Three Principals Defend Themselves

GENERAL Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam during the period of initial troop buildups covered by the Pentagon papers. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Frank McCulloch last week, he noted: "We--all of us--are up against a very fundamental issue here, and there seems to be little chance at this moment that we will approach it rationally." The issue, as Taylor sees it, is simply how much undigested information can be made public in a complex and dangerous world; in other words, what is the proper role of a free press v. the role of the government in a free society?

But is not publication that is apt to offend some sensibilities--even large ones --part of the price of maintaining a truly open society? "We have never paid it before. To my knowledge, this is the first time in history that a government's right to carry on some of its business outside the public eye has, in effect, been challenged."

Taylor does not recall the exact chronology of decisions that led to U.S. takeover of the prime combat role in Viet Nam. "Those decisions," he says, "were all reached in Washington. But I was reluctant to concur in them." At the time Taylor argued that at some indeterminate point, perhaps when the number of U.S. troops reached between 100,000 and 125,000, a "Plimsoll line" would be reached: for every American soldier invested, a Vietnamese soldier would be lost. The war-weary Vietnamese, as the then ambassador saw it, would be only too glad to hand over the fighting to the Americans.

Was there any deliberate deception? "No. One of the problems here is exactly what is meant. In the practice of foreign policy, a President owes a good deal to certain elements of Congress --the leadership--in the way of openness. But the President does not by any means owe that to all of Congress."

Nor does Taylor think that L.B.J. was guilty of duplicity with regard to the bombing of the North. He points out that the issue is one of timing. If the President indeed made the decision to bomb the North before the 1964 election, Taylor admits, then he is guilty because he clearly said in that campaign that he had been urged by others to bomb but had refused. Yet, Taylor says, even after the election Johnson was still rejecting recommendations for bombing, so "it seems highly unfair to accuse him of having made up his mind before the election but putting it off for political reasons."

Lyndon Johnson, of course, is the principal figure in the published articles. He feels strongly that the documents do not tell the true story because they are mostly contingency plans, some of which neither he nor Secretary of State Dean Rusk ever heard of. In 1964 Johnson sincerely hoped to be able to negotiate his way out of a major war in Viet Nam. At one point, he told his advisers not to come to him with any plans to escalate this war unless they carried with them a joint congressional resolution.

The former President is particularly sensitive to charges that he misled the people about U.S. involvement in the Asian ground war. His position is that at the time he vowed not to send American boys to do the fighting that Asians should do for themselves. With some casuistry, Johnson believes he fulfilled this pledge, since there were thousands of South Vietnamese under arms--and still the situation was critical--before the major U.S. troop buildup began. The U.S. only did what the Asians could not do for themselves.

In retrospect, Johnson thinks his greatest mistake was waiting too long--18 months in office--before putting more men in, for by then Viet Nam was almost lost. Another mistake, he feels, was failing to institute censorship--not to cover up mistakes, but to prevent the enemy from knowing what the U.S. was going to do next. As for trying to hide the troop buildup, L.B.J.'s rationale is that he was trying to avoid inflaming hawk sentiment in the U.S. and to avoid goading Hanoi into calling on the Communist Chinese for help.

Contrary to rumor, intimates say that Johnson does not plan to rewrite his memoirs because of the articles; rather, he believes that all of the material on Viet Nam in the book will successfully parry their implications.

The man responsible for the newspapers' series, in one sense, is Robert McNamara, who ordered the Pentagon study while he was Secretary of Defense. McNamara is said to hope that the entire report will be declassified soon for use in libraries and archives, but feels the sensational way in which the documents were released is tragic.

He is known to believe that if the more delicate messages between allies come out, there will be enormous embarrassment and distrust of the U.S. in a number of countries that jeopardized their diplomatic credibility to aid the U.S. Even more serious is the likelihood that young people are now just not going to believe in the Government, in their institutions, and in their history.

Yet McNamara is credited with the most pragmatic view of the incident: now that the documents are out, the country should forget about the man who leaked them and get on with the task of learning from the Pentagon papers.

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