NEW YORK TIMES 3 May 1972 Pl

VIETNAMESE TROOPS
FLEE QUANGTRI IN DISORDER

SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG

New York Times

HUE, South Vietnam, May 2—Thousands of panicking South Vietnamese soldiers—most of whom did not appear to have made much contact with the advancing North Vietnamese—fled in confusion from Quangtri Province today, streaming south down Route 1 like a rattle out of control.

Commandering civilian vehicles at rifle point, feigning nonexistent injuries, carrying away Cations but not their ammunition, and hurling rocks at Western news photographers taking pictures of their flight, the Government troops of the Third Infantry Division ran from the fighting in one of the biggest retreats of the war.

No one tried to stop them: their officers were running too. The battlefield north of Hue was thus left solely to a brigade of a few thousand South Vietnamese marines.

The Third Division had fallen back, at the beginning of the enemy offensive a month ago, but the commander, Brig. Gen. Vu Van Giai, had managed to scrape it together again and put it back on the line around Quangtri until yesterday.

But today, according to American advisers, virtually the entire division—about 10,000 infantrymen plus 1,000 rangers—was in rout, not even stopping at the checkpoints where military policemen were supposed to halt runaways and turn them around.

It was the force that was supposed to have defended the city of Quangtri, which was abandoned yesterday, and which had been the northernmost town held by the Government.

There does not seem to be much now between the North Vietnamese and their next and more important objective, the city of Hue, whose residents are already packing up and fleeing farther south in large numbers.

Many of the retreating troops are not even stopping in Hue, which is about 40 miles south of Quangtri, but are continuing on, taking their rifles, artillery pieces, tanks and armored cars with them.

The province chief went on the radio tonight, appealing to the people of Hue not to panic and flee and promising that the Government would defend them. As he spoke American advisers in Hue were calling Saigon to ask for every available aircraft to evacuate the thousands of refugees from the north who have flooded the city.

Bowling down Route 1 from Quangtri, the Government soldiers, their guns bristling at anyone who tried to interfere with them, clung to the sides and roofs and hoods and trunks of every available vehicle.

With horns blaring and headlights glowing in the midday sun, they raced down the center of the road, pushing other vehicles out of the way. They used trucks and tanks and they took over big buses and three-wheeled mini-buses. They stole motorcycles, riding as many as four to the bike. There were also many on foot, particularly walking wounded.

Their anger at those who watched them running seemed born of their shame. Until the Third Division can be pulled togethre again, it hardly exists as a fighting force.

The South Vietnamese marines, the only units that have fought well on the northern front, are still holding three bridges on Route 1 between Quangtri and Hue. They are trying to slow the enemy advance, the first bridge being about 30 miles north of Hue and the last only 20 miles away.

No one expects that they can hold the positions very long. After those the only major defense before Hue is a large military base known as Camp Evans, or Hoa My, about 17 miles from the city. The new headquarters of the Third Division, it is packed with artillery pieces, which are constantly firing.

At the southernmost of the bridges, at a village called Photrach, the South Vietnamese marines watched with pained faces as the army men fled. They would not talk about it, but their embarrassment was plain.

Their American advisers were not so inclined to silence. "This is really sickening," a Marine lance corporal said.

"It's unbelievable," said an American Marine major, Robert Sheridan, as he leaned on a tank at the side of the road. "It's hard to comprehend..."

To stand here and watch this when you've seen the same people in your own units fight well because they have different leadership."

"You see the troops," he went on, waving his hand at the road. "But I don't blame them. Where are their officers? There's no one to tell them 'stop' and to pull them together."

The major said the Vietnamese marines in his unit were "very sad and very angry" at the army retreat. "They are embarrassed because I am standing here watching it," he added.

The Marines stopped a thousand fleeing rangers last night as they tried to cross the northernmost bridge, he related. The reason for blocking their flight, he said, was that "we couldn't tell if they were enemy." At daylight they were allowed to pass because the Marines had no authority to stop them.

The Marines fought a hell of a battle" at the forward bridge this morning, the major said, knocking out 18 tanks with the help of artillery and air strikes.

The major said that last night, when the Communists wanted to call in naval gunfire from American vessels standing off the nearby coast, but that South Vietnamese officials held off the fire, apparently because they thought it might hit the retreating forces.

Many of those on foot had inexplicably thrown away their boots and were limping along barefoot. Some had bandaged their feet with rags. All were tattered and muddy. Even those who were riding had had to plod for 10 miles through the countryside during the night before they got to the first bridge held by the Marines, where transport was available.

Whether riding or walking, the fleeing men had no time for anything but their own escape.

The body of a soldier lay on the road just outside Camp Evans under the baking sun, a victim, perhaps, of a road accident. His gear lay strewn about him. The troops passed without a glance.

## Commandeering a Ride

As this correspondent turned back toward Hue today with three other correspondents, an interpreter and a driver in an old Citroën, South Vietnamese soldiers waving automatic rifles and pistols forced the car to halt. Fifteen pushed in and on blanketed the roof, hood and trunks. All appeared panic-stricken.

One was a major, Nguyen Van Niem, 45, commander of an ordnance company that had fled Quangtri. Laughing with embarrassment, he said he had no idea where his company was.

Like many of the fleeing men, Major Niem said that when he left Quangtri last night he had not seen any enemy troops, nor had he seen Government troops exchanging fire with the enemy. That apparently means that the Government force fled before it was attacked on the ground, although Quangtri had been under intense shellring by heavy artillery for three days.

Major Niem said he was going to Danang, 50 miles south of Hue, to join his parent unit. He said of the retreat: "We do not feel ashamed. The enemy fought very strongly and we have to withdraw and form a new front."

As the Citroën went on toward Hue, the driver craning out the window because the windshield was blocked, the soldiers brandished their weapons and uttered threats to keep others along the way from climbing on.

The ordnance major, who has pushed his way into the car with great vigor, had developed a severe limp by the time the car reached Hue. He explained that he had been wounded by a rocket, and when he stepped out of the car he hobbled a few paces and collapsed into the arms of a military policeman, who carried him off.

Another soldier had a small neck wound that appeared to be healing nicely. Just before he got off in Hue he unwrapped his first-aid field bandage and asked that it be tied around his neck. A wounded man has a better chance of escaping shipmen back to the battlefield.

Some of the retreating troops reached Hue early enough this morning to find time for relaxation and refreshment. A mud-spattered armored personnel carrier clanked through the gate of the main hotel at 9 A.M. and parked on the grass. A dozen soldiers and their captain clambered out, climbing the three flights to the terrace restaurant overlooking the Hoang River and ordered an ample breakfast of cornets and French coffee.

NEW YORK TIMES 3 MAY 1972

Open-Ended War

The strong offensive by North Vietnamese troops that resulted in capture of Quangtri, undertaken almost simultaneously with the trip to Paris of Hanoi Politburo member Le Duc Tho, could not have been coincidental. The military-diplomatic character of the current Communist offensive has been evident from the start. That Communist offensive, designed to improve the Communist bargaining position in Paris, is now challenging President Nixon's Vietnam policies as never before in this long and fruitless war.

The challenge is hardly answered by the President's rhetorical posturing of recent days. Mr. Nixon's warning in Texas that North Vietnam was "taking a very great risk"—presumably a threat to resume bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong heartland—is not likely to have any more effect than the futile bombing itself last month and in the 1965-68 period.

What is needed now is a reappraisal of the Administration policies that, since 1969, have given Vietnamization of the war and other military measures priority over efforts to negotiate peace. From the beginning, the President has held his negotiating price high—nothing less than the preservation of Saigon's anti-Communist regime —on a double assumption.

One assumption behind Vietnamization was that the withdrawal of most American ground troops from Vietnam would remove the war from the forefront of political issues in the United States before November 1972. The other assumption was that President Thieu's million-man army by 1972 could hold South Vietnam securely with American air and naval support, plus economic and arms aid. The belief was that these optimistic assumptions, if borne out, would favor Mr. Nixon's re-election and confront Hanoi with a choice between negotiating on Mr. Nixon's terms or facing four more years of war.

There never was much valid reason to accept either assumption; but in any event both are now being cruelly blown apart by the current Communist offensive. The war not only has rebounded as a political issue in the United States, but the Administration's war policies appear from the primaries to be losing even their former supporters. Mr. Nixon's stated assumption that South Vietnam's army would be able to "hack it" is now being severely tested to the point that it is apparent that only American air and sea power has saved the South Vietnamese from even more devastating defeats than they have already suffered.

Hanoi's diplomatic offensive, meanwhile, is probing the essential contradiction in Mr. Nixon's two-track policy of Vietnamization and negotiation. Vietnamization of the war requires strengthening and supporting the Thieu regime. The negotiation of a peace settlement requires its replacement with a compromise government acceptable to both sides.

All this is certain to be affected now by the probably irreversible change in the nature of the war that has just occurred. From a civil war within South Vietnam, aided clandestinely at first, then more substantially, by Hanoi, the struggle has been transformed by the large-scale North Vietnamese crossing of the demilitarized zone into virtually a conventional war between the armies of both Vietnams.

The "open-ended" character of the war led Senator Mansfield many years ago to urge Washington to abandon dreams of victory and seek a negotiated compromise. That advice is even sounder today.

Further delay will not improve the American bargaining position, which has declined steadily with the reduction of American forces in Vietnam. The time has come to explore seriously North Vietnam's proposal for a tripartite "government of national harmony" and Le Duc Tho's insistence in Paris Sunday that it would not "impose a 'Communist regime' in South Vietnam as Mr. Nixon claims."

Agreement will not be easily reached on the composition and duration of a caretaker regime in Saigon to be confirmed by elections. But it is the key to a political settlement. It will still be the key when the present battles are over, even if the military stalemate can be reestablished.

WASHINGTON POST 3 MAY 1972 P20

After Quangtri

The loss of Quangtri, the first South Vietnamese provincial capital to fall to Hanoi, and the possible fall of other provincial capitals make the military situation "serious," the Pentagon row realistically concedes. But to project a setback in one area to a disaster in the whole country is no: only bad politics but bad analysis. There is both time and space for the South Vietnamese army to rally, and it will continue to have American support from sea and air.

At the same time, no one—least of all North Vietnam—can afford to ignore the effects which a progressively deteriorating military situation might have on President Nixon. It is all very well to fault his policy but it would not be at all well for North Vietnam to forget that he is the President, that he has considerable military resources at his disposal, and that he could be driven to extreme steps if, say, the remaining American forces were faced with death or a Dunkirk-type evacuation, or if Saigon's army and government fell apart at the seams. True, Mr. Nixon has ruled out nuclear attack and reintroduction of ground forces. But the other night in Texas he defined the heretofore off-limits dikes of North Vietnam in terms—"a strategic target and indirectly a military target"—that might rationalize a last-resort attack. "The problem," as he put it, is that bombing the dikes "would result in an enormous number of civilian casualties." Hanoi would be reckless to assume, in our judgment that moral or political scruples would stop him from hitting such "a strategic target," if he thought the bottom were falling out in the South.

In fact, to put the best face on the President's stated policy—and this is something we would urge North Vietnam to consider in order to help prevent the more fearful parts of the Nixon rhetoric from becoming reality—what he is asking may not be all that impossible to give. Basically, he is asking not to be humiliated. He does not wish to see the remainder of the American expeditionary force rolled up by Hanoi, and he does not wish to have the Saigon government collapse in a heap at his feet, especially before November. These are

his minimal requirements; they are not unreasonable. They should not be beyond Hanoi's ken to understand, nor beyond its self-interest to respect.

In this regard, it is worth looking closely at the remarks made by Le Duc Tho, Henry Kissinger's opposite number in the earlier secret talks, upon his return to Paris on April 30. Mr. Nixon, on April 27, had stated that "the only thing" he refuses to do is overthrow the Saigon government and "impose" a Communist regime; Le Duc Tho said, "what we want is a government of national harmony with three components. We in no way want to impose a 'Communist regime.'" Mr. Nixon had reiterated his concern for the remaining Americans; Le Duc Tho promised safe passage to Americans who "do not take part in military operations." Mr. Nixon had warned against a post-takeover "bloodbath"; Le Duc Tho cited Article 14C of the 1954 Geneva Agreements banning reprisals "against persons or organizations on account of their activities during the hostilities."

Le Duc Tho again insisted on "the immediate resignation of President Thieu. He did not demand that the United States dump him. Is there really anyone in Washington who would be pained, or surprised, if President Thieu decided that the best service he could do his country would be to take a villa at Cannes?"

We do not contend that a deal is near sight or reach—although there are intriguing signs to that effect, reported by Mr. Victor Zorza in this newspaper today. We do believe that if Hanoi can accurately read Mr. Nixon's minimal and legitimate political requirement for an exit from Vietnam in some honor and dignity, and if Mr. Nixon can read Hanoi's minimal and legitimate political requirement for a crack at power in the South, then there may still be a chance to end this wretched war by the only settlement that has ever made any sense. That would be a compromise on terms which give each side some reason to hope that it can gain its ultimate objective, while at the same time subjecting both sides to the risk of falling short of what they originally set out to achieve.

# Pessimism in Saigon

## Army's Inability to Defend the South
## Puts Government in a Perilous Stage

By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
Special to The New York Times

SAIGON, South Vietnam, May 2—The loss of South Vietnam's northernmost province and the collapse of two of its combat divisions in the last week have brought the Government of President Nguyen's 'an Thieu to a perilous stage.

Both American and Vietnamese officials here and elsewhere are deeply pessimistic — for the first time in years — about the country's prospects of pulling through.

The growing consensus among Americans here is that the South Vietnamese armed forces, in their country's hour of greatest danger, have unexpectedly proved unequal to the task of defending it. The principal reason is that the commanders, never before ested so rigorously, are not purring the troops to resist the three-front North Vietnamese onslaught with the vigor and determination that would be required to repel rather than take it.

South Vietnamese observers in Hue assessed the scene in the former imperial capital today as an agony," with the streets full of soldiers running aimlessly about.

The road from Hue south to Danang, Vietnam's second largest city, is jammed with refugees and with soldiers who appear to be deserters, trying to make their way to safety.

A senior American official in Danang said tonight, that the third Infantry Division was finished as an effective fighting force" after its rout from Quangtri yesterday. And in the central Highlands provinces of Indhinh and Kontum, American and South Vietnamese officials were saying the same thing about the 22d Division over the weekend.

So far the Government of President Nguyen Van Thieu as not made a public announcement about the loss of Quangtri. The President, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and Gen. Creighton W. Abrams met an hour in the Presidential add to discuss the steadily improving situation.

The divisions of South Vietnam of the United States in the 1st year of the war with North Vietnam are still limited.

The South Vietnamese have controlled their entire strategic front to the three fronts, and they can hold the North

they have proved unable to halt renewed attacks in the northern provinces and in the highlands.

Since President Nixon has publicly ruled out the use of the United States ground forces to rescue its allies, the principal option available is bombing. The Administration has carried out saturation B-52 raids on targets deep in North Vietnam for the first time in the war, but so far its retaliation raids have been limited in scope and duration; they could become more intense if the Administration chose to make them so.

The only recent raids on Hanoi and Haiphong were made on April 16. The last time B-52's struck in North Vietnam was on April 24. But, an American general said, "you haven't seen the last of that yet."

Even the Americans do not feel any more—if, indeed, they ever did—that air power can stop the North Vietnamese offensive. "If the South Vietnamese would just hold on and establish a line as they did in Anloc," an officer said, referring to the front 60 miles north of Saigon, "and stop the enemy long enough, air strikes can take their maximum effect and maybe do some good."

On the other hand, an American adviser in Binhdinh Province, speaking after South Vietnamese fled rather than resist the Communist take-over of Hoa An District two weeks ago, said, "The best weapon is the guy with the M-16 on the ground, and he just isn't there."

Though American civilian and military officials here have not yet made a negative judgment on the South Vietnamese forces across the country, their collapse in the area near the demilitarized zone this week has caused many to entertain grave doubts.

It has become clear that a final test is underway for the American policy of Vietnamization, which has meant turning over the ground combat responsibilities to the South Vietnamese and withdrawing American ground forces but maintaining a strong presence with air power—bolstered to more than 700 warplanes this week with the arrival of a fifth aircraft carrier, the Midway.

The North Vietnamese have emphasized in broadcasts that the defeat of Vietnamization is one of their principal aims. So far they have not made strong

units although 6,000 United States combat troops were among the 68,000 soldiers still here as of last Thursday.

For all the pounding the North Vietnamese have taken since they began their offensive, allied officials concede, they have done alarmingly well —taking over Quangtri Province in the north, much of Binhlong Province close to Saigon and the northern third of Binhdinh Province on the central coast, meanwhile making slow gains in the Mekong Delta and in provinces west and northwest of Saigon.

Unlike the Americans and the South Vietnamese, the Communists still have several options open.

They are apparently preparing a pincer movement against Hue, with thousands of troops advancing on the city from the north and from jungle redouts to the southwest. They have not yet committed any sizable guerrilla forces to terrorist actions in Danang and Saigon, but intelligence officers here expect that they will in the coming months. When they do, the demoralization of the population, already in its initial stages with mass flights from Quangtri, Hue, Binhdinh and Kontum, is bound to grow.

Today—the issues grow and change daily—the biggest problem is Hue, where, according to American observers, a third to a half of the civilian population is fleeing toward Danang by every possible means.

What has been the Saigon Government's response to the deepening crisis?

President Thieu has go on national television only once to brace the nation for what lies ahead. On April 5 he said: "This is the decisive moment, where the survival or loss of our country is at stake. The present battle is the decisive battle, the outcome of which will determine the loss or survival of the people of South Vietnam."

Since then he has maintained a puzzling silence amid mounting evidence that for many war-weary people the Government's guarantees of security and military victory sound hollow.

Today the Saigon Government's press agency published a warning that intelligence sources had reported that North Vietnamese troops were under orders to "kill on the spot" Government soldiers who surrendered or were taken prisoner.

The warning came after thousands of militants as well as regular soldiers of the 22d Infantry Division gave up their posts and left their weapons behind in Binhdinh Province rather than contest the North Vietnamese for three districts inhabited by 200,000 people.

"All of us feel some frustration," an officer at United States headquarters said. "I'm sure General Abrams feels frustrated too. I know he went

terday."

## Success on One Front

Gen. Cao Van Vien is the chief of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff, although President Thieu has called most of the critical shots in the deployment of reserve forces in recent weeks.

The one front on which the South Vietnamese have been able to hold off their attackers for almost a month is the one closest to Saigon, in Binhlong Province, 60 miles to the north. But American officers, initially proud of the performance of their allies there, are now worried because the South Vietnamese have not pushed the Communists back across the Cambodian border and fear that they may not be able to hold if the enemy mounts an intense attack.

A 10,000-man force of paratroops and infantrymen from the Fifth Division has been undergoing heavy artillery bombardment in the devastated town of Anloc for three weeks and has not been resupplied except by helicopter and parachute.

In the face of the grim battlefield prospects, some Vietnamese politicians and even Cabinet officials have begun the faintest stirrings of rebellion against the policy of peace through war. If the military situation continues on a downward slide, it is not impossible that a movement for a negotiated settlement may gain momentum.

## Loss of Face for Thieu

"How is the situation in the north?" a Government functionary asked. When he was told, he remarked, "I think we may have to reach a settlement soon."

Many Vietnamese political figures feel that President Thieu suffered a serious loss of face last week when the Nixon Administration changed its mind and agreed to a North Vietnamese proposal to go back to the Paris peace talks. The South Vietnamese had vowed only the day before that the allies would not return to the negotiating table until Hanoi had stopped the invasion.

The peace talks have not yet been Vietnamized; the negotiations between Washington and Hanoi are the focus of interest. If they continue to be fruitless and the Americans decide to step up their punishment of the North, many Vietnamese believe, it will not help in the present hour of need. The South Vietnamese press is full of false reports about United States marines landing in Binhdinh or even in North Vietnam to come to Saigon's rescue once again.

The most realistic among the Southerners are aware that such intervention is all but impossible in 1972. The offensive could bring them to act on their own—if not decisively in the field, then in other ways still quite as unforeseeable as the course of the fighting.

24

New York Times - 3 May 1972

WASHINGTON POST - 3 MAY 1972 P-7

Senate Rejects Gravel's Bid
To Air Secret Viet Report

3

By Spencer Rich

Washington Post Staff Writer

A bid by Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) to place a secret 1969 report on Vietnam in the Congressional Record failed to win Senate approval in a four-hour locked-door debate yesterday, but the issue may be debated again in a few days.

The rare closed session—he first since a debate on Laos last June 7—was requested by Gravel last week. Gravel said he would ask the Senate to allow him to make the 1969 report available to the public by placing it in the public record. The report, prepared under the direction of presidential aide Henry A. Kissinger, is stillclassified, but Gravel obtained a copy privately.

The "Kissinger Papers," as the document has been called, described the military and political situation in Vietnam — as a way of laying out options for the new Nixon administration.

Gravel contends they show it bombing can't defeat North Vietnam. Copies of the papers were obtained privately by The Washington

Post. Newsweek, Jack Anderson and other reporters. Large excerpts as well as stories based on the 1969 report have appeared in many publications over the past weeks.

Yesterday's debate was conducted under the strictest junctions of secrecy, and senators—emerging from the four-hour and eight-minute meeting cited Senate rule 36, which calls for a senator to be expelled from the Senate if he reveals what went on in a closed-door session.

However, several senators who were present said privately that Gravel had been unable to obtain a final vote on his request to publish the papers in the Congressional Record.

Instead, they said, there were two procedural votes after Gravel held the floor at length to expound the theory that the Senate has the right to "declassify" a document that has been classified as "secret" by the executive branch.

They said Gravel had sought to put the issue in the wider context of whether the executive branch has the right to

impose an injunction of secrecy on a co-equal branch of government.

The closed session began at 3:44 p.m. and ended at 7:52 p.m. In the first vote, which occurred at 5:58, the Senate rejected, 36 to 32, a move to go back into open session. At 6:45, it voted a second time, turning down, 39 to 30, a motion by Sen. Russell B. Long (D-La.) to adjourn for the night.

Citing the secrecy rule, Long refused to tell reporters why he had moved to adjourn. One Senator said he interpreted it as a move to put aside the whole issue and, in effect, turn down Gravel's request without actually ever voting on it; another, simply because of the late hour.

Senators said they left the as a move to put off debate until a later day simply be-meeting with the definite impression that the issue would be taken up again in closed session, perhaps Thursday. Acting Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) assured reporters there would be no secret session today, but declined to discuss the possibil-

While debating the Gravel week.

Request, the Senate marked time on the State Department USA authorization bill, with its Dec. 31 fund cutoff on all U.S. combat operations in Vietnam, including air.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis (D-Miss.) has offered a motion to strike out the end-the-war language. Administration supporters, believing they have the votes to pass the Stennis move, would like a vote on it this week. Acting Minority Leader Robert P. Griffin (R-Mich.) said yesterday, "we'll be ready to vote this week."

However, the Senate Democratic Caucus is meeting to discuss end-of-war language today, and Sens. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.) apparently want to delay the vote until next week, when Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.)—a supporter of the cutoff — returns from China. They apparently also want delay because they believe the current military crisis in Vietnam would reduce their votes because of a "rally-round-the-commander-in-chief" mood in times of crisis

WASHINGTON POST

3 May 1972 P3

House Unit
Bars Move
To End War

United Press International

The hawkish House Armed Services Committee yesterday soundly rejected an end-the-war amendment and approved development of a billion-dollar nuclear aircraft carrier.

The Committee took the actions in a closed session as it neared completion of work on the administration's $23 billion weapons procurement bill. Altrough amendments voted on so far are technically only ten-

tative, none is expected to be overturned before the measure is given final clearance.

By a roll call vote of 32 to 5, the members defeated a proposal by Rep. Locien Nedzi (D-Mich.) calling for a total U.S. military withdrawal from Indonesia by Sept. 1, contingent only upon return of American prisoners of war.

In a related antiwar move, Chairman F. Edward Hebert (D-La.) upheld a parliamentary point of order against an amendment by Rep. Robert Leggett (D-Calif.) that would have barred the reintroduction of American ground troops or the use of nuclear weapons to counter the current Communist offensive in South Vietnam.

It was Leggett who also tried to delete the $299 million earmarked for so-called long lead time items for the nuclear-powered carrier. The Navy estimates the cost at around $1 billion, not including its planes and escort ships.

BALTIMORE SUN 4 MAY 1972 PAGE 1

# Stennis fears 'humiliating' end to war

By PETER J. KUMOY

Washington Bureau of The Sun

Washington—Senator John C. Stennis (D., Miss.) publicly sounded an increasingly pessimistic official mood here when he warned the Senate yesterday that continued South Vietnamese losses could lead to a "humiliating" end to the war for the United States.

The hawkish chairman of the Armed Services Committee described the military situation in Vietnam as "a crisis" of the "greatest kind" where battles were "being lost" despite the use of American air power.

The Mississippi senator was joining administration supporters in debate to defeat the Case-Church amendment, which would cut off funds for American involvement in the war at the end of the year.

Republicans, like the minority whip, Senator Robert P. Griffin, argued that adopting such a motion would tie President Nixon's hands in Paris peace negotiations, as well as discourage the imperiled Saigon government.

A vote is likely next week.

The morale of the South Vietnamese government was of concern here. In what was regarded, at least in part, as a psychological step, the Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, ordered a high-level logistical team to Vietnam to see if more American military aid, especially more sophisticated weapons, is required. Any outcome of the mission would be a long-term one unlikely to affect critical battles shaping up in the next few days and weeks.

## A brighter picture

Republican congressional leaders, after a White House meeting with President Nixon yesterday morning, were painting a brighter picture of the war situation.

They agreed they had been given a "realistic" briefing on the situation by Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told them that American military action was "absolutely right" but that "only time will tell" the outcome.

Representative Gerald R.

Gerald R. Kugler of Michigan, the House minority leader, volunteered some "encouraging" developments in South Vietnam.

He itemized these as the "full support" being given the government by the people, the very, very sizable casualty rate" being suffered by the North Vietnamese and the use of American air power as the "equalizer" for the better and greater weapons supplies of the Communist-led forces.

Depends on weather, supplies

Mr. Ford said estimates here were that the length of the North Vietnamese offensive depended both on the weather and on the capability of the North Vietnamese to continue to supply petroleum and ammunition.

To discount North Vietnamese gains, Senator Griffin mentioned that Henry A. Kissinger, the White House security adviser, predicted two weeks ago that "he wouldn't be surprised if two provincial capitals might fall in the next two weeks."

Mr. Griffin noted that only one, Quang Tri, had fallen, and so the "situation is better than might have been expected."

Mr. Ford added what has become a standard White House assertion. He said the President was keeping "all options" open except the use of nuclear weapons. There are no longer any substantial U.S. ground forces in Vietnam.

## Continuing Paris talks

The Michigan congressman also said "we are continuing our negotiations" and explained that this was meant to be taken in the "broadest context." He may have been hinting that secret talks were under way in Paris though he confirmed that Dr. Kissinger, who has conducted previous secret discussions, was present at the White House session.

Announcing the logistics mission, a Pentagon spokesman, Jerry W. Friedheim, explained the South Vietnamese might need new equipment to counter "sophisticated" Soviet weapons being used by the North Vietnamese. These included artillery with a 17-mile range, T-54 tanks and SAM-2 antiaircraft missiles, as well as reports of anti-helicopter hand-held heat-seeking missiles.

Privately agree with Stennis

The investigative group is being headed by Barry J. Shillito, the assistant secretary of defense for installators and logistics, and includes eight generals and admirals.

Privately, Defense officials reflected the mood of the speech given by Senator Stennis. They were dismayed by the collapse of South Vietnam's 3d Division and the resulting threat to Hue, the ancient Vietnamese capital. They agreed that the leadership crisis in the northern region of Vietnam is severe.

But they also pointed out that the collapse of one division did not mean the same would happen in other areas where, they maintained, the South Vietnamese have been fighting well.

"We're not throwing in the towel yet," one official said. They were not cheering either.

Senator Stennis, an administration backer on the war, indicated that the military deterioration was not only a major crisis in South Vietnam but also one here for Mr. Nixon's Indonesia policy.

"This is a tragic situation I believe we're facing," he said as he maintained that with all the sacrifices the country has made, the people did not want to see the effort lost.

## "Travail" ahead

The senator predicted "travail" ahead and warned that "if things go to the worst, it could be humiliating for the American people."

Mr. Stennis also suggested that it is going to be hard for the South Vietnamese to save Hue without the assistance of U.S. ground troops.

The administration was treading a difficult line. On the one hand, it wanted to be realistic and give out the worst side of the war news to rally support for Mr. Nixon and defeat what were considered annoying anti-war resolutions in Congress.

But on the other, it did not want to depict the worst side of the war to comfort the enemy and drain Saigon of what it had left of a fighting spirit.

WALL STREET JOURNAL 4 MAY 1972 P1

# U.S. Ready to Accept A Compromise Peace -Or to Expand War

## Turning Point Deemed Likely: Either Peace on New Terms Or a Bloody Surge in Bombing

By ROBERT KEATLEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON-The U.S. is ready to settle for less.

It is ready to accept a Vietnam peace, or something that could be called peace, on terms far less favorable to the U.S. than it once sought or that its Saigon ally still wants.

But if the North Vietnamese don't go along, President Nixon is prepared to give them a lot more-more bombing, more naval bombardment and more war, with no end in sight.

The next three weeks should determine which way the Vietnam war is going to go. By May 22, and Mr. Nixon's scheduled visit to Moscow, the world should either have witnessed a great leap toward peace or a stunning reversion to an even wider war.

No one can be sure what Hanoi is willing to opt or just where events will lead. But en the views of officials and diplomats, these seem to be the alternatives:

Peace. As the U.S. now defines it, peace would mean a cease-fire and arrangements allowing the U.S. to withdraw with some semblance of "honor." U.S. troops would be pulled out of Vietnam, and U.S. prisoners of war would be returned. But the cease-fire would leave North Vietnamese troops holding one or more big cities in the South while giving the Communists a more political role-a good chance for ultimate control-in Saigon. Presumably, South Vietnam would hang together at least through November and President Nixon's reelection campaign. The erratic performance of Saigon's army rules out much better terms than that.

An expanded war. This would mean a stalemated Hanoi offensive in the South, more big battles and deaths there and refugees streaming haplessly across the countryside. And it would mean much more bombing of North Vietnamese "military targets," which could include areas previously off limits to hold down civilian casualties.

### "A Very Great Risk"

"We are prepared to use our military and naval strength against military targets throughout North Vietnam, and we believe that the North Vietnamese are taking a very great risk if they continue the offensive in the South," President Nixon warned last Sunday

night while addressing a group of hawkish Texans. Observers feel that if Mr. Nixon does resume bombing, it will likely be more intensive than anything that has gone before.

In some ways, however, the prospects for a negotiated end to fighting appear better than ever before.

The evidence includes the diplomatic flurry that recently took White House adviser Henry Kissinger to Moscow, some senior Russian officials to Hanoi and North Vietnam's top negotiator, Le Due Tho, back to Paris. "To come for nothing would be foolish" of Mr. Tho, says a diplomat friendly to Hanoi's cause. Presumably, Mr. Kissinger passed on some ideas about the American position to the Russians, who then sent the message to Hanoi. Upon his arrival in Paris, Mr. Tho took pains to insist that his government isn't trying to "impose" a Communist regime on the South but that it is seeking a coalition government of "national harmony."

This points up the main difference between the two sides: Hanoi wants to tie the political terms to any cease-fire, while the U.S. wants a narrower military deal. Such a military settlement would be no great victory for the U.S. It would merely pose aside most political problems for the Vietnamese to work out later, by peaceful means, it is hoped. Significantly, the fact that this is now the U.S. position implies both diminishing confidence in Saigon's ability to survive and decreased American interest in whether it does, once the G.I.s are safely home. It also implies that Mr. Nixon is becoming increasingly conscious of the approaching election day-and of the need to get Vietnam off the front page this summer and fall.

### Defeat and Despair

The U.S. now is bargaining in an atmosphere of defeat and despair. Saigon's army has done poorly so far, with some units running even before being attacked. Leadership problems persist. President Thieu yesterday fired two generals, but the problem goes deeper: Many middle-grade commanders seem to lack courage, competence or motivation when faced by the enemy-some have even abandoned their troops outright. Meantime, Mr. Thieu himself hasn't made any serious effort to rally his people since a foreboding speech last April 5.

"The picture of discouragement is general," says one American official.

And things may soon get worse. Communist troops are expected to take Kontum, a provincial capital in the highlands, in a day or two. Meantime, South Vietnamese (ARVN) troops dig in to defend Hue, the former imperial capital of Vietnam, with uncertain prospects. No natural barriers exist to slow the North Vietnamese advance. Although U.S. advisers believe Saigon's troops can hold Hue if they fight hard, most ARVN units in that area haven't done this yet. If Communist troops do take the city, driving them out may prove impossible.

Such battlefield successes may make North Vietnam more willing to strike a deal in Paris

its victories give it both territorial and psychological advantages in dealing with Saigon's cease-fire in place is more attractive now than Communist forces are perhaps permanently command of Southern territory. And the threat of massive U.S. reprisals if negotiations fail may strongarm North Vietnam a bit in the same direction as well.

Moreover, Hanoi's victories have come at great cost. U.S. estimates (not the more inflated ones from Saigon) are that some 23,000 Northern troops-a fourth of the total involved in this offensive-have been killed during the past month. North Vietnam's final regular division now is crossing the demilitarized zone to enter the fight; some military men here believe this means Hanoi is already hard pressed to keep the offensive going.

Likewise, North Vietnam is under some pressure from its two big friends-the Soviet Union and China-to strike a bargain. Both now seem to regard their improving relations with the U.S. as more important than the war in South Vietnam, though neither dares say so publicly. Their direct influence over Hanoi policies is limited, but it appears that both Soviet Communist Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai would like the war to end, provided North Vietnam doesn't lose.

But in case Hanoi refuses to strike a bargain soon, Mr. Nixon is studying ways to make it regret it. Two additional aircraft carriers now are near the Vietnam coast, giving the U.S. another 150 planes for attacks on the North. The long-discussed naval blockade of Haiphong remains a possibility, though it would risk political problems with China and the U.S.S.R.

And American commanders could revive plans for an amphibious invasion of North Vietnam. This would put ARVN troops ashore north of the demilitarized zone to cut off supply lines and force Hanoi's troops to return home for battle, relieving pressure on Hue. Once they massed for counterattack, the U.S. would bomb them and pull out the ARVN units. Political implications aside, however, this plan has one big drawback: Saigon's army is spread so thin that scraping up the 10,000 or so necessary troops would be difficult.

In any event, a lack of negotiating progress would at minimum prolong the American role in South Vietnam, something Hanoi wants to end. This would include both the "residual" U.S. support force, plus additional military aid. Already, in fact, the Pentagon has sent a senior civilian and five more generals to Saigon to determine what additional weapons might help ARVN fight better.

Some of what's needed-by Pentagon standards-sounds familiar. Defense Department spokesman Jerry Friedheim says that if new weapons are sent to South Vietnam, more American advisers may have to go along to train South Vietnamese troops in their use.

135

SATURDAY REVIEW 6 MAY 1972 (4)

The Building: A Dangerous Way to Deliver a Message

We may be shocked by the renewed
U.S. bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong.
We should not be surprised. For Presi-
dent Nixon has always left himself the
portion of re-escalating the war should
nothing happen to threaten the
inking American military forces in
the final phases of withdrawal. North
Vietnam's massive attacks on the
South gave Nixon the excuse to exer-
cise that option.

There is no doubt that Hanoi did, in
fact, mount a major offensive, the big-
gest since the bloody Tet attacks of
1968. An estimated dozen North Viet-
namese divisions poured across the De-
militarized Zone at the 17th parallel,
bolstered by Soviet-made PT-76 and
T-54 tanks as well as huge artillery
pieces. So many men were hurled into
the attacks against South Vietnam's
northernmost provinces, its Central
Highlands, and the region around Sai-
gon that North Vietnam was left with-
out a single full, combat-ready division
to defend itself.

Still it is puzzling that the President
chose to respond by sending waves of
B-52s over Hanoi and Haiphong. Were
the remaining 70,000 or so American
troops really endangered by the inva-
sion—and it can be called nothing less
—from the North? That does not seem
terribly likely, unless Nixon feared that
South Vietnam's forces were in immi-
nent danger of collapsing—which
could not speak well for the success
this Vietnamization program. The
administration hints that the public
does not know all the facts—as many
an administration hinted whenever its
policies came under attack—but, even
so, what purpose could have been
served by bombing the North's major
cities? If the administration's objec-
tive was to blunt the invasion, wouldn't
it have made more sense to bomb the
attacking units in the South, the
transportation network that threads
through the DMZ and the eastern parts
of Laos, and even the supply bases sit-
uated just north of the 17th parallel?

In all likelihood, Nixon's objective
was considerably broader—and more
dangerous. Though he has scrupulously
avoided saying so directly, his lieu-
tenants have made it clear that the
bombing was aimed as much at Mos-
cow as at Hanoi. In recent months the
Soviets have stepped up their ship-
ments of armor, antiaircraft artillery,
and even SA-2 missiles to North Viet-
nam, and a number of high military
advisers from Moscow are known to
have visited Hanoi. Whether the So-
viet's had a hand in planning the
invasion—or, conversely, counseled
against it—is not known. Their in-
vested arms shipments were enough
alarm the administration. Appar-
ently, the President decided that to
ignore Moscow's role in the new offen-
sive would be to place him in a posi-
tion of weakness when he journeys to
the Soviet Union on May 22. Accord-
ingly, he said during his recent visit to
Ottawa: "Great powers cannot avoid
the rearmament of the Soviet Union."

by those to whom they give them."
There is more than a little irony in the
timing of the remark; it was made just
before a controversy erupted over the
dispatch of U.S. jets to Pakistan by
Libya and Jordan during the war on
the subcontinent late last year.

If the bombing was indeed intended
as a warning to the Soviets, it would
mark the second time in recent months
that Nixon has reacted dramatically in
order to counter moves by Moscow.
The first occurred during the latest In-
dian-Pakistani war, when the admin-
istration, deeply disturbed by New
Delhi's increasing reliance on Soviet
arms and advice, went too far in its
support of the military regime in
Islamabad. The result was to align the
United States with a loser—and one
that had the blood of several million
Bengalis on its hands, at that—and to
alienate the government of the world's
largest democracy.

Nixon's concern with Moscow's mo-
tives is, of course, entirely legitimate,
and a case can be made that the Soviets
lately have been something less than
model citizens of the international
community. It may be, however, that
the U.S. government has not accorded
sufficient weight to one particular ele-
ment in this complicated equation—the
intense Soviet preoccupation with
China. In both India and North Viet-
nam it is entirely possible that Mos-
cow's primar goal was to outflank
Peking, not to irritate Washington.

Whether the bombing will affect
Nixon's talks with the Russians on
strategic arms limitations, increased
trade, and the future of Europe re-
mains to be seen. So far the Soviet
reaction has been rather muted. Not
so the reaction on U.S. campuses,
though the demonstrations might
prove short-lived and the students
might lapse quickly back into the
silence that has enveloped them for a
couple of years. Politically, the impact
is likely to be less than was assumed
when the first thick headlines ap-
peared. At first glance the situation
seems to vindicate George McGovern's
insistence that the war remains the
foremost issue before the nation. By
September or October, however, do-
mediate concerns, such as tax reform,
inflation, unemployment, and busing to
end school segregation, may once again
become paramount.

