Deja vu

If philosopher George Santayana had been in the gallery the other day watching senators debate whether to authorize President Bush to attack Iraq without first getting a congressional declaration of war, he could have been forgiven for being dismayed. It was Santayana, after all, who warned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

And if the late Sen. J. W. Fulbright, D-Ark., had been sitting next to Santayana, he would almost certainly have been holding his head in his hands. It was Fulbright who in 1964 urged the Senate to give President Johnson the same kind of blank check to fight in Vietnam that Bush has today. Fulbright later called his advocacy of that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution the biggest mistake of his life.

The heart of that resolution said this: "Congress approves and supports the determination of the president, as commander in chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Senate passed it on Aug. 7, 1964, by a vote of 88 to 2.

In hindsight, the resolution's two lonely opponents-Democratic Sens. Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska-were the visionaries and Fulbright the misguided victim. Fulbright took the point for Johnson in the Senate because he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, which vetted the Tonkin Gulf resolution.

Does the senator think there is any danger in this resolution that the war will expand to North Vietnam? Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., asked Fulbright during the Senate floor debate in 1964. The war was still confined to South Vietnam that year. The United States had only 23,300 troops on the ground and had not begun its massive bombing of North Vietnam.

"I do not think there is any danger of that," Fulbright answered. "The policy of our government not to expand the war still holds."

Four years later, in 1968, the United States had 536,100 military people on the ground in South Vietnam and was bombing North Vietnam intensively. More than 30,000 U.S. troops would be killed in Vietnam by year's end.

"I would look with great dismay on a situation involving the landing of large armies on the continent of Asia," Sen. Daniel B. Brewster, D-Md., told Fulbright during the floor debate. "Is there anything in the resolution which would authorize or recommend or approve the landing of large American armies in Vietnam or in China?"

"There is nothing in the resolution, as I read it, that contemplates it," Fulbright assured Brewster. "I agree with the senator that that is the last thing we would want to do. However, the language of the resolution would not prevent it. It would authorize whatever the commander in chief feels is necessary. It does not restrain the executive from doing it."

Contrast the flawed vision of Fulbright and the majority of the Senate with the foresight of the two dissenters.

It would be a "horrendous mistake" for the United States to try to win the war for the South Vietnamese, Morse told fellow senators 38 years ago. "When we were through, we should have killed millions and won military victory after military victory, but we should have still lost the war," he said. The Tonkin Gulf resolution is "a predated declaration of war in clear violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which vests the power to declare war in the Congress and not in the President.... There is no power in the Constitution to wage a preventive war."

During the debate, Morse left the floor to talk to me in the reporter's reception area. He was hoarse from sounding his warnings at length. "Everything I'm saying is being met with a deafening silence," he lamented.

Gruening contended in forum after forum in 1964, including the Senate floor, that Vietnam was not worth "the life of a single American boy....We should now make every effort to disengage ourselves. We have lost altogether too many American lives already. Unless we reverse our policy, their number will steadily increase." The war's death toll ended up reaching 57,690 American men and women and more than a million Vietnamese.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., now 84, voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964 but led the fight against the one on Iraq this month. "It is imperative that the resolution be adopted unanimously and with promptitude," he said of the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964. This month, in contrast, he took up Morse's argument that Congress would be abdicating its constitutional responsibility if it passed the similar Iraqi war resolution. "When we do that," Byrd said, "we can put a sign on the top of this Capitol and we can say, `Gone home, gone fishing, out of business.' "

Like Morse and Gruening before him, Byrd found himself shouting down a well. The Senate voted 77 to 23 and the House 296 to 133 to give the president the authority to wage war without a declaration from Congress. The resolution states that "The President is authorized to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

In its replay of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Congress leaves the country with this question: Will past be prologue?