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In Bed with the Chief
Beyond that, of course, are much larger questions about the difficulty of trying to engineer another country's security or national unity. One U.S. officer recently described his method of helping to pacify Vietnamese villages as one of "jumping into bed with the district chief"—which pretty well sums up how many Americans come on in the eyes of the peasants. Most of all, dissenters object to the warm breath of the U.S. "presence" in the program. "It is hard to give the illusion of sovereignty," says Rand Corporation Anthropologist Gerald Hickey, who has been in Viet Nam since 1956. "We continue with the naive notion that nation building is saturating the country with American advisers."
Whether that judgment is too harsh or not, the U.S.'s main business at this juncture must be to seek a settlement. There are essentially two approaches open to Nixon that could lead to a measurable disengagement from Viet Nam: a negotiated solution, or a seesaw of unilateral de-escalations, with each side presumably matching the other's withdrawals. The second possibility, involving the notion that the war will decline gradually by degrees of voluntary and informal pullout, is viewed by many U.S. experts as the most probable ending. Provided that the withdrawals were both steady and large enough, this solution would possibly satisfy the largest number of involved parties. For one thing, it would require each side to demonstrate its good faith in a succession of moves, rather than asking it to risk its position on a single bold stroke. For another, it would give U.S. fighting men time to initiate their ARVN replacements with firsthand experience—and keep providing, until the last phase, the most complicated kinds of battlefield assistance, especially air support.
The President's Detractors
Nixon seems reluctant so far to consider a unilateral U.S. scale-down, worrying those who fear that he may lose an opportunity for lowering the level of the killing by insisting on a formal tit-for-tat agreement with Hanoi. Such critics of Nixon's seeming tough stance tend to overlook the fact that the President, after all, has reacted quite mildly to the renewed offensive. Though they may include policymakers within Nixon's inner circle, the President's detractors come from the Johnson Administration, notably former Defense Secretary Clark W. Clifford and Ambassador Averell Harriman. They are believed to view the current Communist offensive as a direct and understandable, if not justified, response to the unabated allied military pressure during the September-to-January lull. They fault the U.S. for failing to match that lull in allied operations. More generally, they argue that, despite Nixon's refusal to resume bombing the North, the U.S. still maintains a relatively hard line in the conduct of the war, and that this is a mistake even as a stopgap. For all its risks, they feel, the unilateral withdrawal of some U.S. troops—or at the very least a stand-down in place in the fighting —is the nation's best hope for