The President battles on Three Fronts

ALL along. President Nixon and his advisers knew that a crucial time of testing for the Administration's Viet Nam policy had to come. With geometric inevitability, the descending curve that describes the withdrawal of U.S. ground combat forces would have to intersect the curve that plots rising South Vietnamese responsibility for the war. At that juncture, Hanoi would surely test the American resolve, Nixon's own commitment to his policy, and the staying power of the South Vietnamese. Four weeks ago, that testing point arrived with brutal bluntness when a carefully orchestrated force of North Vietnamese soldiers, well backed by tanks, artillery, antiaircraft guns and supplies, burst across the DMZ and the Cambodian border into South Viet Nam. There had been nothing like it in the war, not even the Tet offensive of 1968.

Dramatic Answer. In response the President played his last card--but it was a powerful one. Early last week, for the first time in four years, American bombs fell in the area of the North Vietnamese capital and the key port of Haiphong. The Administration assembled the strongest air and sea armada in Indochina since the war last peaked in 1968. More than 150 fresh planes were rushed to the theater from bases as far away as North Carolina; the B-52 fleet has been nearly doubled since the North Vietnamese offensive began. When Midway and Saratoga join the four aircraft carriers now on station off North Viet Nam, the U.S. and the South Vietnamese will have 150 ships and over 1,000 aircraft, equipped with some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the history of warfare to use against a North Vietnamese force of 110,000 to 130,000 men.

It was a dramatic answer to the enemy, a riposte full of hazards for the President on three fronts. In Viet Nam, militarily, it was the first real test of the Nixon Doctrine that the U.S. will support its Asian allies if they provide most of the manpower for their own defense. Second, Nixon was vulnerable to a Soviet response that might end his cherished plan for a Moscow summit in May; the U.S.S.R. has provided the materiel for Hanoi's offensive, and there were Russian ships in Haiphong harbor during the American attack. And third, on the home front, Nixon risked alienating all over again the large numbers of Americans who were baffled, vexed or outraged by his last dramatic initiative in behalf of Vietnamization --the incursion into Cambodia two years ago. Another Cambodia, another Kent State, and his re-election could be in doubt.

The first seven days that followed Nixon's unleashing of the huge B-52s and the smaller, faster fighter-bombers provided no decisive answers for the President. Neither the Nixon Doctrine nor the South Vietnamese army has failed--yet. U.S. airpower has not turned back the North Vietnamese --yet. If it had prevented an almost certain rout of ARVN, the issue on the battlefields was still in doubt (see story on page 16). A 20,000-man ARVN force led by President Nguyen Van Thieu's personal elite guard, dispatched to relieve An Loc, abandoned the effort 15 miles short of its goal on Highway 13. Late last week, in an astonishing go-for-broke gamble, the last uncommitted North Vietnamese division began moving south toward the DMZ to join two others battling for control of South Viet Nam's two northernmost provinces.

Piercing Eyes. Within hours after the magnitude of the first North Vietnamese invasion thrusts became clear, Nixon began to search for the best response. Less than a week after the invasion began, he ordered the Washington Special Action Group--representatives of the CIA and the State and Defense departments, chaired by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger --to study the feasibility of bombing Hanoi and Haiphong and of a naval blockade of North Vietnamese ports. The purely military answer was clear enough: both could be done, and both would be useful.

For the next week, Nixon mulled over the WSAG analysis. He kept his counsel, but he was visibly angry. "The President was showing the cold fury which only makes him more determined," said a top-level man at State. "You could see the jaw harden, the eyes narrow and become more piercing." Another senior official put it less elegantly. Said he: "You could tell the old man had made up his mind he won't be screwed."

There were repeated meetings with Kissinger, Secretaries William Rogers of State and Melvin Laird of Defense, CIA Chief Richard Helms and Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Ex-Congressman Laird was concerned about the bombing for fear of political reaction at home; Rogers and Kissinger were scarcely more enthusiastic, though evidently less concerned about what might happen politically. Finally the President made up his mind. Top-secret instructions were sent in code via satellite to the B-52 bases and to the Seventh Fleet. Next day he sent the order to raid Hanoi and Haiphong. Within a few hours, the B-52s lifted off the long runways and the Phantoms catapulted from carrier decks in the Tonkin Gulf.

