Kissinger briefs the press: 'A war that has been raging for ten years is drawing to a conclusion'

'PEACE IS AT HAND'

There was a moment last week when Henry Kissinger-awakened out of a deep sleep by a 2 a.m. phone call from the White House Situation Room—thought it was “all going to go into the ash can.” Months of painstaking secret negotiations seemed threatened by the news out of Hanoi—a dramatic confirmation that the U.S. and North Vietnam were, as widely reported, on the brink of peace, and a vitriolic charge that Washington was balking at signing the prepared accord. That stung the White House into action. Kissinger called a news conference the next day and revealed that an end to an anguished decade of war was indeed drawing near. Then, spelling out the terms of an agreement that amounted to a diplomatic triumph for his boss, Kissinger announced: “Peace is at hand.”

Just how close at hand was a most beguiling question. In Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu fumed publicly that the U.S. was pushing him around and vowed that he would not sign any agreement until North Vietnam withdrew its army from the south. In Hanoi, the Communists warned that if the U.S. failed “as promised” to show up in Paris on Oct. 31 to sign the agreement, all bets were off. Despite this, Administration officials confidently insisted that the agreement—which would bring U.S. troops and POW’s home within 60 days—was all but complete. As they saw it, Thieu was blowing off steam to convince his own constituents that Saigon—not the U.S.—had the decisive say in the final agreement. All that remained, said Henry Kissinger, was to clarify several points in the complex accord—a task that would take only a single negotiating meeting

of a few days. He added: “Any day they are ready to meet, we will be there.”

Even if the final agreement was indeed that close, the terms themselves were full of possible boobytraps—notably that the de facto partition of South Vietnam (map, page 34) could crumble and ultimately set the stage for renewed fighting. And pitfalls of misunderstand-ing yawned along the way. Already, for example, Hanoi's idea that the Oct. 31 signing date was a firmly agreed dead-line was actually—according to Kissinger—a misinterpretation. All the U.S. had promised, he said, was a conscientious effort to meet that date.

Diplomatic Finesse, Military Risks

Hanoi's clamor to meet the deadline clearly sprang from distrustful fear that a re-elected Richard Nixon would renege on the terms already negotiated. Ironi-cally enough, this insistence gave the President's campaign yet another boost; it was Hanoi, not the White House, that flourished the prospect of peace by elec-tion day. When the news of the Paris breakthrough reached the already em-battled camp of George McGovern, the reaction was one of stunned surprise and confusion. “We saw Kissinger flitting around the world,” said one McGovern aide, “and frankly we were skeptical about it.” When the Democrats finally got things sorted out, McGovern (whose own Vietnam peace plan was far more generous to North Vietnam than the ver-sion worked out by Kissinger) publicly expressed the hope that Washington and Hanoi could iron out their remaining differences soon. Still pressing his at-tack, McGovern demanded: “Why, Mr. Nixon, did you take another four

years to put an end to this tragic war?”

That was a legitimate question. Clearly, if a dovish President had been willing to settle for less—a smaller fig leaf to cloak the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina—the past four years of suffering in Vietnam could have been avoided. But just as clearly, Mr. Nixon has viewed Vietnam as a strategic paradigm—a global example of American will. And by a combination of diplomatic finesse and daring military risk he had managed to extract from the Communists the kind of concessions that were unthinkable four years ago (page 36).

The dramatic and highly detailed disclosures of the peace terms (box, page 34) capped 39 months of prolonged secret discussions between Kissinger and Hanoi's negotiator, Le Duc Tho. The turning point came Oct. 8 when Le Duc Tho told Kissinger that Hanoi had modified two of its key demands. The Communists no longer insisted that a cease-fire and a political settlement be negotiated simultaneously; instead, they went along with Mr. Nixon's two-step proposal of last May: a cease-fire followed by direct political negotiations between Saigon and the Communists. Hanoi also discarded its standing demand that Thieu must go and dropped its former insistence on a coalition government. With that, things moved quickly—both in Paris and on the propaganda front. Two weeks ago, the North Vietnamese invited NEWSWEEK Senior Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave to Hanoi for an exclusive interview with Premier Pham Van Dong. In that interview (NEWSWEEK, Oct. 30), Dong revealed the extent to which the two sides were in agreement and promised to release all U.S. POW's immedi-

November 6, 1972

33

than three or four days. Although Kissinger's normally smooth delivery faltered from time to time, he was as articulate as ever—and even displayed an occasional touch of the famed Kissinger sense of humor. Referring to an entangled passage in the agreement dealing with plans for international supervision of the cease-

Communist cadres, and to accept the presence of U.S. air bases in Thailand and carriers off the Vietnamese coast. In exchange, the North Vietnamese extracted one fundamental concession from the U.S. Washington agreed that Hanoi could maintain, and resupply, its military forces in the south—a decision that en-

34

Newsweek

THE WAR IN INDOCHINA

ables the North Vietnamese to keep some 145,000 of their soldiers on Saigon's territory.

In his press conference, Kissinger enumerated "six or seven very concrete issues" that still need to be worked out. Foremost among them, he said, was the U.S. feeling that the agreement should spell out the methods by which the international supervisory body can begin work at the same time a cease-fire is declared—a move aimed at forestalling what Kissinger called "a last effort to seize as much territory as possible." (Kissinger's concern was not without foundation; a frantic land-grab was already under way. On one day last week, the number of Communist-initiated military attacks was the highest since the 1968 Tet offensive.) Other unresolved points, he said, included extending the cease-fire to Laos and Cambodia, ensuring that the phrase "administrative structure" in describing the proposed National Council of Reconciliation is not interpreted by Hanoi to mean a coalition government and reworking the agreement to permit Saigon to share the spotlight at the formal signing ceremony.

## What Is Thieu's Status?

Kissinger also voiced some concern over what he called "certain ambiguities" in the NEWSWEEK interview with Pham Van Dong. Dong "seemed to be ... under a misapprehension as to what the agreement contained," Kissinger said. "and we would like to have that clarified." While he did not elaborate, it seemed probable that Kissinger was principally worried about an apparent difference of opinion between Washington and Hanoi over the status of President Thieu. In his remarks, Dong said, "Thieu must resign before the elections. He is a finished man." Yet the draft agreement as publicly revealed does not call for Thieu's resignation, and if Washington and Hanoi have reached different conclusions about the South Vietnamese leader's future status, that could be a serious snag in reaching accord.

In Paris, the North Vietnamese went out of their way to argue that the points Kissinger raised had already been settled. Brandishing a half-inch-thick mimoGRAPHED document, Hanoi spokesman Nguyen Thanh Le said: "This is the agreement to be signed." Then with a smile, Le went on to refute Kissinger's contention that another meeting was required to clear up last-minute details. "I'll let you in on a secret," he said. "I can tell you very definitely that all questions of interpretation and language have already been settled. In the private meetings, Dr. Kissinger was flanked by a very expert and qualified translator ... On Oct. 17, Dr. Kissinger and Xuan Thuy met from 10 a.m. until 2200 hours and the two men went through the agreement page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, line by line and word by word." Was Kissinger, then, a liar? one of the newsmen asked.

"You can interpret the facts as you wish," came the answer.

In Saigon, Thieu had already put his own interpretation on the accord. He fulminated over the Washington-Hanoi agreement and, almost daily, kept finding new reasons to insist that it was a totally unacceptable peace plan. He rejected the cease-fire provisions. Then he demanded a national referendum to determine whether his countrymen approved of Communist involvement in the government. Finally he imposed the "minimum demand" that all North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn from South Vietnam. Despite Thieu's often flaming rhetoric and his seemingly intransigent stance, Administration officials insisted that the Saigon leader was largely posturing—partly in hopes of

squeezing a last concession or two from Hanoi. "He's negotiating by making the maximum disturbance," said one U.S. official. "Some of his objections were reasonable, and we will take them to the North Vietnamese. But we don't think he can hold out for long."

In an interview with NEWSWEEK's de Borchgrave last week, Thieu lent some support to such assessments. "When Mr. Kissinger came here," he said "that was the first time I had any inkling that a settlement had been negotiated. Put yourself in my shoes. I have to prepare public opinion for the unexpected. Until at least a partial North Vietnamese withdrawal, I will not sign anything." Among other points that disturbed him, Thieu complained that the "National Council of Reconciliation and Concord" provided in the agreement to supervise new elections could be construed in its

Vietnamese translation as a coalition government. He wants to call the body an "election commission."

Thieu was also using his hour on the stage to shore up his domestic political position. Whatever additional concessions Thieu may genuinely hope to wring from the Communists, Washington officials believe that he is well aware how generous the settlement is. "Hell, the terms are better than he deserves," snapped an Administration aide. "All we're asking him to do is concede some territory that he couldn't possibly regain and give his opposition a minimum chance for political power." Said another official: "He has 90 per cent of the population under his control, a million-man army, 120,000 police, unlimited economic aid, guaranteed replacement of military

equipment, and he is obliged only to negotiate with the Communists. If he can't survive that ..." A Saigon politician loyal to Thieu pointed out the object of the South Vietnamese President's tantrums: "When the political settlement is finally accepted, it will look as though he has defied both Hanoi and Washington and has saved the people from the Communists. It will make him look very strong."

Wright—Miami Daily News

Man on the spot: 'Better terms than he deserves'

the wisdom of a decade of U.S. sacrifice.

"Our objective," said one ranking U.S. official, "was to get out in such a way that other countries would not lose faith in us, that Americans would not lose faith in their leaders and so we could look at ourselves and say we gave South Vietnam a chance to survive." Certainly the Administration feels it has accomplished those objectives. With his Peking and Moscow trips behind him and a settlement in Vietnam within reach, Richard Nixon believes he has laid the foundation for a new world order—or, to use his own phrase, "a generation of peace." Much could go wrong with that tidy global concept. But not since Franklin Roosevelt's first two terms did the occupant of the White House have so promising a chance to preside over a nation at peace with the world.

November 6, 1972

35

THE WAR IN INDOCHINA

Nixon visiting GI's in Vietnam, 1969: Could he have made the deal then?

The Vietnam Deal: Why Now?

He had a plan to end the war, he said, but throughout much of Richard Nixon's stewardship over the conflict in Vietnam, things only seemed to get worse. Though he steadily withdrew U.S. ground forces, Mr. Nixon launched the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, planted mines in North Vietnamese waters and unleashed the most devastating bombing campaign in modern warfare. His bold tactics spread the war throughout Indochina and sparked fitful outbursts of disunity at home. Then last week, the break finally came, and, with the announcements from Hanoi and Washington, it looked as if Mr. Nixon was finally about to make good on his famous campaign pledge. Yet even in the euphoria over the tentative agreement, a gnawing question lingered in the minds of many Americans: could the U.S. have made a deal with the Communists four years ago?

No doubt it could have—but not on Richard Nixon's terms. Only a few months ago, the North Vietnamese were demanding major concessions from Washington—including the ouster of Nguyen Van Thieu and the dismantling of his Saigon government. To Mr. Nixon, such compromises were unthinkable, the symbols of a “peace without honor” and a “sellout” of his allies in Saigon. He hung tough, and although in the end the President had to give a little too, he managed to wring more concessions from Hanoi than ever.

of his war policy has thought would be possible.

Only the North Vietnamese leaders themselves know why they suddenly decided to come around and break the negotiating deadlock. But there was no shortage of explanations for their seeming sweet reasonableness. Hanoi's seven-month-old offensive in the south has bogged down, and although the countrywide attacks cast serious doubt on the success of Mr. Nixon's Vietnamization program, they failed to topple the Saigon regime. Faced with a military stalemate and feeling the awesome pinch of the U.S. mining and bombing, the North Vietnamese Politburo had to resolve a pivotal question: whether to risk continuing Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap's thrust for “total victory” or to turn their attention to rebuilding at home while seeking a political compromise in the south. After weeks of acrimonious debate, the peace faction won out.

Hanoi was subject to other pressures as well. Over the past few months, the North Vietnamese received unmistakable hints from both the Russians and the Chinese that a Vietnam settlement would be just fine with them. Perhaps the hints were even stronger than that. During his Peking trip last winter, Mr. Nixon himself plainly encouraged the Chinese to lobby for peace by promising that the U.S. would withdraw American forces from Taiwan only after a settlement in Vietnam. To the Russians, the

President held out the prospect of a bonanza of U.S. trade—including desperately needed American wheat—if only the Soviets would put pressure on their comrades in Hanoi. “The full story isn’t in yet,” says one observer in Washington. “But it looks like Peking and Moscow both lined up squarely with the President on this one.”

Much to Hanoi's dismay, most Americans seemed to line up squarely behind Mr. Nixon too. As the Administration pulled out U.S. ground troops—and weekly U.S. combat-death figures plummeted to zero twice this year—the American antiwar movement fizzled. In Moscow, North Vietnamese strategists repeatedly badgered the Kremlin's experts on U.S. affairs. “Don’t the Americans care about the war any more?” they importuned. At the same time, Hanoi’s showcase tours for visiting American doves failed to reignite the passions of years before, and even the prisoner-of-war issue fell flat.

No Guarantees

Still, Hanoi hoped for a change of heart. But when George McGovern, an avowed antiwar candidate, could not capitalize on the Vietnam issue and fell far back in the polls, the North Vietnamese could wait no longer. Fearing that as a second-term President Mr. Nixon might even turn more bellicose, Hanoi moved to break the Paris impasse and get the U.S. on the record—before the election—for a compromise agreement.

But the North Vietnamese did not come to Mr. Nixon on their knees. Anxious to rid himself of the albatross of Vietnam and to move on to the major item on his foreign-policy agenda—broadening détente with Moscow and Peking—Mr. Nixon offered the Communists attractive incentives to go along with the deal. By permitting some 150,000 North Vietnamese soldiers to remain in the south, Washington left Hanoi in a strong military position, and there was no guarantee that the Communists were not simply taking the opportunity to regroup for a third Indochina war—a war that the U.S. would find most embarrassing, if not impossible, to jump into. More likely, Hanoi probably decided the time had come to change tactics. As a “legitimate” part of the South Vietnamese political scene, the Communists will be able to fight President Thieu openly for electoral support—and to try to continue using classical guerrilla warfare to expand their influence in South Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. “I give Thieu maybe a few months and the South Vietnamese Government maybe a year or two and then the Communists will move in,” says one normally hawkish Pentagon analyst. “The North Vietnamese are tough, well-disciplined cadres and their leadership is tenacious. They will move into every little crack, every little opening and there are a lot of openings for them in this agreement.”

Even if the Communists don't try to circumvent the agreement, it remains an

36

Newsweek, November 6, 1972

THE WAR IN INDOCHINA

open question whether the U.S. gains at
the bargaining table were worth the cost
of the past four years of fighting. Since
Mr. Nixon's Inauguration, 20,000 Ameri-
can soldiers, 110,000 South Vietnamese
troops and perhaps hundreds of thou-
sands of Asian civilians have died in the
war. Millions of others have lost their
homes. New ecological destruction has
been wrought on the countryside of In-
dochina by relentless B-52 saturation
bombing attacks. War critics believe that
this human and material devastation was
an exorbitant price to pay for what they
see as Mr. Nixon's vision of American

"honor." "It is my conviction that we
could have had a reasonably good settle-
ment in '69," says former Vietnam nego-
tiator Averell Harriman. "We could have
saved these four years of utter agony. It
might have been a different agreement,
but I don't think the four years have
been worth whatever change has been
achieved."

Ultimately, though, a verdict on the
last four years of American involvement
in Vietnam depends on a larger judg-
ment—whether the U.S. commitment was
valid in the first place. If Vietnam is as
peripheral to U.S. vital interests as a dec-

ade of doves ranging from Wayne Morse
to George McGovern have argued, then
the war has been nothing less than a
tragic, unnecessary, foolish waste—not
just from 1969 on, but from the begin-
ning. For others, of course, such as Dean
Rusk, Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger,
the burden of the war has been worth
the price, a symbol to all of the invio-
lability of American commitments. The
debate over the U.S. role in Vietnam be-
gan nearly a decade ago, and for years
appeared destined to tear the nation
apart. Now, even with "peace at hand,"
the debate seems destined to go on.

THE TALKS: HOW
KISSINGER DID IT

It didn't take Henry Kissinger and
North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho very
long to discover that they had some-
thing in common: a sense of humor.
During their secret Paris negotiations,
a joke developed between them that
they would become exchange pro-
fessors—Le Duc Tho at Harvard
teaching Marxism-Leninism and Kis-
singer at Hanoi University teaching in-
ternational relations. Their negotia-
tions, both wryly allowed, were really
for the purpose of letting the two
practice by making 50-minute lec-
tures to each other. But of course, the
negotiating breakthrough last month
was not achieved on the basis of
jokes, and those who have observed
Kissinger in action have no doubts
about his persuasiveness or profes-
sionalism. Based on conversations with
Kissinger last week—NEWSWEEK's
White House correspondent Henry
Hubbard reconstructs the Kissinger
technique at the secret talks:

Paradoxical as it may sound, Richard Nixon is on the verge of achieving a Vietnam settlement precisely because he seemed to have little need for one politically. Had George McGovern's candidacy produced a closely contested Presidential race, Hanoi might have held out in hopes of getting a better deal. But the Democratic candidate's abysmal showings in the polls pulled the rug from under Hanoi. Mr. Nixon appeared to have American public opinion firmly in hand, and domestic pressures on the President on this issue seemed muted. If Hanoi didn't know all this before, the rough treatment accorded by the U.S. press to Hanoi's handpicked escorts for the three recently released POW's seemed to prove it. And Kissinger spared no effort to drive home the point.

At least once—and probably more
often—during the most recent round
of meetings, Kissinger gave his North

Vietnamese counterpart a gentle lec-
ture on the realities of the American
political system. As Kissinger saw it
—though he is quick to disclaim poli-
tics as a specialty—Mr. Nixon would
never be more generous than he was
at this moment. The way the Ameri-
can system worked, Kissinger sug-
gested, was to give an elected or re-
elected President a “honeymoon” for
up to a year after his victory. Thus,
Mr. Nixon would have a far freer
hand on Nov. 8 than he would on
Nov. 6. On the other side of the
coin, Mr. Nixon was interested in win-
ning a big victory in November. A
peace settlement would contribute to
that goal. This war, Kissinger argued,
was going to end sometime. Wasn’t
now the best time?

**Bold:** Underscoring Kissinger's ar-
gument was an implied threat. The
President, Kissinger pointed out, had
proved many times that he was not
afraid to take risks and bold actions.
Who knows what Mr. Nixon may do
after a landslide victory? Hanoi had
nothing more to hope for by waiting.
Quite on the contrary, there was
every reason to get the military side

of the conflict settled before Nov. 7.

At times, Kissinger played the role
of friendly adviser and Dutch uncle
to the North Vietnamese. He cajoled,
wheedled, lectured, using all the arts
of negotiation, including praise for
the bravery of the North Vietnamese
and their sacrifices. At one point,
Kissinger even passed along a U.S. in-
telligence report that the North Viet-
namese would not be able to launch
another major offensive in the South
until 1974—leaving it to Hanoi's repre-
sentative to judge the quality of the
CIA's assessment.

During their long months of meet-
ings across a green-felt-covered table
(with wine served during the breaks),
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho developed
a relationship of respect—and even a
sort of friendship. Every word was
taken down in shorthand by one of
Kissinger's secretaries and sent back
to the White House. But Richard
Nixon, for all his avid interest in the
subject, has long since given up his
early habit of reading the record of
the Kissinger-Le Duc Tho meetings.
The reams of transcript were too
much even for him.

Kissinger: Tough bargainer, friendly adviser, Dutch uncle

UPI

Newsweek, November 6, 1972

39

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

The Look
Of a
Landslide

It was, as both candidates agreed, the clearest choice in American Presidential politics in this century—and as the campaign wound down to its last desultory days, the gathering evidence was that the choice was no contest. Richard M. Nixon backed into the Presidency four years ago with a reputation as the Great American Loser and the smallest popular mandate since Woodrow Wilson's in 1912. But time and high office softened his image, achievement gave him an air of mastery of the job, and the opposition delivered him George McGovern—a left-Democratic challenger so luckless that Mr. Nixon has barely deigned to leave the White House at all. The great choice played out in a non-campaign with no dialogue joined and no issue seriously debated—and now, by every available indicator, the President stands within a week of a monumental personal victory. His triumph may be loveless, shallow, even bored, as some analysts suggest. It may also be the biggest Presidential landslide in recent history.

The week's returns from the field were uniformly cheery for the President, unrelievedly bleak for the challenger. A NEWSWEEK Listening Post survey (page 42) rated Mr. Nixon ahead in 46 states with 461 electoral votes—and gave McGovern a certain hold only on the District of Columbia, with three. The latest Gallup sounding put the President's lead nationally at 59-36—suggesting that McGovern had narrowed the gap by only three points from early to middle October.

And most discouraging of all for the senator's cause was the outcome of a special NEWSWEEK Poll, conducted by The Gallup Organization, of six of the great industrial states that decide elections. These states tend to be barometric, their returns varying only slightly from the nation's as a whole. And they have been crucial to the McGovern strategy from the beginning: he wrote off much of the South, the plains and the mountain states early on. The news of the NEWS-

WEEK survey, based on personal interviews with some 400 voters in each state and using a secret ballot, was all bad: it showed him trailing by 17 points in New York, 19 in Pennsylvania, 29 in Ohio, 25 in Michigan, 24 in Illinois and 16 in California (state charts). His vote in each of the six was measurably softer and more volatile than Mr. Nixon's. And the aggregate count for all of them—57-38 for the President—showed no evidence that the senator had picked up momentum in the week between the national Gallup poll and the NEWSWEEK survey (based on interviewing Oct. 20-22).

None of these surveys measured the explosive new X factor in the equation: the impact of the week's progress toward peace in Vietnam—and the possibility that a pre-election cease-fire might turn a welling Nixon tide into a deluge. McGovern insisted doggedly that he and his followers ought to share the credit. But the peace headlines stole the issue that had sustained his campaign all along. While the President bore the good news to West Virginia and Kentucky on one of his rare campaign swings, the senator was reduced to arguing aloud that peace should have come four years sooner—and

The Nixons on tour: A landslide built on comfort?

Newsweek Poll

40

Newsweek

# U.S. AT CROSSROADS

D—for decision—Day was closing in. At last, a strong light glowed at the end of the long Vietnam tunnel, just as the election campaign peaked. Whatever the outcome in either event, U. S. seemed headed toward a change in course.

## THE VIETNAM WAR....AND THE ELECTION

AS IT HAD MANY times in its quarter-century history, the faraway war in Indo-China had usurped the center of the world stage as calendars leafed over to November.

For the first time since just before the French defeat at Dien Bieu Phu in 1954, the North Vietnamese Communists abandoned their determination to continue open warfare in the South, no matter the toll. It was they who yielded.

On October 26 the news became official. It showed that on October 8 the Hanoi Communists took the initiative and secretly proposed to the U. S. a cease-fire that was generally along the lines Washington wanted.

But sticking points remained. The biggest was in finding a way to make sure that the Government of South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu would be a participating party. The Communists, at first, tried to ignore Saigon. But Saigon would not be ignored. After all, its forces were now carrying the burden of the ground war.

Even before the approach to a cease-fire became public, an awareness that it was on the way spread around the world. Among the advance signs: Both the Communists and the Saigon loyalists in South Vietnam began battening down their geographic holdings, intending to be in the strongest possible position on the day when the big guns of organized combat fell silent.

Thus opened a new chapter on Vietnam—a nagging war that killed the French empire in Indo-China, prompted Lyndon B. Johnson to bow out of the U. S. Presidency, and was, as much as any one thing, the issue that made a presidential nominee of Senator George McGovern.

Would the new chapter bring lasting peace? Few thought so. At best, in the opinion of most military experts and historians, the primitive war that led to the greatest air bombardments of all time, might go back to the jungle whence it came—to the cruel, stealthy world of the Asian guerrilla who fights to kill humans and ideas, and gives no quarter.

