Senator Mansfield by Don Oberdorfer

Author:Don Oberdorfer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588345141
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2015-03-09T18:00:00+00:00

THE MISERIES OF AMBIGUITY

Throughout 1966 and 1967, Mansfield was in an ambiguous position regarding the Vietnam War, which was increasingly the central issue in American politics and life. He continued to dissent energetically in private meetings and in memoranda to Johnson, but he refused to do anything to aid the growing number of senatorial or outside critics of the war. When he did express public criticism of administration policy, he never attacked Johnson directly and nearly always gave full credence to Johnson’s gestures toward a negotiated settlement.

In late 1965 and early 1966 I spoke several members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in preparation for an article about the committee for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, for which I was a frequent contributor at the time. On February 18, I discussed my findings with a congressional affairs aide to LBJ, Henry Hall Wilson, an old friend of mine and a helpful White House source. “The Mansfield report was taken very seriously by many members of the Senate,” I told Wilson, and “it stirred up a lot of people.… A lot of people were stirred up even more by the failure of the Administration to bother with answering the report.”

For many years during and before Fulbright’s chairmanship, the Foreign Relations Committee had been a quiet backwater of congressional influence on government policy. The committee met around a large table under a crystal chandelier in its ornate room on the first floor of the Capitol. Except when the committee voted on diplomatic nominations or foreign assistance legislation, most of its activity was closed to the press and it made little news. The small, unified staff responded to all members, Republican and Democratic. It was a striking departure from the usual for the committee to put on news-making public hearings, as it did in February 1966.

The committee began discussing the issue of hearings on Vietnam on January 11, when Mansfield and Aiken reported on their trip to Saigon and other capitals. After an hour of discussion of Vietnam issues, Frank Lausche of Ohio, a Democratic conservative, praised the hearing as “the most constructive hearing we have had in the whole time I have been a member of this committee.” When Fulbright raised the possibility of further hearings, Mansfield approved but asked that they be held in executive (closed) session “because then you can feel freer to speak—just among our colleagues.” As Fulbright continued to press for public hearings, Mansfield cautioned that “you do not know how the newspapers will play up public hearings or how they will whip up or interpret these things.” Nevertheless, when the committee returned to the subject of open hearings on Vietnam three weeks later, Mansfield made the motion to proceed, which was carried unanimously. Yet, once agreed, he played virtually no role in the hearings. He attended only one session and asked no questions.

Neither Mansfield nor Fulbright anticipated the powerful effect of the public hearings. It was not the newspapers but the television networks that “whipped up” the public, as senators, war critics, and administration officials debated the wisdom of U.

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