Washington
Dissent (which is the big topic of conversation in Washington just now) is at about the same stage in its development as was nuclear energy in the early forties: its cause is widely understood, but only a few people are beginning to appreciate its full, potential effects.
Dissent has not served to change the Johnson Administration’s policy in Vietnam— nor will it in the future, unless there is some dramatic, surprise escalation in its volume. It has served to help shore up the President’s sagging popularity among the national electorate.
Support for the war in the opinion polls challenges the assumption that he must bring an end to the fighting in Vietnam if he is to win re-election next year. Events strongly suggest that just the opposite may now be true: that it would be to his political advantage if the war is still going on. This disturbing, even shocking, prospect contradicts what has been up till now the best-informed opinion: that the President has been escalating the war in order to mop it up well before November, 1968.
In a very complicated way, the cards in this tricky game are stacked in the President’s favor — a fact which he no doubt appreciated long before anybody else. Now he only has to play them properly; but in that chilling game of showdown lies the real danger.
The political polls tell the story. It now is a proven fact that Johnson’s personal popularity rises whenever he escalates the war in Vietnam. Late this spring, after he bombed the MIG fields in North Vietnam, the polls showed that 72 percent of the people basically supported the Administration’s policy and 59 percent wanted more escalation.
But the polls also show that the President’s popularity slowly declines after a period of time, when it has become clear that the last escalation has failed to achieve its purpose.
Step-up
The problem, to borrow Senator Vance Hartke’s pithy phrase, is that escalation breeds escalation. If the President is to continue to satisfy the nation’s increased demands that he bring a quick end to the war through the application of more power, he must continue to widen the target area in North Vietnam. He has been doing this steadily all year long, to the point where there now is a shortage of targets in the north — a shortage so acute that the Administration is more than six months ahead of its preplanned escalation schedule.
(On January 23, United Press International reported from Saigon that the United States would bomb the MIG bases in North Vietnam “within the next few weeks.” The next day Defense Secretary Robert McNamara described this report as “absolutely wrong . . . incorrect and irresponsible press coverage.” The first U.S. attack on the MIG bases came three months later.)
Thus there has been created in Washington the new fear that the Administration to effect future steps of escalation now must start stepping up the ground war. The fear increased when General Westmoreland asked for 160,000 more troops. That request spawned rumors that ‘it was only a matter of time now before the Reserves would be called to active duty.
The mid-May foray into the demilitarized zone represented another dramatic escalation, but it didn’t surprise Washington very much. For weeks prior to it, there had been insistent reports emanating from the Pentagon that the military was urging the President to authorize an Inchon-like landing north of the DMZ.
The general belief, therefore, according to one senator, is that “the President must either have the war going hot and well by election time or time negotiations so that the frustrating results of those negotiations are not apparent.”
Every step in this escalation has produced an escalation in the dissent, and the same is going to hold true for the future. By the end of this year, the issue of Vietnam will have split this nation as nothing else has since the Civil War.
Wrap-up
But what President Johnson has realized is that in this unique war, it is possible to exploit dissent todomestic political advantage. And that is exactly what he is proceeding to do. As an exercise in political skill and daring, it is an awesome thing to watch.
Johnson’s message is a blunt, mean one. It is that his critics are prolonging this war because their dissent has instilled false hopes in Hanoi. His audience is one that counts in national elections. It is not the nation’s intellectual leaders. It is not what Arthur Schlesinger likes to describe as “that small, politically conscious community of people which determines politics.” It is the nation’s lower-middle-class citizenry.
The dirty cloak
And his strategy is a brilliant one. It is to scramble all dissent and make it into one big messy omelet. It is to wrap William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, Dr. Martin Luther King, Cassius Clay, the Quakers, the pacifists, the peacemarchers, all the preachers and teachers who sign those ads in the New York Times, all the draft card burners and the flag rippers, all the demonstrators and the hysterical women — to wrap them all in one common, dirty cloak.
This campaign was carried out all through the wet, gray spring. Hubert Humphrey said it. General Westmoreland came home and said it. And the President said it every time he awarded another Medal of Honor at the White House. The clear implication was that anyone who disagreed publicly with Administration policy was giving aid and comfort to the enemy during time of war.
Meanwhile, Stokely Carmichael was describing Johnson as a “hunky,” a “buffoon,” and a “liar,” the United States as “a cowardly nation of thieves,” and was leading chants of “Hell, no, we won’t go.”
By the time the roses were in bloom, Johnson had pulled ahead of Richard Nixon and even with George Romney in the polls, Humphrey had gained popularity, Robert Kennedy’s ratings were drooping, legislation had been introduced to make flag burning a federal offense, and Louisiana congressman F. Edward Hébert, anxious to find a way to punish dissenters, was crying, “Let’s forget about the First Amendment.” The plans of peace groups for a “Vietnam summer” promised to heat things up even more.
It is now a well-known fact in Washington that many of the most vocal dissenters in the Senate are in political trouble back home. The list includes Wayne Morse of Oregon, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Frank Church of Idaho. The polls also show that even Fulbright’s Arkansas popularity is at an all-time low, despite the fact that his criticism of the President’s Vietnam policy has earned him a concurrent reputation as a man who “stands up to Johnson.”
