Word: thant
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...Abruptly, and to his own surprise, the President last month got an assist from the adversary. By a vituperative rejection of the latest U.S. peace proposal, North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh displayed unmistakably his own hawk's plumage. Last week U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, long a stringent critic of U.S. policy in Viet Nam, was also rudely rebuffed...
...Thant, reiterating his fears of a wider war in Asia, invoked Hanoi's wrath by suggesting an eminently fairminded, three-step formula for ending the war: 1) "a general standstill truce," to be followed in a few weeks by 2) "preliminary talks" between Washington and Hanoi, possibly refereed by Moscow and London as co-chairmen of the 1954 Geneva conference that partitioned Indo-China, and 3) reconvening of the Geneva Conference...
Errand Boy. Indeed, some U.S. policymakers caviled at Thant's plan. For one thing, they pointed out, the Secretary-General did not specify with any degree of clarity whether or not the U.S. air war against North Viet Nam, which he calls "an insurmountable obstacle to discussions," would have to be suspended as a precondition to the truce. For another, they noted that any such truce could become a trap. They recalled in particular how the Chinese Communists, routed in the battle of Szepingkai in 1946 and on the brink of losing all of Manchuria to Chiang Kai-shek...
Nonetheless, because Thant for the first time urged a mutual truce rather than a unilateral U.S. deescalation, the Administration moved with alacrity to accept his proposal as "constructive and positive." Hanoi thereupon broadcast a scathing denunciation of Thant for having made "no distinction between the aggressors and the victim of aggression," while Peking branded him "an errand boy for Washington...
...letter points out that stopping U.S. bombing and recognizing the National Liberation Front, as U Thant suggested, would not necessarily remove the obstacles to negotiations. "What we mean," explained Craig, "is that stopping the bombing won't be enough, if we continue to mine rivers at the same time...