VIETNAM: A POLICY OF DECEIT
Lens, Sidney
Vietnam: A Policy of DECEIT by SIDNEY LENS HPhe first casualty of war, as United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reminded us recently, is truth. Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester...
...What is more, President Ho Chi Minh wanted a secret meeting with the United States representatives in September last year, and Burma would have been willing to act as host country...
...What counts for us," said Tran Van Tuyen, "is our people, who are suffering from the war, the women and children who are being murdered...
...Before it could do so, he said, there must be guarantees that North Vietnamese forces would withdraw and that U.S...
...And if it does that it must inevitably confront the issue of a coalition government including the Communists...
...headquarters reported that North Vietnam had advised the Secretary-General of its interest in his plan...
...When the election was over U Thant told us that Hanoi was still ready to talk but the United States' answer was a firm negative...
...We have been misled on Vietnam long enough," said conservative publisher John S. Knight recently...
...After the raids had continued for a few weeks, the persistent U Thant, on February 24, announced to a press conference his plan for a seven-power conference including the United States, China, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, France, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that the Administration should have withheld and then distorted news of overtures for a negotiated settlement of the war in Vietnam from the Communist government in Hanoi...
...When the United States began to bomb North Vietnam last February, SIDNEY LENS, a free lance writer and world traveler, has contributed articles to many publications in this country and abroad...
...Not only had Hanoi been ready to meet three months prior to the initiation of bombing, but it was the United States which had been stubbornly opposed to peace negotiations...
...What is even more distressing, few of the nation's newspaper editors, and and even fewer of the people's representatives in Washington ever demanded an accounting...
...After a trip abroad the deputy premier and Quat both were subjected to vigorous criticism by right-wing Vietnamese Catholics for their "neutralism" and for being "soft on Communism...
...McNamara has since denied that he was responsible...
...This clumsy statement raises more questions that it answers...
...it seems to insist on the permanence of a separate South Vietnam...
...I am reasonably sure that if the United States wanted to encourage "unconditional discussions" it could do so readily through some of the pacifists in South Vietnam itself...
...A key point in such discussions clearly is what kind of an interim government would take over when peace comes...
...What so many commentators have been saying is that the Administration has engaged in a game of duplicity...
...not demanding the prior withdrawal of U.S...
...It is noteworthy that Washington did not even disassociate itself from Ky's remarks in August or November, much less rebuke him publicly...
...On July 28, 1965, the President told the press that "we are ready to discuss their [North Vietnam's] proposals and our proposals and any proposals of any government whose people may be affected...
...Once it admits that the National Liberation Front and Hanoi are willing to talk, it must actually go to the bargaining table...
...According to Stevenson, as reported by Sevareid in Look (November 30, 1965), U Thant "had privately obtained agreement from authorities in North Vietnam that they would send an emissary to talk with an American emissary, in Rangoon, Burma...
...But until mid-November—more than a year after the event—the White House never saw fit to comment on peace overtures...
...headquarters in New York which reported: "It has become known here this weekend that Washington has cold-shouldered at least two opportunities for contacts with North Vietnam in the past two years...
...This ended the prospect of negotiations...
...At approximately the same time the Administration reacted negatively to efforts by both Britain and France to promote a settlement: "Other governments," said the White House, "conduct their policies as they see fit...
...They concluded that at last the United States was moving in the right direction...
...If so, what were they...
...But it was noted at the time that the new regime was releasing hundreds of prisoners who had been arrested for neutralism and pacifism, while incarcerating others—including heads of the military intelligence and counter-intelligence—who were extreme anti-Communists...
...But in June the United States withdrew support from the Quat regime and it fell...
...This was passed on to Washington, which waited two months before answering, and then, after the Presidential election, indicated that it was not interested...
...McCloskey is mute on these specific questions...
...By November 11 his mood was even tougher...
...the most recent one is "The Futile Crusade: Anti-Communism as American Credo...
...Finally Sevareid released the story of his last conversation with the U.S...
...The United States asserted that it did not "see any indication that . . . the Hanoi regime is prepared to stop trying to take over South Vietnam by violence...
