Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

That month Fulbright again called on his colleague Senator Russell to define further the constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch in shaping foreign policy. The Arkansas senator asked for Russell’s support for another resolution that would assert congressional participation in the making of national commitments. With Russell’s promise of support this time, Fulbright proposed a “sense of Congress” resolution that declared it unconstitutional for the executive branch to enter into executive national commitments with foreign nations without some legislative action. 27

On 16 August 1967, Fulbright opened public hearings to consider the matter. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach testified for the administration and against the resolution. Katzenbach aggressively defended Johnson’s actions in Vietnam and outraged committee members Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper by stating that, though the Congress still had the constitutional right to declare war, in such a fast moving modern world the term “declare war” was outmoded. He stated that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution acted as “a functional equivalent of the constitutional obligation expressed in the provision of the Constitution with respect to declaring war.” 28Given the diplomat’s reasoning, senators could neither extricate themselves from culpability nor find a way to change the course the administration steered.

The committee, livid at Katzenbach’s statement, continued the hearings to highlight what the chairman, Gore, Cooper, and others felt was a constitutional imbalance in foreign affairs. They called upon another long-time southern senator and constitutional scholar, Sam Ervin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Separation of Powers. Ervin complained of a “marked departure during the last 25 years from the balance struck by the Constitution between the Congress and the Executive branch in matters of foreign policy.” He said the trend would have to be “arrested if we are to avoid the fear of the Constitution’s framers that unchecked executive power might develop along tyrannical lines and pose the greatest threat to our democratic government and to the liberty of our people.” With regard to Vietnam, Ervin repeated the contention that he expressed earlier in the year—the United States had no legal or constitutional authority to intervene militarily in Vietnam. The North Carolina legislator said a distinction should be drawn between offensive and defensive war. The president, he reasoned, could use the armed forces to defend United States territory in the event of a sudden attack on United States territory. Any other use of the armed forces could be taken “only upon congressional authority.” The senator also challenged the administration’s invocation of the SEATO treaty as justification for intervention. In addition to opposing the Johnson administration’s interpretation of the constitution and SEATO treaty, Ervin also rejected the theory of containment. “I have never favored the idea,” he declared, “that democracy is so very good that we should try to give it to everybody on the face of the earth, even those people who don’t know what democracy is and have no experience in exercising it.” Ervin’s statement reveals the diversity of opinion of southerners on Vietnam, even among hawks.

Though disavowing the legal and ideological justification for war, Ervin still disagreed with the doves. Like the majority of southerners, he supported fighting the war “with sufficient force to either win it or to bring the enemy to the conference table.” After offering his comments, the senator said further that he was unhappy with Johnson’s half measures. “I think some in authority would do well to read a little Shakespeare,” he mused. “Shakespeare said, ‘Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bear it, that the opponent may beware of thee.’” The United States, Ervin suggested, ignored the Bard’s advice on both counts. It rushed into “quarrels” such as South Vietnam, Korea, the Congo, and Rhodesia. Once in, however, the United States did not make their opponents beware of them. After his eloquent argument, his conclusion echoed a familiar refrain: “I think we ought to turn over the fighting in South Vietnam to the admirals and generals, and see if they can’t win the war.”

Ervin’s hawkish stand seems puzzling in light of his rejection of the administration’s justifications for war. He, like other southern congressional hawks, suggested that the time had passed for arguing the wisdom of getting into war in Vietnam. “We are faced with a condition and not a theory,” he said, quoting Grover Cleveland. 29Having rejected the theories that created the condition, however, it seems puzzling that the senator could advocate escalating the war in order to defend both the theories of containment and the belief in the necessity to export the United States’ brand of democracy. Perhaps Ervin, also a member of the Armed Services Committee, had been convinced by his southern hawkish colleagues or military officials of the necessity to fight to win in Vietnam. The frustration of the war along with the lack of a cogent “honorable” solution in Vietnam sometimes created strange and conflicted arguments in the halls of Congress. The members of the committee, perhaps sensing their own logic just as tortured in regard to the conflict, did not press the North Carolina senator on the point.

Johnson, though still feeling betrayed by the public dissent of the doves within his own party and region, had said previously that he would be more concerned with the defection of the hawks than the doves. The president, who remembered vividly the disastrous political effects of the right-wing reaction to President Harry Truman’s China policies, worried that a similar thing would happen over Vietnam. By 1966 it appeared that the president realized another one of his major fears.

As the number of U.S. casualties grew significantly, southern hawks became increasingly impatient with Johnson’s gradual escalation. In the 1966 Vietnam hearings, Russell Long expressed discontent with the fighting of a “limited war” in Vietnam that resonated throughout the South. An opinion poll in June 1966 revealed that southern whites and, to a somewhat lesser extent, southern African Americans, were more inclined to believe that the United States would secure an “all out victory” in Vietnam. 30Long, in his 1966 comments in the Vietnam hearings, concluded with a warning to the Johnson administration: “If the 1st Division has to pull Old Glory down on a flagpole it is going to be because somebody over here made a mistake not somebody over there.” 31Increasingly for southerners, those “somebodies” were Lyndon Johnson and his chief Vietnam advisor up to that time, Robert McNamara.

McNamara prompted the sharpest criticism among southern hawks. It did not sit well with Russell, Stennis, Thurmond, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mendel Rivers and ranking member F. Edward Hebert, and several less prominent legislators that a civilian systems analyst wanted not only to revamp the Defense Department, but also, in reality, served as the architect of Vietnam military polices. Southerners on both House and Senate Armed Services committees detested McNamara’s perceived arrogance and his attempts to quantify every military question in his management of the war and the Defense Department. Rivers went out of his way to rankle McNamara, instructing his committee’s chief council to get Navy workmen to make a plaque and place it in the front of the rostrum where it would face the secretary. The plaque read:

U.S. Constitution—Art. 1—Sec. 8—The Congress shall

Have the power… To raise and support Armies… provide

And maintain a Navy… make rules for the Government