ustxtxb_obs_1967_04_28_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

AMERICAN INCOME LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF INDIANA Underwriters of the American Income Labor Disability Policy Executive Offices: P.O. Box 208 Waco, Texas Bernard Rapoport, President #### others that one will perform in a certain way with respect to the other’s interests something like a contract. We have no promise concerning Indochina except with ourselves. Now, let us look back and see how we got where we are: We had already been moving into the colonial power role even under the Truman administration, and this provoked Sen. John F. Kennedy in November, 1951, to declare: “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire. There is no broad, general support of the native Viet Nam Government among the people of that area.” Anthony Eden, who later became a cochairman with Mr. Molotov under the Geneva Accords, said of the United States representative: “General Bedell Smith did everything a man could do and more to align himself with the French and British representatives at Geneva. Even he had to heed his government’s instructions for the final session. These were that the United States was not prepared to join the Conference declaration, but would take note of the agreements, would refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb them and would view any renewal of the aggression in violation of them as seriously threatening international peace and security.” Even if we had joined the declarations they did not call upon any of the signatories to protect the integrity of South Viet Nam as a sovereignty. Indeed they specifically negatived the acceptance of South Viet Nam as a territorially defined sovereignty in paragraph 6: “The Conference recognizes that the essential purpose of the agreement relating to Viet Nam is to settle military questions with a view to ending hostilities and that the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.” . .. We could hardly be committed to support Diem under our unilateral noting of the Geneva Accords, particularly in view of his renunciation of them. He had said: “We have not signed the Geneva Agreements. We are not bound in any way by these agreements, signed against the will of the Vietnamese people.” . . . IN HERE DO WE now stand in Southeast Asia . . . Two Presidents have taken up the staggering burden, and it has become heavier. Diem has been assassinated. The tide of war had turned heavily against South Vietnam and we have turned it back again. And in the process we have taken over the war, lock, stock, and barrel. North Vietnam has been bombed, and we have been asked why the dams in the North have not been ruptured to flood the rice fields, why North Vietnam has not been bombed back into the Stone Age. Now I have been in meetings, including with other congressmen and the State Department, and I know this climate of opinion that we want the war ended at any cost is a very real feeling and has to be reckoned with. Certainly, our nation is not that hawkish and neither am I. . . . No one just in the position of a citizen, or even of a Congressman, can marshal all the facts necessary to delineate the precise steps that should be taken to extricate us from our position. But what I am calling for is getting away from the recriminations contained in such expressions as this one by Secretary Rusk: “If I am pessimistic, it is simply because we have not seen any indication from the other side that they are prepared to give up their idea of seizing South Vietnam by force. You see, they oppose the free elections in South Vietnam for a constituent assembly, they won’t let the question of reunification be decided by the free choice of the peoples concerned. They refuse conferences and negotiations and all those devices by which crises of this sort have been solved in years past.” The refusals, as I have pointed out, have not been altogether on one side certainly in the case of free elections. Of course, Ho Chi Minh has stubbornly refused our proposals to negotiate, particularly our recent ones. I think their position is intransigent and should be condemned. But recriminations and assumptions not well-founded in history reflect the kind of fixed state of mind that discourages negotiation. Dean Rusk stated our position much better when he described what the United States wants in a peace settlement: “Basically, it is that we accept the Geneva agreements of 1954 and 1962 as a basis for peace in Southeast Asia; that we let the South Vietnamese make up their own minds about their own government and about the question of reunification; that we’re prepared to enter into any kind of discussions, conferences, formal negotiations, private contacts on the total problem or any part of it, and that if there can be peace we would be glad to participate in a very far-reaching development program for all of Southeast Asia 1967 9 April 28,