Back to the Fighting

With recent peace efforts decisively doomed by Hanoi's intransigence, the U.S. last week resumed the air war over North Viet Nam and sent its forces in the South swinging into post-truce action. No amount of persuasion by the British and the Russians--not even the fact that the U.S. prolonged the bombing pause by a diplomatic 42 hours and 17 minutes--had been able to move Ho Chi Minh toward negotiations.

From the start, Lyndon Johnson had been worried that Hanoi was less interested in launching talks than in pressuring the U.S. into a permanent bombing pause that would allow the North to resupply its forces without interference. As it turned out, Hanoi used the Tet pause to do just that, mobilizing 2,200 trucks and 1,572 vessels to speed between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of materiel to the South. That is enough to enable the 282,000 Communist troops engaged in the war, who lately have been averaging only one or two days of fighting a month, to maintain their present rate of combat for an entire year.

Elementary Reciprocity. Despite its ultimate failure, the peace thrust came closer to success than any efforts in the past. Before he boarded his white Ilyushin-18 turboprop last week to end his week-long visit to Britain, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin spent some eight hours conferring with Prime Minister Harold Wilson on Viet Nam. In public, Kosygin witheringly blasted the U.S. for its role in the war. But in private, he signaled a new Soviet willingness to try to end the war, even agreed to ask the North Vietnamese if they would offer what Washington calls "elementary reciprocity" in exchange for a halt in the bombing.

Hopeful of a breakthrough, Wilson, who maintained almost constant contact with Washington during Kosygin's visit, urged Lyndon Johnson to extend the U.S. bombing pause beyond the truce deadline so that Hanoi could weigh the Russian proposal. Johnson agreed. At one point, Kosygin asked the British if they could get either Johnson or Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the conference table. The U.S. reply was delivered to British Foreign Minister George Brown during Queen Elizabeth's dinner for Kosygin at Buckingham Palace. Brown scanned the answer, then scrawled a note and passed it to Kosygin. "I can deliver either of my friends," he told Kosygin, "if you can deliver yours."

But Kosygin could not deliver. Just hours before the Soviet Premier's departure, Wilson and Brown sped up to his suite at Claridge's for an unscheduled 1 a.m. conference. It was then that Kosygin relayed Hanoi's reply to his plea for a gesture toward deescalation. The answer was, of course, "No." That clinched it for Washington. Once Kosygin was en route home, Lyndon Johnson gave his commanders the signal to resume the bombing.

No Alternative. With typical flourish, Wilson later spoke dramatically of how "I strove unceasingly, almost without sleep," to get talks started. Peace "was almost within our grasp," he said. "One single, simple act of trust could have achieved it." As for the President of the U.S., he clearly felt that it was Hanoi that had withheld that act. "Despite our efforts and those of third parties," he said, Ho Chi Minh's only response was to launch "major resupply efforts." The U.S., consequently, "had no alternative but to resume full-scale hostilities."

In resuming his prosecution of the war, Johnson was concerned with demands by the hawks--or the "K.O.-punch bunch," as Indiana's Democratic Senator Vance Hartke calls them--to escalate it even further. South Carolina's Democratic Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, for one, urged Johnson not just to resume the bombings but to "triple them." Republican Barry Goldwater accused him of "a sanity gap" for agreeing to a bombing pause, insisted that the war should be intensified "to end it as quickly as possible." To mute such demands, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara called a news conference at the Pentagon, declared that the bombing of the North should not be expanded in hopes of winning the war. Victory, he said, could only be won in the South.

Face-Saving Fadeout. Though a wary Washington feels that it has been burned twice by bombing pauses, it does see some glimmers of hope for ending the war. Chief among them is Moscow's apparent desire, notwithstanding its role as Hanoi's principal armorer, to get it over with. Despite Kosygin's failure to budge Ho, Washington believes that persistent pressure might bring him around, particularly since Moscow's influence in Hanoi has waxed as Peking's has waned because of its convulsive Cultural Revolution. In addition, the Communists are clearly losing the ground war--as was convincingly illustrated by their heavy losses last week. Finally, the chance that Saigon may have a constitutionally elected civilian government by autumn gives the South fresh hope of establishing a genuinely popular government.

Should Ho conclude that a cease-fire is in his best interests, he might seek negotiations--or simply recall his troops and cut off his aid to the Viet Cong in an unannounced, face-saving fadeout. Of the two courses, many officials consider formal negotiations by far the less desirable. They know all too well that "peace talks" are not necessarily peaceful--or bloodless. In Korea, 80,000 Americans were killed or wounded while the armistice talks dragged on, compared with 57,000 before the negotiations were launched. Moreover, conferences do not always achieve desirable results; witness Versailles and Yalta. And there are times when crises are best settled without formal talks; in the vital 1962 Cuban missile crisis, there were no mimeographed agendas, no daily bulletins, no exchanges of views across a polished mahogany table.

In an undeclared war such as Viet Nam, in short, the ideal consummation could very well be an undeclared peace.

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