THE weary, bitter years of war in Viet Nam have all but exhausted the vocabulary of hope. So many corners turned, so many lights glimpsed at the end of tunnels, so many ritualistic negotiating sessions at the old Majestic Hotel in Paris, so many dead. Even the once secret sessions begun by Richard Nixon soon after he took office seemed to be inexorably changing from ventures of high drama and promise to mere suspense entertainment. But last week Henry Kissinger, the President's plenipotentiary for peace, was in Saigon on perhaps the most difficult and critical mission of his extraordinary career in diplomacy. He had in his briefcase an agreement in principle with North Viet Nam for the shape of a settlement, and his was the unenviable task of selling that settlement to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, whose political demise will be an inevitable consequence of the package. However Thieu might balk, Viet Nam seemed closer to the brink of peace than it has been in a decade.
The proposed settlement may have to be altered in some details during the negotiations with Thieu. But from South Vietnamese sources TIME obtained an outline of the Hanoi-Washington bargain that Kissinger brought from Paris. In essence it provides for an internationally supervised ceasefire, the formation of a new South Vietnamese government and elections for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for South Viet Nam. To separate military from political matters it proposes three separate committees or bodies to implement a settlement, a process that might take many months to accomplish. What the White House wants, say the Saigon sources, is to be able to announce an agreement "in principle" on the package before Election Day, though the first step of a cease-fire might not even be possible that soon. What the plan outlines on the military and political fronts:
ENDING THE WAR. A cease-fire freezing all forces in South Viet Nam "in place" and halting all military activity —including the U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam and the mining of its harbors —would be put into effect initially. Then negotiations would begin on the final withdrawal of all U.S. forces and the return of the American prisoners of war. Possibly the talks would eventually extend to the related wars in Cambodia and Laos.
BUILDING A POLITICAL PEACE. Once the cease-fire was in effect direct negotiations would begin between the present Saigon government and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (P.R.G.) maintained by the National Liberation Front in South Viet Nam. The two sides would work out the composition of a "caretaker government" that would succeed the Thieu regime and prepare the country for general elections to choose a constituent assembly. The assembly would draft a new constitution, a new round of elections would be held, and a new and presumably broad-based government that included Communists would take its place in Saigon.
The plan proposes the following three bodies to carry out these efforts: