The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  Details of these peace moves have come from an unimpeachable source. The State Department, however, seems to be dismissing the report of Ho Chi Minh’s willingness to talk last year as irrelevant. It says there was no indication that anything would come of it, and hints that President Johnson was not involved in the matter at all. Nor is it clear whether the State Department ever informed President Kennedy that Hanoi was willing to talk after the fall of Diem. Mr. Adlai Stevenson certainly knew of these moves, and it appears to have been one of his great regrets that Washington did not react positively. [Emphasis added.] The intermediaries who were involved in the effort to bring about a meeting between Hanoi and Washington believe that the Communist position hardened as a result of Washington’s negative attitude.

  Sevareid’s account of his talk with Stevenson shortly before the latter’s death last July adds to the August leak. It reveals that U Thant made two more attempts at peace. The September meeting was rejected for fear that it might leak to the Goldwater forces during the election campaign. “When the election was over,” Sevareid relates, “U Thant again pursued the matter; Hanoi was still willing to send its man. But Defense Secretary McNamara, Adlai went on, flatly opposed the attempt.” The argument against peace talks was that “the South Vietnamese government would have to be informed and that this would have a demoralizing effect on them; that government was shaky enough as it was.” McNamara denied this and the State Department’s spokesman last Monday said the Secretary of Defense “did not participate in the U.S. government handling of this matter.” But the spokesman did not deny that a second Rangoon meeting with the North Vietnamese was possible after the election. U Thant’s next effort was a cease-fire offer on U.S. terms. On this, the spokesman was evasive. He said it was not true that U Thant “at any time said he would accept any formulation concerning a cease-fire that the U.S. might propose—although he did advance his own suggestions.” When pressed for clarification, the spokesman would only say, it would be “highly inappropriate to disclose the details.” The Department always seems to consider candor inappropriate. Through this bureaucratic fog we can see that the Department dares not deny the second Rangoon meeting it turned down nor the offer of a ceasefire. “Stevenson,” Sevareid’s account continues, “told me that U Thant was furious over this failure of his patient efforts but said nothing publicly.”

  Apparently U Thant persevered in his efforts, however. For if one goes back and rereads the transcript of the February 24 press conference one sees that he said he had “presented concrete ideas and proposals” to the principal parties concerned, including the U.S., but that the results “have not been conclusive.” Next day UN headquarters reported a message from Hanoi that it was sympathetic to the proposals U Thant had outlined.* But the same day at a press conference Secretary Rusk made clear U.S. rejection. He said the U.S. would not enter negotiations to end the Vietnamese war until North Vietnam gave some “indication” that it was “prepared to stop what it is doing and what it knows it is doing to its neighbors.” This embodied the view that the war was a simple case of aggression from the North and implied that we would not negotiate until the other side laid down its arms.

  What terms was Hanoi thinking of? In the Weekly last April 12, “Peace Feelers? Is the Truth about Them Being Withheld?” we reprinted a letter to the Times of London April 1 by William Warbey, a British Laborite M.P. back from talks in Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. Warbey outlined their terms for a settlement as told to him and previously “to others who passed their message on to Washington.” This called for a neutralized North and South, with resumption of trade between them, but with autonomous regimes on both sides of the 17th parallel. “The people of the Southern zone” would have the right “to form and support a government which genuinely represents all the major sections of the Southern population” and each zone would have the right “to enjoy economic, cultural and ‘fraternal’ relations with the countries of its choice,” i.e. South Vietnam could be linked economically and culturally with the West if it so chose while North Vietnam presumably would remain linked with the Soviet bloc. Warbey wrote that the only precondition on which the North was insisting was the cessation of bombing attacks upon it. Note that these terms did not call for a government based on the National Liberation Front but on “all the major sections of the Southern population,” and that it was broad enough to envisage free elections. It was also suggested that eventual reunification might be based on a bi-federal system. This would seem to offer a solution which would be democratic and honorable and a face-saver for the U.S. This may make it easier to understand what U Thant meant when he told a luncheon last Tuesday, the day after the State Department’s admissions, “If only bold steps had been taken as late as 1964 I feel that much of today’s tragic development could have been avoided.”

