Decision time for Johnson on Vietnam
Local editorials from 50 years ago are being reprinted in this column. This editorial appeared in the Valley Independent on July 5, 1967.
President Johnson, is reported to be weighing a decision to commit a large number of additional combat forces to Vietnam. Apparently Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the field commander, and the president’s other military advisers have told him that something on the order of 100,000 more men are needed soon.
Some reports suggest that this increase in forces, which would bring the total to something just under 600,000, is required, not for any large scaling up of U. S. offensive effort, but merely to keep the fighting going at approximately the present scale.
It is fairly safe to predict that, if it is true that the military people want 100,000 more men in Vietnam, President Johnson will order them sent. He has said many times that Gen. Westmoreland is going to receive whatever support the general thinks is necessary to carry out his mission.
If President Johnson is having difficulty making up his mind, perhaps the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies will help him. In recent days the enemy has sharply increased attacks on the U. S. Marines just south of the Demilitarized Zone (was a piece of real estate ever more inaccurately named?) and are inflicting unusually heavy casualties on the Americans. U. S. officers are wondering out loud whether these heavy attacks do not presage another Communist offensive.
It must make the American public uncomfortable, to say that four years after our large scale military intervention in Vietnam and over two years after we began the offensive bombing of North Vietnam that we are hearing about the possibility of a serious Communist offensive against such well established bases as Con Thien.
To be sure, these recent attacks appear to have involved Marine units no larger than companies (a company has about 200 men) and a serious offensive would have to engage much larger forces. But it is discomforting, none the less, that the enemy can still mount significant artillery and mortar attacks and exact large casualties (about 200 Marines were killed or wounded in the assault on Con Thien).
President Johnson’s decision about the additional 100,000 men may make itself. Having sent 500,000, why would Mr. Johnson hesitate to make it 600,000 if the 500,000 are not sufficient to do what he expects to have done?
President Johnson’s real decision is larger than this, of course. The real decision relates to the whole administration policy with respect to Vietnam, and this decision is never going to make itself short of direct intervention by either the Soviet Union or Red China or both. If this should occur, this country may have no choices left.
What Mr. Johnson still must decide is whether it is still prudent, if it ever was, to keep pouring men and materiel into Vietnam and to keep absorbing ever-mounting casualties without taking the steps which would insure military victory.
If, as we happen to have believed for a long time, Vietnam will ultimately have to be compromised, just as Korea was, in order to avoid a world war, then President Johnson will have to decide to do things differently than he is now doing them. What he is doing now will not produce military victory — surely that much is clear today. And if we must settle for something short of victory and also short of world war, what adjustments ought to be made, now or in the near future, in American policy?
That is the real decision, and not just 100,000 more men.