TO PARIS WITH PATIENCE

AT last the preliminaries were over.

This week, in a 40-ft.-square conference room dominated by a 299-year-old Gobelin tapestry that is appropriately atwitter with hawks, doves, swans and other birds, negotiators for the U.S. and North Viet Nam sat down and began to talk. If the preliminaries were any measure, they should be at it for quite some time. Merely choosing a building required five days. "Procedural questions" covering housekeeping details—which doors should be used by which delegations, how many chairs should be around the table—postponed the opening of "substantive" talks for two more days.

Stepped-Up War. All week, both Washington and Hanoi had jockeyed for a favorable position. North Viet Nam's President Ho Chi Minh accused the U.S. of talking about "peace negotiations while stepping up the war," then went ahead and did the same thing. Five days before the talks were to start, Communist forces attacked 122 South Vietnamese cities and military installations, concentrating chiefly on Saigon. But the offensive was markedly punchless, especially by contrast with last winter's Tet strikes (see THE WORLD).

For its part, the U.S. gravely noted that Hanoi had infiltrated as many as 100,000 troops since Tet, nearly three times the normal flow; nearly 7,000 entered the South in the first five days of

May alone. "The President is not about to resume the bombing with the peace talks barely under way," said a White House aide. "But we haven't seen one single act of restraint on their part while we have been restraining ourselves." Said Lyndon Johnson, during a White House dinner for Thailand's Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn, whose country has sent 2,500 troops to fight in Viet Nam and plans to increase that force to 11,500: "I hope that our own people, all of them, and our adversaries as well, will realize that increased infiltration, sending new MIGs to new airfields south of the 20th parallel, will not go unnoticed."

In the face of Hanoi's stepped-up infiltration and its new wave of attacks in the South, the Administration's emphasis on the eve of the talks was on determination as well as patience. "It is quite obvious," said Chief U.S. Negotiator Averell Harriman in a Manhattan speech three days before his departure for Paris, "that patience will be required of the people of the U.S. as well as the negotiators." He added: "Above all, we must have determination and firmness to achieve our fundamental objective." Similarly, in a reference to the Communist attacks in South Viet Nam, U.N. Ambassador-designate George Ball warned Hanoi that "if they think that this kind of military operation is going to result in improving their bargaining position, they gravely misconceive the attitude of the U.S., the power position of the U.S., or the determination of the U.S. to see an honorable settlement."