Purse-String Answer

The hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were something less than the constitutional debate they set out to be. Mired from the outset in moot legalistic questions, the sessions became instead an outlet for the unease and bitterness with which most committee members--liberals and conservatives alike--view Lyndon Johnson's management of the war.

The nominal issue was a constitutional question as delicate as any in the federal system of checks and balances: What power does Congress have to influence or change the President's conduct of a war? Committee Chairman William Fulbright evangelized for a resolution suggesting that Congress should have greater control over foreign policy. Implicit in the resolution was Fulbright's disapproval of the war and his wishful belief that Congress could do something to end it.

Blank Check. Constitutionally, Congress can only begin a conflict by a declaration of war, and then sustain it by voting whatever appropriations the President requests to carry on the fighting. The U.S., of course, has not declared war in Viet Nam. Nonetheless, in 1964 Congress did pass, with only two dissenting votes, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, affirming its readiness "to approve and support the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

Fulbright himself sponsored the Tonkin resolution, a fact he now loudly regrets, claiming that the President has taken the measure as a blank check to wage unlimited war without any further consultation with Congress. For his part, President Johnson argued at his last press conference that Congress could vote to rescind the Tonkin resolution--but that also was legalistic legerdemain, since the President insisted at the same time that he had had no constitutional need for the Tonkin resolution in the first place.

Even Fulbright does not believe that the Tonkin resolution should be rescinded. "I don't advocate its being brought up," he said. "An overwhelming defeat of such a move would be interpreted as an affirmation." Still, Illinois' Charles Percy, as a voluntary witness before the committee, suggested that the President should annually "itemize for the Congress our national commitments as he sees them, detailing the nature of each commitment, its limitations, and the justification for it in terms of national interest." In fact--if informally--Johnson has consulted more closely with Congress on foreign policy than has any of his predecessors in this century.

Largest Ever. Testifying for a second week as the Administration's advocate, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach repeated that the

President must make policy decisions as the occasion demands. "Everyone, including the Administration, was extremely hopeful that the commitment would never be as great as the commitment is today," he said. He added diplomatically: "It is extremely important that Congress and the President be as nearly as they can be on the same wave length."

All too clearly, they are not. Last week an Associated Press poll of 84 Senators showed only 44 willing to grant the President a broad policy endorsement on Viet Nam. Forty--including some who advocated intensification of the war--opposed present policy.

The division was not reflected, however, when the Senate voted in the one area in which it does indeed control for eign policy--by the purse strings. With the troops already committed in the field, the Senate passed, 84 to 3,* the Administration's $70.2 billion defense bill, the largest single annual appropriation ever voted in U.S. history.

*The Nays: Oregon's Wayne Morse, Alaska's Ernest Gruening and Ohio's Stephen Young.

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