VIETNAM : THE VIEW FROM THE UNITED NATIONS
GRANT, DONALD
Vietnam: The View from the United Nations by DONALD GRANT United Nations, N.Y. T ooking back over the twenty-year history of the United Nations one cannot think of a time when the United States...
...Stevenson, who had been involved in that tawdry exercise in frustration, told a part of the story to Eric Seva-reid...
...Ky promptly announced he had no intention of negotiating a peace with the National Liberation Front...
...When the opportunity came it proved slippery to the grasp...
...Not only was this peace hope thereby ended quite effectively, but the whole channel of communication —Washington, United Nations, Moscow, Hanoi—was poisoned...
...All this may have its uses on television and in the political precincts, but among the U.N...
...In the United Nations, skepticism of American intentions is widespread...
...The policies which isolate our nation are not, on the other hand, the product of evil, scheming men, but of timid politicians, not so much ignorant of history as obsessed by fears arising out of false historical analogies...
...policy with any conviction...
...Johnson's public "image...
...The non-aligned nations find themselves trying to decide which set of policies is less repugnant...
...In 1964, U.N...
...Of course that agreement would bar foreign troops and weapons from South Vietnam, and it also provides for an election "which will bring about the unification of Vietnam," to quote from the Geneva documents...
...Last November the former mayor of Florence, Italy, Giorgio La Pira, went to Hanoi where he held a long conversation with North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh and others, including leaders of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam...
...This leaves only Nationalist China —Chiang Kai-shek's delegation from Taiwan—among the permanent members of the Security Council supporting U.S...
...Two versions of the Ho-La Pira conversation reached Goldberg, one of them through Amintore Fanfani, the small, round foreign minister of Italy who also was president of the United Nations General Assembly...
...Getting the question inscribed on the agenda was a tragi-comic cliff-hanger...
...I remained—and remain—unconvinced that the Johnson Administration responded positively to the Ho-La Pira peace feeler...
...The non-aligned nations are opposed to U.S...
...As President Johnson now backs his puppet, Ky, so de Gaulle at first tried to set up his own pet Algerians as symbols of a spurious "self-determination...
...Supreme Court and following in the footsteps of the late Adlai E. Stevenson, Goldberg tackled his new job with the warm smile of confidence...
...In Hanoi, he later reported, La Pira was told by Ho that should the United States order "a unilateral cease-fire, including cessation of all bombing," Ho Chi Minh "will be at the negotiating table the next day...
...T ooking back over the twenty-year history of the United Nations one cannot think of a time when the United States has been so isolated in the world organization as it now is on the issue of Vietnam...
...Nor have I found the subsequent "peace offensive"—even including the thirty-seven-day pause in the bombing of North Vietnam—convincing...
...With equal facility, Goldberg realized that effective peace actions by the Security Council depended on Soviet-American cooperation...
...In the case of the war between India and Pakistan he achieved that, with spectacular results...
...Fanfani was presiding over the General Assembly when a note was passed to him informing him that the correspondence would be made public in a few minutes...
...This touched the political nerve-center of the White House, and the reaction was instantaneous...
...The idea was that backstage consultations might turn up something—but in the midst of such consultations the great Hawaiian spectacular took place...
...members, in and out of the Council, the United States can always pick up some support from dependencies here and there, mostly in Latin America...
...The American disregard, and even public disapproval, of Thant's earlier peace efforts are naturally better known inside the United Nations than outside...
...The political embarrassment for President Johnson was considerable...
...Obviously my own doubts are shared by some members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including its chairman, Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas...
...Within hours after Rusk's note reached Hanoi the United States bombed the Haiphong power station...
...It would seem to be high time that Goldberg started to talk sense to the American President, and in terms that Mr...
...In the international community that is the United Nations the voice of the former liberal labor lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg now gives a muffled and distorted sound...
...Unfortunately, the once-powerful collective voice of the non-aligned nations in the United Nations recently has had an uncertain sound...
...They can find some justification for Mr...
...Hanoi accepted the suggestion...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...Rusk then wrote a note to Fanfani for transmission to Hanoi...
...Secretary of State Dean Rusk's shield —with hawks rampant—is a policy under which, he hopes, no one can accuse him of having "lost Southeast Asia to Communism" as the McCar-thyites accused his mentor, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in the case of China...
