LBJ IN TROUBLE-1

All the Way to the Unthinkables

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

AMER1CANS can no more cease Vietnam than they can find to say about it.

talking about anything new Mr Johnson tried to enlist the intellectuals at Princeton University three weeks ago and then to bully them in Chicago three days later with no visible alteration of their indifference. The general uncritical public confidence which had been his ever since he took office was a thing of the past; Louis Harris, the most intimate of our pollsters, came back from his soundings a week ago to report that only 55 per cent of the voters still think the President is doing a good job.

general Ky, who must be the most disreput- able international figure to receive a free military education from the United States since Lieutenant-General Ramfis Trujillo, seems to have restored a semblance of polity to his affairs; but the struggle has visited a blow to American confidence which no foreseeable change can repair.

What is plain is that we are beginning at last to think of what had been until now absolutely unthinkable. The unthinkable has not, unfor- tunately, been a slip into total war but the accep- tance of the necessity simply to withdraw. Yet a majority in the Gallup poll a week ago agreed that, if events proceeded to civil war, America ought to consider pulling out of Vietnam en- tirely. The degree to which these thoughts had touched the President could not, with any con- fidence, be judged; still there were curious signs.

The most curious was a private complaint against the critics of the Vietnam policy by one administration figure whose eminence among the President's civiliftn advisers can fairly be assessed as below only that of Secretaries McNamara and Rusk, , His complaint was not that the critics go too far but that they do not go far enough. Walter Lippmann and Ambassador Kennan are, he esti- mated, private advocates of withdrawal from the scene who, for tactical reasons, have until now gone no farther than to advocate that Ameri- can forces be pulled back to holding positions and kept in Vietnam only for their use in bar- gaining with Hanoi. Lippmann and Kennan, this high observer complained, owe it to the public debate to say what they really believe, and add their voices to the demands for unilateral with- drawal which, while increasingly loud, have so far lacked their kind of authority.

The best guess from these obliquities is that those of the President's counsellors whose advice is in the direction of restraint need greater room to manoeuvre. At Arlington on Monday the Presi- dent reaffirmed the will to go on, but still steering closely between hawk and dove. It is Mr John- son's nature to cherish the middle. As things are, the middle is where he stands now, rejecting the two extremes which at the moment can claim to be respectable—Senator Symington's implica- tion that we should bomb Hanoi and Ambas- sador Kennan's suggestion that we cease to bomb anything and maintain our presence only as a defensive position. For Mr Lippmann, Ambas- sador Kennan and Senator Fulbright to come out now for getting all the way out of Vietnam would be to widen the middle: absolute with- drawal would then become the respectable ex- treme, and confinement of our troops to defen- sive positions could then be argued to the Presi-

dent as the properly moderate and centrist alternative.

And, for his sake as well as our own, the President must be helued towards some alterna- tive to his present course. We can trust his normal moderation to keep him from any move giving way to his current frustration and visiting any really rash punishment upon Peking, Hanoi or Phnom Penh; but his vanity remains a high wall against his accepting the patent fact that there is very little that even he can do to keep these events from going even worse than they have already, and that times come when any man has to take the bad only because there is no alternative but the worst.

Unfortunately the President, in public at least, remains a victim of that myth of his omnicompetence from which his own citizens seem only now to be recovering. His own stead- fast adherence to it suggests the serious danger that he, along perhaps with Prime Minister Wilson, may end as the last believer.

One of the more pernicious elements of the notion that nothing is beyond his powers is the President's assumption that he can go to any audience and, with the proper obeisance to its prejudices, make it believe the best of him, what- ever set of facts may have intervened since his last appearance to make such beliefs unlikely.

The week before last, for example, he invited the African Ambassadors to the White House to celebrate the mournful anniversary of the OAU. In such affairs, of course, the rhetoric is catered to native tastes, and Mr Johnson served his guests from the appointed stock of expressions of our national repugnance for the rulers of Rhodesia and South Africa. It could only be assumed that he was unconscious of the dreadful damage to our credit the events of the last year have done us in Africa.

Now, Black Africa has that place in the politics of the world that Harlem has in the politics of New York City, which is not of much conse- quence since it lives on all of the compliments and as little as possible of the substance of real property. Still, it is no unrelieved pleasure to be the citizen of a nation which has been caught out and the debate on Rhodesia in the United Nations was a depressing indication that the black Africans have caught us out so far that Great Britain, with all her troubles, has rather more credit there than we do.

Lord Caradon managed to answer African

complaints that his gOvernment was at the point of giving up the struggle in Rhodesia with con. siderable grace and candour, confessing so hand. somely that the boycott had been less effective than he had hoped, as to be able to add that the secessionists are suffering more than they care to admit and thus to allow the Africans to maintain a small hope that British guile might yet work things out their way in the end.

