The Perils of Probing

When the Viet Nam war finally ends, the history of the myriad unofficial attempts to end it will make a fascinating study in well-intentioned futility. Scores of private peacemakers have visited Hanoi--Italian ex-mayors and Mexican philosophers, French diplomats and Canadian clerics, professors and politicians--and practically all have gone away with tantalizingly vague reports of a brand new peace feeler. Scores of others have worked up their own formulas for peace and reacted bitterly when nobody seemed interested in buying them. Last week two more episodes in this strange saga of diplomatic dilettantism came to light.

Dancing Dreams. One incident involved Harry Ashmore, former executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette and now executive vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, who spent nine days last January visiting North Viet Nam with Miami News Editor Bill Baggs. In a 15,000-word article in the center's bimonthly magazine, Ashmore claimed that North Viet Nam's President Ho Chi Minh took a "deliberately conciliatory" line during a two-hour talk and "seemed prepared to consider a specific proposal based on mutual de-escalation." But Ashmore claimed that a sub sequent attempt to explore this opening with a letter to Ho from himself and Baggs was "effectively and brutally canceled" by a tough-worded message from Lyndon Johnson that reached Hanoi ahead of theirs. The Administration, said Ashmore, was guilty of "crude duplicity" and "double-dealing."

Actually, Ashmore's letter, written with help from top State Department officials and William Fulbright, was not markedly different from Johnson's. It advised Hanoi that there could be no U.S. bombing pause without "some reciprocal restraint" on its part. The President's letter, more direct and official, called for similar reciprocity.

Johnson's letter, explained Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, was the result of secret contacts between U.S. and North Vietnamese officials that began in Moscow in January 1967. By early February, when both the Johnson and Ashmore letters were written, it was obvious that Hanoi was not interested in talks, no matter how pleasant Ho had been during his brief chat with Ashmore and Baggs. North Vietnamese diplomats in Moscow went so far as to return U.S. messages unopened to underscore their lack of interest. "Mr. Ashmore yields to an understandable feeling that his own channel was the center of the stage," said Bundy. "It was not. It was a very, very small part of the total picture." Other State Department officials suggested acidly that Ashmore left Hanoi with dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize dancing in his skull, and was disappointed to discover that he was not, after all, going to be the man to break the log jam.

Waiting Game. The second episode centered on General Lauris Norstad, retired Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and now president of Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. Norstad disclosed that last March he tried, through an intermediary, to sell President Johnson on a highly unorthodox peace plan. It called for the U.S. to announce an un conditional bombing pause. After that, the President himself would fly to Geneva and hole up in a hotel room to await representatives from the other side --presumably including agents from Red China and the Viet Cong.

What if nobody turned up? "If I were President," said Norstad, "I would get down on my knees three times a day and pray" for somebody to appear. But if nothing happened after a week, he added, "the President would have to stand up and say, This is not leading anywhere and I'm going back to Washington to get on with the business of running my country.' " Having proved his good faith, said Norstad, the President would then be able to increase the pressure on Hanoi without qualms.

Despite Norstad's earnestness, not to mention mild support from former NATO Secretaries-General Paul-Henri Spaak and Dirk Stikker, the plan got nowhere. It would not have been easy for Americans to accept the picture of their President sitting around a Swiss chalet waiting for anybody--or nobody.

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