ALL the old questions were asked—but in new ways that invited honest answers, fresh opinions, dissenting views. The questioning began at field level two months ago, funneled steadily upward and inward to commanders and moved from there to the corridors of Washington. It constituted one of the most intensive policy reviews ever conducted inside the Federal Government, and the subject, of course, was Viet Nam. Last week the results reached the desk of the man who ordered the inquiry, Richard Nixon, who must ultimately weigh the choices and choose his course for extricating the nation from the longest war in its history. The timing was right, for at week's end Nixon flew off to California to continue the questioning in person. Meeting him there in a Pacific beach house at San Clemente were Ambassador to Saigon Ellsworth Bunker and the deputy U.S. commander in Viet Nam, General Andrew Goodpaster. Accompanying the President was his chief foreign affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, who boarded Air Force One carrying the thick black notebooks of analysis that hold Nixon's emerging Viet Nam policy.
To many, it seemed high time for the President to begin articulating his position. On the battlefields, U.S. commanders continue to fight the war more or less on the scale and scope laid down by Johnson in his last months in office. Around the conference table in Paris, Nixon's new negotiating team, led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, gives every impression of men still awaiting their instructions. The Communists fight on too, drawing fresh U.S. headlines daily through the fourth week of their post-Tet 1969 offensive. The blunt aim of their attacks seems to be to kill
Americans, despite occasional shellings of South Vietnamese cities, and they are succeeding. For the third week in a row, more than 350 U.S. servicemen died in action, nearly twice the weekly rate that had prevailed before the offensive. Some time this week the 33,630th American is likely to fall in Viet Nam, exceeding the U.S. battle losses in the Korean War.
The foremost question is how soon the U.S. might begin to disengage from the war by bringing home at least some American forces. The need to do this is great because, without some sign that the U.S. can turn over more of the fighting to the South Vietnamese, the American nation may simply not be prepared to continue the Viet Nam war effort long enough to reach a satisfactory settlement in Paris. When Defense Secretary Melvin Laird arrived in Viet Nam on a fact-finding tour, he suggested that it might be possible to bring some 50,000 soldiers home this year. Last week, his tour completed, Laird reported in Washington that at present this did not seem possible after all. It was unwelcome news, allayed only by the near certainty that, in fact, Laird's disavowal was more tactical than factual. His statement was not meant to preclude the possibility of troop withdrawals later this year, but simply to preserve a bargaining position in Paris. Why should the U.S. unilaterally announce a cut in its forces, asks the Nixon Administration, without trying to get something in return from Hanoi? In the context of the current Communist offensive, Laird's statement also served to warn Hanoi that the new Administration was not about to be panicked out of Viet Nam.
Essential Reliability
The Administration was believed to be working