THE UNITED STATES’ response to the attacks by North Vietnamese PT boats was, in the President’s words, “limited and fitting.” An air raid on installations in North Vietnam is a dangerous act, but far less so than the alternatives of bombing Hanoi itself or letting unprovoked attacks on American ships go without retaliation. Preserving the general peace and deterring the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communists clearly called here for more than a stern rebuke or a complaint to the United Nations. The President, too, has ably defined the nature of the retaliation and left the next step up to the enemy. He has taken pains to portray the U.S. response as carefully calculated and restrained, rather than as a petulant show of force.
But while it is hard to fault President Johnson on his action, there is considerable room for misgivings over the results of the very success he has won. One of the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis was that the near-faultless performance of President Kennedy took no wind out of the sails of the American right wing: the right cherishes the notion that Communism lingers as a threat only because we lack a will firm enough to overthrow it. In the past two years the right has been busy proclaiming that the Russian back-down in Cuba only shows that a President of firmer purpose could have expelled every Russian and toppled Castro as well.
With the nomination of Senator Goldwater, the principal exponent of “firm will” foreign policy, the right is far better positioned to press home a similar argument on Vietnam. Though the Senator’s views on Southeast Asia have not always been clear, he has consistently pointed to the disparity between U.S. military power and the nation’s inability to win in South Vietnam, rather openly playing on the frustration among the voters at the long inconclusive struggle. Now that the U.S. has given North Vietnam a bloody nose, we can expect the right to claim that a knock-out punch can be delivered with just as nmch impunity, if only we had a President with a strong enough will. What this could do under the pressures of a Presidential campaign is not pleasant to contemplate. The obvious danger is that the presence of Goldwater, plus the success of the current brush with North Vietnam, will push President Johnson strongly to the right and he can make a good case for the claim.
This process may already have begun. Even assuming that the recent provocation called for retaliation, it is at least debatable that Johnson’s show of force would have been as strong as it was if the Republicans had not turned to Goldwater. The Senator himself feels that he has already nudged U.S. policies a bit to the right.
THE RESOLUTION that the President sent to Congress, and which was approved with no dissenting voices in the House and only two in the Senate, makes equal sense in terms of international and domestic politics. If the Communists had any doubts about American support for Johnson’s action, the doubts should be laid to rest. And if any Republican Congressman has second thoughts about the wisdom of the Presidential action, he now has his own vote on the resolution to explain away. As far as domestic politics go, Congress was trapped; to vote against the resolution was to repudiate the Commander-in-Chief in the midst of a crisis. The language was unnecessarily broad, granting advance approval of “all necessary measures . . . to repel any armed attack” and to prevent “any armed aggression” against the United States.
On its face, the resolution transfers the power to declare war from Congress to the Presidency, but the exigencies of the post-war world have long since made such a transfer unnecessary, and at any rate the resolution appears to have been regarded as little more than an expression of national solidarity, passed because the President wanted it passed....
The resolution has helped protect President Johnson from those who thought, or might someday think, that his action was excessive. It does nothing to allay the pressure from those who feel it was insufficient. The New York Daily News, which regularly vibrates to the Goldwater tuning fork, says that the recent episode “may be our Heaven-sent good fortune to liquidate not only Ho Chi Minh but Mao Tse-tung’s Red mob at Peking as well, presumably with an important assist from General Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist forces on Taiwan.” Whether President Johnson’s firm action will help cut the ground from under positions such as the News’, or whether it will only feed the right-wing appetite, remains to be seen.
