Washington

As THE new year and the new Administration begin, President Johnson’s principal challenges and opportunities are in the foreign held. His skillful exercise of domestic leadership during his first year in office brought extraordinary, even brilliant, successes. But he is less experienced in foreign affairs. The war in Vietnam, the strains in the Atlantic alliance, the persistent problems in Latin America do not always respond to reason, logic, or persuasion. Yet in all these areas the highest qualities of leadership are demanded of the American President. Too many decisions were postponed following the tragedy in Dallas and the protracted political campaign.

Because the conflicts with President de Gaulle would seem to be the least necessary and the ones most subject to understanding and compromise, President Johnson has yearned for a meeting ever since he took office. But his hope for an immediate post-election meeting in Paris as part of a grand European tour met opposition from almost all his principal advisers. They were disturbed by his eagerness to meet and reason with De Gaulle: they were afraid that the concessions, if there were to be any, would be from the American side. They know that at some point a meeting may be necessary to prevent the appearance of aloofness and bad manners or to attempt to avert an even wider and more dangerous breach.

But in the State Department and in the American embassies in Europe there is almost universal conviction that the famous Johnson technique of “reasoning together” would bring few positive results in Paris now. Any compromise with Gaul1ism, as the President’s advisers see it, would be at the expense not only of principle but of the other members of the alliance.

Between them and the United States there is wide agreement on objectives and a mutual opposition to the fragmenting policies of the French President. Fourteen of the fifteen members of NATO are strongly committed to it and want to see it strengthened. They clearly do not want the United States to take the lead in weakening its commitments in Europe to please De Gaulle. Five of the six members of the Common Market are dedicated to its success and expansion.

Patience with De Gaulle

The President’s foreign policy advisers believe that patience may be the best weapon at present, barring emergency moves to avert an open break. They want the President to cooperate more wholeheartedly than ever with the majority in Europe without entering into unnecessary quarrels or debates with General de Gaulle.

While the General may think that the United States seeks hegemony in Europe, and while he does wish to weaken the American presence there, the other countries disagree on both points. Through his obstructionist policies the French leader may be attempting to gain only tactical advantages. It is hard for rational men to believe that De Gaulle seriously wants to wreck the supranational organizations that have given Europe its greatest hopes for peace and strength in a thousand years. But whatever his objectives, the United States must think not in terms of compromise with De Gaulle, the President’s advisers maintain, but in terms of undeviating adherence to the central idea of unity and Atlantic cooperation.

As President Kennedy often said during his last months in office, the problems in Europe grew out of the post-war bipartisan foreign policy successes. The fact that the most difficult European problems are within the Atlantic community rather than pressing upon it from outside is a measure of the success and strength of the Alliance. Because of its achievements, the world today is vastly different from what it was when Khrushchev handed President Kennedy an ultimatum on Berlin or when he tried to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. The Communist world is more divided than at any other time in its history. Moscow’s domestic problems are more acute than when Khrushchev and Kennedy met in Vienna in 1961.

If there had not been the victories and achievements in the West, made possible in large measure by the success of the combined Western effort, there would not be the deterioration of relations between France and its allies. Yet even those like De Gaulle who question the importance of Atlantic solidarity still rely upon it. Washington believes that it is the first imperative. To preserve and strengthen it the Administration knows that closer defense arrangements are required to supplement economic and political ties. That is why Washington has placed so much emphasis on the multilateral nuclear force.

In 1950, the first steps toward a united Europe were taken in the establishment of the Coal and Steel Community. The proposals for a European Defense Community collapsed in the violent politics of the French parliament. Now, despite all the difficulties, some cohesive organization bringing Europe and America together in a nuclear defense community is necessary to the success of the Alliance.

In a paper widely circulated among Washington officials, a Frenchman, François Fontaine, put the entire argument in a few eloquent words: “The true common interest of Europe and America lies in this zone where life and death are at the mercy of an error. It remains only to find the common rules which will ensure that men on both sides of the ocean have simultaneously the same concept of their security and the same reflexes of self-preservation, The problem is not easy when all the means of protection are on one side — which from our viewpoint is the other side. But it is pointless to attack this aspect of the problem or to disguise it. The significant strength will not be European. It will remain American so long as we lack a form of association in which the moral and physical conditions for the security of the one side arc fused with those of the other.”

It has been said that President Johnson understands the uses of power as well as any leader of modern times, De Gaulle included. The President demonstrated his capacity for the exercise of power in his successful struggle to hold the country together after the Kennedy assassination and in his successful fight against the Goldwatcr rebellion. For these two achievements historians will judge him well.

