Nixon's Plea to End the Killing

JUST one year ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out for an unprecedented Moratorium Day of protest against the Viet Nam War. It is difficult to imagine any repetition now of the massive outpourings of M-Day, 1969, or of the angry campus demonstrations of last May, after the invasion of Cambodia. By working steadily toward an end to U.S. fighting in Viet Nam, the President has damped discord and virtually removed the war from active political debate in the 1970 election campaign.

Last week Richard Nixon took another significant step toward breaking the stalemate at the Paris negotiating table and further diluting Indochina as a domestic issue. In his seventh major television address on the war, the President responded to the National Liberation Front's eight-point proposal of last month with a five-point plan of his own; it won bipartisan plaudits at home and avoided outright rejection by the Communists in Paris. In contrast to the flaunting of American power that marked his speeches during his European trip, his tone last week was conciliatory. Where he had occasionally sounded bellicose in previous discussions of the war, he now struck a quiet note of hope: "Let us give our children what we have not had in this century, a chance to enjoy a generation of peace." Specifically, he proposed:

sbImmediate negotiation of a standstill ceasefire, under international supervision, throughout South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. Forces on both sides would remain in place, but fighting would stop while the adversaries sought agreement on other questions. "I do not minimize the difficulty of maintaining a cease-fire in a guerrilla war where there are no front lines," Nixon said. "But an unconventional war may require an unconventional truce." The Communists' statement of Sept. 17 also mentioned a ceasefire, but in a far different context. It proposed a truce only after acceptance of their two continuing key demands: complete and unilateral U.S. withdrawal by June 30, 1971, and replacement of the Thieu-Ky leadership by a coalition including the Viet Cong.

P:An international peace conference, on the model of the Geneva sessions of 1954 and 1962 that partitioned Viet Nam and arranged a political settlement in Laos. The Paris talks on Viet Nam would continue, but the parallel problems of Cambodia and Laos would be taken up by a conference presumably including the current Paris participants as well as Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China and the members of the moribund International Control Commission--Canada, India and Poland.

P:Negotiation of "an agreed timetable for complete withdrawals as part of an overall settlement." Less dramatic, perhaps, than Nixon's first two proposals, this one was probably the most significant. The U.S. continues to insist on the evacuation of North Vietnamese forces too, but for the first time Nixon publicly accepted the principle of removal of all U.S. forces--including support troops and advisers--by a specified time. As an alternative to Vietnamization bolstered by an indefinitely prolonged U.S. presence in Viet Nam, this could be tempting to Hanoi and the N.L.F.; it would leave the Thieu regime without on-the-scene U.S. backing. The Communists would then be free to step up political pressures in Saigon. They could even resume guerrilla warfare and infiltration from the North with little fear that any U.S. President would be likely to reintroduce U.S. forces.

P:Renewed joint efforts to reach "a political settlement that truly meets the aspirations of all South Vietnamese." Here Nixon took the toughest line of his speech. He flatly refused what he termed the Communists' "patently unreasonable demand" that President Thieu, Vice President Ky and Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem be excluded from an interim regime that would hold national elections to establish a coalition government. "We are prepared to be flexible on many matters," Nixon said, but the U.S. will not consider jettisoning the three principals of the present government.

P:Immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of war on both sides, plus immediate freedom for all captured journalists "and other innocent civilian victims of the conflict." In September, the Viet Cong said that it was ready to discuss P.W. exchanges, but only if the U.S. agreed to get all its troops out of Viet Nam by the middle of next year. The chorus of international voices asking for release of captured servicemen has been steadily rising, and Nixon has now applied public pressure to the Communists at a vulnerable point.

Conserving Gains. Laudable as it is, Nixon's plan for a standstill cease-fire probably has small chance of winning quick agreement from the Communists--largely because he waited to make it until such a truce could preserve a military balance that is advantageous to the U.S. American military leaders including General Creighton Abrams, the Viet Nam commander, opposed a cease-fire until only recently. After surveying the results of the Cambodian incursion, they concluded that the threat to Saigon and the populous Mekong Delta from the border sanctuaries was substantially over for some time to come. The American generals now favor a cease-fire because it would conserve their gains.

