Word: lull
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Twelve-Hour Truce? While the fighting raged in the south, the U.S. mulled over a Viet Cong offer, broadcast over the enemy's clandestine radio, of a twelve-hour truce starting Christmas Eve. It might well be a trap: last year the Communists used a Christmas lull to take more strategic positions and to blow up a U.S. billet in downtown Saigon, killing two and wounding...
...Phase." The lull in the war 'may well be short-lived, as both Pakistan's Ayub and India's Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri indicated in their-post-cease-fire speeches. "From now on we enter a new phase in our struggle to show the righteousness of our cause," said Ayub. He added warm praise for Red China, whose "moral support . . . will forever remain enshrined in our hearts," as well as for Indonesia and other Moslem nations. The U.S. understandably received no public praise from Ayub for its role in the ceasefire, though Ayub quickly called President...
Along with the lull in the fighting came a frantic flurry of diplomatic activity. At the United Nations, in London, Cairo and Belgrade, statesmen scurried about in quest of the magic formula to end the war. Among the few whose efforts deserved notice was veteran U.S. Ambassador-at-Large W. Averell Harriman. Returning to Washington from a "vacation" in the Soviet Union, Harriman advised the President that Russia's leaders "sincerely wanted peace," but could not be counted on to take any initiatives to settle the Viet Nam war. "I don't know whether they have any influence...
...what else would stop if we stopped bombing," said U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk last week. "Are you going to stop attacking these villages and killing off thousands of innocent civilians? What else will stop? And we've never had any reply." Even the intentional five-day lull in U.S. bombing last May failed to draw a response from intransigent North Viet Nam. Britain's Commonwealth peace mission has not got very far either. Last week, after pondering Hanoi's rebuff of the mission, Harold Wilson gamely sent a low-level British official off to Hanoi...
Proving the Point. The President took special pains to inform Hanoi of the purpose of the lull. U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Foy Kohler told Red China's Moscow embassy about it. U.S. officials let Russian diplomats in Washington know. The French, British and Canadians-all of whom have pipelines to Hanoi-were informed. Each was asked to pass on the message that any hostile action by the Viet Cong during the lull would prompt the U.S. to double its bomb loads if and when the raids resumed. North Viet Nam brusquely condemned the lull...