Why Democrats can stop the war
Pundits say if the party gets too tough with Bush, it will be blamed for "losing" Iraq. But the real political risk is going too easy on Bush, and losing the trust of war-weary voters.
By Rick Perlstein
Photos: Reuters
Clockwise from top left: Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, a Vietnam War protest and Richard Nixon
Jan. 24, 2007 | Earlier this month, the folks at MoveOn.org came to me with a challenge: Study the history of Congress' efforts to halt, or at least halt the escalation of, the Vietnam War, and mine it for lessons about what Congress should do about Iraq now. They found themselves saddled with a historian deeply suspicious of using history to glibly draw battle plans for the present -- but one who emerged, nonetheless, believing that this time the lessons are clear. Last Thursday, Salon ran Walter Shapiro's article "Why the Democrats Can't Stop the Surge." I've come to a different conclusion about what Congress can or can't do. The questions are not just: Can Congress stop the surge? Can Congress stop a war-mongering president in his tracks? The better question is what are the things Congress can accomplish just by trying to stop the escalation, boldly, and without apology?
The answer to that is: an enormous amount -- and that the only thing that can guarantee Democratic political weakness in 2008 is if they abandon a strong withdrawal (or, if you prefer, "redeployment") position.
Let's start at the very beginning. Representatives and senators had been criticizing the creep, creep, creep of America's escalating military involvement in Indochina at least since 1963. The hammer really started coming down, though, in February 1966 -- when, a year after Lyndon Johnson began the first bombing runs over North Vietnam, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright of Arkansas called hearings questioning the entire underlying logic of the war. Americans had been doing that in the streets for some time by then. Shortly after the Senate passed the president's 1965 $700 million military appropriation for Vietnam 88 to 3, the antiwar movement staged its first big Washington demonstration -- with about 20,000 young people on the Mall. But the collective reaction of the guardians of polite opinion was a sneer. "Holiday From Exams," the New York Times headed its dispatch.
By contrast, when Sen. Fulbright began his hearings, they stood up and took notice. All three networks covered the hearings live over six days. Thus did Americans learn from hippies like World War II hero Gen. James Gavin and George Kennan, architect of the Cold War doctrine of "containment" -- who said, "If we were not already involved as we are today in Vietnam, I would know of no reason why we should wish to become so involved, and I could think of several reasons why we should wish not to," and that victory could come only "at the cost of a degree of damage to civilian life and civilian suffering ... for which I would not like to see this country responsible."
President Johnson did not sit by idly. He directed the FBI to monitor the proceedings to find where they were echoing the so-called Communist line -- and had agents study wiretaps of the Soviet Embassy for evidence of friendly congressional contact. He also may have had words with the top network brass. CBS, for one, cut away from Kennan's testimony to return to regularly scheduled programming ("I Love Lucy" and "Andy Griffith Show" reruns). The execs defended themselves, claiming the hearings served to "obfuscate" and "confuse" the issues.
First lesson: Forthright questioning of a mistaken war by prominent legislators can utterly transform the public debate, pushing it in directions no one thought it was prepared to go.
Second lesson: Congress horning in on war powers scares the bejesus out of presidents.
The FBI was the least of it. The political threats were even worse. The next year, when Fulbright told the president at a meeting with the Senate leadership that the war was "ruining our domestic and our foreign policy," the president's response was a dare: Repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution -- the authorization of force that passed 98 to 2 in 1964. "You can tell the troops to come home" -- put up or shut up. What's more, "You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn't know what he's doing." This was the same sword of Damocles that potential congressional anti-surgers feel swinging over their heads now: Any second-guessing of the chain of command, and I, the president, will blame everything bad that happens on you. It set a pattern for presidential push-backs against legislators' assertion of their constitutional oversight power. Nixon was even worse.
In March 1968, campaigning in the Republican primary in New Hampshire, the man who would become the next president of the United States laid down his marker on Vietnam: "If in November this war is not over, I say that the American people will be justified in electing new leadership, and I pledge to you that new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific." It was reported as if a campaign promise: A President Nixon would end the war. Nixon spent the rest of the campaign season refusing to say any more about what he meant -- claiming that to do so would jeopardize President Johnson's negotiations with the enemy.
At Nixon's first press conference in 1969, Helen Thomas, blunt as ever, asked him, "Now that you are president, what is your peace plan for Vietnam?" His desultory answer only repeated proposals already on the table. In reality he had no "peace plan" -- save for the fantasy that he could bomb the enemy so savagely that it would surrender at the negotiating table. The falseness of the presumption that the president intended to end the war expeditiously was revealed to George McGovern, the most forceful Senate dove, in an early meeting with Henry Kissinger. Why, McGovern asked the president's national security advisor, didn't Nixon just announce that while his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson had committed troops in good faith, subsequent events had shown that the commitment was no longer in the nation's interest? Kissinger responded by agreeing with the premise -- that the war was a mistake -- but nonetheless assuring him they had no intention of withdrawing short of victory.