...President Johnson had placed the United States in the incredible situation of unleashing bombing raids with the declared purpose of getting North Vietnam to the very bargaining table she had earlier offered to attend...
...But for Washington and its cold war theorists such a coalition means a defeat, for it means that the Communists have pierced "the line"—have taken a step outside the ring that the Pentagon has forged around it...
...So had other newspapers, as indicated by a report in the objective news summary, Facts on File...
...Tran Van Tuyen was accused of having consulted with neutralists, an allegation he denied...
...Johnson put it this way: "I must say that candor compels me to tell you that there has not been the slightest indication that the other side is interested in negotiations or in unconditional discussions, although the United States has made some dozen separate attempts to bring that about...
...In his press conference July 13, 1965, Mr...
...The question is, why would the Administration want to withhold the truth...
...McCloskey's bland explanations fly directly in the face of subsequent assertions by President Johnson himself...
...This is not the first time," wrote Jimmy Breslin of the New York Herald-Tribune, that "we have had facts concealed from us about Vietnam...
...Thant or any other government," the Johnson Administration said...
...Washington, backed up by French authorities, denied Schoenbrun's contention that there were no preconditions, insisting that Hanoi had merely reiterated its long-standing four-point proposal, which was unacceptable...
...On August 13, 1965, The Guardian of Manchester published a cable from its correspondent at U.N...
...The President has not authorized anyone to participate in negotiations...
...On February 25, just a day later, U.N...
...Emphasis added...
...I have stated publicly and many times, again and again, America's willingness to begin unconditional discussions with any government at any place at any time...
...There did seem to be such a move afoot in February, 1965, when after months of instability and protest demonstrations, a government came to office in Saigon headed by Premier Phan Huy Quat...
...As significant as the U Thant and Hanoi overtures were the efforts of non-Communist Vietnamese in South Vietnam to open peace negotiations...
...It also indicates that whatever the faults of the "other side" it has not been as unwilling to end the war as our officials indicate...
...He has no meaningful proposals before him...
...Given the present military and political relationship of forces in Vietnam there is no way of avoiding such a coalition...
...Given its present policy, the Johnson Administration has no alternative but to mislead its own citizens and to sacrifice some of them in a war that violates the spirit and the letter of the highest principles of American democracy...
...Hanoi was still willing to send its man...
...The obvious conclusion is that the United States would grasp at any straw to begin talks...
...It is now confirmed by the U.S...
...The Washington Post, two days later, reported that "The capital talks less of peace by negotiations and it is unanimously thankful that Hanoi did not opt for the conference table last winter when disaster, it is belatedly conceded, was on the military horizon...
...its purpose—as reported in The New York Times—was "to extract from North Vietnam an indication that it is ready to negotiate a truce...
...The New York Times had alluded to the peace feelers as early as February 26, and again in March...
...t Our ally, South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, has stated categorically that there can "never" be negotiations, and the United States has not disagreed...
...and that South Vietnam must remain "independent," thereby excluding the major issue of reunification from deliberations...
...Emphasis added...
...Even if this were true, the question remains why the United States did not make any specific counteroffers...
...Neither Rusk nor anyone else in Washington announced, what is now known, that North Vietnam indeed had made an overture...
...embassy apartment in London, the man from Illinois told Sevareid of the U.N...
...This was revealed five months later when the SANE representative in Washington, Sanford Gottlieb, who had met National Liberation Front and North Vietnam sources abroad, wrote in /. F. Stone's Weekly, ". . . the day before the end of the pause in the bombings of North Vietnam in May, the French government was approached by the North Vietnamese representatives in Paris with the request that the following message be transmitted to Washington: Hanoi was prepared to negotiate on the basis of the four points proposed by its foreign minister in April...
...Some of these men had discussed in detail terms for ending hostilities and they had believed the terms acceptable...
...Why had there been no such readiness earlier...
...troops...
...Robert J. McCloskey, State Department press officer, conceded that Sevareid's report of the offer was true...
...The United States, however, waited until March 9 and then told the world that it opposed the seven-nation conference...
...On August 13, 1965, The Guardian of Manchester carried a story on the same incident...