Mr Justice Goldberg followed Lord Caradon, almost as a demonstration that the special advantages of centuries of imperial authoritl is the insurance they give their inheritor from uttering pious guff in public. 'We regard Southern Rhodesia to involve a basically moral issue,' Ambassador Goldberg said, 'and we say this for all the world to hear.... The birth of our nation has given us a strong anti-colonial orientation. . . . We cannot stand aside My country has at considerable cost taken a number of major steps.'

Mr Johnson's America seems condemned to that key. It is just like us to the complained more about the sufferings of the fattest nation in history than Lord Carson had about the troubles of a country .on the ragged edge.

The truth is that in this case, as in that of the President's speech to the ambassadors, we sacri- fice nothing of our national property except our surplus of national piety. South Africa. the supply depot of the Rhodesian resistance, is. of course, a nation upon which our officials rain their stale invective on every ceremonial occa- sion, and into which our businessmen pour their dollars and their compliments on every com- mercial one.

American corporations which have recently built plants in South Africa include Esso Stan- dard, Crown-Zellerbach, Corning Glass and Eli Lilly. Their spirit is best expressed by Charles Engelhard, chairman of the American South African Investment Company, and a particularly choice specimen of our government's invohe- ment with basic moral issues, because he is the major patron of the New Jerry Democratic party and Mr Johnson's good. friend. 'There are not many countries in the world where it is safe to invest and South Africa is just about the best of the lot,' Charles Engelhard has explained. 'In- accurate reports, whether coming from well- meaning sources or otherwise, only aggravate the difficulties and play into the hands of Com- munist supporters.' Since this is our essential spirit, we can hardly escape the condition that every expression of the national self-approval should get us thought of a worse than we really are. The Africans at the 1J sound then much harsher on the President, ssh only watches Southern Rhodesia, than they d on Mr Wilson, who actively searches to apned, its rebels. A by no means limited Black Africa view is the curious one that Great Britain won be delighted to crush Ian Smith but is helpless cause the American State Department will n let her. 'The British beg the Americans for help, one unusually reasonable member of the Africa bloc said last week, 'and the Americans answ that they can hardly be asked to go out of th way for an ally which has been so laggard abot helping them in Vietnam.'

This theory is at least instructive as a s.imp of our international credit these days; and it c not be dismissed out of hand because it fits perfectly Mr Johnson's dreadful habit of actin in a particular case with an entirely different Ca in mind. That habit is a. special element in h political style: at once the foundation of h legend and the source of many of his proe troubles. A notable consequence of the President's habit of doing a thing for the sake of achieving some- thing quite different is the composition of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman is Senator Fulbright, a great trial to Mr Johnson and an opponent quite beyond the President's reach, because his objections to the Vietnam war are shared by a majority of the members of his committee. But what is most striking about his torment at their hands is that the most recalcitrant rebels on the Foreign Re- lations Committee of the Senate were put there by Senator Lyndon B. Johnson when he had other things on his mind.

Mr Johnson was elected Democratic minority leader of the Senate in 1953. In that first step he began hobbled by his reputation for being a parochial figure tied to the South. His ambitions were therefore vastly helped at a critical point when Mr Mike Mansfield, the senator-elect of Montana, announced his support of the Johnson candidacy. After his election, Senator Johnson, largely from gratitude, made Mansfield a mem- ber of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Johnson became majority leader of the Senate in 1955, when the Democrats assumed control because Senator Morse of Oregon, who had declared his independence of the Repub- licans two years before, announced that he would henceforth vote with the Democrats. Mr Johnson was grateful again and to fortify Morse's stand- ing with the confused voters of Oregon appointed him to the Foreign Relations Committee, the most prestigious committee in the Senate. Senator Gore of Tennessee was also appointed to the same committee in 1955 because the Southerners, whose broker Mr Johnson was in those days, wanted to be sure that the other Senator from Tennessee, the insurgent Estes Kefauver, could never hope for a seat there.

By 1957, Mr Johnson had begun to think of himself as no longer a regional but rather as a national politician to be identified with the West rather than with the South. In pursuit of that vision, he made Mansfield of Montana his majority whip and thus majority-leader pre- sumptive whenever Senator Johnson ascended to great rewards.

Each of these manoeuvres was brilliantly con- ceived and together they have produced the President's most persistent domestic trouble. Morse is the war's most waspish critic; Gore, while more decorous, is hardly less damaging. And, as majority leader, Mansfield, for all his loyalty, is the least appropriate possible captain to rally the troops against Fulbright, whose Viet- nam position he earnestly sustains on the Foreign Relations Committee.

As a special joke on all these persons—of whom the President is one of the most com- mitted—who believe that it is possible to manage human affairs, each of these men does his nuisances from a place of particular prestige which he could not have reached if Senator Johnson had not exercised such special calcula- tion to put him there. The lesson of this and so many other of his current troubles is that it is in the part of him which is his single greatest pride that the Gods take special care to mock a man in the end.