Straight Talk

THE PARIS PEACE TALKS have been dragging on now for almost four months, and despite Harriman's hopeful "straws in the wind," we have nothing to show for it. President Johnson has refused to stop the bombing, and until it is stopped, the North Vietnamese are unwilling to discuss more fundamental issues.

But it is irresponsibility as well as intransigeance that has marked these last months. Our leaders, present and potential, are dealing with Vietnam on a purely partisan level, and the result has been a tragi-comedy of accusation and distortion.

Five days ago Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey told a group of Toledo housewives that if he were elected to the White House "it would be my policy to move toward a systematic reduction in American forces" in Vietnam. "I think we can do it. I am determined we can do it," he told them.

Later Humphrey withdrew his statement after Clark Clifford stated the Administration had "no intention" of withdrawing troops "either by next June or at anytime in the foreseeable future." The Secretary of Defense added that "we have not yet reached the level of 549,500 troops set up by President Johnson" and that "we intend to continue to build toward that level."

Humphrey has been backing Johnson's policies while trying to make people believe they aren't his own, and refusing to state where exactly he stands.

NIXON has not had to lie to be devious. He has just kept silent on the pretext that he is afraid of jeopardizing the Paris peace talks.

And Johnson himself, who last spring seemed to want to end his troubled term by producing a peace settlement, now seems obsessed with the idea that historians may term him the President who "made concessions to the Communists." And so, unmindful of any developments in Paris, he seems determined to order the continuation of the bombing of North Vietnam up until the morning of January 20.

This is not a time for partisan gamesmanship. U.S.leaders must abandon the bluff that we will not have to make major concessions to win peace in Paris.