It is unlikely that the bombing,
which, if anything, reinforced North
Vietnam's fighting spirit in the earlier
days of the war, will force Hanoi into
a more resilient negotiating position.
Unlikely, but not entirely impossible.
Our strategists have spoken too often
of "last-gasp" offensives for us to be
lieve that this one will be any differ-
ent. Yet there are reports from the
battlefields that captured North Viet-
namese troops are generally younger
and less thoroughly indoctrinated than
those of past campaigns. This, together
with the reports that North Vietnam
has virtually stripped itself of de-
fensive, would seem to indicate that
Hanoi's manpower pool may be run-
ning low. Maybe—just maybe—the
next round of talks will get somewhere.
Even if they do, however, the cost will
have been prohibitive: a battle that
killed 8,000 North and South Vietna-
mese in its first week alone and the
return of the bombers after four years

AND THE WAR GOES ON

Nine times Richard Nixon had gone on television to explain his plan to end the war in Indochina. Each time he had vowed that he would extricate the U.S. from that searing conflict without sacrificing the sovereignty of South Vietnam. Last week, the President took his case to the country again, but this time his TV address was made under the shadow of ominous new circumstances. In Vietnam itself, the four-week-old Communist offensive raged ever stronger and threatened to cut the country in half. And at home, the deep but long-dormant hostility that most Americans feel toward the war sputtered sullenly, like coals waiting to be fanned into flames.

Given these pressures, many people expected that Mr. Nixon would unveil some dramatic new turn in U.S. policy toward Vietnam. Instead, he chose to give his audience more of the same. Once again, he proclaimed his determination to defend the regime of South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. Sternly, he announced his intention to continue bombing North Vietnam until the Communists "stop their offensive." At the same time, with an eye to domestic opinion, the President revealed that U.S. troop withdrawals would proceed as planned and that U.S. ground strength would be cut to 49,000 men by July 1. Then came the only new element in the speech: apparently on the strength of a secret trip that Henry Kissinger made to Moscow two weeks ago, the President expressed his conviction that meaningful new negotiations would soon be under way in Paris-and he hinted at a resumption of secret talks as well.

All in all, it was a cool and confident performance-which was remarkable in view of the alarming news reports from the battlefield. There, some 120,000 North Vietnamese regulars, backed by an impressive array of Soviet-made tanks, artillery and missiles, were dealing the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) one severe setback after another. Three provincial capitals-Quang Tri in the northern part of South Vietnam, Kontum in the central highlands and An Loc northwest of Saigon-were gripped in an ever-tightening ring of Communist troops. As tens of thousands of refugees fled to the uncertain sanctuary of areas under Saigon's control, casualties mounted on both sides. According to the latest weekly casualty report, in fact, more ARVN troops-a total of 4,525-were killed and wounded in the seven days ending April 22 than in any previous week since the war began.

**Gamble:** Despite all this, the President presented an optimistic picture of the military situation. Flourishing a red binder containing a report from Gen. Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander in Vietnam. Mr. Nixon declared: "The South Vietnamese are fighting courageously and well in their self defense... General Abrams predicts ... weeks of very hard fighting ... But his conclusion is that if we continue to provide air and support, the enemy will fail in its desperate gamble to impose a Communist regime in South Vietnam."

As the President himself implied, the key element in his upheaval assessment was the support being provided the South Vietnamese by an expanded U.S. naval armada and 600 U.S. planes.

Clearly, though Mr. Nixon sought to leave the impression that the ARVN was doing all the fighting, the U.S. had mounted a massive effort on the sea and in the air. In addition to the daily strategic bombing of North Vietnam, U.S. planes provided close tactical air support in South Vietnam in a dramatic campaign to stave off an ARVN debacle. During the month of April, B-52s and jet fighters dropped an estimated total of 98,000 tons of bombs on targets throughout Indochina-a figure that was only slightly below the 1969 monthly average of 100,000 tons.

It was against this background of an escalating conflict-a conflict that threatened to cancel Mr. Nixon's scheduled summit in Moscow later this month-that Henry Kissinger undertook his clandestine rendezvous in Russia. After attending a party at the home of Polly Wisner, a leading Washington hostess, Kissinger was whisked off to Andrews Air Force Base where he and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin boarded a U.S. Air Force jet for Moscow. Once in the Soviet capital, where he was treated to a VIP sightseeing tour and the customary overabundance of caviar, Kissinger plunged into an extraordinary round of talks with Soviet party chief Leonid Brezhnev that lasted fourteen hours. So intense were the discussions between the two men that Kissinger even extended his planned three-day stay by an extra 24 hours.

Inevitably, Vietnam was a principal point of discussion in the Brezhnev-Kissinger meetings. In effect, Kissinger delivered a professorial lecture on Mr. Nixon's view of how the war is related to the broader sweep of international relations. And he clearly tried to convince Brezhnev that a relaxation of tensions would be as beneficial to the Soviet Union as it would be to the United States.

**About-Face:** Precisely what had come out of the talks was, of course, a matter of speculation. But the President himself provided a clue when he announced that the U.S. had decided to return to the Paris negotiating table. This step represented a sharp about-face from the position that the U.S. would continue to boycott the Paris talks until the Communists called off their offensive in South Vietnam-a position the White House had reaffirmed only a day before Mr. Nixon's TV speech. The most plausible explanation for this policy reversal was that Brezhnev and Kissinger had struck some kind of deal in Moscow. And there were signs that that was exactly what had happened. A few days after Kissinger returned from his Soviet sojourn, the Kremlin dispatched two high-ranking officials to Hanoi. At about the same time, Le Duc Tho, a powerful figure in the Hanoi Politburo, flew off to Peking en route to Paris. And in the French capital, the chief Viet Cong negotiator, Madame Nguyen Thi Biuh, noted that the Communists had no objections to help from the superpowers in arranging a settlement.

By holding out the hope of a negotiated settlement, the President clearly intended to deluse domestic criticism. And

for the time being he apparently had succeeded. True, there were numerous disruptions by radical students-most notably at Cornell, Kent State and Columbia University, where a few hundred undergraduates occupied buildings for five straight days. But most college students seemed more interested in attending classes than demonstrations. And even among Congressional critics of the war, the reaction was restrained. Both Sen. George Aiken of Vermont and Sen. Robert Griffin of Michigan suggested that dissent would only encourage Hanoi to continue fighting. Still, in the primaries so far, pollsters have found the war upermost in the minds of many voters.

Indeed, President Nixon himself was surely aware that he had never been under quite the same kind of pressure as he was now. In order to make his patiently constructed Vietnam policy work, it was imperative that the South Vietnamese stay off military disaster. It also was clear that if the hope of a negotiated peace with honor was to retain any credibility with U.S. voters, there would have to be visible progress at Paris in the fairly near future. Should Mr. Nixon's hopes be frustrated on the battlefield or at the conference table, it is hard to see how he would ever be able to offer yet another encore of his Vietnam television speech to the American people.

## THE VIEW FROM HANOI

When it comes to an appraisal of the situation in Indochina, both North Vietnam and the U.S. are in agreement on one major point-1972 will be a year of decision. But naturally enough, the view from Hanoi of the potential risks and opportunities this year is far different than the view from the White House. As the North Vietnamese see it, President Nixon is vulnerable in many ways: all but a few of his ground combat troops have been brought home, the South Vietnamese are still an uncertain ally and, most important, Mr. Nixon must face a challenge at the polls this fall. In short, the small band of dedicated revolutionaries who rule North Vietnam decided some time ago that, militarily and psychologically, the time was ripe to strike. "The Communists are now trying to convince everyone that they are going to win this war," says a U.S. official. "Clearly, they are going to stay longer and fight harder than at any time since the Tet offensive of 1968."

Almost from the moment that Hanoi unleashed its ferocious artillery and tank assault on Easter Sunday, U.S. analysts concluded that North Vietnam was seeking a series of quick knockout victories. Last week, for instance, a senior official in the Nixon Administration told NEWSWEEK that he had expected the loss of two or three provincial capitals by now and that he had even counseled abandoning the central highlands in order to defend more critical areas. When such dramatic Communist gains did not materialize, however, many in the Administration contended that the offensive

THE VIEW
FROM MOSCOW

C.YJ

Had been stopped. But it soon became clear that that conclusion was premature. For the Communists had planned a campaign of sudden assaults mixed with periods of respite; whenever allied forces breathed a sigh of relief at a sudden hall, Hanoi lashed out again. Presidential adviser Henry Kissinger now estimates that the Communists have enough supplies to keep their conventional warfare offensive going until as late as July. And officials in the Pentagon predict that this summer, as Americans turn their attention to the political conventions, the Communists will be ready to launch phase two—local uprisings sparked by the Viet Cong to shatter government control in populated areas.

**Strategy:** But Hanoi has not put all its chips on a military victory. The North Vietnamese are devout believers in the strategy of talk-talk, fight-fight. Indeed, ever since the spring offensive began, the North Vietnamese have been trumpeting their insistence that the U.S. return to the negotiating table in Paris. Hanoi's diplomatic strategy is not hard to discern. By blooding the South Vietnamese Army and undermining Saigon's control of the countryside, the Communists are calculating that they can force the U.S. and South Vietnam into granting concessions at the bargaining table. Presumably, the North Vietnamese hardly expect an outright American capitulation that would hand over Saigon to Communist rule. Instead, Hanoi is gambling that its military victories can be translated into a political deal that would permit it to obtain meaningful power in a neutralist government in Saigon. Thereafter, the total subversion of South Vietnam would be only a matter of time.

Officially, the Nixon Administration holds fast to the belief that the North Vietnamese offensive can and will be stopped. But even Henry Kissinger, the principal architect of Mr. Nixon's Vietnam policy, readily admits that Hanoi may yet achieve its broader diplomatic goals. Echoing Kissinger's thinking, the President said last week: "[The Communists] one remaining hope is to win in the Congress of the U.S. and among the people of the U.S. the victory they cannot win... in South Vietnam."

The trouble with this view, however, is that it fails to place sufficient emphasis on the Communists' proven perseverance. By conservative estimate, the North Vietnamese have suffered 600,000 casualties during the past decade of war. And yet, despite their suffering and reversals, they have always managed to bounce back. Thus, even if American resolve does not break and Hanoi's current offensive fails in its objectives, it seems likely that the Communists will simply retreat and lick their wounds, awaiting yet another chance to realize their 20-year-old dream of uniting the two halves of Vietnam.

Ever since the United States began re-ferring with unconcealed annoyance to the Soviet Union's role as chief armør of the North Vietnamese spring offensive, the Kremlin leadership had become increasingly fretful. Would President Nixon cancel his proposed summit trip to Moscow? Or would the U.S. military response to Hanoi's invasion take on such fierce proportions that Russia itself would be forced to scrub the meeting as a gesture of loyalty to its North Vietnamese ally? Either way, cancellation of the summit would be a grievous blow to the Russians who have as much, if not more, to gain from the meeting than the U.S. And so, an extraordinary invitation was issued from Moscow by Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev himself. It might be helpful, Brezhnev wrote Mr. Nixon, if a trusted aide of the President's could come to the Soviet Union for consultations. And within days, Mr. Nixon's envoy par excellence, Henry Kissinger, was off on another secret mission.

The Russians' deep need for reassurance that the summit would not be scuttled became apparent to Kissinger early in his four-day visit. "When the Soviets treat you with great courtesy," he said afterward, "it is not an accident. You can be sure it reflects a policy." What seems essential to Moscow, as Kissinger put it, is "a visible relaxation of tensions" around the world. And a suddenly escalated war in Vietnam was nothing but a barrier to those hopes. At a time when the Soviet Union not only seeks détente with America's allies in Western Europe but is eager to counter the newly established cordiality between Washington and Peking, it was in Moscow's interests to do some courting of the Nixon Administration. "The Russians are ready to do business with the U.S.," said one American official. "The leadership has a great stake in specific agreements with us and they are not going to let Vietnam stand in the way."

There is no denying that the forthcoming negotiations with Mr. Nixon hold the promise of rich benefits for the Soviet Union—in economic as well as diplomatic terms. And that is no accident. Since the early days of his Administration, Mr. Nixon has sought to create and emphasize incentives for Moscow to help the U.S. out of its Vietnam dilemma. In that, he has succeeded. Moscow is just as anxious as Washington for an agreement to limit the production and 'deployment of expensive nuclear weapons. And the prospect of expanded trade with the U.S. in everything from feed grains to sophisticated technology appeals to the Russians almost as much.

Quite obviously, this Soviet attitude gives the Nixon Administration no small amount of leverage in its attempts to convince the Russians to bring their influence to bear on Hanoi. "There is considerable reason to believe," said one U.S. official, "that Moscow wants some things from us strongly enough to take

the heat out of some critical areas, so as Southeast Asia."

**Attitudes:** It would be a grave mistake, however, to assume that Russia is any more likely to walk out on its friends in Hanoi than Mr. Nixon is ready to abandon his allies in Saigon. "Vietnam is no longer on the front burner for the Russians," says one American specialist in Soviet affairs. "But I don't think that means they will help us directly in any way. Their attitudes are not any more benevolent; they will do nothing that would leave them open to a verifiable charge of selling out a client." Beyond that, many people hold to the view that it is still in Moscow's interest for the war to drag on. Says Columbia University's Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The continuing war exacerbates U.S. difficulties with China, contributes to domestic discontent and drains the U.S. economy."

Even if the Russians should seek to temper North Vietnam's enthusiasm for fighting to the finish in Indochina, moreover, there is little guarantee that they would succeed. To be sure, Moscow has no small amount of influence in North Vietnam. The Soviet Union is Hanoi's principal patron—especially in terms of rotary equipment. And Soviet delivery Hanoi, which totaled more than 1 million tons last year, will be increased in 1972, according to Soviet officials. Yet, for all its reliance on outside assistance, North Vietnam has always remained a fiercely autonomous state. As Wolfgang Leonhard, a top European analyst of Communist affairs, notes: "North Vietnam has never been anyone's puppet, and Moscow can only influence Hanoi to a very limited degree. You can put pressure on a satellite, but not on an ally."

In a sense, then, both Moscow and Washington have found themselves ensnarled in a similar position as the Vietnamese war has refused to disappear. Both of these powerful governments have seen their broader global designs hobbled by their small but often belligerently independent allies. And surely, just as the U.S. would like to apply its energy and resources to more rewarding and important international matters, so Moscow must seek the freedom to pursue its larger goals in Asia and the West without having to bankroll a seemingly endless Indochinese war. Accordingly, Henry Kissinger may be right when he judges that the Soviet Union has almost as much to gain from dampening the Vietnamese fires as does the U.S. States. It is one thing for Moscow to jubilant at America's predicament in Vietnam. But it is quite another for the Soviets to indulge the North Vietnamese at the risk of losing their chance for an historic détente with the West.

WASHINGTON POST

5 MAY 1973

Before Hue

For all the external evidence of a collapse of the diplomatic process, it is still reasonable to ask if at last Richard Nixon and Hanoi have not arrived at that delimitable point where a compromise on Vietnam is within reach. We suggest this in full awareness of yesterday's abrupt American breakup of the public Paris talks and not out of any special information about any secret mission which Henry Kissinger may or may not be engaged in, but out of a hope that the two sides may finally have communicated to each other the essential message requisite to a settlement. This is, in plain, that each can still do terrible damage to the other to no conclusive purpose—Mr. Nixon with his firepower and Hanoi with its staying power. The damage inflicted either way will not compensate for the damage suffered and, in any event, neither's political goals can be assured by such means. It is, therefore, difficult for us to conceive that with the political intelligence available to both of them, Hanoi and Washington could have failed by now to have registered this elemental fact.

For the moment there is a certain pause on the battlefield. The expected onslaught on Hue has yet to begin. North Vietnam is bringing up its men and supplies. The South Vietnamese, under a new commander alert to the need to reform panicked soldiers into combat units, are taking up positions of their own. Hanoi has the momentum of Quangtri, and not only Quangtri. Saigon should have the spur of its belated awareness of peril, as well as whatever comfort it can find in Mr. Nixon's evident, desperate willingness to contemplate such acts as a blockade of Haiphong or the bombing of the North Vietnamese dikes—even though these are excesses from which many of his countrymen would cringe.

Must the battle of Hue take place? Leave aside for the moment the sure death and devastation it would bring. If Hanoi wins, Mr. Nixon could well retaliate with a ferocity great even by the standards of Vietnam; indeed, he may even do so in advance in hopes of some will-of-the-wisp deterrent effect. If Mr. Nixon and Saigon win, Hanoi would simply make ready for the next battle. If there is a standoff, then the battle need not have been fought at all. There are, in short, overwhelming

reasons to conclude a cease-fire now. These are, we trust, precisely those reasons which support the hints that a cease-fire may be in the mill.

It should go without saying that the propaganda parade at the public Paris talks is the last place to look for results. It begs belief that the United States could have entertained any serious expectations of eliciting answers to the eight questions which Ambassador Porter posed in Paris yesterday—questions like "will you discuss measures to end your invasion?" The American performance there can only be understood, if it is to be understood at all, as either a deliberate effort to distract attention from what real diplomatic action may be going on elsewhere; or—the worst case—as an exercise designed to close down the peace talks, with the onus on Communist intransigence, even while major new air strikes are being planned.

A cease-fire, of course, is not enough. It must be followed, and it can only be sustained, by setting in train a process that will satisfy the minimal political requirements of both sides. The United States cannot tolerate the imposition of a Communist regime, or physical attacks on its remaining forces or on South Vietnamese who had cast their lot with the Americans. North Vietnam cannot be expected to abandon a political struggle for power in the South. Eut there is, we believe, adequate room within the positions of both sides to satisfy the other in these key respects, if the will is there. Whether President Thieu would choose to stand between his country and such a potential settlement, a settlement which most other elements in South Vietnam would presumably prefer to continued war, only he could decide.

For President Nixon, we can imagine no more certain way to earn the gratitude and respect of his country than by reaching out for a settlement of this kind. It would be consistent with the high purpose he has adopted as his own to provide the people of South Vietnam the opportunity to determine their own future. It could not fail to bring closer the prizes he seeks at the Moscow summit later in May and at the polls next fall. We do not ignore the fact that Hanoi and Saigon must make their choices. But the principal choice is the President's.

NATION MAGAZINE 8 MAY 1972 (5)

## Shambles

Where the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been proved wrong so often, *The Nation* fears to tread, but whatever the outcome of the present North Vietnam-Vietcong offensive, a shambles has been made of Vietnamization. From now on, American air power, already carrying much of the burden of the war for the ARVN, must take on still more. If it fails, important units of Thieu's forces may disintegrate or be overrun when they stand and fight. Thieu kept himself in office with a faked election, but what keeps him there now is naked military power—American military power with a South Vietnamese façade. If the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong continue their offensive on the present scale, Thieu may go the way of Ngo Dinh Diem.

The North Vietnamese strategy has been brilliant—General Giap is evidently as good as he was against the French at Dienbienphu. But what is astonishing is the bad showing the South Vietnamese have made. They had a million men under arms, yet soon after the offensive began, news got through the censorship that Thieu had sent his palace guard—his protection against a coup—into action. The delta region south of Saigon was denuded of troops, although the Vietcong had always been strong there. Suddenly the delta area had become unimportant. All this sounded incredible in relation to an army of a million men. Where were its reserves? The only conclusion was that it didn't have any. There was only a nucleus of professional soldiers with an enormous fringe of militia, regional forces, local forces, Keystone Cops, etc. Such amateurs, even if beefed up with a certain number of semi-professionals, are no match for a well-trained army, especially when these effectives swoop down with tanks and artillery.

And what of the South Vietnamese air force, supposedly equipped with some 1,300 planes and said to be the seventh largest in the world? They don't like to fight at night, it seems; from which one may deduce that a lot of them are not eager to fight at all. The previously quiet war suited them; the present war, the real thing, doesn't please them at all. This absence of martial fervor is not entirely the fault of the pilots. A great deal of air Vietnamization is only on paper and in President Nixon's pro-nouncements. The training and equipping of the South Vietnamese air force is not scheduled to be completed until 1974, which doesn't help much in 1972. But even in 1974, this air force (if it exists then) will not be self-sufficient; according to *Time* (May 1) it will not be given equipment that might tempt it into "unwise adventures." Washington, sensible for once, prefers to keep control of the war. There might be unpleasant consequences if Saigon (assuming a Thieu-type government is still running things in 1974) took it into its head to bomb Soviet freighters up at Haiphong and kill a few score Russians.

The prospect, then, is for an indefinitely prolonged American air presence in Indochina, involving, say, 40,000 men and an outlay of $1 billion or $2 billion a year. Nixon wound down the ground war as far as Americans are concerned, but there is no prospect of winding down the air war. Undoubtedly in its present bombing

frenzy the USAF has inflicted serious losses on the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, as on the civilian population of both Vietnam. But these enemy casualties have been achieved at a considerable cost. In the three weeks of the current offensive, eighteen U.S. planes and twenty-four helicopters have been lost, with twenty-five killed, eight wounded, and forty-one missing.

Repeat: forty-one. That is embarrassing, to say the least. One of Nixon's problems is the Americans, mostly airmen, held by the North Vietnamese. The corollary problem is the families of these men, some of whom have been in captivity for eight years. As we pursue and intensify the air war—more carriers and other fighting ships are on the way—not only does the prospect of the POWs coming home recede but their numbers will increase. How Mr. Nixon will deal with that aggravation we are content to leave to him.

"Pacification" of course is a part of the shambles. So is Cambodia, so is Laos. The worst mistake of all was the President's incursion into Cambodia, which gave the North Vietnamese a whole country to use for attacks on South Vietnam from the West, instead of the few border areas they had held before. All over South Vietnam, de-pacification is now the order of the day.

An even more crucial question is whether American air power, at whatever cost, can hold South Vietnam for Thieu. Suppose it turns out that American ground troops are required in concert with air power? For obvious political reasons, Mr. Nixon is not likely to recommit our ground forces before the election, but if he is re-elected, he may do just that, going on TV to explain why, God help him, he can do no other. That possibility, if it can be got into the heads of Nixon-worshippers, might change their minds when they go into the polling booths.

WHERE
There's
No Will,
There's
No Way

SAIGON — "Where are their officers?" an American military adviser asked last week as he watched South Vietnamese troops flee from the battered city of Quangtri. "There's no one to tell them 'Stop' and to pull them together."

Lack of civilian and military leadership capable of arousing the people to stand firm and the troops to fight is being shown up as the Achilles' heel of the American policy of winning the war by Vietnamizing it. In this time of South Vietnam's greatest testing, the Government forces have offered little resistance so far to the North Vietnamese offensive that led last week to enemy control of all of Quangtri Province, the northernmost province bordering on the demilitarized zone. All that the Saigon Government could do about it was sack the responsible commander.

And there is not much that the Americans — with all their air power and frantic effort to replace the tanks and artillery pieces the South Vietnamese have lost — can do about it. Determination is needed desperately now to save South Vietnam, and that seems to be in short supply.

It was the unknown factor all along, despite claims by the Nixon Administration that the South Vietnamese could "hack it," that Vietnamization was working and that air power could be sufficient to give the Vietnamese the edge over their enemy. Perhaps it would, if the South Vietnamese themselves wanted to resist as much as the enemy wants to attack. And now, many Americans here are concluding, their allies are not as game for the fight as they thought.

Thousands of troops of the shattered Third Infantry Division reteated along Highway 1 from Quangtri city toward Hue and Danang last week. Their general made it out of Quangtri on the American helicopters that came in to rescue the American advisers. Most of his troops had to run a 15-mile-long ganlet of North Vietnamese fire to safety north of Hue. Their officers left them to fend for themselves, and many of the officers ripped off their rank insignia to avoid being spotted as men in authority by the North Vietnamese.

The troops roared down the two-lane road in commandeered trucks and jeeps, on the back of motorcycles, in the few armored vehicles they had left, angrily shooting at the country-side around and even running down civilian vehicles. One angry South Vietnamese marine, holding his ground as the Third Division troops fled

South, asked one straggler: "Are you from the Third Division?" When he said he was, the marine shot him through the head.

After the Government forces left Quangtri, the Communist radio announced that local guerrillas had taken over and set up their own administration for the nearly deserted province, now feeling the weight of a rain of American bombs.

Similar scenes of retreat had been played out the week before in Kontum and Binhdinh Provinces in the Central Highlands, where the men of the 22d Division, left by their officers to fend for themselves, fled North Vietnamese assaults on their positions rather than stay behind to get killed.

"The militia in my district felt the regular army had let them down," an American adviser from Hoainhon on the central coast, lost without much of a fight last weekend, recalled. "They saw no point in fighting enemy troops the regulars didn't want to take on."

As the troops began to flee Quangtri, panic overtook the civilian population, which had looked to them for protection. The refugees came streaming down Highway 1 into Hue, where they found many of that city's 200,000 residents also becoming demoralized and heading south to Vietnam's second largest city, Danang, site of a large American air base.

More than 200,000 persons were streaming south from Hue to Danang, and what they were fleeing was war, over their heads and through their homes.

American bombs and North Vietnamese artillery shells do not discriminate between their intended victims and innocent farmers who happen to be nearby. Many of the refugees were aware of that, saying they had fled intense Communist shelling and scanning the skies for the white contrails of the B-52's that were after the North Vietnamese.

With so many people caught in the middle of a war that has torn their country apart for the last decade and longer, it is little wonder that last week, for the first time during the six-week-old offensive, political figures in Saigon began to talk-quietly, because it is illegal about what would happen after a ceasefire, about "accommodation."

It would take something drastic like the loss of the symbolically important city of Hue, the ancient imperial capital, to bring these undercurrents out into the open, but such a loss is not impossible.

In the Tet offensive of 1968, the

North Vietnamese took over Hue and were driven out after a month of hard fighting by United States Marines and airborne troops. Today the plaintive question of some of Hue's citizens who have stayed is: "When are the Americans coming?" If President Nixon and every official here can be believed, the harsh answer is never.

The policy of Vietnamizing the air war has been junked completely. There are now five aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin, more at one time than ever before in the war, and sixth is on the way. The United States Air Force base at Takhli in Thailand, closed during the phasedowns of the last few years, is being reopened, and the American air fleet in the region now has about 750 combat planes.

At the end of the week plans for massive American bombing of North Vietnam were being readied—bombing with eight-engine B-52's this time instead of only the smaller fighter-bombers, which have much less fire. Yet even advocates of such a blow at the enemy do not claim that it will make the North Vietnamese stop their offensive and pull back behind their borders.

It would be punitive revenge, little more—a blow dealt in frustration over the inability of American air power to stop the tanks and supplies and men who have been moving into position on three fronts for the offensive: frustration at the inability of American generals and civilian officials to see deep enough into the hearts of their Vietnamese protégés to realize that, when push came to shove, they would prove to be inadequate: frustration that what was won by 500,000 American troops four years ago is now slowly going down the drain. The South Vietnamese may yet reverse the train of events, but even if they did, it would be over the wreckage of most of the American policies of the past four years.

—CRAIG R. WHITNEY

NEW YORK TIMES

7 May 1972

Saigon's Crisis,

NEW YORK TIMES 6 MAY 1972

# More Vietnam Myths

By ANTHONY LEWIS

LONDON, May 5—One of the nightmare aspects of Vietnam for Americans these days is the sense of déjà vu. We have been through it all before: the donimo talk, the Presidential heroism, the reliance on American air power to replace a South Vietnamese will to fight.

The old myths are dusted off to provide new reasons for a policy that has not worked over seven years: It is a gobal Communism we are fighting. The enemy is stubborn, unfair, immoral. Worst of all, he has broken international agreements.

Thus President Nixon has insisted that the Communists' current offensive is "in violation of the understanding that they had reached with President Johnson in 1968, when he stopped the bombing of North Vietnam in return for arrangements which included their pledge not to violate the demilitarized zone." The offensive, the President also says, "is a clear case of naked and unprovoked aggression across an international border."

So many distortions and untruths are wrapped into myths of that kind that it is difficult to sort them out.

The full record of the negotiations that led to the 1968 "understanding" has not been published. There remains disagreement among American experts on whether the North Vietnamese ever accepted the idea of U.S. reconnaissance flights continuing over North Vietnam after the bombing stopped. It is agreed that American negotiators tried to include language recognizing a right to such reconnaissance; the disputed question is whether the other side ever accepted that interpretation.

But, in any case, Richard Nixon as President long ago publicly disavowed the 1968 understanding. Daniel I. Davidson, a member of the peace talks delegation in 1968, has just analyzed the affair for The New York Times, concluding that it was Mr. Nixon who "first repudiated and breached the understanding."

To summarize the history briefly, Mr. Nixon resumed heavy bombing of North Vietnam in May 1970 at the time he ordered the invasion of Cambodia. He or his aides invented the term "protective reaction" for the raids. At a press conference on Dec. 10, 1970, the President said he wanted to state his own "understanding" about the bombing of North Vietnam:

"If . . . the North Vietnamese by their infiltration threaten our remaining forces, if they thereby develop a

capacity and proceed possibly to use that capacity to increase the level of fighting in South Vietnam, then I will order the bombing of military sites in North Vietnam."

In short, Mr. Nixon said he would feel free to bomb the North whenever the military situation in the South looked difficult. And he did.

That was tantamount to calling off the 1968 understanding that ended American bombing, whatever its precise scope. To complain now that the present offensive violates that understanding is like one side changing the rules in the middle of a game and then denouncing the other as immoral for violating them.

As for the "clear case" of "aggression across an international border," history makes it anything but clear.

The Geneva Conference of 1954, the last definitive international legal forum on the question, treated Vietnam as one country. It recognized a "military demarcation line" but agreed that this was "provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary." The line was to last only until a national election in 1956.

As President Eisenhower frankly said, the United States decided to block the election—because the Communists would have won it—and to build up an anti-Communist government in the South. It was the United States that divided Vietnam, not the Vietnamese or the French.

Of course two very different societies have developed in the two Vietnams since 1954. There are real fears of Communism in the South, and antipathy to the Northerners. The North conceives of itself as fighting a civil war.

The irony is that a few years ago we could have made a settlement with the Communists that gave hope for an autonomous South Vietnam. The Vietcong leaders had real regional feelings and, most experts feel, would not have been mere agents of the North. But endless years of war have given the North a dominant role.

The one thing that is clear from the anguish of the last decade is that the United States is an alien element in Vietnam. All the blood and treasure we have spent have not given the South Vietnamese, with a 500,000-man army that is by far the best equipped in Southeast Asia, the will to resist on their own a North Vietnamese force that we estimate at about 110,000. And so we go on with a policy of mass destruction, clouded by myths.

irreplaceable by any other anti-Communist political force in South Vietnam. could still give up his main objective that army's defeat, or the American in Vietnam and yet be spared the necessity of admitting it.

on an anti-Communist regime in Saigon, could change all that. All the threats and commitments and further what he might do if the pressures do not abate.

—MAX FRANKEL

NEW YORK TIMES - 7 MAY 1972

# Waiting for the Bombs

By JAMES RESTON

WASHINGTON, May 6—During this latest crisis in Vietnam, there has been a mood of morbid anxiety in Washington, a combination of waiting for the bombs to fall on Haiphong plus a feeling that this is very risky business which will not halt the enemy's offensive.

At such a time, when even Joe Alsop is asking us all to pray, it would seem a sensible and logical idea for the President to call the responsible members of the Cabinet and the Congress together to discuss "the clear and present danger," but this is not what has been happening here.

The Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, is touring the European capitals, talking about the President's scheduled visit this month to Moscow, which is providing the tanks, artillery and mobile antiaircraft guns for Hanoi's invasion. Mike Mansfield and Hugh Scott, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate, have been in Peking during most of the crisis, and while the North Vietnamese have been advancing on the old Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue, the President has been in Texas proclaiming his policies to Secretary of the Treasury Connally's friends.

Meanwhile, the big topic of conversation among the officials and reporters in Washington has been "Where's Henry?" Well, it turns out, Mr. Kissinger was at the big press dinner in Washington last Saturday, then in

Paris on Tuesday talking to the North Vietnamese, then at a private dinner explaining it all to some puzzled big shots in New York, but what it all means and where it's all going has been left to the Administration's public relations men, who seem to know little more about the facts than anybody else.

This is obviously one way to deal with a delicate and dangerous military and diplomatic problem, the tactics of which cannot be broadcast to the world, but it is a highly personal way, and the truth is that nobody knows what Mr. Nixon may do if his bombs and his diplomacy do not work any better in the next few weeks than they have in the last few.

For Mr. Nixon believes that secrecy, surprise and sudden, unpredictable moves like the invasions of Cambodia and Laos and the bombings of Hanoi and Halphong are virtues that keep the enemy off balance, and if they scare Hanoi as much as they have alarmed Washington, he may be right.

Mr. Nixon, the old Navy poker player, has gambled (1) that he could pull out his combat ground troops to please the antiwar sentiment at home without risking a modern tank and artillery offensive by the Communists; (2) that he could count on the South Vietnamese, backed by U.S. air and naval power, to smash any such invasion if it came, and (3) that, if all this failed, he could still compel the Communists to negotiate a compromise

settlement by threatening or actually bombing Haiphong and Hanoi.

His first two assumptions did not work out as he had hoped and planned, and now he is left with the third: to bomb the North in the hope of compelling a compromise on his terms, and he is keeping that decision quite clearly in his own hands.

The result—and this is why Washington is now so edgy—is that even his own associates, let alone the Congress, are left to speculate on what he will do. Which Nixon will decide—the hard-liner who will stick to his original policy on supporting General Thieu in Saigon and opposing Communist aggression or the flexible, pragmatic Nixon who adjusts to the facts, orders the wage and price controls he swore he opposed and goes to Peking and Moscow to negotiate a "generation of peace" with the men and systems he has vilified for a generation?

Nobody knows. He is a very complicated man, always on guard, always suspicious, one day defying the world and the next adopting the policies of the people he has denounced; one day acting for tomorrow's headline and the next seeing himself clothed in the robes of history, but always tightly strung up and self-observing, and sitting tense and smiling for his own historical photograph.

This is why Washington has been so morbidly anxious in recent days. It knows there is a serious crisis, but it is not watching an orderly system dealing calmly with that crisis. It has been left to psychoanalyze a man, and it hasn't the vaguest idea of which side of that man will be in charge next week.

NEW YORK TIMES

7 MAY 1972

Nixon's Options:

No One
Knows
What He
Might Do

"What will he do?" they ask, from one end of the country to the other. The President who wanted to be respected for his calculated fury in the face of adversity has indeed inspired that kind of respect—and a good measure of fear as well—at least among his own people. The fear was so intense that even the regular voices of protest were muted.

What will he do, they ask, if the North Vietnamese keep coming, the South Vietnamese keep crumbling, the Russians keep stalling and the political risks keep mounting?

At the height of the enemy advance last week, President Nixon flew to Texas, telephoned President Johnson and then told an assembly of wealthy businessmen at Secretary of the Treasury John Connally's ranch that, like his predecessor, he was not going to yield respect for the office of the Presidency by leaving Vietnam vulnerable to a "Communist takeover."

"I am not going to let that happen," the President said, "We are prepared to use our military and naval strength against military targets throughout North Vietnam, and we believe that the North Vietnamese are taking a very great risk if they continue their offensive in the South. I will just leave it there, and they can make their own choice."

In the realm of Presidential threats, that one ranked as fairly ominous, even if allowance is made for the virile and beefy setting in which it was uttered. Back in Washington, the members of Congress, diplomats and analysts revived their favorite theories about Richard Nixon's acknowledged propensity for psychic rage and for diplomacy by thunderclap. And the White House plainly hoped that such speculations might compensate for two of Saigon's integrating divisions.

The diplomacy of the week seemed merely an extension of the fighting. The White House national-security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, dropped out of sight again amid speculation (that indeed proved to be correct) that he was in Paris, resuming his secret con-

versations with Hanoi's chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho. Then came a rash of rumors that a deal had been struck, that President Thieu was about to resign. Communist sources in Paris—the apparent originators of the reports—plainly hoped that all this talk might be equal in value to the collapse of two divisions more.

The Administration rushed out denials of those speculations, warned of the imminent resumption of massive bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong and justified it with new evidence of the massive Soviet supply operation to North Vietnam. The public negotiations in Paris were then conspicuously broken off again on Thursday with the claim that Mr. Nixon's "firm expectation" of serious talks in all available channels had not been realized. Le Duc Tho, it was said, was ready for nothing more than the resumption of contact, presumably pending a better definition of who was prevailing over whom in battle.

Mr. Nixon, it appeared, was equally reluctant to alter course before the rival armies had been further tested. The first answer to the question of what he would do next was thus completed: fight back hard with the available means, stiffen the resistance and augment the supplies to the South Vietnamese, hold open the channels of diplomatic bargaining, keep reminding the Russians of their complicity and responsibility for events and still try to salvage this month's scheduled journey to Moscow.

The reasons for hesitance before drastic action were plain:

(1) There was nothing much more to be done now to affect the battle raging in South Vietnam. Bombing and shelling were taking what toll they could on the three fronts. The value—if any—of strategic bombing in North Vietnam was long-range, to be reckoned in months not weeks. The reinsertion of American troops in the South had been ruled out, for domestic political reasons. The introduction of nuclear weapons had been ruled out as useless as well as repugnant.

(2) There were still hopes and predictions that the South Vietnamese army would "hold out" against the loss of major portions of the populated regions. Although the enemy has been consistently underestimated by allied intelligence, he was operating on long supply lines and in weather that is expected to be favorable for fighting for only several more weeks. If he could be stopped or even seriously retarded, even without being driven back, he might calculate that an American election year was the optimum time to strike a

bargain.

(3) If Hanoi's armies cannot be stopped from carving up South Vietnam and destroying Saigon's forces, there was nothing lost by a pause before desperate military and diplomatic exertions.

None of the last-ditch options, singly or in combination, seemed very attractive:

* Mr. Nixon could order the systematic destruction of North Vietnam's populated regions, aiming at strategic targets but exacting a horrendous price for North Vietnam's advances in the south.

* He could land American Marines in North Vietnam, not for the extended intervention that he has sworn, but for some finite period to destroy the largely unprotected military installations, depots and harbors, to try to liberate American prisoners or even to hold some coastal enclaves for bargaining purposes.

* He could alter the nature of the war from one in which he feels helpless to one in which he could confront the Soviet Union on a more equal basis. The Russians could be challenged and perhaps forced into some kind of negotiation by attacks on their supply ships in North Vietnam or by the closing of Haiphong harbor by mining or blockade.

* Or the President could break the diplomatic stalemate by using the cover of forceful action for some significant concessions to the Communist side, provided only that they spare him from the appearance of defeat and humiliation.

The bargaining up to this point has left the two sides far apart in substance, because each has sought guarantees that the end of the war would leave one side or the other with a virtual guarantee of political dominance in Saigon. But the various issues in dispute have been refined and defined with enough ambiguity to make it at least theoretically possible for either side to retreat from that central demand without appearing to surrender altogether.

Mr. Nixon has offered a formalistic resignation by President Thieu, while Hanoi wants him banished forever. Mr. Nixon wants him replaced by an election, run by Saigon's Government but open to the Communists. Hanoi and the Vietcong want him replaced by a coalition government, dominated by their friends. If General Thieu were not a candidate to succeed himself and if the commission that organizes the "elections" were to be—in fact—a coalition, these positions could be technically reconciled.

