Nation: The Plight of The Doves

WHEN wounded, even a dove can express its pain by crying out. As South Dakota Democrat George McGovern faced certain defeat in the Senate on the amendment that he and Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield had sponsored to force the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Viet Nam by the end of 1971, he assailed his colleagues in brutally personal terms. "Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave," he charged. "This chamber reeks of blood."

Scathingly, McGovern argued that "it does not take any courage at all for a Congressman or a Senator or a President to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Viet Nam—because it is not our blood that is being shed." But, he predicted, the young men who are sent to fight "will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us." McGovern claimed that his fellow Senators had contributed to "that human wreckage all across our land—young men without legs or arms or genitals or faces—or hopes."

Before any Senator could reply to McGovern, time had run out for debate on the amendment, which its supporters called an end-the-war measure and its foes termed a lose-the-peace proposal. It was killed by a 55-to-39 vote, as 34 Republicans and 21 Democrats, mostly Southerners, voted nay.

Appeal to Anxieties. A prevailing argument was voiced by Kansas Republican Robert Dole, who dismissed the measure as "a shallow appeal to the emotions and anxieties of good Americans, who are weary of seven years of war." He contended that the Senate ought to express its confidence that President Nixon was moving toward "peace with honor, rather than retreat and defeat." Some antiwar critics of the Administration cast negative votes in the belief that a withdrawal deadline would hinder rather than help peace negotiations. The defeat of the amendment cleared the way for easy Senate passage of a $19.2 billion military procurement authorization bill.

The margin of defeat for the Mc-Govern-Hatfield proposal was neither small enough to constitute a "moral victory," as Hatfield claimed, nor large enough to stand as an impressive endorsement of presidential policy. The willingness of more than a third of the Senators to take the unprecedented step of handing the President a deadline for terminating a shooting war was a clear warning that senatorial patience was precariously thin. Yet the vote also indicated Nixon's skill at maneuvering to take the steam out of each resurgence of opposition to his strategy for seeking peace.