Differences at the Times

For many months the New York Times has consistently and firmly deplored U.S. policy in Viet Nam. It has repeatedly argued against escalating the war: "The continued bombing of North Viet Nam makes progress toward a peaceful settlement--however far off it must necessarily be--more difficult rather than less, harder rather than easier." It has never tired of proposing peaceful approaches to North Viet Nam, even suggesting that another suspension of bombings might cause Hanoi to "take some face-saving peace initiative of its own." It has been willing to make more of a compromise at the negotiation table than most U.S. policymakers: "The course of sanity is to explore the initiatives opened up by Secretary-General Thant and General de Gaulle for negotiations to seek a neutralization of Viet Nam and all Southeast Asia."

Peace at No Price. For all that, the regular Times reader could not miss the fact that among the paper's senior staffers, opinion on Viet Nam is less than unanimous. Last February, Military Affairs Editor Hanson W. Baldwin wrote an article for the Sunday magazine urging the U.S. to step up its commitment to Viet Nam and prepare for a long war. "Viet Nam is a nasty place to fight," said Baldwin. "But there are no neat and tidy battlefields in the struggle for freedom; there is no 'good' place to die. And it is far better to fight in Viet Nam--on China's doorstep--than fight some years hence in Hawaii, on our own frontiers." The same day Baldwin's piece appeared, the Times issued a rebuttal: "Such an approach discards any pretense that our objective in Viet Nam is to protect the Vietnamese people."

Columnist Cyrus L. Sulzberger, nephew of Times Board Chairman Arthur Hays Sulzberger, has consistently called for firmness in Viet Nam and warned against negotiating from weakness: "It takes two sides to negotiate, and what the other side makes plain is that all it wants is total victory." Doubtful of the chances of peace until the Viet Cong have suffered some military reverses, Sulzberger prophesied the collapse of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's recent mission to Viet Nam: "One purpose the Wilson peace tour can achieve when it fails--as it almost certainly will--is to make more Americans and America's friends finally realize that what the Viet Cong and Hanoi want is peace at no price, and what Peking wants is no peace whatsoever."

Last week the Times Sunday magazine ran another notable dissent--this time from an outsider, Henry Fairlie, British political analyst for the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. Fairlie suggested that the U.S. is a benevolent, modern-day empire entrusted with peacekeeping in the world whether it likes the idea or not. "No empire," said Fairlie, "can contract and hope to survive. It must either be strenuously maintained or disintegrate. No empire, it follows, can selectively withdraw from its frontiers without inviting another empire to advance. America cannot abandon her responsibilities in any one part of the world without sacrificing them elsewhere. An empire does not exist apart from the will at the center, and that will cannot be shown to be weak in one area without its being assumed to be weak elsewhere."

Sense of Purpose. A frontier such as Viet Nam is always "dangerous," said Fairlie. "It is where interests meet, and may collide. It is where the claims of others seem to be strongest, and one's own claims most open to question. But frontier wars are the inescapable moments of truth for an empire. That America is now 'dissipating' her resources in small wars around the world seems to me, therefore, a meaningless criticism. The 'cloud of critics' at the center, as Gibbon contemptuously dismissed them, may react nervously to every exercise of their country's power. But I have traveled in some of the states and have found in the mass of her people a sense of purpose, even a clearness of mission, which is truly imperial. I am concerned that America should recognize that the responsibility she has undertaken is inescapable, is indivisible, is without logical defense but also without practical substitute; is wasteful and often repugnant but ultimately merciful and needing no apology."

Last week readers of the Times noted a subtle change of tone on the editorial page--as if the internal debate for the moment had come to an end. In the face of changing events, the Times acknowledged that it would be disastrous for the U.S. to quit Viet Nam in the near future. "Viet Nam is a different kind of war from Korea, but it is a war--one that the nation must recognize as such; and it is time to say so."

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