THE WAR: A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

ON the surface, there seemed little reason to expect that the talks between Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Chief Negotiator Le Due Tho, which resume in Paris this week, would be any more fruitful than the meetings that had gone before. In Saigon, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu dispatched a pair of senior diplomats to Washington to reaffirm his opposition to any peace treaty that does not guarantee the sovereignty of the South. In North Viet Nam, which had been further devastated by U.S. bombing during the two weeks before the New Year, the government issued...