As we see it: Vietnam '68; Rowland Evans/Robert Novak

And what do we do if we can't. This is a question I think President Johnson should start addressing himself to publicly and quickly. Mr. Novak will now discuss some of the political ramifications. Good Lord. Thank you Dean. President Shriver gentleman and I I think that by way of introduction I might de explain why Mr. Evans is talking about the substantive aspects of being at Nam and I'm talking about was going pang while he was making Rosa three trips to be at 9am and enjoying such frivolous activities as getting shot at by the Be calm and dodging bombs and Sajjan I was doing the difficult work going to all the conferences and

such hardship poses Palm Beach Florida and St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in Palm Springs. And so I even told Mr. Evans that if the war is still going on after this election and I fear it will be that maybe he'll give me one of those easiest time of calm be it now. And I can see the war firsthand. But for now I'm going to talk about the politics of it. And I think the politics of Viet Nam will be shown clearly as never before in a very important election being held tomorrow. But a thousand miles away premier in New Hampshire a New Hampshire Democratic primary election now just a few weeks ago nobody in the right mind would have said that the New Hampshire Democratic primary. It was an all important all the press including a couple people named Evans

Novak wrote it off as a. Landslide. Johnson Johnson with Senator McCarthy almost certain to suffer humiliation with Senator McCarthy's campaign in as a candidate uninspiring. And the whole thing a deadly bore. In fact the early polls were absolutely phenomenal. One poll taken by the Democratic organization of New Hampshire at the start of the year showed eight percent for Senator McCarthy. Whose name appeared on the ballot a 12 percent write in vote for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and an 80 percent vote for President Johnson which might have been termed a go to conference. Now I'm going to make a prediction that ain't the way it's going to come out tomorrow. I think Senator McCarthy is sure to get 25 percent.

He probably will get 30 percent and conceivably conceivably might go as high as 40 percent which would be a ringing defeat for President Johnson. The question is why as Senator McCarthy suddenly developed into AG charismatic figure who has swept the good citizens of New Hampshire off their feet. Not that I noticed and I was there quite recently is President Johnson more disliked more disbelieved than he was a month ago. I don't believe so. I think it is wholly the fact that the war has gone against the United States forces in Viet Nam that we have not been winning that the end is nowhere in sight and that the casualties are high and that I think is the key to the politics of Vietnam. There has been in this country's history no real parallel

to the impact of the Vietnamese war has had on internal politics. President Johnson has had the researchers on his staff dig up all the dissent in the Mexican War in the Civil War and one war one on what have you but there's been nothing like this. The Korean War just 15 years ago. Had some dissent but nothing like this and the dissent was of a different nature. It is mainly of people who approved of the war but didn't approve of the way it was being fought. There was universal applause from the British people in the British press and from both parties liberals and conservatives in the British parliament. As the war began there was rapt attention through the newspapers to the British victories scored over the boards and there were predictions in the Parliament that the war was going to end in a few months. But somehow on a much

despised army fighting on its own ground without any of the military competence without any of the power backing of Britain managed to keep the war going and going and going and the opposition in parliament suddenly became restive. It began to say when is this war going to end. I do we get into it in the first place. There were huge cries from the government benches that this was treason that this was disloyalty and the public became very very dissatisfied. Many years after Joseph Schumpeter in his essays on imperialism describe what happened to the Boer War in this in the to the Boer to the British public during the Boer War in this fashion. He said that imperialism as I catch word as a phrase this embodied for meaning was a very popular political doctrine in Britain when Disraeli sounded.

But when Gladstone practiced it in South Africa and British blood began flowing in pot imperialism was discredited. That is it was popular only so long as it was not put into practice. And I think that much can be said for what has happened today on a similar vein in the guide to add I communism and I communism is always a very popular political catch phrase in this country as long as it's not put into practice with guns and bullets and laws. As soon as this is the blood starts flowing. Anti-communism loses appeal and the public begins to turn against the war. This I think is a the nature of a western modern bourgeois civilization. I do think however that there are some complicating factors that differentiate the America of the 1960s from the

Britain of the turn of the century at the time of the Boer War. I think simultaneously with the Viet Nam war and cause not entirely by it but by other factors there is an alienation of various groups in American society and a splitting apart of them. On issues that are quite different from the war quite separate from the war but tend to converge on the war. That is the intellectual community students the academic community perhaps some members of the professional classes and felt more alienated because of the war partly but because of other factors from the bureaucracy. From the the professional elite who are running the government who are running a computerized government in their view is a de Umanai government.

