The Senate: Unloving Acts

EVEN if he manages to restore peace within his official family, President Nixon may be unable to re-establish rapport with the U.S. Senate. Relations between the White House and the Upper House, already strained by the Supreme Court nomination fights, are turning ever more bitter over Indochina. Increasingly, Administration spokesmen are simply not believed.

Listening to testimony by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Admiral Thomas Moorer, soon to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Senator William Fulbright declared: "I have been hornswoggled long enough!" Then he asked Moorer whether he knew of "any plans now to invade any other country in the foreseeable future." Senator Albert Gore accused Nixon of informing leaders of veterans' and retired officers' groups about his Cambodian plans two days before Congress and the nation were told on April 30. The White House denied it. Other, less vehement critics of the war were also on the attack. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said that the U.S. was in danger of being dragged into Saigon's territorial ambitions "in Laos, Cambodia and God knows where else."

Going to the Well. The Administration had helped to fuel such sentiment. After failing to make a convincing case that South Vietnamese forces would withdraw from Cambodia along with American units by July 1, the Administration began to retreat from even that prediction last week. If, said Laird, South Vietnamese troops have to "clean out" the Communist sanctuaries again, he would not rule out the use of U.S. air and logistic support. Yet in Nixon's May 8 press conference, when he said that he "would expect" Saigon's troops to withdraw at the same time U.S. forces do, the President had also said: "When we come out, our logistical and air support will also come out." However, there are reports that the next installment of the Cambodian venture will be sustained combat by South Vietnamese forces, supported by Thailand and the U.S. (see THE WORLD).

Senate Republicans grew more discomfited by the day. Robert Dole of Kansas tried to work out an understanding on the Cooper-Church amendment, which would cut off funds for military activity in Cambodia by July 1. Nixon adamantly opposed Cooper-Church. Of the President's attitude, Dole said: "We who have gone to the well a number of times are saying to him that this isn't the time for confrontation [between the White House and the Senate]. It's a time for compromise."

Amended Amendment. By week's end there was no substantive compromise in sight. A round of constant consultation, involving the amendment's authors -Republican John Sherman Cooper and Democrat Frank Church -Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Laird and Presidential Counsellor Bryce Harlow, ended with a modification in the amendment's preamble. The original text included the passage: "In order to avoid involvement of the U.S. in a wider war in Indochina and to expedite the withdrawal of American forces from Viet Nam . . ." The revised opening reads: "In concert with the declared objective of the President of the U.S. to avoid the involvement of the U.S. in Cambodia after July 1, 1970, and to expedite the withdrawal ..."

Shared Responsibility. The change in wording was supposed to make the preamble less of a challenge to presidential authority. However, the operative provisions that follow remain the same, barring funds for a number of specific military purposes in Cambodian territory and airspace. Scott said that the modification did not satisfy the White House. Warned Church: "There can be no retreat on substance."

Last week the Cooper-Church measure could have been passed with about 55 votes in its favor. There was no vote, however, because opponents wanted to "discuss the matter at length," as Dole put it. That is a polite phrase for a small, undeclared guerrilla-style filibuster. A vote will take place this week, but only on the preamble. Debate on the amendment's core might go on indefinitely, since it takes a two-thirds vote to impose cloture. The tone that it could take was suggested by Michigan Senator Robert Griffin's remark that the amendment would "give aid and comfort to the enemy."

The constitutional question implicit in the Cooper-Church and other pending amendments (see THE LAW) is only one issue raised by the debate. The Administration's refusal to accept Cooper-Church is a message to Hanoi that Washington will not necessarily sit still in the future when confronted with a threat that it considers serious. There may be some psychological value in keeping an intractable foe guessing. But the Administration's position on the amendment increases apprehensions among Americans that the U.S. will continue to wage war, directly or indirectly, outside of South Viet Nam. Further, by postponing a vote in the Senate, the loyalists give new ammunition to dissenters who argue that opposition to the war through legitimate channels is doomed to strangulation.

"What is needed now," Henry Kissinger said at a recent Washington social gathering, "is a national recognition that only the President can take us out of the war. The time has come for an act of national commitment to the presidency, even an act of love." Replied Church: "The Congress and the President must join together in a program of shared responsibility for extricating us from this war. What we need is not an act of love, but an act of Congress." Given the mood of Washington and the country, it is likely that neither act will occur.

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