Democrats-When air support is needed yet denied and you let your heroes burn, die, or be taken prisoner, you can count on them.
Twas more bluster than effect:
There was dissent among government officials in the United States, regarding how to handle the situation. Congressman Mendel Rivers suggested that President Johnson issue an ultimatum for the return of Pueblo on penalty of nuclear attack, while Senator Gale McGee said the United States should wait for more information and not make "spasmodic response[s] to aggravating incidents".[15] According to Horace Busby, Special Assistant to President Johnson, the president's "reaction to the hostage taking was to work very hard here to keep down any demands for retaliation or any other attacks upon North Koreans", worried that rhetoric might result in the hostages being killed.[16]
The day following the incident on Wednesday 24 January 1968, following extensive cabinet meetings Washington decided upon that their initial response should be to:
a) Deploy air and naval forces to the immediate area.
b) Make reconnaissance flights over the location of the Pueblo.
c) Call up military reserves and extending terms of military service.
d) Protest the incident within framework of the United Nations
e) President Johnson should personally cable Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.[17][18][19][20]
Although American officials at the time assumed the seizure of Pueblo had been directed by the Soviet Union, it has emerged in recent years that North Korea acted alone and the incident actually harmed North Korea's relations with most of the Eastern Bloc.[21]
On 23 December 1968, the crew was taken by buses to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) border with South Korea and ordered to walk south one by one across the "Bridge of No Return". Exactly eleven months after being taken prisoner, the Captain led the long line of crewmen, followed at the end by the Executive Officer, Lieutenant Ed Murphy, the last man across the bridge,[29] the U.S. then verbally retracted the ransom admission, apology, and assurance. Meanwhile, the North Koreans blanked out the paragraph above the signature which read: "and this hereby receipts for eighty two crewmen and one corpse".[clarification needed]
Bucher and all the officers and crew subsequently appeared before a Navy Court of Inquiry. A court-martial was recommended for Bucher and the Officer in Charge of the Research Department, Lieutenant Steve Harris for surrendering without a fight and for failing to destroy classified material, but the Secretary of the Navy, John Chafee, rejected the recommendation, stating, "They have suffered enough." Commander Bucher was never found guilty of any indiscretions and continued his Navy career until retirement.[30]
In 1970, Bucher published an autobiographical account of the USS Pueblo incident entitled Bucher: My Story.[31] Bucher died in San Diego on 28 January 2004, at the age of 76. James Kell, a former sailor under his command, suggested that the injuries suffered by Bucher during his time in North Korea contributed to his death.[32]
On 23 January 1968 North Korean patrol boats supported by two Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 fighters captured the USS Pueblo northeast of the North Korean island of Ung-do.[1] The seizure of the Pueblo led to President Lyndon Johnson ordering a show of force with a massive deployment of U.S. air and navy assets to Korea. The airlift and deployment of 200+ aircraft was code named Operation Combat Fox[2] while the deployment of six aircraft carriers plus support vessels was code named Operation Formation Star.[3] The operations were supported by the partial mobilization of reservists for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.[3] CIA A-12 Oxcart reconnaissance overflights over North Korea were used to monitor a feared retaliatory mobilization of North Korean forces and when these flights revealed no mobilization or large scale deployments by North Korean forces, Operation Combat Fox forces were stood down.[4]
Soviet response Publicly, the Soviet Union responded by augmenting their naval forces in the Pacific and by sending a letter to the US president Lyndon B. Johnson on 3 February 1968 demanding that the United States scale back their build-up in the Sea of Japan. Privately however, Alexei Kosygin gave assurances to the US ambassador in Moscow (Llewellyn Thompson) on 6 February 1968 that the Soviet Union had no intention to go to war over Kim Il Sung's provocation, as a response to this overture, Lyndon Johnson agreed to withdraw one unnamed vessel "somewhat southward". This exchange enabled Brezhnev to make a subsequent face-saving statement to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the Soviet letter was answered by the Americans by withdrawing the USS Enterprise from DPRK's shores.[5] - https://wikivividly.com/wiki/Operation_Combat_Fox