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What, in fact, are the chances for a ceasefire? As Kissinger flew into Saigon last week, State Department officials were quoting 80-20 odds against an announcement before the U.S. election. Kissinger has told friends with apparent sincerity that Nixon has never pressured him to speed up or slow down the pace of negotiations because of the election. In conversations, he has suggested that he personally expects events to unfold gradually.
Nonetheless, both sides were clearly making preparations. During the crucial talks between Kissinger and Le Due Tho in Paris two weeks ago, the White House began bombarding State and the Pentagon with urgent questions on the feasibility of policing an in-place cease-fire involving 200,000 North Vietnamese troops in South Viet Nam. According to U.S. intelligence in Saigon, Communist units have already received orders to extend their control of South Vietnamese territory wherever possible in anticipation of a ceasefire. At least three North Vietnamese divisions have slipped into positions in the jungles just north of Saigon, which have recently been pounded by heavy B-52 raids. Only last week Communist troops on obvious "flag-planting" missions captured five hamlets in the Pleiku region. Saigon's troops are in control of all of the country's 44 provincial capitals and roughly 90% of South Viet Nam's 17 million people. But they have not been able to dislodge Communist forces from much of the territory they seized in the Easter offensive. All told, the Communists dominate South Viet Nam's sparsely populated eight northern provinces, including the Central Highlands and several districts in the populous, once secure Mekong Delta south of Saigon.
Long Way. With the fighting war once again at a standoff, however temporary it may be, conditions seem possible for the agreement that has so long eluded Richard Nixon and his foreign policy adviser. It may always be a matter of debate whether the Nixon Administration "missed a chance" following the bombing halt of 1968 to settle the war on terms not very different from those that it appears to be negotiating now. There will always be those Americans who will defend his holding out for an "honorable" settlement and those who contend that the Administration's "dual-track" strategy of Vietnamization and negotiations was the long way out of Viet Nam.
Kissinger argues fairly persuasively that at least part of the blame for the drawn-out negotiations must be laid to the style and temperament of the U.S.'s adversaries. As a Johnson Administration adviser in the 1960s, Kissinger was a keen student of the Vietnamese negotiating style. In his remarkably prescient Foreign Affairs article, Kissinger noted "the peculiar negotiating style of Hanoi: the careful planning, the subtle, indirect methods, the preference for opaque communications which keep open as many options as possible." North Vietnamese diplomacy, he observed, operated in somewhat baffling "cycles of reconnaissance and withdrawal." Even if the U.S. accepted all of Hanoi's demands, Kissinger wrote, "the result might well be months of haggling while Hanoi looked for our 'angle' and made sure that no other concessions were likely to be forthcoming."