Chorus of One

A dozen Senators or twoscore Representatives could say the same thing without making too much of a splash. But when New York's Senator Robert F. Kennedy accuses President Johnson of having muffed a chance to end the war in Viet Nam, his single, rather reedy voice has the volume of the Anvil Chorus in this year of presidential maneuvering.

This week, in a new book called To Seek a Newer World, Kennedy accuses Johnson of just such a blunder. In the early months of 1967, he writes, the U.S. "cast away what may well have been the last best chance to go to the negotiating table, on terms we clearly would have accepted before." At that time, he says, Hanoi was willing to begin talks if the U.S. would quit bombing the North. But the Administration, which had ordered a 37-day bombing pause a year earlier in the hope of achieving precisely that outcome, shifted its position and demanded a quid pro quo--namely, an end to Hanoi's infiltration of the South.

The upshot of this hardened attitude may be to "make a negotiated peace impossible for some time to come," concludes Kennedy. Even so, and even though a negotiated settlement would entail the risk of an eventual Viet Cong takeover, he holds that peace talks are the only way out of the war. "Withdrawal is now impossible," he says, because it would "damage our position in the world." As for outright military victory--the only other alternative--that goal "is at best uncertain and at worst unattainable."

Least Impact. Doubleday & Co. paid Kennedy a handsome $150,000 advance--making this the first of his four books not to be published by Harper & Row, which roused his ire during last year's acrid controversy over William Manchester's The Death of a President. Despite the fact that Look magazine also clashed with Bobby over its serialization of the Manchester book, Bobby accepted an additional $10,000 or so from the magazine for his new book's chapter on Viet Nam.

The Senator plans to give the money away, though he will not say to whom; his publishers are quite confident of recouping theirs, and then some. Even though the book, with chapters on youth, the Negro, Latin America, nuclear arms and China as well as Viet Nam, is little more than a rechauffe of old speeches, touched up by the Senator and Aides Adam Walinsky and Peter Edelman, the mere fact that it bears Bobby Kennedy's name is bound to sell copies during the coming year. According to Bobby's aides, the book's release was actually timed to achieve the least--not the greatest--political impact. Had Bobby really wanted to stir up controversy, they say, he would have sprung it on the eve of next summer's nominating conventions.

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