A Paucity of Choice

The most apt appraisal of last week's Viet Nam elections was probably that of Political Scientist Richard Scammon, one of the 22 official U.S. observers on the scene. The balloting was "reasonably efficient, reasonably free and reasonably honest," said Scammon. "I would use exactly the same words to describe elections in the U.S."

To a man, the 22 American observers--ranging in political coloration from liberal Democratic Governors to conservative Republican Senators--reported back to President Johnson that the election victory of Lieut. General Nguyen Van Thieu (see cover story) seemed fair. To be sure, the observers could not be everywhere, and in most cases were taken in tow by Vietnamese officials. "We could all possibly have been bamboozled," allowed New Jersey's Democratic Governor Richard J. Hughes, "but it would have taken a minimum of 25,000 character actors and about 11,000 stagehands to put on the production we have seen."

Not surprisingly, eight of the ten losing Vietnamese presidential candidates cried "we wuz robbed!"--before the votes were totted. Such protests, said former Ambassador to Saigon Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the observers, reminded him of the Tammany maxim: "Claim everything, concede nothing, and if defeated, allege fraud." Added Lodge: "I don't know why we treat some of the utterances of disappointed people over there any differently from the way we treat our own politicians here. A good old irreverent attitude toward some of these charges is somewhat in order."

A good old irreverent attitude was also in order toward New York's two Senators, Jack Javits and Bobby Kennedy, who had cried "fraud" three weeks in advance of the elections. Neither rushed to withdraw his charges. Indeed, they had become irrelevant. What most Americans wanted to know was whether the election might lead to negotiations.

G.O.P. Break. In the campaign, Thieu suggested talks with the enemy, but whether his government could get any started in the near future seemed doubtful. Thieu expects to take office around Oct. 1, and "maybe one week or ten days after that, I will suggest a bombing pause," he said. "But it all depends on how Hanoi replies to my suggestion." Judging from the diatribes from Hanoi, Peking and Moscow after the elections, it seemed likely that the North Vietnamese would reject it out of hand. Top Washington officials say that the Communists have made no attempt to signal any interest in talks.

What makes Johnson particularly anxious to achieve some breakthrough is the fear that the G.O.P. will capitalize on slipping public support for his conduct of the war. In a speech to the Republican National Committee last week, Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith charged that the Democrats are "bogged down and apparently incapable of either winning the war or bringing the fighting to an honorable conclusion." This week, before the American Mining Conference in Denver, House G.O.P. Caucus Chairman Melvin Laird planned to announce that Republicans are now "breaking" with Johnson on the war, though in general they have given him stronger backing than have the Democrats.

Search for a Gambit. To recoup some of the ground it has lost, the Administration last week was groping for a saving gambit. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced that the U.S. would throw an electronic barrier across the 17th parallel to stem infiltration from the North (see following story), which could result in reduced bombing of the North and thus help to placate Washington critics of the war. At the United Nations, Ambassador Arthur Goldberg was trying to line up support for a new bid to the Security Council to undertake a settlement of the war. The U.N., said Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "has a responsibility under its Charter" to do so. But the response was tepid, for many members figured that Moscow would only block any such undertaking, as it did in July 1965.

As Harvard Orientalist and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer writes in a perceptive analysis of the war, a settlement of any sort may be out of reach "until one side or the other recognizes that it faces eventual defeat." In a Look magazine excerpt from his forthcoming book, Beyond Viet Nam, Reischauer reasons that with negotiations apparently out of the question for the time being, the U.S. has three choices, "all of them unsatisfactory."

One is a major escalation of the war, which he dismisses as "absolute folly," since it "would give little promise of ending the war, while exposing us to absolutely unacceptable dangers." A second is withdrawal, which he finds "not much more attractive." For, argues Reischauer, "however our withdrawal might be papered over, it would be recognized everywhere as a defeat for us, and we would have to face the consequences"; the most important consequence "would be the psychological and political impact of our defeat." The nations of South and Southeast Asia, he writes, "would feel much less secure if the U.S. were forced to admit defeat at the hands of Communist insurgents. Such an outcome would send a massive psychological tremor through all these countries, further threatening their stability and perhaps sharply shifting their present international orientation." A U.S. defeat, he believes, "would seem to be proof positive of the Maoist doctrine that what the Communists call 'wars of national liberation' are irresistible."

The third and only tolerable solution, concludes Reischauer, "is to force the other side gradually to reduce the scale of fighting and eventually to accept some sort of reasonable settlement."

Quick Win or Fast Fade? But how? Under unremitting pressure from advocates of both the quick win and the fast fade, Johnson has hewed to this middle course all along. He is loath to ease the pressure, fearing that Hanoi would interpret such a move as a prelude to a pullout. He is also reluctant to risk any major intensification of the war, not only because it would entail vast additional expenditures and mobilization of the reserves, but because it might bring in Peking or Moscow. The President observed last week that he has not permitted bombing of Haiphong Harbor because when he thinks of the Soviet ships backed up there, he thinks of the S.S. Lusitania and the U.S.S. Maine.

As for negotiations, Hanoi has not budged from the position staked out by Ho Chi Minh in a letter to Johnson last February, when he categorically refused to consider talks until the U.S. "unconditionally" halted its bombing of the North and "all other acts of war." Until the 1968 presidential returns are in, Hanoi is unlikely to soften that stand.

That could prove an extremely costly decision. As Dean Rusk noted during his press conference last week: "When the U.S. puts its hand to something of this sort, something gives." Lyndon Johnson can only hope that if, indeed, something has to give in the next 14 months, it will be Hanoi's refusal to negotiate rather than U.S. patience and resolve.

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