...On the contrary, as America "stood the test" in Korea, so will the present Administration hold the ramparts in Vietnam, while President Johnson, fortified by another prayerful session with Billy Graham, studies yet one more rumpled clipping of the latest public opinion poll...
...Among other U.N...
...I do not know with what frankness, or lack of it, Goldberg tells President Johnson what the world's diplomats in the United Nations are saying about the American policy in Vietnam...
...military assistance, and in the end Jordan found itself able to vote with the United States in the Council...
...diplomats whose assignment is making peace and keeping it, this American posture—at the least—lacks dignity and reality...
...But it so happened that the government of Jordan was negotiating for U.S...
...As far as diplomacy goes the episode ended there, tragically...
...among the American voices which were heard in protest against French action in Algeria was that of a Senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy...
...Washington's rival hawking center, Peking, seems as capable of counterproductive diplomacy as the White House itself...
...Similarly, after the bombing of the Haiphong power station had ended the peace hope arising out of the Ho-La Pira conversation, someone "leaked" the story of that episode to Richard Dudman of The St...
...policy in Vietnam...
...Louis Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau, who promptly wrote it for his newspaper...
...But from the outset it was obvious that the true test of Goldberg would come on the Vietnam issue...
...The voice of sense and conscience reached across national boundaries on the Algerian issue as it does now on the Vietnamese issue: French voices are heard today...
...He quickly convinced President Johnson, and key members of Congress, that the policy should be changed to allow the paralyzed Assembly to function normally...
...delegates—begins to take the place of the watchful respect with which the chief American delegate, Arthur J. Goldberg, was greeted after his first vigorous forays in diplomacy...
...French opinion, under de Gaulle's leadership, agreed that peace was preferable...
...In retrospect one can view the "Fanfani affair" only as a scandal of diplomatic ineptitude, compounded by Madison Avenue style diplomatic spectaculars...
...If a Security Council debate was not indicated during the bombing pause, many diplomats found President Johnson's action positively grotesque in linking an order to resume the bombings with his direction to Goldberg to place the Vietnam issue before the Council...
...La Pira, a strange mystic of the political left, maintains useful relations with Italian politicians, and is a welcome Vatican visitor...
...As a saddened spectator I watched the metamorphosis of Goldberg, the man who had stepped down from the Supreme Court bench to find peace in Vietnam, to Goldberg, Mr...
...It was a weasel-worded document...
...De Gaulle had his own "Pentagon problem," to say the least, in his struggles against the French generals who wanted to hold on to Algeria at any cost...
...In response to a call from one of Goldberg's aides I canceled a dinner engagement that evening to engage in a fruitless private exchange with Goldberg over the Administration's role in the whole affair...
...While the United States has been busy dropping Belgian paratroopers into the Congo, invading the Dominican Republic, and sabotaging the Geneva accords of 1954 (Vietnam) and 1962 (Laos) in Southeast Asia, China has not been idle...
...He blanched visibly...
...After Stevenson died, Sevareid included it in an article published in Look magazine, and for reasons never explained the facts were verified by the State Department...
...Behind the facade of official London pronouncements supporting the United States, seasoned British diplomats find the American position a subject of sadness...
...At about the time word of the American rejection reached Hanoi, through Thant and the Russians, the United States began bombing North Vietnam...
...after nearly five months of silence Washington rejected it...
...Goldberg obviously felt that the good faith of American diplomacy— and of the President of the United States—was at stake and, indeed, was to say as much in public in the frenzied days that followed...
...What followed was something else...
...Johnson's attorney for the defense...
...As Thant has pointed out more than once, the absence of representatives of Peking is the greatest single liability of the United Nations as a peacemaker in Vietnam...
...Goldberg's performance in reaction to the Dudman story I found astounding...
...the French people a choice between a Gallic version of the "Great Society" and a continuation of an idiotic war...
...In the end, de Gaulle presented to...
...The Sino-Soviet split has added complications to the task of non-aligned diplomacy...
...Johnson cannot ignore...
...Goldberg passed the peace feeler on to President Johnson with the recommendation that this time it should not be ignored...
...peacekeeping operations, a policy which attempted last year to deprive nations, including France and the Soviet Union, of their votes in the General Assembly...
