PART IV

The Road to Reelection and the End of the War

June 1972–January 1973

 

 

 

 

After the Moscow summit

June 2, 1972, 9:45 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Bob Haldeman

OVAL OFFICE

 

On the first day back in Washington after the Moscow summit, Nixon and Kissinger had a chance to look back over the crowded events of the previous ten days. In the relatively short span of about three months, in fact, they had opened workable relationships with America’s two most powerful adversaries, China and the Soviet Unon.

 

NIXON: Well, how are you feeling, how are you doing this morning, Henry?

KISSINGER: Well, it’s beginning to catch up with me. I think by this evening I’ll—

HALDEMAN: Well, stay up for another hour and a half, will you?

KISSINGER: Oh, no, I’ll be all right. [laughs] You know, you must feel it, too.

NIXON: Yeah, well—

KISSINGER: I’m just beginning to—

NIXON: You need to relax after all the things that we’ve been through pell-mell. You know, the—I know everybody is tired that went over there. Good God, those advance men and others worked their butts off. But, you and I are tired for different reasons.

KISSINGER: Well, the nervous tension of being up for—

NIXON: [unclear] one hell of an emotional fight from having to fight with—the Rogers thing the first day, and then the SALT thing on Wednesday night. Goddamn, you know, you just—Bob, it’s hard enough to go to one of these things without going through that, but it’s really awful.

KISSINGER: Well, then, the SALT thing Wednesday night, afterward, was probably the single most emotional meeting that I’ve attended since I’ve been in the White House.

HALDEMAN: The dacha meeting?

KISSINGER: Oh, yeah.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: You’ve got these three tough guys [the Soviet negotiators] working the president over.

NIXON: It was a rough one. But it was good and interesting, and it was—

KISSINGER: Well, I think it was the turning point of the discussion.

NIXON: I think, probably, what I am trying to do today, Henry, is to say, look confident. The substance is all going to be presented. I’m not going to go into that, but I want to give you—I want to put it in a larger framework. I want to tell you about the men, I want to tell you about—and I’m going to bring both China and Russia into it.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: The China thing only in terms of why do the Chinese want a relationship with us? Because they’re pragmatic. Why does the Soviet Union want this relationship with us?

KISSINGER: Right. We just have to be sure they don’t go out and blab it. That’s [unclear]—

NIXON: I’m not going to say that. I’m not going to say, “The Soviet wanted it because they’re against China.”

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: Or any—or, not for that reason, though, but—but that the Soviet wanted it for other reasons.

KISSINGER: Right. Right. Right.

NIXON: What do you want to cover?

KISSINGER: Well, it’s entirely up to you, Mr. President.

NIXON: Well, how do you feel with all the things this ought to cover? What [unclear]—?

KISSINGER: Well, I could cover the sort of thing about the meetings that you can’t. I mean, you can’t very well cover how the meetings were conducted the way I can.

HALDEMAN: I think you should, too.

KISSINGER: And—

HALDEMAN: I mean, this one is one—

NIXON: What else should I do? Should I start with Henry? Or should I—?

KISSINGER: No, I think you should start.

HALDEMAN: No, you should let out the context and the big picture that you’re talking about. But then, Henry should start with a, “Let me give you a little background on how these meetings were conducted, how your president represented you.”

NIXON: Without going [unclear].

KISSINGER: And, uh—

HALDEMAN: But this is billed, and they understand it, and the press has billed it as a monumental, personal thing, which is the very interesting thing that comes out of all this. It’s—they’re not—

KISSINGER: The first time the press has done that since we have been in—

HALDEMAN: And they’re talking more about the importance of the personal—

NIXON: Component? No—

HALDEMAN: The promise of what you did, the way you worked, and how you did it—

KISSINGER: You see—

HALDEMAN: —than they are about the substance of the, the whole thing.

KISSINGER: You see, the way I could do this is to say, “Why the summit?” I mean, why could it work at the—could certain, certain things work at the summit that couldn’t work anywhere else?

NIXON: Yeah, good. Now, how would you say that?

KISSINGER: And, and that way—

NIXON: Well, tell me—

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: —what do we say, so that I don’t cover that.

KISSINGER: Well, I would say it two ways: first of all, the imminence of the summit—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —enabled the president to take a personal hand—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —on a number of issues. And I’ll give them that incidents-at-sea example, which is—

NIXON: Yeah, I know.

KISSINGER: —a very trivial example of an agreement—

NIXON: Also, if—then again, if you could go on and say how we broke the impasse on—say on such [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Then secondly—

NIXON: —things on SALT.

KISSINGER: —how you broke the impasse. That’s exactly what I was going to say: how you broke the impasse on SALT—

NIXON: And how you think—and then, you might say, for example, in a field where we did not reach our goal—and then I think this may not be bad on Lend-Lease. I’d say, “We—the president narrowed the difference. We got it down, but we wouldn’t give on the matter of the interest rate—”

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: “—and we’re going to have to negotiate it.” I think they’d love to hear that.

KISSINGER: So that was point one. Then, point two was that a number of issues were left that, literally, were unresolvable, except at the highest level. And then, thirdly, the whole statement of principles problem, for example.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: You wouldn’t even have known how to start except at the highest level.

NIXON: And I have. You couldn’t say, “Well, let’s let our ambassadors work it out.” Can you imagine Beam sitting down with Gromyko?

KISSINGER: Inconceivable. Well, the point which I’ve made to the press, which all of them, or all of the—Max Frankel, I know, used it, and a number of others—I said, “Look, under the best of circumstances, you have to consider one diplomatic note is twenty minutes of presidential talk. Now, you add up forty-three hours that the president spent with these people, and that means—”

NIXON: Was it forty-three hours?

KISSINGER: Yeah. I mean altogether. That’s what Ron [Ziegler] figured out.

NIXON: Phew.

KISSINGER: But whatever it is, it would be sixty to a hundred diplomatic notes, each of which taking two to three weeks to get a reply to it. This is without the first-personal impact.

HALDEMAN: It’s much easier. You never get the reading from the notes—

KISSINGER: That’s right.

HALDEMAN: —that you get from the face-to-face.

KISSINGER: So, that’s what I said what you have to consider: it’s a four-year proposition. And then, so many other things happen in the interval that you never get it done. I said—on the other hand, I drew a distinction between summit meetings that are not well prepared, where, then, the principals get together, create a deadlock, and make the situation worse, compared to some which had been narrowed to a point where the principals could act with maximum effectiveness.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And that’s sort of the theme. And then, I thought I could hit a few of the high points of the agreements. But the Russians are on an all-out propaganda campaign at home saying what a terrific achievement this was.

 

KISSINGER: Brezhnev complains to Grechko saying, “Goddamn it these Americans. You remember that afternoon session, the president and Kissinger hit me about exactly the thing they’re worried about.” You know—

NIXON: On these ULMS?

KISSINGER: No, with the missile diameter.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah.

KISSINGER: And Grechko makes all the arguments to him that Jackson is making to us, saying, “How do we know the Americans won’t put modern missiles on diesel submarines?” And Brezhnev saying, “You idiot. Why would they scream about our putting missiles on diesel submarines if they wanted to do it?” And Grechko said, “Well you know, Brezhnev, that we’re going to scrap the diesel submarines,” which is true.

NIXON: Incidentally, what do you want me to get across to him now? What do you want me to say to him, because I—

KISSINGER: On SALT?

NIXON: About anything. Well, SALT, I’m just going to say, I’m going to say, “Look, when I left office and da-da-da-da-da, we had—there was a ten-to-one advantage for the United States. When we came in the advantage had been wiped out. We hadn’t done a thing—”

KISSINGER: And they take ten—

NIXON: “—and if we hadn’t done something, we were—had to go—we either had two choices: to go for a crash program of building, which I think the American people would have had great concern about, or have a limitation.”

KISSINGER: I wouldn’t even give them that. I would say, “There was no crash program of building we could have done.”

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: You can say, “We had the Joint Chiefs of Staff in. We said, ‘Can you do a crash program on submarines?’” I had three meetings with them, Mr. President.

NIXON: Oh, I know, ’cause I asked Moorer in that meeting, too.

KISSINGER: And they said, “No, we cannot do a crash program—”

NIXON: Well, do you think—do you want me to zero in on that or [unclear]—

KISSINGER: But I can do that task better than you.

NIXON: All right.

KISSINGER: If you want to.

NIXON: Oh, yeah, yeah.

KISSINGER: It’s up to you.

NIXON: You take up all the things that I—

KISSINGER: I mean you can just say, “When we came in, this was the situation. It worsened every year. I’ve started a number of programs: ABM, ULMS, B-1. Each of which had enormous congressional opposition. All of you gentlemen know it takes ten years from the time you start a program until it is operational.”

NIXON: You’ve got to remember, we’ve got doves there as well as hawks. [unclear]

KISSINGER: And then I’d say we had two choices then. We had only one choice. We—what we have done is broken the momentum of their agreement.

HALDEMAN: You don’t have any problems with the doves, though. They’re so—

KISSINGER: No. You won’t have any problems with the hawks after two weeks. I guarantee you, I’ll work them over.

HALDEMAN: Except Scoop [Jackson]. He’s gotten himself out on a limb.

KISSINGER: Yeah, but Scoop, I think, is being partisan on this.

NIXON: Sure he is.

KISSINGER: I mean, the things Scoop is saying—why the hell didn’t he say them two years ago? Or one year ago? They were equally true. They have nothing to do with the agreement.

NIXON: Well, the whole secret deal has gotten, of course—he says, “That’s an old point—”

KISSINGER: Well, the secret deal, Mr. President, the way to hit that is this: you can say, “There are a number of interpretive, if they’re agreed, statements,” which I will be glad to explain to them, “all of which will be submitted by agreement with the Soviets to the Senate.” You, just for your information, you have written a letter to Brezhnev—

NIXON: Saying we wouldn’t build three subs—saying all that?

KISSINGER: —in which you’re saying, “I want you to know we have no plans—”

NIXON: No plans.

KISSINGER: “—to build those three extra submarines to which we are entitled during the period of the freeze.” This is nothing but the literal truth. We have no such plans—

NIXON: I mean, we’re simply informing him of something. That’s all.

KISSINGER: That’s not an agreement. You can change your plans anyway. But, the fact of the matter is, you have no such plans. The navy doesn’t want them, and nothing in the agreement forces you to exercise your option. That’s only an option. That’s not something that you’re supposed to do. But I must say—incidentally, I talked to some people who heard your speech. Apparently, on television, it came over extremely well.

HALDEMAN: Yes.

KISSINGER: I’m not—I thought he was speaking a little too fast, quite honestly, sitting in the, in the chamber. But, on television, people told me it sounded very effective.

 

Stennis and arms control

June 13, 1972, 9:52 a.m.

Richard Nixon, John Stennis, Bob Haldeman, Henry Kissinger, and Tom Korologos

OVAL OFFICE

 

John Stennis (D-MS) was the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a key figure in promoting any arms bill in the Senate. He met with the president for over an hour, picking apart the treaties. Nixon had to make sure not only that Stennis would support the treaties, but that he would not delay them into oblivion in committee. The most pointed comment, however, came before the meeting, when only Haldeman was in the Oval Office, and Nixon made a frank assessment of Kissinger’s future.

 

NIXON: We have to realize, Bob, that we cannot continue for four more years the Henry situation. You cannot have a situation where he, basically, is a de facto secretary of state and secretary of defense, particularly with his personality thing. You know what I mean? We could do it now, and that’s a vital thing. We couldn’t have China, we couldn’t have Russia, we couldn’t have SALT, without this.

 

[STENNIS and KISSINGER join the conversation.]

NIXON: Well, it’s very important to do what you’ve been talking about. The goal is to get that darn Defense Department to, you know, tighten its procedures and the rest. The main thing is that when you’re talking about the new weapon system—

STENNIS: Yeah.

NIXON: —it has ULMS—

STENNIS: Yeah.

NIXON: —B-1, and the rest. That’s essential, because if we don’t have something to give, there isn’t anything they can give us. That’s just the way it looks. So, I think you should know that all those tortured hours you spend in fighting for an adequate defense budget, fighting for an adequate foreign assistance program, fighting for ABM, of course, that if you hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t be here—or we wouldn’t be, I mean, in this position. So, that’s what’s coming.

STENNIS: But if you—

NIXON: And, and our peace fellows—our peaceniks, you know, are—

STENNIS: Yeah.

NIXON: —are saying that—I mean, I think it’s just really ironic that the people that say that they’re for peace, because they voted against ABM and vote—and want to vote to cut the defense budget ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty billion dollars, that proves they’re for peace. That’s what leads to war. Don’t you agree?

STENNIS: Oh [unclear]—

NIXON: We’d have never got an agreement without this. But—but, you really carried a terrible load there, and here.

 

STENNIS: But, now, I want to ask you a question: I’ve got the problem here—

NIXON: Yeah?

STENNIS: —too, of getting together this military procurement bill, that is—

NIXON: Yes, sir—

STENNIS: —one-tenth axing missiles and planes. That’s something we’ve come down on—

NIXON: Right. Right—

STENNIS: You’re familiar with that. Now, I want to know if you—as I understand—

NIXON: Mm-hmm?

STENNIS: —you’ve put this B-1; you feel like that’s a must.

NIXON: Yeah.

STENNIS: That’s doctrine.

NIXON: Right—

STENNIS: What about this command post, here?

NIXON: It’s a bargaining chip.

STENNIS: Yeah?

NIXON: Yeah.

STENNIS: What about this command post, here? You know, the—

KISSINGER: The ABM?

NIXON: The ABM?

STENNIS: —the ABM [unclear]—

NIXON: A must.

KISSINGER: A must.

NIXON: A must. I know that a lot of people have said, “He’s not going to build it.” Like Ellender, you know, raised that point the other day, but—

STENNIS: Yeah, but that would be a good bargaining chip, here. I’m not against it. [unclear]—

NIXON: I understand.

STENNIS: —but, if something like that would be a good bargaining chip, legislative-wise here—

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

STENNIS: But, if you say you’ve got to have it, why that’s all right. That’s just, [unclear]—

NIXON: Well, I think you’ve got this specific—this problem, John, if we get it. If—let me say, the Russians are going to build everything that they’re allowed to build.

STENNIS: Mm-hmm.

NIXON: And if we decide that, even with—after we make an agreement for two sites or two bases, that we’re going to build only one, and they build two, you see what it does to your balance?

STENNIS: Yeah.

NIXON: It’s all very, very sensitive here. So, I think we’ve got to have it. Right, Henry?

KISSINGER: Absolutely.

NIXON: It would be misread in Moscow, very much, if the Senate said, “Oh no, we’re not going to even build one.”

STENNIS: Mm-hmm.

NIXON: And we’re only going to build the one that we’ve got, and we’re not going to—and dismantle one, and keep one, and not build the one around the other.

KOROLOGOS: That’s going to be a tough fight.

STENNIS: Yes, it will—

KISSINGER: But is it this week?

KOROLOGOS: No, it’s on procurement—

STENNIS: No, no. That’s the procurement bill, military procurement bill. The tanks and missiles, all of that’s in here. Now, number three—but, by the way—

NIXON: B-1s, ULMS—all are necessary. All are necessary.

STENNIS: All right. I just want to say, now, that ULMS—you want that, the alternate, the advanced procurement—

NIXON: Yeah.

STENNIS: —the—it’s a crash program, as I look over it.

NIXON: Yes.

STENNIS: You don’t want any slowdowns at all.

NIXON: No.

STENNIS: You want it to go all the way.

NIXON: No, no. We’ve got to do that in order to have a bargaining position, John, for the next round of SALT. See, the next round will be—because they’re going to be building. They’re going to be—they’re—they’ve got—

STENNIS: Mm-hmm.

NIXON: —they’ve obviously got good engineers and scientists, and all the rest—

STENNIS: Oh, yes.

NIXON: —and this is about the one thing—place where we can stay ahead.

KISSINGER: There is one other thing, Mr. Chairman. It’s highly probable that they’re going to be putting new missiles into their old holes. Not—not bigger in size, but greater in power, as you know. You’ve had that briefing, haven’t you?

STENNIS: Yes. Yes, I have.

KISSINGER: There’s a pop-out device they’ve now got.

STENNIS: Well, here’s what you’re going to have out there, now, as I see it: we’re going to have one group argue that, that you don’t have to do these positive things we’ve just been talking about.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

STENNIS: We have this agreement, now. It’s going to be approved—the treaty. And, we don’t have to go all out. They want to play it down. Now, Senator Jackson—with all deference to him, and his train of thought—he’ll be telling people, “Well, we’ve given it away. We’re taking a second position,” and so forth.

NIXON: Hmm.

STENNIS: Now, he’s going to get people awfully confused.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

STENNIS: You see, they’re a little, they’re a little skittish on this thing, now. And, I told him—I was actually standing in there, pounding for this very thing that you—

NIXON: Mm-hmm?

STENNIS: —that you mentioned, as I see it, that you’ve got to have this strength, there. That is to assure the people of America, [unclear] about the Soviets, yet.

NIXON: Yeah.

STENNIS: I think if they can stir things up, working from the different end to make the people upset.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

STENNIS: Our people.

NIXON: Mm-hmm!

STENNIS: So, this is an answer to that. I was—I’ve been in favor of SALT before you came back with this agreement to slow down on this ULMS—

NIXON: Oh, yeah.

STENNIS: —on a crash basis. In fact, Packard recommended that last October, and they’ve gotten—

NIXON: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

STENNIS: —they’ve gotten his statement on it, you see—

NIXON: Oh, I see.

STENNIS: [unclear]

NIXON: Yeah.

STENNIS: But you came back, and we met at the White House, and—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

STENNIS: —pieced this thing right off with this positive step.

NIXON: Yeah.

STENNIS: Now [unclear]. I mean, I was willing to—

NIXON: Well, you’re right, but, basically, if you want to slow it down, or anything, let’s negotiate a slowdown.

STENNIS: Yeah, yeah—

NIXON: Let’s—don’t give it away. That’s my point.

STENNIS: So, now, you’ve got to have something that assures the American people.

NIXON: Yeah.

 

NIXON: Yeah. The argument—the way I—the way John has looked at it, and I will generalize, because you know the specifics and I don’t, but if you could simply say this: that the president has demonstrated that this country—by his Moscow trip—that this country is for limitation of arms. The president has talked to you, personally, and has told you that, that the only way we got the limitation of arms was to have a clear position, where we had something to negotiate it with. There is no question that the Soviet Union is going to continue its own arms programs. They may—they—there’s—the only thing that is limited is what is on that piece of paper. Nothing else is limited. Under these circumstances, you are convinced that the president wants to go forward, and that the Soviet leaders may want to go forward, with the second round of arms limitation agreement. But, until we get agreement, we must not discontinue any of our programs. We’ve got to go forward with our programs. Let’s settle them by agreement—agreement; settle them by mutuality, rather than unilaterally. That’s really what it comes down to. And, if I didn’t believe in it—believe me, I’d rather not ask for the money, because we’re all under tight budgets, you know.

STENNIS: Well, I’ve told you what’s on my mind. I’m going to support the B-1 and the ULMS, now, for the full amount, if we can spare some of this R&D, ’cause, you see, we’ve picked up [unclear] having the hearings on all this R&D, and that helps us a lot on the floor. So, we’d have to go back and start hearings again. If that could come later?

KISSINGER: Let me talk to Laird about that. That’s one that I think is easier to handle—

STENNIS: But, I don’t mean that the idea is I came to you, asking you to—

NIXON: Don’t worry. No, no, no—

STENNIS: —do that, you know—

NIXON: All right.

STENNIS: —’cause I just talked to him yesterday.

NIXON: No, we’ll protect you.

STENNIS: Well, I have a [unclear]—

NIXON: No, no, no. What, I mean, we’re not going to—

STENNIS: [unclear]

NIXON: —we’ll talk to him on our own. Just say that we’ve had some questions raised on this, and we want to know what the box score is.