Moreover, if by agreement, with or without a confrontation, Moscow and Washington were to end their arms shipments to the two Vietnams and were to join in supervising a settlement, the prisoner exchanges, the troop withdrawals and the political process, each side could claim not only to have saved the peace but also to have won something for its side.

But for such bargaining to succeed, one side, at least, would have to decide first to take a major risk of losing all political power in Saigon. Mr. Nixon regarded President Thieu as indispensable as long as he deemed his army

CYJ

5 MAY 1972 (8)

'A Complete Lack of Progress...'

Seven months ago, U. S. Ambassador Porter was taunting the Communist side at the Paris peace talks with such comments as "you are, in fact, further from military victory than ever" and "you apparently overlook the fact that your military position is unimpressive." Yesterday he sounded as if he were impressed. The chief American delegate was sternly decrying the "massive invasion" and protesting that Hanoi had committed more troops to the campaign in the South. And once again the talks were indefinitely suspended.

Hope of different results from secret talks were sadly diminished when Porter smoke pointedly of "a complete lack

of progress in every available channel." At about the same time, moreover, the Pentagon announced that still more warplanes are on the way to Indochina.

That Ambassador Porter's diplomatic position is now rather unimpressive is hardly the most serious consideration. The official obstinacy in Washington remains a disheartening obstacle in Paris. An honorable political settlement is still within reach, if we are prepared to recognize a coalition regime in Saigon. But if the President clings to the belief that more bombs are the answer, he may be headed for a diplomatic Quang Tri. In the interim of indecision, the death and devastation continue. How long?

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

7 MAY 1972 (8)

# Negotiations collapse again, and the bloodbath runs on

Under the spectral diplomatic techniques which President Nixon and Henry Kissinger have developed, there is a possibility, of course, that theatory at the Hotel Majestique has nothing to do with the real word-war over Indochina. Sadly, such cheerful speculation probably has little to do with reality.

So we are left to contemplate as a firm expression of the administration's policy the statement by William J. Porter, the U. S. delegate to the Paris talks, that the post-invasion negotiations have produced "a complete lack of progress in every available channel."

Channels are where helmsmen find them.

The current cyclone of destruction in Vietnam — North and South — clearly is not abating spontaneously. The Communist forces have demonstrated beyond reasonable question that the military force directed from Saigon is at their mercy — and precious little of that can be expected. Even with the most intense American air and sea support in the entire grisly war, the South Vietnamese army daily falters, crumbles and succumbs to anarchy.

How long the cyclone can go on is speculative. There is no practical limit to the quantity of explosives the United States can dump on Indochina. There is no reason to believe that the leaders in Hanoi will pull back, and little evidence they will be crippled.

Thus, the prospect: An unrelenting bloodbath, killing thousands a week and driving tens of thousands from home or hope; or an agreed settlement — be it temporary or permanent.

The administration's position appears to be that we prefer our bloodbath to their bloodbath. For the President's contention is essentially that if the American and South Vietnamese forces fail to drive the Communists either into the ground or back above the Demilitarized Zone, they will produce a bloodbath of reprisals.

In human terms, it is a meaningless distinction, ours or theirs. In political terms, we believe it is a hopeless and misconceived one. And to demonstrate that the United States is capable of limitless mechanized destruction, on the face of it, will never prove that this country is right or wise or capable of leadership.

But the present course of the war is suggesting daily that this country is none of those. And to attribute righteousness, wisdom or leadership to our client clique in Saigon would be too irrational to dispute.

America's national interest is to end the war in Indochina. It has gone beyond a question of terms. Negotiations to that objective — by any possible channel — is where the helm should be set.

CYJ

145

NEW YORK TIMES

8 MAY 1972

Stumbling Block

The prospect of further heavy bloodshed in South Vietnam and of a dangerous new escalation of the Indo-China conflict—including the possible reintroduction of some American fighting men—places a heavy burden on leaders of every nation involved to leave no stone unturned in the effort to achieve a negotiated settlement.

It is by no means clear that the two sides are as far apart as the American delegate indicated when the United States and South Vietnam broke off the public Paris peace talks on Thursday. The United States has indicated a willingness to discuss the Communist demand for some kind of coalition arrangement in Saigon in advance of the elections to which both sides are committed. The Communists in turn deny that they seek a "monopoly of political control" in South Vietnam. The Vietcong delegate in Paris, Mrs. Binh, reiterated last week that her side would accept members of the present Saigon regime as well as representatives of other non-Communist elements in a proposed "three-segment government of national concord."

A principal stumbling block to agreement appears to be allied resistance to the long-standing Communist demand for immediate resignation of President Thieu, who has become a symbol of military resistance with his resolute commitment to the "Four No's"—no land concession, no Communist political parties in South Vietnam, no neutrality and no coalition.

President Thieu had already offered to step down one month before elections in the context of proposals put forward by the United States in secret talks last year. Secretary of State Rogers last February indicated that the United States was "flexible" on the timing of a Thieu resignation. Why not now?

With his government enjoying only the dubious loyalty of its people, his military forces retreating and his country faced with interminable civil war, it seems apparent that the greatest service President Thieu could render South Vietnam would be voluntarily to step aside for a less intransigent leader. There are able men waiting in the wings who are in a far better position to rally South Vietnam's substantial but fragmented non-Communist elements for the essential political confrontation with the Communists.

NEW YORK TIMES

7 MAY 1972 (8)

The Grand Illusion

"Now it's suddenly dawning on higher authority here that the South Vietnamese system is inadequate and has been all along." This assessment by an American adviser in the wake of the recent North Vietnamese victories gets close to, but not quite to the heart of, the truth that this country's political and military leaders have refused to face. What is inadequate is less the South Vietnamese system than the past history and present credibility of the current regime.

Present official efforts to explain the South Vietnamese setbacks in terms of the North's unexpected strength in armor and artillery serve only to perpetuate a policy of self-deception. Both of the opposing military forces have been equipped by military superpowers and the South is, in addition, supported by American air and naval strength. One crucial difference is leadership; another is in the will to fight.

The high incidence of corruption and nepotism among the South's commanders, though a threat to military effectiveness and civilian morale, is only a symptom of the deeper problem. The corruption is itself the natural consequence of a history of accommodation to foreign masters and to a social and economic system in which the spoils have long and regularly gone to those native leaders who collaborated with the foreigners.

This is not to say that Americans, including the political and military commands and the G.I.'s themselves, did not originally conceive their role quite honestly as that of liberators and allies in the cause of freedom; but such idealistic motives had little chance to prevail against local leaders skilled in the art of manipulating their foreign protectors.

The American people are naturally alarmed by the fact that power on the other side is in the hands of Communists. But a realistic assessment of the opposing forces' capabilities calls for acknowledgment of the fundamental if unpalatable fact that the South's present leadership is largely tainted by a history of submissive self-protection, while the North draws the core of its strength from a record of resistance to foreign intrusion.

Many Americans, recalling their own nation's origins, no doubt sense instinctively that the military and political explanations of the war given them by their own leaders, both in Washington and in Vietnam, are thus based on a grand illusion. That is precisely why the United States' participation in this distant war has alienated the support of so many patriotic Americans. They know that in a battle against men driven by a sense of national purpose there can be no military victory by any means acceptable to world opinion or the American conscience.

ABC EVENING NEWS, MAY 8, 1972

EDWARD K. SMITH: The President addresses the nation at nine Eastern Time tonight. You may see and hear him on this network.

Two items of news hint that he announce stern options on VN.

for the first time in three weeks US bombers today hit the Hanoi area, a training base 15 miles outside Hanoi, says the US command; river dikes protecting farmland, says Hanoi, but the US denies that.

Fighters also downed three Migs in dog fights near Hanoi.

Item two, while US troops continue to pull out of VN, US air and naval forces around IC, that is in Thailand and in the Tonkin Gulf, have reached an all time high, 90,000 men and it's still increasing.

Here are reports on a day of tension and decision in Washington.

First, ABC White House correspondent Tom Jarriel.

TOM JARRIE.: In the Nixon White House the appearance of an international crisis until today has been avoided like a smallpox epidemic. Today there was no effort to conceal grave atmosphere which precedes military decision of the highest importance.

Black limousines transporting the admirals, the generals and the top civilian advisors streamed away from West Executive Avenue, following one of the longest and most crucial National Security Council meetings of the Nixon Administration.

The presidential decision reached in today's NSC conference is not being revealed until tonight. The military options which were known to be actively considered are many of those former President Lyndon Johnson rejected as being too harsh.

One or several may be announced tonight. They include either a mining of the vital Haiphong Harbor, or more likely a selective blockade of shipping; an amphibious landing of SVNese forces north of the enemy's front lines; renewed prolonged bombing of the cities in VN; a landing of several thousand US Marines at Da Nang to defend 20,000 Americans already there, and bolster the SVNese defense of Hue.

Again, which, if any of these steps may be taken, aren't yet known.

It is known that the old military capital of Hue is considered of both enormous military and symbolic significance. If Hue falls there's concern Saigon may suffer a psychological collapse.

The President tonight apparently is ready to announce steps to make sure that doesn't happen. If it eliminates his chance to go to Moscow he's ready to pay that price.

Tom Jarriel, ABC News, at the White House.

BOB CLARK ( on Capitol Hill): Rumors that the President was planning some drastic new move in VN gave many members of Congress a bad case of jitters.

In the Senate Democrats demanded the President hold an immediate private briefing for leaders of both parties and implied he would have to make a strong case or face new end-the-war legislation.

A leading hawk, Senator Stennis, and a leading dove, Senator Fulbright appeared jointly before camera to express their concern.

SEN. STENNIS: This is not just a casual ordinary request; this is a request because of what we consider an emergency, is confronting the President, and he'll confront us in the same way.

SEN. That is similarly, but not exactly the same.

SEN. FULBRIGHT: I think it would be most serious mistake if the President refuses to consult with the leadership of the Senate. I think it's our responsibility under the Constitution, as was said. It would be a very serious breach, it seems to me, between the Executive and Legislative Branches of Government.

CLARK: A sample of the outcry further escalation of the war could bring from Democratic presidential contenders came from Hubert Humphrey

Hanoi Radio claims we're bombing the Red River dikes. The Defense Dept. says that is not correct, that they are not now on the current list. What do you think the consequences would be if they should be on a future list?

SEN. HUMPHREY: Well, I know about the dikes, and I know that the previous President refused to do it. Because if those dikes are bombed there will be a mass flood that will take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

CYD

147

CBS EVENING NEWS

MAY 9, 1972

Sevareid Sees Nixon's Move As Sizeable Bet In A High Stakes Game

CRONKITE: In Washington, Eric SEVAREID sees Mr. NIXON's latest move in VN as a sizeable bet in a high stakes game.

ERIC SEVAREID: The President has gambled once more, rolling the

dice this time on the big paper table.

Majority opinion at home will probably support him, it nearly always does for a time when the President has made any move in the context of war.

He is not gambling for victory nor for an end to the VN war, he is gambling for an armistice lasting long enough to get our ground forces out of that country.

He can hope, but not expect, to stop the current Hanoi offensive in the south which has supplies enough for several more weeks.

He does expect to prevent a renewed offensive this fall by shutting off present and future shipments of heavy arms and oil.

He gambles that Moscow will not break off the nuclear arms limitation talks, even should the summit meeting be cancelled or postponed.

Though it has never been more urgent than now.

He must hope that the Russians will not send in their own mine sweepers which could mean serious incidents, and will not organize an air lift across China to help Hanoi.

He gambles that the Congress will be paralyzed and not push on with the various moves to cut off funds for the war.

What he is no longer gambling on is success of his basic policy, the three year old aim of VNization.

When he tells us that after five weeks of offensive, SVN is in danger of conquest and our sixty thousand troops gravely threatened, that is to tell us that inspite of his vastly superior numbers and weaponry, the American created army of SVN cannot be relied upon.

He has used a big stick but offered a big carrot. We are to have all troops out in the see-saw acts of war throughout Indo-China, if they release the prisoners and accept a supervised cease fire.

He no longer emphasizes the integrity of the Saigon government, but also does not pledge that our planes and ships in Thailand and off the coast will be withdrawn.

Or that we will not continue to supply Saigon.

Even if Hanoi accepted the principle of a cease fire and there is no sign they will, its terms would have to be negotiated - a hundred sticking points could arise...

WASHINGTON POST 9 MAY 1972 PAGE 15

C7J

# President's Move Long Urged
By Military, Fought by Others

Stanley Karnow

Washington Post Staff Writer

By choosing to block Hai-
phong and other North Viet-
namese ports, President Nix-
on has finally opted for a
policy urged on the White
House by U.S. military men
since the early days of
American involvement in
the Vietnam war.

Mr. Nixon's move, how-
ever, runs counter to the
counsel given to him and his
predecessor, President John-
son, by advisers of the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency as
well as in the State and De-
fense Departments.

Indeed, few conflicts in-
side the U.S. government
within recent years have
been as intense as the de-
bate over whether to take
action against Soviet and
other aid shipments des-
tined to reach North Viet-
nam by sea.

Advocates of the strategy
now being pursued by Presi-
Nixon consistently held
uch an approach, com-
with stronger and
wider U.S. bombings of
North Vietnam, would deci-
sively set back the Commu-
nists.

## Opponents' View

Opponents of the Presi-
dent's latest step have long
argued against it on two
counts. First, they have
warned that it would jeop-
ardize U.S. relations with
the Soviet Union and the
People's Republic of China,
perhaps to the point of pro-
voking them into war. Sec-
ondly, they have expressed
doubts that pressure on Ha-
noi's supply lines would suf-
fice to discourage the Com-
munists.

One of the most vocal
supporters of a tough thrust
against the Communists was
Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp,
former commander of the
American forces in the Pa-
cific. Writing in the Read-
er's Digest in May 1969,
after his retirement, Sharp
disclosed that he and his
"tagon colleagues had
used a plan almost cur-
identical to that cur-
ently being carried out by

President Nixon.

Asserting that "closing an
enemy harbor is customary
and logical in warfare," Sharp said that he had rec-
ommended blocking Hai-
phong "with mines laid by
aircraft." This "was the
simplest and most effective
measure we could have
taken," he wrote, adding
that it "would have short-
ened the war by many
months."

But, Sharp contended, his
suggestion "was always ve-
toed" on the grounds that
it "would not affect the
enemy's capability of wag-
ing war in South Vietnam."
He placed the blame for
"needless casualties" that re-
sulted on former Secretary
of Defense Robert S. McNa-
mara. Sharp wrote:

### Advice "Discarded"

"Secretary McNamara ar-
bitrarily and consistently
discarded the advice of his
military advisers. His in-
sistence that we pursue the
campaign on a gradualistic
basis gave the enemy plenty
of time to cope with our
every move. He was, I sub-
mit, dead wrong."

The Pentagon Papers have
revealed that the Joint
Chiefs of Staff echoed
Sharp's proposal as early as
October 1966, urging that
President Johnson authorize
such operations as "mining
ports" and a "naval quaran-
tine" designed, among other
things, to "decrease the Ha-
noi and Haiphong sanctuary
areas."

But suggestions along this
line were sharply rejected
at the time by McNamara.
In a draft memorandum de-
livered to President John-
son on May 19, 1967, the for-
mer Defense Secretary re-
acted strongly against inten-
sified bombings of North
Vietnam in general and min-
ing the enemy's harbors in
particular with two main
arguments.

In the first place, McNa-
mara contended that bomb-
ing was essentially ineffec-
tive and that "no combina-
tion of actions against the
North short of destruction
of the regime or occupation
of North Vietnamese terri-
tory will physically reduce
the flow of men and mate-
riel . . . needed by enemy
forces to continue the war
in the South."

## Pilot Losses

McNamara also said that
the losses in American pil-
ots—one for every 40 sor-
ties—was excessive. In addi-
tion, he pointed out, more
intensive American bomb-
ings would reflect unfavor-
ably on the United States
abroad and also have an ad-
verse impact at home. He
said:

"The picture of the
world's greatest superpower
killing or injuring 1,000 non-
combatants a week, while
trying to pound a tiny back-
ward nation into submission
on an issue whose merits
are hotly disputed, is not a
pretty one. It could con-
ceivably produce a costly
distortion in the American
national consciousness and
in the world image of the
United States — especially
if the damage to North Viet-
nam is complete enough to
be 'successful.'"

In McNamara's view,
there was a serious risk in
the effect of mining the
Haiphong harbor on the So-
viet Union. The former De-
fense Secretary's observa-
tions then may be relevant
to the present situation.

Mining North Vietnam's
ports, he said, "would place
Moscow in a particularly
galling dilemma as to how
to preserve the Soviet posi-
tion and prestige in such a
disadvantageous place."

### Action Discounted

McNamara discounted the
likelihood that the Russians
would try to "force a con-
frontation" with the Unitec
States in the region, where
"even with minesweepers"
they were as inferior mili-
tarily as "we were when
they blocked the corridor to
Berlin in 1961."

He calculated, however,
that Moscow might decide,
among other moves, to
"send volunteers, including
pilots" to North Vietnam
and simultaneously reply to
the United States with
"some action" in Korea
Turkey, Iran, the Middle
East or "most likely Berlin"
—places "where they can
control the degree of crisis
better."

McNamara also estimated
that if Peking read the min-
ing of Haiphong as an indi-
cation that the United States
"was going to apply mili-
tary pressure until North

Vietnam capitulated," the
Chinese might "intervene in
the war with combat troops,"
thereby prompting Ameri-
can raids against China's
airfields "and perhaps other
targets as well."

President Johnson re-
buffed the advice of Sharp
and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, largely because he
was reluctant to clash with
the Russians and Chinese,
and also because he was
wary of domestic political
opposition to such a course.

Moreover, as Vietnam spe-
cialists working in the gov-
ernment at the time now
recall, Johnson was not re-
ceptive to schemes that
would "win the war faster."
Nevertheless, the policy de-
bate continued after Presi-
dent Nixon entered office,
and it took on a new ur-
gency as it related to his
project to accelerate his
withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Vietnam.

A collection of secret
documents compiled under
the auspices of White House.
national security adviser
Henry Kissinger in early
1969 shows, however, that
the conflict over mining the
Haiphong harbor and step-
ping up bombings of North
Vietnam fundamentally fol-
lowed the lines it had during
the Johnson administration.

Estimating that 80 per
cent of Communist aid
passed through Haiphong,
the Pentagon favored block-
ing the port while mounting
"a strong effort to interdict
road and rail transport"
from China to Hanoi in "a
concerted and coordinated
air interdiction campaign
against all transportation."

The Pentagon proposal
precluded "attacks on popu-
lation as a target" but con-
ceded that the operation
would incur "high risks of
civilian casualties in order
to achieve destruction of
war-supporting targets."

Such moves, the Pentagon
analysts said, "would, in
large part, isolate Hanoi and
Haiphong from each other"
and would be "highly effec-
tive in reducing North Viet-
nam's capability to reinforce
aggression in South Viet-
nam."

Disputing this contention,
the CIA argued that the ef-
fect of a sea blockade
"would be widespread but

Mr. Nixon's Brinkmanship

151

In ordering the closing of land and sea supply routes to North Vietnam by American military action, Presidnt Lyndon B. Johnson said, "I am taking a desperate gamble that alters the entire nature of the war, that risks the fundamental security and deepest interests of the United States for dubious and tenuous 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 superpowers. 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 undereaken.

Let us grant that the North Vietnam Communists are infuriatingly—even insultingly—intransigent 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, they seem to forget that the fighting and land and sea nothing.

Even the peace offer included in Mr. Nixon's speech has a spurious 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 peninsula.

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 nowthreatened 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 then and delimitate 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.

WASHINGTON POST 10 MAY 1972

Nixon's War (Cont.) ...

Once again, the public is not being asked, it
is being told: in the great tradition of the Viet-
nam War, a President has confronted us with a
difficult accomplishment, carefully concealed in advance by
the most artful dissembling, supported by suspect
evidence, specious argument and excessive
logic. And so, once again, one is left with the
sensation of helplessness in the face of a self-
renewing war, and in the hands of an administra-
tion as incapable as the last of distinguishing be-
tween hard decisions and what Mr. Nixon is
pleased to call "the easy political path."—From
an editorial in The Washington Post, May 2, 1970.

That was our view the day after President Nixon
sent American forces on their famous "incursion"
to Cambodia and we cite it today out of the same
sense of helplessness—a sense that it has all been
said before. The same things have been said by the
President—and by his critics—after Cambodia and
after Laos and after the more recent renewal of
the bombing of North Vietnam which has now been
followed by Mr. Nixon's latest exercise in with-
drawal from Vietnam—the mining of Haiphong
and five other North Vietnamese ports—so that
you wonder what more there is to say.

Remember at the time of Cambodia, how we
would be a "pitiful, helpless giant" if we did not
hang in there in Vietnam? "This action is a
decisive move," the President said, and we bought
it, we must admit, as the action of a barroom
fighter in the best tradition of the old West, back-
ing out the door with one last shot at the mirror
to the saloon wall to keep everybody's head down.
And we bought the Laotian "incursion" on similar
terms, assured that this was the end of the line,
that the President and the Secretary of State meant
it when they said we were "getting out" and that it
was "irreversible." We bought it, and a lot of peo-
ple bought it, when the President quoted General
Abrams that "the South Vietnamese by themselves
can hack it, and they can give a better account of
themselves than the North Vietnamese units." And
when the President said that Laos proved the South
Vietnamese "without American advisers ... could
fight effectively against the very best troops North
Vietnam could put in the field."

That was a year ago, and we went along because
Vietnamization had "succeeded" and "the end was
in sight"—although we did observe at the time that
these initiatives are almost never decisive, that
"every new initiative of ours has been met by
some countermove or another on the part of the
enemy; that the North Vietnamese have proved
themselves almost infinitely resilient and resource-
ful; that the enemy is in a position to damage our
interests in a rich variety of ways for which B-52s
are not necessarily an effective remedy — by
stepped-up terrorism, for example, or by merely
lying low and buying time, or by a quick grab for
all of Laos, or of Cambodia, or by a drive down
through the DMZ..." We add that emphasis, not
because we think we were particularly prescient,
but because it was so obvious to anyone who had
followed the history of this war.

Ard yet, a year later, here is President Nixon
crying about "naked invasion," as if it were some-

thing; nobody could have foretold and insisting
that Hanoi has broken the rules, as if there ever
were any. Here he is again renouncing what "from
a political standpoint... would be an easy choice,"
and instead lashing back with an action that had
been first proposed to President Johnson six years
ago, and rejected, and was then warmed over by
the Pentagon and served up to Mr. Nixon again in
1969—and again rejected.

This is the first question raised by the President's
decision to mine the ports: why is it worth doing
in 1972, for the sake of the safety of 69,000 Ameri-
can troops, when our casualties are next to nil, if
it wasn't worth doing in 1969, when we had more
than a half million men in South Vietnam and our
casualties were running at the rate of 300 a week.
As we all know, from the recently-published Kla-
singer papers, the President had the advice of a
solid and respectable segment of the government,
including CIA and much of the State Department,
and the Secretary of Defense, that mining Hal-
phong and bombing the north and piling still great-
er stakes on the potential combat capability of the
South Vietnamese would lead us nowhere in the
end; that our intelligence was unreliable and our
military estimates almost always too optimistic;
that you couldn't get where the President wanted
to go from where we were—and still less could
you do it while you were withdrawing American
troops. And yet the President went along then
with the military and the die-hards in the Saigon
embassy, and made Vietnam his war. And now he
has once again reached into the Pentagon's kit-bag
for still another "decisive military action to end
the war."

Why? The answer almost inevitably has to be,
not that the idea of mining North Vietnamese ports
has gotten any better with age, but that the situa-
tion in Vietnam, on the ground where it counts,
has gotten a great deal worse, at Hue and Anloc and
Kontum, and within the military power structure
that passes for a government in South Vietnam.
Somehow the President must have concluded, as
President Johnson concluded in March of 1965, that
everything would collapse if he didn't do some-
thing, and so, in his own way, he too has gone
North. It is hard to imagine a more damning in-
dictment of the vaunted Vietnamization program,
but that, at this moment, is not the point. For the
mines are in he water, and what matters now is
whether the results can by any conceivable measure
justify the risks, discussed in a separate editorial
below, of rupturing relations with the Soviet Union,
and alienating large parts of the rest of the world.

Even assuming the best, it is hard for us to see
how the answer could be Yes. (The North Viet-
namese are no less resilient, no less resourceful and
no less resolved than they were two or five or
twenty years ago; supplies from somewhere—China
if not Russia or a combination of the two—will get
through. The offer of a stand-still cease fire is
an open invitation for the North Vietnamese to
grab quickly, with what men and material they
have on hand, for further territorial gains before

VIETNAM WAR, continued

T диатими — иф индивидуално се негодите at all. In
short, a situation desperate enough to argue for
winning the war cannot be retrieved so easily.
Either Hanoi will win a settlement on exceedingly
favorable terms or it will fight on. Either way
the outcome is going to be very largely decided
by the armies of North and South Vietnam
And that is really what is so reckless about the
President's latest Vietnam initiative. It is not
just our degree of reliance on a thoroughly un-
reliable South Vietnamese army. It is also the
over-heated insistence that the fate of the world
and the security of this country are riding on that
army and on what marginal help it may get from
the mining of the harbors of North Vietnam. What-
ever may be said about that act itself, there is
nothing whatever to be said for Mr. Nixon's com-
pulsion to justify it by piling ever bigger stakes
on so marginal an effort to influence the course
of a war whose outcome this country has long since
lost the capacity to control.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR 10 MAY 1972

New risks in Vietnam

1972

As the nation and the world listened
President Nixon deliver his televised
inion to blockade North Vietnamese
, few could fail to discern in his
variety, his carefully weighed words, and
his direct acknowledgment to Moscow
of its right to defend its own interests,
that here was a man who had pondered
and doubtless prayed to reach a right de-
cision on what next to do about the
agonizing Vietnam war. The President
was caught between two urgencies: the
need to bring the United States out of a
remote and localized war, in which the
world's first military power has com-
mitted its honor on behalf of the principle
of self-determination; and the deep desire
to go with strength into summit confer-
ence with Moscow, the results of which
could vitally affect global peace. The
dilemma put President Nixon in an ager-
nizing position. One cannot doubt his sin-
cerity and earnestness in making the de-
cision that he did.

That said, without in any way disparag-
ing the President's motives, this news-
paper must view with the gravest concern
the actions which the President took, both
in regard to their intended and likely im-
pact on the Vietnamese conflict, and to
the higher level struggle for power be-
tween Washington, Moscow and Peking.

Assume, for argument's sake, that the
'ade will "succeed" — that is, that
United States can and will effectually
the flow of arms and equipment
to Hanoi. That said, how much can this

accomplish? How much military goods
and fuel are stockpiled already in North
Vietnam? How long will it be until these
stockpiles are used up and the Hanoi war
machine in South Vietnam cut off? By
then, how far will the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese troops have gotten —
will they have taken Kontum, Hue, possi-
bly more? And, given Hanoi's years of ex-
perience in operating without mechanized
weapons of war, will the lack of such
weapons now make a significant military
difference?

Since Mr. Nixon has already committed
himself irrevocably to Vietnamization,
which seems to be tottering on the brink
of failure, and has pledged not to recom-
mit American ground troops to the fight,
we see no leverage in the blockade that
would force Hanoi to the truce tables with
any more willingness to negotiate than
the Communists have shown to date.

Neither do we see any reason for Hanoi
at this juncture to consider giving up the
American POWs, posited by Mr. Nixon
along with an internationally supervised
truce, as a condition to removal of the
last American troops. This offer, however,
does appear to be a relaxation of previous
American demands. Hopefully Hanoi may
see in this an opening to resume bargain-
ing. But the apparent Communist deter-
mination to impose the ultimate humilia-
tion on the United States does not augur
well in that direction.

As regards the United States position
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the White
House appears to be relying heavily on
Moscow's eagerness to go to the summit

with Mr. Nixon and arrive at an agree-
ment on nuclear arms limitation, on military
détente between East and West in
Europe, and other easing of tensions so
that Moscow might give greater care to
its uneasy situation with Peking.

There is, of course, the possibility that
in his secret Moscow talks recently, Henry
Kissinger managed to engineer a prior
agreement with Mr. Brezhnev over the
blockading of Haiphong. But the remote-
ness of this possibility is underscored by
the continued presence of Russian ships
in the harbor. Also, the President's tele-
vised address was certainly read by the
rest of the world, if not in Moscow, as a
throwing down of the glove, rather than
as an agreed-upon plan between the two
superpowers.

If the President's decision is, in effect,
a challenge to Moscow, it has to be a
calculated risk. But for what trade-off?
The slim chance of bringing Hanoi to heel
in an ugly but highly localized war in
a remote corner of the globe, versus the
possibility of dashing the hopes for world
peace that rested on the Moscow summit?

Again, we repeat, Mr. Nixon has no
doubt acted according to his highest con-
science and in defense of a principle —
national self-determination — which he
and the American people hold dear. But
the wisdom of that decision and the
rightness of it are clearly open to ques-
tion. The United States has been brought
back to the old and discredited assump-
tion of a possible military solution in Viet-
nam on the one hand, and the greatly re-
duced prospects for a fruitful Washington-
Moscow summit meeting on the other. We
can only hope and pray that our logic is
wrong and that Mr. Nixon's is right.

NEW YORK TIMES 11 MAY 1972

# The Real Decisions

By TOM WICKER

A questioner at Henry Kissinger's news conference recalled that, for ten years and through three Administrations, mining the North Vietnamese harbors had been considered to pose an unacceptable risk of confrontation with the Soviet Union. "Can you tell us what has changed to make that risk now acceptable?" he asked.

If Dr. Kissinger could have, he didn't. He said only that President Nixon's decision to mine the harbors was not "lightly arrived at" and that "the judgment has been that the risks were not unacceptable."

But something, indeed has changed. More or less concealed by Mr. Nixon's threatening bluster, Dr. Kissinger's plaintive laments, and all the optimistic headlines about a "new strategy" and the President's "hopes" is the fact that the Nixon policy in South Vietnam has been exposed as a miserable failure.

After three years of death and devastation in Indonesia, after huge diversions of funds and energy from this country's real needs, and after nearly irrecoverable political damage among its people, the North Vietnamese have a greater military advantage than ever before, the Saigon Government is weaker, the peace negotiations are at an impasse, the P.O.W.'s are still imprisoned, the bombing of the North has been resumed, and the President—by imperial fiat—has placed the nation in hazard of the gravest confrontation with the Soviet since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Even conceding that a half-million American troops have been brought home in the same period, this is failure on a grand scale.

It is failure, moreover, on at least three levels. Mr. Nixon and his advisers consistently overrated the fighting capacity and motivation of South Vietnamese forces, particularly their leaders. Just as consistently and disastrously, they underestimated the ability of the North Vietnamese to sustain an offensive of the kind now going forward.

Finally, Mr. Nixon not only mis-

Judged the ability or the will of the Soviet Union to push Hanoi into a compromise settlement, but in Dr. Kissinger's words, Washington "also perhaps underestimated the massive influx of offensive weapons, particularly from the Soviet Union . . . that changed the military balance." This, after all the braggadocio as to how the Cambodian invasion of 1970 and the Laotian incursion of 1971 had disrupted North Vietnamese supply lines and assured the success of Vietnamization.

In fact, Richard Nixon's Vietnamization is as grandiose a failure as Lyndon Johnson's land war, and this failure is what has changed the President's mind about mining the North Vietnamese harbors. That action could have some future effect on Hanoi's forces now operating in the South; it retaliates against the Soviets for their arms aid to North Vietnam; and its sensational nature diverts attention from the real situation in the South.

It also puts Moscow, for the second time in a decade, in the position of having to face up to an American ultimatum. Can the Soviets really acquiesce in an American order not to enter Haiphong harbor on pain of having their ships blown up? Even if Mr. Nixon has been "humiliated" by the Soviet-supported North Vietnamese military success, is it sensible to try to push Moscow into the even more pointed humiliation of being barred from its ally's harbors? Does Mr. Nixon really expect the Soviets not only to accept this humiliation but then to persuade or coerce Hanoi into a settlement he can accept?

On the other hand, if the Soviets reply with their own ultimatum, Mr. Nixon in his turn will be put in the position of having to acquiesce or raise the stakes. Mining the harbors, in short, offers as much risk and as little hope as it ever did; it is not a policy or a strategy so much as a dangerous, desperate gamble to retrieve a war that is all but lost. It is one more search for a quick fix that will redeem all other failures.

As for Dr. Kissinger's despairing inquiry why the North Vietnamese

should not accept the President's latest cease-fire and withdrawal proposal, the answer is that it would leave the Saigon Government and its army and administrative machinery intact, which is scarcely Hanoi's aim; and it would point straight to a new and only slightly improved version of the Indonesian partition against which Hanoi has fought so long and so hard.

The real question, which Dr. Kissinger did not ask, is what makes Mr. Nixon think he can gain "withdrawal with honor," while maintaining an American-supported, non-Communist Government in Saigon, when he has not been able to win the war on the battlefield? There, despite all the President's pretensions, is where the real decisions have been made.

Public Outery Against Moves In VN
Tends To Closure of House Galleries

KURALT: The public outcry against
President Nixon's new VN moves led
today to the temporary closure of
the public galleries of the House of
Representatives.

Speaker Carl Albert ordered that
unusual step after word that anti-
war demonstrators planned to disrupt
Congress.

In the meantime, a campaign is
underway to counteract the criticism
of the President.

That story from Bruce Morton.

BRUCE MORTON: The administration
has launched a major public relations
offensive to build support for the
President's new VN initiatives and
is claiming success.

Defense Secretary Laird at that
VN news conference talked about the
home front, too.

SEC. LAIRD: This is no time for
quitters or for a lot of talk about
instant surrender. I don't think
the American people want to clamber
aboard some sort of a bug-out shuttle

MORTON: White House spokesmen say
they received roughly 20,000 tele-
grams with thousands more backed up
in Western Union offices around the
country, and that they're running
five or six to one for the President.

The White House wouldn't let re-
porter see them.

Here at the Capitol the Republican
Senate leaders released a poll they
said showed the public favoring the
President's new peace terms and
mining NVNese ports by roughly three
to one.

A reporter asked why the public
relations campaign.

SEN. HUCH SCOTT: Well frankly
because we found we were being out-
numbered by a count by our own count
of 14 to 1 by the President's critics
and we thought it was time, I'll be
candid with you, we thought it was
time that the truth come out, and
we are the apostles of truth.

(Laughter)

You could look straight in my
eyes, ladies and gentlemen, I mean
it.

MORTON: One apparent target of
the drive, not converted by it, Dem-
ocratic Senator George McGovern.
He talked with David Schoumacher.

SEN. GEORGE MC GOVERN: They
don't want any criticism. they want

to run this country as though the
President were a King rather than an
elected official. Now, I don't in-
tend to be silent on what I think is
a very dangerous course that could
plunge this country into world war
three.

MORTON: Dramatic presidential
action usually does produce at least
short term public support. What
happens after that depends in part
on whether the dramatic presidential
action works.

Bruce Morton, CBS News, Capitol
Hill.

Two Students Shot In Demonstration

KURALT: In dozens of cities
across the country there were pro-
tests against the war in the last
24 hours.

A total of 900 arrests since
Monday night, the most widespread
anti-war protest in two years.

Many were peaceful. But there
also has been violence. At the Uni-
versity of New Mexico two students
were shot yesterday, one remains in
serious condition.

There's been other trouble in
a number of college campuses and
cities. We have reports on two of
the demonstrations beginning with
David Culhane in New York.

DAVID CULHANE: Some 2500 New
York area students massed on both
sides of Park Avenue in front of
world headquarters of the ITT Corp.
They were demonstrating specifically
against ITT defense contracts, but
in general their protest was against
the new escalation of the war in IC.

At one point they dropped tiny
parachutes with make believe frag-
mentation bombs from the 13th floor
of the nearby Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
But then tension developed. The
students began blocking rush hour
traffic and resisting police efforts
to clear the way. Some violence
finally broke out, and mounted po-
lice launched a short charge through
the crowd. There were injuries on
both sides and several arrests.

David Culhane, CBS News, New York

SKIP MOSHER: For a second
straight day there was a violent
confrontation between angry protest-
ing students and police at the U. of
Minn. The students, sometime num-
bering more than a thousand of the
43,000 attending the University,

policed rocks, broke windows and fens, jammed intersections in and around the University. One old man was tipped over and set afire.

Police and sheriff deputies re-
warded with riot sticks, later with
car and pepper fog. Time and time
gain most of the afternoon the two
ides clashed with a fury never be-
fore seen on this campus. There
are numerous injuries, uncounted
numbers of arrests. By early this
vening, the battle was still on.

This is Skip Mosher in Minneapolis

Democrats Oppose Nixon VN Policy

UTLEY: Democrats in the House
Foreign Affairs Committee today
agreed to support legislation order-
ing an end to American military in-
volvement in SVN, and the withdrawal
of all US troops by the first of Oct.
subject to the release of American
prisoners of war.

Yesterday the Senate Democratic
Caucus endorsed a proposal to cut
off funds for the war under certain
conditions, and attacked the Presi-
dent's decision to mine NVNese ports.

This continuing Democratic oppo-
sition to the President's VN policy
today brought a sharp reaction from
Republican leaders in Congress.

SEN. HUGH SCOTT: Nobody asked the
critics to remain silent. We merely
asked them to make sense, which they
have been singularly devoid of. This
is not our war; this is the war of
the Kennedy and Johnson Administra-
tions. The President has a plan to
end it, and is indeed ending it. He
says he'll get out in four months.
Just give us our POWs back and stop
the killing. What's wrong with these
Democratic critics, anyway.

REPORTER: (confusion of voices).. if the President was right, why didn't he consult with Congress before making this decision?

SEN. SCOTT: The President did
inform the Congress of what he was
going to do. This is the kind of
decision that, if he had consulted
the Congress and had said to them,
"I am going to mine the harbors of
NVN," NVN would have known it before
the American people did.

REPORTER: Are you saying that
Congress would have leaked this....

SEN. SCOTT: Yes, sure I am.

REPORTER: Senator, what about...

SEN. SCOTT: I'm not changing the
leadership, but I'm saying that there
are plenty of members in Congress
who would have leaked the information
to the Stockholm peace movement and
other movements and they would have
gotten it to Madame Binh in ten min-
utes by direct phone line.

SEN. ROBERT GRIFFIN: Those who
disagree and want to indicate their
disagreement with regard to his poli-
cies, certainly have the right to do
so. I think what's very unfortunate
however, is that some are actually
offering counter offers to the enemy,
in effect, undercutting the Presi-
dent's peace proposal by whittling
it away, and in effect, forcing the
President to negotiate with the Sen-
ate rather than the enemy.

UTLEY: Demonstrations across the
country, Democratic opposition in
Congress, these are the things Presi-
dent Nixon has to contend with as
he carries out his VN policy.

DAVID BRINKLEY: In a raging con-
troversy about President Nixon's new
tactics in VN, the Republican leaders
are trying today to quiet it by at-
tacking their critics, calling them
quitters, advocates of instant sur-
render, abandoning allies, and so on.

But to see in perspective the
President himself says he is extreme-
ly anxious to end the war and get out
In his speech Monday he offered the
simplest and most generous peace
terms he has offered yet. With a
cease fire and release of the pri-
soners, all Americans will be moved
out in four months, period. No other
terms and no other conditions.

