If Not Thieu, Who?

Now that the U.S. has stopped bombing North Vietnam and is pulling its troops from the South, the peace-at-any-price propagandists are pushing a third Communist demand for unconditional surrender: replacement of South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu with some coalition quisling who can be counted on to cooperate in a leisurely Communist takeover of the government and country. As Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge plaintively used to put it: “They want us to pull out our troops and kick the props from under the Saigon government as we’re leaving!”

U.S. supporters of Hanoi’s three- point plan for unconditional surrender don’t phrase it quite that bluntly. All they want, they say, is replacement of the present Saigon government (usually referred to as a military “junta,” or “cabal” or “regime”) with a “broad-based” government headed up by a miracle man who can satisfy, simultaneously, the Communists and the anti-Communists, the Catholics and the moderate, radical and Cambodian Buddhists, the peasants and the citydwellers, the Hao Hoa and Cao Dai sects and the New York Times.

GK

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Gerry Kirk

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Now that the U.S. has stopped bombing North Vietnam and is pulling its troops from the South, the peace-at-any-price propagandists are pushing a third Communist demand for unconditional surrender: replacement of South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu with some coalition quisling who can be counted on to cooperate in a leisurely Communist takeover of the government and country. As Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge plaintively used to put it: “They want us to pull out our troops and kick the props from under the Saigon government as we’re leaving!”

U.S. supporters of Hanoi’s three- point plan for unconditional surrender don’t phrase it quite that bluntly. All they want, they say, is replacement of the present Saigon government (usually referred to as a military “junta,” or “cabal” or “regime”) with a “broad-based” government headed up by a miracle man who can satisfy, simultaneously, the Communists and the anti-Communists, the Catholics and the moderate, radical and Cambodian Buddhists, the peasants and the citydwellers, the Hao Hoa and Cao Dai sects and the New York Times.