Enter Patriotism?

President Johnson is being criticized, as one reporter headlined it, for “Tending to Make Support of Vietnam Policy a Test of Patriotism.” It has frequently been observed that LBJ will extemporize at the sound of a cheer and when last week he toured three states in a single day, he found himself on all three occasions departing from the written text in order to express wonder that the critics of our South Vietnam policy are so regularly depressed by the excesses of our own armed forces, and so regularly unmoved by the excess of the enemy’s.

“I just wish,” said the President, “they [his critics] would ask themselves if their standard of judgment is really fair.” And again: “They bombed and injured some of our American boys in South Vietnam today, and I doubt that you will hear many columns written. I doubt that our commentators will lecture them for the number of bombs they dropped on that hospital.” Concluded one correspondent: “He seemed almost to be asking which side they [the critics] were on.”

President Johnson is being criticized, as one reporter headlined it, for “Tending to Make Support of Vietnam Policy a Test of Patriotism.” It has frequently been observed that LBJ will extemporize at the sound of a cheer and when last week he toured three states in a single day, he found himself on all three occasions departing from the written text in order to express wonder that the critics of our South Vietnam policy are so regularly depressed by the excesses of our own armed forces, and so regularly unmoved by the excess of the enemy’s.

“I just wish,” said the President, “they [his critics] would ask themselves if their standard of judgment is really fair.” And again: “They bombed and injured some of our American boys in South Vietnam today, and I doubt that you will hear many columns written. I doubt that our commentators will lecture them for the number of bombs they dropped on that hospital.” Concluded one correspondent: “He seemed almost to be asking which side they [the critics] were on.”