FED UP AND TURNED OFF

Though Americans were saddened by the collapse in Indochina, U.S. Congressmen touring their districts during the Easter recess encountered practically no support for President Ford's plea for further military aid. Observed Democrat Don Bonker of Washington State: "People are drained. They want to bury the memory of Indochina. They regard it as a tragic chapter in American life, but they want no further part of it." Said Republican Garner Shriver of Kansas: "The feeling is that we have made a considerable contribution to Cambodia and South Viet Nam and that we've done enough." Added Democrat Joseph Gaydos, whose district encompasses the formerly pro-war steel towns of western Pennsylvania: "In retrospect, most people realize that regardless of how much we might have spent in lives or dollars, we couldn't have changed the outcome."

In interviews with TIME correspondents, about three dozen Congressmen reported that their constituents were fed up and turned off by Southeast Asia and far more concerned about U.S. inflation, recession and unemployment.

Said Republican Manuel Lujan Jr. of New Mexico: "They feel that both South Viet Nam and Cambodia have already gone down the tubes and that we've got to take care of ourselves first." Typical of voter reaction that Congressmen heard was the angry observation of Dan Merwin, a fireman in Girard, Ohio: "They're going down the drain without a fight, and we're still talking of sending them hundreds of millions of dollars? I don't understand it. We've got people starving in West Virginia." Echoed a construction worker in Wilmington, Del.: "All that money that Ford wants to waste in Indochina could do a helluva lot more good in the U.S.A."

Foreign Affairs Editor William Bundy, who was Assistant Secretary of State in the Johnson Administration, believes that "we've done far more than [South Viet Nam] could reasonably have expected at every stage of the proceedings." Bundy's predecessor at the State Department, Roger Hilsman, now a professor at Columbia University, found that "the phrase, 'What we owe the Vietnamese is a peace,' strikes home."

Newspaper editorials expressed similar views. The Pittsburgh Press wrote: "Saigon's battlefield performance has been so miserable and panicky that one cannot believe that more aid would have changed the outcome." Said the Chicago Tribune: "Surely a moral commitment does not mean an obligation to help a country bleed to its last man."

At the same time, however, Congressmen found that most constituents sympathized with the refugees and wanted the U.S. to aid them with food, medicine and shelter. Democrat Edward Koch of New York sensed among his constituents "great anguish about the condition of the refugees and a feeling that we have to do something to rescue those people who want to leave the areas being occupied by Communists."

Because most constituents believed that the fall of South Viet Nam and Cambodia was inevitable, Congressmen found little support for the Ford Administration's attempt to blame Congress for the situation in South Viet Nam and Cambodia. Said Democrat Elliott Levitas of Georgia: "I think Ford's close to blowing his credibility with the people by talking poultry droppings like that." The Detroit Free Press, in its first tough blast against the home-state President, declared that Ford's "sleazy attempt to create a scapegoat" deserved "nothing but contempt." The Philadelphia Inquirer said that "recriminations over 'who lost Viet Nam' " can only "poison our national atmosphere now and in the future."

The future worries many Congressmen because they fear that the sense of futility over Indochina may turn the U.S. isolationist. For example, one constituent wrote Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware: "No, no, no, no, no to any aid to any foreign country except food, emergency relief and education." Democrat Mike McCormack of Washington State detected "a real unwillingness to support foreign military operations or foreign aid." In suburban Chicago, Democrat Abner Mikva found that "people want to pull the oceans down over their heads." But most Americans seemed to recognize that oceans have long ceased to provide protection and that for all the obvious need to solve domestic problems, the U.S. still faces commitments and challenges in the world.

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