NVN is not asked to give up any
territory it holds, or to stop trying
to take over the south after the
Americans leave, as they certainly
will try.

His offer is about all NVN could
reasonably ask; and in fact about
all the doves in this country could
reasonably ask.

What Mr. Nixon did was offer a
settlement on easy terms and then ob-
scure that fact with announcements
about mining harbors and increasing
the bombing. Had he just made the
offer and left out the rest of it,
he'd have had almost unanimous ap-
proval.

CJD

WASHINGTON NEWS

11 MAY 1972 Pg2

Lagos City's
flak at doves

By ALAN HORTON

Tips-Howard Staff Writer

Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, seeking to rally support for President Nixon's latest Vietnam Initiative, has turned his verbal guns on Senate doves.

"This is no time for quitters or for a lot of talk about instant surrender," he said in reply to opponents of the administration decision to mine North Vietnam's harbors.

"I don't think the American people want to clamber aboard some sort of bugout shuttle," he said at the Pentagon yesterday.

Altho he mentioned no names, Mr. Laird made it clear his reference was to Mr. Nixon's Senate critics, including the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Said Mr. Laird:

"I am referring to those individuals that would give the world the impression that the United States is willing to abandon its allies that we have become associated with in four multilateral and four major bilateral treaty commitments, which have been approved under our constitutional process by the United States Senate."

COUNTERS 'MURDER' CHARGE

The defense secretary also angrily countered charges that U.S. planes are "murdering" civilians in North Vietnam.

Laird said the North Vietnamese have fired 35,000 Russian-made artillery rounds to An Loc, a two-square-mile civilian population center. He said the communists also had fired up to 4,600 rounds a day on South Vietnamese civilians in Quang Tri before it fell.

"The North Vietnamese sprayed artillery into those population centers (An Loc and Quang Tri) as if they were using a water hose," he said.

Mr. Laird implied that the civilian deaths are the Russians' fault for giving artillery, tanks, missiles and other weapons to the North Vietnamese.

TAKES HARD LINE

Taking a harder line against Russia than President Nixon, his national security adviser Dr. Henry A. Kissinger or Deputy Defense Secretary Kenneth Bush in recent days, Mr. Laird would not rule out any action to stop Russian supply planes and ships from unload-

ing in North Vietnam.

President Nixon, Dr. Kissinger and Mr. Laird all stated in their statements to the press that they intended to meet with Russian leaders May 26 in Moscow.

Mr. Laird was asked: "Dr. Kissinger said there was no intention to stop ships going in, that mining was the only thing. You are leaving the impact on here that this is a possibility?"

"That is what I meant to leave," Mr. Laird said.

When asked specifically about U.S. reaction to a Soviet airlift of supplies to North Vietnam or ships unloading into North Vietnam boats, Mr. Laird would not say that the ships and planes themselves would not be hit.

157

WASHINGTON POST

11 MAY 1972

Despair in Universities

It is perfectly obvious that a very large number of campus communities are vehemently opposed to President Nixon's responses to the North Vietnamese offensive. The opposition to the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was strong and the reaction to the mining of Haiphong harbor will, I believe, be even more widely and deeply felt.

I report these facts not to the people of my campus community, who already know them, but to those outside the university who may still be following the mistaken beliefs that the absence of large scale campus riots in the past two years bespoke either support for or indifference to the conduct of the Vietnam war.

On the contrary, campus revulsion to America's participation in that war is as strong as it has ever been. So, too, is a dangerous and ever growing disenchantment with a political system that has been unable to bring to an end a venture that is now almost universally acknowledged to be immoral at worst, a failure at best.

These facts about the state of the campuses must be of consequence to anyone who is at all concerned with the future health of the American political process for the campuses are no longer unique. Cynicism and despair today among those who will necessarily bear heavy responsibility for running the system tomorrow can only bode ill for the future, and this malaise is spreading steadily through the society.

I do not say these things as spokesman for the Stanford community on the matter of Vietnam. I was not chosen president of Stanford because I was thought to represent anyone else's political views. I hold no one's proxy. Those at Stanford who wish to be heard can each speak for themselves.

I feel a keen responsibility, however, to make known consequences of public policy in and on the university. Since students and faculty have been among the most active of elements in the anti-war movement in the U.S., and because the well-being of universities has been among the chief victims of the war. I feel compelled to bring to public attention the ways on which this nation's involvement in Vietnam affects the institution for which I am responsible.

RICHARD W. LYMAN,
President, Stanford University

Palo Alto, Calif.

WASHINGTON POST

11 MAY 1972 Pgl

# White House
Says Support
Is 5 or 6 to 1

By Carroll Kilpatrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

The White House yesterday claimed "substantial support" to Opinion Research's director of communications, L. C. Milchuk.

Opinion Research has done extensive polling for the GOP among the voters despite the sharp criticism that has developed.

Press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler, declaring that the congressional opposition was "farely along party lines," predicted that public support for the President would "perpetuate Congress sooner or later."

"This is a time when domestic unity is extremely important; in bringing about an end to this (Vietnam) conflict," Ziegler said, echoing the President's appeal for unity in his address Monday night.

On Tuesday, the day after the President announced his decision to mine North Vietnamese harbors, the Senate Democratic Caucus condemned his "escalation of the war" and proposed a cutoff of Vietnam funds.

Ziegler said letters, telegrams and telephone calls to the White House supported the President 5 or 6 to 1. He said about 20,000 telegrams have been received and that Western Union said there is a backlog of 17,000 still to be delivered.

Ziegler also said that an Opinion Research Corp. poll showed substantial public support for the President's action.

The poll results also were made public by Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott (Pa.) and Senate Republican Whip Robert P. Griffin (Mich.).

An Opinion Research Corp. official said in Princeton, N.J., that a telephone poll it conducted Tuesday showed that nearly three out of four Americans support the President's decision to mine the harbors. Only 21 per cent of those supported expressed disapproval, 5 per cent had no opinion and 74 per cent said they supported Mr. Nixon's actions.

The findings were based on 700 telephone interviews of persons 18 years of age and older at "several locations" around the county, according

Milchuck told a reporter yesterday that the firm was not free to name the client who commissioned Tuesday's survey. He did say, however, that the Republican National Committee was not the sponsor.

Ziegler, when asked why the President failed to consult Congress before making his momentous decision, said Mr. Nixon consulted widely among his advisers, made his decision as commander in chief and informed congressional leaders of his decision and why he made it.

Ziegler maintained that the President considered all aspects of the problem and weighed pro and con arguments. In the end, the President had "the full support of his advisers, made his decision his advisers," Ziegler said.

Referring to a report that Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird opposed the decision, Ziegler volunteered the comment that the report was untrue. He said Laird "is supportive of this action."

Asked whether Mr. Nixon consulted former President Johnson on the decision, Ziegler said no.

He also said there are no plans for Henry A. Kissinger assistant for national security affairs, or any other high official to visit the Soviet Union prior to the President's trip scheduled to begin May 22.

Ziegler said plans for the summit meeting are proceeding, but he declined to give any details or any information on the President's schedule. On a trip of this kind details normally are made available much earlier.

A technical advance mission is in Moscow now but Ziegler declined to say what kind of reception it was getting.

At the State Department.

spokesman Charles W. Bray said Soviet-American discussions on a variety of issues are continuing in a "straightforward, serious" way.

These include the strategic arms limitation talks in Helsinki and talks here on commercial maritime issues, a lend-lease settlement and the avoidance of naval incidents at sea.

EYJ

A Senate move to legislate an end to the Vietnam war was stalled today by President Nixon's proposal Monday to withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam within four months. The Vietnam Communists are an internationally sü-nd cease-fire.

Senate backers of an end-
the-war amendment interrupt-
ed their campaign yesterday
to study the possibility of add-
ing the cease-fire proposal to
their legislation.

The anti-war measure, intro-
duced by Sens. Frank Church,
D-Idaho, and Clifford P. Case,
R-N.J., would forbid appropri-
ations for the war four months
after North Vietnam and the
Viet Cong agree to release
U.S. prisoners of war Nixon
also included the release of
prisoners as a condition in his
proposal, made at the same
time he announced the mining
of North Vietnamese harbors.

Church and Case said they
would oppose an amendment
offered by Sen. Robert C.
Byrd, D-W. Va., to permit con-
tinued funding of the war un-
less the Communists agree to
a cease-fire. Byrd's amend-
ment, however, is believed to
command majority support in
the Senate.

Tch Minimizes Move

Church said he did not be-
lieve the Byrd proposal would
make the funds cutoff mean-
ness and "doesn't do all
that much damage." But he
said he preferred the "simplic-
ity" of his original proposal.

Senate Republicans have
served notice they will fight
the Cooper-Case proposal and
have predicted Nixon would
veto it whether it contains the
cease-fire provision or not.
GOP leader Hugh Scott said
Nixon opposed any encroach-
ment on his powers as Com-
mander in Chief.

At the White House, press
secretary Ronald L. Ziegler
said he believes public support
for Nixon's Vietnam actions
"is going very likely to perco-
late to the Congress sooner or
later."

Remarking yesterday that
congressional criticism of the
President's decision to mine
North Vietnamese harbors is
coming mainly from Demo-
crats, Ziegler said there is
"substantial" support for Nix-
on throughout the country.

Poll Is Cited

told newsmen late yes-
terday that he had been in-
formed that an Opinion Re-
search poll shows 74 percent
support for the military ac-
tions announced by Nixon

Monday night. Twenty-one
percent disapproved and 5 per-
cent had no opinions. Ziegler
did not say who commissioned
the poll.

A spokesman for the corpo-
ration said the poll was based
on 702 telephone interviews
Tuesday among a nationwide
sampling of persons 18 years
of age or older.

Ziegler also said that a flood
of telegrams to the White
House is running 5- or 6-to-1 in
support of the presidential ac-
tion, with some 20,000 tele-
grams having been received
and another 17,000 reported in
"backlog."

Nixon Backing Found

Ziegler said he did not want
to suggest that there is not
wide support for the President
already in Congress. He said
he thinks there is "substantial
support," with criticism
breaking down mainly along
party lines.

He added that he would hope
that some of the critics may
pause to look more closely at
the facts and "perhaps move
to a more reasoned view of
what the President is trying to
do."

In the House, meantime,
Democrats on the Foreign Af-
fairs Committee agreed to ral-
ly behind new end-the-war leg-
islation, but some of them
complained it lacked a cease-
fire provision that would end
fighting.

The joint resolution ap-
proved by the committee
Democrats would order an end
to U.S. military involvement
and a withdrawal of all Ameri-
can forces by Oct. 1. The with-
d withdrawal would be subject to the
release of prisoners, an ac-
counting for missing U.S. serv-
icemen, and the "safe depar-
ture of remaining American
troops.

Mood Has Changed

Chairman Thomas E. Morgan, D-Pa., who has consistently opposed restraints on Nixon's handling of the war, said he voted for the resolution and added that he believes the mood of the House had changed on the war.

"The President himself has
changed his mind on the war,"
Morgan said, "and the same
sort of pressures that made
the President change his mind
are making House members
change their mind."

Morgan said he plans hear-
ings on the resolution next
week with witnesses possibly
including Secretary of State
William P. Rogers.

The resolution was ap-
proved, 10-4, in response to a
directive from the full House

Democratic caucus last month
to prepare such a resolution
within 30 days, Morgan said.

Impeachment Sought

Five House Democrats,
meantime, introduced a reso-
lution to impeach Nixon. They
contended Nixon is guilty of
"high crimes and misdemean-
ors" by arrogating to himself
"the power to declare war."
The five are Reps. John Con-
yers of Michigan, Ronald Del-
lums of California, and Shirley
Chisholm, William F. Ryan
and Bella Abzug, all of New
York.

Among critics of Nixon else-
where was Chicago Mayor
Richard J. Daley, long consid-
ered hawkish on the war, and
six Democratic governors.

WASHINGTON STAR 11 MAY 1972 PAGE 7

End-War Proposal
Stalled by Senate
Cease-Fire Debate

159

The Test for Congress

It has been long apparent that a practical political solution in Vietnam would involve some form of coalition government. Now it remains to be seen whether the U. S. government will be challenged effectively by an aroused American coalition.

That alliance would consist of men and women who are wearied of appeals to national dignity and honor amid a wretched war and who perceived long ago—well before the collapse of Quang Tri and “Vietnamization”—both the military and moral futility of wider war-making in the name of “peace.”

The logical rallying point for these Americans is the Congress of the United States. It may be conceded that there are obstacles: the outlook, however, may not actually be too bleak for a series of forceful declarations and decisions against the war and the abuses of Presidential authority that have perpetuated it despite rising public opposition.

By a 29-14 vote, the Senate Demo-
cratic caucus went on record late yester-
day as "disapproving the escalation of
the war in Vietnam as announced by

the President May 8." That is a notable first step, but it should be only the beginning. The declaration should be accepted to the full Senate. Even more meaningful would be a Congressional move suggested by Sen. Javits (R-N.Y.) to cut off funds for the war and oblige President Nixon to submit his new war plans to a Congressional vote.

Meanwhile, there is the whole pend-
ing question of limiting Presidential
war-making powers that has been
heatedly debated in recent days.

On Monday, echoing Lyndon Johnson once more, the President appealed to the American people to "stand together in purpose and resolve." He can scarcely have hoped that enthusiastic public demonstrations in favor of mining Haiphong harbor would spontaneously burst out in cities and towns across the land; in fact, he will be satisfied with grudging acquiescence in his latest rash decisions.

Silence and submission are indefen-
sible now. In important measure the
tragedy of Vietnam is the result of
Congressional timidity and abdication.

WASHINGTON NEWS 12 MAY 1972 P7

War protesters
shift to Capitol

By JUDY LUCE MANN

Demonstrations against the mining of North Vietnam's ports entered their fourth day today as student organizations called for a nationwide student strike and peace groups continued lobbying on the Hill against the war.

Mark Rasenick, program director of the Na-
tional Student Association, the country's larg-
est student group, predicted Wednesday that
the anti-war movement would shift its pres-
sure from the White House — where, he said,
"Nixon won't listen to anyone" — to the Hill,
in hopes of more successful lobbying. Events
yesterday suggest this is what has happened.

The Quaker's peace vigil continued at the White House, and early in the morning scores of blue tubular balloons with "mine" emblazoned in deep blue on them were floated over the White House grounds. But it was to Capitol Hill that the activists went to protest.

More than 1,000, including Sen. Edward M Kennedy, D-Mass., gathered on the steps of the Capitol at dawn for a vigil.

Later in the day, groups of students and a
deplegation of Women's Strike for Peace lob
bied at various congressmen's offices, and the
Eas: Steps of the Capitol were the scene of a
least two press conferences announcing contin
uing anti-war activities.

A group of 23 congressmen announced they had filed suit in U.S. District Court here to enjoin President Nixon from further mining of the harbor, bombing and further interruption of communication and rail transportation in Vietnam.

Shortly afterwards, a local group of activis-
tics, including Julius Hobson, school board
member Charles Cassell and Brent Dilling-
ham, announced a two-week series of protests
focusing on Congress.

The Women's Strike for Peace contingent, at one point, concentrated its efforts on the office

of House Speaker Carl Albert, who on Wednes-
day ordered the House visitors galleries closed
for three hours following three outbreaks the
day before. Speaker Albert spoke briefly to the
women after they had waited for a meeting in
the hallway leading to his offices. The women
demanded Speaker Albert push for an immedi-
ate end to the war. He urged them to not get
emotional and the meeting turned into a shout-
ing match. Some of the women left, but about
20 remained and threaened to camp out all
night outside of his office.

The Washington area protest schedule, so far, includes: attempts at a student strike today, at both college and high school levels; a demonstration tomorrow beginning at 10 a.m. on the Ellipse and moving at 11 a.m. for a march to the Capitol for a noon rally; a meeting Monday at 7:30 p.m. at All Louis Church, 16th and Harvard streets; now, to involve local groups in planning for the May 21 march on Washington which was called by the National Peace Action Coalition, "the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, and a number of other prominent anti-war groups.

A group of Eastern High School students called for a city-wide rally of high school students today at 9 a.m. in Lincoln Park, at 11th and East Capitol streets, followed by the 11 a.m. march on the Capitol.

Jerry Gordon, National coordinator for
NPAC, said at a press conference yesterday:
"Nixon said in his speech Monday night that
the whole world will be watching to see how
the American people respond to the Adminis-
tration's latest drastic escalation. The world
will be watching on May 20 and 21. We are
prepared to test in the streets the support for
our demand of "Our Now!" as compared to the
support for the Mclntire-Nixon policy."

Support for the Administration did some yes-
day on the Hill as some 350 to 450 support-
ers, including a number of congressmen and
the aides, rolled on the front steps of the
Capitol. Several speakers were shouted down
the hall of the Capitol.

WASHINGTON POST

12 MAY 1972

In Haiphong Harbor

In Haiphong harbor, the mines have clicked on and now the merchant vessels of all nations which ship to North Vietnam, whether those vessels carry arms or grain or medicine, must pause while Hanoi and its allies ponder and fit the choices which will determine whether Mr. Nixon succeeds in his lies: effort to "end the war." While the mines float quietly in the water, American planes by the hundreds, ostensibly trying to spoil Hanoi's battle plans and sever its rail links with Peking, are attacking with undeterminable accuracy what the U.S. Command calls "military targets." When Phantons attacked Long Bien bridge in the center of Hanoi Wednesday, an Agence France Press reporter on the scene wrote that "several bombs missed the target and fell 600 yards to the northeast in the middle of the residential suburb of Gialam."

In Paris, Mrs. Binh of the Vietcong has acknowledged that "some commentators" have found in Mr. Nixon's new terms "something more to negotiate." (The terms: if Hanoi accepts an Indochina cease-fire and frees American POWs, the United States will stop fighting and in four months withdraw all troops, leaving Hanoi in control of the territory it has seized in the South and offering it virtually a free hand in the rest of the South.) But, Mrs. Binh noted, there are also hookers: the Communists would have to "drop our weapons before the (political) problems are solved . . . while we are in a military situation which is favorable to our struggle." Her words indicated not rejection of President Nixon's plan so much as an understanding of his message. The unfolding Vietcong-Hanoi response awaits more internal debate, more consultation with allies and doubtless more action on the battlefield, too.

In Moscow and Peking, the tentativeness of the reactions so far reflects the essentially slow-motion character of the new crisis. It is conceivable that the "commentators" recommending a hard Haro-Vietcong look at the new Nixon terms include the Russians, if not also the Chinese. For them both, but especially the Russians, Mr. Nixon has tried to arrange things so that, to reap the benefits of improved relations with the United States

now, they must bow to his challenge and stop sending aid to Hanoi. Their national interest, conventionally defined, goes in one direction: their national honor in another. It remains to be known whether their self-respect, their domestic politics and their rivalry with each other will support the compromise Mr. Nixon wishes to force on them both. If not, then the China glow and the Moscow summit and the prospects of reaching SALT, trade and European agreements before next January may all go aglimmering.

In Washington, the President's initiatives have deepened and darkened the national agony. The administration chooses to define dissent as partisan and limited. Dissenters of both parties in Congress have launched "end-the-war" proposals. These purport, if enacted, to cut off war funds soon after an agreement on POW return. Actually, they can only record their supporters' distress with the war and with Mr. Nixon. Control over policy is firmly in his hands. Plainly, a President who would not receive a bipartisan Senate mission Monday until 8 p.m., and then only to inform them of decisions already taken and already conveyed to President Thieu, is not much troubled by the alienation rampant on Capitol Hill and by the damage to our division-of-power system which it marks. Nor is there reason to believe the President is troubled by the new round of campus demonstrations.

All in all, a very complicated situation is evolving gradually and unevenly but also in a way that only reinforces our earlier apprehension that the President was acting recklessly and out of desperation. Rather than honestly conceding his losses and moving to cut them by admittedly painful compromise, he has set a course which, even on the dubious chance that it significantly succeeds in slowing down supplies to Hanoi, would by that very success discourage Hanoi's inclination to bargain and threaten the basis on which Mr. Nixon has tried to pursue detente policies with the Soviet Union and with China. His attempt to pull off a virtuoso coup—to have his cake in Vietnam and to eat it in Moscow and Peking—bids fair to be a fiasco for us all.

NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE 15 May 1972 (12)

# What Went Wrong in Vietnam:
The Fallacies in U.S. Policy

1

Mamá Faraón—Newsweek

## Intelligence

In its efforts to outguess the North Vietnamese, the U.S. has employed an impressive array of intelligence-gathering equipment—computers, reconnaissance aircraft, even electronic sensors that can detect enemy soldiers moving through jungles and along darkened trails. Yet for all this modern wizardry, American intelligence repeatedly has misjudged Hanoi's capabilities and intentions. Even when the North Vietnamese were gearing up for their current offensive, the Nixon Administration clung to the belief that the Communists were incapable of inflicting real damage on South Vietnam. Asked in November if the Communists could mount a major campaign in the near future, Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied, "They would not have the capacity or the capability for an operation such as you describe." And that same month, Mr. Nixon said, "The enemy doesn't have the punch that it had."

The reason for this massive failure of U.S. intelligence is not hard to find. "After the allied invasions of Cambodia and Laos," reported NEWSWEEK'S Pentagon correspondent, Lloyd Norman, "the U.S. military kidged themselves into believing that the Communist supply caches and logistics system had been badly damaged if not wrecked." The penchant for self-delusion did not end there. Months ago, captured enemy documents clearly indicated that Hanoi was planning an offensive for February or March. Said one U.S. official: "Some people in the Pentagon laughed when the attacks didn't come when we predicted." Even after the North Vietnamese began their offensive on Easter Sunday—backing up their infantry with 130-mm. artillery pieces, missile and rocket launchers, anti-aircraft guns and no less than 500 tanks—Pentagon officials predicted that the Communists would run out of supplies by mid-May. Yet as the fighting raged into its sixth week, there was no sign that the Communists were short of matériel. They poured 6,000 rounds of artillery shells into Quang Tri city in one three-day period and blasted An Loc with up to 1,000 shells a day. Now, Administration officials ruefully concede, that Hanoi might be able to sustain such attacks for months.

The American intelligence network was equally inept at assessing Communist tactics. While the U.S. command believed that some sort of Communist offensive was in the works, it clung to the view that the assault would come in the central highlands—not across the Demilitarized Zone. And even when that judgment proved dramatically wrong, official optimism still prevailed.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the appearance of massive numbers

of top U.S. intelligence analysts, did not always pick them up, and they showed up in South Vietnam in places where they were least expected. The enemy had widened the roads and built more roads to enable the movement of tracked vehicles. Some were seen on the trails, but no one estimated the numbers that finally showed up."

Whether the faulty analysis of North Vietnam's capabilities was the result of wishful thinking or honest mistakes will be debated for years. But the fact is that Hanoi's successes to date raise serious questions about the way American military intelligence is gathered—and the way U.S. political leaders interpret the data they receive. It is an ageless military maxim to "know your enemy." But the U.S. appears to be singularly unable to understand either the mind or the determination of the North Vietnamese despite the abundance of information American intelligence has gathered over the years. And even when the Administration's advisers have been on target with their assessments of Hanoi's abilities and goals, their advice often has been ignored. That combination of shortcomings could turn out to be a formula for disaster for American foreign policy.

2

U.S. Air Force

## Bombing

The sobering spectacle of Communist tanks and heavy artillery operating deep inside South Vietnam raises serious questions about the ultimate effectiveness of U.S. air power in Indochina. But despite that, President Nixon has clung to his conviction that massive American bombing attacks can stem the Communist tide. In his nationally televised report two weeks ago on the renewed fighting in Vietnam, Mr. Nixon warned that U.S. air strikes "will not stop until the invasion stops." Officially, the Administration offered the explanation that the bombing was designed to aid the South Vietnamese forces and protect remaining American troops. But privately, some American officials suggested that the bombings might take on another, more ominous, character—that of pure punishment. As one State Department officer declared last week, "The President feels he has been abused personally by North Vietnam's current offensive."

In a sense, wider bombing raids are the only realistic option available to the President as a means of blunting Communist military assaults. There are too few American combat troops remaining in South Vietnam to be effective against Hanoi's forces, even if Mr. Nixon wanted to order the available GI's back into the ground war. In addition, Mr. Nixon can point to the fact that U.S. tactical bombing has achieved some short-term results during the current Communist offensive.

The troop positions in the south have changed again. Mr. Nixon flatly stated, "I can see no reason why we should continue to station our forces in South Vietnam and have repeatedly destroyed our forces of Communist tanks. Moreover, the air campaign in the north has no doubt diminished Hanoi's capabilities to launch subsequent attacks in the future, working—even though it had never really been put to the test. But inevitably the test came—and whether the ARVN will pass or fail remains a moot question. Though some ARVN units have fought gallantly, other South Vietnamese troops fled the battle of Quang Tri in panic, deserted in droves, abandoned their wounded and, in Hue, even turned on their own comrades. Technically, the White House has been correct in saying that the ARVN has the capability to stand alone. The South Vietnamese armed forces both outnumber and outnumber their Communist adversaries—and enjoy the luxury of almost unlimited air support. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird confidently predicted last January that the South Vietnamese forces would win "75 per cent or more" of the battles in the event of a Communist offensive. Yet since the current offensive began, Saigon's forces have failed to score a conclusive victory in any major battle. The best they have been able to do is to hold temporarily to the provincial capital of An Loc north of Saigon, which admittedly has been a considerable achievement in the face of intensive and continuous Communist artillery barrages. But even at An Loc, the ARVN has had to abandon its attempts to destroy the North Vietnamese troops that are still bежавіng the town. Somewhat surprisingly, Pentagon officials now openly admit that the Vietnamization program "hangs by a few threads." Perhaps the fatal flaw in Vietnamization has been the inability of the United States to still in the South Vietnamese soldier to respect and determination necessary to win. Hanoi's highly motivated and well-trained troops. It was relative-ly United States to hand out money, the attack planes and the ARVN lacked-

Yet the weight of evidence over the years suggests that much of America's bombing has been in vain. Shortly after he took office, Mr. Nixon received National Security Study Memorandum No. 1, a secret report that strongly indicated that bombing had not played a decisive role in Vietnam. Yet only a week before Hanoi initiated its current offensive, U.S. officials were still claiming that bombing had interdicted more than 98 per cent of the supplies North Vietnam had tried to move down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the previous four months. When the attack began, however, the Communists swarmed into South Vietnam behind the very equipment-tanks, artillery and rockets—that the U.S. claimed to have destroyed. And since the offensive began it has become clear that, like strategic bombing, close air support of ground troops also has limited utility—at least when the ground forces involved lack the will to fight. Despite hundreds of U.S. air strikes against enemy troop concentrations north of Quang Tri, for example, the North Vietnamese seemed to have little trouble capturing that provincial capital.

Still, the U.S. continues to view air power as something close to the ultimate weapon. When a U.S. Air Force officer in Saigon was questioned recently about the effectiveness of the bombing campaign, he replied, "I wouldn't know about that, but we have 'smarter' bombs and new, improved sensors now." And as if to emphasize beyond any doubt its heavy reliance on bombing, the Administration last week sent yet another attack aircraft carrier into action off the Vietnamese coast.

In short, the President seems determined to meet the new challenge in Vietnam with an old policy—and one that has always been of questionable wisdom. That air power plays a significant role in modern warfare, no one can deny. But to imply that it can somehow serve as a substitute for adequately trained and motivated ground forces flies in the face of military history.

3

Vietnamization

Few of his foreign programs can be more important to Richard Nixon than Vietnamization. And none has received more Presidential attention in the last

era. Mr. Nixon flatly stated, "I can see no reason why we should continue to station our forces in South Vietnam and have repeatedly destroyed our forces of Communist tanks. Moreover, the air campaign in the north has no doubt diminished Hanoi's capabilities to launch subsequent attacks in the future, working—even though it had never really been put to the test. But inevitably the test came—and whether the ARVN will pass or fail remains a moot question. Though some ARVN units have fought gallantly, other South Vietnamese troops fled the battle of Quang Tri in panic, deserted in droves, abandoned their wounded and, in Hue, even turned on their own comrades. Technically, the White House has been correct in saying that the ARVN has the capability to stand alone. The South Vietnamese armed forces both outnumber and outnumber their Communist adversaries—and enjoy the luxury of almost unlimited air support. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird confidently predicted last January that the South Vietnamese forces would win "75 per cent or more" of the battles in the event of a Communist offensive. Yet since the current offensive began, Saigon's forces have failed to score a conclusive victory in any major battle. The best they have been able to do is to hold temporarily to the provincial capital of An Loc north of Saigon, which admittedly has been a considerable achievement in the face of intensive and continuous Communist artillery barrages. But even at An Loc, the ARVN has had to abandon its attempts to destroy the North Vietnamese troops that are still bежавіng the town. Somewhat surprisingly, Pentagon officials now openly admit that the Vietnamization program "hangs by a few threads." Perhaps the fatal flaw in Vietnamization has been the inability of the United States to still in the South Vietnamese soldier to respect and determination necessary to win. Hanoi's highly motivated and well-trained troops. It was relatively easy for the United States to hand out money, the attack planes and the ARVN lacked-

crash program. But last week, when more U.S. tanks arrived in South Vietnam to replace those lost to the Communists, one U.S. official in Saigon slapped "For Christ's sake, they don't need more damn equipment. They need some guts." There is considerably more to the problem than that, however. What the ARVN primarily needs are honest and efficient commanders. And in South Vietnam's corrupt and nepotistic military establishment, such men have always been in short supply. "There are many people here in important jobs who are unequal to the task," said one South Vietnamese official last week. "The one thing the Americans could not bring in from their arsenal was leadership."

The Nixon Administration's misplaced confidence in the ability of the ARVN is hard to comprehend. In seven years of intimate and painful involvement in Vietnam, U.S. military leaders had every opportunity to perceive and correct the shortcomings in the South Vietnamese forces. But, as NEWSWEEK'S Saigon bureau chief Nicholas C. Proffitt reported last week: "The Administration could not see the flaws in Vietnamization because of self-imposed blinders. Since Vietnamization, as defined by President Nixon, is the last American option in Vietnam, it simply had to work. The only alternative would be to admit that the Administration has failed. When this attitude at the very top is so ill-concealed, it is inevitable that it will filter down and subordinates will don a matching set of blinders. Nice things do not happen to the careers of men who fail to see the emperor's new clothes." In the case of Vietnamization, the Nixon Administration apparently saw what it wanted to see and believed what it hoped would prove true. The result has been that a policy designed by the President to extricate the United States from the war has become a policy that terrifies the Americans who are fighting it.

CYD

NEW YORK TIMES

14 MAY 72 (15)

The Peace Front-

The public rejection by the Vietcong of President Nixon's latest peace proposal was to be expected at a moment when blockade and air attack are intensifying the American war against North Vietnam. But Moscow, reacting relatively moderately to the war's escalation, has urged resumption of negotiations while refraining, so far, from canceling the Nixon-Brezhnev summit. North Vietnam's chief secret negotiator, Politburo member Le Du Il, remains in Paris, having sent Minister Xuan Thuy instead to Hanoi for consultations. Another round in the Paris peace talks undoubtedly lies ahead and the latest American offer could become the opening for a settlement.

Despite denunciation of the American plan by Mr. Tho and the Vietcong delegation chief, Mrs. Binh, some analysts believe that it represents a softening of President Nixon's previous terms. Such new elements in Mr. Nixon's proposal are partly stated, partly implied. He has offered withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam within four months and a halt in "all acts of force throughout Indochina"—including American air and naval attacks— if there is an end to the fighting through an internationally supervised cease-fire and the return of American prisoners of war. He is prepared to "leave the determination of the political future to the Vietnamese," the President has said.

The Communists say they will not agree to a cease-fire before a political settlement. They also demand a halt in American economic and military aid to Saigon. Despite these differences, the new American policy may yet provide a basis for negotiation. Reciprocal North Vietnamese withdrawal from South Vietnam is no longer being demanded. The implication of the Nixon-Kissinger statements last week is that a cease-fire would consolidate recent Communist military gains; but even so the reluctance of the North Vietnamese to accept a cease-fire is understandable while they are in the midst of an advance and have hopes of gaining control of still more territory soon.

As for a political settlement, the Nixon-Kissinger statements no longer emphasize elections as the solution. President Thieu's political survival is no longer an American condition, nor was there mention in last week's statement of preserving the Saigon regime. A willingness to discuss a valid tripartite coalition government, in which the Communists would have parity with Saigon, and third groups agreeable to both, is evident on the American side.

All this undoubtedly helps to explain the restraint shown so far by both Moscow and Peking, which have other reasons as well to keep Vietnam decoupled from their broader relations with the United States and the West. Close to ten separate Soviet-American negotiations are currently in progress, ranging from maritime issues through trade and credits to the overriding strategic arms limitation agreement, now nearing completion in the SALT talks.

President Nixon's willingness to risk this relationship by blockading North Vietnam has been dangerous and disturbing. But fortunately it has not triggered a similar Soviet response so far. If that restraint continues, there remains a basis for hope that negotiations can still bring the Vietnam war, or at least the American involvement, to an end.

NEW YORK TIMES 14 MAY 1972 (15)

Vietnam War at a
New Crossroads

To the Editor:

President Nixon's decision to mine the harbors and coastline of North Vietnam and expand the bombing of the North follows a significant build-up of United States air strength in Southeast Asia, renewed bombing of military targets in the North and increased doubts that the South Vietnamese can assume the burden of combat in the South.

We believe that the President's decision and the resumption of bombing are tragic mistakes. They are dangerous, wrong and ineffective. We urge that the bombing of the North be discontinued, that the mining be stopped and that our military involvement in Southeast Asia be ended promptly, leaving the Vietnamese to work out their own political resolution. The bombing of the last several months did not discourage or impede the major North Vietnamese attacks now

in progress. In fact, years of experience in the unsuccessful attempt of the last Administration to cut off men and supplies from the North by air attacks against supply depots, supply routes and other military targets demonstrate abundantly that increased interdiction bombing will not put an end to the North Vietnamese war effort. Nor will the new steps being taken restrict the daily importation of military and war-supporting material sufficiently to prevent North Vietnam from continuing its operations in the South.

The recent escalation of military activity on both sides has hindered rather than advanced a negotiated settlement in Paris. Moreover, the additional escalation in attempting to seal off North Vietnam jeopardizes our relations with the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China. It unjustifiably risks a direct military confrontation with both countries and may impede the progress of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which are of fundamental importance not only to the United States and the Soviet Union but to all nations.

The escalatory trend also causes apprehension over the possibility of new types of air actions against the North — those in which the United States may engage in retaliatory and punitive bombing raids against heavily

populated areas. We want to say as strongly as possible that such bombing would be an unconscionable error.

The national interest of the United States does not justify the escalatory actions which have been taken and we urge that a date be set for the withdrawal of all our military forces from Vietnam.

CYRUS R. VANCE, PAUL C. WARNKE
PHIL G. GOULDING, ALAIN C. ENTHOVEN
FREDERICK S. WYLE
RICHARD C. STEADMAN
New York, May 11, 1972

The writers are former Defense Department officials. Mr. Vance was Deputy Secretary, Messrs. Warnke, Goulding and Enthoven were Assistant Secretaries and Messrs. Wyle and Steadman were Deputy Assistant Secretaries.

BOSTON GLOBE 12 MAY 1972 (14)

Peace plan rejected

The rejection of President Nixon's three-point peace proposal by both Hanoi and Vietcong spokesmen should not be made the occasion for recriminations either in Washington, Hanoi, Saigon, Paris (where it is deplorable that the peace talks are still in Washington-ordered suspension) or on the American homefront.

There have been enough recriminations, reprisals and killing already in a war that never was any of our business in the first place.

What is needed now is not umbrage, but less talk about possible humiliation, greater concern for those who are still being killed, including American troops, and a relentless effort to determine not only precisely why Mr. Nixon's peace terms have been rejected, but, more important, how they can be made acceptable.

In announcing the Viet Cong's rejection of the three-point plan, Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh told Paris newsmen that she supposed "some commentators are saying there is something more to negotiate than there was in Mr. Nixon's eight-point proposals." She thus rephrased the position earlier stated by Hanoi. "As a matter of fact, his conditions are even stiffer than those raised before."

The point may be well taken. The eight-point program, promising US withdrawal from South Vietnam "within six months of an agreement of an over-all settlement," proposed, as Hanoi earlier had proposed, an exchange of prisoners. "beginning the same day as the troop withdrawal," and a cease-fire "beginning when the agreement is signed." This was rejected because other provisions, in the Communist view, constituted "a plan to carry out the Vietnamization policies indefinitely."

It does not matter that many Americans believed then and believe now that the eight points were negotiable. It is not Americans with whom Washington has to bargain. It is Hanoi and the Viet Cong. And Mr. Nixon himself, even in his peace speech last Monday, has supplied the rhetoric which tends to support Communist distrust of Mr. Nixon's intentions. His Monday night peace proposal was juxtaposed to utterances which the Communists could not be expected to view as an unequivocal commitment to peace: "Do we join with our enemy to install a

Communist government in South Vietnam? This will not happen. We will not cross the line from generosity to treachery. . . . Abandonment of our commitment in Vietnam would mean turning 17 million South Vietnamese over to Communist terror and tyranny." Such rhetoric, Mme. Binh has made clear, is as much anathema to the Communists as is the President's Monday night ultimatum.

The objections to Monday night's three-point proposal may reflect nothing more than the fact that they were perhaps awkwardly worded. The President stated, for instance, that the bombing will continue, as will the mining of North Vietnam harbors, until all American prisoners of war have been returned. But prisoners of war, except on rare occasions of prisoner exchange, are never returned while a war goes on. The Communists state that Mr. Nixon knows this. They stand on the proposition, which ought to be acceptable to Washington, that the prisoners will be released when the war ends.

Mr. Nixon's second point, that there must be an internationally supervised cease-fire throughout Indochina, is objected to on the ground that it is unreasonable at this time of Communist successes on the battlefield, and would give the South Vietnamese a chance to re-coup and regroup.

On the President's third point, to proceed with a complete withdrawal of all American forces within four months, the Communists point out that, inasmuch as the promise to withdraw is contingent upon so much else that has been left unsettled, it is in fact no promise at all. "Four months from what?" they ask. "Four months after when? After 1976? Or after 1979? When?"

There is not, in our view, so much intransigence in all of this as seems to be seen by some. Dr. Henry Kissinger has acknowledged that there is some room for misunderstanding in the proposals as Mr. Nixon stated them.

"We will be delighted," he said, "to spell out the details as soon as negotiation starts."

That is the rub now—the resumption of negotiations, rather than accusations. This is no time for Washington dictates. This is the time for compromise on terms acceptable to both sides.

WASHINGTON POST

16 MAY 1972 P-15

TUESDAY MORNING, 16 MAY 1972

# Senate Vote Today Expected To Back Nixon on Cease-Fire

By Spencer Rich

Washington Post Staff Writer

In a key test vote today, the Senate appears ready to endorse President Nixon's demand that North Vietnam accept an Indochina cease-fire before the United States withdraws from Vietnam.

Reversing an earlier position, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) said yesterday that he opposes the cease-fire language that his deputy, Majority Whip Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), is seeking to add to end-the-war provisions in the pending State Department authorization bill.

But Byrd, with strong administration backing, appears to have the votes, though the tally could be close.