IN THE HOT, uncomfortable days of last July—before the presidential campaign was well under way—a Gallup Poll of voter preferences showed this:

For Republican Richard Nixon, 56 per cent; for Democrat George McGovern, 37 per cent.

By the Indian summer of October's close, with the campaign almost over—President Nixon had gained three points and Senator McGovern had dropped one.

That is to say: After weeks of intense and bitter election-ering by both parties, sentiment among voters at the end seemed just about where it was at the beginning.

No practical politician accepts polling as an exact science. But, by the general view, it was as good a gauge as any of a campaign that never seemed to get off the ground.

For one thing, soundings across the country indicated that the real issues, if such there were, started out dampened by public indifference and never reached the tender point where a spark could ignite the campaign.

The war? As steps toward a cease-fire advanced, Vietnam receded as an election issue. Since both parties wanted an honorable end to the fighting, the strategy of one or the other for reaching that goal seemed secondary.

Business was good and getting better, so the state of the economy made a poor conduit for political currents to arouse the voters. Most people, talking about their personal feelings, seemed comfortable and fairly content.

Prices... taxes... crime... charges of political skulduggery by either side—samplings indicated the first two were an annoyance, the third a matter of receding alarm and, as for skulduggery, the general reaction seemed to be "a curse on both your houses."

Thus campaign '72 came to its finale. As the curtain lowered, the vast audience—nearly 140 million Americans of voting age—seemed to be saying:

"Let's get it over and get on to other things."

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: After a Vietnam cease-fire, 14; why Hanoi weakened, 17; campaign, 50-State survey, 20; Nixon, McGovern on issues, 28; Governorship races, 32; mood of older voters, 35.

U. S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, Nov. 6, 1972

13

# AFTER A CEASE-FIRE...
## Stumbling Blocks to Vietnam Peace

No matter how fast it comes, Vietnam truce is not going to mean "instant peace." Silencing the guns is only the start of a rugged, uphill road to a permanent settlement in shattered

Indo-China. Policing the cease-fire . . . halting terrorism . . . bringing off a final political solution . . . they add up to a formidable set of problems in the months ahead.

### Reported From
SAIGON and WASHINGTON

For the United States, the end in Vietnam finally was in sight. It was coming with the same fits and starts that marked the beginning of American involvement a decade ago.

After nearly 4½ years of truce talks, presidential aide Henry A. Kissinger announced at the White House on October 26: "Peace is within reach in a matter of weeks, or less."

Terms between the U. S. and North Vietnam had been agreed upon earlier in October, except for a few noncrucial details. The summary of the agreement appears on page 15. It would clear the way for an end of U. S. bombing, withdrawal of all U. S. forces in 60 days and freedom for American war prisoners.

Concurrence to terms by South Vietnam proved harder to get. U. S. authorities were convinced, however, that the groundwork was laid for Saigon's eventual—if reluctant—acquiescence.

It was agreed to by all: The momentum toward a cease-fire was unstoppable.

Both in Saigon and Washington, authorities already were scouting the problems that lay beyond a cease-fire. There are no illusions that a truce in the fighting means that formal peace will come soon to Indo-China.

A White House source warned:

"Hanoi is too set on taking over all of Indo-China to abide by any genuine, lasting agreement."

Stumbling blocks are many. Most specialists on Asia are convinced, for example, that it could be months, if not years, before the two sides follow a cease-fire with the next important steps—a coalition council to implement the truce and the holding of new, internationally supervised elections in the South.

Says one source:

"During that time, anything can happen. With the hatred and distrust that exists between the two sides and with two powerful armies facing each other in the field, resumption of full-scale war would be only a few clock ticks away."

**American concern.** American military analysts cite worries such as these:

* A Vietnam cease-fire is virtually

impossible to police. In Korea in 1953 and in Laos in 1962, the ink barely was dry on peace agreements before the Communists began violating treaty terms.

* An in-place, or "leopard skin," cease-fire gives the Communists legal control of South Vietnamese territory they seized by force. The Saigon Government and people would be under constant threat.

* Lifting of American air and naval operations against North Vietnam would enable Hanoi to rebuild its offensive military might with massive shipments of armaments from Russia and China. But under terms of the draft treaty, the U. S. could send South Vietnam only re-

placement weapons on a piece-by-piece basis.

Even with a cease-fire, most U. S. experts fully expect the Vietnam fighting to continue. Some foresee North-South shoving matches over disputed territory escalating into pitched battles. Others predict a surge of Communist political assassinations, terror strikes on villages and attacks on isolated outposts.

South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu emphasizes just that point. He warned in a speech to his nation on October 24 that he would meet force with force.

He said:

"If they fire pistols, we will respond with rifles. If they shoot rifles, we will respond with machine guns.

"If they fire machine guns, we will respond with bombs. If they vio-

-Wide World Photo

President and Mr. Kissinger. With prospects of a Hanoi accord at hand, there was conviction that Saigon would fall in line.

14

late it [the truce] once, I will fight them
10 times."

Key to a successful cease-fire, accord-
ing to American strategists, is the with-
drawal of North Vietnamese troops from
South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

An officer says: "The North Viet-
namese must agree to go home if a
cease-fire is to have any chance of
success."

The Reds did agree in the nine-
point draft treaty to withdraw "totally"
from Laos and Cambodia. But the ques-

tion of North Vietnamese forces in
South Vietnam would be negotiated
later by the Vietnamese.

North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sol-
diers now total up to 200,000 men
inside South Vietnam, 90,000 in Cam-
bodia and 70,000 in Laos. North Viet-
nam has sent all 15 of its organized
combat divisions, plus a number of in-
dependent regiments, to war outside its
borders. Fourteen divisions are targeted
against South Vietnam. The fifteenth is
in Laos.

Eight North Vietnamese divisions have
been fighting in South Vietnam's five
northernmost Provinces and one each in
the Central Highlands and in Binh Dinh
Province on the eastern coast. Elements
of four divisions headquartered in Cam-
bodia also are operating in the South—
two north of Saigon and two in the Me-
kong Delta.

"It is not a happy prospect for a cease-fire," says one American.

Few U. S. military men believe that
a truce can be successfully policed by
an international supervisory commission
called for in the treaty or by an "Inter-

(continued on next page)

-UPI Photo

President Thieu. His distrust of North
Vietnam posed problems for the future.

U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, Nov. 6, 1972

TRUCE ... GI PULL-BACK ... POW RELEASE
TERMS OF AN HISTORIC AGREEMENT

Following is the heart of the
draft of the U. S.-North Vietnam
agreement to end the fighting in
Vietnam, as broadcast by Hanoi
Radio and confirmed by the U. S.
on October 26:

CEASE-FIRE

An in-place cease-fire will go
into effect throughout South Viet-
nam 24 hours after the agreement
is signed. The U. S. will halt all
air and mining operations against
North Vietnam. Military action by
foreign troops in Laos and Cam-
bodia also will stop.

TROOP WITHDRAWAL

U. S. and allied troops will be
withdrawn totally from South
Vietnam within 60 days of the
agreement. No mention was made
of North Vietnamese soldiers in
South Vietnam, although it is
agreed that Saigon and the Viet
Cong would negotiate later the
"question of Vietnamese armed
forces" in the South. U. S. forces
in Thailand, and in the Seventh
Fleet, are not affected.

The U. S. will halt all military
aid to Saigon except for replace-
ment of worn-out or damaged
weapons. Apparently, no prohibi-
tion was written into the agree-
ment that would prevent North
Vietnam from receiving military
supplies from Russia, China or
other countries.

PRISONER RELEASE

Release of prisoners of war and
detainees held by both sides will
take place "in parallel" with the
withdrawal of U. S. troops; that
is, within 60 days.

TRUCE CONTROLS

An International Commission of
Control and Supervision will be
established to police the cease-
fire. An International Guarantee
Conference will be convened
within 30 days of the signing of
the agreement. Two joint military
commissions also will be formed,
one including American and
North Vietnamese officers.

A NEW GOVERNMENT

A National Council of National
Reconciliation and Concord made
up of Saigon supporters, Com-

munist Viet Cong and neutrals
will implement the agreement.
The Council also will organize
"genuinely free and democratic"
elections in South Vietnam under
international supervision. The
U. S. will not back any one can-
didate or seek to impose a pro-
American regime in Saigon. The
Communists have dropped de-
mands for a coalition regime in
South Vietnam. The Government

-Hesse in "St. Louis Globe-Democrat"

STICKY BUSINESS

of President Nguyen Van Thieu
will remain in office until new
elections are arranged.

LAOS AND CAMBODIA

Foreign countries—meaning the
U. S. and North Vietnam—agree
to end their military activities
and to respect the neutrality of
both countries. All foreign troops
will be withdrawn, and outside
military aid will be stopped.
Both sides promise not to use
Laotian or Cambodian territory
“to encroach on the sovereignty
and security” of other nations.

REPARATIONS

The U. S. will contribute to the
"healing of the wounds of war"
and will aid in postwar recon-
struction throughout Indo-China,
including North Vietnam.

REUNIFICATION

Reunification of North and
South Vietnam will be carried out
peacefully "step by step."

15

Officials in Pnompenh point out that even if foreign Communists did pull out, the Government still would have to deal with the Khmer Rouge, a Communist-led Cambodian rebel movement that has grown in size from 5,000 men to an estimated 40,000 over the past two years and which has seized sizable amounts of territory.

**Laos: brighter prospects.** The outlook was somewhat brighter in Laos—mainly because peace talks already were under way between Premier Souvanna Phouma's Government and officials of the Pathet Lao, the Laotian Communist insurgents.

Still, there was realization in the capital, Vientiane, that Hanoi has too large a stake in Laos to actually withdraw all its 70,000 troops and abandon control of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

This supply network, leading from North Vietnam through Eastern Laos into South Vietnam and Cambodia, is considered vital to whatever future military operations the North may plan for South Vietnam.

With all these uncertainties ahead,

why did the United States agree to a truce at all?

The answer, according to White House sources, is that President Nixon has won from the Communists just about everything he set out to win at the conference table—the release of American prisoners of war, an internationally supervised cease-fire, and the promise of

new elections that will enable the South Vietnamese the chance to choose their own future.

Furthermore, these sources say, after more than a decade of fighting, more than 56,000 American lives lost, and nearly 130 billion dollars spent in Vietnam, the time for a truce there was long overdue.

-Wide World Photo

Captured U. S. pilots at recent news conference in Hanoi. Release of American POW's was a central point of agreement in talks between the U. S. and North Vietnam.

# WHY HANOI CAME TO REALIZE IT “COULD NOT HOPE TO WIN”

## Interview With a British Authority on Vietnam

**What was behind the big change of heart in Hanoi? Military failure? A split at the top?**

**All that—and more—says Patrick J. Honey in this interview conducted by Joseph Fromm, the magazine's senior European editor.**

At LONDON

**Q** Mr. Honey, what brought about the change in Hanoi's attitude toward peace?

**A** There are a number of factors:

First, President Nixon is almost certainly going to defeat George McGovern, and the Vietnam war is no longer politically disadvantageous to the President. This is very important.

Second, Mr. Nixon's visits to Peking and Moscow aroused in the minds of all North Vietnamese leaders the fears that they were once more going to be sold down the river by their Soviet and Chinese allies as they were at Geneva in 1954.

Third, their military invasion of South Vietnam earlier this year—from which they had hoped great things—has, in fact, failed to achieve any of its primary targets. They have

had more than 100,000 killed in this invasion, and these losses are difficult to replace.

They also have lost several hundred tanks and heaven knows how much equipment.

Finally, there was the disruption of communications inside North Vietnam due to the bombing, and the effect of the mining of the ports that has reduced severely the flow of supplies.

All of these things produced a cumulative effect. I think that it was borne in on the North Vietnamese leaders more and more that they could not hope to win a military victory. They were being forced to accept some sort of negotiated settlement on the best terms that they could secure from [presidential aide] Henry Kissinger.

*(continued on next page)*

**Patrick J. Honey**, ranked among the outstanding Western authorities on North Vietnam affairs, has extensive first-hand knowledge of the country and fluency in the language. For the past 24 years he has been in charge of North Vietnamese studies at London University.

Copyright © 1972, U. S. News & World Report, Inc.

17

## INTERVIEW ON VIETNAM

[continued from preceding page]

**Q** Has there been tangible evidence that Hanoi was contemplating a settlement?

**A** Yes. I have seen a number of Communist documents and debriefing reports on interrogation of defectors and prisoners that are quite clear on this score.

The Communists were telling their people in the South that there might be a cease-fire. They advised them that, if there was a cease-fire, the infrastructure cadres in the South must "surface"-come into the open-to establish effective control over the people in the local areas where they operate.

The aim is to guarantee that when an election comes, the Communist cadres will be in a position to tell the people what to do, how to vote. I don't think that the North Vietnamese leaders would do this unless the possibility of a cease-fire were under very serious consideration in Hanoi.

## BOMBING: "VITAL FACTOR" IN TALKS-

**Q** How important was the bombing of the North in pressuring Hanoi toward a negotiated settlement?

**A** The heavy bombing of North Vietnam was perhaps the vital factor which kept pressures on North Vietnam and maintained their interest in continuing the negotiations with Dr. Kissinger. In 1968, on the advice of Clark Clifford [former Secretary of Defense], the bombing was stopped. This removed any sense of urgency on the Communist side. As a result, the negotiations got nowhere. But now the North Vietnamese leaders knew that the bombing would continue. Therefore, they had an incentive to settle as soon as possible because the bombing hurt.

**Q** Do you think Moscow and Peking were pressuring the North Vietnamese to end the war?

**A** The North Vietnamese were coming under pressure insofar as Moscow and Peking both advised them to end the war. But neither the Russians nor the Chinese dared to exert pressure by cutting off aid for fear of recrimination from the other.

So the Communist leaders in Hanoi continued to get aid-but at the same time they were getting insistent advice that it is against the interests of the North Vietnamese to continue the war. They were being advised insistently by Moscow and Peking that they would do very much better to settle on the best terms that they could get at the moment.

There are two reasons for the Chinese and Russian attitudes:

First, this war has been going on a long time-since 1959. North Vietnam has lost something in the region of a million men. The Soviets and the Chinese have lost billions of dollars in military aid. And all they've got to show for it is that the North Vietnamese control less territory now than they did in 1960. North Vietnam was smashed up. And they were no nearer victory.

Second, both the Soviets and Chinese are hoping to get things out of the United States. The Soviets need American grain and trade. The Chinese are after Taiwan and all sorts of foreign-policy requirements. It's quite difficult for them to deal with the U. S. with this war going on. Both, for national reasons of their own, have wanted out.

The fact is, under pressure, the North Vietnamese made some concessions. For example, they have conceded that none of the three factions in the coalition government they envisage for South Vietnam will be able to assert its authority over the others. More recently, they dropped their insistence on the removal of President Thieu from the Saigon Government.

The North Vietnamese leadership has been undergoing

-UPI Photo

"This war has been going on a long time," says Mr. Honey.
"North Vietnam has lost in the region of a million men."

the painful experience of preparing itself to settle on terms fairly close to the offer that President Nixon made on May 8. This would hold out the prospect that a non-Communist South would survive-at least for the foreseeable future.

## HOW HANOI'S LEADERS HAVE SPLIT-

**Q** Is there really a division inside Hanoi's Politburo between so-called hawks and doves?

**A** There is plenty of evidence to support the view that the Politburo is divided. There is unanimity in the leadership on the final objective-namely, the imposition of a Communist regime in South Vietnam. The division has arisen over the means of implementing this objective.

**Q** Has there recently been a power struggle, with a war faction losing to a peace faction?

**A** I think it is probably wrong to talk about a war faction and peace faction. Both factions maintain the necessity for struggle in one form or another.

One faction, led by Truong Chinh [Chairman of the National Assembly], argues that the stability of North Vietnam is being endangered by overemphasis of the military aspect of the war and by subordination of everything to the prosecution of the war. They contend that priority No. 1 ought to be the consolidation of socialism in the rear base, which is North Vietnam.

The other faction, which is led by Le Duan [First Secretary of the Communist Party], maintains that priority No. 1 must be winning the war in South Vietnam. Le Duan argues that once they have disposed of the enemy in the South they can go on with the consolidation of socialism throughout the whole of Vietnam at their leisure.

In short, Truong Chinh emphasizes political struggle while Le Duan emphasizes military struggle.

**Q** Which faction is winning out?

**A** I think that there has not yet been a showdown to force a change of policy.

**Q** Where does the Army-and especially Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap-stand in the division within the North Vietnamese leadership?

18

-UPI Photo

Oil tanks near Haiphong under attack. Bombing has "hurt very badly," Mr. Honey says. "Resupply is greatly reduced."

A They stand fairly firmly inside Le Duan's faction. Defense Minister Giap has always wanted to win military victory.

No doubt he sincerely believes that this would best serve North Vietnam's interests. But I can't avoid the conclusion that he also is thinking of his personal reputation and his place in the history books. If he could win a military victory, he would go down as a great general. Otherwise, there would be a question mark over his place in the history books. He has suffered two failures—in the *Tet* offensive of 1968 and again in this year's invasion of the South. He probably has argued for a third offensive.

## KEEPING A LID ON DISSENT—

Q Are Hanoi's present leaders firmly in control of the North?

A They're in control as firmly as any Communist administration is in control in its own territory. They have very powerful security forces.

There is no public opinion because nobody dares to voice a contrary opinion. It's very difficult for any disaffected North Vietnamese to start any dissident movement which would threaten the regime.

Q Is there any sign of an effective anti-Government underground in North Vietnam?

A No. The only evidence of any disdidence whatever involves a number of wounded veterans who were allowed to be repatriated to North Vietnam several months ago.

Some have come back so embittered that they have beaten up the managers of co-operative farms whom they have accused of failing to look after their families while they were in South Vietnam.

Quite a number have been going around telling people very bluntly that they should not allow their sons to go to South Vietnam because they will die of starvation or disease or be killed by the South Vietnamese.

There have been several instances in which these returned veterans have clashed with security forces in North Vietnam. They actually have killed members of the security forces, and nobody has attempted to stop them. But these wounded veterans are too scattered and too few to form any sort of effective anti-Government movement.

Q Do the North Vietnamese still widely support their Government?

A I don't think they either support or oppose the Government, but rather accept it. There's nothing to be done about it. So they've got to manage with it and make the best of what they've got. This, for my money, is about the state of mind of the North Vietnamese people.

## WHERE THE NORTH FEELS THE STRAIN—

Q Have civilians borne up well under bombing and privation?

A As we discovered here in Britain in World War II, heavy bombing induces a spirit of camaraderie and mutual self-help. But, equally, the bombing in North Vietnam damaged severely the communications system. It reduced imports. The mining of the ports in particular cut down imports by sea. This in turn required the requisitioning of vast numbers of North Vietnamese to carry goods by coolie labor and to repair the communications, roads and railroads. North Vietnam just doesn't have the manpower to meet all these demands. Also, families were split up, as coolie labor had to go to the Chinese frontier or elsewhere. Socially, I think, the bombing and mining of the ports had a tremendous effect on civilians.

Q In view of that situation, did morale sag seriously?

A No. Morale has been fairly high. The people believed the propaganda that told them that they were winning victories in the South. I think that morale was reasonably high for the simple reason that the truth was not getting through.

Q Has there been plenty of food, fuel and other necessities?

A It's very difficult to generalize. The North Vietnamese were getting all of the petroleum products they required through plastic pipelines that run from China. It was almost impossible for bombers to cut them. Delivery of foodstuffs, however, was curtailed, since priority on the damaged communications system went to military supplies. There has been greater reliance on growing more food at home. Fertilizer was no longer being imported. Inevitably that will affect crops. Other things have been cut off, too, but they were mostly goods that the North Vietnamese leaders believed they could do without in the short term.

Q Were the bombing and the blockage of ports hurting Hanoi's military forces badly?

A I'm sure they were being hurt very badly. Remember that virtually every division in the North Vietnamese Army has been deployed outside North Vietnam's frontiers. Supplies must be carried from the Chinese border through North Vietnam to the battlefields of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—and this at a time of disrupted communications and power shortages. Resupply is greatly reduced.

## AS REDS' STRENGTH WANES—

Q Were enough supplies getting through to keep the war going?

A They were probably getting enough through to the front line to keep the war ticking over for the next few months on a reduced scale. But the sort of military action that we saw in April, May and June this year was quite impossible.

With the present blockading of supplies and disruption of communication, I don't think that the North Vietnamese could really hope to achieve more than rocket and mortar attacks, sabotage, or local operations against towns and villages. I don't think they could achieve any real military victories of great significance.

19

# TALK OF A RECORD LANDSLIDE—
## Final 50-State Survey of Campaign

Nixons tour New York suburb.

Students at a McGovern rally.

-UPI Photos

Will it be a shutout victory for Nixon over McGovern in all 50 States? Not likely. But politicians say it could come close if late campaign trends hold.

Unless all the political omens are wrong, Richard M. Nixon is headed for an electoral-vote landslide to rank with the record presidential victories in the past of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson.

This is the finding in a final nationwide survey by the editors of "U. S. News & World Report" on the political outlook a week before the November 7 general election.

Many politicians believe that agreement on a Vietnam cease-fire before Election Day could bring out millions of additional voters—as the Suez crisis did in 1956—and apply a final, crushing blow to the McGovern candidacy.

Otherwise, there could be some shifting in voter sentiment during closing hours of the campaign, and apathy or complacence might have some effect on cutting down the size of the vote.

But, at this point, political analysts foresee no circumstances that are apt to change this basic forecast:

President Nixon is on the way to re-

election by a popular mandate of 55 to 60 per cent of the total vote.

That conclusion is based on in-depth reports by a team of "U. S. News & World Report" staff members who traveled over the country in September and October, consulting pollsters, party leaders, newspaper editors and other expert observers of local public opinion.

Also canvassed in each State were the views of a cross section of average voters. Earlier reports were rechecked for latest political trends in the last week of October.

Final results indicate:

*   President Nixon is leading in 46 States, with 500 electoral votes—a substantial margin over the 270 majority needed to elect the President.

*   The Democratic candidate, Senator George S. McGovern, of South Dakota, is clearly ahead in only one jurisdiction—the District of Columbia, with 3 electoral votes.

*   Four States, with a total of 35 votes, are in doubt—and could go either way in the election. The doubtful States, and their electoral votes, are: Massachusetts, 14; South Dakota, 4; West Virginia, 6, and Wisconsin, 11.

If the Nixon Administration is able to tip the balance in these wavering States during the closing hours of the campaign, political experts say the potential exists for a sweep of every State in the

union for the first time in any presidential election since 1820.

How the States are leaning now is shown by the chart on page 27.

In mid-October, at a crucial stage of the campaign, the polls uniformly found President Nixon ahead in every region of the country, and with most categories of voters.

**The Nixon margins.** There was not a recognized State survey anywhere that showed Mr. McGovern leading in any key State. Instead, pollsters found these margins for Mr. Nixon:

New York, 17 points; California, 14 points; Illinois, 29 points; New Jersey and Connecticut, 31 points; Michigan, 25 points, and Texas, 41 points.

In the South, politicians predicted that the Nixon-Agnew ticket would carry every State by 60 to 80 per cent of the popular vote.

Margins of 60 to 65 per cent were forecast in Rocky Mountain States, and the Midwest farm belt.

Nationwide, three surveys—Gallup, Harris and Sindlinger—found Nixon support holding fairly steady at 59 to 60 per cent of all registered voters.

Pollster Louis Harris said, "The Nixon lead is one of the widest ever recorded at this stage of a presidential contest."

Senator McGovern did not appear to be closing the gap to any significant

(continued on next news page)

20

Washington Whispers®

【Items appearing on this page are being talked about in Washington or other news centers】

# Why Hanoi Broke Truce Secrets . . . Flop of the Year: Red Offensive . . . McGovern's Money Woes Over?

Hanoi's cease-fire proposals to Henry Kissinger, the President's top adviser on national security, were dealt with in such secrecy that experts high up on the Kissinger staff had no idea of the details until he, himself, made them public on October 26. The fear was that the slightest leak could have blown up the whole deal.

