The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  Mr. Gorton’s analogy invites elaboration. If John Brown had succeeded in raising a slave revolt, if the North had helped the rebels, and if England had intervened on the side of the slaveholders (as the Tories later wanted to), the situation would have been comparable to the Vietnamese war. Suppose further that England, tired of a costly distant conflict, had proposed that all “non-Southern” forces withdraw, thus putting Lincoln’s Unionist armies in the same “foreign” category as Britain’s. Suppose the slaves were asked to lay down their arms while the slaveholders kept their army intact, and trust to “free elections” under a vague promise of international supervision but with the slaveholder regime still in power. Suppose that regime in Richmond were filling the jails with spokesmen for poor white, non-slave-holding and pro-peace elements while Britain—heavily arming this regime in preparation for its own troop withdrawal—piously insisted that its only purpose was to give the South the right of self-determination. That is where Nixon stands today.

  For those who wonder just what Nixon was up to in his May 14 peace proposals, the Nixon-Gorton visit offers another source of illumination. Except for New Zealand, with its 150 token soldiers, Australia is the only white country which has put troops beside our own in the effort to revive the white man’s burden in Asia. The war is almost as unpopular in Australia as here, and Gorton’s opposition—the Labor party—led the protest demonstrations which greeted Ky two years ago in Australia. The conservative coalition Gorton heads was Johnson’s faithful junior partner. Gorton was here only a week before Nixon’s Vietnam speech. If Nixon were contemplating any real departure in policy, he would be leaving Gorton out on a limb. It would be necessary to prepare Australian public opinion. But nothing in their exchanges reflected any change in policy; they spoke as simple-mindedly as Johnson of their joint effort “to help South Vietnam preserve its independence.”

  Those who are working themselves into euphoria by wishful exegesis of what Nixon did not say in his May 14 address would be wise to pause a moment over what Nixon and Gorton did not say in their exchanges a week earlier. These, as expected, attracted little attention in this country, and did not have to take American peace sentiment into account.* The Nixon farewell statement, which Gorton said was framed with his agreement and served as a final communiqué, spoke of their talks on “Vietnam and regional security.” A continued U.S.-Australian protectorate over Southeast Asia was implied. Nixon welcomed, and promised to support, Australia’s decision to keep troops in Malaysia and Singapore when the British leave two years hence, forever ending the Kipling era east of Suez. But not a single word was said about the negotiations in Paris, or the hope of a turn toward peace.

  Nixon, like Johnson, is playing for time. His May 14 address strongly recalls Johnson’s at Johns Hopkins in April 1965. Johnson deluded many people into believing that he was moving toward peace at the very moment he was committing the first U.S. combat troops to the South. The only remarkable thing about the Nixon address is that at one point he seemed to be pulling his own leg. When Nixon said “repeating the old formulas and the tired rhetoric of the past is not enough,” he seemed to be setting himself up for the cartoonists. If I were running the Secret Service I would find out who wrote that and take him down to the White House cellar for interrogation under the bright lights. For as Senator Gore showed in a devastating analysis on the Senate floor May 20, the speech was full of old formulas and tired rhetoric picked up almost verbatim from Johnson and Rusk. Even Nixon’s titillating hints about free elections and a neutral South Vietnam were also uttered, as Gore found, in almost the same words by Rusk in 1966. The parallels with Johnson sound as if Nixon was down on the ranch. If this weren’t politics, it would be plagiarism.

  The speech is so tricky it has everybody confused except Henry Kissinger. “Proponents leak stories that the President is sending subtle signals to the Reds that he’d let them share in a new Saigon government as part of a peace package,” the Wall St. Journal said May 23. “Opponents warn this would bring the ‘disguised defeat’ Nixon had vowed not to accept. White House aides insist no decision has been made.” Never have there been so many hints with so little substance.

