A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

ON the surface, there seemed little reason to expect that the talks between Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Chief Negotiator Le Due Tho, which resume in Paris this week, would be any more fruitful than the meetings that had gone before. In Saigon, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu dispatched a pair of senior diplomats to Washington to reaffirm his opposition to any peace treaty that does not guarantee the sovereignty of the South. In North Viet Nam, which had been further devastated by U.S. bombing during the two weeks before the New Year, the government issued a detailed and unprecedented public order for evacuation of major cities and industrial sites and the dispersal of factories--suggesting that Hanoi saw little hope ahead.

Square One. Yet, almost inexplicably after its earlier pessimism, the White House seemed to exude a private sense that the peace could be made in Paris this month. Its current mood--involving almost a willing suspension of disbelief--was based in part on some apparent progress in the newly resumed secret technical talks, which were delving into the mechanics of the cease-fire--how large the international control commission should be, for instance, and what powers it should have.

The closely guarded hopefulness was also grounded in a belief that North Viet Nam still stands by its agreement of last October to separate the cease-fire--the military aspects of the conflict--from the eventual political settlement. "We are not back to square one," insists a ranking U.S. diplomat in Paris. But neither had the Administration returned to the heady optimism of last October when Kissinger, at the peak of his prestige, made his famous pronouncement that peace was at hand.

Since then, Kissinger's reputation has become somewhat tarnished, and Washington observers have seized every opportunity to search for hints of a rift between the President and his foreign policy adviser--including last week's congenial ceremony at which Nixon awarded a Distinguished Service Medal to Kissinger's longtime deputy, General Alexander H. Haig Jr. But in the end, obviously, Kissinger's reputation--and his place in history--will stand on what finally happens in Paris.

If Kissinger's past performance is any criterion, he has already laid down priorities for discussion with Le Due Tho and narrowed the issues to fundamentals. Those fundamentals are the release of American war prisoners conditional only upon U.S. withdrawal, a cease-fire and an international observer force of some consequence. The President does not regard the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Viet Nam as an insurmountable problem. In the eleven days of savage bombings, he strengthened the Thieu regime as much as he could, at a heavy cost to his own international prestige. Nixon would like to achieve a truce before Jan. 20, the beginning of his second term.

Both Blinked. An agreement, if it comes, will probably also include a semantic compromise on Vietnamese unity--as in the preamble to the Washington-Hanoi draft agreement of last October, in which the U.S. reportedly acknowledged the "unity" of Viet Nam while extracting from the North the concession that the country was temporarily not unified. The U.S. is not likely to win a guarantee that Hanoi will refrain from using violence to impose its system on the South. But Washington seeks, at the least, an assurance that Hanoi will respect the DMZ as a temporary border between two sovereign halves of a divided country.

After the U.S. resumed bombing, was it Washington or Hanoi that blinked first and called for renewed negotiations? The answer seems to be that both sides reacted more or less simultaneously to various pressures.

Richard Nixon undoubtedly expected a certain amount of opposition from America's allies to a resumption of U.S.

bombing. But his sense of reality seemed to fail him. He was not prepared for the continuing avalanche of outrage and revulsion that his actions set off in practically every Western capital. Last week the Canadian House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution deploring the U.S. air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong--a form of protest that, as Secretary of State for External Affairs Mitchell Sharp acknowledged, "we rarely use." Nor did Nixon expect the bombing to be so costly in American lives and planes; by week's end 16 B-52s had been lost and 98 airmen killed, captured or missing.

Still another factor was the rising fury of many members of Congress against the U.S. bombing and the President's continued failure to explain it or justify it. Both the House and Senate Democratic caucuses last week passed resolutions--the Senate group by 36 to 12--calling for a cutoff of war funds subject only to the return of U.S. prisoners. Senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield introduced, for the third time, a similar resolution calling for withdrawal from Viet Nam.

Doubts. At the least, the Administration felt, Congress should have held its fire until after the January round of negotiations. "Members of Congress should ask themselves," declared White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, "if they want to take the responsibility of raising doubts in the minds of the North Vietnamese about the U.S. position, and thereby possibly prolonging the negotiations." The point might seem more valid if the Administration had not been saying much the same thing for more than three years in an effort to silence opposition--as in September 1969, when the President urged American political leaders to "match the sacrifices" of the nation's fighting men.

It is true that Congress's mood of frustration and anger will not strengthen Henry Kissinger's hand at Paris. It is also true, however, that congressional action may help in the end to force a solution. The bombing of the North has given Thieu a final chance, and now he, too, will be expected to settle.

If Washington was under pressure to resume negotiations, so was North Viet Nam--and not only from the U.S.

bombing. The North Vietnamese have been urged by both the Soviet Union and China to try to reach a quick accord. Hanoi could hardly have been encouraged by Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's mild references to the bombing in his recent speech at the 50th anniversary of the U.S.S.R.--or by the fact that he sent his son and daughter to meet Tricia and Edward Cox at a U.S. Embassy reception in Moscow last week. The message was clear: Hanoi's sponsors want a settlement.

Thus this week, once again, the last act looms in Paris, though its end remains unwritten. The peace--badly stained, to be sure, by the events of the past month--appears to be underfoot if not exactly at hand. "Things are at a point," a top Administration official said carefully last week, "where the coming sessions could do it or the coming sessions can go on forever."

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