Foreign Relations: A Look Down That Long Road

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To the members of the National Security Council, seated around the coffin-shaped table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the President of the U.S. said with quiet anger: "I've gone far enough. I've had enough of this." And so, in response to a murderous series of Communist attacks against U.S. military forces and installations in South Viet Nam, President Lyndon Johnson gave the orders that on three different days last week sent American and Vietnamese warplanes smashing north of the 17th parallel at Red supply dumps, communications systems and guerrilla staging areas.

As the U.S. policy evolved during the week, it became increasingly evident that future raids against North Viet Nam will not be carried out on a strict tit-for-tat basis—a dubious strategy that has deprived Washington and Saigon of the initiative. Thus the war in Viet Nam has taken on a brand-new dimension—and can never again be quite the same.

To no one was this more welcome than the man directly responsible for the U.S. military effort in Viet Nam: Army General William C. Westmoreland, 50, commander of the 23,500 American servicemen in South Viet Nam and senior U.S. military adviser to South Vietnamese forces. "The war has quite obviously moved into another stage," said Westmoreland in visible relief. "Now the rules of war have changed, and policymakers in Hanoi are confronted with the necessity of balancing their resources against the damage they may suffer. They've got to take a look down that long road and decide whether they really want what lies ahead for them if they persist in past policies."

After Nothing, Something. It was a long time coming. For 15 months, President Johnson had refused to change course, despite the steadily deteriorating situation in South Viet Nam. To retreat, he said, would be "strategically unwise and morally unthinkable." To expand the war might get the U.S. into a fight "with 700 million Chinese." On the very eve of the current crisis he reiterated to an associate his determination to "go neither north nor south."

Last August, when Red torpedo boats attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered air strikes against their home bases—but he made it eminently clear that this was a one-shot reprisal and would not be repeated, except under similar provocation. For months afterward, as Hanoi steadily increased the rate of infiltration via jungle trails threading into South Viet Nam until it reached the rate of at least 1,000 men a month, Johnson did nothing. Twice the Viet Cong struck directly at U.S. personnel, and twice they got away with it. Two days before the U.S. presidential election, guerrillas killed five Americans, wounded 76, and destroyed six B57 bombers with a savage mortar barrage against South Viet Nam's Bienhoa Airfield. Last Christmas Eve, a plastic charge demolished Saigon's Brink Hotel, a big officers' billet, killing two Americans and wounding 98 others. Both times U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor pleaded for a retaliatory strike at the North. Both times he was turned down.