Sunday, April 29, 2007 | 7:25 a.m.
WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had been thinking about Vietnam.
Administration officials presiding over that war were aware that it was going badly but they couldn't extricate the country from the conflict.
That history was on Reid's mind 11 days ago when he blurted out that the "war is lost" in Iraq.
The three words exploded. In an instant, for better or worse, Reid became the face of congressional efforts to end the war. Lawmakers are now preparing to send President Bush legislation that attempts to draw down troop levels, Bush is eager to veto it, and the tug of war between the White House and Congress has begun.
Where does that leave Harry Reid?
Maybe to think about Vietnam.
Four decades ago, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, also a Democrat and also a Westerner, startled the nation when he brought his opposition to the Vietnam War to the Senate floor.
Mansfield had never supported the war, and for nearly his first decade after becoming majority leader in 1961, he met privately with President Kennedy, then later with Presidents Johnson and Nixon, urging them against military escalation. But he kept his opposition largely behind the scenes because he believed in a president's authority over the military.
Mansfield's approach infuriated anti-war activists. They were already angry with him for voting to approve the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that authorized the early military engagement in Vietnam - much the way that Reid's support for the Iraq invasion roused anti-war activists in 2002.
But Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia in 1970 changed Mansfield. Not long after Nixon took office in 1969, the senator had offered Nixon a private deal - uphold his campaign pledge to draw down the war and Mansfield would declare Nixon had found the best possible end to a bad war that Democrats had launched, according to an account by Senate Associate Historian Donald A. Ritchie.
But Nixon demurred and blindsided Mansfield with the surprise invasion.
"The American people feel let down, disappointed, concerned," Mansfield wrote in a memo captured by biographer Don Oberdorfer. Faced with more conservative Democrats running the House, Mansfield wrote: "Their only hope, I think, is the Senate."
Mansfield threw his support behind the Cooper-Church amendment, the first of a series of legislative steps to remove troops and, later, cut funding.
"In retrospect, it was the tipping point," Oberdorfer said. "He wasn't able to use the power of persuasion with the presidents and finally he decided the only way the war could be stopped was for Congress to stop it in a strong fashion.
"This is a Draconian action as troops are still fighting the war, as Reid and the others are now finding out."
Mansfield, much as Reid today, methodically brought a series of war votes to the Senate floor.
Mansfield, like Reid, endured repeated failures as he was unable to secure Senate votes for passage. Mansfield had a greater margin of Democrats than Reid's slim one-vote majority, but the Montana war veteran struggled to keep Southern hawks on his side.
Eventually, the Senate passed landmark legislation over Nixon's veto.
Mansfield had advantages that Reid does not. The wartime cultures are different. Even though public opinion polls show that most Americans want out of Iraq, the public isn't as actively engaged. Anti-war protests are muted compared with those of the late 1960s, after Nixon instituted a draft.
Also, Washington politics then were not the bitter sport they are today. Mansfield enjoyed executive-branch relationships that seem impossible now. He lunched one-on-one in the Nixon White House almost weekly.
Reid faces a much different dynamic. Bush, unlike Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, displays little of the respect for the legislative branch that comes from having served in Congress. Only now, after the 2006 ouster of the Republican-led House and Senate, is Bush grappling with the power that comes from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Where Nixon kept his enemies close, Bush leaves them out. Reid sees the president only when called.
After Mansfield stepped forward to try to end the war, he, too, endured his share of hits from the Nixon administration - the national security adviser called efforts to cut off war funding immoral. But it was "nothing like Vice President Cheney going after Sen. Reid" today, Ritchie said, referring to last week's episode when Cheney scolded Reid as uninformed and defeatist.
Shortly before Mansfield died in 2001, some 25 years after retiring from the Senate, he told Oberdorfer his biggest regret was not halting military action in Vietnam sooner. " 'What a waste,' " Oberdorfer recalled Mansfield saying.
Critics complain Mansfield didn't do enough and should have resigned.
But Don Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholarship, writes that he played "bad cop, good cop," staking out tough positions, then working for compromise to end the war. History remembers Mansfield as someone whose efforts helped end the war.
Will Reid become the majority leader remembered for leading the country out of Iraq, or only for his polarizing comments that critics say undermine the military and possibly the fortunes of Democrats trying to overcome perceptions they are soft on national defense?
"We have to see over the next few years which of the two Reids wins out," said congressional historian Julian Zelizer at Boston University.
Recalling Mansfield in an article in Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, Wolfensberger wrote last week: "Harry Reid is following in big footsteps down a similar path.
"Unfortunately, with one eye on opinion polls and the other on the next election, it's not clear he sees where he is going."
Or maybe Reid knows exactly where he's going - the next legislative mountain in the majority leader's sights is to cut off combat funds as another step toward ending the war.
History will decide.
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