The doves have no monopoly on dislike of the Vietnam war. Nobody likes it. We all feel it weighing us down, like a dead rooster around the neck. If only we could cut loose! Then—why, then the boys could come home and the dollar would get healthy and we could clear up these riots and inflation would stop and people abroad wouldn’t hate us any more and there’d be plenty of money to spend on the cities and the campuses would quiet down and we could reduce taxes for a change instead of jacking them up another notch and maybe even Reverend Coffin and Dr. Spock would shut up about politics and go back to God and babies. The vision is almost irresistible: cf. the behavior of Wall Street after the President announced he was going to stop the war and get off. This is the way human beings very often feel about the ill they have, especially if it has been dragging on for a long time.
It is possible and indeed probable that the current negotiations, begun in Vientiane and scheduled to enter Phase II in Paris, will lead to an American pullout. It is altogether impossible that the dream of a relaxed, rosy post-Vietnam epoch will come true.
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