  You can read in Chalmers Roberts in the Washington Post (May 18) that silence gives consent and that what Nixon didn’t say May 14 really means he is ready to accept even an interim coalition government. This was “spelled out by persons in a position to know,” Roberts wrote ecstatically. But gravitation being what it is, what goes up must come down, and he added a but—“The U.S. cannot accept settlement terms which would turn the South over to the Communists and make a mockery of the years of American and South Vietnamese bloodletting.” The only sure nonmockery, it would seem, is to maintain in power the same oligarchy we have imposed on the South for 15 years.

  On the other hand you may read in David Lawrence (May 21) that the Nixon Administration has “at last” decided that it will not tolerate the continuance of heavy attacks and is not ruling out drastic reprisals which “could mean the resumption at any moment of the bombing of North Vietnam and even a blockade of Haiphong harbor.” Obviously the White House is handing out different lines of poop. Richard Wilson (Washington Star, May 21) reports jubilantly that before Nixon went on TV May 14 he gave an extemporaneous résumé to his top-level officials. They not only applauded but “there was no doubt what they were applauding.” The main emphasis was on “not quitting” and on Nixon’s “unpleasant options” if Hanoi does not accept mutual withdrawal. These include “a massive firebomb raid to destroy Hanoi.” We’ll put ’em back in the Stone Age yet. Senator Hugh Scott, the GOP whip, dropped hints of the same kind after Senator Kennedy—in the wake of “Hamburger Hill”—attacked the bloody nonsense of charging up any hill a well dug-in enemy baits for U.S. attack.

  In the blizzard of hints, there is also a preview of what Nixon may say to Thieu on Midway June 8. It is hinted that if one reads the fine print closely one will see that Saigon holds a secure veto over the international supervisory body to verify withdrawals “and for any other purpose agreed upon between the two sides.” The elections, too, would be held under “agreed procedures” and agreed means the agreement of the Thieu regime. While Nixon takes the high road, Thieu will have the low, and when domestic opinion gets tired of seeing the Reds reject Nixon’s “generous” offers, the iron will be hot and the Pentagon hopes it can strike again.

  * * *

  *Indeed the only place the texts are available is in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents for May 19.

  Only the Bums Can

  Save the Country Now

  Although the phrase wasn’t widely used at the time, by the early ’70s a version of today’s “culture war” was already in full swing, with leftist antiwar students, black advocates of civil rights, and nascent movements in support of a new feminism, gay rights, and other progressive causes ranged against a political and business establishment supported by a quasi-populist coalition of “white ethnics,” southern conservatives, and anxious parents—Nixon’s so-called “silent majority.” When students around the country erupted in protests over Nixon’s expansion of the war into Cambodia, the president responded with an angry attack, referring to “these bums . . . blowing up the campuses.” Soon Ohio State National Guardsmen would kill four students and wound nine others during a mostly peaceful protest at Kent State University. In this angry article, Stone allies himself squarely with the “bums” in exposing the deceptive basis for the Cambodia policy. Later the same year, Stone would publish a book on the Ohio tragedy, The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished.

  . . .

  May 18, 1970

  THE RACE IS ON between protest and disaster. Despite the first four martyr “bums” of Nixon-Agnewism at Kent State, the college shutdown their deaths precipitated, the outpouring of student and other protesters here last weekend, the campus lobbyists beginning to flood the halls of Congress, the Senate resolutions to limit or end Indochinese military op
erations, and the smoldering near-revolt within the Nixon Administration itself, we are still on the brink. We are in the first stages of a new and wider war from which withdrawal will be difficult. The military holds the reins and can precipitate new provocations and stage new alarms. The only hope is that the students can create such a Plague for Peace, swarming like locusts into the halls of Congress, that they stop all other business and make an end to the war the No. 1 concern it ought to be. Washington must no longer be the privileged sanctuary of the warmakers. The slogan of the striking students ought to be “Suspend Classes and Educate the Country.” I see no other visible and adequate means to stop the slide into a conflict that may sweep very suddenly beyond the confines of Indochina if the man who gambled on Cambodia ends by gambling on the use of nuclear weapons.