On the other hand there is a mutual and perhaps more serious alienation of the working people of the country the lower middle class the blue collar workers the white blue collar worker who feels that. When he looks at as the intellectuals and the bureaucrats numbering them into one basket have ruined his country have have given the negro too much and got us into a war we can't win and put on all the professors phony doctrines and done nothing and done nothing for the common people and have trod upon good American virtue. So you have three differences. Groups all alienated from each other to government. You know electoral community and the workers and this is a phenomenon that is not. It is not singular to the United States with his Viet Nam war and its racial problems. What I think is found all over Europe indeed in Eastern Europe perhaps even more than it is

in Western Europe. Now what this means is that the attitude of these various alienated groups toward the war is shaped and heightened by that sense of alienation. I think the intellectual community the academic community looks at opposes the war more on a moral basis than anything else. It feels that the dehumanizing bureaucrats have brought us into a war which has no moral basis which is immoral in fact in many of its aspects. The other hand the blue collar worker feels that the bureaucrats and the professors have sent their sons and their dad to to fight into a foreign war with no hope of winning it but putting some of their crazy doctrines into effect hold back American power and did not win the war. I think perhaps this this sense of alienation is heightened by the

by the drafting laws of the country which in a sense have said that those who are not who are neither intelligent nor wealthy enough to go to college are going to be the ones who fight the war. All those who go to college can sit by and up until recently go on endlessly. Sitting by while the middle and lower and middle and lower classes of the country fight the war. That's why I think you are finding two separate kinds of opposition to the war in Viet Nam. The older kind the kind that began when we first got in on a big scale in 1965 and his continuing is of a moral variety. The other kind and this is the more important kind and the reason the Gene McCarthy is going to get a lot of votes in New Hampshire tomorrow is a more pragmatic kind that is there is generally support for the war for its purposes. But there's a feeling that we are winning and so if we're not going to win it would better get out.

I think that Senator McCarthy's early problems in his campaign for the presidency were based in part on his early speeches which call this an immoral war. By making that stand he limited his support to the most narrow opposition to the Vietnam War. He completely cut off all those who do not feel it is immoral and that the vast vast majority of the American people but feel it is not being won and should be liquidated in one way or another. He has since corrected that mistake and now say a little bit of luck that night. I think the difficulty in understanding the type of opposition that has developed in the war particularly since the Tet Offensive look a few weeks ago can be found in the very grave problems the pollsters are having in analyzing what's going on in regard to public attitudes toward Vietnam.

I was appalled I saw the other day by a nationally Apolo poster of national reputation in which he decided or determine that over 70 percent of the voters in New Hampshire the Democratic voters in New Hampshire were hawks. Now how could you have over 70 percent hawks and and but by the way let me let me add that in only 5 percent were dogs and the others were in between someplace but Huckabee have over 70 percent and the possibility that President Johnson is not going to get much more than 65 percent or perhaps even less on the vote and only 5 percent Dobson the possibility that Senator McCarthy is going to get 25 or 30 percent or more. I think the reason is that is the pollster asked the person in New Hampshire to win the war. Would you you extra military pressure.

