The War: Deflating the Dragon

Dean Rusk's face was grim, his voice grittily intense. Concluding a Boston University speech on U.S. Asia policy last week, head-libbed: "I would hope that our citizens would try to think about these questions in terms of-nottea-table conversations-but think of it in terms of what you would do if you were the President of the United States. And perhaps out of it would come a little sense of what I mean when I say that those who make these decisions need your prayers and not your imprecations."

In the continuing debate over Viet Nam and China, there was, as usual, no lack of imprecation. Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse attacked President Johnson for conducting "an illegal and immoral war," even took Republicans aback by shouting: "The American people would be much better off if Barry Goldwater had been elected President!" In Berkeley, before 3,500

University of California students, University of Chicago Professor Hans Morgenthau, one of academe's bitterest Johnson baiters, reached for a preposterous historical parallel. The Administration's insistence on negotiating with Hanoi rather than directly with the Viet Cong, he averred, was "like George III of England saying he won't negotiate with Washington and Hamilton, only with Louis XVI"

Who Are the Viet Cong? More temperate criticism came from some 400 churchmen-delegates to a National Inter-religious Conference on Peace in Washington, who approved overwhelm ingly a resolution asking the President to consider 1) "an immediate halt" to the bombing in both North and South Viet Nam, 2) a new cease-fire beginning on Good Friday (April 8) and 3) an agreement to give the Viet Cong "direct representation" in any peace talks.

As Lyndon Johnson seldom fails to point out, polls have long shown that critics of his Viet Nam policy are in a minority. A group of Stanford University social scientists who conducted their own survey of Americans' "deeper attitudes" on the issue reported last week that according to their nationwide sampling, 61% of the population does indeed approve the Administration's handling of the war. Oddly enough, the Stanford poll also showed that 88% would favor negotiations with the Viet Cong, though the Administration has rejected any such concession. In fact, only 29% of those interviewed could correctly define the Viet Cong as South Vietnamese Communists; the rest thought that they were North Vietnamese (41%), Red Chinese (10%), or an arm of the "government we are supporting" (4%), or else had no notion who the Viet Cong were (16%).