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DT

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee:

Twenty three years ago the President of the United States did me the great honor of asking me to be the principal negotiator for ending the war in Vietnam. When the Administration in which I served entered office it found 550,000 soldiers in Vietnam. 31,000 had already died there. We faced a ruthless enemy without any regard for human life or elementary principles of treatment of the captured.

From the day we entered office, we had no more consistent or important goal than the release of the brave Americans held prisoner throughout Indochina and a full accounting of their missing colleagues. The negotiating record makes clear that this matter was repeatedly and insistently raised with the North Vietnamese. Despite Hanoi's protestations, we demanded that Hanoi guarantee the release of American POWs in Laos and Cambodia and assist in accounting for our MIAs. There was no issue on which American officials, from the President on down, were more adamant. For us on the negotiating team it was a painful process because we all had many friends on the other side of the national debate. We went through exhausting negotiations, sustained by the hope that our effort would reconcile those who gave priority to peace with those who gave priority to their concept of honor, recognizing the anguish of both sides.

After nearly four years of grueling negotiations, it was my privilege on January 23, 1973, to initial the agreement to end the war that required the return of all prisoners throughout Indochina and an accounting for the missing, together with a ceasefire and other important provisions I shall describe later. I am proud of what my associates and I accomplished.

All of us remember the exaltation on October 8, 1972 after Le Duc Tho accepted President Nixon's public proposal of May 8, 1972, and we knew that the end of the war was in sight. One of our notetakers, Mary Stifflemire, insisted on working for a twenty-hour negotiating session without relief because she wanted the honor of being present when we culminated four years of often anguishing efforts. Yet here we are, twenty years later, being pilloried in leaks from this inquiry without a shred of evidence, with the unforgiveable libel that we neglected the very group whose suffering was the biggest single incentive for our exertions.

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The Paris Accords were a major diplomatic accomplishment for America. As part of the Accords, we demanded, and finally received, from Hanoi agreements which specifically made the withdrawal of American forces dependent on the release of our prisoners and assurances of Hanoi's assistance in the accounting for our missing throughout Indochina.

Monday morning quarterbacks can argue that the Paris Peace Accords were not perfect. I agree. To me, the ideal outcome would have been an American victory. But, Mr. Chairman, we had to deal with the war in the specific circumstances we faced. Even with the perspective of 20 years, I am convinced that in those circumstances no better agreement was obtainable and much worse ones were urged by our critics. For example, just as I was leaving for the final negotiations in January 1973, the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses each passed, by very large margins, resolutions calling for legislation to cut off all funds for the war.

I challenge those flaunting their 20/20 hindsight to say how they could have gotten better terms in that charged political atmosphere. What precisely would they have been willing to do to achieve which particular changes and at what cost? Moreover, since Congress removed both incentives and penalties for Hanoi's compliance, how exactly would any achievable amendments to the text of the Paris Agreement have changed Hanoi's behavior?

This is not the first time Congress has examined this issue. Sixteen years ago in 1976, the bipartisan House Select Committee on POWs and MIAs after a 15 month examination concluded that "The provisions of the Paris Peace Agreement relative to POWs and MIAs and the Protocol on Prisoners and Detainees appear, at first glance and after more thoughtful consideration, not only adequate but excellent". The Accords, they stated "constitute an achievement of which the American negotiators and the American people could be proud. Their true success, however, depended on their implementation and their implementation depended on the cooperation of all parties".

That is precisely the point: The problem with the Paris Accords was not with the words, but with their implementation by North Vietnam. From the very start, Hanoi began violating the Accords. The record shows clearly that while the Executive branch tried strenuously to bring pressure on Hanoi to carry out its commitments under the Paris Accords, in particular those relating to POWs and MIAs, the US Congress even more vigorously, and successfully, undercut our ability to enforce those accords. For our Administration was prepared to use force to resist Hanoi's violations of the Agreement until the Congress prohibited it. The Congress also took away other means of leverage -- such as economic aid. In light of this record, it hardly becomes the present Congress to accuse the 1970s Executive branch of not doing enough.

[Y]

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It is therefore amazing to see press stories hinting darkly about prisoners "abandoned" by their own government. There has been talk of a conspiracy extending through five administrations. Leaks that could only have come from this inquiry assert that when President Nixon announced that all prisoners were on the way home, he or his aides knew that many were left behind. The allegation is a flat-out lie, as I shall show later.

What has happened to this country that a Congressional Committee would inquire whether *any* American official of *whatever* administration would fail to move heaven and earth to fight for the release of American POWs and for an accounting of the missing? There is no excuse, two decades after the fact, for anyone to imply that the last five Presidents from both parties, their White House staffs, Secretaries of State and Defense, and career diplomatic and military services either knowingly or negligently failed to do everything they could to recover and identify all of our prisoners and MIAs. Can anyone seriously believe that any honorable public official would neglect America's servicemen and especially those who suffered so much for their country or, even worse, arrange a conspiracy to obscure the fate of prisoners left behind?

Personally, I have no proof whether Americans were kept behind by Hanoi. The Vietnamese are certainly capable of such a cynical act and of lying about it, even though their motive would be obscure. If any prisoners were held back, there can be only one guilty party - the Vietnamese Communists who flagrantly and unforgivably would have violated solemn and clear-cut agreements. If any proof of such a betrayal is found by this Committee, all Americans will unite to demand redress.

The Committee owes it to the country, and above all to the families of the MIAs, to dispel the misapprehension that every unaccounted for missing person was necessarily a Vietnamese or Laotian captive. While I was in office, we did receive some reports alleging that live Americans were still in Indochina. I can assure the Committee that all those reports were taken seriously. But no confirmed report of living American prisoners ever crossed my desk. At the time, returning prisoners stated that they believed all POWs had been released.

The Committee also owes the American people a statement of the simple truth:

- Some prisoners *may* - I repeat *may* - have been *kept* behind by our adversaries in violation of solemn commitments.

- *No* prisoners were *left* behind by the deliberate act or negligent omission of *American* officials.

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Anyone suggesting otherwise is playing a heartless game with the families of the MIAs, who are entitled to the consolation that their government kept faith with their suffering. I recognize that Vietnam evoked deep differences about its purpose and its strategy by serious people on all sides. But to try to settle scores at this remove and to tear the scabs of the Vietnam War in such a manner would be unconscionable.

## The Political Background of the Peace Negotiations: Pressures for Unilateral Withdrawal

When the Administration in which I served came into office, it found half a million Americans fighting in a region far removed from the United States. The number was still increasing according to a schedule established by our predecessors. Casualties had risen and reached their highest level the year before we entered office - about 300 a week. Four years later we had withdrawn 95% of the troops and reduced casualties by 98%.

We began negotiating in 1969, continuing a process begun in the previous Administration which, however, had never gone beyond procedural discussions. One of the highest priority demands, which we consistently declared to be non-negotiable, was the release of all prisoners throughout Indochina, and a full accounting for the missing. During four anguishing years we negotiated to find honorable terms for ending the war, first sporadically on weekends, later in week-long day-and-night sessions. For not withdrawing more unconditionally, we were harassed by protesters, attacked in the media, criticized in countless Congressional resolutions and ridiculed for our concept of national honor. Never once did we receive any criticism from any source of the kind now emerging from this inquiry. The pressures we experienced were in the other direction - that we were not making enough concessions, that we should withdraw unilaterally in the expectation that then prisoners would be released by an act of grace of their captors.

By 1972, there was a steady drumfire of public statements and editorials urging the immediate withdrawal of our forces. I am making available separately a sample of these (Appendix A). For example, the *Washington Post* editorialized April 17, 1972 that "we ought to fix a date for our total military disengagement, negotiate as best we can for the return of our prisoners, and get out".

There were also numerous Congressional resolutions. Most were "sense of the Congress" resolutions which meant they were not binding. Some resolutions passed; others did not. Whether they passed or not, they were all known to the Vietnamese and necessarily weakened our negotiating position. The number of formal anti-war votes in Congress swelled from 5 in 1969 to 35 in 1972. I am also providing the Committee an illustrative list of

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some of the many resolutions or votes in 1972 (Appendix B). For example, on July 24, 1972 the Senate passed an amendment asking for the withdrawal of US forces in return for the release of US prisoners. Yet it rejected an amendment requiring a cease-fire during the withdrawal. Without a ceasefire withdrawals would have taken place under military attack; our remaining forces would have been overwhelmed; more Americans would have become prisoners.

During this period, many political leaders, including Senator George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate, and 30 US Senators were calling for the *unconditional* unilateral withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam, without any formal North Vietnamese commitment for the concurrent or even subsequent return of our MIAS and POWs or accounting for the missing in action.

At the same time, members of the American peace movement were spreading the word that they had been told by the North Vietnamese that setting a deadline for our withdrawal would create "favorable conditions" for the subsequent release of American prisoners of war. America had been down this road before. Our predecessors had agreed to a bombing halt on the "understanding" that Hanoi would not take advantage of it; within weeks Hanoi started an offensive that killed over 1,000 American a month.

Our Administration knew from its secret talks what Hanoi's real position was: America should set a deadline for withdrawal -- unilaterally and independent of all other conditions. Then while American troops were being withdrawn there could be negotiations about a cease-fire, the replacement of the Saigon government and the release of our prisoners. In other words, only when our leverage was in the process of being dismantled, while the Saigon government was disintegrating in the absence of a cease-fire, would we be permitted to talk about our prisoners under conditions of unspeakable chaos.

We rejected these proposals because we were unwilling to subject either our prisoners or those serving in Vietnam to such risks. Key Senators, Congressmen and much of the media loudly objected to our position.

We rejected as well the consistent North Vietnamese demand to overthrow the Saigon government, both for reasons of honor and on practical grounds. There were 700,000 Saigon troops, close to 500,000 Communist troops (including guerrillas). If Saigon collapsed, the residual American force would become hostage; the number of our prisoners would increase exponentially.

We made very clear to Hanoi that we were prepared to set a deadline for withdrawal *provided* there was a cease-fire and a *simultaneous* release of prisoners and full accounting for our MIAs. Until late in 1972 North Vietnam consistently rejected this position.

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In the end, we achieved the terms which we set out to obtain, and which our critics had repeatedly told us were unattainable and provocative. In the process, we dramatically improved the conditions for the return of American forces:

- We demanded and obtained North Vietnamese promises to release <u>all</u> American prisoners and to assist in an accounting of our MIAs <u>throughout</u> Indochina despite initial insistence by Hanoi that it would negotiate only about prisoners in Vietnam.

- We obtained a commitment to return the prisoners in phased installments coordinated with simultaneous withdrawals of our forces from South Vietnam.

- We demanded and obtained important commitments designed to prevent the reinforcement and supply of North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam, so that the South Vietnamese would be able to defend themselves after the American forces were withdrawn.

- We separated the release of our prisoners from being contingent on the release of what the North Vietnamese called "political prisoners" in the South because we thought this would provide endless pretexts for procrastination.

- To encourage compliance with these commitments, we held out the inducement, first offered by President Johnson in 1965 and frequently reiterated since, of asking Congress to authorize economic aid to the region after peace had been established.

We achieved all this while refusing, as we were being urged, to overthrow the government of an allied country and to turn over to the Communists tens of millions who, in reliance on America's word - given by a previous Administration - had cast their lot with America.

Mr. Chairman, this is the record. Yet leaks from this inquiry have been suggesting:

- That those who had refused to abandon America's <u>Vietnamese</u> allies, supposedly abandoned <u>American</u> prisoners;

- That those who struggled to husband the leverage necessary to bring about the release of American prisoners were insufficiently attentive to the fates of remaining MIAs; and

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- That those who were prepared to use force to compel Hanoi's compliance were guilty of not doing enough to enforce the agreements.

One day an author will write a play about this bizarre reversal of roles drawn straight from Kafka. Mr. Chairman, while it may make good theater, it is bad and cynical history.

## Paris Peace Agreements

Let me now turn to the implementation of the peace agreements. ¹

The Paris Agreements were signed on January 27. Under Article 8, the parties were committed to exchanging complete POW lists on

¹ Before turning to implementation of the agreement, let me explain the way we went about the negotiations. Until 1972, I conducted private talks, together with a small team from the NSC, all whom have been deposed by the Committee staff. The typical procedure was to leave on a Saturday morning for a French military base from which a French military plane took us to a private airfield near Paris, where we would arrive around midnight. After spending the night in the apartment of our then military attache, General Walters, who acted as interpreter and advisor, we met the North Vietnamese negotiators, usually Hanoi Politburo member Le Duc Tho. After negotiating all day - and sometimes briefing the French President Pompidou - we returned to Washington by the reverse procedure of the day before.

At this stage we discussed only basic principles - usually no more than two pages.

The return of POWs and accounting of the MIAs was an integral part of every American proposal and was always declared as non-negotiable by us.

After the breakthrough of October 8, 1972 I asked Ambassador Bill Sullivan and George Aldrich, the State Department's Deputy Legal Advisor, to join the team. They, together with other experts and members of my staff, negotiated the protocols of implementation with Vietnamese technical teams.

After the agreement went into effect, the POW/MIA issue was handled by the NSC process with the Defense Department as the lead agency. As a general procedure, the Defense Department dealt with the Four Party Military Commission, the State Department with embassies abroad, the White House with heads of government.

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January 27 and to giving a full accounting of MIAs. All POWs were to be released within 60 days. As I told a press conference on January 24, we had been assured that there were no American POWs held in Cambodia and that those held in Laos would be returned to us in Hanoi.

The North Vietnamese, in what would turn into a constant pattern, immediately began to violate the agreement. For example, they did not hand over the POW list for Laos as required on January 27. In response we delayed delivery to them of a confidential Presidential letter on recommending to Congress reconstruction assistance after peace had been established. This letter implemented a proposal first made by President Johnson in 1965. It was repeated in a Presidential report to the Congress in February 1972, which gave a figure of $2.5 billion dollars and repeated yet again in a Presidential television address on May 8, 1972. The Nixon letter of February 1973 noted the Administration's intention to ask Congress for some $3.25 billion for reconstruction in Vietnam, provided the other provisions of the Agreements were implemented and were in conformity with American constitutional procedures. We delayed the delivery of the letter several days in a successful effort to force Hanoi to hand over the list of our POWs in Laos. This they did on February 1, though their list contained the names of only 10 Americans held as prisoners, whereas our intelligence agencies believed a greater number to be missing.

Mr. Chairman, some suggestions have been made that the North Vietnamese may have withheld some American POWs in an effort to get this economic aid. I find this reasoning difficult to understand. First of all, it had been our constant position that we would never give aid as a form of "ransom" for our prisoners. Nor did we want the North to be able to portray any such aid as "reparations", as we repeatedly told them. That is why the question of reconstruction aid was handled separately from the formal Paris Agreements via a private Presidential message.

Moreover, we had so structured the implementation of the Paris Accords that we would not even begin to discuss aid until almost all the POWs had already returned to the United States. The Joint Economic Commission did not hold its first meeting on the matter until March 15. The Vietnamese were required to return all the POWs by March 28.

Finally, it is curious that Americans would make such an argument when the North Vietnamese did not. As the bipartisan House Select Committee reported in 1976, during all the discussions with the North Vietnamese in 1973, 1974 and 1975, not once did they cite the American failure to provide economic aid as an excuse for their failure to provide a complete accounting for our MIAs. Why should Americans now put forward an alibi for Hanoi which even they did not assert?

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We immediately made clear our dissatisfaction with the Laos list. Secretary of State Rogers testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 8, 1973 (and again on February 21) that we did not regard the Laos list as complete and noted that we would continue to press for the fullest information on all American MIAs throughout Indochina. When I visited Hanoi for negotiations in mid-February, I raised the POW and MIA issues, presenting the evidence we had with respect to specific discrepancies including Laos and asking the Vietnamese to follow up. In particular there were about 80 names of our men who we had reason to believe were alive when they reached the ground that did not appear on Hanoi's lists. The Vietnamese insisted that there were no additional prisoners beyond those on the lists and in the process of being released over the 60-day period. I covered this issue in my memoirs over ten years ago, so that I am surprised that these discrepancies are now being presented as great discoveries.

By the last week of February 1973, the North Vietnamese had not yet carried out their obligation to hand over the list of men to be freed on February 27. In violation of the Peace Agreement, they were hinting at tying their release to the freeing of what they called "political prisoners" in South Vietnam. This was a linkage we had explicitly rejected in the negotiations leading up to the Peace Agreement - a concession for which we had struggled through many night sessions. We reacted to the North's stalling by suspending troop withdrawals and mine-clearing operations. The POWs were thereupon released as scheduled.

In the following weeks we kept up the pressure at the Vietnam Peace Conference in Paris. Representing the US there, Secretary Rogers told the press that President Nixon would take "appropriate action" if there were any delays in POW releases. In a March 2nd press conference, the President repeated publicly that POW releases could not be linked to anything other than the rate of US withdrawal.

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese were violating other provisions of the Agreement, through massive illegal movement of troops and materiel across the DMZ and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. During March, we registered a number of protests to the North about these violations and about our growing concern on the accounting for MIAs. They regularly, and disingenuously, responded that they were innocent of all charges. We rejected their replies, as we said in a message, as "an insult to our intelligence".

As the March 28 deadline for the last POW release approached, the White House issued a threat on March 25 that US troops would remain in Vietnam until all POWs in Indochina were released. All remaining prisoners on the lists were thereupon released as scheduled.

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Uncertainty Remains After March POW Releases; US Leverage Erodes

On March 29, President Nixon announced that "all of our American POWs are on their way home." Those who leaked that President Nixon or his advisers, in announcing that all prisoners had been released knew that we were keeping prisoners behind, disingenuously neglected to mention President Nixon's statement that "there are still some problem areas. The provision of the agreement requiring an accounting for all missing in action in Indochina .... [has] not been complied with...". That is all we knew and nothing has been produced or can be produced to indicate the contrary.

Every US official was dissatisfied with the lack of information about our MIAs in Laos, and we said so publicly. Our dissatisfaction was based on evidence that many of these men, mostly pilots who had been shot down, had reached the ground alive but they were never returned to us alive or declared to have died. We also noted that, statistically, the percentage of the missing accounted for in Laos was far smaller than in Vietnam. I used these figures in my February talks in Hanoi. But we did not have evidence that any of the missing were actually still alive and being held prisoner. We repeatedly and insistently demanded that North Vietnam provide a better accounting for the missing. We did so both before and after Secretary Richardson's March 28th memorandum to me which has been featured in these hearings. Hanoi ignored our demands. Between February 1973 and June 1975, we raised our dissatisfaction with accounting for MIAs in Laos more than 60 times with officials of the Laotian government. It is the ultimate irony that our Herculean efforts to get an accounting in 1973 should be twisted twenty years later into "evidence" that we knew POWs had been left behind.

There is, as well, the question of what more we could have done. During this period, as I have reported in detail in my memoirs, I favored military retaliation against Hanoi's repeated violations. The President felt that on balance it was better to have one more negotiating round. Certainly there was little political support in the US for stronger measures. Most commentators, Congressional and media, opposed any effort to stand up to Hanoi, arguing that the US had no right to retaliate at all against the North's blatant violations. Again, I am making available a sample of prevailing opinion (Appendix C). Let me read just two here:

- A *New York Times* editorial of April 1, 1973 stated that "The President continues to imply in dark and guarded language that he is ready to use the power of the United States to force adherence to the cease-fire terms. Nowhere in the official records of the truce is there provision for any one nation to deal with violations by its own bilateral actions."

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— The _Des Moines Register_ said on April 4, that "it would be a grave mistake for the United States to decide the peace violations by the other side were intolerable and jump back into combat again...The agreement calls for the United States to get out and stay out and leave the Vietnamese to settle the future of Vietnam."

Nor did Congress offer support needed to resist Hanoi's violations. At Appendix D. is a sample list of Congressional resolutions debated in 1973.

By the middle of April, Hanoi's violations of the Paris Accords were overwhelming. In blatant contravention of the January agreement, they had moved an entire army, some 35,000 fresh troops, 400 tanks, 300 artillery pieces, 7,000 trucks and 27,000 tons of military supplies into South Vietnam. On April 19, we suspended meetings of the Joint Economic Commission. The next day, the US government issued a detailed public statement listing all the North's violations and specifically criticizing their failure to provide information on US MIAs. The same day, technical teams began meeting to review compliance with the Agreement, especially the fate of our prisoners and missing. Before my scheduled meeting with Le Duc Tho in the middle of May 1973, President Nixon instructed me to "hit them hard on MIA accounting..."

Much has been made of Deputy Secretary Clements' alleged remark in April 1973 that "They're all dead". You will be able to ask Secretary Clements what he actually said and meant. But the fact is that in our subsequent negotiations with the North Vietnamese, we never accepted that "They're all dead", and continued to express our dissatisfaction with Hanoi's failure to account for the MIAs. The negotiating record and public statements by our government make this very plain.

Between mid-May and June 1973, I conducted twelve days of talks with the North Vietnamese. I reviewed in detail the North's violations including the failure to account for all the MIAs and pressed the North Vietnamese repeatedly for a better accounting of US personnel missing in Laos. But Hanoi sensed our leverage was rapidly eroding partly as a result of actions taken by the Congress. For example:

- On May 10, the House adopted an amendment which prohibited the use of funds for military activity in Southeast Asia.

- Two weeks later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a similar proposal.

- On May 31, the full Senate _rejected_ a Republican-sponsored amendment which would have made the cut-off of

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American military activity in Laos and Cambodia contingent upon the North Vietnamese making a good faith effort to account for MIAs.

In response to my presentations, Le Duc Tho disdainfully read me editorials from the American press and speeches from the Congressional Record. His message was clear: I understand what you are saying but I also know that you have no way to back up your threats. This was vividly reflected in a briefing that Vietnamese Communist leaders gave to their cadre just prior to the negotiations. According to our intelligence reports, they said that President Nixon would "not dare to apply such strong measures as air strikes or bombing attacks in either North or South Vietnam, because the US Congress and the American people will violently object".

## US Continues to Press Hanoi in late 1973

Despite all these obstacles, strenuous negotiations resulted in a joint US-North Vietnamese communique on June 13 which reiterated the existing Vietnamese obligations to release remaining POWs, if any "without delay", to make a full accounting for MIAs throughout Indochina and to facilitate knowledge about the dead. When Hanoi still did not give us such an accounting, the American government issued a lengthy protest statement on MIAs on July 29, noting that after six months, North Vietnam had failed to comply with the agreement and that we still had some 1300 listed as missing. We again called upon the North to provide information on the names we had provided.

While we had no hard evidence that any of the missing were still alive we emphatically wanted to determine their fate. In the following months we continued to raise with the North their violations of the agreement. We made no secret of our outrage with Hanoi's violations. During 1973, we delivered at least thirty separate public statements or private messages protesting Hanoi's violations. In my confirmation hearings for Secretary of State in September 1973, I told the Senate we considered Hanoi had an obligation to provide an accounting for the missing throughout Indochina and that "we are extremely dissatisfied with the results of that part of the agreement."

Unfortunately, it was also no secret that these efforts to pin Hanoi down amounted to firing empty cannons. In theory, we had three sources of leverage available: bombing the North, offering economic aid to Hanoi, and giving military and economic aid to Saigon to deprive Hanoi of the hope for military victory. The Congress took all three levers away, denying us both the carrot and the stick.

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-- On June 29, 1973, a little more than two weeks after the restatement of the Vietnamese obligation regarding prisoners and the missing, the Congress prohibited all military action in, over, and near Indochina, including reconnaissance flights after August 15.

-- In July 1973 it became clear that Congress would not approve economic aid to North Vietnam.

-- In each of the remaining years that Saigon was independent, Congress cut aid to it by 50%.

-- The Congress cut off aid to Cambodia altogether in 1975 and was in the process of debating a "terminal grant", at best 75% of its last inadequate annual grant, when South Vietnam collapsed in 1975.

Unfortunately, when the Congress eliminated our leverage we were trapped in the classic nightmare of every statesman -- we had nothing to back up our tough words but more tough words.

Under such conditions, we had no bargaining position left. I had one final meeting with the North Vietnamese in December 1973. I remember being armed with a long list of violations to raise with them, including the fact that Hanoi had failed utterly to comply with the agreements on MIAs. As I recall the meeting, Le Duc Tho's response was even more contemptuous than six months earlier. He was after all a professional; he would not waste his time on adversaries incapable of either rewarding or punishing.

During 1974 and 1975, our Administration continued to press Hanoi publicly, in private messages and in meeting of the Four-Party Joint Military Team, to perform their treaty commitment to account for our MIAs. I personally asked the Laotian government to help. Vietnam ignored us and even suspended meetings of the Four-Party team in mid-1974 as Watergate finally sapped the Presidency.

The Paris accords contained clear and binding commitments that all prisoners throughout Indochina would be accounted for and returned. If the Vietnamese violated these provisions it was not because of any omission by the responsible US officials but because we had been stripped of the weapons we might have used to enforce that commitment. I am proud of what my colleagues and I accomplished under heartbreakingly difficult circumstances. I challenge critics of the Accords to say precisely how they would have achieved a better outcome under those circumstances.

## Conclusion

Mr. Chairman, like you, I had the great honor of serving this country. As I did, I was conscious of my responsibility

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-- to the servicemen I visited in the infantry divisions on three different trips to Vietnam in 1965-1967;

-- to the wives and families of the MIAs, with whom I met frequently and who, despite great pressures, never broke faith with their government;

-- to those on my staff who stayed with me when so many of their friends were among the demonstrators and to whom I promised that, if they stayed, they would help end our country's divisions by working on an agreement of which they could be proud;

-- to this country which saved me and my family from totalitarianism.

Throughout the difficult period we are discussing, I had regular meetings with the families of our POWs and MIAs. Through them, I came to know the great personal anguish they faced. Over the years, no honor has meant more to me than being invited twice as guest of honor by the returned prisoners at their annual "dining-in" at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. When I received the Nobel Peace Prize for my part in ending the Vietnamese war, I donated all of the money to a scholarship fund for the education of children of servicemen killed or missing in Indochina.

I presented the agreement to end the war to the press on January 24, 1973 with the following concluding comments:

"...as for us at home it should be clear by now that no one in this war has had a monopoly of anguish and that no one in these debates has had a monopoly of moral insight. And now that at last we have achieved an agreement in which the United States did not prescribe the political future to its allies, an agreement which would preserve the dignity and self-respect of all the parties, together with healing the wounds in Indochina we can begin to heal the wounds in America."

Healing those wounds preoccupied me then; it has preoccupied me since. It is still a noble objective.

Mr. Chairman, you have stated that this inquiry was designed to heal the wounds of Vietnam. This cannot be done by blaming American officials for Vietnamese transgressions, nor by innuendos, distortions and outright falsehoods being leaked out of this inquiry.

Nor did any Administration know that there were live Americans kept in Indochina. American prisoners may have been kept in Vietnam by a treacherous enemy in violation of agreements and human

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decency. But no one was left there by the deliberate act or
negligent omission of any American official.

Let us stop torturing ourselves. The United States government
kept faith with those who served their country. If servicemen were
kept by our enemies, there is one villain and one villain only:
the cold-hearted rulers in Hanoi. That is the conclusion your
report owes to our nation, to the families of those who served and
suffered there and to the public servants who worked their hearts
out to bring an honorable peace, to return prisoners and to account
for the missing. That is the one true way to put this anguishing
issue behind us.

