To me, Vietnam is like a Pirandello play: one knows that what one is looking at is not true, but that does not guarantee that one knows what the truth is. One of the difficulties with coming to grips with the situation in Vietnam is that almost everything that is being said about it is true, but not necessarily relevant.

## The Situation within Vietnam

Perhaps the best way to discuss the situation within South Vietnam is to begin with General Westmoreland's visit to Washington last November when he announced that we were winning, that by the end of 1968 the troops could be withdrawn. Westmoreland's statement was followed by President Johnson's announcement that some 67 per cent of the population was now under government control and that we were making great progress in pacification. It would be comforting to assume that they both were lying; comforting because that would presuppose that they knew what the truth was and were putting the best possible face on a complicated situation.

There are many things to be said about Vietnam and, while I do not want to go into detail about the situation within the country, I believe a number of propositions are perhaps worth making. First, we were fighting a military war; the North Vietnamese were fighting a political war. To us the goal of the war was victory; to the North Vietnamese the goal of the war was the psychological exhaustion of

2.

the United States. This is why all our claims could always be true
and still not be fully meaningful. That is, we were winning all the battles
insofar as traditional military criteria have any meaning, but the vic-
tories were not related to the actual situation on which a political settle-
ment would eventually depend. The American military strategy was to
defeat the enemy main forces on the theory that as these main forces
were defeated, we would be able eventually to take care of the guerrilla.
The Vietnamese strategy was to use his main forces the way a bull-
fighter uses his rag--to keep the US lunging in areas that were not
strategically decisive. (Many of our battle reports were not dis-
similar to what a bull would report in the middle of a bullfight were he
to make reports.)

Second, the enemy was always *advancing*. The key to the situation was that if one looked at the statistics of who initiated action--and this was not done until fairly late in the game--it became apparent that a significant percentage of the military actions were initiated by the North Vietnamese. As long as that was true, the strategy which we thought we were following--that of attrition--could not be decisive because the North Vietnamese always had it within their power to reduce those military operations which they were initiating and, therefore, to control their casualties. Conversely, as long as a very significant percentage of their casualties was caused in actions that they initiated,

3.

we should have asked ourselves, but did not, whether a strategy of
attrition could possibly be meaningful.

The third problem in connection with the military strategy was
following traditions and military maxims very much concentrated on
controlling territory and attempting to protect the access into the
country. This accounted for the deployment of our troops along the
Demilitarized Zone and along the Cambodian-Laotian frontier, with
the result that about 85 per cent of the American forces were in terri-
tory that had about 5 per cent of the population. Indeed, if one looks
at North Vietnamese actions prior to the Tet Offensive, one finds a
whole series of actions along the frontiers, each of which they lost by
our criteria, but each of which drew American military forces from
the coast into the frontiers. The significance of the coast is that the
populated areas in Vietnam are a coastal belt north of Saigon and the
Mekong Delta. About 95 per cent of the population lives in about 60
percent of the territory.

## Political Problems within South Vietnam

One of the troubles with our political program within South Viet-
nam was that it represented in part the application of an American
philosophy to situations where the historical preconditions did not fit.
In the American experience domestically and in the American experi-
ence abroad during the Marshall Plan, we solved the problem of

4.

political stability by bridging the gap between expectations and realities.
Therefore, to the extent that we could raise the standard of living, we
permitted an already existing stable political structure to reassert
itself. In Vietnam, this was not the case. A political structure did
not exist; to the extent that there was one, it was undermined by our
development programs. While I am not opposed to our development
programs, I do think that there was no automatic correlation--nor is
there in most underdeveloped countries--between economic develop-
ment and political stability. While the sophisticated Americans in the
development programs there understood this better than I do, it was
not necessarily understood in Washington or by the people who had
short-term programs to make.

*proceedings*

Moreover, with respect to the population, the key issue, in my
judgment, was not a low level of economic activity but a physical in-
security. One of the problems we had and have had consistently in
Vietnam is that we have tried to apply Western administrative stan-
dards and Washington bureaucratic criteria to a situation which does
not lend itself to that. To us, government radiates from a center
into the provinces, according to clear chains of command. The first
experience I had in Vietnam was to find out that a very brilliant brief-
ing one of the ministers gave me did not correlate with anything what-
ever that I could find in the provinces. I could not find a single man

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5.

who reported to that minister. Had I left after what I had heard in Saigon, I would have made very favorable reports. I do not blame that minister. Nor do I really think this is so significant, except when one identifies progress with this sort of an administrative structure and when one then puts all, or most of, one's resources into getting this kind of administrative structure.

