No Substitute for Defeat

For a few days after the start of the President’s mining-bombing operation the public response was confused and sometimes hysterical. The operation was viewed with alarm as a drastic re-escalation of the war, an open-ended commitment to permanent combat, and a nuclear-arms-rattling confrontation with the Soviet Union. This impression, however, was the result more of the President’s strident rhetoric than of his strategy. Wall Street was first to recover from the momentary shock. Within a week or so the more astute political commentators in both Europe and this country converged on an analysis along the lines presented in NR’s last issue: “The President . . . wants out. His military action … is a screening move for his political proposition. He is asking Hanoi, Moscow and Peking to get him off the hook. He offers to meet, in substance, Hanoi’s terms. . . . He begs only that our withdrawal from the contest be carried out according to a protocol that can be publicly labeled ‘peace with honor.’ ”

In his Newsweek column (May 22) Stewart Alsop puts it this way: “For more than a year now, [the President] has been asking from the North Vietnamese only a translucent fig-leaf to cover a total American withdrawal from Indochina. He has been asking for an agreed exit that could be made to look, if not exactly honorable, at least not downright indecent.” Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber calls his column in L’Ex-press (May 8-14) “A Letter to Americans” and begins: “There now comes for you the hour of defeat. We Europeans have so often known its bitter taste, the human tensions and the political convulsions it brings, that with all our hearts we are with you in this unprecedented experience for your country.” The Guardian (May 20) is blunt: “Two things are apparent—that the United States has lost the war and that Hanoi is firmly in the ascendant.”

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James Burnham

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For a few days after the start of the President’s mining-bombing operation the public response was confused and sometimes hysterical. The operation was viewed with alarm as a drastic re-escalation of the war, an open-ended commitment to permanent combat, and a nuclear-arms-rattling confrontation with the Soviet Union. This impression, however, was the result more of the President’s strident rhetoric than of his strategy. Wall Street was first to recover from the momentary shock. Within a week or so the more astute political commentators in both Europe and this country converged on an analysis along the lines presented in NR’s last issue: “The President . . . wants out. His military action … is a screening move for his political proposition. He is asking Hanoi, Moscow and Peking to get him off the hook. He offers to meet, in substance, Hanoi’s terms. . . . He begs only that our withdrawal from the contest be carried out according to a protocol that can be publicly labeled ‘peace with honor.’ ”

In his Newsweek column (May 22) Stewart Alsop puts it this way: “For more than a year now, [the President] has been asking from the North Vietnamese only a translucent fig-leaf to cover a total American withdrawal from Indochina. He has been asking for an agreed exit that could be made to look, if not exactly honorable, at least not downright indecent.” Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber calls his column in L’Ex-press (May 8-14) “A Letter to Americans” and begins: “There now comes for you the hour of defeat. We Europeans have so often known its bitter taste, the human tensions and the political convulsions it brings, that with all our hearts we are with you in this unprecedented experience for your country.” The Guardian (May 20) is blunt: “Two things are apparent—that the United States has lost the war and that Hanoi is firmly in the ascendant.”