Chips on Khanh

SOUTH VIETNAM

The trio chucking children under the chin, gripping the hands of local leaders and waving gaily at the crowds made an improbable clutch of campaigners. There, grinning broadly and apparently enjoying it, was U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in boots and suntans. Beside him stood U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, also smiling and waving. A good head below the tall visitors stood the man they were boosting, trim, goateed General Nguyen Khanh, the "strongman" whom the U.S. desperately wants to sell to his own people.

Shaken by two coups in four months, South VietNam can ill afford another, for such an upheaval could prove disastrous to the war effort. Hence McNamara's visit to Saigon last week--the third in five months. On arrival, McNamara placed his hand on Khanh's shoulder in full view of the welcoming crowd at the airport, announced that the 36-year-old career officer "has our admiration, our respect and our complete support."

Barnstorming Act. Next day McNamara and Khanh took off on a barn storming tour, crisscrossing the guerrilla-infested Mekong Delta and hitting three provincial centers in one day. Their plane was trailed by another carrying two squads of Vietnamese paratroopers, who were to be dropped to protect the V.I.P.s had they been forced down, and was escorted by a half-dozen AD6 fighters. On the ground the pair plunged into a round of grassroots politicking that left locals gasping. At Cantho, 80 miles southwest of Saigon, McNamara and Khanh ignored a blazing oil-storage tank--set afire by Viet Cong mortars only the night before--and drove to the town square. There McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, each grabbed one of Khanh's stubby arms high in a victory salute. McNamara then wowed the crowd by shouting lustily three times in Vietnamese: "Viet Nam rnuon nam!" (Viet Nam forever). The act proved such a crowd-pleaser that the barnstormers repeated it everywhere.

At Baclieu, near the South China Sea, McNamara strolled dusty streets, shaking hands and tousling children's hair, while Khanh conferred respectfully with town elders and coddled a baby. "We would make a good team," Khanh cracked to McNamara at one point. When the pair were airlifted by helicopter into Hoa Hao, a thatch-roofed village near the Cambodian border and seat of the important Buddhist sect which bears its name, McNamara and Khanh set off on foot for the shrine which once was home of the Hoa Hao sect's late founder. Standing in its silk-bedecked interior, McNamara placed both hands before his chest in the Bud dhist attitude of prayer and bowed. Afterward, the visitors stood beaming as Khanh presented a U.S.-made hearing aid to the founder's mother, a partly deaf octogenarian who still lives on the place; the old woman seemed baffled but appreciative.

The biggest reception came two days later when McNamara, Lodge and Khanh carried the show to the northern city of Hue, only 55 miles from the Red North Viet Nam border. At the airport the party was almost swept off its feet by antiCommunist, placard-waving students (BOB, NO MORE BAY OF PIGS),

and during the drive into town an estimated 50,000 citizens--half the population--lined the route in pouring rain. Speaking from a platform hard by the storied Perfume River, Defense Secretary McNamara vowed continued U.S. military aid to South Viet Nam "now and forever."

Ample Opportunity. Slightly self-conscious at the start, the normally unbending McNamara soon warmed to the part of stump politician; time and again he and Khanh waved clasped hands to the crowds. Said one brasshat: "Bob loved it. In the end, you couldn't keep him away from a camera or a microphone."

It was not all politicking. One of McNamara's primary goals was a round of intensive briefings from Lodge, General Paul Harkins and other U.S. officials. With them he had ample opportunity to discuss all the alternatives open to the U.S. in the effort to salvage victory from the deadlocked little guerrilla war. He knew that back home there was a growing conviction among many Americans that 1) the Vietnamese alone probably could not win the war no matter how much money and weaponry they were given, 2) the U.S. should ship more troops to South Viet Nam, discard its "adviser" role and forcefully engage in the fighting, 3) the war must be vigorously carried to North Viet Nam if necessary.

Compromise Course. McNamara apparently opposes direct commitment of U.S. troops at present to combat the Viet Cong Communists. Back in Washington at week's end, he delivered a 1-hr. 15-min. verbal report to President Johnson, prepared a long written memorandum as well. Pentagon sources predicted that McNamara, while not discarding the possibility of some form of harassment against North Viet Nam, such as hit-and-run raids by Vietnamese guerrillas, was expected to urge that Washington simply step up its logistical support.

Such a compromise course might possibly stave off disaster while minimizing, for the Johnson Administration, the risk of a major war in an election year. But it all had a familiar ring, since McNamara had expressed many of the same hopes about the short-lived junta that preceded Khanh.

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