KISSINGER: Well, but if he could—if there is anything at all we could knock off, just to show that we’re willing to. Because, our problem, really—when we were—when the president was negotiating with the Soviets, it’s miraculous what we got this time, when we had next to no chips. They’re building submarines; they’re building missiles.

STENNIS: Yeah, yeah.

KISSINGER: We don’t have a program in either. And, we need the ULMS to have any—

STENNIS: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —something to bargain with in the second round. Without Safeguard, we would have been dead.

STENNIS: Dead?

KISSINGER: We would have had no negotiation at all.

STENNIS: We wouldn’t have gotten very far [unclear]—

NIXON: They—we had to be doing something that they wanted to stop—

STENNIS: Yeah.

NIXON: —in order for us to get them to stop something.

STENNIS: Yeah.

NIXON: Now, that’s why we need ULMS and B-1. Then, we got to stop—they want to stop. And then, we’ll want to stop something they’re going to build. They’re building these big missiles, and all these other things.

STENNIS: Well, now, you think that this will pave the way, not perfectly, but this will open the door to a second summit?

NIXON: Well, let me say this—

STENNIS: How do you—?

NIXON: You have—you have this: you can say that I—that I am firmly committed to the goal of a second negotiation, with the Soviet with regard to arms limitation, and that—and that it, and that—but that it is indispensable—not only to pave the way—it is indispensable—if such negotiation is to take place, and to be concluded in a way that will not be detrimental to the security of the United States, it’s indispensable that the United States go forward with some of its own programs, because the Soviet Union is going forward with its programs.

STENNIS: Yes.

 

The unwanted link between arms reduction and defense spending

June 14, 1972, 10:04 a.m.

Richard Nixon, William Rogers, and Henry Kissinger

OVAL OFFICE

 

The White House effort to secure ratification of the arms treaties required negotiations not only with the Soviets and with the Senate, but also with members of Nixon’s own cabinet. On June 6, Laird had testified before a closed-door session of the House Armed Services Committee and then freely commented to the press afterward, insisting that ratification of the treaty would jeopardize national security unless Congress simultaneously authorized funding for the Trident submarine and B-1 bomber. Moorer made similar comments on behalf of the Joint Chiefs. None of it quite jibed with the priorities coming from the White House.

Three days after the meeting, in the midst of Nixon’s afterglow from the Moscow summit, five intruders were arrested at the Watergate building in Washington, DC, “in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee,” as the Washington Post described it in its first article on the massive story that became known as Watergate.

 

ROGERS: On the testimony on the SALT agreement [Rogers was scheduled to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 19], the—I assume that on the question of reservations we want to do everything we can to prevent any reservations from being attached?

NIXON: [unclear]

ROGERS: There has been some discussion at lower levels that maybe we ought to be lenient toward the reservations—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

ROGERS: —but my attitude is we ought to oppose them like hell. I think it would—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

ROGERS: —be very dangerous to have reservations.

NIXON: Well, if you do, I think you’d have a hell of a time having to go back and renegotiate with them. [unclear]

KISSINGER: I don’t know about reser—but, I would say, in principle, every—any reservation would require a renegotiation. And, some of them might be nonnegotiable; all of it would be damaging.

NIXON: That’s right.

ROGERS: So, I think we should just be against the reservations. Okay, well, I’m glad I asked. Now, on the timing of it, because of Mel Laird’s testimony—

NIXON: What’s—what day is he going?

ROGERS: Well, he’s going after me. But, I mean, he—I’ve talked about the testimony where he will link the defense expenditures to—

NIXON: Yeah.

ROGERS: —ratification.

NIXON: Yeah.

ROGERS: I talked to Fulbright yesterday, and he said that’s one of the things he’s going to ask about.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

ROGERS: So, it really gets down to how we do it. Mel linked it very directly. He said he couldn’t support ratification unless he got what he wanted on B-1 and on Trident. And, I guess he also referred to the—

NIXON: Hmm.

ROGERS: —to the Washington ABM site.

NIXON: I think he—well, I think that the way I would, the way I would feel about it, just offhand, is this: I saw what Mel was trying to do, and I know the way the question would come to you. I think the—I think our position should be that we favor the B-1; we favor that, and we favor—we think we would be out of our minds not to do the two sites, because of the equilibrium, and the rest. But, I don’t think that it makes sense to—and Henry, they’ll probably ask you that question. So, what is your view, too? I don’t think if you link it, I don’t—if you link it like Mel has, you might run into—you might just start a hell of a fight among the Fulbright types, which we don’t need.

ROGERS: Or, you’ll have a Jackson saying, “Well, hell, let’s not ratify until we see what’s going to happen to the defense budget.”

NIXON: Oh, we can’t do that. We need ratification as fast as we can get it—

ROGERS: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Well, now, Jackson was in this morning.

NIXON: Was he?

KISSINGER: And, I think, well, that he is weakening. And, he makes a good point that over the next term, when you get reelected—which he says he hopes if McGovern gets the nomination—

NIXON: He really does?

KISSINGER: That’s what he said. He said McGovern would be an unalloyed disaster for the country.

NIXON: Good.

KISSINGER: He said you—

NIXON: He is. You see what the son of a bitch said this morning?

 

NIXON: Well, let’s get to agree on an announcement, what Bill should say. Now, Bill, would—what are you going to say?

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: What I would propose to say, subject to—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —the discussion here, is not to establish a direct linkage, but to say, “We think the treaties are justified in their own right. We believe that the other things are equally justified. That we—that the administration strongly supports both. But—”

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: “Each should stand on their own feet.”

ROGERS: Yeah. I think that’s the way to do it.

NIXON: But, I would say this, that I think it’s very important, Bill, for you to come down. I mean Mel, by the linkage thing, I mean, he was basically too belligerent, too threatening. But, on the other hand, the—he was talking to his constituency. The thing is that if you could—I think that the [unclear] that this is a—the point I made to the Republican leaders yesterday: I said, “Look, this is a deal where we both negotiated very hard.” I said, “Neither—and, and neither side got everything it wanted.” I said, “That’s—and that’s why it’s a deal which both sides, therefore, can and should accept.” That, I said, “On the other hand, we have to realize that it’s only the beginning of a long process. It’s a total limitation on defensive missiles. It’s only a partial on offensive missiles. And, it—we must now set the stage for the next development.”

And, I told, incidentally, Stennis yesterday that we would have the next round begin in October, if this thing began. But, I said, “In order to set the stage for the next development, we should pass this in—but after—” Oh, then, I said to the Republicans, “We welcome, we welcome from you a thorough, thorough questioning, a thorough examination of this, because we believe that after—that such examination would clearly demonstrate that these agreements are in the interest of the United States.”

ROGERS: Mm-hmm.

NIXON: I think we have to—I think we have to avoid—I mean, and this will hurt us to an extent here, but it’s the right thing, and it’s the—if it’s not the right thing it’s responsible. We really can’t say this is a better deal for us than it is for them.

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: It isn’t. And, it isn’t. And, they on their part, have got to avoid that, too. The deal is not a better deal for us than it is for them. Frankly, what—if you really get down to it—is—and this is where Jackson understands it, and I suppose you made this point to him as I made to the [committee] leader, Strom [Thurmond]. I said, “Look, what you really get down to it here is that we in the field of offensive weapons didn’t have any cards to play with.” I said, “We have—because we’re not going to build any, either. The Joint Chiefs are flatly against a crash program for new submarines, so we have no cards to play with. We’ve got to build ULMS with the fifty-nine billion dollars. We have no land-based missile program. We have no new weapons systems, except those that were started in the Eisenhower administration.” I said, “Under these circumstances, therefore, we are not limiting ourselves in any way that we would not have been limited by what the Congress refused to do.” I said, “Now, you fellows know ABM only passed by one vote.” You can’t talk this way in testimony, but you can to our—the other fellows, the realists. I said, “You also know that as far as the defense budget is concerned, it’s totally unrealistic to say that we’re going to have a twenty-billion-dollar increase in the defense budget in order to catch the Soviet.”

ROGERS: [unclear]

NIXON: So, the offensive limitation one, I think—which is the tougher one—

ROGERS: Yeah.

NIXON: Everybody wants to hold the defense down. They say, “Well, isn’t that great?” But, the offensive one, really—well, looking at the defensive one, you know there wouldn’t be a prayer to get through another ABM if we didn’t have this agreement. So, we’re not really giving anything away over there. That’s the practical thing. The Russians may be just a little worried that there is. On the offensive side, you and I know there isn’t a prayer to get a crash program increasing the defense budget—

ROGERS: That’s right.

NIXON: —that the pull is all in the other direction. So, we’re not giving away anything there. So, looking to the future, yes, we should be for ULMS, we should be for the B-1, we should be for all these other things—

ROGERS: What about NCA?

NIXON: —but I wouldn’t link it.

ROGERS: What about NCA? That’s, that’s a—oh, that’s a tough one—

NIXON: You mean, whether we’re going to build it?

KISSINGER: As I look back on it, that was one major mistake we made in this bloody negotiation.

NIXON: Well, that’s [unclear].

KISSINGER: And, we did it because the Joint Chiefs and Laird—and Laird gave us a written letter saying that in the context of SALT he, as a congressional expert, would guarantee that it would go through.

NIXON: Yeah.

ROGERS: I don’t think it could get through.

KISSINGER: And—

NIXON: Well, I’m not too worried, to be perfectly candid—

KISSINGER: Well, but if we weren’t going to get it, there was no sense for our going for it.

ROGERS: Yeah, because that gave them a—an extra—

KISSINGER: It gave them the—

ROGERS: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Then, we would have been better off. We could’ve kept Malmstrom [Air Force Base, one of the proposed Safeguard sites] if we had stuck with it. They would have kicked and screamed, but at the last minute, they would have yielded. They were dying to get the agreement. But, you were in no position to overrule the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and all your other advisors. State didn’t take a position, as it shouldn’t have. I mean, it’s not a State problem.

NIXON: No, but I didn’t—as you know, I never did feel we ought to build that, then. Do you remember the meeting?

ROGERS: Yeah.

NIXON: Do you remember I didn’t? I said, “Why—who in the hell wants to build it?”

KISSINGER: But you had, well, Allison on the delegation. You had Moorer—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: You had a unanimous recommendation—

NIXON: Nitze?

KISSINGER: You had Nitze. All of them pressing plans—

ROGERS: It never made any sense to me, because I didn’t think we could get it through. Well, in any event, we can [unclear] that.

NIXON: While we’re thinking about it, let’s just understand, period, the thing about it is to say, “Well, of course, we should build them.”

 

NIXON: Now, Bill, so that you’ll know, I told the congressional leaders. They said, “Now, do you want this?” I said, “We certainly do. Because,” I said, “it’d be the wrong signal to the Russians, after we’ve negotiated it, that we didn’t build it.” And so, I think we should just take the position: we need it, we should have it, and it provides—and it’s essential to the strategic balance. And Laird should say that, goddamn it—

KISSINGER: Laird will say it.

ROGERS: We don’t have a budget this year, do we?

NIXON: No, we had the other.

KISSINGER: Not yet.

ROGERS: I’ll have to check—

KISSINGER: You know, I think we have it in. Yeah—

ROGERS: Or, beginning—maybe it was—

KISSINGER: Beginning—

ROGERS: —getting seed money to somebody.

KISSINGER: Under their site—

ROGERS: Site selection?

KISSINGER: We have in the budget, we have advanced—whatever the word is—preparation, but not actual construction.

ROGERS: Mm-hmm.

NIXON: Well, it was in the original plan.

KISSINGER: Yeah, but then it was dropped out and confined to advanced preparation. And now it’s back in. Speaking in this room, it was a mistake. We should have just told the military to go to hell.

ROGERS: Yeah.

KISSINGER: And that we weren’t going to do it.

NIXON: Yeah.

ROGERS: I suppose, though, that even—well, even though it’s a waste of money, it might have some psychological advantage for the country.

NIXON: Let me tell you something: it’s—it’s not all [unclear]. I mean, let’s look at it from the standpoint of the Russians. Why do they protect Moscow [unclear]? Because, there’s a hell of a lot of important population there. And this—

KISSINGER: And with China.

NIXON: Yes, that’s right, Henry; against China. But, there is a very important—let’s face it—population complex around here.

ROGERS: Yeah.

NIXON: Right, Henry? It isn’t just Washington.

KISSINGER: Hell, we’d cover [unclear] you’ll cover as far north as Philadelphia, which would have—it is—against third-country attacks, there’s a certain utility in it, and it forces a larger attack on us.

ROGERS: It also gives us an opportunity to develop our technology [unclear]—

KISSINGER: In our population—

ROGERS: In other words, if you don’t have something going, you’re not going to have any interest in the, the program.

NIXON: But, also, it’s a—the technology for the defense of civilian areas [unclear]—

ROGERS: Of course, you know, that’s what I mean.

NIXON: —which they’ve been developing.

ROGERS: Sure.

NIXON: The technological developments will go forward here.

ROGERS: I think that’s the best argument for it. It really is that—

NIXON: [unclear]

ROGERS: —they’re going to go ahead with theirs, and if we’re out of the business, entirely, we’ll fall behind. Goddamn, I thought it was amazing how the expenses go up. Already the estimates were way above what they were when we made them, initially.

NIXON: On, on this thing?

ROGERS: [unclear] Yeah—

NIXON: Oh, God. Well, on this, the—I think just, just be—

ROGERS: I think I’ve got it.

NIXON: Does Mel testify after you do?

ROGERS: Yeah.

KISSINGER: I think he testifies Wednesday; Bill testifies Monday, isn’t it?

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: Well, I think, I’ve covered it, I’ve covered it with the—with Republicans, and I’ll cover it in my remarks. [unclear] I’m not going to talk long, just—

ROGERS: You know, Mr. President, thinking about the renewed negotiations in October, I think, probably, Gerry’s going to resign pretty soon, so we have to give some thought to who—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

ROGERS: —who we’d put in that spot. Maybe you have someone in mind. But it’s going to be a long—

NIXON: [unclear]

ROGERS: —tedious job.

NIXON: Get somebody who’s gonna give five years of his life to it.

ROGERS: That’s right. What do you—what did you say the other night at the dinner? You know, what were you called at the—at the Duke law school? What did your professors call you there? Hell, “Iron Butt”?

NIXON: An iron butt.

ROGERS: [laughs]

NIXON: That’s all one needs to learn the law.

 

“There’s no question there’s a double standard here.”

June 20, 1972, 11:26 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman

EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING

 

In this brief excerpt, Nixon and Haldeman discuss Watergate on the taping system for the first time. The five burglars, arrested at the offices of the Democratic National Committee during the predawn hours of June 17, were quickly found to have connections with Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. They also wiretapped the DNC for a period in advance of the break-in.

Nixon was at his home in Key Biscayne when the break-in took place and did not return to the White House until the evening of June 19. An earlier portion of this conversation includes the “18½-minute gap,” an erasure that Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, contributed to but has still not been fully explained in the face of evidence that the gap contains numerous erasures. Various attempts to recover the erased portion have been unsuccessful. The way that Nixon starts the conversation suggests that perhaps the erased portion included a discussion of wiretapping.

 

NIXON: Back in connection with wiretapping, I think it’s very, very serious.

HALDEMAN: Right.

NIXON: There’s no question there’s a double standard here.

HALDEMAN: No.

NIXON: With regard to [unclear] do it—

HALDEMAN: Yes.

NIXON: —[unclear] prior authorizations to have it done. They’re all doing it! That’s a standard thing. Why the Christ do we have to hire people to sweep our rooms?

HALDEMAN: We know they’re—

NIXON: Yeah.

HALDEMAN: —bugged.

NIXON: We have been bugged in the past.

HALDEMAN: Right.

 

“The real question is whether . . . we settle at a cost of destroying the South Vietnamese.”

August 2, 1972, 10:34 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

OVAL OFFICE

 

For the first time, Kissinger came back from the Vietnam peace talks encouraged that a solution was entirely possible. In a morning meeting with Nixon, he reviewed the high and low points of his session with Le Duc Tho, which had taken place in Paris the day before. As a negotiator, Kissinger liked nothing more than having room to maneuver, which he finally had in the form of proposal points that were acceptable to Tho, who had previously stonewalled every proposal. The remaining problem was finding common ground on a government and a set of guarantees that would protect South Vietnam. Kissinger was confident that they could be arranged, even before the election. Nixon was sly enough to know that in truth, it might not be possible to arrange any real guarantees—ever. That wasn’t something he cared to admit, not before the election.

 

KISSINGER: Well, first, it was the longest meeting we’ve ever had. It was the most complex.

NIXON: Yeah, I noticed that in your report.

KISSINGER: And—do you want me to run through it?

NIXON: Sure. Sure. Sure. Anything. Anytime.

KISSINGER: Well, but—

NIXON: All I have is Haig’s report—

KISSINGER: Right. Well, Haig didn’t have much—

NIXON: It was just indicating it was a long meeting and they made some concrete proposals.

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: You made some concrete proposals, which I assumed.

KISSINGER: Well, the proposals I made you know. They were the ones that Brezhnev and you worked out.

NIXON: Yeah.

 

KISSINGER: All right, so we spent an hour on that, which was very acrimonious. As I said, “The president has proved that he does not have goodwill and serious intent?” I said, “Mr. Le Duc Tho, I waited for two weeks to tell you this. The next time you say anything about the president’s intentions, motives, or anything else, I will pick up my papers and walk out of this room. We are here to negotiate. The fact that I’m here shows our goodwill. I’m not going to discuss our motives. You discuss our proposals. We’ll discuss your proposals. I’m not sitting here to listen to one more word about the president. If you can’t take this, I’ll walk out now.” I figured they were never going to let me walk out.

NIXON: It was a good move, though. You had to test him.

KISSINGER: Yeah, so he pedaled right back. He said, “I’m not attacking you.” I said, “I’m not saying you’re attacking me. Attack me, that’s your privilege. I’m here. I won’t let you attack the president. I represent the president.” So—so he started dancing away from me. Well, at any rate, after about forty-five minutes of this, I presented in effect what you and Brezhnev had discussed, which I had held back last time, with a few extra frills, which I had mentioned to you, such as a—

NIXON: Yeah, sure.

KISSINGER: —constitutional convention, made a very long speech for publication, in which I showed that we had—

NIXON: Good.

KISSINGER: —that we had—

NIXON: That’ll be good for this record.

KISSINGER: That’s right. That we had taken every one of their seven points into account, just so that they had to shut up that we had never responded to their seven points—

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah.

KISSINGER: —and—and how we had that evidence, and so on, and so forth. I—he asked a few questions and asked for a recess. There was an hour and fifteen minutes’ recess where, for the first time, they served us a hot meal and offered us whiskey, and wine, and tea.

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: That never happened before.

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: Then he came back, asked a few more questions, then made a fifteen-minute violent attack on the bombing—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —and what you have said about bombing, and—

NIXON: So, then what’d you say to them?

KISSINGER: And what did I say to them? I was just cold. I said, “We’ve offered you a cease-fire. You can accept your power to stop the bombing.” I said, “It’s up to you, it’s not up to us. You can stop the bombing.” Then he went on again. I said, “Mr. Special Advisor, on May 2, when I saw you, you said, ‘Offensives are the result of long wars.’ End the war and we’ll end the bombing in the next minute.” And then I offered him a cease-fire—a three-month cease-fire, a mutual deescalation. I said, “Why don’t you tell us, privately, you’re going to reduce the intensity of your fighting. I promise you we’ll reduce the intensity of our bombing.”

NIXON: Good. That’s good—

KISSINGER: Frankly, it’s cynical. I just made it for the record.

NIXON: Sure, I know. It was good—

KISSINGER: Then he pulled out a long statement, which is the most comprehensive proposal they’ve ever made. The first, I would say, negotiating proposal they’ve made. In the past, they’ve just given us nine brief points. This time it’s about an eight-page document, ten points, and then four procedural points. Now, I can get them, if you want them point by point—

NIXON: No, no, no. I think—

KISSINGER: —or I can give the main—

NIXON: —the gist—what’s the heart of the matter?