Many officials in Washington, Saigon and Paris were caught completely by surprise when the North Vietnamese Communists suddenly took the wraps off delicate truce negotiations. One theory: The Reds thought their broadcasts of their terms might pressure the U.S. into a hasty settlement before everything was tucked in and all the seams stitched.

Within minutes after Henry Kissinger announced that a cease-fire was near at hand in Vietnam, the Price Commission was getting phone calls asking if controls will be dropped when the war ends. The answer: No.

Senior American officials agree with the South Vietnamese that the Communists' 7-month-old invasion was an utter flop. Not only did the enemy fail in a military sense, it was unable to come even close to any of the political goals it set to try to undermine the Saigon Government.

How much will it cost American taxpayers to "reconstruct" North and South Vietnam, if that decision is made? Between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year, according to estimates of some Government experts.

John D. Ehrlichman, presidential assistant for domestic affairs, is doing

everything he can to discourage Washington talk that he might be Richard Nixon's next Attorney General. Mr. Ehrlichman tells friends he takes the same attitude toward that job that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman took toward the Presidency. The General stopped a Sherman boomlet nearly a century ago by saying if nominated he would not run and if elected he would not serve.

Democratic National Chairwoman Jean Westwood is ready to fight to remain at that post after the election, friends say, even if Senator McGovern is defeated. Mrs. Westwood is almost certain to face a critical vote of confidence on December 9 in National Committee meeting.

Senator George McGovern's strategists have settled now on a 25-million-dollar campaign-spending figure, and say that they fully expect to wind up debt free.

Colleagues of Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., the former Kissinger aide who was vaulted into the Army's No. 2 job, point out that descriptions of the General as a man "long on staff work, short on combat" are inaccurate. General Haig's battlefield service earned him the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest award for combat; the Silver Star twice, the Distinguished Flying Cross three times, the Bronze Star twice and the Air Medal 28 times.

Some supporters of Republican Senator John Tower of Texas charge that Democrat John Connally is deliberately trying to torpedo the Senator's re-election and thus leave a vacuum at the top of the State's Re-

publican Party, should Mr. Connally decide to switch parties after November 7. Mr. Connally, so far, has not encouraged speculation that he may become a registered Republican before the 1976 presidential election.

A top corporation executive is telling his associates: "I've given up trying to predict what will happen to the wage-price control program—and when. Surprise is essential to any program of this sort. Officials would be foolish to tip their hands in advance. You have to keep that in mind in interpreting what they say or don't say about the future."

White House aides are passing the word that as price controls come to an end, price supports on farm products may be lowered as a means of restraining food costs. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz is described as fighting such action—but as unlikely to prevent the move once the election is over.

Strong sentiment of many business leaders to continue wage-price controls beyond next April 30's expiration date is irritating President Nixon's economic advisers. Said one: "Too many businessmen would rather that the Government did the job for them in keeping wages in line than stand up to unions themselves."

Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, the influential editor of the Cairo daily "Al Ahram" and a confidant of Egyptian President Sadat, claims that the cost of maintaining Egypt's armed forces at their present levels is equal to that of building and tearing down the great Aswan Dam on the Nile once a year.

8

U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, Nov. 6, 1976

TIME
THE WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE

Nov. 6, 1972 Vol. 100, No. 19

SPECIAL SECTION

G.I.s IN SAIGON

VIETNAMESE MOTHER & DAUGHTER

CHARLES BONNAY

McLAIN P.O.W. FAMILY

# The Shape of Peace

■ The war began gradually, by fits and starts. Peace may come the same way. The agreement laboriously worked out between Washington and Hanoi still faces many pitfalls. A cease-fire should be achieved soon, but the vast complexities of the proposed settlement. President Thieu's resistance, the maneuvering and counter-maneuvering for political control in Viet Nam, the pent-up bitterness and distrust—all these may still mean protracted trouble and even renewed bloodshed. Yet last week Henry Kissinger proclaimed: "Peace is at hand." At long last the U.S. could really count on the end of the conflict. That prospect makes it appropriate for the U.S. once again to assess the terrible cost of its longest, psychically most debilitating war—the cost not only in lost lives and disabled bodies but in the country's troubled conscience, its shaken self-image and its uncertainty over its world role. This is the moment also to look back on what the war meant, and to look ahead to try to perceive what peace will mean. Some of the answers may take years to develop, but in the following pages TIME makes a start.

"We believe that we can restore both peace and unity to America very soon."

WITH those words, Presidential Negotiator Henry Kissinger concluded last week his consummate one-hour briefing on the imminent prospects for a settlement in Viet Nam. After so many false starts and unfulfilled promises for so long, Kissinger's very act of revelation of the secret dealings with Hanoi implied a new U.S. commitment, one that would almost inevitably gain a momentum of its own, much as other commitments have. Probably unconsciously, Kissinger described Washington's determination to resolve the unwinnable, inconclusive and finally intolerable war in terms oddly similar to those in which three Administrations had committed themselves to staying the course. "Having come this far," he said, "we cannot fail, we will not fail."

The hard bargaining was far from over. President Nguyen Van Thieu was resisting the terms of the settlement with all his might—publicly, at least. Hanoi was complaining that the U.S. was trying to slip out of a promise to sign the agreement by Oct. 31, a date

that seemed too soon to be realistic. Nor was the fighting yet at an end. Indeed the heaviest ground action in months flared up in Viet Nam as both sides jockeyed for eleventh-hour gains in advance of a cease-fire in place.

But the omens of settlement gathered too. The U.S. restricted its bombing of North Viet Nam to targets below the 20th parallel. South Vietnamese flags were selling at a brisk pace in Saigon, as Vietnamese prepared to show their colors—and protect themselves—in the event of a truce. In Paris, the French government was said to be making quiet preparations to host a new Geneva-style "guarantee conference" of five or six nations that would oversee an orderly cessation of hostilities throughout the scarred Indochina landscape. Inevitably, the accounting would begin of the cost of a decade of war in lives lost and bodies maimed, in homes destroyed and land ravaged, in shattered careers and alienated generations.

Amid all the activity and the building hopes, the answers to the big questions began to solidify, the shape of the long-awaited peace began to emerge.

► When could the shooting stop? The cease-fire agreement would be

14

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

signed, said Kissinger, "in a matter of weeks or less"—possibly before the U.S. election on Nov. 7, more probably later on this month.

► *How soon could the G.I.s and P.O.W.s be home?* Within 60 days—or before Inauguration Day if the papers are signed in the next three weeks.

► *Will there really be peace?* For the U.S., yes. For the Vietnamese, the conflict would enter a new phase, in which fighting among Vietnamese might continue, although probably on a much reduced scale.

► *Who won?* Probably neither side. Hanoi will certainly claim victory over the U.S., but the outcome will probably be a military and political draw for the foreseeable future. Both Washington and Hanoi accepted compromises well short of their long-held goals.

► *Will there be a bloodbath?* No firm predictions are possible about this long-feared possibility. The agreement does, however, contain assurances against post-settlement violence, whatever they may be worth.

► *Will the U.S. pay to help rebuild North Viet Nam?* Yes, and Hanoi hints that the amount may have been agreed upon.

Washington's struggle to bring the fighting to a close inevitably shifted the U.S. role in the conflict from ally and combatant to mediator between Hanoi and Saigon—and there were signs in the explosive events of last week that the new role was proving to be as slippery as the old one. Although TIME had learned and published the outline of the secret agreements, there was no public confirmation of them until Saigon's fulfillments against what was afoot and moves by Washington to seek more negotiations panicked a suspicious Hanoi into breaking its secrecy agreements with the U.S. and broadcasting the details. That in turn forced Washington to its public commitment, through Henry Kissinger, to the success of an extraordinarily intricate enterprise.

The imbroglio began with Kissinger's journey to Saigon. He managed to obtain Thieu's reluctant agreement to a cease-fire after four days of "heated" talks. But the tough-minded South Vietnamese President dug in against the proposal for a three-part council composed of Communists, Thieu loyalists and "neutrals." It would arrange elections, which Thieu fears would lead to a gradual Communist takeover or at least a new constitution that would effectively drum his narrowly based regime out of power. Fighting back in a two-hour TV address last week, Thieu denounced the plan as "a cunning scheme" of the Communists. Later on he threw up more flak in the form of a proposal for a United Nations-supervised vote to choose members of an electoral commission that would take the place of the three-part council.

Then it was North Viet Nam's turn. Fearful that the settlement—which it evidently wanted very badly—might

collapse, Hanoi mounted a frenzied campaign to pressure Washington into carrying it through. The North Vietnamese made direct appeals to Peking and Moscow to urge Washington to complete the negotiations. North Vietnamese diplomats in East European capitals called on Hanoi's Communist allies for similar third-party support.

But for its most effective ploy, Hanoi reached into Richard Nixon's bag of diplomatic tricks. Last January, in an effort to break the long impasse at the Paris negotiations (and hike up his sagging ratings in the polls), Nixon went on TV with his dramatic revelations of Kissinger's secret meetings in Paris, explaining that the disclosure might speed things along. In a similar move one afternoon late last week, Radio Hanoi flashed word that an "important statement" was coming. The broadcast that followed contained not only the first official summary of the nine-point plan but also a detailed account of the hur-

ried negotiations that had brought it about. The U.S., Hanoi charged, was using "difficulties in Saigon" as an excuse to back out of the deal.

The provisions revealed by Hanoi—and later confirmed by Kissinger—envision an internationally supervised cease-fire in place, a withdrawal of all U.S. forces and a return of P.O.W.s in 60 days, and complex arrangements for the evolution of a political settlement among the Vietnamese (see box, page 16).

Perhaps the most startling revelation of the Communist broadcast was the details on the pace of negotiations—which suggests that Hanoi was literally sprinting for a settlement before the U.S. election on Nov. 7. The two sides worked on tight deadlines. The first target date for an agreement to be signed was Oct. 26, a scant eighteen days after the beginning of "serious" negotiations on the nine points. According to Hanoi, there were two postponements

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

15

SPECIAL SECTION

—one to Oct. 30 and another, while Kissinger was haggling with Thieu in Saigon, to Tuesday, Oct. 31. If the U.S. did not sign the agreement on the deadline, Hanoi warned, the U.S. would be “responsible for prolonging the war.”

Hanoi's open gambit caught the Administration by surprise. When news of the broadcast reached Washington by 2 a.m., Kissinger called Nixon and told him what had happened. Early next morning, they met in Nixon's office and decided

that the Administration would have to make its own public accounting of the talks. Shortly after the meeting, Kissinger entered the briefing room.

It was a remarkable performance. Speaking without notes—he had only a copy of the agreement before him—Kissinger addressed a number of audiences. For the U.S. electorate, there was a forcefully put case for the Administration's handling of the negotiations. “We believe that by far the longest part of the road has been traversed,” he said. Yet the pace of negotiations “has not been framed by the election.”

He was almost abrupt with the Thieu regime. Saigon's wishes “would be taken extremely seriously,” he said, but “we will make our own decisions as to how long we believe a war should be continued.” He spoke warmly to Hanoi. He insisted that the Oct. 31 deadline had

been Hanoi's creation, and that while he had promised “a major effort” to meet it the U.S. did not feel bound by it. Things had been delayed by various problems—the most important of which seemed to have arisen in Saigon. But he “understood” Hanoi's disappointment, and reassured the North Vietnamese that “peace is within reach in a matter of weeks or less,” provided that the two sides held “one more” session in Paris of perhaps three or four days. After that, Washington and Hanoi could “move from hostility to normalcy and from normalcy to cooperation.”

But for the moment, Hanoi was still at the hostility stage. At a Paris press conference, North Viet Nam's reedy-voiced spokesman Nguyen Than Le chortled that certainly his colleagues would like to see Kissinger again—but only to “down the champagne” after the agreement had been signed. From Hanoi, Le Duc Tho sent word to Kissinger that he would meet him in Paris this week on Monday—but only if the U.S. was ready to sign on the Tuesday, Oct. 31 “deadline.” At week's end the Soviet news agency Tass took the highly unusual step of reporting that Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin had personally urged the North Vietnamese to continue negotiating.

What had driven Washington and Hanoi so close to a final agreement after so many years of stalemate? One big factor was the U.S.'s new relationships with Moscow and Peking, which no longer find it in their interests to duel with Washington over a scrap of Southeast Asian rice land. Nixon believes that his decision to resume full-scale bomb-

RICHARD NIXON

NGUYEN VAN THIEU

DIRK HALSTEAD

HENRY KISSINGER

## A Summary of the Nine Points

1) The U.S. respects the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Viet Nam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva agreements.

2) Twenty-four hours after the signing of the agreement a cease-fire will take effect throughout South Viet Nam. The U.S. will stop all its military activities and end the bombing and mining in North Viet Nam. Within 60 days there will be a total withdrawal from South Viet Nam of U.S. and allied troops and military personnel. No troops, military personnel, armaments, munitions or war material for the Provisional Revolutionary Government (Viet Cong) or the Saigon government will be reintroduced into South Viet Nam, except for replacement of war material worn out or damaged after the cease-fire, and then only on a piece-for-piece basis. The U.S. will not continue its military involvement or intervene in the “internal affairs” of South Viet Nam.

3) All captured and detained personnel of the parties will be returned simultaneously with the U.S. troop withdrawal—that is, within 60 days.

4) The South Vietnamese people will decide their own political future through “genuinely free and democratic general elections under international supervision.” The U.S. will not impose a “pro-American regime in Saigon” or commit itself to “any personality or political tendency.” General elections will be organized by an administrative organization called the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, composed of three equal segments (the Saigon gov-

ernment, the P.R.G. and neutralist groups). Saigon and the P.R.G. will hold talks to reduce and demobilize their forces and “sign an agreement on the internal matters of South Viet Nam”—if possible, within three months after the cease-fire. The National Council will “promote the implementation” of their agreements.

5) “The reunification of Viet Nam shall be carried out step by step through peaceful means.”

6) To supervise the agreement, a four-party military commission (consisting of North Viet Nam, the U.S., the P.R.G. and the Saigon government), and a joint military commission of the P.R.G. and the Saigon government will be formed, as well as an international commission of control. An international guarantee conference on Viet Nam will be convened within 30 days of the signing of the agreement.

7) All four parties will strictly respect the Cambodian and Laotian people's “fundamental national rights as recognized by the 1954 Geneva agreements on Indochina and the 1962 Geneva agreements on Laos”—that is, their independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity. They will also respect the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos. Foreign countries will put an end to all military activities in Cambodia and Laos, and will “totally withdraw” and refrain from reintroducing arms.

8) The ending of the war “will create conditions for establishing a new, equal and mutually beneficial relationship” between North Viet Nam and the U.S. The U.S. will contribute “to healing the wounds of war and to reconstruction in North Viet Nam and throughout Indochina.”

9) The agreement will come into force as of its signing.

16

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

ing of North Viet Nam and mine its har-
bors was also "very, very important."
It is hard to measure how badly Hanoi
has been hurt by these measures. But it
seems undeniable that the failure of
Moscow and Peking to challenge Nix-
on's moves was a signal that Hanoi
could not ignore.

The Communists' massive Easter
offensive also fits into the equation, al-
though how it fits is a matter of debate.
The Pentagon has been selling the of-
fensive as a serious defeat. While it is
true that an estimated 100,000 Com-
munist troops were killed over seven
months and that Thieu was not toppled,
it is also true that the Communists are
in better military shape in the South
than they have been since 1969. With
100,000 to 145,000 North Vietnamese
troops now in the country, the Com-
munists control over one-third to one-
half of South Viet Nam's territory (see
map, page 15). Those areas encompass
about 10% of the South's 17 million
people; the Communists also have con-
siderable but unmeasured strength in
"government-controlled" areas. Thus
the White House view is that Hanoi is
reaching for the fig leaf to mask a de-
feat; but it seems plausible that the
North has merely decided that this is
an opportune time to seek a military
end of the conflict in order to protect
and possibly expand its political gains.
A captured Communist directive dic-
tated the new strategy last September:
"Although we will stop with the cease-
fire and the big guns will fall silent, the
small guns will remain in action."

Hint. Overlaying the equations in
Viet Nam has been the ineluctable fact
of an American election year. By now,
Washington's quadrennial political fix-
ation must be one of the few institu-
tions that governments everywhere can
count on and plan for. Thus the timing
of the "breakthrough" decision to ne-
gotiate was almost certainly dictated by
Hanoi's perception, some time in Sep-
tember, that there was little prospect of
a McGovern victory and a unilateral
American withdrawal. Hanoi's haste to
get Nixon to sign this week suggests that
it is impressed with the argument that
a settlement after the election might be
less advantageous.

At first, events moved slowly. When
Kissinger was in Moscow last April, So-
viet Boss Leonid Brezhnev hinted that
Hanoi might begin to bargain seriously
if the U.S. would resume the formal Par-
is negotiations, which it had broken off
a month earlier. The negotiators went
back to the Majestic Hotel, but noth-
ing happened. Then when Kissinger was
in Peking in July, China's Premier Chou
En-lai dropped a similar hint; this time
the results were more encouraging. By
August a cease-fire was emerging as the
central topic of the secret talks for the
first time—and Kissinger flew to Saigon
to prepare Thieu. Kissinger's first ser-
ious discussion of a deal with Le Duc
Tho came in late September. That ses-
sion lasted two days, and this time Kis-

BUYING SOUTH VIETNAMESE FLAGS IN SAIGON

Preparing to show their colors—and protect themselves.

singer's deputy, General Alexander M.
Haig Jr., made the trip to Saigon.

The real breakthrough came on
Oct. 8, as Kissinger arrived at a spa-
cious villa used by the North Vietnam-
ese near the town of Rambouillet, 28
miles southwest of Paris, for this 19th
meeting with Le Duc Tho. The North
Vietnamese began the quiet Sunday-
morning session with a ritual demand
for a political settlement, and then
asked for a two-hour break. Kissinger
spent the time walking through the sur-
rounding oak and beech forests, pon-
dering what would come next. The set-
ting had the kind of historical cachet
that delights Kissinger. It was at Ram-
bouillet, with its 14th century château,
once a retreat of Mary Queen of Scots,
Catherine de Médicis and Henry IV,
where Ernest Hemingway set up his
headquarters with advance units of the
American Army about to retake Paris
in 1944. Now Kissinger and Le Duc Tho
would be added to the guidebooks.

When Kissinger returned to the vil-
la, Le Duc Tho offered a cease-fire close
to the President's May 8 plan, and the
four-year impasse was broken at last.
Kissinger sent a summary to the White
House by cable, then called ahead to
Nixon that something was coming that
deserved his "urgent consideration."
Next morning Kissinger postponed the
Monday session twice so that Washing-
ton's answer could be received and di-
gested. From then on, negotiations
moved at full speed. By the end of two
more 16-hour sessions, the two sides had
produced a draft of the nine-point plan.
Its title: "Agreement on Ending the War
and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam."

The North Vietnamese wanted to
set deadlines; Oct. 31 was the final date
after two postponements. Kissinger did
not flatly reject the idea, and over the
course of the next few days Nixon sent
Hanoi's Premier Pham Van Dong two
messages saying that the U.S. would
make every effort to conclude the ne-

gotiations by that date. But Kissinger in-
sisted repeatedly that the U.S. could not
sign unless all parties concerned were
agreed. Even so the Administration was
eager to move ahead as fast and as far
as possible. Though the Oct. 31 dead-
line meant compressing a three-week
process into ten days, Kissinger felt that
even if there "were a lot of loose ends"
it would be "worth the gamble."

Back in Washington after his un-
precedented five-day meeting at Ram-
bouillet, Kissinger and Haig drove
straight to the White House. "How are
the girls in Paris?" Nixon quipped. Then
they got down to work.

Two days later, Kissinger was ready
to fly to Saigon via Paris and put the
proposition to Thieu. As he boarded the
presidential 707 for the flight, Kissinger
was given a handwritten letter from Nix-
on. On two pages of pale green statio-
nery, Nixon had penned some last-
minute thoughts for his plenipotentiary
for peace. "Do what is right for an hon-
orable peace, without regard to the elec-
tion," he wrote. A settlement might be
"a slight plus for the election," Nixon
mused, but more likely it would prove
to be "basically a mixed bag for a va-
riety of reasons."

**Patriot.** In Paris, Kissinger stressed
to Xuan Thuy, Le Duc Tho's deputy,
that there were now three possibilities:
All parties would agree to the nine-point
plan, or some revisions would have to
be made, or there would be a total dead-
lock. Next day, as Kissinger arrived in
Saigon for his four days of talks with
Thieu, the trouble began.

Thieu was concerned about grant-
ing the Communists de facto territorial
sovereignty over those areas they now
occupy. He was irate that the agreement
would permit the North Vietnamese
troops camped on South Vietnamese
soil to remain. But he seemed most con-
cerned about the political unrest and
coup-scheming that might be unleashed
by a cease-fire. He seemed, doubtless

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

17

SPECIAL SECTION

with some acumen, to feel he might
have more to fear from South Vietnam-
ese politicians and factions he has hith-
ero ridden roughshod over than from
the Communists.

Kissinger accentuated the positive.
He reminded Thieu that he had a
million-man military machine, a 120,-
000-man police force and the promise
of U.S. aid continuing through the com-
ing period of "political reconciliation."
In short, Thieu had "a fighting chance."

Will Thieu go along? The Washing-
ton view is that there is less to Thieu's
intransigence than appears on the sur-
face. In order to strengthen his hand for
the difficult days ahead, he is establish-
ing himself as a Vietnamese patriot and
not an American stooge. Like Hanoi, he
was attempting to pressure Nixon on
election eve into modifying the agree-
ment in his favor. But what if Thieu re-
fuses to settle? The next steps are un-
clear, but it is possible that the U.S.
would declare that it had done what it
could and then make a separate peace
with Hanoi. In his briefing, Kissinger
warned both Hanoi and Saigon: "We

will not be stampeded into an agree-
ment until its provisions are right. We
will not be deflected from an agreement
when its provisions are right."

In any case, the dash for peace has
been deflected for the moment by the
need to tidy up those "loose ends." Kis-
singer wants to speed up creation of the
international supervisory machinery so
that it can be operative when the cease-
fire is declared. The idea is to pare down
the inevitable period of bloody chaos
after a cease-fire—a situation that usu-
ally works to the advantage of guerril-
las rather than government.

More serious was the wrangle over
the hazily defined National Council of
Reconciliation and Concord. The coun-
cil is billed as a three-part "administra-
tive structure" that would appear on the
scene long enough to organize elections.
Thieu worries that it could become what
he has always steadfastly opposed and
the Communists have always demand-
ed: a tripartite coalition government.
The issue is a powerful one because the
well-organized Communists might well
end up first among equals in any ar-

rangement in which they would share
power with Thieu loyalists and "neu-
trals." The Communists may see the
council as a sort of "delayed coalition"
that would eventually prove to be the
basis of a post-Thieu regime. If so, it
would be a major concession on the
U.S.'s part—and perhaps a main rea-
son why Hanoi is so anxious to sign.

During his TV exposition, Kissinger
took pains to picture the council as a
nongovernment body that would have
no lasting political impact. But indeed,
the very vagueness of the future it limns
for Viet Nam is a brilliant part of the
nine-point plan. As a State Department
expert summed the agreement of last
week: "Things cannot be settled to ev-
eryone's satisfaction. Thieu got what we
promised: no imposed coalition, and a
reasonable chance for South Viet
Nam's survival." That is not really a
great deal to show for a U.S. invest-
ment of ten years of fighting, more than
$100 billion and 56,000 lives, but for
most Americans, it will probably be
enough if it suffices to liquidate the U.S.
share in the war at last.

Could It Have Been Settled Sooner?

