Getting Out of Vietnam

...So Mr...

...That is a tragic and terrible chance...

...Nixon can think that such a clique can easily dispense with the services of half a million American soldiers is hard to understand...

...To face facts, the result of such a commitment could be to harden Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, to frustrate any agreement, and to prepare the way for an NLF take-over in the South...

...Vague promises, like the ones Mr...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS It could, I thought, provide at least some protection for the non- and anti-Communists in South Vietnam...

...And on that last count, the President's preposterous analysis of how this country got into the war makes it highly unlikely that his scenario for getting out of it will ever come to pass...

...Every Washington commentator agrees that the campaign to expose Haynsworth's political outlook and public record was largely the work of these organizations...

...As a result, there is a paradoxical situation: only an American commitment to withdraw can make a negotiated settlement possible...

...That might mean that Mr...

...But that vote of confidence is strictly limited as to time, as on a similar occasion Lyndon Johnson discovered...

...The Communists in the South, Jean Lacoture has noted, were the last to take to the maquis since they were sticking to the soft line established in Geneva in 1954...

...Nixon made, will not inspire, or threaten, Thieu and Ky...

...But we must get out and soon...

...Nixon won over with his speech could come to the same conclusion...

...That is why the Moratorium after brilliant beginnings must prepare for the long haul...

...For if the Nixon policy fails, as I think it will, America will have to settle with this issue for once and for all, and will desperately need a vigorous peace movement to help it do so...

...In the last election, they got only a third of the vote in a ballot which they themselves supervised and which excluded the advocates of a negotiated settlement on the grounds that they were pro-Communist...

...troops last year), but with no possibility of an acceptable outcome and with the real chance of provoking an international catastrophe...

...Moreover, one year of negotiations —and of death—has clearly demonstrated that The Unions And Haynsworth WHATEVER its ultimate consequences, the refusal of the Senate to ratify the nomination of Justice Haynsworth to the Supreme Court was a sharp rebuke to an administration that daily shows itself to be more reactionary and deceitful...

...In view of this history it is absurd to think that the Thieu-Ky government can suddenly improvise the political strength that would allow them to defend themselves militarily...

...Nixon himself was soft-voiced in his McCarthyite insinuation but the basic smear was still there...

...The American people have become so weary of the war that a significant minority of perhaps 40 percent is prepared to accept the logic of withdrawal and, if the bloodshed continues, that uncommitted center which Mr...

...And in Vietnam this is even truer, since no one would care to equate Thieu and Ky with the freedom movements of Budapest and Prague...

...All of this is disturbing enough to read in the New York Times but, if I may add a personal note, it is much more frightening to experience first-hand...

...Meanwhile, those of us who have at some points been critical of the unions ought to have the grace to say that in rallying sentiment against Haynsworth, both Roy Wilkins and George Meany did a fine job...

...But it seems utterly foolish and self-defeating for people on the Left to keep repeating, as one hears them do, that the unions have simply become "conservative...

...Fifteen years ago," Mr...

...Under the present circumstances the Thieu-Ky regime, which understandably hailed the Nixon speech, has no incentive to move from its effective refusal of any form of coalition with the National Liberation Front, be it in the form of an election commission or a new government...

...We should offer the chance of emigration to America to anyone who wants to take it...

...If the evidence becomes overwhelming that the President is wrong, if a promised victory turns into a defeat, then there can be a mass defection...

...For it was in the early fifties, when the scene of the Cold War suddenly shifted from Europe to Asia, that the French saw an opportunity to get American support for their colonial policy in Indo-China...

...And this is what the mainstream peace movement did in its most successful effort, the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns...

...For the Nixon administration has been sponsoring a modest revival of Joe McCarthyism, administrative style, and if it succeeds in polarizing the society and stigmatizing the advocacy of peace as subversion, that will create the mood for an increase in the violence in Southeast Asia...

...But how, then, should the democratic Left respond...

...But if "Vietnamization" is going to fail, what are the alternatives...

...In any case, it was the only form of a peace proposal which the American public would accept and therefore, whatever one thought of the abstract question of unilateral withdrawal, a realistic political struggle for peace had to make negotiations its key demand...

...Behind the Senate's action was an extremely well-organized lobbying effort by the AFL–CIO and the NAACP, the two "traditional" bulwarks of the ruptured labor-liberal-Negro alliance...

...For escalation, or even a continuation of the current levels of violence, involves terror and death too (see the revelations of the horrible massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S...

...This notion that the war is a result of an international Communist conspiracy and an external aggression is not simply erroneous...

...From that moment until the present, a civil war and a Communist drive for power were inextricably, and tragically, bound together...

...The third was held on the parking lot of a Long Island shopping center and featured Dave Livingston, the trade unionist, Congressman Allard Lowenstein, and myself...

...Nixon's fate depends in large measure upon what happens in Vietnam...

...There will be difficult times ahead and yet the new-found confidence of Nixon and his bully boys should not intimidate us...

...It also makes it impossible for anyone who believes it to recognize the political realities in that tortured country...

...And, as Averell Harriman pointed out, Mr...

...Only Americans can do that...

...Johnson resigned from politics on March 31...

...In December 1967, Lyndon Johnson was going up in the opinion polls: many were hostile to the Pentagon demonstrations in October and General Westmoreland had just made the annual, optimistic analysis of the course of the conflict...

...So it was that by the time of the French defeat and withdrawal in 1954, the United States was paying around 80 percent of the cost of their imperialist venture...

