Little Hope Held For Talks

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31786, 17 September 1968, Page 18

Little Hope Held For Talks

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) NEW YORK, Sept. 15. A new book by two American journalists who were intermediaries between Hanoi and Washington condemns President Johnson for “calculated deceit” and holds out little hone for success of the Paris talks until the United States stops bombing North Vietnam.

The journalists, Harry Ashmore and William Baggs, said the United States entered the talks with a dangerous and possibly fatal trimming of the understanding under which the talks were arranged.

They said that the understanding as related to them by Ho Chi Minh himself and his spokesman was “that there must be a total cessation of the bombing before North Vietnam would pass on to discuss any substantive matters.” Ashmore and Baggs report in their book “Mission to Hanoi” that the chief United States negotiator, Mr Averell Harriman, “simply rejected our contention that the North Vietnamese had made it quite clear that while they would make contact while the bombing went on, they would not begin to negotiate seriously until it had been halted.” “This is simply not possible,” Mr Harriman said in a meeting with the authors at the State Department. “They can’t expect us to stop the bombing without getting some concession from them to protect our troops near the demilitarised zone.” Ashmore, a former newspaper editor, and Baggs, editor of the “Miami News,” are executive members of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California.

They have travelled twice to Hanoi and were there last April when President Johnson made his dramatic speech altering United States bombing policy and withdrawing from the presidential race. Ashmore and Baggs returned home to tell Harriman of Hanoi’s indicated willingness to meet with the United States.

“If there was to be bargaining,” the authors told Mr Harriman, “it would have to be done on the other side of total bombing cessation —then., as we

judged it, there would be considerable room for manoeuvre if the United States was now willing to accept some form of coalition Government in Saigon embracing the National Liberation Front.

“This, we reported, was the essence we had distilled out of many hours of direct talks and background probing. “At that point it seemed as though Governor Harriman

turned off his hearing aid, and the others in the room began to gaze at the ceiling.” According to the authors, the demand for reciprocal action in response to a total bombing halt was the same proposition that President Johnson used to erase the prospect of negotiations 14 months before.

They said the North Vietnamese might very well be

stubborn and unrealistic in refusing to yield on the bombing issue, “but they are not in any sense departing from the letter and spirit of every public exchange between the two Governments.” In the conclusion of their book, Ashmore and Baggs stated: “Lyndon Johnson, of course, cannot thus play fast and loose with his Vietnamese adversaries without subjecting his own people to the same kind of double-dealing. Yet this seems to produce only sporadic cries of moral outrage, and even more infrequent complaints of insult to the intelligence. "A substantial number of Americans continue to applaud this kind of calculated deceit, even when they are themselves taken in by it, on the ground that the onlyway to deal with the communists is to trick them before they trick you.”