Sept. 29, 1964 - President Johnson said last night that he does not want to get American soldiers “into a war with 700 million Chinese.”
In answer to suggestions by Senator Barry Goldwater and others that the United States carry the war in South Vietnam to the North, Johnson said:
“Before I start dropping bombs around the country, I would want to think about the consequences of getting American boys into a war with 700 million Chinese.”
The President said the loss of 190 American lives in Vietnam was bad.
“But it’s not like the 190,000 we might lose the first month if we escalated that war,” he declared. “We’re not going north and drop bombs at this stage of the game, and we’re not going south and run out and let the Communists take over either.”
Johnson, speaking to New Hampshire weekly newspaper editors, said the suggestion to carry the war in Vietnam to the North had been advanced by Senator Goldwater, Governor Rockefeller, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and others.
This morning, however, William P. Bundy, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, said increased pressure by the Communists could force an expansion of the war in South Vietnam outside the boundaries of that country.
“Expansion of the war outside South Vietnam, while not a course we want or seek, could be forced upon us by the increased external pressures of the Communists, including a rising scale of infiltration,” Bundy declared in an address before the Research Institute of Japan.
Mr. Bundy declared: “Our resolve to help defend the nations of Southeast Asia, and of East Asia as a whole, is unshakeable.”
He asserted that a Communist victory in South Vietnam would imperil the whole of the non-Communist Asian mainland and eventually threaten Australia and Japan.
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