Mr. Nixon's Cruel Gamble
Editorial
Mr. Nixon's Cruel Gamble "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" One central fact emerges clearly from the barrage of rhetoric laid down in President Nixon's 180-page message...
...Nixon replied: "The proposal we had made is, of course, for a Southeast Asia settlement, one in which North Vietnamese troops —there are 40,000 approximately, as you know, in Cambodia...
...Nixon declared that he would beat Clifford's suggested timetable...
...A year ago, Mr...
...Nixon's Cruel Gamble "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" One central fact emerges clearly from the barrage of rhetoric laid down in President Nixon's 180-page message to Congress on the "State of the World" and in his March 4 news conference on foreign policy questions...
...The Nixon Administration, George Gallup wrote, "is facing the same crisis in public confidence regarding the Vietnam war that confronted President Johnson's Administration...
...We can recall the time, two decades ago, when Washington's experts were equally sure that China would not send troops into Korea, and we recall that they were wrong and that Americans and Koreans paid a bloody price for their miscalculation...
...Nixon was willing to contemplate the possibility of "neutrality or . . . unification of Vietnam if that is what the South Vietnamese people choose...
...Having asserted almost a year ago that Communist supply lines—and, therefore, the Communist military effort—would be crippled by the U.S.-South Vietnamese "incursion" into Cambodia, he now declares with equal certainty that the "incursion" into Laos "has very seriously damaged the enemy's ability to wage effective action against our remaining forces in Vietnam and assures even more the success of our troop withdrawal program...
...It is a one-package situation...
...When asked at his news conference about South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu's public threats to mount an invasion of North Vietnam, Mr...
...It cannot, except over a long period, end the war altogether...
...For the first time, the President acknowledged that his famous policy of "Vietnamization" may perpetuate the war rather than end it...
...They say, 'Comrade Khrushchev, look at this—the Americans are developing such and such a system.' I tell them there's no money...
...And, of course, there are 100,000 or so in South Vietnam...
...When Senator George McGovern voiced this fear a few weeks ago, Administration spokesmen swiftly and categorically dismissed the danger...
...I'm not going to go further than that...
...Frankly, I've had it up to here" Even if the most perilous potential consequence of the President's policy can be averted—the possible prologue to World War III—and all mankind must fervently hope that it will be, the fact remains that his course continues to exact an ever more grisly toll in Indochina...
...Nixon proposed a settlement based on "a mutual withdrawal of all non-South Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam and internationally supervised free elections...
...The President made this point even more explicit at a subsequent press conference, when he was asked whether, if all North Vietnamese troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam, the United States would still insist that American troops remain until the North Vietnamese also left Laos and Cambodia...
...The rest of us, however, cannot afford to countenance the deception...
...Still, if Vietnamization leads to perpetuating the war, it is not by our design but because the other side refuses to settle for anything less than a guaranteed takeover...
...Since then, the United States and its South Vietnamese mercenaries have carried the war into Cambodia and Laos, and now withdrawal from these nations, too, is declared to be a prerequisite for peace...
...It is all the more urgent, therefore, that we all do everything in our power to salvage what is left of America's...
...He has now fallen headlong into the same trap that ensnared his predecessor: He has come to believe his own propaganda about the war...
...The other significant shift from 1970 was in the President's hardened commitment to the perpetuation of the corrupt and dictatorial regime in Saigon...
...Today the President insists on maintaining an American client state in South Vietnam...
...It is a policy of indiscriminate aerial warfare and blind firepower on the ground that means death and destruction wholesale, not just body counts of enemy dead, but a slaughter of innocents—women and children and old people—villages destroyed, the earth ravaged, refugees in their miserable thousands wandering homeless and hungry...
...On two significant points the President's message stood in sharp contrast to his foreign affairs report of a year ago, and heralded a decided turn toward intransigence on the part of the United States...
...The same poll showed forty-six per cent disapproving (and only forty-one per cent approving) the President's handling of Vietnam...
...Now tell me, how is it with you...
...It is worth recalling that only two years ago, when former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford proposed the withdrawal of all American forces from South Vietnam, Mr...
...On June 19, 1969, the President expressed the hope that most American troops would be withdrawn by the end of 1970...
...That's how they wring money out of me...
...Having peddled the slogan of "Vietnamiza-tion" and the absurd notion that the South Vietnamese army would be able to achieve on its own what it had been unable to accomplish with the help of half a million American troops, the President solemnly assures a national television audience that "the South Vietnamese by themselves can hack it" —even as the dispatches from Indochina make plain that the South Vietnamese are totally helpless without massive American air support...
...There are now approximately by latest estimate 90,000 to 100,000 in Laos...
...Nixon said a month ago, "difficult issues remain concerning its neighbors: the removal of North Vietnamese and Viet-cong troops [from Cambodia and Laos], the securing of South Vietnam's borders, and the re-establishment of the Geneva agreements...
