Help from the Hyperhawks

For two arduous years, President Johnson has sought in vain to end the war in Viet Nam, and--with little more success--to convince the world that this is indeed his aim. Abruptly, and to his own surprise, the President last month got an assist from the adversary. By a vituperative rejection of the latest U.S. peace proposal, North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh displayed unmistakably his own hawk's plumage. Last week U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, long a stringent critic of U.S. policy in Viet Nam, was also rudely rebuffed by Ho.

Thant, reiterating his fears of a wider war in Asia, invoked Hanoi's wrath by suggesting an eminently fairminded, three-step formula for ending the war: 1) "a general standstill truce," to be followed in a few weeks by 2) "preliminary talks" between Washington and Hanoi, possibly refereed by Moscow and London as co-chairmen of the 1954 Geneva conference that partitioned Indo-China, and 3) reconvening of the Geneva Conference.

Errand Boy. Indeed, some U.S. policymakers caviled at Thant's plan. For one thing, they pointed out, the Secretary-General did not specify with any degree of clarity whether or not the U.S. air war against North Viet Nam, which he calls "an insurmountable obstacle to discussions," would have to be suspended as a precondition to the truce. For another, they noted that any such truce could become a trap. They recalled in particular how the Chinese Communists, routed in the battle of Szepingkai in 1946 and on the brink of losing all of Manchuria to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, pressured U.S. mediators into calling for a standstill, then used the precious time to regroup. The Chinese later exploited the Korean peace talks at Panmunjom, which dragged on for two years at the cost of 80,000 American casualties.

Nonetheless, because Thant for the first time urged a mutual truce rather than a unilateral U.S. deescalation, the Administration moved with alacrity to accept his proposal as "constructive and positive." Hanoi thereupon broadcast a scathing denunciation of Thant for having made "no distinction between the aggressors and the victim of aggression," while Peking branded him "an errand boy for Washington."

Welcome Windfall. The outcome of the new exchange was to reinforce in many parts of the world a growing feeling that Hanoi, probably elbowed by Peking, remains the real obstacle to peace. In Asia, Scandinavia and France, newspapers that had previously regarded Johnson's motives with undisguised skepticism were beginning to change their views. Cambodia's Chief of State Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who three years ago had fervently welcomed China's embrace while reviling U.S. "imperialism," recently reassured Australian diplomats that he welcomes the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia as a counterweight to Peking. Other Asian leaders have made the same point.

The shifts in Asian attitudes were a welcome windfall for the President. As Johnson explained last week before an audience of Democratic state chairmen at the White House, some 33 offers--formal and informal--have been made to Hanoi in the past four months. "If I propositioned a gal 33 times and I didn't get one proposition in return, I just wouldn't have anything more to do with her." He said he can see no acceptable alternative to his middleway policy. If the stop-the-bombing advocates had their way, he reasoned, the result would be carte blanche for "our adversaries to descend unimpeded on the men who fight for us in the hills and jungles and rice paddies." On the other hand, if some domestic hawks were heeded, he warned, the U.S. would be "gambling with a total, worldwide war."

The hyperhawks, for a change, were all too clearly ensconced in the North Vietnamese aviary.

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