TOP SECRET SENSITIVE

2220257 OCT 72

TOP SECRET SENSITIVE EXCLUSIVELY FOR ONLY CITE WRP 0074

FROM: GEN HAIG WHITE HOUSE

TO: COL GHAY PAPIT

OCTOBER 23, 1972

PLEASE TRANSMIT THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO COLONEL GHAY IMMEDIATELY WITH INSTRUCTIONS TO DELIVER IT TO HIS CUSTOMER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

BEGIN TEXT: THE FOLLOWING IS A MESSAGE ON BEHALF OF THE PRESENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM.

1. THE U.S. SIDE APPRECIATES THE GOOD WILL AND SERIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE DRU SHOWN IN ITS MESSAGE OF OCTOBER 19, 1972, WITH THE TWO PROVISIONS FOR ARTICLES 7 AND 8 AGREED TO BY THE DRU SIDE IN ITS MESSAGE, THE TEXT OF THE AGREEMENT CAN NOW BE CONSIDERED COMPLETE. FOR PURPOSES OF CLARITY AND TO AVOID ANY ARGUMENT, THE 11.2. SINE WAS DELETED THE FIRST CLAUSE OF THE SECOND PARAGRAPH OF ARTICLE 7, AND THE ENTIRE ARTICLE 7 AS ACCEPTED BY THE U.S. SIDE NOW BEARS AS FOLLOWS:

QUOTE: ARTICLE 7. - FROM THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE CEASEFIRE TO THE FORMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDED FOR IN ARTICLES 6 AND 91 OF THIS AGREEMENT, THE TWO SOUTH VIETNAMESE PARTIES SHALL NOT ACCEPT THE INTRODUCTION OF TROOPS, MILITARY PERSONNEL, AND MILITARY PERSONNEL INCLUDING TECHNICAL MILITARY PERSONNEL, ARMENTS, MUNITIONS, AND TAP MATERIAL INTO SOUTH VIETNAM.

THE TWO SOUTH VIETNAMESE PARTIES SHALL BE PERMITTED TO MAKE PERIODICAL REPLACEMENTS OF ARMENTS, MUNITIONS AND WAP MATERIAL WHICH HAVE BEEN HROWN OUT OF DAMAGED AFTERSHAVE. ON THE BASIS OF FIRST-APPEARANCE, OF THE SAME CHARACTERISTICS AND PROPERTIES, UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF THE JOINT MILITARY COMMISSION OF THE TWO SOUTH VIETNAMESE PARTIES AND OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION OF CONTROL AND SUPERVISION, END QUOTE.

2. THERE REMAINS TO BE SETTLED, HOWEVER, THE MATTER OF UNILATERAL

DECLARATION BY THE TWO SIDES. IN ORDER TO AVOID STARTING A NEW RELATIONSHIP ON THE BASIS OF MISUNDERSTANDING, CLARIFICATION OF THESE STATEMENTS IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

A) WITH RESPECT TO THE QUESTION OF PRISONERS, THE U.S. SIDE HAS STATED ON INNUMERABLE OCCASIONS THAT UNDER NO CIRCUMstances CAN IT SIGN AN AGREEMENT THAT DOES NOT UNCONDITIONALLY GUARANTEE THE RETURN OF ALL ITS MILITARY AND CIVILIAN PRISONERS THROUGHOUT INDONESIA. ACCORDINGLYS, THE FORMULATION IN THE DRU UNILATERAL STATEMENT HANDED OVER ON OCTOBER 17 WHICH MAKES THE RETURN OF PRISONERS IN LACS CONDITIONAL ON A LAOTIAN SETTLEMENT AND MAKES NO MENTION OF PRISONERS IN CAMBODIA IS UNACCEPTABLE. THE U.S. SIDE WAS PROCEEDING ON THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ASSURANCES GIVEN BY SPECIAL ADVISOR TO DHC TWO THAT THE DRU WILL MAKE ITSELF RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OF ALL U.S. MILITARY AND CIVILIAN PRISONERS HELD THROUGHOUT INDOCTRINA. THEREFORE, THE U.S. SIDE REQUIRES A DRU UNILATERAL STATEMENT ALONG THE LINES OF THE TEXT HANDED OVER ON OCTOBER 8, 9 AND 12, 1972, TO READ AS FOLLOWS:

DECLASSIFIED
E.O. 12356, Sect. 3A

Nsc. Van Tassel authority 9/15/72
By: AH NARA, Date: 9/15/72
(SA99)

["[Y]", "CHIEN, WITH RESPECT TO U.S. MILITARY PERSONNEL AND CIVILIAN LIFE IN THE COUNTRY, COUNSEL OF STATE, THE PRESIDENT TO HAVE AGREEMENT FOR THE IDENTIFICATION AND RETURN TO UNITED STATES AUTHORITY IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE SAME SCHEDULES ISSUED FOR THE RELEASE OF U.S. MILITARY MEN AND CIVILIAN LIFE IN VIETNAM. THE NEW WILL ALSO ASSURE THAT THE EXECUTION IN THE COUNTRY OF AGREEMENT AND WITNESSING OF THE U.S. MILITARY MEN AND CIVILIAN CONSIDERED MISSING IN ACTION WILL BE ACCORDED ALSO IN LAOS AND CAMBODIA. END QUOTE.", "END QUOTE.\n\nBY THE ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM, THIS DOCUMENT IS CONSIDERED AS HEREBY ISSUED BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM, THIS DOCUMENT

C. WITH RESPECT TO OTHER UNILATERAL STATEMENTS LAMITED BY THE DOV SIDE ON OCTOBER 17, 1972, THE U.S. POSITION IS AS FOLLOWING:

A) WITH RESPECT TO ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE U.S. AND DOV IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD, THIS MATTER WILL BE DISCUSSED DURING VISITERS' VISIT TO HANOI AND CAN BE SETTLED SATISFACTORYLY.

B) WITH RESPECT TO RECONNAISSANCE ACTIVITIES, THE U.S. SINKS CONFERE THAT WITH THE COMING INTO EFFECT OF THE AGREEMENT, OF RECONNAISSANCE ACTIVITIES AGAINST THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM WILL CEASE.

C) WITH RESPECT TO U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIERS, THE U.S. SIDE CANNOT ACCEPT ANY RESTRICTIONS REGARDING THE TRANSIT OF AIRCRAFT CARRIERS, AS WAS POINTED OUT BY THE KISSINGER TO SPECIAL ADVISOR LEON THE ON OCTOBER 11, 1972. THIS UNDERSTANDING ON THIS QUESTION OFFERS ONLY TO THE STATIONING OF U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIERS.

D) WITH RESPECT TO INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN SOUTH VIETNAM, THE MATTER DEFERED TO THE DOV STATEMENT WAS BEING DISCUSSED IN THE CONTEXT OF THE U.S. PROPOSALS OF SEPTEMBER 26 AND 27, 1972. THESE PROPOSALS ARE SUPERSEDED BY THE AGREEMENT NOW BEING COMPLETED. THE U.S. SIDE TAKES THE VIEW THAT THE QUESTION OF INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS IN SOUTH VIETNAM IS SUFFICIENTLY COVERED BY ARTICLE 9 OF THE GRAFT AGREEMENT AND THAT NO ADDITIONAL UNDERSTANDINGS EXIST.

E. AS SUCH AS THE DOV SIDE CONFIRMS THESE UNDERSTANDINGS AS SET FORTH IN PARAGRAPHS 2 AND 3 ABOVE, THE AGREEMENT CAN BE CONSIDERED COMPLETED.

F. ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE QUESTION OF THE UNILATERAL STATEMENTS WILL BE SATISFACTORY SETTLED, THE U.S. SIDE PROPOSES THE FOLLOWING SCHEDULE WHICH WOULD NOT INVOLVE MORE THAN A 24-HOUR CHANGE IN THE TIME OF THE SIGNING OF THE AGREEMENT.

A) BECAUSE OF THE DELAY CAUSED BY THE NEED TO RECEIVE REPLIES ON REMAINING MATTERS, THE U.S. SIDE PROPOSES THAT DR. KISSINGER ADDS IN HANOI ON OCTOBER 24 AT THE TIME AGREED UPON AND LEAVE ON OCTOBER 25.

B) THERE WOULD BE A JOINT ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE AGREEMENT IN WASHINGTON AND HANOI ON OCTOBER 27, 1972 AT 2100 WASHINGTON TIME.

C) THE SIGNING OF THE AGREEMENT WOULD TAKE PLACE ON OCTOBER 31 IN PARIS.

D) WHILE THE AGREEMENT WOULD NOT GO INTO EFFECT UNTIL ITS SIGNATURE IN ORDER TO SHOW ITS GOOD WILL THE U.S. SIDE IS PREPARED TO OFFER A CEASE FIRE AS OF OCTOBER 28, NOON, WASHINGTON TIME AND ARRANGE FOR SIMILAR ACTION BY THE FORCES OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM.

E) ASSUMING THE DRV SIDE AGREES TO THIS NOTIFICATION SCHEDULE, THE U.S. WOULD STOP DOING NORTH OF THE 20TH PARALLEL ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 23, 1972, AND ALL DOING, SHELL, AND MINING OF NORTH VIETNAM ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 23, 1972.

F) THE U.S. SIDE REQUESTS PRESENT CONFORMATION WITH RESPECT TO THE UNDERSTANDINGS IN THIS MESSAGE. THE U.S. SIDE ALSO REQUESTS THE DRV SIDE TO CONFIRM THE ARRANGEMENTS REGARDING PUBLICITY OF DR. KISSINGER'S VISIT TO HANOI SET FORTH IN THE PAPER WANDER OVER TO MINISTER XUAN THUY BY DR. KISSINGER ON OCTOBER 17, 1972. AS SOON AS THESE CONFORMATIONS ARE RECEIVED THE DRV SIDE CAN COUNT ON THE U.S. SIDE PROCEEDING WITH THE SCHEDULE PROPOSED ABOVE.

G) THE U.S. SIDE REGRETS THE 48-HOUR DELAY IN CARRYING OUT THIS SCHEDULE, BUT CONSIDERS THIS IS UNAVOIDABLE BECAUSE OF THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SUBJECT AND THE NEED FOR PRECISE MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING. IT DOES NOT BELIEVE THAT NOW THAT TWO SIDES ARE SO CLOSE TO THE COMPLETION OF SO LONG A CONFLICT THE DRV SIDE WOULD PROCEED ON THE BASIS OF THREATS.

H) THE U.S. SIDE REJECTS ITS CONVICTION THAT THE END OF THE WAR, UNLESS INTENTION, SHOULD HENDER IN A NEW ERA IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE U.S. AND THE DRV.

END TEXT

TOP SECRET - CONITIVE

10/15/72

THIS COPY ONLY

NEW REPUBLIC

15 JAN 72 (13)

Let's Find Out

Again, there has been a clarification of policy on Vietnam which does not clarify The confusion arises out of a dispute between the President and Senator McGovern (among others) over what Hanoi demands in return for the release of American POWs. The President triggered the debate by telling a CBS interviewer that these "international outlaws" in North Vietnam had said "no deal" on freeing the prisoners in exchange for an announced date for US military withdrawal. McGovern then accused the President of deception, and said that the offer had never been made by the administration. Within 24 hours, another background briefing by a White House spokesman concluded that Mr. Nixon hadn't exactly made that offer but that he had concluded from what has been said in Paris, that no deal could be arranged because "the North Vietnamese are still demanding what they have always demanded, that we pull the rug out from beneath the South Vietnamese government." This is how the administration interprets Hanoi's statement last July, that the US must "respect the South Vietnamese peoples' right to self-determination, put an end to its interference in the internal affairs of South Vietnam," and specifically, cease its efforts to maintain the present Saigon government in power.

Two questions arise. The first is whether this demand of Hanoi is inseparable, as the White House insists, from an offer to let the prisoners go if a deadline for withdrawal is fixed and met. Senator McGovern believes the two are separable; the President doesn't. We are inclined to think the senator is right, but we are not sure. And we would note in passing that by prisoners, Hanoi means all prisoners, not just Americans, which complicates the problem further.

The second, related question is whether Hanoi has in mind to hold prisoners unless and until the President, formally and explicitly, announces his nonsupport of the present Saigon regime. We are not mind readers, but that is not our understanding of the situation. We read Hanoi as saving that the war will go on so long as the US government acts on the belief that the survival of Thieu is vital to its national interest. But if that belief were discarded, if Mr. Nixon were to decide, as he ought, that Thieu is not worth the price we pay for him, it would not follow that the President would have to collaborate in Thieu's overthrow. All Washington need do is allow Vietnamization full play, leaving the political and economic future of Vietnam for the Vietnamese to decide.

These opinions of ours are speculative, but they could be put to the test. One way of testing them was suggested by Max Frankel in The New York Times of January 4: "American negotiators have wondered why the North Vietnamese have not played on American feelings by offering in unambiguous exchange of prisoners for ground and air withdrawal." We have wondered something else. Why doesn't Mr. Nixon offer an unambiguous cessation of all US military action in Vietnam the moment out of our forces by a direct date - convenient on Hanoi's agreement to let free US prisoners by that date and assurances of site visit for our troops? That proposal might produce a clarification that clarifies.

[L.C.]

JAN 21. 1992
Symington Comments On VN

BILL MONROE: Senator SYMINGTON, you indicated yesterday that you felt some of the policies we are pursuing in Indo-China don't seem to you to be consistent with our plans for withdrawal.

Why not?

SENATOR STUART SYMINGTON: It's difficult to understand why we bomb heavily up in NVN, increase our military operations in Cambodia, our support, maintain the military operations in Laos; at the same time say that we are moving out of that war as quickly as we can.

If we continue this operation, there's a chance that our troops that are left could be in very serious trouble.

It's been my position for many months that if we agree to a date and provided a withdrawal, provided they released our prisoners of war, that we could get out of Indo-China, which I now believe is important for the future of this country.

MONROE: You believe we could get out if we simply said we will pull out by a certain date in exchange for release of prisoners?

SYMINGTON: I think that would end this Indo-China war.

And I believe that would be to the advantage of the US for many reasons.

MONROE: Now, Senator, you're talking in exactly an opposite direction than from the Administration.

The Administration says that these activities in Cambodia and Laos and the bombings are actually done to protect our remaining troops and to speed withdrawal.

SYMINGTON: Well, I may be talking against the Administration, but I'm talking about something that the Senate three times has passed and been in favor of.

The House has not approved it, nor does the Administration approve it.

And I think what we're doing today is dangerous from the standpoint of our future.

And it's going to kill a lot more people on the ground - civil-

It's going to kill more of our own flyers and soldiers. We lost five planes in the week that I was out there.

And I would like to see us either pursue it, which is now obviously wrong, or get out of it.

And I think we could get out of it if we were to agree to a date on the withdrawal of the prisoners.

Provided that the prisoners were withdrawn at the same time. (?)

***

[L]

WASHINGTON POST

23 JAN 72 (24)

New Hints on Ending the War

In his CBS interview on January 2, President Nixon hinted for the first time that he would later propose to Hanoi a total American withdrawal in exchange for release of the POWs. This is, of course, the crux of the matter. The administration has talked a good deal about it but it has not made a proposal embodying a withdrawal-prisoner deal to North Vietnam. Thus North Vietnam has never been forced to go through what surely would be the terribly difficult political exercise of deciding how to respond.

Rather, Hanoi has been free to make propaganda on the issue and to float differing and confusing versions of its bargaining position—one should say its "propaganda position" because the United States has yet to force it to define a "bargaining position." For it is of the essence to distinguish what North Vietnam may say to inquiring politicians and journalists—or to American diplomats who are under instructions in effect only to buy time for President Thieu—from what its actual response on a withdrawal-prisoner proposal might be.

Now, however, the administration seems to have moved a step closer toward making such a proposal, though Mr. Nixon's State of the Union message contained no suggestion of it. Diplomatic correspondent Murrey Marder wrote on Friday that "administration strategists are reported to be increasingly tempted to put the question directly to counter critics of administration policy." One hopes the temptation is not based on private assurances that Hanoi will reject the offer. But the critics, assuredly, are gaining force. Last year they were led by Senator Mansfield, whose leverage was limited to legislative politics. This year they are led by Senators Muskie, Humphrey and McGovern,

whose leverage is applied in the much more critical arena of presidential politics.

This newspaper has previously stated its conviction that Mr. Nixon has full and fair reason to declare the United States has achieved its appropriate mission in Vietnam, and that a withdrawal-POW deal should now be offered. To many, it will be deeply disturbing that Mr. Nixon should not start issuing hints of interest in that course until now. But if Mr. Nixon is seeing matters more clearly in 1972's early light, then we urge him to move on.

Senator McGovern, among others, claims that Hanoi would surely accept a withdrawal-POW offer. We are not so sure. It is not inconceivable that some in Hanoi, perhaps those who might win the internal debate such an offer would provoke, might insist that the United States must withdraw not only its own forces but all forms of support for President Thieu. It would involve a risk. There is, however, only one way to find out whether Hanoi will bargain and that is to put the question: to put it, furthermore, in a way and in a form designed to enhance prospects of its acceptance.

The administration is currently advertising its alarm about a forthcoming military "spectacular" the Communists are said to be planning and about the unravelling effect it may have on domestic support for administration war policy. If the White House is in fact as alarmed as it professes, then why should there be any further delay in submitting a serious proposal in Paris? Such an offer could well deter the "spectacular" they believe is being planned. Surely Mr. Nixon would not want to delay the offer, if he is actually contemplating one, because he does not think this is the proper moment for it in his re-election campaign. We repeat our comment on his CBS interview: why not now?

[L]

26 January 1961 P1

# REACTION IS MIXED

## Backers of President Praise His Offer—Critics Skeptical

By JOHN W. FINNEY
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 25—
President Nixon's eight-point
peace proposal was applauded
tonight by Congressional sup-
porters of the Administration,
but was greeted with a mix-
ture of skepticism and surprise
by critics of the Vietnam War.

To the Administration's sup-
porters, the President's disclo-
sure of the secret negotiations
and the American offer was
taken as evidence that Mr.
Nixon had done everything
possible to achieve a negotiated
settlement of the war.

Among the critics there was
doubt that the President had
gone far enough or that his
proposal would be acceptable
to North Vietnam.

Senator John Sherman Coop-
er, Republican of Kentucky,
who in the past has teamed
with Senator Church in offer-
ing Vietnam withdrawal amend-
ments, described the President's
offer as 'fair and just.'

"It ought to be accepted but
I doubt that it will be," he
said. "If not accepted, I still
think we should move out."

Senator J. W. Fulbright, the
Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and one
of the harshest critics of the
Administration's Vietnam pol-
icies, said that the President
had offered what would be
considered in western eyes a
"fair and generous" proposal.

### Sees a 'Sticking Point'

"But what looks generous to
us may not look generous to
North Vietnam," Senator Ful-
bright said. "We may have to
do more" to get a favorable
response from North Vietnam.

The "sticking point," he said,
remains the question of whether
the United States is "willing
to get out and leave the Thie
Government to its own devices."

From the initial Congress-
al reaction, it did not appear
that the President, in disclosing
his peace initiatives, would
achieve one of his stated goals
of unifying the American people

and the Congress behind his
position.

There were expressions of
support, such as from Senator
John Stennis, Chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Commit-
tee, and Representative F. Ed-
ward Hebert, chairman of the
House Armed Services Commit-
tee.

Senator Stennis said, "This
shows that the President has
repeatedly done all that he
could reasonably and honor-
ably do as the chief executive
of our nation."

Mr. Hebert said that: "To-
night in the cause of peace the
President had his finest hour."

"He demonstrated beyond
any doubt his sincerity of pur-
pose and his continuing effort
in spite of the efforts to chal-
lenge the fact that he had been
fighting the cause of peace to
bring about the end of the use-
less and tragic slaughter in
Vietnam," Mr. Hebert said.

Senator Hugh Scott, the Re-
publican leader, said the Pre-
dent's detailed accounting of
the secret negotiations "sup-
ports the wisdom of the Presi-
dent's push for peace" and
Representative Gerald R. Ford,
the House Republican leader,
said, "the President has set the
record straight by revealing his
efforts to end the war through
broad and comprehensive ne-
gotiations."

Mr. Nixons critics admitted
they had been caught off hal-
ance by the disclosure of the
secret peace negotiations—a
fact that contributed to their
generally cautious reaction.
Mingled among some words of
praise for the President by the
Vietnam doves was uncertainty
as to exactly what the Presi-
dent had and was proposing
and skepticism that his peace
proposals were sufficient to
ead the war.

Expressing disappointment,
Senator Frank Church of Idaho,
a Democratic dove on the For-
ign Relations Committee, said
that "had President Nixon con-
fined his offer to a withdrawal
of the remaining forces in ex-
change for our prisoners of
war, I would have applauded
him without reservation."

"However," Mr. Church went
on, "he added another condi-
tion which would require the
north to stop fighting and settle
instead for elections in the
South under a caretaker Gov-
ernment. This has been sug-
gested before and rejected.
Nevertheless, I hope Harris will
not turn down the President's
offer out of hand but will re-
gard it as a starting point for
serious negotiations."

Senator Dan H. Harb (of
Michigan), a Democratic dove,
interpreted the President's offer
as embracing the concept of
a amendment offered by Sen-
aTOR MIKE HAHN, theDemi-
tratic leader calling for with-
drawal of all American forces

in six months, contingent only
upon release of American pris-
oners of war. "It's not the
Mansfield Amendment, but it
certainly aims at the underly-
ing elements of it," he said.

Senator Mansfield, who ear-
lier in the day had persuaded
the Caucus of Democratic Sen-
ators to embrace once again his
amendment, was not immedi-
ately available for comment.

Senator Alan Croston, Dem-
ocrat of California, suggested
the President had still not met
the terms of the Mansfield
Amendment. The issue remains,
he said, of "How long do we
want to stay in Vietnam and
fight and die there until Viet-
nam is able to defend itself?"

Senator Jacob M. Davits, Re-
publican of New York, said that
while the Nixon offer was "fair,
obviously its being made public
indicates that there is little
hope for near-term acceptance."

"The question therefore re-
verts to the U. S. interest and
that I feel still requires com-
plete U. S. withdrawal and the
conclusion of our willingness
to submit financially and with
our national interests at well as
construction," he said.

Senator George Stetson of
South Dakota, comparing in
Chicaco for the presidential
election, expressed I doubt
that the President's offer would
be accepted, especially because
Mr. Nixon offered to set a date
rather than fixed a date for
withdrawal.

Senator M. M. Govea also an-

cused the President of contrib-
uting to a "credibility gap" with
his secret negotiations.

"At the same time Mr. Nixon
was bitterly opposed to the Mc-
Govern-Hatfield proposal to end
the war, he was at the very
same time offering it to the oth-
er side," the Senator said. "This
leads to a credibility gap, both
with the United States Senate
and the other side."

Senator Henry M. Jackson of
Washington, another contender
for the Democratic Presidential
nomination, said Mr. Nixon "re-
vealed a course of negotiation
and action close to what I
have been emphasizing — the
release of our prisoners based
on an agreement for withdraw-
al of all our forces and a stand-
still cease-fire."

Gov. George Wallace of Ala-
bama said the President had
made a "generous offer" but
"since the North Vietnamese
did not respond in private talks,
I doubt if they will make any
positive reaction to an offer
made publicly to the American
people."

Representative John M. Ash-
ton of Ohio, a conservative
member of the Senate, for the
Republican nomination, com-
mitted the President "for re-
fusing to bow to pressures
from the left at home for un-
conditional withdrawal." But he
expressed concern that the
presidents were being used as
mediating "lawns" by the
North Vietnamese and con-
vinced against "withdrawing our
troops simply on the basis of a
negotiation and a promise."

[C]

Jan. 29
1972

John
Cranfield

CHANCELLOR: There was considerable political reaction today to the President's speech.

Republican Senator Hugh Scott said the speech was an answer to reasonable people who had reasonable doubts about the negotiations.

Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader, said the President's speech was a long step forward in laying the cards on the table.

Senator Edward Kennedy said of the President's eight-point plan, that there should be a one-point plan, to withdraw all American troops contingent only on the release of the prisoners.

And some of the candidates for president had their comments.

SENATOR MCGOVERN: What the President is proposing is a complicated eight-point proposition, much of which represents warmed over details from previous offers that have been rejected by the other side. I'm not very hopeful that the Nixon formula will move us any closer to a negotiated settlement.

REPORTER: Senator, what would you do if you were president?

SEN. MCGOVERN: I would accept the offer that the other side has made, in which they said if we would announce now a definite timetable for the withdrawal of all American military operations, in the air and on the ground, no preconditions, just announce a deadline, that that would then open the way for negotiations on the release of prisoners and a cease fire.

I would announce that deadline without further delay.

SEN. HUMPHREY: It seems to me that the better way, and I'm not trying to be a carping critic, because I'm very pleased that the President has taken the steps that he has outlined to the public, it seems to me that the better way would be to set the time for withdrawal, to take the initiative on our part, and of course, at the same time, tie the subject of the release of the prisoners and the MIA's, the missing in action, and set up the machinery to identify the release or to supervise it. It seems to me that's the way to end the war.

SEN. MUSKIE: To propose political initiative aimed at new presidential elections in SVN under international

supervision, copied with President Thieu's offer to resign and that of his Vice President to resign a month before the elections is a new element

On the military side the one speaking point in the proposal is that it would call for a cease fire throughout IC, not simply in VN, that is it would call for a cease fire in Cambodia and Laos as well as VN. This could well lead, I think, to stalemate in Paris, and to a prolongation of the war.

CHANCELLOR: Clark Clifford, who used to be Secretary of Defense, and who was one of Muskie's advisors, today reinforced this point about a cease fire.

Clifford said that in all his dealings with the NVNese, they have always been dead set against any deal involving a cease fire, and Clifford says the President knew that

There was also comment today from Republican Congressman Paul McCloskey of California, who is running in the New Hampshire Primary against Mr. Nixon's VN policy.

CONGRESSMAN PAUL MCCLOSKEY: I didn't think he said too much that was new, except to disclose the secret negotiation efforts. I think that as long as the President continues to insist on the survival of the Government in SVN that the other side isn't going to be impelled to negotiate.

I think that the purpose of the speech is more here for domestic consumption than there's any hope of expectancy that it was going to be answered affirmatively.

CHANCELLOR: It's being said at the White House that the President decided to disclose his own secrets because of domestic divisions in the country. Mr. Nixon has been called his own Daniel Ellsberg.

Domestic divisions on the war, however, are at a low point, and some cynics have suggested that the President's dramatic disclosure had something to do with all those politicians running against him.

[L]

ABC EVENING NEWS,

FEBRUARY 2, 1972

## Peace Plan Comes Under Sharp Attack

REASONER: President NIXON's eight point peace plan came under sharp attack today from Senator Edmund MUSKIE. The Democratic presidential front runner delivered a major foreign policy speech in Washington.

FRANK REYNOLDS: MUSKIE's immediate response to the President's peace plan was cautious but basically positive.

And he believed, criticism of Mr. NIXON would be resented. Now, a week later, he has changed his mind.

SENATOR EDMUND MUSKIE: Most Americans thought they heard the President agree to set a date certain for our withdrawal.