The end-the-war provision, sponsored by Sens. Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.) and Frank Church (D-Idaho), cuts off all funds for U.S. Indochina com-

bat activities four months after North Vietnam agrees to release U.S. prisoners, with no other conditions. Byrd is proposing to add another condition: that an internationally supervised cease-fire be arranged first. The President has made this, as well as prisoner release, a precondition of U.S. withdrawal.

Case, Church and others say this would gut their fund-cut-off proposal, permitting either South or North Vietnam, or local Communist groups in Cambodia and Laos, to block U.S. withdrawal by stalling a cease-fire or imposing conditions unacceptable to the other side. They say that instead of requiring the United States to get out of Vietnam, it would simply endorse Mr. Nixon's position.

Byrd told the Senate yesterday that when the President goes to Moscow May 22, he

may find that the Russians and Chinese see their own interests in Vietnam as different from those of the North Vietnamese—a possibility that could lead to a peace settlement.

Therefore, he said, it is too soon to impose an absolute withdrawal requirement that isn't contingent on a cease-fire, since that would leave the President no bargaining power to obtain negotiated settlement.

"It may be that at a later time I would vote for a proposal such as that made by Mr. Chase and Mr. Church," Byrd said—but not until the possibility of some agreement at Moscow has been exhausted.

Scott told reporters that after the Byrd amendment is passed, he will seek to change the Case-Church language again to make clear that U.S. prisoners must actually be re-

jected. The Senate should draw in a lot of media attention. North Vietnam agrees to their release. The White House supports this change also although it opposes anything that retaint a fund cut-off.

Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.) said the mining of Haiphong harbor actually is a "narrowing of the war" because it reduces the enemy's capacity to fight. He criticized Democratic presidential candidates for opposing the President's new Vietnam policies, saying, "I think these candidates are going to be sorry they never took time out to condemn North Vietnam's aggression."

He said predictions by the candidates of "confrontation" with Russia had proved false. "Everyone of these false prophets has been condemned by the facts," he said.

While the Senate is voting today on the end-the-war cease-fire amendment, Secretary of State William P. Rogers is scheduled to testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about why the administration opposes the end-the-war legislation and demands inclusion of the cease-fire language.

WASHINGTON POST 16 MAY 1972

# Amendments on War Policy

Ever since Congress licensed the President to practice war at his own discretion in Indochina seven years ago, some legislators have been trying to retrieve the power and prestige the institution so unwisely then threw away at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. But in the absence of an effective majority, and having to cope with clever Presidents who rarely offered them a good target, they have had to settle for a series of guerrilla forays designed less to force a turn in policy than to record symbolically their own dissent from it.

The latest such foray is the Case-Church amendment to the State Department authorization bill, which would cut off war funds four months after an agreement on prisoner return. The language would be of dubious effect, even in the unlikely occasion of enactment. Moreover, the Congress has no way of bringing about the particular event—a prisoner agreement—that would start the four-month cease-fire. Nonetheless, a vote for Case-Church is an appealing—some would say essential

—gesture of protest, not only for legislators opposed to the latest presidential escalation but for a legislature with any grip left on its institutional pride.

Characteristically, an overly fearful President has contrived to blur the expression of even this relatively tame challenge. Thus Sen. Robert Byrd has introduced a contrary amendment which would not let that four-month clock start ticking until the prisoners had actually been returned and—a more serious delaying maneuver—until an internationally supervised cease-fire had been installed throughout Indochina. The Byrd amendment amounts to nothing more or less than the Nixon policy of May 8. In other words, it is another rubberstamp, which would submit Congress to the same institutional humiliation it accepted carelessly seven years ago.

Understandably, Mr. Fulbright and others who now strongly feel both about the Senate and the war indicate that they may defect on Case-Church, which won't be voted on for a while, even if the Byrd amendment passes in a vote due today.

Harris

In the Harris Survey, 16 and 10 the American people give decisive 55 per cent to 24 per cent approval of President Nixon's move in mining the harbors of North Vietnam. Those results can be taken as a ruling of public opinion behind the President in a time of national crisis, with 68 per cent of those with opinions supporting his dramatic decision.

At the same time, a national cross-section of 1,385 persons interviewed indicated that it would be willing to go a substantial distance toward compromise at the negotiating table to achieve an end to the Vietnam war:

* By 51 per cent to 31 per cent, the public favors a "standstill cease-fire," under which "both sides would keep their troops where they are now."

* By a narrow 44 per cent to 38 per cent, it would back "an agreement to end the war, but to let North Vietnam keep the territory in South Vietnam it now occupies."

* By a substantial 60 per cent to 14 per cent, it would favor having "president of South Vietnam resign from office, if that were the only way to get peace."

Previous surveys have indicated that upwards of 80 per cent of the public also wants a return of American prisoners of war as a key term in the settlement of the Vietnam conflict.

The cross-section of 1,385 was asked:

Do you approve or disapprove of President Nixon's order to mine all the harbors of North Vietnam?

Approve ........ 59%

Disapprove ........ 24%

Not sure ........ 17%

Heaviest support for Mr. Nixon's step to mine North Vietnam harbors could be found among men, residents of the South and West, in smaller towns and rural areas, among those 50 years old and over, those with a high-school education and persons with incomes of $100 to $15,000.

Opposition was strongest in the East, among those under 30 among Democrats and those with a college education.

The cross-section also was

WASHINGTON POST (15
13 May 1972 P6

The Harris Survey

59% of Public
Backs Nixon
Viet Moves

Considering the fact that the North Vietnamese now occupy much of the northern part of South Vietnam, would you favor or oppose:

A cease-fire in the fighting in which both sides kept their troops where they are now?

Favor ........ 51%

Oppose ........ 31

Not sure ........ 18

An agreement to end the war but to let North Vietnam keep the territory it now occupies?

Favor ........ 44%

Oppose ........ 38

Not sure ........ 18

Finally, people were asked: Suppose the only way we could get peace in Vietnam were to have President Thieu of South Vietnam resign from office. Would you favor or oppose such a move?"

Favor ........ 60%

Oppose ........ 14

Not sure ........ 26

Those who most favor allowing the North Vietnamese to keep the territories they now occupy are women, easterners, those under 30, the college educated and those with incomes of $15,000 and over.

BALTIMORE SUN
15 MAY 72 Pg6

Life claims
mining split
Nixon aides

New York (Reuter)—President Nixon's closest advisers were split over his decision to mine North Vietnamese harbors and escalate the bombing, according to Life magazine.

In an article in its current issue, the magazine says that John B. Connally, Secretary of the Treasury, firmly supported the President's decision, but that Henry A. Kissinger and Melvin R. Laird, secretary of defense, had doubts, as did officials in the State and Defense Departments and the Central Intelligence Agency.

During White House deliberations, Life says, "another Nixon aide was heard to mutter not once, but several times, 'we ought to nuke 'em' —an allusion to use of nuclear weapons."

Informing congressional leaders of his decision just before his television speech, Life says, Mr. Nixon told them: "They spit in our eye in Paris. What else can we do."

Five weeks before his decision to escalate the war, Life says, Mr. Nixon "felt that his whole plan for world stability was falling into place just as he had wanted it to. His China summit had been a success; Russia seemed eager to limit nuclear weapons to stabilize Europe. The Moscow summit gleamed ahead as another presidential spectacular, providing, in addition, the prospect of real progress toward peace."

But then Dr. Kissinger's secret trip to the negotiation table in Paris was a disaster," Life says, and the North Vietnamese began their offensive.

"It is by such dashed hopes that his disappointment must be measured," the magazine says. "It's depth is still not fully appreciated."

Strong
Misgivings
Over the
Solitary
Decision

169

WASHINGTON—The scenario was notably familiar. Once again the event appeared on nationwide television to announce a major escalation of the Vietnam war, and once again his words triggered the predictable sequence of events that have become a fixture of American life.

Beginning moments after President Nixon spoke on Monday night, demonstrations erupted in major cities and on campuses across the country. The protests ranged from a peaceful march in Ann Arbor, where 200 high school students scattered dandelions around an Air Force recruiting station, to open combat in Berkeley, where police fired hard rubber pellets from "ricochet" guns into an angry crowd.

The National Guard was called out in Minneapolis and two persons were injured in Albuquerque when police fired buckshot into a crowd that had blocked traffic on a freeway. By late Friday, nearly 2,000 demonstrators, including the president of Amherst College, were reported arrested around the country, and the president of Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis., had decided that prudence required him to cancel a scheduled commencement address by Army Secretary Bert Froehlke.

Qualitatively predictable was the sharp-dissipative rhetoric and opposition of the antiwar critics on Capitol Hill. Meeting in caucus on Tuesday, the Senate Democrats adopted a resolution, by a vote of 29 to 14, "disapproving the escalation of the war."

More striking was the 10 to 1 vote the next day by the Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in favor of a bill to pull all United States forces out of Indochina by Oct. 1, subject only to the release of prisoners and the safe withdrawal of American troops. If, as now seems likely, the full committee approves the bill and sends it to the floor, it will be the first time the normally hawkish House has considered troop withdrawal legislation of its own.

The Democratic Presidential contenders were quick to react, and with the exception of Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, they all criticized the President's decision. To George McGovern, the mining of North Vietnam's harbors was a "flirtation with World War III;" to Hubert H. Humphrey, "a serious escalation of the war;" to Edmund S. Muskie, "a risk of major confrontation with the Soviet Union."

In the opposite side of the issue, White House mounted a formidable effort to demonstrate that the President's decision had the support of the majority of the public. On Wednesday afternoon Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler called reporters' attention to the Committee Research Corp. poll that

concluded that nearly three out of every four Americans backed the President's decision. Mr. Ziegler added that the more than 20,000 telegrams and letters received at the White House were "five to six-to-one" in favor of the mining.

To many people here the poll results merely reinforced their conviction that a majority of the American public will always support the President in the immediate wake of a major decision, particularly when it involves national security, but to Mr. Ziegler it was demonstrable proof that the mainstream was still flowing behind Mr. Nixon. The spearhead of the Administration's counterattack was John B. Connally, the increasingly influential Secretary of the Treasury. A Democrat himself, Mr. Connally nonetheless accused the Democratic Presidential candidates of playing politics with the war. Their public statements, he said, "raise doubts in my mind about their essential commitment to the best interests of the nation."

Strong as the rhetoric was last week and violent as many of the demonstrations turned out to be, the nation's reaction to the mining decision was distinctly more muted than the anguished outcry that followed the allied invasion of Cambodia in May, 1970. The difference appeared to be attributable to a variety of factors, including the following:

* The very seriousness of the move tended to cause some critics to pull their punches. As Senator Gail McGee, the Wyoming Republican who supports Mr. Nixon's policy, put it, "This is a time to keep quiet and hope the President lucks out."

* The fact that American troops were not involved, as they were in the Cambodian action, lessened the impact for many, even though a number of American airmen are certain to be shot down by North Vietnam's strengthened air defenses.

* The belief among some that more is involved in the mining than meets

the eye, that Mr. Nixon is engaged in a complex military-political maneuver with the Soviet Union that may ultimately bring about a negotiated solution to the war.

* The weariness with the Vietnam issue that has afflicted the country,

Despite all this, the solitary quality of the President's decision stirred a vigorous debate here last week over the constitutional limits of his powers to make war. Critics such as Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, maintained that the mining was clearly an act of war and therefore subject to Congressional approval. The Administration repeated its standard defense that the mining was designed to protect the remaining American troops in South Vietnam and thus fell within the President's prerogatives as Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

But as before, the two sides talked past each other and the issue was not joined. Mr. Fulbright summed up his colleagues' frustration when he observed on Friday that the only effective restraint on Presidential power is impeachment, and that this recourse is politically impractical.

Despite the instant opinion polls cited by the White House, the political impact of Mr. Nixon's decision remains hard to assess. On the one hand, he has acted contrary to what seems to be a widespread public aversion toward greater American involvement in the war, on the other hand, his action no doubt appeals to many who have long wanted to see Hanoi's source of supplies cut off at the throat.

Moreover, much will depend on the results of the blockade. If it cripples the North Vietnamese fighting ability and brings the Communists to the negotiating table, Mr. Nixon will have pulled off the political coup of his career. If it fails to stop Hanoi and alienates Moscow in the process, he may well have shortened that career.

— JEREMY SMITH

7-F

Military Effect:

Will the
Measures
Work? If
Not, What
Then?

SAIGON — "Our objective is to have an impact on the battle in the country as fast as possible," a senior American officer said the other day, explaining what President Nixon had in mind when he ordered the mining of the seven North Vietnamese ports and extensive bombing of supply lines north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ).

The officer did not elaborate, but the feeling among most American commanders here is that "as fast as possible" may not be fast enough. The only front on which the bombings can be expected to have an immediate effect is the one in the South Vietnamese provinces of Quangtri and Thauien, just below the DMZ. The enemy's pipe lines just above the DMZ have been cut by bombing, and the North Vietnamese may have trouble keeping their tanks and trucks going for the expected push on the city of Hue.

The other two fronts—Kontum and Teiku in the Central Highlands, and Anloc just above Saigon—will not be affected by the bombing for months. It takes the North Vietnamese 90 days to get their supplies to the first of those theaters via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and about 120 days to infiltrate material to Anloc; whatever they earmarked for their current drives on these fronts must be there already.

A collapse on either of these two fronts would pose great problems for the Government of Nguyen Van Thieu, but a collapse at Anloc would probably be disasterous. And a secret American report assessing the possible effects of the fall of Hue has concluded, as many observers here have done, that the Thieu Government could probably not long survive the consequences.

So the bombing and the mining are measures that sound stronger than they actually are.

For example, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by which the North Vietnamese moved their supplies, tanks, heat-seeking missile, antiaircraft guns, food, bullets and artillery from the North to the fronts in the Central Highlands and

Anloc is now under the clouds of the southwest monsoon season. The clouds will not lift until the fall, so the earliest that the mining and bombing of the North can possibly have an effect on North Vietnamese supply movements to those fronts is the end of this year. By that time, most observers feel, the North Vietnamese will have either succeeded or failed in their military objectives in the South.

Even below the DMZ, where the Communists are being supplied from across that dividing line, the enemy can circumvent the effects of the bombing, as he did during 1967 and 1968. If gasoline and diesel fuel is spilling out of wrecked pipelines, then the North Vietnamese will manage to get it South in 55-gallon drums and may have stockpiled them already in anticipation of the bombing. The effect of the interdiction on their offensive operations will doubtless be less dramatic than the bombing itself, and the view here now is that they will persist for months if they can.

Throughout last week American planes ranged over most of North Vietnam, striking rail and road links and attacking port installations. Most of the fire was directed at military targets around Hanoi and Haiphong. The Americans ran into Communist antiaircraft missiles and MIG fighters on many of the missions.

However long the bombing continues, most military observers do not believe that such raids are likely to put a complete stop to the flow of Communist supplies. Past experience has shown that damage to bridges, roads, rail lines and the like can be repaired quickly.

This weekend, it is Anloc—on the front where the bombing of the North will have the least immediate effect, —that is receiving the brunt of the enemy attacks. So far the North Vietnamese have lobbed more than 30,000 mortar and artillery shells on the completely devastated rubber plantation—more supplies than American intelligence thought they had in eastern Cambodia—and used a fleet of around 75 tanks that nobody knew they had, all in an effort to destroy the two regiments of Saigon's Fifth Division that have been encircled at Anloc for a month.

There are those here who believe that the bombing was primarily intended to show the Saigon Government that, despite the summit meeting in Peking and the expected one in Moscow later this month, the United States is still standing solidly behind its allies, but that the American demonstration of will must be matched by even stronger ones from the Saigon Government.

The moment of greatest peril in the six-week-old offensive came on May 1, when Government forces under Brig. Gen. Vu Van Giai abandoned Quangtri Province — needless, in the view of American commanders—and it was that loss that prompt-

ed President Nixon's decision to resume the bombing, according to high-ranking officials here.

At the same time, they say, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and General Creighton W. Abrams called on President Thieu at the Independence Palace and told him he had to exercise firmer leadership and get the Government in gear. So last week, following up after his removal of General Giai, he issued a series of emergency measures imposing martial law on the country, closing the universities and drafting the students, and he asked the national legislature to grant him the power to rule by decree. His request will certainly be granted since he controls the majority in both houses.

On a television broadcast to his people last week, President Thieu declared:

"Today, allied peoples and governments, especially the people and Government of the United States, have done their utmost. We must do the rest to save ourselves.

"We are sincerely grateful to the American people for their generous assistance, but we cannot ask from them what they cannot do in lieu of ourselves, that is to guarantee our own survival."

The President's office garbled the women a little, but that is what Ambassador Bunker and General Abrams told Mr. Thieu at the beginning of the week — and why the mines and bombs are being dropped.

—CRAIG R. WHITNEY

8-F

NEW YORK TIMES 16 MAY 1972

War Power

The Congressional showdown on the President's war policy, which may come today in the Senate, involves far more than the immediate issue of Mr. Nixon's continuation and escalation of American involvement in the Indochina conflict. Underlying the proposals to involve Congress' power of the purse to end United States participation in the war promptly, conditional only on the release of American war prisoners, is a fundamental constitutional prerogative—the essential responsibility of Congress to decide whether to commit the armed forces of this country to a foreign war.

For the moment, the possibility of obtaining the prisoners' release in return for American withdrawal does not appear bright. In his Paris news conference last week, North Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho insisted that there must first be a political settlement. But Hanoi needs testing on this point. Its willingness to separate the military and political issues should be probed by a clear-cut American offer. Moreover, a Congressional expression at this point would represent an essential reaffirmation of its constitutional responsibility.

The most disturbing aspect of the Nixon decision to mine Haiphong and other North Vietnamese ports and to resume the widespread aerial bombing of North Vietnam as that the President not only failed to seek Consial consent for these grave actions but did not consult with Congressional leaders before deciding on them.

If the Church-Case amendment, currently before the Senate, is subjected to crippling amendments as proposed by Senator Byrd and other supporters of the President, it will mean that Mr. Nixon will have a free hand to continue the conflict in Indochina indefinitely, regardless of the desires of the American people and Congress. It will encourage the President to take any additional risks he alone may deem appropriate to try to salvage his own misconceived policies.

Even more serious, Congressional failure to challenge the President's power grab would let stand a precedent that could undermine for years to come the constitutionally mandated Congressional checks on executive war-making. To argue that Congress has no option but to support the President in an emergency, even if that emergency is enormously enlarged by his own arbitrariness, is certainly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they gave the Congress exclusive authority to declare war.

WASHINGTON. — The Senate, on Tuesdaynooned Presi-
dent Nixon's call for an Indo-
china cease-fire, ending the
chance of a Congressional
challenge to his war policies
at least, before he goes to
Moscow. The vote was 47 to
43.

In a victory for the White House legislation, calling for a cutoff of funds for the war four months after release of American PW's was amended to require North Vietnam also to accept an Indochina cease-fire as a condition for total U.S. withdrawal.

Sens. Frank Church (D.,
Idaho) and Clifford P. Case,
(R., N. J.) said the action vir-
tually nullified their end-the-
war measure.

THE CEASE-FIRE amend-
ment was offered by Sen.
Robert C. Byrd, (D.), W. Va.,
who frequently acts as a com-
promiser between the admin-
istration and its critics in the
Senate.

Byrd contended that inclusion of the cease-fire provision would enable the President to go to Moscow free of the threat of congressional restraints on his policy while preserving the Senate's hope for a swift end to the war.

Delaware Valley senators split 3 to 3 on the provision. Voting for it were Sens. Hugh Scott (R., Pa.) and J. Caleb Boggs and William V. Roth Jr. (R., Del.). Opposing were Sens. Richard S. Schweiker (R., Pa.), Clifford P. Case (R., (N.J.)) and Harrison A. Williams Jr. (D., N.J.).

In announcing the mining of
North Vietnamese ports, Mr.
Nixon said he would withdraw
U. S. troops from Vietnam
four months after an interna-
tionally supervised cease-fire
and following Hanoi's return
of American prisoners.

Case and Church incorpo-
rated the wording on prison-
ers, saying it would back up
with law what the President
offered the North Vietnamese.

"If there is to be an end to
wholesale slaughter, it can't
be accomplished just by with-
drawing U. S. forces," Byrd
said.

BUT CASE AND CHURCH
said the president al provision
would weaken their amend-
ment.

Church said the cease-fire

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
17 May 1972 P2

Nixon Wins
Viet Vote
In Senate

171

proviso would bind the Presi-
dent's bargaining position and
freeze the chief executive into
something he may want to
discard later.

And, Church said, to add a
cease-fire as a withdrawal
condition — a cease-fire the
Saigon government would
have to agree to—would give
South Vietnam a veto on U. S.
withdrawal.

Sen. Stuart Symington (D., Mo.) said the North Vietnamese already had rejected earlier cease-fire offers. "Without a political settlement, a cease-fire would be tantamount to their losing the war," he said.

DEFENSE Secretary Mel-
vin R. Laird said meanwhile
that U. S. pressure on the
flow of supplies to North Viet-
nam "could help lead to a
breakthrough" in Hanoi's will-
ingness to end the war.

Laird held a short news
conference at Andrews Air
Force Base before leaving for
North Atlantic Treaty Organi-
zation meetings in Europe. He
said he would spend much of
his time explaining President
Nixon's decision to mine
North Vietnamese harbors.

"It is imperative that this
move be understood by our
NATO allies," Laird said.
"Their support is important."

Pentagon sources said the
United States was preparing to
send a seventh aircraft car-
rier, the US Ticonderoga, to
the waters off South Vietnam.
A Japanese correspondent
in Tokyo reported that Pre-
mier Chou En-lai of China
said U. S. action in Vietnam
runs counter to the spirit of
his joint statement in
Shanghai with President Nixon

CJG

WASHINGTON POST 15 MAY. 1972

Tiness has Almost Overcome Horror

Relentless Patterns to Our Vietnam Nightmare

The President has just offered North
Vietnam the best deal ever, the softest
terms of the war: at the same time, the
same man has just found a new way to
escalate what he carefully calls "acts of
force" against North Vietnam.

Question: When did this happen?

Answer: It has happened almost every
year since 1964.

This is obviously different, and more seri-
ous, than those that preceded it. But there
are relentless patterns to our nightmare,
and it has become so numbing that weari-
ness has almost overcome horror. Consider
the following:

* We refuse to negotiate from weakness.
So does Hanoi. But how can both sides nego-
tiate from strength at the same time?

The administration says that it undertook
Vietnamization to strengthen its negotiating

The writer is the new managing
editor of Foreign Policy. He spent the
last two years in Morocco as director
of the Peace Corps.

position. But how could our negotiating posi-
tion get stronger as our military firepower
got weaker?

How will it finally end—will we be negoti-
ing from strength by bombing Hanoi,
the position of the South Vietnamese
collapses in the South? We will end up of-
fering Hanoi everything it wants in the
South while simultaneously leveling the
North?

* Ever since the war began, and regardless of who has been President, we have followed a single, simple, central philosophy—that if we increase our military pressure against the other side, then Hanoi will offer, or accept, more “reasonable” peace terms.

This theory was devised before Viet-
nam, and tested, apparently successfully, in
the Cuban Missile crisis ten years ago. Show
them that we are determined, start gradually
up the ladder ("graduated reprisal"),
adapt our military power to the specific situation ("flexible response"), and they will see
that their best course is to back down.

This theory has never worked in Indo-
china. There is no historical evidence to sup-
port the hope that it will work now.

When Dean Rusk was Secretary of
State, he talked often of the countless
Chinese backing up their friends in North
Vietnam. To Rusk, that was the threat be-
hind the threat. He seemed to downplay de-
liberately the Russian role in supporting
Hanoi so as to leave the Russians with max-
imum breathing room and to avoid another
Moscow-Washington confrontation.

In contrast, in his speech May 8, President
Nixon did not mention China once. This
me the threat behind the threat came from
oscow, and Mr. Kissinger said the next day
that "prior to a meeting that had, and still
has such high prospects, [the Russian leader-
ship] should ask themselves whether it can
be in the interest of either party to impose
a major setback on the other."

By Richard Holbrooke

• In every major communist offensive, our intelligence has underestimated the enemy. In 1959, we failed to see the signs of the gathering guerillas. In 1962, we overlooked the evidence that the Viet Cong were forming into battalion-sized units. In 1965, the power and size of the North Vietnamese asstult was unforeseen. In 1968, we missed both the timing and extent of the Tet offensive. In 1972, having predicted an offensive, our intelligence was still stunned by the massiveness of it—and by those tanks that came out of the jungles. The failure to Vietnamese Army—with tanks and artillery—must surely rank as one of the worst intelligence failures of modern warfare.

In 1954, the French artillery commander at Dien Bien Phu, Colonel Piroth, placed his artillery pieces on top of the hills that formed the French positions, and waited confidently for the battle in which the Viet Minh would be demolished. On the night of March 16, 1954, the Viet Minh opened up on the French positions with the equivalent of an artillery division, and virtually destroyed the French artillery. General Navarre, commanding, called it "the major surprise of the battle." Colonel Piroth, on the night it began, went back to his bunker and committed suicide.

* Why do we bomb North Vietnam? The reasons given over the years have varied enormously. To the military, we bomb to win. To some, we bomb to stiffen morale in Saigon, or to save American lives. To others, the bombing is a "blue chip for bargaining." In 1965, when the bombing debate was fierce, someone called some of this latter group the "doves for bombing." If you think that theory received a proper burial, listen to Dr. Kissinger. May 9, 1972, defending the "very difficult decision" to bomb and mine: "We want to be in a position that if our assessment is incorrect, and things should turn out not as well as we hope (in the ground war in the South), that we have some bar-
gaining position left on behalf of the Ameri-
cans who will then be threatened, and of
the Americans who are now prisoners."

* In 1946 Jean Sainteny, the great Frenchman who tried to prevent war between North Vietnam and France, saw his efforts breaking down. Ho Chi Minh, who respected and liked Sainteny, is reported to have said to him: "If we go to war, you will kill ten Vietnamese for every Frenchman who dies. But we will pay that price, and you will not be able to."

Ho is dead, but his words are still true. When we replaced the French, we inherited the most determined and toughest enemy we have ever faced. This is not intended to turn the North Vietnamese into heroes, simply an attempt to recognize their refusal to quit—and our inability to make them quit. Like the fisherman in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the North Vietnamese can be destroyed but not defeated. Except that to destroy them would mean using unthinkable weapons against unthinkable targets.

* And finally, the President has put every-
thing including "respect for the Office of the
Presidency" into his terrible gamble. (It
seems odd to stake the American Presidency
on the fighting ability of the South Vietnam-

ese Army).

If he succeeds in the gamble—then we
may be able to breathe more easily and
think about other things. But the most omi-
nous parallel is not in the past, but rather
the future. What if two weeks from today
the North Vietnamese offensive is still mov-
ing steadily forward, and the South Viet-
namese are still falling back? What will his
next speech say? Perhaps something to the
effect that "... I made them a reasonable
offer on May 8, and ordered certain military
steps to protect our remaining forces ...
They have arrogantly replied by ... In
these circumstances, any President who
failed to act decisively would have betrayed
the trust of his country and the cause of
peace. I will not take the easy path peo-
cially ... I have therefore ordered, in full
coordination with the Republic of Vietnam,
the following measures, which are being im-
plemented as I am speaking to you ...

But, whatever those "measures" are, they
will not work. They will not stop Ho Chi
Minh's aggression. They will not end the war. As Ho
Chi Minh tried to tell the French 25 years
ago, his forces will outlast everyone else in
Indochina—by at least one day.

Confidence in Non Policy
Shows a Recent Decline

in Michigan Survey
By JACK ROSENTHAL

Confidence in President Nixon's handling of Vietnam has sagged notably in recent weeks among those who voted in Michigan's Democratic primary this week, according to a New York Times survey.

Nearly half of all voters surveyed said that they had had little confidence in the Administration's conduct of the war in the first place. Another quarter said that their confidence level had dropped in the wake of such recent events as the mining of North Vietnamese harbors.

Taken together, these finding mean that among all voters surveyed, the Administration's war policies retain the unqualified support of only one voter in the state. Among women the figure is one in five. Among first-time voters aged 18 to 24 it is 1 in 20.

At the same time, the survey showed that the Michigan voters divided about evenly on the impact of the recent developments in Vietnam. About a third think they will hasten the end of the war.

Nearly a third think they will hurt the chances for peace. The rest do not see much difference.

411 Voters Interviewed

The survey was conducted by The Times and Daniel Yankelovich, Inc. of New York, a leading market and social research concern. A cross sector sample of 411 voters was interviewed after leaving 41 precincts in 10 counties.

Of the total 30 were independents and Republicans—free to cross over and vote on the Democratic ballot.

These Republicans gave Mr. Nixon a strong vote of confidence. Nearly 60 per cent expressed unqualified support for his war policies.

But among no other group of voters—where arrayed by candidate, income, age, race, sex or economic level—did the level of support exceed 31 per cent.

This was the figure for supporters of Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, who, in past surveys elsewhere, have given the Administration strong support on Vietnam.

McGovern Voters Most Opposed

Predicatively, the strongest discontent was evident among supporters of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, long an opposition war critic. At least 8 in 10 of his Michigan voters expressed lagging or even negative confidence.

The survey suggested that the Wallace voters are discontented because they are "hawks"—strongly anti-tougher military

action. About 40 per cent said that they thought recent events, such as the mining and the intensification of bombing, had improved the chances for peace. By contrast, only about 20 per cent of the McGovern voters thought so.

Ending the war in Vietnam was a dominant concern of almost every category of voters—whether Republican or Democratic, young or old, blue collar or white. In only two categories did it fall below No. 2 on a list of major issues.

One category was Wallace voters. A majority cited the war, but they ranked crime busing and welfare as more important.

The other category was persons who voted for Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. Fewer than half cited the war. More expressed concern over crime and busing.

Women Concerned Over Peace

While peace is a dominant issue regardless of sex, the survey indicated that women were substantially more concerned about it than men were. Among women 69 per cent cited the war as a major issue. Among men 57 per cent did so.

The strong concern of the Michigan voters for issues appeared to work against Senator Humphrey. As in past surveys, nearly two-thirds of his supporters cited the former Vice President's long experience as their main reason for voting for him. At the same time, fully two-thirds could not identify him with a particular issue.

Mr. Humphrey continued to be the favorite of older adults and blacks, as he has been everywhere else he has run. But in both categories, his proportion of the vote—though a majority—appeared to be notably less than in the past.

His support the survey suggested, dropped during the late stages of the campaign. When all those interviewed were asked whether their opinion of him had improved or declined in the last two or three weeks, the net result was a drop of 6 per cent.

By contrast, the net result for Governor Wallace — the easy winner in Michigan—was a 20 per cent gain. Senator McGovern gained 13 per cent.

Had Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts been a candidate, the survey indicated, he and Governor Wallace would have battled to a photo finish, barely half a percentage point apart. Many blacks would have voted for the Massachusetts Democrat rather than Senator Humphrey.

THE TIMES
26 MAY 1972 P.2
TIMES STUDY FINDS
DOUBT ABOUT WAR

173

CYJ

What Did They Expect?

To a man the American right supported the escalation of the Vietnam War by the United States, and only now are some of its members beginning to express doubt. What happened? They ask. Was it a failure of our intelligence services? Did our own people misinform us? Although he may not welcome it, one must feel some compassion for William Buckley, who ascribes the debacle to a monumental failure of intelligence and is trying to decide whom to blame. He is going about his task clinically, he explains, "without prejudice to any future right to give way to anger."

He suggests that maybe we should fire a few generals or even chastise the Commander in Chief in some unspecified way. Nobody seems terrified and—just a friendly suggestion—a commentator in his position should scrutinize himself before he looks for other outlets for his wrath. He really shouldn't be all that surprised.

The causes of failure are not difficult to discern. An American officer in Vietnam remarked that troops are everywhere much the same. If the officers are contemptible (in a military sense; they may be good to their wives and children) the men are not going to fight to the bitter end. The generals whom Thieu blamed for the defeats in the northern military region are probably typical of the officer corps as a whole. Many of the generals, colonels and other grades fought on the side of the French against their own countrymen, and they are behaving now as they behaved then. An American observer told Craig R. Whitney of The New York Times, "These generals are a class apart from the ordinary people of Vietnam. They send their children to French schools, often to Paris, and they are in a sense alienated from their own people."

That is putting it mildly, and the company-grade officers are not likely to be any better than the generals. A CBS television shot shows an ARVN lieutenant screaming at a member of his platoon for not tucking in his shirt or some such misdemeanor, kicking the man in the buttocks and slapping his face—all on camera. The man has to take it; the lieutenant has a revolver in his hand. But if, in battle, that soldier and his comrades don't shoot the lieutenant in the back, they are showing more forbearance than some privates showed in the more respectable armies of the two World Wars.

Other TV shots border on the incredible—but this isn't fiction. A British TV camera crew picked up scenes of wounded South Vietnamese troops left to die on a macadam highway, the hot tar sticking to their wounds. Lories whiz by them carrying officers to the rear. The well-mannered British narrator expressed his sense of shock at an army that would so callously abandon its wounded.

The weakness of the ARVN stems from the fact that for years the Americans bore the brunt of the fighting and took a large share of the losses. The ARVN was a kind of freshman team preparing to become the varsity; at least such was the American view. But, for reasons that, however obvious, neither the American trainers nor the American Right could understand, this freshman team never wanted to rise to varsity status. This, after all, was not football but something exceedingly lethal, even with American air power in support.

The North Vietnamese, in contrast, are for the most part dedicated, disciplined soldiers. No disaffected army could fight as theirs does. That, among other facts, gives the lie to Mr. Nixon's contention that the Thieu dictatorship is fighting on behalf of 17 million South Vietnamese. Most of the 17 million, including those in the ARVN and auxiliary forces, want nothing but peace.

Still larger issues, with broader reference, were pointed out years ago by W. Macmahon Ball, the former Australian ambassador who was at the time a contributing editor of The Nation. He was the author of a book about nationalism and communism in Southeast Asia. Nationalism, Ball wrote, was a potential counterweight against communism. But in Vietnam we did not back the nationalists, we backed the puppets. Quite unwittingly, we engineered the fusion of nationalism and communism. Our leaders were, and still are, ignorant, self-confident men who have led us into disaster. The American Right, which allied itself eagerly with the rightist factions in the countries of Indochina, was prominent in that leadership. When they are puzzled now is a puzzle it itself.

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

The most address 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 imbedded 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 fals: 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

person that in the end things get out of hand. It is more important that the people be made to see a false definition of power. But that is a false definition. Ronald Sampson reminds us that the British Empire had with the plantation in Ulster 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 godless 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.

BALTIMORE NEWS AMERICAN 18 May 1972 P2 (19)

Military Planners Expect
Critical War Decision

177

By PATRICK J. SLOYAN

News American
Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Military planners in Congress and at the Pentagon are braced for what, they believe will be a "critical" battlefield decision in South Vietnam in the next few weeks.

"This is the critical period," said Chairman John C. Stennis, D-Miss., of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "There's no question about it. The outcome of the fighting in the next few weeks will determine it."

Earlier this week, Deputy Defense Secretary Kenneth Rush had the same view. "The next few weeks clearly are critical," said Rush in a speech in Atlanta.

SENIOR members of the House Armed Services Committee also saw the crucial point of the war coming as the South Vietnamese prepared for a down battle with Hanoi's forces at the old South Vietnamese capital at Hue.

While Pentagon officials are uncertain, many expect the next major clash to occur at Kontum in the Central Highlands. U.S. planners believe North Vietnamese forces have hidden a number of tanks in the jungles surrounding Kontum.

These Defense Department officials believe the highland terrain will favor a Communist attack when it comes. The jungle covering will permit attackers to get close to Kontum before launching the battle.

PENTAGON officials discount the idea that the North Vietnamese are planning to renew their offensive when President Nixon arrives in Moscow next week.

"They're doing everything they can now to get ready," one Pentagon official said. "It would have been this week if they had an everything together."

Saigon, now, it is claimed, has more of an effort to protect Hue where the open country would appear to render the defenders. Pentagon officials said. South Vietnamese marines, tersers, airborne and First Infantry Division troops — the South Vietnamese forces — have been building a defensive ring around Hue.

STENNIS HAS been expecting the worst since South Vietnamese troops led their defensive positions in northern South Vietnam shortly after the Eastern offensive began.

"Things are looking better now," Stennis said. He noted small-scale counter-offensive operations launched by Saigon troops in recent days.

Some U.S. officials believe faltering morale among the South Vietnamese is even more of a threat to the Saigon government than the Hanoi attackers. Counterattacks by Saigon forces were staged to bolster morale.

However, U.S. air strikes in conjunction with the Saigon counterattacks were believed to have taken a heavy toll of North Vietnamese soldiers.

WASHINGTON STAR 19 MAY 1972 Pg 3
CHANGE OF APPROACH?

End-the-War Debate
Bogs Down in Senate

Associated Press

With Republicans saying even to discuss such an issue now would hamper President Nixon's upcoming Moscow summit and encourage the North Vietnamese, the Senate has lapsed into a slowdown on an end-the-war amendment.

Senate doves, convinced their amendment to cut off appropriations for U.S. combat involvement in Indochina has been diluted beyond hope, would like to try something else. They are eyeing a new amendment to Sen. Mike Mansfield call for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam by Aug. 31 and cutoff of funds at that time.

Meanwhile, the original amendment of Sens. Clifford Case, R-N.J., and Frank Church, D-Idaho, sits before the Senate. Not a word has been said about it in two days.

Amendment Reworded

A vote of 47-43 Tuesday put the President's wording on a cease-fire into the Church-Case amendment, so weakening it, Church said, that he would vote against it. Nixon called for a cease-fire as a condition for U.S. withdrawal.

On the House side, Rep. Thomas Morgan, D-Pa., chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has switched sides on the war—a change that could affect the shape of anti-war legislation now forming in the House.

Morgan said yesterday he would not support the cease-fire provision, United Press International reported. Administration supporters on Morgan's committee are trying to

include the cease-fire in end-the-war legislation likely to emerge from the panel next week.

Clifford's Argument

"If the Communists were going to buy a cease-fire, they would have accepted it the Monday night the President proposed it," Morgan said after hearing former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford argue that Hanoi consistently has rejected a cease-fire and will not agree to one.

Republicans on the committee attacked Clifford for the difference between his present stance on Vietnam and the one he held when he was part of the Johnson administration. Although early in the hearing he admitted, "I made a mistake," the GOP congressmen continued to needle him.

Clifford said he believes "peace forces" in North and South Vietnam will end the war as soon as the United States withdraws.

The only choice that can truly end the war, he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is withdrawal of all U.S. military forces on a date certain in return for American prisoners and guaranteed safe withdrawal of the U.S. forces.

At the State Department, spokesman Charles W. Bray said Clifford "clearly has not done his homework." Bray said that last week in Paris, North Vietnam's top negotiator at the peace talks had reconfirmed North Vietnam's requirement that there be a political settlement as well as a purely military settlement of the war.

Panel Invited to View
Nixon Mail on Vietnam

By Frank Cormier

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a $1.7 billion authorization for foreign military aid yesterday, after slashing $350 million from President Nixon's request and adding an Aug. 31 end-the-war amendment sponsored by Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.).

More often than not, the White House keeps silent about incoming letters and telegrams concerning current issues. But it seems easier to draw a bit about public reaction to Nixon's May 8 speech in which he announced the mining of North Vietnamese ports.

Kenneth W. Clawson, the administration's deputy director of communications, volunteered that Mr. Nixon's chief lobbyist, Clark MacGregor, began writing all senators Thursday to offer a program breakdown of the response the White House has received from their constituents.

