Nov. 1, 1964 - President Johnson has ordered the immediate replacement of the B‐57 jet bombers destroyed or damaged this morning in a Communist mortar attack on Bienhoa Airbase in South Vietnam.
The order was presumably issued early in the day, after the President learned the details of the surprise attack, which cost four American lives. It was announced by the White House after an hour‐and‐a‐quarter conference involving Mr. Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and other high officials.
While Administration officials depicted the Bienhoa attack as serious, they stressed that it did not call for instant retaliation against North Vietnam, where the Viet Cong movement has its base.
In this respect they distinguished the new attack from the North Vietnamese patrol boat strikes at American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin last August, which provoked bombing raids by United States planes against bases in North Vietnam.
The Administration took the Bienhoa attack as an occasion to issue new warnings to North Vietnam and Communist China. It cautioned them against believing that after the Presidential election Tuesday the United States would alter its Asian policies and move toward disengagement from the Vietnam war.
Officials also insisted that while the new episode was important because of the losses suffered, it should not be taken as a sign that the over‐all situation in. Vietnam was deteriorating.
In fact, high officials were adamant in maintaining that the Administration was greatly encouraged by the formation of a civilian government Saigon last week and that it hoped the stabilization of the political situation would be reflected in better conduct of the war effort.
They said the situation the countryside was brighter than reported.
Increased military activity in the provinces surrounding Saigon was ascribed by United States officials to a major cleanup operation begun by South Vietnamese forces on Oct. 1.
This operation, described as one of the most important in the present phase of the war, has been planned since the summer, officials said. They asserted that the mounting intensity of action around Saigon was due not to Vietcong initiatives but to the Government's efforts.
President Johnson received the first reports of the Bienhoa attack late yesterday afternoon. He kept in touch with Mr. Rusk and Mr. McNamara during the evening, when he was campaigning in New York, and when he returned to the White House, just before 1 a.m.
The White House said Mr. Johnson, who is scheduled to fly to Houston tomorrow afternoon for his last pre‐election appearance, would “continue to keep in touch with the general situation.”
The judgment in the Administration after the afternoon White House meeting was that the mortar attack must be viewed in the light of the Vietnamese war and of the whole Southeast Asian situation. If the United States is to retaliate against North Vietnam in the future, it was said, it must be for broader reasons than the strike against the Bienhoa base.
Senator Barry Goldwater, in a videotaped interview in Phoenix, Ariz., said it was time for the President to admit to the people that the United States was fighting an undeclared war in South Vietnam.
“We have been at war in South Vietnam, a shooting war, since 1961,” said Goldwater, “at war under the orders of McNamara and Taylor.
“It is an undeclared war. I don’t believe the President has ever put his approval on it. I don’t know if President Kennedy ever really realized that we were over there shooting at the enemy and being shot back at.
“Now, I have tried to make this a point at different places in the campaign, and it doesn’t elicit denial from the Pentagon or from the President. We are not over there instructing and advising. We are over there at war, and I think it is high time that the President tells the people we are and tells the people what he plans to do.
“Now, if we were over there in an advisory capacity, in an instructive capacity, it would be a relatively simple thing for us to say, ‘Well, we are getting no place; let’s come back.’ But now we are at war; we have been committed to it, and there is no easy pullout, and it is not an easy solution, nor is it going to be an easy win.”
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