The War, The Presidency: Flak from Hanoi

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Dashing into a bomb shelter at his Hanoi hotel during an alert, Salisbury bumped into four visiting U.S. women who belong to such organizations as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Due next week are several clergymen, including U.S. Pacifist A. J. Muste, who has led antiwar rallies in New York, Washington and Saigon. Though the ladies and the preachers were traveling without clearance from the State Department, a total of 57 Americans—47 of them newsmen—have validated passports to visit the North. So far, Hanoi has agreed to admit only two—Salisbury and Louis Lomax, a Negro TV commentator for KTTV in Los Angeles who was en route to Hanoi last week after stopping in at the State Department for a briefing.

Distorted Picture. Why did Hanoi open its doors to selected visitors? It obviously hoped that by controlling their movements they would get a view of U.S. bombing as ineffectual against military targets and brutal against civilians. It hoped, by this distorted picture, to reinforce the widely held impression that the U.S. is a big powerful nation viciously bombing a small, defenseless country into oblivion, and thus spur international demands for an end to the air war.

"Consider what would happen if we didn't bomb," said Air Force Secretary Brown. "There is no doubt that it would make it a lot easier for them to move anything South." Even more important, the bombing is the American equivalent to Communist guerrilla warfare in the South. It is a way for the U.S. to keep the North off balance, to disrupt its transportation and communications networks, and to remind it constantly that it is engaged in a war of aggression it will not be allowed to win.