  The day the Warbey letter appeared in the Times of London, Mr. Johnson was asked at press conference whether he had “any evidence of a willingness on the part of the Communists to negotiate” in Vietnam. We called attention in that same issue of April 12 to the curious wording of his reply. He said he had “no evidence that they are ready and willing to negotiate under conditions that would be productive.” Our italics. Last Monday’s press conference at the State Department suggested that what we would consider “productive” would be restoration of an independent South Vietnam under our wing. The Department’s spokesman insisted that the Johns Hopkins speech last April 7 did not mark any change in policy when it offered “unconditional discussions.” To prove continuity of policy he read the reporters two previous Presidential statements. In one, at an AP lunch, April 20, 1964, Mr. Johnson said “Once war seems hopeless, then peace may be possible. The door is always open to any settlement which assures the independence of South Vietnam and its freedom to seek help for its protection.” This implies (1) that peace can only come when the other side realizes war is hopeless and (2) that the settlement to which our door is open is one which assures an independent South Vietnam, which can call on the U.S. and SEATO for protection. The other quotation offered was from Johnson’s message August 5, 1964, assuring Congress “that we shall continue readily to explore any avenues of political solution that will effectively guarantee the removal of Communist subversion.”

  Any compromise which would give the National Liberation Front some role in a coalition government would seem to be ruled out by that formulation. It implies their surrender or extermination. The fact that the State Department put these two quotations forward as embodiments of our policy foreshadows war to the bitter end rather than negotiation. When a reporter said, “Well, all that does not say that he [Johnson] is willing to have unconditional discussions,” the Department’s spokesman replied, “Well I think then that we are hung up on semantics.” This makes sense only if “unconditional discussions” means something very different from unconditional negotiations. In negotiations we would still insist on winning at the bargaining table what we have yet to win either on the battlefield or in our dealings with the Vietnamese people. When reporters at the press conference tried to elicit what standards the government imposes in determining whether peace feelers are “serious” or “sincere,” the spokesman retreated behind a smoke-screen of double-talk. The truth I believe is that we wait for a signal that the other side is ready, not to negotiate, but to surrender.

  I hope I am wrong because if this is the policy then it will take a good many years of fighting and a lot of American and Vietnamese lives. It will poison our relations with the Soviet Union and may end the hopes of preventing a new step-up in the arms race. The Soviets, as can be seen in the latest attack from Peking, are under fire for serving U.S. interests in trying to bring about peace. Peking discloses that Kosygin went to Hanoi last February 6 in an attempt to bring about a negotiated settlement. This was also the report carried by the London Sunday Observer February 7 from Hong Kong in a dispatch by Stanley Karnow which reflected the judgment of the U.S. intelligence commun
ity there. That was the day Johnson, under the impact of the Viet Cong attack on our barracks at Pleiku, ordered the bombing of the North in accordance with contingency plans drawn up months earlier and long urged upon him by the military. To bomb the North while Kosygin was there virtually as our emissary trying to bring about peace, and to continue the bombing indefinitely instead of limiting it to a reprisal raid, may turn out to have been the Big Mistake of the war. It hardly made the search for peace easier. On this, too, the Administration has been deceptive.

  * * *

  *An earlier hint of this had appeared the previous April 18 in a dispatch to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from its UN correspondent, Donald Grant.

  *Facts on File for 1965, p. 74E3.

  What It’s Like to Be in Saigon

  I. F. Stone reports from Saigon. The picture he paints of a well-intentioned American military and political establishment that is isolated in protected enclaves, oblivious to events in the surrounding country, and arrogantly convinced that it knows how best to bring peace and democracy to an alien people, helps to explain the nature of the Vietnam quagmire in which the U.S. would remain stuck for another eight years—and surely suggests an analogy to other, more recent, conflicts.

  . . .

