The National Interest

A week after President Nixon revealed his eight-point Viet Nam peace proposal, Maine Senator Edmund Muskie pronounced the plan unworkable and set out his own formula for getting the U.S. out of the war. Instead of Nixon's stipulations--a cease-fire throughout Indochina and new South Vietnamese elections--Muskie said that the U.S. should simply set a firm pull-out date in return for the safety of withdrawing forces and the release of American prisoners of war, leaving Saigon to work out its own accommodation with the Communists or else forgo further U.S. aid.

Whatever its merits, Muskie's plan was not unlike an earlier Nixon offer that Hanoi had rejected. That fact helps to explain the resulting barrage from the White House and Republican leaders that virtually accused Muskie of disloyalty to the U.S. In a political riposte unusual for a Secretary of State, William Rogers observed: "Every man who is running for public office should ask himself whether [what he says] serves the national interest or not." Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton challenged Muskie with having "undermined our negotiating position." In short, the Administration was coming close to saying that any criticism of the President's Viet Nam moves --and, by extension, of his foreign policy in general--damages the national interest. To which Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a careful man with words, replied: "Ridiculous."

The Democrats had the best of the argument. Muskie was hardly giving aid and comfort to the Communists by telling them that Americans are still divided on how best to end the war quickly; Hanoi knows that well. The expectation of domestic discord may well have rendered the North Vietnamese more stubborn, as the Administration has always claimed, but there is no convincing evidence that this ever was or is now a decisive factor. Viet Nam long ago destroyed any vestige of the precept that "politics stops at the water's edge." For any Democratic candidate not to discuss or criticize Viet Nam policy would be a curious--and surely damaging--deficiency in his campaign.

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