...A Gallup Poll released last month disclosed that sixty-nine per cent believe the Nixon Administration "is not telling the public all they should know about the Vietnam war...
...President, we need such and such a sum for such and such a program.' I say, 'Sorry, we don't have the funds.' They say, 'We have reliable information that the Soviet Union has already allocated funds for their own such program.' So I give in...
...For the people of Indochina, it is a wanton lie that this Administration is 'winding down' the war...
...So we discuss it some more and I end up by giving them the money they ask for/' Clayton Fritchey New York Post ors humanity should understand the cost of this policy in life and suffering...
...Nixon entered the White House in 1969 with a historic mandate to make peace...
...Like President Eisenhower in 1952, Mr...
...He has abandoned any thoughts he may have entertained in the past of seeking a swift end to the ugliest, most despicable war ever waged by the United States...
...Nixon declared, "fulfills our objective of reducing American involvement...
...In fixing his sights once again on "victory" in Indochina, in widening the war, in taking what The New York Times has called "an increasingly desperate gamble to stave off the inevitable day of reckoning" when "Vietnamization" is plainly exposed as a hoax and delusion, the President is toying with tactics that could bring on the ultimate catastrophe of Chinese —and perhaps even Soviet—intervention in the war...
...Ike smiled and Khrushchev smiled back, as if they already understood each other...
...Today, one third of the way into 1971, that hope has drifted into the dim and distant future...
...it is spreading the war like a holocaust...
...Nixon has still another round of escalation up his sleeve...
...The President is apparently prepared to bear this burden cheerfully...
...As far as we are concerned, that is the proposal and that is the one we will stick by in Paris...
...Close reading of the President's statements reveals the drastic extent to which he has retreated from the "peace" pledges which were instrumental in electing him in 1968, and from the promises he made in 1969 and 1970 to extricate America from its disastrous Indochina adventure...
...Nixon said in his recent "State of the World" message...
...He had the power and he could have had the glory, but he chose, instead, to risk all on the gamble of "winning" a wider war...
...Even if Hanoi were to negotiate genuinely about Vietnam," Mr...
...It has, he says, "an excellent opportunity not only to survive but to build a strong, free society...
...It's just the same," said the Soviet leader...
...We cannot afford to indulge the Administration in the hollow pretense that "Vietnamization" is the moral equivalent of peace...
...North Vietnamese actions could require high levels of American assistance and air operations in order to further Vietnamization and our withdrawals," Mr...
...He gave no indication that the Administration contemplates any time limit to these activities, nor any restraints on the amount of death and devastation to be inflicted on the ravaged lands of Southeast Asia...
...It is too late, we suspect, to salvage Mr...
...Despite the massive campaigns of official propaganda, nearly three Americans in four favor an early and total withdrawal of United States forces from Indochina...
...Nixon replied disingenuously that "no such plan has ever been suggested by President Thieu to us, none has been considered and none is under consideration...
...As The Washington Post observed in commenting on the President's response, "that is not nearly good enough, because we have heard all too many times that this or that wasn't under consideration at one time or another, only to watch it happen later on...
...The President has raised the ante in Indochina...
...In an anguished column a few weeks ago, Tom Wicker wrote in The New York Times: "Every American, every citizen who loves his country, every man who honHow They Fuel the Arms Race Chairman Khrushchev's historic memoirs, now published in book form, ought to become must reading for the present leaders of both America and Russia...
...He has reverted, instead, to the chimeric goal of "victory" in Vietnam...
...Nixon's place in history...
...What all this seems to betoken is an immense and alarming capacity for self-deception on the President's part...
...These helicopters are comparatively safe, aren't they...
...He is the willing prisoner of his own "wanton lie...
...Then the President said, "It's like this: "My military leaders say, 'Mr...
...Perhaps first I should tell you how it is with us...
...We cannot afford to let the warmakers believe that barbarism is acceptable, provided only that a few cosmetic touches are applied here and there...
...There are signs, fortunately, that Americans are not deceived...
...It has been replaced by vague but ominous talk about maintaining "residual" ground forces in what amounts to perpetuity, while waging an ever wider and bloodier air war throughout Indochina—including North Vietnam...
...In 1970, Mr...
...This policy," Mr...
...Behind his impersonal talk of "American assistance and air operations" lies the awful reality of American technology destroying helpless people and their lands...
...And if it should turn out that this new widening of the war also fails to turn the trick and produce "victory," Mr...
...Tell me, Mr...
...Khrushchev," Ike said, "how do you decide the question of funds for military expenses...
...The former head of the Kremlin tells with astounding candor of a private talk he had with Eisenhower (then President) at Camp David in 1959 on disarmament...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