  May 9, 1966

  WHAT I REMEMBER MOST OF SAIGON is the heat, the squalor and the despair. I began by being terribly frustrated and ended by being terribly fascinated. The frustration arose from trying to get things done in a country which seems engaged in a giant conspiracy to slow everything down; I’d hate to have to run a war in the vast snafu that is South Vietnam; only an Eagle Scout like Westmoreland could stand it without going off his rocker. Just what the fascination was I don’t quite know, perhaps it was the ringside seat Saigon offers on the inexhaustible vitality and folly of the human race.

  The heat lay like a suffocating blanket on the city, and it was hard to know which was worse, the sunny days or the cloudy when a blue haze of carbon monoxide lay low over the teeming streets. At night with the windows open in a cheap hotel which charged New York prices, one slept not just naked but with every pore alert for an occasional hint of breeze. After the midnight curfew one is awakened from time to time by the dull thud of mortars like a giant tapping on distant doors. One night the whole hotel shook, the doors went rat-tat-tat, as a huge armada passed overhead and dumped its deadly freight somewhere far off in the darkness. There were three waves of this miniature earthquake and one suddenly realized the meaning of the term privileged sanctuary, for Americans in Vietnam can sleep with the assurance that amid the heavy traffic overhead, there are no enemy planes. Goliath never had it so good.

  Even on the quieter nights, sleep begins to be impossible around five. There is a constant roar of heavy trucks from the clogged waterfront nearby. The noise overhead surpasses that in the areas adjoining La Guardia airport, and starts much earlier; the decibel factor alone makes it easy to believe that Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut is now the world’s busiest airport. The guerrillas have cut the railroads and made the roads impassable everywhere—except for those who pay their fees and are granted passage. For Americans it is safe to travel only in the skies. In the morning one emerges early on streets from which the garbage is no longer carted away. This and the lax currency control on entry are the first signs of disintegration; the government is falling apart. The generals maneuver, no longer so much for power as for some political foothold. Their wives, so it is said, are the brains of the family and devote them to the business of selling export and import licenses. The coolies who used to collect the garbage probably make five times as much now on the docks or in construction, for labor is scarce in the war boom that has seized Saigon. One newspaper article I saw suggested that maybe garbage collection ought to be handed over to free enterprise, a touching testimonial to the spread of the American theology to these lands beyond the sea.

  In the mornings, moving from air-conditioned U.S. offices to the hot bake-oven outside, one felt ninety-eight years old by 10 A.M. and ready to collapse in a pre-lunch siesta under an electric fan, those days electricity was available. After lunch, one hastened back to the darkened and sweaty refuge of one’s hotel room. The once beautiful and broad avenues of the great city outside are filled with a mad tangle of vehicles. Here a tiny donkey cart carries a rustic family into town; it is loaded down with pots and pans and bags. From the interstices children look out big-eyed with wonder. There a two-seater cyclopus goes by with two soigné matrons, exquisitely kept in their privileged middle age, engaged in shrewd and vivacious conversation. The streets swarm with cyclopuses—the old rick-shaw raised to a higher technological level by being wedded to the bicycle, with which the driver pushes from behind. Next in the hierarchy of public transport is the motorized cyclopus, then tiny Renault taxis. They contest the streets with a constant flow of jeeps and military buses. Maneuvering dashingly amid this wildly tooting herd of vehicles is an occasional Vietnamese motorcycle “cowboy” with miniature Stetson and tight Western movie pants. The costume makes the slight, delicate-boned Vietnamese look more mannikin than man, a tiny caricature of a Texan. The scene is dominated from time to time by the passage, often under armed escort, of some Vietnamese VIP in a Peugot, Mercedes-Benz or Cadillac; these testify to how many people do quite well on the war.