What is significant is that the problem of physical security for many of the villagers was actually cruder than we thought it was. Most of the maps which one saw in American newspapers, and some of the maps one saw in American offices, listed three types of areas: Government controlled, contested, and Viet Cong controlled. Following the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middles; i.e., something is one or the other, the fact of the matter is that there are very few areas which one can say are unambiguously government controlled and very few areas that are unambiguously Viet Cong controlled. The US had a tendency to show as pacified on situation maps any area in which there were governmental forces operating. To the average villager, however, the significance was not the presence of the forces during the daytime, but their absence at night. If heavily armed bands of 50 men were not willing to stay in the area at night, this indicated certain conclusions. One was that in the Vietnamese effort to survive, which is a powerful incentive, a series of passive accommodations

6.

developed between the Communists and the villagers and between
the Communists and the local administration, for which no official
statistics made a great deal of allowance and no situation map could
accurately reflect. This meant that the United States really did not
have a reliable political base in the country. This is really the main
point I want to make.

The Negotiations

The official statement of our national policy was that we were
ready to negotiate at any time, anywhere, whenever the North Viet-
namese were willing to send someone. For purposes of negotiation
the assets had to do with control of the population; we would have been
better off with 100 per cent control in 40 per cent of the country than
with 40 per cent control in 100 per cent of the country. It would have
been more meaningful to have something that the other side had to
get away from us and could get away from us only through the process
of negotiation, than to have a totally amorphous situation in every part
of the country. Therefore, even though we constantly announced our
willingness to negotiate and, what is worse, mean it, neither our mili-
tary deployment nor our pacification program was geared to the fact
that a negotiation might take place at any moment. And since we had
given the choice to the other side, the negotiations would probably not
take place at a moment of maximum convenience to the United States.
It is into this situation that last year's Tet offensive came.

7.

The key comment I want to make again is that everything that has been said about Vietnam is true. General Westmoreland stated recently at the Naval War College that it is a symptom of the lack of understanding of American television that it reported the Tet offensive as an American defeat, where in fact it was an overwhelming American victory. We flushed out the Viet Cong and inflicted enormous casualties on them, something we had been trying to do for years and only managed to do last year. This is true. Militarily we inflicted enormous casualties on the Viet Cong and if it were a military war, General Westmoreland would be absolutely correct in saying that it was a military victory.

On the other hand, if one asks what the Viet Cong achieved, one will find that they attacked simultaneously some 20-odd provincial capitals and took most of them for various periods of time. They did not hold any of them for more than 48 hours except, I think, Hue. But they were in all of them long enough to execute many people on lists they had brought with them who had in their definition cooperated with the United States. In recapturing these provincial capitals we tended to level a good part of each. The significance of this is that, while I had my doubts about the reliability of what was shown on our maps as pacified, if there were any pacified areas in Vietnam they were the provincial capitals. If a Vietnamese wanted to go anywhere,

8.

with reasonable assurance of having some chance of protection against
the Viet Cong, he would go to either Saigon or a provincial capital.
The Viet Cong capacity to take these capitals and to punish their
enemies meant that in the contest between two sets of expectations,
the Viet Cong, at least for that period, scored a significant victory.

The expectations were these: The United States had generally
maintained that wherever it went it would stay and whoever cooperated
with them would be protected. The Viet Cong had generally said that
they did not guarantee to stay in one place, nor would they ask the
people not to cooperate with the Americans. All they asked the people
to do was to do the minimum necessary in cooperating with the Ameri-
cans. But wherever they left they would come back at some point,
would know what the people had done, and would have the capacity to
make reprisals. That was in essence their message.

In the contest between these two sets of expectations, the Tet
offensive was an enormous victory for the Viet Cong. They do not
have to be able to launch a similar offensive for a measurable time
because they have demonstrated that they can do it. And how many
people are going to test their ability to repeat it? Compound this
with what I consider a Vietnamese trend, defined as follows: In Viet-
nam, contrary to what some of the local people think, a government
is not strong because it is popular; it is popular because it is strong.

9.

In Vietnam you cannot deduce the legitimacy of a government from the degree of popular support it has. It has popular support because it has shown the ability to govern. This means that many of the criticisms one hears about the unrepresentative nature of the Vietnamese government are essentially irrelevant. It also means that once a government has demonstrated weakness, this demonstration produces massive difficulties for it.

