Deflating the Dragon

Dean Rusk's face was grim, his voice grittily intense. Concluding a Boston University speech on U.S. Asia policy last week, head-libbed: "I would hope that our citizens would try to think about these questions in terms of-nottea-table conversations-but think of it in terms of what you would do if you were the President of the United States. And perhaps out of it would come a little sense of what I mean when I say that those who make these decisions need your prayers and not your imprecations."

In the continuing debate over Viet Nam and China, there was, as usual, no lack of imprecation. Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse attacked President Johnson for conducting "an illegal and immoral war," even took Republicans aback by shouting: "The American people would be much better off if Barry Goldwater had been elected President!" In Berkeley, before 3,500

University of California students, University of Chicago Professor Hans Morgenthau, one of academe's bitterest Johnson baiters, reached for a preposterous historical parallel. The Administration's insistence on negotiating with Hanoi rather than directly with the Viet Cong, he averred, was "like George III of England saying he won't negotiate with Washington and Hamilton, only with Louis XVI"

Who Are the Viet Cong? More temperate criticism came from some 400 churchmen-delegates to a National Inter-religious Conference on Peace in Washington, who approved overwhelm ingly a resolution asking the President to consider 1) "an immediate halt" to the bombing in both North and South Viet Nam, 2) a new cease-fire beginning on Good Friday (April 8) and 3) an agreement to give the Viet Cong "direct representation" in any peace talks.

As Lyndon Johnson seldom fails to point out, polls have long shown that critics of his Viet Nam policy are in a minority. A group of Stanford University social scientists who conducted their own survey of Americans' "deeper attitudes" on the issue reported last week that according to their nationwide sampling, 61% of the population does indeed approve the Administration's handling of the war. Oddly enough, the Stanford poll also showed that 88% would favor negotiations with the Viet Cong, though the Administration has rejected any such concession. In fact, only 29% of those interviewed could correctly define the Viet Cong as South Vietnamese Communists; the rest thought that they were North Vietnamese (41%), Red Chinese (10%), or an arm of the "government we are supporting" (4%), or else had no notion who the Viet Cong were (16%).

"Crafty Trick." In any case, Administration spokesmen continued their patient efforts to clarify and explain U.S. policy. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who of late has acted as chief exponent of Administration aims in Asia, tried diligently to answer the dissenters on NBC-TV's Meet the Press. To criticism of U.S. bombing raids, he said: "We did not send our bombers against North Viet Nam until full regiments of the North Vietnamese forces were in the South, until it was recognized in every chancellery and every embassy around the world that the North Vietnamese had committed an act of aggression." When asked about the possibility of conducting negotiations with the Viet Cong, Humphrey pointed out that during his discussions of the war with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in India last January, the Russian "never mentioned the Viet Cong." On the contrary, Humphrey recalled that Kosygin said: "You will have to negotiate this with Hanoi."

Since then, said the Vice President, the U.S. has had contact with the Ho Chi Minh regime-"through third parties" and at times "directly." Typical of Hanoi's response was a statement last week by Truong Chinh, a top party official, denouncing U.S. peace overtures as a "crafty trick."

Strategy of Survival. Meanwhile, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as it continued hearings on Asia policies, a group of distinguished scholars firmly and-atypically of academics -unanimously supported the Administration's Viet Nam policy. Most agreed with Harvard Sinologist Morton H. Halperin-who at 27 is also an adviser on China to the Defense and State departments-that U.S. military power in Viet Nam has convinced Red China's leaders that they face a "long-drawn-out war." Indeed, said Halperin, Peking has now "urged on the Viet Cong the need to adopt a strategy of survival until the American invaders tire of the war and withdraw." China's leaders, he told the committee, are well aware that a U.S. nuclear attack would devastate their "modernized sector" and are determined not to provoke one.

Such testimony was clearly a disappointment to Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, who has repeatedly warned that the U.S. commitment to Viet Nam might lead to war with China. And for all the chairman's hopeful proddings, the scholars without exception described as unrealistic Fulbright's contention that the U.S. and Red China should agree to "neutralize" Southeast Asia. Samuel B. Griffith, a retired Marine Corps brigadier general and old China hand who holds an Ox ford University doctorate in Chinese military history and translated Mao Tse-tung's key treatise On Guerrilla Warfare, bluntly told the committee: "I don't think the Chinese would place any credibility whatever in any treaty we might sign. We are the demon in Chinese eyes as much as they are the demon in our own eyes."

Bread on the Waters? The experts generally agreed, too, that China's internal problems have left Peking the paper dragon of world powers. "Save through the application of her doctrine of national-liberation wars, China cannot influence events outside peripheral areas," said Griffith. Thus "she wishes above all to remove our presence from Asia." To a man, the Sinologists urged that the U.S. try to normalize relations with China, however unrewarding that might be. They proposed that Washington recognize the Peking regime, support its admission to the U.N. (provided Nationalist China is not ousted) and in general follow a policy of "containment without isolation"-a phrase approvingly picked up by Humphrey on Meet the Press.

Though that approach was generally accepted, there were some noteworthy reservations. As Senator Jacob Javits put it: "The one big qualification that I would make to this idea of 'containment without isolation' is that it should be within the context of a peace settlement in Viet Nam. I still cannot see casting bread upon the waters to hungry sharks who will eat you up if you dare to put your toe overboard. But something has to be done within the context of giving the world a sense of peace."

"Kiss of Judas." The U.S. has been trying for several years to open new channels into China-by approving trips there for journalists in 1957 and more recently by granting travel permits to doctors, scientists and scholars. The Communists have invariably rebuffed such overtures. Since December the Ad ministration has been conducting a complete reappraisal of its China policy. So far, the inclination has been toward further attempts to relax tensions, possibly even including cancellation of the U.S. embargo on nonstrategic trade with the Chinese. When a high-powered West German consortium recently notified Washington that it had contracted to build (on credit) big, up-to-date steel plants in Szechwan province, the Administration made no attempt to block the project.

No academic or diplomatic expert considers that a less inimical U.S. approach will be reciprocated for years to come. What the nation can expect instead was foreshadowed last week after Humphrey declared that the U.S. should "take every opportunity to show our friendship for the Chinese." Inoffensive as it was, Humphrey's statement was denounced by Peking as the "kiss of Judas," with the warning that it "cannot fail to disgust the Chinese people and make us maintain utmost vigilance."

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