  Most of the people’s daily life seems to be spent in the streets. On the crowded sidewalks, capitalism is in flower. Half the population of Saigon seems to have set itself up in business with items from the American PX. Everywhere there are tiny stalls selling Gillette razor blades, Spearmint chewing gum, Almond Joys, Colgate toothpaste, Chesterfield cigarettes and Hershey bars at a generous markup. So large an outflow from the PX indicates that military service has not stifled the Yankee trader spirit in our troops. Along the curb and under the stalls, mats are spread on which whole families lunch and dine; the food is cooked on a tiny brazier, and delicately served by the mothers. The meals, mostly seafood stews served on rice, are eaten with the gusto of a family picnic. Everybody seems to be having a good time, from the children begging in the streets to the shoeshine boys showing off to an admiring crowd how much they can overcharge the big barbarians from oversea. In the endless pageantry of the streets, I even encountered one patriotic demonstration. Just before 8 A.M. on Nguyen Hué street I was attracted by a crowd standing at attention while the South Vietnamese flag was raised and a loud speaker broadcast the national anthem. When the ceremony was finished the crowd filed into the building. It was the headquarters of the General Confederation of Employers. This evidence of a renaissance in national spirit may give Henry Cabot Lodge a lift.

  The crew of the Air Vietnam plane on which I flew from Hong Kong to Saigon was entirely Vietnamese. Lunch was first rate French Asian cuisine with good French wines. The stewardess gave me my first glimpse of how demurely seductive the Vietnamese woman’s costume can be: delectably feminine loose flowing pants as the undergarment, usually white, with a kind of split sari over it of contrasting color. It is the direct opposite of the strip tease. The girl is completely covered from throat to feet, not even the ankles are visible. Yet as the girl moves the flowing garments suddenly mold and reveal the figure for a fleeting intimate moment. The moving limbs provide a constant, spontaneous and luminous ballet.

  The civilian arrival hall of the airport at Saigon was a huge shed of wood and tin, almost furnace-like in its suffocating heat. When I finally got away in an Air Vietnam bus, the sky was a luscious pale blue with tufts of white cloud but the scene below was hot and dusty. April, before the monsoon rains begin, is Saigon’s hottest and driest month. I saw no signs of the mortar attack on the airport a few days earlier. It must have been in a distant corner of that huge airport. There was a big unpainted restaurant with a billboard in French advertising the first dentifrice of the Republic with “fluor.” Other billboards as we sped by advertised the Lambretta scooter, GM’s Cadillacs and Chevrolets, and Pan Am. We passed villas taken over by the military. Sandbag embankments
were visible behind their low white walls. Some of the villas were as big as palaces. We went over a bridge and caught a glimpse of dark unpainted shacks high on stilts along a river bank as far as one could see. Near them, set back from the water, were white and pink stucco villas with gardens behind high white walls. The rich and the poor seemed to live almost side by side in this neighborhood.

  At the hot dusty freight shed which is Saigon’s air terminus, a taxi driver made a deal with me—the newly arrived sucker—for 200 piastres to the Hotel Caravelle, or ten times the normal price. Then he strode off in lordly satisfaction, leaving me to handle my bags. Several eager urchins seized them despite my effort to explain in French and English that I had no cash. When I got into the miniature cab and left them empty handed, I was treated to a pantomime of pained indignation and an outburst of grandiloquent Vietnamese by the budding entrepreneurs until my lordly driver handed out two five-piastre bills to quiet down the demonstration. At the Caravelle, only a few blocks away, I learned that my telegraphic confirmation of a reservation was worthless. I soon discovered that the Caravelle was inhabited by phantoms. I had the names of half a dozen persons to see, all presumably at the Caravelle, and all equally unknown to the management. I did not learn until later that every room there was acquired only by intricate bribery; the lucky few who have rooms are forced to treat the management as a pampered mistress; one day asked to bring expensive film from the PX, another day some choice foodstuff. The only exception was A. J. Muste and his CNVA* delegation which got a big room, perhaps because it was conveniently wired for sound by the police and they preferred to have the pacifists where they could keep a close watch on their comings and goings. I soon was sent off to what I was assured was a modern air-conditioned hotel. The room at the Federal turned out to have a broken down fan and a shower which never once in my eight day stay had hot water.