A HALTING STEP TOWARD PEACE

WHEN Lyndon Johnson announced the bombing halt to the American people, he prudently cautioned that the U.S. could be seriously disappointed in its efforts to find peace in Viet Nam. At first, his admonition seemed unwarranted. From most of the world's capitals, including Moscow, came only praise for the President's action. More important, as a silent signal of Hanoi's acceptance of the U.S. offer, the battlefields of South Viet Nam, which have been relatively quiet for the past month, became almost totally still. Then, to Washington's dismay, the U.S. peace initiative foundered on the obduracy of its principal allies, the South Vietnamese. As a result, last week's scheduled session in Paris, when the broadened peace talks were to have begun, was canceled. The impasse thus raised a serious question about just when the expanded negotiations would get under way.

The man who dashed the diplomatic hopes was South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. Until two days before the announcement of the bombing pause, Thieu seemed to go along with the U.S. plan. Then he hardened his stand, bluntly barring South Viet Nam's participation in the Paris talks. His defiance made him a hero at home. The often critical and divided South Vietnamese press praised him. In a show of support, some 50 members of the National Assembly paraded to the presidential palace, shouting pro-Thieu slogans and waving red-and-yellow national flags. Groups of demonstrators in Saigon carried banners reading THE PEOPLE ARE UNITED TO KILL THE COMMUNISTS AND SAFEGUARD THE COUNTRY.

Even Thieu's political opponents rallied to his side. "For one year you have asked me to give the President full support," snapped Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, Thieu's most powerful rival, to a U.S. diplomat. "Now I'm going to give the President full support."

Anglo-Saxon Approach. The expressions of new-found loyalty for Thieu were a measure of South Vietnamese anger over the arrangements in Paris. The sticking point is the participation of the National Liberation Front, which is the political arm of the Viet Cong. As Saigon sees it, the participation of the N.L.F. as an equal member in any peace talks is tantamount to recognizing that the Communists represent a portion of the population of South Viet Nam. Such an admission would be a serious loss of face for Thieu's regime and might force the Saigon government into the position of having no alternative to the acceptance of Communists in a coalition government.

Ever since the first phase of the Paris talks began on May 10, U.S. diplomats in Saigon have kept President Thieu informed about the issues under discussion. Aware of South Viet Nam's sensitivity about Viet Cong representation, the U.S. suggested to the North a proposal Secretary of State Dean Rusk described as a practical "Anglo-Saxon approach." An exercise in diplomatic gymnastics, the American plan allowed each side to constitute its negotiating team as it wished and to say what it liked about the equality of its members. The genius of the plan was that the other side would be equally free to ignore whatever claims its opponents made. To avoid closer identification of the participants, the two sides would refer to the negotiating parties only as "our side" and "your side."

Hawks' Triumph. Late in October, after the North Vietnamese accepted the U.S. formula, Washington instructed U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon to seek Thieu's final approval. The original goal was for Thieu to sign a joint communique with Johnson proclaiming the bombing pause. Bunker conferred with Thieu and a few other high Saigon officials, notably Premier Tran Van Huong and Vice President Ky. When the text of the communique was complete, all the principal leaders expressed their concurrence with it.

But before Thieu could make the communique public, he had to seek the approval of the South Vietnamese equivalent of the National Security Council, which is composed of important military and political figures. Its session dragged on in interminable Vietnamese fashion. Top-ranking civilian politicians, including members of Thieu's own Cabinet, protested that the formula for N.L.F. representation would make the formation of a postwar coalition government almost inevitable. Hour after hour the wrangling continued. Ky and Thieu popped out of the meeting intermittently to confer with Bunker, who spent a total of nine hours that day with the Vietnamese leaders. Bunker, of course, could not guarantee that the N.L.F. would not claim an equal and independent status at the talks, since, after all, the whole point of the U.S. formula was to allow each side to claim whatever it wished.

