Correspondents' Correspondence Rumanian Connection

...even under bombing the road and rail network from China can sustain a flow of 8,500 tons per day...

...and China through Hanoi's offensive...

...The Rumanian President reportedly made no offer to mediate the Mideast conflict, nor did he pass messages from Cairo or Moscow...

...Little leaked out of the private, high-level talks...

...Daniel Bell (Professor of Sociology, Harvard) No...

...Meir...

...Stanley Hoffmann (Professor of Government, Harvard) No...

...Meir said Israel believed Rumania could use its influence to bring Cairo and Jerusalem face to face at the negotiating table...

...William Kintner (Director, Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania) Yes...

...I said that if Nixon did not negotiate more vigorously the Communist side would launch an offensive in the spring of 1972...

...But the scarcity of government representatives was offset by the swarm of foreign correspondents scenting a major story...

...By that decision John Kennedy nailed the Stars and Stripes to the Saigon flagpole...

...Stepping off their El-Al jetliner, they were met only by the official Rumanian host, Premier Ion Gheorghe Maurer, and a blue-jacketed honor guard...

...that anyhow our vital interests are in Europe, the Mideast and disarmament...

...If No??taking into consideration (1) the fate of the POWs, (2) the North Vietnamese invasion, and (3) the likely domestic reaction??what would you have done in his place...

...Four years ago enemy forces were all over the populated heart of South Vietnam, and it required over 500,000 U.S...

...I would withdraw all the troops within six weeks, the only conditions being the release of the POWs and assurance against attacks upon the withdrawing American forces...

...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...has in effect given up its previous insistence on a withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnamese territory, and setting the stage for a possible collapse of the Saigon government...

...And just the week before, Cairo's Mohammed Heikal wrote in Al-Ahram that Ceausescu had offered to mediate the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...This would be similar to France's acceptance of Algeria's terms...

...President Johnson refused to consider this package and so has President Nixon...

...2. We could leave and let the North and South fight it out...

...John P. Roche (Morris Hillquit Professor of Politics, Brandeis) No...

...Nixon could have made that proposal as a straightforward act of negotiation, without the gun to make his offer seem a threat...

...and, if we have learned anything in the last decade, we must surely have learned that national interest is more potent than ideology...

...Leo Cheme (Chairman, Executive Committee, Freedom House) I don't know...

...On these terms we probably would be able to get the return of our prisoners...

...Unless the South Vietnamese collapse, or Chinese policy changes again, I foresee Soviet acceptance of detente in this sense, perhaps after a further test of strength in the Middle East or elsewhere...

...visas for the South Vietnamese in mortal political danger...

...In sum, I believe the blockade to be mainly a diplomatic device that undoubtedly places the Soviet Union in an awkward position and at the same time might help protect Washington's prestige in the event of military disaster...

...Unhappily, that prediction has come through...

...I would not have followed the line of action taken by President Nixon...

...Moreover, the mere presence of Israel's Prime Minister in Rumania undoubtedly gave spiritual nourishment to many East European and Soviet Jews who regard Israel as a second homeland...

...Without knowing what passed between Kissinger and Brezhnev, no observer can evaluate thoroughly the risks the President took...

...There are less violent alternative strategies of resistance to Communist aggression...

...The problem with pursuing a policy of Vietnamization is that it makes a compromise almost impossible, for it commits us to supporting the very government the other side finds objectionable...

...Second, this action will inform Moscow that we intend to link cooperative arrangements such as SALT with their stoppage of assistance to those opposing us, as in Vietnam...

...author, Vietnam Primer and West to Cambodia) I don't know...

...The President had no other military option, given both the pace and force of the enormous Soviet-equipped invasion...

...I would also negotiate for an amnesty for the people we leave behind...

...in the Mideast, in Europe, and other areas...

...I would announce a date certain for total withdrawal of all American forces in Indochina, contingent upon Hanoi's guarantee of the release of the American POWs...

...A negotiated withdrawal would of course free the prisoners of war...

...Rumanian Connection Bucharest--Although she was the first Israeli Prime Minister ever to visit a Communist country, Golda Meir and her entourage were given a deliberately low-key reception upon their arrival at Otopeni airport here one overcast, drizzly day early this month...

...Under the circumstances, the President's action measures the vital American interest in achieving a stable balance of world power, maintained by reciprocal respect for each nation's national commitments, and for the rules of the UN charter regarding the use of force in international politics...

...Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York) No...

...A complete response depends on an estimate of how fast Hanoi's divisions can go, how far they intend to go, and what answer the North would give to alternative signals for a political settlement...

...Morton Kaplan (Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago) No...

...Moreover, the May 8 action was unnecessary because a much better alternative for ending the war is and has been available...

...In view of our responsibilities, we should give refuge in the United States to a few hundred thousand South Vietnamese...

...This was apparent when Mrs...

...President Nixon's new terms for a negotiated settlement come very close to what I believe is acceptable to Hanoi??namely a ceasefire with no promises of North Vietnamese withdrawals and no guarantees about South Vietnam, and our promise of complete withdrawal within four months...

...What would one have done in his place...

...Nathan Glazer (Professor of Education and Social Structure, Harvard) No...

...Had the same decision been made four years ago, I would have been unqualifiedly for it...

...Meir's words, in Yiddish, were characteristically simple and direct...

...There is only one course of action??admit the mistake and negotiate for the POWs in return for a fixed departure date...

...I think the President's decision is rash and dangerous, ineffective and unnecessary...

...would still try to prop up Thieu for political competition during a cease-fire, and remained secure in its intransigence...

...Meir's visit did not seem to accomplish much of immediate consequence, it did open another channel of communication between Cairo and Jerusalem...

...There was the confidence that one more step of escalation would have a decisive effect...

...to return to the Paris negotiations, and why were the expectations from the secret conversation with Le Due Tho not realized...

...Inside another 1,500 Jews, admitted by special pass through cordons of uniformed and plainclothed police, filled the synagogue an hour before her arrival...

...Indefensibly, we expected Soviet restraint in Vietnam, and therefore reduced our forces much too rapidly...

...Not because I disapprove in principle of a military response to the massive invasion of the Republic of South Vietnam, but rather because I do not believe the President of the United States can continue to fight this war in a legislative vacuum...

...First, I believe it will help restore the morale of the South Vietnamese forces as they regroup for the defense of Hue...

...Roger Fisher (Professor of Law, Harvard Law School) No...

...I would have continued as much effective air support as public opinion would allow...

...We might give South Vietnam some aid, but would not be directly involved in the fighting or responsible for its outcome...

...Nixon apparently saw this as a humiliation of the United States, and it would seem to be the basis of his reiterated use of the word "honor" in his May 8 announcement...

...Paul Seabury (Professor of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley) Yes...

...Hans J. Morgenthau (Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York) No...

...but there seem substantial reasons why the Hanoi regime would not wish to destroy future relations with the non-Communist world by staging a new bloodbath of its own...

...It brings about a confrontation with the Soviet Union for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis...

...and others...

...I cannot responsibly assess the President's decision without knowing what was discussed between Henry Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev...

...Much as I might like to rewrite history, I am convinced that our honor is at stake as a consequence of events in Vietnam over the past decade??notably the American-inspired coup in 1963, which resulted in the murder of an authentic, non-Communist Vietnamese nationalist, President Diem...

...By this weird logic America could have intervened with impunity in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union withdrew missiles from Cuba...

...Because he incredibly decided that the preservation of General Thieu was a vital interest of the United States, he has progressively abolished limitations that even President Johnson placed on the conduct of the war and has done the things that President Johnson declined to do??invaded Cambodia, invaded Laos, renewed the bombing of North Vietnam, and now mined its harbors...

...there was the whining implication that it is somehow unfair for the North Vietnamese to fight back and unfair for the Russians to give them one-hundredth as much aid as we are giving our Vietnamese...

...China has turned to the U.S...

...As for the domestic reaction, I have no question that most Americans would welcome an end to a war whose continuation (and, for many, whose initiation) makes no sense...

...In his speech he proposed an internationally supervised cease-fire and a withdrawal of all U.S...

...Whatever the case, more than 2,000 Jews stood quietly at militia lines near Temple Choral for over four hours to catch a glimpse of Mrs...

...Morton Halperin (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution) No...

...troops to block them...

...the remark was included in the full text of her speech distributed to all correspondents, but Scinteia dropped it...

...There has already been, God knows, a continuing bloodbath, righteously wrought by the United States...

...Above all, there was the idea that Vietnam is of planetary importance as a test of American will...

