MAJOR" PRES IDENCIES?
The Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, who was highly criti-_ cal of Johnson up to the moment when American planes began bombing north Vietnam February 7, is now one of the president's most ardent admirers, In his column of April 29 he holds that Johnson has removed the "last doubt that, with any luck at all, his time in office may prove to be one of the major presidencies."
As part of the evidence, which he has been industriously assembling, Alsop reports Johnson's personal role in the military aggression on north Vietnam: "It is hard to believe, but it is a fact that the president follows the bombing missions attacking targets in North Vietnam almost in the manner of a field commander,"
Johnson is "customarily notified when the planes have gone out. He often stays up, or has himself called, or is wakened by his own internal alarm clock, to hear the mission's results."
Since the bombings are now being conducted on a “round=theclock" basis in accordance with the present phase of the "measured escalation" of the war, Johnson has been missing sleep. "He has been looking a bit tired recently, and no wonder: for his new role as a field commander of operations halfway round the world must clearly cut substantially into his always minimal daily allowance of rest,
Johnson's passionate involvement in Operation Slaughter is not that of a mere amateur following the moves on the map. "The significant point to note is that the president, in some sense, really is the field commander of these remote, delicate and crucial military operations."
Alsop, who apparently has inside sources of information, knows whereof he. speaks: "All targets are, in the first place, personally approved by him, in committee with the secretaries of state and defense."
Of course, minor details. are left to minions actually in the field: "The operational plans for each attack, the choice between approved targets dictated by weather and other considerations, the estimates of forces needed for each mission -- all these matters, very naturally and properly, are left to the air officers and naval officers on the spot, who have direct operational responsibility." Very naturally and properly!
Alsop is quite interested in the psychological effect of all this on the great leader. "Like the man who has never been in combat, President Johnson before Pleiku had never taken quite the sort of decision that he took when the attacks on North Vietnam were ordered at last,"
Johnson tells ‘all and sundry" that his decision to start a war “involved no change of policy." Alsop smiles indulgently: "But in fact a very major Rubicon was crossed." The man from Texas gets. "none of the exhilaration that another sort of national leader might have felt." Being "field commander now does not excite him as it would have excited Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy...eBut one suspects, nonetheless, that he has somehow been liberated, and even enlarged, by making a cruelly hard decision
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that was foreign to his previous experience..."
Alsop, unfortunately leaves out two important details which he ought to have reported in order to leave his readers with full assurance that the scene is completely natural and proper. (1) When he enters the War Room, does Johnson take off his cowboy hat and put on something more closely resembling the headgear worn by Napoleon? (2) To protect the great leader of the "Great Society" in case a sudden emergency occurs, are the walls sufficiently padded?