NEW RESOLUTION NEEDED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000200240004-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 17, 1999
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: September 11, 1967
• Content Type: OPEN

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Senator `frb:r. Ore^on as nnotcd time table, many of then,. thinl::ng they could
and time a ain on ti:e floor of the Senate explain it by s.^ying it was a vote on a
the opposition to the War by a procedural matter. But the country knew
dissenter of his day, a than named Abra - it was a vote on a substantive matter.
h ar: Lincoln, a Congressman i.onl 1111- I'ay respectfully to my beloved -friends
nois, who forthrightly anti courageously
spoke out about the illegality of the,
blexic:, War, about the immorality
the 2--e tear, War, about the lack of
Justification of our invoivang the Ameri-
can. people in the l~:csic.:n War.
Mr. President, that great speech of
Abraham Lincoln in the House of Rep-
resentatives stands as one of his n':any
deserved monuments in the histoi y _ _,e
Republic.
So, too, was there a resolution in the
case of Cuba in 1893. We heard it said
in Congress at that time that a sho,v of
national unity would frighten Spain out
of Cuba. But it led to war with Spain,
instead.
One of the comments of the so-called
war advocates in regard to both the
Mexican War and the Spanish War is
that we won both of them.
Oh, Mr. President, so often what a
sting there is in victory. The fighting in
t lose two wars stands as despoiled pages
on the record of American history. Vic-
tory does not make right. We can com-
mit enough inhumanity a,'a:ulst both our
men and the enemy to force a surrender.
Some will call it victory, but history will
record it as a great defeat because we
will have defeated so many of the ideals
of our Nation.
That has been our experience with the
Tonkin Gulf resolution. It has been pro-
ductive of more war and ever more war
in Asia. If it had any effect upon North
Vietnam at all, it was to prod that coun-
try into new and more carefully orga-
nized military and political activity for
her own defense.
If one can find any comfort in our ex-
perience with this resolution, it is that
no future resolutions of this kind will be
accepted by Congress so long as anyone
is :ere who went through the Tonkin
Gulf experience.
NEW RESOLUTION NEEDED
Although I have always believed that
resolution was a mistake, and that it
should be rescinded, yet it is obvious that
much more is needed.
I tried to rescind it, as will be recalled,
a year and a half ago, and the course Of
action was to lay my proposal on the
table. Whereas there were only two votes
against the resolution in August 1964, be-
ing the votes of the Senator from Alaska
[Mr. GRUENINCl and the senior Senator
from Oregon, we had five votes against
the motion to lay on the table, and every-
one in the Senate knew what they were
voting on. They were voting not on a mo-
tion to lay on the table, except in techni-
cal form; they were voting on whether or
not they wanted to go on record on the
floor of tic Senate contrary to the posi-
in the Senate that it is easy to make
speeches here and elsewhere in the coup-
try raising regrets and doubts of the wis-
dom of passing the Tonkin Gulf resolu-
tion an the first instance, but I know of no
gymnastic ambivalence that Is going to
enable any politician in the Senate or the
House of = c resen ,.tiv be on both
sides of this issue. If they try to do that,
I think the vo e_s will catch up with
thee"
would t_._. solution could be re-
pealed or resc de: I am enough of a
political realist to know that the proba-
bilities a, figs ilappe 1Zhg are so remote
that there is r chance for F. frozen
snowball to :lain frozen ina_. oven of
150 degrees 'Fahrenheit. Therefore, my
approach today is somewhat different
from my approach of February 1945,
when I sought to rescind the Tonkin Gulf
resolution.
Although the administration takes the
view that what Congress thinks is irrele-
vant, I believe the kind of resolution
that is needed is a statement of congres-
sional policy on how a major war in
Southeast Asia should be dealt with by
the United States. Such a resolution is
needed because our previous policy of the
Tonkin Gulf resolution has failed totally
to arrest the size and scope of the con-
We need a resolution that recognizes
that in acting unilaterally, the United
States has not been able to stop the fight-
and that it has in fact grown into
a major war that threatens the peace
not only of all Asia, but of the entire
world. It should recognize that the naval
incident of August 190?^_, is no longer rele-
vant to the situation, and the action that
Congress anticipated at that time against
North Vietnamese PT-boats has long
since been carried out. The resolution I
am offering today is based on those facts.
