Scenes from the Late '60s

A President pleading once again for more U.S. military aid to Southeast Asia. Antiwar underground radicals igniting a bomb at the State Department, hiding another in a federal building in Oakland. Peace marchers rallying in Washington, exhorted by Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Congressman-Priest Robert Drinan, Folk Singers Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. Demonstrators occupying the Minneapolis and Washington offices of Hubert Humphrey, temporarily seizing the South Vietnamese consulate in San Francisco. Senator Strom Thurmond bellowing through a bullhorn in support of the Saigon regime.

More Money. A nostalgic flashback to the nation's Viet Nam War agonies of the late '60s? Not at all. The familiar scenes were actually enacted last week, two years after the Paris peace agreement was supposed to have stopped the fighting in Viet Nam. This time the call for more military money to help anti-Communist forces in both Viet Nam and Cambodia came from President Gerald Ford. In a coordinated drive, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger added their personal public appeals. Even Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu suddenly submitted to interviews with a dozen newsmen. The net impression was that the nation was once again caught up in a divisive war debate.

Conceivably that could yet become the case, especially if South Viet Nam's military forces were about to collapse and President Ford were to propose any kind of U.S. air or naval rescue effort. But at the moment the rhetoric, and even the tired bombing and sit-in tactics, were misleading. The U.S. public, worried about unemployment, recession, inflation and energy, clearly was in no mood for a renewed argument over Southeast Asia. A question among Washington politicians was why the Ford Administration, fighting on so many fronts, was risking a new confrontation over the lingering war.

Ford's explanation in a message to Congress was that the U.S., to protect its own "national security," should give South Viet Nam a supplemental appropriation of $300 million and the anti-Communist government of Cambodia's Lon Nol $222 million. Said Ford: "We cannot turn our backs on these embattled countries. U.S. unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives would seriously affect our credibility throughout the world." All that was being sought for Saigon, Kissinger said, was for Congress to provide the funds that it had authorized for the current fiscal year but had failed to appropriate fully. (Actually, in its two-stage funding process, it is commonplace for Congress to authorize more money than it finally appropriates.)

Whole World. Speaking in his Saigon palace to TIME Correspondent Peter Range, Thieu put the issue more starkly. "Do the American people like the sacrifice of 50,000 American boys to be in vain? How can you imagine coming here just to run and abandon the men who continue your ideals?" If the U.S. abandons Viet Nam, as the French did in 1954, Thieu insisted apocalyptically, "all Viet Nam will be a Communist country. All Indochina. All Southeast Asia. The whole world."

That talk will not be persuasive in the U.S. Congress. Indeed, congressional leaders came away from a more reasoned presentation by Ford wholly unconvinced that more American money should be pumped into Southeast Asia. "We've sort of had it up to the neck," said Senator Humphrey. "There's a real feeling that there has to be a complete cutoff not too far down the line." Senator Robert Byrd said that he would vote for Ford's request only "if we could be assured by God himself on tablets of stone that $300 million would be all and that it would save South Viet Nam for all time."

Briefing a group of Congressmen at the Pentagon, the usually dispassionate Schlesinger was startled by the vehemence of the opposition to the military-aid proposals. When the Secretary argued that the U.S. had an obligation to support Saigon, Rhode Island's freshman Democrat Edward Beard interrupted, "Hey, a man named Richard Nixon made that commitment, not Ed Beard. I would never subsidize a bunch of crooks in Saigon."

Why, then, was the Administration waging such a seemingly hopeless fight? A few wary Democrats in Congress suspected that the military situation might be deteriorating rapidly in South Viet Nam, and that Ford was maneuvering to blame the Democrats if there are national recriminations over a Saigon collapse. But while the long-range prospects for the Saigon government's forces do not look good, the fall of Saigon would hardly become imminent solely because of the lack of another $300 million.

Into a Rathole. In the two years since the "peace" settlement, some 130,000 Vietnamese have been killed by the continued fighting. Both sides have violated the treaty provisions--the Communists most glaringly in a military way, the Thieu government by resisting the prescribed procedures for a political accommodation. There is room for reasoned argument over whether continued U.S. military aid merely contributes to the carnage or is vital to the prospects of eventual peace and freedom in Southeast Asia. But there is little doubt about the practical political realities in the U.S. Georgia's Democratic Congressman John Flynt Jr. bluntly expressed the predominant congressional opinion when he declared: "We can't vote to pour more and more money into a rathole when people in this country are unemployed." That sentiment could change as the Ford Administration spreads new alarms about the Communist military buildup in Viet Nam. But, as with protest bombs and antiwar marches, scare tactics, even if the dangers are genuine, may prove all too familiar to be effective.

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