South Viet Nam's hawks were adamant, and they prevailed. The next day Thieu informed Bunker that he would not sign the communique. The U.S. embassy relayed the decision to Washington, but President Johnson felt that his own arrangements were already so advanced that he could not delay the announcement of a bombing halt. The timing of the halt did not help Thieu. Only hours before Johnson's statement, Communist gunners shelled four South Vietnamese cities, including Saigon, where one rocket hit a Catholic church just before Mass, killing some 24 people. Since the Catholic minority is militantly antiCommunist, the shelling further inflamed Saigon's political atmosphere.

U.S. Reassurances. Sensing that atmosphere, Thieu declared that the bombing halt had been a "unilateral decision" by the U.S. Then, in a televised address before a joint session of the Vietnamese Senate and House of Representatives, he vigorously rejected the U.S. plan. In a 27-minute speech, which was interrupted 1 8 times by extended applause, Thieu demanded that Hanoi enter into direct talks with his government in which the N.L.F. would participate only as part of the North Vietnamese delegation. "The government of South Viet Nam deeply regrets not being able to participate in the present exploratory talks," he said.

There remained the possibility--some diplomats considered it a probability-- that a new formula could be devised that would enable Thieu to send representatives to Paris. At the same time, the U.S. was mindful that if it pushed Thieu too hard, it might damage his standing among his countrymen and perhaps even tempt his rivals to stage a coup. American diplomats therefore assured Thieu that, despite the disagreement over the talks, the U.S. commitment to South Viet Nam--and to him--remained unchanged. In Washington, Dean Rusk sought to quiet Vietnamese fears by reiterating the U.S. commitment to "our friends in South Viet Nam to ensure that they are protected from aggression and have the right to make their own decisions for themselves."

Secret Agreements. The events in Saigon suggested that American diplomacy for the moment was proving more effective with the U.S.'s enemies than with its friends. The slowdown on the battlefields raised the question of whether the U.S. and North Viet Nam had entered into a secret understanding. Rusk conceded as much in a Washington press conference, saying that the U.S. had acted on more than just "an assumption" when it stopped the bombing. As Rusk put it: "The North Vietnamese know what we expect with respect to talks and with regard to the circumstances in which serious talks can proceed." He refused to go into specifics, explaining that "the days and weeks ahead will reveal what is involved."

Even so, some terms of the agreement already seemed evident. They represented considerable military concessions on the part of Hanoi--a fact seemingly supporting U.S. military estimates that the Communists have taken a severe beating in the past ten months. Judging by their actions, the North Vietnamese appear to have agreed 1) to refrain from launching rocket attacks on Saigon, Hue, Danang and other major cities, and 2) to withdraw their troops from the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Viet Nams and to stop shelling across it.

Despite such accommodations, the Communists obviously regard the switch to the conference table as simply a new tactic in their struggle for victory in Viet Nam. Even as the people of Hanoi celebrated the end of the bombing, North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh asked for a still greater effort. Said Ho: "All Vietnamese must fight on with still greater determination until the last American aggressor is driven from our land." Similarly, when Madame Nguyen Thi Binh arrived in Paris as the leader of the N.L.F.'s negotiating team, she declared that the people of South Viet Nam must be left alone to run their own affairs "according to the political program of the National Liberation Front."

Waging a sort of conference-table warfare, the Communist diplomats sought to exacerbate the tensions between the U.S. and Saigon. Brushing aside the our-side-your-side formula, Hanoi's chief negotiator, Xuan Thuy, stressed in Paris that the new talks will encompass "four delegations--independent delegations with the right to speak." Thuy's public elevation of the N.L.F. to an independent status would, of course, make it even harder for President Thieu to send representatives to Paris. At the same time, Thuy twitted the U.S. for South Viet Nam's unwillingness to join the conference. "As for the attitude of Saigon," he said, "it is an affair for the Saigon and the American sides to settle."

In reply, U.S. Chief Negotiator W. Averell Harriman conceded that the U.S. could hardly talk about the substantive political issues for a settlement without the participation of the Saigon government. He added, moreover, that "there are other matters of de-escalating the war we could make progress on if they did not arrive." That was true enough. But it was also true that the delay in the start of Phase II of the talks-- which could lead to a formal cease-fire --had for the moment robbed the U.S. of its diplomatic momentum.

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