The first 20 senators to whom MacGregor sent letters included the two widely regarded as principal contenders for the Democratic presidency.

The nomination George Meade of South Dakota and Richard B. Humphrey of Minnesota were among the nominees.

Clawson said a White House administration count showed a 200-250 breakdown in support of Mr. Nixon from Minnesota and a 115-to-6 count from South Dakota.

Both McGovern and Humphrey have been critical of Mr. Nixon's latest moves.

Clawson said MacGregor invited the senators to inspect the letters and telegrams Mr. Nixon has received from voters in their states. MacGregor's letter to the senators, as quoted by Clawson in response to an inquiry, included to such invitation. Asked about this, Clawson replied, "If they ask to inspect the mail, they will be permitted to."

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which has been much interested in the response of the American people to the President's May 8 statement announcing the steps he is taking to bring hostilities to an end in Vietnam. Knowing your own constituent mail has been very heavy on this subject, I thought you would be interested as well in correspondence to the President from people of your state."

Clawson said MacGregor wrote the senators.

"There has been much interest in the response of the American people to the President's May 8 statement announcing the steps he is taking to bring hostilities to an end in Vietnam. Knowing your own constituent mail has been very heavy on this subject, I thought you would be interested as well in correspondence to the President from people of your state."

WASHINGTON POST

24 MAY 1972 P-1

Panel Votes
$1.7 Billion
In Arms Aid

By Spencer Rich

Washington Post Staff Writer

The bill also contains provisions carking $300 million in military sales credits for Israel, limiting aid to Cambodia of all types to $275 million, curbing U.S. payments for Thai forces fighting in Laos, and seeking to force all agreements on military bases and on stationing of atomic weapons in other countries to be submitted to the Senate for ratification.

Although Mansfield declined to discuss his intentions yesterday, it is considered a strong possibility that addition of his amendment to the aid bill could shift the fight over end-the-war proposals from the State Department authorization bill—now on the Senate floor—to the aid bill.

The State Department has been stalled for weeks in a dispute over end-the-war language. If Mansfield and other sponsors now agree to strip their proposals from the State Department bill and wait until the aid bill reaches the floor to fight the issue out, the State Department measure

could pass relatively quickly.

That, in turn, would open the way for an early start of debate on the nomination of Richard G. Kleindienst to be attorney general. Mansfield said again yesterday morning that the nomination will come to the floor as soon as the State Department measure is completed. As majority leader, he has primary control over the scheduling of Senate floor action.

Yesterday, Mansfield refused to discuss his plans, judicial hinting at one point that he might decide to leave the amendment in both the State Department and aid bills. As approved by a voice vote of the committee yesterday, the amendment requires withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam by Aug. 31, 1972, without preconditions.

It further provides that all funds for U.S. combat operations in and over all of Indonesia would be cut off as soon as North Vietnam releases U.S. prisoners and agrees to a cease-fire with the United States. The administration opposes the amendment.

The Nixon administration had sought $2.293 billion for Fiscal 1972 foreign military aid and a few related items in the authorization bill, including $100 million for Bangladesh relief and $45.5 million for international mercantile control activities. The mercantile authorization was approved but with the proviso that it be shifted to the State Department measure. Bangladesh aid was cut to $50 million because, Chairman J. W. Fulbright (D-Ark.) said, some $71 million is still left over from funds approved earlier this year.

The committee cut the grant military assistance request from $760 million to $600 million and the supporting assist-

ance request from $844 million to $650 million, with $50 million of that figure earmarked for Israel.

Funds for foreign military credit sales were cut from the $522 million request to $400 million, with a credit ceiling of $550 million of which $300 million was earmarked for Israel.

The $275 million outlay for Cambodia—compared with a $348 million administration request—was an attempt to curb unauthorized expansion of the war there.

The treaty provisions on bases and atomic weapons were sponsored by Sen. Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.), who, with committee support, has been fighting a running battle with the Nixon administration over submitting major international agreements to the Senate for ratification instead of being handled as executive agreements not requiring ratification.

One case provision applies to future agreements. But another—in effect nullifying recent base agreements on the Azores and Bahrain unless they are submitted for ratification—was also adopted by the committee.

Other committee provisions would bar transfer of foreign aid funds to other agencies and thus apparently cut off use of aid funds by the CIA; prohibit military grant aid to

India, Pakistan, Ceylon and other South Asian nations, and provide $125,000 for an in-depth study of multinational corporations by the committee.

Fulbright said the total of funding considered in the bill represents only about half the actual request for military aid to overseas nations, since some $2.5 billion a year in additional military funds for South Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations is carried separately in the military procurement bill.

LIFE MAGAZINE 19 MAY 1972 (21)

## The Vietnam tragedy

The Vietnam War was one of the most dramatic events in this century when the United States was in worse peril—times when its own territory was bombed, times when casualties ran conspicuously higher, times clear war was at risk. But has there been a war in which we could take so little pride in the way we fight it, or in the way it continues to unfold in Vietnam, or have so little confidence in its success?

Precisely because our survival was never invented in Vietnam, this is an appropriate time to ask where does democracy fit in the waging of an undeclared war. Is its proper role only to go along with what a President decides, assenting to actions already in progress before we are told of them? To accept as binding on all of us his definitions of what interests of ours are at stake, and where our honor lies? To receive without debate his extensions of the field of battle and otherwise to sit loyally mute? Something is now terribly askew in the conduct of our foreign affairs. This has been a closely held presidential war too long, and becomes more and more so. The result is to overburden and isolate a President, make Congress only a money-supplying auxiliary, and to frustrate a public which is told its only choice and necessary duty is to support the President. But the most serious objection is that such a state of affairs can produce bad decisions.

## Our underestimated President

Sympathize with the President's predicament: didn't get us into this war (even though esoteric assumptions weren't basically different from those who did). He badly wants out of it: the war gets in the way of a grander vision he has of developing fruitful relationships with the two great Communist powers, which he and Henry Kissinger have pursued with imagination and skill. He made ending our involvement in Vietnam the key to his first term, and said three weeks before the 1968 election, "I want to make one thing clear: those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance."

Richard Nixon has been a much underestimated man: they were wrong who thought him merely a pliant politician who bent to every popular wind; he sees himself as submitting to one crisis testing after another, and his courage deserves to be acknowledged, even while we challenge his judgment and deplore his actions.

## Who's being tested?

Twelve days separated the President's first and second TV addresses to the nation on Vietnam. In the first, the President expressed his faith in South Vietnam's ability to survive—and got General Abrams to go bail for it. Therefore, he said, Hanoi's "one remaining hope is to win in Congress of the United States and among the United States the victory they cannot win". Among the people of South Vietnam or the battlefielded South Vietnam." In that first

speech it was the American people who in this final challenge were being tested. On how we behaved peace in the Middle East, in Europe and elsewhere would turn

In those 12 days the American response was relatively mild—a few campus outbreaks, which didn't even command the support of campus majorities. Most everybody else numbly watched the dejecting evening war spectacle on television, hoped Henry Kissinger's trip to Russia might have some dramatic effect on the peace talks, and hoped too that the South Vietnamese would hold, with the powerful help of our air armadas.

For of course it was the South Vietnamese who were really being tested along with the President's policy of Vietnamization), and it was this testing—and the prospects of worse to come—that produced the President's second and infinitely more alarming speech. The two Vietnamese sides now gather for a crucial battle, which apparently must be played out before the real equations of a negotiation, if there is even to be one, can be recognized. The North Vietnamese seem ready to spend heavily of their own forces, and are not apt to be tender if the other side gives way; the South Vietnamese are more numerous and better equipped, but what will decide is the generalship and will of the two sides. It has come to that at last, and as Dean Acheson used to say, you can supply another nation with everything except will.

## Back to Goldwater

The President is a bold gambler: something else we have come to know about him. Usually careful and calculating, but capable too of miscalculation.

So now we have the 1964 Goldwater solution: interdicting the harbors of the North, heretofore regarded, by Nixon as by Lyndon Johnson, as dangerous for the hostile response it could invite from Peking and Moscow. Rather than wait the outcome of battle, the President has chosen to involve Russia in an unnecessary confrontation, thus dangerously heightening the risks we are taking. Now he must rely on Russian prudence, if Russia is not to respond in kind to his warlike threat to its vessels. And overhead, unprecedented flights of bombers drop death and destruction on the North. The past history of such bombing is that havoc results, but often a strengthening of resistance as well. Where will Nixon stop? He was asked, at that gathering of Texas millionaires at John Connally's ranch, how about hitting the dams and dikes of North Vietnam. "While it is a strategic target, and indirectly a military target." Nixon answered, "it would result in an enormous number of civilian casualties. That is something that we want to avoid." But should the North continue its offensive, "they are taking a very great risk.... I will just leave it there, and they can make their own choice."

So we have not yet come to bombing of the dikes. Yet heavy saturation bombing of the North, which does not protect our 60,000 troops

in the South, and which we must attack, must be met with a firm and persistent A good many of us feel that this policy shameful. But they weren't asked

## Lowering the terms

Under the cover of his new military actions and surrounded by a great deal of inflammatory rhetoric about naked aggression, arrogant behavior and international outlawry by the other side, the President lowered his terms for getting out. Give us our prisoners back, he said, and permit an internationally supervised cease-fire, and we will "stop all acts of force throughout Indochina" and withdraw all American forces from Vietnam within four months. The Vietnamese could then make their own political settlements.

These are generous terms, he said. They are. And they are probably pretty close to what any final settlement will bring. They make no mention of Hanoi calling off its invasion and pulling back first; make no insistence that we can guarantee the independence of South Vietnam after we leave. All the more regrettable that the President does not match this compromising attitude with words in the same spirit, but instead reiterates that if there's a Communist take-over after we leave, "the office of President of the United States will lose respect and I am not going to let that happen." He has spoken before of the "nightmare of recriminations" he fears in the United States if our exit from Vietnam goes sour. The people who might feel this way come largely from the constituency he speaks for. He has never really used his prestige with this constituency to accustom it to our scaled-down terms for leaving. He escalates the language of hostility even as he moderates his terms for peace.

## Let's not close ranks

Too much now turns on whether Richard Nixon thinks the Russians, or Hanoi, by their actions have treated the office of the President with insolence and arrogance. We hear often of heavy presidential burdens; we would all be better off if some of them were shared with Congress and the people. For the balance of decision is now out of kilter. Too much turns on one man's introspective responses—a man who seems incapable of seeking wide counsel even inside his own administration. Men prominent in that administration have serious misgivings about his new policy, doubts that are both moral and pragmatic. Perhaps they find it hard to resign. But there are concerned and patriotic members of his own party in Congress who think the President is embarked on a policy that is dangerously wrong, wrong in a pattern that has become tragically familiar over seven years of war. Their fears are shared by Democrats, not necessarily presidential candidates, in the House and Senate. We think they should resist the seductive call to inactivity which holds that everyone must rally around a President even when he is wrong. It is time for a loyal opposition to form, to be heard, and to be counted,

## Terror Bombing

The bombing of North Vietnam's harbors and the undeniable drama of seeing whether that act would affect the summit have distracted attention from the central element in current American policy towards Hanoi—the unprecedented level of our bombing. In respect to North Vietnam, mining merely involves the denial of arms, food and all other military and civilian products that come, from whatever country, by sea. The renewed heavy bombing of the North, on the other hand, involves nothing more and nothing less than a calculated effort to pulverize large parts of a country with which the United States is not formally at war: to spread terror among its people, by pounding it with ever increasing severity, and so to force its government to accept the political terms Mr. Nixon offered on May 8.

The administration likes to point out that the mines just lie there and don't hurt anyone unless the enemy tries to run a ship through. No such justification can be made for the bombs. The B-52s, dropping their 30-ton loads from 30,000 feet, haven't been used in the North since April 24. But other aircraft are conducting 200-300 strikes a day. Earlier plans to hit only "military" targets have yielded to a Pentagon policy of striking "any targets that we deem contribute or support (North Vietnam's) effort to wage war in the South" (italics added). Just what is excluded by that formulation is unclear. Maybe toy shops and flower stalls. But foreign eyewitnesses have reported the destruction of, for instance, hospitals.

The targeting and the publicized targeting guide lines amount, in essence, to a calculated tactic of terror, and so does the American military's new policy of announcing raids against the North on a daily basis and of announcing that still more B-52s are being sent to Southeast Asia—almost 140 are already there.

General Haig of the White House staff told selected reporters the other day that the bombing was already adversely affecting North Vietnam's morale and fighting capacity and unraveling the social fabric as well; to buttress the argument, he said there had been a great new burst of inflation and a rise in, of all things, prostitution in Hanoi. Subsequently it turned out that many of these reports on conditions in the North came, or so it was said, from captured North Vietnamese soldiers

who had left Hanoi well before the latest bombing began. How siezy. We had hoped the time had passed for fraudulent progress reports — if an increase in prostitution can be called "progress."

This is not at all to say the bombing has been without serious consequence. Its intensity, the new willingness in targeting, the use of new, more accurate "smart" bombs, Hanoi's difficulty in quickly finding rail and road alternatives to the blocked ports while the rails and roads are being bombed, and Hanoi's use of heavy equipment requiring greater supplies—no doubt all these factors have helped make the new Nixon bombing more effective than the old Johnson bombing, at least by the yardstick of gross destruction.

The record is quite plain, however, that the North Vietnamese have never drawn the same conclusions from their suffering and loss that Americans expect them to draw. Understandably, Americans find it hard to accept that it makes little difference whether they believe the negotiating terms Mr. Nixon offered Hanoi on May 8 deserve acceptance. What counts is whether Hanoi so believes. The President cannot negotiate the end of the war with either his supporters or his critics at home. He can achieve that only with Hanoi.

And North Vietnam, after all, is not wholly without its own options. It could slow down its military pace in the South while awaiting further supplies from its allies. It could step up its military pace in parts of the South, like the Delta, which have been vacated by South Vietnamese units moved into other regions; something like this may be happening now. It could play the prisoner card, offering to return, say, five or ten prisoners a week as long as the bombing did not continue. It could announce that the prisoners had been dispersed to factories, bridges and other likely bombing targets. This grim list covers only the obvious.

In short, President Nixon is conducting a ruthless policy of terror bombing against North Vietnam. Since there is little hope of stopping it, one wishes it would work quickly so that it could end, however ugly an ending it would be. And what will he do if it does not work? No summit glow, however intense, should blind Americans to that possibility.

Bombing for 181st
Peace

NEW YORK, MAY 20, 1972

Until last week no President would buy the advice generals and war-mongers and a few politicians like Barry Goldwater had been pushing since the earliest days of the war—to mine North Vietnamese ports. The danger of blowing up a Russian ship and presenting the Soviets with a direct military challenge seemed to outweigh whatever temporary local advantage might be won by a blockade. But President Nixon now sees things differently—as Henry Kissinger said on May 9, "the risks were not unacceptable" to him—and he ordered the Navy to drop mines in all the major seaports of North Vietnam while he sent bombers deeper into the enemy countryside. Mr. Nixon took this initiative, he said, to "keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam" and to avoid "turning 17 million South Vietnamese over to Communist tyranny and terror." He said he would keep the ports mined until the enemy agrees to a cease-fire and a trade of POWs. The word "Vietnamization" didn't come up in the President's address.

Although Nixon's gamble was provoked by the current invasion of South Vietnam by the North, his own spokesmen admitted that mining the harbors wasn't likely to have much immediate impact on the fighting. Defense Secretary Laird speculated in his May 10 press conference that the enemy has stored enough supplies to keep fighting in the South for another two or three months, and Henry Kissinger admits that too. "We do not believe," he said, "that anything that was done will affect the battle that may now be taking place in the next three weeks. It could affect the next round...."

The administration apparently believes that once North Vietnam takes up to its new supply problems, it will be realistic and withdraw from battle, or at least of necessity cut back the level of attack. As Allen Whiting and Hans Morgenthau make evident elsewhere in this issue it may be harder but it will not be impossible for the North to maintain its supplies.

In the same briefing on May 9, Kissinger stressed what he called the "modification of our peace proposal," suggesting that mining the North Vietnamese ports is not politically as important as the President's offer to withdraw all US forces from Indochina within four months of an agreed cease-fire. The President hopes with his stick-and-carrot strategy to press the Communists with the naval blockade while enticing them toward negotiation with the promise of complete US withdrawal from Vietnam.

Many strategies have been tried on the North Vietnamese in this war, and none has worked. Least effective have been military gadgets; now in desperation the President is resorting to them more boldly than ever to try to bring the war to an end on his own terms. During this administration alone, the US has dropped more than three million tons of bombs on Indochina—more than we dropped in World War II and the Korean War combined. The largest naval armada assembled since World War II (about 60 ships, including five carriers) is currently pounding Vietnam from the sea. Nearly 1000 American warplanes are based in Indochina, and more are on the way. The consequences of this for the Vietnamese, and for Americans, are terrifying.

Reverting to Mr. Nixon's overtures to Peking and to the中国人民 negotiations with Moscow, we are told last week that reason instructs a man who's trying in a dead-end to look for a way out, and that the Cold War in Europe and in Asia is a dead-end. We don't take that back, but we're now forced to consider the possibility that the President of the United States, as he faces Indochina, is not guided by reason but by passion. Proud, angry, determined not to be taunted for weakness or miscalculation, he is substituting a policy of vengeance for a policy of victory.

Prudence would caution the administration to prepare for the possibility of military failure rather than raising it out as the ultimate catastrophe. The collapse of the Thieu army would surely be less of a catastrophe than keeping the war going indefinitely by ever more desperate military gambles. It must have occurred to men like Henry Kissinger that a characteristic of limited war is that one is prepared to lose it, what does "limited" mean if not that? But we have no sign of any such recognition; the administration will not admit the possibility, and by not admitting it, leaves itself and the American public unready to respond intelligently to what may lie ahead. This was shown when Secretary Laird appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 18. He was asked what the administration had, if any, in the event of Vietnamization does not work, and that US naval and air power, plus the South Vietnamese army, are not sufficient to achieve the purposes for which we have been fighting. Laird could not entertain the question. The government has no plan for failure, he said.

It takes more courage to make the best of a bad situation than to make it worse. The American people, weary of this war (though the Vietnamese are wearier), dubious of its necessity, can face facts, however bitter, if they are given them. But if they are misled by false expectations and misrepresentations of what is, at stake, who can blame them if they indulge in precisely those recriminations and irrational demands for a scapegoat that every sensible man wants to avoid?

By Paul W. Valentine and Abbott Comb

C.YJ

In another direct drive to pressure Congress to cut off funds for the Indochina war, a group of women led by singer Jean Baez and civil rights activist Coretta Scott King have called for a mass encirclement of the Capitol by mothers and their children on June 22.

In a separate announcement, the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC), urging that protesters keep antiwar sentiment visible at President Nixon's doorstep, called for picketing of the White House Friday that may involve several hundred persons.

Miss Baez said yesterday that appeals to women's and other groups are being made now to bring several thousand persons here for the Capitol demonstration.

She told a press conference that actress Candice Bergen and Jane Fonda andfolksinger Judy Collins may join the protest.

LaDonna Harris, wife of Sen. Fred Harris (D-Okla.) told a reporter she is also attempting to organize a congressional wives' contingent which may include the wives of Sens. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.), Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Philip A. Hart (D-Mich.) and others.

After encircling the Capitol, Miss Baez said, the protesters would break up into groups, visit individual members of Congress and ask them to sign statements supporting an immediate cutoff of funds for the war.

The protesters would then reassemble either in the Capitol Rotunda or on the steps of the building and conduct a public "roll call" to determine which House and Senate members signed the statements, she said.

Miss Baez did not rule out the possibility of some form of civil disobedience, such as a portion of the group refusing to leave the Capitol after closing hours, but she said such actions would be up to each individual.

In the last two weeks, two other antiwar groups have conducted similar actions, with 123 persons arrested in the Rotunda May 16, and another 94, many of them prominent scholars and professionals, arrested in a House hallway May 24.

Friday's White House picketing is timed to coincide with the first anniversary of a continuous 24-hour-a-day vigil that has been conducted by a small group of protesters on the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk in front of the executive man-

son.

Organizers estimate up to 750 persons may participate either in the sidewalk demonstration or in adjacent Lafayette Park. The Justice Department has not yet sought a court injunction, as it has frequently in the past, to limit the number of protesters near the White House to 100 on the sidewalk and 500 in the park.

Fred Branfman, director of Project Air War, a military research organization critical of American involvement in Indochina, told a NPAC press conference that U.S. mining of North Vietnamese harbors and intensified bombing of rail and road connections to China appear to be militarily ineffective and that President Nixon knows it.

He said the mining and route bombing are a smoke-screen to hide Mr. Nixon's real purpose—"an all-out effort to literally destroy North Vietnam."

Indiscriminate saturation raids by B-52 bombers are no longer restricted to military targets and are causing "enormous civilian casualties" and devastation to plant and animal life throughout the Vietnamese countryside, Branfman said.

"The automated air war has made Vietnam less visible to us now," he said. "We don't see it on TV every night. But the situation is worse there now than it ever was before."

WASHINGTON POST 1 June 1976 P.02

War Foes to Ring
Capitol on June 22

THURSDAY MORNING - 1 JUNE 1972

BALTIMORE SUN 1 JUNE 1972 P4

# Senate suspends debate on U.S. Vietnam pullout

Washington Bureau of The Sun

Washington—The Senate temporarily suspended its debate with President Nixon over ending the Vietnam war yesterday when it passed a routine authorization bill without proposed amendments calling for a halt in American military activity in Southeast Asia.

Senator Mike Mansfield (D., Mont.), majority leader and author of one of the proposed amendments demanding the unconditional withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam by August 31, said he did not press his proposal at this time because he did not want to interfere with the success of the President's Moscow summit talks.

## Several amendments

However, an identical Mansfield amendment, which also calls for ending all American military involvement in Indonesia after an agreement on a verified cease-fire and the release of all prisoners of war, is attached to another bill expected to come to the Senate floor in a few weeks.

The bill passed yesterday by the Senate after a month's debate was a $1 billion authorization measure for the State Department and associated agencies. The upcoming measure is a $1.7 billion military-foreign aid bill.

Before yesterday's final action on the State Department legislation, the Senate adopted a modified amendment, originally proposed by Senator Frank Church (D., Idaho) and Senator Clifford P. Case (R., N.J.), that would have called for the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam four months after the release of the prisoners.

The Case-Church proposal had been altered by another amendment from Senator Robert C. Byrd (D., W. Va.): the majority whip, stating that an internationally supervised cease-fire should be a part of any withdrawal plan.

## Unacceptable proviso

However, that added proviso was unacceptable to Senator Church and Senator Case. Their Byrd-modified amendment was first accepted on a voice vote

and then cut out of the bill entirely when another amendment sponsored by Senator John C. Stennis (D., Miss.) was approved by a voice vote.

The Stennis amendment simply deleted the entire section of the bill dealing with deadlines or conditions for the withdrawal of American forces from Indonesia.

Another amendment to the bill, passed by a roll-call vote, would have kept the United States ignore United Nations-imposed economic sanctions against the Ian Smith government of Rhodesia, thus allowing the U.S. to continue importing chrome from the white-ruled African nation.

## 40 to 36

The roll call vote was 40 to 36 in favor of the amendment, which was proposed by Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (Ind., Va.) In general, Northern and Western liberals of both parties voted against the amendment while Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans voted for it.

Senator J. Glenn Beall, Jr. (R. Md.) was not recorded.

Senator Harry Byrd and other members of the Armed Services Committee wanted the import of chrome from Rhodesia to continue because it is a strategic material used in missiles, aircraft and submarines.

However, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) argued that State Department officials had told Congress earlier that the United States inventory of so-called metallurgical grade chromite as of May 31, 1971, was more than 5.3 million tons. The officials said that American stockpile had accumulated an excess of over 2.2 million tons.

The Senate first defied the U.N. embargo when it voted 46 to 36 last September to retain a provision in a military procurement bill that had the effect of permitting chrome imports from Rhodesia, a land of 5.3 million blacks and a quarter of a million whites. The house followed suit in November.

Economic sanctions against Rhodesia were imposed in 1968 by the United Nations Security Council, three years after the former British colony declared its independence and established a white minority government.

Two months ago, the U.N. urged strict measures by all governments to prevent the shipment of Rhodesian chrome exports in violation of the 1968 embargo.

CYJ

Harris Survey

WASHINGTON POST 12 JUNE 1972 P-16

19% Want U.S. Viet Pullout,
But 88% Expect Continued War

By Louis Harris

The American people are extremely doubtful that a resolution of the Vietnam conflict will occur anytime soon. The conviction that "the United States will still be involved in the Vietnam war by election time." is held by 88 per cent, while no more than 6 per cent see the American involvement as close to an end.

Despite the fact that 79 per cent want "to bring all U.S. ground, naval, and air forces home from Vietnam," a plurality, 45.38 per cent, would oppose a coalition government which included Communists as the price for peace. Asked if they would "favor or oppose an agreement to end the war by having a neutral but non-Communist take-over in South Vietnam," three out of four Americans answered in the affirmative.

Apart from the question of denying the North Vietnam-se a political role in Saigon, the public also overwhelmingly believes, 75-13 per cent, that "the U.S. should stay involved in the war until

American prisoners of war are released."

Basically, the American people would settle for a stand-still cease-fire to end the fighting, favored by 52.31 per cent, and the return of U.S. prisoners of war, favored by 93.2 per cent, as the terms for a complete withdrawal of all this country's forces from Vietnam. Clearly, however, a big majority do not expect the North Vietnamese to agree to these terms anytime soon.

Recently, a cross section of 1,385 voters were asked:

"By election time, do you think President Nixon will have ended all U.S. involvement with the war in Vietnam, or do you think we will still be involved there?"

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Total voters</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Will still be involved</td><td>88%</td></tr><tr><td>Will have ended</td><td>6%</td></tr><tr><td>Not sure</td><td>6%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Part of the reason the public is pessimistic about any early settlement of the war is the strong feeling that a prior condition must be the release of prisoners of war. The cross section was asked:

"Suppose you had to choose between the U.S. ending all of our involvement in Viet-

nam without assurances of the return of our men who are prisoners of war, or continuing our involvement in Vietnam until the prisoners are released?"

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Total Voters</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>End U.S. involvement</td><td>12%</td></tr><tr><td>Continue involvement</td><td>75%</td></tr><tr><td>Not sure</td><td>12%</td></tr></tbody></table>

The commitment in this country to the release of captured members of the U.S. armed forces is deep and likely will not be reversed. Opposition to a coalition government with the Communists in Saigon persists among a plurality, but is not as overwhelming. Yet, American public opinion has become more intractable on the coalition issue as peace negotiations have dragged on.

Periodically, the Harris Survey has asked cross sections:

"Suppose the only way we could get peace in Vietnam were to agree to a coalition government which included the Communists. Would you favor or oppose such a coalition in Saigon?"

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Favor</th><th>Oppose</th><th>Not Sure</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>May, 1972</td><td>38%</td><td>45%</td><td>17%</td></tr><tr><td>March</td><td>31</td><td>46</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>July, 1971</td><td>38</td><td>38</td><td>24</td></tr><tr><td>April</td><td>42</td><td>39</td><td>19</td></tr><tr><td>January</td><td>40</td><td>41</td><td>19</td></tr></tbody></table>

©1972. Chicago Tribune

THE TODAY SHOW NBC TV 7:00 AM

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 note that as hostages. I think they're full of massive aerial bombardments. They're holding on to the prisoners 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...

SIX LESSONS WE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED IN VIETNAM

CY3

By Leslie H. Gelb

He is the formerly director of the
pilot training and arms control staff in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense
This article is excerpted from his recent
 testimony before the Senate Foreign
 Relations Committee.

President Nixon has, for the most part,
justified continuation of this country's in-
volvement in the Vietnam war along two
lines: first that "the right way out of Viet-
nam is crucial to our changing role in the
world, and the peace in the world"; and
second, that the wrong way—losing the war
—would produce a "nightmare of recrimina-
tion" at home, undermining political sup-
port for U.S. interests abroad.

In evaluating the President's rationales,
it is helpful to consider them against the
lessons we should have learned from twenty-
five years of war in Vietnam.

Lesson one concerns the Saigon Govern-
ment and military forces. They always get
better, but they never get good enough.
The current North Vietnamese offensive,
whatever the immediate results, shows once
again that the Saigon forces cannot defend
themselves without massive American assist-
ance. Regardless of what can be said about
the improvement and bravery of the Saigon
forces, one simple fact obscures all the rest
— a North Vietnamese force of some 100,000
men is fighting and beating a 1 million
plus South Vietnamese army backed up by
about 800 tactical air sorties per day. Some-
thing is wrong somewhere. Something al-
ways has been wrong.

The lesson is that military power without
political cohesiveness and support is an
empty shell. Americans can have great sym-
pathy for the many non-communist South
Vietnamese who do not want to be ruled by
the communists. Yet, these "groups never
have been able to submerge their own dif-
ference into a single, unified purpose and
gather support from the peasant masses.
Most recently, the Thieu regime has gained
in stability but not in legitimacy. Without
this legitimacy, and the quest for it seems
never-ending, the Saigon regime perpetually
will require American support.

Lesson two concerns the Hanoi Govern-
ment. While annual hints and predictions
have it that the North Vietnamese are
about to expire, their will to fight seems
undiminished and they keep coming back.
It is not necessary to glorify Hanoi to face
this fact. The brutality of Hanoi's methods
of warfare have matched, if not exceeded.
Saigon's. And certainly, Hanoi has received
massive doses of aid from the Soviet Union
and China—although only a fraction of the
aid the United States has given to Saigon.
But something has gone right for them
somewhere.

The lesson is: I believe that time and
determination are on the side of the ele-
mental tide of nationalism, and that the
leadership in Hanoi always has symbolized
this basic political force. To be sure, the
Hanoi regime is a dictatorship, unlike the
Saigon regime mainly in its efficiency. But
efficient authoritarianism is not the prin-
cipal reason for Hanoi's success. In the past,
decentralized regimes have fallen under far
less pressure than has been absorbed by
Hanoi. The only satisfactory explanation is
that, at least for its own people and for a
substantial minority in South Vietnam,
Hanoi still stands for nationalism and
independence.

Three lessons back to the nature of
war itself. The war in Vietnam was and
is a war and a war for national inde-
pendence. The central question of who shall
win the war in Vietnam would have been settled
if those terms had not been

in this conflict was in danger of losing an
outside power would step into to redress
the balance. When France and the United States
increased their efforts. Russia and China
would follow suit.

The lesson I think is that the war never
will end as long as outside power keeps it
going. This goes for Russia and China as
well as the United States. But the United
States has a particular responsibility for
prolonging this war. There can be little
doubt who would have won in 1943 or 1954
or 1965 had the United States restricted its
role or stayed out. There is, I feel, little
doubt who would win today. This, in turn,
gives the United States an additional re-
sponsibility — standing ready to provide
asylum to all those South Vietnamese who
believe their lives would be endangered by
a North Vietnamese victory. But before this
point is reached, we must face the tragic
and brutal probability that more Viet-
namese will die by the continuation of the
present war than will die in a bloodletting
following its conclusion.

We can attribute great principles to our
involvement in Vietnam — stopping com-
munism, preventing falling dominoes, see-
ing that aggression does not succeed, pro-
tecting the fabric of U.S. foreign policy at
home and abroad. But these principles can
mean only continuing death to the Viet-
nese. In the end, the struggle will be
resolved, as it began, by the Vietnamese
themselves.

A fourth lesson, related to the others,
concerns bombing. In April 1954, President
Eisenhower, backed by all the military
chiefs except the Chairman, decided that
U.S. bombing could neither save Dien-
benphuor nor turn the tide of battle against
the Vietminh nor make the Vietminh cease
and desist. Over the years, our leaders have
lost sight of the basic soundness of this
decision. Bombing has not broken Hanoi's
will, and there is no sign that it could.
Bombing does impose certain limitations on
the movement of men and supplies, but not
to low enough levels to prevent Hanoi's
carrying out its strategy. Tactical bombing
is supposed to be quite effective against
conventional force operations and it can
be decisive in particular battles, but it has
not prevented Hanoi in the last months
from bringing down tanks, trucks, and
heavy artillery into the South, and it can-
not ultimately do the job of ground forces.

The lesson is that more bombing will
bring neither victory nor peace. More
bombing in North Vietnam would, in time,
bombing in South Vietnam is offensive in the
somewhat curtail Hanoi's offensive in the
South, but at the risk of once again setting
back United States relations with Russia
and China and at the price of countless
civilian lives. More bombing in South Viet-
nam will impede Hanoi's offensive at the
expense of killing and making refugees out
of hundreds of thousands of peasants. What
then, is the purpose of such senseless
slaughter?

A fifth lesson concerns domestic dissent.
Many people who participated in the efforts
of the last seven years to change our policy
say that they think they were wasting their
time. I do not agree. Their opposition, and
the potential threat of greater public publica-
tion, was a constant factor in the delibera-
tions of American policy-makers during the
last two Administrations.

The lesson is that dissenters may not
have been powerful, but they were not
powerless. Responsible criticism, often con-
tered in these chambers, played an impor-
tant and honorable role in preventing worse
outcomes from taking place.

A sixth and final lesson stemming from
the others concerns dealing with dilemmas
and ending the war (Given the constant goal
of a noncommunist South Vietnam since
the Korean War, Vietnam has presented the
crucial terms long ago had it not been

defending the Vietnam War. They
said that resistance to Vietnam, but the
U.S. government ignored it. The war
not remain and fight the war. So we can
not win with France and we could not win
without her. Then, our leaders recognize,
that Diem was hopelessly losing the sup-
port of the people, but at the same time
that he represented the only hope for
political stability. So we could not
win Diem and we could not win war. But
Later, our leaders came to the view that
the Saigon regime could not survive without
massive U.S. involvement, and that the
North Vietnamese effort seemed able to
survive despite U.S. efforts. So again, the
war could not be won with the United State
nor without the United States.

In full knowledge of these dilemmas, on
leaders persisted nevertheless. Each suc-
cessor group of leaders thought that the
might just succeed where their predecessor
had failed—or at least, that they would
prevent defeat . . . For many years until
the American people saw the policy not
working and began doubting the word
of their elected officials), these reasons found
a generous reception. It is not difficult to
understand why proposals for U.S. dis-
engagement fell on deaf ears. But this is a
different time, and we have, I think, new
and more sensible lenses through which to
view the war.

The old rationales about nations falling
like dominoes to communism and our own
nation falling into the pit of McCarthyism
no longer can stand close scrutiny. Extrem-
ists looking for scarp roats will try to mak
trouble, but every indication is that the
American people want out of this war. No
should U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam
premise a return to popular isolationism
If continuing commitments elsewhere in
the world are honestly explained to seem
reasonable to the American people, the
have a proven record of being
bear international burdens. As a
majority of Vietnam being central to the credi-
table and successes of all U.S. foreign policy,
President Nixon has suggested so often:
this is an improbable proposition. Why
wisdom is there that causes President Nix
to link the "dignity of the office of the
President" to the fate of the Saigon forces
Who still believes that any of our allies
expect us to fight indefinitely? How mar
of our allies were worried enough about
the fate of Vietnam to make a meaningful
contribution to its defense? If anything,
to domino theory may now be true in revers
That is, if we continue the war, this is a
alone might jeopardize the growing pursu
of common interests between Washington
and Peking and Moscow and might unde
mine American political support for a co-
tinuing U.S. security role in the world.

It would be better to find some mag-
diplomatic formula that could reconcile
parties in a free and democratic state
But the pursuit of such a magic formula
the Vietnam civil war is a dangerous ill
sion. No civil war has been settled by poli-
cial compromise. Even President Nixon's ge-
erous terms when measured by the stan-
ard of nation-to-nation negotiations ca
not resolve the hatreds and stakes of
civil war. Civil waning parties will risk
their lives and their lifelong aspirations
in the throw of some electoral dice.
Elections require trust, and a com-
mitment to loyalty. These are precisely the
ingrediente
which are missing in a civil war

At this point in history, it is
morality as between the Hanoi
regimes is not a clear-cut mat-
ter. U.S. refugees are fleeing South, not North.
When they get South, they develop
loyalty to Saigon. It is not easy for
them to declare whether Hanoi or Saigon is rig
about who should rule South Vietnam. I
I do believe that the United States is the
keeper of Vietnam's morality and the

WASHINGTON POST JUNE 14, 1972

Protective Reaction

By TOM WICKER

The Vietnam war has generated so much dishonesty and moral blindness through three administrations that the nation now appears to consider these normal. So there is no particular out-of-ery over the disclosures that numerous "protective reaction" raids on North Vietnam have been staged, to let American filters bomb what they wanted to bomb, when they wanted to bomb it.

These unprovoked attacks were staged in violation of stated American policy of the military rules of engagement arising from that policy, of the "understanding" by which the Johnson Administration's bombing campaign had been stopped and the Paris peace talks started in 1968, and of simple honesty. It is not yet clear that high civilian officials in the Nixon Administration knew of these staged attacks, but high military officials seem to have known. That no one in authority is particularly upset about the matter is suggested by the facts that General Lavelle was not court-martialed but permitted to retire at three-star rank, and that the Pentagon has said no further "active investigations" are being made.

One group that certainly knew these illegal, staged air attacks were taking place is the North Vietnamese Government; its officials keep up with what is in the American press and therefore they knew all along that deliberate attacks were being officially reported by the American Government as "protective reaction."

There must have been some laughter of the cynical variety in Hanoi, therefore, when the Nixon Administration solemnly accused the North Vietnamese of violating the "understanding" when their forces crossed the demilitarized zone last spring; for the violation was of an "understanding" Hanoi knew to have been already violated—and repeatedly—by the American Air Force. The revelation of these American violations also puts in proper perspective President Nixon's remarks in his May 8 speech about the "outlaw" government in Hanoi.

Given their experience, moreover, it is not hard to see why Hanoi is not impressed by such Nixonian proposals as the one to have President Thieu resign a month before elections would be held to settle the matter of power in Saigon, or by Washington's insistence on a cease-fire agreement before an American withdrawal. Little the North Vietnamese have seen in Ameri-

IN THE NATION

can combat since the Viet-Viet Administration toward the Vietnam elections promised by the 1974 Geneva Accord can have derailed them to trust American proposals or not.

This is one of the simple facts of the Indochina war, yet something many Americans are unwilling to grant—the other side simply does not trust our word, and has little reason to do so. That is a major reason why "peace offers" that seem reasonable to Americans, accustomed to thinking of their country and Government as trustworthy and propagandized into regarding all Communists as unconscionable liars, are often spurned or ignored in Hanoi. That is their own kind of "protective reaction."

The problem can be illustrated by the discussions now going forward in Congress about the strategic arms limitations negotiated with Moscow by the Nixon Administration. Those agreements do not depend on mutual trust, although each side probably does place some confidence in the good intentions of the other. Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger insist that the agreements were calculated to leave neither side at a disadvantage, that each can monitor the other by its own means, and thus discover and counter any violations.

If so, these are self-enforcing agreements between two parties professing the same goal—to avoid nuclear war—and confident that their interests have been protected. Given the long history of suspicion, fear and antagonism between Moscow and Washington, each with what it considers good reason to mistrust the other, no other kind of major arms agreement was conceivable.