...Taking the question to the Security Council was supposed to prove that the Administration will do anything to get peace in Vietnam...
...Johnson's actions if they are intended to cover a retreat from an untenable position in Vietnam, but if—as some of the British suspect—the United States actually contemplates a major war against China "to stop Communism in Asia," the problem seems to these well-bred diplomats chiefly one of diagnosing the madness in Washington...
...French intellectuals—Jean-Paul Sartre's brilliant essay, "Hitler Was Only a Forerunner," comes to mind—played a respectable role in helping the French nation reach that point of health...
...The Johnson Administration, and Goldberg, had become terribly sensitive to the charge that they were un-receptive to peace, while escalating the war—in which more and more American boys were being killed...
...Realizing that further debate was useless, Goldberg then engineered an indefinite postponement of further meetings...
...If I received a dinner invitation like that I wouldn't accept," one diplomat told me...
...In an effort to prove that this particular peace feeler had not been rejected outright, the secret diplomatic correspondence between Fanfani and Rusk was released to the press, both in Washington and in New York...
...Goldberg, in all this, was still acting as the attorney for the defense— of Mr...
...Goldberg held a press conference in which he implied—though he was careful not to say so directly—that peace had been frustrated by The St...
...Not even in Washington is it claimed that this is the loneliness of moral grandeur...
...Coming to the United Nations from the high vantage point of the U.S...
...Scornful skepticism—expressed in bitter jest by U.N...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...Among diplomats in this peace group one hears repeatedly that there is a parallel between Vietnam in the 1960s and Algeria in the 1950s...
...Secretary General U Thant suggested to Hanoi and to Washington that representatives of the two governments meet in Rangoon to see if a road to peace could be found...
...Still, in any positive action to end the Vietnam war the non-aligned nations probably will play an important part—along with that unusual troika, President Charles de Gaulle in Paris, the Pope in Rome, and U Thant in New York...
...American policy keeps Peking out: Goldberg was especially vigorous in opposing representation by Communist China at last fall's General Assembly session...
...Thant had opposed bringing the Vietnam issue to the Security Council because he felt it more likely to inflame passions than to lead to peace...
...The mediating force of the non-aligned nations, summoned by Pope Paul VI to help end the war in Vietnam, has come to represent something like a balance of negatives...
...What is the position of the five permanent members of the Council...
...No great power has ever had so difficult a time on what normally is a simple procedural question...
...Indeed, he told friends that he had been willing to step down from the Supreme Court only because he believed he might be useful in achieving peace in Vietnam...
...There is a similar intellectual ferment in the United States today on the Vietnam question: from the teach-ins, the peace marches, the growing protests of the clergy, and the floun-derings of the New Left on across the spectrum to the careful testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by George F. Kennan...
...Only after six years of bloodletting and hard-bought realization of reality did peace come through negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front following de Gaulle's return to power in 1959...
...The French and the Russians have a simple formula, which also happens to be Ho Chi Minh's formula and which has the blessing of U Thant as well: Let us go back to the 1954 Geneva agreement and see if it can be made to work...
...Having alienated India by a senseless border war, Peking has jolted much of Africa into active opposition by its crude machinations and more recently has managed to antagonize Indonesia—and even Cuba...
...He grasped at once the absurdity of the American policy on financing DONALD GRANT is the United Nations correspondent for the St...
...That pretty well took care of the backstage consultations at the United Nations...
...One would hope that Goldberg did not step down from the Supreme Court only to allow himself to be backed into the same corner in which Stevenson was so tragically trapped—defending policies in public with which he was in profound private disagreement...
...President Johnson embraced South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the young man who said his real hero is Adolf Hitler...
...The necessary nine votes were lacking, at the outset...
...More importantly, in his conversation with La Pira, Ho had stated explicitly that any air strike in the Haiphong-Hanoi area would end the possibility of peace talks...
...British policy is less clear...
...The American formula, endlessly repeated by Goldberg, is for discussions "on the basis of the Geneva accords," which is something different...
...Not only was this implication totally without justification, but some of the basic "facts" disclosed by Goldberg, fed to him by the White House, were in error...
...It has never recovered from the loss of Indian leadership...
...He would bide his time, Goldberg said: If the opportunity arose he would seize it...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
