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 a detailed and unprecedented public order for evacuation of major cities and industrial sites and the dispersal of factories—suggesting that Hanoi saw little hope ahead.

Square One. Yet, almost inexplicably after its earlier pessimism, the White House seemed to exude a private sense that the peace could be made in Paris this month. Its current mood—involving almost a willing suspension of disbelief—was based in part on some apparent progress in the newly resumed secret technical talks, which were delving into the mechanics of the cease-fire—how large the international control commission should be, for instance, and what powers it should have.

The closely guarded hopefulness was also grounded in a belief that North Viet Nam still stands by its agreement of last October to separate the cease-fire—the military aspects of the conflict—from the eventual political settlement. "We are not back to square one," insists a ranking U.S. diplomat in Paris. But neither had the Administration returned to the heady optimism of last October when Kissinger, at the peak of his prestige, made his famous pronouncement that peace was at hand.

Since then, Kissinger's reputation has become somewhat tarnished, and Washington observers have seized every opportunity to search for hints of a rift between the President and his foreign policy adviser—including last week's congenial ceremony at which Nixon awarded a Distinguished Service Medal to Kissinger's longtime deputy, General Alexander H. Haig Jr. But in the end, obviously, Kissinger's reputation—and his place in history—will stand on what finally happens in Paris.

If Kissinger's past performance is any criterion, he has already laid down priorities for discussion with Le Due Tho and narrowed the issues to fundamentals. Those fundamentals are the release of American war prisoners conditional only upon U.S. withdrawal, a cease-fire and an international observer force of some consequence. The President does not regard the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Viet Nam as an insurmountable problem. In the eleven days of savage bombings, he strengthened the Thieu regime as much as he could, at a heavy cost to his own international prestige. Nixon would like to achieve a truce before Jan. 20, the beginning of his second term.