Faculty Members Hit Recent Vietnam Move

Harvard faculty members reacted yesterday with disappointment, but not surprise, to U. S. bombing and commando raids on North Vietnam last weekend.

"It depresses me, but I was afraid of it all along," Thomas Schelling, professor of Economics, said yesterday. "It's consistent with what Nixon has been saying since Cambodia."

"The Nixon administration seems willing to do many things that widen the war," Everett Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science, said. "This is of a piece to their invasion of Cambodia."

"While attempting to keep American casualties down, to lull the American public, they have gone on with the use of the Air Force in both Cambodia and Laos-and now North Vietnam," Mendelsohn said. "At the same time they have regularly lied to the public about the nature of the air warfare."

Nixon Consistent

Dean May felt the Nixon administration was acting in a way "consistent with their analysis" of the situation. "I suppose it's a signal to North Vietnam that the American government is prepared to take 'prompt and efficient' action, if the North Vietnamese explicitly or implicitly refuse to accept a 'just peace,'" he said.

One faculty member, however, took issue with his colleagues. Samuel Huntington, Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, said: "The administration is committed to gradual disengagement of ourselves from South Vietnam. There are going to be ups anddowns in this process-and although it is an escalation, it is nowhere as big an escalation as Cambodia last May."

Schelling was not so optimistic. "I don't think Nixon is any cleverer than Johnson was," he said. "Once he gets into this, I don't see how he's going to stop."