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Strident Protests. By and large, the Administration's public relations strategy proved a success. There were criticisms, to be sure. Averell Harriman, who negotiated the 1962 Geneva agreement providing for a neutral Laos, told a University of Chicago audience last week that "expanding the war to Cambodia and Laos with our unlimited air support is not the way to end the war." Though there is genuine room for debate on whether it is necessary to fight a war in two countries just to be able to pull out of a third, Harriman's point went all but unnoticed.
So did strident protests from Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh, head of the South Vietnamese Communist delegation at the Paris peace talks, who fired off telegrams to antiwar groups in the U.S. and elsewhere with the appeal: EARNESTLY CALL YOU MOBILIZE PEACE FORCES YOUR COUNTRY. CHECK U.S. DANGEROUS VENTURES INDOCHINA. The response was hardly electrifying, further proof of the shrewdness of the Administration's calculation that it is difficult, after all, to argue with a policy that is steadily reducing the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam.
* After a mountain range in what is now North Viet Nam where Emperor Nguyen Hué trounced a Chinese invasion force during Tet 1788.