The Mail HUNTINGTON REPLIES

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Gene Bell's purported description of my "policy recommendations" concerning Vietnam (CRIMSON, May 14) is totally devoid of truth. Inasmuch as his letter is one more contribution to a vicious campaign of falsehood and slander on this subject. I would like to set the record straight for those of your readers who may be interested in the facts of the matter.

Mr. Bell's claim that I supported "free fire zones, defoliation, forced relocation, squalid refugee camps, the shooting of prisoners, the saturation bombings" is a monstrous lie. He has no evidence to back his assertion and can have none. I have never advocated or supported these tactics or any other form of military action designed to promote the movement of people from the countryside to the city. I have, in addition, never advised the government in any way on the military strategy, tactics, or operations of the Vietnam War.

I did go to Vietnam in the summer of 1967 for the State Department to study the possibilities of a political resolution of the conflict. One of the things which struck me most dramatically and directly when I arrived there was the extent to which the war had produced a massive movement of population into the cities. At that time, few people had paid much attention to this fact, and no real effort had been made even to estimate the number of people who had come into the cities. My studies led me to the conclusion that the population of South Vietnam was then about 40 per cent urban, contrasted with the 15 to 20 per cent which had been assumed up to that 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; they were simple, straight-forward descriptions of what had happened and was happening in South Vietnam as I observed it; my prescriptive "policy recommendations" were entirely different. In a similar factual vein, my article also described the extent to which no significant changes had taken place or were taking place in the relative distribution of political control in the countryside among the Viet Cong, the government, and the communal groups.

This was the situation which existed when I arrived in Vietnam. In the light of these conditions, what could be the route toward political settlement? An end to the fighting, it seemed to me, would have to reflect the twin realities of the increase in the urban population and the continuing control by the Viet Cong of a significant portion of the countryside. "Peace in the immediate future," I concluded, "must be based on accommodation." The title of my article was "The Bases of Accommodation" and its central theme was the need for accommodation between the warring sides. I argued in my article that in order to achieve peace the U.S. government should adopt a political program designed to promote:

(a) "urban welfare and development programs" to mitigate the "dramatic and often heartrending" social consequences of urbanization and the "horrendous" conditions in the refugee camps.

(b) "the early inauguration of a political process within South Vietnam in which all significant political groups can participate and to allow that process rather than a diplomatic conference to have the lion's share in determining the future of the country."

(c) the start of "the process of political accommodation" at the bottom, capitalizing on the various local accommodations which already existed between the Viet Cong and local government forces.

(d) local and provincial elections which "would give the VC-NLF the legitimate opportunity to enter the political process and to demonstrate their ability to win power at the grassroots level."

(e) the "election of a new constituent assembly to devise new basic laws and chosen a new Central Government" which the U.S. would accept as legitimate whether or not it was controlled by the VC-NLF.

(f) the strengthening of local governments and the decentralization of the central government in order to facilitate accommodation between "Viet Cong and non-communist forces."

All of these statements and quotes are from the article and they constitute the "policy recommendations" which I made in the article. This cannot help but be abundantly clear to anyone who has read the article.

These recommendations made good sense then and still make good sense now. They were embodied in a report which I submitted to the State Department in the fall of 1967. 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 me: "If what you say is right, everything we are doing in Vietnam is wrong." Some other bureaucrats reacted in a similarly negative fashion. On the other hand, many officials, including Ambassador Averell Harriman, Under Secretary Nicholas Katzenbach, and Secretary of Defense-Designate Clark Clifford, were sympathetic to my criticisms. The report did, I think, have some effect on official Washington's perceptions of the social-political situation in Vietnam in the winter of 1968 and made some contribution to the series of developments which brought about the change in U.S. policies in March 1968.

These are the facts. They stand in dramatic contrast to the name-calling and lies to which Mr. Bell and others have resorted.