Word: saigon
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...time. This massive shift was, as I said in my Foreign Affairs article (July 1968), primarily the result of the American's "drastically and brutally" speeding up the war. Its political consequence had been a significant increase in the proportion of the total population under the control of the Saigon government. In this sense, as I stated in the article, the "Maoist-inspired rural revolution" had been undercut by the "American-sponsored urban revolution." "Forced-draft urbanization" had been an "effective response" to the VC strategy. These factual observations in the article were not and could not have been prescriptive...
...That report, to repeat, did not include any "policy recommendations" endorsing military action of any kind. It did include an analysis and enitique of the expansion of the U.S. civilian bureaucracy in Vietnam and it did urge that this process be reversed and that the effort to extend the Saigon government's authority into the countryside be drastically reduced or totally abandoned. The report argued that the U.S. government should accept VC-NLF control of the areas they then dominated. This proposal directly challenged the official orthodoxy of the time. As the principal White House specialist on Vietnam told...
...repatriation. South and North Vietnamese ships flying Red Cross flags are to rendezvous in the South China Sea off the DMZ at 10:30 a.m. on June 4; there must be no military activity within an 18-mile radius of the rendezvous point on that day; Washington and Saigon must announce ahead of time "the number and characteristics of the ships transporting the patriots to be released." If those instructions were clear enough, however, what Hanoi was up to remained murky...
...Communists repeated that formulation last week as the Paris peace talks entered their fourth year with each side, depressingly enough, blaming the other for failing to stop the bloodshed. North Vietnamese acceptance of Saigon's offer to return captured N.V.A. soldiers evidently remains independent of the question of repatriating American prisoners, which is one of the most difficult and dangerous obstacles to ending U.S. involvement...
...open a few doors toward broader negotiation, although the Communists will probably let serious initiatives wait until the U.S. withdrawal proceeds still further and the South Vietnamese elections approach next fall. By then, American bargaining leverage will be diminished, and there may be signs of new political alignments in Saigon more amenable to making concessions that could bring peace...