Partly Political. Says a ranking Administration official: "It was not a portentous, cataclysmic one-shot decision. We consider it a tactical decision." The bombing, he adds, was "partly political, partly military': "We are trying to compress the amount of time the North Vietnamese have to decide on whether the offensive is worth continuing and whether they have the means to continue it." The White House military argument is that bombing supply depots and petroleum stores in northern North Viet Nam now will hurt the enemy in the front lines six to eight weeks hence. However, experts in South Viet Nam think that the North Vietnamese have enough supplies already in place to last out the year at least.

One senior official estimates that the Hanoi-Haiphong raids destroyed 30% of North Viet Nam's fuel supplies, more vital to them than ever before in the war because of the mechanized nature of their new onslaughts. Beyond that purely military achievement, the President had two other goals in mind:

> He wants to reach a settlement with the Vietnamese before Election Day. The raids were designed to show Hanoi that Nixon is not powerless, though his options may be limited. For the moment, however, the Administration refuses to treat with Hanoi's negotiators in Paris until the offensive is called off. The North Vietnamese mission at first demanded that the Americans end the bombing and return to the conference table. The Americans refused. Under the supposed "understanding" of 1968, U.S. bombing would stop if--among other things--North Viet Nam agreed not to violate the DMZ and not to infiltrate its forces into South Viet Nam. Hanoi's chief negotiator, Xuan Thuy, released the North Vietnamese version of the talks that led up to the bombing halt. In effect, he said that there were no "understandings" and that the U.S. agreement to stop bombing was unconditional. But at the same time Hanoi made a concession: it was willing to resume the talks even while the bombing continued. The U.S. is not, until the offensive stops.

> Nixon wants to go to Moscow in a position of strength. Nixon gambled that the Soviet Union would not call off his summit visit, even if Russian ships were damaged in the Haiphong raid. The Russians want to counter the new U.S. rapprochement with China and to talk about so many things beyond Viet Nam, he reasoned, that they would react to the bombings cautiously. He was right. The present Soviet leaders --Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny--were in power in 1968, when the Russians insisted that there could be no summit meeting with Lyndon Johnson until the U.S. stopped bombing the North. But so far the Soviet response has been mild. As the B-52s were bombing North Viet Nam, Brezhnev received, within hours of each other, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz and Hanoi's ambassador to Moscow. As Moscow factory workers were being marshaled for "Viet Nam, We Are With You" rallies, other workers were sent out on the Potemkin-village mission of cleaning up or tearing down eyesore buildings on Nixon's Moscow route. As the foreign ministry ground out a protest against the damage it claimed had been done to Soviet shipping in Haiphong, a 24-man American party under Brigadier General Brent Scowcroft arrived to arrange logistics, security and press and communications facilities for the presidential visit. The U.S. replied to the Soviet note with a tough, unequivocal note.

For reasons of its own, Peking also reacted with restraint to the news that Hanoi and Haiphong had been bombed. The North Vietnamese practically wrung a measured, pro forma statement out of Premier Chou Enlai, who noted simply that "escalation failed in the past and will continue to fail" because it makes "the entire Vietnamese people unite ever more closely in their fight." The Chinese want nothing to interfere with the opening of relations with the U.S. A few days later, Chou was all graciousness as he received the Senate's leaders, Democrat Mike Mansfield and Republican Hugh Scott, who are on a three-week tour of the People's Republic. The Chinese are unhappy with Hanoi for switching prematurely to a large-unit campaign against their advice, instead of building up the Communist political infrastructure in South Viet Nam. The Sino-Soviet rivalry is also a factor in Peking's tepid backing of Hanoi. North Viet Nam's tanks, artillery and antiaircraft weapons come from the Russians; if Hanoi wins its battles using them, it will be a blow to the Maoist doctrine of "people's war" and a boost for Soviet power in Southeast Asia. Moscow could then point to Viet Nam as well as India's victory in the Indo-Pakistani war to show that its friendship counts--and Peking's does not.

Thinner Reed. Even on Nixon's third front, at home, the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong failed to ignite antiwar passions to the degree it would have in the past. To be sure, critics noted that bombing North Viet Nam has never persuaded Hanoi to bargain before. Quite the contrary, Lyndon Johnson got the North Vietnamese to Paris in 1968 only by stopping the bombing north of the 20th parallel--and he got them to start talking only by stopping the bombing sorties entirely. Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rogers and Laird insisted that the Commander in Chief's constitutional duty to protect American troops justified the bombing raids. Conceivably, that rationale could cover tactical air-support missions in support of ARVN troops in South Viet Nam, where American forces remain, but it is a thinner reed to lean on to defend bombing the North Vietnamese capital and the country's biggest port.