White House experts contend that the cease-fire and Nixon's other proposals are not designed to gain unilateral advantage for the U.S. Says one foreign policy adviser: "We believe that this offer makes it possible for the other side to go along without risking whatever position they now have. We recognize that the North Vietnamese have not fought for 25 years in order to be maneuvered out of their share of the political process at this stage."

To Hanoi and the Viet Cong, the war has always been a political struggle, while Americans have viewed it mainly as a military confrontation. Nixon is proposing a freeze of the military conflict where it stands in return for U.S. agreement to remove all forces within as little as twelve months' time. What is more, the Nixon proposals are not being presented to Hanoi and the Viet Cong on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Rather, they are designed to get the Communists talking more seriously and fighting with less enthusiasm. Even an imperfect cease-fire would reduce casualties and costs on both sides.

Calculated Display. What Hanoi's eventual response will be, no one could predict last week with authority. As Ambassador David Bruce arrived to put Nixon's proposals on the table in Paris the morning after the President's speech, North Viet Nam's Xuan Thuy denounced them as "an electoral gift certificate" aimed solely at improving Republican chances in the November elections. Alluding to Bruce's description of the Communists' Sept. 17 points as "new wine in old bottles," the Viet Cong's Duong Dinh Thao called Nixon's speech "a bottle marked 'Peace' but which contained no wine at all--only gunpowder, poisonous chemicals and many words in the Goebbels style."

In the rituals of international diplomacy, first reactions often mean little, and some U.S. officials in Paris read significance into the fact that nothing said amounted to direct rejection of any of Nixon's substantive points. Instead, the rhetoric's main purpose was to disparage U.S. motives. In Washington, Secretary of State William Rogers declared that at the present rate of withdrawals, U.S. troops "by and large will be out of the combat role" by May 1. This seemed to be a further effort to win the Communists' assent to Nixon's five points.

Same Perch. If nothing else, however, Nixon earned high grades at home--for the merits of his proposals and for his political skill in presenting them. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield quickly backed the plan; Maine's Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie, an eloquent critic of the war and a possible challenger to Nixon in 1972, called it "welcome and serious." Said Idaho Democrat Frank Church: "The President has joined us. He is now on the same perch with the doves. So what is there to argue about? We've won this argument. Now we have to keep withdrawal going. We should not fight the President in his efforts to move us out, we should support him. That way we keep up the pressure on him, and it will be a lot harder for him to turn around."

John Stewart, director of communications at the Democratic National Committee, thought Nixon's timing was judicious: "This was the week to make the speech. To have waited a few weeks would have opened him to the charge that he was simply playing politics with the war issue." Both Stewart and Jim Allison, deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee, agreed that Viet Nam will swing few votes in November. Said Allison: "I don't think the speech will have any particular effect on the votes one way or the other. What this really does is negate the issue." But the speech was not without political effect. Democratic and Republican strategists alike felt that it added to Nixon's standing as a world statesman--and would inevitably improve his effectiveness as a campaigner for Republican candidates in the few weeks remaining before Nov. 3.

During a political journey to Georgia last week, where the President encountered Governor Lester Maddox, greeted black schoolchildren and pressed the flesh in behalf of Hal Suit, the Republican candidate for Governor, Nixon repeatedly paid tribute to backers of his plan in both parties. "It was a bipartisan speech," he proclaimed. "There was no partisanship in it. When people are working for peace, there are no politics in it." The Senate quickly and unanimously voted a resolution of support. Even though a lone irate Republican in Congress telephoned Henry Kissinger to complain that Nixon should have saved the speech until after the World Series, the President had good reason to be happy with his performance. Should the Communists eventually agree to his proposals, he will have made the enormous stride of ending the killing in Viet Nam. Even if his plea is rejected, he will still get credit for trying to follow a Churchillian dictum: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war."

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