...The Washington claim that Hanoi still clung to its four points seems credible...
...William Beecher's commentary in the Wall Street Journal of October 14, 1965, is highly instructive...
...Circumstantial evidence would tend to indicate that they were at least preparing to do so...
...According to some versions of this report, Hanoi specified that it was...
...There is evidence of at least four other peace moves in the last two years that Washington seems to have rejected...
...Translated simply this means that the United States would "discuss" only after the Vietcong had retired from action...
...The second incident is obviously the same one referred to by Sevareid and Stevenson...
...Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester confirmed this aphorism when he contended a while ago that in the nuclear age the government finds it necessary on occasion to manipulate the news...
...Speaking before the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations on November 5, 1965, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs William P. Bun-dy castigated Hanoi for demanding "acceptance of the Communists in a coalition government"—a demand, he said, "which we reject...
...On April 7, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University, the President made an offer of "unconditional discussions...
...As The Progressive reported last month, he concluded a survey of official Washington opinion by noting that "by and large, Administration authorities no longer look to negotiations as the most likely way of ending the war in Vietnam...
...In the second case Washington waited for five weeks before delivering a negative reply...
...Its claim that it is willing to talk "unconditionally" is false, for it will not talk with the National Liberation Front...
...Sevareid was convinced that Stevenson had virtually made up his mind to resign...
...A few weeks later, David Schoen-brun, American radio commentator in Paris, made a similar disclosure...
...He is the author of a number of books on national and world affairs...
...Yet that is exactly what the United States evidently insists on: a government in South Vietnam without Communists...
...and it will not tolerate a coalition government with Communists...
...It has not yet been confirmed by any official source, though it is reasonable to assume—particularly in the light of The Guardian's general reputation and its accuracy on the 1964 events—that there may be something behind it...
...troops would remain until such a time as his government asked them to leave...
...If the authority for this revelation had not been so prominent a figure as Adlai Stevenson, or the vehicle not a magazine with the impact of Look's seven and a half million circulation, it is possible that the Administration might still not have confirmed the fact that there was a Hanoi offer to confer on a possible settlement and that it had been rebuffed...
...The pacifist strains in that city run deep, and since there are 7,000 Front members operating in the underground, contact and discussion between non-Communists and Communists is not exceptionally difficult...
...What was the "total evidence" available to the State Department...
...What is surprising is the extent and callousness of the deception...
...But as John Knight wrote, we are "preserving the freedoms of a little 'democracy' that is neither free nor democratic...
...In his version, Hanoi had laid down no preconditions whatever...
...The idea is so unrealistic as to be absurd...
...That Washington is actually disinterested in a settlement is hinted at in many reliable quarters...
...With the war expanding, U Thant offered to let the United States write the draft of a cease-fire...
...What purpose would it serve...
...in what we consider to be the best interests of the United States...
...An American official asked that the matter be postponed until after the Presidential election...
...The actual aim of American policy in Vietnam has been what it is everywhere else—to forge a military ring around the Communist world, particularly China...
...However, the 1963 proposal to end hostilities by establishing a "coalition neutralist government" is less easily verified...
...Did Hanoi or U Thant lay down impossible conditions...
...On April 2, 1965, James Reston of The New York Times noted that in 1964 "Ho Chi Minh indicated to the United Nations that he was interested in talking to the United States about a settlement in Vietnam...
...It would be like calling for the unity of the United States and Canada with Lester Pearson as President and an all-Canadian cabinet...
...When the election was over, U Thant again pursued the matter...
...State Department itself—and posthumously by Adlai Stevenson—that the opposite was true...
...The thin veneer of U.S...
...In its place came the government of Air Vice Marshal Nguen Cao Ky, whose outlook on negotiations is negative...
...By the time of Dienbien-phu we were paying seventy per cent of the French military costs, and, according to Roscoe Drummond and Gaston Coblentz, in their book Duel at the Brink, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had offered French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault three atom bombs to use on the Vietnamese people—obviously not to help them achieve independence, but to prevent it...
