The Greatest Drama

Beaming avuncularly at the reporters wedged three and four deep around his White House desk, the President observed: "I would say we all ought to be commended for our good spirits and jolly frame of mind. I appreciate the good humor you are all in. I don't know how to account for it."

Lyndon Johnson, looking trim and tanned, is in pretty good humor himself these days, and he is only too happy to account for it. He is optimistic that by continued persuasion and pressure —"the jawbone technique," in Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler's phrase —he can keep the booming U.S. economy from spiraling out of control. On the international scene, he can only be reassured by the strident argy-bargy between Moscow and Peking, despite some pundits' predictions that the U.S. stand in Viet Nam could only induce harmony between the two great Communist powers (see THE WORLD). As for the war itself, the President is firmly convinced that the patient and sustained application of U.S. power will eventually carry the day.

Making It Right. Last week's military actions in South Viet Nam more than justified that view. In eight separate operations ranging from the northern uplands to jungled War Zone "D" near Saigon, U.S. troops and their allies killed more than 1,900 of the enemy. At week's end a battalion of U.S. Marines splashed ashore near the mouth of the Long Tao River, the main shipping channel to Saigon, to yet another foray, this one dubbed "Jack Stay."

The heaviest fighting occurred in the I Corps sector abutting the 17th parallel in the northernmost provinces, where the Reds, having apparently abandoned hopes of slicing South Viet Nam in two at the Central Highlands, are now concentrating their efforts. In Operation Texas, six battalions of allied forces dashed to the aid of a beleaguered outpost at An Hao, then found themselves tangling with four battalions of hardcore Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops. In five days they wiped out 485 of the attackers and crippled the unit as a fighting force.

Heartening as the military news has been, it is the progress of the other war in Viet Nam—the peaceful construction program—that appeals most deeply to the President. The Administration's efforts to help the Vietnamese people provide him, in addition, with an irrefutable answer to many of his critics. One leader of the anti-war movement, Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins, wrote compassionately last week of the Vietnamese, "whose constant and unwanted companion has been violence and terror and whose only crime has been their geography." They have, he said, a kind of "moral claim on history." Yet, he asked, "How do we go about making it right with them?" Johnson is determined to meet that challenge. Said he: "We are trying to concentrate our energies and all of our expertise and knowledge to help these people help themselves and have a better way of life."

As the President sees it, this attempt to build a nation in the midst of war is not only one of the most ambitious and complex undertakings his Administration has attempted; it is also perhaps the most exciting drama of our times. He is impatient for results, though well aware that the program is barely gathering momentum. Accordingly, though Johnson originally told