It expresses the sense of Congress that
the President and his administration act
as we are required to act under the char-
ter of the United Nations. It states that
the President should request the Security
Council of the United Nations to meet on
the subject of the entire Vietnamese war,
and asks that he call upon the Security
Council to issue a call for a cease-fire by
all parties on all fronts of the fighting. .
One of the essential provisions of my
resolution is that we must propose and be
willing to comply with a cease-fire order.
We have got to stop the killing and we
have at to stop the sending of our young
men to Southeast Asia to be slaughtered
in a war that is unjustifiable, illegal, and
immoral. That is the test of our ideals. It
means, said in my colloquy with the
Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Coorar,l,
Lion many of theme take on the other side that we must submit a resolution to the
of those two doors. When many of there U.N. that is subject to a veto or adoption.
are out in the cloakroom, they freely ad- We must submit, a resolution in which
trait they made a mistake when they voted we pledge that we will accept the juris-
for the Tonkin Gulf resolution in the first diction of the United Nations and comply
place, but not here on the floor of the with its orders. That is What the charter
Senate are they willing to they provides, and that is What we have never
made a mistake by a vote to reNea 1. So. been willing to do. Until we do it, and.I
they voted for the motion to lay on the speak most respectfuliyof my President,
Sanitized - Approved For Relea
all of his talking about being willing to
go to the United Nations is empty scinarh-
tics.
The language we must use and the
pledge we roust make is that we will
abide by the jurisdiction of the pro-
cedures of the charter. The first thing
we have to be willing to commit our-
selves to is that we will support a cease-
fire order. That will stop the killing. Of
tote se, i z sizitli point out later, it calls
for enforcement, but that is what the
United Nations Charter was set up to do.
That is why I have been heard to say
so many times in these historic debates
in the Senate that the sad thing is not
a single signatory to the United Nations
Charter, including the United States,
has ever carried out its solemn conlnlit-
ment vis-a-vis the war in Vietnam. That
goes for our neighbor to the north-
Canada-for Great Britain, the Scandi-
navian countries, France, Russia, Italy,
Japan, India, and the Latin American
countries. Every signatory has failed to
carry out the clear obligation that their
signature to the charter imposed upon
them when they signed it.
If the charter is becoming a dead let-
ter, as some critics of the United Nations
declare, that is only because the signa-
tories to it no longer seem to honor their
signatures in a ; reat world crisis such as
this.
It further urges that the United States
ask the Security Council to take what-
ever steps necessary to enforce that
cease-fire, and it states that whatever
action the Council decides to take under
article 25 will be accepted and carried
out by the United States.
The resolution states further that if
the Security Council fails to act to assert
jurisdiction over the war, the President
should pursue the same course of action
in the General Assembly, just as we did
in the case of the Congo when the Se-
curity Council failed to act and the Gen-
eral Assembly acted instead to prevent a
colossal confrontation among nations
warring for control of central Africa.
When it is India, Pakistan. Israel, or
Egypt, or the Soviet Union that is in-
volved in warfare, the United States has
always insisted that the United Nations
act to take jurisdiction and to move in
and settle the dispute.
Senators have heard me discuss many
times the situation involving the Cyprus
problem, when Great Britain and the
United States attempted, behind the
scenes, to work out an understanding to
get NATO to move in on the Cyprus is-
sue.
As the RzCO:aD will show, 10 days be-
fore I had the slightest idea of what Rus-
sia and France were planning in regard
to Cyprus, I took the floor of the Senate
and made a major speech calling for
United Nations action on the Cyprus
problem. I pointed out that there was not
a scintilla of legal basis for NATO in-
vclvement in Cyprus, but that the United
Nations Charter cried out for United Na-
tions intervention.
Later, we were told that the Pentagon,
the State Department, and the CIA wore
not aware of what Russia and France
were up to at the time. I said during that
debate that it was nothing new for the
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