Foreign Relations: The Great Peace Teach-in

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The brief holiday truce, violated continually by the Viet Cong, had come and gone, and the President said nothing. Day after day, the bombing pause over North Viet Nam went on and the President said nothing. Rumors of peace feelers to Hanoi spread like wildfire, and still the President said nothing.

For a week, Lyndon Johnson remained in insulated silence at the L.B.J. Ranch. Suspense and hopeful anticipation built up. Then, in a spectacular series of midweek revelations, the shroud of mystery lifted. In a characteristic stroke of showmanship, the President had dispatched a flying squad of U.S. officials all over the world to discuss the prospects for peace talks on Viet Nam.

"Clarify & Reclarify." U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg went to Rome to confer with Pope Paul VI on the Vatican's peace offensive, flew on to Paris to see Charles de Gaulle and then to London for discussions with Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Roving Ambassador Averell W. Harriman surfaced in Warsaw, talked about Viet Nam with top Polish officials, including Communist Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka, headed for Belgrade to see President Tito, planned thence to go to India. White House Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy went secretly to see Prime Minister Lester Pearson in Canada, which is one of three nations on the Viet Nam International Control Commission set up by the 1954 Geneva Conference, thus has a representative in Hanoi.

In Moscow, U.S. Ambassador Foy Kohler met in the Kremlin with Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny just before a high-level Soviet group headed by Aleksandr Shelepin, the party's No. 2 man, left for Hanoi. And in Washington, Secretary of State Dean Rusk met with Hungarian officials, who had made it clear that they, too, wanted to join the lengthening procession of countries hopeful of mediating the war.

The only official word from the White House about the great peace teach-in came from Press Secretary Bill Moyers, who told reporters: "The President in the last few weeks has felt that it was especially appropriate for more leaders of the world to know his views on Asia. This is a continuation of this Government's efforts to state and restate, affirm and reaffirm, clarify and reclarify our position on Viet Nam."

Accuracy from Hanoi. On the surface, Johnson's play for negotiations seemed to be well timed and shrewdly designed. An exhaustive—and exhaustively publicized—presidential effort to bring the war to a conference table could serve once and for all to satisfy the U.S. public, Congress and the world that the Administration was genuinely eager to end the war. If it came to nothing Lyndon could use its failure to justify his whopping U.S. defense budget, which may top $60 billion this year.

Nevertheless, the diplomacy-in-public that Johnson unleashed last week did not seem particularly well suited to the delicate manipulations necessary to setting up meaningful peace talks. Worse, with the scantiest justification it built high hopes throughout the world that peace in Viet Nam might really be imminent, when it was not.