The President needed help badly in doing his job and so it was incumbent on Americans to pull together and unite in support of the war effort.

The Jaycees who had seen action in the last war had already undertaken to try to educate young soldiers as to what to expect and how to get ahead in the Army and Navy, and above all inform of the objectives of the war and its reasons.

The average citizen tended not to understand when and where wars began. American involvement in World War II had actually begun on September 18, 1931, when the Japanese warlords invaded Manchuria, not at Pearl Harbor. Secretary of State Henry Stimson, later Secretary of War under FDR from 1940, tried to stop the war in 1931 through the League of Nations but had failed in the endeavor. Wars usually began in segments, not suddenly at one time. Aggressors had to build up their strength to wage war effectively, and undertake it gradually to avoid as long as possible arousing the democracies to fight back. After Manchuria, Mussolini had attacked Ethiopia in late 1935 and Hitler and Mussolini had aided Franco's Insurgents against the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, and then came Hitler's Anschluss in Austria in 1938 and the Munich "peace in our time" agreement regarding Czechoslovakia in September of that year, all as a prelude to the invasion of Poland in September, 1939 by Germany and the further aggression by the Japanese in Manchuria, starting in summer, 1937, beginning the Sino-Japanese war.

World War III, were it to come to pass as a hot war, he ventures, had begun when Russia grabbed Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, although regarded as the beginning of the cold war. Korea was another of those segments, a part of the overall scheme of the Kremlin to Communize the world and wear down the resistance and economic wherewithal of the democracies in the process.

Sooner or later, he urges, the democracies had to draw a line against the scheme of Communist aggression and the President deserved credit for recognizing that fact. He could have waited, as FDR had, for a Pearl Harbor, that is a direct attack on the territory of the United States. But, he adds, the Russians were smart enough that, unlike Hitler and the Japanese, there would likely have been no Pearl Harbor before they were ready to conduct such a severe blow to the U.S. as to knock it out completely.

It might be added historically that other such incremental actions would be Vietnam, the Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1958, which set forth in high relief Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's concept of "brinksmanship", the eyeball-to-eyeball strategy made most manifest in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, another Soviet test of American resolve, this time testing further the young new President's will to contest Soviet aggression, after the start of erection of the Berlin Wall in August, 1961, following the April, 1961 failed Bay of Pigs effort, planned late during the Eisenhower Administration, to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba for his affinity to Moscow and willingness to receive arms from Russia, placing a Russian satellite 90 miles off the coast of Florida and, in the Crisis, providing therefore significantly shorter response time and greater accuracy to offensive medium-range and long-range nuclear ballistic missiles, thus providing the means by which the Soviets could barter, if left unchecked, the NATO protection of West Berlin and then West Germany, that sought by the Russians to be eliminated since after World War II.

While the "domino theory", which provided the rationale for both Korea and Vietnam—though Korea having started in a much different way, with U.N. denunciation of undeniable Communist aggression by the North against the South, in furtherance of a pre-existing U.S. and U.N. commitment to protection of the South's independence, as opposed to the questionable casus belli offered by the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of August, 1964 and further intensified by the Viet Cong attack on Pleiku in February, 1965—proved in the end not to be operative after the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists in 1975, a reasonable argument can be made that without the long war against the Communists there, waged first by the French through Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and then by the Americans in aid of the South Vietnamese, starting in 1965, Communist aggression might have continued in hot war elsewhere and, indeed, the dominoes in the Pacific might have begun to fall one by one, even if premised on an outmoded World War II, pre-nuclear, pre-jet, pre-rocket era concept—a concept, it might be noted, that Joseph Alsop during this period of history regularly pushed in his columns leading up to the invasion of South Korea by the North. But the counter-argument is equally sound, that the Vietnam War was, in its essentials, a local civil war waged by Ho Chi Minh's guerrilla fighters for independence of the country from foreign interests—perceived, even as to the Americans, as being imperialistic—, and not as an incremental part of the cold war. That latter argument finds its own counter, however, in the theory of Communist resolve to wear down the U.S. economically and sow the seeds of discord domestically, even if apart from the actual motives of Ho and the Viet Minh in waging that war in their native country, wanting no more part of the Chinese Communists or the Russians than of the French or the Americans.

Had the U.S. removed from South Vietnam its military advisers, as planned by President Kennedy in fall, 1963 shortly before his assassination and as recommended by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to be achieved after the 1964 presidential election, would the Soviets or Communist Chinese have sought to stimulate, through the usual propaganda tools and agreement to supply arms against the "imperialist" West, Communist military aggression elsewhere, from which the U.S. could not so easily demur? Or would the refusal to take the bait in 1964 by continuing the policy to remove the advisers have worked to lessen that likelihood?

In the grip of war, however, as made plain in Errol Morris's documentary, "The Fog of War", such theoretical armchair diagnosis and laser surgery to eradicate the cancer is not easily accomplished or, generally, practicable, with the complication of potential nuclear disaster at the end of an erroneously rendered prognosis and treatment, such as much earlier withdrawal from Vietnam, prior to the mire. In other words, 20-20 hindsight is always perfect, but reasonable foresight is substantially harder to achieve when approaching relatively novel situations in novel times complicated by new weaponry. It all might seem a little fanciful with that perfect hindsight in play but the avoidance of the nuclear confrontation was uppermost in everyone's mind, and if that meant fighting relatively small, limited conventional wars occasionally, then the thinking was so be it. And who is to say that not doing so would have rendered the same result, that is the absence of nuclear confrontation?

Mr. Pearson concludes that while the President had made his negative feelings known of the columnist, having called him an "S.O.B" the previous year when Mr. Pearson criticized Presidential military aide General Harry Vaughan for accepting a medal from Argentine dictator Juan Peron, he still respected him as the President, and if some believed that he was not a strong President, it was up to the country to help him, that the citizens could not abdicate their citizenship and the responsibilities which went with it.

He says that in future columns, he would delineate the issues behind the Korean crisis.

Robert C. Ruark again, as on Saturday, looks at Hanson Baldwin's piece in the Saturday Evening Post which had contended and complained that the American fighting man in World War II had fought only to get home rather than with the moral and ideological tenacity of the Germans, Japanese, and Russians. He does not differ with Mr. Baldwin in the opinion that the Americans lacked the same zeal to die with relish as martyrs as that demonstrated by the totalitarian state soldiers. But he resents the Americans being portrayed as a "sort of Ferdinand the Bull", while praising the stoic qualities of the others.