On Jan. 16, The Times approved of Nixon's most recent troop withdrawal, but knew it wasn't enough:

President Nixon's latest announcement of American troop withdrawals from Vietnam is gratifying though expected. American forces will be cut in half over the next three months — from 139,000 to 69,000 — and there will be another announcement about withdrawals for the period after May 1.

One must hope it all works, and works easily . . .

But…the continuing and slightly accelerated withdrawal schedule is not the whole matter, nor the winding down of the war the end of the war.

What of the bombing? What of the prisoners? And what of the implications of the current fighting? . . .

If, indeed, the President has in mind for this year the total withdrawal he has hinted at, the sooner the better.

We have been urging that for a long time. Eleven days later, Nixon had revealed that his administration had launched secret peace negotiations. The board was cautiously optimistic for peace, and coldly realistic on American unity:

In the 30 months since the President authorized the secret peace talks to parallel the public peace talks in Paris, he has continued to cut American forces in Vietnam. In the last four months, while waiting in vain for some response to his latest peace initiative, Mr. Nixon has accelerated the withdrawal. This has been a reasonable recognition of the limited, very limited, prospects for negotiating an end to this undeclared war . . .

Only Mr. Nixon fully understands his motives for making public the course of the 13 secret sessions between Henry A. Kissinger and North Vietnamese leaders. One immediate result has been the shifting of a heavy burden of responsibility to Hanoi in the eyes of world opinion. The President seemed to justify his disclosure on the grounds that North Vietnam had divided Americans by deceiving them about the talks.

There is no assurance that disclosure of the deception will produce the national unity called for by the President.

The Times took a blunt, big-picture look at war policy on Feb. 9, after criticizing Nixon for his treatment of dissenters in Congress:

There is afoot here a crude attempt to make the war a patriotic issue for the political benefit of Mr. Nixon. It is too late for that. The issue in this war is not Us or Them, not the Flag against the Enemy, not "utter surrender" and "total defeat" . . .

There is one issue for the United States in Vietnam: how to get out. The President knows that. His Democratic challengers know that. The whole country knows that. Upon that central proposition hang all arguments about ways to do it. The President has made his own proposals. His critics, Democratic and Republican, have made theirs. In content they differ on this point or that point; but they do not differ in intent from his. The aim is the same.

To suggest that it isn't, as the Administration is suggesting, is to throw the national discussion of Vietnam back to the primitive level of the Johnson years; is perhaps to retard the development of negotiations toward which Mr. Nixon opened the way; and is certainly to undo the progress the country has been painfully making toward resolution of the internal conflict about this awful war.

On April 4, the North Vietnamese had launched an Easter offensive, testing U.S. resolve to withdraw. The Times remained a strong supporter of withdrawal as a way to conclude a war that couldn't be won:

The Indochina war is visible again. The largest offensive by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in four years is under way . . .

For Saigon, this is the first real test of the Vietnamization program under which the United States has turned the ground war over to the South Vietnamese.

For Washington, this is a bitter test of real intentions . . .

If there is one thing certain in Indochina, it is that "victory" has lost all meaning. And yet it is a word that still haunts governments and policy makers and strategists. And it seems uncomfortably true that it is hope for some sort of "victory" — South Vietnam's continued control by those now in Saigon — that motivates this new escalation of the American part of Indochina's war.

But victory in Indochina is not the will of the American people. This nation has long since perceived the futility of this war . . . There is only one way out. It includes pilots and bombardiers and airborne electronics technicians as well as infantrymen. If Saigon cannot survive without them, the sooner that is acknowledged the better.

On April 17, the U.S. bombing campaign was, in the board's eyes, an admission of failure and, possibly, of some wagging-the-dog:

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