THE end of the war will not arrest
the bitter debate in the U.S. over
whether that end might have come
much sooner. The note was struck to
cheers from a student audience in Iowa
last week by George McGovern when
he asked: "Why, Mr. Nixon, did you
take another four years to put an end
to this tragic war?" For McGovern and
many Americans, the Thieu regime was
so corrupt, the war so immoral, the cost
in lives and national spirit so debilitating,
that instant U.S. withdrawal from
Viet Nam had long since been justified.
Nixon, of course, rejected unilateral
withdrawal by the U.S. from the outset
of his Administration. He was con-
vinced that America's role in the world
could not allow abandoning a commitment
and an ally. More important, he
felt that the sacrifices in blood that the
U.S. had already made in Indochina
must not be dishonored and seemingly
rendered in vain. So the quest for either
a clear victory through Vietnam-
ization and the massive use of U.S. air-
power, or a negotiated, face-saving
"peace with honor" began—to be accomplished within the four years of his
first Administration, Nixon promised.

Any illusions about the prospects of
victory through Vietnamization in that
time frame were shattered by the suc-
cesses of Hanoi's Easter offensive this
year, when only American air strikes
prevented a South Vietnamese rout. For
both sides, those battles seemed to mark
an acquiescence, or at least a war-
weary recognition of military stalemate,
making the negotiations, stymied by the
demands of both sides for so long, at

last a more promising out. And finally,
the bargain across the table was struck
between Hanoi and Washington.

Could it have come sooner than
this year? No, snapped Henry Kissinger
in response to that inevitable first ques-
tion following his briefing last week.
There was "no possibility" for a deal
until now because Hanoi, he said, "con-
sistently refused to discuss the sepa-
ration of the political and military issues"
and insisted "that we had to
predetermine the future of South Viet
Nam in a negotiation with North Viet
Nam." Hanoi's own testimony seemed
to support that defense. Radio Hanoi
claimed credit for making the swift,
ultimate meeting of minds possible by
its "extremely important initiative" in
the area Kissinger cited. Moreover,
there is little doubt that pressure from
Moscow and Peking on Hanoi, which
in turn resulted from Nixon's summit
diplomacy, was a significant factor in
Hanoi's agreement.

But the argument really goes be-
yond who finally said "I do" first, to an
examination of what has finally been
agreed to. The concessions and the com-
promises are real and earnest on both
sides. The primary bargain may be that
Nixon agreed to let North Vietnamese
troops now in South Viet Nam remain
there in exchange for Hanoi's permit-
ting Thieu to stay in power while a po-
litical settlement is worked out.

On balance, whatever face the Ad-
ministration puts on it, Nixon appears
to have given more than he got. He has
in effect ratified Hanoi's conquest of
large portions of South Viet Nam, and

will permit North Vietnamese soldiers
to stay on to preserve those conquests.
He has in effect overturned the South
Vietnamese constitution by certifying a
process to rewrite it and replace the
country's form of government. As a re-
sult, Thieu's interim lease on the pres-
idential palace—Hanoi's part of the
bargain—is tenuous. To be sure, he has
a chance, but it is a limited one. TIME's
Saigon Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud re-
ports that "Most observers here seem
to agree that it will be impossible
for the Thieu government or any anti-
Communist government in South Viet
Nam to negotiate on a one-to-one ba-
sis, as the agreement provides, and sur-
vive." That does not necessarily mean
an instant Communist government in
Saigon; an interim period of years of
factional regimes might ensue. For what
Nixon has is a set of procedures for a po-
litical settlement among the Vietnamese
so complicated that the U.S. will be gone
from Viet Nam before any resolution,
however injurious to American "hon-
or," it takes place. It surely is not the peace
with honor Nixon said he had in mind
when he took office and charted his Viet
Nam course.

The question then becomes easier
to frame: if Nixon had been willing to
give as much in 1969 or 1970 or 1971
as he has now, could the U.S.'s part in
the war have ended much sooner? There
can, of course, be no definitive answer
about the roads of history not taken.
For its own reasons, Hanoi might have
been adamant and unwilling to take the
bargain. It was never tried. But in the
long run the Communists stand to gain
enough from the present deal so that it
is hard to believe that Hanoi would not
have accepted this or a similar offer.

18

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

# The U.S. After Viet Nam

WHEN the truce came, no one would call it "V-V Day." No crowds would jig through Times Square yelling their relief and pride, exuberantly kissing strangers. Such celebrations, the victory dances of other wars, were in a sense ceremonies of innocence. When the end for Americans came in Viet Nam, the longest and strangest of U.S. wars, innocence would have little to do with it. Something more complex would be occurring in the national psyche: relief, surely, but also bewilderment and chagrin, perhaps a lingering sense of betrayal on both sides of the long domestic debate that would now have to be settled by history.

Too much had happened, too much had changed. The Duke of Wellington

MICHAEL ABRAMSON

VETERANS' ANTIWAR PROTEST

once remarked that "a great country cannot wage a little war." Viet Nam, once geographically obscure and utterly remote from almost any American's consciousness, had become, blindly, incredibly, an event almost as important to the nation's culture as its own Civil War. Viet Nam, in fact, grew into a kind of spiritual civil war in the U.S. Thus, even if the physical battle, or at least U.S. participation in it, recedes, its traumatic effect upon the American self-image will persist. The war has gone on so long, has so distorted American life, that in a sense it is difficult to imagine exactly what the nation will become without it. Perhaps, optimistically, the light at the end of the tunnel might now at least give Americans a truer vision of themselves.

In the 13 years since the first American advisers died there, Viet Nam had the time to touch some of the deepest national nerves. It had to be so. A young man now old enough to vote cannot remember a time since he learned to read when it was not there—those malign black headlines of Tonkin and *Tet* and moratorium, of Khe Sanh and presidential abdication and Chicago. It was, in Critic Michael Arlen's phrase, "the living-room war." The evening news on television imaged forth the village ignited with a Zippo lighter, the director of South Viet Nam's police matter-of-factly blowing out a man's brains near the An Quang pagoda, the Buddhists burning themselves to death. In a sense, all Americans became veterans; the war was mainlined electronically straight into the national bloodstream.

Customary proportions of war were skewed, endowed with a wild irony. The greatest military power on earth brought all of its technology—all but the doomsday bombs—to bear on a

peasant nation slightly larger than Florida. The smallest war, 9,000 miles from San Diego, became a national obsession that capsized a consensus President and undermined some of the most crucial American institutions—the military, the universities and, more broadly, the framework of authority itself, the sheer believability of Government.

Viet Nam spawned in the American mind a strange combination of tender, outraged sensibilities and deep callousness—an exaggerated sense that everything was wrong and an almost truculent indifference to things that really were dangerously awry. That was a measure of its divisiveness. BRING THE WAR HOME, the radical graffiti said, and sure enough, the Ohio National Guard shot down four Kent State students one spring afternoon as the allies moved into Cambodia.

Norman Mailer, the nation's literary witch doctor, saw cancer there—the rioting cells of some American craziness, a berserk technology seeking and finding the necessary release of violence. Mailer, wrote Mailer in *The Armies of the Night*, "had come to decide that the center of America might be insane." But was it that? There are two ways to judge it: 1) the war was the metastasis of some deeper American sickness, an expression of institutional evil, or 2) the war was the product of essentially well-meaning miscalculation, an error of judgment and perspective, perhaps, but not a fundamental indictment of the entire society.

**Counterpoint.** Those two perspectives became the political counterpoint of the '60s. To those who subscribed to the first view, the growing battalions of the radicalized, Viet Nam became a kind of metaphor of evil that justified any excess. If Viet Nam was possible, then anything was possible. The war was a driving psychological wedge that alienated the young and in many ways legitimized a dozen other anti-institutional movements. Some of them would have occurred anyway, no doubt—the campaign for Women's Liberation, for example, the consumer movement, the drive for political reform in the Democratic Party—but it was the climate of war protest that made all the other fragmentations possible.

The war's imprint on American universities is deep and lasting. Faculties became deeply self-conscious and divided about the intellectual's role in American life. Stanford, M.I.T. and other centers of technological training eventually more or less forsook secret research. The war and the deferments students enjoyed from it turned campuses into what Yale President Kingman Brewster described as "purgatorial sanctuaries." With what became an almost automatic fervor, the nation was damned as "imperialistic" and "racist" and "fascist." Students swelled the ranks of conscientious objectors and draft exiles, as well as those who accepted the consequences of a more

BODY BAGS BEING LOADED ONTO HELICOPTER AT KHE SANH (1968)
Bewilderment, chagrin and a lingering sense of betrayal.

DAVID DOUGLAS PARCHMEN

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

continued on page 22

SPECIAL SECTION

burdensome conscience and went to jail.

Apocalypse was in the air. The old world was always coming to an end the day after tomorrow. "Do it!" said Jerry Rubin. Abbie Hoffman prankishly scattered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a gesture of his burlesque contempt. More than any other single factor, it was the war that spawned the "counterculture." The undeclared war, in what seemed its extravagant absurdities, appeared such a fundamental violation of the social contract that all bets were off. Illegal drugs achieved a widespread legitimacy. At one critical turning point, the once pacific movement that grew out of the civil rights crusade turned to violence. The explosion of Weatherman's bomb factory on New York City's West Eleventh Street was just another symbol of the war come home.

**Privatism.** With the ending of the draft and the troop withdrawals, the radical movement waned. Yet for all its profligacy, it accomplished some profound changes in American life. By its theatrical domination of the press and TV, it helped turn a majority of Americans against the war. Probably its most enduring effect will be cultural rather than political—the development of alternative life-styles, for example. Much of the political energy of the movement was subsumed by the McGovern campaign. But for many months now, with the ending of the draft, the old activism has been dead. In many, a sullen kind of privatism has replaced the formerly furious idealism. In a sense, the war has ended by producing a basically antipolitical generation. Observes Political Scientist Richard Young: "More and more on the campuses, you see a kind of I'm-going-to-get-mine style that's quite different from several years ago. The cynicism is amazing."

The most insidious impact of Viet Nam has been the erosion of trust and confidence in authority. It began at the White House, perhaps in the U.S. complicity in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. The endlessly repeated official optimism about Viet Nam had dangerous consequences. Always, the "corner had been turned," the end was in sight; stick it out a little longer. In 1969 Henry Kissinger told war protesters, "If we have not ended the war by six months from now, you can come back and tear down the White House fence." Writes Anthony Lake, a young Foreign Service officer who resigned in 1970 because of the war: "To be believed is (to some extent) to be trusted. Not to be believed—the present condition Washington often faces before the world and the American people—threatens the character of representative democracy."

Viet Nam dangerously concentrated the nation's power in the presidency, with Congress relegated to a kind of resistive passivity. The fault lay not only with the three Presidents who prosecuted the war but with the executive elites with whom they surrounded themselves, hubristic warrior-intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Robert MacNamara. Under Lyndon Johnson, at least, there was an odd blending of *machismo* styles—the President's "coonskin-on-the-wall" Texas mystique with the cooler but no less assertive air of the intellectuals. This "can-do" mentality, it may be, suffused the executive thinking, the very traditional American sense that an impelling will in harness to superior technology can solve any problem. That impulse reckoned without the devastating complexities of Viet Nam, and a culture based on values few in the U.S. understood.

Thus one serious casualty of the war

has been the U.S. military itself, the instrument of that will. Abnormal requirements for instant manpower—and the disaffection of so many of the educated young—lowered the services' standards to some extent. Said one senior Army officer: "Calley would never have become an officer if we were not so short-handed." As the war ground on, the protest movement infected the Army itself. "Fragging" became part of the new vocabulary of the '60s. Occasionally units refused orders to go into combat. "Grunts" smoked marijuana openly at their firebases. Thousands came home contaminated with heroin. Race riots broke out among soldiers at places like Danang, even on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.

Surely one of the bitterest, most poignant tolls of the war was taken simply on the 2.7 million Americans who fought there. If the majority of them

PAUL DE MARIA—N Y DAILY NEWS

NEW YORK HARDHATS
Dual recriminations.

performed bravely and well—and they did—their sacrifices were somehow tragically diminished by the very ambiguity of the war, its often enraging purposelessness. At its very worst, that frustration produced My Lai and other less celebrated atrocities. The fraternity of Viet Nam veterans faced the additional frustration of returning with neither honor nor glory to the nation they were supposedly "defending." The experience is especially bitter for those thousands who came back maimed or crippled. In one scene of Hogarthian savagery not long ago, television audiences watched a legless vet in a bar near Washington's Walter Reed Hospital blearily drinking beer from his prosthetic calf.

America has endured a transformation, in many ways a radical transformation. In sum, the experience may well amount to a kind of loss of innocence. It demonstrated, for one thing, that American technology does not always

TIME Chart by J. Donovan

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TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

work; all the F-111s and "people-sniffers" and laser-guided bombs and helicopters could not ultimately, not really, enforce the American will. Of more psychic importance, the war may have forever soured the almost subconscious, idealized conviction that Americans are somehow morally superior beings. My Lai, the massive bombing campaign, the image of a napalmed child—such things have corroded the American self-esteem. But how deeply?

Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton believes it may amount only to a kind of "psychic numbing," an emotional state encouraged by the Administration. The President still uses the high rhetoric of "peace with honor." Says Lifton: "Nixon has made it very clear that he wants to end the war without coming to terms with it. To learn from Viet Nam the country would have to accept some very painful truths—most notably

TARENTUM, PA. VALLEY DAILY NEWS

DEATH AFTER NATIONAL GUARD OPENED FIRE AT KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

A combination of outraged sensibilities and deep callousness.

PROTEST IN WASHINGTON

Loss of innocence.

that it was wrong. The impossible truth for Americans is that we are capable of evil and have committed it on a large scale."

But Americans do not seem in a mood for such catharsis. For one thing, they appear to be weary of self-flagellation. Most would probably be content to turn away and never look back, to let the nightmare fade. Viet Nam, for all the changes it has wrought in the American spirit, remains even today a somehow remote and unreal phantasm. It may be that, as George McGovern seems to be discovering, the nation really harbors little sense of guilt about it, possibly because from the beginning to the very end, Americans have never really understood the war or the Vietnamese or why the whole cruel business ever happened.

Yet at the same time, the nation has been humbled, not only militarily but psychically as well. In some respects that is a healthy thing. It may

be eventually a foundation for the U.S. to achieve a reconciliation with itself. The deepest need for healing now lies in a restoration of Americans' faith in their own leaders. Columbia Sociologist Amitai Etzioni finds prospects for that discouraging. "I believe it is too late here," he says. "That mistrust will take a long, long time to correct. It's an illness which has spread too far." Assuming that he is re-elected, Richard Nixon's past record of secrecy and comparative executive isolation does not give much reason for encouragement about the next four years. For all of his success in being "presidential" rather than political during this campaign, Nixon has taken a belligerent line on many of the issues about which his countrymen are most divided. Amnesty for Americans who evaded the draft and the war could be a healing gesture after the P.O.W.s come home, but the President feels that to the majority of Americans it probably would be offensive without some compensating provision for national service. Still, it was hardly necessary to call the amnesty idea "the most immoral thing I can think of." In a second term, of course, with the war and its domestic turmoil behind him, Richard Nixon might adopt a more open and generous style, and work harder at his 1968 notion of "bringing us together."

Quite aside from emotional anguish, Viet Nam's legacy to the U.S. includes a massive list of domestic problems long deferred: schools, housing, jobs, public health, environment, all of the social needs that the war superseded. Funds will not necessarily be abundant (see following story). But as much as anything, the sense that such reconstruction is under way might help restore the lost faith in American institutions. In that sense, a feeling of business as usual, of problems being dealt with, might bring back some buoyant normalcy. McGovern's campaign phrase strikes the need: "Give us back our country."

For a time, the nation may simply slump into a relieved apathy. Eventually, according to Yale Historian John Morton Blum, there is a danger of dual recriminations over the war—one kind emanating from the militaristic right wing seeking to fix blame for the absence of victory, the other from the left carrying on its crusade against the machinery that it believes led the U.S. into the swamps—the military-industrial complex. The U.S. military may pack up its tanks and choppers and howitzers and APCs and bombs and M-16s and all its young men and sail away, back to "the world." But it may be much longer before America finds peace with itself.

**Dead Wrong.** Was it all worth it, the deaths, the devastation, the emotional wounds to the nation? Says George Ball, who served as Under Secretary of State in the Johnson years: "It has been a disastrous undertaking from the beginning, and historians will give a bearish verdict to the whole operation. Many men of good will became obsessed with the need for success, but they lost sight of the country's larger interests." To Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "all we did was show our inability with 500,000 troops and vast technology to cope with a few hundred thousand guerrillas in black pajamas."

All through the '60s, even the stated purpose of U.S. intervention kept changing, from limited counterinsurgency to containment of China in accordance with the domino theory to the argument for South Vietnamese self-determination. Policy at times was dictated by an oversimplified notion of Communist aggression. Says Clark Clifford, Secretary of Defense under L.B.J.: "We misevaluated the situation. We thought the joint Soviet-Chinese effort to Communize Southeast Asia would succeed. We were just dead wrong."

There is at least widespread agreement that apart from the morals of it, the price paid was just too high. But

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granting that the U.S. was there, a second and more problematic question is whether President Nixon should have withdrawn U.S. forces sometime after he took office in 1969 instead of expending an additional 15,300 American lives and $57.7 billion. The last three and a half years of the war have been, in some sense, an elaborate and bloody face-saving operation for the U.S. The

Administration has argued that the effort was necessary in order to redeem the American sacrifices already made and to prevent the hypothetical turmoil that would descend on the U.S. after a "shameful" withdrawal. Such questions may be debated for years. Could Nixon, like De Gaulle in Algeria, have asserted his leadership to declare the issue closed? It is arguable that the new Pres-

ident could have explained that the U.S. had done everything it reasonably could do for Saigon and that the commitment was therefore at an end, that no further lives would be expended to somehow justify the lives already lost.

The argument will go on. No one can claim that the United States won in Viet Nam. What the nation lost it is only beginning to measure.

## Where Did the Peace Dividend Go?

FOR the U.S. economy, peace will provide a modest but significant bonus—and only minor dislocations. Previous postwar conversions were economic turning points: consumers rushed to buy goods that had been scarce during the fighting, and the Government choked off defense spending in favor of domestic projects. By contrast, the Viet Nam War never required quite enough of the nation's output to cause such shortages in civilian goods, and the U.S.'s spending on it has shrunk considerably in the past three years. Says Economist Edward Fried of Washington's Brookings Institution: "The peace dividend has virtually been paid."

The war has been a debilitating experience for the economy. Since 1964 the U.S. has poured in $107.8 billion in direct spending, an amount second only to the $664 billion spent in World War II. In 1969 at the height of the war, the direct cost was $21.5 billion. This led to huge budget deficits and punishing inflation. In an attempt to curb that inflation, the Government created the recession of 1970 and imposed the wage-price controls. More than that, the high cost of Viet Nam forced the nation to put off spending for many badly needed domestic projects—schools, hospitals, sewage plants and mass-transit systems.

These economic problems stemmed from Lyndon Johnson's determination to press ahead simultaneously with costly social programs and a costly war —without raising taxes to pay for them. Johnson's economic advisers began calling for a tax increase in 1965, arguing that war spending was mounting much faster than the Pentagon was willing to admit. Arthur Okun, then a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, recalls glancing skeptically over one set of military-cost estimates marked "For internal consumption only" and penciling in the margin, "but not to be swallowed." Nevertheless, fearing the political onus of a war tax, Johnson held off seeking it until 1967.

Considering the vast sums spent on Viet Nam, why will the once vaunted peace dividend be so small? The main reason: many of the benefits have already been parceled out during the slow, tortuous winding down of the war. The 10% income surtax that became effective in 1968, for example, was cut by

three-quarters in 1970 and canceled altogether thereafter.

What about specific savings in the defense budget resulting from a pull-out? War spending in the current fiscal year, including military aid to the South Vietnamese government, is budgeted for $7.3 billion. Roughly $1.5 billion of those expenses would be incurred whether there was a war or not; for example, the ships of the Seventh Fleet would have to be manned and serviced wherever they were. Thus, Pentagon planners estimate that peace would bring a savings of $5.8 billion annually. But Pentagon leaders insist that all of this sum—and more—will be needed for other military purposes. For one thing, President Nixon has ordered up

several new strategic-weapons systems, including North American Rockwell's B-1 bomber and Lockheed's Poseidon missile. Nixon expects defense costs to rise from $76.5 billion in this fiscal year to $83 billion by fiscal 1975.

Thus, far from fearing peace, many big defense contractors look forward to it as an essential step in winning contracts for future projects. Says John C. Bierwirth, vice president of Grumman Corp.: "Once the present expenditures for daily combat support are behind us, the military will begin to improve current aircraft." In addition, under terms of the proposed settlement, the U.S. would continue supplying South Viet Nam with nearly all of its defense needs, including aircraft, tanks and guns. True, some war suppliers, mostly manufacturers of bomb casings and small-arms ordnance, will lose substantial business. As many as 100,000 jobs are dependent upon the current war effort. But except for the Government, the employers of such workers tend to be small, localized firms that have a limited impact on the total economy. Few big companies depend upon Viet Nam for as much as 1% of their revenues.

The economy, which is already in the midst of an extremely healthy growth period, would probably pick up yet a bit more quickly on the psychological lifting power of a rise in consumer confidence. That in turn might light up Wall Street. The key Dow Jones industrial average after all has jumped following every wisp of a peace rumor for years. Yet strangely last week, when peace seemed closer than ever, the Dow Jones rose less than four points; the most plausible explanation that brokers could offer was that investors had largely discounted a settlement in advance. Brokers remain optimistic, agreeing with Spencer Trask & Co.'s Raymond F. DeVoe Jr. that the war "has kept a lid" on stock prices.

Most businessmen also expect the war's end to pay them benefits as the result of a boost in national morale. Says J. Peter Grace, chairman of the broadly based W. R. Grace & Co.: "Essentially, peace will bring about the promise of greater stability, which businessmen value highly." Like most other Americans, business leaders for the last few years have generally considered Viet Nam a bad investment that ought to be discarded, even at some sacrifice, at the first opportune moment.

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# The New U.S. Role in the World

The end of World War II probably marked the pinnacle of U.S. prestige; the height of the Viet Nam War may well have marked its nadir. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, retiring editor of *Foreign Affairs*, writes in the current issue: "The methods we have used in fighting the war have scandalized and disgusted public opinion in almost all foreign countries. Not since we withdrew into comfortable isolation in 1920 has the prestige of the U.S. stood so low."

Even America's staunchest allies, while not unsympathetic, used to be dismayed by Washington's obsession with Viet Nam. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger have begun to rebuild American prestige and influence by the daring, skillful summit diplomacy that led to the agreement with Hanoi. To achieve their grandly labeled "generation of peace," Nixon and Kissinger are seeking to limit the American role in the world, concentrating on great power relationships and on learning to live with all kinds of Communist regimes.

In Kissinger's view, American involvement in Viet Nam stemmed from "an outmoded foreign policy concept" long before the Nixon Administration came into office. "In seeking to establish new relationships," he has said, "our concern is not to withdraw from the world. We are trying to find a posture to remain committed to the world yet to have a policy that is emotionally sustainable in this country."

**Diplomatic Game.** Nixon's new policy is a direct shift away from the cold war rigidity and messianism of the 1950s and early 1960s—an ideological policy based upon a national agreement that the U.S. had a moral responsibility to contain Communism. As Harvard Political Scientist Stanley Hoffmann observes, "The external development of the 1960s made obsolete the strategy that had been devised in the late 1940s. The war in Viet Nam destroyed the consensus. In a way, this may have been a service—at what a price—for it forced Americans to face the obsolescence of policy earlier than they probably otherwise would have."

Describing the Kissinger-Nixon design, Hoffmann continues: "Ideology would not disappear, but its external effects would be neutralized; different political systems would coexist. A great power would be more concerned with its maneuvers with and around the other major states than with the courtship of the weak. Thus mobility would be restored to the diplomatic game, and changes in the international system would once more result from the playing of the game itself rather than from the 'eyeball to eyeball' crises."

The new direction of U.S. foreign policy was illustrated by the Administration's success in separating Viet Nam from America's relationships with China and the Soviet Union. Both nations

agreed to proceed with the Nixon summit meetings because they were more concerned about their own national interests than with Marxist orthodoxies. In future dealings with the two Communist superpowers, the U.S. must adroitly avoid giving the impression that it is aiding one at the expense of the other; tricky as this balancing act might sometimes become, it will afford the U.S. far more leverage than it had when Peking remained in isolation.

