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THE NEGOTIATION PUZZLE : 63 The Secretary of State may not intend this to mean that an elec- ” tion that chooses Communists is ipse facto not a free election, but fo the Vietnamese citizen this must sound like the usual situation un- der the Diem regime in which lists of voters were drawn to rule out all dissident elements. Because of its political repercussions here in the United States, the proposal of any coalition government including Communists is a principal stumbling block for negotia- tions. The course of negotiation feelers has gone through several phases. It is clear that the United States showed a complete cool- ness toward negotiations from the fall of the Diem regime on November 1, 1963, up to the President’s Johns Hopkins speech on April 7, 1965. From that speech through the July 28 press con- ference and up to the events of the turn of the year, various expressions were made indicating an interest in negotiations, and separate elements of possible settlement were put forth. The sin- ccrity of American offers was subject to question on four counts. First, any actual overtures from the other side were ignored or rebuffed as in the incident at the end of the five-day bombing lull in May. Second, the government in Saigon made frequent state- ments against negotiations and passed a law in May 1965 that made talk of peace a treasonable offense.** Third, each major statement for negotiations was coupled with the announcement of a new phase of armed forces build-up and offensive action. Fourth, there was no attempt on the part of the United States to put all its pieces of negotiation into one package and present it with con- viction and corresponding action. By the end of 1965 the cycle had nin its complete course, and the Johnson Administration, rather than being aloof from any talk of negotiation, set forth on a dramatic worldwide effort to persuade ail nations including Hanoi that the United States really wanted to bring the dispute from the battlefield to the conference table. Ambassador Harriman went to Poland, Yugoslavia, and India. (Poland and India are members of the International Control Commission for Vietnam; Yugoslavia is one of the nonaligned countries that has offered to mediate.) McGeorge Bundy, Special * See Appendix IIL.