But it is not the genuine date certain so many of us had urged on him.

He did not offer to exchange our presence in VN for the freedom of our prisoners.

Instead, he laid down additional conditions, in short, in the face of a frustrating deadlock, the President has basically renumbered and reissued the proposals that have failed for six years.

We are still trying to win at the conference table what we have not won and cannot win on the battle field.

REYNOLDS: One week ago, MUSKIE was persuaded that he would suffer a political backlash if he criticized the President's peace plan.

He no longer feels that way and again insists the only way to end the war and recover our prisoners is to withdraw all Americans and leave theVNese to deal with the NVNese.

MUSKIE now believes that not only would that be wise policy, but is good politics.

REASONER: While Senator MUSKIE has been relatively subdued on the VN issue up to this point, another Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator George MCGOVERN has made it a major part of his campaign.

This week MCGOVERN is campaigning in New Hampshire.

BILL MATTNE: One year and a million dollars later, George MCGOVERN now believes he is finally seeing some momentum in his long campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Here in New Hampshire, MCGOVERN emphasizes first that he is a serious candidate all the way to the last delegate vote in Miami Beach six months from now.

SENATOR MCGOVERN: I think what we have to demonstrate to skeptical people who might want to support me on the basis of my views but who wonder whether I can really win, we have to demonstrate to them that we do have strength where the voters are.

I've got to either come through with a victory or I've got to come through very strong in some of these early primaries.

I don't say I have to win them all or even to win one of them, but I do have to indicate that I'm a serious contender and that I can draw a heavy vote at the grass roots.

***

MCGOVERN: I would commit us to a definite date - I would make the same kind of a commitment that the Premier of France once made that if he couldn't meet that commitment, he would be willing to resign.

BOSTON GLOBE
FEB 72 (6)

The road to Vietnam peace

[L]

The government of North Viet-
nam has now made public the text
of the nine-point peace plan it
offered secretly to the United States
last June. This is the plan men-
tioned Jan. 25 by President Nixon
on nationwide television and subse-
quently discussed in some depth by
Presidential Assistant Henry A. Kis-
singer at a press conference the fol-
lowing day.

' Examination of the text, and commentaries upon it by leaders of both sides, makes it painfully clear that the United States and Hanoi are still a long way apart in at least two major respects.

First, there is the issue of a time-
table for the withdrawal of US mili-
tary forces from Indochina.

Hanoi's position was, and remains,
that the United States withdraw un-
conditionally from all of Indochina
within approximately six months.

The United States's position is
that withdrawal should take place
only after agreement has been
reached in principle on a final settle-
ment of the differences between the
US and its enemies.

Thus Hanoi demands withdrawal
by a date certain. We propose a date
uncertain — since we set no date for
the final settlement.

The second major divergence of
aims lies in the contending proposals
over the political future of South
Vietnam.

Here, Hanoi wants us to abandon
the Thieu government forthwith and
agree to replace it with a "new ad-
ministration standing for 'peace, in-
dependence, neutrality and democra-
cy.'" This administration would ne-
gotiate a political settlement with the
Viet Cong.

For our part, we would have an
election carried out by a commission
with Communist participation. One
month before this election, President
Thieu and Vice President Huong
would resign. Thereafter, a caretaker
government headed by the chairman
of Thieu's Senate would reign until
a new president was elected.

The chances of the United States
achieving significant modification of
Hanoi's demands through further ne-
gotiations are plainly slim and get-
ting slimmer as we continue the uni-
lateral withdrawal of our ground
forces from South Vietnam.

There is virtually no incentive for
Hanoi to agree to a compromise po-
litical settlement just to get a date
certain for our final withdrawal,
since we are withdrawing our

ground force anyway and have the
calculation of bombing from the air,
as a means of bringing the North
Vietnam to level has already been
tried by former President Johnson
and proved a failure.

As for President Nixon's proposal
for a new election, it seems calcu-
lated to perpetuate the present gov-
ernmental system and certainly is
regarded as such by the North Viet-
namese.

'As the Times of London has ob-
served, "this would leave the South
Vietnamese army and administra-
tion, right down to the village level,
still in effect answerable to President
Thieu. Thus the independent body
supervising the elections on which
Communists and others would be
represented would have little direct
power."

To expect that Hanoi would ac-
cede to Mr. Nixon's proposal is un-
realistic. Their object is to see that
the Thieu government is supplanted,
not perpetuated in power.

Thus, barring major new initia-
tives on Mr. Nixon's part, the pros-
pect is for prolongation of the war
through continued arming of the
South Vietnamese and, perhaps,
stepped-up retaliatory bombing of
the kind already begun late last year.
In short, perpetuation of a limited
war. And so long as this is the case,
the problem of freeing our prisoners
of war will remain unsolved.

Is there then a way out of the di-
lemma?

The Globe believes that there is
one way, and only one. Simply, it is
for the United States to offer the
enemy a firm and early date for our
withdrawal from Indochina — lock,
stock and barrel — in exchange only
for the simultaneous release of the
prisoners of war.

This is not unconditional sur-
render. It is only recognition of the
realities of a situation which has
gone on far too long from the stand-
point of all the combatants.

As former chief US representa-
tive to the United Nations, Charles
W. Yost, has pointed out, the time is
long since past when we had the ca-
pability of playing a decisive role ei-
ther in propping up the South Viet-
namese government or changing it.

"The future of Vietnam," says
Mr. Yost, "will eventually be settled
between the two Vietnamese govern-
ments, either by negotiation or con-
tinued fighting. . . . Vietnamese poli-
tics is no longer our business. That
should be the ultimate meaning of
'Vietnamization.'"

10

WASHINGTON POST
7 FEB. 1972 P-1

WarDeal
Rejected
By Hanoi

Won't Release POWs in Trade For Pullout

By: Hedley Burrell
Washington Post Staff Writer

North Vietnam's chief delegate to the Paris peace talks made it clear yesterday that his side will not give up prisoners of war in return for withdrawal of all U.S. forces.

The delegate, Xuan Thuy, also indicated that the military and political issues must be handled together.

The conditions for settlement, he said, changed with "a re-election last October of the Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.

He suggested that the POWs could have been returned in exchange for a total withdrawal, and the political and military issues could have been handled separately last year if the Nixon administration had withdrawn support of Thieu.

"It would have allowed Mr. Nixon to get out of the war very honorably," Thuy declared on "Face the Nation" (CBS-WTOP). "But Mr. Nixon refused to do that."

Thuy asserted in a New York Times interview Saturday that had the United States set a precise date for withdrawal before the October elections, Thieu would not have been re-elected. He thus suggested that an overall settlement would have been possible by withdrawal alone.

Secretary of State William P. Rogers, reacting on a separate segment of "Face the Nation" to Thuy's comments, said, "We have on every opportunity pointed out that

"the Vietnam would not contain a separate military and political settlement. They have said. We have it return your POWs unless you throw out

the Vietnamese and meet our concerns and solutions." It has never worked any other way, it is not possible for us to work out any military solution unless we give them exactly what they want and that would mean total defeat for the United States.

Thuy was interviewed in Paris, Rogers in Washington.

Sen. George S. McCullum (D-VA), a presidential assistant, has repeatedly argued that the Communists would release the POWs if Mr. Nixon set a firm withdrawal date. Thuy indicated yesterday that while this would have been possible before the October elections in Vietnam last year, it was no longer the case.

Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine), who has come under fire for tagging Mr. Nixon's peace proposals a rearrangement of rejected offers, has said the United States should offer a withdrawal date in return for the POWs and press Saigon to work out a settlement with the Communists.

Except for the suggestion that the United States pressure Saigon to talk with the other side, Muskie's proposals are not considered drastically different from those of Mr. Nixon or other Democrats.

In Miami Beach, another presidential hopeful, Sen. Herbert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) said in an interview with Paul G. Edwards of The Washington Post that he does not consider the North Vietnamese position outlined by Thuy to be an obstacle to ending U.S. involvement in the war.

"Our last priority should be the preservation of Mr. Thieu as head of the South Vietnamese government," Humphrey said. "He has indicated he is willing to step aside...the point is that his successor should not be selected by either the United States or North Vietnam. The people of South Vietnam must have the right to choose a leader in elections that include the Vietcong."

Presidential adviser H. R. Haldeman, meanwhile, in an interview to be broadcast on the "Today" show (NBC-WRC), said that critics of Mr. Nixon's efforts to reach a Vietnam settlement were "consciously aiding and abetting the enemy."

In the interview broadcast yesterday, Thuy asked: "Why doesn't President Nixon make a statement stopping commitment to the Saigon administration? And then the Vietnam problem would be very rapidly settled, both political and military."

Rogers answered: "It is not the Saigon regime were supporting. We're supporting the people in South Vietnam so that they can decide their own future. We just want to work out a relation so South Vietnam can decide its own future."

Thuy was asked why North Vietnam refused to let an impartial group of observers visit American POWs.

"The conditions of this war are different from any other war," Thuy replied. "You must understand that. The war in Vietnam has its own characteristics. If now we let those people visit camps it might help Mr. Nixon in his aim..." He then referred to the unsuccessful U.S. commanding raid of a POW camp in North Vietnam in 1970.

Thuy said that the disclosure Jan. 23 by Mr. Nixon of secret meetings between U.S. national security affairs adviser Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese negotiators was a serious obstacle to a peace settlement.

This was the second time that Mr. Nixon disclosed secret meetings to end the war. Thuy added. The first, he said, was in 1969, when the President spoke of talks with the North held by Henry Cabot Lodge, then the U.S. chief negotiator in Paris.

Asked if his side would favor new talks should Kissinger request them, the minister responded that it would depend on whether Mr. Nixon was serious about reaching a settlement.

He said he does not think that the United States and China would strike a deal adverse to North Vietnam when Mr. Nixon visits Peking later this month.

Peking has always supported progressive movements, he said, adding that China had denounced the U.S. peace proposals and supported the Viet Cong's bid for the total withdrawal of U.S. forces and the end of American support for Thieu.

Asked why the POWs had to be used as pawns in the negotiations, Thuy replied, "It is Mr. Nixon who uses the POWs as pawns, not us."

He said the prisoners were receiving medical treatment and a new list of captives would be published "in due time."

Rogers was asked about the prospects for a North Vietnamese and Viet Cong offensive in the near future.

"My information," he said.

"is that they are moving troops down to the central highlands and strengthening their forces near the Demilitarized Zone." He said an offensive could come within the next month and might coincide with Mr. Nixon's Feb. 21 visit to China.

Thuy said the reports were all speculation.

"Statements make me wonder whether it is the United States who is now conditioning opinion for launching some military adventures against the Vietnamese ..." he remarked.

In Paris, meanwhile, Jean de Broglie, leader of a French parliamentary mission visiting North Vietnam, was quoted as saying the Viet Cong not only want Thieu's resignation but are insisting that the police system in the South be disbanded.

It was put to Rogers that the Communist position all boiled down to one point—"how they define continued American support of Saigon."

"It appears very clear from both these broadcasts that there is something utterly irreconcilable about it, both philosophically and politically," an interviewer suggested.

Rogers answered that negotiations always "seem irreconcilable until they're reconciled."

"I think the President's proposals provide us a foundation on which negotiations could succeed," Rogers added.

WASHINGTON POST 17 APRIL 1972

[L]

Vietnam: "Getting Out" by Way of the Brink

What President Johnson and his predecessors steadfastly tried not to do over 15 years or more, President Nixon, has managed to do almost overnight: he has brought the war in Indochina to the brink of a head-on confrontation with the Soviet Union by his decision to send American soldiers over the suburbs of Hanoi and the port of Haiphong and to amass an American naval armada off the North Vietnamese coast.

There does not seem to be any other way to interpret what he has done. One could understand —if not accept—the monumental air support given to the South Vietnamese during the ongoing North Vietnamese offensive of the past few weeks, and the systematic substitution of our air power for our manpower in the months before that. One could see this as having something to do with bolstering the South Vietnamese forces, and even with "saving the lives" of our remaining troops. Leaving aside the cynical euphemism of "protective reaction," there were enemy tanks to be hit, and SAM missile sites to be taken out and trucks and roads and bridges to be blown up. You could even believe, but just barely, that most of this was being carried on in remote, unpopulated areas so that civilians were pretty much out of the way of it.

But you cannot believe that anymore about a reversion to bombing tactics which plainly endanger population centers and which cannot be related in any immediate sense to the fighting now under way south of the Demilitarized Zone and in the Central Highlands and around Saigon. Nothing that is blown up in Hanoi or Haiphong today is going to influence, in any direct way, the course of battle in the South for a good many months, perhaps even a year; we have ample evidence of that, out of long experience.

And you cannot seriously believe that this revival of the thumbscrew is directed at "the will of Hanoi" for we have more than enough evidence on this score, too: the thumbscrew, sometimes called "rolling thunder" (by the military) or "graduated response" (by the professors in residence in government), has never really worked. In the days of Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow, it didn't persuade the North Vietnamese to "leave their neighbors alone"—if anything it stiffened them—and there is no reason to believe that the effect would be any different now. Moreover, there is nothing "graduated" about what is going on.

So you have to assume that the Russians, who are the main suppliers of the heavy weaponry now in use by the North Vietnamese, are the main object of the weeken bombing strikes around Hanoi and Haiphong; that the President is reviving and applying what John Foster Dulles described as "the necessary art" and which his critics called "brinkmanship": that he is seeking to persuade the Russians to use their benefactor's influence on Hanoi either to slow down the current offensive or to promote negotiations, or both; and that he is prepared, for lack of any other leverage, to throw Soviet-American relations into the scales, to put the SALT talks and the European detente and Russia's alleged axiety over China and East-West re-

lations in general on the table, for the sake of salvaging whatever precisely it is that Mr. Nixon would conceive of as an "honorable" way out of the war.

There is a grim logic in this assessment. It fits the President's longstanding concepts about the utility of air power, particularly in Indochina; it is quite keeping with him oft-expressed admiration for the way President Eisenhower supposedly achieved a Korean truce—by threatening the Chinese with nuclear attack. It accords with the Administration's own proud account of how Jordan was saved and a Middle East conflagration averted —by the maneuvering of American sea power in the eastern Mediterranean. It would be, in short, almost a classic exercise in balance-of-power politics of the sort that Mr. Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger have long espoused.

In other words, it figures—which leaves you to wonder only by what set of values, or what sense of American obligations or security interests, or what reading of American sentiment, it is necessary at this stage of the game to go to the brink with the Russians over Vietnam?

We were told long ago of a plan "to end the war." Can this be it? Can the Russians, in fact, maintain their position in the world while telling their sister socialists in North Vietnam to abandon what they have been fighting for these forty years?

We were told that the South Vietnamese could "hack it by themselves." Are we now to believe that what this really means is that this country must not only continue to provide massive combat air support but also to confront the Russians with the twin threats of aerial and naval blockades against North Vietnam? Is this what "Vietnamization" is all about? Or isn't the real meaning of the Hanoi-Haiphong raids that "Vietnamization" doesn't work well enough to guarantee the President the kind of outcome of the current Vietnam fighting he could feel comfortable with, either in Moscow at next month's summit, or in the election campaign next fall?

This, in our view, is the rub of it—the sort of outcome the President wants and the risks that are worth taking to bring it about, for the risks involved do not seem to us to bear any relationship to the possible gains. If the President's "Vietnamization" policy is as successful as he would have us believe, we have done all that we could reasonably have been expected to do for the Saigon government and we ought to fix a date for our total military disengagement, negotiate as best we can for the return of our prisoners, and get out.

If "Vietnamization" turns out, in fact, to be less than it has been proclaimed to be, the end of it all in Vietnam may then be something well short of what we set out to accomplish, and some might even see it as "dishonorable." Against that ultimate, and still hypothetical judgment, however, you have to weigh the honor, not to say the sanity of trying to influence the outcome in Vietnam at this late date by resuming bombing in or around population centers in North Vietnam for the indirect and largely theoretical effect this may have on the actions of the men in power in Moscow or Peking or Hanoi.

# War Critics on Hill
## Ansail U.S. Tactics

By STANLEY ELDER

Cuyahoga County Free Press

Spurred by the increased U.S. war effort in Vietnam, war critics in the city and Senate are heating up their attack on the Nixon administration's policies.

Hitting at the bombing for the third day in a row, Sen. Edmund R. Stucke of Maine, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said last night that President Nixon is doing the United States "irreparable harm" and undermining its sense of decency with the renewed attacks on North Vietnam.

Another candidate for the nomination, Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota, said: "If anything, the stepped-up bombing will only unit the will of the Viet Cong in the same way as continued Nazi raids over England united the British in World War II."

### Effort to End War

In the House, the Democratic caucus will meet tomorrow to back a new legislative effort to end the war within 30 days.

Rep. Thomas P. O'Neill of Massachusetts, assistant Democratic leader and one of the sponsors of the latest anti-war move, questioned yesterday whether the new and heavy bombing indicated that President Nixon is willing to risk World War III in support of the Thieu government.

GOP leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan angrily charged O'Neill with raising a "red herring." The bombing, he said, is needed to protect U.S. troops in South Vietnam against an invasion by the North Vietnamese.

Other House members criticized Nixon's policy as "bankrupt", a "rand" and unconstitutional. Only Congress, not the President, has the power to wake 'em, Rep. William F. Ryan, D-N.Y., said.

Praise for Nixon came from a Southerner, Rep. Joe D. Waggoner, D-La.

"(Baubly)," Waggoner said, "in his right mind is for war. But there are times when we must face a situation as it is. We must respond, and I commend the President for having the fortitude to do it, to protect American troops."

Muskie hit at the bombing during an emotional address to a fund-raising dinner here last night.

"You know this President hasn't even undertaken to tell our people why he has done what he has done," Muskie said. "He has escalated the war in Vietnam beyond any dimensions that we have known. He has taken on risks not only for our military forces in Vietnam but for us beyond any that have been taken in this war..."

Muskie said Nixon has revived "the discarded policy" of former President Lyndon B. Johnson — a policy that Muskie once supported himself.

"I understand, of course, that his Vietnamization policy is in jeopardy..." Muskie said. "I understand, of course, that this creates grave political uncertainty for the President in this election year.

"But what I don't understand, and what he has failed to tell us, is how this serves the best interest of our people, how this adds to the symbolism of our country as a place of hope, as a force for peace and justice on this troubled planet," Muskie said.

Since the bombing of Hanoi began Saturday, Muskie has introduced a Senate resolution calling for an immediate end to all U.S. military action against North Vietnam. And he promised that if elected, "within two months of my inauguration, I will withdraw all of our forces from

In-China," with release of prisoners as the only condition.

Meantime, Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., said he approves the bombing of targets in North Vietnam, reminding newsmen that six years ago he advocated using U.S. air power to "seal off" Hanoi.

Jackson, campaigning extensively in Ohio prior to the May 2 presidential primary, said he supports "such bombing as is necessary to stabilize the military situation... so as to enable us to continue our withdrawal and bring our prisoners home."

Repeatedly, over the last few years, the House has been asked to condemn the war. Just as often, it has refused.

However, the number of Congressmen in favor of ending the war has increased slightly on each vote. And with the current stepped-up bombing, liberals see growing congressional opposition to the war.

The resolution sponsored by O'Neill and several others asks the Democrats to support legislation that would:

* Cut off money for U.S. military operations in or over North and South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos 30 days after enactment.

* End funds for air and naval bombardment of North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand immediately upon enactment.

* Cut off money for bombing in South Vietnam immediately unless Nixon determines that such missions are necessary to protect American troops during withdrawal.

The legislation would provide for a 30-day extension of the deadline for military operations if prisoners of war are not released.

The request for endorsement from the Democratic Caucus is co-sponsored by Reps. William Anderson, of Tennessee, Philip Burton, of California, Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii, Henry Reuss of Wisconsin, and Charles Yanik of Ohio.

WALL STREET JOURNAL. 21 APRIL 1974.

LAP

# Raids on North Vietnam Peril Nixon Stand Against Pullout Law, Especially in House

By NORMAN C. MILLER

SOUTHERN PERIODICAL OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON--The Nixon administration's renewed bombing of North Vietnam is threatening to destroy the White House's shaky defenses against end-the-war legislation in Congress.

The new drive for legislating a Vietnam pullout deadline is most dramatically evident in the House, which has always quashed Senate withdrawal proposals in the past. While the Senate moved toward a vote on a Vietnam measure, possibly next week, the usually cautious House erupted over the newly charged war issue.

Yesterday, the House Democratic membership voted 144 to 58 to order the House Foreign Affairs Committee to produce within 30 days legislation setting some deadline for total U.S. withdrawal from the war.

Moreover, the resolution adopted by House Democrats condemns the U.S. bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong as "a dangerous escalation of our role in the Indochina war." The Democrats also approved a one-sentence condemnation of North Vietnam's invasion of South Vietnam, but they rejected a tougher resolution attacking Russia, for its arms-supply role, as well as Hanoi.

The Democrats' unusual directive to the Foreign Affairs Committee poses the prospect of the first full-dress House floor fight over Vietnam policy. In earlier tests, pullout proponents always were handicapped because the House was considering Senate-initiated bills under restrictive rules. Still, in the most recent House test last October, administration forces beat back a pullout deadline by only 23 votes. Gain in Strength

The overwhelming Democratic vote yesterday indicates that the opponents of the Nixon policy have gained strength since then. While a pullout bill might still be defeated in the House, to do so the White House would have to hold almost all Republicans behind the Nixon policy --and that would be difficult if current antiwar sentiment continues to boil.

The resolution by the Democratic Caucus directs the House Foreign Affairs Committee to write legislation establishing a date to "terminate all U.S. military involvement in and over Indochina," subject only to the release of U.S. prisoners and an accounting of the missing. Democrats control the House and thus have a majority of the committee. While the committee could nonetheless refuse to obey the Democratic directive, the unusual order by the party membership is so unusually strong that the measure's backers are confident that one way or another they will be able to force a pullout bill to the floor.

The effect of such legislation, even if passed, is questionable, as it would depend on acceptance not only by the Nixon administration but by the North Vietnamese. But its passage obviously would put powerful political pressure on the administration.

The Senate, which three times has approved policy declarations calling for a Vietnam pullout, may vote as early as next week on a far tougher proposition: A cutoff of appropriations for U.S. land, sea or air forces engaged in "hostilities in Indochina" after next Dec. 31. The cutoff would be conditional on the return of American prisoners of war.

Not even the Senate has been willing to invoke the ultimate congressional weapon of closing the purse strings on the war, though the doves have tried several times. The new effort is a rider attached by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Monday to a bill authorizing funds for the State Department. The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Frank Church (D., Idaho) and Clifford Case (R., N.J.), would cancel any other law authorizing combat spending in Indochina after this year.

Floor Vote Next Week

The State Department money bill is scheduled for floor action next week, and administration supporters will try to remove the Church-Case rider. However, the White House could decide to stall this vote in hopes the current criticism of the air action over Vietnam will subside, especially if there isn't any repeat bombing in the Hanoi area. Another reason for possible delay is the absence of Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and Republican Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, who are in the middle of a three-week visit to China.

Another possible hitch to Senate approval of the Church-Case rider is dissatisfaction with it among some of the war critics themselves. Making the money cutoff conditional on release of the prisoners of war could indeed prevent a withdrawal, contends Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R., Ky.).

The POW condition was attached to the Senate's milder policy resolution last year as a way of nullifying the administration's use of this issue as a justification for keeping a residual U.S. force in Vietnam. Now, more antiwar Senators—including some Democratic presidential candidates—are openly suggesting North Vietnam will release the prisoners only after the American forces depart.

Sen. Jacob Javits (R., N.Y.) concurred in this view in a Senate speech yesterday. "It is my firm conviction that there should be no preconditions attached to the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam," he said. "The likelihood of getting out the prisoners is on precedent much greater on this basis."

The White House reacted angrily to the condemnation of its bombing policy by House Democrats. "Words and resolutions are very ineffective in stopping brutal armed aggression," declared Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler.

Mr. Ziegler also attacked the House Democrats for taking a "somewhat contradictory" position in condemning both U.S. and North Vietnamese military actions. "The Democrats are trying to have it both ways," he said. "In matters such as this they can't have it both ways."

Meantime, a group of long-time Senate and House doves joined antiwar organizers in calling for massive demonstrations on May 4 against the Nixon Vietnam policy. At a press conference, they said demonstrations are being planned in several cities.

At the same time, antiwar lobbying organizations, such as Common Cause, are beginning to organize a grassroots campaign in support of end-the-war legislation. The lobbying effort will concentrate both on the pending Senate measure and on members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as they take up their bill.

Mr. Nixon's Brinkmanship

Lg

In ordering the closing of land and sea supply routes to North Vietnam by American military action, President Nixon is taking a desperate gamble that alters the entire nature of the war, that risks the fundamental security and greatest interests of the United States for dubious and dangerous gains, and that runs counter both to Congressional mandate and to the will and conscience of a large segment of the American people.

The mining of the harbors of North Vietnam poses a direct challenge to the Soviet Union and other arms suppliers to Hanoi that could quite possibly escalate into a confrontation between the world's two great super-powers. Only the gravest threat to the security of the United States could justify such a challenge, as was indeed the case in the Cuban missile crisis. But Vietnam is not Cuba; and there is no conceivable American interest at stake in Indochina today as there was in Cuba to warrant the risk—and the escalation—the President has so clearly undertaken.

Let us grant that the North Vietnam Communists are infuriatingly—even insultingly—intransient in the negotiations at Paris and are stubbornly aggressive in the field, as indeed they are. Let us grant that the United States still has a commitment to support to the death the present Saigon Government as representative of South Vietnamese democracy—a commitment which, if it ever existed, has surely been long ago fulfilled. Let us even grant—contrary to fact—that President Nixon's Vietnamization program has been a success and that all that is needed is a little more time and a few more arms to bring Hanoi's belligerence to a halt. Granting all these hypotheses, what possible good could President Nixon's present escalation—cum-confrontation accomplish?

Even if the closing of the ports by mining and the interdiction of land routes by renewed extensive bombing should succeed in their goals without retaliation by the Soviet Union and China, the resultant cutoff in supplies could not materially affect the outcome of the present North Vietnam offensives in the South.

In any case, the bulk of North Vietnam's military supplies enter not from the sea but from China via road and rail. The entire history of deep interdiction of supply routes, from World War II to the present, demonstrates its ineffectuality. At most, therefore, Mr. Nixon's orders would simply tend to move Soviet supplies back to the trans-China route and shift the balance of influence in Hanoi a little more toward Peking.

This semi-blockade policy is both spurious and impractical; and it is difficult to understand how the President and his advisers, given the history of the war, can genuinely believe in it either. But to explain it, as the President did in his television address Monday night, as a means of protecting the American troops still remaining in Vietnam strains credulity to the breaking point. In fact, it is painfully obvious that Mr. Nixon's escalation of the conflict, including the stepped-up bombing of the North in reprisal for the Northern successes in the South, only increases the peril of American ground troops in Vietnam while obviously raising with every air raid the potential number of American prisoners held by Hanoi.

The President's risky action Monday evidently signals a decision to intensify and enlarge American military involvement in the war from sea and air, with all the attendant risks accompanying such escalation. The President is in fact leading the country down precisely the road—though by different means—that President Johnson did in 1965. The difference is that President Nixon

Yet, like the Danes, he seems to forget the history of the war and land resting.

