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During the conference, the President touched on foreign-aid cuts ("a serious mistake") and on congressional reluctance to enact his proposed 10% surcharge on individual and corporate income taxes. Singling out House Republican Leader Gerald Ford, Wisconsin Republican John Byrnes and Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he declared: "They will live to regret the day when they made that decision [to bottle up the tax bill], because it is a dangerous decision. It is an unwise decision." Raising taxes is an unpopular move, but "we should do it" and eventually "Congress will do it." Will he run again? "I will cross that bridge when I get to it." Hardly anybody in the room doubted that he had long since made the crossing.
Most of the 37-minute conference was devoted to the war and the wide spread dissent that it has spawned. The President emphasized that measurable progress is being made. "We are pleased with the results that we are getting," he said—so much so that no increase was anticipated in the currently authorized troop level of 525,000. He was pessimistic about prospects for a bombing pause, and noted that Hanoi's demands last week for a U.S. pullout as a prelude to peace talks "should answer any person in this country who has ever felt that stopping the bombing alone would bring us to the negotiating table." If North Viet Nam's leaders are operating on the assumption that another President would pull out of Viet Nam and make "an inside deal," they are making "a serious misjudgment."
Johnson insisted that U.S. goals in Viet Nam have been clear from the first. "I thought even all the preachers in the country had heard about it," he cracked. One aim was to preserve U.S. security, another was to honor a commitment. "In 1954 we said we would stand with those people in the face of common danger. The time came when we had to put up or shut up. We put up." A third goal was to resist aggression: "If you saw a little child in this room and some big bully came along and grabbed it by the hair and started stomping it, I think you would do something about it."
Admitting that there were deep divisions within the Democratic Party, Johnson said that all parties had their internal disagreements, though "we have perhaps more than our share sometimes." Clearly, he felt that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee contributed more than its due. With a passing reference to the fact that, historically, the committee's chairmen have "almost invariably found a great deal wrong with the Executive in the field of foreign policy," he took a swipe at the present chairman, J. William Fulbright, who had just pushed through resolutions urging Johnson to take the Viet Nam issue to the United Nations and demanding a greater voice for Congress in committing U.S. troops abroad. "The committee had a big day yesterday," said Johnson archly. "They reported two resolutions in one day."