One example of this proposition, incidentally, is the Buddhist uprisings in 1966. It was the Buddhists who could get thousands of people into the streets for a period of weeks. Then, against our advice, the Ky government moved a battalion against the pagodas in Danang and succeeded. Since then the Buddhists have had the most enormous difficulty in getting massive demonstrations started. This does not inherently mean that Saigon was any stronger after it had used the battalion than before, nor was it any more liked. It was simply that it had shown (in relation to the Buddhists) a superior strength and this meant that the Vietnamese, who in a thousand years of foreign rule have specialized in understanding the nuances of strength, drew the conclusion that in that particular contest one did not line up with the Buddhists.

Finally, in my view, the most important effect of the Tet offensive was that we had to, or will have to, face the fact that we have

10.

run out of time in Vietnam. We have run out of time not in the sense
that we are bound to lose, as I will explain, but that we have run out
of time in the sense that it is now impossible to win according to any
of the concepts that we had before or according to any other concepts
of guerrilla warfare. Even if we do everything right from now on, I
do not believe that the American political process would stand for the
amount of time necessary to carry it out. This does not mean I am in
favor of unilateral withdrawal. It does mean that I feel a clinical
analysis of the situation must start with this face even if we develop
the most beautiful anti-guerrilla warfare strategy now, it will not be
able to change the fact that we wasted three years. The three years
we were there prevented defeat, but they did not make any measurable
progress toward victory. And as has said, the essence
of a guerrilla war is that the foreign army, if it does not win, loses,
while the guerrilla army wins if it does not lose. That creates an
enormous psychological imbalance. All that Hanoi has to do is to
keep itself from losing, and it can hope that since it is in its own
country, it will eventually win. We, on the other hand, will have to
learn that if we do not win eventually, there will be an outcome which
is not very favorable.

This, then, is the background. General Westmoreland brought
matters to a head by asking for 200,000 additional troops in an election

11.

year. Even if Washington did not agree with my analysis of the problem,
as it never has, it could not ignore the fact that the Westmoreland
request gave them an impossible choice: if they gave him any less
than 200,000 men and he continued to lose, they would be blamed for
it; if they did not give him any men, they would also be blamed. And
they had no intention of calling up four reserve divisions in an election
year. So the unpolitical approach of our army, which had first been
applied in Vietnam, was applied to Washington and removed whatever
hesitations might have existed in Washington about the significance of
the Tet offensive.

This produced the President's speech of March 31 and the pre-
liminary negotiations in which we are now engaged. I am not interest-
ed by the level at which our domestic debate with respect to these ne-
gotiations has been conducted, although I feel that many of the phrases
like "We must take a chance toward peace" are almost totally mean-
ingless. Unless someone tells me what the chance is and what risks he
is running, he is striking a pose, not making a meaningful contribution.
Let me say where I think the negotiations stand and what, from my
point of view, some of the issues are.

First, the negotiations did not start in April. They have been
going on for a long time; in fact, even before American troops were
sent to Vietnam. They were not all direct negotiations. Some of
them were by means of public radio announcements on the part of the

12.

various contestants. Hanoi has Four Points; the NLF has Five Points; the United States, being a larger bureaucracy, has Fourteen Points; Saigon has, I think, Seven Points. There is actually a reasonable amount of agreement on a number of propositions. There is an agreement, for example, that self-determination should be the basis of a settlement. There is agreement that the Geneva Accord should define the international status of South Vietnam; that the question of unification should be left to the Vietnamese people; and that the United States troops should ultimately be withdrawn.

There is a disagreement about the status of the Hanoi forces. Indeed, there is a disagreement about the existence of Hanoi forces in South Vietnam. There is a disagreement about the role of the NLF. Hanoi denies that it has forces in the South; Saigon denies that the NLF exists. There is a disagreement about the sort of supervision that should be exercised over any existing or successor government of Saigon. And, of course, there is a complete disagreement about what the agreements mean. The agreements are on a set of abstract propositions, each of which would have to be negotiated in great detail.

In addition to these negotiations by public pronouncements, there have been, of course, secret negotiations, which have been described more or less correctly in many articles and books, and these finally culminated in the recent formal negotiations. And I would not be surprised if these formal negotiations did not exhaust the range of contacts that are going on.

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13.

While I do not want to go into the specific areas of negotiations, I do want to make a few general propositions of what I take to be true about all of these negotiations. First, everybody faces enormous problems. Both Hanoi and the United States face the problem that I have described before of the subtle way that the Vietnamese population is attuned to the realities of the power balance. If the negotiations create the impression that one side or the other is in the process of throwing in its towel, there will be nothing left to negotiate. Therefore, Hanoi, explicitly, and we, in our complicated bureaucratic way, have to be aware of the fact that how certain things are done is almost as important as what is being done. This, in turn, means that the choreography of how one gets into negotiations, what one settles first and in what manner, is almost as important as the substance; in fact, it is inseparable from the substance.

