THE President had planned to wear his domestic hat last week. He flew to Des Moines to push his revenue-sharing plan and other legislative reforms before receptive audiences: the Iowa state legislature and a group of Midwest Governors. But he was jeered even in Middle America by an improbable combination of hardhat construction workers and youthful war protesters. He could not shake the uncomfortable reminders of the war in Indochina.
The news from Laos was alternately good and bad (see THE WORLD). Although the domestic reaction had produced no new surge of street demonstrations, the first reports of public opinion were disturbing. George Gallup reported that public approval of Richard Nixon's presidency had fallen to 51%, the lowest point so far: only 19% agreed with Nixon that the Laos drive would shorten the war. Louis Harris discovered that 46% felt that U.S. troop withdrawals from Viet Nam were "too slow." No wonder, then, that when the President returned to Washington, he decided to hold a televised press conference and confine the questions to matters of foreign policy.
Nixon made his major point on the very first question. For much of the day, he said, he had been in trans-Pacific consultation with his Viet Nam commander, General Creighton Abrams, who had told him that the South Vietnamese troops had proved in Laos that they could "hack it" against "the very best units that the North Vietnamese can put into the field." Moreover, Nixon claimed, the disruption of enemy supply lines already "assures even more the success of our troop-withdrawal program." Nixon hinted that in April he may announce an acceleration of the present withdrawal pace of 12,500 men per month. Complaining about "a drumbeat of suggestion . . . night after night on television" that the Laos incursion "isn't going to work," he told newsmen that if he is proved right "what you say now doesn't make any difference."
Invasion Bluff. Yet Nixon did little to assuage the rising number of Americans (the polls now place it at well above a majority) who favor a definite time limit on the presence of U.S. troops in Viet Nam. While repeating that his goal remains "total withdrawal," he also reasserted his insistence that the U.S. must retain a residual force (of unspecified size) until the Communists withdraw all their troops from South Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos and release all U.S. prisoners of war.
Basically, the President argued again that the main purpose of both the Cambodia and Laos operations was to "cut American casualties and to ensure the success of our withdrawal program." (The number of U.S. fatalities did decline after Cambodia, although they have risen again in the Laos action mainly as the result of enemy antiaircraft fire: at the same time, Vietnamese casualties have soared.) Nixon also admitted that the operations in Laos and Cambodia were partially designed "to increase the ability of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves without our help." The two goals of protecting Americans and strengthening the Vietnamese are almost inseparable in Nixon's definition of Vietnamization, in which U.S. withdrawals are dependent on South Viet Nam's expanding capabilities.