U.S. IN VIETNAM Lodge Suggests 25 Years

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31412, 4 July 1967, Page 15

U.S. IN VIETNAM Lodge Suggests 25 Years

(N .Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

WASHINGTON, July 3.

Mr Henry Cabot Lodge, a former United States Ambassador in Saigon, suggested yesterday that American troope might have to stay in South Vietnam for as long as 25 years.

In a recorded radio and television interview, he said that a United States military presence there would be required “for a long time” and noted that the United States has had troops in West Germany for 25 years and in Korea for 17 years. “There’s no great tragedy in that as long as they are not being killed,” he said. The Ambassador’s remarks, interpreted in the light of President Johnson’s pledge to withdraw American troops within six months after North Vietnamese forces withdrew and violence disappeared in South Vietnam, indicated he expected a long pacification campaign. President Johnson has always demurred from predicting how long the war would last. But the Ambassador also said that he expected “very big military results” in a year or two.

Mr Lodge was answering questions in the recorded interview , with Senators

Joseph Clark and Hugh Scott, both from Pennsylvania. He conceded that the pacification programme was the least successful phase of the war “although we are doing better at it than we ever have before.”

The proportion of the population under Government rather than Viet Cong control had risen from 52 per cent to 58 per cent between 1965 and 1966, he said.

Commenting on the coming elections in South Vietnam he predicted they would be orderly and result in “a Government whose legitimacy cannot be questioned." He praised Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky as “a young man who has learned a great deal and who has accomplish a great deal” and denies a suggestion by Senator Clark that he was a dictator. Asked when he foresaw an end to rising American casualties, Mr Lodge said: “I certainly hope they ought to be down by the end of this | year.”