THE NEGOTIATOR AND THE CONFRONTER

HIS Administration is pledged to lead the U.S. from "an era of confrontation to an era of negotiation." However, few doubt that Richard Nixon will seek the counsel of men from both eras. His first two major decisions were, in effect, announcements that the new President would not be rushed from one to the other. He altered but preserved the basic plans for a dubious anti-ballistic-missile system. Even while concentrating on negotiations at the peace table in Paris, he continued to prosecute the war in Viet Nam at a cautious but undiminished pace. The task of defending those decisions, however tentative they remain, has largely been handled by Nixon's Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who has emerged as the Administration's principal confronter. Last week a good part of Laird's task was taken over by Secretary of State William P. Rogers, a man whom Nixon has described as "the best negotiator in the world."

It would be difficult to find two men more diverse in their approach. Laird, a kinetic, combative Midwesterner, testified before the Senate's Foreign Relations subcommittee on disarmament the week after he returned from his first tour of Viet Nam as Defense Secretary. As an eight-term Congressman from Wisconsin, he was used to committee hearings, and he knew how to make his point in them. During vigorous questioning, he stood his ground firmly. Rogers, a former Attorney General and ever the coolly prepared advocate, showed a reasoned, refreshingly pliant approach to questions that Laird handled with brusque assurance.

The two men probably differ more in style than in substance. Yet to the extent that there are two divergent bodies of opinion within Nixon's inner circle--at least on Viet Nam and ABM systems-Laird and Rogers probably exemplify them. The President, still playing for time, has so far kept to a cautious middle course. But sooner or later he may have to choose one tack over the other.

Two Faiths. The Secretary of State was careful not to contradict Laird flatly, even though his testimony was laced with optimism. Whereas Laird gloomily doubted that U.S. troops could soon leave South Viet Nam (but added qualifiers to his doubts), Rogers wanted them back "as quickly as possible." Moreover, said Rogers, any settlement that required the U.S. to stay on in Viet Nam permanently--like that in Korea--would be "not desirable." The conditions for peace that Rogers outlined were substantially unchanged from those of the Johnson Administration. However, he acknowledged that Saigon's present attitude would be a "problem" in holding genuinely free elections.

While Laird had seemed to place his faith in keeping up a tough battlefield pressure, Rogers put more trust in negotiations. "If they're serious about peace, if they want to talk about it, we're ready," he declared, adding that previous breakthroughs had come about almost entirely in secret negotiations. "That was where the progress was made," he said. Rogers seemed to imply that such private sessions had not yet begun--though reports of them have surfaced in several places. Later he added: "If you want to have secret talks, you pretend you're not having them." Just how much pretending went into his earlier hedging was never made clear.

Happier News. In his assertive defense of the controversial ABM system, Laird made what seemed like a startling revelation. The "Safeguard" system was absolutely necessary, he said, because "there is no question" that the Russians are marshaling a first-strike force of giant intercontinental ballistic missiles that could destroy large numbers if not most of the Minuteman U.S. ICBMs. Laird insisted that without Safeguard the U.S. strategy of retaliatory deterrence would be dangerously undermined. Laird's report about the Russian first-strike capacity is still unconfirmed by the White House and doubted by many experts.

Rogers also had news, but it was of a happier sort: low-level preparatory arms talks between the U.S. and Russia, he announced, will begin "fairly soon," probably within two or three months. More important, when the two nations start bargaining in earnest--which should be well before Safeguard is deployed in 1973--the system could be scuttled entirely. "If the Soviet Union, when we start these talks, indicates that it wants to get out of the defensive-missile business, we can get out of it very quickly," Rogers said. That reasoning only added evidence to suggest that Nixon was proceeding with the ABM partly to have it as a handy bar gaining point. Rogers at first denied that it would ever be used in that manner, which seemed logical enough if its proposed deployment was not deemed threatening enough by the Russians to stall the arms talks in the first place. When Committee Chairman William Fulbright raised the question a second time, Rogers admitted that the ABM might, after all, prove "useful" in bargaining. Fulbright was not about to let the self-contradiction pass unnoticed. "I should not have brought up the question," he said with mock seriousness. "You've just destroyed what little confidence I've had in you."

Packard's Wand. In fact, any confidence Fulbright might have had in the Safeguard system had already been undermined by Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, who turned up to testify armed with a raft of charts and diagrams showing Russia's growing threat as an 1CBM power. When he had finished explaining them with the help of a pointer, Senator Albert Gore asked to borrow his "wand" and produced some homemade charts of his own. The resulting debate on "overkill"--nuclear capability beyond that needed to assure the total destruction of an enemy--turned primarily on the difficulty of determining a nation's future offensive capacity. Packard stuck to his estimates. He admitted, however, that Defense Department projections were based on the "payload capability" of Russia's new S59 missile rather than on hard intelligence that large warheads are actually being installed on them.

When pressed for the names of outside authorities who were consulted in the Pentagon's review of the proposed ABM system, Packard produced only one--that of Stanford University's Wolfgang Panofsky, an electronics and radar expert. The name was hardly out of

Packard's mouth when Panofsky himself appeared at the hearing. On the stand he told committee members that the "consultation" consisted of a chance meeting at San Francisco airport. Moreover, he had "some very serious engineering criticism" of Safeguard. However serious they are, Panofsky's reservations have undercut the Pentagon's assurances that Safeguard is a carefully considered and dependable system.

Black Balloons. In the end, Rogers was the only Administration spokesman who drew unanimous praise from the committee. Even Fulbright called his overall performance "auspicious." It was--but not only because of its reassuring effect on eleven Senators. Rogers' testimony also helped to calm the nationwide impatience for peace, which continues to resurface with increasing force and frequency. Last week, in the first large-scale antiwar demonstration since Nixon became President, some 1,300 women paraded outside the White House urging the President to end the "immoral war." Many wore black clothes and waved black balloons as a sign of mourning. In the House, their protest was joined by 30 speakers who denounced the war, many promising to vote against all defense appropriations until it ended. Republican Paul Findley, in perhaps the most dramatic gesture, entered the names of war dead into the Congressional Record. The roll of honor filled 122 three-column pages of the Record, cost $14,000 to print, and contained 31,379 names, most of them belonging to Americans between the ages of 19 and 24. Findley said it "presents the precise width, breadth and depth of the war Mr. Nixon has inherited."

There was also some criticism from sidelined Democrats. On a television show, Dean Rusk broke silence for the first time to repeat his oft-stated fear that "a return to isolationism" now threatens the nation. Hubert Humphrey advised Democrats to give the new Administration the traditional 100-day honeymoon--a message that provoked a swift counterthrust from Everett Dirksen, who pointed out that most of Nixon's problems had taken the Democrats more than 100 days to create.

Rogers' soothing testimony, it seemed, amounted to little more than skillful temporizing. Having pleaded for a buildup of the State Department's traditional peace-keeping role in U.S. foreign policy, Fulbright and other Senate doves could do little but go along--for the time being. But they were also careful to extract a promise from the Secretary that he "would not be hard to find" for future questioning. That was primarily a barbed reference to Dean Rusk, who--on L.B.J.'s orders--virtually cut off relations with the committee whenever war criticism reached embarrassing heights. But it was also a warning to Rogers. Particularly on the question of Viet Nam, the Senators are not likely to wait long before they ask for a new accounting. Nor, as Richard Nixon is finding out, is the rest of the nation.

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