U THANT'S PATH TO PEACE
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" U ThanVs Path to Peace /??? man alone, President Johnson has suggested, controls the destiny of America and the peace of...
...The Vietcong's National Liberation Front in the South has an annual budget estimated at about ten million dollars...
...But two persons with excellent sources of information did not agree on the outcome of the Ronning probe for peace...
...Shortly before the most recent escalation, Chester Ronning, a high-ranking Canadian diplomat with excellent contacts in Asia, journeyed to Hanoi to determine the prospects for a negotiated settlement...
...Upside Down With the bombing of targets on the outskirts of Hanoi and Haiphong, it [the Johnson Administration] has now done almost everything it said or indicated it would not do except bomb China, and the end of this melancholy chapter in American history is not yet...
...man alone, President Johnson has suggested, controls the destiny of America and the peace of the world...
...Our annual costs in this war run to about fifteen billion...
...Aware that Washington and Saigon regard Hanoi's Four Points as representing complete surrender and that Hanoi dismisses Washington's Fourteen Points as a total fraud, Thant came forward again with the Three Points which, he is convinced from his vantage post as the neutral chief of the United Nations, "alone can create conditions conducive to the holding of a conference and conducive to the creating of conditions for a peaceful settlement of the problem in Vietnam...
...Johnson was on shaky ground...
...The enemy needs an estimated eighty-seven tons of supplies each day...
...Immediately after his return the Johnson Administration passed the word to the press that the Ronning mission was a complete failure, and the President proceeded to order the bombing of the oil storage depots in Hanoi and Haiphong...
...U Thant has been steadfast these many months in his pursuit of a peaceful solution to the war he accurately described as "one of the most barbarous in history...
...On the scene in Hanoi, Raffaeli reached the same conclusion...
...The' President advanced this estimate of his role last month when he embarked on a strident, hard-sell campaign designed to justify his newest escalation of the runaway war in Vietnam...
...What if we accept and Hanoi says no...
...The gamble involved seems immeasurably slighter than the gamble of an expanded war in Asia that is involved in our present policy of escalation...
...Drawing on reports from his exceptional sources, Thant contended that North Vietnam's reaction to the newest peace overtures "was not an irrevocable rejection...
...It was not President Johnson but his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, who demanded escalation of the war and the bombing of North Vietnam in that campaign of 1964—and who was crushed in fortyfour states...
...Johnson that Section 8 of Article I of the Constitution vests the authority to declare war in Congress, not in the President...
...But at least give me something to talk from...
...bombing of North Vietnam...
...But we don't want to get tied down in a land war in Asia...
...And then he would add to the cheering throngs: "We are not going North...
...Johnson allowed, that man...
...It said it was there merely to help a legitimate government defend itself, and it has ended up by replacing a military clique that is not a government, not legitimate, and is not really defending itself...
...It was Mr...
...But there is only one that has been chosen by the American people to decide...
...Cabling Paris from the capital of North Vietnam, he reported that the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong came at just the time that North Vietnam was beginning to waver toward possible negotiations...
...But the direction has been distorted and the trust betrayed as the President has led the nation into a constantly escalating, open-ended conflict which may yet explode into the kind of Asian land war with Communist China against which he warned so often and so eloquently when he was seeking votes...
...Our official statement is that at the end of last year eight and a half per cent of the total land area was considered secure...
...Johnson emphasized the magnitude of his mandate and the nature of the choice on Vietnam the people had made when they elected him...
...Indeed the people gave him "a direction...
...This is the direction for which the American people voted so overwhelmingly two years ago...
...Johnson who stood solidly against the Goldwater position—and captured forty-four states...
...His efforts have been rebuffed by both sides but more harshly in recent months by the United States...
...Johnson's eager hands...
...But it is a direction precisely opposite from the one he is now pursuing...
...Like U Thant, the French observer felt the rejection of the Ronning proposals was not final and that before the bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong the leaders of North Vietnam "were being tempted for various reasons to seek a solution...
...I believe that their vote was a trust...
