Nation: Dawk Talk

Though Viet Nam does not loom large as an election issue in November, the Republicans would dearly like to make it one. Toward that end, the House Republican Conference last week issued a 37-page indictment of Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the war. In it, the Republicans did their agile best to sail with the doves and swoop with the hawks.

The result was a dawk. The G.O.P. "White Paper" deplores the fact that the number of U.S. fighting men in Viet Nam, now at 310,000, has reached "the maximum level of American troop strength committed in Korea in the 1950s." For this, it argues, the President is solely responsible. Not until well after Johnson was safely elected in 1964, the document points out, did he openly commit U.S. ground forces to combat in Viet Nam. Nor was this decision forced upon him by the SEATO treaty or by "any other obligation entered into by an earlier Administration."

With some justification, the report—presented at a press conference by G.O.P. House Leaders Gerald Ford, Melvin Laird, Les Arends, John Rhodes and Charles Goodell—also charges that the ever-deepening U.S. involvement has been accompanied by obfuscation, miscalculation, even "studied deception." However, the Republican dawks could not convincingly square their criticism of U.S. war policy with their insistence that they still support the war. Moreover, in blaming Johnson for U.S. involvement, they glossed over commitments made by his predecessors, including President Eisenhower, and pointedly neglected to mention Congress' 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, in which Republicans and Democrats alike backed L.B.J. in whatever actions he deemed necessary.

Above all, the Republicans offer no alternative. The real problem, says the G.O.P. document, "is how to end this war more speedily and at smaller cost, while safeguarding the independence and freedom of South Viet Nam." Precisely. But the White Paper does not say how this might be accomplished.

The Republican document was, if anything, mild compared with separate attacks on Administration war policy mounted by two New Frontiersmen who stayed on a while under L.B.J. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, former White House Aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. scored Johnson for "piling on all forms of power without regard to the nature of the threat." Crueler, and more ironic, was the attack by former Speech Writer Richard N. Goodwin. Addressing the Americans for Democratic Action in Washington, Goodwin assailed the President for engaging in "deliberate lies and distortion" in his war pronouncements—some of which, during Goodwin's White House days, he himself had helped draft.