Even the peace offer included in Mr. Nixon's speech has a specious ring to it. He tells Hanoi that if it agrees to an internationally supervised cease-fire and returns the American prisoners, the United States "will stop all acts of force throughout Indochina" and will be out of Vietnam "within four months." On the face of it, this sounds as though Mr. Nixon were at last cutting all ties with the Saigon Government, for there is no mention of any political condition whatsoever. But given Hanoi's present military successes, there is little incentive to North Vietnam to accept a cease-fire now, and while Mr. Nixon specifically promises American withdrawal from Vietnam within a short period, he does not promise withdrawal from the neighboring states, leaving the implied threat of American force and American power still hanging over the periphery.

By his rash and precipitate action, President Nixon is not only risking military confrontation with the Soviet Union over an issue that is not and never has been vital to the security interests of the United States; he is also risking the almost equally dangerous collapse of the painfully built progress toward a genuine diplomatic détente, at it is already taking form in the SALT agreements and would surely be further advanced by the now-threatening Moscow summit conference.

By his action, President Nixon is also inviting Soviet retaliation, if not in East Asia, then in other sensitive parts of the globe. By his action, he is unwittingly encouraging the Soviet hawks. By his action, he is incurring the possible speedy dissolution of the Soviet and detente relationship just painfully constructed with Peking. By his action as well as his rhetoric, he has dug the United States deeper into the hole from which it had for four years been trying to extricate itself in Indochina.

And by his action he has clearly defied the Congress if not the Constitution. This may turn out to be the most dangerous of all the ominous aspects of Mr. Nixon's present course. The Congress of the United States last year resolved that it was "the policy of the United States to terminate at the earliest possible date all military operations of the United States in Indochina." Mr. Nixon said at the time that the resolution was "without binding force or effect and it does not reflect my judgment about the way in which the war should be brought to a conclusion."

But now Mr. Nixon has in effect defied the expressed will of the Congress by replying to North Vietnamese escalation with more escalation—an old, familiar and demonstrably useless course of action. His dangerous and unnecessary resort to semi-blockade and massive bombing in a futile search for military victory in an undeclared war repudiated by a large section of the American people can only weaken the country internally and discredit it abroad.

The only recourse now is in the hands of Congress. It still has the Constitutional power to curb and control the Executive. While it is an extremely distasteful action, under the circumstances Congress still can regain its along the general lines of the Church-Case amendment in the Senate. It can shut off funds for all further military operations after return of the prisoners and after a certain date, either in Indochina as a whole or, as a more limited restraint, above the North Vietnam panhandle.

Mr. Nixon is pushing the country very near to a Constitutional crisis; Congress can yet save the President from himself and the nation from disaster.

NYT
5/10/72

[L]

NATION MAGAZINE 22 MAY 1972 (19)
The Danger of Definitions

In most cases by the President and briefing by Dr. Kissinger underscore the near impossibility of carrying on with them a critical dialogue about the war. The more one reads and hears what they have to say, the clearer it becomes that U.S. policy is almost hopelessly enshrouded in myth and illusion. From the outset, American policy in Vietnam has been based not on misconceptions or erroneous judgments but on willfully false definitions. Over a seven-year period, these definitions have been endlessly repeated and are now firmly embedded in innumerable policy statements. By dint of bipartisan repetition at the highest levels, these definitions have, to some extent, been accepted by a large section of the public as unassailable propositions. Still worse, the decision makers are so entangled in these false assumptions that they habitually deceive themselves.

A fundamental rule in the rational handling of embittered controversies is that each party should be able to give a fair and accurate statement of the other's position. Neither the President nor Dr. Kissinger is capable of such an exercise. They cannot or will not see the situation as the North Vietnamese must see it or, for that matter, as the Russians or Chinese may see it. Or if they can, they are so caught up in their own mistakes that they cannot afford to make the effort. Worse, they must cling to these accumulated false definitions in order to avoid acknowledging profound misjudgments by themselves and their predecessors. So they take new and steadily more dangerous risks in a desperate effort to redefine the situation in a way that will rally domestic opinion and shore up a disintegrating political position.

Thus the President's latest gamble is not primarily designed to "win" the war—his own actions and statements imply that it has been lost—but to make it possible for him to journey to Moscow without the stigma of defeat. It would be difficult to negotiate with the Russians about anything just when, say, the North Vietnamese were entering Hue. At the same time he assumes that he can count, at least temporarily, on a section of the public rallying "in support of the President," as it usually does in a time of national crisis. So he is willing to accept the risks because, as he sees it, he has run out of options. But what if the Russians elect not to stage a direct confrontation? What will the next escalation be? A landing of some kind in the North? A threat to use nuclear weapons (as Dulles once threatened the Chinese through the Indian ambassador?) Or the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons?

Bemused by 19th-century notions of power, Kissinger believes that if preponderant power is escalated, a step at a time, and if the "carrot" is seemingly sweetened a bit at each escalation, the enemy must eventually do the bidding of those who turn the screws. It was Metternich's

partisan view in the old things that were done. But that is a far different matter from the new. But that is a far different matter. Ronald Reagan seems as sure as the British Empire has with the plantation in Lister in 1609. But the trouble in Ireland has not yet ended nor will it until the British quit deceiving themselves about the Irish. General de Gaulle tried to hammer this point home to President Kennedy about Vietnam but without success. In *Memoirs of Hope*, he quotes himself as having said to Kennedy: "You will find that intervention in this area will be an毫无效的 entanglement. Once a nation has been aroused, no foreign power, however strong, can impose its will upon it."

Kissinger's strategy of escalation also assumes that the way to win in the nuclear poker game is to raise the ante, at the right time, in such a way as to force the opponent to make the hard decision of acquiescing in the ultimatum (the bid for power) or of staging a counter-escalation. But suppose the other party elects to do nothing for the time being? Suppose the Russians and the Chinese believe (and in this they would be supported by CIA and other "evaluations") that mining the harbors of North Vietnam and bombing the rail links to China will be as ineffective as Vietnamization in solving America's dilemma? No one pretends that the recent actions can have any short-term effect on the war, and substantial expert opinion on logistics believes that the long-term effect will also fall short of the goal. Mr. Nixon, then, will have "spent" one of his few remaining options to no avail, and will be faced with the need to employ some still more dangerous escalation. It is a progress from unjustified aggression to complete outlawry.

There were, to be sure, some new elements in the offer which the President tried to bury beneath the bluster and arrogance of his address, but the North Vietnamese are not likely to take the bait. So then what? He could try to take the entire issue to the Security Council, but he won't. There is, of course, the possibility of a coup in Saigon. Thieu's declaration of martial law is evidence that he senses the danger. If the present regime were tossed out, the successor regime would not need to be called a "coalition" government even if it were that in fact.

In the meantime, the war continues, the number of POWs is increasing, the destruction is mounting and so are the casualties, and Nixon's Vietnamization policy is in tatters. Why, then, doesn't the President show real concern for the American honor about which he talks so much? Why doesn't he follow the examples of Mendès-France and de Gaulle, who saved French honor by bowing out of Indochina and Algiers? The answer, in brief, is that they were not self-deceived, whereas the President has so entrapped himself in a weight of dogmas, promises, affirmations, threats, declarations and false definitions that he is incapable—psychologically, morally, intellectually, politically—of facing the reality of defeat.

THE TODAY SHOW NBC TV 7:00 AM

June 8, 1972

An Interview with Senator McGovern

BILL MONROE: ...Senator, you have talked about going to Hanoi or to Paris, if necessary, to try to wrap up an agreement to end the Vietnam war and bring the prisoners home. And you have said you have no doubt that you can accomplish such a negotiation.

Now, this suggests that you're going to offer Hanoi something President NIXON is not offering Hanoi. What would that be?

SENATOR GEORGE McGOVERN: I would offer them two things that I think are essential to bring about the release of our prisoners and to end the war. Number one, I've felt for months that we're going to have to set a definite deadline for ending all American military operations. And I think that has to be announced in advance. I don't think they're going to negotiate that point. We'll just have to say that within ninety days, or some such period of time, all operations will be ended.

The second thing we're going to have to agree to is that we will cut off any further foreign military aid to the government in Saigon, the THIEU regime.

Now, I would be willing to make those two concessions in advance, with the understanding that if we carried out our part of the bargain our prisoners would be released, our missing in action men would be accounted for, and our troops would be permitted to withdraw in safety. And I don't have the slightest doubt that that can be negotiated.

The trouble with our present policy is that while we continue the bombing and continue the military presence in Southeast Asia, the other

side is going to make the other side's concessions. I think they're full of massive aerial bombardment. They're holding on to the point, partly to -- as a protection to them against that...

FRANK McGEE: Senator McGovern, you say you would make these concessions in advance and then negotiate the release of the prisoners. If you made the concessions in advance, with what would you be left to negotiate?

SENATOR McGOVERN: Well, I would make clear, Mr. McGee, that the reason for setting the timetable for our withdrawal and the reason for our pledge to cut off aid to the THIEU government was with the understanding that our prisoners would be released, as prisoners always have been at the end of a conflict.

Now, we have to keep in mind that the other side has no selfish interest at all in holding those prisoners once we've agreed to get out and once we've cut off aid to the THIEU regime in Saigon. But as long as we continue our military presence there, I'm convinced the prisoners will stay in their cells.

We know the present course isn't working. So let's make these two concessions that are in our interest anyway, which is to get out and which is to terminate any further military involvement with the THIEU regime, and then take whatever steps we can to see that our prisoners are released.

I am convinced that I could accomplish this whole matter within ninety days of becoming President of the United States...

[L]

By Marilyn Berger

Washington Post Staff Writer

Lc

WASHINGTON POST 13 JULY 1972 P14

# McGovern Changes On Asia Withdrawal

The day before the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. George McGovern substantially moderated his position on withdrawing all American forces from Southeast Asia, saying he would "retain the military capability in the region" to assure the return of all U.S. prisoners of war.

In a statement in response to an endorsement by a group of relatives of American prisoners, McGovern pledged that he would "never abandon those men."

He said: "I intend to use every resource available to the President, including direct personal diplomacy in Hanoi, to insist upon release of all prisoners and a complete, impartial accounting for all missing in action."

Then he added: "While I am fully confident that there would be no such need, I would also retain the military capability in the region—in Thailand and on the seas—to signal and fulfill our firm determination on this issue."

Previously McGovern had said: "I don't think there's a chance in the world of getting those prisoners out of there until hostilities end and we get those troops out of there."

In his Tuesday statement he said the prisoner issue "is the only cause for which I would retain any U.S. forces in or adjacent to Southeast Asia." But he reiterated his position that the prisoners "will not be brought home by more American blood, by more American treasure, or by more American bombs raining on the people of Asia.

"Their only hope is peace," he said.

McGovern said that if he were elected President, "we would be out of the brutal war in Vietnam in 90 days. There would be no forces on the ground in Vietnam, and there would be no American aircraft bombing anywhere in Asia on behalf of the Thieu government."

He said: "We must take the keys to those (POW) prison cells away from General Thieu and place them in American hands."

McGovern said the POWs "can be returned within 90 days of a single decision-- that their freedom, and not the political survival of a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon, is our first and only priority in Southeast Asia."

McGovern's nomination was seconded last night by Valerie Kushner, the wife of Maj. Floyd H. Kushner, who has been a prisoner of war since November, 1967.

The Democratic Party platform adopted Tuesday states that, "We must insist that any resolution of the war include the return of all prisoners held by North Vietnam and other adversary forces and the rullest possible accounting for the missing. With increasing lack of credibility, the Nixon administration has sought to use the prisoners of war as an excuse for its policies."

The platform pledged, "as the first order of business, an immediate and complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces in Indochina."

In testimony before the foreign policy panel of the Democratic Platform Committee, Prof. Abram Chayes, a McGovern foreign policy adviser, said that, "Sen. McGovern has said that if elected he will, on inauguration day, order an end to all armed action by U.S. forces in Indochina, except in self-defense if fired upon. He would withdraw all such forces, lock, stock and barrel, within 90 days thereafter."

Chayes said: "When the war is over there will be no need and no purpose for the North Vietnamese to hold them (the POWs)...That is the way it has always happened after past wars. That is the way it will happen this time."

McGovern also threw his support behind an amendment to the proposed platform sponsored by Sen. Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington, strengthening the plank on support for Israel. The revised plank, adopted by a voice vote of the convention during the early hours yesterday, states that the next Democratic administration should "maintain a political commitment and a military force in Europe and at sea in the Mediterranean ample to deter the Soviet Union from putting unbearable pressure on Israel."

McGovern has not altered his position that American forces in Europe should be reduced from 310,000 to 130,000 troops.

Church: Hanoi will get its own
terms
7/22/72

[L]

By Courtney R. Sheldon
Staff correspondent of TCSM

Washington

While White House officials are alternately
hopeful and discouraged over Vietnam peace
prospects, a leading Democratic dove says
that Mr. Nixon "has come to the end of his
rope."

"If a settlement is possible at all," says Idaho Sen. Frank Church — who has been mentioned by Senator McGovern as a potential secretary of state — "it will have to be made on Hanoi's terms."

"Now it can be camouflaged to look like an
acceptable arrangement. But I don't think
Hanoi will back down on any of its basic
demands."

He was referring to the possibility of some
kind of interim cease-fire in South Vietnam in
exchange for ending the U.S. bombing of the
North.

The Idaho Senator was questioned on
Vietnam in an interview as the Senate
grappled with the Mansfield end-of-the-war
resolution and Dr. Henry A. Kissinger kept
his bags packed for further secret talks with
the Hanoi delegation at Paris.

This central sticking point in Paris and in
the debate in this country has not changed
over the past two years, U.S. officials

acknowledge. How much further support
should the United States give the SAIGON
GOVERNMENT BEFORE IT IS LEFT TO
DEAL DIRECTLY WITH Hanoi?

The heavy air support that was dispatched
to rescue the South Vietnamese from the
North Vietnamese offensive indicates, ac-
cording to the doves, that the Nixon program
of Vietnamization is not working even at this
late date.

Secretary Melvin R. Laird and others,
however, praise the South Vietnamese Air
Force, point to the disruption of North
Vietnam inflicted by U.S. bombers, and say
these are the realities Hanoi must deal with.

It has been axiomatic among Democrats
that Mr. Nixon needs peace in Vietnam to be
re-elected. Statements by Mr. Nixon and Dr.
Kissinger that the U.S. would now negotiate
its "already generous" peace package still
further have tended to confirm this.

A converse theory has gained more belie-
vers here since the Democratic Party splin-
tered itself at Miami Beach. It is that Mr.
Nixon now doesn't need a Vietnam peace to
smash the McGovern candidacy.

Indefinite holdout seen

Thus, it is argued, he can hold out for his
terms indefinitely. The administration is
passing the word to its newspaper columnist
supporters that the Soviet Union and China
have already concluded that Mr. Nixon will
be re-elected and are advising Hanoi to make
the best of this before the election.

In these moments of uncertainty on the
President's ultimate decision, the tide of
public opinion is being watched closely

The television networks show films of
destruction of civilian targets and a Swedish
narrator says some legitimate military tar-
gets nearby were untouched. If this is so in a
few instances, it is accidental, administration
officials say.

The Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, secretary-general of the World Council of Churches, believes U.S. planes are deliberately bombingikes in North Vietnam.

According to Dr. Blake, he requested a
meeting in April with President Nixon on
behalf of a group of American church figures
to "discuss the moral issues involved in the
Vietnam war.

"As of today," he complained in a letter to
Mr. Nixon, "There is no indication of your
willingness to discuss these matters with the
ecumenical leaders of your own country."

'Ought to have withdrawn'

Senator Church says he is convinced that
"this bombing, despite the devastation, has
really unified the North Vietnamese. . . . All

that's left is to level Hanoi. . . . I think they
can absorb the last and final punishment we
can give out."

In the Senator's opinion, "We could not
honorably agree to the political conditions
laid down by Hanoi. Therefore we ought to
have withdrawn our own forces, inasmuch as
we have fully armed and equipped the South
Vietnamese to defend themselves."

"Had we done that, then the Vietnamese
themselves would either have fought the war
to a finish one way or the other, or would have
found a basis for compromising the struggle.
It would not have been one involving the
United States or one that forces the United
States to displace the very government we
have undertaken for so long to sustain in
power and for which we have sacrificed so
much."

What chance to succeed?

What assurance is there that the Church-
McGovern plan for ending the war will be any
more successful than that of Mr. Nixon, the
Senator was asked.

"One thing that should be clear by now is
that the strategy of retaining American
forces in South Vietnam and continuing to
participate in the war has not succeeded in
releasing the prisoners," he replied.

"I think, and I've thought all along, that
North Vietnam will never be willing to give
up our prisoners until we are willing to give
up the war."

"Hanoi then would have no further reason
for keeping them once we have stopped
bombing the North and once we have with-
drawn the balance of our forces from the
South. This has been the case in the past. It
was true with the French. It was our
experience in Korea.

What basis for expectation?

Is there anything in the record of North
Vietnam that can be pointed to which
demonstrates that Hanoi would do as the
doves say they would?

"I should think the evidence is there only in
a negative way. Time and time again they
have said the prisoners won't be released
until the United States ends its participation
in the war."

Administration spokesmen have said they,
too, would be willing to settle for a military
solution — that is, one that leaves a political
settlement up to Saigon and Hanoi. But, they
insist, Hanoi balks.

The counter to this by the doves is that the
Nixon administration would continue aid to
the Saigon government, whereas the Demo-
crats would cut it off. This, the doves say,
would be sufficient concession to Hanoi and
Hanoi would not expect the U.S. to get
involved in forming a coalition government.

[L]

New Vote
Sets GI
ullout

Senate, 50-47,
Puts 4-Month
Limit on Funds

By Spencer Rich
Washington Post Staff Writer

In a new rebuff to President Nixon on his Vietnam policy, the Senate voted 50 to 47 yesterday to force total U.S. military withdrawal from all of Indonesia in four months, provided North Vietnam releases U.S. prisoners of war within that period.

It was the second time in two weeks that the Senate has voted to cut off funds for U.S. military operations in Indonesia within four months, subject to prisoner release. Vir-

the same amendment

ided to the foreign military authorization a week ago Monday on a 49 to 46 vote, but the Senate then killed the aid bill.

Yesterday, however, the amendment, sponsored by Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass.) and backed by 10 other Republicans and 39 Democrats, was added to the $20.6 billion defense procurement authorization bill, and the bill was then passed, 92 to 5. The procurement measure, unlike foreign aid, is considered absolutely necessary to U.S. security even by most critics of the war.

The bill now goes to conference with the House, which doesn't have a similar antiwar provision. The administration hopes to kill the amendment in conference.

Administration supporters like Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis (D-Miss.) argued that by setting a fixed withdrawal date without requiring North Vietnam to agree to a cease-fire as a prior condition, the amendment would cripple the Pres-

's efforts to negotiate an
able peace that could

South Vietnam with
some hope of survival.

"It's ridiculous to try to carve into hard law" a specific date for withdrawal and instructions to the President

the purpose of withdrawal, said Stennis.

"That might be a good regulation for a schoolchild, but the idea of putting the President of the United States under restrictions like this... he's not permitted to be Chief Executive... why they'd laugh at him, they'd laugh at him."

"Binding the hands of the President—if we're going to do that, I think we ought to send up the white flag," Stennis thundered.

Brooke, Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.) and other supporters of the fund cutoff argued that the time had come, once and for all, to put an end to the war subject only to release of U.S. prisoners. They said this should be done without waiting until the future of South Vietnam as a non-Communist power had been made certain, regardless of how long this would take.

"If we don't bite the bullet, if we keep hoping for negotiation, we might be there not four months more, but a year or two more," said Brooke.

Cranston argued that the preconditions of withdrawal demanded by the President—release of prisoners and an Indochina-wide cease-fire—were simply a formula for endless U.S. involvement, since the South Vietnamese could veto the cease-fire. Others argued that the all-Indochina cease-fire requirement implied a demand that North Vietnam guarantee the non-Communist future of South Vietnam, and meant endless war.

Seeking to reassure Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who feared the language of the Brooke amendment might not contain guarantees strong enough to require release of U.S. prisoners, Brooke said, "before he withdraws all our forces (under his amendment), they must return the prisoners of war."

Cranston gave this interpretation, "It is my understanding that we don't get all the way out... we retain the right to use land, sea and air forces, until the last prisoner is out. If there's no release (of prisoners), we don't necessarily apply" the withdrawal requirement for U.S. forces.

Final passage of the Brooke amendment and the bill came in a series of 12 successive roll-call votes which took more than two hours. With Vice President Agnew in the chair, administration forces—knowing that they were a few votes short—forced one roll-call vote after another in an attempt to reverse the outcome, perhaps by delaying the final vote so long that some senators favoring the Brooke amendment would leave for out-of town engagements, a

But the blue favoring the amendment held firm on one procedural roll-call vote after another.

The first vote on the war issue came on an amendment by Sen. George D. Aiken (R-Vt.), which, in effect, killed strong Vietnam fund-cutoff language being proposed by Cranston and substituted an endorsement of President Nixon's demand for prior release of all U.S. prisoners of war and for an Indochina-wide internationally supervised cease-fire before the United States withdraws.

This carried, 50 to 47, since many middle-of-the-road senators considered the Cranston language simply too tough in requiring withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam by Oct. 1, without preconceptions.

However, the Senate next took up the Brooke proposal—a more moderate amendment than Cranston's, but far stronger than Aiken's in the demands it placed on the President to withdraw.

This carried, 49 to 47, in the first crucial roll-call, with 11 Republicans favoring it while 14 Democrats (virtually all Southerners) opposed it.

This vote wiped out the earlier Aiken language. On this vote and all the others, Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (R-Md.) and William B. Spong (D-Va.) voted to back the Brooke amendment, while Harry Flood Byrd Jr. (Ind.-Va.) and J. Glenn Beall (R-Md.) voted to oppose it.

Administration forces then began their series of procedural moves to reverse the 49-to-47 decision. They lost them all by margins of two and three votes.

Brooke forces then mopped up by tabling (killing), 59 to 38, a Dole amendment that Congress "assumes responsibility" for the consequences of passage of the Brooke language.

Just before final passage, the Senate accepted, 95 to 2, an amendment by Jack Miller (R-Iowa) adding the requirement that North Vietnam account for U.S. men missing in action, as well as release prisoners of war, as a precondition of U.S. withdrawal from Indochina.

The final vote on the Brooke amendment was 50 to 47. It would have been 49 to 48 had not Sen. James B. Allen (D-Ala.), opposing the amendment, switched his vote to "yes" in order to be eligible to move for reconsideration.

Despite heavy pressure from the administration, none of the Republicans who supported the fund cutoff last week switched their votes.

"Funds authorized of appropriated by this or any other act for United States forces with respect to military actions in Indochina may be used only for the purpose of withdrawing all United States ground, naval and air forces from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and protecting such forces as they are withdrawn. The withdrawal of all United States forces from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia shall be carried out within four months after the date of enactment of this act; provided that there is a release within the four-month period of all American prisoners of war held by the government of North Vietnam and all forces allied with such government."

The Senate bill authorizes $20.6 billion in Fiscal 1973 for weapons procurement. The administration asked $23.3 billion, and the House voted $20.6 billion. Total Defense Department appropriations, for which the Nixon administration has requested $86 billion, will be voted separately. The $86 billion includes pay, food, equipment and benefits for the armed forces, as well as weapons.

The Senate bill also includes an unlimited authorization for arms credits for Israel through the end of 1973; authority for a one-time repurcation of military retirement pay for persons who retired before Jan. 1, 1972; a requirement that the Defense Department notify all subjects being used for medical experiments of any danger to their health; and a ban on deliberative attempts to start firestorms and alter the weather as methods of warfare.

All these provisions were added by Senate floor amendments and aren't in the House bill.

Major provisions of the Senate bill provide the full $444.5 million sought for the B-1 bomber, virtually the full amount sought for the Trident submarine-fired missile system ($906.4 million in the Senate bill), the full $299 million sought for the fourth nuclear-powered carrier, $732 million for the F-14 navy fighter (procurement of 48 is called for), and $171.4 million for the SAM-D missile. All these provisions are the same as the administration asked and the House approved.

The Senate bill, however, contains only $561 million for the anti-ballistic missile system and limits it to one site, the one already being built at Grand Forks, N.D. It bars a start on a second ABM site in the Washington area. The House granted the administration's request for $800 million for both sites.

[c]

The Brooke Amendment: A Potential Nixon Book

For the second time in a week, a working majority of 50 senators, including 11 Republicans, has amended a bill in such a way to require a cutoff of funds for American war activities in Indochina in four months—if Hanoi returns the prisoners. Since Mr. Nixon wants not only to retrieve the prisoners but to bring about a certain political result in South Vietnam, he remains adamantly opposed to this second amendment sponsored by Republican Edward Brooke. Speaking for Mr. Nixon, Senator Stennis argued that the amendment would bind the President's hands. This, of course was exactly what the Senate majority wanted to do. It had evidently lost confidence that the President, if left to pursue his own policy, would soon enough end American participation in the war. The Senate majority was also well aware that its conditional four-month deadline — conditional on prisoner return—is slacker than the now three-month deadline the President set for himself by in effect pledging to end the war by election day.

To be sure, the Brooke amendment is still a long way from becoming law. Last week it was attached to the military aid bill; Mr. Nixon showed his distaste for any war-policy restriction—and, incidentally, his concern for supposedly crucial military aid—by having his Senate lieutenants join with aid's regular foes to kill the bill. But now the Brooke amendment is on the $20.5 billion military procurement bill, which few think the President would kill or veto. Since procurement goes to a conference of the two armed services committees, both generally respectful of White House war rogatives, the bill they report out is unlikely to include the restrictive amendment. But would the Senate then accept the report? The Senate has the further option of attaching the Brooke amendment to the foreign aid bill when it comes out of the House; foreign aid is handled by the two foreign affairs committees and even the House committee now wants to use legislation as leverage on the war. Just how the battle over the Brooke amendment will end is uncertain. That it will rage right up to November 7—unless Mr. Nixon has managed to reach a negotiated settlement before then—seems virtually assured.

As we have noted previously, the Brooke amendment, even if enacted into law and implemented by the President, would not of itself end the American role in the war in Vietnam. Any policy mandating the release of prisoners before the host of hostilities assures that the initiative will remain in Hanoi: Hanoi holds the prisoners and, alone, decides whether to let them go. It has held them so far we point out, notstag against a bombing halt and total troop withdrawal but as trading bait in its negotiations for a wide political opening for its comrades in Saigon.

Close readers of this page know that we had some reservations about both the propriety and effectiveness of Congress jumping in, after years of permissive support of White House policy in Vietnam, and issuing legislative orders which effect would be to undercut President Nixon's efforts to reach a settlement. Now that the Senate has gone ahead and taken this leap, however, it seems to us right to acknowledge that the substance of the Brooke amendment does in fact off an opportunity to end the struggle between the President and the Congress. For its language provides a broader basis than any other in sight on which different branches of the American government and different segments of American opinion can unite on a common route out of the war. The possibility is open now that it has been fully proven to practically everyone but Mr. Nixon and supporters on this matter—that the United States has done all it could reasonably and honorably be expected to do for the cause of South Vietnam.

