FitzGerald Asserts Vietnamese Truce Is Inconsequential

Frances FitzGerald '62, author of the best-selling Fire in the Lake, said last night that the Vietnam peace agreements were only one step in a "long, slow, symmetrical" process in Indochina.

Withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam is far more important than the actual signing of a peace agreement, because the withdrawal "means that American involvement didn't work," FitzGerald said.

Speaking on a panel headed by Stanley H. Hoffman, professor of Government, FitzGerald, who has recently returned from Vietnam, said she is "not optimistic we won't resume bombing, because the major issue of the war has not been solved." That issue is the question of who will run South Vietnam, she said.

FitzGerald described the strategy of President Thieu's regime in South Vietnam as one of a "war for population" which attempts by police tactics and bombing of houses to keep the people of South Vietnam in areas where the South Vietnamese government can control them.

By contrast, the Provisional Revolutionary Government in Vietnam is convinced it can win in a cease-fire situation, and will work for "patience and reconciliation," she said.

FitzGerald, whose book won the National Book Award for non-fiction this year, spoke with Richard Holbrooke, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and with Ithiel Pool, professor of Political Sicence at MIT.