The Secret Search

NO ONE has assembled a "Handbook for Doves" yet, but The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam should make the task infinitely easier. It is a quiet book. It does its work methodically and dryly, with a sure but muffled sense for the dramatic.

David Kraslow and Stuart Loorv, two Los Angeles Times correspondents, compiled this account of the Johnson Administration's diplomatic efforts to arrange peace in Vietnam after an elaborate research effort which took them literally all over the world. The record they relate is dismal at best, but their conclusion, like their treatment of their data, is low-key and pleasantly devoid of the rhetoric which so often invades studies of the Vietnam problem:

The record suggests that the Johnson Administration missed opportunities over the years to secure, if not peace, at least negotiations; if not negotiations, at least talks; if not talks, at least a propaganda advantage over the enemy that would have improved the nation's standing in the world and the President's credibility at home.

AS THE authors track down their leads, The Secret Search comes to recall Theodore Draper's Abuse of Power, and in some respects this later book just misses being a perfect last chapter to Draper's work. While Draper is far more ambitious, surveying the whole panorama of the U.S. involvement, and also more polemical, the two works have a common message: the U.S. has sought in Vietnam to settle by force a problem it would not, and probably could not, handle by political means.

As Draper, Kraslow and Loory tell the story, the United States has failed in several political arenas. According to Draper, it has failed in Saigon and in the hamlets of the countryside to encourage the political development which could have competed with the Viet Cong infrastructure for the allegiance of the Vietnamese people. Both The Secret Search and the Abuse of Power also show very clearly that U.S. leaders have failed as propagandists--with tragic domestic results. And finally The Secret Search argues persuasively that the Johnson Administration has failed at the task of diplomacy as well.

IN EXPLAINING these failures, Draper's more theoretical analysis probably comes closer to their cause. The U.S., he reiterates, has clearly misconceived the nature of the struggle, and this country's stake in it. Draper places much of the blame on the remnants of the domino theory which, while officially out of favor, still works powerfully on the minds of voters and politicians.

The Secret Search contributes less on a theoretical plane than Abuse of Power, but it makes Draper's observations come alive. It shows how the misconceptions of politicians operate through institutions and people in the Johnson Administration. Further, it shows how these institutions themselves contributed to diplomatic failure.

Of the many case studies in The Secret Search, the author's treatment of the Marigold initiative is most instructive and most exciting. The account of this abortive attempt at arranging talks occupies a full third of the book, and Benjamin Read, chief assistant to Dean Rusk and one of the few people in government who has access to the full story, has assured one faculty member here that the account of this incident from late in 1966 is "90 per cent" accurate.

The Marigold initiative was killed by two sets of bombing raids on Hanoi during the most delicate phases of the diplomatic effort. Cynics may find this hard to believe, but the first set of bombings--December 2 and December 4--were mistakes and nothing more. As The Secret Search relates, only one official in the vast web of American government, a deputy assistant Secretary of State, happened to know about both the military's plan to bomb Hanoi and the peace initiative; and he was buried away in the State Department bureaucracy with no decision making power, and, due to security problems, no way of alerting someone who did.

ACCORDING to Kraslow and Loory, the coordination problem arose largely as result of a decision by Lyndon Johnson to gather into his own hands, and those of his top advisors, the day by day controls over the war. By June, 1966, Johnson's concern with the war was so great that he, Rusk and McNamara were choosing at Tuesday lunches all the sites to be bombed for the coming week. This was simply more detail than he could handle, and with his vast responsibilities he had little time to follow the progress of peace initiatives. The one bureaucratic agency which could have coordinated the peace and war efforts, the Vietnam Working Group at the Vietnam desk of the State Department, had become by this time little more than a propaganda organ which sent its members around the country defending Administration policy.

It is not unusual for Presidents to take control of detail like this in times of crisis. Kenedy did it for two weeks in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. The problem was that the bombing of the North constituted a continuing crisis lasting for years. Lyndon Johnson's personal obsession with the war obviously aggravated the problem, but to some extent, the political failure of the first week of December 1966 is a failure of an institution --the presidency--which has increasingly been biting off more than it can chew. A year long crisis is an extreme example, but it contains a warning nonetheless.

The Executive did have an arm responsible for keeping track of peace probes. It operated under the direction of Averill Harriman, but as the War progressed, it gradually withered into a front toward which Johnson could gesture when his desire for peace was questioned. The story of Harriman's group as told by Kraslow and Loory illustrates one rule of executive decision-making: when an executive organization is not nourished by presidential concern it wilts. Harriman had neither the President's ear nor a security clearance which would have permitted him to do his job. Harriman did not even know of Marigold after it began to pan out. Johnson would have been protecting himself by keeping Harriman informed, but his central concern in December 1966 was not peace.

THE STORY of the second set of bombings--December 13 and 14--make Johnson's attitude even clearer. On December 4 the Polish Foreign Minister delivered a clear warning that the bombings might hurt the Marigold initiative though he refused to guarantee that he was speaking at Hanoi's request. Johnson was now aware of both the bombing plans and the danger to the peace talks. He chose to go ahead with the bombing. Kraslow and Loory speculate Johnson had decided that by now Marigold had little chance of succeeding, and that if the North really wanted to talk, one little bombing more or less wouldn't hurt.

In this calculation Johnson and his advisors committed the cardinal sin of diplomacy: they failed to place themselves in the enemy's shoes and examine the options as he must see them. What would Johnson have thought if the North Vietnamese offered peace and then launched a Tet offensive? The answer is clear. The error was so elementary that Johnson could hardly have taken the peace initiative seriously to begin with. The tendency of American statesmen to judge themselves and their enemies by different standards is a continuing motif of the Vietnam War.

The Administration had failed at home as well as abroad. The credibility gap shows that Johnson has not persuaded the public he was doing the right thing. To some extent, this is a tribute to the press, but it is also a comment on the men and institutions which are running the war. For better or worse, they have been bad propagandists. The extent to which any administration can deceive the public without control of the media is fortunately limited, but the Johnson Administration has repeatedly misused its still formidable weapons of persuasion. The blunders have been sometimes comic, sometimes pitiable, sometimes scandalous. The story of the we-will-be-out-by pledges is well known, but there are other failures. For instance, it would seem no great problem to coordinate the statements of the President and his Secretaries of Defense and State. And yet, in at least one instance mentioned by Draper, the case of the 'mysterious 325th," they flatly contradicted each other.

ADMINISTRATION officials have also changed their positions back and forth. September 1964 U Thant got Hanoi to agree to unconditional negotiations in Rangoon, Burma. Thant informed Stevenson, ambassador to the U.N., of the agreement. Stevenson in turn communicated the news to Washington. Four months later Stevenson told U Thant that the United States could not accept the proposal. When Stevenson finally leaked the news of the rejection the following June, Rusk justified the administration's action by contending Hanoi had had no intention of entering "serious" negotiations at the time, citing his sensitive "antennae" as the source of his impression.

In October 1966, according to Kraslow and Loory, Dean Rusk told Thant that Stevenson actually rejected the peace proposal on his own initiative, a contention which stunned Thant. Stevenson, dead by that time, had always worked indefatigably for peace in Vietnam.

The Secret Search for Peace combines exhaustive reporting, heaps of new data and gentle hints at broader theoretical issues in a readable and levelheaded volume. It is journalism at its best.