As one who so expertly knows how to focus his energies on the main objective, the President should be able to deal with the foreign problems that now beset him. He does not see everything in blacks and whites—even his conflict with De Gaulle — and he does not expect total victory.

In the Far East, Johnson knows that he will be lucky if he escapes serious defeats. In recent months, everything Washington has done in this area has been designed with one basic objective in mind: to get the message to Peiping that its adventuresome policies are dangerous. There is no indication that the message has gotten through.

Rusk stands firm on Vietnam

Because of the failure of Peiping to show any signs of appreciating the seriousness with which the United States views the problems in Asia, Secretary of State Dean Rusk has taken the leadership in adopting an un-Ruskian stance of toughness and inflexibility. He believes that for the United States to take a more flexible position toward Communist China, now that it has the atomic bomb and there have been new Communist successes in South Vietnam, would be to encourage Peiping by rewarding it for provocative acts. A “flexible” American policy might open the floodgates. That is the basic reason why he has insisted on continuing the policy of trying to isolate Communist China.

Despite new pressures from critics at home and abroad, including California Governor Edmund G. Brown’s proposal for reopening American trade with China, Rusk will not consider altering the tough nonrecognition, no-trade policy. If China would show any sign of heeding American warnings — in Laos, for example — American policy might become less rigid. But Rusk is not optimistic.

His critics maintain that Communist China is too big to ignore, that its internal progress is more impressive than the West generally believes, and that some new approaches are essential. The dike that has kept Red China out of the United Nations is fast collapsing. Events are moving at great speed in South Vietnam, which the Administration still believes must be held to prevent the spread of Communism throughout most of Southeast Asia. The Administration knows that the stakes are large and that the gamble is very great. And it knows also that in its recent policies it has had no real answers to the problems.

Medicare, first on the agenda

On the domestic front, the President can view the scene with far more optimism. Several months before the 1964 Republican National Convention, a prominent Democratic politician surprised his friends one day with two predictions: Barry Goldwater would win the Republican presidential nomination, and that would assure victory in 1965 for the long-fought-for medical-carefor-the-aged program. The Democratic leader was confident, he said, that a Goldwater campaign would assure the election of enough marginal Democratic candidates for Congress to provide the votes needed to approve the controversial medicare bill.

As a result of the anti-Goldwater landslide, Democrats are convinced that they do have the votes to pass a bill in some form. Actually, they had the votes in 1964, but they did not have the key vote, that of Chairman Wilbur D. Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee. However, Mills also read the election returns, and he knows that the new Democratic majority will not permit him to keep the bill bottled up indefinitely.

The Democratic majority does not have the power to deny Mills the chairmanship or to do anything about the archaic seniority system. What it can and almost certainly will do is circumvent, by one means or another, any chairman or group that imposes intolerable roadblocks in the way of important legislation. There are always methods by which a recalcitrant chairman can be prevented from exercising autocratic power if the majority really wants to clip his wings. But it takes a commanding majority with a strong will to do so.

With their large majorities, and faced as they are with the mandate to consider some form of health insurance for the aged, the Democrats bear a special responsibility to act wisely in the preparation of the legislation. Proponents of medicare under the social security system are convinced that this is the best way to handle the problem. But Mills has made some vigorous arguments that it would place too heavy a burden on the social security system. He believes that hospital care should be financed in some other way. Since the new Congress will have the power to enact a bill, it should proceed carefully. If it accepts a jerrybuilt system, it will encourage dissension and lack of confidence in Congress’s ability to deal with this important social problem.

Mood of the capital

Moods change quickly, as everyone knows, but Washington has not yet forgotten that the country recently passed through an excruciating and unedifying election campaign. Representative John S. Monagan of Connecticut wants to act while the mood prevails. He has promised to introduce a bill designed to hold presidential campaigns to a tolerable sixty-day limit.

Senator Goldwater and both the vice presidential candidates said that the campaign was much too long and that they were exhausted toward the end. President Johnson likes campaigning so much, particularly when the crowds are big and friendly, that he could do so forever. But he must realize that this one was in fact too long. The country is weakened at home and abroad because too many urgent decisions arc postponed until after an election.

It has been suggested that the Republican and Democratic national conventions should be held after Labor Day instead of in the summer. And presidential preferential primaries should be held later in the year than at present. New Hampshire’s March primary marks the formal opening of a presidential campaign, which means that contenders file and begin their barnstorming in January. All the state primaries were completed in 1964 by early June. If New Hampshire would set an example, it could lead the nation in a most desirable reform.