No Exit

If they achieved no other goal, the Senate hearings confirmed President Johnson's belief that nothing short of a premature pullout from Viet Nam will pacify the pacifiers. The hard-core critics of his foreign policy, concluded a White House aide, "are insatiable. They will not accept the legal argument, the political argument, the moral argument or the military argument. They want out." And that, Lyndon Johnson maintains, is the one argument he will not buy at any price. Last week, more determinedly than ever, he said it again.

Realizing now perhaps that many Americans have been unsettled by the failure of his all-out overtures for peace, Johnson unequivocally rejected Hanoi's demands for a virtual U.S. surrender and spelled out his Administration's ultimate purposes and prospects. "We have the military strength to convince the Communists they cannot achieve the conquest of South Viet Nam by force," he said. "They may delay us, but I warn them they will never deter or defeat us."

The Teacher Toll. The President declared his resolve before the kind of audience he likes--12,000 school administrators--in a place he has reason to regard fondly, Convention Hall in Atlantic City, where the Democratic Party acclaimed him as its presidential candidate 18 months ago. A dense fog that forced the cancellation of all commercial landings almost kept him away. But, braving a 100-ft. ceiling, he flew in aboard a Convair, soon was standing before the educators.

However arduous the task of "building a better school and a better nation," said Johnson, Americans have "little reason to be discouraged. Others face tasks so much more difficult than ours." He had in mind, of course, the South Vietnamese officials with whom he had conferred the week before in Honolulu.

"These leaders," he said, "voiced no weariness before the task of getting on with reforms in education and health and agriculture." Yet, he noted, they must at every turn defy a "deliberately planned and coldly carried out" Viet Cong terrorist campaign.

In South Viet Nam last year, said the President, 12,000 schoolteachers, administrators, health officials and village leaders were killed or kidnaped by the Communists, while more than 36,000 incidents of terrorism were directed at such facilities as schools and hospitals.

Double Standard. This, declared Johnson, "is the terrible scarred face of the war, too seldom seen and too little understood." Moreover, he warned, "if the takeover of Viet Nam can be achieved by a highly organized Communist force employing violence against a civilian population, it can be achieved in another country, at another time, with an even greater cost to freedom. If this 'war of liberation' triumphs, who will be 'liberated' next?"

The President honed his sharpest barbs for those critics--notably Sovietologist George Kennan and Pundit Walter Lippmann--who contend that Viet Nam's destiny is a trivial matter compared with the defense of Western Europe. To this thesis, Johnson replied: "We cannot raise a double standard to the world. We cannot hold freedom less dear in Asia than in Europe." Nor, he suggested pointedly, should the U.S. "be less willing to sacrifice for men whose skin is a different color."

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