For a President who campaigned in 1968 or promise to end the war, who entered the White House with a pledge to bring the American people back together, and who faces strong opposition to his Vietnam policy in his re-election campaign in 1972, the Brooke amendment or some variation on it would seem to constitute a potential boon. The Congress, as we say, assumes serious political and even moral risks by leveling an election eve war-policy challenge at a President who has a secret negotiation with the enemy in progress. For his part the President must weigh the political and moral risks of his own.

[c]

WASHINGTON POST

17 AUG 1972 Pgl 1

Hanoi Spurns
McGovern's
POW Plea

By William Greider

Washington Post Staff Writer

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. Aug. 16 — Sen. George McGovern sent a personal emissary to ask the North Vietnamese to release American prisoners of war before the November election, but Hanoi turned down his down.

McGovern's communication was through Pierre Salinger, press secretary to the late President John F. Kennedy and a McGovern campaign aide. Salinger said today that he met with North Vietnamese officials in Paris twice in the last month, asking about the possibility of an early release of prisoners before the war is over.

Salinger said he also advised the North Vietnamese that McGovern wants a quick-settlement to the war, even if that means a Nixon peace agreement which would wipe out the war in Vietnam as a political issue in the fall campaign.

McGovern, campaigning today in Illinois, acknowledged the efforts and said:

"Anything I can possibly do to secure the release of those prisoners, I'm going to do."

His campaign political director, Frank Mankiewicz said the prisoner return, if successfully engineered, "might have taken the issue out of the campaign—defused it."

Mankiewicz added: "It was worth asking. I don't know how much hope there ever was."

These developments came to light today in a somewhat tangled manner in which McGovern at first seemed to deny any connection with Salinger's conversations in Paris then later in the day announced that he had requested the inquiry.

It began with a United Press International dispatch from Paris which quoted unidentified "friends of the McGovern campaign." The story said Salinger had called on the North Vietnamese delegation to urge a peace settlement with the Nixon administration and to warn them not to delay until after the election.

When reporters confronted McGovern in the lobby of the St. Nicholas Hotel here with questions about that report, McGovern said he gave no such instructions to Salinger.

"I know nothing of any such report," McGovern said. "There's no truth in it at all."

The Democratic presidential candidate recalled that Salinger told him he was traveling to Paris after the Democratic National Convention and said, "He might make some inquiries about the status of negotiations and I told him I would be interested in talking to him when he returned." But McGovern said there had been "no instructions whatsoever."

A few hours later after a phone conversation with Salinger who was back in New York, McGovern issued this statement about the trip to Paris:

"At my request he met with members of the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris. The only purpose of the discussion was to determine if any change had occurred which would permit the return of the prisoners prior to the end of hostility.

"Mr. Salinger found no change in the publicly stated position of Hanoi. Mr. Salinger also made clear that I have repeatedly stated my conviction that the end of the war should not be delayed by a single day because of the American election campaign."

Confronted later again by reporters, McGovern insisted there was no inconsistency in his two public statements.

As Salinger reconstructed the events, McGovern called

him the day after the Democratic convention and asked me if I would make contact with the North Vietnamese delegation on one point only — if there was any chance of releasing prisoners and if there was any change in their position on the prisoners and anything that would induce them to change."

He met with two members of the delegation staff in Paris on July 18 and put the question to them. "They told me they would get answers for them," he said. That was the day before White House foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger met in Paris with Le Due Tho of North Vietnam, a meeting which Salinger was told about.

Salinger said that in inquiring about the prisoners he also stated to the Vietnamese "what has been Sen. McGovern's public position—that I desire to end the war, greater than his desire to see the war remain as a political issue and therefore, if they felt they could make peace, they should not delay."

Two and a half weeks later, the delegation staff called him and they met again on Aug. 9.

They told me the word from Hanoi was that there was no change on the POW's and the prisoners will not be released until hostilities are ended," Salinger said.

By Spencer Rich

President of the Senate

The Senate yesterday approved a bill which would kill an Indochina and cutoff provision by a 45-to-42 vote yesterday, reversing two embarrassing defeats for President on the same cent months.

stripping the Indochina proposal from the foreign-military-aid authorization bill, the Senate approved the 1.82 billion aid measure on a 9-to-41 roll-call vote.

President Nixon also won a victory when the Senate agreed, 56 to 32, to boost the amount in the bill from $1.45 billion to the final $1.82 billion figure. A substantial proportion of the funds will go for military economic aid to allies in Southeast Asia. The measure must now go to conference with the House, which approved an authorization of $2.13 billion.

The Indochina fund cutoff—sponsored by Sen. Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass.)—was by far the most controversial provision of the bill. So strong is the administration opposition that, at the President's request, Vice President Agnew flew back from Texas, where he was campaigning, to be on hand as presiding officer so that he could break a tie vote and defeat the provision if

er, Agnew's vote waseded, as Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern (D-S.D.), Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.), William B. Spong (D-Va.) and several others who have voted for the fund cutoff in the past were out campaigning and didn't return for yesterday's vote.

A few other former supporters either switched positions or withheld their votes and gave pairs to absent senators.

Had all the absentees been present, and had those who paired voted instead, the fund cutoff apparently would have carried, 51 to 48.

Brooke, who has pushed the fund cutoff through the Senate twice before only to see it watered down or defeated at a later legislative stage, expressed considerable annoyance with the absences, particularly McGovern's.

The fund provision would have cut off money for all U.S. military operations in Indochina in four months, provided North Vietnam returned U.S. prisoners within that period and gave an accounting of those missing in action. Services Committee Chairman John Stennis (D-Miss.) offered the amendment stripping it from the bill.

Stennis, with strong support from Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), who also spon-

sored the provision raising the aid authorization amount, argued that to set a fixed date for U.S. withdrawal conditioned only on release of prisoners would leave North Vietnam no incentive to negotiate and would thereby thwart the President's effort to obtain a settlement that would guarantee the survival of South Vietnam.

Scott told the Senate that the President, having removed more than 500,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam, leaving only 39,000 there, is doing an excellent job of winding down the war and shouldn't be handcuffed in his search for a settlement on U.S. terms.

But Brooke, Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Harold Hughes (D-Iowa) and others said the current course seems to presage an endless bombing war designed to bring North Vietnam to heel while negotiations dragged on forever. They said the United States could gain no advantage whatever from continued participation and should get out.

Predictions that North Vietnam would massacre 100,000 opponents should it ever gain control in the south are a "hoax" based on dubious prognoses, Kennedy charged. In any event, he said, the fighting and massive U.S. bombing in the last two years has already killed 400,000 North and South Vietnamese civilians and combatants from various countries.

In the Key vote yesterday, Sens. J. Glenn Beall (R-Md.) and Harry Flood Byrd Jr. (Ind.-Va.) voted to kill the In-

dochina fund cutoff, while Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (R-Md.) voted to keep it alive. Spong was absent.

Mathias was one of only seven Republicans who joined 35 Democrats in voting to retain the cutoff. Thirty-three Republicans and a dozen Democrats (mainly Southerners) voted to kill the cutoff.

The only outright switch by previous supporters was that of Clinton P. Anderson (D.-N.M.), who voted with the administration. But previous supporters Marlow W. Cook (R-Ky.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) both gave pairs to absent senators, and McGovern, Spong, Humphrey, Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.), Harrison A. Williams (D-N.J.), and Robert L. Stafford (R-Vt.) all were absent. They had voted for the cutoff on Aug. 2.

In yesterday's vote the administration lost two senators who had backed it Aug. 2, as Thomas J. McIntyre (D-N.H.) and Howard Cannon (D-Nev.) voted for the fund cutoff. Several other backers also were absent, but it picked up Anderson, James B. Allen (D-Ala.) who didn't vote last time, and Sen. Elaine Edwards (D-La.) who succeeded the late Allen J. Ellender.

Brooke, angry at McGovern's absence, said, "The war is McGovern's chief issue, he had a chance to be effective but he was out talking about it." Cranston, responding later, said, "If McGovern is elected President, the war will end anyway."

McGovern was advised the

night before the vote that the administration probably would win because of absenteeism by others and a decision by some former GOP backers of the cutoff to withhold their votes; and therefore was told he wasn't required to come back because his vote probably wouldn't make a difference.

On final passage, the administration had the support of four Republicans who had voted against the aid bill when it was defeated in August: Sens. Norris H. Cotton (N.H.), Edward J. Gurney (Pa.), Clifford Hansen (Wyo.) and Milton R. Young (N.D.).

WEDNESDAY MORNING - 27 SEPTEMBER 1972

Absenteeism Helps White House

WASHINGTON POST 27 SEP

# Senate Kills Viet Fund Cutoff

LQ

us.

He has chosen what he calls "decisive military action" to end the fighting. Despite all the highly publicized "secret" meetings with the other side, he has persisted in the belief that we can find peace only in a wider war. But the escalations of 1965 and 1967 were also "decisive military actions" and they did not end the war. They only increased the killing and increased the costs.

## Cambodia and Haiphong

Mr. Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, made without the approval of Congress as required by our Constitution, that was a "decisive military action," but it did not end the war. It only brought the war to more people who had been living in peace and it brought Communist rule to two-thirds of that previously neutral country.

The mining of North Vietnamese harbor was a decisive military action, but it did not end the war. The supplies still flow into the south, and our adversary is reported by our own observers to be as strong as ever.

For nearly 30 years, the people of Vietnam have been at war. For nearly 30 years, the Japanese, the French, the Americans have tried "decisive military action" to win a satisfactory peace. And for 30 years, each, in turn has failed.

Now, the answer to failure is not more of the same. And yet I fear continued war is what the Nixon Administration has in store if they stay in power.

Secretary of Defense Laird recently admitted to a Congressional committee that the fighting could continue far into the future under present policy.

Four years ago last night, on Oct. 9, 1968, Mr. Nixon, as a candidate for President, said to a crowd in California, and I quote:

"Those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance." Now, Mr. Nixon has had his chance. He could not produce peace in four years. And we have every indication that he cannot produce peace in eight years.

So, I ask the American people—shall we break free at last from General Thieu? Shall we forget about saving face and begin saving the soul of our nation? Shall we demonstrate that we are determined to stop the killing and to stand for peace?

Let me now set forth the specific steps that I would take as President to carry out that determination.

Immediately after taking my oath as President, if the war has not ended by then, I would issue a national security directive to the Secretary of Defense, to the Joint

— Immediately stop all bombing and acts of force in all parts of Indochina.

— Immediately terminate any shipments of military supplies that continue the war.

— Immediately begin the orderly withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam, from Laos and Cambodia, along with all salvageable American military equipment. And we will assign whatever transportation is required to complete that process and to complete it within 90 days—a time period that I've been told by competent military authority is well within our capability. Secondly, I would issue the negotiators in Paris:

— Notify the representatives of the other side that we have taken these steps to end the hostilities, and that we now expect that they will accept their obligation under their own seven-point proposal of 1971—to return all prisoners of war and to account for all missing in action. We will expect that process to be completed within 90 days to coincide from our complete withdrawal from the war.

— We would further notify all parties that the United States will no longer interfere in the internal politics of Vietnam, and that we will allow the Vietnamese people to work out their own settlement. The United States is prepared to cooperate to see that any settlement, including a coalition government, gains international recognition from the war.

## Trip for Vice President

Thirdly, I would send the Vice President to Hanoi to speed the arrangements for the return of our prisoners and an accounting of the missing.

I would also instruct our diplomats to contact the opposing parties in Laos and Cambodia in order to secure release of prisoners held in those countries, and an accounting of missing in action, including American civilian newsmen now missing in Cambodia. There are six known prisoners in Laos, and nearly 300 missing. No effort has been made to secure their release.

Fourth, after all of our prisoners have been returned, and we have received a satisfactory accounting for any missing men, I would order the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs to close our bases in Thailand, to bring home any troops and equipment still there, and to reassign elsewhere any ships still stationed in the water adjoining Indochina.

Fifth, as the political solution in Vietnam is worked out by the Vietnamese themselves, we should join with other countries in repairing

Press to take immediate action on an expanded program for our veterans. I think it's simply a disgrace that our Government is able to find these young men to send them off to war, but somehow, we look the other way when they come back in need of an education or decent medical treatment, or a decent job.

Now, like many other veterans of World War II, I received a four-year education under a generous G.I. Bill of Rights. I think Vietnam veterans need that help more than those of us who fought a generation ago because we came back with the welcome of a nation that knew we had fought and won a necessary war.

The Vietnam veterans come back to a country that largely believes this war was a mistake. So, we ought to literally put the arms of this nation around these young men and guarantee them either a good job or a fully funded higher education. Months ago, I sponsored in the Senate a Vietnam veterans bill of rights that would do precisely that.

Finally, when the war has ended, when our troops and prisoners are home, and when we have provided for the veterans of Vietnam, we must then consider the young men who chose jail or exile because they could not in conscience fight in this war.

So, following the example of earlier Presidents, I would give these young men the opportunity to come home. Personally, if I were in their personally, if I were in their for two years of public service on subsistence pay simply to demonstrate that my objection was not to serving the nation, but to participating in a war I thought was morally wrong.

We are not a vindictive or mean-spirited people. And we must act as Lincoln told us — "With malice toward none and charity for all." We must bind up the wounds of this nation, and we must bring all of our sons back.

In that same spirit, we must oppose any so-called war crimes trials to fix the blame for the past on any citizen or any group of citizens. Vietnam has been a terrible experience for all of us, on every side of this issue. And this is not the time for recompilation. It is the time for reconciliation.

So, this is what I would do to bring America home from a hated war, and it is a program that will work. The people of France were once trapped in Vietnam, even as we are. But in 1954, they chose a new President, Pierre Mendes-France, whose highest commitment was to achieve peace in Indochina. His program was very similar to mine. And within just

returned.

Now, I ask you to remember that I speak to you as one who has publicly opposed this war for nine years. I ask you to remember that my opponent has supported American military intervention in Vietnam ever since 1954. I ask you to recognize that every detail of my position is fully out in the open. It is a public plan—not a secret plan.

Often during this last tortured decade, I've reflected on a question from the Scriptures: "Which of us, if his son asked him for bread, would give him a stone?"

Our sons have asked for jobs—and we've sent them to an Asian jungle. Our sons have asked for an education—and we've taught them how to kill. Our sons have asked for a full measure of time—and 50,000 of them have been lost before their time.

## "Rekindling of Faith"

So, let us seize the chance to lift from our sons and ourselves the terror of this war, and bestow the blessings of peace. And then, we can restore our sense of purpose and our character as a great nation.

This is not just a question of material wealth—although the billions which would other wise be lost in Southeast Asia could then be used to secure a better life for our own people. But more important for America, there will be a special healing in the wings of peace. It will be a healing of our doubts and a rekindling of our faith in this great and good land, and in our own capacity to make it so.

On the night when the last American soldier from Vietnam has landed in San Francisco, there will be a new birth of confidence and hope for all of us. On that night, we will know that, once free of the waste of this war, we can begin the rebuilding of our own land—a task that can provide a fulfilling job for every man and woman in America, who is able to work.

On that night, America can begin to be America again. It can be the America that we learned to love in the days of our youth—a country that once again stands as a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs.

This is the choice of a century. But it is also the same choice that human beings have faced from the very beginning. So, let us heed the ancient words: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose life, that thou and thy seed may live."

Thank you. God bless you.

[L]

LOS ANGELES TIMES - 12 OCTOBER 1972

# McGovern's Plan for Withdrawal

Sen. George S. McGovern's television address on the war in Vietnam was constructive and useful. He spelled out a practical program for the withdrawal of American forces, for terminating American military action. And, perhaps more important, he dealt realistically with the way America must accept this failure without losing confidence in the nation's principles.

We are uneasy about some of the details, notably the question of support of South Vietnam following an American withdrawal. McGovern has suggested (1) the immediate termination of "any shipments of military supplies that continue the war" and (2) removal from South Vietnam within 90 days of "all salvageable American military equipment."

Presumably he is not suggesting that the army of South Vietnam be disarmed. But he seems to be suggesting that South Vietnam be left defenseless. It seems to us that this question is more appropriate to negotiation. For McGovern has left nothing as an incentive for China and the Soviet Union to halt their arms flow to North Vietnam.

We think McGovern is right in refusing to make the prisoner question an obstacle to American withdrawal from South Vietnam. In practical terms, there is little the United States can do to force this issue. The potential for negotiating release of the prisoners is being explored in Paris. McGovern has proposed that only the withdrawal of American forces off shore and in Thailand

would be contingent on settlement of the prisoner question.

The most useful contribution McGovern has made in the speech is the realization with which he has faced the failure of the American intervention. This is not new for him. But it is important for the nation to face the facts and not be diverted by those who insist on a peace formula contrived to justify what the United States has done. He spoke with compassion that equated the deaths of Vietnamese with those of Americans. He spoke with welcome favor of the ideals of the nation, "the America that we learned to love in the days of our youth, a country that once again stands as a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs."

But he also spoke against the backdrop of peace talks proceeding in Paris with unprecedented intensity, peace talks that could bring a cease-fire before election day. They are peace talks that have failed in the past out of boundless suspicion and distrust, not for lack of generosity in terms. But they are peace talks that have been permitted for too long to justify a perpetuation of the American intervention.

If the peace talks fail again to end the killing, Sen. McGovern has at least shown that there is another way to end the American part in the killing. So his proposals deserve a central place in the debate of this campaign.

WASHINGTON POST 19 December 1972

# The Great Peace Charade

"Charade: a parlor game in which the players are typically divided into teams, members of which take turns in acting out in pantomime a word or phrase, often syllable by syllable, which members of their own team must guess."—the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

As Dr. Henry Kissinger tells it, the North Vietnamese have engaged in procedures in Paris that "can only mock the hopes of humanity" and so the President has decided that "we could not engage in a charade with the American people". So the talks have been suspended and the bombing of the North above the 20th parallel has been resumed, presumably to knock some sense into the heads of the men in Hanoi. Well, we do not doubt from Dr. Kissinger's account, that the North Vietnamese are up to some dark and dubious bargaining tricks; on the contrary we would be surprised if they weren't. And we are astonished that the President's chief Vietnam negotiator, who is not exactly new to dealing with Communist negotiators, seems so surprised that the North Vietnamese are not behaving like perfect gentlemen. The tactic of suddenly reintroducing new and hard demands, of renegotiating on tentative past agreements in advance of an across-the-board settlement, of seeking to squeeze out last minute concessions and to undermine broadly-stated principles—all this is familiar stuff, reminiscent of almost all of the classic confrontations with the Russians and others across countless bargaining tables over the years.

Nor do we doubt that the proposals that the Communists presented to us in the last few days of the talks last week would in fact make a shambles of a cease fire, and as Dr. Kissinger argues, give North Vietnamese operatives a license to spread across the countryside and enter every village in the South as members of inspection teams ostensibly charged with keeping the peace. The President and his negotiator were probably well advised under the circumstances not to accept terms which would have given formal endorsement to a peace plan which would deny the Thieu government or any other independent regime in Saigon a reasonable chance to work out its own destiny.

But not having ourselves introduced the word "charade" into the conversation, we feel free to call attention to its dictionary definition: it is a game "in which the players are typically divided into teams"—that is to say, it takes two teams to play. And it is our reluctant conclusion, that Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger have made their own considerable contribution to this particular charade. The word they have been trying to get across to their team members, which is to say, the American public, is "peace"—as in "peace is at hand." And it is important to remember that the critical piece of pantomime, if you will, was played out on television on the eve of the national election, with the most careful calculation, with what had to be enormous political effect. Everything we were told by Dr. Kissinger on October 26th pointed in one clear direction: a settlement was within handy reach, a matter of a few days and a little good will; the American role in the war was just about over; the President

had for all practical purposes fulfilled his 1968 campaign pledge, renewed in 1969, to "end the war" in Vietnam.

Now the very least that can be said, on the basis of Dr. Kissinger's latest progress report on the war, last Saturday, is that he and the President have been taken for a long hard ride by the North Vietnamese; in short, they have been bad, by Dr. Kissinger's own admission, and so have all of us by indirection, because nobody is any longer talking about peace being at hand. Rather, we are being told that every time we reach out for it, Hanoi's bargainers snatch it from our grasp.

We are still, of course, getting some of the same old pantomime: "great progress has been made... we have an agreement that is 99 per cent completed"... although Dr. Kissinger concedes that the remaining one per cent is "a fundamental point." We do not know, because nobody's saying what this last difficulty is. But our own interpretation of Dr. Kissinger's analyses suggests that what remains to be decided, while it may turn on such specifics as the machinery of cease-fire enforcement, is in fact nothing less than the political future of South Vietnam. That is to say, what remains to be settled is what the war has been fought over for several decades.

This, in our view, is a large part of what gives the talks the character of a charade. For as they have been presented to us by the Nixon administration, the talks are supposed to produce "peace"; they are supposed to reconcile the diametrically opposed objectives of North and South Vietnam in a way that will satisfy the interests of both sides and justify hundreds of thousands of deaths and endless expenditures. And this, in our view, cannot be done. As we have argued, there is no conceivable settlement short of an unwinnable victory in conventional terms that will not impose on both sides a risk of losing almost everything each has been fighting for while simultaneously granting both sides some reasonable opportunity of achieving through a settlement and a cease fire what they have been unable to achieve by force of arms. It is nonsense to suppose, after an end to the fighting as it has been waged the past ten years, that the struggle will not continue in other, subtler forms—to suppose that Hanoi has abandoned its objective because of the bombing and because of the big power diplomacy conducted by Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger with the Russians and the Chinese. The performance of the North Vietnamese negotiators late last week, you would think, offers conclusive proof of this.

And yet, the President gives no evidence of being prepared to accept this harsh reality. He continues—mostly through his spokesman these days—to hold out this bright promise of enduring peace, when the most he can hope to achieve is an American disengagement from the conflict on terms which will bring back our prisoners and leave the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance of survival by their own efforts and out of their own will. This is the risk Mr. Nixon will not face up to. And that, in turn, is why it will take more than an end to Hanoi's pantomime to put a stop to the Great Peace Charade.

LOS ANGELES TIMES 28 December 1972 (1 Jan)

Beyond All Reason

There in his splendid isolation sits the President,
consulting with few, explaining to none, directing
against a small Asian country a rain of death and
terror that to the whole world makes the United
States of America appear a barbarian gone mad.

No hope of marginal advantage in further nego-
tiations with the North Vietnamese can justify
such terrible retribution for the breakdown in ne-
gotiations. No hope of slight improvement in the
fortunes of the South Vietnamese government can
justify the blackening of our good name, the sear-
ing of our self-respect, that this murderous bomb-
ing inflicts upon this nation. No presidential anger
at the slipperiness of the North Vietnamese can
justify the damage done by this massive assault to
the people's confidence in the Presidency and in
this President.

The President is trying to obtain the unobtain-
able. He is trying to secure through negotiations a
guarantee for the future of South Vietnam that a
decade of heavy American fighting has not been
able to obtain.

It cannot be done. The United States has for a
decade prevented the collapse of South Vietnam.
The United States has for a decade poured military
aid into South Vietnam to enable it to prevent its
own collapse. The one thing the United States has
not been able to do, because it cannot, is to breathe
into the South Vietnamese that sense of nation-
hood, that fiber of the will, that will in the end
make the difference between an independent South
Vietnam and a South Vietnam influenced or con-
trolled by North Vietnam.

There are no guarantees in Vietnam. There are
only possibilities; at best, probabilities. A negotiat-

ed settlement that would bring peace to all Indochi-
na has always been the preferred resolution of the
war, even though no one has ever thought that a
negotiated peace would ever be anything but unea-
sy and inconclusive, would ever be much more than
a pause in the long struggle over the future of In-
dochina. But at least a negotiated settlement would
bring about an end to the killing that has devastat-
ed the peninsula for a generation.

That kind of settlement slipped from our grasp in
October, in large part, apparently, because the
President believed that the guarantees for South
Vietnam were too weak, and the threats to South
Vietnam too great.

Now the President, once again, is trying to bring
about the solution he desires by the use of enor-
mous military force, by an aerial bombardment
more fearful than any the world has ever seen.
This in the face of all the evidence in this war and
others that the bombs will not achieve the ends
sought. This in the face of the deaths of yet more
American airmen, in the face of the taking of yet
more of those very prisoners whose release is one
of the few legitimate aims the United States has
left in the war.

Of all the errors made in the war, of all the con-
fusions of illusion and reality, of all the willful uses
of arbitrary power, this is one of the most shock-
ing, because the means used are so grossly dispro-
portionate to the ends sought. If a negotiated set-
tlement is still possible, then let us quit the bomb-
ing and find out; let us be willing to take the risks
for peace necessary to end American involvement
and bring the American prisoners home. If a nego-
tiated settlement is not possible, then let us quit In-
dochina, with the reasonable expectation that the
release of the prisoners will follow.

[L]

APPENDIX B

VIETNAM 1972: SAMPLING OF CONGRESSIONAL ACTIONS

February 2, 1972 Senator Muskie offered a two-point peace plan for Indochina. It would:
- set a date for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in return for the release of American POWs and the safety of American forces as they withdraw, and
- urge the South Vietnamese Government to seek a political accommodation with the Communists or be deprived of U.S. military support after U.S. forces withdraw.

February 9, 1972 Senate Foreign Relations Committee by unanimous vote reported a war powers bill sponsored by Javits/Stennis, a synthesis of war powers bills introduced in 1971. Debate on war powers legislation began March 29.

March 23, 1972 Seven Democratic Senators and 34 House members announced the introduction of end-the-war legislation. Their bill would:
- require total withdrawal of all U.S. forces in Indochina and a cessation of all U.S. air and shelling operations in Indochina within 30 days in exchange for an agreement by North Vietnam to release all American POWs;
- failing such an agreement, the withdrawal deadline would be extended 30 days;
- after that time, unless Congress cancelled the measure, withdrawal would proceed with or without a POW agreement.

March 29, 1972 Senate began debate on war powers legislation. As reported by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the bill provided that the President could take emergency military action - in the absence of a Congressional declaration of war - only to repel or forestall an attack on the United States or on U.S. forces stationed abroad, or to protect U.S. citizens or nationals in danger in a foreign country or pursuant to some specific statutory authorization, short of a declaration of war, confined to some particular area. When the President took such emergency action, he had to terminate it within 30 days unless Congress specifically authorized

[LC]

2

it to continue.

**April 11, 1972**
Senate rejected a Hruska motion to send the war powers bill back to the Committee on the Judiciary for further study. The vote was 26-60.

Senate however rejected a Gravel amendment to the war powers bill to apply the bill's provisions to the Indochina war, unless Congress declared war on North Vietnam within 15 days. The vote was 11-74.

Senate adopted a Javits motion to table (kill) a second Gravel amendment to the war powers bill to delete the provision exempting ongoing hostilities and substitute a declaration of war on North Vietnam. The vote was 78-7.

Senate rejected a Fulbright amendment to the war powers bill specifying that the bill, while exempting the Vietnam War, did not give the President any authority to continue hostilities in Southeast Asia. The vote was 28-56.

**April 13, 1972**
Senate by a vote of 68 to 16 passed the war powers legislation, along lines reported by the SFRC with the addition of perfecting amendments proposed by Sen. Javits. No conference was requested with the House which had passed much milder war powers measures in 1970 and 1971. The House version required only that the President report to Congress whenever he acted without prior Congressional authorization to commit US forces to hostilities, to send combat-equipped troops overseas or to enlarge forces already stationed abroad. It urged but did not require the President to consult Congress before taking such action.

