Word: north
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wake of President Richard Nixon's Viet Nam speech, the U.S. and North Viet Nam last week edged cautiously toward substance in the Paris peace talks. The movement, as usual, appeared tortuously slow. That was in part a measure of the distance that still separates the participants, but more important, it was a sign that each side has yet to render a final verdict on the other's proposal. After last week's session in the old Hotel Majestic, North Viet Nam's chief delegate, Xuan Thuy, left Paris for his first visit home since...
...matter of troop withdrawals, Hanoi has privately agreed to President Nixon's insistence on simultaneous mutual pullouts. The North Vietnamese insist, however, on maintaining the fiction of victory. While continuing to demand unilateral U.S. withdrawal, they would simply negotiate their own private "unilateral" pull-out with South Viet Nam-which would just happen to correspond with the U.S. schedule. On the issue of interim authority in the South, the major stumbling block, the U.S. has given up its demand that elections for a permanent government be controlled by the present Saigon regime. That, to be sure, is still...
...surface, at least, his persistence brought the forms of peace no closer. North Vietnamese Spokesman Nguyen Thanh Le said that the two positions remained "as different as night from day." Still, U.S. negotiators noted that the session remained refreshingly free of propaganda blasts, and Lodge himself left convinced that "a basis now exists for productive discussions...
Just as the pressures on the South Vietnamese government affect the Paris talks, so, too, do the pressures on the leaders of North Viet Nam. Are the North Vietnamese really weary of the war? Have the tremendous losses suffered by Hanoi's army in the South placed a burden on Ho Chi Minh's freedom of action? Do the North Vietnamese now want peace badly enough to make significant concessions...
...vital, but the answers are hard to come by. Though the Communists are fully aware of the domestic pressures in the U.S. to settle the war, and try to manipulate American public opinion to their own advantage, the American negotiators have only the scantiest information about the mood of North Viet Nam or how that mood might affect the Communists' bargaining position. About all that U.S. policymakers can do is ponder the clues that slip out of Ho Chi Minh's secretive land by means of foreign visitors, an occasional defector, and the North's own radio...