Rancors Aweigh

The echoes were rancorously reminiscent of 1948, when another Democratic President began to fight back. Last week, abandoning his customary quest for consensus, Lyndon Johnson lashed out at his critics. "The struggle for progress and reform in America has never been easy," he told labor leaders in Manhattan. "On the one hand is the old coalition of standpatters and naysayers. They never wanted to do any thing, but this year they say they can't do it because of Viet Nam. Well, that's pure bunk. And far off at the other end of the spectrum, there are those who say, 'What America has built is rotten. Let's tear it apart.' I say they're both wrong. I say we can meet our commitments at home and abroad--and I believe we will."

During a 5,100 mile tour of military bases from Georgia to California and back to Virginia, the President repeatedly returned to his theme--using Veteran's Day as his cue. "For these Americans," he said of the troops at Fort Benning, "Viet Nam is no academic question. It is not a topic for cocktail parties, office arguments or debate from some distant sidelines. Their lives are tied by flesh and blood to Viet Nam. Talk does not come cheap for them." Calling for unity, he predicted that "peace will come more quickly when the enemy of freedom finds no crack in our courage--no split in our resolve --and no encouragement to prolong his war in the shortness of our patience or the sharpness of our tongues."

Ask the G.I. The President's new militancy--fueled perhaps by Democratic successes in last week's big-city elections --was aimed at both the inactive 90th Congress and the hyperactive antiwar dissenters. Other Administration voices were equally combative. Home from Southeast Asia, Hubert Humphrey was confronted by Senator J. William Fulbright during a White House briefing at which each legislator present was allowed one question. Fulbright's was: "Just who is our enemy there?" Retorted the Vice President: "You don't have to ask the G.I. whose leg has been cut off who the enemy is."

Secretary of State Dean Rusk also fielded a perennial Fulbright question. Appearing before the Arkansas Senator's Foreign Relations Committee at a 31-hour closed session, Rusk was asked to explain why he continued to refuse to appear this year before the committee in a public session on Viet Nam. Rusk said he would think it over. Much more to his liking was a representation from Indiana University, where he had been heckled unmercifully last month by antiwar demonstrators. A contingent from Bloomington presented Rusk with notebooks containing an apology signed by 14,000 of the campus' 27,000 students.

Oceanic End. Meanwhile, the debate over Viet Nam, though hardly running out of steam, seemed to be running out of ideas. Last week General Lauris Norstad, former NATO commander who now runs the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., had a proposal for handling the myriad end-the-war proposals. "It is not my purpose to play the game of 'if I were President,' " Norstad told a Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce audience, "or to present a specific plan. The ideas are there, they have been presented. I urge that they be molded into a clear, positive, direct plan of action."

In Norstad's view, the U.S. should "give serious consideration" to such possible moves as an unconditional bombing suspension and a unilateral ceasefire if those actions could bring Hanoi to the negotiating table. Moreover, he reasoned, a firm program for peace in Viet Nam would "unite the people of the United States in a sense of national purpose" and "stop the erosion of our credibility." Once those goals were attained, he said, "we should have convinced Hanoi that it is more profitable to come to the conference table than to delay." That might be a bit too much to hope for, but, as others have argued, a demonstration of Washington's willingness to try reasonable concessions to end the war--even without Hanoi's cooperation--would at least douse dissent at home and restore American prestige abroad.

Lyndon Johnson had a dousing notion of his own. Cruising off San Diego aboard the nuclear carrier U.S.S. Enterprise at week's end, he proposed an oceanic end to the war. Addressing Hanoi--as well as the voters at home--he declared: "You force us to fight, but you have only to say the word for our quarrel to be buried beneath the waves." The President suggested that "a neutral ship on a neutral sea would be as good a meeting place as any" for the U.S. and North Viet Nam to begin negotiations--"so long as one did not insist that the other walk on water and work a miracle alone."

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