The Senate, having voted its legislation on April 13, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 20 reported adversely on the House version and sent it to the Senate floor with a recommendation it not be passed. It was hoped that when it came to the Senate floor, the Senate passed version would be offered and adopted as a substitute, followed by a conference. However, the Senate took no action on the House resolution.

**April 17-19, 1972**
Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the Administration's foreign military aid requests. Secretary of State Rogers and subsequently Secretary of Defense Laird testified at the opening sessions which focused almost exclusively on U.S. resumption of full-

3

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scale bombing of North Vietnam.

Following Secretary Rogers' testimony, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 9-1 in favor of a Church-Case end-the-war amendment to the State authorization bill cutting off all funds for U.S. ground, naval or air operations in or over Vietnam after December 31, 1972, conditional upon the release of American POWs and an accounting of American MIAs.

Senator Muskie has introduced a resolution calling for the immediate end to all American military action against North Vietnam.

April 19, 1972
House Democratic Caucus considered (and narrowly rejected by a vote of 97-105) a resolution sponsored by Rep. O'Neill calling upon Democrats to support legislation to:

- cut off all funds for U.S. military operations in or over North and South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos 30 days after enactment;

- cut off funds for air and naval bombardment of North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand immediately;

- cut off funds for bombing in South Vietnam immediately unless the President determines it is necessary to protect withdrawing American forces;

- provide for a 30 day extension of the military operations deadline if American POWs have not been released.

At the request of Senator Cranston, the Senate set aside five hours of debate on American bombing policies in Indochina. Senators engaged in the debate spoke on both sides of the issue.

April 20, 1972
House Democratic Caucus adopted an O'Neill resolution ordering the House Foreign Affairs Committee to produce, within 30 days, legislation setting some deadline for total U.S. withdrawal from the war subject to the release of American POWs and an accounting of MIAs. The vote was 135-66.

House Democratic Caucus adopted a Gibbons amendment to the O'Neill resolution adding a condemnation of the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. The vote was 186-16.

House Democratic Caucus adopted the O'Neill resolution with the Gibbons amendment by a vote of 144-58.

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House Democratic Caucus rejected a Montgomery amendment to the resolution condemning the Soviet Union for sending weapons to North Vietnam. The vote was 51-149.

April 26, 1972
House tabled an Abzug resolution of inquiry to require the Administration to supply Congress with sensitive information on:

- current U.S. troop strengths in Indochina and all movements of men and supplies to Southeast Asia since March 15, 1972;

- detailed bombing statistics regarding North and South Vietnam and American casualty figures for the first ten days of March and the first ten days of April 1972;

- bombing statistics regarding Cambodia and Laos from January 1972;

- Administration compliance with the Mansfield amendment (passed in 1971) stating it was U.S. policy to withdraw totally from Indochina by a specified date, contingent upon the release of American POWs. The vote was 113-270.

May 2, 1972
House Armed Services Committee rejected a Nedzi amendment to the military procurement bill calling for total U.S. military withdrawal from Indochina by September 1, 1972, contingent upon the release of American POWs. The vote was 5-32.

House Armed Services Committee maintained a point of order against a Leggett amendment to the military procurement bill to bar the reintroduction of American ground troops or the use of nuclear weapons to counter the current Communist offensive in South Vietnam.

May 9, 1972
Senate Democratic Caucus adopted a resolution "disapproving the escalation of the war" reflected in the President's decision to mine North Vietnam's harbors and continue intensified bombing of that country. The vote was 29-14.

May 10, 1972
Democrats in the House Foreign Affairs Committee (10-1) agreed to support legislation ordering an end to all American military involvement in South Vietnam and withdrawal by October 1, 1972 conditional upon American POW release, MIA accounting and safe withdrawal of U.S. forces.

May 11, 1972
20 House members and 2 Senators filed suit to obtain an injunction to enjoin the President from continuing the Vietnam War, from further bombing or the mining of harbors, from further interruption of communication and

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rail transportation and other acts of violence against
North Vietnam.

**May 16, 1972**
Senate narrowly adopted an Administration-backed Byrd amendment to the Church-Case end-the-war amendment (State authorization bill) to make U.S. withdrawal also contingent upon North Vietnam's acceptance of a ceasefire (putting the Senate in line with the President's proposal for a ceasefire). The vote was 47-43.

House Foreign Affairs Committee began hearings on a draft joint resolution requiring termination of U.S. military involvement in or over Indochina by October 1, 1972.

**May 31, 1972**
Senate first adopted the Church-Case end-the-war amendment to the State authorization bill, as modified by the Byrd amendment. In response to the President's May 8th proposal, Senators Church and Case had modified the December 31, 1972 withdrawal deadline reported by the committee to four months after an agreement was reached for the release of American POWs and an accounting of missing. Voice Vote.

Senate then adopted a Stennis amendment to delete the entire Church-Case amendment from the State authorization bill. Voice Vote.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported the FY73 foreign military aid authorization bill with a Mansfield end-the-war amendment. This amendment would prohibit: --(1) the use of funds to keep U.S. forces in South Vietnam after August 31, 1972 (no preconditions);

--(2) participation by U.S. forces in hostilities in or over Indochina upon completion of a ceasefire agreement between US and communist forces (only), release of American POWs and an accounting of MIAs.

As reported, the bill also placed a $275 million limit on U.S. aid to or spending in behalf of Cambodia (excluded air operations) and required specific Congressional authorization for use of funds to finance foreign forces operating in Laos, Thailand or North Vietnam (aimed at CIA funding of Thai "volunteers".)

**June 12, 1972**
Senate began consideration of the FY73 foreign military aid bill which included the Mansfield end-the-war amendment.

**June 13, 1972**
House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly adopted a

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6

Buchanan end-the war resolution that the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam within four months of an agreement on American POW release but also conditional on a ceasefire. The resolution, adopted by a vote of 19-18, in substance was an endorsement of the President's May 8th peace proposal. It was a substitute for the proposal supported by committee Democrats (May 10) for withdrawal by October 1, 1972 without complete ceasefire condition.

June 27, 1972
House rejected a Harrington amendment to the military procurement bill to cut off funds for military operations in Vietnam on September 1, 1972, contingent only upon POW release. The vote was 152-244. House also rejected a Mikva amendment to prohibit the bombing of dikes in North Vietnam. Voice vote.

July 18, 1972
Senator Cannon offered an end-the-war amendment to the foreign military aid bill as a substitute to the committee-approved Mansfield amendment (May 31). Senator Cannon's proposal would alter the first section of the Mansfield proposal by changing the withdrawal date from August 31, 1972 to "90 days after enactment" (about December 1, 1972 given Congressional timetables) and make such withdrawal contingent only upon an agreement for the release of American POWs. The second section of the Mansfield provision would be unchanged.

July 19, 1972
Senator Cooper offered an end-the-war amendment to the foreign military aid bill to require the unconditional withdrawal of all American forces from Indochina within four months.

July 24, 1972
Senate adopted a Mansfield amendment to the Cannon end-the-war proposal to change the withdrawal deadline to October 1, 1972 and deleting an agreement that POWs be released before troops were withdrawn. The vote was 60-32.

Senate rejected the modified Cannon amendment to the foreign bill. The vote was 44-49.

Senate rejected a second Cannon end-the-war proposal offered as a substitute to the Cooper amendment (above). This would cut off war funds 90 days after enactment contingent upon an agreement for American POW release. The vote was 40-55.

Senate rejected an Allen amendment (in the nature of a substitute for the Cooper amendment) stating the sense

7

of the Congress that all U.S. forces be withdrawn from
Vietnam four months after an internationally supervised
ceasefire and release of American POWs. The vote was 45-
50.

Senate adopted a Brooke amendment to the Cooper end-
the-war proposal requiring the release of American POWs
before the fund cut-off would become effective. The
vote was 63-32.

Senate adopted the Cooper end-the-war amendment, as
modified by Brooke. The vote was 50-45.

Senate then rejected a Stennis amendment to delete the
Cooper-Brooke provision from the bill. The vote was 46-
49.

Senate finally rejected the entire FY73 foreign military
aid bill by a vote of 48-42. Those opposed to the end-
the-war provision were aided by traditional opponents
of military assistance.

July 25, 1972
House Foreign Affairs Committee, reversing itself, narrowly adopted a Hamilton amendment to the foreign military aid authorization bill to require the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Indochina and the termination of all hostilities no later than October 1, 1972 contingent upon a ceasefire with North Vietnam "to the extent necessary" for the safe withdrawal of American troops and upon the release of American POWs and an accounting of MIAs. The vote was 18-17.

July 26, 1972
Senator Cranston reintroduced the revised Mansfield end-the-war proposal (October 1, 1972 deadline) as an amendment to the military procurement bill.

Senator Brooke reintroduced the modified Cooper end-
the-war amendment, defeated with the foreign aid bill
July 24th, as an amendment to the military procurement
bill.

August 1, 1972
House Foreign Affairs Committee voted end-the-war language in the foreign aid authorization bill. It would terminate US military actions "in or over" Indochina by October 1, 1972, with US troops withdrawn by that time, subject to a US ceasefire with North Vietnam "to the extent necessary" to withdraw US forces, and subject to POW release and MIA accounting. The vote was 18 to 17 in favor.

8

August 2, 1972 Senate first adopted an Aiken amendment to the Cranston end-the-war proposal (above) to declare withdrawal would be completed four months after an internationally supervised ceasefire had been declared (in line with the President's terms). The vote was 50-47.

Senate then adopted the Brooke end-the-war amendment as a substitute for the Cranston and Aiken proposals. The vote was 49-47. Senate reaffirmed adoption of the Brooke substitute by a vote of 50-47.

It adopted a Miller amendment to the Brooke substitute making withdrawal also conditional upon an accounting of MIAs. The vote was 95-2. And it rejected 1-96 a Mansfield motion to table (kill) the Miller amendment.

Senate also adopted a Pastore motion to table (kill) a Dole amendment stating that Congress accept full responsibility for the consequences of adopting the Brooke amendment. The vote was 59-38.

August 10, 1972 House adopted a Bolling amendment to delete the end-the-war provision from the foreign aid bill. The vote was 229-177.

August 14, 1972 The House, considering war powers legislation previously passed by the Senate, passed by a vote of 344 to 13 amended language which was less restrictive of the President's war powers than the Senate version; the House version was similar to the milder resolutions passed in the two preceding years.

September 8, 1972 House and Senate conferees to the military procurement bill agreed to delete the Brooke end-the-war provision adopted by the Senate August 2. Senator Brooke announced he would reintroduce the amendment when the Senate considered the revived foreign military aid bill.

September 14, 1972 House rejected an Addabbo amendment to the DOD appropriations bill to cut off funds for support of U.S. activities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia pending the release of American POWs and an accounting of MIAs. The fund cut-off would become effective four months after enactment and apply only to funds in the defense bill. The vote was 160-208.

September 19, 1972 Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a revised foreign military aid bill with Brooke end-the-war provision requiring the withdrawal of American forces from Indochina in four months contingent upon the return

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9

September 26, 1972 Senate narrowly adopted Stennis amendment to the foreign military aid bill to delete the Brooke end-the-war provision from the bill. The vote was 45-42.

October 2, 1972 Senate rejected (26-55) a Proxmire amendment to the DOD appropriations bill to ban the use of funds in the bill for American bombing in Indochina.

Senate however also adopted a Mathias amendment reaffirming the 1971 anti-war language (the only language approved by both Houses of Congress) that it was US policy to end military operations in Indochina "at the earliest practicable date."

October 10, 1972 Senator McGovern outlined his plan for peace in Indochina. Under the proposal outlined, he, as President, would:

- bring an immediate halt to all bombing and acts of force in Indochina;

- terminate any shipments of military supplies that continue the war;

- withdraw all American forces from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia along with all salvageable American military equipment within 90 days;

- inform Hanoi of these steps and request it, in exchange, to release all American POWs and provide an accounting of MIAs to be completed during the 90-day American withdrawal;

- notify all parties that the U.S. will no longer interfere in the internal policies of Vietnam;

- close American bases in Thailand once American POWs had been released and an MIA accounting provided;

- join with other to provide reconstruction aid to Vietnam;

- expand Veterans' programs in the United States;

- provide amnesty to draft evaders contingent upon a period of alternative domestic service.

December 18, 1972 Resumption of bombing of North Vietnam prompted renewed anti-war statements on the Hill, foreshadowing new legislative end-the-war efforts in 1973.

[L]

DENVER POST

16 March 1973 (23)

# But Not With U.S. Forces

OUR GOVERNMENT is gravely and properly concerned this week over the reports that North Vietnam is continuing to move troops and weapons down the Ho Chi Minh Trail toward South Vietnam in possible violation of the Paris peace agreement.

The Pentagon has estimated that the traffic has involved about 30,000 soldiers, 300 armored vehicles and some heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns since the first of the year.

How much of that has moved down the trail since the peace agreement was signed in late January is not clear. But the post-treaty movement has been substantial enough to worry U.S. officials and raise additional doubts about whether Hanoi intends to allow a meaningful peace.

The picture is complicated by an unfortunate vagueness in the language of the Paris treaty on the subject of the introduction of new troops and weapons.

Article 7 says that at this stage "the two South Vietnamese parties shall not accept the introduction of troops, military advisors . . . armaments, munitions and war materials into South Vietnam."

But the article doesn't say how the two parties go about not accepting the introduction of troops and weapons, if the troops and weapons remain under the control of North Vietnam, which is not mentioned in the article at all.

In addition, Article 7 specifically permits the "two South Vietnamese parties" to make periodic replacements of arms which have been destroyed, damaged, worn out or used up after the cease-fire.

A further complication is that the United States was supplying arms to South Vietnam at an accelerated rate before the cease-fire and there have been reports that South Vietnam has violated the treaty as well as North Vietnam.

None of this in any way lessens the danger to the peace or the breach of good faith which the North Vietnamese movement of troops and arms brings with it.

OUR GOVERNMENT OUGHT to do everything it can through diplomatic means and non-military pressure to bring the movement toward the south to a halt.

There is one thing, however, which it ought not to do, and that is to become reinvolved in the Vietnamese fighting.

The movement of the North Vietnamese is primarily a problem for the South Vietnamese, who have been trained and equipped for years to handle such a development.

Having halted aerial bombing in both the north and the south, the United States ought not to resume it. Having moved most of the way toward a total troop withdrawal from Vietnam, the United States ought not to stop the withdrawal.

[L]

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 18 March 1973 (19)

# The U. S. must not return to the Vietnam quicksand

March 28 is ten days from today. In that interim we will not even speculate that President Nixon would impede the completion of the prisoner return and U.S. withdrawal agreement in Vietnam. That swap is a fragile business, charged with emotionalism and with symbolism.

Mr. Nixon, however, expressed what can be reasonably taken as worrisome resolve in his Thursday news conference.

We are of no mind to make more of it than there is there. We profoundly hope the President is not contemplating what could become re-engagement in the Indochina war. We are eager to be convinced that he is as committed as we believe the vast majority of Americans are to getting America finally and totally out of that ugly involvement.

But even with those reservations, the President's Thursday statement is ominous:

"I only suggest this: That we have informed the North Vietnamese of our concern about this infiltration and what we believe it to be, a violation of the cease-fire, the cease-fire and the peace agreement. Our concern has also been expressed to other interested parties and I would only suggest that based

on my actions over the past four years that the North Vietnamese should not lightly disregard such expressions of concern..."

The infiltrations of which he spoke are of North Vietnamese men and materials into the south — charged by some to be in greater quantities than the replacement allowances the cease-fire provides.

The "actions over the last four years" to which Mr. Nixon refers may — or may not — be taken as the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, the blockading and mining of Haiphong harbor, or the intolerable bombing of Hanoi and other population centers during the final cease-fire negotiations.

Speculations abound about the relative strengths and stabilities of the Thieu regime and of the remaining Communist cadre in the South, and about the prospects for continued civil war within South Vietnam.

They are interesting speculations. But they do not relate to the U.S. national interest, which is — we firmly believe — to free America from all involvement in the Indochinese peninsula and to leave its future, its politics and its wars, if they must be, to the Indochinese.

NEW YORK TIMES
17 March 1973 (19)

Threatening the Truce

President Nixon certainly has every justification for
expressing concern over the continuing violations of the
Vietnam cease-fire agreements, inasmuch as the "rather
serious consequences" he mentioned this week involve
not only the truce in Southeast Asia but the stability of
the American homefront.

Intelligence reports of apparent massive flows of war materiel—tanks, artillery and anti-aircraft guns—toward South Vietnam from the North are indeed disturbing. The Administration's argument last January for ignoring the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops inside South Vietnam was that without being reinforced and re-equipped they would cease to be an effective military force. Now that assurance may be in jeopardy.

There is ample evidence, however, that the cease-fire
violations are not all on the North Vietnamese side.
We hope that Mr. Nixon is considerably stronger on this
point in his private communications with the Saigon
Government than he was in his news conference. In
public he seemed to dismiss the violations of the truce
on the ground, for which Saigon's forces have been as
responsible as Hanoi's, as inevitable, "because of the
nature of the war." It is untenable to hold one set of
violations more legally reprehensible than another; any-
one who expects to benefit from the obligations of
others has the obligation to honor his own undertakings.

The President left little doubt that he regarded resumption of bombing and harbor mining as a viable option against North Vietnam. Hanoi's leaders recently tried to test Mr. Nixon's resolve on the cease-fire terms by delaying the process of releasing American war prisoners, and when they saw the Administration's firmness they returned to the agreed-upon schedule. A similar response is looked for now.

Contained in the President's scarcely veiled threat, however, was an ominous time-bomb. The Congress has maintained relative silence on recent Vietnam developments only under the firm hand of its Democratic leadership, concerned that the sixty days of releasing the prisoners pass without reverses. Once that process is completed, by March 28, both the Congress and the President must be aware that resumption of combat by American military personnel could threaten a constitutional crisis of the first order.

Senators Church and Case have bipartisan legislation ready for floor action flatly forbidding the reintroduction of any American forces into hostilities in Southeast Asia. Even without passage of such a measure, there are strong arguments from Mr. Nixon's own statements that the President would have no constitutional authority to re-commit American military forces. The Tonkin Gulf resolution, which the Johnson Administration considered a virtual declaration of war by Congress, was repealed in 1970. Shortly thereafter Mr. Nixon argued that his legal justification for carrying on the war in North Vietnam was "the right of the President of the United States under the Constitution to protect the lives of American men."

With American prisoners safely at home and American
troops correspondingly withdrawn from South Vietnam,
the President would be hard-pressed to invoke this justifi-
cation again. Any move to resume hostilities against
North Vietnam could provoke a resive Congress into its
most bitter challenge yet of Presidential powers.

NEW YORK TIMES
21 March 1973

Vietnamizing the Peace

Fifty-one days after the signing of the Vietnam cease-
fire agreements, the two South Vietnamese sides have
finally got down to talking about the political future of
their land. For the first time in the long series of Vietnam
conferences the common language of the participants is
Vietnamese. By rights, this Paris conference should be
the culmination of a decade of war, the forum at which
at last can be exercised "the South Vietnamese people's
right to self-determination," in the words of the truce
agreements. These documents blandly declared that
ninety days would be a reasonable period for the two
sides to reach agreement on their internal affairs.

Nothing that has happened in Vietnam since the cease-
fire, nothing said at the opening of the Paris meetings
Monday, gives room for any confidence that the two
South Vietnamese administrations are even close to the
spirit of "national reconciliation and concord" prescribed
for them by the diplomats. National elections, creation
of the tripartite National Council, demobilization of
armed forces—all these matters which the South Viet-
namese were supposed to settle on their own seem as
illusory now as ever.

Did anyone ever honestly believe that it would be
otherwise? Diplomatic rhetoric aside, the best that could
have been hoped for from the cumbersome political
machinery envisaged by the cease-fire agreements was
the transfer of the South Vietnamese power struggle
from the military to the political arena. This remains a
possibility, but the portents are not comforting.

Far from moving toward a Vietnamization of the peace,
the charges traded by Hanoi and Washington these days
suggest that the two capitals intend to remain as deeply
engaged in South Vietnam's future as they were at the
height of the war. Hanoi's apparent violation of the
truce terms, its dispatch of heavy military equipment
toward its forces in the South, signal that it has no expec-
tation of replacing the military struggle with purely
political maneuver. The latest reports of a slowdown in
this Infiltration, while welcome for the immediate future,
does not change this longer-term design.

President Nixon's terse warnings about the violations
may have been heeded for the moment, but they still
raise an ominous question about his vision of future
American responsibilities in South Vietnam. The direct
United States interest in the cease-fire structure remains
to obtain the release of the American prisoners of war.
According to the schedule which has been more or less
respected, that will have been completed one week from
today. After that point has been passed, the issue will
be whether the Nixon Administration considers itself to
have any continuing obligation to guarantee the terms
of the cease-fire agreements.

Is the United States somehow obliged to hold the
North Vietnamese at bay while the two South Vietnamese
parties work out their internal arrangements? On present
appearances that may take closer to ninety weeks than
ninety days. If this is the Administration's position, if
it accepts some tacit or specific commitment to enforce
a cease-fire that no side seems ready to honor fully,
the dangers are still ominously large of a continuing
American engagement in Vietnam's power struggles
despite the lessons of the past.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES

21 March 1973 (22)

Persuasion and the Cease-Fire

The return of the American prisoners in Indochina is proceeding ahead of schedule, which is reassuring with only a week remaining before the deadline.

With the release of the last prisoner, and that may come Sunday, the last American soldier can be withdrawn. And with withdrawal of the last soldier, the military role of the United States will end. As it should. That was the central objective of the cease-fire agreement.

In Saigon, there is talk of perpetuating the Joint Military Commission created by the cease-fire agreement. The United States serves on that commission with North and South Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. It was intended as an interim arrangement for the 60-day troop withdrawal period. It was also intended to provide a bridge until Viet Cong and Saigon officials agreed on a two-power commission to take over the task. That has not worked out yet. The peace agreement anticipated just such difficulties and suggested, nevertheless, that the matter be left to the two warring South Vietnamese parties. It seems as sensible now as it did when negotiated two months ago.

In Washington, President Nixon has hinted that he will resume the American bombing if alleged cheating on the cease-fire by the Communists continues. Perhaps such things must be said. But Mr.

Nixon knows as well as anyone else how unacceptable to most, and certainly to the American people, any such resumption would be, His responsibility has been to keep the prisoner exchange and troop withdrawal on schedule, and his firmness can be justified on that score. That is the only remaining American interest.

This is not to argue that it is unimportant whether the cease-fire is fully implemented. It is obviously important. But its importance is for the Vietnamese people, not for the Americans. The Vietnamese are the losers if fighting continues. The Vietnamese will share the benefits if the fighting yields to the political competition and compromise envisioned by the cease-fire agreement.

Once the last Americans are out of Vietnam, the United States will have no justification, no rationale, for resort to arms or the threat of arms in that region. That fact will surely guide the President regarding the 45,000 American troops remaining now in Thailand, and the thousands of Americans remaining in the forces off shore in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Washington's only remaining power will be the power of persuasion. A significant argument for respect of the cease-fire flows from the American promise in the Paris agreement to "contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction" throughout Indochina. That promise cannot be kept unless the firing ceases.

NEW YORK TIMES - 28 MAR 1973 Page 43

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# Nixon's
War
Powers

By James Reston

Now that the last of the American prisoners and troops are on their way home from Vietnam, it would be useful if President Nixon would tell the country what authority he thinks he has to carry on military action in Indochina rather than leaving the explanation to Senator Barry Goldwater.

"The Senator from Arizona asserts in a letter to The New York Times that the President has the legal authority to punish violations of the Vietnam peace agreement on his own, and says questioning of this authority is "destructive of the peace we all seek." "The President can, if he sees need," Senator Goldwater writes, "order reprisals in line with more than 24 acts of Congress which were judicially determined in Orlando v. Laird to provide Congressional collaboration in the Indochina war...."

Well, this may be so, but that "Congressional collaboration" was authorized before the Congress specifically repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which had been regarded by Presidents Johnson and Nixon as legal sanction for the war. Also, if the Congress has the power to sanction and finance a war, it also has the power to withdraw both sanction and funds.

"Acting as Commander in Chief, which confers on him supreme direction over the armed forces," Senator Goldwater adds, "the President possesses full constitutional authority to judge that the terms of the armistice

which he negotiated have not been met by the enemy and that an actual state of war continues there that carries with it his power and duty to enforce that settlement...."

If this is true, then President Nixon not only has the power but "the duty" without a word to Congress to order the bombers or even American ground troops back into Vietnam to "enforce" one of the most ambiguous settlements ever negotiated at the end of a war.

The fact is that the armistice agreement is being violated constantly by both sides, but the main American objective of the agreement was to get the Americans out of Vietnam, not to impose on the President "the duty" to get them back in whenever he personally judged that the armistice was being violated.

"As Chief Executive of a sovereign nation and bearer of primary powers over the conduct of foreign affairs and the maintenance of our national defense," Senator Goldwater remarked further, "the President possesses a constitutional independence in these two fields which reinforces his authority in this situation. . . ."

This is undoubtedly true, but it is not a power "independent" of the Congress in the present situation where the President can no longer claim to be "protecting the lives" of American troops and prisoners. Besides, if Senator Goldwater is correct, Mr. Nixon also has the right and duty to take whatever military action he wants to enforce not only the Vietnam settlement, but the Korean settlement, and for that matter, the World War II settlement.

It is odd that one of the most sincere conservatives in the Senate, who has fought against excessive Presidential power for half a lifetime, should defend such extraordinary authority for the Chief Executive.

And odder still that the President who has taken such credit for getting out of the war, should not explain

what the B-52 bombers are doing in Cambodia, and why, and on what authority. This is not a subject that should be left to a couple of non-legal amateurs, but is central to the larger issues of the President's war powers, his executive privilege, and his right to impound funds.

Is it really "destructive of the peace we all seek" to wonder whether the President has the personal right to send his bombers and troops back into the Vietnam struggle? Nobody honestly thinks he is considering such a move in Vietnam, but to assert his "right" and even "duty" to do so if he personally chooses indicates just how much things have changed since conservatives were worrying about "the supremacy of the Presidency."

Besides, it is hard to see the logic in Senator Goldwater's assertion that Orlando v. Laird support his case, for what the court said in Orlando was that Secretary Laird had the right to send Orlando to fight in Vietnam because the Congress had appropriated funds specifically for such a purpose. The Congress, however, has not appropriated funds to reintroduce troops into Vietnam after the armistice.

The President has asserted an absolute right to shield his staff from Congressional or legal questioning, not only about their personal dealings with him, but about their personal dealings with men convicted of burglarizing Democratic headquarters in the Watergate case. This has aroused a storm over whether or not he has such an "executive privilege," but at least in this case the President issued an official statement defining what he thinks his powers are.

No such statement, however, has been forthcoming from the White House on the President's intervention in Cambodia or his right of reinvention in Vietnam after the prisoner and troops are home. And oddly enough, the Congress has not yet requested an official explanation of what the President's policy actually is.

5

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LOS ANGELES TIMES - 30 MARCH 1973

# Indochina: Relief and Anxiety

There is obvious relief that the last American prisoner has been returned and the last American soldier pulled out of Vietnam. But the relief is qualified by anxiety about the intentions of American leadership.

