Again, the Credibility Gap?

"If the war is still going on next January," Candidate Richard Nixon declared in 1968, "it can best be ended by a new Administration . . . neither defending old errors nor bound by the old record. A new Republican Administration will do what the present Administration has so signally failed to do: it will arm the American people with the truth."

Two and a half years later, President Nixon is finding that "arming" more difficult than he expected. Despite cautiously phased troop withdrawals, more than 300,000 Americans are still fighting in South Viet Nam, and in the U.S. some of the same incredulity that enveloped Lyndon Johnson is descending on Nixon. A recent Gallup poll found that 69% of the American people do not believe the Nixon Administration is telling the truth about Viet Nam; L.B.J.'s rating on that question at the same point in his first full term was 65%. Columnists are increasingly burdening Nixon with the old phrase "credibility gap."

It was the South Vietnamese expedition into Laos that aroused new suspicions. The spectacle of Saigon's best fighting men dangling from the skids-of helicopters in their haste to retreat clashed with Pentagon optimism about Vietnamization and the success of the Laotian mission (see THE WORLD). Some Administration officials, including Secretary of State William Rogers, had declared that the incursion would last weeks longer. When it ended abruptly and bloodily last week, many Americans were again entertaining the sort of doubts that Nixon has tried to quiet.

Convincing Hanoi. But Laos is only a symptom of Nixon's larger problem. Time may, as the White House believes, work to the allies' benefit in Viet Nam, but it works against the Administration at home. Nixon's formula for U.S. withdrawal is inherently schizophrenic--widening the war in order to end it, persuading the nation that he is committed to withdrawal while convincing Hanoi that the U.S. means to stay just as long as necessary to protect the South Vietnamese government. But the time may not be far off when Americans will decide that an endlessly protracted withdrawal is just as bad as the prolonged escalation over which Lyndon Johnson presided.

The credibility gap involves not so much official untruths or half-truths regarding military actions as the question of Richard Nixon's ultimate intentions in the war. Last week in an hour-long interview with ABC's Howard K. Smith, the President was cautiously vague. He promised to end America's involvement "in a way that South Viet Nam will continue to survive as an independent country, have a chance to survive," but added: "We can't guarantee their [South Vietnamese] survival." Still, he in effect held out the hope that the purpose of U.S. intervention--the prevention of a Communist takeover--can be achieved. Otherwise, he said, "all over Southeast Asia, all over the Pacific, in the Mideast, in Europe, in the world, the United States would suffer a blow. And peace, because we are the greatest peace-keeping nation in the world today because of our power, would suffer a blow from which it might not recover." The doubt remained: How far and how long would Nixon have the U.S. fight to keep Saigon out of Communist hands? Few Americans could be soothed when Nixon resurrected an ancient and unhappy Indochina metaphor, saying that his next troop withdrawal announcement would bring "some indication as to the end of the tunnel."

Sullen Skepticism. Nixon attempted to shift the credibility problem onto the shoulders of the media, arguing that, among other things, news coverage of the Laotian mission emphasized those South Vietnamese units that returned badly battered and not those that had fought more successfully. But then almost no reporters and photographers were permitted to cover the operation inside Laos anyhow, so the President in effect was criticizing the press for not entirely accepting the official version of the story.

If Nixon is suffering a public relations loss, he is not nearly in Lyndon Johnson's dilemma of three years ago. Nixon is committed to a policy of quitting the war, and he can increase troop withdrawals as political pressures rise within the U.S. He will announce more reductions of the Viet Nam garrison in April, which may draw some of the poison out of planned antiwar demonstrations this spring. He must, however, reckon with the fact that if he sets out to disarm his critics at home, the result may be to undermine the morale of the South Vietnamese and weaken Thieu before his test in South Viet Nam's presidential elections in October.

Further troop withdrawals may mute criticism in the U.S., but the war has lasted so long, to such demoralizing effect upon Americans, that nothing short of total and final evacuation will ever completely ease their minds. Long habit has ingrained a sort of sullen skepticism about the war, an incredulity that is often oddly mixed with boredom. The night of his television interview last week, Nixon drew only 14% of the networks' prime-time audience; the other viewers chose a movie on NBC or Doris Day and Carol Burnett on CBS.

-Massachusetts' Senator Edward Kennedy seized on the image to make a mordant and perhaps tasteless pun: "America is coming out of Laos on the skids."

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