ISSUES '72
THE peace roller coaster seemed to be moving again. Henry Kissinger in Paris, elusive black limousines, suburban hideaways, no hard news but tantalizing intimations of "rapid progress." Twice Kissinger extended his stay 24 hours, inevitably heightening the speculation that the dealing had indeed grown serious. In Saigon President Nguyen Van Thieu contributed his bit by vehemently asserting in a speech that he would never agree to a coalition government—which naturally enough suggested that his future was front and center in the Paris bargaining.
But there was nothing in Kissinger's briefcase that the President cared to disclose when his National Security Adviser returned to Washington after his unprecedented four straight days of secret talks with the North Vietnamese. Kissinger and Major General Alexander Haig reported to Nixon and Secretary of State William Rogers at breakfast. To the public, matters were reported still "in a sensitive stage," with "many difficult things to settle."
It was perhaps both fitting and a little unfair that all this activity enveloped what George McGovern deemed the most important speech of his campaign. His subject was the war, the issue that made his candidacy, the issue to which he is most deeply committed, the issue that still matters most to the American people however subliminally it sometimes appears to be moored.
McGovern began with a feeling condemnation of the war as "a moral debacle." Over the Nixon years the suffering had begun to involve more Asians and fewer Americans, but the war, he said, had not become less of an issue merely "because the color of the bodies has changed." He reminded the electorate of the statement that Candidate Nixon made in October 1968: "Those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance."
Dictator. Then McGovern laid out his plan to end the war; it was largely a summary of his previously articulated views. Unlike Nixon, who seeks a negotiated exit, McGovern would carry out a unilateral U.S. withdrawal requiring a minimum of cooperation from the Communists. If the war was still raging on Inauguration Day, McGovern would stop the bombing and other "acts of force," halt the flow of supplies to Saigon and begin a 90-day withdrawal of U.S. forces—keeping U.S. airbases in Thailand open and Seventh Fleet ships on station until Hanoi released the 539 American P.O.W.s and helped to account for the 1,143 servicemen listed as missing in action. McGovern would join in a postwar reconstruction effort (as Nixon has also proposed to do), but he would take no part in organizing Saigon's future, save to condemn Thieu harshly as a dictator progressively usurping South Viet Nam's democratic forms.
The Democratic nominee said in his speech that he would bring home "all salvageable" U.S. military equipment. In response to questions later, he denied that this would amount to surrender, pointing to the considerable hardware that Saigon's 1,100,000-man army has already received from the U.S., including more than 1,300 aircraft for South Viet Nam's air force. But a halt of U.S. aid and further supplies would eventually strangle that huge military machine.