Perhaps inevitably, the often stage-managed drama of Nixon's pragmatic diplomacy has proved to be jarring to some. The imposition of martial law in the Philippines and in South Korea is almost certainly linked to the thaw in U.S.-Chinese relations, the end of the Viet Nam War and a sense of a lessening American commitment to Asia. In the Shanghai communiqué, the U.S. declared that it would "progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as tension in the area [Indochina] diminishes." But the Chinese themselves emphasized during the summit that they did not want the U.S. to withdraw completely from Asia—presumably because they do not want the Japanese, or possibly the Russians, to fill the resulting vacuum.

The end of the Viet Nam War will make possible a presidential visit to Japan next year, another "historic first" that Richard Nixon clearly covets. He is also aware that American ties with Europe are in urgent need of strengthening and redefining. Kissinger in fact has already dubbed 1973 "the year of Europe," and a Viet Nam settlement will undoubtedly be capped by a triumphal visit to Europe in the spring.

But it will take far more than that to restore the U.S.'s prestige and moral power. In the end, the world's judgment of the Nixon-Kissinger settlement will probably rest on whether an independent government can survive in Saigon. It will also depend upon the way in which the U.S. chooses to help the shattered nations of Indochina rebuild.

The war's end will inevitably improve America's standing with Third World nations, although present U.S. policy toward them, as Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, is currently one of benign neglect. He adds, "This cannot long endure, because we are going to see more fragmentation and unrest in those areas that will impose themselves on our society." One reason for this, says Brzezinski, is the political impact of U.S. investments and raw material needs. Whether the Viet Nam settlement will lead toward progress in the Middle East remains to be seen; the U.S. can reasonably hope that as a result of the Moscow summit the Soviets will be willing to help keep the situation there defused.

The war shattered the twin assumptions that America is virtually omnip

otent and that its power is invariably used to advance the cause of peace; in doing so, Viet Nam also altered the nation's defense strategy. Obviously the U.S. will not soon again dispatch "advisers" let alone other military forces to intervene abroad. Nor will the U.S. rely so heavily on its weaponry—particularly its massive airpower.

The size of America's nuclear arsenal is partially frozen by treaty. Nonetheless, the U.S. will continue to improve the quality of its present weapons even as it reduces the size of the nation's armed forces from 2,300,000 today to perhaps 2,000,000. With a few exceptions, most notably the NATO commitment in Europe (which could be scaled down if future Mutual Balanced Force Reduction talks with Warsaw Pact Nations are successful), these troops will be

ALDO DURAZZI

ITALIAN LEFTISTS AGAINST NIXON

*Public opinion was scandalized.*

stationed on the ground in the U.S. There will still be nuclear-equipped American forces in the air and under the sea; but the myth that this technologically sophisticated deterrent is invincible in all circumstances—particularly against a tough, dedicated, nontechnological foe—has been destroyed.

What lessons has the U.S. learned from the longest and most costly war in its history? "That good intentions and physical power are not enough," says Political Scientist Hans Morgenthau, an early critic of the war. "What is required is a wisdom and recognition of limits that our national experience hadn't taught us." As the cold war disappears, suggests former Diplomat George Kennan, one of the principal architects of America's policy of containment, the U.S. will be free to concentrate on such larger issues as the control of strategic weaponry, the salvation of man's environment and "the organization of international life."

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

27

Chronology: Generation of Conflict

September 2, 1945. Ho Chi Minh, head of the Communist-dominated Viet Minh and leader of the Vietnamese resistance to the Japanese occupation, proclaims an independent Viet Nam. (Indochina had been under French control since 1893.)

March 1946. France recognizes limited Vietnamese independence and Ho's leadership but wins right to station troops in Viet Nam for five years.

June 1946. French local authorities proclaim a "provisional republic" of South Viet Nam.

December 1946. Skirmishing between French and Vietnamese. Ho goes underground and launches guerrilla war.

December 1946-March 1947. French gain control of Vietnamese coastal cities, but Ho's Viet Minh entrench themselves in countryside.

October 1949. Mao Tse-tung's Communists win control of China, promise aid to Ho's Viet Minh.

June 1950. Korean War breaks out. U.S. begins to send aid to French in Viet Nam ($500 million annually).

July 1953. Korean armistice signed. Guerrilla war intensifies in northern Viet Nam. French, seeking to carry war to Viet Minh territory, occupy outpost at Dien Bien Phu in November. Ho offers to negotiate truce.

March 1954. Viet Minh besiege Dien Bien Phu.

May 8, 1954. Dien Bien Phu falls.

July 21, 1954. At Geneva conference, war-weary French agree to temporary partition of Viet Nam at 17th parallel. Ho's Viet Minh march into Hanoi in October and establish capital of Communist North Viet Nam. U.S.-backed Premier Ngo Dinh Diem takes charge of South Viet Nam. Geneva accords call for elections in two years to reunify country.

September 1954. U.S. negotiates Southeast Asia Defense Treaty to guarantee security of Indochina.

February 1955. After months of skirmishing between Diem and rival political factions, U.S. takes over training of South Vietnamese army. U.S. advisers grow to 327.

July 16, 1955. With U.S. support, Diem bars reunification elections. President Eisenhower later says Ho would probably have won.

1957-59. Viet Minh renew guerrilla warfare. Hundreds of Diem's local officials murdered.

July 8, 1959. Viet Minh raid kills two U.S. advisers, first American dead.

May 1960. U.S. increases number of advisers to 685, the maximum permitted by Geneva treaty. Number increased to 900 by December. Communists reorganize into National Liberation Front of South Viet Nam, with Viet Cong as its military arm.

October 1961. President Kennedy sends Special Adviser General Maxwell

Taylor to South Viet Nam. Taylor, who had resigned in protest against Eisenhower Administration's emphasis on nuclear strategy, urges increased Army aid against "limited wars." Kennedy increases U.S. military forces to 3,200.

May 1963. Buddhists and students in Hue riot against Diem. Troops fire on crowds. In June, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sets himself on fire as protest against Diem. Rioting spreads in Saigon. U.S. press increasingly critical of Diem's authoritarian rule.

Nov. 1, 1963. With tacit U.S. approval, Saigon army officers stage coup against Diem and execute him. Junta headed by General Duong Van Minh takes over. As turmoil continues—13 governments in 19 months—Viet Cong rapidly gain strength in countryside.

Aug. 2-4, 1964. U.S.S. Destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy report being attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in Tonkin Gulf. (No damage done, and reports of attack may have been greatly exaggerated.) President Johnson orders a retaliatory raid against North Vietnamese gunboats and "supporting" facilities.

Aug. 5, 1964. President Johnson asks Congress for resolution enabling him to take "all necessary steps" to maintain the security of Southeast Asia. Senate approves, 88-2; House, 416-0. Johnson later cites this resolution as authority for military action without declaration of war. U.S. forces in Viet Nam rise to 23,000 by end of year.

Nov. 3, 1964. Lyndon Johnson, after promising "no wider war" during campaign against Barry Goldwater, wins landslide election victory.

Feb. 7, 1965. Viet Cong attack U.S.

MAJOR DONLON

GENERAL KHANH

TRI QUANG

BAO DALI

Among the Famous and the Forgotten

OVER the years, the tragedy of Viet Nam has thrust onstage a variety of characters who strutted and fretted their hour and then virtually disappeared from sight. Among them:

Bao Dai, the last Emperor of Anam, forced to abdicate after World War II, resurrected by the French in 1947 as puppet Emperor of Viet Nam, went into exile in 1954 to a more loathagous life on the French Riviera. Now 59, his majesty lives in France's Midi, still enjoys a playboy's existence and occasionally issues political pronouncements that are widely ignored.

Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, the beautiful doll-like sister-in-law of President Ngo Dinh Diem, once ruled Saigon social life like a pirate queen. She censored movies, organized women's militia units and fiercely denounced all opposition. When a Buddhist monk set himself on fire to protest Diem's repression, Mme. Nhu ridiculed the immolation as a "barber-cue." Touring abroad when her husband and Diem were slain in 1963, Mme. Nhu took up residence in a commodious, ocher-colored Roman villa purchased with funds the family had accumulated during the years of power. Now 48, she still lives there with her three children in almost complete se-

clusion, under the supervision of Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, 75, Diem's oldest brother. She was last heard from in a statement saying the Pentagon papers' details on U.S. involvement in Diem's overthrow showed "That I, Mme. Nhu, spoke the truth." Her most recent price for an interview: $1,000, with photo $1,500.

Thich Tri Quang, a militant Buddhist monk, spearheaded his church's noisy protest movement against a succession of Saigon governments. Intense and ardent, an excellent organizer, Tri Quang inspired the beginning of the Buddhist demonstrations against Diem in 1963, followed through in 1965 and 1966 against Premier Ky and President Thieu. As the latter solidified his power, Tri Quang drifted back to his pagoda in Saigon. Now he is studying Buddhist scriptures, toying with a stamp collection and perhaps thinking out ways to deal with a new government.

Fighting soldiers from the sky, Fearless men who jump and die, Men who mean just what they say, The brave men of the green beret.

Special Forces Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler made a quarter-of-a-million

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base at Pleiku and kill eight Americans. Johnson subsequently orders campaign of air raids against North Viet Nam.

**March 6, 1965.** First two battalions of Marine combat troops land at Danang for "limited security duty."

**April 1965.** Johnson says U.S. is ready to negotiate a peace that will leave South Viet Nam independent. Hanoi rejects Johnson's offer, demands U.S. withdrawal and eventual reunification of Viet Nam.

**June 1965.** South Vietnamese army stages coup. General Nguyen Van Thieu becomes chief of state, with Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky as Premier. White House confirms reports that U.S. forces are now authorized to engage in combat. U.S. military strength of 74,000 rises to 148,000 by October. U.S. Commander William Westmoreland requests 350,000, declares that war can be won.

**Oct. 15-16, 1965.** U.S. antiwar groups organize mass demonstrations. First draft-card burning.

**Dec. 24, 1965.** Johnson orders bombing halt, sends high officials to various world capitals to discuss peace possibilities. Missions lead to nothing. Bombing resumed after 37 days.

**April 1966.** U.S. starts to use B-52s to bomb North Viet Nam. U.S. troop strength rises to 389,000 at end of year.

**May 1967.** U.S. forces enter Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to block infiltration routes from North. U.S. forces increase to 463,000 in June.

**September 1967.** U.S. organizes nationwide elections to provide "self-determination" for South Viet Nam. General Thieu wins easily.

**Jan. 17, 1968.** Johnson reaffirms willingness to stop bombing if there are "reasonable hopes that talks would be productive."

**Jan. 24, 1968.** Communists open heavy attack on Khe Sanh base near DMZ.

**Jan. 30, 1968.** Communists launch Tet offensive with attacks in all major cities. Viet Cong raid U.S. embassy in Saigon, overrun Chinese quarter of Cholon, seize city of Hué.

**February 1968.** Month-long fighting to suppress Tet offensive. After years of optimistic predictions from U.S., Communists have demonstrated ability to strike at will, but offensive ends in Communist military defeat. Hué recaptured after 26 days.

**March 12, 1968.** Senator Eugene McCarthy, campaigning against war, wins 40% in New Hampshire primary.

**March 31, 1968.** President Johnson announces retirement at end of term, orders cessation of bombing and appeals for truce talks.

**May 13, 1968.** Truce talks open in Paris between U.S. and North Viet Nam. Averell Harriman represents U.S.

**Nov. 6, 1968.** Nixon elected President. Names Henry Cabot Lodge as chief Paris negotiator in January. South Viet Nam and Viet Cong join talks.

**June 8, 1969.** Nixon meets Thieu on Midway and announces U.S. force of 541,000 will be reduced by 25,000 before September.

**Aug. 4, 1969.** First secret meeting between Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese in Paris.

**Sept. 3, 1969.** Ho Chi Minh dies.

**Nov. 15, 1969.** Large crowds demonstrate in U.S. cities for "Moratorium" in Viet Nam.

**April 30, 1970.** Nixon sends troops into Cambodia to attack Communist sanctuaries. Student protests climaxed by Ohio Guard's shooting of four students at Kent State.

**June 29, 1970.** Last U.S. troops withdrawn from Cambodia.

**Oct. 7, 1970.** Nixon proposes a standstill cease-fire throughout Indonesia. Hanoi rejects proposal, still demanding U.S. withdrawal.

**February-March 1971.** American troops enter Laos to stop infiltration around DMZ, then withdraw.

**July 9-11, 1971.** Kissinger makes secret trip to China.

**Feb. 21-28, 1972.** Nixon visits China, then goes to Russia May 22-30.

**March 30, 1972.** Communists begin heavy offensive in South, crossing DMZ with tanks and artillery.

**May 1, 1972.** Communists capture provincial capital of Quang Tri and gain control of northernmost province.

**May 8, 1972.** Nixon orders mining of Haiphong and other ports to stop Communist military shipments. Offers withdrawal of all U.S. troops four months after agreement on an internationally supervised cease-fire.

**June 17, 1972.** U.S. ends combat role in Viet Nam, leaving residual force of 60,000.

**Oct. 8, 1972.** Kissinger achieves breakthrough in secret talks with North Vietnamese.

GEN. HARKINS

MME. NHU

SERGEANT SADLER

GENERAL LOAN

dollars within three months by writing that paean, *The Ballad of the Green Berets*, one of the big song hits of the gung ho days of 1966. Sadler himself stayed on with the Green Berets for 18 months, then took a discharge and set out to scale the heights of folk music. He never quite made it. "I went broke three times," Sadler laments. "I just didn't have the knack of keeping money." Today he is vice president of an auto-battery firm.

Special Forces Captain Roger H.C. Donlon, a tall, sandy-haired soldier who led a heroic defense against Viet Cong attackers in 1963, was the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Viet Nam. Donlon himself was wounded four times in the firefight, but he refused medical aid until his men were treated. Donlon, 38, today is a major serving in Thailand.

General Nguyen Khanh, who toppled the junta that had toppled President Diem, ran South Viet Nam in 1964-65 through a series of revolving-door coups and count coups (one of which sidelined Khanh himself for a time). Amid wide civic unrest and a serious deterioration in South Viet Nam's military effectiveness, Khanh responded to his problems by repeated calls for a "march north" (Bac tien)—which served to torpedo a promising peace initiative

that was then under way. Finally ousted in 1965 by General Nguyen Van Thieu, Khanh, 44, now cheerfully operates a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris called La Table du Mandarin.

General Paul D. Harkins, the U.S. commander in Saigon from 1962 to 1964, who labored mightily to build up South Viet Nam's military and economic reserves, used to tell doubting reporters: "I am an optimist, and I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic." General Harkins retired after his Viet Nam assignment, and now, at 68, he lives in Dallas, where he serves as a director of the Independent American Life Insurance Co. Says he: "Looking back on all these years—all of the blood and agony—I have to wonder what we accomplished."

One of the single most horrifying photos of the war was that of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then director of the national police, emptying his pistol into the head of a bound prisoner during the 1968 Tet offensive (see page 20). Three months later, in a Saigon street battle, Loan was seriously wounded in the right leg and thigh. A year later, he was treated in Washington's Walter Reed Hospital for complications from the wound. He is now back in Saigon in a minor defense post, with the leg atrophied and useless.

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29

# They Made a Revolution

I think the Americans greatly underestimate the character of the Vietnamese people. We have always shown great determination when faced with a foreign invader.

—Ho Chi Minh to Bernard Fall, Hanoi, 1962

THE lights went out in Viet Nam on a quiet evening in December 1946. Ho Chi Minh, bitterly realizing that his months of negotiation for independence from the French had failed, ordered that the electrical plants all over the country be mined; at 8 o'clock that night nearly all of them blew up simultaneously. That same evening, Viet Minh troops attacked French garrisons North and South. The war for independence

often hatred for the French colonial rulers. All spent months and years in prison and exile for their beliefs. Ho himself, when he returned to Viet Nam in February 1941, had been away from his native land for 30 years, and the name Ho Chi Minh was only the last in a bewildering list of pseudonyms. Born Nguyen That Thanh (which means He Who Will Be Victorious), he became Nguyen Ai Quoc (He Who Loves His Country) during his poverty-ridden years in Paris. Later, during his travels between China and Moscow, where he studied at the revolutionary University of the Toilers of the East, he was known for a while as Nguyen O Phap (He Who Hates the French).

It was his Paris experience, in fact,

brightest of all his associates, was Pham Van Dong, now Premier of North Viet Nam. Son of a high-ranking mandarin, Pham was educated in Hue and Hanoi, joined Ho in Canton in 1925. The next year he was sent back to Viet Nam to organize party cells. Arrested by the French in 1930, Pham spent six years at hard labor in a penal colony, then fled to China to rejoin his leader. When Ho was jailed by the Nationalist Chinese from 1942 to 1943, Pham took over the leadership of the independence movement, and after Ho's release he eventually settled into the job he still holds: the party's top administrator.

Equally well organized and considerably more fiery is General Giap, who joined Ho in China in 1940. A year later he was ordered to establish the Viet Minh army. From a raggle-taggle beginning came the forces that overwhelmed the French at Dien Bien Phu and fought American troops to a standstill. Giap's classic work on guerrilla warfare (*People's War, People's Army*) is essentially a Vietnamese variation on the military doctrines of Mao Tse-tung, stressing, as does Mao, the vital importance of broad popular support. Asked in 1964 about the situation in South Viet Nam, Giap replied: "We are in no hurry. The longer we wait, the greater will be the Americans' defeat."

In general charge of the political campaign in the South is Communist Party Secretary Le Duan. Considerably less known in the West than his comrades, he prefers the role of éminence grise; he is the only one of North Viet Nam's revolutionary leaders who is of lower-class stock. Le Duan took responsibility for the campaign against the South in 1956 and helped create the National Liberation Front in 1960. An independent-minded hard-liner, Le Duan resisted pressures to run the war along either Soviet or Chinese lines, proclaiming instead the "creative nature" of the Vietnamese revolution. Western analysts consider him the first among equals in the Hanoi leadership—the de facto successor to Ho Chi Minh.

**Goals.** It is to Ho, however, that credit for North Viet Nam's determination must first go. Alone among Communist leaders, Ho had to face—and turn back—two major Western powers, and his fight went on far longer than that of any other. Though he died three years before the glimmers of a final settlement began to appear, there is evidence that he accurately gauged its arrival. In a 1962 talk with Bernard Fall in Hanoi, Ho said: "The Americans are much stronger than the French, though they know us less well. So it may perhaps take ten years to do it, but our heroic competitors will defeat them in the end." Ten years later, the war is ending. Defeat, however, is too strong a word: while the U.S. has not achieved its original goals, neither have the Communists. The remarkable fact remains that the four revolutionaries accomplished as much as they did.

© PHOTO PIC

VO NGUYEN GIAP

*Years of prison and exile for a belief that endured.*

was under way, and the precision of its inception was to be echoed for the next 26 years.

Determination, organization, passion: all were key elements of Ho's extraordinarily complicated personality, as they were of the close little band of men he chose to help lead his crusade. Le Duan, Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong—all sworn to create a Viet Nam free of foreign control, all dedicated Communists. But they were Communists of a distinctly nationalist breed. Influenced though they were by the writings of Marx and Lenin, all seemed to know that neither Peking nor Moscow could win their war for them.

These revolutionaries shared roughly similar origins: mostly from middle-class families, well educated, born before World War I. Their fathers were teachers or government officials (save for Le Duan), and in their formative years they learned at least distaste, more

that turned Ho against France. His brief, futile efforts on behalf of Vietnamese independence at the Versailles Peace Conference led him past past social-ism, which promised much for Asians but actually did nothing, to Communism. In December 1920, attracted by the professed ideals of the Russian Revolution, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party.

For two decades, Ho traveled through Asia, never daring to set foot in his native Viet Nam, gradually spending more and more time in South China, where other Vietnamese exiles gathered round him. In February 1930, after a series of meetings in and near Hong Kong, Ho was able to reconcile the wildly divergent ideas of his fellow exiles and form the Indochinese Communist Party. With him during the China years were Le Duan, Giap and Pham, all brilliant and promising young men.

Closest to Ho, and perhaps the

ROGER PIC

HO CHI MINH

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30

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

# The Future of Viet Nam

AFTER a quarter-century of war, Viet Nam confronts problems of such magnitude that they seem insurmountable. The area has been ravaged by 15 million tons of explosives, more than were used by U.S. forces in all of World War II.* Of this total, almost 80% has been inflicted on South Viet Nam, where it averages out to more than 500 lbs. per acre, or 1,333 lbs. per person. The death toll on both sides is estimated at 1.5 million, with millions of others wounded. As the war clawed across the countryside, it uprooted a rural society, driving millions of refugees to the cities. Corruption, bribery, black markets, theft, drug peddling and prositution flourished.

**New Politics.** What is startling, however, is how much has survived. The population on both sides is greater now than before the major fighting. It stands at 18 million in the South and 21 million in the North—in each case a gain of 2,000,000 since 1965. Even after all the destruction, Viet Nam remains, at least by Asian standards, a basically rich country, capable of rapid agricultural and industrial regeneration. How fast it will recuperate depends on how long it has some semblance of peace and political stability. President Thieu's political leadership may soon be finished. He will have a difficult time dominating the divergent political and religious factions that will become increasingly active when the cease-fire starts. Thieu is already toying with the idea of resigning and turning the government over to a committee until he can be re-elected President in a general election, to be held in roughly six months. If Thieu does resign, however, he is unlikely ever to return to power.

Many of Thieu's opponents sense his political weakness, and rumors of a coup are circulating for the first time in a year. Who could succeed Thieu? One name often mentioned is that of General Duong Van Minh ("Big Minh"), who is a former chief of state. Other possibilities: former Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky; Au Truong Thanh, a former high official who was exiled to Paris in 1968 as a neutralist; Nguyen Van Huyen, president of the South Viet Nam Senate; Tran Thien Khiem, the country's Premier; and Tran Van Tuyen, an anti-Thieu member of the South Vietnamese Lower House.

In the period of uncertainty and transition that lies ahead, the main question is whether—or when—the Red flag will go up over Saigon. Most experts now believe that the chances of a Communist takeover within the next five years are actually quite slim. Historically, strong central governments have been disliked in the South, and most of

the Southerners are either anti-Communist or neutral. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army now control between one-third and one-half of the land but only an estimated 10% of the population, all in thinly settled rural areas. The crowded cities are heavily infiltrated by Viet Cong cadres, but they are all under non-Communist control.

Though in the minority, the Communists are by far the best-organized political group in the South. They might get as much as 25% of the vote in a free election in the South if it were held today. In any future Parliament, Communists will be a major bloc. They will sometimes cooperate with opponents, often act as a disruptive force, and always strive to exploit any advantage that would help them to win ultimate control of the government. But that

does not mean an imminent takeover.

Will the North Vietnamese try to help the Southern Communists gain full power, even at the risk of reopening the hostilities? High officials in the White House think not—at least not for five years, and what happens after that is impossible to predict. These U.S. analysts contend that the North Vietnamese have been so badly battered by the bombing and other punishments of war that they will have enough trouble rebuilding their own land. Other Southeast Asia experts, including many who opposed the U.S. war effort, believe that the war has so completely exhausted both sides that the Vietnamese people, North and South alike, want no more large-scale fighting. Even if North Viet Nam wished to make a grab for power in the South, it might be restrained by the bigger Communist nations on which it depends for military supplies. Both China and Russia could well conclude that a quick takeover by Hanoi would

tions will play a large role in reviving the Vietnamese economy. President Nixon has made a commitment to the governments of both North and South Viet Nam to help finance reconstruction. Henry Kissinger has said that an "illustrative figure" for U.S. spending might be $7.5 billion over five years, with perhaps $2 billion going to the North. Government officials have not figured out whether the U.S. would give aid directly, as it did under the Marshall Plan, or work through a multinational consortium. High officials of both the U.S. and North Viet Nam declared last week that they want to normalize relations with each other. The North Vietnamese are accomplished at political balancing acts; by opening relations with the U.S. and accepting U.S. aid, they might well nudge the Soviets and Chinese to increase their own flow of aid.

