Something Happened to the Crisis

In the sparkling sunshine of a Hawaii morning, a stream of limousines purred up to a yellow concrete building over looking Pearl Harbor. Central Intelligence Agency Director John McCone alighted from one and hurried inside.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Maxwell Taylor emerged from another.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, both in slacks and open shirts, arrived together, were greeted under the portico by Pacific Commander Harry Felt.

Last to arrive, 20 minutes late, was U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam Henry Cabot Lodge, natty in an olive suit.

What brought all the brass to Hawaii's Camp Smith, named for retired Marine General Holland M. ("Howling Mad") Smith, was a two-day conference on the deteriorating U.S. position in Southeast Asia. The meetings got un der way in a top-secret briefing room that rivaled the war room in Dr. Strangelove. There were flashing lights, whirring projectors and 9-ft.-high maps bristling with red pins. On one wall was an 18-ft. by 30-ft. colored map of Southeast Asia. On another, facing a semicircular table at which the key conferees sat, were multicolored lights positioning every vessel in the U.S. Pacific fleet and maps pinpointing Viet Cong supply areas, Soviet and Red Chinese ships and munitions dumps, and other strategic targets.

No Plans. It was the ideal setting for a crisis-atmosphere conference. But the conference was barely under way before it took on a noncrisis air. In Laos, the Red Pathet Lao had momentarily halted their drive, in some areas were even pulling back--though at week's end, after the Hawaii conference broke up, they were beginning to shoot again. In South Viet Nam, the number of attacks launched by the Viet Cong guerrillas had suddenly dipped sharply.

Desperately anxious to avoid having to make painful election-year decisions involving war or peace, the Johnson Administration seized on the respite offered by the Reds and began softening its tough talk about intensifying the war in South Viet Nam or extending it to North Viet Nam. After Wisconsin's Republican Congressman Melvin Laird told a radio audience that "the Johnson Administration's position is to move north, and we are prepared to move north," the President told a news conference: "I know of no plans that have been made to that effect." Laird stuck to his guns, but in Hawaii, Rusk, McNamara & Co. sought to downplay talk of any bold new measures.

Routine. As a result, what had been shaping up as a grim meeting designed to chart a potentially risky new course in Southeast Asia suddenly turned into a routine conference on the war in South Viet Nam--the 14th such meeting in Hawaii since December 1961. At a working lunch, the VIPs brought swimming trunks to the Navy Officers' Club on shimmering Keehi Lagoon, left their "classified" folders on the tables while they enjoyed a quick dip. Lieut. General William Westmoreland, the newly designated U.S. military chief in Saigon, gave a virtuoso display on one water ski. During off-hours, Rusk and McNamara relaxed at Felt's flower-decked Makalapa Guest House, while Lodge could be seen sipping coffee in splendid isolation at Waikiki Beach's Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

The routine meeting also yielded some routine decisions. "Essentially," said one official, "we were talking about how to do what we're doing better." About the only suggestion of any consequence to come out of it was that the U.S. send a team of perhaps 20 or 30 officials to South Viet Nam to make sure, in the words of one official, that economic aid "gets where it's supposed to go, and not to a bank in Geneva."

Yet the U.S. could not go on indefinitely letting Hanoi call the shots in South Viet Nam. For all the soothing qualities of the lull, Lyndon Johnson might soon be faced with the need to win Congress over to a plan for putting new pressure on North Viet Nam --something short of bombing Hanoi or outright invasion, but something far more convincing than the conference offensive conducted so far.

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