One of the major casualties in the Vietnam war, and now in the Dominican intervention, has been the credibility of the U.S. government. No government can tell the whole truth to its people, but the number of half-truths and untruths in which the Johnson Administration has been caught is extraordinary. The White Paper which prepared the nation for the bombing of North Vietnam was an amateurish arrangement of carefully selected and entirely unconvincing facts. American reports out of Saigon are still carefully doctored. Catching the Administration in an untruth has become a minor industry among journals of opinion, and it has become commonplace for non-government foreign policy experts to accuse the Administration of supplying us liberally with falsehoods about Vietnam.
So far the skepticism about President Johnson’s intention has not extended to his willingness to negotiate. Yet it well might. In recent weeks a number of brief and largely unnoticed reports have cast some doubt over the Johnson offer. First there are indications that China and North Vietnam may not be as unyielding as we have been led to believe. Since last December, French government officials have been reporting that Ha Chi Minh is willing to discuss the basis of an accommodation with the U.S., and has repeatedly said so to the French. In March, the New York Times reported from Paris that North Vietnam was intensifying its efforts to sit down with U.S. officials; at about the same time, the Times reported that the Chinese were no longer insisting that the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam as a condition for a peace meeting. Mao Tse-tung said the same thing in an interview published February 27 in the New Republic.
These reports, of course, may be nothing more than propaganda. The United States insists that it has been rebuffed in every feeler it has put out in a search for discussion. President Johnson has twice offered “unconditional discussions,” insisting that the U.S. is exploring every avenue to bring peace through talks. Yet on March 23, Henry Cabot Lodge, the official American spokesman on Vietnam in Europe and Asia, opposed any negotiations until the enemy manifests “a change of heart.” Mr. Lodge invoked the subtle distinction between “discussions” and “negotiations,” defending “discussions,” which the Administration is publicly committed to, but opposing “negotiations” as “the equivalent of turning South Vietnam over to the wolves.” The distinction disappeared, as it should, when Mr. Lodge told a news-magazine that “a conference now would be disastrous.” The obvious question here is which more accurately reflects what the Administration really thinks: Mr. Johnson’s speech of May 13, which included an offer to enter into talks unconditionally, or Mr. Lodge’s hard-nosed insistence that the wolves become sheep before serious negotiating is considered?
Even more disturbing is the absence of any proof that the Administration is trying as hard as it says it is to sit down and talk with the enemy. On May 23, the New York Times “News of the Week in Review” reported: “During the bombing lull, the Administration made still another approach to Hanoi through ‘third party’ channels. One such channel was Canada, which is a member of the International Control Commission in Vietnam.” But what the Times omitted in its weekly round-up was a one-inch article it published on May 19: “Ottawa—Official sources denied tonight that the Canadian government had played a specific role in President Johnson’s latest effort to bring North Vietnam to the conference table.” With the growing suspicion that the President’s closest advisors may be more interested in getting at China than in negotiating, the questions raised by the Lodge interview and the Canadian denial should not be allowed to go unanswered.