Along with the U.S., the Japanese will lead in reconstructing Viet

*Although the raids then were more destructive because the targets were densely populated cities and industrial complexes rather than jungle and villages.

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impede their developing trade and political relations with the U.S.

Might the North alternatively achieve a Communist-dominated reunification by negotiation? The proposed truce settlement calls for reunification but does not provide any detailed plan. Most experts believe that a negotiated reunification within the next five years is even less likely than a Communist takeover. It will take many years before the divisions in Viet Nam—caused by history, the blood debts of the war, internal political disputes and regional differences—can be surmounted. There are also some rivalries between Hanoi and the Viet Cong, and these splits have been aggravated since the death of Ho Chi Minh. The Communists no longer have a single father figure to guide and inspire them.

Provided that a political agreement holds together at least for several years, the U.S. and other non-Communist na-

BATTERED NVA TANK & SOUTH VIETNAMESE SOLDIER AMID RUINS OF AN LOC

In a devastated land, what is startling is how much has survived.

LE MINH

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

33

CHARLES BONNY

RUSH HOUR IN BUSTLING SAIGOON

Now, a drive to rebuild.

Nam. They know Indochina well, hav-
ing occupied it during World War II,
and they are eager to build political and
economic influence. The Japanese gov-
ernment proposes to start a $2 billion re-
habilitation fund for both North and
South. Japan would pay about half of
that amount and invite contributions
from other countries, notably the U.S.,
the Soviet Union, China, Britain and
France. Beginning almost immediately,
the Tokyo government would ship to
Viet Nam tons of medical supplies and
other emergency aid.

Japan's hustling businessmen are
eager to cultivate a lively trade of Viet-
namese raw materials and farm produce
in exchange for Japanese appliances,
motorbikes, small trucks and cars. In
North Viet Nam, for example, the Jap-
anese are talking about developing the
big Hon Gay coal mines, building up
the nearby port of Cam Pha, and ship-
ping 2,000,000 tons of coking coal an-
nually to Japan.

Other nations are also planning to
join in, with aid, trade and investments.
Sweden has announced that it will give
$70.5 million to North Viet Nam over
the next three years. The French, who
have never got Viet Nam out of their
blood, will seek to revive the huge Mi-
chelin rubber plantations near Saigon,
which are now producing at scarcely
40% of prewar levels. The French also
plan to make investments in transpor-
tation and trucking in the South. Mean-
while, in West Germany, Britain and
other nations, businessmen are looking
forward to winning construction or de-
velopment contracts.

The economic problems are still im-
mense. South Viet Nam has a 20% an-
nual rate of inflation and a towering
trade deficit (last year its exports

amounted to less than $8,000,000 v. im-
ports of $373 million). But despite all
its physical and human destruction, the
war also provided Viet Nam with the
basis for what could become a modern
economy. Working for the Americans
or the South Vietnamese government,
some 300,000 people learned useful
skills as clerks, mechanics, technicians,
engineers. The war also brought forth
all manner of entrepreneurs, from the
black-marketeer to the small industri-
alist. Last year they built or expanded
factories that produce textiles, plastics,
detergents, bricks, ceramics and flour.
South Viet Nam is abundantly endowed
with highways, power lines, ports and
well over 100 airfields—mostly built for
the war but now in place.

South Viet Nam's real potential for
future prosperity rests on its farms. Ag-
riculturally, it is one of Asia's most fer-
tile countries, and despite the ruin of
many farm areas, the green revolution
brought about by fast-growing "miracle
rice" enabled South Vietnamese farm-
ers to harvest a crop last year that was
25% greater than in 1965—although
10% fewer acres were cultivated.

Economic need will probably force
the North to seek some form of coop-
eration with the South. Hanoi now re-
lies on China for its rice, and that is a
position of dependence that the Viet-
namese have struggled for centuries to
avoid. It would be tempting for the
Northerners to import from the rice
bowl in the South.

The Vietnamese are a tough, resi-
ient people. Over the centuries they
have been invaded by the Chinese, bul-
lied by the Japanese, occupied by the
French and bombed by the Americans.
Through all this, they have developed
a love of their land, a burning desire
for peace and a keen instinct for sur-
vival. Having survived the war, they will
surmount the problems of peace—and
there is at last the hope that they will
eventually prosper.

JOHN ROSEN—CAMERA PRESS

MAIMED SOUTH VIETNAMESE ORPHAN

Millions more wounded.

Two Veterans—
Their War
Hasn’t Ended

For the vast majority of Americans
the war is ending at last, but for some
it will never end. Of the 2,700,000 who
have served in Viet Nam since 1961,
more than 300,000 have been wounded.
Of these, the Veterans Administration
carries on its rolls 73,670 suffering at
least 50% disability. Last week two of
these men recalled their own personal
wars, past, present and future.

WITH fluffy brown hair, bright blue
eyes and a complexion as clear as
a baby's, Paul Coats looks much younger
than his 23 years. As he lies on the
bed in his sunny corner room at Manhattan's VA Hospital, he appears
healthy enough. But Coats carries a
wound that has not healed in 4½ years
and is taxing the ingenuity of some of
the nation's most expert neurosurgeons.

Coats enlisted in the Marine Corps within eight hours of graduating from Calhoun High School in Merrick, L.I. "I saw no way to beat the draft, and if I had to go, I wanted to get it over with. And it looked as though we were in for a bigger war, with the North Vietnamese coming in, not just the guerrillas." With the 2nd Battalion, 9th Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division, he landed in Viet Nam in November 1967 and served six months as a machine-gunner in "Leatherneck Square" adjoining the DMZ. Lance Corporal Coats no longer remembers the date when he was wounded more precisely than "the last couple of days in May 1968." "We'd just cleared a bunker complex and were stationary. Early in the afternoon, a barrage came in. A rocket round hit about 15 feet from me and a fragment got me in the right buttock, right on the sciatic nerve."

**Dropout.** Discharged from the hos-
pital after five months, Coats returned
home to his family and tried to resume
his education by enrolling in general
studies at Nassau Community College.
Four times he had to go back to the hos-
pital, however, once for five months. He
dropped out of college, partly because
the commuting was too difficult. "Even
at home," he says, "it's like being in the
hospital."

To end the agonizing, fiery pain in
Coats' leg, surgeons are thinking of a
radically new procedure: implanting a
device with electrodes in the spinal cord
so that when the pain heats up Coats
can press a button and switch it off. He
may have to use such a device all his
life. Was it worth it? Would he do it
again? "I don't feel the same as I did in
1967, because of what's come out—the
Pentagon papers, and the reasons for
the U.S. going in originally. I can't see

34

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

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KEN REGAN—CAMERA S

COATS IN VA HOSPITAL
“I don’t feel the same.”

why we kept on spilling American blood for a government that wasn't worth fighting for and people who won't fight for themselves. Eventually, they'll throw down their arms and the Communists will win."

Theodore Cornelius Strong, 35, a black double amputee, thinks differently. Topping six foot, Ted Strong was a muscle builder, weight lifter, football player and boxer in Memphis when he was drafted in 1960. On his second reinlistment in 1966 he expected to stay in the U.S., but was soon shipped out. "I never would have volunteered for Viet Nam," he says. "I wanted to stay here, save my money, and start a health

club and bodybuilding studio after my years in the Army were up. You might not believe this, but it just never occurred to me that I'd get wounded in Viet Nam. When I got there, I couldn't see much reason for being there, but then I figured it out. We were there to hold them off, at a price. There's always a price."

The price for Strong was high indeed. On the morning of May 3, 1967, when he was on a search-and-destroy mission, he was preparing to throw a grenade into a bunker. "I felt this tug at my ankle, but I didn't break stride," he recalls. "I guess I should have broken stride." The trip-wired land mine blew off Strong's left leg just below the hip and tore the back off his right leg. The grenade in his hand exploded and took his right forearm with it. He spent 18 months in Army hospitals, shrinking from 225 lbs. to 135 lbs., sometimes too weak to lift his head off the pillow. It took him a year to learn to walk again, months to learn to drive a specially equipped car—and longer to persuade the motor-vehicle authorities to give him a license.

Last month, with his wife, two stepsons and their own young son, Strong moved into a five-bedroom, $47,900 house in Wheaton, Md., with extra-wide walks, a ramp from the low porch and extra-wide doors and hallways for his wheelchair. He operates this four-wheeled device with his right leg, which is fitted with a full-length brace. For going out, he has an artificial left leg, but must use two crutches. Strong's road back has been long and all uphill, battling with bureaucracies to get his benefits. With an assortment of VA and Social Security payments, his tax-free income is now $1,390 a month. The going at Prince George's community college is also hard, but he expects to get his associate degree in computer programming a year from now.

DON CARL STEFFEN

STRONG SHOPPING IN MARYLAND
"We do have victory."

Far from being embittered by his disabling wounds, Strong has turned them into a source of strength. "It's possible for a man to lose half of his physical being and still become whole," he told a recent speech class. "Before I lost my limbs I was only half a man. Now I've developed some humility. I can look at the average person and understand him, where before I looked only at myself."

When he reflects on the war, Strong takes a similarly optimistic view. It is, he believes, coming to a "fair and honorable conclusion." "We do have victory," he says, "because we've guaranteed their freedom. We accomplished our mission."

## The Uses of Vietspeak

Q: When is a war not a war? A: The fighting in Viet Nam is referred to as an "international armed conflict," according to the Judge Advocate General's Office.
—Army Digest, April 1968

EVERY war makes its peculiar contributions to the language. There was still a sense of heroics in the neologisms of World War I: over the top into no man's land. World War II created a new terminology of mass death: fission, fire storm, and the final solution. From Korea, the first confrontation with Asian Communism, we acquired the widespread use of gooks and brainwashing.

The most vividly iconoclastic new words generally come from the G.I.s, and so, in Viet Nam, the grunts spoke of slants and slopes, of Charley (Viet Cong) and Yards (Mongagnard tribesmen) and White Mice (white-uniformed local police). Where they were was "the boonies of Nam"; everything else was "the world." Officials spoke windily of "winning hearts and minds," but the G.I.s shortened that to WHAM. To the airmen, the jungle was Indian Country, where you might end up either in the Hanoi Hilton (prison camp) or Buying the Farm (dead).

Killing was the reality for which the G.I. invented the largest number of euphemisms: zapping, fragging, offing, greasing, waxing, hosing down a village (or using a Zippo Squad to set it afire). When Lieut. William Calley testified that he had been ordered to attack My Lai, he did not say that he had been told to kill but to "waste" everyone in sight.

In devising such brusque euphemisms, however, the G.I.s hardly matched the ornate creations of their superiors at headquarters. Specimens:

* Air raid—Limited duration protective reaction strike

* Artillery fire—H & I (harassment and interdiction)

* Murder of an enemy spy—Termination with extreme prejudice

* Defoliation—Resources control program

* Refugee camp—New life hamlet

"War does things to the language," New York Times Columnist Russell Baker once wrote, "and the language in revenge refuses to cooperate in helping us to understand what we are talking about." In Viet Nam, it was all too unpleasant to "understand what we are talking about," so even when the U.S. finally decided to start withdrawing its troops it created a new word to disguise reality one last time. It called the process Vietnamization.

# It's a whole different car inside.
The 1973 Super Beetle.

For one thing, there's a lot more inside, inside. We're giving you plenty of legroom up front. And fantastic headroom.

We've also done a nice thing for your nose. Our new windshield is pushed way forward, and curved. It's actually 42% larger.

For comfort, the seats, too, are curved. The same way what you sit on is. And the same way your back is.

Inertia type seatbelts buckle up as standard equipment.

The padded dash is completely redesigned. To be read in a flash.

Getting in and out of the back seat of the Bug is now pretty easy even for non-athletic types.

And we've had some very fresh ideas about air. And how to circulate it. Our remarkable improved ventilation system even de-fogs the side windows.

Altogether, the interior of the 1973 Super Beetle is so radically different, you'd have a

hard time knowing it was a Beetle, except for the steering wheel insignia.

There remain, however, certain things that will give you the clue that you're driving a VW.

Economy. Dependability. Our good old never-give-up character.

The beauty of the new inside may be its beauty. But the fact that it comes in the car it does, is the most beautiful part of all.

Few things in life work as well as a Volkswagen.

© VOLKSWAGEN OF AMERICA, INC.

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Operation Egress Recap

THERE are 537 of them according to the official lists—the American prisoners of war, confined in an unknown number of detention camps somewhere in Indochina. More than half of them are airmen, downed during the long bombing campaign; over 50 are civilians, trapped while out on patrol. One of them, Lieut. (j.g.) Everett Alvarez, now 34, was shot down fully eight years ago; others, still unidentified, may have been seized during the past few weeks. In the 60 days after the impending truce settlement, they will all begin their voyage home.

Their families are jubilant, but the jubilation is not unmixed with concern. "It's actually a little frightening," says Carol North, of Wellfleet, Mass., whose husband Lieut. Colonel Kenneth North was shot down more than six years ago. "When he left, our eldest daughter was 10. Now she's getting ready to apply for college. The transition is bound to be difficult. There will be a lot of adjustment for everyone."

"These men will be suffering from future shock as well as culture shock," says Eileen Cormier, 36, who became a school librarian on Long Island to support her four children in the seven years since her husband Arthur was captured. During the long captivity, the commonplaces of life have changed—there are easier abortion laws, widespread color television, the success of *Hair*, and Spiro Agnew has become a household word. "It will almost be like a Martian dropping in," says Mrs. Cormier. "I don't know how he's going to feel. Who helps me if he starts crying or screaming?"

To deal with such problems, and to avoid the recriminations that surrounded the prisoner exchanges at the end of the Korean War, the Pentagon has devised a program with the elaborate and somewhat mysterious name of Operation Egress Recap. (Possibly a combination of the prisoners' "egress" from North Viet Nam and their "recapture"

by the U.S., though Washington spokesmen profess uncertainty as to what the terms actually mean.) U.S. officials hope to bring out the prisoners by sending Air Force C-141 Medevac planes directly to Hanoi; more likely the Communists will fly the men to Laos or some other neutral point. There, Operation Egress Recap will begin.

For each known prisoner a tailored uniform has been provided, complete with medals and insignia of rank, to which in some cases the men were promoted while in prison. The reason for this, says the Pentagon, is that prisoners often tend to feel guilty and ashamed after they are freed, and a familiar uniform helps to reassure them. The uniforms have already been flown to the returnees' primary processing center in the hospital at Clark A.F.B. near Manila. There, too, a personnel brochure will be waiting for each man, listing such welcome information as pay records and savings accounts, plus personal messages from relatives and their recent photographs.

**Decision Makers.** Each prisoner will get a medical checkup to find out whether he is suffering from disease or serious malnutrition. Then there will be a quick debriefing for information about other captives. (One previously released prisoner brought out with him the names of 350 P.O.W.s he had memorized; he wanted to tick them off before he reached the confusing jangle of life in the U.S.) After that debriefing, released prisoners who are able to travel will spend longer periods in military hospitals closer to home. Each returnee will be accompanied by a military escort whose job it will be to help him make necessary decisions (studies have shown that men conditioned to the authoritarian life of a P.O.W. camp have difficulty starting to think for themselves again).

Hospital stays will vary, but the Pentagon generally expects the men to be in good condition, since North

Vietnamese prison life improved after the U.S. began complaining loudly of mistreatment in 1969. Part of the hospitalization will be taken up by psychological interviewing. "We have found," says Dr. Roger E. Shields, the Pentagon's expert on war prisoners, "that every man who returns from captivity urgently needs to tell his story, not publicly but privately, to someone who will listen to him with empathy and understanding."

Even with such physical and mental crutches, the transition will not be easy, either for released prisoners or for their families. Not only have P.O.W. wives had to run families and homes, but the life-style of women in general has shifted since many of the prisoners were captured. "These men were male chauvinists when they went in," says Mrs. Cormier. "So many things have changed. Can you imagine me going back to the local officers' club and doing knitting? No way!" Several P.O.W.s, including Lieut. Alvarez, have already been divorced in absentia by their destraining wives.

No matter how great the problems of readjustment, however, the return of the P.O.W.s highlights the cruel question of the 1,256 Americans listed as missing in action. Some wives and families have heard nothing definite since their men disappeared, and since the Viet Cong and other guerrilla forces have never issued complete prisoner lists, there is always the possibility that some of the lost have survived. Mrs. James White, 29, of St. Petersburg, Fla., wife of an Air Force lieutenant shot down over Laos in 1969, heard the news of a settlement last week and rushed out to buy new nightgowns and evening dresses for herself and a new dress for her daughter Katherine, 3½. But Sharon White is still trying not to let her hopes get out of control. "I can't get myself too high and then sink to a low," she says. Mrs. White has cleaned out half her bedroom closet for her husband. But she refuses to put any of his old clothes in it until she learns for certain that he is alive.

LIEUT. EVERETT ALVAREZ & GUARD

RETURNING P.O.W. LIEUT. GARTLEY WELCOMED IN NEW YORK

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# A War That Changed the Presidency

TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey has watched three Presidents agonize over the Viet Nam War. Now that the agony may be coming to an end, he reminisces about the individual styles and policies of the three men, and offers some observations on the effects of the war on the presidency.

AS pickets marched before the White House, chanting demands that Richard Nixon sign a peace agreement immediately—in perhaps the last sacristy of the sidewalk institution of protest—the dusk slowly faded and an autumn moon rose over the Executive Mansion. The White House lights came on in melancholy beauty, highlighting a glistening new coat of paint applied for the Inauguration of the next President, whose term will embrace the bicentennial celebration of the Republic. Maybe tranquillity of one kind or another is to be the reward for two centuries of survival. But life will be different in the old mansion, with its understated elegance. The presidency has been stretched and tormented in the long decade of the Viet Nam War. It has suffered a dramatic decline in respect, yet perhaps it has gained some new wisdom too. It is more powerful than ever, more feared than ever, and at the same time it has revealed its human dimensions more than ever. Some of the mysticism has vanished. Americans need leadership as much as ever, but they may never again respect the presidency as much as they used to, finding that they have been brought so close to it by war and its internal ferment. Still, they may understand it better. If they do not give it the old trust and

support, they may at least reduce their expectations about what one human being can do in the Oval Office.

Indeed, the whole story of Viet Nam and U.S. Presidents is a human one. The memories march out now as hope rises that the long war is ending. There were evenings that John Kennedy used to anguish about Viet Nam. He was one part the Irishman who wanted to show the flag and another part the scholar who remembered reverently when he had gone to see the ailing Douglas MacArthur and the old general had told him never to get involved in a war on mainland Asia. Kennedy bleated and complained about the news stories out of Viet Nam that ran counter to the cheery calculations of Robert McNamara's Pentagon computers and the bravado of the gen-

erals. But he was always tugged by reason and maybe, just maybe, had he lived to face the crunch he might have overwhelmed his gut, which said fight, and gone by his head, which suggested that Communists were not as bad as they used to be and, besides, wars on mainland Asia were not an American calling.

Lyndon Johnson lived by his gut, and it told him to fight. We rode those airplanes in the campaign of 1964 as he inhaled his Cutty Sark Scotch and thumped our chests and squeezed our knees and vowed that he wasn't about to send American troops to fight Asian battles. We discovered the "Alamo syndrome" later, the unalterable cast of L.B.J.'s character that made him go through life like Davy Crockett or Matt Dillon, never backing from a dare, nev-

looked proudly at his field commanders and heard the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt calling him and he told them to come home and put the coonskin on the wall. More troops. More bombs. But no coonskin. The result was that Sunday night in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson announced an end to the bombing of North Viet Nam and an end to his political career.

The great peace marches were in Nixon's time. Nixon was a lonely figure, preferring at first to watch the football games, remote, disdainful, vague in his promises for peace. Yet Nixon's story of Viet Nam is largely untold. It is bottled up in this singular man who brooded alone at Camp David and with his yellow legal pad sat endless hours with Henry Kissinger, balancing all the forces facing him, both political and military. We watched from the outside as the inexorable march to the boats began for American troops, and predictions of disaster were too numerous to count.

There were even days when perhaps discouragement penetrated Nixon's outer tenacity. We sat in Kissinger's high-windowed office only 50 yards from hordes of peace marchers shouting obscenities and heard the professor say quietly: "In the end, Viet Nam may destroy everyone who touches it." After the Cambodian invasion, Nixon took his walk at dawn along the mall among the youthful invaders, talking about his travels to foreign lands and college football teams. Then he went off to the Mayflower Hotel for scrambled eggs, strangely rejuvenated.

Still the troops came out, but not with a whimper. Nixon applied muscle. From the secret musings came not only the orders for the Cambodian invasion but for the excursion into Laos and then the ultimate shock, the mining of Haiphong Harbor and the renewed heavy bombing of the North. They are all ingredients of the impending peace no less astonishing today than when they happened. Then there was Peking and the mind-boggling view of Nixon raising his glass to Chou En-lai, a part of the Viet Nam equation, and the scene just a few months later of Nixon eating his bowl of cereal in the Kremlin as he examined yet another pressure point to bring the war to its close.

When Henry Kissinger came to the White House press room to tell what was happening in the negotiations and proclaim "Peace is at hand," the weight of these long years was behind him and no doubt gave his voice its unusual gravity. Photographers and reporters pushed and shoved and strained to see and hear in the overcrowded and overheated room. It was as it had been for ten years, but yet it wasn't. Many in the press had witnessed the whole decade and seen all of the actors in the drama. Though conditioned to deception, hardened to failure, they rushed to the phones to flash the news with a note of exuberance never heard before.

DON CARL STEFFEN

WESTMORELAND & JOHNSON IN VIET NAM (1968)

The ghost of Teddy Roosevelt.

er going into a fight he didn't intend to win. We were spirited out of the American embassy in the Philippines one incredible day in 1966, locked up at a naval airbase and flown into Viet Nam to await the arrival of the President on his first visit to the "front." He came dressed in his cowboy brown twill, looking 10 ft. tall and with the presidential seal on his jacket over his heart.

In a strange way on that strange day, there was pride in the air. A beleaguered President, doing what he conceived to be right, had come to see the best men America had on the battlefield. The tragedy of the war was washed away from those few hours. Johnson went through the hospitals, sat in the mess hall with boys who had been in foxholes a few hours earlier. Then, in a sweltering room of the officers' club, he

40

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

THE NATION

THE CAMPAIGN

# The Hard-Luck Crusade

ONCE, George McGovern had hoped that his stand on Viet Nam, above anything else, would carry him to victory in November. But wildly improbable as it seemed earlier, Richard Nixon gradually made the issue his own and emerged in the popular mind as the peace candidate. It was, after all, the President who had been wheeling and dealing with the Communist bosses in Peking and Moscow and had kept Henry Kissinger in constant motion on the road to work a settlement. Then, last week, whatever momentum McGovern may have been gathering came to a halt again when the White House was finally able to announce that peace—real peace—is just around the corner.

There was Nixon, in one of his infrequent campaign swings, confidently assuring a friendly crowd in Huntington, W. Va., that the remaining obstacles to a peace settlement would soon be overcome. And there was McGovern, darting about in a plane festooned with Halloween black and orange crepe paper, first casting doubt on the peace rumors, then gracefully if a little grimly saying that he hoped they were finally true. He argued that peace could have been achieved four years ago, that the antiwar movement deserved the credit

for forcing the President to conciliate.

Round the country, McGovern workers, dejected for most of a campaign marred by blunders and bad breaks, had begun to get the scent, not of victory to be sure, but of some improvement. Small contributions were coming in at a brisk rate through the mails. There was something in the air that caused a middle-class homeowner in Burbank, a jar of olives in hand for his martini, not to close the door in the face of the earnest, shaggy McGovern canvassers but to wish them well. In Chicago's 47th ward, a housewife accepted a bumper sticker from a McGovernite. "I'm only a step ahead of poverty," she said. "The middle class gets nothing. You can tell McGovern that. But thanks for the bumper sticker. As soon as I get a car to put it on, we'll be all set."

