Word: cong
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That possibility continued throughout last week to be stymied by the unwillingness of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to agree to send a delegation to Paris and sit at the same negotiating table with the National Liberation Front of the Viet Cong. There were reports and rumors that he was about to change his mind. But the delay brought to nearly a month the elapsed time since the bombing halt. Meanwhile, the war on the ground in South Viet Nam sputtered...
...South Vietnamese flags as possible before any cease-fire might freeze territorial claims. Saigon wants to add no fewer than 1,000 hamlets to its control by early 1969: it now claims some measure of control in 5,100 of the country's 12,800 hamlets. The Viet Cong apparently operate on similar assumptions: since last summer, they have held revolutionary council elections in about 1,200 of their hamlets, presumably in an attempt to ready quasi-governmental structures for the day of a ceasefire...
...middle part of the country, II Corps, is quiet. Communist forces have either gone into hiding, drifted further south or slipped across the Cambodian and Laotian borders. Except for a massive, six-battalion attempt by the South Vietnamese last week in Chau Doc province to take a vital Viet Cong stronghold, the fertile and populous Delta area of IV Corps is equally calm...
Wanting to Lead. When Johnson first proclaimed the bombing halt and expanded negotiations more than two weeks ago, Thieu balked at any South Vietnamese participation in a conference in which the Viet Cong's National Liberation Front would be permitted to speak for itself, rather than through Hanoi's delegates. But after several days, he announced that he would let his representatives come, provided South Viet Nam took over from the U.S. the leadership of the allied delegation and dealt directly with the North Vietnamese, not the N.L.F., at the negotiating table...
Ever since the first phase of the Paris talks began on May 10, U.S. diplomats in Saigon have kept President Thieu informed about the issues under discussion. Aware of South Viet Nam's sensitivity about Viet Cong representation, the U.S. suggested to the North a proposal Secretary of State Dean Rusk described as a practical "Anglo-Saxon approach." An exercise in diplomatic gymnastics, the American plan allowed each side to constitute its negotiating team as it wished and to say what it liked about the equality of its members. The genius of the plan was that the other side...