VIETNAM: THE NEXT STEP
PROGRESSIVE Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' Vietnam: The Next Step United States policy toward the war in Vietnam seemed to undergo a significant change during the...
...It was their insistence on a policy that emphasized negotiation—often expressed in the face of cries of "appeasement" and "soft on Communism"— that moved a consensus-minded President to reverse his position...
...It is the NLF that has rallied a considerable segment of the peasantry to its revolutionary banner...
...The "heartbeat of the war," he said, is the "trained men and supplies, orders, and arms [that] flow in a constant stream from north to south...
...This strikes us as highly imprecise history...
...President Johnson's failure to recognize this underlying character of the conflict in South Vietnam showed up in what was for us an equally disturbing portion of his Johns Hopkins speech...
...Disappointed as we are that he did not include it in his original declaration that unconditional negotiation was our national goal, we think that there may be even more merit in announcing now, as a second step in our peace offensive, a cessation of the bombings for whatever period seems desirable...
...These are significant gains in the pursuit of a more creative American policy...
...The President's decision to accentuate the positive came only after public opinion in the United States and throughout the world had rolled up a compelling demand for negotiations, as The Progressive emphasized last month in this space...
...It is the NLF that has waged war against the government of South Vietnam...
...Surely, if we believe in the Geneva accords, as the President indicated we do, we must make it clear that we favor a free election, under international auspices, to permit the unification of North and South Vietnam if that is the will of the people...
...But he did not seem to think that this amounted to much...
...But so great had become the national yearning for some sign of moral purpose in our handling of this baffling war that most of the critics of past policy abandoned their critical faculties altogether...
...The Geneva accords of 1954 stipulated that there be free elections in North and South Vietnam in 1956, but the late dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, with the blessing of the United States, refused to permit the elections, in large measure because it was feared left-wing forces would win...
...In his plea for "unconditional discussions," Mr...
...Johnson did not say...
...We are there because we have a promise to keep...
...For this reason the change in policy deserved the great chorus of hallelujahs that greeted its appearance...
...Such a step would provide a meaningful follow-up of what was best in the Johns Hopkins speech and make evident to the world, and to ourselves, how much we meant what the President said...
...The fact is, however, that he proclaimed this position for the first time in the speech in which he pretended it was an old story...
...No peace settlement would be worth the paper on which it is written unless it has the approval of the NLF, and there is no hard evidence NLF could be blackjacked by Hanoi or Peking into accepting a settlement of which it did not approve...
...But long before this "constant stream" appeared, and at a time that it was achieving even greater success than it is now, the Vietcong, using methods ranging from terror to propaganda, was mobilizing sentiment in the countryside in behalf of social revolution—and among many peasants and workers who had never heard of Marx and wanted no part of Communism...
...During its entire course they have been ruled by ruthless dictatorships and a succession of military juntas that have denied them the most elementary rights of a free society, most of all the right to choose their own government...
...We had hoped he would call for an immediate cease-fire to provide a cooling-off period in which both sides could think calmly of negotiations, relieved of their present preoccupation with the next military reprisal...
...our emphasis...
...The continuance of that pressure now might be equally effective in achieving the next vital step—a cessation of bombing as a preliminary to the cease-fire that must precede negotiations...
...Johnson said: "We have stated this position over and over again—fifty times and more—to friend and foe alike...
...Most of the reports reaching us from Hanoi indicate that after three months of bombing, the predictable result has been to harden the position of Ho Chi Minh's regime and to move it closer to the intransigence of Communist China...
...This strikes us as ambiguous, to say the least...
...Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Vietnam . . . Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence...
...And there was much the President said in his Johns Hopkins speech that we want to applaud, as we indicated at the outset of these comments...
...His announcement of a vast TVA type of economic development program for Southeast Asia, with North Vietnam invited to participate, added an affirmative ingredient to what has been largely a negative policy in that region...
...We were troubled, too, by the President's insistence, in one portion of his speech, on an "independent Vietnam," which would seem to rule out reunification with North Vietnam, and his acceptance elsewhere of the freedom of South Vietnam to decide its own future without outside interference...
...His description of the project as a multi-national program with United Nations supervision provided new emphasis to an old dimension in the planning of economic aid...
...The people of South Vietnam have had nothing at all to say about the war...
...There was much that made great sense in President Johnson's address at Johns Hopkins University, and in the subsequent formal White House reply to the seventeen nonaligned nations that had petitioned the United States, and the Communist nations involved, for unconditional negotiation of the conflict in Vietnam...
...His only reference to this hard and uncomfortable fact of life in South Vietnam came when he said, somewhat impatiently, that "of course, some of the people of South Vietnam are participating in an attack on their own government...
...We emphasize this again because we believe it will hearten the countless Americans out in the country and those in the Congress who dared speak up, in their various ways, for a more affirmative policy...
...We were disturbed most of all by the President's failure to recognize the indigenous character of the revolution that has been sweeping South Vietnam...
...It is against this background that we express the gravest concern over President Johnson's exclusion of the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Vietcong guerrillas, from any hoped-for peace negotiations...
...These critical reflections on some of the things the President did say are matched by our deep concern over what Mr...
...It was their petitions that were heeded at long last—if only up to a point...
...They represent a victory of the people over the Pentagon, and, indeed, over the President...
...Holding out, as it did, the offer of unconditional negotiations, and emphasizing, as well, economic alternatives to continued warfare, it was a hopeful and refreshing change—one that thawed the glacial inflexibility that had characterized our course for a decade...
...His call for a negotiated settlement with no prior conditions was the opening of a long-closed door...
...Today, the government in Saigon commands the loyalty of no more than thirty per cent of the populace, with the remaining seventy per cent opposed to the war, indifferent to its outcome, or committed to the Vietcong...
...Responding to a growing demand to explain our role in Vietnam, he said: "Why are we in South Vietnam...
...Surely the continuation of the bombings remains a serious roadblock to peace negotiations, and presents the greatest danger of a widening of the war...
...We had hoped, too, that the President would announce a moratorium on the bombing of North Vietnam for two weeks, three weeks, or a month as dramatic evidence of our desire to make negotiation more tolerable and face-saving for the government of North Vietnam...
...But there were aspects of both presentations—and they were much alike—that disturbed us as well...
...Almost every thoughtful observer who has seen the struggle firsthand reports that if a towering wall were built between North and South Vietnam and the "constant flow" of aid from the North were stopped, the revolution of the South Vietnamese would go on—so great are their social and economic grievances and so deep is their rejection of the military dictatorship that rules them...
...It is still not too late for President Johnson to proclaim this breather on bombing...
...PROGRESSIVE Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' Vietnam: The Next Step United States policy toward the war in Vietnam seemed to undergo a significant change during the past month...
Vol. 29 • May 1965 • No. 5