...Then in February the United States began bombing North Vietnam for the announced purpose of getting her to the bargaining table— the table at which the United States had refused to sit...
...Thirty million citizens of that unfortunate country, on both sides of the Seventeenth Parallel, are pawns in this game and many are being slaughtered to achieve America's—not their own—purposes...
...More recently, Business Week reported from Washington that "the prevailing mood in top policymaking circles is one of relief that the North Vietnamese are not suing for talks, now that the United States is in a stronger position...
...Its claim to having "always" been willing to talk things over is false...
...Someone in Washington insisted that this attempt be postponed until after the Presidential election...
...In an interview on August 31, 1965, Ky stated that his government was "not ready now" to enter into peace talks...
...This, too, was rejected by Washington...
...Was U Thant trying to "put something over...
...it therefore talks of defending Vietnamese independence and upholding democracy...
...peace pretensions might not have been cracked if it were not for Ambassador Stevenson's disenchantment, his private conversation with television commentator Eric Sevareid two days before his death in London, and Sevareid's subsequent publication in Look of "stories of negotiation efforts that were not then known to the public...
...Either Ky is out of step with the "unconditional discussions" theme of President Johnson, or the term "unconditional discussions" is being used by the American Administration as a euphemism for the "unconditional surrender" of the Vietcong and North Vietnam...
...The word in Saigon, too, was that if given the opportunity and a free hand certain Buddhists could reach a favorable agreement with the National Liberation Front...
...But it does not explain why the news that Hanoi had spoken through the French was withheld from the American people for half a year, and why no efforts had been made to pursue the matter...
...But under the new circumstances Washington was forced to say something, and what it did say was unhappily as suspicious as its role in the incident itself...
...This is the immoral objective that the Johnson Administration must hide from its own people...
...When the five days had passed, Americans were led to believe that Hanoi had remained silent, that it had taken no steps to establish contact with Washington...
...Months after the May pause in U.S...
...But there are two additional factors that must be taken into account...
...Stevenson was clearly unhappy with American policy in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic...
...Even assuming that the Johnson Administration were willing to bypass Ky and that its silence is solely a matter of protocol, the fact remains that there is a disturbing element in its offer of "unconditional discussions...
...Its willingness to "discuss" at all must be looked at skeptically, for, as The New York Times has said, "it has couched these statements in terms that indicated that the North Vietnamese would have to demonstrate sincerity by halting their aggression in the South...
...French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, after three days of talks in Washington, advised the press that he was reasonably sure that China and North Vietnam were ready to negotiate a neutral zone in Southeast Asia, free both of Chinese and American influence, but that the United States had rejected his suggestion to enter into negotiations on the subject...
...It seems that Hanoi was willing to discuss the establishment of a coalition neutralist government in Saigon after the fall of President Diem in 1963...
...It is definitely known that at the time U Thant had accelerated his peacemaking efforts and was also talking of a coalition government, though of a different kind...
...bombings, President Johnson stated on July 28 that along with our proposals and those of other nations he was "ready to discuss their proposals...
...But Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Adlai went on, flatly opposed the attempt...
...In the first case Washington did not respond at all...
...In September, 1964, Hanoi was willing to meet with the United States to discuss termination of hostilities...
...Ambassador...
...Were Quat and Tuyen actually negotiating with the National Liberation Front or with intermediaries abroad...
...We conduct our policies...
...Vietnam is one of the links in that chain, and the Administration does not intend to have a Communist breakthrough there—no matter what the wishes of the Vietnamese people...
...The only conceivable explanation is that there is a contradiction between the stated aims of the government and its real aims—a contradiction that would be exposed if it became clear that the United States does not really want a negotiated settlement...
...Actually he posed two conditions: that we would negotiate only with "governments," thereby excluding the National Liberation Front (Vietcong...
...The evidence indicates that Quat, who had opposed the tyranny of the Diem regime, was inclined—despite his vigorous anti-Communist statements—to chart a course toward peace...
...He saw the purpose of the Quat regime in these terms: "We will need several months to consolidate our regime, to create finally a national front including all Vietnamese nationalist currents, in order to build a real force capable of negotiating with the adversary on a footing of equality...