This means that if the negotiations proceed on a normal course they are bound to be long. The fact that there are a series of stalemates is not due to the absence of ingenuity on the American side or obstinacy on the Hanoi side. The objective realities of the situation impose a certain delay. On the face of it, the argument of where the site of the conference should take place was absurd. Six weeks were wasted. On the other hand, a certain amount of time was required for us to get Saigon used to the idea that there would be negotiations at all. I would not be surprised if Hanoi had an analogous problem

14.

with the NLF, certainly with Peking. But arguing about conference sites, or some other topic taking six weeks, was not the crucial factor, and I do not think the period could have been significantly shortened even though a different issue had been taken.

Second, whatever one may think about the wisdom of the American involvement in Vietnam or the manner in which we have carried it out, for any responsible President and Secretary of State more is now at stake than South Vietnam itself, especially when we are engaged with more than 500,000 troops and have made so heavy a commitment. Even if one assumes that we must withdraw, the manner in which we do it is of significant consequence for us. While it is true that there are many people around the world who criticize us for having shown bad judgment in going into Vietnam, I do not believe that one can take away that charge by a demonstration of incompetence. Even General de Gaulle, who had less international responsibility, required three or four years to disengage from Algeria and he had the advantage of having more or less won the military war and, therefore, was in a much stronger negotiating position than we are.

Hanoi, on the other hand, faces the problem that it must maneuver uneasily between Peking, Moscow, and the NLF. It does not wish to be completely dependent on Peking or on Moscow. It does not wish--and this we have not always understood--to pay the price of severing,

15.

or even straining, its relations with Peking in order to find out what we may ask of it as an entrance price into negotiations, because it feels it might lose its negotiating position. Finally, it may not have complete control over the NLF. It probably can keep the NLF from doing anything that it does not wish, especially militarily, but I am not sure it can make the NLF do everything it wishes, especially with relation to a peace settlement. So Hanoi must tread very warily.

Then there are many others involved, such as the Soviet Union, which has its own problems. It cannot want a complete victory for North Vietnam--or not until fairly recently--because this would demonstrate the correctness of the Chinese interpretation of international affairs. It could not accept a defeat for North Vietnam because this would demonstrate that it could not protect its own allies. Therefore, being run by mediocre leaders, it did enough to keep the war going and nothing whatever to get the war settled. So everybody was caught in his own trap. I am not going to run through other countries because I think their contribution, intellectual and otherwise, to the problem has been relatively slight.

Now then, having stated these complexities, let me sum up. The assets of Hanoi have been the ones I described: that if they did not lose, they were bound to win a continuing political infrastructure in the South. This meant that whatever military victories we achieved, they could not survive our withdrawal, so that we were not building anything

16.

permanent. The fact is, painful as it may be to admit, they were
superior planners. Our assets were twofold: One is that with all
these advantages, Hanoi could not get us out of South Vietnam by it-
self; they had to negotiate us out. This is our basic negotiating asset
in South Vietnam. The second asset, which is more ambiguous be-
cause it raises enormous domestic issues, but must be stated for
reasons of intellectual symmetry, is this: one thing that induced the
North Vietnamese to negotiate is their knowledge that the next escala-
tion might require such a massive degree of foreign aid that they would
lose control over their own war. It is not that they were afraid that
we would knock them out with the next escalation, but that they could
resist the next escalation only by taking a degree of Chinese and Soviet
support that would make Hanoi as dependent on foreign support as
Saigon was, not only in terms of equipment, but also in terms of opera-
tional control. So I think that this is another asset: the possibility
that if the war is prolonged, there might be another escalation.

Now them with these complexities, assets and liabilities, where
are we? First, with respect to negotiating styles, there are probably
no two people in the world less meant to deal with each other than the
Vietnamese and the Americans. In terms of national style, bureau-
cracy, values, and history, it would be hard to imagine a greater
cultural gap than that which exists between the two. The Vietnamese,

17.

