Dialogue by Headline

For the third straight week, Hanoi continued its efforts to persuade Washington that it was ready to come to terms about coming to terms. Filling North Viet Nam's principal sound stage in the West, Hanoi's chief envoy in the non-Communist world, Paris-based Mai Van Bo, picked the eve of President Johnson's State of the Union message to make a carefully worded statement about Hanoi's latest position on peace talks. Yet after Bo spoke, and spoke still again, Washington could find little in his words to support hopes that negotiations would soon begin.

Bo's little peeps were well calculated for maximum impact. The Communist diplomat invited the government-controlled French television-radio system in for a recorded interview, confided that he was going to drop "a bomb," and then proceeded to answer questions that he himself had supplied. When the network failed to broadcast the interview promptly, Bo's office distributed transcripts to other news agencies.

"Suitable Time." Bo re-emphasized last month's Hanoi statement that talks will--rather than could--take place after the U.S. stops bombing North Viet Nam and halts "all other acts of war" against the North. He then went on to say that conversations "will begin after a suitable time" once the bombing halts and that the initial talks would settle an agenda and determine at what diplomatic level to continue discussions.

Bo followed this up in another interview by defining a "suitable time" as "days, or a matter of weeks."

If the North Vietnamese really propose to talk within days, the U.S. would consider it a favorable sign. Yet the crucial question in Washington's view, as enunciated in Lyndon Johnson's San Antonio speech in September, is whether Hanoi intends to use a cessation of bombing to build up its forces in the South, intensifying military pressure there, while marking time at the bargaining table. On this point, Bo yielded not a millimeter. Johnson's San Antonio statement, he said, is an "indefensible position." "The U.S. attacked the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, an independent and sovereign country, without valid reason and without declaration of war. This is deliberate aggression and a challenge to all men. The U.S. must put an end to its aggressive acts without any conditions whatever."

Out of Moves. Without mentioning the Bo statement, Johnson in effect replied to it in the State of the Union message with a slightly reworded version of his San Antonio speech. In San Antonio he had said that the U.S. would call off the bombing "when this will lead promptly to productive discussions. We, of course, assume that while discussions proceed, North Viet Nam would not take advantage of the bombing cessation or limitation." Last week the President seemed more yielding in one phase of the formula and more adamant in another. Instead of asking assurance that the talks would be "productive," he asked only for "reasonable hopes that they would be productive." The hardening seemed to come on military reciprocity. "The other side must not take advantage of our restraint as they have in the past. This nation simply cannot accept anything less without jeopardizing the lives of our men and our allies." And the "first order of business" if talks do begin, said Johnson, should be a "true cease-fire."

Regardless of the wording, the Administration insisted afterward that there had been no change of position and that there would be none. "We've run out of moves," said one high official. "The San Antonio formula is it, as far as we are concerned." Whatever the real import of Hanoi's intensified diplomatic campaign, one side benefit from the Communist viewpoint is the increased pressure it puts on Washington. United Nations Secretary General U Thant chimed in once again and put responsibility for getting talks started on the U.S. The Soviet Union condemned Johnson's "unwillingness to negotiate," although elsewhere Soviet-American diplomacy--which may yet prove the key to any meaningful negotiations over Viet Nam--was more fruitful. The two nations finally agreed on the full text of a draft treaty to prohibit the spread of nuclear weapons to nations that do not yet possess them.

Whether any give will develop in either the U.S. or the North Vietnamese positions remains to be seen. Private diplomatic exploration of exactly what is on Hanoi's mind is continuing, and may go on for some time before it is clear whether any progress is being made. So far, ranking U.S. officials reported last week that these private contacts were yielding essentially the same results as the dialogue by headline.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.