McGovern v. Nixon on the War

ISSUES '72

THE peace roller coaster seemed to be moving again. Henry Kissinger in Paris, elusive black limousines, suburban hideaways, no hard news but tantalizing intimations of "rapid progress." Twice Kissinger extended his stay 24 hours, inevitably heightening the speculation that the dealing had indeed grown serious. In Saigon President Nguyen Van Thieu contributed his bit by vehemently asserting in a speech that he would never agree to a coalition government--which naturally enough suggested that his future was front and center in the Paris bargaining.

But there was nothing in Kissinger's briefcase that the President cared to disclose when his National Security Adviser returned to Washington after his unprecedented four straight days of secret talks with the North Vietnamese. Kissinger and Major General Alexander Haig reported to Nixon and Secretary of State William Rogers at breakfast. To the public, matters were reported still "in a sensitive stage," with "many difficult things to settle."

It was perhaps both fitting and a little unfair that all this activity enveloped what George McGovern deemed the most important speech of his campaign. His subject was the war, the issue that made his candidacy, the issue to which he is most deeply committed, the issue that still matters most to the American people however subliminally it sometimes appears to be moored.

McGovern began with a feeling condemnation of the war as "a moral debacle." Over the Nixon years the suffering had begun to involve more Asians and fewer Americans, but the war, he said, had not become less of an issue merely "because the color of the bodies has changed." He reminded the electorate of the statement that Candidate Nixon made in October 1968: "Those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance."

Dictator. Then McGovern laid out his plan to end the war; it was largely a summary of his previously articulated views. Unlike Nixon, who seeks a negotiated exit, McGovern would carry out a unilateral U.S. withdrawal requiring a minimum of cooperation from the Communists. If the war was still raging on Inauguration Day, McGovern would stop the bombing and other "acts of force," halt the flow of supplies to Saigon and begin a 90-day withdrawal of U.S. forces--keeping U.S. airbases in Thailand open and Seventh Fleet ships on station until Hanoi released the 539 American P.O.W.s and helped to account for the 1,143 servicemen listed as missing in action. McGovern would join in a postwar reconstruction effort (as Nixon has also proposed to do), but he would take no part in organizing Saigon's future, save to condemn Thieu harshly as a dictator progressively usurping South Viet Nam's democratic forms.

The Democratic nominee said in his speech that he would bring home "all salvageable" U.S. military equipment. In response to questions later, he denied that this would amount to surrender, pointing to the considerable hardware that Saigon's 1,100,000-man army has already received from the U.S., including more than 1,300 aircraft for South Viet Nam's air force. But a halt of U.S. aid and further supplies would eventually strangle that huge military machine.

McGovern spoke with an almost old-fashioned moral fervor, and even those who disagree with his program could hardly fail to be moved by his anguish for America. To point up the horror of the war, he recalled the memorable photograph of the Vietnamese girl Kim running naked from a napalm attack. It was a grim parallel to Nixon's use of Tanya, the Leningrad girl orphaned in World War II, to plead his case for rapprochement and peace in the world. Yet McGovern spoiled a sound point by arguing that if the U.S. can accommodate itself to a billion Russian and Chinese Communists, it can learn to live with a small group of guerrilla Communists. That is hardly an adequate description of North Viet Nam's army, well supplied by Russia and China. He seemed visibly embarrassed as he awkwardly straddled the amnesty question; he asserted that war resisters should be allowed to come home without punishment but stated that "personally, if I were in their position," he would volunteer to serve two years in compensatory public service programs.

Does McGovern's plan amount to surrender, as Administration spokesmen charge? It would almost certainly mean the sudden departure of President Thieu and perhaps the demise of an independent South Viet Nam. McGovern would not seek any guarantees from Hanoi, which could resume its attack on the South after the U.S. withdrawal without fear of U.S. airpower. It is essentially an act of faith on McGovern's part to believe that Hanoi would not do so, just as it is an act of faith to believe that the P.O.W.s would be promptly released. The Communists have, however, suggested that they would release the prisoners following a U.S. withdrawal, much as they did following the French departure. As McGovern noted in his speech, Pierre Mendes-France managed to stop the fighting within five weeks after he won the French premiership on an end-the-war platform in 1954; France's 11,000 P.O.W.s were repatriated within three months.