North and South, are morbidly suspicious. They have survived under
foreign rule for thousands of year by not telling foreigners what they
really thought. They are greatly attuned to the facts of power, but
not necessarily to the *irrational*, legalistic, bureaucratic representa-
tion of the facts of power. All Vietnamese have an almost morbid fear
of being made to look ridiculous. I sometimes suspect that if we
accepted the North Vietnamese package at the next Wednesday meeting
with Hanoi, they would spend three months trying to figure out where
the angle was, because the idea that one might make a straightforward
proposition which did not have an angle is inconceivable to them.
Moreover, the North Vietnamese, while they look impressive to us
and are impressive as a military power, know better than we do how
marginal their strength is in relation to ours. They have operated
vis-à-vis us by superior planning and superior intelligence; they are
meticulous planners in everything they do, especially in contacts with
the United States.

If the document of negotiations ever become public, it will be
apparent, in my view, first, that they were heading for negotiations
in 1968, with or without the Tet offensive. Second, their method of
getting there was always to send out a reconnaissance to find out what
the American reaction would be, to assess that reaction to a certain
proposition, and then to make a formal proposition. Over a period of

18.

years this is what most of the secret associations have been about,
and this is exactly what the American governmental process is almost
incapable of handling. I think this is true for two reasons:

First, there are always two groups in Washington: those who
are opposed to negotiations and those who are in favor of negotiations.
The result is that we never have a negotiating position. Those who are
opposed to negotiations tend to equate the fact of their existence with
surrender and a negotiating position with giving away something.
Therefore, they either oppose having a negotiating position at all, or
they consider the development of a negotiating position equivalent to
writing surrender terms. Those who are in favor of negotiations
are opposed to them precisely because they are afraid that in a bureau-
cratic contest they will lose to the hawks, because the President is not
likely to spend his prestige on a theoretical argument when no definite
negotiation is in the offing. Those who are in favor of negotiation
are correct in this assessment of the bureaucratic lay of the land.
They also tend to oppose a negotiating position because they have
enormous faith in the negotiating process itself, and they want to keep
their hands free for this process--which they intend to carry out
themselves--without being bound by a negotiating position. One of
the results of this, incidentally, is that no matter what you read in the
newspapers, there is almost never an American negotiating position.

19.

No matter how much we affirm our desire to negotiate an issue, we do not know what we are going to do when we get into the conference room. (The State Department people here can contradict me, and probably will out of loyalty.)

Second, once a negotiation occurs, the American negotiator, in practice, tends to become an ally of the opposing side. The reason for this is as follows, I believe: I would say as a sociological axiom that you cannot put an American in charge of something without his wanting to succeed. I suspect that if George Wallace were made head of the Disarmament Agency, he would be a wild disarmer within two years. Maybe not George Wallace, but almost anyone else. The only way you can succeed is to go over the list of proposals that the other side makes and see what you can responsibly concede. Therefore, I am not surprised if at every deadlock that arises the American negotiators tend to try to discover what is sensible in the other point of view. This is something to keep in mind when we discuss the composition of the conference.

Not having a negotiating position, combined with the legalistic approach to our policy, meant that it was almost impossible for us to understand what Hanoi was up to in the preliminaries to the preliminary negotiations. For example, President Johnson at the press conference last November said, "Sure we are in touch with Hanoi and they sometimes

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20.

communicate to us, and sometimes they even change a word in their
communication; for example, sometimes they change the word 'can'
to 'could' and 'will' to 'would', but that does not mean anything, it has
no legal force. He had the sequence wrong, for one thing. The sequence went the other way around; it went from the condition to the
future, rather than from the future to the conditional. The interesting
question, however, was why would a government that prides itself on
its planning communicate to us and change phrases that had become
ritualistic, if only in a grammatical manner, unless they meant to say
something? To that question the American answer has been, "They are
trying to trick us." (I will reserve my comment on the meaning of
trickery in international affairs, as we have finally reached some of
the substantive issues.)

Ever since these preliminary negotiations started, they have been
hung up on the issue of the end of bombing. The United States position
has been expressed in the so-called "San Antonio Formyla", which
says that the United States is willing to stop bombing, is prepared to
stop bombing unconditionally, *provided* this leads to "prompt and productive negotiations." It is assumed, moreover, that Hanoi will not
take advantage of the cessation of bombing. This San Antonio Formula
did not lead to an immediate resolution of the disputes. Not only are
the Vietnamese a morbidly suspicious people, but, even if they had
wanted to, they could not guarantee productive negotiations because it

21.

takes two. All they could promise was prompt negotiations. Also,
the phrase "take advantage" was sufficiently ambiguous to lead to a
year of back and forth on that particular issue. This is now partly
water over the dam, because we have since specified what we mean
by "not take advantage." Secretary Rusk listed a whole catalogue of
things on "Issues and Answers" last week. The problem has been
how one can reconcile the two modes of communication. We are
really partly hung up again on the problem that we faced in the preli-
minaries to the preliminary negotiations, which is: What is it that
we really want Hanoi to say and to do? Our tendency, when a Hanoi
communication arrives, is to get a legal opinion about its obligatory
nature. We have had enormous difficulty understanding what it is
that Hanoi is trying to say to us, and Hanoi has had great difficulty
understanding what we are about.

