Camera Obscura

I read the Honolulu declaration as a refusal by the President to put limits on our war aims and on our military commitments in Viet Nam.

--Walter Lippmann

It is remarkable that scarcely a word in either the declaration of Honolulu or in the accompanying communique suggests any expansion of the war.

--San Francisco Chronicle

The aging columnist and the California editorialist hardly seemed to be talking about the same thing. But their disparate readings of the Hawaiian conference were symptomatic of the whole U.S. press. The conference, said the Detroit Free Press, was a disaster that "brought into sharp focus the schizoid personality of our foreign policy." That wasn't the conference reported by the Washington Post, which found that it "did what it obviously was intended to do from the beginning." It brought together "officials who are going to have to work together if the war is to be skillfully conducted. It was a good thing to bring them together." It was more than a good thing, said the Chicago Sun-Times. "The summit conference between American and Vietnamese political and military leaders in Hawaii may prove to be an important turning point in the war against Communism." About all the Sun-Times found to criticize was the hasty preparation; the paper did not like the President and so many Cabinet members flying the Pacific in the same plane.

Peculiarly Clear. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however, was less worried about the physical dangers of Johnson's trip than it was angry at its "showy and confusing" detraction from "the primary business at hand, which is to gain agreement on terms for a peace conference." Others might be impressed by talk of social reform in Viet Nam; not the PD, which found the idea "utterly fantastic." It would require conquering the Viet Cong, and that would take "a military effort of many long years-the establishment of an armed American occupation."

One answer to this argument came from Washington, where New York Herald Tribune Columnist Roscoe Drummond cited facts and figures suggesting that the Viet Cong are being beaten right now. The V.C. are so short of manpower, said Drummond, that they are impressing 15-year-olds and girls into service; the B-52 raids are mauling them badly and their losses are high. Another answer came from South Viet Nam, where Columnist Joseph Alsop explained that as he saw it, "the problem that has been examined at Honolulu is peculiarly clear. Provided that the President is willing to wage war in earnest, all sorts of signs indicate that this is a war that can be won-perhaps a lot sooner than most people imagine."

Inner Logic. While the controversy raged back and forth, the TV networks hardly knew where to focus their cameras next. On top of some memorable footage from the battlefield, there was the conference-to say nothing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings where Administration critics were having their day. CBS finally decided that continuous coverage of the Senate hearings was consuming too much time, and consigned that part of the dialogue to evening selections from the tapes. The move stirred up something of an intra-network flap, but it had its defenders in the press. The conference, said the Detroit News, was "infinitely more useful" than "the taunting of that hysterical hound-dog, Wayne Morse of Oregon."

To the cartoonists, it was all a matter of sharp blacks and whites, a picture etched in the vitriol of their trade. Johnson was a cranky old codger blind to criticism and deaf to dissent; he was a foolish tourist taken in by the grass skirts and leis of a Pacific tourist trap.

A reasoned summation was offered by Columnist Max Lerner. "Many will view the whole Honolulu venture as a tricky Johnsonian gimmick to give the outward semblance of activity when there is no substance of progress in the war," he wrote. "But it would be serious to underestimate the President or believe that his moves have been wholly histrionic. There is a logic to his latest move, the logic of adding political warfare as a third phase of the American effort, to fill out the triangle whose other two sides are formed by the military operations and the diplomatic operations."

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