...An intensification of Soviet or Chinese military engagement cannot be discounted, but now there is much greater likelihood of their pressuring Hanoi to accept the greatly watered down United States proposals...

...But I have one vote, and under our system majority rule is the name of the game...

...The Israeli position was said to be straightforward: It would welcome a Rumanian initiative if that led to direct talks with Egypt...

...The U.S...

...Yes or No answers to complex questions reflect a dangerous political polarization...

...Brigadier General, U.S.A., ret...

...Ithiel de Sola Pool (Professor of Political Science, MIT) I don't know...

...Leslie Gelb (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution) No...

...Certainly its effect upon supplies will come too late to have a decisive impact on the present battle...

...If the American people want to run, I would consider it disgraceful and dishonorable...

...I was involved in the decisions made at that time, and the situation was quite different: Nuclear missiles were then pointed at the heartland of the United States...

...Richard Pipes (Professor of History, Harvard) I don't know...

...Voicing concern over the continuing exodus of Rumanian Jews to Israel (some 300,000 have emigrated), he called on the young to stay and perpetuate their Jewish heritage at home.--Mark Hopkins Vietnam Survey: Given the present state of the war in Vietnam, and the apparent stalemate in Paris, if you were in the President's chair, would you have taken the action he took on May 8 ? If Yes??what do you see happening as a result of his action...

...If in the face of all this progress the killing continues, it is largely because dissidents in the United States continue to give the totalitarian regime in Hanoi the hope that in the end it will be allowed to impose its tyranny upon the South...

...The Rumanians had invited her less than a month after President Nicolae Ceausescu's talks in Egypt with President Anwar el-Sadat...

...In the April 27, 1970, issue of The New Leader ("The Way Out of Vietnam"), for example, I argued that Nixon's Vietnamization plan would not work and that the only way to end the war was through the kind of agreement Harriman had negotiated...

...S.L...

...But having done what we have been committed to do, we could serve no useful purpose by continuing an intervention doomed to failure...

...To do this, the North Vietnamese must have relations with the United States??on the same balance-of-power principle that leads Peking and Moscow to seek improved relations with Washington...

...The turning point in our situation in Vietnam was the Presidential election there last year...

...And in an age of Communist poly-centrism, can anyone suppose that the Communization of Vietnam would be a threat to our security...

...Indeed, there was a hint of breakthrough news to Mrs...

...If that information revealed that the President's decision entailed grave risks of enlarging Soviet or Chinese involvement, I would be critical of his actions...

...Once again Nixon has turned his back on a negotiated settlement??the only way that the war can truly be ended and the prisoners returned home...

...I would not continue the intervention in Vietnam...

...We are not going to free them any other way...

...Announcing this alone, without the very hazardous mining of the ports, would have been Nixon's best action under the present circumstances...

...with a certain amount of leverage...

...Dankwart A. Rustow (Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York) No...

...3. We could simply accept North Vietnam's terms...

...We must accustom ourselves to the agonizing effects of witnessing the immense toll of human lives in South Vietnam which this kind of peace will surely bring...

...The Soviets have now answered the U.S...

...Blockading North Vietnamese harbors is such a tactic...

...It is to some extent a face-saving device, concealing the fact that the U.S...

...directly, with all that this implies, or else lose prestige and influence with Hanoi...

...A central Hanoi concern will be to avoid a situation of dependence on Peking or Moscow...

...I would also expect the usual Communist reprisals and atrocities...

...there are even hints that the hidden message of the May 8 speech is that Nixon is at last prepared to dump General Thieu...

...He should go to Congress and force the legislature to answer the question, Do we fight or do we run...

...I would announce a date certain in four or five months for complete withdrawal of all U.S...

...Roger Hilsman (Professor of Government, Columbia) No...

...The arbitrament of war has shown that we have failed...

...has abandoned insistence on free choice for the South Vietnamese people and should prepare for "defeat with honor...

...But I don't see this happening...

...The Rumanians, however, played down the mediation theme...

...I would at once halt American operations throughout Indochina, withdraw all troops by June 30, exile Thieu, agree to elections under a Buddhist-Vietcong coalition (thereby freeing our prisoners), and arrange 100,000 U.S...

...Rumania, incidentally, was the only Warsaw Pact member to maintain relations with Israel after the Six-Day War...

