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Fortunately, none of the crises was of the magnitude of the Cuban missile confrontation, and Johnson did well enough. Though he got off to a hesitant start on Panama, he showed toughness as well as restraint by offering to resume talks while refusing to yield any principle. "They were killing people, and some thought we should write a new treaty right off," he has recalled. "But you can't just say, Til give you a blank check' when there's a pistol at your head. All you can say is that 'we'll do what's right.' " The principle established and the pistol withdrawn, Johnson agreed two weeks ago to renegotiate the Panama Canal Treaty, announced that the U.S. would eventually build a sea-level canal somewhere in Central America or Colombia.
Johnson showed similarly sound restraint when Cuba's Fidel Castro cut off the water at Guantanamo. He avoided an unnecessary showdown, and eliminated a potential source of future conflict, simply by ordering the U.S. naval base to develop its own water supply.
Prosecuting Attorney. Trouble seasoned him. When North Vietnamese PT boats twice attacked Seventh Fleet destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin last summer, there was nothing impetuous about Johnson's response. Like a prosecuting attorney, he kept asking his aides: "Are you sure we were attacked? How come they were such bad shots?"
Only when he was completely satisfied that the attacks were deliberate and unprovoked did he okay the retaliatory bombing of North Vietnamese torpedo boats and bases. Though some advisers hesitated about striking one big nest of boats dangerously close to Red China, Johnson specifically ordered a strike against that target.
But if the Gulf of Tonkin was a triumph, it was one of the few for the U.S. in Viet Nam. Unwilling to withdraw and fearful of escalating the war, Johnson has maintained a "more of the same" policy that pleases almost nobody and makes less sense with the passing of each day. All the while, the Saigon government has been stumbling from coup to coup. In the latest unhappy episode, the U.S. and the Vietnamese approached a parting of the ways. The U.S. was insistent about trying to sustain a group of civilian politicians against overthrow by a junta of disgusted young generals, has come close to a parting of the ways, with Vietnamese Commander in Chief Nguyen Khanh loudly denouncing U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and the U.S. muttering dire threats about curtailing or withholding aid to Viet Nam.
On several other occasions as well, Johnson's diplomatic report card also was mixed. His decision to go ahead with the Congo air-rescue operation was diluted by its tardiness and by the fact that the mission was halted prematurely. To his credit, he attempted to restore peace to Cyprus, even though the prospects of success were slight. The effort failed, but only after Under Secretary of State George Ball gave the island's Archbishop Makarios a dressing down worthy of Lyndon himself. "For God's sake, Your Beatitude," Ball scolded the archbishop, "this killing must stop!"
Unaccountably, Johnson allowed U.S. officials to press ahead with plans for a multilateral