**Creeping Thing.** McGovern workers in Chicago were confident, despite adverse polls, that their man had a fighting chance now that they had Mayor Richard Daley on their side, lock, stock and poll watchers. They prided themselves on their realism, a fact verified by a Daleyite who was prepared to hate the kids until one showed up "so full of vim and vigor and so willing to listen

to my advice that I guess I softened." As Columnist Mike Roykomused, Daley, after his humiliation at the Democratic Convention, "has to enjoy seeing all those admiring liberal faces looking up to him."

Despite such modest upbeat signs, there was nothing resembling the final surge that almost swept Hubert Humphrey to victory in 1968. Said George Christian, L.B.J.'s former press secretary who is now a Democrat

for Nixon: "It's a creeping thing."

McGovern is not normally given to self-reproach, but earlier in the week, while waiting to appear on a TV show, he summed up his woes: "It was Eagleton and that lousy $1,000!" he blurted. He had never been allowed to stop explaining why he had dumped Tom Eagleton (who is now, according to one poll, the most popular politician of all those who sought the presidential or vice-presidential nomination) and why he had once proposed giving $1,000 to every American as part of an ill-conceived welfare program.

As he approaches the end of his hard-luck crusade, McGovern has grown even more righteously indignant. Asked by a reporter if he considered the election a clear-cut contest between good and evil, McGovern had no trouble answering, "The Nixon Administration has betrayed the great ideals of this country." But as often happens with him, McGovern seemed unable to communicate his own passion and indignation to his audiences. Some 5,000 students at Cleveland State University braved the chill wind off Lake Erie to hear him talk on the campus quad. They cheered lustily when McGovern referred to the peace talks: "We may not be able to dictate peace to General Thieu, but he's not going to dictate war to us."

In a mid-week TV address on morality in government—an issue he felt was beginning to work for him—McGovern came across far better. More relaxed than usual, modulating his rhetoric, McGovern commented again on morality in one of the most eloquent speeches of his campaign: "The people want a President who will restore their trust in government by trusting them. They want a leadership that will set not one standard for the powerful and one for those without power, but a single standard for us all. They hunger for that clarifying vision of national purpose that only a President can provide—a President who will lift our eyes above

NIXON CAMPAIGNING IN WESTCHESTER

DICK HALSTAD

Across the country, candidates for less-er offices are engaged in their own contests. At stake is the control of Congress and the statehouses. TIME examines some of these races in a supplement, *Elections '72*, following p. 50.

McGOVERN ADDRESSING A STUDENT RALLY AT CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

UPI

42

SINATRA

SCHACTER

REYNOLDS

ROOSEVELT

RIZZO

FITZSIMMONS

## Guess Who's for Richard Nixon

THERE is no way of telling a Democrat for Nixon unless he says he is one, but the defectors come from all segments of the party and from all parts of the country. James and Elliott Roosevelt have joined their brother John, long a Republican, in backing the President. That leaves just two of F.D.R.'s children—Franklin Jr. and Anna Halsted—remaining faithful to the party.

No incumbent Democratic Governor, Senator or Congressman has come out for Nixon (whatever their private reservations about McGovern), but several mayors have, including Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia, David Kennedy of Miami, Louie Welch of Houston and Beverly Briley of Nashville.

In view of McGovern's position on economic issues, it is not too surprising that a number of businessmen have de-

serted him. Among them: Robert Six, president of Continental Airlines; Eugene Klein, chairman of the board of National General Corporation, and a Humphrey backer; and August Busch, chairman of the board of Anheuser-Busch—forsaking the party that ended prohibition. Almost as predictable by this time is the defection of portions of labor. Converts include Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons; Kenneth Lyons, president of the National Association of Government Employees; and J.M. Calhoon, president of the National Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, which gave COPE its single biggest contribution in 1970. The catch from show business includes Milton Berle, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Danny Thomas, Eva Gabor, and Sonny & Cher.

The President has made a special pitch to various ethnic groups who normally vote Democratic, and many of them have returned the compliment. Albert Gee, grand president of the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance, is supporting Nixon. So is Sam Nakis, past supreme president of the Greek-American organization AHEPA. Among Jewish defectors are Rabbi Herschel Schachter, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations; and David Luchins, who headed the 1972 Jewish Youth for Humphrey. Blacks have been the staunchest hold-outs against Republican blandishments, but Nixon has been able to pick up the backing of Athlete-Actor Jim Brown, Singer James Brown, Floyd McKissick and Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford, who admits that he is supporting the President because he has been promised up to $4,000,000 in federal funds for his city.

the daily entanglements to a more distant horizon, to the time when, as Thomas Paine said, 'No land on earth shall be as happy as America.'"

Nixon, meanwhile, campaigned on the premise that Paine's vision has more or less been achieved. Exuding total confidence, he went to friendly Republican territory in Westchester County, N.Y. The 50-mile, 3½-hr. motor excursion was a symbol of his party's current harmony. With him were his erstwhile rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, as well as New York Senator Jacob Javits. Though anti-Nixon signs popped up frequently along the route, the crowds that lined the roads on the warm, sunny afternoon were mostly in his camp.

The President tried to cover as much political ground as possible. He wanted to alert the Republican faithful to the dangers of apathy. He was anxious to make still another pitch for the vote of the ethnics, who have moved in increasing numbers to the suburbs. He managed to get in a good word for every state in the Northeast; if he had not visited the state or campaigned in it or lived in it or attended Officers' Candidate School in it, he had sent his daughters to summer camp there. Once noisy protesters had been dragged out of the Nassau County Coliseum on Long Island, Nixon offered what he called an "eleventh commandment": "No one who is able to work shall find it more profitable to go on welfare than to go

to work." If it is not the Lord's Commandment, it certainly is Nixon's. He has issued it on almost every possible occasion. He has also continually attacked "big spenders," even though he has rolled up the biggest budget deficits of any President since World War II. Last week he took action as well and vetoed nine appropriation bills that would have threatened his spending ceiling.

**Punishment.** He must know what he is doing, because Democrats as well as Republicans have been rallying to him—the makings of what Nixon calls a New Majority based on an appreciation of traditional American values. He seems to have a better understanding of the electorate's current mood than McGovern, who has preached that a New Politics would supplant the old. It has done no such thing. Youth, minorities and liberals have not rallied in sufficient numbers to form a new alignment. The traditional coalition still prevails, only it is Nixon who, for the president at least, seems to have taken it over. Some of the basic ingredients of the Democratic Party—the South, labor, ethnic groups—have deserted in considerable numbers to the Republican candidate. These defecting Democrats have not learned to love the man they used to love to hate (see box). But he has earned their esteem in many respects, while McGovern has not. They fear the Senator as being too mercurial and too unorthodox—if not too far left. Some feel that they will be doing their party

a favor by voting for Nixon; once McGovern has been properly punished, this reasoning goes, centrist forces can recover control of the party.

McGovern has also been hurt, if accidentally, by the tragedy of another powerful Democrat. Once he was shot, George Wallace had no chance of running as a third-party candidate. Most of his votes are expected to go to Nixon. His replacement at the top of the American Party ticket is a virtual unknown, John Schmitz, a member of the John Birch Society and a former California Congressman. He will take few votes away from the President; in fact, he is grateful to the Secret Service for swelling his crowds by their presence. He has received so little attention that he has sued the three TV networks for $20 million in damages because their failure to cover him, he claims, has prevented him from getting campaign contributions. Small as his crowds are, Schmitz keeps them entertained with such one-liners as "Some day Henry Kissinger is going to make a secret trip to this country." Or: "There is nothing wrong with the Catholic Church that a good inquisition wouldn't cure."

The Democrats have scheduled a blitz of TV spots for their finale. One spot will show a troubled Democrat pausing in the voting booth as he fingers the Nixon lever. "This hand voted for Kennedy, you know. I mean, it's just possible McGovern's straight." He drops his hand and votes Democratic.

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

43

THE NATION

A satisfied voice concludes, "that's the way." In other vignettes, McGovern appears in shirtsleeves, earnestly reassuring traditional Democrats on the issues that most concern them: law-and-order, taxes, unemployment. By contrast, the G.O.P. spots show the President not chatting with the folks but consorting with the likes of Mao Tse-tung and Leonard Brezhnev. McGovern, on the other hand, is portrayed in Republican commercials as a waffler on the issues or a demon for defense cutting.

McGovern heads toward Election Day betting on corruption as a crucial issue. Yet even that has been pushed out of the headlines by the prospective peace settlement. It is an ironic predicament for a candidate who, above all, wanted to have a bold and decisive airing of the issues. The Higher Morality, it would seem, is no match for the New Majority.

proceedings. Agnew, obviously seeking a new image, has for the most part dropped his old shrillness in favor of a more judicious, lighthearted and confident style. Shriver, oddly, often comes across almost as bombastic as the old Agnew; yet there is an ebullience about him that makes him the liveliest of the top four candidates.

Traveling in his comfortable jet, *Michele Ann III* (named for his granddaughter), Agnew is campaigning at a rather stately pace, but nevertheless, he has hit 32 states and covered more than 35,000 miles. He sprinkles his stump speeches with light sallies. In Columbus, Ga., Agnew contended that "McGovern couldn't carry the South if Rhett Butler were his running mate." Firing at Ted Kennedy, Agnew replied in Idaho to Kennedy's criticism of the Administration's farm policy by terming him "that great son of the soil," and add-

changed more in style than in substance.

Shriver has the advantage of being a fresh face. He was thrust unprepared into the campaign, speaking out too sharply, before he had mastered the issues. When he said bluntly that Senator Thomas Eagleton had been dropped from the ticket because he had become a burden, Shriver was chastised by McGovern's staff. "We've got no control over him," one strategist lamented. But Shriver, a hard worker and quick study, soon got in tune.

Working as many as 21 hours a day and flying about in his chartered jet, *The Fighting Lucky Seven*, named after his family, Shriver sets a frantic pace. He draws on his past connections in the poverty program, the Peace Corps and Kennedy political campaigns to carry out his assignment of bringing defecting Democrats back into the fold. He appeals for money one night at a dinner of chic artists and intellectuals at Author William Styron's exurban Connecticut home. Next night he tours a Spanish area of Brooklyn, plugging McGovern plans to ease poverty, and drawing excited cries of "¡Ese es! ¡Ese es!" (He's the one! He's the one!).

**Bucks or Bombs.** Shriver's crowds have been smaller than those of the other three ticket headers. His staff unabashedly admits, "We're No. 4." Yet his listeners respond enthusiastically, as when he attacks political spying by Republican agents. "The era of Big Brother is arriving not in 1984 but in 1972!" Shriver cries. "If he knew this was going on, President Nixon is guilty of immoral and illegal acts. If he did not, President Nixon has proved himself impotent and incompetent." Although he draws cheers, Shriver can be accused of an Agnewism when he denounces Nixon on as "a man obsessed with power. What he cares about is money and military power, bucks or bombs."

Shriver is at his best when he speaks, often eloquently, of the need for a more compassionate society. An unlikely advocate for the poor in his Cardin suit, he gracefully acknowledges his Kennedy connection, but does not flaunt it. An acquaintance recently recalled an incident at Hyannis Port when a Shriver boy fell hard in a game and began to cry. A cousin in reminded the child that "Kennedys don't cry." Shriver stepped in: "He's a Shriver, and he can cry if he wants to."

If the campaign were more closely contested, the activities of the vice-presidential candidates would have much greater impact. With Nixon mainly above the battle, Agnew has effectively carried the party flag into all parts of the nation, soothed the right wing, and plugged hard for local Republican candidates—a matter Nixon has largely ignored. Shriver has given his best to his mission of rekindling old Democratic loyalties, cozily touring Chicago, for example, with Mayor Richard Daley. It is neither candidate's fault that, in the end, their efforts probably will have made little difference.

AGNEW BLOWING WHISTLE AT HECKLERS

SHRIVER AT SOUTH CAROLINA CAPITOL

The Junior Partners

In Twin Falls, Idaho, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew attended a cocktail party for the men he has often used as foils: the reporters who cover him. Relaxed, smiling and exchanging wisecracks, he accepted the gag gift of a policeman's whistle from newsmen. That night, as he was heckled at the College of Southern Idaho, Agnew suddenly blew a piercing blast with his new toy and shouted: "Wrong!" The startled audience gasped, then broke into loud applause.

Bursting into a swim-suit factory in Passaic, N.J., Sargent Shriver merrily shook hands with sewing-machine operators, accepted a bouquet of roses without looking silly, then responded to a dare by stitching up a bikini top. As delighted women crowded around to squeeze Shriver's arms and pummel him, one of his aides, Mark Shields, said happily: "It's carnal. Positively carnal."

In this unexciting campaign, it is the junior partners rather than the presidential candidates who lend color to the

ing: "They learn a good deal about farming in Harvard Yard."

Although Agnew has chosen his appearances before young people with care, selecting such conservative campaigns as Brigham Young University and Michigan's Calvin College, he has been harassed by hecklers at many stops. When some students at Calvin College chanted, "Dump Nixon!", Agnew said "Since you are unable to think independently, I'll lead," and waved his arm to direct the chorus. The crowd loved it. In Syracuse, he gibed at demonstrators who were walking out on his talk: "Bye! Don't forget your bottle before you go to bed."

Agnew attacks McGovern by implying that the Democratic candidate favors the coddling of criminals, missiveness toward drugs, loafing on welfare and the street antics of radicals. At other times, he haughtily dismisses Nixon's opponent. "McGovernism," he predicts, "will be nothing more than an obscure footnote in the pages of history." Still often patronizing and rigidly righteous, Agnew has

44

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

## THE NATION

content of the event. D. The names of specific people who can be contacted for the purpose of setting it up. E. All trade-off factors to be considered in scheduling the event."

As an example of the kind of issue Ehrlichman was interested in, the directive suggested that "there are certainly criminal justice problems such as the Fort Worth Five that we should flag for the President." This referred to the case in which five New York men were jailed in Fort Worth for refusing to answer federal grand jury questions about buying guns for the Irish Republican Army. Agents worked over the weekend of Sept. 9 and 10 to obtain the information required by Gray and to meet his Sept. 11 deadline. Concluded Gray's message: "The deadline must be met." FBI sources would not reveal just what the replies from the field contained.

While it has been normal for the White House to ask for FBI files on individuals—a request former FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover routinely granted Lyndon Johnson, for instance—there is no public record of the bureau's having been asked to initiate political studies for a President.* Ehrlichman later told TIME that the request for information had gone from his office to the Justice Department and should not have gone to the FBI. If it did, he said, it would violate Administration policy and "would not be condoned by the White House."

The procedure astounded veteran FBI officials. Said one of them: "The White House wouldn't have dared to send over an order like that when Hoover was in charge. He would have kicked it right back to them and refused to do what they wanted."

## INVESTIGATIONS

### How High?

The most controversial issue between the White House and the press growing out of the Watergate affair and related political espionage is how high up responsibility reaches. In last week's inning, the score seemed to be journalists 1, White House 1. Items:

* TIME learned that, despite Republican denials, Dwight Chapin, Deputy Assistant to the President, has himself admitted involvement in setting up a political intelligence platoon.

* No hard evidence could be developed to support a charge by the Washington Post that H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, was one of those with control over a fund that paid for spying and disruption.

The first revelation about Chapin came when TIME (Oct. 23) reported that he was one of two White House assistants who had hired Los Angeles Attor-

ney Donald H. Segretti to disrupt the campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates. Last week Clark MacGregor, director of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, declared: "Dwight Chapin just simply had no knowledge of and was not involved in any way."

However, Justice Department officials say that Chapin admitted to FBI agents that he had hired Segretti to disrupt the Democratic campaigns. Chapin had also told the FBI that Segretti's payment was set by Nixon's personal attorney, California Lawyer Herbert Kalmbach. Justice Department sources say that Kalmbach, too, admitted to FBI agents that the money he paid Segretti came from cash kept by C.R.P. in the office of its finance chairman Maurice H. Stans.

The allegation about Haldeman drew heated and specific denials. "At no time has Bob had any tie whatever to the funds," MacGregor said. Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler accused the *Post* of "blatant character assassination." The *Post* story ostensibly was based on a grand jury appearance by Hugh W. Sloan, former treasurer of C.R.P. James Stoner, a lawyer representing Sloan, denied that his client had made any such statement. Further, TIME learned, Sloan had not mentioned Haldeman in his statement to the FBI; presumably Sloan's remarks to the grand jury were no different.

## TRIALS

### Victory for Fast Eddie

The courtroom audience first gasped, then applauded as Cook County Circuit Judge Philip Romiti handed down his verdict: "The evidence is simply not sufficient to establish or prove any conspiracy against any defendant." Thus ended an enormously tangled legal proceeding that had long threatened

HANRAHAN AFTER THE VERDICT

*Gray revealed last week that he is discontinuing a 22-year FBI practice of maintaining biographical data on congressional candidates. He said that the information had been used mainly to help check out any threats made against them.

to discredit—and perhaps jail—the heir apparent to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's political fiefdom, Cook County State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan.

The case began with bullets and blood at 4:40 a.m. on Dec. 4, 1969, when 14 policemen assigned to Hanrahan's office raided a Chicago Black Panther redoubt, killing Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and wounding four others. The next day the Panthers guided newsmen through the scene of the shootout, attempting to prove that all the shots had been fired from the outside by the police. The authorities claimed that the Panthers had fired first.

**Denuded Charge.** Conflicting evidence provoked three separate grand jury investigations. The second inquiry concluded that more than 82 shots had been fired by the police and only one by the Panthers, and the third handed up indictments against Hanrahan and 13 co-defendants. They were accused of conspiring to present false evidence, rig an internal police department probe, and obstruct justice for the seven surviving Panthers. Trying to unravel the case in the 15-week trial without a jury, Judge Romiti said that he found it necessary "to engage in evidentiary strip-tease...to strip away the layers of rhetoric, of oratory, the emotional appeals, the speculation and conjecture in search of some basic hard evidence." Thus denuded, the conspiracy charge, to Romiti's eyes at least, seemed one of "inference pyramiding on inference."

More to the point, there was fresh evidence to suggest that the Panthers had fired on the police four times, and that five of the nine Panthers had been armed at the time of the raid. Without even waiting to hear defense witnesses, Romiti dismissed the case.

The acquittal, which virtually assures Hanrahan of re-election next week, has already set off further charges of impropriety. Andrew Barrett, executive secretary of the Chicago N.A.A.C.P. branches, quickly raised "serious questions about the integrity of the judge, who made a political rather than a judicial decision." Romiti, who enjoys one of the better reputations among Cook County's judges, conceded that "It was one of the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't cases. It has been a case which has created its own self-charging, catalytic climate, not because of the nature of the offense but because of the person or persons involved."

One of those involved, at least obliquely, was Daley. He had attempted to dump Hanrahan from his team because he seemed politically poisonous. Now Daley declared the whole thing, presumably including his loss of faith in his protégé, "a mistake." Senator Adlai Stevenson III, who had withheld support even after Hanrahan was re-nominated, re-enlisted on the unity team. Hanrahan, sometimes called "Fast Eddie," cracked: "There's nothing like a fair-weather friend who comes to your aid when the fight is over."

50

TIME, NOVEMBER 6, 1972

Going to school exposes these
kids to more radiation than they get
from the nuclear power plant.

To confirm what the people
in the area of Ontario, New York,
already know—that nuclear power
plants are safe—radiation
detection devices were installed
around town. They measured the
natural background radiation
the residents live with day-in
and day-out.

Not surprisingly, it turns out
that both this school and the local
firehouse expose people to more
radiation in a year than even the
closest neighbor gets from the
area's nuclear power plant.

Of course, these community
buildings are not unusual or
unsafe. Radioactivity is just natu-
rally everywhere—in the air, the
water, the ground, even in common
building materials such as brick,
concrete and tile. The whole
world is radioactive, and always
has been.

Facts like these are important.
Because over the next decade
America's need for electric power
will increase, and clean, safe
nuclear power is one of the best
ways to meet that need.

Our country's ability to do
the work that needs to be done
will depend on an adequate supply
of electricity. There's no time to
waste. New generating facilities
must be built, and built in a way
compatible with our environment.

We'll continue working to
do this. But we need your
understanding today to meet
tomorrow's needs.

The people at your
Investor-Owned Electric Light
and Power Companies:

*For names of sponsoring companies, write to Power Companies.
1345 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019

KISSINGER IN PARIS

'This is
my battle
station'

An unlikely nerve center, this vast bedroom in the U.S. ambassador's elegant mansion on the Faubourg St. Honoré in Paris. But as presidential aide Henry Kissinger said, "This is my battle station." Here, supported by ceaseless staff work and discussion, Kissinger was working out final details of a peace settlement in Vietnam. Negotiating sessions with Vietnam's Le Duc Tho took place in secrecy in a villa 15 miles from Paris. Yet this bedroom is where Kissinger went when the talking ended, armed with bulging briefcase, staff reports and cables from Washington and Saigon. "Most of the real work is done here," he said last week. "This is where it all happens."

Since August 1969 he had come to Paris 20 times in secret to discuss peace with Hanoi. This time he came openly, as if to emphasize the conclusive nature of the journey. Talks began immediately. Inside his headquarters, activity was intense. LIFE photographer Harry Benson, who took the exclusive pictures on these four pages, sensed a feeling of relief and joviality. It seemed likely, as Kissinger had suggested five weeks ago, that peace was indeed "at hand"—in the splendid bedroom on the Faubourg St. Honoré and on the cratered battlefields of Southeast Asia.

In a huge bedroom in the U. S. ambassador's residence in Paris, Henry Kissinger shucks his jacket (right), then studies documents dealing with the Vietnam peace.

LETTERS TO THE EDITORS

PRISONERS

Sirs: "When Johnny Comes March-
ing Home Again—or Doesn't" (Nov.
10) presents our dilemma in such a
forceful but feeling way. The timeliness
of your article cannot be overestimat-
ed. At a time when there seems to be a pos-
sibility of peace, our apprehensions
about exactly who will come home and
what we will face in the readjustment
of those who come home are greatly
magnified. The prospect of actually
achieving what we have worked so long
and hard for is frightening. It is impor-
tant for the American people to realize
what our problems will be.

Mrs. PAUL E. GALANTI
Washington, D.C.

Sirs: As an ex-POW, I am extremely concerned with the treatment to be given these men on their return. On a recent nationwide tour I visited the Center for POW Studies at San Diego, and I know that every effort is being made to insure complete care for the men. Their problems may not manifest themselves for years. But their files will be so complete that the source of trouble can be traced and remedied, which was not the case for World War II and Korean POWs. The POW Center staff is dedicated to finding solutions before the men and their families are overwhelmed by the problems.

HAROLD L. PAGE
National Commander
American Ex-Prisoners of War, Inc.
Buckley, Wash.

Sirs: This article has a special meaning to me because as I turned to page 37 I got the greatest surprise. There was a picture of M/Sgt. Arthur Cormier taking Communion. You see, I wear his bracelet and I wasn't even sure that he was still alive.

CATHY SODDY
Harbor City, Calif.

Sirs: I've got a very special request. One of the wives in your story is Louise Mulligan. Her husband, U.S. Navy Capt. James Mulligan, March 20, 1966, is the man on my POW bracelet. I will be 13 soon and my best birthday present ever would be to let Mrs. Mulligan know that the captain is always in my prayers. Even my whole class prays for him and the other POWs.

MADELYN LIVIOTHE Bronx, N.Y.

► LIFE is forwarding those letters which readers wished to be sent to the families

of particular prisoners and missing ser-
vicemen. Other letters for forwarding
may be addressed to the National League
of Families of American Prisoners and
Missing in Southeast Asia, 1608 K St.,
N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006.—ED.

MASSILLON

Sirs: The picture you present to the
nation of Massillon is grossly unfair
("No Bells for Peace," Nov. 10).