An examination of the mail these men are receiving from their states reveals a phenomenon peculiar to what must be described as the strangest war America has ever fought. Their constituents do not especially fault them for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The biggest problem that the “dove” senators are having is that their constituents believe they are giving aid and comfort to “the flag burners and the draft dodgers.”
South Dakota’s George McGovern says his constituents really aren’t angry at the Vietnamese. “The reason there has been such a reaction is that people are uneasy about the protesters, just protesters in general,” he says.
“Flag burners raise my hackles too,” McGovern says, adding, “These extreme protesters have done more to handicap responsible dissent than any other single factor.”
McGovern admits his stand has caused him trouble. “I am not kidding myself. I know a dissenter in wartime is in a dangerous position. But I honestly believe we are flirting with World War III.”
McGovern says that it was “selfdefense which prompted the sixteen Senate doves to tell Hanoi that, although they are opposed to the President’s escalation, they remain steadfastly opposed to any unilateral withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam.”
“That was aimed more at domestic politics in the United States than Hanoi,” McGovern says. “It was an effort to counter the Administration’s charge that dissent is prolonging the war. To many, that has been the most maddening, frustrating tactic they’ve yet used.”
Dissent against dissent
Richard Scammon, the former director of the Bureau of the Census and one of the most astute, sophisticated interpreters of national voting habits, describes this reaction as “a dissent against dissent” by America’s lower middle class. This group of voters always has been predominately conservative, and it is Scammon’s belief that its reaction to “the beatniks” has been consistently underestimated.
McGovern’s political dilemma is particularly poignant. South Dakota’s Democrats are angry because he is opposing the war, and many of them are expected to split their tickets next year and vote for his probable opponent, Republican Governor Nils Boe. At the same time, an Oliver Quayle poll commissioned by McGovern shows that Johnson, who carried South Dakota by 33,000 in 1964, will lose it by about 30,000 in 1968. So McGovern stands to lose support at both ends.
He has launched a massive publicity campaign in an effort to educate his constituency on his views. Some 85,000 copies of his April Vietnam speech have been mailed home. He is bombarding the state with newsletters which explain his position. And he is spending as much time as he can back home, making public appearances.
It is fog-laden country to try to chart, but it is probable that this resentment and fear of the more dramatic, outspoken peace demonstrations are related to the apprehension these same voters have about increased crime rates and racial disturbances.
It seems that, at least to some extent, it is all part and parcel of the same thing in their minds. Beards are beards. Marches are marches. That young man in the sandals who is ripping up Old Glory in the newspaper picture sure does resemble that young man in sandals who marched into the suburbs with the Negroes last summer when they tried to integrate the neighborhood (as a matter of fact, he might well be the same person); and there are King and Carmichael leading the whole thing.
The war machine
Where does all this leave the Republicans, who must nominate someone for President and arm him with issues next year? It may leave them without a profitable issue in Vietnam, and it certainly leaves them in a quandary.
Short of advocating the use of nuclear weapons, it is virtually impossible for the Republicans to squeeze into the right and push Johnson into the doves’ nest. The national war machine is under his command, and as he already has demonstrated, he will not hesitate to use it. If the cry of the hawks becomes preponderant, he has at hand the means of response.
If the Republicans nominate what could even vaguely be described as “a peace candidate,” Johnson’s strategy will be to try to associate him with the dissenters he is now attempting to isolate.
In fact, it appears that the Democrats are counting on the Republicans to find it impossible to believe that there is no political profit to be made from this war. Most of them concede that the President is in trouble if the GOP has the political perspicacity to neutralize the Vietnam issue and play upon Johnson’s personality problems.
“ Unity” — unity for unity’s sake — always has been one of Johnson’s old, reliable campaign themes. He used it as a young man when he ran for office in Texas — “Roosevelt and Unity” his posters proclaimed — he used it to historical advantage in 1964, and he is sure to use it again in 1968. But while he has played the “unity” card in the past to disarm his critics, it has rarely been his only card. The new twist is that he is single-mindedly manipulating the darker fears and prejudices of voters he has generally sought to calm with apolitical appeals “for progress,” or “against poverty.” Now, no longer the hero of the poor or the Negroes or any other force within the old Democratic coalition, he seems determined at least to be the hero of the jingoes.
“Don’t spit in the soup we’ve all got to eat,” he tells his fellow Democrats in private conversation. Dissent disturbs and distracts him, and he might welcome back the most outspoken of his critics, if only they would return. What he is not telling them, but what is now apparent, is that the critics and the recalcitrants must be prepared to face the potential risks of isolation. He has no choice. Political necessity dictates that this peninsula of discontent be sawed off his continent of consensus. It is dangerous strategy.
If the lonely island he is working to create is larger than he anticipates it will be, it means he will have split the Democratic Party. It also means he probably will be defeated, for no Democrat has won the presidency in this century without liberal support. And what about the Negroes? He must have their vote to win in most of the big industrial states.
Worst of all, it is the most perilous of international risk-taking, for it is open-ended by nature. Even if Johnson succeeds in isolating American dissent, he must continue to escalate the war in Vietnam because that is the only way he can retain the main source of public support for his policy there.
He cannot stand still. He cannot back down. He can only go up, up, and that is what scares Washington.
— Douglas Kiker