But Washington and Hanoi do not profess the same goal in Indochina; therefore no such balanced, self-enforcing agreement is possible. At some point, any negotiated settlement between them is bound to rest on trust; but Washington mistrusts Hanoi's proposals as leading to a Communist take-over in Saigon, and Hanoi equally mistrusts Washington's offers as cloaking plans for continued American power and influence in Indochina. Past all Mr. Nixon's talk of "outlaws," that is why a negotiated settlement has not been reached; and much of the blame has to rest squarely on the dishonesty of American policy and behavior in Southeast Asia.

Peace Talk
In the
Air Again;
Is It
Just Talk?

WASHINGTON — The longing for some sort of peace in Vietnam has grown so strong, both in and out of the Nixon Administration, that the slightest hint of progress toward the evanescent goal instantly spurs eager speculation that a settlement may yet be within reach.

So it was last week, when the So-
vets announced that Nikolai Podgorny,
their President, was on his way to
Hanoi, and the Administration an-
nounced that Henry A. Kissinger, the
President's national security adviser,
was going to Peking.

The Administration flatly denied any
pre-arranged connection between the
two journeys. Yet the denials failed to
inhibit speculation in a capital weary
of war that a basis for the resumption
negotiations might soon be found—
possibly this month—and that a major
new round of diplomacy, secret or pub-
lic, might be in the offing.

Mr. Kissinger left Andrews Air Force
Base Friday morning, and after a stop
in Hawaii to adjust to the time differ-
ence this weekend, will arrive in
Shanghai late tomorrow. Mr. Podgor-
ny, meanwhile, left Calcutta for Hanoi
on Friday and spent the weekend in
North Vietnam.

The two journeys were related as
much by substance as by timing. Both
men, for example, can be expected to
report to their interested hosts some
(although presumably not all) of the
results of President Nixon's summit
talks in Moscow, May 22-29. In addi-
tion it seemed virtually certain that
both Mr. Podgorny and Mr. Kissinger
would be dwelling heavily on the sub-
ject of Vietnam.

The White House did not specifically
confirm last week that Vietnam would
be on Mr. Kissinger's agenda; and Ron-
ald L. Ziegler, the White House press
secretary, went to some lengths to
demonstrate that Mr. Kissinger's mis-
sion was not undertaken to response
to any particular crisis. Mr. Ziegler
recalled that the Shanghai communi-
que in February had provided for
future visits by senior American offi-
cials, and that the Kissinger journey
had been agreed to in principle at

that time.

That much said, however, Mr.
Yager did not seek to discourage
speculation that Mr. Kissinger would
be preoccupied with the subject of
Vietnam in his conversation with Pre-
mier Chou En-lai. The war is plainly
the biggest single obstacle to further
improvement in bilateral relations be-
tween China and the United States. In
addition, Mr. Kissinger is undoubtedly
anxious to reassure the Chinese that
recent American bombing raids near
the North Vietnamese-Chinese border
—to which the Chinese had bitterly ob-
jected—are not intended to threaten
Chinese security. Finally, he is equally
anxious to discover whether the Chin-
ese are any more disposed now to
using their influence to nudge Hanoi
toward a settlement of the war than
they were when Mr. Nixon visited Pe-
king in February.

As for Mr. Podgorny's mission to
Hanoi, American analysts said they
did not know what he planned to tell
the North Vietnamese and Mr. Pod-
gorny himself did little to clear up the
mystery.

"The Vietnam problem should be immediately solved," he said during a stopover in Calcutta. "America should cease bombing. The United States should leave Vietnam." But the hope in Washington was clearly that Moscow had decided to use what influence it has to persuade Hanoi to resume meaningful bargaining, and that Mr. Podgorny had been sent to Moscow to convey that decision.

Victor Louis, a Soviet journalist believed to have excellent connections with Soviet intelligence, reported from Moscow Friday that Mr. Podgorny's trip was "aimed at stopping hostilities on all fronts so that new negotiations can get under way." Whatever the Soviet President's purposes, the United States was careful to suspend bombing of the Hanoi area for the duration of his visit.

There were other interesting signs
elsewhere in the world—particularly
in Paris, where the peace talks have
been suspended since May 4. The Unit-
ed States and South Vietnamese nego-
tiating teams declined to meet with
their enemy counterparts last Thurs-
day, but issued a joint communique
that carefully left open the door for
sessions later.

Meanwhile, the chief of the North
Vietnamese delegation, Xuan Thuy, re-
mained in Hanoi awaiting "new direc-
tives," and Le Duc Tho—the Hanoi
Politburo member who has conducted
previous secret talks with Mr. Kis-
singer—left for a visit to Bulgaria. On
his way back to Hanoi this weekend
he was reported to have stopped in
both Moscow and Peking. There was
no hard information on the significance

that time.

It was not until the presence of
Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho from Paris
was viewed here more as a hopeful
than a discouraging sign. There is not
really much point in pressing the
Paris talks," one analyst said. "Until
both sides find out what happens in
Peking and Hanoi. That is where the
real action is, and when those talks
are over we shall get some movement
in Paris."

All in all, therefore, the absence of
Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho from Paris
was viewed here more as a hopeful
than a discouraging sign. There is not
really much point in pressing the
Paris talks," one analyst said. "Until
both sides find out what happens in
Peking and Hanoi. That is where the
real action is, and when those talks
are over we shall get some movement
in Paris."

It would be fall of course to read
too much into the separate flight pat-
terns of American, Soviet and North
Vietnamese diplomats. Enormous ob-
stacles to peace still remain. Mr. Nixon
has shown no sign of making any
changes in his basic offer to withdraw
from Vietnam in exchange for prison-
ers, a cease-fire, and a political settle-
ment. Hanoi, on the other hand, still
insists that we leave unilaterally and
take President Nguyen Van Thieu with
us. The fighting, meanwhile, seems to
be going better for the South Viet-
namese, but nobody here is saying that it
is going so well that the North Viet-
namese—after so many years of dedi-
cated warfare—are now preparing to
sue for peace.

Finally, most American officials con-
cede that neither Moscow nor Peking
has sufficient influence on Hanoi to
compel North Vietnam to take a
course of action it does not wish to
take.

But what intrigued some people here
was the prospect that: for one reason
or another—perhaps their shared de-
sire to improve relations with the
United States—Moscow's and Peking's
attitudes toward the war were now
moving more closely into phase, and
that together they might exercise some
genuine influence on the North Viet-
namese. Perhaps this was too much to
hope for; yet officials here noted that
despite considerable provocation, Mr.
Nixon and his emissaries have been
welcome in the Communist capitals.
The Soviet Union did not let the min-
ing of the North Vietnamese harbors
interfere with the summit; similarly,
the Chinese did not allow the bombing
near its borders to ruin the Kissinger
trip.

Moreover, 1972 is a political year.
There are many here who believe that
Mr. Nixon must have one or two more
cards up his sleeve to end a war he
pledged to end four years ago and thus
rob his likeliest opponent, George
McGovern, of a major issue. Perhaps,
they reason—admittedly more out of
hope than knowledge—Mr. Kissinger
and Mr. Podgorny are playing these
cards now in Peking and Hanoi.

—ROBERT B. SEMPLE, Jr.

NEW YORK TIMES - 28 JUNE 1972

Bombs for Peace?

The United States is a four-time loser in the bombing of North Vietnam's only steel plant. The fifth bombing last weekend again has halted production there, but it is unlikely that it will hamper North Vietnam's war effort any more significantly than did the other four. Nor is there any substantial military purpose to be achieved in the stepped-up aerial attacks this week in the Hanoi-Haiphong area, which undoubtedly are taking a heavy civilian toll.

The Pentagon Papers revealed the futility of bombing so-called strategic targets in underdeveloped North Vietnam. President Nixon and his aides may not have been willing to accept this Johnson Administration study, but a secret Nixon Administration analysis in 1969 by Henry Kissinger's National Security Council Staff along with seven other Government agencies reached a similar conclusion.

This first Kissinger National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM-1) showed that almost four years of American bombing destroyed $500 to $770 million of capital stock, military facilities and current production in North Vietnam. But aid from other Communist countries during this period totalled $3 billion, four to six times as much. "In terms of total economic and military resources available to support the war, North Vietnam is better off today (1969) than it was in 1965," Defense Secretary Laird's office noted in NSSM-1.

Aid from the Soviet Union, China and other Communist countries averaged only $115 million a year through 1964. But it was stepped up after the bombing began in 1965 and was in the neighborhood of $1 billion a year by 1968. When the bombing was suspended, aid from those countries dropped off again.

There has been no change in the commitment of Moscow and Peking to supply everything Hanoi needs to continue the war. In the 1965-68 period, Communist

China even provided up to 50,000 transport troops to help keep roads and railways in repair between Hanoi and the Chinese border. The return of some of those troops now is hinted in a statement by Radio Hanoi that "new forces" have just joined North Vietnam's "communications and transportation forces."

President Nixon may be counting on the mining of Haiphong and other ports to increase North Vietnam's import problems, particularly in petroleum. Mr. Nixon has been forewarned since the 1969 NSSM-1 study that the capacity of the overland routes from China alone was two and a half times larger than North Vietnam's combined sea and land import tonnage. The "smart bombs" and virtually unrestricted attacks now under-way on this transport network undoubtedly are hampering the flow. But even an unlimited bombing campaign would leave North Vietnam with enough material to carry on, the C.I.A. and Secretary Laird's office informed Mr. Nixon in NSSM-1.

Differences between Moscow and Peking may cause some temporary supply difficulties. But a shift from Russia to China as major supplier is unlikely to reduce the flow of Soviet weapons and ammunition, virtually all of which has been coming overland across China all along. As for petroleum, a new pipeline from China may help to ease North Vietnam's problem, even if sections are bombed out at times.

The only effect of the bombing on the war is that it imposes hardships on the people of North Vietnam. It might damage morale—but never has in the past. It might influence North Vietnam's Politburo, now in the midst of an important policy review, to soften its negotiating position in Paris. But it never did so in the past, despite President Johnson's carefully calculated orchestration of bombing and peace offers.

More bombing is no more likely now to pressure Hanoi to accept American terms. De-escalation and a resumption of negotiations for a compromise settlement offer a better hope of peace.

5

Bombing:

You Might
Call It
'Protective
Aggression'

WASHINGTON — "Dear Senator Hughes," the letter began, "I and other members of wing intelligence ... have been falsifying classified reports for missions into North Vietnam. That is, we have been reporting that our planes have received hostile reactions such as AAA [antiaircraft fire] and SAM [missile] firings whether they have or not."

The letter, dated Feb. 25, 1972, and mailed by an Air Force intelligence sergeant at Udorn Air Base in Thailand, was to become the cornerstone of perhaps the most potentially significant dispute of the air war, one that last week raised grave questions about the Nixon Administration's grip on command and control over the skies of Southeast Asia. Within three weeks, the following happened:

* A secret Air Force Investigation concluded that the Commander of the Seventh Air Force, Gen. John D. Lavelle, had ordered at least 28 unauthorized raids into North Vietnam and later reported them as "protective reaction" — a defensive action. The targets included airfields, missile sites and array of radar equipment.

* At least three classified after-action reports were said to have been falsified, largely because General Lavelle had ordered his subordinates never to file a bombing report without describing the raid as being in response to enemy action.

* General Lavelle was relieved and ordered to return to Washington, where he eventually became the first four-star general or admiral in modern United States military history to be demoted upon retirement.

All of this reeked of scandal, and the Air Force chose the classic way to handle the affair. It quietly announced early in April that the officer had retired "for personal and health reasons."

There the matter rested — until mid-May, when Representative Otis G. Pike, Democrat of New York, made two short but critical speeches on the floor of the House. Mr. Pike, a former Marine pilot and usually a strong supporter of United States bombing policies, accused the Air Force of covering up

A second Air Force statement was issued that General Lavelle had been relieved "because of irregularities in the conduct of his command responsibilities." Again, nothing happened, although the House Armed Service Investigating Subcommittee, headed by Representative F. Edward Hebert, Democrat of Louisiana, did agree — at Mr. Pike's urging—to schedule a hearing for last Monday on the firing and demotion of the general.

General Lavelle and the man who fired him, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John D. Ryan, found themselves testifying before a packed gallery of newsmen and Congressional aides. "This is the largest contingent of press I've seen here since the Mylai situation," Representative Charles S. Gubser, Republican of California, noted at one point. "Seems like we got another chance to make America look bad."

Mr. Gubser's remark set the tone for the hearing, and most members of the hawkish House subcommittee made it clear during the testimony that they found much merit in General Lavelle's decision to bomb North Vietnam without authority.

General Lavelle acknowledged that he had ordered "in the neighborhood" of 20 raids between November and March that were later reported as "protective reaction." He did so, he said, because higher headquarters had refused his repeated requests to attack large North Vietnamese buildups of tanks, fuel and other war materials about 11 to 15 miles above the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that straddles the border between the two Vietnams. The general did insist, however, that his superior officers in the chain of command had been kept fully informed of his activities.

"Protective reaction" was first enunciated as a military concept in October, 1969, by Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird. It authorized American bombers escorting unarmed reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam to attack enemy antiaircraft sites and SAM missile sites if the enemy initiated offensive action.

At the time, the United States was theoretically bound to the bombing restrictions negotiated with the North Vietnamese in Paris by the Johnson Administration shortly before the 1968 elections. Over the years, however, the rules gradually loosened and eventually American fighters were given permission to initiate attacks after determining that enemy radars had "locked-on" to their craft preparatory to launching missiles or firing shells.

When the North Vietnamese did attack, to begin their new offensive March 30, it came near the point where General Lavelle's pilots had reported the buildups. Yet, there were few in Washington willing to justify the general's violation of orders on the basis of intelligence—even accurate intelligence.

The Lavelle Incident could have ended just as a blemish on what some experts believe has been a satisfactory record of tight command control by Air Force units. The service had even court-martiaed two pilots who bombed the harbor at Haiphong in North Vietnam in the middle of the 1965-1968 air war, damaging two Russian ships in the process. The fact that General Lavelle was immediately sacked and subjected to an unprecedented demotion

was an indication, as one high official said in an interview that "unlike the Army, the Air Force still has a lot of pride in itself."

But within a few days, a continuing investigation by The New York Times uncovered evidence that systematic abuses of "protective reaction" have been commonplace since 1970 through all Air Force commands in Southeast Asia. More than a dozen former photo intelligence specialists and analysts for the Air Force were located and interviewed. Without exception they agreed that, as one put it, protective reaction "was a constant joke."

The former intelligence specialists, who were violating Federal codes by talking openly about their work, alleged that many so-called "protective reaction" raids had in fact been planned in advance by Air Force headquarters in Hawaii or Saigon. In addition, they said that at least three times as many such raids were actually carried out as reported by the Pentagon throughout 1970 and 1971.

Former high-ranking Government officials — all of whom worked in the Nixon Administration — subsequently acknowledged in a series of interviews that civilian command and control over the air war has indeed eroded in the past three years. President Lyndon B. Johnson "had more command and control," one former official said, "but it came at a higher cost of military irritation. The rules of engagement are more relaxed under Nixon."

Some members of Congress have criticized the seemingly slight punishment given thus far to General Lavelle whose nomination for retirement at three-star rank is now pending before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Despite his demotion, General Lavelle will receive the equivalent of a four-star general's retirement pay—about $2,250 per month—because his last active duty assignment was at that rank.

In a Senate speech last week, Senator Hughes raised some of the broader questions presented by the incident. "To what extent can the actions of a single combat commander," asked the Senator, "trigger a spiraling escalation of hostilities by both sides at a time when we are committed to winding down the intensity of the war and withdrawing?"

There were other questions, still unasked in Congress:

* Did Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, United States commander in Vietnam, or any of his colleagues at headquarters really know what General Lavelle was doing in North Vietnam?

* Has the Air Force done all that it could in its investigation of General Lavelle to find and prosecute those officers responsible for official abuses?

* Has President Nixon's day-by-day command and control over his pilots diminished?

On Thursday Senator John C. Stenius, Democrat of Mississippi, promised that his Armed Services Committee would look into the Lavelle incident more fully.

—SEYMOUR M. HERSH

NEW YORK TIMES 20 JUNE 1969 1-33

# Bombing the Dikes

By ANTHONY LEWIS

LONDON, June 25 — The Tonkin plain of North Vietnam is hemmed in by mountains to the north and west, the sea to the southeast. In the rainy season every summer vast amounts of water pour out of the mountains and down the rivers that lace the plain. The principal river gives its name to the area: the Red River Delta.

Over thousands of years peasants have made the delta habitable by building and maintaining an enormous system of dikes. There are nearly 2,000 miles of dikes on the plain, and more along the sea. Without them, it would be a desolate land of marsh and flood.

From the beginning of American intervention in the Vietnam war, some strategists have suggested bombing the dikes. Presidents have successively rejected each such proposal, on the ground that it would be an act of terror unworthy of the United States. At least that has been true until now.

Over the last month North Vietnamese officials and diplomats have said repeatedly that American planes are bombing dikes. The charges have been extremely specific and detailed.

On May 26, for example, North Vietnam's Ministry of Water Conservancy listed in a statement 42 alleged raids on dikes in the Hanoi area and seven other provinces, giving dates and places. On June 22 in Paris, a North Vietnamese diplomat gave further details of asserted dike bombings, and shelling by American ships, and appealed to world opinion to stop it.

Even with all the details, the statements from North Vietnam could of course be just propaganda. But now, over the last few days, two pieces of evidence have come to hand that make it harder to dismiss the charge that the dikes are being deliberately attacked.

One item is a report from the correspondent of Agence France-Presse in Hanoi, Jean Thoraval. On June 24 he and some other foreign reporters visited Nam Dinh, a town sixty miles south of Hanoi. He found its textile mills and commercial center in ruins from bombing. Then he went to some of the dikes protecting Nam Dinh, about fourteen miles from town. He reported:

> "One of the dikes was completely cut. Several were gutted, with gaps in the dike itself and hoilows, evidently caused by bombs, alongside. Deep cracks were visible everywhere. The landscape was almost what one might have expected to find on the moon."

The second piece of evidence is a

report from a highly reliable, non-Communist diplomatic source of information on North Vietnam. This source has concluded that "without doubt there is now systematic bombing of the dikes."

The rainy season is just under way in North Vietnam; the rivers usually rise toward the top of the dikes between July and September. No one should be in any doubt about what systematic destruction of the dikes at this time might mean. It would bring into play, justifiably for once, that much-abused word genocide.

Fifteen million people live on the Tonkin plain, one of the more densely populated areas of the world. Some would drown in floods if the dikes failed; many more would be in danger of starvation after flooding of the rice paddies.

After dinner at John Connally's ranch in Floresville, Tex., on April 26, President Nixon answered questions from other guests. One asked about the idea of bombing "dams" in North Vietnam. According to the official transcript, the President first rephrased the question to refer to "the dams and dikes." Then he said:

> "Now, the problem that is raised with regard to dams or dikes is that, while it is a strategic target, and indirectly a military target, it would result in an enormous number of civilian casualties. That is something that we want to avoid. It is also something we believe is not needed."

That answer seemed at the time to be carefully calculated to alarm the North Vietnamese, to put more pressure on them to negotiate on American terms. While indicating that he wanted to avoid anything that would kill so many civilians, Mr. Nixon listed the dikes as "indirectly a military target." And by saying that bombing was "not needed" then, he logically left that step open if it ever were "needed."

Is the United States now systematically bombing dikes of North Vietnam? Americans know from experience that such things can happen without a President informing the public — or even without the President knowing. Those American officials or members of Congress who care about the possibility of causing mass civilian deaths in North Vietnam might want to ask.

196

CYJ

NEW YORK TIMES - 24 JUNE 1972 P-1 (26)

# War Foes See No Evidence Of Deliberate Dike Attacks

By SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 23 — A number of well-informed critics of the Vietnam war, including some men still serving in the Government, said in interviews today that there was no evidence to support repeated assertions by Hanoi that the United States had been deliberately bombing dikes and dams in North Vietnam.

The interviews were conducted in response to yesterday's renewed charges by the North Vietnamese, one of a series since the air war was renewed in April, that the waterways in the north are being systematically destroyed by United States bombs.

Vo Van Sung, a member of the North Vietnamese delegation at the peace talks, said at a news conference in Paris that United States aircraft had attacked dikes 68 times from April 10 through June 10, dropping 665 bombs along the Red River and other waterways.

## Appeal to the World

Mr. Sung appealed for world opinion to help stop what he called a "premeditated" effort by the United States to destroy the dikes before the heavy rains that begin in North Vietnam in July.

"I know for a fact that the target lists do not include dikes," one well-informed former official said. "If we wanted to bomb them, we would."

This official, who just recently left the Government, said that the United States had "too little to gain from such a risk." The source, who had access to most intelligence material while in the Government, added that the occasional bombing of a dike, whether by error or because of a pilot's violation of rules, was impossible to rule out.

"In fact," he said, "we had some photos earlier this year of dikes that were hit, but I just can't believe it was done by policy."

Two former photo intelligence specialists for the Air Force also said in interviews that to their knowledge the waterways of North Vietnam were never targets for destruction.

Former Srs. Bradley V. Oanber and Miles Yoshida, both of whom served with the Pacific Air Force headquarters in Honolulu, said they had never seen any reconnaissance photos depicting any systematic damages to North Vietnamese dikes.

Hanoi's complaints about the bombing of waterways have on occasion been extremely spe-

For example, a broadcast on May 30 quoted a spokesman for the Ministry of Water Conservancy in North Vietnam as alleging that in Thanhoa Province, some 100 miles south of Hanoi, "for many times in a day of April 19, 20, 24, 26 and 27, and May 13, 17, and 18, U.S. aircraft attacked the irrigation works, dropping a total of 158 big-sized bombs on the embankments of the Ma and Len rivers in Hoanghoa, Dongson, Theiuhoa, Vinhloc, and Hatzung districts."

## Denials by Pentagon

The Pentagon has repeatedly denied all such charges. Asked about the allegations during a recent news briefing, Lieut. Gen George J. Eade, Deputy Chief of Operations for the Air Force, said, "We haven't targeted any dikes and to my knowledge we haven't accidentally hit any dikes which have caused any problem."

Military men offer two explanations for the repeated North Vietnamese accusations.

An Air Force general suggested that North Vietnam, "is trying to obtain world support to put the pressure on us as they did in 1968 to halt the bombing."

The general acknowledged that some bombs might have accidentally landed on river embankments or near dams. "Anything is possible," he said, "but I think it's highly improbable."

Daniel Z. Henkin, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, said in an interview that he believed "Hanoi might be making these allegations so that they could claim, if there were any floods caused by natural phenomenon, that they resulted from the erroneous charges that we have been bombing dikes."

"If there are floods in North Vietnam," Mr. Henkin added, "and I hope to God there will not be, they would be acts of God and not as a result of any targeting of dikes or dams."

Fred R. Branfman, director of Project Air War, a leading anti-war group in Washington, acknowledged that "we have no independent verification" of the Hanoi charges.

"Non one is going to be stupid enough to target dikes," Mr. Branfman added. "Particularly since it's a known war crime. But there is a paucity of targets left in North Vietnam and an awful lot of planes going up. Its inevitable that pilots are going to want to bomb lucrative targets."

The Pentagon Papers show that during the first bombing

campaign, in 1965 and 1966 the systematic destruction of North Vietnam's waterways was proposed. This was rejected by then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.

Mr. McNamara said at one point in 1967 that "there may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go"

WASHINGTON POST 29 JUNE 1972 PAGE 13

Senate Study Finds Saigon Regime
Might Not Survive a Cease-Fire

By Stanley Karnow

ANDREW P. POST Staff Writer

Two Senate foreign affairs specialists recently returned from Vietnam reported yesterday that the present Saigon government might not survive a decision by Hanoi to accept President Nixon's latest peace offer.

James G. Lowenstein and Richard M. Moose, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, said in a study that several South Vietnamese expressed the view that Hanoi's acceptance of Mr. Nixon's cease-fire proposal would disrupt the Saigon regime and pave the way for a Communist takeover.

Mr. Nixon proposed on May 8 to withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam within four months if the Communists released American war prisoners and agreed to an "internationally supervised cease-fire" throughout Indochina.

The Senate specialists also reported the overwhelming consensus of both Americans that South Vietnamese that Saigon government would collapse during the recent Communist offensive had it not been supported by U.S. military aid and assistance.

In a press briefing yesterday, Lowenstein stressed that the "tremendous reliance" of South Vietnam on American support "raises doubts about whether the United States can withdraw." He said: "The South Vietnamese have very little confidence in their own ability to face the future."

The two committee staff members reported that Vietnamese they had interviewed regarded the possibility of a cease-fire with "mixed emotions."

On the one hand, their study stated, the Vietnamese voiced "relief that an end of the war might be in sight." But at the same time, the study said, they seemed apprehensive that "the subsequent political turmoil would find the non-Communist forces so leaderless and divided" that an estimated 10 or 15 per cent Vietcong vote "might consti

tate decisive influence."

The American and Moose reported that many Vietnamese feel that South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu's inflexible political position is preventing non-Communist elements in Saigon from strengthening themselves to confront a possible Vietcong political challenge.

At their press briefing, the Senate aides pointed to Thieu's acquisition on Tuesday of special emergency powers as evidence that he has no intention of diluting his authority. The bill enfranchising Thieu to rule by decree for six months was passed in a rump session by 26 of South Vietnam's 57 senators.

During their visit to Vietnam from May 23 to June 5, Lowenstein and Moose reported in their study, U.S. Embassy personnel were engaged in lobbying in favor of Thieu's bid for special powers. The study said:

"American officials argued that the granting of emergency powers would demonstrate the willingness of the Vietnamese to put aside politics in the interest of unity...."

The Senate specialists reported that American equipment and advisers played a critical role in halting the Communist offensive that began in April.

The study said, for example, that the U.S. Air Force airlifted a total 36,717 tons of cargo and 128,586 military personnel between March 31 and May 25, while the South Vietnamese Air Force airlifted 6,302 tons of cargo and 77,191 passengers during the same period.

According to U.S. military estimates, the study said, the South Vietnamese would have needed a fleet of 229 C-123 cargo aircraft to supply and move their troops. The South Vietnamese Air Force has 48 such aircraft.

The study further emphasized that American tactical air support was "the most crucial U.S. contribution" during the Communist offensive. Between March 31 and May 24, the study showed, U.S. aircraft were flying an average of 169 sorties per day in North Vietnam and 605 sorties daily in South Vietnam.

While there were no ground attacks and only a few rocket mortar attacks against U.S. units during the Communist offensive, the study said, American advisers "played a critical role" helping South Vietnamese troops.

In some cases they "assumed virtual command" and they were "indispensable in coordinating air support", the study said adding: "No one with whom we talked, American or Vietnamese, thought that the South Vietnamese could have held had there not been American advisers."

Lowenstein and Moose also found that U.S. economic aid is comparable to South Vietnamese aid. It offsets the entire budget of the Saigon budget devoted to defense expenditures and provides a significant portion of the rest of the Vietnamese budget. The Senate specialists estimated that gross U.S. economic assistance in Fiscal 1973 would reach $753 million.

The study reported that after reductions made by Congress in the 1972 aid pro-

gram, several steps were taken to maintain Vietnamese dollar earnings at a high level." One of these steps was a decision to maintain the exchange rate for official piaster purchases at 118 to the dollar, which amounted to a subsidy.

3

WALL STREET JOURNAL 29 JUNE 1972

# New Cut to 39,000 U.S. Troops in Vietnam
Leaves Nixon Military and Political Options

By RICHARD J. LEVINE

WASHINGTON — President Nixon's announcement that 10,000 more U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Vietnam in July and August still leaves him a lot of flexibility on the military and political fronts.

The latest pullout plan, disclosed yesterday in low-key fashion by the White House Press Secretary, Ronald L. Ziegler, will reduce the authorized U.S. troop ceiling in Vietnam to 29,000 by Sept. 1. But it doesn't block the President from continuing to offset the Vietnam withdrawals by increasing U.S. strength in other parts of the Indochina theater, should the Vietnam military situation suddenly begin to deteriorate again.

This is the course he has followed for the past two months. Since the start of the North Vietnamese invasion on Easter weekend, Mr. Nixon has beefed up U.S. forces operating in Indochina, outside of Vietnam, by 25,000 men.

The Seventh Fleet units in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Tonkin, which are laying mines, bombing North Vietnam and pounding coastal targets with their big guns, include 40,000 men, up from 18,000 two months ago. U.S. military strength in Thailand, mostly Air Force and Marine aviation personnel, has jumped to 45,000 from 32,000 over the same period.

Recently, for example, four Air Force F4 fighter-bomber squadrons and three Marine squadrons were transferred from Vietnam to bases in Thailand; there they don't count against the current Vietnam troop ceiling of 49,000.

## Monthly Average Reduced

The new troop announcement, which slows the average monthly pullout pace to 5,000 from 10,000, also should leave Mr. Nixon room to make further withdrawals during the height of this fall's presidential election campaign. The President has talked publicly of leaving a residual force in Vietnam of 25,000 to 35,000 men in the event there isn't any negotiated settlement and the Communists continue to hold U.S. prisoners of war.

Thus, Mr. Nixon could make two or even three more troop-withdrawal announcements before election day and still leave a residual force in the 25,000-to-35,000 range. Indeed, Mr. Ziegler said yesterday that the White House planned another announcement on Vietnam troop cuts "before Sept. 1."

Mr. Ziegler had another politically attractive announcement on Vietnam yesterday: starting immediately, draftees won't any longer be assigned to Vietnam unless they volunteer.

President Nixon decided on the latest pullout schedule after a "thorough review of the situation" on the battlefield, his press secretary said. That situation, according to military analysts and a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report just released, has improved significantly since the early weeks of the North Vietnamese drive across the demilitarized zone. But military analysts remain uncertain as to just what the North Vietnamese are up to and what the future holds.

Despite the heavy toll taken by some of the most intensive U.S. bombing of the war, Pentagon analysts still believe Hanoi's strategy is capable of launching new attacks in the weeks ahead. The Defense Department's concern still focuses largely on the South Vietnamese city of Hue. "They do have the capacity to make another thrust at Hue," says a military source.

## Some Questions of Supply

One of the big unknowns in the current battlefield situation is the state of North Vietnamese logistics. U.S. officials are certain the mining of the enemy's ports and the stopped-up bombing, using more sophisticated and effective laser-guided and television-guided bombs, has hurt. But what they don't know is exactly how much material the Communists have prepositioned in South Vietnam and how fast they might be willing to expend it, now that the other end of the pipeline isn't being filled as in the past.

Still, U.S. officials are breathing a lot easier than in the first month after the North Vietnamese offensive started, when Hanoi's troops swept through Quang Tri Province in northern South Vietnam and Saigon's forces abandoned their positions and rushed south in ragging fashion. Since then, however, other South Vietnamese forces have fought well, especially where well led by competent officers.

A new on-the-scene report by Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff members, James G. Lowenstein and Richard M. Moobe, attempts to assess the Vietnam military, economic and political situation in the wake of the offensive.

Summing up, the 32-page report says that both South Vietnam and North Vietnam have been hurt by the recent fighting and that the future "has never been more uncertain." There is general agreement that the Saigon government and the South Vietnamese army have "regained their equilibrium since the crisis" that followed the offensive and aren't "in danger of immediate collapse," the committee staffmen say.

But they warned that the enemy still appeared to have "a sizable force intact in the South" and adequate supplies for several more weeks or even months of offensive operations. They also noted that North Vietnamese replacements continued to flow south.

Most U.S. officers in Vietnam, the report says, appear confident that any attack on Hue will be defeated and think it unlikely the North Vietnamese will be able "to mount another major offensive for at least another four or five years."

Yet the staffers found general agreement that the Communists weren't likely to abandon their objectives in the South and that U.S. support, critical to averting a Saigon defeat in the current offensive, will continue to be required for the foreseeable future.

Yesterday, the White House named the officer who will have to worry most about such problems—Gen. Frederick C. Weyand, who succeeds Gen. Creighton W. Abrams as a U.S. commander in South Vietnam. Gen. Weyand has been deputy commander; Gen. Abrams is returning home to become Army Chief of Staff.

As the Paris talks resume, it is worth recalling
the President's 1968 campaign claim to have a
"plan" to end the war, the details of which he
never designed to reveal to the people. Was it to
neutralize much of American public opinion by
reducing American troop levels and combat losses
on South Vietnamese ground? To substantially
isolate Hanoi from its principal allies, politically
by the summits in Peking and Moscow and militar-
ily by the mines and bombs on the supply routes?
To use American air power to an unprecedented
extent in order to compensate for Saigon's weak-
ness and to induce the North to stop or suspend
its military campaign in the South? Finally, to pull
all of this together on the eve of his campaign for
re-election?

Frankly, we do not pretend to know what Mr.
Nixon had in mind in 1968. It is perfectly plain,
however, that this is the state of affairs that has
come about in 1972. And while we make no prophes-
cies in either sphere, it can be no mere coincidence
of the calendar that President Nixon's negotiators
are returning to the Paris peace talks today, seem-
ingly more confident than ever that the end of
the war may be near, precisely at the moment when
the Democratic Party has nominated for President
a man who has pledged unequivocally—not merely
promised vaguely—to withdraw the United States
from the war. Could any President conceive of a
more effective and dramatic capstone of a first
four-year term than by making good on his princi-
pal promise of 1968, and by doing so in a way and
at a time that could leave his opponent grasping
vainly for the great issue that got away?

We have cautioned before, and would again, that
Hanoi has demonstrated itself capable of enduring
a degree of punishment and sacrifice, and of main-

taining a capacity for surprise, baffling to friends
and foes alike. What can it mean to Hanoi, how-
ever, that the scorned South Vietnamese army
is still in the field, recapturing lost ground and
taking casualties? Moreover, just as the Paris talks
resume, Moscow and Peking make huge trade deals
with the "enemy," agreeing to buy American grain
and bid for American jets, respectively. Nor has
the publicity given to the horrendous possibility
that Mr. Nixon may order flood-season attacks on
the North Vietnamese dikes—attacks which could
take what he casually describes as an "extraordi-
nary" civilian toll—evidently deterred the Presi-
dent from continuing with whatever bombing
plans he may have.

In this particular week, it is necessary to ask as
well how North Vietnam reads the American po-
litical scene. Here, in view of our own professed
uncertainties about the meaning of events in Miami
Beach and the strange mood of disenchantment in
the country, Hanoi is entitled to some degree of
sympathy. It must estimate the progress and result
of an election campaign that already seems to many
Americans one of the least fathomable in history.
Mr. Nixon appears confident that, even if he does
not end the American role in Vietnam by Novem-
ber, his effort to do so will be rewarded by the
voters. We are not so sure that the electorate's
gratitude for his success, or for his effort, will
count more than its resentment of the time it has
taken him, and of the means he has used and of
the loss of some 20,000 additional American lives,
not to speak of the toll of Vietnamese.

Our advice to Hanoi, however gratuitous, would
be to assume the worst from its viewpoint the re-
election of Richard Nixon, and to negotiate with
him—on the quite reasonable terms he offered
May 8—now.

BALTIMORE SUN 13 JULY 1972

The War Issue among the Democrats

In the small hours of yesterday
morning the Democratic National
Convention in Miami Beach re-
jected, without any debate whatso-
ever, a platform amendment that
would have made the release of
American prisoners of war a con-
dition for the withdrawal of all
foreign forces from Indochina. The
inaction may have been partly due
to wearjiness, but it also reflected
an uncertainty in Democratic ranks
about how the war issue is to
evolve during the presidential cam-
paign.

Many Democratic politicians con-
sider it a distinct possibility that
President Nixon, somehow, will be
able to arrange a cease-fire before
election day. While such a develop-
ment would be welcomed all
around, despite the cynical aspects
of its timing, the Democrats well
realize that this could take from
Senator McGovern the issue that

provided the early impetus toward
his nomination. As an unequivocal
opponent of the war he has pro-
claimed his determination, if
elected president, to end all actions
of war in Southeast Asia, to with-
draw all U.S. troops from Vietnam
and to go "begging" to Hanoi if
necessary to gain the prompt re-
lease of American prisoners of war.

It is a bold and provocative
stand, one that already has drawn
intense criticism and could leave
Mr. McGovern politically exposed
if President Nixon should get the
kind of cease-fire, prisoner-ex-
change package that has been his
goal.

Just a few hours before the South
Dakota senator appears before the
Democratic convention tonight to
deliver his acceptance address,
American and North Vietnamese
negotiators will be meeting in ple-
nary session in Paris for the first

time since May 4. Whether the
Hanoi representative will begin to
bargain seriously, as Henry Kissin-
ger has hinted, may take some
time to determine. But it is ex-
tremely interesting that Mr. Mc-
Govern has chosen this particular
moment to begin attaching some
conditions of his own to the pro-
spective U.S. withdrawal from
Southeast Asia. His assertion that
until prisoners are released he
would "retain the military capabil-
ity in the region—in Thailand and
on the seas—to signal and fulfill our
firm determination on this issue"
is welcome. Our national Interests
would be ill-served if the presiden-
tial candidates, by their own rhet-
oric, permit the coming campaign
to deteriorate into a simplistic mis-
leading contest between an "ap-
peaser" and a "warhawk." Mr.
McGovern and Mr. Nixon are
neither.

# Voters favor '72 Viet exit,

By GEORGE GALLUP

Princeton, N. J.—In the debate over the platform at the Democratic convention in Miami Beach this week, the views of the typical Democratic voter on the key issues will be of prime importance.

To obtain the vote of Democrats on major campaign issues, the Gallup Poll utilized a new survey approach called the National Public Opinion Referendum. In this experiment, which simulates a national referendum, the Gallup Poll selected one indicator county in each of the four major regions of the nation.

These counties were selected because each has a record of accurately reflecting the sentiment of its area in the presidential elections of 1968, 1964, 1960 and 1956. Together, the vote of these counties reflects the vote of the nation for the last four presidential elections.

Within each indicator county, a secret ballot was delivered to every household in selected election districts. These districts were chosen so that in combination they reflect the vote of the county in recent presidential elections.

The four counties selected for the referendum were New London county, Conn. (including Norwich); Hillsboro county, Ill.; Shelby county, Tenn. (including

Memphis); and San Luis Obispo county, Calif. Balloting was carried out June 29 and 30.

More than 55 per cent of the ballots distributed were returned — higher participation, for example, than in the last national congressional elections in 1970, and only six percentage points under the turnout for the 1968 presidential election.

Here is the vote for the four indicator counties combined:

## Views of Democrats
(Four Counties Combined)

1. Withdraw from Vietnam by the end of 1972?

Should ............ 70pc.

Should not ..... 30pc.

2. Bus children to achieve better racial balance?

Should ............ 27pc.

Should not ..... 73pc.

3. Decrease the national defense budget?

Should ............ 50pc.

Should not ..... 50pc.

4. Legalize abortion?

Favor ............ 53pc.

Oppose ............ 47pc.

5. Allow draft dodgers to return without punishment?

Should ............ 31pc.

Should not ..... 69pc.

6. Make wage-price controls stricter?

Should ............ 73pc.

Should not ..... 27pc.

NEW YORK TIMES 13 JULY 1972

# Last Chance for Peace

The resumption of the Paris peace talks today opens what is probably the last effort by both sides to end the Vietnam war before the American elections.

