THE WAR: The President battles on Three Fronts

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ALL along. President Nixon and his advisers knew that a crucial time of testing for the Administration's Viet Nam policy had to come. With geometric inevitability, the descending curve that describes the withdrawal of U.S. ground combat forces would have to intersect the curve that plots rising South Vietnamese responsibility for the war. At that juncture, Hanoi would surely test the American resolve, Nixon's own commitment to his policy, and the staying power of the South Vietnamese. Four weeks ago, that testing point arrived with brutal bluntness when a carefully orchestrated force of North Vietnamese soldiers, well backed by tanks, artillery, antiaircraft guns and supplies, burst across the DMZ and the Cambodian border into South Viet Nam. There had been nothing like it in the war, not even the Tet offensive of 1968.

Dramatic Answer. In response the President played his last card—but it was a powerful one. Early last week, for the first time in four years, American bombs fell in the area of the North Vietnamese capital and the key port of Haiphong. The Administration assembled the strongest air and sea armada in Indochina since the war last peaked in 1968. More than 150 fresh planes were rushed to the theater from bases as far away as North Carolina; the B-52 fleet has been nearly doubled since the North Vietnamese offensive began. When Midway and Saratoga join the four aircraft carriers now on station off North Viet Nam, the U.S. and the South Vietnamese will have 150 ships and over 1,000 aircraft, equipped with some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the history of warfare to use against a North Vietnamese force of 110,000 to 130,000 men.

It was a dramatic answer to the enemy, a riposte full of hazards for the President on three fronts. In Viet Nam, militarily, it was the first real test of the Nixon Doctrine that the U.S. will support its Asian allies if they provide most of the manpower for their own defense. Second, Nixon was vulnerable to a Soviet response that might end his cherished plan for a Moscow summit in May; the U.S.S.R. has provided the materiel for Hanoi's offensive, and there were Russian ships in Haiphong harbor during the American attack. And third, on the home front, Nixon risked alienating all over again the large numbers of Americans who were baffled, vexed or outraged by his last dramatic initiative in behalf of Vietnamization —the incursion into Cambodia two years ago. Another Cambodia, another Kent State, and his re-election could be in doubt.

The first seven days that followed Nixon's unleashing of the huge B-52s and the smaller, faster fighter-bombers provided no decisive answers for the President. Neither the Nixon Doctrine nor the South Vietnamese army has failed—yet. U.S. airpower has not turned back the North Vietnamese —yet. If it had prevented an almost certain rout of ARVN, the issue on the battlefields was still in doubt (see story on page 16). A 20,000-man ARVN force led by President Nguyen Van Thieu's personal elite guard, dispatched to relieve An Loc, abandoned the effort 15 miles short of its goal on Highway 13. Late last week, in an astonishing go-for-broke gamble, the last uncommitted North Vietnamese division began moving south toward the DMZ to join two others battling for control of South Viet Nam's two northernmost provinces.