Nation: At War with War

(9 of 10)

Even so, Nixon's failure to advise Congress before he decided upon the Cambodian mission seemed a gratuitous affront. Led by William Fulbright, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee immediately requested a meeting with the President. Nixon responded by inviting the committee over to the White House late one afternoon last week; but he also issued invitations to the less prestigious, less dovish House Foreign Affairs Committee, and scheduled an earlier meeting with the House and Senate Armed Services committees as well. Fulbright and other Senators such as Vermont's George Aiken had planned a confrontation. Nixon deftly transformed it into a routine briefing.

Operation Talk

The growing antiwar factions on Capitol Hill began searching for legislative leverage to exert on the President. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has reported Charles Mathias' resolution to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and is bringing it to the Senate floor this week. Oregon's Mark Hatfield and South Dakota's George McGovern are pushing for an amendment that would cut off military authorizations for Cambodia immediately, and for South Viet Nam by the end of 1970. Chances for that measure seem slim. More likely to pass next week is an amendment that would cut off funds for the Cambodian mission by July 1—which is precisely when the President promised the troops would be out of Cambodia anyway.

Antiwar members of the House tried last week to force the President out of Cambodia with legislation. They fought for a series of amendments to the military procurement authorization bill, but were easily defeated, and the week of planned congressional confrontation on constitutional issues dissolved in bitter argument. Yet there was no doubt that the President had badly damaged his standing with Congress. In one exercise of ineptitude, the White House allowed Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott to pledge, on assurance from the Administration, that bombing of North Viet Nam would not be resumed. Next morning the bombings were in the headlines. Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield is now making no pretense, as he did under Lyndon Johnson, that he supports the war. He is actively searching for the legislative means to attack the President.

Richard Nixon can ill afford such alienation either in Washington or in the rest of the nation—a fact that he now seems to realize. For months, the President did nothing to tone down Spiro Agnew's divisive statements. After Nixon's meeting last week with the eight college presidents, the word went out that Agnew would be sedated. Nixon promptly denied it, as he had to in order to avoid humiliating the man he has praised so handsomely in the past. Agnew also insisted that he was not to be "muzzled." Nonetheless, in a speech at Boise, Idaho, Agnew excised some harsh phrases about "choleric young intellectuals" and "tired, embittered elders" that had appeared in his advance text. He was similarly subdued when he dedicated a Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Ga.