Negotiations, Withdrawal, or What?
Wrong, Dennis H.
ONE SENSES THAT THE DOVES have won, or at least have gone far toward winning, the battle to influence public opinion. A mood of dissatisfaction with the war and unwillingness to approve any...
...The San Francisco resolution went on to imply that the United States had no business at all in Vietnam Given this wording, it is amazing that a third of the voters nevertheless supported the resolution...
...It is now sometimes said that in case the U.S...
...Already militants in the peace movement, frustrated by their failure to end the war, are advocating active "resistance" in place of legal protests and demonstrations as the only effective answer to the Administration's rigidity...
...but that is a problem to be faced only after we have succeeded in getting the U.S...
...If an unambiguous dove could outpoll a field that included Shirley Temple in a district like San Mateo, the possibility of electing peace candidates is a real one throughout the country...
...But for better or worse they are not prepared to support unilateral American withdrawal without negotiations—they still hope for something that can be called an "honorable" peace, a peace that will not make the lives lost in the war appear to have been lost in vain or that will not look like a total American backing down...
...ONE MAY PROPERLY FEEL that the war is such an abomination that moral protests against it are their own justification and that the protesters, as Mary McCarthy has argued, are under no obligation to offer a "solution" to the situation in Vietnam...
...WE SHALL HAVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT, then, the sensitivities of the newly restive audience if we are to evoke an electoral response that may lead to an end to the fighting...
...But if we are to be politically effective in taking advantage of the rising opposition to the war, the terms of opposition will have to be considered because much of the public is by no means indifferent to them...
...to take the indispensable preliminary step of ceasing the bombing and offering negotiations...
...But if there is no further escalation in the immediate future, then the new mood of the country surely indicates that the most effective way of opposing the war at the present time is the most traditional and "square" method of all: political activity, electioneering...
...ceases the bombing, and Hanoi and the NLF then refuse to enter negotiations, that will raise new dangers of escalation by the U.S...
...but even the people who had fought to get it on 3 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS the ballot conceded afterwards that a different wording would probably have produced a far larger vote in its favor...
...Surely, many such people would have found it possible to vote for the antiwar referenda in San Francisco and Cambridge if the wording of the resolutions had not, called for "immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of U.S...
...troops from Vietnam" with no reference at all to preceding negotiations...
...To get that far would be a victory for the peace movement, a victory by no means assured but tremendously to be desired...
...Even Nixon, of all people, is now being touted by many of his backers less as a militant hawk than as a cool, experienced professional in dealing with international affairs...
...To be sure, the war goes on and the Administration defends its policies with great heat...
...Evidently, many people are alarmed at the prospect of further escalation and/or a confrontation with China, fed up with the Saigon government, favorably disposed toward ending the bombing and reducing troop commitments, and ready to approve direct negotiations with the NLF...
...And now that Senator Eugene McCarthy is challenging the President in several primaries on the war alone, the issue is joined on the highest level...
...The idea of such negotiations should be linked with the prospect of a phased withdrawal of all foreign troops from South Vietnam and some kind of provision for political self-determination, perhaps under international auspices, by the South Vietnamese...
...Whether or not this is the meaning, or will prove to be the consequence, of McNamara's impending departure from the Pentagon remains unclear at the time of writing...
...If this should happen, the opponents of the war will be confronted with an entirely new situation...
...And it remains entirely possible that the Administration will escalate again in the hope of "winning" the war before next year's elections...
...That is why, in a situation where for the first time the mood of the country seems to be turning in a favorable direction, we believe that the central emphasis of the peace movement must continue to be a demand for cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam, coupled with an immediate and serious offer to negotiate with the NLF...
...Perhaps so...
...A mood of dissatisfaction with the war and unwillingness to approve any further escalation has begun to take hold...
...The signs are scattered but all point in the same direction: the opinion polls, some election returns last month, and, most of all, the behavior of the politicians, both those in the running for the Presidency and those up for lesser offices next year, and, perhaps more significantly, even some formerly hawkish Senators who are not up for reelection...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
