Progress

"It's going to be all right, Mr. President," said Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, cocking his head characteristically to one side. "Just let's keep on, keep on." Bunker's exhortation, delivered in a White House office strewn with war charts and pacification graphs, succinctly summed up the Administration's guardedly optimistic view of the war as the nation's operating military and civilian chiefs returned from Viet Nam to report on its slow but promisingly tangible progress.

Along with General William Westmoreland and his deputy, Ambassador Robert Komer, chief of the pacification effort, Bunker brought home a message not of a clearly foreseeable end to the war but of heartening movement toward that end. "I have never been more encouraged in my four years in Viet Nam," said Westmoreland, who, with his wife and daughter, spent the week as a guest at the White House.

Some reasons for his buoyancy:

P: The total of South Vietnamese living under Viet Cong control is down from around 4,000,000 in mid-1965 to 2,500,000 today. About 68% of the South Vietnamese population live in reasonably secure areas, while 15% remain in contested sections. Another 17% are under Viet Cong control. The government has gained 12% of the country's population in the past year.

P: The South Vietnamese have conducted five elections in the past 14 months in the midst of war--"a remarkable performance," said Bunker--and a new government acting under a new constitution has shown marked promise in achieving stable and honest rule.

P: Viet Cong recruitment, running last year at the rate of some 7,500 per month, has now dropped to 3,500.

P: The South Vietnamese army, though far from first-rank efficiency, has demonstrated an increasing capacity to fight bravely and well.

The profile of war and pacification was sketched for the President from meticulously gathered statistics, Communist reports, prisoner interrogations, and U.S. and South Vietnamese intelligence sources. In almost all the country's provinces, the reports suggest, the Viet Cong is suffering increasingly from lack of food, recruiting difficulties, and the steady movement of the people from V.C.-held areas to the security of government-controlled territory. Ironically, in a war in which the enemy has always banked heavily on outlasting the more impatient Occidentals, many Viet Cong troops are sick and tired of the fighting.

The U.S., meanwhile, does not intend to increase projected force levels in Viet Nam but will concentrate on honing its present commitment to maximum efficiency. Westmoreland's only significant request was to continue bombing the North without any extended pause. He compared the war to a knitted sweater, stretched and worn until the threads have grown thin. "In time," he said, "it will unravel. It is difficult to forecast when it will unravel.

But if we relieve the pressure, we prolong the war."

One development that increasingly troubles U.S. strategists is the supply line that the Communists have established through Cambodia to circumvent the dangerous U.S. bombings of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnamese and Red Chinese cargo ships are docking at the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, where Jacqueline Kennedy only a few weeks ago with much eclat dedicated a new Avenue J. F. Kennedy. Then the supplies, particularly ammunition, are trucked along the U.S. aid-built highway to Pnompenh, whence they are moved east to South Viet Nam and into the battlefield.

Meantime, despite the rising political pressures for a bombing halt to try for peaceful negotiations, the prospect in Viet Nam now is merely for 24-hour cease-fires at Christmas and New Year's, with another 48-hour hiatus in February for Tet, the Buddhist lunar New Year.

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