The War, The Presidency: Flak from Hanoi

(2 of 4)

From his temporary White House in Austin, the President declared that he has never authorized bombing anything "except military targets." Dwight Eisenhower backed him up. "I know U.S. operations are aimed exclusively at military targets," said Ike, "but unfortunately, there are some civilians around those targets." Added he: "Is there any place in the world where there are not civilians?"

No Choice. So, once again, the U.S. was reacting to rather than anticipating an event. Administration officials would have done better to acknowledge earlier on their own initiative what every military expert has long known was inevitable: that some civilians would be killed in U.S. raids. In failing to do so, they not only helped to widen the "credibility gap," which is already causing Lyndon Johnson considerable trouble at home, but enabled Hanoi to use the Salisbury reports to stir up a virulent new round of anti-Americanism from London to New Delhi. Even France's normally prudent Le Monde declared that "not a day passes but that the American press catches the President or his collaborators in the flagrant act of lying."

At home, the long-quiescent dove-hawk debate broke out anew. A dozen religious leaders wrote to Lyndon Johnson to express their regret that he is sanctioning the bombing of targets "in or near residential sections of Hanoi, even if many civilians die." Democratic Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Vance Hartke of Indiana called on Johnson to stop the bombing unilaterally. On the other hand, South Carolina's Congressman Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, urged the U.S. to "flatten Hanoi if necessary" and "to hell with world opinion." Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Richard Russell declared that Hanoi's "intransigence" left the U.S. with "no choice but to inflict greater punishment on the Communists."

In all the commotion, the Administration missed a chance to point out the contrast between the relatively small number of civilian casualties in the North and the deliberate war waged by the Viet Cong directly on civilians in the South—something that practically all the critics of the air war on the North conveniently ignore. During the past year alone, Viet Cong terrorists have methodically murdered more than 3,000 civilians in the South, kidnaped 10,000 others—village chiefs, technicians and teachers, and often their wives and children as well. In the past decade, they have slaughtered 30,000 civilians in a bloody campaign aimed at destroying whatever leadership and expertise existed in the South.

Face Value. U.S. officials by no means accepted Salisbury's overall picture of the bombing war. Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper pointed out (and the Times dutifully reported) that the paper has been a consistent critic of the U.S. role in Viet Nam; he complained that Hanoi would "let a New York Times reporter in but not objective reporters." Others speculated that Salisbury may have fallen into the same trap in Hanoi as he did in Pnompenh last June. At that time, he accepted at face value assurances from Cambodian officials that there was "probably" no such thing as a "Sihanouk trail" along which Hanoi was trucking supplies into South Viet Nam.