Chart & Pointer Time Again at BAWS

By Hugh Sidey

We have now in the Federal Government something we might call the "Bureau of Asian War, Southeast"--or BAWS. It goes on now like HUD or the FPC resisting, right down to the desperate end, efforts to change it or end it. The Ford Administration seems overpowered by the momentum of the thing, a familiar condition of institutional Washington. It is a rule of thumb that any program that survives ten years is permanent. Our longest war has taken on this characteristic.

BAWS does not have a legal charter or a shiny new headquarters building along the Potomac. But scattered throughout the Government are thousands of men and women who depend on it for their livelihood. Other thousands who gave more than a decade of their most creative years to BAWS feel compelled to continue their search for vindication of their positions.

Last week retired General William Westmoreland, who ran the massive combat over there more years than anyone, was back on the White House grounds barking out his lament that Ford could not use "tactical air support" and "B52 strikes" and "the mining of Haiphong Harbor." He stood like a ramrod, his chiseled jaw working, his eyes flashing as if he once again heard the distant trumpet, asserting of his old antagonists: "The only language that Hanoi understands is the language of force."

Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger have no more or less logic in their pleas for hundreds of millions of dollars for more ammunition than the Government ever did. Their public case rests on the analysis of the Communist mind (the enemy will negotiate this time) and the long-range weather forecasts (the monsoons are coming). In truth, they simply cannot bring themselves to walk out of BAWS.

All along the BAWS line folks are rallying as if some invisible flag had been raised at headquarters. There are the same old slogans, press releases and speeches about honoring commitments and about other nations losing faith in the United States if we do not plunge on. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger last week was puffing his pipe and weighing "the dry season," against "the wet season." His computers were spinning out statistics about the percentages of the land and the people controlled by the Communists. General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dispatched Major General John R.D. Cleland on a new fact-finding mission to the war area. Cleland roared off through the skies, and there were memories of General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow swooping down on Saigon for Kennedy. The exhilaration of new crisis was evident all through BAWS.

Big colored maps unrolled in briefings from the Cabinet Room to Capitol Hill. In the State Department they put up the coded progress reports by the hour. The old Southeast Asia hands walked with a little more pride among their mementos, which have never been put away, including a stuffed mongoose and a fine selection of tribal folk art. Suddenly there was a resurgence of the collapsible aluminum pointer, that riding crop of bureaucratic status. All up and down the ranks, the pointers were extended with sharp clicks, the desk officers and colonels whacking the charts authoritatively as they explained the fluid fronts, slapping their trouser legs to drive home salient points.

Old fears were rekindled. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on board his jet raised the specter of a "bloodbath" of a million people if South Viet Nam fell. Apparently that stems from the claim by Richard Nixon five years earlier that 1 1/2 million Catholics who fled to the South would be killed if South Viet Nam fell. Former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford did some research at the time and found a little more than half that many Catholics had fled South and about the same number stayed in North Viet Nam and were not touched by the Communists. Further, the original contention that countless thousands had been slaughtered when North Viet Nam went Communist in 1954 could not be verified.

One wonders, as BAWS clanks again, what it would be like if the President decided to end our part of those wars by just ending it, turned the full energy of the U.S. into a powerful appeal for all factions to stop the killing and devised a whole new program--"Rebuild Asia, Southeast," or RAS--to use the millions for reconstruction and reconciliation. But that is not in the manual of the Old Boys at BAWS.

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