KISSINGER: The heart of the matter is that in the past they had always said that we must set a deadline, which we then will keep regardless of what else happens. In other words, December 1 or whatever. They’ve given that up. Now, they agree with our formulation that the deadline will be a specified period of time after the signature of the agreement. So they accept our formulation on that. They say one month, we say four months, but I’m sure we can find a point in between. They say one month after the signature of the agreement. That, for them, is a tremendous change because in the past they have always said we must set a fixed date. And only after that phase, and only after we’ve agreed with [unclear].

NIXON: Which comes first?

KISSINGER: Well, they now agree the agreement has to come—

NIXON: That’s right. That’s right. Which is our position.

KISSINGER: Which is exact—they’ve accepted our position. The only thing we give them now is the length of time, but that’s unavoidable. Secondly, they propose a Government of National Concord, but they have changed that somewhat. But, quite significantly in the past, their Government of National Concord was composed, as they said, of three elements: peace-loving elements of the Saigon administration, neutralists, and themselves.

NIXON: Jesus—

KISSINGER: And the peace-loving elements of the Saigon administration had to change their policies: disband the army, let people out of concentration camps, and so forth. So, they were paranoid. Now, they say the Government of National Concord should be composed in the following way: the Saigon government, including Thieu, appoints people to the Government of National Concord, anybody they want. Except, they can’t appoint Thieu to the Government of National Concord.

But they can appoint anybody else. They, the PRG, will appoint another third. And then the Saigon people—it’s not acceptable, but it’s a tremendous change for them—the Saigon people and the PRG, between them, select the other third. So, in other words, it’s fifty–fifty. That’s what it really amounts to. In the past, it was at least two to one for them, and, probably, completely them, because who is a peace-loving element of the Saigon administration? Again, I repeat: this is not acceptable, but it’s the biggest shift they’ve ever made.

NIXON: It’s still a coalition Communist government?

KISSINGER: It’s still a coalition—fifty–fifty—government. Third, they said they are willing—if we agree to some of these principles—they are willing to set up two new forums in Paris. One, direct talks between the PRG and the Saigon government, including Thieu, which they’ve never been willing to do. Second, direct talks between themselves, the PRG, and Thieu. The first forum would discuss the implementation of the political program. The second forum would discuss the military things that do not involve America. And then—and they have a lot of other clauses which we can hammer out. The big, enormous change they have made is the willingness to talk to Saigon, plus Thieu, about anything. In the past, they’ve always said Thieu has to resign before—and the government has to change its policies—before anything happens. That was the condition for negotiation, not the condition for settling. Now they say they’re willing to talk to Thieu about a political settlement. They still insist that it should be a coalition government, and this is why I say it’s still unacceptable. Now, I asked him, “What happened in the provinces? How are they governed?” And then they said something that was quite interesting. He said, “In the provinces, the provinces governed by Saigon remain governed by Saigon. The governed—provinces governed by the PRG remain governed by the PRG. The contested provinces get a Provincial Administration of National Concord.” Now, I didn’t press him too hard because I didn’t want him to get a negative answer. But if he means that, then what you really have is a standstill cease-fire, which brings this about. Oh, and they agreed to a cease-fire. [unclear] That’s the fourth point. And they agreed that all prisoners would be released within one month, and we agreed to withdraw within one month. At any rate, they agreed to a total release of prisoners.

NIXON: Contemporaneous withdrawal?

KISSINGER: Right. Now, there are two—the first question is this: if they mean that each administration continues and some sort of super thing is set up, that we could li—conceivably live with. In other words, if we said—if we reversed the process—if we said, “First, there’s a standstill cease-fire,” the standstill cease-fire de facto will produce Saigon areas and PRG areas. That’s what it’s got to do. And then you could say you have some commission over those. That we could live with. If they say, “The Saigon government has to disappear, and only a coalition government can exist,” then, we’re in trouble. Now, he said one other thing. He said, “You don’t have to put this into an agreement. We’re willing to write the agreement in a neutral way, provided you tell us privately you will use your influence in the negotiations that will go on between Thieu and us to bring about that Government of National Concord.” Now, this gives us a number—first of all, it gives us massive problems, because, if they publish this, this is harder to turn down than their other stuff.

NIXON: Yes. It’s harder to say they’re imposing a Communist government.

KISSINGER: It’s harder to say they’re imposing a Communist government. It’s harder to say they’re loading the process because they want it to abandon its army, police, and so forth, because they’ve dropped all of those demands. Secondly, you have to say that, for them, they have made a tremendous step. It’s not—in the past, we used to say they’ve made a step because of the mood. But this time—we used to say that when they’re willing to talk to Thieu, we are halfway home.

I think we are halfway home, myself. Third, and this I will say only in this room, if you told me to sell out I could make it look brilliant. I mean—I’m not ask—I’m not recommending it, Mr. President, but I’m saying—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —that if we got up against a hard place—I do feel this, that a McGovern victory would be worse than a sellout in Vietnam.

NIXON: Oh, Christ. Of course, of course. We know that for sure—

KISSINGER: But I also think we shouldn’t do it.

NIXON: Why?

KISSINGER: We shouldn’t sell out, I mean, and fourth—

NIXON: We can survive without it.

KISSINGER: Fourthly, Mr. President, I don’t believe—

NIXON: It depends upon how much of a price we have to pay.

KISSINGER: Fourthly, this is not their last word. It can’t be their last word. I mean, they—when they start, they’re not going to nail themselves to the blackboard. [What] they have done, in my judgment, is this: they have decided—you see, the easy thing to do is to say that they’ll wait till October, and then, if you’re way ahead, they’ll settle with you. I’ve always said they can’t do that, because if they—supposing they had floated this plan in October, we could just—they’d never finish it.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: If you are ten points ahead in November—in October, we’ll accept elements in principle, and it gets to be November 7, and they haven’t got an agreement. So, if they want to have the option of settling it early in October, they must start talking about it now. As they talk about it, now, they’re helping you, because no one—because these meetings—I don’t know what they do to public opinion, but I’ve seen when I talk to senators—they confuse them. They confuse McGovern—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —and even with this proposal, we’re in a position to say, “Hell, we were negotiating seriously, and this son of a bitch makes any negotiation—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —impossible.”

NIXON: Hmm. Yeah.

KISSINGER: So—

NIXON: That’s fine.

KISSINGER: So I think—and certainly what they have done, now, they’ve given us a piece of paper which makes it impossible for these talks to break up quickly, because I can now drive them crazy.

 

KISSINGER: Now, to get back to this Vietnam thing, Mr. President, I think now, for the first time, we can settle it. And I think—I’m not saying we can settle it on their plan. This is too complex, too detailed, and they’re too eager. If you stay ten points ahead, I would say now the chances are two out of three that they’ll settle in October.

NIXON: Should we?

KISSINGER: Well, that’s a different question, but I’m just telling you what I think.

NIXON: Yeah, what I mean—I guess that my question is then another one. Suddenly, we’re ten points ahead and we are—and then, will we settle in October? The real question is whether, whether we settle at a cost of destroying the South Vietnamese.

KISSINGER: Well, we cannot accept this—

NIXON: Yes, we cannot [unclear]—

KISSINGER: —present proposal.

NIXON: We have to have something that would—

KISSINGER: Uh-huh.

NIXON: I would like—frankly, I’d like to trick them. I’d like to do it in a way that we make a settlement, and then screw them in the implementation, to be quite candid.

KISSINGER: Well, that we can do, too. See, they’ve given us—

NIXON: We could promise something, and then, right after the election, say Thieu wouldn’t do it. Just keep the pressure on.

KISSINGER: Well, they can give us a lot of—they’ve given us a lot of options now. We could—

NIXON: See, we can’t—one problem we’ve got, you’ve got to remember, we can’t—it’s very difficult to lift the mining and stop the bombing and then, then restart it again. We could after the election, but—and will—but—yeah. If—you see, here’s the advantage. The advantage, Henry, of trying to settle now, even if you’re ten points ahead, is that, then, you assure a hell of a landslide. And you might win the House and get increased strength in the Senate.

KISSINGER: And you’d have—

NIXON: You’d have a mandate in the country.

KISSINGER: And you have the goddamn nightmare off your back, I mean—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: It’s—

NIXON: It’s very important. Because, you know, it is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare being there, but—and so therefore, I think we, I think our goal should be that. I just, I just don’t know how far we can go—

KISSINGER: No, I’ve never been—

NIXON: —with the Communists. I don’t see how far we can go in good conscience, not only—not because of South Vietnam, but because of the effect on other countries in the world—

KISSINGER: Mr. President—

NIXON: —without screwing up [unclear]—

KISSINGER: —we cannot possibly accept what they’re proposing.

NIXON: Oh, I know, but—

KISSINGER: That is clear. Then, the question is what—

NIXON: What, if anything, has Henry—has Thieu offered? He [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: He’s never talked about a Government of National Concord, has he?

KISSINGER: No. I think what we ought to do is this—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —simply to get some procedural things. On the fourteenth, I ought to accept, or nearly accept, every point in their proposal, except the political one.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Because—

NIXON: Oh, I see no problem with that.

KISSINGER: There’s no problem with that, but that shows major progress.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Then, we ought to send Haig out to Saigon, or, conceivably, even I should go out to Saigon.

 

KISSINGER: And then, I could tell them, frankly, at the next meeting, “Let’s make as much progress as we can today, and let’s narrow the differences on the political.” We can’t accept their proposal. Then, the question is: how do we get into alternatives, and I’m really—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: I’d like to spend today thinking it through to see—

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: —what we can do to [unclear]—

NIXON: We’ll have tomorrow and the next day. Don’t press yourself too hard on that [unclear]—

KISSINGER: But, for the first time—

NIXON: —keep yourself available for other, bigger shows.

KISSINGER: But, for the first time, we have a, we have a real—I mean they’ve given us so many elements to play with, that, for example, we can accept the procedure immediately. We’ve been trying for three years, Mr. President, to get them to talk to the Thieu government.

NIXON: Yeah. Let me say this—one thing I—they are thinking you don’t have to spell out: they are under no illusions that this offer is not open-ended. They are under no illusions that on November 7, there ain’t no offers, believe me. None.

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: Not even a cease-fire.

KISSINGER: Well, I’m not saying it explicitly because I’m afraid—

NIXON: No, because you don’t want to use that premise—

KISSINGER: No, I don’t want to be—no, I don’t want to be threatening. I don’t want it to be published, but—

NIXON: That’s what I mean. You don’t want to become threatening in the public, I know. I know, but, you see, that’s the way it’s going to be. November 7, and these sons of bitches have strung us along, then we just continue to step it up—

KISSINGER: They are not stringing us along—

NIXON: This war is over by the end of this year [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Mr. President, the reason I’m convinced they’re not stringing us along is that if this proposal gets published, it will be very embarrassing to us. It gives us a tough problem domestically.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: But it will be more than murder for them, for them to have offered to us that they will talk to Thieu, which they have said for eight years they would never do under any circumstances. This will have a shattering effect on their guerrillas. I mean, every intelligence document we get holds firm on the proposition that Thieu can’t be talked to, so they have made—for what is for them, you know, they are bastards—

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah.

KISSINGER: —they are—they would love it best if you got defeated.

NIXON: Oh, sure. Or shot.

KISSINGER: Or shot, or anything. You could disappear from the scene. They hate you, and they hate me. I mean, they know who did this.

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: But, the question is, now: how can we maneuver it so that we can have a process, so that it can look like a settlement by Election Day, but if the process is still open? If we can get that done, then we can screw them after Election Day, if necessary, and we can get—I mean, if you pull off—these sons of bitches are going to say you’re not going to succeed. I mean, that’s for sure. They’re going to say you lie, and you’re not going to succeed.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: And, I think this could finish the destruction of McGovern.

NIXON: Oh, yes. And it does.

KISSINGER: And it does.

NIXON: Which is just as important—

KISSINGER: And I think—

NIXON: —[unclear] the whole damn bunch—

KISSINGER: And I think we have two problems here. It isn’t just that you win, which is crucial.

NIXON: We’ve got to win big. I mean, you can’t—

KISSINGER: And that you win big, but also that, ideologically, if they see—if it is that you knew all along what you were doing—no one is hassling you anymore on Russia and China.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: But you said you had a plan. You said you’d do it with Russia and China. You did it with Russia.

NIXON: Yeah, and even with Japan, now.

KISSINGER: Yeah, we’ll come out all right.

NIXON: See, I think with this that the—look, there’s no question that—I don’t know. I don’t know. The real problem, which I guess you’ve got here on Vietnam—Vietnam poisons our relations with the Soviet, and it poisons our relations with the Chinese. We have suffered long and hard, and God knows how do we get out of it. All it is, is a question of getting out in a way that to other countries—not the Chinese or the Russians so much, they don’t give a damn how it’s settled, just that we’re out—but to other countries, it does not appear that we, after four years, bugged out. That’s all we have to do—

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: I’m not—I’m just not sure that South Vietnam can survive in any event, you know? I just don’t think that I—

KISSINGER: And the South—

NIXON: —the Northerners seem to be—have the more stamina. How the hell they’ve taken what they have, I don’t know. I’ll never know.

KISSINGER: And the doves should not be able to say—

NIXON: To have a veto on us.

KISSINGER: Well the doves should not be able to say—

NIXON: Oh, the doves. I thought you said the South.

KISSINGER: No, I said the doves should not be able to say in October that what you did, they would have done in February of ’69 and saved—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —twenty thousand lives.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: So we’ve got to have something to show for them. We’ve got to be able to prove that we had honor and a settlement.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: And, therefore, even if we go very far, the settlement has to look as if we haven’t done a hell of a lot.

NIXON: Of course, what you’re going to have here, basically, is a secret deal. Let’s face it. That’s—that’s the only chance of a settlement, a secret deal where we say, in effect, “All right, we agree to a cease-fire, et cetera. And we agree that we will then use our influence strongly on the side of the kind of a political settlement that we have agreed to [unclear].” Right?

KISSINGER: Well, you see I have—

NIXON: And then you don’t [unclear]—

KISSINGER: I have a number of, a number of things I’ve thought of I think we should do. One is, we’ve asked for a general cease-fire. I think, now, one way of handling it—the reason they’re opposed to that is that they’re afraid if they break it, we have a right to come back in. Now, if we made a dual cease-fire in which every party makes a separate cease-fire with every other party, then if they don’t break it with us, they’ll break it with the GVN. We may go back in, but we also may not.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And after January, if we beat them up enough, Mr. President, I don’t think they can win against the South.

NIXON: I agree. No, I’ve—from what I’ve read, you know, and everybody else in here, they’re kicking also. Let’s face it, Henry, we didn’t do the mining for fun. That mining and that bombing has got to be hurting these bastards.

KISSINGER: That’s right. I have an [unclear] feeling about the bombing, Mr. President, that somebody—

NIXON: Is screwing it up?

KISSINGER: —is screwing it up. They’re not bombing, and if I—

NIXON: Well, I know that the weather’s always—

KISSINGER: Well, but this is the dry season, Mr. President.

NIXON: I know the point. That’s my point. I’m thinking Laird—I’m just wondering [unclear] on this weather crap.

KISSINGER: I’m wondering—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —would you would be willing to let me bring Moorer in after some WSAG meeting and tell him now, by God, you want them to go full bore until there’s a settlement?

NIXON: Now, if he’s willing, I’ll—I will order him. Who do you think it is? Laird?

KISSINGER: I think Laird—Moorer, basically, is a tricky son of a bitch. After his present term is over, Mr. President—

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: —in two years—in a year and a half into your new term—but four years is plenty for him. He won’t care. My—my recommendation is too far down. It would be somebody like Haig, who is your man—

NIXON: Of course.

KISSINGER: —who understands—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: And, in fact, you don’t have to fight back with him—

NIXON: Moorer—Moorer—

KISSINGER: Moorer is—anytime you give him an order, he’s all right for four weeks, then Laird gets to him, again, and Laird is just—

NIXON: The bureaucracy.

KISSINGER: And Laird is pretty disaffected. Right now, you know, he took you on yesterday on that debt ceiling.

NIXON: On the, the—

KISSINGER: The spending limit.

NIXON: Well, he’s wrong on this, and let me—the spending limit does not entail any cut, any limit on defense.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: It’s only a limit on the other things. He knows that. But that’s all right. Laird’s doing all right kicking the hell out of them on these various bases. He’s sort of scaring—

KISSINGER: Oh, yeah—

NIXON: —the shit out of people—

KISSINGER: Oh, yeah.

NIXON: That’s always a job. That’s the kind of a thing he’s good at.

KISSINGER: Oh, yeah. Politically, incidentally, he thinks that McGovern has just about killed himself. He told me this morning.

NIXON: I think having Moorer in is an excellent idea. I should talk to him anyway, and, your suggestion, I’ll wring him out good. I’ll say, “Now, we’ve got to do it.” I’ll tell him that we need it from the standpoint of the negotiations—

KISSINGER: Now, Mr. President, I don’t exclude—I’m looking at this thing totally cynically, now. I don’t exclude that you might want to consider when I come back from Moscow, that you—that we stop bombing north of the twentieth parallel for the six weeks of—if there’s to be major progress in Paris.

NIXON: I agree.

KISSINGER: You see, what we need—

NIXON: Oh, I agree.

KISSINGER: —is to have something at home that shows constant progress and could—

NIXON: While that’s happening we’ll stop bombing, but, also, they’re to reduce their level of fighting, too.

KISSINGER: Right, well that will happen automatically, but my point is, if we stop on September—between September 15 and November 8 they can’t do much.

NIXON: No.

KISSINGER: After November 7, if you get—there’s no question you’ll get reelected—

NIXON: If we win—

KISSINGER: We—

NIXON: —after November 7, school’s out.

KISSINGER: That’s right—

NIXON: No foolin’ around, because you say—

KISSINGER: We can’t go through another two years—

NIXON: —[unclear] we’re going to take out the heart of, the heart of the installations in Hanoi.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: We’re going to take out the whole goddamn dock area, ships or no ships. Tell them, “Clear out of there.” We’ll stay away from the Chinese border. And frankly, Henry, we may have to take the dikes out, not for the purpose of killing people—

KISSINGER: Mr. President—

NIXON: Warn the people. Tell them to get the hell out of there.

KISSINGER: It’s the dry season. I would take the dikes out.

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: Right now, you have [unclear]—

NIXON: Sure, but in the dry season, we take them out, and then they have to move, that’s all. Isn’t that right?

KISSINGER: I’ll tell them, “Let our prisoners go,” I’ll make them an offer again, and then I’d [unclear].

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: But, when all is said and done, Mr. President, if they want to take—assuming they have decided they’re going to accept your May 8 offer—they couldn’t go further than they did yesterday. This was, in all the years of the negotiations put together, this is the biggest concession. Well, that doesn’t prove anything, because they’ve never made a concession.

NIXON: I know. I know.

KISSINGER: But they’ve accepted two of our—I said—we’ve always said there are three acceptable points. That the deadline has to be conditional on an agreement. They’ve accepted that. That they have to talk to Thieu. They’ve accepted that. The only thing they haven’t accepted, yet, is the structure of the government. But it was another thing they did which will help us with the record. I read them a long statement last time of, really, garbage, of basic principles. I took it from some of the things you had said to Zhou Enlai about how we can coexist with Communist countries.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: I said, “I just want you to know what the president is thinking”—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —and they said they were very impressed by that. It’s—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —half baloney, but the fact is they’ve said it, and we can publish it—

NIXON: Sure. Sure. Sure.

KISSINGER: —and—and what—they really are serious. They say from now on, after every meeting, let’s write down what we’ve agreed to, and then let’s shift it into another forum. I don’t think they will make a final thing before the second half of—

NIXON: How about getting Bunker over and letting him do the, the brutalizing of Thieu.

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: That’s one other way to get at it—

KISSINGER: We can also—well, first of all, we have to know what we want you to do.

NIXON: Yeah, I know.

KISSINGER: Which we haven’t decided. If we could do two things, we could have, first, Bunker come here. I think either Haig or I have to go out there, at some point. First of all, it will look—if after the next meeting—

NIXON: [unclear] if you wanted to go, because if you go, then that’ll have an enormous impact here. I mean, it also doesn’t buy time. You have to realize that the more time we buy, the better.

