Impeachment Hearings: House Judiciary Committee, July 30, 1974
Impeachment Hearings: House Judiciary Committee, July 30, 1974
[00.08.20] Mr. RAILSBACK. It seems to me ironic that when the Ellsberg papers came out the Nixon administration was concerned about that leak not because they revealed things that had happened under the Nixon administration, but, because of the decision and policy decisions that had been made under the Johnson and Kennedy years. What an irony and how foolish we would be, to impeach this President for that particular incident, when the whole South Vietnamese involvement was one series of mistakes, one right after the other. The CHAIRMAN. I recognize the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Sandman, for' 3 minutes and 4.5 seconds. Mr. SANDMAN. -Mr. Chair-man, I would like to address my remarks to the 37 other members, and I would just like. you to remember one little thing that I am going to say to you. Do you want to be remember as part of that Congress that tried to impeach a President of the United States because he did something which ended a war that his two predecessors could not do? That is a pretty good question. And I said yesterday that one of the closest admirers that the previous President had I think was myself. I thought he was a great man. I can remember when President Johnson. the first year was down here, invited 40 freshmen to come over to the Oval Office and sit down with him. And it was at that particular time that he was making up his mind to accelerate the bombing. I know that history is going to be very unkind, in my mind, to 'what was a great man and a great President He revealed to us the advice that he had received from all of the generals, General Westmoreland and all of the rest of them all on one piece of paper with their recommendations, and he said to us, you know, I never -went to West Point, I am not a general, and he said I don't know as we have any generals in this room or any West Pointers either. But, these are the best military minds in the world, and I want. you to look at their advice to me as the Chief Executive, and on every piece of paper, about 40 of them, the recommendation was to accelerate, and he said, what would you do, I am asking you. There was not one that gave a dissenting opinion. There were 40 people in that room besides the President and every one of them a Congressman. and hindsight is always better than foresight, isn't it? And a -Monday morning quarterback could made a better guess, I suppose, but based upon the best information available the President acted. It was not the right decision, as time revealed, and he is not going to go down in history as a man who did a very good job with that war. I remember when he, made his farewell address over in the Longworth Building, and I guess everyone does too, a very sad man, a brokenhearted man because on his conscience was the death of thousands of people, and the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else in the world -was to end that war and he could not do it. Then along came Richard 'Nixon with all of the faults that he may have had. He ended that war. One-half million people were in Southeast Asia when he became President. Fifty thousand Americans lost their lives there, and nobody is dying in Southeast Asia today. And so we want to reward him by impeaching him because he did not. tell everybody what he was going to do before he did it. And this is an awfully funny way to run a war, isn't it? Concealment. Every war is run on concealment. You do not tell the opposition what you are going to do before you do it. I voted for or the war powers amendment and so did everybody else. It is a good thing. But, let us not forget the commencement of activities in Vietnam was the 81st time an emergency power was exercised by a President. And I say to you, let us not be remembered because we want to reward this man by throwing him out of office. The CHAIRMAN. The time of the gentleman has expired. [00.13.07]