Foreign Minister Tran Van Lam invited Kissinger into his Saigon home on October 21 and, during an opening prayer, expressed thanks for his visit and work before asking the Lord to bless the Vietnamese and American people at this crucial moment.
Thieu was not present, but his foreign affairs adviser, Nguyen Phu Duc, politely went through the draft and offered “suggested changes.” Twenty-three of them. When he got to the part about total American withdrawal, he said, “We suggest adding another paragraph: ‘Concurrently, North Vietnamese regular and irregular forces will be withdrawn from South Vietnam into North Vietnam.’ ” A far from outlandish suggestion, President Nixon himself having publicly demanded no less during his first three years in office.
Kissinger was blunt: “I believe there is no possibility whatever of getting them to agree to this.”1
Thieu had a meeting scheduled with Kissinger that afternoon. He postponed it several times, then canceled altogether. Nha (“the egregious”) called to say the South Vietnamese president would see him the next morning at 8:00 a.m.2 Meanwhile, Hanoi crushed all hope for delay by mercilessly meeting Haig’s demands on Laos and Cambodia.3
“It now appears that your meeting with Thieu is a decisive one,” Haig cabled. Nixon, unhelpfully, directed Kissinger both to push Thieu to the limit and to avoid “forcing him to break publicly with us before November 7.” More helpfully, the president wrote a threatening letter for him to brandish at the 8:00 a.m. meeting.