Word: nams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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EVER since President Nixon announced last June that he planned to begin bringing U.S. troops home from Viet Nam, Washington has waited anxiously for some sign of a reciprocal move by Hanoi. In the U.S., Nixon's Viet Nam position rests heavily on some form of favorable response from the North. So far, the North Vietnamese have not obliged. Last week, in the wake of a presidential decision to delay further withdrawals until Hanoi's position becomes clearer, a sharp debate broke out at the highest levels of the Nixon Administration over the enemy's intentions...
...exchange was touched off by, of all people, Dean Rusk. Breaking a seven-month silence on the subject of Viet Nam, the former Secretary of State told a University of Wisconsin audience that there had recently been an "almost total lack" of North Vietnamese infiltration into the South. Since such a development could be an important signal of Hanoi's willingness to reduce the level of combat, newsmen the next morning eagerly clustered around the State Department's spokesman, Robert J. McCloskey...
Hanoi, convinced that Nixon's delay of troop withdrawals was essentially an empty gesture, reacted with smug cockiness. After the 32nd session of the Paris peace talks last week, North Viet Nam's Nguyen Thanh Le loftily declared that rising American opposition to the war at home, combined with what he described as a near mutiny among U.S. troops in Viet Nam (see following story), would compel Nixon to accept the N.L.F.'s ten-point peace program. A pivotal point calls for unilateral U.S. withdrawal...
...Nam's success in assuming a larger combat role; and 3) a decrease in the level of combat. Understandably, Nixon feared that another troop pull-out in the face of the recent renewed violence would be interpreted by Hanoi as a sign of U.S. weakness...
...month. Though the White House bristles at any suggestion that the timing was more than coincidence, the Administration is obviously not sorry that it occurs when Congress convenes and the nation's colleges reopen. Nixon's main domestic pressure is to reduce the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam to a minimum. As last week's debate indicates, his freedom of action is somewhat circumscribed by the Communists, who have shown no willingness to accommodate him. If they continue to gun down his strategy of a phased, orderly U.S. disengagement, the President might be forced to choose between...