THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

...Johnson who insists on doing all the talking...

...Five days might be enough to circulate preliminary papers among the interested ministries in Moscow, but not enough has attached a fatal condition: He will not discuss a settlement or negotiate with the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Vietcong, which is the very force that is waging the civil war against the ever-changing government of South Vietnam...

...Part of our problem in Vietnam derives from the poor fighting qualities of the South Vietnamese forces—a fact long whispered privately in Washington and only now beginning to see public print...

...Secretary-General, called for immediate negotiations and announced he had presented "concrete ideas and proposals" to "some of the principal parties directly involved," including the United States, his proffer of good offices was met with a harsh and derisive response from the Johnson Administration...

...Aggressive forces in the Pentagon are demanding that the bombing of North Vietnam be extended to include the Hanoi-Haiphong area...

...America's allies read in it evidence not of forthrightness and vigor but of ham-handed lack of knowledge of how the world runs...

...One of the prime purposes of the bombings, we were told at the time, was to "persuade" Hanoi to quit fighting and start talking...

...The situation is charged with explosive possibilities for the United States and all the world...

...The South Vietnamese troops were conscripted by their government of the moment to fight to preserve a system and a way of life they find intolerable...

...Is it, then, too much to ask, as twenty-eight liberal Democratic members of the House of Representatives have, that before we go rushing on to further disaster, we pause to consider where we are and where we are going...

...They are caught up in a world they didn't make and a war they didn't want and don't understand...

...Their hearts are not in the struggle and the rates of draft evasion and desertion are strikingly high...

...There has been precious little debate in Congress on the underlying issues, problems, and prospects of the war in Vietnam...

...Polaris submarines are standing at firing stations off the coasts of Communist China and Eastern Russia...

...President Johnson, to be sure, is forever summoning members of the Senate and House to the White House to discuss the crisis with him, but as just about every one of them has confided privately afterwards, it is Mr...

...Two weeks would have made sense...

...Men fight best, said a philosopher several centuries ago, when they have ideas at the end of their bayonets...

...When U Thant, U.N...

...The step-by-step exfor a decision at the top...

...Moreover, it is our policy of bombing North Vietnam, according to just about every neutral and pro-American diplomat in Moscow, that led the Soviet Union to abandon its earlier pursuit of a peaceful settlement and, instead, provide Hanoi with jet bombers and rocket missiles...

...Joseph C. Harsch, senior European correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, surveyed opinion on the continent among our warmest allies, and came up with this judgment: "Anyone familiar with Soviet and other varieties of Communist life knows that places like Moscow and Peking cannot react that fast to initiatives taken in other places...

...It seems to us a tragic commentary on our professed commitment to peace in Vietnam and our avowed devotion to the United Nations that the people are not allowed to know, three months afterward, what U Thant's "concrete ideas and proposals" were-—and perhaps still are...

...By refusing to acknowledge that the NLF as well as Hanoi is a party, if not the principal party, in the conflict, the Johnson Administration hardens the determination of the rebels to continue their successful guerrilla operation against the government of South Vietnam...

...Since then he has done nothing at all—or, at any rate, nothing he cares to share with Congress and the country—to implement that position or invoke the machinery of enforcement created by those Geneva accords...

...Certainly, given the hard facts of life as they are in Vietnam and the deepening frustration here at home, this is the least we can do before we race past the point of no return...

...participation in the conflict...

...bombers...

...We are trying to win a political war with military weapons, and trying to do this as the political heirs to white colonialism in Asia...

...Failure of a response after five days is meaningless...

...The Soviet machine is slow and cumbersome...

...This, in turn, has boosted morale in North Vietnam and made Hanoi even less willing to consider negotiation than it had been before...

...The relentless escalation of the conflict has underscored, too, the harsh fact that for the United States the moment of truth, so long obscured for many Americans by official distortion and deception, has now emerged in plain view...

...It may be argued, as the Johnson Administration has argued endlessly, that the United States has done everything possible to secure a peaceful solution but that our efforts have been spurned by the Communists in Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow...

...Our ambassador to South Vietnam, General Maxwell D. Taylor, said recently, after conferring with the Administration in Washington, that the bombings have "accomplished exactly what was intended...

