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By Root 893 0

efforts accomplished little. Speaking teams of government officers sent to debate in the universities only supplied more occasions for protest and victims for the students to heckle. A White Paper entitled “Aggression from the North” issued by the State Department, designed to show the infiltration of men and arms by North Vietnam as “aggressive war,” was feeble. In all their public justifications, the President, the Secretary of State and other spokesmen harped on “aggression,” “militant aggression,” “armed aggression,” always in comparison with the failure to stop the aggressions that brought on World War II, always implying that Vietnam too was a case of foreign aggression. They made the point so insistently that they sometimes said it explicitly, as when McNamara in 1966 called it “the most flagrant case of outside aggression.” The ideological division in Vietnam may have been real and insuperable, just as was the division between South and North in the American Civil War, but it is not recorded in the American case that the North’s war against the South’s secession was considered “outside aggression.”

By April it was apparent that ROLLING THUNDER was having no visible effect on the enemy’s will to fight. Bombing of the supply trails in Laos had not prevented infiltration; Viet-Cong raids showed no signs of faltering. The decision to introduce American infantry seemed ineluctable and the Joint Chiefs so recommended. Fully recognized as portentous, the question was exhaustively discussed, with the confident assurances of some matched by the doubts and ambivalence of others, both military and civilian. The decisions taken in April and May were piecemeal, based on a strategy of continued bombing supplemented by ground combat with the aim of breaking the will of the North and the Viet-Cong “by effectively denying them victory and bringing about negotiations through the enemy’s impotence.” This impotence it was thought possible to achieve by attrition, that is, by killing off the Viet-Cong rather than trying to defeat them. United States troops were to be raised initially to a combat strength of 82,000.

Wanting it both ways, battle axe and olive branch, Johnson delivered a major speech at Johns Hopkins University on 7 April offering prospects of vast rural rehabilitation and a flood control program for the Mekong Valley, supported by $1 billion of United States funds, in which North Vietnam, after accepting peace, would share. The United States would “never be second in the search … for a peaceful settlement,” Johnson declared, and was ready now for “unconditional discussions.” It sounded open and generous, but what “unconditional” meant in American thinking was negotiations when the North was sufficiently battered to be prepared to concede. Matched by an equal and opposite insistence on certain preconditions by the other side, these were the fixed premises that were to nullify all overtures for the next three years.

The billion-dollar carrot attracted no bites. Rejecting Johnson’s overture, Hanoi announced its four preconditions the next day: 1) withdrawal of United States military forces; 2) no foreign alliances or admission of foreign troops by either side; 3) adoption of the NLF (National Liberation Front or Viet-Cong) program by South Vietnam; 4) reunification of the country by the Vietnamese without outside interference. Since point 3 was exactly what the South and the United States were fighting against, it was the obvious nullifier. International interest in sealing off the conflict found itself blocked. A conference of seventeen non-aligned nations convened by Marshal Tito appealed for negotiations without effect; contacts with Hanoi pursued by J. Blair Seaborn, Canadian member of the International Control Commission, went unrequited; the prime ministers of four British Commonwealth countries on a mission to urge negotiation in the capitals of the parties to the struggle were refused admission by Moscow, Peking and Hanoi. An envoy of the United Kingdom on the same mission, admitted to Hanoi a few months later,