The Paris agreement has achieved its central purpose—the military disengagement of the United States from Vietnam. Peace has not yet come. The killing goes on.

The White House and the Pentagon have asserted a determination to go on bombing Cambodia. President Nixon Thursday night again encouraged speculation that he might resume bombing North Vietnam and the supply routes from North to South Vietnam. As if there were an American interest there. As if nothing had been learned from the last eight years. As if it did not matter that the whole cycle of mass destruction and captured Americans might be risked again.

Secretary of Defense Elliot L. Richardson went before Congress to defend military action in support of the Cambodian regime of Lon Nol, elevating that tattered and tottering contrivance of expediency to the status of "ally" despite explicit renunciation long ago of the one treaty that had bound the nations. President Nixon apparently had forgotten his promise, at the time of the American invasion of Cambodia, when he said that American action in Cambodia after July 1, 1970, would be limited to "air missions to interdict the movement of enemy troops and materials where I find this necessary to protect the lives and security of our forces in South Vietnam."

A giant American force remains grouped on the periphery of Indochina: offshore, 30,000 men, a flo-

tilla that includes two carriers, with two more in nearby callup positions; in Thailand, 45,000 Americans, 450 warplanes, including 50 B-32s, and a new American command, U.S. Support Activities Group at Nakorn Phanom, discreetly located more than 500 miles from Bangkok and the gaze of foreign correspondents. And, within South Vietnam, there remain an estimated 10,000 Americans in mufti, many of them unmistakably military and intelligence operatives.

There is good reason for the uneasiness in high American quarters. This weekend marks the first anniversary of the spring offensive in which North Vietnam shattered the hope that South Vietnam could defend itself. The same kind of North Vietnamese buildup is going on again, in clear violation of the cease-fire. And, in Cambodia, the "firm expectations" for a cease-fire reported by Henry A. Kissinger last Jan. 29 have not been realized.

It is an understatement to say that all of this is disappointing. But, at the same time, it seems to us terribly mistaken to find in this situation any justification for an American military response.

Washington is not the policeman of the cease-fire. The whole structure of the agreement, above all else, was designed to do the very opposite—to get rid of foreign interference that for 30 years had only made matters worse.

This war has taught one lesson well, and that is that the United States, even when it wanted to, could not control the outcome of the struggle. Any prolongation, any resumption, of American military activity in Indochina can only compound the tragedy and postpone the solution that only the Indochinese themselves can find.

[L]

NEW YORK TIMES 1 April 1973 (2)

# Finality in Vietnam

The air of finality with which President Nixon heralded the American withdrawal from Vietnam Thursday night has been welcomed with gratitude and relief across the country. The nation and its elected representatives in Congress now have the right to insist that this finality be reflected in the Administration's actions.

Specifically, the continuing American bombardment of Cambodia sounds a roaring discord against Mr. Nixon's self-congratulatory utterances. None of the constitutional or strategic justifications previously offered for these acts of war exist any longer. Administration spokesmen seem to be struggling to find some new legal rationalization for the bombing raids, and it is not surprising that they are having a difficult time of it. The fact is that these raids, unless quickly halted, carry the germ of a new United States commitment to bestow open-ended authority on yet another shaky Southeast Asian leader.

The arrival in this country of South Vietnam's President Thieu could similarly create temptations for escalating new commitments. None should be necessary. Mr. Nixon stated that through his policy of Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese people now have the strength to defend their right of self-determination. On his words, therefore, there is no need for further American military effort, in the air or on the ground in Vietnam.

language that he is ready to use the power of the United States to force adherence to the cease-fire terms. Nowhere in the official records of the truce is there provision for any one nation to deal with violations by its own bilateral actions. The possibility of cheating on the truce was specifically envisaged in the Jan. 27 accord, and Mr. Nixon's negotiators devised an elaborate if utterly unrealistic mechanism for dealing with violations. Having accepted this control mechanism freely, the Administration can hardly claim unlimited license to act on its own if the system turns out to be as ineffectual as it was freely predicted it would be.

Congress now has the opportunity to insure that Mr. Nixon's rhetoric of finality is embodied in fact. Bipartisan legislation is before the Senate, introduced by Senators Church of Idaho and Case of New Jersey, providing that "no funds heretofore or hereafter appropriated may be expended to finance the reinvolvement of United States military forces in hostilities in or over or from off the shores of North and South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, without prior, specific authorization by Congress."

Passage of this measure would assure long life to the gratitude and relief now felt across the United States at the declared end of the Vietnam war.

[L]

BALTIMORE SUN 1 APRIL 1973 (2)

Joseph Kraft

On the Road
Back to Vietnam

Washington.

Even as the last of the war prisoners reaches home, and the final GI quits the rice paddies, the road is being paved for another American entry to the Vietnam war.

That is what the fateful visit of President Nguyen Van Thieu to the United States this week is all about. It is also the issue behind the President's statement on Vietnam Thursday night and the constitutional debate in the Senate over the bombing of Cambodia.

The starting point for the re-entry mechanism is on the ground in Vietnam. All accounts indicate that the cease-fire has broken down.

Much of the blame goes to the Communists. Hanoi has never abandoned the objective of unifying all of Vietnam. To that end the Communists have staged military actions in South Vietnam, and sent down new equipment on a large scale.

But just as much of the blame goes to President Thieu. In absolute violation of the spirit of the cease-fire, he has at all times denied the legitimacy of any Communist presence in South Vietnam. He has put pressure on Communist enclaves, and even Communist cease-fire officials, in ways bound to provoke military retaliation—If only in self-defense.

The United States does not have to be dragged into all of this. Whatever moral obligations (if that term can decently be used in this context) are owed by this country to South Vietnam can be more than honored by the dispatch of military hardware.

Moreover, the cease-fire agreement itself provides a diplomatic remedy against its breakdown. That is the 12-power conference, including Russia and China, which met in Paris February 26 to endorse that agreement.

But President Nixon, now as in the past, seems chiefly concerned to build up South Vietnam against Communist pressure. Even in announcing the cease-fire, Mr. Nixon, in direct violation of its spirit, recognized the Thieu regime as "the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam."

This week the President will accord General Thieu the honor of a summit meeting at San Clemente, Calif. Then he will send President Thieu crosscountry on a tour clearly designed to thicken further the American commitment to South Vietnam.

Mr. Nixon has already spelled out the implications of that commitment. In his press conference of March 13 and in his nationwide TV address Thursday night, the President asserted the principle of unilateral American military intervention to prevent the Communists from violating the cease-fire. Despite the turmoil it would unleash in this country and the ill will it would rekindle abroad, President Nixon is prepared to resume bombing in Vietnam to save the Saigon government.

The more so as resistance Inside the administration to the President's phenomenon for intervention in Vietnam is receding. Melvin Laird, who used all of his weight against intervention in Vietnam, is no longer Secretary of Defense. His place has been taken by Elliot Richardson, who has shown himself in several posts as a man marvelously ready to take a complaisant posture in the face of White House pressure on issues of principle.

So the task of starting a barrier against re-entry to the war now involves entirely on the Congress—which means the Senate. For once there are a couple of good handles for Senate action.

First, there is the matter of constitutional authority for further use of force in Indochina now that the prisoners are home and American forces out. Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, the keeper of the Republican conscience, expressed widely held view Thursday when he declared that there "was no authority in the Constitution or in statute" for bombing Cambodia. But that lesson needs to be driven home, and applied to Vietnam in public hearings.

Second, there is the matter of the 12-power conference set up to guarantee the cease-fire. The administration has done nothing to use that diplomatic alternative to unilateral military action. That point—end in particular the stance of Mr. Nixon's friends in Moscow and Peking—also needs to be driven home.

To be sure, nobody in the Senate has a stomach for reopening the Vietnam issue. But if the President keeps pressing forward, there is no alternative. The country needs to be warned about the dangers of further commitment in Vietnam, and the right agency is a new set of hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

WASHINGTON POST 3 April 1973

Message for President Thieu

For signing the Paris agreement, Hanoi got the bonus of a visit from Henry Kissinger. For signing the same agreement, and doing his part to permit extrication of American prisoners and forces in the agreement's first 60 days, President Thieu has been rewarded even more handsomely with an invitation to San Clemente. Mr. Nixon received him there conspicuously yesterday. But just what the visit is meant to bring is unclear.

By receiving Mr. Thieu, Mr. Nixon demonstrates to all that he regards the Vietnam agreement as much more than a figleaf contrived only to cover American combat disengagement. He also demonstrates—to Hanoi and to Mr. Thieu's Southern political rivals in particular — that Mr. Thieu still has the American seal of approval, to be defined not only in terms of what political advantage it may confer but in terms of continuing economic aid, arms replacement and diplomatic support. No one—or so Mr. Nixon presumably hopes—can fail to get the message that when he promises, he delivers. The whole structure of his great-power diplomacy is based on persistent efforts to get that message through.

If that were all, American citizens might throng the streets to hail President Thieu: what an easy way to show your support or, if you feel another way, to bid him your (and his) last hurrah. The question is whether he is being told by Mr. Nixon that if he gets in serious trouble, the United States will again ball him out. That this may be precisely what Mr. Thieu is being told is surely implied by the calculated way in which Mr. Nixon has issued his scarcely veiled threats to resume bombing Hanoi if the North Vietnamese do not behave.

Frankly, we are uncertain how to get across to Mr. Thieu—or, for that matter, Mr. Nixon—the fundamental notion that the United States has given South Vietnam more than a reasonable chance to stand on its own and that, regardless of what the other side now does, American support will be limited to categories specifically permitted in the Paris agreement. Despite the administration's current contention, the Paris agreement does not say that if one side breaks its terms, the other can follow

suit. Rather, the agreement sets the limits—which do not include more bombing—within which the United States could honorably end its own direct involvement and go on indirectly supporting Saigon. The agreement also binds the United States to use its influence to induce Saigon to respect the agreement. It would seem obvious that this is the path by which Washington acquires some leverage by which to induce Moscow and Peking to restrain Hanoi.

We would not expect President Thieu to be conversant with the niceties of the United States Constitution. We would, however, expect President Nixon not only to be conversant with the constitutional implications of further American military support for Saigon but to make it his business to clear up any misunderstandings Mr. Thieu may have on this score.

The Constitution does not authorize the President to bomb foreign countries at his own discretion. It does not say that, to help enforce shaky cease-fire agreements, the President is entitled to make war as he sees fit.

Some may say that this position amounts to a death warrant for President Thieu. Our authority for rejecting this argument is Mr. Nixon's own claim of smashing success for his efforts to ready South Vietnamese to fight their own battles, and his own high estimate of the determination and resourcefulness of President Thieu. Granted, it will be a novel experience for Mr. Thieu to rule without direct American combat support. But he will still have the other ample forms of American support permitted by the Paris accord. He will also have the extra incentive derived from knowing that his fate is in his own hands. We should all be delighted to accept President Thieu's thanks for the great effort the American people have made in South Vietnam's behalf. The word the American people most want to hear, however, is that this effort has finally given South Vietnam the capacity to fend for itself. The rest of it—the will, the courage, the patience — has always been something only the South Vietnamese can supply.

WASHINGTON POST - 4 APRIL 1973 PAGE 1

[LC]

# Bombing Rationale Is Sought

## Rationale Is Sought

By Murrey Marder

Washington Post Staff Writer

Only a week after the last American troops left South Vietnam, the barrières are rising each day in Congress to challenge President Nixon's authority to continue bombing in Cambodia.

The contest is still in a positioning stage on both sides, hearings in the Senate and House illustrated yesterday. A war-weary Congress, often cutaneuvered by the executive branch in the past over Indochina war powers, is reluctant to launch a new frontal challenge over Cambodia. The national mood is still quiescent about the remnants of war in Indochina that refuse to go away.

But all the prospects are that a confrontation over presidential war powers in Cambodia is coming, and each side is girding for it.

Administration officials privately concede that the hopes they held when the Vietnam cease-fire was signed Jan. 27 for also dissolving the conflict in Laos, plus the more complex tangle in Cambodia, have crumbled considerably since January.

The Nixon administration is far more on the defensive over the use of presidential powers in Cambodia than the United States ever has been for justifying the use of American power in Indonesia.

All the older justifications have been stripped away over the years.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964, on which the Johnson administration relied, was repealed Jan. 12, 1971, with the Nixon administration stating that it was not depending on the resolution anyway.

The Southeast Asia Treaty, also invoked by President Johnson, does not apply to Cambodia. The government of Premier Lon Nol disclaimed inclusion in SEATO when it came to power in March. 1970, as ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk similarly excluded Cambodia from coverage.

In addition, the Vietnam cease-fire accord states that "North and South Vietnam shall not join any military alliance or military bloc," and it also re-pledges respect for "the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia." Thus there are no alliance ties that can apply to Indochina to justify employing U.S. arms, if existing agreements and declarations are honored.

Through the Nixon administration years, the declared constitutional justification for the use of armed forces in Indochina was to protect the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Before and since the troops were all withdrawn from South Vietnam, legal experts searched the statute books seeking rationalizations for continued American bombing of Communist troops in Cambodia.

"There are no easy answers," said one administration source yesterday, echoing a rueful refrain. Several

draft rationalizations have been produced in the State Department's legal office, and the most recent version is now reported awaiting White House action—with concern that it might only widen the dispute.

What have been produced are variations on two generalised themes: the President's constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief to pursue actions in which he has been engaged, and Article 20 of the Vietnam cease-fire accords. This article calls for "an end to all military activities in Cambodia and Laos," plus a withdrawal from those countries of all troops. military advisers, personnel and war material.

Laos, on paper, has a cease-fire, signed Feb. 21 but still awaiting any enforcement provisions.

Cambodia still lacks not only the glimmer of a cease-fire agreement, but even identifiable participants to begin negotiating one. A unilateral cease-fire declared by the Lon Nol government was ignored by the Communists, and while American officials deplore the continued fighting by North Vietnamese troops there, the bulk of the battle actually is conducted by indigenous Red Khmer forces.

This "kind of a lingering corner of the war" in Cambodia, as it has been described by Defense Secretary Elliot L. Richardson, is plaguing U.S. strategists more than they will admit in public. The best evidence is the continued daily bombing by American B-52s. This is what has aroused the congressional challenges to President Nixon's authority to pursue that war, originally justified solely in defense of U.S. troop withdrawals from South Vietnam.

Richardson, before a House subcommittee yesterday, elaborated on the alternative argument that the Nixon administration has sought to develop. It turns on the failure on the Communist side to live up to all the terms of the Vietnam cease-fire, with its cross-references, through Article 20, to Cambodia and Laos.

"If the President had the authority to pursue the cease-fire agreements," said Richardson, "he has the authority to secure adherence with those agreements." Therefore, Richardson contended, "He needs no new grant of authority to continue doing the kinds of things he was doing before the peace agreement was signed," when it is "not being adhered to."

Critics on Capitol Hill, who include increasing numbers of Democrats and Republicans, scoff at this interpretation. "The issue," said Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton (D-Mo.), who joined the outcry yesterday, "is whether the President can legally continue his action without the authorization of Congress, I must answer that question with an emphatic no."

What makes the Cambodian dispute especially sensitive is that in the intense debate that followed the American thrust into Cambodia in 1970 to attack Communist sanctuaries there, unusual legislative restrictions were placed on U.S. operations there to prevent "another Vietnam."

Not only were American combat troops and military advisers barred from Cambodia, but strict limits were placed on the numbers of Americans who could be in Cambodia at any time—200.

Arthur W. Hummel Jr., deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday that it has been necessary to "juggle" Americans in and out of Cambodia to stay within that force level. To do so, said Hummel, sometimes U.S. personnel based in Cambodia have to leave for a few days when "visitors come in.

U.S. "failure to give air support to the forces of Cambodia," said Hummel, in defense of the administration's new rationale, "could have a deleterious effect on the achievement of an actual cease-fire in Cambodia."

"I strongly disagree with the administration's justification," countered Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), "and see it providing further grounds for entanglement."

What is at issue, Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.) has said, is not whether U.S. interests are served by bombing in Cambodia, but whether "the President alone" can make such a determination.

The administration is now seeking to invoke a presidential right to enforce an international agreement today that was never submitted to Congress for ratification.

Secretary of State William P. Rogers told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Feb. 21 that there was little "time" to submit the Jan. 27 Vietnam cease-fire accord for ratification. I do not detect any opposition to it, and most importantly, it contained

### NEW YORK TIMES
4 APRIL 1973 Pg 4

## Fulbright Asks End To Military Aid Over 2-Year Period

WASHINGTON, April 4 (AP) — Senator J. W. Fulbright introduced a bill today to phase out foreign military grants and military assistance missions over a two-year period.

Mr. Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the world had changed since the United States started military aid with a Greek-Turkish program 26 years ago.

"The cold war is over," Mr. Fulbright said in a Senate speech. "Yet the policies of the era linger on in the military aid program."

"It is time to wipe out this relic of the past," he continued. "The bill I am introducing today will give it a fitting burial."

In the two year phase-out period, the Fulbright bill would require recipient countries to pay for 50 per cent of the assistance in their own currencies to be used to meet United States expenses within those countries.

Loans would be permitted and sales on credit would be financed where possible through Government guaranteed commercial bank loans.

Authorized foreign military grants would be reduced to $250-million for the year beginning July 1, compared with President Nixon's budget request of $685-million. Half the $250-million would have to be paid in local currency by the recipient countries.

Recipient countries also would have to pay half of the cost of the United States military aid missions.

Mr. Fulbright said there are 2,300 United States military advisers assigned to aid missions in 47 countries around the world.

Since World War II, he said, the United States has provided $180-billion in assistance to foreign countries, $80-billion of it in military and related aid.

### NEW YORK TIMES
4 APRIL 1973 Pg 17

## U. S. Continues Bombing

HONOLULU, April 3 (UPI) — American pilots flying B-52s and fighter-bombers continued today to bomb Communist targets throughout Cambodia.

The United States Pacific command here would say only that the bombings were conducted at the request of the Cambodian Governments.

"ambiguous phrases and clauses and provisions." To try to spell them out, said Rogers, would have killed any accord.

DES MESURES REGISTER

4 APRIL 1973(17)

Threatening North
Vietnam:

Defense Secretary Elliot Richardson's statement that renewed U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and mining of Haiphong harbor are "among the kinds of things that could be done" if President Nixon decides North Vietnam isn't living up to the peace agreement was meant to frighten North Vietnam. It should frighten a lot of Americans, too.

President Nixon has made the same threat, in less explicit form, over and over. He also said recently that North Vietnam is not keeping the peace agreement. He is in danger of locking himself into a situation from which it will be difficult to escape. Threats of war are always dangerous for a government leader.

The peace agreement is not being well kept, by either side. The United States has done better by it than either the Saigon government of South Vietnam or the Viet Cong or North Vietnam. But North Vietnam accuses the United States of serious violations.

One violation by the United States is turning over bases in South Vietnam to the Saigon government when the agreement calls for "dismantlement" and removal of all "armaments, munitions, and war materiel." The United States has taken home the equipment it wanted, but it did leave the rest in usable shape, and it rushed great quantities of planes, tanks and supplies to the Saigon government in the months before the agreement was signed.

Another violation charged against the United States is its official statements that it continues to recognize the Saigon government as the only legal government in South Vietnam. North Vietnam's view is that the peace agreement gives the Viet Cong "Provisional Revolutionary Government of South, Vietnam" equal status in areas it controls. This is an arguable point, and a subtle one. But the text of the agreement has a good deal of support for the North Vietnamese position.

The biggest violation of the peace agreement lies in the continued fighting. The cease-fire has not become effective. Both sides blame the other for that. The United States claims an alibi—its troops are not there. North Vietnam blames it anyway, for encouraging or permitting the Saigon government to fight on.

It would be a grave mistake for the United States to decide the peace violations by the other side were intolerable and jump back into combat again, after four years of step-by-step extrication. The peace agreement is hard to make work at best, and it is full of ambiguities and debatable points. But one thing

about it is clear, and in line with the deepest feelings of the people of the United States. The agreement calls for the United States to get out and stay out, and leave the Vietnamese to settle the future of Vietnam.

NEW YORK TIMES - 20 APRIL 1973

Bombing for Peace?

United States bombers rain death on Cambodia, South Vietnamese troops sally across the Cambodian border, American bombers strike intermittently in Laos —it has all the aspect of the rerun of a bad movie.

And yet, thus far the American public seems largely unconcerned about this repetition of the sordid history of United States escalation in Indochina. "How short our memories! How still our voices!" laments Senator Eagleton. Is it possible that Americans have forgotten so soon the sour lessons of the past decade? Can it be that public opinion is genuinely immobilized by what Mr. Eagleton has suggested may be "a stupefying cynicism about the whole governmental process."

Few Americans today would knowingly advocate heavy reinvolvement in Indochina. Yet, for the time being at least, many appear content to accept the argument of Administration spokesmen that the intense bombing in Cambodia and Laos is merely designed to stabilize the tenuous peace of Paris. This may be a dangerous delusion. Bombing cannot solve the complex political problems left unresolved in the Paris agreements. The indiscriminate use of United States air power in Cambodia, according to Western diplomatic observers, has only increased the alienation of the people from the unpopular American-backed regime in Phnom Penh, which has just undergone a face-lifting that appears largely cosmetic. Bombing cannot bring peace, nor does it reflect honor on the United States when a foreign diplomat is moved to observe that "the Americans are throwing air support around like a mad woman."

The most disturbing aspect of the continuing bombing in Cambodia and the renewed if spasmodic bombing in Laos is the Administration's underlying assumption that it has the power and authority to enforce an American peace throughout Indochina, without regard to the will of the peoples there, to constitutional processes at home, or to public opinion abroad. This was the fundamental error that led earlier Administrations into the Indochina quagmire in the first place.

It is one thing to try to hold the Communists to their side of the January agreement through use of what Secretary of State William P. Rogers has described as "diplomatic devices"—a category in which he includes the withholding of promised economic aid from North Vietnam and even the suspension of mine-sweeping operations in North Vietnamese waters. But to go beyond such devices into arbitrary Presidential use of American air power to try to enforce the peace could lead this country inexorably back into Vietnam, where the Paris accords are also crumbling.

Legislation proposed by Senators Church, Democrat, of Idaho, and Case, Republican, of New Jersey, which would bar re-introduction of United States military forces in or over any part of Indochina without express Congressional consent, is an appropriate vehicle to compel the President—and the public and Congress—to think twice before risking full-scale repetition of the costly mistakes of the recent past.

[LC]

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

5 April 1973 (17)

# The Illegal War In Cambodia

By ordering the continuous heavy bombing of Cambodia in support of the Lon Nol government, President Nixon has shown disdain for the Constitution, which confers on Congress the power to declare war, and for laws of the United States, through which Congress in several instances has withdrawn its legislative authority for continued military operations in Indochina, including Cambodia.

The extent of Mr. Nixon's contempt for the law and for the legislative branch of the Government is underscored by his failure to even report to Congress on his actions in Cambodia, to say nothing of explaining and legally justifying them. He has left that task to unofficial spokesmen in the Senate and in the State and Defense departments. And they have fallen back upon the flimsiest imaginable arguments.

Listing them in descending order of importance, the arguments are that the President, under his powers to conduct foreign policy and to command the armed forces, has the authority to enforce the settlement of the Indochina war; that a Circuit Court of Appeals, in Orlando vs. Laird, upheld the legality of the Indochina war by noting congressional appropriations and other acts supporting the conflict; that U.S. help has been requested by Lon Nol; and finally that the President is justified merely by the fact of his re-election.

None of these arguments can be sustained in even the most tenuous way on the basis of the record of what has happened. Cambodia was not a party to the Paris agreements ending the war, nor do these accords specify any Cambodian cease-fire deadline or Cambodian political settlement. Nor, as Senator Eagleton has pointed out, do the Paris accords contain any enforcement machinery with respect to Cambodia, as they do for Vietnam — although the accords expressed the vague objective of ending military activities there.

As for the Orlando decision, it came before the repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was the original congressional act cited in support of the Vietnam war. Since that time

Congress has enacted the Cooper-Church amendment, which specified that no funds could be expended to conduct combat activity in the air over Cambodia and the Javits amendment, which stipulated that aid extended to Cambodia should not be construed as a U.S. commitment to defend that country. Nor can the U.S. be said to have any treaty commitment to defend Cambodia. In fact, Lon Nol explicitly rejected the SEATO pact, which itself is of dubious applicability to Cambodia, a country that Mr. Nixon originally invaded without legal authority.

With the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from Vietnam and the return of all U.S. prisoners, the President lost the last vestige of legal authority to conduct military operations in Cambodia — the 1971 Mansfield amendment having proclaimed the "policy of the United States" to be the withdrawal of all U.S. armed forces from Indochina "at a date certain," contingent only on the release of American prisoners.

Lacking even the pretext of a need to protect American forces or lives or property, Mr. Nixon has no justification for invoking his power as commander in chief; confronted with specific withdrawals of congressional authorizations for continued military operations in Indochina, he can hardly claim the authority to carry on a war merely on the basis of his power to conduct foreign policy.

As a means of stopping what he deems to be the unconstitutional and illegal air operations in Cambodia, Senator Eagleton is backing, for the short term, new legislation to prohibit military activity in Indochina and, for the long term, a war powers act which would limit the President's war-making powers. These are laudable objectives. But against a President who has already usurped the congressional power to make war and who seems ready unilaterally to enforce (with bombs) peace on terms which he alone has assumed the power to interpret, legislation may be of no avail. Public protest, when new U.S. casualties begin, may be the only message which Mr. Nixon understands.

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 1970 President Nixon provoked what he later was to describe as "an unprecedented barrage of criticism" by sending American troops into Cambodia. The stated purpose was to clear out North Vietnamese sanctuaries in that presumably neutral country and eliminate a military threat on South Vietnam's western flank.

Last week Cambodia was back as a potential crisis for Mr. Nixon's Indo-china strategy.

The military situation in Cambodia has deteriorated dramatically in the past month. American officials last week used words like "serious" and "grave" to describe the outlook for the American-equipped forces of President Lon Nol. As though scenting a possible change in his fortunes, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose long neutralist reign in Cambodia ended with the Lon Nol military coup of 1970, turned up last week in Hanoi and—according to a French news agency report from that capital—confided to a diplomat there that he had just spent a month with "his forces" in Cambodia. The Prince, who lives in Peking, claims political leadership of the "patriotic" indigenous insurgent groups in Cambodia.

Whatever the merits of his claims and officials in Phnom Penh expressed doubt that he had really visited Cambodia—it underscored one important change in the situation. In 1970 the military threat to the Lon Nol Government came from regular North Vietnamese units in Cambodia. Today the Government forces are pitted against primarily Cambodian insurgent forces fighting under several pro-Communist banners. For all their numerical superiority and the hundreds of millions of dollars of American military equipment, Cambodian Government troops are performing poorly. The main reason for that, in the view of American officials, is lack of will and leadership.

The insurgents have put a stranglehold on Phnom Penh, cutting off all roads as well as the crucial Mekong River route into the Cambodian capital. Defense Secretary Elliot L. Richardson said last week the situation could become serious enough to force the United States to consider mounting an airlift of supplies and military equipment into the city.