Presidential adviser Henry Kissinger has made known that "very intense diplomatic activity" went into angling the resumption of talks—diplomacy that undoubtedly involved both Moscow and Peking. He said he had "some reason to believe" that North Vietnam was ready for "serious negotiations" — a term the State Department deems to require, at minimum, "a somewhat more systematic discussion of the issues" put forward by both sides.

The impending return to Paris of Le Duc Tho, who represented North Vietnam in the earlier secret talks with Mr. Kissinger, indicates that today's semipublic meeting is only the beginning of a more extended discussion. Xuan Thuy, formal chief of Hanoi's delegation, has encouraged peace hopes by expressing a willingness to discuss any new American proposals and calling for a "rapid" settlement.

Two routes to a settlement are open, President Nixon's clear preference is for a military arrangement based on an all-Indochina cease-fire, release of American prisoners and withdrawal of American troops within four months —leaving negotiation of a political solution to the Vietnamese.

Hanoi up to now insisted that a political solution—the composition and character of an interim coalition government to rule South Vietnam until elections are held—must be agreed upon first. But despite Mr. Kissinger's willingness in secret talks to explore any reasonable Communist suggestions for a compromise government, Hanoi has refrained from advancing concrete proposals, insisting on advance American acceptance in principle of its concept, including the ouster of the Thieu Government.

Both routes need exploration in detailed private talks now. Either could lead to peace, but only if both sides are prepared to abandon hopes for immediate victory and accept a provisional accommodation that translates into political terms the military stalemate which neither has been able to break on the field of battle.

By Marilyn Berger

Washington Post Staff Writer

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 Sa

gon, 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.

# What North Vietnam wants now in Paris peace talks

By Takashi Oka
Staff correspondent of
The Christian Science Monitor

Paris

Hanoi's immediate and principal objective in its reopened Paris peace talks with the United States is to get the latter to move even a fraction of an inch away from its present position of total support for South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.

After reading and rereading statements by Xuan Thuy, Hanoi's chief delegate at the talks, political observers here have been strengthened in this appraisal of North Vietnam's stand. Brief remarks by Le Duc Tho, Politburo member and counterpart of presidential adviser Henry A. Kissinger in secret discussions paralleling the formal talks, hint the same.

There is already on the table an American proposal, concurred in by Saigon, that President Thieu and his vice-president resign one month before internationally supervised elections.

American sources have also said their commitment to President Thieu is not a permanent and unchanged one—that what they demand of the North Vietnamese is only that they accept his government as the existing valid representative of South Vietnam. Behind this statement lies the hint that changes in the Thieu government could subsequently take place by agreement.

"If Mr. Kissinger has anything new to say, and wants to see me, I will be happy to see him in order to arrive at a correct solution of the problem of Vietnam," Mr. Tho said in substance on arriving in Paris via Peking and Moscow on Saturday. He smilingly refused to be drawn out further.

As Mr. Thuy remarked earlier, "It all depends on what one means by the word 'new.'" Both Hanoi's position and that of Washington, by this time, are well known.

What might be called "new" about the North Vietnamese 'ance since the Paris talks resumed July 13 is that despite the American naval blockade of their ports, despite intensive bombing of their cities, industry, and communication links, despite the limited response of their allies, Peking and Mos-

cow, to these measures, the men of Hanoi remain unwavering in their definition of war goals and of the order of priorities entailed thereby.

In his May 8 speech, repeated in its main points by the American delegation at the July 13 session, President Nixon offered to withdraw American troops totally from Indo-China within four months of an Indo-China-wide cease-fire and return of American prisoners of war. He attached no political conditions to this offer.

The North Vietnamese, however, are not interested in a cease-fire. They want political and military questions settled at the same time, and a cease-fire only after such a settlement. They will not accept a purely military settlement that leaves the fate of the Thieu government reserved for later discussion.

Nor will they accept a politico-military solution unless it entails the removal of President Thieu. "Every other issue [than President Thieu's removal] is of secondary importance," said one north Vietnamese source.

In other words, Hanoi seems prepared to accept continued American bombing of the north and any other military measures President Nixon may order before surrendering what is in effect its principal war aim.

## Plan not clarified

But Hanoi may be prepared to change its negotiating tactics somewhat in order to achieve this goal. This is the possibility observers here sensed after Mr. Thuy's remarks at the July 13 session. Hitherto the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies have steadfastly refused to clarify their own seven-point plan calling for total withdrawal of American troops and abandonment of support for President Thieu.

They have even refused to ask questions about points in American-submitted plans that in some respects approach theirs.

The North Vietnamese are deeply suspicious of these American hints. "Actions count more than words," says one North Vietnamese source, and the actions they have seen in the past are Mr. Thieu's manipulation of elections to ensure his remaining in power, his banishing of some opponents and his jailing of others. All these actions, from their viewpoint, must be with American approval. Hence their charge that Mr. Thieu is only an American puppet, brought in by the Americans and therefore removable by them.

## Leisurely approach indicated

Now, however, they seem disposed at least to probe the American position. What Messrs. Thuy and Tho seem to be asking of the Americans in their request for something "new" is a more explicit undertaking by the United States regarding the future of the Thieu government, even if the "immediate" change they demand is not possible.

All this would indicate a fairly leisurely approach by the North Vietnamese to the reopened peace talks. They do not give the impression of men desperate to conclude an

agreement because of the attrition while country has suffered. They may not be expecting — although they must certainly be hoping for — a McGovern victory in the presidential elections in November.

But they seem quite reconciled to the possibility that if Mr. Nixon wins another four-year mandate in November, he may be under less domestic American pressure to conclude an early agreement than before the election.

## Talks still thorny?

They seem solidly convinced that there is no way in which Mr. Nixon can rid himself of the Vietnam conflict without coming to terms with them, election victory or no election victory.

The coming secret talks between Messrs. Tho and Kissinger, therefore, are likely to be at least as thorny as previous ones. If, however, the latest remarks made by Messrs. Thuy and Tho indicate a real desire to get a substantive dialogue going, the way to a final settlement may still be long, but the dreary stalemate of the past nine months will have been broken. This is the hope that glimmers as both sides prepare for next Thursday's sessions and for the Kissinger-Tho talks that may well have taken place even before then.

C4J

207

Cooper Urges an Unconditional U.S. Pullout

By JOHN W. FINNEY
Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 19—
Senator John Sherman Cooper,
a leader of antiwar Repub-
licans in the Senate, proposed
the unconditional with-
of all American forces
1. Indochina within four
months.

The Cooper proposal, made
in the form of an amendment
to the pending foreign aid bill,
caused new complications for
the Administration as it sought
to ward off passage of any
end-the-war legislation by the
Senate.

In some ways the Cooper
amendment goes further than
the troop withdrawal amend-
ment that the Senate majority
leader, Mike Mansfield, has of-
fered to the foreign aid bill.
Until the Cooper move, the
Mansfield amendment had been
expected to be the focal point
of the new Vietnam debate
building up in the Senate.

Senator Mansfield made it
clear today, however, that any
votes were now likely to be
postponed as a result of the
announcement that Henry A.
Kissinger, the President's na-
tional security adviser, was
holding private negotiations
with North Vietnamese repre-
sentatives in Paris.

Mr. Mansfield's amendment
require the withdrawal
American forces from
Vietnam by Aug. 31, a
that he is now proposing
to shift to Oct. 1.

In addition, the amendment
would require the termination
of all American hostilities in
Indochina, such as air and na-
val activities, upon agreement
for a cease-fire and release of
prisoners of war.

In contrast, the Cooper
amendment would lay down no
conditions for withdrawal of
American forces and termina-
tion of hostilities. It would pro-
vide that funds could be used
by the President only for with-
drawing all United States
forces from Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, with the withdrawal
to be completed within four
months after enactment of the
legislation.

In a speech introducing his
amendment, Senator Cooper
argued that all the end-the-war
amendments that contained
conditions, such as release of
prisoners, basically differed lit-
tle from Administration policy
and in essence represented a
prescription for continuing
rather than ending American
involvement in the Vietnam
war.

WASHINGTON POST 21 JULY 1972

The Mansfield Amendment

At Senator Mansfield's initiative, the Foreign Relations Committee wrote into the military aid authorization bill a provision categorically cutting off funds to maintain "any" American forces in South Vietnam after Aug. 31, that is, to preclude a residual force; Mr. Mansfield indicates he would slip the date a month. The administration opposes this particular "Mansfield amendment," which differs from earlier versions, on grounds that the President alone should direct policy on Vietnam and that passage would deprive him of an important bargaining chip—the threat of indefinitely maintaining a residual force—which he is using at the Paris talks. (The amendment further states that all American military operations in Indochina should end after the United States and Hanoi agree to a cease-fire and after the prisoners are released, but this part of the amendment is simply a declaration without the force of a fund cutoff behind it.) A vote could come as early as today.

The issue is more complex than the debate on it
has so far made out. To start, we would reiterate
our judgment that it is unfortunate and gratuitous
for the President to keep contending that Congress
has no role in foreign affairs beyond ratifying his
own decisions. The Congress—in this instance, the
Senate—has ample constitutional and institutional
claim to try to affect war policy. And although the
onset of the political campaign undeniably com-
plicates the matter, the issue posed by the Mans-
field amendment should not be regarded as one to
be treated on party lines.

But neither can the amendment be taken simply
as an index of whether a given senator is "for" or
"against" the war, regardless of the tendency of
some of its supporters to call it an "end-the-war"
measure. In no conceivable sense could the re-
moval of American forces from South Vietnam
alone "end the war." or even the American role in

the war. American planes based outside of South
Vietnam could still be bombing. American prison-
ers would still be captive, and the American-sup-
ported government in Saigon—whose leader's re-
moval is Hanoi's dominant war aim—would still
be in power. Passage of the amendment would no
doubt be taken by many as a triumph for the
"peace" movement. It would be politically embar-
rassing to the President, though surely he could
find a political riposte by accusing his supporters—
and fairly so—of undercutting his negotiating
strategy in Paris. But none of these results, how-
ever they are evaluated, should be confused with
ending the war.

The core truth is that the denial of funds for a
residual force would indeed undercut the Presi-
dent's negotiating strategy. That being so, we sub-
mit that the only basis on which a responsible vote
can be cast for the Mansfield amendment is the
belief that Mr. Nixon's strategy is not going to
work by November anyway and that he will then
be defeated by Senator McGovern. Mr. McGovern
has pledged, of course, not only to pull all forces
out of South Vietnam within 90 days of taking of-
fice but—a step not contemplated at all by the
Mansfield amendment—to stop the bombing on
Inauguration Day. That is to say, before taking a
crucial card out of Mr. Nixon's bargaining hand,
legislators must be persuaded that the President's
policy and political career alike are bankrupt. With-
out such a dual conviction, a vote for the Mans-
field amendment would be capricious in the ex-
treme. And even with those two convictions, those
who vote for the Mansfield amendment must take
upon themselves the responsibility for bringing
Congress into the act not only far too late in the
day but in a way which would threaten to under-
mine or even scuttle the Paris negotiating process
which, whatever its promise, is now so clearly
under way.

BOSTON GLOBE 21 July 1972 (25)

Horror nears the absolute

The wonder is not so much that the North Vietnamese and others throughout Indochina have been able to survive the almost incredible tonnage of bombs that are poured down on them day and night from American bombers.

The larger wonder is that Americans themselves, from the President down to the least one of us, are not so sickened by carnage that the thought of just one more innocent

Consider the escalation of the tonnage in the first six months of this year while the war, as White House spokesmen persist in putting it, is being "wound down." The 56-790 tons dropped on Indochina in January was not enough. It was raised to 67,536 tons in February, 70-000 in March, 91,670 in April, 105,729 in May and 112,460 in June, a 100 percent increase in death and destruction in six months. Is there any-

JUNE'S TONNAGE WAS DOUBLE JANUARY'S

peasant blown to bits as he toils in his small field would be, more than even the most callous could bear.

Were it one of the soulless monsters recorded in history on whose orders death and destruction were poured unceasingly from the sky, it would be appalling and almost unbelievable enough. But it is an American President who has ordered it, and American young men in American planes who carry out his terrible orders. The total inhumanity of what Americans are doing on orders of an American President devastates the spirit enough even without reading news accounts by columnist Joseph Kraft and others of the bits of human bodies they have seen in rubble and Haiphong in a city so pockmarked with craters that it resembles a lunar landscape.

one for still more of it in July and August?

Bombs, more and more sophisticated as we sharpen our techniques for killing, are falling at the rate of more than 3700 every day, 155 every hour, two or three every minute, with scarcely an hour when our bombers are not overhead, cursed by the peasants running for cover, their hearts hardened with hatred.

Peace, if it can be engineered now (one day's reports are contradicted by the next day's developments), will save the whole of Indochina from further American-made and American-delivered devastation. But America itself will be a long time recovering from what it has done not only to a land of peasants but to itself.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE 22 JULY 1972 (24)

Opinion on the Campus

War in Viet Nam
Still Top Concern

BY DANIEL C. BEGGS AND HENRY A. COPELAND

In the opinions of the nation's college students, the Viet Nam War continues to top the list as the single greatest issue facing America today. In a national campus poll conducted last month, nearly 30 per cent of the students felt that the Southeast Asian conflict was our most pressing problem, a number significantly up from that found in a similar poll taken last October.

Also, at that time, the economy was viewed as the second most urgent problem. In this latest reading on the opinions of youth, however, concern about inflation and unemployment has given way to ecology and pollution, and what many termed simply "internal dissent."

Commented a Syracuse University coed: "I think the most serious problem is general dissent within the United States, and I don't think it's only young people. The primary votes for both McGovern and

Wallace show an awful lot of people aren't happy."

Regarding the Viet Nam War, a University of Minnesota student said: "After so many years, it looked like Viet Nam was a thing of the past. Now, it seems to be back as strong as ever. He's done a lot of good but I'm sure "newed involvement at Nam" is hurting Nixon."

In early June, 590 randomly chosen college students from 23 schools were interviewed for the latest Campus Opinion poll. Interviewers asked:

"What, in your opinion, is the single greatest issue facing America today?"

Answers for June and last October are compared below:

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>June, 1972</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Viet Nam</td><td>29%</td></tr><tr><td>Ecology/Environment</td><td>17%</td></tr><tr><td>Internal Dissent</td><td>12%</td></tr><tr><td>Economy</td><td>11%</td></tr><tr><td>Racial Strife</td><td>7%</td></tr><tr><td>Other/No Problem</td><td>24%</td></tr><tr><td>Viet Nam<br>October, 1971</td><td>24%</td></tr><tr><td>Ecology/Environment</td><td>11%</td></tr><tr><td>Racial Strife</td><td>13%</td></tr><tr><td>Overpopulation</td><td>11%</td></tr><tr><td>Other/No Opinion</td><td>8%</td></tr><tr><td>© 1972. Unidex Corp., Bloomington, Ind.</td><td>26%</td></tr></tbody></table>

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR 22 JULY 1976 (24)

# Church: Hanoi will get its own terms

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, according 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 believers here since the Democratic Party splintered itself at Miami Beach. It is that Mr. Nixon now downs'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 targets 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 bombing kikes 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 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 withdrawn 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 Democrats 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.

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 23 JULY 1972

# Nixon may pull the rug on Vietnam War issue

JOHN S. KNIGHT

George McGovern has a passel of issues with which to confront President Nixon in the forthcoming campaign. But none, including his controversial and hotly debated tax and welfare reforms, looms as large in the public mind as the Indochina war.

Simply put, Sen. McGovern sees himself as the apostle of peace, while President Nixon is to be depicted—if not the war candidate — at least as the man whose hard-line approach to peace has failed to end the war.

The Democratic candidate promises a halt to all U. S. bombing in Southeast Asia and an unconditional withdrawal of all American forces within 90 days after his inauguration. McGovern says he will take those actions without assurances that U.S. prisoners would be returned, but believes that his withdrawal course "would trigger the release of our prisoners."

Furthermore, Sen. McGovern has said: "I would go to Hanoi and beg, if I thought that would release the boys one day earlier." He added: "Begging is better than bombing."

President Nixon, on the other hand, views McGovern's position as naive and uninformed. Republicans critical of McGovern allege that his "no-condition" concessions actually serve to make negotiations with Hanoi more difficult and only prolong the war.

And that is where the public debate rests at this time while the campaign strategists in both camps are hard at work.

At first glance, George McGovern appears to have the advantage on this issue. Early in the Nixon Administration, the President announced that he had "a plan to end the war," and expected to be held accountable by the American people if he did not end the conflict. Though the "plan" remains unveiled, it obviously rested upon the success of "Vietnamization," a concept that the South Vietnamese — given adequate arms and training—could hack it on their own.

Vietnamization, though not a total failure, has fallen far short of anticipated objectives. Only the most massive bombing in our military history has prevented the North Vietnamese from overrunning South Vietnam's defenses and toppling the Thieu regime in Saigon.

Yet the strong possibility exists that we may be nearer an accommodation with Hanoi than at any time since the Paris peace talks were first convened on Jan. 25, 1969.

Nixon's tough stand in mining Haiphong harbor and North Vietnam's other ports brought about a resumption of negotiations, with Henry Kissinger playing a significant role in secret discussions with Hanoi's Le Duc Tho, a leading member of North Vietnam's politburo, and Xuan Thuy, Hanoi's chief negotiator in the formal discussions.

Upon reporting to President Nixon, Presidential adviser Kissinger said only that there

were grounds for "modest optimism." The official Washington line is to discount the likelihood of a major breakthrough, finding "no evidence that makes you feel confident of successful negotiations."

Yet something is stirring. Columnist Jack Anderson reports that President Nixon is sanguine that a stand-still ceasefire will result from the Paris peace discussions. The possibility of a truce such as has existed in Korea for 20 years might be regarded as a satisfactory solution.

In my quest for further information and background, I turned to Prof. Milton J. Esman of the Center for International Studies at Cornell University and George Quester, professor of government and director of the Peace Studies program at the same institution.

Both of these educators have long opposed what they term "the Johnson-Nixon policies" in Vietnam. They are severe critics of President Nixon's massive bombing in Indochina.

So I asked the question as to whether Moscow and Peking are exercising pressures upon Hanoi to reach an accommodation with the United States? Professor Esman replies:

"George Quester and I have been speculating on your question 'are there any Moscow or Peking pressures at work?' The answer has to be an emphatic yes. Hanoi has to be satisfied with the material support they were getting from China and the USSR before Nixon imposed the blockade. Their moral support also seemed reasonably secure, even though the summit meetings threatened some uncertainties.

"Can Hanoi possibly be satisfied with the material and moral support it has been receiving since the blockade? Almost surely not. Only a small fraction of the normal material shipments are reaching North Vietnam. The Chinese are doing little, hinting that the Russians should use minesweepers to open up Haiphong. The Russians are doing little, suggesting that Peking should open up Chinese ports for the transshipment of cargoes from Soviet freighters. The Russian leadership went ahead with a very cordial summit with Nixon in Moscow. The Chinese quickly invited Kissinger to come to Peking for renewed consultations at the same time that Soviet President Podgorny was visiting Hanoi.

"All this means that the North Vietnamese will be materially outgunned by ARVN, supported by U. S. air and naval forces. Hanoi is made to look like an immoderate and unreasonable camp of fanatics, ignoring the advice of big, responsible socialist states such as China and the USSR. The whole exercise may be beautifully illustrated by leaflets the U. S. has been dropping over North Vietnam showing photos of Nixon with Mao and Nixon with Brezhnev. Apart from the imagery, rumors continue to emerge that the Russians have been urging Hanoi to moderate its demands (as suggested by the unorthodoxic tone of the communique issued after Podgorny's visit) and that the Chinese

have been urging the same ... With more clear and open material and more support, it will be difficult for either Moscow or Peking to refute these rumors.

"Moscow and Peking may not be pressuring Hanoi in the sense of 'make peace with Nixon or else we'll abandon you.' But there is a clear message of 'don't count on us for too much if you and Nixon don't make peace ...' Nixon's action in blockading Haiphong indeed reduced how much the North Vietnamese could count on the Chinese and Russians materially. And his visits to the Communist capitals reduced the moral support available as well.

"For the Russians, the price of more resolute support for Hanoi would have meant postponement of SALT and the detente with West Germany, as well as whatever trade possibilities may emerge with the United States. For the Chinese, there is also now an interest in detente with the United States, in part because 25 years of hostility have given the Russians a position of advantage.

"Hanoi is thus a victim of the Sino-Soviet schism. Despite the rhetoric, both of these powers are more interested in the state of their relations with the U. S. than in the victory of proletarian revolution in Indochina.

"While each would like to keep the U. S. off balance in Vietnam, they are not prepared to cooperate with one another enough to sustain a high level of military operation. by Hanoi. This new reality must be clear to Hanoi.

"It represents very significant pressure on them because they cannot fight both the ARVN and U. S. air power without a substantial flow of material which has now been reduced to a trickle. If they have to revert to guerilla tactics, the Thieu regime this time may be able to establish effective control south of the DMZ.

"Hanoi is really hurting. They know that Nixon is determined to maintain the blockade and continue the air war which he will probably be able to manage politically in the U. S. By their actions, if not by their words, Moscow and Peking seem to be urging Hanoi to find a peace formula. Given Nixon's terms, the effect of any acceptable formula would leave a non-Communist government in control of South Vietnam. This would deprive the North Vietnamese of the prize for which they have struggled and sacrificed for a quarter century — a unified, socialist fatherland."

Given this background from two eminent foreign affairs specialists who find Nixon's position on Vietnam incompatible with their own views, it is conceivable that the President may be able to dispose of the "war question" before election day.

Such an eventuality would deprive Sen. McGovern of his most potent issue — a lingering, costly and bloody conflict which has sickened every thinking citizen and torn out country asunder.

A promise kept — to end the war — means to President Nixon an election won.

WASHINGTON POST 24 JULY 1972

The Cooper Amendment

Senator Cooper's amendment to the military aid bill, due to be voted on today as an alternative to a new and revised Mansfield amendment, poses to the Congress for the first time the stark issue of whether it will take unto itself the responsibility for imposing a quick and unconditional end to American involvement in the Vietnam war. As we noted the other day, the latest version of Senator Mansfield's amendment, which would cut off funds for a residual force in Vietnam but allow the President to continue bombing, is a tentative gesture: it could undercut the President's negotiating strategy but it would not bring about an end of the war. By contrast, the Cooper amendment, while it could undercut the President's strategy, would do so with the additional and transforming effect of ending American combat participation. By means of a fund cutoff, it would compel the withdrawal of all American forces and an end to the bombing if the war did not end by negotiation in four months.

But what about the prisoners? The uniqueness of Senator Cooper's approach lies in the fact that previous war-policy amendments have conditioned an end to American military activity upon an agreement to release the POWs, or upon their actual release. "On the one hand these amendments have provided that all funds shall be denied except for the withdrawal of our forces," said Mr. Cooper last week. "Then in contradiction, they provided implicity that funds for our participation in the war shall continue, that the United States will continue to fight in Vietnam from other countries, from the air, or from the seas, until our prisoners are released." This is, of course, the approach the President is now taking at Paris, so far as is publicly known. His offer to withdraw and stop bombing is conditioned upon a release of POWs (and presumably upon Hanoi's acceptance of a cease-fire as well).

The demonstrable fact is that this approach has yet to produce results. Barring success in four months, Mr. Cooper would act on the expectation that the prisoners will be freed—and that other nations will urge Hanoi to free them—only when the United States withdraws and halts the bombing. "I do not believe that this amendment or any amendment can promise absolutely the release of our prisoners of war," said the senator. "I do not believe that any individual can promise the release of our prisoners of war. I can only say that, in my view, negotiations and withdrawal offer the best chance to secure their release." That he mentioned "negotiations" at all can probably best be put down to his reluctance to embarrass his fellow Republican, President Nixon. It seems plain that Mr. Cooper believes "withdrawal" is the only way.

So finally the Senate has the occasion to vote directly and forcefully (by a fund cutoff) on the President's strategy of negotiating from strength. By this vote, it has the further occasion to assert its constitutional responsibility to direct the use of funds and its constitutional right to bring its influence to bear—as best it can—in the shaping of foreign policy.

Frankly, we cannot conceive of a more serious

and difficult vote for conscientious legislators. For one thing, they are being asked to second-guess the President in a matter of the greatest national import—in a matter, moreover, where the President has in train a secret negotiation which conceivably could succeed and which might be torpedoed by the challenge to it which they are now requested to endorse. What makes it more difficult is that conscientious legislators are also being asked to make this momentous intervention after Congress, for years, has gone along with successive Presidents and enabled them, if not encouraged them, to develop the very policies which the Cooper amendment would now suddenly reverse.

We would agree with those who argue that the flabbiness of Congress from the first debate on the Tonkin Resolution in 1964 is no argument by itself for compounding crimes of omission that stretch back over eight years or more. Nor has President Nixon earned, by his performance, much sympathy or consideration from Congress. Repeatedly he has rudely scorned opportunities to make Congress his partner in a genuinely national, bi-partisan war policy—opportunities which would have taken nothing away from his own concepts of how we ought to proceed. Last November he loudly denounced as no part of his policy an earlier Mansfield amendment which was actually written into law, only to reveal in January that almost its precise terms had been secretly offered to the North Vietnamese by Dr. Kissinger the previous May. For the resulting frustration of congressional war critics and the subsequent hardening of their position, he has himself, in large measure, to blame; more than one senator, seeking some accommodation with the White House on a Vietnam peace plan, has been bluntly told that this is to be Mr. Nixon's show.

So we can sympathize with those who will vote with Senator Cooper to impose a four-month time limit, once and for all, on American involvement in Vietnam. But we nonetheless doubt the wisdom, and still more the practical purpose, of such a vote. For one thing, whatever the outcome in the Senate, the measure is almost certain to fail in the House. In any case, in reality it cannot amount to more than a shattering vote of no confidence in a difficult and delicate effort, now presumably under way, to translate weeks of pulverizing bombing attacks into a negotiated settlement.

The Senate cannot undo the bombing and the mining and the Cambodian and Laotian "incursions" and all the rest of Mr. Nixon's three-and-a-half-year performance in the conduct of our Vietnam war effort—including some 20,000 American dead. It can only undermine the last chance he has to make good, before election day, on four years of promises to end American participation in the war. He does not need Congress to tell him that the great majority of Americans expect that promise to be kept. And if he fails to deliver on it by November, the American electorate will have an opportunity at that time to render a more meaningful judgment upon his record than any that could be made in the United States Senate today.

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 26 JULY 1972 (1 AUG)

# The Question Of The Dikes

Since before the Christian era the inhabitants of what is now North Vietnam have maintained earthworks to contain the Red River and its tributaries as they flow toward the Gulf of Tonkin. The system contains some 2500 miles of dams and dikes, which hold back floods and irrigate the plains of the delta. Some 15,000,000 peasants live and farm in the area; it is North Vietnam's major source of food.

The destruction of these ancient works by bombing would be an unpardonable crime that would bring death by flood and starvation to thousands of Vietnamese civilians, and yet ever since American aerial attacks on the North were intensified last spring there have been rumors that the United States has been bombing the dikes. There is evidence that bomb hits have occurred; there is no evidence that attacks have been deliberate or on a massive scale.

Nevertheless the North Vietnamese, apparently fearful that the United States might further escalate the war by breaching the dikes, some of which were weakened in floods last year, have been mounting a world-wide campaign to focus attention on what the United States might try to do as it desperately seeks new ways to defeat Hanoi. Five years ago the Johnson Administration considered the possibility of bombing the dams and dikes, but properly decided against it. At that time Secretary of Defense McNamara wrote, "There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and most of the world would not permit the United States to go."

That was sound advice, but times have changed. The U.S. has unleashed the heaviest bombing attacks ever on North Vietnam as President Nixon tries to fulfill his 1968 pledge to end the war, before the voters go to the polls later this year. So we think Hanoi has reason to be concerned, especially since the season of rains and floods is beginning. Independent observers also are concerned.

United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim says he has received unverified reports *that the dikes are being bombed, whether intentionally or not, and he has warned against disaster this might bring about. The Rev. D.*

Eugene Carson Blake, citing reports by a French reporter and Swedish television films, says he believes U.S. planes are deliberately bombing the dikes and that he does not accept the claims of lower-echelon U.S. officials. Dr. Blake, Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, has called on President Nixon "immediately to cease this bombing."

The United States denials have been persistent but less than fully satisfying. Secretary of Defense Laird says there "has been no targeting of dikes and dams" but that a dike tied in with a bridge network or missile site might be hit as the military objective was bombed. That allows a lot of leeway. The White House says there is a presidential memorandum specifically prohibiting targeting of dams and dikes. Last April Mr. Nixon said that while dams and dikes are "a strategic target, and indirectly a military target, (bombing) would result in an enormous number of civilian casualties. That is something we want to avoid. It is also something we believe is not needed."

What is needed, we think, is an unequivocal statement by Mr. Nixon that deliberate bombing of the dikes is unthinkable and will not be undertaken under any circumstances. Hanoi, if it has a clear case, could invite inspection by an international group, perhaps connected with the UN, or failing that, by objective American news reporters, who, so far as is known, have not been shown damage on any appreciable scale. It should not be too difficult to evaluate the damage, nor should it be difficult for the Administration to categorically repudiate any thought of bombing the dikes (unless Washington thinks ambiguity would add to pressure on Hanoi to come to terms at the Paris peace talks).

Whether the Administration likes it or not, reports of U.S. actions and intentions are gaining currency, and it is up to Mr. Nixon to end these frightening charges once and for all.

26 JULY 1972

# On bombing

The differences between the American Government and the Secretariat of the United Nations over the bombing of North Vietnam are symptomatic of a basic difference between Americans and most people in the world over bombing. Americans have never been bombed in their homes. Most other people in the world know what it is like to have sudden destruction descend from the skies. Kurt Waldheim is a European. The memory is still vivid in all Europe of the bombs which wrecked many of the great cities of Europe during World War II.

Mr. Waldheim speaks as Secretary-General of the United Nations and as a European when he protests against American bombs which sometimes, admittedly, do hit the dikes in North Vietnam which contain the rice paddies and thus sustain the food supply of the plain people of that country.

Washington promptly retorts that he has been duped by the North Vietnamese into taking up a public position which could hamper the military operations which President Nixon is conducting in retaliation for the major offensive which North Vietnam has launched into South Vietnam.

There is no common ground between these two positions and these two points are: 1. Americans are more willing to use bombing weapon than are Europeans because Americans have never yet been on the receiving end of this weapon. Europeans are highly suspicious of the motives of anyone who uses bombs, and also skeptical of the military effectiveness of bombs. They have seen bombs increase the will to resistance of a people. They know the anger which wells up among survivors.

We cannot know that every American pilot sent on a bombing mission over North Vietnam is scrupulously careful to avoid hitting anything but lines of supply and weapons aimed at him. There is the unfortunate case of General Lavelle who admits he deliberately engaged in bombing against orders. We do know that President Nixon has authorized only the bombing of supply lines and weapons.

As for any bombing of North Vietnam, there is still a substantial part of the main Army of North Vietnam in the south. The great offensive seems to be receding now, but there was a major offensive and it probably very nearly achieved a decisive military success. Mr. Nixon felt entitled to answer that offen-
sion by trying to isolate the battlefield its accustomed sources of supply. mined the harbor of Haiphong, which seems to have stopped almost all movement of supplies into North Vietnam by sea. He authorized the bombing of the rail and road lines coming down from China in an effort to cut down the supplies coming overland. It has been

partially successful. In view of the size and weight and near success of the offensive the response was as justified as anything is in war. It was an available, partial answer to a major act of war.

But the outside world will inevitably be skeptical. Some civilians are bound to be hurt by any bombing. Some dikes have admittedly been hit. The argument is that the bomb was aimed at the road or anti-aircraft battery sitting on the dike.

For all such reasons any bombing by Americans becomes bad publicity for the United States everywhere else in the world. And there is a good deal of evidence that bombing increases the will to fight among the North Vietnamese people.

There is always a question whether the military results of the bombing equal

the damage done to the one who bombs. Strategic bombing in World War II was found, after the war, to have been the most expensive and least productive way of waging war. The same blood and treasure put into other weapons would have had more military effect.

Hence we urge on the White House the utmost restraint in the bombing. Mr. Nixon is entitled to try to stop train loads of guns and ammunition, but he should be as sparing as possible in the methods used to that end because his motives are going to be misunderstood among friends abroad as well as by unfriends. And bombing is at best a marginal advantage to the user. He should, of course, end all bombing just as soon as he thinks he safely can.

NEW YORK TIMES 26 JULY 1972

Hanoi's Choice ...

What is probably the last round of the Paris peace
talks prior to the American Presidential election is
now under way with the resumption of private meet-
ings between Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese
Minister Le Duc Tho.

The issues are clearly drawn. President Nixon has
offered a military settlement—a cease-fire, followed
by release of American prisoners of war and withdrawal
of all American troops in four months—leaving the
political issue of South Vietnam's future government
to be settled among Vietnamese. Alternatively, he is
prepared to discuss a political settlement, ruling out in
advance only the "imposition" of a pro-Communist co-
alition government by the United States.

Hanoi heretofore has insisted on a political settlement first, while refusing to negotiate it with Saigon unless President Thieu resigns and a new government that it dislikes less is installed there. But at least two hints of possible flexibility have now been lofted.

A possible willingness to separate the military from
the political settlement was hinted in the Hanoi state-
ment that political issues could be divided into "two
aspects." One, a halt in American support of the Thieu
Government, was Washington's "responsibility." But the
next stage of arranging a replacement government could
be worked out among Vietnamese alone.

The demand for a halt in American support of the
Thieu Government presumably raises the question of
military and economic aid. An aid halt has long been
part of Hanoi's demand for "total" American withdrawal
and Mr. Kissinger has indicated that this is negotiable.

The other hint of possible Communist flexibility came
a statement last week by Madame Binh, the Viet-
namese negotiator, that suggested less rigidity on a political
settlement. Some observers see a possible effort to
explore a middle ground between the Communist demand
for immediate removal of President Thieu and the forma-
tion of a coalition government, and President Nixon's
January announcement that General Thieu had offered
to resign one month before general elections conducted
by mixed Saigon-Communist-neutralist electoral com-
missions.

What is not known yet is whether these hints, made
publicly, are open for examination in the private talks
or have just been advanced for propaganda, something
that has happened in the past. Once Hanoi takes a deci-
sion to negotiate a settlement, it should be possible to
devise formulas to reconcile the differences.

...Washington's Evasion

In its response to Secretary General Waldheim's
appeal not to bomb the dikes of North Vietnam, the
United States Government has distorted and evaded the
main issue.

Dismissing as mere propaganda widespread reports
that the dikes are being bombed, Secretary of State
Rogers announced that he had instructed Ambassador
Rush to point out to Mr. Waldheim that "the information
that he has received concerning alleged deliberate bomb-
ing to damage the dikes in North Vietnam is false."

The Secretary General in fact had taken pains to make
clear to a news conference Monday that he was not
accusing the United States of deliberately bombing
Hanoi's vital and highly vulnerable flood control net-

work. "I cannot tell you whether the bombing was inten-
tional or not," Mr. Waldheim said in response to a
question. But he added that he had received "private and
unofficial" information from Hanoi "that the dikes were
bombed and also the nearby areas causing cracks in the
dams and producing the same results as if the dikes
were bombed directly."

President Nixon himself said last month that bombing
the dikes could cause "extraordinary" civilian casualties.
He said then: "We have orders out not to hit dikes."
But American officials have since said only that the
dikes are not being "deliberately" targeted. Some offi-
cials have conceded that some dikes might have been
hit "inadvertently" during the continuing heavy Amer-
ican bombing of the north, as a number of Western
reporters and diplomats posted in Hanoi have reported.

Echoing the recent plea of Dr. Eugene Carson Blake,
secretary general of the World Council of Churches,
Secretary General Waldheim said: "I am deeply con-
cerned about this development and I appeal to stop thi-
kind of bombing which could lead to enormous hun
suffering, enormous disaster."

This humane appeal from the official spokesman of
the international community deserves a more forthright
response from the United States Government.

1-E

BALTIMORE SUN
25 JULY 1972 P-1

Senate
defeats
aid bill

Had attached
strong anti-war
amendment

By ALBERT SEHLSTEDT, JR.
Washington Bureau of The Sun

Washington—The Senate unexpectedly killed a $1.7 billion foreign military aid bill last night after it had amended the measure to withdraw American forces from Indochina if United States prisoners of war were released.

The vote to kill the bill was 48 to 42. The decision followed a statement by Senator Hugh Scott (R., Pa.), the minority leader, who said the legislation with the withdrawal amendment attached would "not help the chances for peace or the negotiations in Paris."

Eight-hour debate

The effect of the withdrawal amendment on America's bartering position with the North Vietnamese was one of the key elements in a spirited Senate debate that lasted for more than eight hours.

The death of the aid bill, which could be resurrected in another form later in the session, occurred after Senate opposition to the Vietnam war had reached a new milestone in the legislative process.

Earlier in the day, the Senate had voted to cut off funds for American military operations in Indochina, conditioned solely on the release of the prisoners.

Far-reaching but short-lived

Temporary though it was, the amendment stood for a few hours as the most far-reaching action ever taken by the Senate in its years-long debate over Vietnam.

Senate supporters of the amendment, which in any event would have faced stiff opposition in the House and a likely presidential veto, called the 50-to-45 vote for withdrawal "an historic occasion" and a "massive step forward."

Opponents charged that the majority's action could "scuttle the Paris peace talks" and subject the remaining American forces to withdraw under enemy fire.

The withdrawal would be completed four months after enactment of the legislation, assuming the prisoners were released by Hanoi.

There was no provision in the amendment for an internationally supervised cease-fire, as was advocated by President Nixon in his May 8 television address to the nation.

Nor was there any provision for an accounting of Americans missing in action. There are 512 American prisoners of war and 1,243 men listed as missing in action, according to Defense Department figures.

Modified version

The amendment approved by the Senate was a modified version of a proposal from Senator John Sherman Cooper (R., Ky.), who had wanted an unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Indochina—meaning Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The Cooper amendment was later modified, however, by an additional clause proposed by Senator Edward M. Brooke (R., Mass.), who pleaded for the release of the prisoners as a condition to the pullout.

Senator Cooper was so distressed by this addition to his proposal that he voted against the amendment as modified by Senator Brooke. The Ken-tuckian indicated that adding conditional clauses to his pullout directive would simply be following past legislative practices that had failed to end the fighting.

Senate liberals and moderates on both sides of the aisle combined to pass the Cooper-Brooke amendments.

Maryland's two Republican senators split. Senator J. Glenn Beall, Jr., voted against the amendment and Senator Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., voted for it.

Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, the Democratic presidential candidate who has made ending the war a prime campaign issue, was absent for yesterday's voting. However, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (D., Mo.), his running mate for the vice presidency, was on hand and voted with the majority.

Opponents of the amendment, led by Senator John C. Stennis (D. Miss.) chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tried to strike the withdrawal language from the bill, but that move failed by a vote of 49 to 46.

Senator Beall voted for the motion to strike the Cooper-Brooke amendment; Senator Mathias voted against it.

Senator Cooper had originally proposed his amendment in the following form:

"Funds authorized or 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 and 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."

Then Senator Brooke added the following phraseology:

"... provided that there has been a release of all American prisoners of war held by the government of North Vietnam or any other government allied with them."

Senator Brooke contended that without his additional language Congress would be asking the United States government to take on good faith North Vietnam's intentions after the pullout was completed. He said this country would have "absolutely nothing left" to negotiate with after all Americans had left Indochina.