RARELY had so perfunctory an occasion been so raptly watched. There in the White House to pay a courtesy call on the President and exchange a few ideas about world trade were Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and Moscow's Foreign Trade Minister, Nikolai Patolichev. Every flicker of emotion on the faces of the visitors could be vastly portentous. Suddenly, newsmen were invited into the Oval Office. They were astonished. The Russians were grinning and laughing and exchanging lively banter with the President over how to say "friendship" in two languages.
Deceptive as that signal might yet prove to be, it relieved the grim tension that had enveloped Washington. For the moment, at least, a showdown between the two superpowers had been averted. Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had the possibility of armed conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. loomed so large. This time the arena of conflict was half a world away in the Gulf of Tonkin, rather than 90 miles from the U.S. mainland, and this time, fortunately, there was no deadline ultimatum requiring immediate response. The feeling that the worst was past was reinforced by Patolichev's nonchalant response to a newsman's question: Was President Nixon's May 22 summit visit to Moscow still on? "We never had any doubts about it. I don't know why you asked." There were ritual denunciations of the U.S. from Moscow and Peking. But while the language was harsh, no specific action was threatened. At week's end Hanoi's negotiators in Paris even seemed willing to talk peace some more, although still on their own restrictive terms.
Ready to Settle. The crisis had been created by the most momentous military decision Richard Nixon had yet made in his presidency: to mine the harbors of North Viet Nam and cut off the flow of all military supplies to Hanoi from any other nation, by almost any means. He had acted because his whole Vietnamization policy and his hope for an honorable U.S. withdrawal from the war seemed threatened by a massive, two-month-old North Vietnamese offensive, armed and fueled by the Soviet Union. His decision, made virtually alone and in the face of grave dissension within his Administration, also grew out of an almost obsessive fear of national and personal humiliation in Viet Nam.
The way that decision was reached illustrates with disturbing clarity the President's total domination of the vital arena of war and peace—and the total lack of effective checks and balances under a Constitution that is in other respects so careful to prevent arbitrary action (see TIME ESSAY, page 18).
The President began considering new military moves soon after Communist troops swept across the DMZ with tanks and heavy artillery on Easter Sunday, and too many South Vietnamese units crumpled with alarming speed. His choices included the resumption of massive bombing of the North, including possible air strikes against Hanoi itself, and the destruction of flood-preventing dikes. He could even send U.S. Marines into a hit-and-run attack above the DMZ to divert Hanoi's troops. He considered urging the South Vietnamese to stage a similar raid or to counterattack across the zone.