One problem for Mr. Nixon is that he has seemed to make Cambodia a test of his policies and prestige. In 1971 he described Cambodia as "the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form." That is so, he explained, "because in Cambodia what we are doing is helping the Cambodians to help themselves... rather than to go in and to the fighting ourselves."

In some ways, of course, the United States has been fighting in Cambodia ever since the 1970 "incursion"—though not with troops but with air power, as contemplated under the Nixon Doctrine. This bombing has intensified in the past month. About 60 B-52's and 150 fighter-bombers are now operating daily over Cambodia, striking at insurgent positions in an attempt to reopen the supply lines to Phnom Penh. Yet there are political, legislative and perhaps constitutional restraints on how much deeper the President can take the nation into the Cambodian war.

Congress in 1970 imposed a prohibition on the reintroduction of American ground troops into Cambodia. Questions are being raised on Capitol Hill as to the President's authority to undertake any further military action in Cambodia—even if only air action—now that all American troops have been withdrawn from Vietnam. The general justification offered by Mr. Richardson is that the President's authority rests on his power to clean up a "lingering corner" of the war.

More critical, in practical terms, is the policy question — Is the Nixon Administration prepared to tolerate the collapse of the Lon Nol Government before the Communist-led insurgency? The Nixon Administration has emphasized repeatedly since 1970 that the United States is not committed to

the defense of the Cambodian Government. That policy, in fact, was spelled out in the Congressional mandate of military aid to the Lon Nol regime. The Administration says the current bombing is meant to force the Communists into accepting a Cambodian cease-fire.

But the rationale for the bombing could change if the military situation continues to worsen. Mr. Richardson, who at one point referred to Cambodia as an "ally," appears to be resurrecting the argument that if Cambodia fell it would endanger South Vietnam. The concern in some Congressional quarters is that the Administration may be dragged by events—and its own actions and rhetoric—into a military commitment in Cambodia.

—JOHN W. FINNEY

NEW YORK TIMES 8 APR(9)

# A New Test In Cambodia

[10]

ATLANTA JOURNAL - 9 April 1973 (22)

[L]

# Is Cambodia to be our next Vietnam?

IN THE congressional debate now beginning over the bombing of Cambodia, and indeed over the possibility of future military operations anywhere in Indochina, the key question has been posed by New York's Senator Javits. "The issue," he said, "is not whether it is in the American interest that the bombing in aid of the central government's forces in Cambodia is substantively desirable, but rather who is to determine that fact for the United States." The answer that Senator Javits and many other concerned members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, give to that question is that there is no longer any reason why such decision-making should be made unilaterally by the President.

Until now, President Nixon has consistently defended his right to act independently of Congress by falling back on his constitutional powers as Commander-in-Chief. These powers, however, are vague. While U.S. ground troops remained in Vietnam he obviously required the authority to take whatever military action was necessary to protect them. It was a recognition of this right—plus a similar reluctance to do anything that might jeopardize the lives of the withdrawing troops and the chance of recovering our prisoners of war—that prevented the passage of the end-the-war amendments that Congress gave birth to over the past few years.

## 'Authorizations' now lacking

But that situation has changed now. No longer are there troops or POWs on the ground to protect. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which President Johnson had leaned on for additional authority, was repealed more than two years ago. The U.S. is not obligated to help the Cambodian government under the SEATO treaty, since Cambodia is not a member of that organization. Furthermore, the various acts of Congress under which military aid has been provided for Cambodia specifically state that this aid shouldn't be construed as a commitment to the defense of that country and, since 1970, have explicitly ruled out the re-introduction of American ground troops or advisers.

The Paris peace settlement makes no provision for one of the former belligerents to have recourse to military action if any part of it should break down. The U.S. is, in fact, expressly bound to a cessation of hostilities against North Vietnam that is to be "durable and without limit." The supervisor of the

truce in the South is supposed to be the International Control Commission and the guarantor of the entire agreement is supposed to be the international conference that met briefly at the end of February. Nobody has been at all surprised to find that neither of these groups has accomplished anything meaningful. Right from the start it was doubtful that they ever would.

Yet the Paris agreement is in serious danger of breaking down completely. The conflict within Vietnam hasn't moved, as was intended, from the military to the political level. Spot fighting is still going on all over the South; North Vietnam is illegally moving men and equipment across the demilitarized zone; and the political dialogue between the Thieu government and the Viet Cong is getting nowhere. But for President Nixon to threaten, as he has, that he would react "vigorously" if Hanoi continues to violate the agreement, is almost to invite the North Vietnamese to intervene first. They would have no qualms about claiming that the U.S. was encouraging President Thieu to renege on the peace terms.

## Another long tunnel?

Clearly Mr. Nixon hopes that threats will be enough, that the conflict eventually can be switched to the political level and that the U.S. can completely disengage militarily. Whether or not this turns out to be a wild hope, the war still continues in Cambodia—and so, too, does heavy U.S. bombing in support of the Cambodian government forces.

The Nixon administration, failing to find any legal basis for its role in Cambodia, has been arguing that we have a continuing political obligation to help bring about a ceasefire there. If heavy bombing is what it takes, the argument runs, as was necessary to finally push the North Vietnamese into signing a truce, then that's what the U.S. must do. Unfortunately, all the reports coming out of that beleaguered country suggest that if the war is indeed almost over, it's the Cambodian government and army that are on the verge of collapse, not the Communists. If we are going to stick around until President Lon Nol is as firmly entrenched as President Thieu is now—which isn't all that firmly—then we could be in for another long haul. As Senator Mansfield warned the other day, Cambodia could have "the makings of another Vietnam."

That's why it's so vitally important that whatever we do next be done with the concurrence of both President and Congress. For Americans, the promise of peace in Vietnam was more than just an end to this particular slaughter. It was also to provide assurance that never again would our young men be asked to go abroad and die for reasons that wouldn't be fully explained and justifiable both to them and to their elected representatives. Ever since we all woke up at the height of the Johnson escalation and asked ourselves, "What are we doing here?" the American people have been determined not to let themselves drift helplessly into such a situation the next time. But what's going on now in Cambodia may be the next time unless Congress is finally ready to insist on regaining its proper voice in determining what is in our national interest.

Lg

Merlo J. Pusey
WASHINGTON POST - 11 April 1973 (Page 26)
# Legislating War Powers

Is it possible to draft legislation that will restore to Congress a meaningful role in war-making without crippling the United States in its international relations? Foes of the war-powers bill say it is not. Their strongest argument is that our responsibilities as a super-power in a chaotic world are so complex that the President must have a free hand in using our military forces without the restraint of legal formalities.

A few years ago that view was widely held. It commands less support today, not only because the perils of presidential wars have been so graphically demonstrated, but also because patient and understanding legislators have devised a bill that gives promise of restoring the constitutional balance without excessive rigidity. Chief credit for the bill goes to Senator Jacob Javits, but it now has 60 sponsors in the Senate.

In its present form S. 440 is a composite worked out largely by Senators Javits, John Stennis and Thomas Eagle.

> This is the third of three articles by Merlo J. Pusey, former associate editor of The Washington Post and author of "The Way We Go to War." The first two articles appeared on Monday and Tuesday in this space.

ton and their staffs. Senators Robert Taft and Lloyd Bentsen, who had introduced war-powers bills of their own, joined the trio for the sake of consolidating support behind a single measure. The Foreign Relations Committee held extensive hearings, and the Senate passed the bill in April, 1972, by a vote of 68 to 16.

The measure failed to become law last year because the House passed the much weaker Zablocki bill and there was time for only one meeting of the conference committee before Congress adjourned. New hearings have already been held on the House side this year, however, and new Senate hearings are scheduled for today and tomorrow. Representative Clement J. Zablocki has substantially strengthened his bill, and the prospect that a useful measure will be sent to the White House has notably improved.

It is worthy of note that these are not partisan bills designed to embarrass the President. The Republican and Democratic sponsors have worked closely together with the commendable objective of reasserting the constitutional authority of Congress and of preventing presidential wars. Both the majority and minority leaders of the Senate are co-sponsors of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill. It likewise has wide support among both liberals and conservatives.

Care has been taken to avoid any encroachment on the President's constitutional powers. By way of codifying the law, which Congress has a right and duty to do under the "necessary and proper" clause of the Constitution, the bill spells out the circumstances under which the armed forces could be used without a declaration of war. The President could repel an attack on the United States territory or its armed forces stationed outside of the country. He could retaliate against such attacks, and he could act to "forestall the direct and imminent threat of such an

attack." He could use military force to protect the evacuation of American citizens abroad if their lives were in imminent danger, and of course he could act under any specific congressional authorization such as the Middle East resolution.

The later provision does not, of course, imply that Congress might again give the President blank checks in regard to using military force, as it did in passing the Tonkin Gulf resolution. The bill specifically provides that the right to use the armed forces in hostilities shall not be inferred from any resolution unless such action is specifically authorized. Specific congressional authorization is also required for the assignment of any part of our military to the armed forces of another country that is at war or in imminent danger of being involved in hostilities.

To minimize controversy, the bill leaves undisturbed the three so-called area resolutions now on the books—authorizing the use of armed forces in Formosa, the Mideast and Cuba, if the President finds it necessary. It is anticipated, however, that one of the first actions of the President under the bill would be to review these situations and go to Congress with fresh recommendations.

One of the most delicate problems sponsors of the bill had to deal with was its effect on NATO. The NATO treaty provides that an attack upon one of its members shall be regarded as an attack upon all of them. If it is to remain effective, the unified NATO commands must be able to respond to attacks in Europe at the discretion of the President (and other NATO executive authorities) without, waiting for legislative action. The Foreign Relations Committee report interprets the bill, however, as meaning that "no treaty, existing or future, may be construed as authorizing use of the armed forces without implementing legislation." This seems to say that any military action by American forces in defense of an ally in NATO would have to be approved by Congress.

The debate in the Senate makes clear that no such crippling of NATO is intended. The President could respond to an attack upon a NATO country if American forces stationed there were involved or if he deemed the attack to be also aimed at the United States. Such action would not necessarily mean full-scale war any more than a presidential response to an attack upon the United States would. In either case follow-up action by Congress would be necessary if a war had to be fought.

Congress has a legitimate interest in preventing use of the NATO treaty as a substitute for a declaration of war. A treaty ratified only by the Senate cannot nullify the war power which belongs to both houses. In reasserting its war power, however, Congress should be careful to avoid casting any doubt upon the right of the President to speak for the United States in authorizing immediate NATO action in case of an emergency. The language of the report on this point needs to be clarified.

The heart and core of the bill are Sections 4 and 5. Section 4 would require the President to report promptly to Congress whenever he might take emergency military action under the

terms of the bill. Section 5 would forbid him to continue the hostilities thus begun for more than 30 days without congressional approval, unless Congress had been put out of operation by an armed attack. In any circumstances, however, the military could continue to fight while disengaging from the unauthorized hostilities.

In case of an outrageous abuse of presidential power to make war Congress could, by a two-thirds vote (overriding a veto), tell the President to stop in less than 30 days. And of course Congress could always extend the 30-day period by legislative action. Accelerated procedures are laid down to make certain that Congress would not be namibiaed by filibustering or other dilatory tactics. While the 30-day cut-off is necessarily arbitrary, it would allow time for reports and deliberation, and it would force Congress to act before a military build-up like that in Vietnam could take place.

The effect of the bill would be to put the President on notice that he could not undertake a military venture without explaining to Congress his action and his aims and his claim of authority. That alone would be a powerful restraint upon dubious hostilities that would not bear scrutiny or win popular support. Even more important, the bill would almost compel Congress to face the issue and to assume responsibility for the course to be taken.

Congress itself has been shamefully negligent in relinquishing into the hands of the President all but absolute control over the fate of the nation. Now it is attempting to cool and rational legislation to redress the balance and to assume its rightful place as the national policy-making body. Every American has a vested interest in the success of this undertaking, even though the details of the bills under consideration are still open to debate, clarification and improvement.

WASHINGTON POST - 13 APRIL 1973 Pg 7

# Senators Worried
By Cambodia Crisis

By Murrey Marder

Washington Post Staff Writer

Senate anxiety over deeper U.S. military involvement in Cambodia intensified yesterday as President Nixon reviewed options for reinforcing the Phnom Penh regime.

Although speculation here is soaring about decisions that may follow the trip to the war zone by Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., only marginally increased allied activity is visible so far.

President Nixon met for about an hour yesterday with Haig on his return from Thailand and Indochina. The White House was silent about the outcome of the meeting.

Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield (Mont.) told the Senate he is alarmed by rumors that South Vietnamese and Thai troops may become engaged in Cambodia..." Mansfield said that would only "embitter the struggle."

From Thailand, however, Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn, who conferred with Gen. Haig earlier this week, was reported to have said that Thailand will immediately increase its training of Cambodian soldiers in Thailand but will not send any Thai troops to Cambodia.

Field Marshal Thanom, Agence France Presse re-

ported, said Thailand has started to deliver 40,000 tons of rice, purchased with American aid, to Cambodia by ship. "Thailand may also deliver petrol and petroleum products within the next few days" to Cambodia, the marshal said.

In Saigon, South Vietnamese officials have declined to discuss possible use of their troops in Cambodia until South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu returns from his world trip. Increased use of American-supplied South Vietnamese gunboats to escort convoys up the Mekong River to Communist-encircled Phnom Penh is anticipated. Thieu and his top officials, however, have indicated opposition to any major new involvement of their ground forces in Cambodia.

White House officials indicated that neither Cambodia nor Indochina as a whole were discussed at a morning meeting yesterday of the National Security Council.

The Nixon administration has been ambivalent about just what state of alarm it wishes to project publicly about its assessment of the Cambodian problem. It apparently seeks to convey a sense of continuing concern that will focus international atten-

tion on the need for a ceasefire in Cambodia to help preserve the Vietnam cease-fire. At the same time, the administration apparently wants to avoid a crisis atmosphere implying that the Vietnam accord is in danger of collapse, after President Nixon hailed that agreement as "peace with honor."

In this murky situation, with no clear sign of President Nixon's intentions, Sen. Mansfield warned again that "there are no legal or constitutional grounds for our becoming involved in any way, shape or form in the Cambodian civil war."

Mansfield called for what the Nixon administration also is known to be seeking, "a restoration to power of Sirik Matak" in Cambodia, in place of ailing Premier Lon Nol. But Mansfield also advocated, again, negotiations with Cambodia's deposed leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk who now claims to represent all the rebel forces.

Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott (Pa.) joined in expressing concern about the prospects for Cambodia. Scott, however, said that while it is "deplorable" that American bombing "has to continue," at the same time, "I do not want to see Phnom Penh destroyed by the advancing forces."

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in hearings on legislation to limit presidential war powers, attempted unsuccessfully yesterday to try to obtain from the Nixon administration a more precise accounting for its authority to continue American bombing in Cambodia. Chairman J. Wil-

liam Fulbright (D-Ark.) continues that the administration is using "specious legal justifications."

Charles N. Brower, State Department acting legal adviser, said the President has "constitutional authority to win up the war" in his functions as commander-in-chief and chief executive. Brower said Defense Secretary Elliot L. Richardson and other officials "illuminated the issue" in recent weeks, and "it seems clear to me beyond a doubt that the President has full authority to conduct air strikes" in Cambodia.

"I don't think they have illuminated it at all," countered Fulbright. Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.) challenged Brower to specify "what laws?" the President is enforcing. Brower responded, "all laws passed by Congress with respect to Cambodia."

Any prospect for using new war powers legislation to halt American activities in Cambodia was seriously set back yesterday in a statement sent by influential Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Stennis is recovering from gunshot wounds inflicted in a holdup last January.

Stennis, a sponsor of the war powers limitation bill, said while he hopes "the war will finally be ended" in Cambodia when the legislation reaches its final stages, "this bill excludes hostilities in which the United States is engaged on the date when it becomes law."

In other words, Stennis would not use it to cut off ongoing involvement in Cambodia.

[c]

WASHINGTON POST 23 April 1973

# The Right 'Signals' in Vietnam

In suspending mine-clearing operations off North Vietnam and in halting talks with Hanoi about reconstruction, Mr. Nixon has sent just the right "signals" to indicate his concern over Communist violations of the Vietnam cease-fire. These are gestures of diplomacy, not of war: a wielding of the carrot rather than the stick. Unlike bombing, they do not raise either constitutional or political issues at home. Very few Americans, we surmise, will find it unreasonable that Mr. Nixon has taken these steps. Moreover, they are gestures of American disengagement. In our view, the mine-clearing and reconstruction offers made sense as part of the whole cease-fire package, but if there is not to be a cease-fire, then the logic of mine-clearing and reconstruction fades. Hanoi does not lack for friends who can help out at both tasks.

We see yet another positive aspect to the President's new gestures. Some administration members declare that the January agreement must be "fully carried out" and that the United States will not abide the other side's selective fulfillment of it. But the new gestures seem to suggest that this is not the President's policy: now that the troops and prisoners are out, he intends to carry out the obligations undertaken in the agreement only to the extent he deems appropriate. Exhibit A is his suspension of the mine-clearing and aid discussions. Exhibit B—quite different, of course, in its threatening implications—is his resumption of reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam. One can deplore that the complete agreement is not being smoothly consumated but it appears to us wiser to recognize, as the President now explicitly has, that the agreement is not "of a piece."

It is not, after all, that full implementation is necessary in order for Mr. Nixon to deliver on his stated war aim of assuring South Vietnam a reasonable chance to make it on its own. By past American sacrifice, by continuing American aid, by readying Saigon to fight its own battles, by using his new leverage in Moscow and Peking—by all these elements, the President has fully satisfied the requirements of his own policy. To insist on "full" implementation, when it is plain that both Vietnamese sides mean to cheat just about every chance they get, is merely to provide a rationale for open-ended American participation in a struggle among the Vietnamese.

Mr. Kissinger is reportedly dismayed that North Vietnam has not switched more quickly and cleanly from

the military to the political track. No doubt Mr. Nixon is similarly dismayed. One can have sympathy, especially in view of the prediction of many war critics that Hanoi and the Vietcong would make a quick switch to politics. Fortunately, however, the American mission can fairly be judged to have been accomplished, despite what has happened since January. And surely a responsible President will not elevate personal disappointment to the level of a national imperative. Those who urge the President to continue regarding Vietnam as an essential arena in which to demonstrate American will, when there is no legitimate American interest to be served by such a demonstration, are, in a word, irresponsible.

We would note that it is not that clear exactly what has happened in Vietnam since January. The administration concedes that not all violations are on the Communist side; a "preponderance" are, it says, whatever that means. Hanoi has continued sending men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail—for a purpose (a military offensive or political action) which events have not revealed—but at the same time Hanoi has, according to the Pentagon, withdrawn portions of one or more divisions from South Vietnam. In any event, it is inconceivable to us that the vaunted results of the Nixon-Vietnamization program have evaporated in just three months. For the administration to imply that, by its jitters, is careless and wrong.

American warplanes are now bombing in Cambodia within a few miles of Phnom Penh. Presumably, by continuing to move in, the insurgents can "walk" American bombs downtown. The U.S. embassy in Cambodia concedes, by the way, there is no documented evidence that North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops are fighting there. That the insurgents can withstand aerial pounding does not seem to be seriously in doubt. But whether the American-supported government of Lon Nol could survive the American bombing of its capital is in doubt. Our sense of events is that Prince Sihanouk will be back in Phnom Penh before too long. Some may be apprehensive at this prospect but we share the editorial judgment of the Star-News that, so great is Communist control in Cambodia anyway, "It is not clear that a complete Communist takeover in Cambodia would place South Vietnam in much greater jeopardy than it is in today." And Mr. Nixon has, we repeat, put South Vietnam in an excellent position to tend for itself.

WASHINGTON POST - 27 APRIL 1973

Vietnam Perspective

There is something troubling, not to say ambiguous and a little redundant, about the President's latest decision to send Henry Kissinger back to Paris next month to confer with Le Duc Tho on obtaining "strict implementation" of the three-month-old cease fire accord. Perhaps the President means only to eat up a little more time while waiting for the military and political crises in Cambodia somehow to settle down, and for monsoon rains to curtail whatever offensive operations the Communists may be planning in South Vietnam. It is hard to see what extra measure of threat or other incentives toward peace Dr. Kissinger can add to the "signals" already conveyed by this continued bombing of Cambodia, the resumption of air reconnaissance over North Vietnam, and the suspension of mine-clearing and aid discussions—and therefore hard to see what there is to talk about. Sure to be extravagantly publicized, the Kissinger trip would seem to commit the administration further to a hard and unilateral American line at a time when we would have thought it better served the American interest to try to associate as many other nations as possible with evolving events in Vietnam. As we suggested the other day, Mr. Nixon's problem is letting go.

What in fact does "strict implementation" of the Vietnam agreement mean? We do not condone violations, either Hanoi's or Saigon's or Washington's. But what did Mr. Nixon have in mind when he accepted the agreement? He said then he "expected" all parties to observe its terms "scrupulously." But aside from the inducements of reconstruction, mine-clearing and political relations which were written into the agreement, it provided only for certain international supervisory devices—which have proven inadequate to ensure that North Vietnam in particular honored its terms. "Of course," Mr. Kissinger explained, when he was first presenting the agreement, "It is not inconceivable that the agreement will not in all respects be lived up to. In that case, adding another clause that will not be lived up to, specifically requiring it, would not change the situation." Precisely so.

Some may now wonder whether Mr. Nixon is not so determined to compensate for Watergate and other political deficits, and to preserve—or, rather, reconstitute—his handwork in achieving a "cease-fire" that he and Dr. Kissinger have accepted the goal of "strict implementation" against their own better political judgment. This seems unlikely. Both men know Indochina deeply. In making the January accord, they could not have failed to realize the depth of the Vietnamese Communist commitment to continue working for power in Saigon; indeed Dr. Kissinger conceded as much at the time. It belittles the President and his chief adviser to claim for them that they did not expect Hanoi and Saigon to keep on struggling, or to expand their struggle beyond the confines of the agreement. Surely Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger

do not mean to justify further unilateral applications of American power now by saying that in January they were naive.

Nor is there public evidence to show that in January they intended only to provide a "tigleaf" for American withdrawal of troops in exchange for our prisoners—a "decent interval", as it has been described, between American departure and whatever consequences might follow, including South Vietnamese collapse. The immense American effort to prepare Saigon to defend itself—an effort we have often joined the President in commending as a major success—argues against that kind of cynicism. So do the large loud claims of "peace with honor" which Mr. Nixon has repeatedly made.

There is, in short, a fundamental contradiction in the administration's current attitude toward Vietnam. On the one hand, we are told privately and sometimes even openly that there was always great risk in the terms of the January agreement, apart from that portion of it which directly dealt with our withdrawals and the return of our POW's; that the means of enforcement of the cease-fire terms would inevitably slip from American hands; that in the end it would be up to the Vietnamese, North and South, to work out the destiny of South Vietnam by one means or another; and that the Thieu Government had acquired the means and the capability to defend itself.

And then, on the other hand, we are told that entirely predictable North Vietnamese violations of the cease-fire somehow pose a new and terrible threat to Saigon; that massive bombing of Cambodia by B-52's is the only solution; and that we must take upon ourselves almost the entire burden of securing the "strict implementation" of an agreement which was supposed to be enforced by a presumably effective supervisory procedure underwritten by big and little powers around the world.

The President cannot have it both ways. Either he accomplished something durable and respectable in January or he was unbelievably naive about his adversaries—and the "peace with honor" which he then proclaimed was at best an illusion and at worst a fraud. We happen to believe the President made as good a deal as could reasonably be expected. And we also doubt that it can be made much better now by re-negotiation or by adopting for the United States a largely unilateral, open-ended enforcer's role. It is redundant to suppose that the maintenance of America's honor depends on what happens in a corner of Asia where this country has already fulfilled the fundamental mission of readying an ally to fend for itself. To believe otherwise—to forge on in search of an elusive will-the-wispy "peace with honor" in an area torn by rival ambitions and doomed to continuing conflict of one form or another—is to lose the essential sense of perspective the President should now be bringing to Vietnam.

[L]

LOS ANGELES TIMES - 27 APRIL 1973

Our Continuing Intrusion in Asia

The United States is elaborating its pursuit of
peace in Indochina today with consultations with
North Vietnam, for which there is a precise provi-
sion in the international conference agreement of
March 1.

It is a marked Improvement over the bellicosity
that has otherwise marked American reaction to
the breakdown of the cease-fire, including the
American bombing of Cambodia and Laos, for
which there is no legal provision whatsoever either
in international arrangements or American law.

The conversations today between William Sulli-
van and Nguyen Co Thach, and the consultations
next month between Henry A. Kissinger and Le
Duc Tho, represent one of the two remedies for
cheating provided in the international agreement.
The other remedy is to reconvene the international
conference itself, either on the joint call of the
United States and North Vietnam or on the call of
six or more of the 12 member nations.

Now, there is no question that cheating has been
going on. It was evident in the heinous shooting
down of the peace observation helicopter by the
Communists. Report after report has itemized the
movement of arms and men. There have been re-
ports of cheating by the South Vietnamese, but the
preponderance of the reports has involved cheat-
ing by the Communists, and their cheating has
been accompanied by a deliberate program of con-
cealment that has frustrated the work of the Inter-
national Commission of Control and Supervision.

But this tragic, regrettable, dismal situation, this
shocking disregard for solemn international obliga-
tion and commitment, does not sanction American
military intervention, either the kind that we have
seen in Laos and Cambodia or the kind that the
Pentagon is now threatening in Vietnam.

On the contrary, the cease-fire agreement of Jan.
27 and the international conference agreement of
March 1 deny to any outside power the right of in-
tervention. The four nations of the International
Commission of Control and Supervision are report-

ers. The "guaranteeing" of the end of the war is
left to the 12-nation conference, of which the Unit-
ed States is but one member. The conference itself,
in a document approved by the United States, re-
served to itself the problem of cheating. But it in-
vited the signatory parties "either individually or
jointly" to enter consultation "with a view to de-
termining remedial measures."

This basically reinforces the principle of nonin-
tervention that undergirds the cease-fire agree-
ment itself. The only direct participatory authority
for the United States, as a member of a temporary
joint military commission, expired 60 days after
the cease-fire was signed. At that moment, North
and South Vietnam were left in charge. Kissinger
added his endorsement of this principle in the com-
munique of Feb. 14, at the end of his visit to Hanoi,
which said that "the two sides reaffirmed that the
problem existing between the Indochinese coun-
tries should be settled by the Indochinese parties
on the basis of respect for each other's indepen-
dence, sovereignty and territorial integrity and
noninterference in each other's internal affairs."

The operative words are worth repeating:
"should be settled by the Indochinese parties."

So it was, at the end of the international confer-
ence in March, that the British delegate empha-
sized that peace depended solely on the parties con-
cerned on the ground and "if they are determined
that the agreement will work, it will."

Any diplomatic effort to shore up, extend and re-
vitalize the cease-fire is to be encouraged. So the
meeting today and the meeting next month are
welcome. But they are robbed of some of their
credibility by the continuing American bombing,
by the threat of more, by the continuation of a
force of American civilians that monitors, directs
and intrudes into the life of Indochina as if there
were never to be an end to the American commit-
ment. These actions erode the single most im-
portant achievement of the cease-fire, which was
to get the Americans, and with them the other
foreigners, out of Indochina once and for all.