Nixon, the Press and Vietnam

...Second, the President has halted major U.S...

...Actually, the press and the bureaucracy play a largely passive role here...

...Despite all the surface pleasantries and earnest shoptalk, he thinks most reporters are out to do him in and he responds accordingly...

...The standard technique is to send Herb Klein on the road, although sometimes the President will go himself...

...Of course, it didn't take many months for this so-called policy to be openly exposed as public relations claptrap...

...Nixon cannot understand how the main body of reporters here once went to Georgetown dinner parties with New Frontiersmen, enjoyed themselves, and still took a cold, professional attitude toward their work the next day...

...But it is typical of Nixon to vary the technique and to stay flexible...

...military and diplomatic leverage for the POWs' eventual release...

...By now, Nixon has gotten over the substance of the leaks, which had to do with policy options at the start of the Indo-Pakistani war...

...The President's resentment toward the press is fully matched by his resentment toward the faceless men and women who are charged with carrying out his policy beyond the walls of the White House...

...It is in this light that one must consider the President's reaction to last month's leak of secret minutes of the National Security Council's Special Action Group to columnist Jack Anderson, and the subsequent highly embarrassing appearance of the documents in the New York Times and Washington Post...

...In August 1970, draftees comprised about 40 per cent of all Army enlisted men in Vietnam, creating a politically explosive situation...

...In any event, Washington reporters do not go to dinner parties with Nixon men...

...Essentially, this is why North Vietnam was heavily bombed in late December...

...Within a few days, it became clear that no such offer had been made...

...This, too, is basic policy...

...To begin with, he created a phony equation on the prisoners-of-war issue, asserting that some troops would have to remain in Vietnam in order to retain U.S...

...Then, the scenario writers say, the President could still point to how reasonable he has been in trying to negotiate with cruel "international outlaws...

...It is just possible that the North Vietnamese might compromise on this point and agree to a limited amount of U.S...

...Still, the relationship between the White House and the Washington press corps has changed since Nixon took office...

...The field generals in particular have been highly concerned about the threat of a Communist flanking movement from Laos and Cambodia, as well as the buildup of materiel in North Vietnam...

...Thus, he invites broadcasters and publishers to state dinners or cozies up to them on the telephone, while keeping Spiro Agnew around to scare the hell out of them...

...By spring, the draftee element will have been reduced to about 15 per cent...

...But what if Hanoi says no to the deal...

...Then, when he was unexpectedly pressed on the matter, he strongly implied that the Administration had offered Hanoi a straight swap????prisoners for pullout????And had been summarily turned down...

...In truth, his strategy is a devious but essentially simple six-part plan...

...The real tragedy of Richard Nixon is that he has regularly demonstrated an ability to cut his own political throat, and to do it with a deftness that newsmen and civil servants have come to admire...

...Presumably, it would be a phased deal...

...Sixth, Nixon may make a serious offer to the Communists, openly or covertly, before Election Day...

...troops by, say, mid-1973 in exchange for the release of prisoners...

...First, Nixon is pulling American troops out of Vietnam at a steady rate, now averaging 12,000 men a month...

...Researchers for the Democratic Presidential candidates pasted the news accounts into scrapbooks, to be put to use in the campaign...

...Yet he will not change his overall policy to save Vietnamization, should that choice ever confront him...

...Johnson had a nook by his Oval Office where he would spend a few hours a week with columnists and correspondents, Scotch in hand, trying to get them to appreciate his problems and see things his way...

...In short, he stands to gain politically anyway...

...The Nixon commentary on Vietnam delivered during an hour-long CBS interview on January 2 illustrated how self-defeating it is for the President to deal in images instead of in realities...

...Too much American blood and treasure has flowed for Nixon to stand idly by and watch Vietnamization go down the drain...

...And yet I do not think that the Washington press corps is out to "get" Richard Nixon, any more than it was out to get Lyndon Johnson or even John F. Kennedy...

...Paranoids have real enemies...

...Henceforth, it was said, Presidential positions would be aired with candor, in refreshing contrast to the rococo Texas style...

...ground operations in Vietnam and adopted a defensive stance based on sheltered American enclaves...

...But as matters stand today, Hanoi would probably demand that the U.S...

...But the incident must have fused in his mind the twin strands of conspiracy????one the press, the other the bureaucracy ????further isolating him and his tiny loyal band of servants in the capital...

...Either way, a little dog-and-pony show is performed for top-ranking news executives, who are informed, in a manner of speaking, about the state of the nation and the world...

...Because of this step, weekly casualties, which used to run in the hundreds, are down to a handful of men...

...Third, as the fighting has wound down and troop levels fallen, there has been a sharp proportional decline in the number of draftees being sent to Vietnam...

...The President is letting the generals have their way, so long as their tactical response does not frustrate his basic plans...

...When Nixon took office, more than a half-million Americans were fighting in Vietnam...

...also halt military and economic aid to the Thieu regime...

...The pullout is irreversible policy...

...W. Averell Har-riman, who was negotiating with the Communists in Paris at the time, thinks the chances of striking such a bargain in 1969 or even 1970 were excellent...

...One of the few members of the Nixon inner circle who consents to brief reporters on these matters, provided no one learns of it, thinks that by March, when the President has returned from Peking, Chinese envoys will be seeking answers to these questions from Hanoi...

...Richard Nixon gave up on the national press 20 years ago...

...Fifth, the President would like to prevent a pro-Communist government from taking power in Saigon...

...He sincerely imagines the bureaucratic woods to be full of crypto-Demo-crats who want to give him plenty of time after January 20, 1973, to raise funds for a Presidential library and have his portrait painted by Andrew Wyeth...

...The President seems to feel that his approach is too complex to be presented honestly to the public...

...By the time the Republican party is ready to renominate him in San Diego, the troop level will be down to 50-60 thousand men, or a tenth of the troops that were in Indochina when he took office...

...as the last captive comes out, the last soldier flies home...

...If Hanoi takes the offer, for at least a good part of the time the television networks should swing their cameras away from the Democratic Presidential candidate to focus their attention on the prisoners, whom the man in the White House, through coolness and courage, succeeded in reuniting with their loved ones...

...He could go so far as to pledge a withdrawal of all U.S...

...In the final scene of this Republican political scenario, a grateful electorate responds appropriately at the polls...

...Fourth, Nixon has sought to avoid any showdown with his military commanders, either in the field or within the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...Toward the end of the briefing Klein, whose title is Director of Communications for the Executive Branch, is apt to communicate the thought that, yes, indeed, isn't it too bad that your Washington people don't report these things...

...Nixon, however, has never mastered the art of juggling all the disparate and even contradictory elements of his policy for a critical audience, let alone on national television...

...aid, both in form and in quantity, with a reciprocal limit on the amount of military aid they receive from the Russians and Chinese...

...Under Nixon, the White House is bigger than ever and more efficiently run, but accurate information about what is really going on remains hard to come by...

...Seeing himself as a hostage in an enemy encampment, Nixon occasionally tries to outflank his tormentors...

...Lyndon Johnson regarded newsmen the way an indulgent tyrant might regard an unfaithful mistress ????ever prone to seduction by troublemakers outside his court, yet loved all the same...

...The saddest aspect of the CBS performance is that the President and his chief foreign policy architect, Henry Kissinger, have managed to formulate a rational strategy toward Asia that seems to be working, against difficult odds...

...This Nixon is not prepared to do, since he thinks it would lead to the collapse of the government in Saigon...