The President Defends a Policy and a Man

THE President had planned to wear his domestic hat last week. He flew to Des Moines to push his revenue-sharing plan and other legislative reforms before receptive audiences: the Iowa state legislature and a group of Midwest Governors. But he was jeered even in Middle America by an improbable combination of hardhat construction workers and youthful war protesters. He could not shake the uncomfortable reminders of the war in Indochina.

The news from Laos was alternately good and bad (see THE WORLD). Although the domestic reaction had produced no new surge of street demonstrations, the first reports of public opinion were disturbing. George Gallup reported that public approval of Richard Nixon's presidency had fallen to 51%, the lowest point so far: only 19% agreed with Nixon that the Laos drive would shorten the war. Louis Harris discovered that 46% felt that U.S. troop withdrawals from Viet Nam were "too slow." No wonder, then, that when the President returned to Washington, he decided to hold a televised press conference and confine the questions to matters of foreign policy.

Nixon made his major point on the very first question. For much of the day, he said, he had been in trans-Pacific consultation with his Viet Nam commander, General Creighton Abrams, who had told him that the South Vietnamese troops had proved in Laos that they could "hack it" against "the very best units that the North Vietnamese can put into the field." Moreover, Nixon claimed, the disruption of enemy supply lines already "assures even more the success of our troop-withdrawal program." Nixon hinted that in April he may announce an acceleration of the present withdrawal pace of 12,500 men per month. Complaining about "a drumbeat of suggestion . . . night after night on television" that the Laos incursion "isn't going to work," he told newsmen that if he is proved right "what you say now doesn't make any difference."

Invasion Bluff. Yet Nixon did little to assuage the rising number of Americans (the polls now place it at well above a majority) who favor a definite time limit on the presence of U.S. troops in Viet Nam. While repeating that his goal remains "total withdrawal," he also reasserted his insistence that the U.S. must retain a residual force (of unspecified size) until the Communists withdraw all their troops from South Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos and release all U.S. prisoners of war.

Basically, the President argued again that the main purpose of both the Cambodia and Laos operations was to "cut American casualties and to ensure the success of our withdrawal program." (The number of U.S. fatalities did decline after Cambodia, although they have risen again in the Laos action mainly as the result of enemy antiaircraft fire: at the same time, Vietnamese casualties have soared.) Nixon also admitted that the operations in Laos and Cambodia were partially designed "to increase the ability of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves without our help." The two goals of protecting Americans and strengthening the Vietnamese are almost inseparable in Nixon's definition of Vietnamization, in which U.S. withdrawals are dependent on South Viet Nam's expanding capabilities.

A more precise definition of U.S. intentions in Indochina, however, has been sought by the President's critics on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Their frustration at not being able to get it erupted in a new argument over the Administration's claim to an executive privilege against some kinds of congressional inquiry. Missouri Democrat Stuart Symington raised the issue in a personal way by complaining in a Senate speech that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger has emerged "as clearly the most powerful man in the Nixon Administration next to the President" but "will not appear before the duly constituted committees of the Congress." He also stated something that nearly all of Washington believes: "Dr. Kissinger, not Secretary of State William Rogers or the State Department, is the primary spokesman on foreign policy."

Candid Advice. At his press conference, Nixon distorted Symington's speech as an "attack upon the Secretary and a cheap shot." He praised Rogers as his "oldest and closest friend in the Cabinet," said that he "participates in every foreign policy decision that is made by the President," and ticked off all the times that Rogers had talked to Senators and Congressmen.

Nixon's defense of Rogers missed the point. It was Kissinger, not Rogers, whom the Senators wished to quiz--and not because they denigrate either man. The issue, Democrat William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, explained in another Senate speech, was that "the people's representatives in Congress are denied direct access not only to the President himself but to the individual who is the principal architect of our war policy in Indochina." The clash over executive privilege is a recurring and complex one. The Senate has a right to review U.S. foreign policy: yet a President needs candid advice from his aides, which he is unlikely to get if each aide knows that he may be publicly grilled on what he tells the President.

The ruckus tended to obscure the real issue. What is actually under attack --and at stake in Laos--is Nixon's whole Indochina policy. The thrust into Laos represents a huge gamble. Yet there has been a growing sense in the White House in recent weeks that perhaps, just perhaps, the U.S. may be able to pull off not only a successful withdrawal from Indochina but some form of victory as well. That victory would be based on the ability of a South Vietnamese government to survive without large-scale U.S. help and like South Korea after 1954, to hold its own against Communist attempts to overthrow or subvert it. That may be only wishful thinking, but success in Laos is essential if such a victory is even to have a chance of becoming reality. The President had a valid point when he warned against too quick judgments on Laos. "The jury," he said, "is still out."

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