Absurd, Humorous, Imaginative, Offensive

Politics has always made strange bedfellows but it was not until this week that the Nobel Prize Committee had to order a king-size mattress.

Even the largest bed would be hardpressed to accommodate Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, who shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the January cease-fire in Vietnam.

The committee's dual selection is fraught with contradictions and has already brought the resignation of two members of the five-member Norwegian Parliament's Nobel Committee. The two, Helge Rognlien and Einar Hovdhavgen, resigned Thursday to protest the 1973 prize recipients. Both said they voted against the joint award.

Reactions to the award from Hanoi and Washington were predictably different. While President Nixon praised the committee for giving "deserved recognition to the art of negotiation," and Kissinger in turn praised Nixon for "creating the conditions necessary for this settlement," a North Vietnamese official said he personally thought Le Duc Tho would decline the award.

Faculty opinion at first was pleasantly laudatory, but then it turned cautiously negative, as professors wondered just what was so special about a cease-fire which took four years to mold.

Arthur MacEwan, assistant professor of Economics, broke out laughing.

Samuel P. Huntington, Thomas Professor of Government, said Kissinger earned the prize "more by what he's done in relations with the Chinese and the Russians than in the armistice in Vietnam."

Others called the award absurd humorous, imaginative and offensive. The most glaring contradiction, however, is not whether Kissinger deserves the award--many feel he does not--but over the gaping differences between the co-winners.

Both men rose from humble origins and neither has shied away from the use of force in carrying out his own political and philosophical beliefs. But their lives are aimed in opposite directions. Le Duc Tho, a life-long revolutionary who fought the French and has spent ten years in jail, envisions a socialist society of peace and justice.

Kissinger on the other hand has sought primarily stability--a diplomatic status quo that has no room for revolutionary change.

Kissinger will be in Oslo on December 10 to receive the Nobel medal and a cash award of about $60,000, but speculators say Le Duc Tho will be absent.

If the dual award is actually a thinly veiled praise of President Nixon's policy of negotiated settlement, Le Duc Tho's absence would hardly seem surprising. The man who negotiated with Kissinger for 42 months has never admitted that the agreement was less than a victory for the North Vietnamese. It is unlikely he wants to climb into bed with Kissinger on Alfred Nobel's terms.