Winding Up the Cambodian Hard Sell

THE U.S. suffers these days from more than one kind of inflation. As familiar as the ballooning of wages and prices is the inflation of rhetoric, a pneumatic exercise in which the radical left and extreme right, militant blacks, the press--and, of late, the Administration of President Richard Nixon--have all indulged. Still, nothing in recent times has quite equaled the blitz of language that has been employed by the White House to certify and canonize the success of the Cambodian venture.

It all rose to a crescendo last week as the last U.S. troops swept happily back into South Viet Nam. The President took to television for an unprecedented live, hour-long foreign-policy conversation with three network anchormen. He issued a 7,000-word White Paper justifying the Cambodian operation. This came atop public and private hard sells by Vice President Spiro Agnew and other White House and Cabinet officials; among their efforts was a four-hour briefing of television executives and publishers that produced a 49-page transcript.

Despite the lavish expenditure of Administration rhetoric, the U.S. Senate pinked the President by passing the Cooper-Church amendment, which, though watered down, nonetheless served clear warning that Nixon should not feel free to embark on another Cambodia. Moreover, the news from Phnom-Penh was that the Communists were enlarging their hold on portions of the embattled country (see THE WORLD). And despite Nixon's appointment of Veteran Diplomat David K.E. Bruce to head the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks with Hanoi, there was little indication that North Viet Nam was willing to begin fruitful negotiations.

Cooling It. Such minuses were not allowed to mar the fact of the President's extraordinary appearance on television. To sit down with Eric Sevareid of CBS, John Chancellor of NBC and Howard K. Smith of ABC, and plumb live the intricacies of foreign policy for an hour, bespoke presidential confidence --and courage. No tape editor could erase a presidential slip that might occur on the special set at a KABC studio in Hollywood, where the temperature had been lowered on request to 59DEG before air time. When the red lights of the TV cameras winked on, the President was cool, collected and relaxed.

He began by announcing the Bruce appointment, then accepted questions. Had he got any signal from Hanoi that the Communists were more willing to talk? No direct signals, but third-party indications were that they wanted to see a top U.S. negotiator named. Will Bruce have anything new to offer? Well, let's review what we have already offered. Would Nixon categorically assert that he would never send U.S. troops back into Cambodia? The U.S. has no plans to send the troops back in, but he would not say that he would never do so under any circumstances.

Unfashionable Phrases. So went the parries and thrusts, the President displaying anew his ability to retain detail, his satisfaction in intercepting a debater's point, his grasp of the theorems of foreign policy discourse. Yet the conversational format seemed nonetheless ill-suited to the Nixon style and personality, which fit more easily into the brisk, orderly one-shot answer of the mass press conference.

Forced to give longer, expository answers, the President appeared at times to be uncertain, contradictory and defensive. He managed to discuss foreign policy for an hour without offering one original or fresh formulation of U.S. aims. Instead, he fell back on the cold war rhetoric of domino theories and the desire to check Communist expansion--phrases that even he conceded are no longer fashionable. He seemed petty in his attack on a foreign policy critic, former Under Secretary of State George Ball, claiming that Ball had not opposed U.S. involvement in Viet Nam in the Kennedy Administration. Actually, Ball strongly counseled Kennedy against sending even U.S. advisers there. In an effort to show his mastery, Nixon never once admitted that perhaps there were no ready answers to some of the hard world questions--an admission that would have added a grace note of credibility to his performance.

The President also claimed that if the U.S. were to leave Viet Nam "in a way that we are humiliated or defeated," it would be "ominously encouraging to the leaders of Communist China and the Soviet Union, especially in their expansionist policies in other areas." He implied that the survival of the non-Communist Lon Nol government in Cambodia is now an important, though limited aim of U.S. foreign policy.

When asked why he did not consult the Congress on his controversial Cambodia decision, Nixon cited the need to move swiftly, invoking President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis. Few analogies could be less apt. The whole sluggish war in Indochina is a military world apart from a nuclear showdown. A likelier explanation for the President's unwillingness to consult Congress was the near certainty that the legislators would not buy the idea.

Convincing Claims. The President was more effective in his White Paper, which listed the accomplishments of the Cambodia operation. He claimed convincingly that U.S. and South Vietnamese troops had 1) conducted an effective military operation, 2) captured or destroyed a substantial amount of enemy supplies, 3) diminished any immediate threat of a major enemy assault on the Saigon area from sanctuaries in Cambodia and 4) complicated Hanoi's problem of resupplying its troops. All this was done with fewer U.S. casualties than expected and with the most impressive show of competence yet demonstrated by the South Vietnamese forces.

These were no small achievements, although they hardly justified Nixon's overblown comparisons of the Cambodian invasion with D-day or Stalingrad. The President also claimed, with far less credibility, that the operation had shortened the war, guaranteed U.S. adherence to his announced troop-withdrawal schedules, proved the viability of the Vietnamization program and speeded the work of pacification in South Viet Nam. Those achievements cannot yet be substantiated. Moreover, until the U.S. opened its drive last April 30, officials had not portrayed either Vietnamization or the withdrawal schedules as severely threatened by Communist troops in Cambodia.

The President refused to see any kind of rebuke in the Senate's approval of the Cooper-Church amendment. Indeed, the language of the amendment had been muddied by modifications added in order to make its legal impact dubious even if it is accepted by a House-Senate conference committee, which must act on it next. Passed by an easy 58-to-37 margin, the amendment tries to tie the President's hands so as to avoid any repetition of a Cambodia venture by denying him the use of federal funds to 1) retain U.S. forces in Cambodia, 2) send military advisers and instructors there, 3) provide direct air support of Cambodian troops, or 4) hire anyone to "engage in any combat activity in support of Cambodian forces."

Peace Must Come. The most substantive news in all of the President's words was that the Administration now intends to place new emphasis upon the use of diplomatic rather than military leverage to end the war. As the President stated the situation: "There is no military solution to this conflict. Sooner or later, peace must come. It can come now, through a negotiated settlement that is fair to both sides and humiliates neither. Or it can come months or years from now, with both sides having paid the further price of protracted struggle." There perhaps could be no better man to carpenter such a settlement than Ambassador Bruce.

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