Vietnam forever?

AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON

It is a depressing indicator of President John- son's low public credit that he should have

made a fair-seeming tender of peace, that Ho Chi Minh should have responded with a ringing rejection and that the publication of their ex- change seems to have done so little to abate the liveliness of our distrust of our own intentions. The subtleties apart, the correspondence makes it difficult to believe that either side wants negotiations. Mr Johnson sent his pro- posals to Hanoi on February 8, early in the bombing truce. He then renewed the air war on February 13, presumably before Hanoi had responded. Ho Chi Minh dispatched his answer on February 15, after the fat was in the fire. It seems fair to say that Mr Johnson could have been a little slower on the trigger and Ho Chi Minh a little faster with his response. This is not the way of serious negotiations.

This passage confirms the suspicion that each side is waiting for the next election—the Americans for the South Vietnamese to choose a Congress next September and the North Viet- namese for the Americans to choose a president a little more than a year later.

Ho, after all, has been in garrison for twenty- one years and can probably remain there another two. He is by no means so well briefed as the Russians are on Mr Johnson's dreadful temper, and that ignorance may be an advant- age to him. There is very little more, assuming his balance, that the President can do in the North thrill he has already done; as for the South, out titanic efforts there have made it unlikely that the Vietcong can ever win the war but hardly indicate a quick victory for the Americans. Mr Johnson would seem altogether in the worse position. At Guam he could not even muster the show of some great new turn that was announced at Honolulu and Manila; the concluding comtnuniqud made no effort to disguise the weariness of the proceedings, and afterwards it was even explained that the principals were so exhausted from their long trip they were unfit to complete the agenda. All that was new was the effrontery of Prime Minister Ky.

The most plausible assumption is that Mr Johnson is hoping to be able to announce that

he has won the war when South Vietnam elects

its own government in September, by which time, if the military breaks the habit of this war and keeps a promise, the Vietcong might be well enough contained to be incapable of the embarrassment of a major offensive. If that

happens, the triumph of our aims could be announced without having had to deal with the North at all.

That would be a most delicate manoeuvre, and Prime Minister Ky would appear to have rendered its slim chances all but invisible at the outset. Mr Johnson in fact could hardly have better reaspn than Ky has given him for regret- ting his habit of slapping backs in public. The

appointment of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker to replace Henry Cabot Lodge would seem,

most of all, to reflect the President's recollec- tion that Bunker was able to reconcile the fac- tions in the Dominican Republic in such a way to give us some excuse for escaping the un- fortunate results of our intervention there. Ambassador Bunker would seem to be of very little use unless he is charged with some attempt to deal with the Vietcong.

But at Guam Ky made it plain that not only he will not consider dealing with the Vietcong but that he is insistent on widening the war by dragging Mr Johnson into places he must shud- der to contemplate. So the President has barely begun the sinuous journey towards getting out, and already he has a Syngman Rhee. When President Eisenhower was trying to escape the Korean War he is said to have wondered whether he might have to jail. Rhee to do it. Yet Ky hardly possesses what Time magazine used to describe as Rhee's immense moral authority: what authority he has is owing to Mr Johnson; and Ky has even now attacked Senators Ful- bright and Kennedy and will doubtless attack Mr Johnson at his first failure of kidney.

And so, though we talk of very little else here, there is small chance that there can be anything of substance to be said about this melancholy event in the predictable future. Whatever changes will result from the war seem likely to occur in America before they do in South-East Asia. Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago, one of the Democratic Party's paladins, is said to be telling a story about him- self and Mr Johnson which is none the less in- structive even if it is not true. During Mr John- son's last visit to Illinois, Mayor Daley says he told the President that he must end the war. 'How do you end the war?' the President is supposed to have asked. `Mr. President, it is very simple,' Daley says he answered. 'You take the United States fleet and you sail it to the shores of Vietnam. Then you put the gang- planks out and march all our troops aboard and then you sail them home.'

The old Madison Square Garden's last heavy- weight championship was everything we have come to expect from an institution which caters to Frank Costello—sober, genteel and distinotly cerebral. Cassius Clay has never appeared better brought up. There has always been the suspicion that, like most white Southerners, his manners are most to be trusted if you scrape and shuffle a little. In Zora Folley, he had the ideal retainer, affectingly grateful for the chance to take home 58,000 dollars from the kitchen.

Folley brought along the splendid education of eighty-five fights, considerable dignity and no delusions of grandeur. He knew enough to present a problem but not to constitute a menace, and he went down with obvious honesty just before Clay's left hand might have begun to make things messy. The affair was graceful and contained. There was just one clinch and only four words of conversation.

'I hit him low once or twice and said "excuse me," ' Folley explained afterwards. 'He didn't say nothing.' Mr Folley's a respectable man,' Clay said. He is too. All those years of being a respectable man in a disreputable profession have given him a look about the eyes not so much furtive as reluctant to intrude, like a bellhop's looking away from the bed when he brings up the whisky.

It is a mark of his fine character that Folley's best moments were not in the first two rounds,

which he won by the mere expenditure of a better education, but, in the fourth, when Clay reached him with the right hand and he went down as he so often does. He had been hurt: still, when he looked at his corner to make sure of the count, his eyes were entirely clear and one felt that he could be knocked unconscious and that their aware and fretful look would be unchanged. But then he got up and charged Clay with the right and pushed him back into the ropes. There was a sudden sense of grati- fication at how splendidly pride can endure in a man long after he has abandoned all ex- pectations.

Folley bit Clay more often and to better effect than anyone since Sonny Liston; but these commendable efforts seemed to bother Clay less than the crippled lunges of Floyd Patter- son or the clutches of Ernie Terrell. What disturbs Clay, one begins to understand, is not so much being hit as being lain all over by some awkward body; and Folley's crisp, self-con- tained style was perfectly calculated for those attitudes Clay feels most graceful in striking.

So, altogether, it was Clay's best night, being busy enough to keep him from getting bored and short enough to keep him from getting mean. It was notable that, after the second round, when Angelo Dundee, his trainer, was making suggestions, he nodded quite seriously, and that, after the sixth, when his spiritual leader, the Black Muslims' Herbert Muham- mad, attempted a message of inspiration, he shook his head as though dismissing an irrelevancy. Perhaps he matures, and religion is taking that proper, secondary place in his life that it has for all Americans.