  In a dispatch from a landing zone in Cambodia, Jack Foisie of the Washington Post (May 8) described GIs jumping from helicopters under enemy fire with derisive denunciations of the war scrawled on their helmets. One of those he copied down sums up the situation of the whole country in this war. “We are the unwilling,” it said, “led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.” As usual the country is not being told the truth about why we went into Cambodia. In his war address of April 30 Nixon pictured the attack across the border as a preemptive exercise to hit an “enemy building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.” It was described as a swift preventive action from which we would soon withdraw and which was not part of any broader intervention in Cambodian affairs.

  But thanks to the indiscretion of one Congressman, we now have the private—and more candid—version given members of Congress at special State Department briefings. This puts the origins and purpose of the Cambodian action in a very different light. The Congressman is Representative Hamilton Fish (R. N.Y.), a right-winger who has long questioned the logic of our heavy commitment in so peripheral an area as Southeast Asia. In a letter to constituents released May 13, Mr. Fish summarizes a private briefing by Under Secretary of State Richardson for selected members of Congress. Nixon said we moved across the border to nip enemy plans for an imminent attack. But from Richardson’s briefing, Mr. Fish reports, “It was clear that the present military thrust into Cambodia hinged largely on the reportedly surprise overthrow of Prince Sihanouk.” Nixon said in his April 30 speech that for five years “neither the U.S. nor South Vietnam moved against those enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.” But Richardson gave the Congressmen a different story. He told them, “U.S. intelligence had known for years of those enclaves from which attacks on South Vietnam have been launched” but we had never attacked them before “because it was feared that Sihanouk would counter any invasion by allowing NVA [North Vietnamese Army] forces to enlarge their occupied areas.”

  Sihanouk was trying to maintain a precarious neutrality by playing one side against the other. Nixon was deceitful when he said in the April 30 speech that our policy since the Geneva Conference of 1954 “has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people” and added—as proof of our virtue—that since last August we have had a diplomatic mission in Pnom Penh “of fewer than 15” and that for the previous four years “we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever.” The truth is that Sihanouk ousted our mission and broke relations in 1965 because he claimed the CIA had been plotting against him for years and even tried twice to kill him. Sihanouk was especially resentful of the Khmer Serei (Free Khmer) mercenaries the CIA and our Special Forces had enlisted from among Cambodians living in South Vietnam and Thailand to act as an anti-Sihanouk commando force. The CIA gave it facilities to broadcast anti-Sihanouk propaganda from Saigon.

  “For the past five years,” Nixon said with bland hypocrisy, “we have provided no military assistance and no economic assistance whatever to Cambodia.” He did not explain that Sihanouk threw out our military mission because he said it had been trying to turn his armed forces against him, and gave up economic aid, too, rather than have it used as a cover for U.S. agents trying to overthrow him. This was not a figment of Sihanouk’s imagination. As far back as 1958, in a police raid on the villa of one of his generals, Sihanouk found a letter from President Eisenhower pledging full support to a projected coup and to a reversal of Cambodian neutrality. This was part of a “Bangkok plan” worked out between the dictators of South Vietnam and Thailand (Diem and Marshal Sarit Thanarit) to dismember Cambodia and instigate civil war (see William Worthy’s account in the York, Pa., Gazette & Daily of April 30). When Sihanouk resumed relations last August, in his desperate see-saw between the two sides, his condition was that the U.S. mission be kept small. He didn’t want too many CIA agents roaming around.

