Mar. 30, 1964 - Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, said today that the Johnson Administration “must be repudiated” unless it abandoned the policy of supporting what he called “the McNamara war in South Vietnam.”
Senator Morse said the United States “couldn’t be more wrong” in what he called its unilateral intervention. He said Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was “calling for a unilateral American war and holding out the possibility of expanding the fighting into North Vietnam and even into China itself.”
The Senator described his speech as a reply to McNamara’s statement last Thursday pledging continued help to the South Vietnamese Government in its fight against the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas.
In related news, two U.S. soldiers captured by the Viet Cong near the southern tip of Vietnam last Oct. 29 have been reported alive. Both were forced by their captors to kneel and apologize for their alleged crimes every time they were taken through a village, according to peasants in the area.
The men, reportedly ill and undernourished, were identified earlier as Lieut. James Rowe of McAllen, Tex., and Capt. Humbert Versace of Baltimore.
A third American captured with them was Sgt. Daniel Pitzer of Spring Lake, Calif. There have been no reports about him.