Short of nuclear weapons or including nuclear weapons against the Communists and the responses yet and he's put down as a hawk. Let's ask him the second question that the pollster sometimes doesn't ask. If that isn't going to be used would you want to get out. And you say yes I figured out is that a hawk or a duck. I did classify that and I think the answer is that he wants the war ended and he is not too fussy as long as the ending of the war has some kind of filigree some kind of facade that keeps American honor and is not regarded as a sellout. I think what is being shown from a political standpoint that in particular really since the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam there are two kinds of political doctrines of the American people won't will not by I'm Viet-Nam one is a straight anti Vietnam position that the war is

immoral and that we should get out because it is immoral. The father or the uncle or the grandfather with boys in Viet Nam. Some of them buried were not. Absolutely not except that. More interesting. The second thing he will not accept is the candidate who wraps the flag around him and says Please have faith in me believe me I am the patriotic candidate and we're going to end the war. He's not going to buy that either. I think that what is happening is that President Johnson's strategy of wrapping the flag around him and calling all those lists implying that all those who dissent on Beate now are somehow less patriotic than he is is not going to work not because of the basic fairness of the American people which is never been shown up particularly in past elections but merely because we are not

winning the war. We are winning the war. It would be something else other words you cannot be a patriot a president. A painter a janitor and a war that is not being won and therefore given the tastes and the shows the attitudes of the voters of a Western democracy therefore is an unpopular war. I think this was shown very clearly in in in New Hampshire when after the Tet off fans of McCarthy started to move up in the polls obviously his campaign was taking hold and Governor John King the chief white house agent in New Hampshire said that if in effect that a victory for McCarthy was a victory for HO Chih min. And if McCarthy does get 40 percent of the vote and I don't like it he can thank Governor John King statement for it. You simply won't wash to do that sort of thing. If the war is not in its essence a popular war on the other hand I think that Senator

McCarthy has seen that his early statements about the war being an immoral war is certainly not the answer to any political victory. And he has become more and more ambiguous about what he would do and what his nature of his opposition is to the war in Vietnam. He says it is a bad war. It is it is not it you say does not say it is a bad war he says it is unfortunate that so many American boys are dying in this war and he promises that the war will be ended if he is if he is elected president. Now I think that we should go back at this point to the some of the reasons for the McCarthy candidacy. Apart from the senator's own which are somewhat difficult to ascertain. Those who pushed him into this are those who recommended that he run. Abby what I thought was a very hair brained idea that if McCarthy showed a lot of a lot of support a lot of steam

in these primary elections he certainly would be nominated. He certainly wouldn't stop President Johnson from getting the nomination. He certainly wouldn't give the nomination to Bobby Kennedy but he would push the Republican candidate to the left. And you may now realize this but this is precisely what is happening. If you compare the town of Richard M. Nixon his first statement on Vietnam on February 3rd in Concord New Hampshire and his most recent statements there is a perceptible shift at that time in his early statement Mr. Nixon was talking about the necessity for victory in this war. His accent was on the military aspects. If nothing else Mr Nixon can spot a trend and he is seeing the McCarthy tide beginning to rise. And suddenly I think it was February 28 or 20 Feb. 28 and no is Leap

Year night love February 29 and woman in New Hampshire. He suddenly said lamely I'll end the war. Which sounded very much like what Senator McCarthy was saying on you know nobody tends to believe Mr. Nixon they sometimes believe second. Carter that's another story. But he says I am the war on and I'll keep and I'll win the peace in the Pacific. Now I don't know what winning the peace exactly means but he did say I'll end the war. And a lot of newspaper reporters said he is moving to the hawkish side of President Johnson because he said he's going to end the war and that means more military at sekret setting and that is the way the people regarded when they heard it. And if there was any mistake just the other night last Thursday night in a national radio address Mr. Nixon said that there cannot be a wholly military situation in Vietnam and in fact he said President Johnson.

Had err in putting so much reliance on the military and not worrying about the diplomatic political and psychological aspects of the war. Again saying he would end the war now for us Misc. Nixon ologists the handwriting is on the wall. He is moving to the back of the president gingerly cautiously ambiguously moving to the left of the president to get this anti Vietnam sentiment and perhaps get there before his friend Nelson Rockefeller gets there. You know all of this. There is the expectation by many particularly the stalwarts of the Republican party who'd been beaten so many times in so many ways that they really have no confidence whatever in the other side to make mistakes too. There's been an expectation by many that to use the cliche

