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FREEDOMWAYS THIRD QUARTER 1966 of the Congress are openly expressing their frustration at the "bad faith" of the State Department and their resentment at no longer being able to influence the President. Is our nation at war in Vietnam or not? If we are not at war, what accounts for the presence of more than a quarter million American troops over there and the growing casualty list of dead and wounded? The question has been asked a hundred times and never answered: by what authority does the President of the United States put this nation into war, when the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that only Congress has the power to declare war? And against whom would a declaration of war be made? Against the people of North Vietnam- a nation with one-tenth the population of America and located 5,000 miles away? Both Congress and Lyndon Johnson know the American people would never support a declaration of war against North Vietnam. Is not Lyndon Johnson pursuing a Goldwater-type foreign policy despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of American voters, black and white, clearly rejected Goldwaterism in the last Presidential election? Why are there more than 250,000 troops in Vietnam but fewer than 200 federal registrars and Marshalls in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and elsewhere, when it is the sworn duty and obligation of the President of the United States to uphold the Constitutional rights of citizens of our country? Most certainly the millions of Negro voters did not support Lyndon Johnson's election in order for him to send their sons and brothers to die is a racist-colonialist war abroad. With regard to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, Dr. Du Bois makes the following observation on his classic study Black Reconstruction: The constitution made the removal of the President contingent upon his committing "high crimes and misdemeanors." Here then came a plain question of definition: was it a crime, in the judgement of the people of the United States in 1867, for a President to block the overwhelming will of a successful majority of voters during a period of nearly three years? Stevens and those who followed him said that it was. They did not all pretend that Johnson was personally a criminal with treasonable designs, although some believed even that; on the other hand it was clear even to many of Johnson's friends that he was "an unfit person to be President of 198
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 09:21:36