Known and Unknown (14 page)

He was a “Ford man,” the President said, but of course he couldn't say so publicly.
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No matter how heartfelt Johnson's remarks might have been, I found it hard to believe that bolstering the ranks of his Republican opposition in the Congress was part of LBJ's agenda.

When it came to the Vietnam War, the Republican Party was in something of a quandary—and Johnson knew it. Republicans in Congress were likely to be the last ones to counsel retreat in the face of Communist aggression. I too was sympathetic to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' expressed aims in Vietnam—to check Communist expansion—as were most Americans in the early years of the war.

But I started to have concerns in May 1965, when a Vietnam War appropriation bill came before the House, and President Johnson urgently requested an additional $700 million for the Department of Defense. The vote turned into a proxy fight between supporters and opponents of the war. I could see no reason for Johnson to try to ram through an appropriations bill so quickly. It seemed to me it was another maneuver designed to show the American people that Congress supported the war. But in the end, I voted for the appropriations, basing my decision, as I wrote at the time, “on the more fundamental fact that we cannot know what is in the mind of the President and certainly we cannot function if we operate on the assumption that his motives are bad.” I concluded, “Frankly, I do not have the vaguest idea whether I voted properly or improperly.”
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Shortly after our memorable White House briefing in February 1966, it was clear that the war in Vietnam had become the single most important issue facing the country.
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Many members of Congress were questioning Johnson's credibility, including his use of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to justify any action he took.
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While LBJ and others in the administration would offer comforting words like “the tide is turning” and that there is “light at the end of the tunnel,” for the first time in history the world was watching a war on television and was beginning to sense that the words did not match what they were seeing. The administration's rhetoric gradually evolved into clichés associated with what was beginning to feel like a failing effort.

As I had seen firsthand, President Johnson avoided difficult questions about the conduct of the war from members of Congress and the press. He believed that media reporting was providing aid and comfort to the enemy and said as much. I concluded that if I wanted to better understand what was going on in Vietnam, I should go there myself.
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In May 1966, our House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information traveled to Vietnam to look into charges of waste and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars by the Agency for International Development (AID). I saw this trip also as an opportunity to talk to the troops without a filter and to hear from the military and diplomatic leadership in Vietnam firsthand.

Almost immediately I observed one telling sign about our difficulties in Vietnam. When we arrived at the AID office in Saigon, the television set wasn't working. The picture was on but there was no sound. The AID employees tried to fix the set, but couldn't. Then someone tried to ask the Vietnamese personnel on duty there for assistance. But none of the Americans around were able to communicate with the Vietnamese to tell them what was needed. If the folks on the ground at AID were not able to communicate well enough with the Vietnamese they worked with to fix a television set, I wondered how they could work together to win a war.

The language barrier extended well beyond the AID office. We were told that of 260,000 U.S. personnel then stationed in Vietnam, roughly 1,500 could speak some Vietnamese.
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While language differences could be manageable in a conventional war, they posed particular difficulties in a conflict where U.S. forces needed to appeal to local populations for support.

There were other revelations ahead. When our delegation traveled to the port of Cam Ranh Bay, we noticed a mammoth construction project underway. I asked an engineer how many U.S. troops the new port facilities would be capable of supporting. The answer was, up to a half million. Since there currently were fewer than three hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, this suggested that the administration might be preparing for a sizable increase in the U.S. military presence in the period ahead. This would have been stunning news to the American people. During the presidential campaign in 1964, in fact, Johnson had suggested that Goldwater, not he, would expand the war if he was elected president.

In South Vietnam the briefings we received from military leaders, including General William Westmoreland, were discouraging. We received little information on efforts to build up the military, political, and economic capabilities of the South Vietnamese. I thought it was easy for the administration to order the American military, largely made up of draftees, to Vietnam, but it was a vastly more difficult task to marshal diplomatic or economic experts who could help the Vietnamese develop the capabilities they needed to be able to sustain themselves.

It was clear that the Vietnam War was an unconventional conflict that the American military and other elements of our government were not well enough organized, trained, equipped, funded, or staffed to manage. The enemy America was fighting didn't have to win a single direct engagement with our military to survive, and they never did. Indeed, it was in their interests not to fight our kind of battle at all. They would ambush American troops on Monday and go back to harvesting rice on Tuesday. They would selectively engage our forces when it suited them, but generally avoid direct confrontation, because they knew they would lose. Their strategy was simply to hold on and make the war costly enough so that the Americans and our allies would eventually call it quits.

Further, there seemed to be little success in engaging in the ideological component of the conflict. The Viet Cong were fighting for something. Ho Chi Minh promised his followers economic progress, while the United States had been portrayed as promising only more bombs and bloodshed. Unquestionably, the people of Vietnam would have been vastly better off free of a repressive Communist regime and with freer political and economic systems. But neither we nor the Vietnamese we were supporting had developed an ability to communicate that truth persuasively. We were fighting dedicated ideological revolutionaries who would not surrender their Marxist ideology or bargain away at the negotiating table their hope for a united, single Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh.