...He should have announced that we have done all??indeed much more??than our commitment called for, and it was insufficient to prevent Communist rule in South Vietnam...

...that most Asian "dominoes" are still standing and our relations with Peking are improving...

...In addition, it demonstrated that Israel could have proper, even cordial, relations with a Communist nation, despite the pro-Arab bent of the Eastern bloc...

...They are Communists, but they are also fervent nationalists...

...The Nixon Administration must come to this point sooner or later...

...If the fighting goes reasonably well, and the North does not change its demands, I would take the second option...

...What understandings were reached which led the U.S...

...Nixon's decision is an admission that his Vietnamization policy is a failure...

...Meir attended Friday night services in Bucharest's main synagogue...

...All political issues would be left to the Vietnamese to settle among themselves...

...If anything should be clear, it is that the North Vietnamese have not been going through a generation of war so that the Chinese or the Russians will move in and take over their country...

...My impression is that the blockade does not have primarily military ends, although military means are being employed...

...Eugene V. Rostow (Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs, Yale) Yes...

...After the war, they may well make the same overtures that Ho Chi Minn and Mao Tse-tung, seeking to avoid such dependence, made to us a quarter century ago...

...It is hard to suppose that even President Nixon could believe that...

...Unlike the ordinary citizen, the President has at his disposal facts concerning the strategic implications of the closing of North Vietnamese ports and the probable reactions of China and the Soviet Union...

...In Rumania, he said, Jews were free to be Jews...

...James Thompson (Assistant Professor of History, Harvard) No...

...In the summer of 1968 Averell Harriman worked out with the Communist side a package agreement for a negotiated settlement that most Americans would find acceptable...

...Ronald Steel (Author of Pax Americana and Imperialists and Other Heroes) No...

...Technologically, however, the blockade we are attempting seems more likely to fail than to succeed...

...Because of his own mistakes, the President found himself on May 8 in a dilemma to which his response, as the British said, was inevitable...

...I would accompany this move with the following statement: "We have for many years done everything in our power to make the government of South Vietnam self-sufficient, politically and militarily...

...President Nixon said, "An American defeat in Vietnam . . . would encourage agression all over the world...

...We naturally regret this outcome...

...All of this the North Vietnamese have indicated to be possible...

...The impasse at Paris would be resolved by allowing the Vietnamese to work out their own political settlement...

...Had we not supported Thieu, I think we might have succeeded in establishing a "government of accommodation" in Saigon that would have come closer to meeting North Vietnamese demands and perhaps made some compromise solution possible...

...I would expect North Vietnam to release our prisoners eventually in return for some consideration...

...Today, with 500,000 U.S...

...The scant publicity given Mrs...

...So is Vietnami-zation and the associated withdrawal of American combat troops...

...I would set a deadline and get out...

...Nixon should finally have done what would better have been done anytime in the past seven years ??withdrawn all American Armed Forces...

...A Bucharest editor unequivocally declared that Ceausescu would not assume the role of peacemaker...

...There is, however, the larger political??and moral??question...

...It means that world peace now depends upon the restraint and sense of responsibility of the Communists, and is bound to affect other matters, such as the summit conference and the SALT talks...

...Shifting defense savings to massive programs in education, housing and transport, I would look forward to a landslide reelection in November...

...I would withdraw American military forces...

...Meir met for five and a half hours in the old King's Palace on her second day here, and they met again unexpectedly on the third...

...But Nixon cannot single-handedly defend our honor...

...A. Marshall (Military historian...

...I would have done four years ago what Averell Harriman and Clark Clifford had urged the Johnson Administration in vain to do that is, to stand aside from the Saigon regime and negotiate an American withdrawal...

...I would have negotiated on terms offered by the North Vietnamese in their proposal of July 1, 1971, and as subsequently amended by them...

...That is to say, I would continue the withdrawal of our ground troops and abstain from air and naval bombardment...

...For four years Harriman and others have attempted, without success, to persuade this Administration to give the plan serious consideration...

...President Nixon's May 8 speech seemed to me to reproduce in a single document all the fallacy and folly of a decade of error in Indochina...

...Ideologues may give such polar answers, but serious scholars cannot...

...troops gone and the South Vietnamese doing the job, the enemy, despite his heaviest attacks of the war??whether he takes Hue or not??occupies only difficult outskirt areas...

