November 10, 1969
Page 33594
COLUMNIST JOSEPH KRAFT WRITES OF "A CHANNEL TO HANOI"
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in yesterday's Washington Post Joseph Kraft contributed a significant column entitled "A Channel to Hanoi – A French Expert Says the North Vietnamese Are Quite Willing To Bargain With United States." The article discussed President Nixon's exchange of correspondence with Ho Chi Minh earlier this year. In the column, Mr. Kraft also reported on a conversation he had in late September with Jean Sainteny, the former French High Commissioner in Vietnam. At that time, M. Sainteny had just returned from attending Ho's funeral in Hanoi, where he had discussed with North Vietnam's Premier, Pham Van Dong, the possibilities of a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam war.
From this conversation and the released text of the Nixon-Ho corespondence, Mr. Kraft reached the conclusion that the President had missed a conciliatory tone in Ho's response to his letter.
This is much the same conclusion that I had reached and which I discussed in the Senate last Friday. I ask unanimous consent that the text of Mr. Kraft's column be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
A CHANNEL TO HANOI; A FRENCH EXPERT SAYS THE NORTH VIETNAMESE ARE QUITE WILLING TO BARGAIN WITH UNITED STATES
(By Joseph Kraft)
It is passing strange that so many people have made up their minds so quickly about the President's speech on Vietnam. For at the core of Mr. Nixon's argument, there is a mystery – the mystery of why negotiations have gone sour.
The President's claim, of course, is that the intransigence of the other side is to blame. But the evidence he offered argues the opposite. And so does the view of a truly weighty figure used by the President as counselor and go-between – the former French High Commisioner in Vietnam, Jean Sainteny.
The issue of negotiations is central because the President offered the country an absolute choice between immediate withdrawal and his plan for Vietnamization. Since hardly anybody favors a bugout, the tendency is to go with the President, but only if there were no other alternatives available. And in theory, at least, one obvious alternative is negotiated settlement.
It is not only an obvious alternative, but a very promising one. For negotiation offers a genuine answer to two problems usually raised sophistically by persons whose public reputation or sense of the dramatic requires that the war go on.
Through negotiations, it is possible to avoid – by an international guarantee of personal safety – the bloodbath so widely feared if the Communists gained the upper hand. Through negotiations for a neutral Southeast Asia, it would also be possible to guarantee the small states in the area against Communist domination – to prop up the dominoes.
The uses of negotiation were plainly not lost on Mr. Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger. Even before they took office, they had opened a line of communication to the late President of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh. And subsequently, they pushed negotiations through the Russians and in secret meetings in Paris.
So what went wrong? The President said in his speech that "the obstacle is the other side's absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join in seeking peace." As evidence, he released an exchange of letters with Ho Chi Minh. But Ho's letter, dated three days before his death on Sept. 2, does nothing to justify the President's staggering denunciation.
The tone is conciliatory. The text refers to the need for "good will on both sides." It speaks of an American withdrawal, but without the usual demand that it be either immediate or unconditional.
It mentions the 10-point program of the National Liberation Front not as the only basis for settlement, in the manner of past demands, but more modestly, as "a logical and reasonable basis for the settlement of the Vietnamese problem."
Many American officials past and present – including the Johnson administration's chief negotiator in the Paris talks, Ambassador Averell Harriman – find Ho's letter a flexible document full of openings for negotiation. But the Nixon speech didn't say anything about making reply to the letter. Apparently it went unanswered. Why?
At this point, Sainteny becomes relevant. He was an old friend to Ho Chi Minh. He slipped into Washington this summer under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and may have been the means of passing Mr. Nixon's letter of July 15 on to the other side. Previously, Mr. Nixon had sought his counsel on Vietnam even to the point of once searching him out for a chat when Sainteny was off sailing on the Mediterranean.
I saw Sainteny at the end of September, just after his return from the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. He had had a long talk with Premier Pham Van Dong. He was persuaded that the other side was prepared to accept a settlement that would include an independent and noncommunist South Vietnam set in a neutralist Southeast Asia.
The obstacle to agreement, in his view, was that Hanoi did not have any faith in Mr. Nixon's claim that he wanted agreement. On the contrary, the North Vietnamese thought the United States was still tryingto impose in Saigon, by military means, a pro-American government hostile to Hanoi.
Sainteny felt – and his feelings were made known to the President – that the United States could dispel Hanoi's doubts in two ways. One would be a formal statement that the United States recognized the principle of total withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam at some unstipulated date. The other would be by broadening the present regime in Saigon to include some political figures who were not diehard anticommunists.
If these views are correct, then the responsibility for blocking negotiations does not lie only with Hanoi. Washington is to blame for not making considerable concessions, for wanting to shove the Saigon regime down the throat of Hanoi.
Maybe Mr. Nixon's plan for Vietnamization can succeed. Maybe the South Vietnamese will prove able to undertake their own defense with an American contribution so low as to be no cause for internal strife in this country. But I have looked upon the South Vietnamese government and upon its army, and I have my doubts.
In any case, the price being paid for Mr. Nixon's policy should be clear. The other side has now been confirmed in its worst suspicions of the United States. Negotiations are much more difficult than ever before – if possible at all. A long and bitter struggle, almost certain to intensify at some point, looms ahead. That struggle is, by no mere rhetorical touch, Nixon's war.