KISSINGER: Well, if after the meeting on the fourteenth, I go to, to Saigon—I mean, I’m looking at it partly now as PR.

NIXON: Oh, I know. That’s all it is then.

KISSINGER: Everybody will figure, “Jesus Christ, something has—”

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: “—to be going on.”

NIXON: My own view is that you really, probably ought to go to Saigon after the meeting on the fourteenth.

 

KISSINGER: Now that they’ve offered a standstill cease-fire, I know they’re going to start a big offensive. I mean, they’re going to try to grab every square inch of territory—

NIXON: Oh, yes [unclear] that we may agree to a standstill cease-fire.

KISSINGER: Well, they’ve objected—

NIXON: But I must say, I think, as I read these reports, and I’m reading them quite carefully these days, the ARVN may be doing a little better on the ground than we had—than they have. They—they seem to be having a hell of a lot of spoiling operations, and I say that not because of the casualties they claim they’re inflicting, but because of the ones they’re taking themselves.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: In other words, whenever I see low ARVN casualties, I know they’re sitting in their foxholes, but when I see them high, they must be out killing somebody.

KISSINGER: They’re taking almost as many as the North Vietnamese.

NIXON: They are, are they?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Well, they should be, because they’re on the offensive. Now, those spoiling operations, Henry, are pretty hard on these bastards.

KISSINGER: Oh, and then, they pick up—yesterday, they picked up six [unclear] of mortar action—

NIXON: I saw that.

KISSINGER: —in one place [unclear]—

NIXON: I also saw that in one area, in another province, that, where they came into an area of training, they found about 180 dead bodies. Just dead bodies from bombing.

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Now there are—that must not be an isolated incident. You know, damn well, these bombs have got to be hitting something.

KISSINGER: Well, we think we’ve killed about seventy thousand people. That’s not even counting B-52s. Now, if that’s true, that means we’ve wounded another seventy thousand. I’ve talked with [Sir Robert] Thompson, who’s going around the world for us, around Southeast Asia for us, and he thinks—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —we’ve—we—he thinks they’re through till ’75.

NIXON: Well then, ARVN—ARVN can survive, then.

KISSINGER: And I think, Mr. President, we have a—I’m going to get these terms improved. I mean, we’ve never yet accepted a first offer anybody made to us.

NIXON: No.

KISSINGER: But I will make specific recommendations to you before the end of [unclear]—

NIXON: Of course, you know, you know that you have a very tough partner in Thieu here. He may not be willing even to go along with this, that he won’t run again.

KISSINGER: That isn’t—that is not—that’s no longer an issue. Actually, their proposal—

NIXON: Says that he will not?

KISSINGER: Their proposal is easier for, for him to handle—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —because it requires a direct negotiation with him. Strangely enough, their proposal is better attuned to Vietnamese psychology than ours is. Their proposal requires that he, that he can participate in the negotiations. Then, he’s supposed not to participate in a Government of National Concord—

NIXON: Good. Good—

KISSINGER: —but I’m not yet absolutely sure what that Government of National Concord is. Whether that’s a super, sort of, structure, or—and Saigon continues, you see? Or whether Saigon disappears? But he’s always said, when there is permanent peace, he won’t run. So, he has the face-saving—he will resign. So, he could put it into that context.

NIXON: Well, the Government of National Concord could just be a temporary government until new elections are held. That’s—

KISSINGER: Oh, well, that’s what they want.

NIXON: And then new elections will determine the government?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: You’re sure?

KISSINGER: Oh, positive.

 

Later, the conversation turned to a very different subject: Ted Kennedy. Even after it was clear that Edward Kennedy would not be the 1972 Democratic Party presidential nominee, he remained a topic of Oval Office conversation. While much has been written about the rivalry between Nixon and the Kennedys, it remains unclear whether Nixon admired or detested them more.

 

NIXON: What the hell is the matter with Teddy? It isn’t a question, I mean, I don’t think it’s a sex business. I think his problem, meaning his lack of discretion, don’t you think it’s the booze? He can’t resist the booze?

KISSINGER: Well, these can’t—first of all, he drinks.

NIXON: No, no. But, Bobby and Teddy—Bobby and Jack, everybody knows it, had their own way. But they were a hell of a lot more discreet!

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: I—

KISSINGER: I’ve had Cristina Ford tell me, for example, that Teddy’s unbelievable. He invited her to the opening of the Kennedy Center, to his house. He had two tables. One upstairs and one downstairs. He took her upstairs. All during the dinner she had to fight him off because under the table he was grabbing her by the legs, and—

NIXON: Oh Christ! And there were other people present?

KISSINGER: That’s right, at his own house. With his wife heading the table downstairs. You know, Cristina’s past, she’s not exactly an innocent.

NIXON: I didn’t think so.

KISSINGER: And—

NIXON: She doesn’t look like an innocent. I don’t know.

KISSINGER: Then, she said, he followed her to New York. They [Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II] have an apartment there, in the Carlyle Hotel. He [Kennedy] rented one ten floors down. Walked up the stairs, practically beat her door down.

NIXON: Uh-huh.

KISSINGER: And she said she’s been pursued by many men in her life, but Teddy, just, is impossible! She finally told him, “What if the newspapers get this?” He said, “No newspapers are going to print anything about me. I’ve got that covered.”

NIXON: Jesus Christ! That’s pretty arrogant.

 

“If he gets shot, it’s too damn bad.”

September 7, 1972, 10:32 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman

OVAL OFFICE

 

Following the shooting of controversial presidential candidate George Wallace on May 15, 1972, prominent politicians—whether they were candidates for the presidency or not—were offered temporary Secret Service protection. While Senator Edward Kennedy was not a candidate in 1972, he received more threatening mail than any candidate. Because of this, Nixon debated whether Kennedy should be given permanent Secret Service protection. On the one hand, Nixon did not want to give favors to Kennedy that no one else had. On the other hand, Nixon did not want to be blamed if a threat to Kennedy were acted upon.

 

HALDEMAN: You’ve got one United States senator [Kennedy] who is a secondary factor in the campaign. You give him [Secret Service] coverage through the campaign—

EHRLICHMAN: Understand, I don’t like to give him something, but at the same time—

HALDEMAN: And then if he gets shot, it’s our fault.

EHRLICHMAN: Sure.

NIXON: You understand what the problem is. If the son of a bitch gets shot they’ll say we didn’t furnish it. So you just buy his insurance. Then after the election, he doesn’t get a goddamn thing. If he gets shot, it’s too damn bad.

EHRLICHMAN: All right.

NIXON: Do it on the basis, though, that we pick the Secret Service men. Not that son of a bitch [Secret Service Chief James] Rowley. Understand what I’m talking about? Do you have anybody in the Secret Service that you can get to?

EHRLICHMAN: Yeah.

NIXON: Do you have anybody that we can rely on?

EHRLICHMAN: Yeah. We’ve got several.

NIXON: Plant one. Plant two guys on him. This would be very useful.

 

“I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now that not a thing will come crashing down to our surprise.”

September 15, 1972, 5:27 p.m.

Richard Nixon, John Dean, and Bob Haldeman

OVAL OFFICE

 

In late summer, Nixon was focused on the presidential campaign, in which he led the Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern (D-SD), by a comfortable margin in the polls. He was also struggling to contain the controversy growing out of the break-in at the Watergate office building, an effort that received a blow on September 15, when the five Watergate burglars were indicted on criminal charges, as were G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, two men associated with both the break-in and with the Nixon White House. Counsel to the President John Dean assuaged Nixon’s concerns, promising that the cover-up would hold through Nixon’s reelection.

 

NIXON: Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you?

DEAN: I did.

NIXON: You got Watergate on the way, huh?

DEAN: Quite a three months.

HALDEMAN: How does it all add up?

DEAN: I think we can say “well” at this point. The press is playing it just as we expect.

HALDEMAN: Whitewash? [Reference is to the criticism by some that the FBI investigation into Watergate was expected to not be rigorous.]

DEAN: No, not yet. The, the story right now—

NIXON: It’s a big story.

DEAN: Yeah.

NIXON: [unclear]

HALDEMAN: It’s five indicted—

DEAN: Plus—

HALDEMAN: Plus they’re building up the fact that Watergate—

DEAN: Plus the White House aides.

HALDEMAN: Plus the White House former guy and all that. That’s good. That takes the edge off whitewash really.

NIXON: Yeah. [unclear]

HALDEMAN: That was the thing Mitchell kept saying that—

NIXON: Yeah.

HALDEMAN: —that to those in the country, Liddy and Hunt are big men.

DEAN: That’s right.

NIXON: Yeah. They’re White House aides.

HALDEMAN: And maybe that’s good.

 

DEAN: The resources that have been put against this whole investigation to date are really incredible. It’s truly a larger investigation than was conducted against the after-inquiry of the JFK assassination.

NIXON: Oh.

DEAN: And good statistics supporting that Kleindienst is going to have a—

HALDEMAN: Isn’t that ridiculous though?

DEAN: What is?

HALDEMAN: This silly-ass damn thing.

NIXON: Yeah.

HALDEMAN: That kind of resources against—

NIXON: Yeah, for Christ’s sake. [unclear]

HALDEMAN: Who the hell cares?

NIXON: Goldwater put it in context: “Well, for Christ’s sake, everybody bugs everybody else. We know that.”

DEAN: That was priceless.

HALDEMAN: Yeah. I bugged—

NIXON: Well, it’s true! It happens to be totally true!

DEAN: [unclear]

NIXON: We were bugged in ’68 on the plane and bugged in ’62, even running for governor. Goddamnedest thing you ever saw.

DEAN: Well, the shame of that is that evidence of the fact that that happened in ’68 was never preserved around. I understand that only the former director had that information.

HALDEMAN: No, that’s not true.

DEAN: There was direct evidence of it?

NIXON: Yeah.

HALDEMAN: There’s others who have that information.

NIXON: Others know it.

DEAN: DeLoach?

NIXON: DeLoach, right.

HALDEMAN: I’ve got some stuff on it, too, in the bombing halt study. Because it’s all, that’s why, the stuff I’ve got we don’t—

NIXON: The difficulty with using it, of course, is that it reflects on Johnson.

DEAN: Right.

NIXON: He ordered it. If it weren’t for that, I’d use it. Is there any way we could use it without reflecting on Johnson? Now, could we say the Democratic National Committee did it? No, the FBI did the bugging though.

HALDEMAN: That’s the problem.

DEAN: Is it going to reflect on Johnson or Humphrey?

HALDEMAN: Johnson. Humphrey didn’t do it.

DEAN: Humphrey didn’t do it?

NIXON: Oh, hell no.

HALDEMAN: He was bugging Humphrey, too. [laughs]

DEAN: [laughs]

NIXON: Oh, goddamn.

 

DEAN: Three months ago I would have had trouble predicting where we’d be today. I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now that not a thing will come crashing down to our surprise.

NIXON: Say what?

DEAN: Nothing is going to come crashing down to our surprise, either.

NIXON: Well, the whole thing is a can of worms, as you know. A lot of this stuff went on. And, the people who worked [unclear] awfully embarrassing. But the way you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because you put your fingers in the dike every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there. [unclear] having people straighten the [unclear]. The grand jury is dismissed now?

DEAN: That is correct. They’ll, they will have completed and they will let them go, so there will be no continued investigation prompted by the grand jury’s inquiry. The GAO report that was referred over to Justice is on a shelf right now because they have hundreds of violations. They’ve got violations of McGovern’s. They’ve got violations of Humphrey’s. They’ve got Jackson violations, and several hundred congressional violations. They don’t want to start prosecuting one any more than they want the other. So that’s, uh—

NIXON: They damn well better not prosecute us unless they prosecute all the others.

DEAN: I know.

 

“All I’m saying is that they’re moving step by step.”

September 15, 1972, 11:43 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

OVAL OFFICE

 

Very late that night, Kissinger arrived at the Oval Office to talk to the president about the Vietnam peace process. It had seen noteworthy progress. Among other signs of movement, the North Vietnamese were within a day or two of implementing a POW release, something they had not done for three years. At the time, they claimed to hold 383 Americans. As a gesture of goodwill, they planned to release three downed fliers, in cooperation with a group called the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam. It was a group of humanitarian purpose, run by ardent antiwar activists. When Kissinger met with Nixon, he was just back from Paris, where Tho was making so many positive comments that Kissinger was tempted to accept his invitation to extend the talks for another day. Kissinger, however, was wary and came home as scheduled.

 

KISSINGER: “You [Le Duc Tho] just don’t understand America.” I said, “If you had released those three prisoners to us, you would have put us under some pressure to reciprocate. Releasing them to a peace group that’s better known in Hanoi than in America,” I said, “hurts you.”

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: I said, “I’ve got trouble enough advising in Washington. I don’t want to advise in Hanoi. But I just want to tell you, whatever little advantage you get from releasing three prisoners, you’ve destroyed by giving it to, I think, giving these prisoners to these people.”

Well, [unclear] he said, “‘Peace group?’ We don’t know any peace groups. This is a social welfare organization. It’s the first time I hear that it’s a ‘peace group.’”

NIXON: Jesus Christ.

KISSINGER: [laughs] And, about the announcement, he said, “Why do you think we would object to it? Of course make the announcement.” And—so, this, this set the mood. Then I presented our proposal.

But then, he said—then I told him I had to go to Pompidou. He said, “Well, if we don’t finish, maybe we can meet tomorrow.”

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: I said, at first, “All right we’ll meet tomorrow.” And I was thinking of staying over. That would have given us a tremendous press play, but then, the more I thought about it, without preparing Saigon, if I stayed over—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —Saigon, on top of that peace plan, would have thought we had sold them out.

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: So, then—

NIXON: That’s true.

KISSINGER: Then he presented maybe thirty pages of documents of—and when you consider that, in the past, they’ve never presented more than one—now, their new peace plan is still not acceptable, and I’m not arguing that one. But, they’re moving stuff out. It’s already amazing that every meeting they propose a new plan. Formerly, they made one plan, then stuck with it for a year—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: When we started, they said Thieu had to go and a provisional government had to be set up. Then they said Thieu could stay as long as we promised to set up a provisional government, later. Now they say, “The administration in Saigon can stay even after the provisional government is set up, to administer the part of the territory it controls.” That also—that’s also not acceptable. All I’m saying is that they’re moving step by step. But, I don’t want to go into the details now, but I can do it tomorrow.

NIXON: Well, sure.

KISSINGER: When he was through all of this, I said, “I’ve thought about it, Mr. Special Advisor, there isn’t enough here to meet tomorrow, and this is so much we’ve got to study.” He said, “Well, when can you meet again?” I said, “Well, I propose the twenty-ninth.” And I have a State Department interpreter, a reliable guy, who was apparently—he said he’d never seen anything like that. He said Le Duc Tho went to pieces. He said, “I must know one thing from you, but you must tell me now: do you want to settle it?” I said, “Yes, we want to settle it, but I want to say, simply, we don’t have to settle it before the election. Actually, settling it is a liability for the election.” And I read him the Harris poll.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And I read him the other one. So, I said, “If you really want other concessions from us because of the election, frankly, we’d really a little bit prefer not to settle it before the election for political reasons, but, because this is so important for the sake of mankind, we’ll settle it before the election, if you let us. But don’t count on any more concessions.”

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: He—he said, “You have to tell us if you want to settle it. All our plans could be made to settle it. If you tell us you don’t want to settle, it’s childish.” I said, “Yes, we want to settle it.” He said, “Give me a day.” I said, “Well, October 15.” He took my hand and said, “Our first agreement. We’ll settle it October 15.” Then he said, “October 15, between you and us, or between everybody?” I said, “I think we’ll be doing, probably doing, between you and us. The others, I will see.” He said, “Oh, no, no, no. We ought to get them all done by the end of October, anyway, with Saigon and everybody else.” So, I then, I said, “All right.” I said, “I’ll have to check with the president. Let’s—we’ll aim for next Friday or early the following week.” He said, “Can you come for two days?” So, I said, “I’ll try.” And I pretty well promised it to him, because I figure if I go for a day, they announce we’d meet in the morning. Then, in the evening, we announce that I’ve extended it for a day, which we have prepositioned Saigon, so that they don’t get nervous—

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: After that, our domestic opposition has to shut up. I mean, something has to be going on—

NIXON: Well, yeah.

KISSINGER: —if we are meeting for two days.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: And Hanoi has to shut up. Now, frankly, I don’t see how it can be settled—

NIXON: No.

KISSINGER: —with all these issues unresolved. But, he said, “Let’s do it this way.” He said, “Let’s agree on all the things we agree on and draft language on it.” He said, “Let’s agree on the International Control Commission, and let’s spend a whole day on the political settlement.”

I, frankly, don’t see how it’s going to get solved. But I—he was absolutely—I cannot overemphasize how candid he was. Now, you can say he’s stringing us along, but if he’s stringing us along he would delay the meeting.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: He—what does he get out of a two-day meeting? A two-day meeting enables us to say [unclear] that there must be something going on.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: It takes care of us for three weeks after that. By that time, we will be so close to the election, that if they go public we’ll just say they’re trying to affect the election.

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: Then, we won’t even have to go public anymore.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: I think he’s out—he’s, he’s been totally outmaneuvered.

NIXON: [clears throat] What do you think his reason is?

KISSINGER: I think they are terrified of you getting reelected.

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: Not one word—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Not one word about bombing.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Not one word about inhuman acts. Not one word about how they’re winning. Not one word about how they’re going to fight for all eternity.

NIXON: Never.

KISSINGER: I said, “You know, one thing I want you to remember, Mr. Special Advisor,” I said, “you and your friends have turned this election into a plebiscite on Vietnam. And after November the president is going to have a majority for continuing the war.”

NIXON: Because of them.

KISSINGER: “Therefore,” I said, “you’d better think about what the negotiating position will be in November.”

NIXON: Good. Good.

KISSINGER: And he didn’t say—if I had said this to him a year ago, I would have heard an hour speech about how the Vietnamese people have fought everybody.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And—but, I don’t want to mislead you. If he were Zhou Enlai, I would now say, “We’ll settle it.”

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: But surely—

NIXON: They just may not have the capability of doing it.

KISSINGER: They, they are in a panic. They would like to settle. They don’t know how to do it. They keep making moves. For them, they have made huge concessions.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: I mean, considering where they started, that in three months they have moved—

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: —from disbanding everything in South Vietnam, to keeping Saigon in charge of the admin—of the area it controls. That’s an unbelievable move for them, but it’s not enough, and whether they can go the rest of the way, I would doubt. But, in order to go the rest of the way—but, in order to find that out, they have to do so many things to help you.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. That’s right.

KISSINGER: Then—and—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: It’s, it’s really—I was stunned by that—

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: —by, by, by their behavior. Usually, it’s extremely unpleasant—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —to sit with them. It was a six-hour meeting, but—

NIXON: Hmm. Goddamn—

KISSINGER: —but they were really—well, they wanted more. I, I broke it off, partly because I had to see Pompidou, but I’ll have a real problem keeping this thing going for two days. But I’ll come up with enough bravado. We shouldn’t make another significant move now.

NIXON: No. We can’t—

KISSINGER: We should let them make the move. But, if we hadn’t done—it was really—I was very—

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: If we hadn’t made this—first of all, their offer now washes out our proposal anyway, but if we hadn’t made that proposal, that was the one new thing in that, in our—

NIXON: Mm-hmm?

KISSINGER: And it makes no practical difference, and I’m certain that Thieu, now that he sees this whole evolution, sees that we—what Thieu is really afraid of is a cease-fire.

NIXON: He is?

KISSINGER: Yeah. Now, there is this possibility, Mr. President: it may be that they have decided to cave, but that they’re not going to cave before—until midnight of the last day that they had set for themselves.

That they say to themselves, they can cave soon enough. That’s—I mean, they can cave whenever it—whether they cave at the last second, or two weeks earlier—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —doesn’t get them any benefit. Brezhnev said what the Russians did to them. Le Duc Tho was in Moscow Sunday—Sunday night, Monday morning. He saw Mazurov, number fourteen in the Politburo. I saw Brezhnev for twenty-five hours.

