The Hawaii Conference

The decision, activist and abrupt, was in the quintessential Johnson style. With no advance warning, the President announced that he would fly to Hawaii for three days of talks with U.S. military commanders and leaders of South Viet Nam's government. The South Vietnamese did not even have time to draft position papers. Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, asked when he first heard about it, confessed in some embarrassment: "Very recently."

Nevertheless, the imposing array of officialdom at the Honolulu talks signaled that the President intended to conduct a wide-ranging examination of the military, political and psychological conduct of the Viet Nam war--indeed, of U.S. strategy in all Southeast Asia. From Washington came Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler, retired Joint Chairman Maxwell Taylor, White House Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman. From Saigon came a 28-member South Vietnamese entourage headed by Ky, Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu, Foreign Minister Tran Van Do, Defense Minister Nguyen Huu Co, and a nine-man U.S. team led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Waiting for the President in Honolulu were General William C. Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. forces in Viet Nam, Pacific Commander Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr. and Major General Richard Stilwell, who heads the U.S. military effort in Thailand.

Slim Chance. The hastily scheduled meeting, Johnson made clear, betokened no military crisis or vital policy change. Rather, as suggested by its unprecedented emphasis on peaceful programs for the Vietnamese, the President's mission reflected his determination to continue what he calls his "two-fisted" approach to the war: a simultaneous attempt to wage the conflict with vigor while hoping to end it at the negotiating table. Johnson had resumed that now-familiar stance earlier in the week when he announced resumption of U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam while taking his peace offensive to the United Nations.

The decision to go to the U.N. had been weighed in secret for ten days. There were impressive arguments against it, most notably the likelihood that a Security Council debate might simply become a forum for anti-American tirades and might also force a hardening of the Soviet position. But a renewed appeal for U.N. "arbitration" from Pope Paul VI, coinciding with a cogent memo from Rusk and U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, persuaded the President to try. "It's a slim chance," said a U.S. official, "but one worth probing." Just how slim a chance was demonstrated when the U.S. managed to get its resolution requesting the U.N. to arrange a peace conference on the Security Council's agenda by a one-vote margin. Since Hanoi had already announced that it would consider any U.N. decision "null and void," the effort seemed less like peace-punching than shadowboxing.

"I Wish I Hadn't." While the Security Council jawed, U.S. bombers once again flew over North Viet Nam. Keeping well south of the strategic "red envelope" that enfolds the heavy industrial targets around Hanoi and Haiphong, the strikes hit many of the same roads, bridges, ferries and supply dumps that were plastered when the bombing originally started a year ago. Farther south, the ground war was markedly intensified in both scale and determination. More than 25,000 U.S., South Korean and South Vietnamese troops scoured the countryside in six massive operations; one of them, the division-sized "Operation White Wing," was the biggest and possibly the costliest yet mounted in the war (see THE WORLD).

Johnson's balanced approach won considerable nationwide support, including a comment from Dwight Eisenhower that he "unquestionably has made the right decision." There was, however, no letup in congressional criticism. Chief among the sharpshooters was Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who floor-managed the landmark congressional resolution in 1964 by which the President has authority to take "all necessary steps" to resist aggression in Southeast Asia. Fulbright now confesses that he played "a part that I am not at all proud of at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin. That would have been a good time to have precipitated a debate and re-examination of our involvement."

Last week, 18 months later, the Senator decided to precipitate that debate in public. However, since only one of the committee's 13 Democrats, Louisiana's Russell Long, now unreservedly supported the President, the re-examination promised to become an all-out attack on Johnson's conduct of the war. Fulbright was having trouble getting some key witnesses to the stand. McNamara and Wheeler refused to testify in open hearings, arguing that they might compromise the security of the 200,000 U.S. fighting men in Viet Nam. Maxwell Taylor had to postpone his appearance so that he could fly to Honolulu.

One expected witness this week is retired General James Gavin, who opposes Johnson's strategy and has argued that the U.S. should retreat to a limited number of enclaves in South Viet Nam. Even so, Gavin has backed down somewhat since his "turtle" tactics have drawn fire from most of his former colleagues, notably Taylor, who warned last week that a holding strategy of this sort would only convince the Communists that "wars of liberation" are "the surefire formula for successful expansion." Asked last week how he felt now about having suggested the idea, Gavin said: "I wish I hadn't."

"A Good Time." Fulbright insisted solemnly that "we are not trying to put on a circus" with the televised committee hearings. Even if he had been, Johnson's portentous flight to Honolulu would have stolen the spotlight. Naturally, that was not the chief object of the President's meeting with Saigon's leaders. "For some time I have been wanting to see them," said Johnson. "This seems to be a good time to do it." In fact, it seemed long overdue, for no U.S. President in office has ever met with the leaders of South Viet Nam.

Clearly, too, it was a well-timed opportunity to clarify U.S. issues and objectives in the war. Thus far, pacifist demonstrators, antiwar columnists and dissident Democratic Congressmen have made their case far more persuasively and specifically than has the Administration. In large part, this is due to Johnson's reluctance to spell out the potential costs and dangers of the war. Vermont's moderate G.O.P. Senator George Aiken last week urged him to do just that by letting the nation know that it might very well be in for some "extraordinary sacrifices," including higher taxes, wage and price controls, rationing, and universal conscription if the war widens further. If the President is to retain the nation's considerable support for the war, some such acknowledgment may well prove necessary.

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