The War: Dialogue by Headline

For the third straight week, Hanoi continued its efforts to persuade Washington that it was ready to come to terms about coming to terms. Filling North Viet Nam's principal sound stage in the West, Hanoi's chief envoy in the non-Communist world, Paris-based Mai Van Bo, picked the eve of President Johnson's State of the Union message to make a carefully worded statement about Hanoi's latest position on peace talks. Yet after Bo spoke, and spoke still again, Washington could find little in his words to support hopes that negotiations would soon begin.

Bo's little peeps were well calculated for maximum impact. The Communist diplomat invited the government-controlled French television-radio system in for a recorded interview, confided that he was going to drop "a bomb," and then proceeded to answer questions that he himself had supplied. When the network failed to broadcast the interview promptly, Bo's office distributed transcripts to other news agencies.

"Suitable Time." Bo re-emphasized last month's Hanoi statement that talks will—rather than could—take place after the U.S. stops bombing North Viet Nam and halts "all other acts of war" against the North. He then went on to say that conversations "will begin after a suitable time" once the bombing halts and that the initial talks would settle an agenda and determine at what diplomatic level to continue discussions.

Bo followed this up in another interview by defining a "suitable time" as "days, or a matter of weeks."

If the North Vietnamese really propose to talk within days, the U.S. would consider it a favorable sign. Yet the crucial question in Washington's view, as enunciated in Lyndon Johnson's San Antonio speech in September, is whether Hanoi intends to use a cessation of bombing to build up its forces in the South, intensifying military pressure there, while marking time at the bargaining table. On this point, Bo yielded not a millimeter. Johnson's San Antonio statement, he said, is an "indefensible position." "The U.S. attacked the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, an independent and sovereign country, without valid reason and without declaration of war. This is deliberate aggression and a challenge to all men. The U.S. must put an end to its aggressive acts without any conditions whatever."