Rogers put on an uncharacteristically tough performance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, easily matching wits with Democratic Chairman J. William Fulbright. That was no accident. Nixon had told Rogers to take the offensive; Rogers spent the weekend with his top advisers, rehearsing for the hearings. He ruled out no possible U.S. course except use of nuclear weapons and commitment of U.S. ground troops to the fighting. "We're not going to make any announcement about what we're not going to do," he said. "We think there has been altogether too much of that in this war." Predictably, Laird was more truculent, leaving open the chance that the U.S. could mine Haiphong harbor or even blockade all of North Viet Nam's ports.

Politically, the man who stands to gain the most if there is a reaction to Nixon's belligerence is Senator George McGovern of South Dakota (see story on page 19). His identification with the antiwar cause will doubtless help him in this week's primaries in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine pledged to stop the bombing of the North and withdraw all troops from Indochina, in return for the release of U.S. P.O.W.s, "within 60 days of my inauguration." Hubert Humphrey, his chief centrist rival, knows that he is tarred with having been Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, and having turned from hawk to dove. He told a hissing University of Pennsylvania audience last week: "I hope some of you will have the courage to change your mind when you find that what you've been doing isn't the right thing."

But even Humphrey is a dove of long standing compared with several Democrats who announced their conversion last week after the Hanoi-Haiphong raids. "I'm for gettin' out," George Wallace said last week, to the general astonishment. If the Communists should wind up taking over in Saigon, "it will be tough," Wallace added. "But I want us out." On Capitol Hill, Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma, abandoning his usual caution, voted with the House Democrats who endorsed, 144 to 58, by far the most stringent antiwar resolution ever to get anywhere on that side of the Capitol. (The House has always been more hawkish than the Senate.) Even Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, long a tacit Administration backer on Viet Nam, proclaimed: "It's high time we got out of there."

Around the U.S., particularly in the Northeast, students demonstrated against the bombing with varying degrees of fervor. At Harvard, 150 demonstrators once more ransacked the Center for International Affairs, after a march from downtown Boston. After a bitter meeting of the university senate, Columbia joined 100 other colleges in a one-day closedown last week. At the University of Maryland, Governor Marvin Mandel called out the National Guard to enforce a curfew after students repeatedly blocked U.S. 1. Last weekend in New York, 50,000 marchers--some from as far away as Nebraska--demonstrated in the rain against the bombing. Much of the protest was genial, even languid, but there were incidents of violence. In Palo Alto, Calif., hard by Stanford University, police made 210 arrests after some rock throwing along El Camino Real, a major highway. In Detroit, 15 out of some 250 sit-in demonstrators were arrested at the Federal Building. The drawdown of U.S. forces has made the war a less personal issue to many collegians, and many 18-to 21-year-olds may be saving their spleen for the November presidential election, the first in which they may vote; if the war continues to be in the news, their supposed apathy may prove to have been overestimated.

Terrible Toll. The President seems willing to accept the political risks of bombing. A high Administration official quoted him as saying: "By doing what I must do, even if it means the election of someone else, I will at least give him a chance to have a viable, credible foreign policy." In fact, despite the anguished complaints that he is prolonging the war and adding to its terrible toll in lives over the years, his tough line may well be profitable at the polls. A talented opinion sampler who has the White House as a client, Albert Sindlinger of Swarthmore, Pa., reports a big upswing in support of Nixon's Viet Nam policies since the North Vietnamese invasion, continuing into last week after the Hanoi-Haiphong bombings. He put Nixon's current popularity at 48.5% of the voters by his measuring, the highest any President has reached since Eisenhower's record after two months in office.

Nixon believes that everything rides on his Viet Nam gamble--his global policies, his reelection, perhaps his place in history, and he means to press ahead. U.S. troop levels will be down to 69,000 at the beginning of May, and he huddled with Kissinger at Camp David last weekend to work out the next withdrawal announcement. Intelligence experts in Washington think that the vital element in the North Vietnamese offensive is the psychological impact on the South Vietnamese--and on the U.S. electorate, as at the time of Tet in 1968. The experts predict much more heavy fighting and scattered Communist advances, successful at least for long enough to hold a village or a town for a day or so. But they believe that the North Vietnamese momentum has been blunted by the heavy bombing, and by ARVN. Still, ARVN is spread thinly, vulnerable to a dramatic breakthrough by the enemy. Both sides have more to gain, and to lose, than at any time since American combat troops were rushed in to save Saigon from collapse in 1965. This time, for the U.S., the counterpressure must be applied from the sea and, above all, the air.

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