The Presidency: Protecting the Flank

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the eve of the conference, Lyndon Johnson crowned the U.S. diplomatic effort with a 4½-hour performance that showed the President at his best. Soon after his arrival, the President paid" a visit to South Korea's flinty, austere President Chung Hee Park. Blending flattery and cajolery for the next hour, he lauded Park for steering Korea from military to civilian government, hastened to assure him that the U.S. was not seeking peace out of weakness but out of a desire to attack "the underlying roots of the problem-human misery." Noting that he had entered public life to help people, he told Park: "The place to do it is in Asia. Here's where most of the people are." Johnson delivered the same message to other Asian leaders—Thailand's Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn, South Viet Nam's Premier Ky and President Nguyen Van Thieu, and Marcos. There was no need to lobby Australia's Harold Holt and New Zealand's Keith Holy-oake; they were already firmly in his corner.

It was Lyndon Johnson, too, who was personally responsible for the most controversial item in the communique—Point 29—pledging an allied troop withdrawal six months after "the other side" withdrew its forces, infiltration was ended and the level of violence had subsided. The point was designed to allay fears in other capitals that the U.S. has no intention of pulling out of Southeast Asia. Even more, it was designed to answer those statesmen—most notably France's Charles de Gaulle and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko—who have urged the U.S. to offer a specific timetable for withdrawal of its forces from Viet Nam as a possible prelude to negotiations. When Gromyko talked with Johnson in Washington last month, he declared: "You've got to be more precise. You've got to spell it out more than Ambassador Goldberg did in the United Nations."

In the final session, Johnson persuaded the Koreans and the Vietnamese that Point 29 would not be misread as a hedge for a U.S. pullout at any price. "Nobody can accuse us of a soft attitude," said the President. "If anyone doubts the basis of our commitment, they will find that we have more troops in Viet Nam than there are words in the Webster's New Dictionary."*

Communist Kitty. Predictably, the Communist reaction to the conference was swift and negative. Hanoi and Peking dismissed it as a "big fraud" and an "insipid farce." Moscow said it masked U.S. plans to escalate, not end the war. Meeting in New Delhi, Yugoslavia, the United Arab Republic and India urged an immediate end to U.S. bombing of the North and withdrawal of all foreign—meaning U.S.—troops. Asked if that applied to the North Vietnamese as well as the Americans, U.A.R. President Gamal Abdel Nasser smiled blandly. "The North Vietnamese," he purred, "say they do not have any forces in South Viet Nam."

Nonetheless, an optimist could discern some signs of headway. Marcos noted cryptically that he had heard of a number of "initiatives for peace." U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman took off to brief leaders in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Italy, France, West Germany and Britain on the conference—and there was speculation that he would try to persuade one of the governments along the way, perhaps Djakarta,