...Senator Vance Hartke, Indiana Democrat, in a memorable speech in the Senate, lauded Thant's struggle to achieve a peaceful settlement and then accurately appraised Thant's plight as peacemaker: "What he is saying to us is, ? am willing to help you...
...Here, too, Mr...
...Two—Reciprocal scaling down of all military activities in South Vietnam, leading to a cease-fire by both sides...
...Eric Sevareid CBS, June 21, 1966...
...The estimates of U Thant and Raf-faeli do not constitute hard evidence, to be sure, but given the Johnson Administration's dismal record of double-speak response to earlier overtures for a negotiated settlement, it is not difficult to suppose that both men, situated in their strategic positions, had some substantial basis on which to rest their convictions that the hope for negotiations had not collapsed altogether before the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong knocked out the last props, however feeble, on which that hope rested...
...Thant's Three Points strike us as a sound, practical, and reasonable approach to the problem of peacemaking...
...We are using giant sledgehammers to kill hornets...
...The Johnson Administration said it was not seeking a military solution to the war, and it is now obviously seeking precisely that...
...About eight million people, a bit over half the population, are in secure allied controlled areas...
...He is, Mr...
...In a speech on September 25, 1964, and many times thereafter in that campaign, the President said: "There are those who say I ought to go North and drop bombs to wipe out the supply lines...
...In terms of last year's total expenditure for the war, each enemy soldier killed last year cost us well over a million dollars...
...at the end of February nine and a half per cent...
...Speaking in Omaha just after the first American bombs fell along the edges of Hanoi and Haiphong, the Chief Executive said of his decision to extend the war: "Now, there are many, many, many who can recommend and advise and sometimes a few of them consent...
...the American establishment alone needs about twenty thousand tons a day...
...Give me the starting signal...
...Indeed the people voted Mr...
...Three—A willingness by all sides to enter into discussions with those who are "actually fighting"—in other words, American agreement to negotiate with the Vietcong's National Liberation Front as well as with North Vietnam...
...Shortly before President Johnson ordered the most recent escalation of hostilities, Thant, who has come to serve as the world's conscience, urgently renewed his plea for a settlement before the conflict would run out of control...
...the other was Jean Raffaeli, Hanoi correspondent for Agence France-Presses, the only Western correspondent on the scene in North Vietnam...
...In his emotional defense of his newest enlargement of the war, the President sought to assure the country and the world that he had diligently exhausted every prospect for peace before giving the signal for the new bombings...
...Give me something to indicate that you are willing to move forward with me.' " This is the heart of the challenge that confronts the United States today: to speed U Thant on his mission of peace by accepting his Three Points as the preliminary basis for negotiations...
...I am willing to go along and be the intermediary, if you wish me to be...
...Those conditions are: One—Unconditional cessation of U.S...
...In a campaign talk in Akron, Ohio, he outlined again the direction in which he proposed not to go...
...North Vietnam and the Vietcong greeted them with silence, which is at least faintly hopeful...
...The United States responded by escalating the war with the bombing of the oil storage depots in Hanoi and Haiphong...
...It did not seem to occur to Mr...
...Johnson "a majority" and gave him their "trust...
...U Thant, who has long sought to find common ground for a negotiated settlement, clashed head-on with the White House-State Department snap judgment that the peace mission had failed...
...U Thant's way should appeal especially, we would think, to a President who won the trust and accepted the direction of the people of America by promising: "We are not going North...
...James Reston The New York Times July 1, 1966 Sledgehammers and Hornets We are not really conquering territory in Vietnam...
...One was U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations...
...We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves...
...The bombings were a political error, he wrote, "arising from an underestimate of diplomatic possibilities that would lead to useful contacts over a period of time...
...all the rest is in enemy hands or disputed and unsafe, or empty...
...It was only twenty months ago," he pointed out, "that the people of America held a great national election and the people of forty-four states . . . gave me a direction and voted me a majority for the Presidency of this country...
...This is the trust they placed in Mr...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