...today American survival is not endangered nor is any vital American interest...

...I don't have enough information to say what I would do in the President's place...

...Meir's May 4-7 visit in the Party newspaper Scinteia reinforced the impression that Communist officials were treading warily in the tangled Arab-Israeli dispute, lest they be trapped ignobly in diplomatic failure...

...1. If the current strategy of the Administration succeeds??in other words, if the present offensive is blunted and the blockade is successful??North Vietnam would be forced to change its terms...

...This time, I would like to think, we will be more sensible in our response...

...For his part, Ceausescu added a bit to his image as a world diplomat, and to his country's international standing, by displaying once more his independence from the Soviet Union...

...From every indication the mining and bombing can have no immediate effect and therefore are largely punitive...

...Rabbi Rosen, with careful political tact, praised his government's liberalism toward religious expression...

...Communist countries have done so in the past...

...What our President is saying is that because we will not fight to the end in a part of the world in which we have no direct and vital interests, other nations will conclude that we will not fight at all in parts of the world where we do have direct and vital interests...

...If I were in the President's chair right now, I would wait and see what happens on the battlefield...

...troops from Vietnam in four months if the prisoners of war were then released...

...Back home, I would proclaim that American bombs cannot win jungle wars or propagate democracy...

...John Kenneth Galbraith (Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, Harvard) No...

...If so, his response has been appallingly extravagant...

...The blockade can be maintained indefinitely and as such provides the U.S...

...If he had done this four years ago, many people, Americans and Vietnamese, who are now dead would be alive...

...And this military action is accompanied by such inflated rhetoric as the designation of the North Vietnamese as "international outlaws...

...For example, at a banquet Mrs...

...Thus we are now faced with three possibilities...

...The President's action is also in part a political countermaneuver, designed to force the Soviet Union either to challenge the U.S...

...If Hanoi succeeds, the promise of China's new policy will fade...

...Westerners here were under the impression that Rabbi Moshe Rosen had spread the word among the city's 50,000 Jews (half the total left in Rumania) that a public rally for her would serve no good, though he denied having done so...

...Hanoi was either not disposed to wait for victory or feared that the U.S...

...Will there be a bloodbath...

...Our commitment should never have been understood to require us to defend a nation incapable of organizing an effective government, or to destroy that nation in the course of defending it...

...These are "tactical" questions, and on these I have no grounds for making a judgment...

...A person who has no access to classified information cannot reasonably be expected to say what he would do if he had such information...

...Edwin O. Reischauer (University Professor, Harvard) No...

...Diplomatic prospects have been interwoven with an uncertain battle...

...Kahin (Visiting Fellow, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) No...

...This could lead to their accepting something like the coalition government we have offered, leaving the future of South Vietnam open...

...My reading of the transcript of Henry Kissinger's briefing following the President's announcement leads me to believe the Administration, in its secret talks in Paris, was telling Hanoi that it was willing to get out of Vietnam but did not want to be humiliated, and that if Hanoi would wait Saigon would fall of its own ineptitude in a year or so...

...There is great hope for detente in this change of Chinese policy, but it cannot be realized without firm and strenuous efforts by China, the U.S...

...The simple fact is that Nixon's Vietnamization policy has failed and he lacks the courage to say so...

...for support against the threat of Soviet encirclement and attack...

...After centuries of persecution, blood and tears, she said, the Jewish people have a homeland once again...

...But Hanoi has enormous leverage on us??the POWs??that might force us to take the third option in any event...

...If we are concerned with the containment of China, a Hanoi government would resist Chinese pressures far more effectively than any of the shoddy regimes we have sponsored in Saigon...

...forces from Indochina...

...I suppose that the end of a civil war is likely to be accompanied by the paying off of local scores...

...CIA and defense intelligence agency studies have shown that a total blockade of the North Vietnamese coast would not be effective...

...there was the preening nonsense about our "generosity" in making negotiating offers which, with their insistence on the survival of the Saigon regime, Hanoi by definition will not accept...

...Although Mrs...

...The President is offering to surrender to the North Vietnamese if they will safeguard his political position until after the election...

...But I think we have to face the fact that in this war we have missed one bus after another...

...George McT...

...Ceausescu and Mrs...

...Meir's seemingly abrupt visit...

...On moral grounds I have opposed bombing and shelling of populated areas throughout this war, and I continue to do so...