"But There Is No Peace"

With a total of 47 Nobel peace prize nominees, including such divergent figures as Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, Richard Nixon and Viet Nam War Critic Daniel Ellsberg, any decision was bound to be controversial. But the selection last week of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Chief Negotiator Le DuC Tho for their efforts in attaining a cease-fire in Viet Nam aroused an unprecedented storm of criticism.

Only at the White House was the announcement greeted with unguarded praise. Kissinger was unabashedly delighted; President Nixon, who might have hoped to win it himself, said that the award gave "deserved recognition to the art of negotiation itself in the process of ending a war and laying the groundwork for peace." Hanoi, however, was resoundingly silent, lending substance to rumors that Tho would not accept the prize.

Officially, the selection was, as always, unanimous among the Nobel committee's five members. But this year the committee, crippled by insoluble differences of opinion, made the award with only three of the five members favoring the Kissinger-Tho combination.*

Disapproval of the peace award far outweighed praise for it. Norwegians complained that "there is no peace." In Italy, Giorgio La Pira, a prominent left-wing Catholic intellectual, said that the award made sense from a pragmatic point of view. West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the 1971 peace-prize recipient, sent off congratulatory telegrams to both Kissinger and Tho, but the West German press claimed that the prize had been "degraded," wondering sarcastically if it might go next year to Anwar Sadat and Golda Meir.

The New York Times ruefully labeled the award the "Nobel war prize," while former Ambassador Edwin O. Reichauer, now a Harvard professor, said: "The fighting in Indochina will go on. Theirs was not a great achievement." Paris' prestigious Le Monde termed it a "masquerade," pointing out that Tho had spent his life committed to violent wars of liberation and that Kissinger was part of the American policy that reached its most unpeaceful moment in the Christmas bombing of Hanoi last year. In Saigon, a government spokesman was pleased enough with Kissinger, but he likened the selection of Tho to "nominating a whore as honorary chairman of the P.T. A."

Despite the controversy, the fact remains that Kissinger and Tho had indeed concluded a difficult and complex agreement that effectively removed American troops from combat. Whether or not the agreement will lead to peace is uncertain, but the strenuous efforts of Kissinger and Tho in Paris were at the very least a move in the right direction.

* No such problems beset the judges awarding the prizes for economics and literature, which went to Harvard's Wassily Leontief, 67 (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS), and Australian Patrick White, 61, whose sensitive, lonely novels are set against the vast open spaces of his homeland.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.