The War: The String Runs Out

THE WAR

The String Runs Out

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Day after day, congressional leaders and Administration aides streamed into the White House for closed-door conferences and confidential briefings. Hour after hour, Lyndon Johnson consulted earnestly with his most trusted advisers in the Cabinet Room. Night after night, the President pored over memos arguing for and against the choice that confronted him. Finally, after interminable hours of anxious, even anguished debate, Johnson last week reached a decision that may well prove as pivotal to the course of the war as his announcement last July that the U.S. would "stand" in Viet Nam. He concluded that the protracted pause in U.S. bombing raids against North Viet Nam would have to end.

Delayed Resolve. Though the decision had been reached days earlier, Johnson set 6 p.m. Saturday as the irreversible deadline. Most of Saturday, the President and his advisers were closeted in the White House discussing which targets to bomb, how hard to hit, when to start. Militarily, limited bombing of the North could have only limited results. Still, its renewal signified in a much broader sense that the U.S., having gone to extraordinary lengths to seek peace in Viet Nam, was now prepared to win the war for that unhappy country.

The decision to resume bombing the North came far later than even the proponents of the pause originally expected. Yet, after 37 days, the Administration's massive peace offensive had yielded nothing but insults from Hanoi. "The evidence available to this Government," said Lyndon Johnson, "indicates only continuing hostility and aggressiveness in Hanoi, and an insistence on the abandonment of South Viet Nam to Communist takeover." In his latest and strongest rejection of Washington's peace bid, North Viet Nam's President Ho Chi Minh last week sent a letter to other Communist capitals denouncing the U.S. effort as an "impudent threat" and demanding that the Hanoi-sponsored National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong's political facade, be recognized "as the sole genuine representative of the people of South Viet Nam." In so doing, Ho unequivocally closed the door on negotiations in the foreseeable future.

Ho's thumbs down came in the midst of a last-ditch effort by the President to break the diplomatic impasse. For more than a week, he and his aides had been dropping hints designed, in the words of an Administration official, "to let the North Vietnamese know that they damn well better hurry up." The implication was clear that if they did not, the U.S. had no choice but to resume bombing.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk dropped one such hint when, in a press conference on the fifth anniversary of his oath taking as Secretary of State (a tenure exceeded by only eight of his 51 predecessors), he remarked that the response to U.S. peace efforts had been overwhelmingly favorable "except from those who could in fact sit down and make peace." At the same time, cables advising that air strikes might soon be resumed began flowing to U.S. ambassadors in the 40-odd nations that U.S. emissaries had visited when the peace offensive was launched at Christmas.

Never before in the 20th century has a major nation committed itself to war and then unilaterally limited its war-making potential in hopes of negotiating