A Certain Reversal

The growls that emanated from Hanoi and Peking last week had all the gruff timbre of true paper tigers. Both Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung sneeringly declined to receive British Envoy Patrick Gordon Walker, who had planned a visit to discuss negotiations over Viet Nam. The U.N.'s Secretary-General U Thant got a more raucous rebuff: "U Thant is knocking at the wrong door," bellowed Peking to the suggestion of U.N. involvement. Ho dismissed Lyndon Johnson's offer of "unconditional discussions" over Viet Nam as "stinking of poison gas," and demanded complete withdrawal of U.S. forces as the starting point for any truce talks.

The Subjunctive. Yet beneath the bluster there were signs that the Reds were running scared. Ho couched his demands in a clever, diplomatic subjunctive that could easily allow him to make withdrawal of U.S. forces an end --rather than a precondition--to negotiations. Did this suggest that the Communists were finally wincing under the increased application of U.S. air power both north and south of the 17th parallel?

Maybe so. In the French newsmagazine L'Express, a leftist reporter freshly returned from a month-long sojourn among the Communist Viet Cong, implied as much. Asian Specialist Georges Chaffard said that the Viet Cong are demoralized by continued U.S. bombings in the South, that their supplies from North Viet Nam have been rudely interrupted by American air strikes (as well as by malaria and dysentery along the Ho Chi Minh trail), that they are losing support among the people, and that the Communists are now regrouping in the mountain plateaus above Saigon as if for a last stand. "In short," wrote Chaffard, "a certain reversal of opinion has begun."

Postponed Visits. But Chaffard felt emphatically that the Viet Cong had lots of staying power. "Old Uncle Ho and his comrades would go back to the maquis," wrote Chaffard, rather than suffer a military defeat at American hands. By the same token, their Viet Cong guerrillas in the South are perfectly willing to lie low for a while until U.S. patience wears thin and they can again set out to topple the Saigon government. Meanwhile, there was still the chance that Viet Cong regiments --backed by North Vietnamese army units--might mount a concerted attack on the airbase at Danang, hoping to recoup the prestige lost in recent defeats and even perhaps to "hurl the Americans into the sea."

Although many negotiation-minded nations were still urging Washington to begin talks with Hanoi leading to neutralization (perhaps starting at a conference over Cambodia), this was clearly not the time. In fact, Lyndon Johnson appeared to be getting fed up with all the unsolicited advice pouring in from nervous Nellies. Shortly after Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri demanded an end to American bombings of North Viet Nam as a precondition to peace talks, the White House asked them to postpone the trips to the United States that each had planned this spring. Washington's official excuse: "the congressional work load."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.