The brief holiday truce, violated continually by the Viet Cong, had come and gone, and the President said nothing. Day after day, the bombing pause over North Viet Nam went on and the President said nothing. Rumors of peace feelers to Hanoi spread like wildfire, and still the President said nothing.
For a week, Lyndon Johnson remained in insulated silence at the L.B.J. Ranch. Suspense and hopeful anticipation built up. Then, in a spectacular series of midweek revelations, the shroud of mystery lifted. In a characteristic stroke of showmanship, the President had dispatched a flying squad of U.S. officials all over the world to discuss the prospects for peace talks on Viet Nam.
“Clarify & Reclarify.” U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg went to Rome to confer with Pope Paul VI on the Vatican’s peace offensive, flew on to Paris to see Charles de Gaulle and then to London for discussions with Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Roving Ambassador Averell W. Harriman surfaced in Warsaw, talked about Viet Nam with top Polish officials, including Communist Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka, headed for Belgrade to see President Tito, planned thence to go to India. White House Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy went secretly to see Prime Minister Lester Pearson in Canada, which is one of three nations on the Viet Nam International Control Commission set up by the 1954 Geneva Conference, thus has a representative in Hanoi.
In Moscow, U.S. Ambassador Foy Kohler met in the Kremlin with Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny just before a high-level Soviet group headed by Aleksandr Shelepin, the party’s No. 2 man, left for Hanoi. And in Washington, Secretary of State Dean Rusk met with Hungarian officials, who had made it clear that they, too, wanted to join the lengthening procession of countries hopeful of mediating the war.
The only official word from the White House about the great peace teach-in came from Press Secretary Bill Moyers, who told reporters: “The President in the last few weeks has felt that it was especially appropriate for more leaders of the world to know his views on Asia. This is a continuation of this Government’s efforts to state and restate, affirm and reaffirm, clarify and reclarify our position on Viet Nam.”
Accuracy from Hanoi. On the surface, Johnson’s play for negotiations seemed to be well timed and shrewdly designed. An exhaustive—and exhaustively publicized—presidential effort to bring the war to a conference table could serve once and for all to satisfy the U.S. public, Congress and the world that the Administration was genuinely eager to end the war. If it came to nothing Lyndon could use its failure to justify his whopping U.S. defense budget, which may top $60 billion this year.
Nevertheless, the diplomacy-in-public that Johnson unleashed last week did not seem particularly well suited to the delicate manipulations necessary to setting up meaningful peace talks. Worse, with the scantiest justification it built high hopes throughout the world that peace in Viet Nam might really be imminent, when it was not.
Even before Lyndon’s gesture, there had been over the past year no fewer than 225 negotiating approaches to Hanoi from various sources. Said Dean Rusk last week: “Hanoi denies it has made any peace feelers, and in this case Hanoi’s denials are accurate. I am not aware of any initiative from Hanoi. The initiative always comes from others.”
“Down to Bare Bone.” Right on cue, North Viet Nam President Ho Chi Minh answered the Pope’s Christmas plea for peace with a typically savage diatribe against the U.S. Ho denounced “aggression by the American imperialists,” accused the U.S. of setting up a “fascist dictatorship” in South Viet Nam, and again served up the same four preconditions whose acceptance by Washington would amount to surrendering South Viet Nam to the Communists. “The U.S. leaders want war and not peace,” wrote Ho. “The talks about unconditional negotiations made by the U.S. President are merely a maneuver to cover up his plan for war intensification and extension in Viet Nam.”
Plainly, nothing had changed the issues at stake in Viet Nam. With characteristic bluntness, Dean Rusk summarized the situation for a friend: “All that’s left is the question of what we do about North Viet Nam’s attempt to take over South Viet Nam by force. We’re down to the bare bone. Do we stand aside and let them take it? We do not!
There are no tricks or gimmicks here. There is no lack of diplomatic energy or effort on our part to bring the war to a peaceful conclusion. We could have peace in 24 hours if the other side stops what it is doing. The only other thing—the only other egg we could add to this basket—would be South Viet Nam itself. Just give it to them. And that is what we will not do.”
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