NIXON: Geez—

KISSINGER: Brezhnev did not receive Le Duc Tho.

NIXON: Twenty-five hours?

KISSINGER: Twenty-five hours I saw him.

 

“I know we have to end the war. I know that now.”

September 29, 1972, 9:45 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Bob Haldeman

OVAL OFFICE

 

Kissinger met with Tho in Paris again in late September and found him continuing his newly productive ways. Several reasons may have accounted for North Vietnam’s changing attitude toward peace. The main one arose from America’s subtle turn in expectations. At the Moscow summit, Kissinger had explained that “we will not leave in such a way that a Communist victory is guaranteed. However, we are prepared to leave so that a Communist victory is not excluded. . . . I don’t know if this distinction is meaningful.” It would be meaningful to the North Vietnamese—and to South Vietnamese President Thieu, who saw American support for his regime slipping away. As the secret peace talks continued to make strides, it was Thieu and not Tho who seemed more and more like the enemy of peace. Kissinger discussed that problem when he briefed Nixon about the latest peace talks.

 

KISSINGER: See my worry, Mr. President, isn’t the election. My worry is that—

NIXON: Oh, I know, I know. That’s just what I—just what—Bob agrees with me, and I said exactly that I was prepared, that I’m prepared, and I know we have to end the war. I know that now, but when we really decimate the place, you’ve got pretty serious problems. But nevertheless, the real question is, it’s the old—the old irony: if we don’t end it, end it before the election, we’ve got a hell of a problem. But, if we end it in the wrong way, we’ve got a hell of a problem—not in the election. As I said, forget the election. We’ll win the election. We could—Bob, we could surrender in Vietnam and win the election, because who the hell is going to take advantage of it? McGovern says surrender, right?

HALDEMAN: Yeah—

NIXON: But the point I make—

HALDEMAN: It doesn’t affect the election; it affects—

NIXON: It affects what we’re going to do later. It affects our world position. [unclear] And, so that’s why—why Thieu will. Hell, yes they’re hurting—

KISSINGER: Let me—

NIXON: —if we get a landslide.

KISSINGER: Let me make a few things. See, I don’t think it is technically possible—even though these silly North Vietnamese think it is—to get all the documents signed by the election.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah.

KISSINGER: The best we can do by the election is a statement of principles.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: That can absolutely do you no damage, and must help you, because it has—

NIXON: Forget about it—

KISSINGER: —prisoner release in it—

NIXON: It sounds right.

KISSINGER: —cease-fire—

NIXON: Right—

KISSINGER: —with withdrawal—

NIXON: Oh, oh. That’s, that’s fine, but even if—

KISSINGER: —and no coalition government, and continuation of the GVN.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And no withdrawal—no resignation of Thieu.

NIXON: Both a Committee of Reconciliation, or a Committee—

KISSINGER: A Commission of National Concord or Commission—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —of National Reconciliation, and any knowing person—I mean, this will go like SALT, believe me.

NIXON: Yeah. I—I agree with you on that. The question, though, there is what we do require Thieu to do. If we do—if he does get out, does it unravel in South Vietnam, Henry? That’s the point.

KISSINGER: That is—

NIXON: Goddamn it, you know, you can’t have.

KISSINGER: That, Mr. President, we cannot do.

NIXON: That worries me.

KISSINGER: Me too.

NIXON: Especially.

KISSINGER: And if—because if we had wanted to do that—

NIXON: Yeah. Well, if we’d wanted to do it, also—

KISSINGER: We had—

NIXON: —Henry, the effect, when you didn’t see what’s happening, if it is happening as always. But what you see is—you know, you know these little Indonesians and all the rest. They’ll all come apart at the seams. There is—there is a domino. That’s what really—

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: —worries me—

KISSINGER: Well, it depends, Mr. President—

NIXON: On how Thieu does it.

KISSINGER: Well, it depends how this thing—this is why he cannot, his resignation can’t be written into the agreement. He has to resign—

NIXON: That’s all right—

KISSINGER: —after peace is restored, saying he’s done everything.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: But—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —if this thing is played intelligently, he may never resign. I don’t believe this agreement—what I believe this agreement will do, practically, the practical consequence of what we’re now working on is—and, there are so many—I may have misled you a little bit yesterday—there are so many technical issues in there—

NIXON: Oh, yeah. I know about that—

KISSINGER: —that it may never even get signed. But assuming it got signed, I believe the practical results will be a cease-fire, an American vindication, and return of prisoners, and everything else in Vietnam—

NIXON: And then it’ll end and then it’ll sit screwed up.

KISSINGER: And they’ll go at each other with Thieu in office. That’s what I think.

 

“He’s got to realize that this war has got to stop. I mean, that’s all there is to it.”

September 29, 1972, 5:15 p.m.

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Haig

OVAL OFFICE

 

The North Vietnamese had expressed their acceptance of a tripartite election commission to oversee the democratic selection of a new government. It would be composed of officials from each of the Vietnams, along with what were described as “neutral parties.” Thieu, however, was adamantly opposed to any involvement of the North Vietnamese and was telling his people in speeches that the only way to peace was to kill Communists. Nixon and Kissinger discussed their plan to send Haig to try to change Thieu’s mind, and then they briefed Haig, who was due to leave for Saigon the following day.

 

HAIG: I think we don’t want to have a breach with the man [Thieu], but I think he’s got to know that he’s [unclear].

NIXON: Well, I think you could make it, of course, as clear as you possibly can, because, after all, we’re his friend and a breach with us is not going to help him. And also, a breach with us would destroy him here in this country. Good God, I mean, he’s got no place to go.

KISSINGER: I mean, no one can make it credible that you are betraying a man for whom you risked the summit, Cambodia, Laos—

NIXON: I realize that—

KISSINGER: —bombing, mining.

NIXON: —and he’s—he’s got to realize that. The other thing is that he’s got to realize that this war has got to stop. I mean, that’s all there is to it. [unclear] We cannot go along with this sort of dreary business of hanging on for another four years. It’s been too long. It’s been too long. I’m convinced of this. I’m convinced of it. If I thought—believe me, if I thought, if I was reasonably sure that immediately after [unclear] going all out—I mean after the election, the goddamn war would end, and the president’s back and so forth, and you wouldn’t be quite as concerned about trying to do something now. But I’m not sure. [unclear]

KISSINGER: We’ve got to do it. If we can’t end it this way, we’ve got to go all out after the election.

NIXON: I understand that. I know. What I meant is, if I knew that option would work, I would say to hell with this.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: I would try doing it. But I’m not sure it’ll work, that’s why we’ve got to try this.

HAIG: I think we have to make an honest effort to do this—

NIXON: Yes.

HAIG: Do all we can without dishonoring ourselves, which I don’t think is possible under the arrangements that we’ve talked at.

KISSINGER: And, you see, if we have made this effort, and then if you have to go all out—the strength of your position up to now has been that we’ve always been able to present to the American public both strength and moderation. We’ve always alternated a peace proposal with a tough line. We’ve never been in the position—you’ve never been in the position of Johnson, who was bombing mindlessly day after day, without ever making a peace proposal. So if this doesn’t work, we haven’t—it gives us three, four, six months of, of, of quiet. I don’t think anything less than this will work. Al, you’ve looked over these papers, now what do you think?

HAIG: It doesn’t matter what I think. I think it would be awfully difficult to reject what they have given to us in this last session. [unclear] because anybody would [unclear] it seems that they have really given up the objective of [unclear].

NIXON: That’s what—and that’s what he’s got to understand—

KISSINGER: And, therefore the argument of saying they don’t want a Communist government there just no longer holds the water—

NIXON: That’s the thing that concerns me about our position at this point, that we cannot say that they are insisting on a Communist government. Because they are getting a chance for a non-Communist government to survive, are they not?

KISSINGER: Yeah, of course, what they think is that if they can get Thieu to resign, plus all these changes made, plus keeping their army in the country, that they can create so much chaos that the remnant is going to collapse. And, therefore, our scheme requires that if Thieu agrees to this constituent assembly rule, that then we will require that they have to pull some of their army out of Vietnam, and all of their army out of Cambodia and Laos. And if they don’t do that, we wouldn’t settle. And on that I think we can stand. I mean, they can’t demand both that the constitution be abrogated, and that they can keep their whole army in the country.

NIXON: I would put it to ’em. I guess that you can be just as strong as you want, Al, in this respect. You can be just as tough as you want [unclear]. First, [unclear] make it, make it very clear to him that this has nothing to do with the election.

HAIG: Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir—

NIXON: This is why we’re doing it, but that—make it very clear to him, however, that after the election, we’ve got to live with this problem, and we’ve got to have a solution to it. That—that our—that after we get in, we cannot just continue to sit there, that this POW thing is a pretty good indication of the enormous buildup that’s goddamn [unclear]. And—and that we’ve got to have a solution, and we’re going to find it. And that it isn’t going to work that other way, you know what I mean. It’s—therefore, we believe that this is the best thing we can do [unclear]. What—how do you have it in mind to present it to him?

HAIG: Well, I was going to structure it just this way. This is why we discussed it. We’ll start out talking about what the past four years has represented in terms of our interest for a non-Communist South Vietnam, the risks we have taken. [unclear] Then I’ll make it very clear that this is different than 1968, where Johnson had to try to achieve some progress at the negotiating table to help his domestic election chances.

NIXON: That’s right.

HAIG: That we are in precisely an opposite position this year, that you don’t need this.

NIXON: Uh-huh.

HAIG: But that you want to use your strength, domestically, here, to put pressure on Hanoi for concessions—

NIXON: That’s right—

HAIG: —and that they are moving. And that we do have [unclear] some interesting possibilities, it’s not yet acceptable. But that’s what I want to discuss with them. Then, I want to go through the realities of the strategic picture; what we could hope for if we don’t get a settlement; the fact that we are going to have been faced with disabling legislation.

NIXON: But point out that we still wanted—that the last Senate vote should not be reassuring, because it was still a margin of only one vote.

HAIG: We give him that—

NIXON: So, in reality—

HAIG: At a time when you’re thirty points ahead in the polls—

NIXON: That’s right.

HAIG: —we win a vote for cutoff of funds by two votes.

NIXON: That’s right.

HAIG: So, that this is—this is very damaging. And I’m going to recall his discussions with me last October, when he said if he felt there was a true peace in the making that he would step down—

KISSINGER: And he repeated it on May 8.

HAIG: And he repeated it on May 8.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Or May 10, whenever he made it.

HAIG: Then I will go through our counterpunch, which does not yet get him into the proposal that he sent out. We will go through it in the detail, and, of course, the paragraph [unclear] political arrangements is the toughest, and I will discuss those, but, in reality, what they’ve offered us is a fig leaf for an advisory group that is without power, and that the South Vietnamese government would still control the army, the police, and the territories they currently hold—

NIXON: What I mean is that on this case, what I would like for you to do is to say to the president, if you could say, “Now, Mr. President, [unclear] asked me here. He’s a pretty shrewd analyzer—analyzer of these things.” Why don’t you [unclear]? “It seems to me like this is the way you might be able to see it.” In other words, put it out that I’ve analyzed this thing, and that I wish to call it to his attention. See?

HAIG: That’s right, and if he can’t select the man—well, I won’t get into that—

NIXON: Yeah. That’s right—

HAIG: —until we get through the whole proposition.

NIXON: That’s right.

HAIG: Now, he’ll have problems with that, because it calls for a constituent assembly and a new constitution, and—

KISSINGER: Yeah, but he will, in effect, dominate the election because the electoral law—the election can never take place because its electoral law will be written by a commission—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —which requires unanimity. I don’t see how you can ever agree on any actual laws—

NIXON: [unclear] noted his interest in the proposition. And that he—and, therefore, I think that he should be very, very generous, insofar as what happens after that due to the unanimity proposition.

Now, he’ll say [unclear]. And, also, how much of this needs to be public at the present time. [unclear] But the main thing, I guess, Al, that I want you to get across to him, is that he can’t just assume that because I win the election that we’re going to stick with him through hell and high water. This war is not going to go on. Goddamn it, we can’t do it.

We’re not going to do it. We’re not going to have our—we’re not gonna have, let alone, our guys getting killed, and our prisoners, so that’s just that. We’re not going to have him get killed. And we happen to have our relationships with the Russians and the Chinese. There’s that, and, also, I’m not going to have it keep us from doing some other things that we need to do. We’ve got to get the war the hell off our backs in this country. That’s all there is to it.

HAIG: And off his people’s back.

NIXON: Oh, I feel that, too. Tell him that I know those casualties show three hundred a week being killed. I said, “I take no comfort out of the fact that we—our casualties were one last week when his are three hundred.” I said, “To me, that concerns me and that, I doubt that I’d be here.” I think you now know, I want you to know you can go very far in saying that I believe that he ought to accept this proposition. That’s my view. I wouldn’t indicate that I’m not going to press him on it, either. I’d indicate that we might just [unclear].

HAIG: Well, I think—I think once—

NIXON: And, incidentally, I just want it to be arranged so that Al has plenty of time with him. I want to be sure that he has—

KISSINGER: Oh, yes.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Now, we got a cable that he sees him twice. Monday morning—

NIXON: Yeah, yeah.

KISSINGER: —and Tuesday afternoon—

NIXON: Well, look, but you better send a message indicating that I want him to take plenty of time [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Well, I think once he hears the subject, he’s going to take plenty of time. It’s too much in his interest. I don’t think we should get him all stirred up—

NIXON: All right—

KISSINGER: —before Al gets there.

HAIG: [unclear] But I don’t think, either, that we should force him into an answer in the first session there, or even the second, necessarily, because this is the kind of thing that he’ll want to think out in the greatest detail. He ought to know that we’re very strong for him.

NIXON: Whatever, he’s got to think. He may not decide at the second session, then you’ll get away, and he’ll sit down and talk with his own people.

KISSINGER: That doesn’t make a difference—

NIXON: [unclear] Huh?

KISSINGER: We’ll table this proposal anyway the following week, and it doesn’t make any difference what he agrees to.

NIXON: Let’s suppose—yeah, let’s see. Are you going to tell him that you’re going to table his proposal?

HAIG: Tell him we’re going to move.

NIXON: How?

HAIG: We intend to move. Of course, if it looks like it could cause a public break—

KISSINGER: We can’t. It isn’t desirable to have a public break, because—

NIXON: No, that would be bad. A public break would hurt us. That’d hurt us in the election.

KISSINGER: That would. Also you’d be accused by McGovern, then, that you strung along with Thieu, and when it served your interest—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —just before the election, you killed twenty thousand people.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: So, we should avoid—

NIXON: We can’t do that—

KISSINGER: —a public break.

NIXON: What you’ve got to say there is that this—you’ve got to point out that this president has stood by him with no support. The House is against him. The Senate is against him. The media has been against him. The students have rioted. All sorts of hell-raising loose.

He’s made these tough decisions. And, now, he’s got to have something from him, in return. We’ve got to have [unclear], an agreement, an acceptable proposition that I think he can live with. That’s really what you get down to.

KISSINGER: Mr. President, nobody would have believed that they would make a proposal which would keep the Saigon government in power with its own army and police, but without Thieu. Never have they gone that far before. All their previous proposals were that Saigon has to disappear and that the other government, the Provisional Government of National Concord, replaces it. Because that would have led to a sure Communist takeover. And that was easy to reject. We were never tempted for one minute. You could have settled it in July, announced those terms. We were never tempted for thirty seconds by any of those—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: But here we are with—confronted with a proposal of a Government of National Concord that has no power, no police, no army, and, moreover, we won’t even accept the word “government” for it. We’ll call it “Committee” or “Commission for National Reconciliation.”

 

“We’ve come absolutely to a hard place with the South Vietnamese.”

October 6, 1972, 9:30 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

OVAL OFFICE

 

Even as the United States came closer and closer to common ground with its adversary, North Vietnam, it was clear that serious differences existed with its ally, South Vietnam. Haig’s visit to Thieu, designed to reassure him, failed to do that. Rather than convince Thieu that the United States would not make peace with North Vietnam without him, privately that is exactly what the United States threatened to do.

 

KISSINGER: We’ve come absolutely to a hard place with the South Vietnamese. It’s not, they’re not, I’ve got the transcript of the—

NIXON: [Gives unrelated instruction to assistant who enters and then departs.] You’ve got Haig’s transcript?

KISSINGER: I have Haig’s transcript. These guys are scared, and they’re desperate. And they know what’s coming. And Thieu says that, sure, these proposals keep him going. Somewhere down the road he’ll have no chance except to commit suicide.

 

KISSINGER: I’ve had a study. They [unclear] air force, they lied to us again. They substituted planes that they told us were better, and Haig has found out aren’t nearly as good. We’re dealing with a sick military establishment on top of everything else. They’re going to have funding problems in January. But then, the dilemma that additional military operations produce for us, is this. We can improve the situation in South Vietnam drastically, but we can’t get our prisoners back. And before they collapse, they will offer us our prisoners for a withdrawal. And in that case, I think at this point, we have to take that.

NIXON: We will. I’d take it today. They’re not going to offer it, but I’d take it.

KISSINGER: So that is, well I don’t think that we can do it before the election.

NIXON: They’re not going to offer it, that’s what I mean. When I mean “today,” I mean I’d take it November, December, January, anytime.

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: That’s the deal, we have to take it.

KISSINGER: That’s right. But that will also collapse the South Vietnamese, except we won’t be so responsible for the whole settlement. So as I look down the road, I think there is one chance in four—

NIXON: Well, if they’re that collapsible, and if they think this thing is going to collapse, that’s another way to look at it, too. We’ve got to remember: we cannot keep this child sucking at the tit when the child is four years old. You know what I mean? There comes a time.

KISSINGER: What we can get out of a settlement now, I’m not even sure it’s going to help you politically. You can judge better whether you will wind up like Churchill, having just—

NIXON: I don’t want it for the election, but go ahead.

KISSINGER: Well, if we keep going, you may have no choice, you may get it before the election.

NIXON: Well, let’s try our best not to. The more that we can stagger it past the election, the better.

KISSINGER: You do not want it before the election?

NIXON: Well, I don’t want it before the election if we have a Thieu blowup. If we do, it’s going to hurt us very badly.

KISSINGER: We may be able to avoid a Thieu blowup.

 

“The deal we got, Mr. President, is so far better than anything we dreamt of.”

October 12, 1972, 7:05 p.m.

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Bob Haldeman

EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING

 

When Kissinger arrived in Paris for a new round of talks with Tho on October 8, he received—for the first time—a peace agreement composed by the North Vietnamese. A complete document, it gave Kissinger hope that the North Vietnamese were actually ready to sign. During three days of talks honing the draft agreement, Kissinger sent very little information to Nixon. Presumably, he didn’t want to be hindered or delayed by a president with other major concerns. And there were plenty; on October 10, the Washington Post reported that an FBI investigation had found evidence of a campaign of political sabotage by the Nixon forces that was “unprecedented in scope and intensity.” When Kissinger returned to Washington, he brought Nixon good news on the diplomatic front.

 

NIXON: Well, it was a long, long day—

KISSINGER: [unclear] Mr. President—

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: Well, you got three out of three, Mr. President [their goal of a China summit, a Soviet summit, and a Vietnam peace agreement]. It’s well on the way.

NIXON: You got an agreement? Are you kidding?

KISSINGER: No, I’m not kidding.

NIXON: Did you agree on it? Three out of three?

KISSINGER: Although it’s done, we got to—

NIXON: [laughs]

KISSINGER: We got it word for—

NIXON: I see.

KISSINGER: —word. We got a—we got a text.

NIXON: [humorously] Al—I’m going to ask Al, because you’re too prejudiced, Henry. You’re so prejudiced to the peace camp that I can’t trust you. Don’t you think so, Al?

HAIG: Yes, sir.

KISSINGER: If it is done—?

NIXON: What about Thieu?

HAIG: It isn’t done.

KISSINGER: Well, that’s the problem, but it is a commitment.