...Certainly it cannot be a security matter, for the adversary knows the full story...
...It needs the moral stance to hold popular support for hostilities...
...If the recent disclosures represented an unconfirmed incident, or if the incident were not surrounded by so many other mystifying circumstances, one might dismiss it as either a misunderstanding or an incomplete story...
...For many months thereafter most Americans believed that while the Johnson Administration was willing, even eager, to sit down at the bargaining table, the National Liberation Front and Hanoi were stubbornly opposed to peace talks...
...If we want to achieve a genuine victory—unification —then we must begin to annihilate all the capabilities of the Communists both north and south of the Seventeenth Parallel...
...This is an interesting commentary because, as the story unfolds, we learn that the United States evidently prevented one of the recent Saigon governments from initiating peace talks...
...Here again, the full story is not known, but in September, 1964, when I was in Saigon, I spoke to non-Communist political leaders who were in contact with the National Liberation Front...
...And far from working for the right of self-determination, the United States first injected itself into Vietnamese affairs on a large scale in 1950 to sustain French colonialism...
...The National Liberation Front and the Vietcong today control about two-thirds of the territory of South Vietnam and rule more than half the people...
...But the talk heartened many of his pro-peace critics both here and abroad...
...No government in South Vietnam since direct involvement by the United States in 1954 has been anything but a dictatorship, usually a military one...
...but that is less important than the indisputable fact that the Administration did turn down the offer...
...But the United States, he said, had refused to meet with Hanoi's representative as U Thant had proposed because "on the basis of the total evidence available to us, we did not believe at any time that North Vietnam was prepared for serious peace talks...
...Speaking in Seoul, South Korea, he stated that he would never bargain with the Communists...
...But according to Sevareid, reporting his talk with Stevenson, U Thant was willing to go so far out of his way to appease the United States that he later "made a remarkable suggestion: United States officials could write the terms of the cease-fire offer, exactly as they saw fit, and he, U Thant, would announce it in exactly those words...
...By May, with no word from Hanoi and under pressure from many neutral as well as friendly nations, the Johnson Administration decided to call a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam for five days, waiting, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, for a "signal" from Hanoi that it was ready to begin peace talks...
...Thus, if one puts together the bits and pieces, the picture begins to come into clearer focus: In late 1963 there was some effort to broaden the Saigon government—either initiated by U Thant or by Hanoi—as a means of moving toward peace...
...No wonder we have people parading through the streets [demonstrating] against the war...
...This war must be stopped...
...Sitting in a U.S...
...The contradiction stems from the fact that the Administration feels the need to affect a moral stance while pursuing an immoral war...
...Secretary-General's efforts to secure peace in the early autumn of 1964...
...Why did not the United States extend the moratorium on bombing while it probed further...
...On April 16, 1965, the influential Paris newspaper, Le Monde, published a significant interview with Quat's deputy premier, Tran Van Tuyen, another anti-Diemist who had been imprisoned by the late dictator...
...military involvement in Vietnam, voiced most vigorously by faculties and students on the nation's campuses, had at least an apparent tempering effect on the Administration...
...It would even precipitate a deal in South Vietnam between the Vietcong and the peace party...
...The White House, far from being conciliatory, was cold as ice: "There are no authorized negotiations under way with Mr...
...McCloskey does not say why this offer, too, was rebuffed, but in Walter Lippmann's column of April 29, 1965, there is a significant hint: "There is a compelling reason," Lippmann wrote, "why the Administration has rejected the proposal of a cease-fire and has substituted for it a proposal for 'unconditional discussions.' The compelling reason is that a cease-fire today would leave the Viet-cong with the upper hand in the eventual negotiations with Saigon and Washington...
...Any proposal to exclude them from the interim regime is thus not a proposal for negotiations but for surrender...
...The growing uneasiness of many Americans over increasing U.S...
...By 1952 we were boasting of having delivered the two-hundredth shipload of arms to the French to be used against Vietnamese aspirations for independence...
...We are ready now, as we always have been, to move from the battlefield to the conference table...
Vol. 30 • January 1966 • No. 1
