Timed Optimism In U.S. Alleged

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31108, 11 July 1966, Page 13

Timed Optimism In U.S. Alleged

(From FRANK OLIVER. N.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent ) WASHINGTON, July 10. There is a sense of unreality about the wave of optimism over Vietnam which is engulfing the country. The optimism transformed the country in a matter of hours.

Commentators have gone so far as to suggest that official optimism concerning Hanoi’s alleged pessimism is really a psychological warfare ploy. Whether it is working on Hanoi is not known but it is working on the American public—in the opposite direction, giving high hopes where almost none existed.

That official optimism has been “timed” would seem to be borne out by the fact that when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 10 days ago, the Under - Secretary of State breathed no optimism and did not see that American action had brought Hanoi nearer the conference table.

the time being silenced them. The public is pleased because it was obviously sick and tired of a long war of attrition. It simply could not see light at the end of Mr Johnson’s tunnel and became impatient. Now, It feels, light is discernible and there is a wave of optimism that even a complete, or fairly complete, military victory is attainable. People are prepared to ignore the alleged Ho Chi Minh statement that without more help he cannot carry on the war for more than another year. Danger Seen There is indeed so much optimism around suddenly that it could be a little dangerous if the great expectations now created cannot be made reality pretty quickly. Both Dean Rusk in Tokyo and the Under-Secretary, Mr George Ball, in Washington seem to sense this in their brakes on optimism and their expressed belief that decisions based on Hanoi’s war weariness may well be some distance off. Long Or Short-Range? There is so far no indication that the split in his own party has been healed by Mr Johnson and the chances seem to be that criticism from liberal Democrats is simply stayed for a while and not dead. The differences are fundamental.

but before the outbreak of optimism, complained that Mr Johnson was talking as if Vietnam was one of the decisive battles of the world and that he was escalating his speaking as well as his bombing. He added, and so think others, that it is hard to look ahead to the end of the Johnson Administration and imagine the stable, free, cooperative Asian world that in Johnson’s view, will be established by the sacrifices being made in Vietnam.

What the critics complain of is the Johnson thesis that the Communists are to be taught that guerrilla warfare to conquer weaker neighbours will not pay. After The Table They ask what is to be the position when the intensified war brings Ho Chi Minh and others to the conference table and, presumably, a settlement of this conflict What will happen, they say, when the war is over and, probably, a new government in Saigon asks the Americans to go home. Is that the end of alt Communist aggression in Asia? If it isn’t critics add. then for what are thousands of men and billions of money being sacrificed? Will, say the critics, military victory in Vietnam produce a democratic nation in South Vietnam or persuade either Hanoi or Peking that renewed aggression at another time would be" unprofitable? Rhetoric, comments Reston, does not change geography. How much in short will be changed when victory is won and the Americans have departed? Peace And War

Now he has told the press that in “recent weeks” reports of war weariness in Hanoi have been reaching Washington from various sources, sources obviously considered good and reliable because official optimism is founded upon them. There are those who tend to believe that the war weariness reports really triggered the Hanoi-Haiphong oil bombings about which the President is reported to have hovered so long. To these raids the war weariness reports now come as a very satisfactory postscript If this view of public relations timing is correct then Madison Avenue could scarcely have done better.

But then Lyndon Johnson has long been a past master at the art of political timing. At One Blow

At one blow he has surely added to Hanoi’s pessimism and he has restored that consensus of support in the country from which he prefers to operate. In addition he has silenced a great deal of criticism. It would be dangerous and even absurd to imagine that he has changed the minds of his chief critics in Congress and in the press but he has for

In Los Angeles, the VicePresident, Mr Humphrey, has been telling the conference ’of governors that the Johnson policy in Vietnam is the long-range policy. Democratic critics believe this to be the reverse of the facts, insisting that the President is pursuing short-range objectives and is not looking into the future. James Reston, writing after the Hanoi-Haiphong bombings

Critics argue that the South Vietnamese have lately shown little disposition to fight for the things Mr Johnson wants them to have and that while the wish of the people in South Vietnam is for peace the will of the generals running the Saigon Government is for war.

o General Ky said a day or tw ago that he would never negotiate with the Viet Cong, but the feeling in Washington among critics of Johnson policy and among some who are not is that Saigon sometime has to talk with the Viet Cong for some kind of a settlement.

The question being asked is whether the successor to the Ky government after the elections can make South Vietnam secure. This, the critics believe can only be achieved if the American forces remain in which case South Vietnam will be an occupied country and neither free nor self-gov-erning. And as far as one can see it is not a Johnson policy to remain in South Vietnam but to defeat the enemy and leave the South Vietnamese to govern themselves. Moscow Visit

Critics of the Johnson policies seem to be making no secret of the hope that Mr Wilson, of Britain, by his Moscow and Washington visits can help to bring the parties to the conference table reasonably soon to stop the sacrifices by Americans and South Vietnamese for objectives that seem to them unobtainable.