Fletcher

tract for the proposed study. "It may have been cancelled for all I know," he said.

Since CCAS made the proposal public last week, Fletcher officials "have been catching a lot of flak," Cameron said. "We've agreed in the future to keep the Fletcher community informed about negotiations with the government on collective research contracts."

Morrell said yesterday that CCAS had obtained copies of the proposal and of Fletcher Dean Edmund A. Gullion's covering letter from "a source within Fletcher," CCAS is selling additional copies of both documents at its office in Phillips Brooks House.

CCAS is a group of historians, political scientists and sociologists involved in Asian studies. It has chapters at ten universities around the country. Last year it published a collection of articles by CCAS members, called The Indochina Story.

Morrell said the Fletcher proposal was "explicit about proceeding on the assumption that current American objectives-maintaining a complaint, dependent, U.S. aided regime in South Vietnam-will be achieved. Any kind of research based on this assumption contributes to the myth of Vietnamization."

Cameron said the new aid program would be the "reverse of Vietnamization, which is a bilateral relationship. We're talking about multilateral assistance channeled through multilateral organizations to all of Vietnam-North and South."

Smokescreen

Morrell said that "if the smokescreen about aiding both sides doesn't pan out, we'll still go ahead and aid South Vietnam. That could easily happen, since there's no way Hanoi or the NLF could accept American aid while we're occupying their country."

Cameron noted that there was a precedent for American aid to North Vietnam. "Sometime last year the U.S. sent a token amount of aid-under $100,000-through UNICEF to help children in North Vietnam, and Hanoi accepted it," he said.

Primary Objective

"Our primary objective in this study would be to produce a mechanism to aid Vietnam as a whole, a mechanism acceptable to all sides," he said. "Only secondarily would we look for mechanisms acceptable to one side and not to the other."