  That was poor Sihanouk’s mistake. Cambodia neutrality was ended when the military we had long wooed finally overthrew Sihanouk on March 18. The most complete account yet published of the events leading up to the coup is to be found in Le Monde Diplomatique for April. It is by Daniel Roy, a Frenchman with 15 years’ experience in Indochina who was for a time press attaché to Prince Sihanouk. He claims that funds for the coup were provided by a Cambodian adventurer turned banker in Bangkok who was associated in the enterprise with the notorious Son Ngoc Thanh, puppet President of Cambodia under the Japanese occupation. The latter fled to Thailand after the war and according to M. Roy is “today in the service of the CIA.” M. Roy also charges that the coup was prepared by Khmer Serei forces who went over the border with their arms and wives and pretended that they were defecting to Sihanouk. They infiltrated the army and the police as a Trojan Horse for the CIA.

  Let us now return to Congressman Fish’s account of the private State Department briefing. “Following the fall of Sihanouk,” the Congressmen were told, “the new anti-Communist government cut all supply lines [of the NVA and Viet Cong] except the Ho Chi Minh trail” which, of course, lies largely outside Cambodian territory. “To resecure their severed supply routes” the account in the private briefing continued, “VC and NVA began moving out of the enclaves, thereby threatening the overthrow of the Cambodian government” (my italics). It is “against this background,” Representative Fish’s account of the briefing concludes, “that the American-South Vietnamese strikes into Cambodia were ordered.”

  The sequence is quite different from that given publicly by Mr. Nixon. Instead of preparing an attack on our forces in South Vietnam, the enemy was reacting to an attack on its supply lines. This upset the status quo, and risked a complete take-over of Cambodia by the other side. We intervened to save it from the consequences. Did our government give the new Lon Nol government of Cambodia assurances that we would defend it if its action in cutting all the supply routes precipitated an attack upon it?

  It is true that at the State Department briefing “it was stressed that the present attacks were not aimed at either the confrontation of the estimated 40,000 to 50,000 VC and NVA believed operating in Cambodia or the defense of the present government of Cambodia. The raids were described as strictly ‘spoiling actions,’ aimed at supply, bunker and communication network destruction” and to give the South Vietnamese army additional time while the enemy rebuilds its supplies. But you have to be pretty feeble-minded to accept this at face value. What if Sihanouk, with NVA and Peking support, is restored to power, this time not as a precarious neutral but as an ally of the other side? What if we are then faced with the prospect, not just of restoring the old supply lines and bases but of Cambodia turning into one big enemy base? Who can believe that the Nixon Administration will stand by and let this happen?

  This is the wider war which lies ahead. The overthrow of Sihanouk was a grave political mistake. It gave the other side a new ally with legitimacy and mass support, basic necessities for the Indochinese People’s War which has already been proclaimed against us. The situation inside Cambodia was succinctly summed up in an interview which the pro-Nixon and pro-war U.S. News & World Report for May 18 held by cable
with its correspondent, James N. Wallace, in Pnom Penh:

  Q. Have the allied attacks in eastern Cambodia saved the rest of the country from a Communist take-over?

  A. No. Unless the allied drive completely overwhelms the Communists, Cambodia’s position remains about the same . . . the short-run result is even more chaos and confusion . . .

  Q. Did the Cambodians welcome the Allied move?

  A. Again, no. Cambodians do not like . . . the idea of South Vietnamese troops’ rolling across Cambodia . . .

  Q. What kind of reception would Sihanouk get?

  A. Almost certainly he would receive more popular support than the Lon Nol government cares to admit. Sihanouk still is popular among a great many of Cambodia’s 5.5 million peasants, who respected his traditional status as a god-king and liked his earthly personal relations with villagers.

  The French journalist Max Clos, who has been covering Indochina for years during both the French and U.S. wars, foresees (Le Figaro, May 2–3) a Cambodian resistance based on peasant support, doing in their country what the Viet Cong have done in Vietnam and creating a “liberated zone” from which in time they will be able to take over Pnom Penh. “Mr. Nixon,” M. Clos wrote, “hopes to withdraw his troops from Cambodia in a month and a half. Even if he succeeds, it is safe to predict he will have to send them back again.”