On the Horizon

The American people may find it hard to believe that the U.S. is winning the war in Viet Nam. They have, after all, been ladled too many over-sanguine assurances in the past, only to be confronted later with the familiar due bills of heavier manpower commitments, steeper costs and higher casualties. Nonetheless, one of the most exhaustive inquiries into the status of the conflict yet compiled offers considerable evidence that the weight of U.S. power, 21 years after the big build-up began, is beginning to make itself felt. Within the next 18 months or so, White House officials maintain, the increasing impact of that strength may bring the enemy to the point where he could simply be unable to continue fighting.

Because Lyndon Johnson fears that the U.S. public is in no mood to accept its optimistic conclusions, he may never permit the report to be released in full. Even so, he is sufficiently impressed with the findings--and sufficiently anxious to make their conclusions known--to permit the experts who have been working on it to talk about it in general terms. Highlights: > Bombing of the North, while it cannot alone prove decisive, is putting so great a strain on Hanoi that before long a major break will ensue. Last spring, U.S. Air Force Lieut. General William ("Spike") Momyer, commander of the bombing war in Viet Nam, devised a tactic known as "pursuit-of-a-target system" that puts relentless pressure on the North's transportation network. Instead of blasting a road or bridge and then leaving it alone for a while, the system calls for flyers to make continuous "multiple cuts" in roads and rail lines, trapping trains and trucks between the gaps and leaving them exposed to U.S. planes (see THE WORLD). Last week's strikes at Haiphong and Cam Pha, the North's first and third biggest ports, signaled a shift to the next step--isolating the ports by blasting roads, marshaling yards and rail sidings around dock areas. > Antiaircraft and SAM-missile fire from the ground has fallen off dramatically in some areas, thanks largely to shortages of shells and missiles. This has been reflected by a decline in the ratio of U.S. planes lost to sorties flown. Further, there has been a drop in the number of bomb loads that had to be jettisoned by U.S. flyers in order to combat pursuing MIGs, now considerably less in evidence. > In the South, Viet Cong strength is dropping. Recruitment, once thought to be adding 7,000 men per month to guerrilla ranks, is now estimated to be running at only 3,500. One result has been a decline in terrorist incidents from 2,700 to 1,700 a month. While estimates of either side's effective control over the populace have always been suspect, the Administration figures that the South Vietnamese civilians under guerrilla rule now total some 25% of the country's 17 million people (v. more than 40% under outright Viet Cong control or in sharply contested areas at the beginning of 1965). A telling piece of evidence is the flight of more than 1,000,000 South Vietnamese to the cities in the past year. Whatever their reasons--war-weariness, the lure of jobs or plain fear of the guerrillas--their exodus has markedly reduced the Viet Cong's rural base.

Wearing Thin. As marshaled by the White House, the evidence strongly indicates that Hanoi's resources may be wearing thin. In fact, ever since the battle of the la Drang Valley in late 1965, when U.S. troops first engaged the Communists in a major battle and handed them a bloody defeat, there has been little doubt that American power would eventually tell. Fittingly, in a White House ceremony last week, Johnson awarded a Presidential Unit Citation for valor to Lieut. General Harry Kinnard in behalf of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) which he commanded in that hard-fought action.

Moreover, the U.S. has plans afoot to make things even more difficult for Hanoi. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's plan to lay an electronic barrier across the demilitarized zone aims at reducing Hanoi's ability to slip men and supplies into the South. The barrier is expected to run into Laos as well, which will vastly increase Hanoi's difficulties, since many infiltration routes make an end run around the North-South border and snake through Laos.

However accurate it may prove to be, any such appraisal from the White House is bound to stir a skeptical reaction. For a growing number of Republican leaders, in particular, no amount of rosy predictions will conceal the fact that Lyndon Johnson is vulnerable on the war issue. That conviction was reinforced during the Labor Day recess, when vacationing Congressmen sounded out their constituents. Said Kentucky's Republican Senator Thruston Morton: "The people I talked to a year ago were saying, 'Bomb hell out of that little country.' Now they're saying, 'Get out.' They're frustrated."

Accordingly, more and more Republicans are seeking ways to exploit this frustration by hanging the war on the President. "Some of us are going in different directions," said one Republican leader, "but we don't differ in our basic objective: to disengage ourselves from the Johnson policies."

Self-Propelled Candidate. One prominent disengager--from Johnson as well as from Viet Nam--is retired Lieut. General James Gavin, who was U.S. Ambassador to France during the Kennedy Administration and is now trying to promote himself among G.O.P. moderates as a peace candidate. Last week in San Francisco, while conceding that Viet Nam is "the best fought and least understood war in history," he said flatly: "We shouldn't be there." Next week a draft-Gavin group will run a full-page ad in the New York Times. That may well prove the high point of his candidacy.

One Republican whose cooperation will be crucial for a truly effective attack on the President is having none of it--at least for the time being. He is Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, who, significantly, is scheduled to head the Republican Platform Committee at the 1968 presidential convention in Miami, and thus may have a good deal to say about the party's Viet Nam policy, before and during the campaign. Shrugging off the efforts of House Republican leaders to dissociate themselves from the President's Viet Nam policy, Dirksen declared gruffly: "They offer no alternative. Do we quit? Do we stop the bombing? There has to be an alternative. You don't declare a holiday in war unless both sides are willing to go to the table. There have been no indications that the other side will talk."

On the other hand, by breaking with the President without offering a closely reasoned alternative, said Dirksen, "you only strengthen Ho Chi Minh's determination to hang on. That's been the trouble right along."

In similar vein, Richard Nixon told an interviewer that it would be disastrous for a Republican presidential nominee to run on a "peace-at-any-price" platform in 1968. "This would be a Pyrrhic victory the candidate might win," said Nixon, "but the Republican President would soon have another war on his hands." Nixon took note of the growing peace sentiment within the U.S. but added that the task for a presidential contender is not to pander to this sentiment but to exert forceful leadership.

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