Word: saigon
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...Saigon, Laird discussed Nixon's worries with Abrams. The first signs that something big was afoot came in mid-January, soon after Laird departed. General Cao Van Vien, chairman of the South Vietnamese Joint Chiefs of Staff, told his subordinates that there would be no more talking to the press ?particularly about operations in Military Region I. Soon after, Abrams met Vien and Major General Tran Van Minh, the South Vietnamese air force chief, to discuss strategy. The three met twice more in the next two days...
After his last session with Vien & Co., Abrams and white-haired U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker swept into President Thieu's Saigon Palace ?brushing past a phalanx of startled Vietnamese officials who had been waiting to offer the President Tet holiday greetings. Not until four days later, when they were summoned to an urgent briefing at MACV headquarters in Saigon, did reporters have any idea that something was afoot...
...South Viet Nam was being shunted into I Corps. The buildup obviously presaged trouble in the coastal cities of Hue and Danang. But MACV asserted that it also posed a "serious threat" to U.S. troop withdrawals and that a "preemptive offensive" was planned with "limited objectives." Few reporters in Saigon doubted that the jargon was a verbal screen for a direct ARVN assault on the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...response was remarkably temperate. About the angriest reaction came from Democratic Presidential Hopeful George McGovern, who blasted the Administration for imposing "the longest news blackout of the war."* Added he: "What a way to run a war! What a way to manage a free society!" The U.S. command in Saigon defended the embargo as essential to keeping the enemy guessing about allied intentions...
...many critics, Abrams' math does not add up. Getting involved in wars in Cambodia and Laos as well as South Viet Nam could make U.S. withdrawal more difficult, not easier. "By edging Cambodia closer to war than it had been," says TIME Saigon Bureau Chief Jon Larsen, "we inevitably moved it from a secondary concern to one almost as intertwined with our interests in Indochina as South Viet Nam. The same will be true of Laos." Another problem is that if ARVN is to be called upon regularly for cavalry duty in Cambodia, and possibly Laos as well, it might...