...Escalation reached its moment of truth last month when the State Department casually revealed—and the White House lamely confirmed—that we are now committing American troops to "combat support" with South Vietnamese forces —a step which puts us into a land war on another continent, an action grave enough in itself, and only intensified in its gravity by the implications of pitting white Americans against colored Asians...

...Item: On March 25, President Johnson asserted that "we seek no more than a return to the essentials of the [Geneva] agreements of 1954...

...As for military results of our bombing policy, it hardly seems likely that it has "accomplished exactly what was intended" when we examine a Pentagon admission, reported recently by the Associated Press, that North Vietnam "has been able to get certain key bridges back into use only weeks after they were blasted by U.S...

...Secretary of State Dean Rusk's role seems to have been reduced to a ritualistic intonation of amen, and United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson's contribution seems hardly more substantial these days...

...And the end is by no means in sight...

...The Johnson Administration has been steadily escalating the war for the past four months...

...James Reston of The New York Times noted recently, for example, that "the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese army is far more disappointing than any official has dared admit in public...

...It was the decision, four months ago, to bomb North Vietnam that triggered the current escalation...

...Consider these facts: Item: We did, indeed, suspend the bombing of North Vietnam for five days as a token of our hopes for a peaceful settlement, but five days add up to a pitifully inadequate gesture...

...It is callous, to say the least, to ask them to support a diplomatic operation of great delicacy and then pull the carpet from under them by resuming bombing without having given them either the time to carry out the assignment or get out of the way...

...The premise is that the main source of the Vietcong's strength lies in North Vietnam...

...Item: For all his talk about "unconditional discussions," the President pansion of hostilities is almost always preceded and followed by peace-loving speeches by the President...

...Again, Joseph Harsch: "This episode has had a deeply disturbing effect upon the Allies...

...Item: President Johnson was so eager to end the five-day moratorium on bombing that he did not bother to notify the very allies on whom he had counted to interpret his bombing truce to the Communists...

...This argument, however, does not stand up under searching examination...

...Item: President Johnson has spoken eloquently of the compelling worth of the United Nations, but he has stubbornly refused to seek its services as an agent for mediation, conciliation, and negotiation in the war in Vietnam...

...But ten long years of experience argue powerfully that it is the people of South Vietnam who provide the climate in which the Vietcong continue to thrive despite enormous military efforts to subdue them...

...Such a debate might remind Congress that under the Constitution the decision to make war rests with it, and not the President...

...Louis Post-Dispatch put its finger on the heart of the problem when it recently said editorially: "Does it never occur to anyone in Washington that the bombing of North Vietnam is a failure because its basic premise may be mistaken...

...The twenty-eight Congressmen have called for public hearings on the whole Vietnam situation so that we may have something resembling democratic discussion, debate, and decision before the crisis runs even farther beyond our control...

...As Senator George McGovern, South Dakota Democrat, put it, this is "not only an undeclared war, but an unexplained, undiscussed, undebated war...

...The St...

...The best-informed of the Washington correspondents have been unanimous in reporting that the great decisions of war-or-peace and life-or-death are resolved by a tiny coterie of Presidential intimates limited to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, the President's arrogant assistant for security affairs, and his brother William Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs...

...The question confronting the country is simply this: Do we ride our present escalation policy to its logical conclusion—full-scale land war in Asia— or do we pause at this fateful moment to make a supreme effort to achieve a cease-fire as a preliminary to a negotiated settlement...

...This strikes us as an astonishing bit of nonsense...

...PROGRESSIVE Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' The Moment of Truth The ominous developments in Vietnam during the past month have served notice on the nation that the situation there is racing out of control...

...It is against this background that the Johnson Administration has been expanding U.S...

...Public hearings, followed by full-scale Congressional debate, would cost us little if we are the great democracy we say we are, and they might well provide creative insights and new directions to replace threadbare policies that have manifestly failed...

...American forces in Vietnam were tripled in four months, and they will be increased again—to at least 100,000 men—before the year ends...

...But this is not surprising, and it is by no means a reflection on the innate courage of the South Vietnamese soldiers...

...Congress could demand that the Administration suspend bombing long enough to encourage worldwide pressure on Hanoi for peace and create the climate needed to permit a sincere exploration of the prospects for a negotiated settlement...

...But the North Vietnamese are farther from the conference table than they were in March...

...Far from inducing them to talk, the bombings seem to have strengthened their determination to fight on—a result that was readily predictable on the basis of bombing-raid experience in World War II...