The Nixon View

All presidential candidates' views on Viet Nam will obviously shift in the wake of Johnson's speech. But even before he made it, Richard Nixon had already begun to moderate his position. The prevalent impression had been that Nixon was more bellicose than Johnson and that he had a concrete plan for ending the war. Both ideas stemmed from Nixon's own past statements, but neither was strictly accurate.

In Wisconsin last week, Nixon gave a paid, 20-minute nationwide radio speech adumbrating a broad and basically moderate approach to the war. He had planned a second radio broadcast on Sunday to talk more specifically about Viet Nam, but canceled it when the President announced his TV talk.

Nixon's discussion of Viet Nam reflected no basic change in his ideas but a shift of emphasis. As early as 1954, the then Vice President believed that U.S. troops should be sent to save the French from defeat in Indo-China. After the Johnson Administration began its major U.S. buildup eleven years later, Nixon supported the commitment in principle, but criticized its implementation, finding fault with the gradualism of the war effort.

No Gimmicks. In his most recent statements, however, Nixon has dropped his call for more drastic action against North Viet Nam, notably the mining of Haiphong harbor. Last month in New Hampshire, he gave rise to the secret-plan notion by giving his "pledge" that a new Administration would "end the war and win the peace in the Pacific." He conceded that he had no "pushbutton solutions, no magic gimmicks." He was merely making the quite obvious point that any new President would be under particular pressure to stop hostilities.

"Viet Nam has been a deeply troubling lesson in the limits of U.S. power," Nixon declared. Yet he does not advocate U.S. abdication of its global commitments, argues, rather, that "economically, diplomatically, militarily, the time has come to insist that others must assume the responsibilities which are rightly theirs." He urges a stronger Asian regionalism and a consequent "dispersal of responsibility."

Nixon has also maintained recently that the likeliest prospect for peace is to persuade Moscow to bring pressure on Hanoi for a diplomatic settlement. Such leverage, says Nixon, may be the "key to peace"--though Russia of late has shown no inclination whatever to insert the key in the lock. Exactly what inducements Nixon might offer at the bargaining table are unstated. It could hardly be otherwise. Even if the status of the war next year could be predicted, it would be foolish, his aides point out, to get locked into a bargaining position now. "I don't have all the answers," Nixon told a breakfast reception in Oshkosh. "But I do know the questions, and I do know it is possible to do a better job than we have in the last five years."

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