor by forcing us to re-examine a system that has prevented Communist aggression in Europe for nearly two decades. But if a defense system like NATO is to be effective in the nuclear age, it must be possible to make rapid decisions, to have a force in being, and to have a command system in operation ready to carry out decisions. It took from 1914 to 1917 to achieve a joint command in World War I, and no one suffered more from this delay than France. The inadequacy of British-French staff planning in 1939-1940 led to a catastrophe for France. Now De Gaulle wants to destroy an integrated command that has kept the peace for his own country and its allies.
To experts in Washington he appears to be attacking not just an alliance but the very basis of the allied and American security systems in Europe. A debate on what all this means and where the United States and other NATO countries stand is essential, just as it is essential to have an intelligent understanding of issues relating to Communist China. Debate is important for the other NATO countries as well as for France, where parliamentary elections will take place in less than a year. French supporters of NATO and the European idea look longingly to the United States for leadership.
The greatest immediate fears are in Germany. As De Gaulle plans his visit to the Soviet Union, the Germans recall how in his memoirs he described his thoughts as he prepared to visit Moscow in late 1944: “Perhaps it would be possible to renew the old Franco-Russian solidarity which, though repeatedly betrayed and repudiated, remained no less a part of the natural order of things, as much in relation to the German menace as to the endeavors of Anglo-American hegemony . . . the signing of a Franco-Russian treaty could help us to participate at once in the elaboration of the European settlements.” A Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, a typically unclear Gaullist phrase, still remains an objective of the man who has never trusted “les Anglo-Saxons.”
LBJ and the polls
Recent public opinion polls make it clear that every time President Johnson flexes his muscles in Vietnam he frightens some but heartens many more. He has said that he is under greater pressure from the hawks than from the doves, and the polls bear him out in this. If the war grows bloodier, as it is almost certain to do, there may be increasing demands on the President to take more drastic action to win and get the fighting over with in a hurry.
Senator Richard B. Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, put the matter baldly when he said that the war may “assume political proportions” that will force advocacy of a more aggressive policy upon political leaders. “I do not think we can afford to let this war drift on and on as it is now,” the senator told the Senate. “Search and destroy tactics may, after ten or twelve years, bring the Vietcong to their knees, but the American people are going to be very unhappy about it, and someone who comes along and says: ‘I will go in and clean this thing up in six months’ will, I’m afraid, have some advantage over the senators who say ‘Let’s play this thing along for ten or twelve years as we’re doing now.’ ”
The President’s popularity shot up after his decisive responses to the Bay of Tonkin and the Pleiku attacks and after he announced his decision last July to increase substantially the American commitment in Vietnam. His popularity has declined in the periods when there has seemed to be uncertainty about national policy. During the Christmas peace offensive popular support for the way the President was handling the Vietnam war dropped. While peace is desperately wanted, there also appears to be a feeling that we should get on with the job.
About 10 percent of the people tell the pollsters that we should abandon the fight and get out of Vietnam. A clear majority support the President, and a majority of those who support him say that a more aggressive policy is needed. The President, of course, is an experienced politician and poll watcher. If the war were going against the United States, the temptation to do something dramatic would be very great.
By the end of the summer every congressman must face his constituents and answer their questions on Vietnam. He must face those who have suffered losses in Vietnam as well as those who want to pour men into the battle to try to gain a clear and quick victory. Some White House students of the polls think that unless public opinion changes, many congressmen who now are nearer to the dove than to the hawk position may begin to support a harder line. Congressmen also follow the polls.
When Senator Morse predicts that the Democrats will lose fifty congressional seats because of Vietnam, he is vastly oversimplifying the question. Nearly everyone in Washington expects the Democrats to lose seats in November, some because of Vietnam. But the party in power has lost seats in every midterm election in this century except one. In 1964 the Johnson landslide carried into office many Democrats who had little hope of winning. Some of these Democratic districts will revert to their Republican moorings in November, Vietnam or not.
Mood of the Capital
Lyndon Johnson is the only President in thirty-five years who has not held regular open press conferences at a time fixed in advance. He has held only one news conference in the State Department auditorium used by Kennedy. He has tried holding conferences in the tiny theater in the east wing of the White House; he has held impromptu conferences in his office and barred television cameras. He has held elaborately planned conferences before the cameras in the East Room of the White House, some on an hour’s notice. Last year he indicated that he would hold one formal televised meeting with the press a month, but he has not done so. He simply dislikes the institution.
The secrecy surrounding the President’s action and thoughts is a stultifying influence not only on public opinion but on the operations of the government. It is literally true that some presidential assistants in the White House know only one facet of policy because the President deliberately keeps them in the dark on other facets. Johnson has always believed that his power is diminished whenever he shows his hand. He is therefore an exceedingly cautious and clandestine planner of every move he intends to make. He does not regard the presidency as a “bully pulpit,” and he leaves too often to others the leadership of public opinion. This trait may cost him heavily in the end.