McGovern argues that a quick pull-out would vastly benefit the U.S. The war has badly scarred the country's image abroad, he says; by acknowledging its "mistake," he suggests, the U.S. would not lose but would recover its international prestige just as France did. But most important to McGovern is "the special healing" that he believes would begin in America once its divisive military involvement in Southeast Asia ended. The Administration replies that McGovern's position is foolish, that he would give up too much too easily at a time when the North Vietnamese seem to be preparing to back off from their maximum goals. Even if McGovern wants to get out of Indochina, Administration staffers argue persuasively, his proposal to close out the U.S. presence throughout all of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, seems unnecessary.

More generally, Nixon argues that a visible failure of the U.S. effort in Viet Nam would undermine Washington's credibility with its allies and weaken its hand in its ongoing negotiations with Moscow on arms limitation and other questions. The Administration seems less convincing on this point, because it also insists that it must continue the bombing, for which there is less and less justification and that does little for U.S. "credibility." Nixon also worries that a Communist takeover in Viet Nam--especially one followed by a "bloodbath" of reprisals there--would lead to an outbreak of recriminations that would scar U.S. domestic policies for years.

It could be, of course, that Nixon risks recriminations of quite another sort. If the U.S. will ultimately have to sacrifice Thieu to get a settlement, Americans might justifiably feel that the war could have been settled and the killing ended much sooner. In that case, the U.S. might have avoided its appalling commitment to bombing.

By any yardstick except the polls, the Administration should be in trouble over its handling of the war. In the four years since Nixon's inauguration, the war has been escalated in Laos and Cambodia and carried back to North Viet Nam, where the U.S. resumed full-scale bombing last May. The violence has increased steadily. More than a third of the 56,000 Americans who have died in Viet Nam since 1961 have been killed during the Nixon Administration. All told, 897,111 Communist troops and 183,000 South Vietnamese soldiers have died in the war--36,000 of them in the past six months alone. Something like 1,300,000 South Vietnamese civilians have died or been wounded in the fighting. Throughout Indochina, the war has produced 11 million refugees--many of whom have been bombed out of their villages by U.S. airpower and artillery.

Yet Richard Nixon apparently sails along toward a major victory as the recognized "peace candidate." One reason, of course, lies in the troop reductions that, along with a sharp decline in draft calls and casualties, have largely neutralized the antiwar movement. But there is more to the President's strength in the polls than is indicated by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's glib gibe that "the American public understands the difference between addition and subtraction." Some observers, among them Leslie Gelb, who headed the "Pentagon papers" study during the Johnson Administration, reckon that the real difficulty in sustaining protest against Nixon's handling of the war began after the Laos incursion of 1971, when it became clear that Viet Nam was turning into a "proxy war" fought mainly by Vietnamese with sharply reduced U.S. casualties. "From that point on," says Gelb, "nobody could rouse the people on the war issue." Others, among them Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, say that reluctant tolerance of Nixon's stewardship began to turn to something like admiration after his decision to mine North Viet Nam's ports last spring--widely regarded by the public as a daring and successful riposte to Russian and Chinese perfidy.

McGovern turns off some would-be supporters because he sometimes seems to want not only an end to the war but an act of national moral self-flagellation. "We tell him to go easy on the blood and bomb stuff," says a McGovern adviser, "but it does no good. He just feels too deeply to change." During a flight to Minneapolis one day last week, campaign aides played a tape recording of a young veteran's horror and guilt over his participation in the devastation of Viet Nam. Deeply moved, McGovern played it for his audience that night (see box, preceding page).

The polls suggest that McGovern's sense of moral outrage is not shared by most Americans, who tend to go along with Nixon's gut conviction that a U.S. President cannot simply get out of Viet Nam without an "honorable" settlement. As Gelb, now with the Brookings Institution, says, it is true "both that the American people want out and that they don't want the place handed over to the Communists."

As it has done to so many other things, the interminable, infinitely complex war in Viet Nam has turned meanings inside out. McGovern, with his angry moralism and his too-eager willingness to ratify the worthlessness of the long U.S. effort, offends a deep sensibility in the American people. This allows Nixon, who has not ended the war as he promised and continues to destroy a small corner of the earth with all of the firepower the U.S. can muster, to campaign as the peace candidate.

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