First, the difficulty of Hanoi. I am not known around here for
an excessive understanding of the Communist point of view in these
matters, but with respect to the bombing issue, they do have a problem.
If they express what they will do if we end the bombing in the form of
a legal document, then they are, in effect, legitimizing the bombing;
they are saying that there are some conditions which would justify our
bombing. Therefore, not only would they retroactively justify our
bombing, but they would also, in effect, allow us to start bombing

22.

them again if we caught them in a violation. To them, the fact that
our bombing is illegal in the eyes of what they consider world opinion
is an enormous asset. The fact that they can mobilize demonstrations
against us on the issue of bombing is a political and psychological
asset which they are not going to give up. Therefore, their failure
to sign a legal document does not necessarily mean that they do not
want to do so; it is that they do not want to do so in a manner which
destroys other options which they have. This, then, gets us to the
problem of the meaning of an international commitment and the defi-
nition of trickery in international affairs.

The American conviction is that an international commitment
has to be expressed in a legally binding form. Therefore, we want
some unambiguous statement of the reciprocal action that Hanoi would
take. Hanoi has great difficulty doing that for reasons that I have
already described. I also wonder why we need it. If Hanoi violates
an understanding, we will not be able to take them to court. The
sanction lies in what we will do to them if they violate the agreement.
In other words, the sanction is what we can do unilaterally. From
that point of view, it is more important that Hanoi understands what
we will not tolerate than that it agrees to a formal document. We
should, of course, be fairly clear that they do understand what we will
not tolerate and that that is not totally repulsive to them, but I do

23.

not think it is crucial that this be expressed in a legally binding form.
To put it another way, there are really two characters who are mor-
bidly afraid of being tricked. One is the North Vietnamese; the other
is LBJ, whose psychological complexities are not to be minimized.

The problem is: What could Hanoi do to trick us? I do not doubt
for a moment that Hanoi is morally capable of tricking us. I am sure
that no matter what the stage of negotiations, they are going to try to
win the political game in South Vietnam, and if they can undercut our
political base they will do it with the greatest vigor and energy.

Unfortunately, that can be done through actions other than purely military ones. On the purely military level, however, I have great difficulty seeing what precisely they could do to us that would be worth it. The worst thing they could do from their point of view is to inflict a ton of hell on us after a bombing halt. They cannot possibly push us into the sea no matter what they do, even if we stop bombing for three years. The worst they can do is to trap a significant segment of an American force and conceivably annihilate it. But I think this would really mean their end as a functioning society, because I do not believe that any of the restriction on bombing which have ever been observed would still hold and we would level Hanoi, Haiphong, the Dikes, whatever anybody has ever suggested. So I do not really see why it is in their interest to take that sort of military advantage

24.

of a bombing halt. Therefore, the question for us is much more whether we want to stop bombing and are sufficiently clear that they understand what we will not tolerate, than whether they agree to a formula.

Therefore, I believe that we can all stop raving about the bombing halt; there will be a bombing halt within six months. The logic of events forces us in that direction, and if it is not done by LBJ, it will be done by his successor within the first three months of his term in office. (That would be my guess.) There is no overpowering reason any more not to have one. (Up to now I have been saying things that most of my colleagues will probably like, but from now on I will probably say things that they will not like so much.)

I do not believe that the end of bombing is going to do anything except buy us an admissions price to the next stalemate. The first issue we will confront is, who will participate in the substantive negotiations? Saigon refuses to talk to the NLF. Hanoi refuses to talk to Saigon. We are committed not to talk substance without Saigon.

Therefore, if you look at the situation from a President's point of view, you do not see an overwhelming incentive to go from a stalemate on the bombing, where at least he can still talk about saving American lives, to a stalemate on the participation of Saigon in the conference, where the pressures would be very much greater after a little while.

We have taken the view that Saigon must be in the next round of negotiations, and so has Saigon. I happen to believe that that is going to

22.

be disastrous, not because I am opposed to Saigon's participation in
the conference, but because of the way that stalemate is going to be
resolved after two or three months.