By increasing American troop levels still further in the country, we were increasing the number of targets, which would lead to more casualties and further undermine support for the war at home. The U.S. approach seemed to be playing into the hands of the enemy—with more military bombardments and more American troops and without successfully enabling our South Vietnamese allies to take on more of the burdens of the fighting. In a report to my constituents I noted that it was unlikely that the United States “could ‘win' this type of insurgency war for the South Vietnamese.”
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Despite our country's good intentions, I was concerned that we were creating a dependency on the part of the South Vietnamese.
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During one of my stops in the country I visited a training facility where American flight instructors were teaching Vietnamese pilots how to fly. It seemed to me that it would have made more sense to teach the Vietnamese pilots how to be flight instructors, so they could train other Vietnamese pilots. As long as Americans were the ones training the Vietnamese, they would remain dependent on us to keep turning pilots out.

There was growing sentiment in Congress, particularly among Democrats, that the best way to express their objection to the conduct of the war was to deny it funding. That wasn't how I saw it. My view was that even if one disagreed with the way the policy was being implemented, as I and others increasingly did, the best way to respond was to recommend corrections at the policy level.
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I wished Congress could be more involved, on a substantive level, rather than simply yanking the purse strings shut when displeased.
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In September 1967, I cosponsored a resolution to bring the conduct of the war to the House floor for debate and discussion. Resolution 508 proposed to determine if “further congressional action is desirable in respect to policies in Southeast Asia.”
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I didn't think anyone knew with certainty what the balance should be between the branches on these matters. I was not proposing specific reforms; rather, I was suggesting that Congress undertake a study of the topic.
^†
Unfortunately, at the request of the administration, a majority of Democrats blocked Resolution 508 from consideration.

On a number of occasions I joined other members of Congress in expressing concern about what appeared to be the White House's attempts to manage the news on the war. This was an understandable inclination on the administration's part, since no doubt they felt the media coverage of the war was unfair. But the administration made matters worse with their seeming reluctance to provide much, if any, documentation that would have given members of Congress a better sense of what was taking place.
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By this time, I had become a cosponsor and advocate for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), authored by Congressman John Moss, a Democrat from California. The legislation, which passed unanimously in 1966, was crafted in reaction to the Johnson administration's behavior. As a Democrat, Moss was in the awkward position of promoting a bill that went against the express wishes of the President, so I helped him develop the legislation and move it through the House. For me, support of the bill came down to one long-held belief: Good judgments require accurate information.
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I'm still a supporter of FOIA. But once I joined the executive branch of government in 1969, I began to understand the costs our well-intentioned law imposed. Under FOIA, for example, it often proved difficult to differentiate between the many legitimate requests for information and frivolous fishing expeditions by those who want to bury government in paperwork or those with an ax to grind. Federal officials spend many hours and considerable expense trying to decide what information is and is not releasable under FOIA. We wanted to pass a law to solve an immediate problem. In retrospect, I wish we had been able to better understand the long-term ramifications of the legislation we were championing.

The situation in Vietnam, and the demonstrations against the war and the draft, strengthened greatly my support for a transition to an all-volunteer military. The draft had been in place since World War II. By the mid-1960s, many young Americans were asking why they were being forced to fight in a war they did not understand and that they did not see as critical to our country's security. Since the various draft exemptions—being a college student, a teacher, married, or a conscientious objector—seemed to favor the more affluent, the draft also exacerbated racial and social tensions in the country. In October 1967, one of the largest antiwar demonstrations in the Washington area was held on the steps of the Pentagon, with many protesting that conscription was unwarranted, discriminatory, and unfair. I agreed with them.

In our free system of government, I believed, conscription was appropriate only when there was a demonstrated need.
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A volunteer system offered many advantages. First and foremost, it would preserve the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions about how they wished to live their lives. Volunteers who chose to enter the military would be more likely to make it a career, instead of serving for a short period. It also would avoid the implicit discrimination and the inherent inequities caused by the various deferments and exemptions in the draft system.

Because of my interest in a volunteer military, I was invited to be part of a conference at the University of Chicago convened to discuss the topic. There I met one of the most passionate proponents of the all-volunteer system, the economist Dr. Milton Friedman, who I would turn to many times over the years for advice and guidance. Friedman's belief in the power of freedom was inspiring, and he felt the same way about giving people the choice to serve in the U.S. military as he did about giving them a choice about their education. Other participants on the panel included Senator Edward Kennedy and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, both of whom favored continuing the draft.

Many arguments were offered to bolster both sides of the issue. Some contended that without the draft we would not be able to recruit enough troops. My view was that in every other activity in our society, in both the public and the private sectors, we were able to attract and retain the personnel needed without resorting to compulsion. It was done simply by paying them a competitive market wage. The critics also contended that it would be too expensive to pay the men and women in the U.S. armed forces what would be paid in the private sector. My response was why should government pay those serving in our military less than a competitive wage, namely, what the market says they are worth? specifically, why should government draft only some and then say, in addition, we will pay you only 50 percent or 60 percent of your worth? No one ever had a good answer to those questions.
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As members of the Joint Economic Committee, Tom Curtis and I proposed and held a hearing on whether or not the military draft was still necessary and whether a volunteer military was or was not economically feasible. One Pentagon official testified that the Department of Defense had as its objective “to obtain as many or all of its personnel through voluntary means.”
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But that wasn't what was happening in practice, and they knew it. I tried to test the willingness of members of Congress to study the feasibility of ending the draft by offering a nonbinding resolution. The resolution stated simply that it was “the sense of Congress” that the draft should be enforced “only when necessary to insure the security of this Nation.”
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With bipartisan opposition, I was not able to get it considered—it later fell to the Nixon administration to pursue the issue.