HAIG: He wanted this agreement.

NIXON: It’s not insurmountable. How do we handle it?

KISSINGER: I have to—I have to go up—out—here is what we have to do: I have to go to Paris on Tuesday [October 17] to go over the agreed things word for word with Le [Duc Tho].

NIXON: You could then get it?

KISSINGER: No problem. I think we have an agreed text. I’ve left a man behind to go over it. Except, but I’ve—you know, just in case there’s any last-minute treachery. Then I go to Saigon to get Thieu aboard. Then I have to go to Hanoi if they’re willing [unclear]—

NIXON: I understand.

KISSINGER: That was the price we had to pay.

NIXON: Well, that’s no price if we get Thieu aboard. What do you think, Al? When do you get him aboard?

KISSINGER: That’s—

HAIG: He’s already aboard—

KISSINGER: But the deal we got, Mr. President, is so far better than anything we dreamt of. I mean it was absolutely, totally hard-line with them.

NIXON: Good.

KISSINGER: The deal is [unclear]—

NIXON: Won’t it totally wipe out Thieu, Henry?

HALDEMAN: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Oh, no. It’s so far better than anything we discussed. He won’t like it because he thinks he’s winning, but here is the deal, just to give you the main points, then I’ll tell you [unclear]—

NIXON: We can do that after.

KISSINGER: All right, afterwards. The cease-fire will go into effect—

NIXON: The more—the more, of course, we think of all this is that we see a lot of the problems, you know, the silly-ass thing of some SAM hitting the French consulate [in Hanoi] and everything raises hell about it. I didn’t think it either. Most people would rather kill all the Frenchmen anyway, but the point is—

KISSINGER: [unclear] we had a love fest two hours yesterday.

NIXON: I know. I know. My point is, Henry, I’m thinking of Americans. Most Americans are very cynical about all these things now. But the point is that we can’t go on, and on, and on, and on having these things hanging over us either. We can ask—the other thing, are they afraid we’re going to nuke ’em? Or just hang on for another ten years?

KISSINGER: Mr. President—

NIXON: You see, Al, that’s the problem, isn’t it?

KISSINGER: We’ve done just about everything we can do, but this is a deal, Mr. President, that George Meany could go along with. So we have no problem. I mean this is—if—if you went on television and said you’re going to make this as an American proposal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even moderates would fall all over themselves, foaming at the mouth, swearing that this couldn’t—that you were indeed out of—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —tough, mean, [unclear].

NIXON: Good. Well, I’ve got a little saved up.

KISSINGER: I mean, so you—but, first, the cease-fire allows, goes into effect until the thirtieth or thirty-first. We have to settle then. [unclear] withdrawal of our forces in two months.

NIXON: In two months after the cease-fire?

KISSINGER: Two months after the cease-fire.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And some provisions about military aid to South Vietnam. There’s bound to be technical issues as far as whether we can continue military aid.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: It says we cannot give military aid except for replacements of what is theirs.

 

KISSINGER: The peace we are getting out of this is with honor.

NIXON: Henry, let me tell you this: it has to be with honor. But also it has to be in terms of getting out. We cannot continue to have this cancer eating at us at home, eating at us abroad. Let me say, if these bastards turn on us, I am not beyond [unclear] them. I believe that’s, that’s what we’re up against.

KISSINGER: They don’t care if we—

NIXON: I am not going to allow the United States to be destroyed in this thing.

KISSINGER: Mr. President—

NIXON: These little assholes are not going to do it to us—

KISSINGER: Mr. President, if they—if we play this gun-shy—both Al—and Al, as you know, as I told you last week, was very leery about our approach, but—

NIXON: Is that what he told you?

HAIG: He told me, but he told you I’m going to get him [Thieu].

NIXON: Well, that’s the only thing.

KISSINGER: I—I think everything I say to you, Al supports one hundred percent. I mean we are—we’re getting out with honor, we are saving [unclear]—

NIXON: You use that term, [unclear] “with honor”?

KISSINGER: “With honor.”

NIXON: Do you use it? Apprise me, Al. “Honor”?

HAIG: [unclear] exactly. Sure.

NIXON: It is “honor”?

HAIG: Thieu’s got his rights to deal with the rest of them.

 

NIXON: What’s that? He will accept the fact that we will continue to give military aid?

KISSINGER: Yeah. But that he’s already accepted in principle, we just have to find the right words for him. Even though they replaced them with the present ones, that all can change.

NIXON: Hah! Don’t worry. Don’t worry—

KISSINGER: And what we can say is—

NIXON: Just do it.

KISSINGER: —we are permitted to make periodical replacements of armaments [unclear] form that appears equal in quality and quantity to those being replaced.

NIXON: Good. [unclear] That’s right on. Right. Right—

 

KISSINGER: Then on the political side—

NIXON: Now—now, this is the critical thing [unclear]—

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: Mr. President, but with this, Thieu can stay. No side deals.

NIXON: Why can he? How? Under what conditions?

KISSINGER: There are no conditions. Thieu can stay. The only thing we agreed was that Thieu will talk to the other side—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —about setting up something that will be called the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord.

NIXON: Will talk to them or agree to it? Did we agree to it or did they agree to it?

HAIG: They agreed to it—

KISSINGER: “Immediately after the cease-fire, the two seated South Vietnamese partisans [parties] shall hold consultations in the spirit of national reconciliation and concord, mutual respect, and mutual nonelimination, to set up an administrative structure called the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord. The two South Vietnamese parties shall do their utmost to accomplish this within three months after the cease-fire comes into effect—”

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: Say that thing again. Suppose—does the release of our prisoners depend upon their agreeing on that?

KISSINGER: This will be decided on after the prisoners are released.

NIXON: The prisoners will be released regardless of the success of that agreement?

HALDEMAN: It was from sixty days to past ninety.

KISSINGER: That’s right. Secondly, the cease-fire is of unlimited duration, and I have a verbal assurance in the protocol that the cease-fire provisions are independent of all other points.

NIXON: Why have they gone this far?

KISSINGER: So, all he has to—

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: —agree is to negotiate a National Council for Reconstruction [Reconciliation]. But if you consider, Mr. President, there isn’t one newsman in this city who believes that this will end with anything other—and the Thieu government, of course, not [unclear].

NIXON: Good.

KISSINGER: Then Thieu will take a beating—

NIXON: They’re leaving Thieu in. They’re in. And they’re supposed to negotiate a national council? Thieu will never agree, they’ll never agree, so they screw up, and we support Thieu, and the Communists support them, and they can continue fighting, which is fine. Right, Al? Do you see it that way, Al?

KISSINGER: They will not go this way—

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: I would have said that in full.

 

NIXON: Now, what did you do with regard to reparations and the rest?

KISSINGER: I’ll come to that in a—

NIXON: I’m very—you know, as you know, I’m not going to—I’d give them everything because I see those poor—

KISSINGER: [unclear] victor reparations.

NIXON: —North Vietnamese kids burning with napalm and it burns my heart.

KISSINGER: With reparations—with reparations we had to say it.

NIXON: I don’t mind them.

KISSINGER: All right, I’ll read you the clause we’ve—we couldn’t get around it because that is also our—that is our best guarantee that they will observe the agreement. They are panting for economic aid.

NIXON: Are they?

KISSINGER: Oh.

NIXON: They want it? See, China doesn’t want it, Al. China doesn’t want economic aid—

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: The United States—

NIXON: Henry, you’re overlooking the most important point of this offer. This is the first time the North Vietnamese have ever indicated any interest. Do you remember? I said it in the May 8 speech.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: I mean the May speech—May speech in 1969 [Nixon’s May 14, 1969, speech in which he stated support for reconstruction aid for both South and North Vietnam]. They said, “Screw you.” Economic aid to Communists is—compromises their morality. It compromises the Chinese morality.

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: And they’re—they want it? This is great!

KISSINGER: They want a five-year program. What that means is—

NIXON: Good. Give it to them—

KISSINGER: If we give them a five-year program that’s part of the agreement.

NIXON: Yep, that’s right.

KISSINGER: But if there is a five-year program, this is the best guarantee that they aren’t going to start up. If we can get them committed to rebuilding their country—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —for that period of time, and I’m going to—

NIXON: Concentrating on internal rather than external affairs.

KISSINGER: Exactly. We have more pages on the international control—all of which is bullshit to tell you the truth, but it will read good for the soft-hearts, for the soft-heads. We have four pages of joint commission, a four-party commission, if [unclear] agrees to it, a national commission. It is utter, downright crap because they’d never work, but it’s in there. The thing that will—the thing that will work, though, is they’re playing to us. Here is what it says about reparations: “The United States expects that this agreement will usher in—”

NIXON: Will usher in how?

KISSINGER: A year from now.

HAIG: That’s right with Hanoi.

NIXON: Usher in what?

KISSINGER: “Usher in an era of reconciliation with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and with all the peoples of Indochina. In pursuance of this traditional policy of the United States to contribute to healing the wounds of wars of both warring parties—”

NIXON: There’s no question, no problem. Give ’em—give ’em ten billion, because I believe in this. I really do believe in it. The fact is if we did it with the Germans, we did it with the Japs, why not for these poor bastards? Don’t you agree, Henry? Don’t you agree, Henry? Goddamn it, I feel for these people. I mean they fought for the wrong reasons, but damn it to hell, I am not—I just feel for people that fight down, and bleed, and get killed.

 

NIXON: Let me come down to the nut-cutting, looking at Thieu. What Henry has read to me, Thieu cannot turn down. If he does, our problem will be that we have to flush him, and that will have flushed South Vietnam. Now, how the hell are we going to come up on that?

 

“But it’s really turned out to be a damn good help to us because we can really bludgeon Hanoi for whatever additional nickels we need.”

October 22, 1972, 12:22 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig

CAMP DAVID TELEPHONE

 

On October 21, the North Vietnamese broke a promise made to Kissinger that there would be no publicity about the accord until it was officially announced by all parties. The North Vietnamese premier, however, soon told a reporter from Newsweek that an agreement would be announced within two days. At the time, Kissinger was in Saigon, where he was having a steep uphill battle convincing Thieu to agree to the basic terms settled in Paris. The news reports on the accord didn’t help Kissinger, who stooped to lying in his efforts to persuade Thieu. In Washington, however, Nixon decided it was one leak he could use to his advantage, as he told Haig.

 

HAIG: Hello?

NIXON: Hello.

HAIG: Mr. President?

NIXON: Yeah? I had one thought that in view of Hanoi as having, you know, totally broken their word with regard to publicity and so forth—

HAIG: Right, sir.

NIXON: —don’t you think Henry ought to—I mean insist on [unclear] that said we—he’d meet them in Vientiane. You know that the Hanoi ploy I’d—I think they really [unclear] so much that—I know how passionately he wants to go there, but, you know, they’ve really handled this in a very shameful way.

HAIG: Well, let me tell you what I’ve done, sir. Dobrynin was in here this afternoon with a strong message from Brezhnev. He called me at about ten.

NIXON: Yeah?

HAIG: I just called him and laced it to him. I said, “You tell your goddamn people in Hanoi that they have broken our agreement, which we considered sacred, that if you want to be helpful in getting this thing settled, you insist to them that there’ll be no more of this, and that we expect them to be flexible, or we cannot have a repeat of the ’68 situation, and that we may have some additional requirements that they have to understand and meet because we have a very difficult problem.”

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

HAIG: Now that they have breaked—broken—

NIXON: Because they—because they broke it? And did he—

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: What’d he say?

HAIG: For the first time he was very much on the defensive. He was shocked. He said, “This is inexcusable.” And I told him who did it—it was the prime minister—and who they gave the leak to, and it’s all over the press. And I said, “It’s given us an incredible problem, which could sink, delay this thing and require additional negotiating.”

NIXON: Right. Good.

HAIG: I’ve done that to safe-side it.

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: And I think we ought to wait on—on the Hanoi—

NIXON: Yeah. Well—

HAIG: —thing, until we get Henry’s—Bunker’s assessment—

NIXON: Is he going to go from Phnom Penh to Hanoi?

HAIG: No, no. No, he’ll come back to Saigon.

NIXON: Oh.

HAIG: And then we have, in effect—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

HAIG: —all day tomorrow.

NIXON: Oh, good—

HAIG: He’ll be in Saigon.

NIXON: Debating with Thieu some more?

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: Oh, good.

HAIG: And then he would leave Monday our time.

NIXON: Well, when he says he thinks he has braked for them he’s still got a day’s work.

HAIG: I think so.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah—

HAIG: And I wouldn’t add this burden to him now, until he gets to—

NIXON: I get your point.

HAIG: [unclear]

NIXON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That’s good. Well, since you’ve taken that, but you see what our thinking is that—?

HAIG: Oh, absolutely.

NIXON: —that we can’t get sucked into this now, Al, on any—and then have it broken off on something.

HAIG: No, if this is a locked agreement, with Thieu on board—

NIXON: Yeah?

HAIG: —I don’t think the Hanoi thing’s bad at all for us. I think it’s damn—

NIXON: No.

HAIG: —good.

NIXON: No.

HAIG: It’s positive.

NIXON: No.

HAIG: And end on a high, a very high note.

NIXON: I agree. I agree.

HAIG: Now, I’ve called Bill Rogers and told him that it looks much better.

NIXON: [chuckles]

HAIG: Just to keep him abreast of anything all day, too.

NIXON: But you told him for—did you tell him where we’ve laced Dobrynin? Or you didn’t?

HAIG: No, I didn’t—

NIXON: Well, you didn’t need to. But you just told him it looks better and that’s that, huh?

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: But told him to keep shut? I mean—

HAIG: Absolutely. That’s why I—

NIXON: Let’s don’t sound better because, Al, this thing may still blow. You know?

HAIG: Oh, it could still blow.

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: He—you see, we’ve had them working full bore on getting this equipment out there, getting aircraft back from the Koreans—

NIXON: Yeah?

HAIG: —in with the Thais—

NIXON: Right.

HAIG: —and then there’s the ChiNats—

NIXON: Right.

HAIG: —and the Iranians. And they’ve been working like hell over there.

NIXON: At State? [Reference is to Operation Enhance Plus, in which military equipment intended for South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan was diverted to South Vietnam.]

HAIG: Yes, sir.

NIXON: Well, they must be pleased. Oh, I know we had to tell them, but I just wanted the—I just want them, they ought to know that we don’t want to—

HAIG: Well, he doesn’t have any of the details.

NIXON: We don’t want to leak anything to the—to Time or the—or the Washington Post or something. Then, well—

HAIG: Oh, no.

NIXON: You know the whole settlement thing is just—if they leak it, that’s one thing, but when we do it, it’s inexcusable.

HAIG: Well, we’ve held the line very strongly since this—

NIXON: You understand the reason that I don’t want this leaked is not because of the goddamn enemy. The reason I don’t want it leaked is because it might hurt us.

HAIG: Very much so. That’s right.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

HAIG: But there’s going to be a lot of stories tomorrow on this Hanoi story.

NIXON: I understand—

HAIG: They all have it. They spread it all over town this afternoon.

NIXON: Sure. Sure.

HAIG: But it’s really turned out to be a damn good help to us because we can really bludgeon Hanoi for whatever additional nickels we need.

NIXON: Yeah. But doesn’t it say “coalition government”?

HAIG: Uh, not really. It says the—

NIXON: What is the story hit at? Yeah?

HAIG: It, essentially, it has the outlines of the political settlement. It’s heavy on that Thieu will stay in power, there’ll be two governments, and they’ll negotiate what will ultimately be a coalition, which is true. We wouldn’t put it that way ourselves.

NIXON: Yeah. But now Henry understands now, Al, that that word, as I said, cannot be used.

HAIG: Oh, no.

NIXON: In fact, or, you know—

HAIG: We’ll never use it—

NIXON: —or appearance.

HAIG: —in our briefings or—

NIXON: Right.

HAIG: —or discussion of it.

NIXON: Right. Right. Okay.

HAIG: Fine, sir.

 

“We know that the enemy’s hurting, or they wouldn’t be talking.”

October 22, 1972, 10:10 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig

CAMP DAVID TELEPHONE

 

As Kissinger continued to negotiate in Saigon, Nixon continued to receive regular updates from Haig.

 

NIXON: Have you done any further thinking on—?

HAIG: Yes. I figured—

NIXON: Have you talked to Dobrynin again or not? Or—

HAIG: I’ve got a call in to him. He went out for [unclear]—

NIXON: Now, the other thing, the only thing that I was thinking there, if you want to play it at a higher level, I almost think I might have to talk to him at this point, in other words, to keep this lid on.

HAIG: Yes.

NIXON: And I will do it. I mean I have a—what I have in mind is this: I think we just simply have to tell him, “Mr. Ambassador, we’ve—because of what happened in Hanoi, because of what—of your people blowing this, I mean,” and then show him the papers—that this is—“Thieu has reacted as we would expect: negatively.” We had it all set, because, that is, he was provided, you know, that so he could play a part in it. But they were going to have a victory celebration, they’ve played this, he put the whole thing out, and now he’s thrown up his hands.

“Now, we do not think this is permanent. We think we can handle it, but the main thing is that—two things: one, we will settle on the basis that we have described; two, we have to have a time to settle and you must not push us; but that, but—and, three, you need not be concerned about the election deadline.” Remember? Because he knows that—

HAIG: Mm-hmm.

NIXON: —and that’s a total commitment that you can pass on.

HAIG: Well, I’m not sure I would—

NIXON: Go far?

HAIG: —make a commitment to go along the route outline, because he knows that without Thieu there is no commitment.

NIXON: Well—oh, I see your point—

HAIG: Well, I think that’s the—

NIXON: I mean, that’d be dumping him. Yeah, yeah. Tell him we’ve got a—we will say that basically, on all the military sides and so forth and so on, that’s a deal. And we’re ready to—

HAIG: Right. So he’s not worried we’ll stay—

NIXON: Yeah. And we’ll see—and we’ll work with you to see what we can work out.

HAIG: Right. That’s sensible—

NIXON: We have to—we may have to go our own. We understand that we’ll have to go our own way, but we haven’t given up on Thieu. We’re still working on it.

HAIG: That’s right. That’s right.

NIXON: We’re still working on it, but we’ve got to put the lid on this thing and hold it.

HAIG: That’s right. And we need them to—

NIXON: And we need you—and just say our relations, the two great powers, must not be affected by the fact that these two pipsqueaks are acting the way that they are. And that, now, let’s keep our heads. And you keep theirs down and we’ll keep his down, but that’s the responsibility. I really feel that I had—that if I told him that that could have quite an impact on him.

HAIG: Yes, sir. I do, too. I do, too.

NIXON: So, you think about it and I’ll be there at twelve fifteen.

HAIG: Okay.

NIXON: And if we think well of it we’ll call him in and just lay it out like that. But we’ll talk it through first.

HAIG: All right, sir.

NIXON: Fine. Good. But you had no other thoughts since we’ve talked? The other thing is that I—I just had lunch with it, doing a little more thinking about one thing: I am just really adamant on Henry not going to Hanoi with this thing in mind because, basically, the way it will look is a complete surrender.

HAIG: Yep.

NIXON: You know what I mean? It’ll be played that way. And also it’ll look like Ramsey Clark, going to Hanoi, hat in hand, making their deal [reference to his visit in 1972 to Hanoi to protest American bombing]. Sure, we’re going to get the prisoners back and sure, you know, but they’ll say, “What the hell have we fought for? The prisoners?”

HAIG: I agree.

NIXON: You see the problem?

HAIG: Oh, absolutely. I do.

NIXON: His going to Hanoi can do it now. To do it, I think, another—however, a part of the game plan, he can make a commitment to go to Hanoi later.

HAIG: Later?

NIXON: Yeah. You know, say, “All right, let’s meet in Paris.” And then he’ll come to Hanoi later.

HAIG: Exactly.

NIXON: And then we can. Then there’s no problem, but it must not be before the election. It must not be. Third point is this: I strongly feel that if we could make the case that we really would prefer not to do this before the election, I mean not just politically, but not to do it because, basically, one hell of a lot of people in this country and, frankly, in Vietnam—the South, particularly—think that we are doing it, doing the wrong thing, because of the election.