It will undoubtedly be on a your-side, our-side formula; that
is, we bring Saigon and Hanoi brings the NLF. Then, after Hanoi has
brought the NLF, Hanoi may leave the room, incidentally, and we will
be stuck facing just the NLF. Even assuming Hanoi does not play
dirty like this, we will be confronted with Hanoi/NLF on one side;
Saigon/US on the other. This will create a situation in which there is
one party in the room with a demonstrated record of not understanding
the domestic situation in South Vietnam and with an agenda which
cannot exclude the domestic situation of South Vietnam. That party is
the United States. Therefore, the subject which, in my view, we
should avoid discussing at almost any price--the internal political
structure of South Vietnam--cannot be excluded from a four-sided
negotiation. Moreover, I would predict that in a four-sided negotiation,
although the American negotiator will not side with Hanoi and the NLF
totally, his tendency will be to try to bring Saigon along in that sen-
sible direction, and I suspect that Saigon may not be able to stand this
and may collapse in the process. That is one of the dangers that I
see. Once this happens, the subjects are going to get terribly complex,
and they are complex enough as it is.

It is part of the folklore here that an end of bombing is to be
followed by a cease-fire and then things will be very simple. The word
"cease-fire" trips easily from the editorial page of the _New York Times_.
I do not know in practice what "cease-fire" means in South Vietnam.
How one would police it, how one would arrange it, who would be per-
mitted to do what under what circumstances. Indeed, I would say the
definition of the cease-fire is really the definition of the political
settlement. And it is not at all an easy problem. If Saigon can move
anywhere it wishes and stay at night, then you have accomplished some-
thing through the cease-fire that has not been the case for 25 years. On
the other hand, (1) if there are to be reserved areas--some for the
government, some for the Viet Cong--then you are going to start a
tremendous scramble of establishing unambiguous control in some
areas, which will intensify the war for the period just before the de-
marcation lines are drawn; and you are going to create an entirely
new political reality. And (2) no cease-fire is going to be able to pro-
hibit murders and assassinations, which happen to be one of the chief
weapons of the Viet Cong.

None of this is to say that I am against the cease-fire; only to
indicate that a cease-fire is not easy to separate in Vietnam from the
political settlement itself. Incidentally, I believe the problem of
~~that~~ cease-fire is more easily approached through tacit mutual de-
escalation than it is through a formal agreement.

24.

If you do get this four-sided negotiation, we will finally reach the problem of the coalition government, which Senator McCarthy, for example, has made one of the tests of a wise American position. At the very kindest, the thing to say about a coalition government is that it reflects the peculiar American mentality that if you get a government that gives an order into the countryside, that order is more or less accepted; you get lines of command; and so forth. Since the Saigon government without a coalition has not managed to achieve this happy states, I do not see why it should be possible for a coalition government to do so. Second, I have not heard any American suggest that the way to solve the problems of Mississippi is to get a coalition government between SNCC and the Ku Klux Klan. I am not sure that the distrust between those two groups is any great; indeed, it is probably less. Third, just operationally, what does one mean by coalition government? I think Viet Cong ministers would be insane to go into Saigon unescorted. If, however, you begin introducing Viet Cong military forces into Saigon, if only to protect their own ministers-- which I think would be a very prudent thing for the Viet Cong to do-- you have changed the whole political complexion of Saigon. In other words, I do not see how a coalition government can be established in Vietnam, short of breaking the back of the army, in which case you do not need a coalition government any more and it just becomes a face-saving formula for pulling out.

25.

For all these reasons, I believe that when substantive negotiations
begin, we will face major problems.

After having made such a long analysis of the difficulties, you will
probably ask me, what is my solution? I will disappoint you; it is
easier to diagnose a broken leg than to set it. I do not have a brilliant
answer to the problem; indeed, I do not even have an unbrilliant
answer. But let me give you some general conclusions to which I have
come.

If we approach the problem of negotiations in the good old Ameri-
can style of going forward one issue at a time, we are going to be in
for a long haul. We do not have a very clear position domestically
and will have to improvise our position step by step. Hanoi, in turn,
since it does not know where the thing is going, is going to make
absolutely sure that it has squeezed the last possible advantage out
of every issue. Even if we made a proposal to them that they liked,
I think they would stall and delay to see whether there was not a little
more give. The South Vietnamese do this when they negotiate with
you; why should not the North Vietnamese, apart from their being
Communist? Since I believe that one of the problems that we face in
relations with Hanoi is that they profoundly distrust us and that they
seriously do not know where we are going, this is a procedure which
is bound to maximize complexities. Also, I believe that on this pro-
cedure, the possibility that Saigon will collapse somewhere along the
route is very grave indeed.