You state that "what seems like a whole generation has grown up and gone to work in the steel mills ..." The economy of our city is greatly dependent on the steel mills and many, including my husband, are employed in them. Your inference is that a few young people go from high school into the steel mills. Many of our children go on into medicine and law and other professions which benefit humanity as much as making steel, which is of basic importance to America.

Of the boys who died in Vietnam,
I knew three; I assure you they are
not forgotten. Massillon has given up
13 of its young men to a war popu-
larly considered immoral and unjust.
Of that number many, if not all, un-
doubtedly went against conscience and
will, but it was their patriotic duty.
Their patriotic duty ended in death;
a death despised and deplored but deep-
ly felt by their families, friends and
hopefully by all Americans. To say that
they, "the real cost of the war," are for-
gotten by the people of Massillon is
grossly untrue.

Mrs. WILLIAM H. BROWN
Massillon, Ohio

AFRICAN ANIMALS

Sirs: I'm afraid that LIFE has erred in
"Hard Life in a Dry Country," Nov.
10. The springbok look like Thomson's
gazelles, and what you refer to as gems-
kok sure look to be oryx—definitely!

LEONARD H. STONE
Waukegan, Ill.

► Springbok indeed "look like" Thom-
son's gazelles, but of the two species only
springbok have white faces. A gemshok
is a type of oryx, the largest and most
handsomely marked of all oryx, and the
only one of the species living in the Kal-
ahari area.—ED.

TV REVIEW

Sirs: Cyclops's review of the BBC
Masterpiece Theatre program ("Again
Your Best Bette Is the BBC," Nov. 10)

asks the unfair question, "Why doesn't American television produce such addresses?" [as Margaret Tyzack and Glenda Jackson]. British television doesn't produce such addresses either. The majority of them are stars in their own right on the British stage, and the only fair comparison would be with women of the caliber of, say, Colleen Dewhurst or Geraldine Page.

SHEILA DE SIMONE
New York, N.Y.

ROYAL FAMILY

Sirs: Surely women's lib hasn't per-
vaded that bastion of male supremacy,
the British royal family. In the caption
alongside your portrait of the queen's
relatives listing her children in "direct
line of succession to the throne," you
placed Princess Anne ahead of Prince
Edward!

RICHARD P. DONOHOE
Sherman, Conn.

► The order given in LIFE's caption was not intended to indicate order of succession to the throne, but simply to help the reader locate each of the queen's children in the group picture. Princess Anne is, of course, fourth in line of succession, following her brothers.—ED.

Top to bottom: Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, Princess Anne, cousins Marina and Helen and Prince Edward.

GEORGE III AND FAMILY

Sirs: Our seventh grade is studying English history and our assignment was to research the living royal family tree. What a surprise to come home from school to find you had done my homework for me. My teacher asked whose portraits were on the wall behind the queen and her family; now I'm stuck.

NINA SANSONETTI
Cheshire, Conn.

► They are King George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, during whose reign the American Revolution took place.—ED.

DATING GAME

Sirs: I am appalled by the tasteless, tactless questions asked on game shows. I hope that by reading "How I Won Bruce, Ruth and Acapulco" (Nov. 10) more people will be turned off.

MRS. E. KAVANAGH
Berea, Ohio

Sirs: I also once tried out for The Dating Game, but unfortunately I was one of "the uglies." I agree the average con- stant's IQ is equivalent to a cran- ery, so where does that leave your au- thor? All she does is complain. She'd probably sue the company if she had an accident, or her date attacked her.

DANA BLUE
Santa Ana, Calif.

Sirs: Ms. Fayard's article made my
day. My daughter, who is black, beau-
tiful, 23, single, speaks fluent French,
majors in psychology and whose hob-
by is painting (she just sold two of her
works), was rejected by the Game as a
candidate. She missed nothing.

CECILIA PAULIE
Brooklyn, N.Y.

1. **TO WRITE ABOUT YOUR SUBSCRIPTION:** Change of address, billing, adjustment, complaint. renewal—address: LIFE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE, 541 North Fairbanks Ct., Chicago, Ill. 60611. Ira R. Slagter, Vice Pres. Attach present address label in space at right. (If you are receiving duplicate copies, please attach both labels.) This will help us identify you quickly and accurately. We are able to answer inquiries by telephone in many areas. Please note your number here:

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COVER-painting by TOM ALLEN 3-MARK GODFREY 6, 7-BILL RAY 8, 9-L.I. DAVID LEES: cen. VITTORIAN RAS-TELLI: rt. DAVID LEES (2) 10, 11-FRANK WOLFE, PATRICK LICHFIELD for CAMERA PRESS from PICTORIAL 12-cartoon by RANAN LURIE 20-illustration courtesy ABC 24-JILL KREMENTZ-AP, ALFRED EISENSTAEDT 25-JILL KREMENTZ-ALEX GOFRYD 28-PARAMOUNT PICTURES. CHARLES PETERSON-HARRY BENSON 32-W. EUGENE SMITH 33-W. EUGENE SMITH exc. L.I. SHARLAND 35-PATRICK LICHFIELD from CAMERA PRESS. © RADIO TIMES HULTON PICTURE LIBRARY 36, 37, 38, 39-HARRY BENSON 40, 41, 42-GAMMA 44-cartoon by RANAN LURIE 58, 59-JOHN ZIMMERMAN 60, 61-LI. HEINZ KLUETMEIER: cen. JOHN ZIMMERMAN (2); rt. BILL

EPREDGE 62 NEIL LEIFER for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 66-RALPH MORSE 63, 69, 70 GEORGE SKADDING 72-THE NEW YORK TIMES 74-ALFRED EISENSTAEDT-ELIOT ELISSON 76-UPI: AP, CARL MYDANS 78 JOE SCHERSCHEL 81, PAUL SCHUTZER 82, AP 84-MICHAEL ROUGIER 86, 87, 89, 91, MICHAEL ROUGIER: it. HENRY GROSKINSKY 98-HISTORICAL PICTURES: PHILIP JONES GRIFFITHS from MAGNUM 99-IT. TOMORROW ENTERTAINMENT INC.-UPI: PHILIP JONES GRIFFITHS from MAGNUM: rt. ALFRED EISENSTAEDT-PHILIP JONES GRIFFITHS from MAGNUM 100-© KARSH OF OTTAWA from RAPHO-GUILLUMETTE

35

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

## Peace by Inauguration Day?

As things have turned out, peace is not quite as close at hand as Henry Kissinger once led the world to believe. But this week, the Presidential adviser will return to Paris for what may be a final series of talks leading to the signing of the Vietnam pact. His North Vietnamese opposite, Le Duc Tho, preceded Kissinger to the French capital by two days, and White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler ventured a guess that the two men and their staffs would be closeted in negotiations for "several days—perhaps longer." At Kissinger's insistence, the location of their exact meeting place remained undisclosed. "I have seen to it that it will be impossible to have me followed," Kissinger vowed firmly. "I am determined not to let this turn into a circus."

The fact that both Kissinger and Le

background of increasingly hostile anti-U.S. propaganda over the Vietnam war, Soviet Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev weighed in with a demand "that the obstacles put up by the American side literally on the eve of the signing of the agreement should be overcome and that the war against the freedom-loving Vietnamese people should be ended in the immediate future." Meanwhile, an article appeared in the Peking People's Daily blasting the U.S. for "repeatedly changing its position on Vietnam, reaching out for a yard after taking an inch." The article then went on to warn that if the U.S. "refuses to sign the agreement reached . . . the restoration of peace [in Vietnam] will be postponed indefinitely."

That seemed unlikely. Already, half a dozen countries were talking about serv-

the skyjackers to release the passengers—but lawmen frightened them each time.

FBI officials claimed they had "no alternative." The plane was dangerously low on oil, they noted, the crew was exhausted after its ordeal and prone to some fatal error and the hijackers were talking of ordering the short-range jet across the Atlantic in small hops. "Sometimes," said one agent, "it's more dangerous to let it take off than to keep it on the ground."

**Shoot-out:** Never one to sidestep an issue, acting director L. Patrick Gray III took personal responsibility for the decision to stop the plane, although he said it was made with the concurrence of Southern Airways officials. He was evidently prepared to risk a number of lives in the process: the FBI assault team had already rehearsed a plan to storm aboard through various hatches and shoot it out with the skyjackers.

Just as important as the argument over whether the FBI should have intervened was the question of how the three skyjackers got aboard the Southern jetliner in the first place. A stewardess aboard the flight reported that the men seemed to know that security at the Birmingham airport was loose. As it happened, all three men—two of them free on bail in a Detroit rape case, the other an escapee from a Tennessee prison study program—were earmarked for special screening by a Southern employee because they fitted the FAA's hijacker profile. But follow-up inspections with a handheld metal detector set off no warnings; the FBI later reported that the particular detector could not register the presence of a revolver more than 2 inches away.

**Walk-out:** While the FAA launched yet another investigation into its security requirements, the airlines and the government wrangled over which should take responsibility for the problem. The carriers want Washington to foot the bill for on-the-ground detection devices and a force of Federal agents trained to man them—and to handle any would-be skyjackers they turn up. The government wants to avoid the cost and the creation of still another national police force; it argues that if banks and railroads can provide their own protection, so can airlines. The pilots, for their part, side with the carriers—and ALPA chief O'Donnell threatened a nationwide pilot walk-out early next year if the Federal government doesn't take firm action.

Agreements with Cuba—and Algeria—to return all skyjackers would certainly go a long way toward solving the problem, although some disturbed individuals may still find reward enough in simply taking command of a multimillion-dollar aircraft. More sophisticated weapon detectors are in the offing and more vigorous personal searches may be ordained. For with each new skyjack drama, the flying public seems ever readier to pay some price—in money, time, and privacy—for restoring the sense of security to which it once was accustomed.

Kissinger leaves Camp David after talks with Mr. Nixon: 'No circus'

Duc Tho were in noticeably buoyant moods late last week seemed to augur well for their Paris talks. "There's no hangup," Kissinger insisted, and he pooh-poohed pessimistic reports in the American press as verbose belaboring of "minor, petty details." For his part, Le Duc Tho came on as his usual relaxed self. Though his prepared arrival statement at Orly Airport took a pro forma swipe at the "massive reinforcement of a great number of aircraft and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into South Vietnam," Tho's tone was generally conciliatory. "My presence in Paris," he pointed out, "shows once again our serious attitude and goodwill."

Until then, Hanoi had also shown a considerable amount of impatience over the delay in signing the cease-fire pact. No doubt at the instigation of North Vietnam, both Moscow and Peking began making threatening noises. Against a

ing on a four-nation Control Commission to supervise the peace. Japanese diplomats actively sought a place on the commission, but Hanoi was known to be cool to that idea. India, a member of the International Control Commission for Inochina, hoped to continue its role, but Washington no longer regards the New Delhi government as a neutral. It was almost a sure bet that the new line-up would be Canada, Hungary, Indonesia and Poland. Though none of those four nations was ready to make a firm commitment before learning its exact role, the Canadian military last week inoculated 200 officers for immunization against diseases in Southeast Asia. And in Budapest, knowledgeable Hungarians speculated that they will be expected to supply at least 200 officers who are reasonably fluent in English or French—which strikes them as no mean task.

As for an International Conference on

November 27, 1972

23

## MY TURN: George Ball

# A Vote for Kissinger

For four years the team of Nixon and Kissinger has written, directed, produced, acted and publicized the unfolding drama of United States foreign policy. For Kissinger, particularly, it has been a virtuoso performance; at a number of tense moments in the action he has held center stage, while the President has been left with set speeches, formal soliloquies, and the pageantry that accompanies summit meetings.

Unquestionably it has been good theater and one cannot deny its solid achievements. Yet now, as the guns begin to fall silent in Vietnam, it is time to rewrite the script, expand the cast and give the audience greater participation than has been the case up till now.

For the innovations of the current management were more than a change in diplomatic style; they meant a drastically altered foreign policy that may not respond to the genius of America or even be compatible with our system. When the President took foreign policy away from the State Department to share it with Professor Kissinger, he replaced America's policy of alliance with a policy of maneuver.

Instead of continuing to build an expanding circle of like-minded nations that would concert their strategies and combine their resources in seeking a détente with Moscow and Peking, we embarked on an intricate game of check and maneuver with what the President has identified as "equal" players—the Soviet Union, China, Western Europe and Japan.

### QUICK REVERSAL

The object of this game is to try to maintain a precarious power equilibrium by playing one nation off against the other without distinction between ally and adversary. Essential to success are the exploitation of surprise and the quick reversal of positions—and these, in turn, require the maximum of secrecy and flexibility.

That this is no fit game for a Foreign Office Kissinger has made abundantly clear. "The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy," he wrote some years ago, "are diametrically opposed. The essence of policy is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural. The essence of bureaucracy is its quest for safety; its success is calculability." Thus, he concluded, in a later work, "it is no accident that most great statesmen were opposed by their 'experts' in their for-

eign offices, for the very greatness of the statesman's conception tends to make it inaccessible to those whose primary concern is with safety and minimum risk."

Yet if our current game of maneuver is not suited to the State Department, our traditional foreign-policy instrument, the hard question remains whether—though productive of successes in the short run—it is a game that can be effectively played by a democracy over the longer pull.

Throughout history, the best players have been such agents of authoritarian governments as Metternich and Bismarck, who felt no obligation to Parliament or public opinion—and for the past year or so this has been the foreign-policy posture of the Nixon Administration. With an alienated and impotent Congress and a tired and confused country, the President has borrowed a leaf from another hero in the Nixon-Kissinger pantheon, General de Gaulle, who taught how public opinion could be led to accept major and abrupt changes of policy by illusionism and showmanship—the dramatic announcement, the stage-managed press conference, the panoply and spectacle of the summit visit.

### WHERE NEXT?

Yet there is doubt as to how much longer these tactics can work their magic in the 1970s. Anticlimax is fatal to effective theater, and, after Peking, there is nowhere the President can go (except the moon) with anything like the same dramatic punch.

Nor is the Senate likely to sit passively by while our foreign policy, for which it shares constitutional responsibility, is secretly fashioned and administered by a man shielded from their questioning by his White House status.

For the past four years—the whole of President Nixon's incumbency—the relevant committees of Congress have been paralyzed by the Vietnam war. But now that a period—or at least a semicolon—has been put to that dismal business, Congress is bound to resume an active interest in American foreign policy, while an increasingly alert and inquisitive public—no longer bemused and frustrated by an issue on which no consensus was possible—will once again ask hard, insistent questions as to where America is going.

In this climate, it will be next to impossible to play a secret game of Metternichian diplomacy, for the essential conditions will no longer exist. Once the

country catches on to the implications of the power-juggling act, it is not likely to be comfortable with it. What Americans like is to have a circle of identifiable friends, close allies, companions in a common endeavor—something other than the cold geometry of a shifting balance conducted in secret by alchemists at work somewhere under the stage.

Thus it seems more than likely that the U.S. will feel compelled to turn back toward the policy we have pursued so long and so profitably, to re-establish our close ties with Western Europe, which have been eroded by an unnecessarily harsh tradesmen's argument, and to try to repair the dangerous rift we have quite unnecessarily created in our relations with Tokyo. It is time now, in other words, to move away from the go-it-alone politics we have lately been playing—a game that carries with it, as Kissinger has noted of Metternich's maneuvering, "the calm acceptance of great risks, of isolation or sudden settlements" at the expense of the player.

### LEADERSHIP

If, like Metternich's Austria, America were a declining power in a world where the other balancing powers were clearly "equals," such a game might have a greater logic. But that is not the situation. In spite of all the self-deprecatory nonsense that passes for wisdom in this season of confusion, we are still by far the strongest and richest nation in the world, with a vast capacity for leadership and the ability to attract and maintain the allegiance of other nations—and we would forget or neglect that fact at our peril.

Just as a change in style altered the substance of our policy, so a reversion to earlier policy will mean a return to the more open and professional style of our traditional diplomacy. To facilitate that change, the President would do well to appoint Henry Kissinger Secretary of State. Such a move has much to recommend it. Not only would it make the architect of our foreign strategy accessible to the Congress and the people; it would preserve Dr. Kissinger's extraordinary talents to serve a policy consistent with our democratic conditioning. Finally, it would provide what may well be our last chance to rebuild and reanimate the Department of State, to restore its self-respect and vitality by returning it to the mainstream before it totally attributes and all the good men leave. The skill and experience of a great Foreign Office are not a commodity we can afford to waste. We shall need all the brains and judgment we can mobilize to preserve the values we cherish in the uncertain years ahead.

*Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, George Ball is now an investment banker in New York City.*

Newsweek, November 20, 1972

21

# THE PERISCOPE

## THE ODD COUPLE

Despite disillusionment with his revolutionary politics, Moscow continues sending military support to Fidel Castro a decade after the Cuban missile crisis. Recently, another Russian shipment of new jet fighters brought Cuba's MIG-21 air force up to 80 planes. And even now, a Soviet naval task force—including one nuclear-powered missile submarine—is conducting joint anti-sub exercises with Cuba's navy.

## SHOWDOWN OVER SENIORITY

Congress's sacrosanct but increasingly vulnerable seniority system is about to come under yet another withering attack. Unless the Democratic caucus agrees to abandon its old automatic selection procedure for committee chairmanships, House liberals will move to impeach—and thus force a vote on—every one of the 21 incumbent or incoming chairmen. This time, Common Cause, John Gardner's public lobby, has lined up enough House members in advance to make the bold impeachment strategy stick.

## A QUESTION OF GUILT

The new rush to recognize East Germany as part of the current East-West détente may be throttled by the old specter of Nazi war crimes. Although West Germany has paid more than $14 billion to survivors of the holocaust, East Germany has steadfastly refused to acknowledge responsibility. Now, Vienna-based Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal is spearheading a campaign to establish a quid pro quo: no diplomatic relations with the Honecker regime unless restitution is made. Already, Wiesenthal has won pledges of cooperation from Holland, Denmark, Austria and several other West European governments.

## BLAST-OFF IN THE PACIFIC

Before the year is out, Russia will probably test-fire a new model of the SS-9 super ICBM. Moscow has warned mariners away from an area in the Pacific 750 miles northwest of Midway Island, where three Soviet missile-range ships are operating. Conceivably, the advanced missile will carry MIRV-type warheads.

## RUMSFELD VS. STEVENSON IN '74

Notwithstanding his illustrious name, GOP strategists in Illinois apparently believe Sen. Adlai E. Stevenson III can be beaten in 1974. And the man who can do it, some insiders say, is

the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to NATO and former OEO director, Donald Rumsfeld. He's a longtime Nixon favorite. But to win the right to challenge Stevenson, Rumsfeld will probably have to outmaneuver another ambitious Republican, Congressman John B. Anderson of Rockford.

## TIME RUNNING OUT ON FOREIGN AID?

Whatever the outcome of the Vietnam peace talks, don't look for an early reduction of Senate-White House friction over foreign aid. Earlier this year, the Administration rejected a foreign-aid bill requiring Senate ratification of an agreement on a military base in the Azores. If the President continues to balk on that point as a matter of principle, some senators now warn, foreign aid may very well end altogether in February, when funds run dry.

## OUT OF POWER, OUT OF SORTS

Following the recent ouster of Haitian Defense Minister Luckner Cambronne, a military clique is plotting a coup against young President Jean Claude Duvalier. Apparently the civilian militia is now in the ascendancy, threatening the influence of the once dominant regular military.

## CLEAN WATER: WHO SHOULD PAY?

The Administration is bracing for a barrage of lawsuits over clean-water funds from Connecticut, Illinois, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities and states. The suits will contend that President Nixon's $6 billion cut in Congressional authorizations for water pollution was unconstitutional. What really worries many mayors and county executives, however, is the deadlines built into the tough new antipollution law. Not incidentally, failure to meet them will leave local officials vulnerable to a year in jail and $25,000 fines.

## A VISIT FROM GOLDA

If Israel's redoubtable Foreign Minister Abba Eban has his way, Prime Minister Golda Meir will be dropping in for a friendly little chat with Richard Nixon before long. The President is scheduled to meet Russia's Leonid Brezhnev next fall. With Jordan's King Hussein already set for a White House conference, Eban and the Israeli Cabinet reason that a touch of Golda's grandmotherly counsel—and granite stubbornness—can only reinforce Nixon's pro-Israel stance prior to his other discussions.

Newsweek, December 18, 1972

19

nition of the National Council of Reconciliation and Concord, the tripartite body charged with supervising South Vietnamese elections after a cease-fire. According to sources close to the talks, Tho continued last week to refer to the council as a "governmental structure"—a phrase unacceptable to Washington and anathema to Saigon. Angered by what they considered Hanoi's breach of faith, U.S. negotiators reportedly insisted that the council was to be a purely administrative body and that they were not about to change their minds. "There is no possible way Hanoi can think that phrase was ever acceptable to us," says one American official. "At the outset, the North Vietnamese even gave us the phrase 'administrative structure'—in English."

**'In Tandem'**: Despite the snail's pace of the negotiations, Mr. Nixon's South Vietnamese allies were still certain that a Washington-Hanoi deal was at hand. And they felt they had good reason to worry. As one U.S. aide put it: "There is no agreement that won't get us into a brawl with Saigon." But at least the South Vietnamese appeared to have little ground to complain that they were not consulted. In an effort to head off potential problems with Saigon and to keep the negotiations—to use the Kissingerian phrase—moving ahead "in tandem," the American negotiators topped off their daytime talks with the North Vietnamese with a series of lengthy night-time sessions with South Vietnamese officials.

All the consultation in the world could not smooth over the basic conflict of interest between Washington and Saigon, and Kissinger or Haig will surely face a monumental task in trying to make Thieu see things the U.S. way. Indeed, with his sharp criticism of the draft accord, Thieu may have painted himself into a dangerous corner. If he turns around now and gives his blessing to the final agreement, he risks irreparable damage to his prestige and credibility. Yet if he tries to sabotage the agreement, he risks losing vital U.S. military, diplomatic and economic support. His only recourse seems to lie somewhere in the middle—grudging acceptance of the inevitable peace plan without endorsement, all the while demanding a summit meeting with Mr. Nixon.

Even if Mr. Nixon does not buy the summit proposal, most Americans in a position to know expect dramatic movement on the peace front very soon. For despite the battling between adversaries and the bickering between allies, it now seems that the U.S. and the North Vietnamese have at last edged toward the brink of peace. "If we settle by the end of the year," says one top-level official, "then a ten-year war will have been settled in four weeks. If it is a good settlement, the delays will be forgotten. If there is no settlement, there will be so many things to recriminate about that the delays will also be forgotten."

© Herblock in The Washington Post

"Actually I've Been More Concerned About Toplessness in Top Positions"

## NIXON'S KEEN SCYTHE

The great Administration housekeeping continued, but last week Richard Nixon seemed to be wielding not so much a broom as a scythe. What had begun a fortnight ago as a bureaucratic overhaul assumed the proportions of a general purge, as the President sought to make room in his topmost ranks for those who shared his emphasis on economy, efficiency and unquestioned political loyalty. The new breed of bureaucrats that Mr. Nixon installed last week were more conservative and management-oriented than their predecessors. They also displayed an almost uniform lack of political charisma or clout, which left them beholden only to the President and his White House inner circle.

The exits were just as significant as the entrances—Mr. Nixon's reorganization seemed designed to clear out those who

were judged too independent, too liberal or too outspoken to fit the new Nixonian low profile of a model civil servant. The casualty list included Cabinet Secretaries Peter Peterson of Commerce and John Volpe of Transportation, Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Helms, Republican National Chairman Robert Dole and a growing host of lesser officials who, to their chagrin, found their pro forma resignations promptly accepted. Behind the bloodletting, many Washington observers thought they detected the hands of the White House palace guard led by H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman, eager to settle some scores and break up independent centers of power. Among the major appointments:

**Frederick Dent**, 50, a textile manufacturer from South Carolina, replaced Peterson at Commerce. The appointment

Wally McNamee—Newsweek

AP

A

Newest faces: Lynn at HUD, Dent at Commerce, Brinegar at Transportation

December 18, 1972

21