Feb. 12, 1965 - Senator Everett Dirksen (pictured with President Johnson) of Illinois, Republican leader, said tonight that the military action in Vietnam might be escalated within a short time.
Dirksen said on a local discussion program in Chicago that additional United States troops might be sent to Vietnam. The 23,000 United States military advisers there now, he said, are spread “pretty thin.”
The set-up of attacks by the Viet Cong on United States installations in South Vietnam, Dirksen said, means that the United States should “meet it with equal if not greater intensity and with more weapons and greater firepower and, in the language of the streets, you have to give them the business.”
Dirksen quoted President Johnson as having told him in a telephone conversation that U.S. weaponry in the Far East had been “beefed up” so that if additional retaliatory action were ordered, it could be on a larger scale than the 49-plane Navy raid last Sunday on Dong Hoi, the 28-plane U.S. and South Vietnamese raid Monday on Vin Linh, and the 160-plane joint raid on Chan Hoa and Chap Le Thursday.
Dirksen’s comments about strengthening retaliatory forces in the Pacific may have referred to a large flight of intercontinental B-52 bombers and accompanying KC-135 aerial refueling planes sighted yesterday above San Francisco flying north-northwest over the Pacific.
Air Force officers in Washington declined to discuss the flight or its destination.
“As far as I know, they’re still flying,” one officer said in response to an inquiry.
Meanwhile, the Viet Cong responded today to the U.S. bombing raids on North Vietnam with a call for stronger attacks against U.S. forces to compel them to “pay more blood debts.”
The Liberation Front, the parent organization of the Viet Cong, declared in a radio broadcast that “the United States must know that any aggression against our heroic Vietnam will be punished appropriately.”
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