Strong Echoes from Honolulu

FOREIGN RELATIONS

The Honolulu conference on Viet Nam wound up with a strongly worded communique offering no hint of a breakthrough in the war. Last week Honolulu's firm words produced echoes in Paris, Saigon and Cincinnati, site of the U.S. Governors' Conference.

> In Paris, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman made it clear that Washington was not about to order a complete bombing halt in the North unless Hanoi offered something in return. "What are you prepared to do in response to our de-escalations?" asked Harriman. "What will you do if we cease bombing the North altogether?" The North Vietnamese, who had expected the Honolulu meeting between Lyndon Johnson and South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu to yield an announcement of a complete bombing halt, had an equally blunt reply. Stop the bombing, they said, and then we'll talk about it. For a time, the U.S. conferees were hoping that a lull in the war might prove to be the conciliatory gesture that Washington is looking for. That speculation ended last week with terrorist attacks on Saigon and nearby towns that killed nine, wounded 68.

> In Saigon, renewed assurances of U.S. support and the omission of any proposal for either a bombing pause or a future political role for the Viet Cong measurably strengthened Thieu's hand. He immediately used that newfound strength to squeeze his opposition. Lawyer Truong Dinh Dzu, runner-up to Thieu in last September's presidential elections, drew a five-year prison term at hard labor for suggesting that it would "be better if we negotiated" with the National Liberation Front, the guerrillas' political arm. Dzu's imprisonment followed the death sentences meted out in absentia two weeks ago to ten members of the recently formed Alliance of National, Democratic and Peace Forces for recommending a coalition government. Harriman has publicly dismissed the Alliance as "a front for the Front"--an impression buttressed by the fact that its propaganda tracts are being cranked out on the same mimeograph machines used by Hanoi's Paris delegation.

> In Cincinnati, where Johnson stopped en route back to Washington from his Texas ranch, he told the nation's Governors that he intended to pursue his present course in Viet Nam "regardless of the pressures and strains of this political year." Said he: "Some among us seem to feel that I or we alone can bring peace to Viet Nam. They seem to ignore the presence and the irreconcilability of the enemy." When he added that the U.S. was not going to impose a coalition government on Saigon or "let the totalitarians impose a Communist government either," he was heartily applauded.

It was unlikely that Hubert Humphrey's advisers were similarly inclined to cheer. The Vice President has promised to issue a major Viet Nam statement in the near future, but Johnson's more-of-the-same policy makes it difficult for him to say anything that does not either repudiate the President or disappoint those who want to see a swift end to the war. For the time being, he contented himself with a thinly veiled rebuke to his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Eugene McCarthy. "Peace talkers are 10-c-a dozen today," Humphrey said at a dinner-dance at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. "Peaceworkers, peacemakers are priceless." Judging from the still-remote prospects for peace, that verdict seems unimpeachable.

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