ABSTRACT
Most South Vietnamese voters understood that they had participated in a carefully staged political show mainly to please their American patrons. From mid-1965 to the end of 1967, while the Americans escalated both the air war against North Vietnam and the ground war in South Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government failed to eliminate its underlying political weaknesses. Neither side could ignore the many diplomatic efforts initiated by third parties concerned with bringing together American and North Vietnamese negotiators to halt the war, but they consistently refused to make concessions necessary to initiate serious peace talks. Given the battlefield realities existing during the 1965–67 period, Hanoi’s diplomatic stance did not represent the negotiating position of a nation seriously concerned with a diplomatic resolution of the Vietnam War. Hanoi refused to consider performing any reciprocal acts to get the Americans to halt the bombing and insisted that only their negotiating positions offered a basis for a correct political settlement of the war.