...All of this was compounded by a communications policy, enunciated by Nixon's Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and by Dean Burch, in which the government used its great power to intimidate the media...

...If an American commitment to withdraw does not force negotiations, if it leads to a Communist victory and terror, that seems to me a lesser evil to the other choices...

...and if, as seems likely, the war goes on and "Vietnamization" fails, Mr...

...Nixon will decide to extricate himself from the impasse in the classic, Lyndon Johnson manner: by escalation...

...Almost any President, and certainly a new one, can get support for his conduct of a war the first time he goes to the country and makes a patriotic appeal...

...Mitchell's chagrin, was largely peaceful, the facts were altered to fit the predictions about them...

...But by March there had been the Tet offensive, the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire, and Robert Kennedy's entry into the race...

...The policy I advocate is not without its ambiguities and perils, yet it is the only hope I can see for ending the horror in Southeast Asia...

...After the division of Vietnam, there was relative quiet until, in the late fifties, Diem's repression struck at the South Vietnamese nationalists...

...Nixon himself brusquely rejected one of the most conciliatory statements Ho Chi Minh ever made...

...If there is more death and frustration in Vietnam, that McCarthyite atmosphere could become pervasive and provide the emotional justification for escalation...

...On November 13, I gave three speeches as part of the Moratorium...

...Moreover, these possibilities also involve the threat of a revived American McCarthyism and the certainty that our desperate social problems at home will be ignored...

...CONSEQUENTLY, THERE IS LITTLE HOPE for a political settlement in Vietnam since the Saigon regime doesn't want one—and probably could not survive one...

...And, in any case, it is a brutal denouement to almost a quarter of a century of war to offer the people whom we theoretically fought to defend a prospect of more war...

...There are, to be sure, Saigon statements which accept the principle of coalition but since any South Vietnamese who takes them seriously is threatened with prison one can assume that they are, up to now, intended for American consumption...

...It was, and is, indigenous to the political history of the South even though the other Communist powers supplied arms and, in the case of Hanoi from 1965 on, men...

...There are moments—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—when democrats must stand by while freedom is repressed because armed intervention would provoke even greater evils...

...Perhaps there is a point here worth reflection by people on the Left...

...It demonstrates that there is no easy way to free a nation like ours from a generation of errors...

...North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States," he said...

...It is the direct consequence of an American policy that identified with French colonialism and its heirs in Vietnam and drove the nationalist movement into the arms of a clever, hardened Communist cadre...

...We and 300 supporters of the Moratorium holding candles were joined by 50 or so Rightists brandishing flags, chanting "Go Back to Russia, Let the Flag Speak," and I was hit in the back of the head by a very light, not at all painful, missile, but a missile nevertheless...

...But now the situation has changed...

...Nixon is going to be confronted by even greater pressure for change...

...How Mr...

...Until this year, I believed that a negotiated settlement was the only way out of Vietnam...

...And it is, under the anguished circumstances, a risk that must probably be taken...

...On many crucial domestic issues they remain a major force for progress...

...It was only COMMENTS AND OPINIONS when Saigon had forced the nationalist opposition into armed revolt that the Communists joined up—and took over...

...But there is a catch...

...There are already disturbing domestic signs that such a Rightist "solution" to the Vietnam tragedy might be in the making...

...Even his hawkish speech was presented as a kind of "peace plan" with America ending its involvement either through a negotiated settlement or "Vietnamization...

...The reason the United States got involved in Vietnam was, first of all, the Korean War...

...America should, of course, take all the a COMMENTS AND OPINIONS steps to provide safety for those who believed in the promises we never should have made, the scoundrels among them included...

...PRESIDENT NIXON'S SPEECH on November 3rd almost certainly rallied a majority of the people behind his policy...

...And it provides the utterly unreal premise on which "Vietnamization" is based: that "our" government in Saigon is engaged in the nationalist defense of the homeland and can therefore prevail if only provided with sufficient arms...

...And some of the people on the payroll, fighting for Paris against their own countrymen, were later to turn up as our men in Saigon...

...So all the evidence points to a continuation of the war and a failure of "Vietnamization...

...But on global questions the people have few sources of information, they assume that the White House has an excellent intelligence network (even after the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam), and they join ranks behind the Commander in Chief...

...But a clear statement that all the American troops are leaving in a given period of time might...

...H. Saigon has a vested interest in subverting even the possibility of a settlement...

...On issues of domestic policy, like wages or medical insurance, the average citizen can check what the President says against his own experience...

...The reason for this is well-known...

...The Justice Department practically sent an engraved invitation to the violence freaks on the Left to be sure and turn up and do their thing in November, and when the march, to Mr...

...Moreover, if that were to take place there is a very good possibility that the mass terror employed by Ho in the North in the fifties when the peasants were forcibly collectivized, or that visited by the Viet Cong on Hue in 1968, will occur again...

...This pious, prissy slander of the peace movement was followed by much more vigorous attacks from the Attorney General, the Secretary of Transportation, and the Postmaster General...

...But for such a tactic to work, the commitment to withdraw must be serious and specific...

...Nixon said, "North Vietnam, with the logistical support of Communist China and the Soviet Union, launched a campaign to impose a Communist government on South Vietnam by instigating and supporting a revolution...

...But this development was hardly invented in Hanoi, Moscow, or Peking...

...If a viable electoral bloc is to be reconstituted in order to defeat Nixon and all he stands for, the unions and groups like the NAACP will have to be major segments of it...

...There is, God knows, plenty to criticize in the recent conduct of the trade unions concerning Vietnam...