There Is No One Else

THE PRESIDENCY

Last week unquestionably marked a turning point in U.S. policy toward the war in Viet Nam. President Johnson, after a week of deliberation with his topmost advisers, finally addressed the nation and the world. But so measured were his words and so balanced his pronouncements in favor of both stopping Communist aggression and seeking peace that it was hard to tell whether the immediate result would be a large U.S. military victory in Viet Nam or the appearance of U.S. negotiators at an armistice conference.

"What we want to do," Johnson had said during his long hours of consultation, "is achieve the maximum deterrence with the minimum of danger and cost in human lives."

That, of course, is cutting it very fine, since war is both unpredictable and wasteful. The President gave no indication that he has hopes for a cheap victory or that he would foolishly yield to Communist demands. But implicit in all that he said was an unspoken hope that increased American military power, and the threat of more to come, would force the enemy to negotiate.

The Buildup. In stepping up the U.S. commitment, Johnson announced that U.S. troops in Viet Nam will be increased "almost immediately" by some 50,000, bringing the total to 125,000; that the monthly draft quota would be doubled, from the present 17,000 to about 35,000, but the President thought that there was no present reason for ordering Reserve units into service.

That was the sum total of the military news. At the same time, Johnson went out of his way to declare that the U.S. is ready, willing, and indeed anxious to negotiate about Viet Nam with "any government at any place at any time." He said that he had sent the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg, to New York with a letter requesting U.N. Secretary-General U Thant to use all his best offices to try to achieve a peace settlement. He even mentioned the terms laid down by Hanoi last April, terms then indignantly rejected by Secretary of State Rusk, as conditions that should not even be discussed.* Said the President: "We are going to continue to persist, if persist we must, until death and desolation have led us to the same conference table where others could now join us at a much smaller cost."

Even as Johnson spoke, nearly 16,000 troops of the Army's recently created "Airmobile Division" were saddling up to leave their Fort Benning, Ga., base to head for South Viet Nam. Other troops required to bring the U.S. force in Viet Nam to 125,000 in the immediate future would be selected from inbeing units. Last week 3,700 paratroopers of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division--better known as the "Screaming Eagles"--landed at South Viet Nam's Cam Ranh Bay.

The Pool. Obviously, to fulfill its new commitment, the U.S. must increase the size of its armed forces, which numbered 2,653,861 on July 1. Pentagon spokesmen said that this number will be increased by some 330,000 within the next year. They hoped that all this could be accounted for by the boost in the monthly draft call--which has, in fact, already gone from a mere 3,000 last February, to 17,000 for September. For the present, the National Selective Service plans to continue drawing upon only unmarried men between the ages of 19 and 25.

At the same time, a few "top priority" National Guard divisions will undergo intensive training to ready themselves for actual fighting in Viet Nam. One of the reasons that President Johnson last week restrained himself from activating such outfits was the fact that they were at least six months away from combat readiness.

The Future. What of the future in Viet Nam? An Army idea for stringing an American chain of some 150,000 men along the 17th parallel, from the

South China Sea to the Thailand border, has been rejected as impractical. So has a Marine Corps notion of establishing three heavily protected enclaves on the east-central coast of South Viet Nam, then expanding them 40 or 50 miles inland. So has an Air Force plan for bombing industrial targets and cities in North Viet Nam.

But heavier fighting on the part of U.S. combat troops is sure to come. The U.S.-South Vietnamese position has deteriorated since the U.S. began its increased participation after the Pleiku bombing in February. This is largely because the Viet Cong, with greater backing from North Viet Nam and Red China, has stepped up its pace. The way things stand now, there is almost no way for the U.S. forces to go but up (see THE WORLD) and, in fact, a military success of some kind is urgently needed.

Thus, if it remains an unpopular war, it can also be long drawn out. Said the President: "We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else. Nor would surrender in Viet Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country, and then another country, bringing with it perhaps an even larger and crueler conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history."

*Those terms: 1) Recognition of the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the Vietnamese people, total U.S. military withdrawal from South Viet Nam and an end to "acts of war" against North Viet Nam; 2) pending the peaceful reunification of Viet Nam, an observance by both sides of the military provisions of the 1954 Geneva accords forbidding military alliances and the presence of foreign troops; 3) settlement of South Viet Nam's internal affairs by the South Vietnamese people under a formula proposed by the National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong political front), without foreign interference; and 4) peaceful reunification of Viet Nam also without foreign interference.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.