VIET NAM: TRYING TO BUY TIME

HOW to buy a little more patience --or perhaps lots more? How to buy it from the restless young who are streaming back to the campuses? How to buy it from the rest of the country, which so far has been willing to give Richard Nixon time to extricate the U.S. from Viet Nam? With an evident sense that time may soon begin to run out, the President last week made several moves. He announced a second withdrawal of troops from combat and a two-month moratorium on the draft. He applied new pressure on the Congress to make selective service more equitable. And he used the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly to ask for help in ending the war.

The flaw in Nixon's moves was one that has so far marked--and may come to plague--his Administration. It is his tendency to take cautious half-steps in the hope of appeasing critics who demand leaps, while avoiding angering those who insist that he stand fast. However laudable each small act, this course in the end satisfies no one and it leaves him open to the charge that he cares more about the illusion of action than about substantive change. Without any cooperation from Hanoi, it is difficult to see what else Nixon can do, short of a precipitate withdrawal from Viet Nam. Among the most frequent suggestions from war critics: give less solid U.S. support to the present Saigon regime, grant more political concessions to the North, perhaps including the acceptance of a coalition regime in South Viet Nam. Admittedly, such moves would be risky. But even the present cautious program of withdrawals might be carried out less hesitantly and confusingly.

Nixon's latest troop "replacement" was first forecast as imminent, then held up, then linked with an obviously futile short halt of B-52 bombings in South Viet Nam. When the announcement finally came, it turned out to involve only a modest 35,000 men to be returned to the U.S. by Dec. 15. That was about 10,000 more than the reluctant Joint Chiefs of Staff had conceded would be acceptable, but far fewer than many war critics think possible. It will bring to 60,000 the number of troops pulled out since the Administration outlined its gradual-withdrawal strategy last June, and will leave about 484,000 U.S. troops in Viet Nam. It will also leave Nixon well behind the self-imposed timetable he stumbled into when he announced that he hoped to beat former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford's call for disengagement of 100,000 men this year. Only half of the new withdrawal consists of combat troops. Most are from relatively inactive fighting areas, and thus their leaving will not really test the replacement capability of South Vietnamese forces --a key criterion in U.S. withdrawal plans (see THE WORLD).

The draft suspension seemed only slightly more convincing. Nixon said that because of the troop cutback no new quotas would be required of local draft boards in November and December, during which 50,000 men had been scheduled to be called. The 29,000 men already set for October induction will be spaced out instead over the final three months of this year. At the same time, Nixon announced that if Congress does not act promptly on proposals for draft reform that he submitted last May, he will institute most of them by executive decree (see box, opposite page).

Ill as a People. On the same day that Nixon appeared at the U.N., he was lashed by a familiar adversary. After brooding for nearly two months about the effect of his fatal Chappaquiddick Island accident on his credibility in raising a moral issue, Senator Edward Kennedy converted a routine dinner speech in Boston into a chance to resume--with even more sting than before--his attack on the Administration's war policy. "We have made only token troop withdrawals on the battlefield, an exercise in politics and improvisation," he charged. He called Viet Nam "difficult to justify, impossible to win--a war not worthy of our lives and efforts, a conflict that has made us ill as a people." There will be no peace, he predicted, so long as the Administration insists on perpetuating the present government in Saigon or that government refuses to compromise on a postwar coalition. "Why should General Thieu control the destiny of America or dictate the future of young American lives?" Kennedy asked.

Nor did the week's activity seem likely to deflect the impending campus protests. Leaders of a combined peace movement claimed spreading support for their plans to stage a nationwide "Moratorium Day" on campuses Oct. 15 and follow it with a two-day demonstration in November, including a march on Washington of 45,000 people, each bearing the name of a war fatality. The organizers say that 400 colleges will participate in the Moratorium Day, with students boycotting classes to hold mass teach-ins, distribute antiwar leaflets in neighborhoods, turn in their draft cards. One peace leader, Dr. Benjamin Spock, dismissed the troop-withdrawals as "frauds, sops to the American people and attempts to deceive us." It was standard protest rhetoric, but the outspoken Spock touched a deep worry in the Administration when he declared that "the peace movement helped oust Johnson --now a new President must be taught again."

Civilized Values. More important than what such activist leaders claim, however, is how other segments of the public may react. It was discontent with the war, felt not only by young radicals but also by businessmen and many other groups, that turned Lyndon Johnson from another term. U.S. business is more than ever on the side of an early peace, as evidenced in part by Wall Street: new peace probes or rumors generally send stock prices jumping upward. Still, it is the campuses that offer the most vocal opposition and provide the broadest base for organized protest. The entire academic community seems as stirred as ever about the lingering combat. Last week University of Michigan President Robben Fleming personally launched a two-day campus teach-in at Ann Arbor with a sharp antiwar speech. Rutgers President Mason W. Gross, who also heads the American Council on Education, said that his university will demonstrate that it is "a teacher and guardian of civilized values" by suspending normal classes on Moratorium Day to conduct a campus-wide dialogue on the war.

Undoubtedly the majority of Americans still support the President in his search for an honorable way out of the morass in Viet Nam. But they also unmistakably want an early end to the killing. Nixon's dilemma continues to be how to fulfill those two, thus far irreconcilable demands.

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