The Chess of Ending a War

THE script seemed once more to be playing out with the inevitability of Greek theater. Again a chorus of dissenters in the Washington spring, again the President before reporters and television cameras, explaining, in the tenth year of the Viet Nam War, that he could not be moved by demonstrators' passions. Both sides, as always, clung to their own higher logic--the protesters to the rights of humanity beyond all political or even practical considerations, the President to his responsibilities to a larger design for peace ("Not just for us, but for our children, their children"). But for all the ritual quality of both the demonstrations and Richard Nixon's pronouncements, they contained new and unique elements.

Large questions about the future of the antiwar movement would be answered this week as the Mayday demonstrators, numbering up to 30,000, attempt an exercise in "nonviolent civil disobedience" to shut down the Federal Government for two days by blocking nine key bridges and intersections in Washington during rush hours.

Guerrilla Theater. The problems of keeping such disruptive protest peaceful may be difficult for both demonstrators and police. All last week a force of about 2,000 youths and adults, organized loosely around the People's Lobby, experimented throughout Washington with blunt, symbolic techniques of agitation. Groups raced through the corridors of the Capitol and Senate Office Building, wailing and moaning for the Vietnamese civilian dead. Some stormed into congressional offices to perform guerrilla theater, miming war's atrocities. In Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's office, demonstrators dumped red paint onto books and furniture, including an Indian art object. Goldwater responded by simply closing his office for the duration.

Protesters shrieked from the Senate gallery: "People are dying! God have mercy on your souls!" Some, led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Hosea Williams, stormed the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Others gathered at the "war machine's" Justice Department and Selective Service offices, lobbying with civil service workers, sometimes trying to bar the doors. By night, much of the group camped in tents in West Potomac Park near the Jefferson Memorial, where drugs and petty thefts contaminated the larger purpose of the gathering.

Bumper Sticker. Last week's performance left a sour and uneasy feeling among many Congressmen and others who had been profoundly moved by the previous week's protests by dissident Viet Nam veterans. "The vets left a really strong and favorable impression," said an aide to one of the Senate's most outspoken doves. "But these kids are destroying it." One group that appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reduced Vermont Senator George Aiken, a persistent war critic, to sounding like a right-wing bumper sticker. Advising them that there was no law against leaving the U.S., he snapped: "Why the hell do you stay here if other countries are so much better?"

The editors of the George Washington University Hatchet had only harsh words of welcome for the Mayday forces. "The 'give peace a chance' gang had their day last week and now they are gone," said a Hatchet editorial entitled "Forget It." "A new crowd is in town now . . . They have plans that we find disturbing, self-defeating and absurd."

Addressing the Mayday coalition, the paper advised: "After you get finished making what you think is a revolution by playing in the traffic, and if you happen to avoid arrest, don't come back here crying 'repression!' and try to stir up Act Two of your kind of revolution. Some trashing and some attempts at stirring up the campus proletariat have gotten to be routine around here and they don't impress anybody. The activities of last week made up a legitimate and resounding demand for an immediate end to America's latest bungling overseas caper. The kind of stuff planned for next week will do nothing but detract from the impact of last week's march and veterans' action." For his part, the President at Thursday's news conference spoke respectfully of the demonstrators; there was none of last year's talk of "bums." But he reiterated, talking to Hanoi as much as to his domestic audience, that he would not be "intimidated." Said Nixon: "If we were to do what they were advocating--a precipitate withdrawal before the South Vietnamese had a chance to prevent a Communist takeover--that would lead to a very dangerous situation in the Pacific and increase the dangers of war in the future ... I think that they will judge me harshly now. But I think what is important is how they judge the consequences of the decisions I make now, which I think are in their best interests and in the interests of our children."

The President remains unbending in his refusal to set a date for total U.S. withdrawal from the war--the central demand of his domestic critics and of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong negotiators in Paris. Nixon repeated that such an announcement would remove any diminishing incentive that the enemy might have to negotiate a peace and would give Hanoi all the information it would need to prepare an onslaught against withdrawing U.S. forces.

Larger Gamble. Actually, anyone with calendar and pencil can calculate that the U.S., even at the present rate of withdrawal, will probably be down to a "residual" force level of about 50,000 troops by mid-1972. Nixon said for the first time last week that a Korean-type residual force will not remain in Viet Nam. The central question is when and under what conditions the U.S. will withdraw the residuals.

The Administration reasons that the residual force must remain 1) to ensure that the South Vietnamese have a chance to go it alone and 2) as a hole card to play to obtain release of U.S. P.O.W.s. Withdrawal as a result of successful Vietnamization is, according to Nixon, foreseeable in the near future. The much larger gamble involves maintaining the residual force until the American prisoners are released--a maneuver that in a sense amounts to open-end commitment. Except for the P.O.W.s, a total withdrawal by early or mid-1973 would be predictable. In an effort to establish an opening on the P.O.W. question the U.S. last week announced that it would repatriate 540 sick and wounded North Vietnamese prisoners.

Hanoi, however, may well refuse to release American prisoners as long as any U.S. troops remain in Viet Nam. Last week the North Vietnamese delegate to the Paris peace talks, Xuan Thuy, invited negotiations on a fixed-date withdrawal of U.S. troops, suggesting that if the date is set, discussions on the release of prisoners may begin. The message, along with several others (see box, following page), was doubtless timed to support the demonstrators in the U.S. In effect, it was the same offer Hanoi made last year. Nixon replied at his press conference that he would not set a date until Hanoi offered "not just the promise to discuss the release of our prisoners but a commitment to release our prisoners."

It is a grotesque aspect of all war that it becomes a sort of chess game in a charnel house. At week's end Nixon, as if to find a brief respite in a crisper tradition, flew to Camp Pendleton, Calif., to welcome home the 1st Marine Division after five years of bloody fighting. Acrid white smoke rose over the parade grounds from a 21-gun salute. Nixon, thoughtful and obviously proud, pinned a presidential combat citation on the unit colors. "We are not going to fail," he told the Marines. "We shall succeed." Later he issued a word of warning to the protesters: "The right to demonstrate for peace abroad does not carry with it the right to break the peace at home." Nixon spent the weekend at San Clemente, and then planned to come back to the White House and wait for reports from the streets outside.

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