BUSH’S WISE MEN

As Lyndon Johnson did 38 years ago, President Bush has asked a group of senior public figures to advise him on how to deal with a long war that is increasingly unpopular and seemingly unwinnable.

President Bush’s group was created by Congress with White House approval and is headed by the secretary of state of the first Bush administration, James A. Baker III, and former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. It is scheduled to report its findings, still being formulated in deepest secrecy, in December.

This new process carries eerie echoes of President Johnson’s “wise men,” who helped end the Vietnam War. He called them together in 1968, when the U.S. intervention in Vietnam had dragged on for a decade and had escalated to a deployment of more than 500,000 American troops and looked like a hopeless quagmire. The crisis came with the Tet Offensive, when North Vietnamese troops attacked throughout South Vietnam and even temporarily invaded the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The raid, televised into American living rooms, created a tipping point in war support despite heavy losses on the communist side. The respected CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, long a backer of the war, finally turned against it, and President Johnson knew he had lost the country.

Mr. Johnson’s advisory group was headed by his new Defense secretary, Clark Clifford, who had quietly gone from hawk to an obsession that the Vietnam War could never be won and would have to be closed down. He led most of the group of 14 to the same conclusion. President Johnson stunned the country by announcing that he would not seek another term and would devote himself to reaching a peaceful settlement. Negotiations went slowly, however. The war kept going for another seven years, through President Nixon’s election, the Watergate scandal, the forced Nixon retirement, and into Gerald Ford’s presidency, until remaining troops and diplomats helicoptered out as the communists took control.

The two wars have been much alike. Both were ill-conceived and poorly managed and wound up in quagmires. The public eventually turned against both of them, but only a few members of Congress dared to call for withdrawal until public pressure mounted. Mr. Nixon, like Mr. Bush, kept urging that the nation hold the course, urged during both wars by a small group that included Henry Kissinger. Bob Woodward, in his book “State of Denial,” has disclosed that Mr. Kissinger has been the leading behind-the-scenes adviser to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, always advising against even limited withdrawals.

A big difference between the two wars is the fact that North Vietnam was prepared to rule the country, albeit as a communist dictatorship, while Iraq is close to civil war with no prospects for a stable government.

It may prove significant that Mr. Baker and several others of the new wise men argued strongly in the first Gulf War against going after Saddam Hussein. They warned that it could lead to a long and messy occupation.

Whether the new wise men will come out for even a phased early withdrawal is doubtful. And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, with Mr. Kissinger in the background, still seem determined to keep the war going until an Iraqi government can defend itself.