26.

Therefore, I hold the view, which is not widely shared, that the
only way one can even conceive of a relatively rapid settlement--
relatively rapid means anywhere from nine months to a year, not three
weeks--is to put a fairly global package to Hanoi in a devious way.
This would mean not making it public in Hanoi, but putting it to them
through complicated channels so that they could examine it before they
were to commit themselves to it and to let them bicker about it before
it becomes an official package. The package should address their
chief concern, which does not happen to be a coalition government--
that is one that they trot out every once in a while just to stay in the
ball game--but the withdrawal of American forces. The one thing that
they believe, and they are probably right, is that they understand the
domestic issue in South Vietnam a lot better than we do. Therefore,
they do not have to be given a political structure by us in South Vietnam.
What they cannot get by themselves is the withdrawal of American
forces. This is our big negotiating asset. Therefore, I believe that
if we want to make rapid progress--rapid in the terms I have described,
not spectacularly rapid--the chief item of negotiation has to be the
mutual withdrawal of foreign forces over a reasonable period of time.
Indeed, I believe they would give us a reasonable period of time if
they understood that that is what we were doing. In order to do this,
we have, in my judgment, to separate the issue of the internal struc-
ture of South Vietnam from the negotiations.

27.

I hold the view which has no support anywhere: It is in our interest to have various levels of negotiation. A level where we and Hanoi talk about mutual control over a staged period. This would give us a chance to avoid the two big problems we have. The first is that the American political process will not tolerate a continuation of the war on its present scale for the next electoral period, even though we cannot accept a military defeat for purposes of general political reasons. Second, we cannot commit ourselves to keeping a government in Saigon in power against the wishes of the South Vietnamese population for all eternity. I am not saying the present government is there against their wishes, but we cannot be in such a posture that we have to guarantee a government in Saigon against the wishes of the population. Therefore, our concern ought to be to get foreign troops out of South Vietnam and to let a political process develop there. (I would suffer no enormous pain if that political process did not meet the latest standards of Western pluralistic democracy. And I feel that if we are there and start negotiating, we are going to go through this whole exercise of free elections for the umpteenth time.)

Therefore, I believe that the thing we first have to negotiate with Hanoi is a mutual withdrawal over a reasonable period of time, and that period of time can be geared to a reasonable political process on the side. Second, we have to let Saigon and the NLF settle their

28.

problems, either through negotiation or through whatever means they
manage to devise. My guess would be that there might not be Saigon/
NLF negotiations on the national level, but there might be formal
arrangements between Saigon and the NLF on the provincial level,
which already exist tacitly. Third, there would be an international
conference, which would work out guarantees for the other two sets
of negotiations. This sort of three-tiered approach offers to me the
only possibility for a relatively rapid end to the conflict. By rela-
tively rapid I mean as compared to the other road where one goes
step by step: composition of the conference agenda, cease-fire,
composition of the government, internal status, international status,
and whatever else the check-list is that people have of what a global
settlement looks like if you arrive at it by normal negotiating proce-
dures.

Having said all these things, I am actually not too pessimistic
about the negotiations. I think that the big decision for Hanoi was to
enter the negotiations; for that they must have paid an enormous
price with Peking. I do not believe they would have entered the ne-
gotiations unless they meant to conclude them, albeit in a way
favorable to them, or at least to get the maximum advantage out of
them. They have certainly stuck with the negotiations in Paris under
conditions in which there have been no spectacular advances on either

29.

side for many months. I think that the tendency is to get a settlement,
whether this administration can do it or whether a new administration
will have to do it. This depends on the idiosyncracies at this moment
of a few key individuals. I think Hanoi may well decide that it is
better off having a new president make the settlement and being able
to deliver it, than to have a lame-duck president make it. But I
can construct an argument for the other side, too. Or they may decide
that they will see what happens. Even if the approach that I outlined
becomes the dominant one, it still would mean a process of anywhere
from six months to a year. I think that if there is a bombing halt
before the end of the present administration, which is not at all im-
possible, then our tendency would be to approach subsequent negotia-
tions step by step, and this would guarantee that we would not be very
far along the road by the time the administration changes. Therefore,
the only question, I would suspect, by January 20 is whether we are
stalemated on the bombing issue or on the participation issue. How-
ever, I do not expect the settlement by January 20, although it is very
foolish to make short-term predictions that can be overtaken by
events.