Resolution-offering Senator John Warner, former secretary of the Navy, is haunted by memories of Vietnam. Suddenly. Bill Kristol writes:


“‘I regret that I was not more outspoken’ during the Vietnam War, the former Navy secretary said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. ‘The Army generals would come in, ‘Just send in another five or ten thousand.’ You know, month after month. Another ten or fifteen thousand. They thought they could win it. We kept surging in those years. It didn’t work.’


“In fact, John Warner was Richard Nixon’s undersecretary of the Navy from 1969 to 1972, then Navy secretary until 1974. No admiral (or Army general) showed up in either his undersecretarial or secretarial office in those years to urge more troops for Vietnam — because we were then drawing down as part of Vietnamization. So Warner would seem to be making up these conversations with foolishly optimistic Army generals — unless they visited him before 1969 in his office at the law firm of Hogan and Hartson, where he was ensconced during the period of the Vietnam buildup.”