President Johnson would pull a rabbit from the hat. That President Johnson with Sun hollow at the last minute or perhaps at the last minute just before the campaign starts bring up negotiations perhaps make some kind of sweeping gesture to the Vietcong that brings them to negotiations table and have a whole war wrapped up. By Election Day. I think that's paranoia in reverse because I think that if Lyndon B Johnson could have brought this war knew how to bring this war to an end if he had seen his way clear to doing the things necessary to bring it would have been done a long time ago. You may have heard this talk just before the 66 election again by the Republicans there was going to be some tremendous tour de force by the president just before the election to

prevent the Republican victory in that year's congressional elections. There was a lot I don't think there's going to be this time although you can never quite predict Lyndon Johnson I will say though that from all indications all the good the the outward indications that we have. Run quite the contrary may indicate that President Johnson does feel that that sentiment from the country is solidly in favor of the war no matter what. No matter what the reverses that have been so suffered in Viet Nam are. He has said constantly that he feels his pressure is from the hawks and those who want to escalate the war and those who want to to bomb an oil and tar greater extensive bomb Hi pong to mind the harbor do we use tactical nuclear weapons and who knows all else they might go into. But President President Johnson feels that this is

his threat and he feels the dissenters are just a bunch of people hang around universities and places like that he doesn't have to worry about it. I think he feels that by wrapping the flag around by campaigning and military installations that is the way to gain support. I don't think I think he reads the polls and he sees that through the inexact formulations and inexact questioning techniques. Oh the. Of the of the of the questionnaires that there is an 80 percent or 95 percent job rating and sums I mean Hauke rating and some stating he assumes well that there are for me or they might even be beyond me. I don't think he grasps the extent of the anti Vietnam sentiment which is not based on any test of Asako or any illogical opposition to the war but is based wholly on war weariness on a war that is not going to end. Now

after tomorrow. Assuming Senator McCarthy makes the kind of showing I think you will anywhere from 25 to 40 percent I would guess around 30 percent as is likely an entirely respectable showing. I think that in much more trouble I had for President Johnson. I think that in Wisconsin which is a more dovish state the New Hampshire Senator McCarthy boy would be showing in New Hampshire will in April. Have a good shot at getting in excess of 40 percent of the vote in Massachusetts. Where by some incredible bungling by the White House he is given a free shot at the delegation. He has been president as Senator McCarthy has been given a leg up in that race. And all this leads to the big showdown in California in the June primary there where some 200

delegates at stake. I think it is entirely possible if this McCarthy momentum increases at the anti-war sentiment increases. I think it is entirely possible that McCarthy will beat the delegation there that is headed by Attorney General Thomas Lynch as a stand in for President Johnson. Incidentally they they've been calling that delegation the Lynch and Johnson delegation but that some people are leaving out the hyphens. What does this all mean. As I said before it doesn't mean that Gene McCarthy is going to be nominated for president. It doesn't even mean I don't think that Bobby Kennedy is going to put on his armor and jump into McCarthy's place at the last minute after McCarthy has done the dirty work. I don't think that Johnson is going to drop out from faint hearted at this stage of the game and try to give the

nomination to Vice President Humphrey what it does mean. What it does mean is that there is indeed an anti-war sentiment in the country which goes beyond the universities it goes beyond the intellectual community that he's cut into the the great alienated middle class and lower middle class in the country who are sick of sunning their boys to die in some war that the the educated classes the better educated classes are not fighting and who are resentful of a war that they did that never ends. And I think this feeling is going to be the great danger for President Johnson in the fall because if the Republicans with either Mr. Nixon or Governor Rockefeller took to Governor Rockefeller. Use this anti-war feeling and exploit it. Not with the intellectuals who will never vote for Nixon Anyway I guess but with the common people who

want to end the war like it or not is entirely possible that Viet Nam may lead to the inauguration of a Republican president next January. Thank you. Thanks. You've been listening to a discussion on the war in Vietnam with a noted columnist Rowland Evans and Robert Novak Evans and Novak spoke in the series as we see it Vietnam 68 this form of opinion featuring noted spokesmen on the war in Vietnam was sponsored by the Miami University student senate and organized by Dave speller Berk Miami student recording an editing was done by the staff of Miami University radio station WMUB in Oxford Ohio. This is national educational radio.