HAIG: Exactly.

NIXON: And I think we just ought to say, you know, we—we’re just not going to be able to do it, but I think that point has just got to be made, that this isn’t the right time.

HAIG: That’s right. No, this is right and in many respects this has pulled us back from what could have been a more troublesome [unclear]—

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? [chuckles]

HAIG: Right, sir.

NIXON: But we’re going to work it out in the end. The main point is we’ve come a long way on these negotiations, as you well know. The war has got to be ended, Al, and we’re now at the point where we’ve got a basis for ending it. We know that the enemy’s hurting, or they wouldn’t be talking. The Soviets—

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: The Soviets [are] helping. In other words, they haven’t got all the cards either. And we’re still bombing. And that’s the way it’s going to be. And so, therefore, we’ll end it. But, I think, the sad part of it is that I just don’t know how South Vietnam—I don’t see any leadership other than Thieu. I don’t see any other horse, looking to the—do you look—do you see this Diem syndrome starting again? [South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a military coup in 1963.]

HAIG: No. No, he’s going to come out of this very, very strong.

NIXON: Thieu will?

HAIG: Oh, yeah.

NIXON: Yeah. I know. But then what happens? How can he be strong if we cut off assistance to him?

HAIG: Well, what we’ve got to do is work with the same parameters we’ve put on the military side and—

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: —and keep the economic in, and—

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: —and—

NIXON: In other words, keep—

HAIG: —maybe we can work another deal with Hanoi.

NIXON: With Hanoi, without the political?

HAIG: Without the political.

NIXON: Huh. That’s true. Well—

HAIG: They’re hurting so badly—

NIXON: That may be.

HAIG: —that they may pay the price.

NIXON: Right. Okay.

HAIG: Right, sir.

 

Afterword: When Kissinger failed to obtain Thieu’s support for the agreement, Nixon reluctantly had to send word to the North Vietnamese that the negotiations would have to continue. At that, Hanoi regarded the entire episode as a political trick on the part of the Americans. Kissinger, with Nixon’s support, managed to salvage the situation, and the peace talks began again following the election.

 

“If . . . the United States . . . were not able to deal with the entity of Vietnam . . . with whom can the United States ever deal successfully?”

October 24, 1972, 11:15 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Fritz G. A. Kraemer, and Henry Kissinger

OVAL OFFICE

 

Fritz G. A. Kraemer, an attorney and holder of two doctorates, was a Pentagon analyst who discovered young émigré infantryman Heinrich Kissinger during World War II. Kissinger owed his rise to the White House to Kraemer, who served as his longtime mentor. However, they broke off their relationship after this meeting due to differing views over Vietnam. Kraemer believed the United States was giving away too much in the negotiations to end the war in an election-year gambit, causing both American allies and foes to question whether the United States remained a responsible ally and world power. This later became known as the theory of “provocative weakness,” a core tenet of neoconservatism.

 

KISSINGER: Our difficulty, Kraemer, has been not that we have made concessions before the election. Our difficulty has been to think up demands which could protract it beyond the election because every demand we make—

NIXON: They settle.

KISSINGER: —they meet within twenty-four hours. So we are literally running out of proposals we can make to them.

NIXON: Yeah.

KRAEMER: Make a proposal that they should withdraw from South Vietnam.

KISSINGER: We’ve made that now. We’ve made the proposal, for example, that their prisoners have to stay in South Vietnamese jails.

NIXON: Forty thousand.

KISSINGER: Forty thousand political prisoners would stay in South Vietnamese jails, which we thought was unacceptable.

KRAEMER: That’s interesting.

KISSINGER: And they have now accepted that their cadres stay in South Vietnamese jails. Now, you know that this is not an easy thing for them to sign a document in which they release our prisoners, [they] have to release South Vietnamese military prisoners, but all [North Vietnamese] civilian prisoners stay in jail.

KRAEMER: Do you perhaps think, that the cease-fire is such an advantage to them for the psychological reason that they are more disciplined, more homogeneous?

NIXON: I think they are fairly confident, but I think there is the other factor, which I think we must have in mind. Remember, we never want to obviously underestimate—that they have taken a hell of a beating. I mean the bombing has hurt, the mining has hurt, the attrition that has occurred in South Vietnam. I mean, when you stop to think of, not just what we have done in the North, but the ’52s, those six carriers we’ve had out there, and everything. We have clobbered the bejeezus out of them. I think, therefore, that they have reached a point, and it is only temporary, I agree, where in their thought there, they may have read Mao. You know, he was always willing to retreat.

KISSINGER: We may have been, in fact, too successful, because we told them, for example, that all communications will be cut off on November 7. Because the president would have to retreat to reorganize the government.

 

NIXON: We’ve fought a pretty good fight up to this point, and we’re not caving. Because we see that it’s a very difficult war. Success or failure now, not just for the moment—because anything will look good for two or three months—but something that has a chance to survive, shall we say, for two or three years. That is very much a condition that we cannot compromise on.

KRAEMER: May I formulate, say, one strategic sentence—

NIXON: Sure.

KRAEMER: —that maybe summarizes—

NIXON: Sure.

KRAEMER: If it should prove, within a number of fronts, that we, the United States, were not able to deal with the entity of Vietnam, thirty-one million inhabitants, that would be, apart from everything moral, the question will arise—among friend, foe, and entrants—with whom can the United States ever deal successfully? Because this entity of thirty-one million, supported by the Soviets, by China, but not by their manpower—

NIXON: Yeah.

KRAEMER: —is relatively so small that everybody from Rio de Janeiro to Copenhagen, and from Hanoi to Moscow, can draw the conclusion: obviously, the enormous American power couldn’t deal with this. Therefore, as a lawyer, I would say [unclear] since we cannot deal with Vietnam, with whom can we deal?

 

“I didn’t want to let this night go by without calling.”

November 8, 1972, 1:31 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

Four years after Senator Humphrey called former Vice President Nixon to concede the 1968 presidential election, they spoke again in the early-morning hours following the 1972 presidential election. Despite political differences, their friendship went back to the days when they served in the Senate together more than two decades earlier. Now that they were no longer direct rivals, Humphrey called to congratulate Nixon on his landslide victory over Senator George McGovern. Nixon hinted that he had a Vietnam agreement; at that point, Thieu had not yet scuttled it.

 

NIXON: Hubert, how are you?

HUMPHREY: Well, fine, and I wanted to call up just to congratulate you on this historic victory.

NIXON: Well, thank you very much.

HUMPHREY: You really racked ’em up.

NIXON: You’ve been a very statesmanlike man. As I always, just speaking as friends, people ask me very privately to compare this with ’68, and I said, “Well, the difference is, that when Senator Humphrey and I were campaigning and we had this terrible issue of Vietnam, we both put the country first.” And I said, “This time, we had a problem where one fellow said any goddamn thing that came in his head.”

HUMPHREY: Yeah.

NIXON: For your private information, you should know that for three days, I had the whole thing in my pocket.

HUMPHREY: Yes.

NIXON: [laughs] As you probably guessed.

HUMPHREY: Yes. I had a talk with Henry a couple of days ago.

NIXON: Right.

HUMPHREY: They asked me whether or not we could have got a settlement like this in ’69, and I said no.

NIXON: Well, you made a great statement. I asked Henry to call you. I think you should know that—

HUMPHREY: Thank you.

NIXON: —within ten days you will see, it’s all fallen into place. And we knew it a week ago, but we couldn’t say it. I mean—

HUMPHREY: Well, I understood that.

NIXON: But I felt you had to fight for your man, and I understood why, but I know that you didn’t approve of some of the tactics.

HUMPHREY: Well, I’ll have a talk with you sometime. I knew, you know, I did what I had to do.

NIXON: Of course you did.

HUMPHREY: If not, Mr. President, this whole defeat would have been blamed on me, and so—

NIXON: That’s right. [laughs]

HUMPHREY: I know that.

NIXON: Well, we’ll get together and we’ll work for the good of the country. That’s the important thing.

HUMPHREY: Surely will. And I didn’t want to let this night go by without calling.

NIXON: It’s so good of you to call.

 

“Get the very best agreement you can.”

November 18, 1972, 12:02 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

Just ten days after the election, the Vietnam peace agreement began to look shaky. This time, it was American ally South Vietnam that wavered. Kissinger informed President Nixon that he had received a phone call from U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker. Bunker said the “news is not good.” The South Vietnamese were trying to change the terms for a negotiation session scheduled in Paris.

 

KISSINGER: What I wanted to mention and check with you since we now—we had a phone call from Bunker. We haven’t got the actual message yet saying that now, apparently the South Vietnamese are beginning to kick over the [traces] again.

NIXON: Oh, Christ.

KISSINGER: And I believe that we just have to continue now and get the best agreement we can—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —and then face them with it afterwards.

NIXON: How are they kicking it over?

KISSINGER: Well, they’ve apparently submitted a memorandum to him. He just said the news is not good. And their ambassador here has also raised some questions with Sullivan. It’s their old pattern. What they always do is they first read what you give them then they raise a few technical objections and they just keep escalating it.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: But—

NIXON: Well, shall I send them another letter?

KISSINGER: No, I think we now have to wait, Mr. President, until we get a—until we see at least what’s going to happen in Paris.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And once we have the text of an agreement in Paris we’ll have a new situation.

NIXON: So, Bunker says that they’re kicking over the [traces] and just being unreasonable as hell. Is that it?

KISSINGER: That seems to be the case. But I don’t—we can’t delay the negotiations and we can’t tell Hanoi that we’re having trouble.

NIXON: No, sir.

KISSINGER: They’re going to play it like an accordion.

NIXON: All right.

KISSINGER: The other—

NIXON: When you really come down to it, though, I just can’t see how Thieu has got any other choice. Goddamn it, we’ve told him we’re doing everything we can and that’s going to be it—

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: —but on the other hand the idea of just making a bilateral thing, Henry, is—

KISSINGER: It’s repugnant.

NIXON: It’s repugnant because we lose everything we’ve done. You know what I mean? People said we could have done that years ago.

KISSINGER: Well, if we can get a cease-fire in Laos and Cambodia; and we can, of course, say we’ve put them in a position where they can defend themselves.

NIXON: Uh-huh.

KISSINGER: But it’s going to be a miserable exercise.

NIXON: Well, it may not be. You just can’t tell—

KISSINGER: If we do it bilaterally I mean—

NIXON: This is maybe—

KISSINGER: But I—I—

NIXON: This just may be bargaining on their part knowing, knowing that you’re going to Paris.

KISSINGER: Basically, I really don’t know where the hell they’re going to go.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And they’re still making all the preparations as if there will be a cease-fire.

NIXON: Right. I noticed that.

KISSINGER: But I just wanted to check with you whether it is in accord with your views that we proceed negotiating. We can’t wait any longer for coordinating.

NIXON: Hmm. Well, what would be the choice otherwise? This would mean you—

KISSINGER: Well, but we’d have to—

NIXON: —wouldn’t go?

KISSINGER: That’s right. And ask for another delay but I think that’s almost impossible.

NIXON: Well, we couldn’t do that.

KISSINGER: I mean not after—

NIXON: No—

KISSINGER: —we announced it.

NIXON: —but I would, uh—I’d simply go. You mean they—don’t you really think they’re trying to strengthen the bargaining position before you go to Paris? Isn’t that—or—

KISSINGER: Oh, I think that’s one possibility. That they’re just, uh—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —trying to prove that if they’re going to cave they’re going to do it afterwards, not before.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And probably that they figure they’ll get less than what they agreed to so they better ask for more.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I think you should tell Bunker to play it damn tough. He is, isn’t he?

KISSINGER: Oh, yes.

 

KISSINGER: And what [exiled former Cambodian Prime Minister] Sihanouk says that, his interests were completely sold out by the North Vietnamese. He said this to the Algerian ambassador—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —that it was one of the most shocking examples, and it’s an example of U.S.-Soviet pressure and that it’s the Soviets who pressed the North Vietnamese into yielding.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah. Well, go right ahead on the same track. Do the very best that you can. Haig has no doubts about going ahead now, does he?

KISSINGER: Oh, no. No, no. He’s completely with us.

NIXON: And he feels that we have to do it, and, uh—

KISSINGER: Haig is against an open break with them before the negotiation, as I am.

NIXON: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, no. Go negotiate now. But they can’t go over the [traces]. They’re—they’re making public statements?

KISSINGER: No. No, no. This is a private communication.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Just go ahead. Do the best—the very best you can. Get the very best agreement you can.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: That’s all. Okay?

KISSINGER: Okay, Mr. President.

NIXON: Fine, Henry. Fine.

 

“‘We’ll make our own deal and you’ll have to paddle your own canoe.’”

November 18, 1972, 12:32 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

“Peace was at hand,” and then it wasn’t. As Thieu continued to buck the peace agreement to which he had originally agreed, Nixon gave more thought to making an agreement with North Vietnam only. He did not want to abandon an American ally, but securing the best exit terms for the United States was the primary objective.

 

NIXON: Well, Henry says he’s having some more problems with Thieu. He’s kicking up his heels—

HALDEMAN: Oh, really?

NIXON: —according to a line from Bunker and so forth. He wants to renegotiate this and that and more, a hell of a lot of other things. And I told Henry, “Well, just go right ahead to Paris,” get the very best deal he could. And then we’re just going to have to, in my opinion, then say to Thieu, “This is it. If you don’t want to go, fine. Then we’ll make our own deal and you’ll have to paddle your own canoe.” It’s tough, but don’t you think that’s what we have to do?

HALDEMAN: I don’t see what else you can do now.

NIXON: Right.

HALDEMAN: ’Cause, uh—

NIXON: Well, it’s a good deal; that’s the point. The only thing is that what—the big thing we have here is that if Thieu doesn’t go, of course, it poisons the agreement to an extent and so forth and so on, but that, then we have completed Vietnamization, we have dealt with the others, we’re getting out, and South Vietnam—

HALDEMAN: Turn it over to him.

NIXON: —is strong enough to defend itself and now it’s up to South Vietnam.

HALDEMAN: If he collapses then there we are.

NIXON: I don’t think he’ll collapse.

HALDEMAN: He’s going to ride that out anyway.

NIXON: Well, he will certainly collapse if he plays this dog-in-the-manger theme on that because the Congress is damn well not going to appropriate the money for him.

HALDEMAN: Yep, because we told him that.

NIXON: Yeah, well, we’re going to tell him that again.

 

“They’re tough on the points that are almost insoluble.”

November 29, 1972, 7:35 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

The problem with the secret talks in Paris was that they did not include all four parties, as did the official talks. While the North Vietnamese were able to speak for the Viet Cong, the absence of the South Vietnamese at the table was a liability. They were told the fate of their country on an as-needed basis, an arrangement that helped lead to the falling-out between Kissinger and Thieu in late October. The South Vietnamese were aware that the first round of secret peace talks after the U.S. presidential election began in Paris on November 20. Further talks were scheduled for December 8. In the interim, the South Vietnamese government sent a special envoy, Nguyen Phu Duc, to Washington. He and the ambassador, Tran Kim Phuong, tried to open what amounted to separate negotiations with Nixon, but he would have none of it.

 

NIXON: Now, on the matter today, we’ve got what I think is—I don’t know what more we can do with these clowns but we’ll—

HAIG: Yeah, I think we’ve got a couple of tough nuts to get over here between now and the time they leave. They’re still pretty strong on a couple of points and that’s what we’re working on.

NIXON: Well, they’re [chuckles]—they’re tough on the points that are almost insoluble. That—

HAIG: That’s right. That’s right.

NIXON: But we’ve got to stand firm, you see? We—I mean, they just got to realize it, and it’s really true that January 3 is too late. [The U.S. Constitution requires Congress to convene on January 3, unless they have stated plans to do otherwise. Congress did not convene until January 18.]

HAIG: That’s right. Well, I think they—

NIXON: Don’t you agree?

HAIG: —got that message—yes, sir, and I think they’re just hoping beyond hope that they can get some changes, some of which are impossible to get.

NIXON: But don’t you think we should stand firm?

HAIG: We have to.

NIXON: Yeah. All right. That’s what we’ll do then.

HAIG: Right, sir. Well then—

NIXON: And, uh—

HAIG: —it’s going to take some work.

NIXON: Are you going to be with Henry in—?

HAIG: In Paris. Yes, sir.

NIXON: Good. Well, you just have to see that he stays right on track, and—

HAIG: Oh, he will. Uh-huh. I’m not worried about—

NIXON: No, he’ll do everything he can.

HAIG: Yes, sir.

NIXON: But, in the meantime, what these people—there’s really nothing more we can do, you know? Those—they’ve just got to realize that all this—

HAIG: Exactly, exactly.

NIXON: You know, that—

HAIG: So, they’re [unclear]—it’s coming through. It’s just a traumatic thing for them.

NIXON: I know.

HAIG: They just [unclear].

NIXON: Well, I couldn’t have given the message to them stronger today than I did, you know, I think.

HAIG: Oh, no. God. There wasn’t any doubt about it. They—they know.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

HAIG: They know, and I think tomorrow we’ll have it sorted down to the manageable two or three pieces.

NIXON: Right.

HAIG: And we’ll just put the frosting on the cake.

NIXON: Right. Okay, Al. Fine.

HAIG: Good, sir.

 

“We’ve been playing with fire.”

November 30, 1972, 12:17 p.m.

Richard Nixon, Bob Haldeman, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Haig

OVAL OFFICE

 

The two South Vietnamese diplomats remained in Washington, seeking to insert their nation into the peace talks somehow. Nixon tried to figure out what to do with them—and more important, what to do with the nation they represented.

 

KISSINGER: What the little bastard [Nguyen Phu Duc] has now said is that we should go on alone. Just our prisoners for withdrawal and let them continue fighting. I think they have to get it into their heads that, in that case, the Congress, no matter what you intend to do—the North Vietnamese will demand cutting off military and economic aid as a price for that—

NIXON: Why in the hell would they?

HALDEMAN: What the hell are they going to shoot? They won’t have any bullets.

KISSINGER: Well, their idea is we continue to give aid, and they’ll fight alone.

NIXON: I’m thinking of going that route.

KISSINGER: But tell them that the Congress won’t—

 

NIXON: No, I’m sorry, but fine, but I have issued—directed that Congress cut off all military and economic aid. And that’s it. [unclear]

KISSINGER: But I would just say that the Congress will under no circumstances agree to that.

NIXON: Yeah. I’m not going to worry—

KISSINGER: So then you’re not the villain.

NIXON: I’m going to be a villain myself, too.

KISSINGER: Did you get to the Vietnamese?

NIXON: Henry, you must say that you reported to me. I’m not going to listen to it from him.

KISSINGER: No, no.

NIXON: We’re going to have it straight out and get it done [unclear]. Well, the hopes that they would start to be reasonable proved to be wrong.

KISSINGER: [unclear] after the agreement is made. They won’t be able to say they [unclear]—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: Well, are you going to then put the thing to him about my meeting at Midway or I’m going to tell him that?

KISSINGER: Well, these guys—the major trouble is, they have this punk kid in the palace, this thirty-year-old suitor [Hoang Duc Nha], who is—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —acting out a Wagnerian drama. I mean, I must say when I went through the agreement this morning, I told Haig afterwards, when you listen to these guys you begin to doubt your sanity.

NIXON: No, it’s a good reason.

KISSINGER: [unclear] but it’s—

NIXON: [unclear] we’ll just go ahead. And, frankly, you go ahead with the North Vietnamese and we will cut off economic aid, but, of course, it means that everything we fought for is lost.

KISSINGER: Well, we can just let Congress do it.

NIXON: Yeah. I think Duc understands it.

KISSINGER: Duc understands it, and the ambassador [Tran Kim Phuong].

NIXON: It’s after what I put him through. Christ, he’s [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Mr. President, you gave an absolutely magnificent presentation.

NIXON: Did it do any good?

