Fumbled Hopes

THE SECRET SEARCH FOR PEACE IN VIETNAM by David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory. 247 pages. Random House. $5.95.

When President Johnson announced the partial halt of North Viet Nam air strikes March 31, he left the strong impression that the bombers would be confined to areas just north of the 17th parallel and the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South. But he left the cutoff line vague on State Department advice, and the vagueness was deliberate. State strategists figured that the impact on world opinion would be greatest if immediately after his statement the bombing frontier was dramatically cut back to the vicinity of the 17th parallel. Diplomats assumed that the Pentagon would understand these motives. But the generals, aware that the President, on strictly military grounds, had actually drawn the line at the 20th parallel, well into Ho Chi Minh territory, promptly bombed to the northern limits of their authority. Washington--not to say a great number of Americans--was paralyzed with dismay, and the White House was obliged to issue a clarifying statement.

Zapping a Toothpick. That incident, too recent for inclusion in this hastily updated book, nevertheless echoes the theme: the Administration's attempts to arrive at a formula for peace have been less than brilliant and often self-defeating. The President of the U.S. has spent an extraordinary amount of time poring over reconnaissance photographs, trying to decide whether a toothpick bridge can be zapped without damage to nearby tenement hovels. But for all this attention to minutiae, he has been unable to exercise control at some crucial moments.

Kraslow and Loory, both able Washington correspondents for the Los Angeles Times, illustrate the point with a wealth of diligently acquired detail, much of it, indeed, secret. In late 1966, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge conferred repeatedly with a Polish diplomat who shuttled between Hanoi and Saigon. Shrouded plans (code-named "Marigold" by the State Department) were laid for a U.S.-North Vietnamese meeting in Warsaw on Dec. 6. Two weeks before, however, the White House had approved a bombing list including previously off-limits targets in Hanoi. Because of rain and high winds the strikes did not actually take place until Dec. 2 and 4. Why the bad timing? Only a bare handful of men in Washington were aware of both Marigold and the earlier target authorizations. Some simply forgot about the raids as the bad weather delayed execution; others overlooked the connection. But the Communists saw the connection, and the meeting never materialized.

Wilted Face. Two months later, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson approached Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in London with L.B.J.'s approval. The P.M. handed the Russian a note, prepared with the help of a White House liaison man, proposing a bombing halt (phase A) to be followed, after a face-saving interval, by mutual de-escalation (phase B). Kosygin had boarded a train to Scotland when Johnson abruptly decided that the proposed interval was too long. The embarrassed Wilson was forced to chase Kosygin down with a new proposal.

But were these moments really crucial? The authors fail to emphasize that less than a month after the wilting of Marigold, for instance, American and North Vietnamese diplomats held numerous face-to-face discussions, exchanging letters from their respective Presidents. Nothing came of the exchange. They brush lightly over evidence that some would-be East European peacemakers were acting on their own. Hungary's Foreign Minister James Peter, for example, strongly hinted to Dean Rusk in late 1965 that a bombing cessation would bring a military response as well as talks. This was all so much goulash, insists Defector Janos Radvanyi, who was Hungary's envoy to the U.S. at the time; the Vietnamese never told Budapest any such thing.

The problem with the book is that at least half the story of the search for peace remains secret, and the discussions in Paris outmode some of the Kraslow and Loory materials. But their demonstration that Washington is confused about its goals and uncoordinated in its methods remains disturbing.

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