KISSINGER: You could not have—

NIXON: It didn’t do any good? That’s—

KISSINGER: Oh, no. No, no, no. I—I’ve dealt with these guys. They—they’re going to wait till a minute before midnight.

NIXON: Well what’s—

KISSINGER: I mean, this is a lot better than the—

NIXON: Then you’ll make the deal on Saturday?

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: Then sign, and then what happens? You come back here again, do what?

KISSINGER: And then we’ll have to put it to them and say this is it—

NIXON: We’ll have him come back here and put it to—to them and say, “Do you want to meet with the president, or not?”

KISSINGER: That’s right. That’s right.

NIXON: Is that what you say? For the purpose of the agreement, that we’re going ahead on this without economic assistance? Fine.

KISSINGER: Well, I’m seeing the North Vietnamese Monday. They are having a message for us now, too. Maybe they are going crazy. They’re both nuts. I mean, that’s the trouble with these Vietnamese, they’re—

NIXON: That’s right. Don’t worry. Sit down. They’ll be here. They’ll be here.

KISSINGER: And they’re fighting it out—

NIXON: You think—do you think the North—huh, I guess the North Vietnamese can just break off negotiations now, too. No they can’t—

KISSINGER: We’ve—why would—they can, but we’ve been playing with fire ever since we had this goddamn agreement with these two maniacal parties.

 

NIXON: We have no choice with these people now.

HAIG: No, no. We—

NIXON: Goddamn, I know this little guy [Nguyen Phu Duc] understands it and so forth, but if they want to commit suicide that’s all there is to it. Are they going to?

HAIG: No. I don’t think so. It would be inconceivable. This man isn’t suicidal.

NIXON: You don’t think so?

HAIG: No.

NIXON: Why did he send that message this morning? Henry came in here [unclear] to the effect that Thieu had laid out, and all it meant for us to go at it alone, and he’d go it alone. Did he really?

HAIG: Not really that way. Well—and that’s what he tried to pull away from. What he was saying is, “For God’s sake, if I can’t get these three principles— ”

NIXON: Yeah?

HAIG: “—then try to work out the May 8 proposition, in which we cut the mining and the bombing in return for your prisoners and a cease-fire, and then we’ll continue to try to police the cease-fire with your help. And if they break it, then we would hope you could intervene.”

NIXON: When it’s all done, we can’t intervene—

HAIG: It’s got to be done. Well, I told him that it would kill us with the Soviets—

NIXON: [unclear] We’ve got to go ahead. He says he’s got a message coming in from the North Vietnamese. Maybe they’re going to break off negotiations, Al, do you think they are?

HAIG: No. I don’t think so.

NIXON: Why not?

HAIG: They want to settle. That I’m convinced of. But they have [unclear]—

NIXON: What I said to him about the congressional thing is totally true. [unclear] aid for them.

HAIG: Of, course it’s true.

NIXON: I got it from, also, Goldwater. Goldwater, Jesus Christ. [unclear] He says, “If this ever becomes public and you don’t accept it, you’re down the tubes.”

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: And they’ve got to understand that. I mean, that aid will be cut off like that. [taps table] Like that. [taps table] And they can’t do that. I think the meeting at Midway is an excellent idea if he’ll do it. If. But understand, a meeting for the purpose only of my—of our agreeing [unclear] is it. I will not go there to talk about the agreement.

HAIG: That’s impossible.

NIXON: He’ll just [unclear]—

HAIG: They’re going to fight and negotiate—

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: —right to the wire.

NIXON: What’s that?

HAIG: They’re going to fight right up to the wire. Now, you pulled the wire tight today and that’s the end of it. And they now know that.

NIXON: When do you leave?

HAIG: I plan on the fifteenth, sir [Haig intended to leave for Saigon on December 15 to meet with Thieu].

NIXON: Well, you deserve a little rest.

HAIG: [unclear]

NIXON: Henry cannot take the—this heat much longer. You know what I mean? He’s—you know what I mean? It’s—it’s been hard for him. But—an emotional pattern here is—

HAIG: It’s worse. Well, I, this past—well, he had three weeks where I thought he lost touch with reality. It started out in Paris, the first round in October. He drove that thing despite all the counsel, all I could give him—

NIXON: Well, and I was trying telling him that, you know, I didn’t want the goddamn thing. But you know why he did that? He wanted to make peace before the damn election. There isn’t anybody to do it after the election.

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: For Christ’s sakes don’t do that. Then what happened?

HAIG: Then in Saigon he really lost touch because here he was sending two messages to the North Vietnamese, agreeing to the [unclear], knowing that Thieu was not on board, and it was going to take some careful working. That’s what caused our problem. Now, this week he started to regain himself. And I think he did a very fine job last week.

NIXON: Are you going with him?

HAIG: Yes, sir.

NIXON: Does he have you in on the meetings?

HAIG: Yes, sir. In fact, at the two private meetings I sat there. [Haig was referring to the two private meetings with Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy on November 24 and 25.] And we did the right thing. We had to delay. Well, we could never have done this with Thieu around.

NIXON: This has got to give Thieu something. And that meeting with the Joint Chiefs will.

HAIG: That helps. That’s right. And, you know, it’s conceivable. I just don’t think he’ll do that. I think he’s going to come around. I think he’ll come around, and we’ve got to have that communication completed in the next twenty-four hours.

NIXON: Hmm. In the next twenty-four hours he’ll come around and meet with us?

HAIG: We’ll just have to drive it to that.

NIXON: I think he’s going to wait. Wouldn’t you think he’d just wait?

HAIG: See what we get? Well, he’ll caveat it in a certain way. But he’s got to know—

NIXON: The point is—the point is it’s done. I told him now Henry’s gone over, he’s going to settle the goddamn thing. At the end of the week, they can either come or go. That’s my view as to what he’ll say. If he says go at it alone, that puts us in a position. What—what kind of a deal could we make with the North Vietnamese? Just prisoners for withdrawal, right?

HAIG: And the end of—

NIXON: You can’t reason with them—

HAIG: —the mining and the bombing—

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: And the end of the mining and the bombing.

NIXON: Why don’t we give up the mining, the bombing, for prisoners? [unclear] It’s just a hell of a way to end the goddamn war.

 

“He must play the hard line with them, and, if necessary, . . . we’ll have to break off.”

December 4, 1972, 7:51 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Richard Kennedy

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

On December 4, Kissinger and Haig flew to Paris for a meeting with Tho. They were warily hopeful that the Vietnam peace talks could be righted, after the fallout of late October. What they found was that Tho was no longer in any hurry, the U.S. presidential election having formerly been a kind of deadline for him. Instead, he was stalling with all of his former recalcitrance. Colonel Kennedy, a staff member at the NSC, relayed the disappointing situation to Nixon. The question of how to shake the North Vietnamese back into productive negotiations wasn’t easy, especially in view of the fact that the United States was then arming the South Vietnamese heavily and quickly, in anticipation of an imminent cease-fire. As Nixon heard Kennedy’s report, his mind was on the American people. He felt he couldn’t give them any more words on the peace process; it had to be action and results.

 

NIXON: Hello?

KENNEDY: Mr. President?

NIXON: Yes.

KENNEDY: This is Colonel Kennedy, sir.

NIXON: Yes. What is the report from Paris you have?

KENNEDY: Oh, we have—it’s a very long one, sir.

NIXON: Yeah.

KENNEDY: And I was going to bring it over to you, or have it brought over to you right away. We’re just having it retyped so you could read it easily.

NIXON: Oh, I see. Fine.

KENNEDY: He—they were pretty tough.

NIXON: Well, I expected that.

KENNEDY: And he feels that it just might be that we’re going to have to break off negotiations.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: That they’re just not going to move.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: Now he just doesn’t [unclear]—it’s possible that, in fact, that they’re playing a little chicken.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: Using us on the assumption that we have a problem here, vis-à-vis Saigon on the one hand, and domestically on the other—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: —that they can use to go back, really, beyond the understandings that we’d [unclear]—

NIXON: September [October] 8. Right.

KENNEDY: So, Henry believes that we ought to just go in and be tough and indicate that we’re—we want to insist on the changes of last week and boil the remaining two issues down to the correct Vietnamese translation on the administrative structure—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: —and one of our formulations—that we had three of them, on the—establishing the principle that the North Vietnamese do not have any legal right to intervene indefinitely in South Vietnam.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: Then, we can drop all our other requests in exchange for their dropping their changes on civilian prisoners and U.S. civilian personnel.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: Now, if they were to buy that, of course, then we would have had some significant gains—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: —which would still leave us with some problem with Saigon, but, at least, a wholly defensible position in respect to them.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: On the other hand, if they don’t, this, he believes, would give us a tenable position domestically. However difficult it will be, nonetheless, we could rightly say that we were tricked in the translation, and we’d always reserved on it, as we said at the beginning—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: —and that they’re trying to distort the phrase by describing it as a gover—the council as a governmental institution.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: And, on the military side, they were in effect trying to produce an agreement, which ratified their continued presence—the presence of their forces in South Vietnam.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: So, as I say he’s [unclear]—

NIXON: Well, I think what we’d better do is to—I really think I can sense from—without having to read the whole message—I mean, going into the details of it—that you’d better message him to the effect that we should stick firmly to our positions. What I—I mean, what you have described—

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: —of course, is what we had agreed in advance—

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: —that we cannot give—we cannot go back beyond what they’ve agreed to before. Is that—first.

KENNEDY: Yes.

NIXON: And, second, that he must play the hard line with them, and, if necessary, we—we’ll have to break off.

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: There’s really no other choice, because, basically, we can’t just go to Saigon with nothing.

KENNEDY: Well, I think that’s exactly his point. If we go the other way, we’d wind up in a situation in which we’d be going back to Saigon, indeed, with having accomplished nothing of what they had been working with us now for the past several weeks.

NIXON: Right.

KENNEDY: And this would—and this would cause, perhaps, some domestic problems, too, because people would see that nothing had been accomplished.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: And Thieu, probably—in his view—if we were to do this and cave on it, Thieu would probably simply go down.

NIXON: Yes.

KENNEDY: He couldn’t survive—

NIXON: Yeah.

KENNEDY: —such a thing.

NIXON: Well, that’s really Henry’s point, isn’t it? That he—that his point being that we’ve got to have as a minimum what we’ve agreed to up to this point. And, uh—

KENNEDY: Yes, sir. That’s right—

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Well, you just send him a message that we must stick to the positions that we have previously insisted upon, and that they either have to take it or leave it.

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: The choice is theirs, and that we have other choices that we can make, too.

KENNEDY: Now on that—in that, Henry notes that he instructed me earlier today to call Dobrynin and—

NIXON: Right.

KENNEDY: —just lay it out to him in the most categorical terms. That—

NIXON: Right.

KENNEDY: —it’s the other side’s intransigence which is causing this problem and if—

NIXON: Right.

KENNEDY: —they have any influence, they’d better bring [it] to bear.

NIXON: That’s correct.

KENNEDY: I did so.

NIXON: Right.

KENNEDY: He also saw the Chinese ambassador tonight—

NIXON: Yeah.

KENNEDY: —and did the same—

NIXON: Right.

KENNEDY: —in Paris.

NIXON: Right. Okay, well, I think the main thing is that before he meets in the morning, it’s now midnight there—

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: —that you just send a message that he’s on the right course, to stick to it.

KENNEDY: All right, sir.

NIXON: And that we—we’ll have to—but to make the record so that it’s their intransigence that breaks it off rather than—

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: —our insistence on changes.

KENNEDY: This is precisely the thrust—

NIXON: And that’s—

KENNEDY: —of his approach.

NIXON: And that’s really what it is, too—

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: —because—

KENNEDY: He feels that if it, in fact, has to be broken off, that, in all probability, that it would—you would have to step out and make a case to the people, again, rallying them again as you’ve done in the past, with your—with firm and clear, direct appeals. And he outlined some of the points that would be made, precisely along the lines that you’ve suggested. Making the point that it is their intransigence, and their clear trickery, that’s caused this breakdown.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s a—somewhat of a weak reed at this point. I mean, I realize that Henry’s thinking of past circumstances, of course, where we were able to do so. The difficulty is that we’re—well, we may have to do that. That we have to realize that we, ourselves, are boxed somewhat into a corner, here, by reason of the, you know, the hopes that have been raised.

KENNEDY: Oh, yes, sir.

NIXON: You see?

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: So, I think you should indicate that—in the message—that the idea of going to the people is a very—it’s a tenuous situation, I would say. I mean, it’s a—I don’t consider that as being a—as a very viable option. I think that we, probably, are better off to break it off and then just do what we have to do for a while.

KENNEDY: Right. Yes, sir.

NIXON: I mean a—I think Henry must not rely on the fact that he thinks, “Well, we can just go to the people as we did on November 3, in Cambodia, and May 8, and so forth, and it will all come around again,” but the situation has changed quite drastically since then, you see, as a result—

KENNEDY: Yes.

NIXON: —of what has happened. And so—but the main point is he has got to stay hard on the course, but don’t assume that we can go to the option of my, you know, making a big television speech calling for the bombing—

KENNEDY: Oh, he feels that we’d have to—we’d have to step up the bombing, again as a [unclear]—

NIXON: Oh, I understand that.

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: I understand that.

KENNEDY: Sure.

NIXON: We may do that.

KENNEDY: Yes.

NIXON: But I don’t think that—

KENNEDY: But without going back—

NIXON: But going on television for the purpose of doing it, and so forth—

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: —is not something that I think is too via—is really a viable option. I think we have to do it, and I think he has just got to indicate that, and then the other—the only other course, of course, is to keep the negotiations open any longer, and I guess he can’t do that either, can he?

KENNEDY: Well of course, that’s what he’d be trying to do with this, with this option.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: Going back, again. Cutting down our proposals to those two—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KENNEDY: —and insisting that both sides stick with those things that had been agreed last week.

NIXON: That’s right. Well that’s the thing to say: we will agree—we will stick to those things we’ve agreed to last week, or else we have no choice but to break off the negotiations. But, be sure to put the message to Henry the fact that he must not assume that we should go on national television for the purpose of doing it. I think we’re just going to have to just—just do it this time.

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: Because the going on television isn’t quite—probably too viable an option. When do they meet again?

KENNEDY: Tomorrow afternoon, Paris time fifteen hundred. That’s nine o’clock. No. Yes, nine o’clock, our time.

NIXON: Nine o’clock our time.

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Now—well, I really think that that’s really all we have to pass on to him tonight, then.

KENNEDY: All right, sir. I’ll get it off right away.

NIXON: I mean to—we’ve got to stick the course, we’ve got to insist on, as a minimum, the—what we have already agreed to, and if they are not going to go with that, then we will have to assume that they’ve engaged in deceit and trickery, and we will have to look to our other options, which we are really going to do. But, I don’t want him to be under any illusions to the effect—on the point that we’ll then go make a big speech, here, in this country. I mean, the domestic situation is one that will not really carry that at this point—

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: —much as we would like to. It just isn’t there right now.

KENNEDY: Well it’s—it—because of the tremendous pressure the press has put on all this—

NIXON: That’s right.

KENNEDY: —it’s built up to a crescendo, and—

NIXON: That’s right.

KENNEDY: —and the disappointment is going to be there, but—

NIXON: That’s correct.

KENNEDY: —on the other hand, I think that—

NIXON: On the other hand—we—understand, I have no question about doing it.

KENNEDY: Right.

NIXON: I’m just questioning the idea of escalating it even further by—in terms of saying, “Well, the negotiations have broken down,” announcing it all, “and now we’re going back to unlimited bombing,” and all that sort of thing.

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: I think the thing to do is just to go back to the bombing, and so forth. That is something that we—we’ll go back to what we do, but not—I don’t think we can assume that we can go back to simply making a big speech about it.

KENNEDY: Yes, sir.

NIXON: And that he should think about that as he develops it. Okay?

KENNEDY: All right, sir.

NIXON: All right, fine.

KENNEDY: And I’ll get this [unclear] right away—

NIXON: Get something along—

KENNEDY: —and the other is just now finished, and I’ll have it brought over.

[unclear exchange]

KENNEDY: His message.

NIXON: You can send it over. I don’t think it’s going to change much. It’s just really a [chuckles] blow-by-blow, right?

KENNEDY: Yes, sir. That’s right. But, it goes on and elaborates on what we’ve spoken about.

NIXON: Right, okay.

KENNEDY: All right, sir.

 

“They’re all saying that we’re close to a settlement.”

December 12, 1972, 5:50 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig

OVAL OFFICE

 

First, the challenge was to get South Vietnam back on board with the peace agreement. Now, North Vietnam also wavered. With the American election over, the pressure to agree was off for all parties except one: Richard Nixon.

 

NIXON: Well, the [unclear] earlier. Have you got Henry’s message?

HAIG: No, his message hasn’t come in. I called about it. It’s very long, very long. He’s laid out all kinds of things that we should be doing, and how we should proceed from here; Henry’s thoughts on Thieu; Henry’s thoughts on the military action; Henry’s thoughts on how [it] should be handled publicly, and what we’ll have to cope with; how to keep the dialogue going with them to keep from breaking. You know, a lot of the press reporting is—it’s encouraging in a way because obviously nobody’s telling anybody anything, and these guys are wrong as hell. They’re—

NIXON: They’re all saying that we’re close to a settlement.

HAIG: [chuckles] Yeah.

NIXON: They’re all wrong.

HAIG: They’re all wrong.

NIXON: But they may be right.

HAIG: They may be right.

NIXON: You know what I mean? They may be right in the broad sense, in the sense that a settlement is inevitable. They are wrong in the timing; a settlement is not inevitable right at this time. That’s kind of my feeling about it. What do you think?

HAIG: I think that, sir. I’ve been through all the intelligence that we’ve had since the sixth of October, the raw reports. It’s just inconceivable to me that Hanoi’s going to be able to pick up and go on the way they’re going and that they do want this because they’ve instructed all their cadres, they’ve reorganized their forces in the South, broken down into small units, everyone’s been briefed and oriented.

NIXON: Yeah. So, what does that mean?

HAIG: Well, I think they’re going—they’re going to play on what they anticipate to be pre-Christmas anxiety on our part, and, we [unclear]—

NIXON: What I mean is this: let me say that I’m talking about Henry’s long message and so forth, Al. There is nothing to be gained by going through a tortured examination of what went wrong and this and that and the other thing. You know what I mean is that—

HAIG: Yeah.

NIXON: —just forget that. I am not interested in all that.

HAIG: No, sir.

NIXON: There’s nothing to be gained of going over: well, they gave on this, and we gave on that, and they’re sons of bitches, and so forth. Just forget all that. All that—all we have to be concerned about now is where to go from here? And the point is that—I told you when I went through this—he’s got to go to the meeting tomorrow. You sort of got off—got off to him my thoughts, did you?

HAIG: Yes, sir. I sent that message to him and told him to use it as he sees fit, sees fit—

NIXON: Yes, if he thinks it wise, of course. You can’t tell if it’s wise unless you’re really there, of course.

HAIG: No, that’s right.

NIXON: He’s got the sense of it. He’ll know.

HAIG: He did. He was quite explicit in saying that the thing would be done amicably—

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: —which lessens the chance that they’ll go public with an attack. Although they’ve reacted quite sharply with Thieu today. [Haig was referring to the North Vietnamese reaction to Thieu’s December 12 speech.]

NIXON: What are they saying?

HAIG: Well, they said this was an unreasonable demand, the United States was responsible for it. Then, Madame Binh did the same thing, except she said that she, that—she sort of implied that we shouldn’t allow him to do this, trying to keep his foot between us.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

HAIG: But Hanoi was a little more—

NIXON: Mm-hmm?

HAIG: —more direct in its attack on both Thieu and ourselves, as they mean being a puppet of ours, and an extension of our view, claiming that we really didn’t want to settle, and that we’re building up with military supplies, and civilians acting as military—tens of thousands, they say—and that we don’t really want peace and that we just want to continue to Vietnamize.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

HAIG: Which is fairly consistent with their approach to the table.

NIXON: Mm-hmm—

HAIG: They’re making these same kinds of—

NIXON: Al, what’s your—when you really come down to the fundamental thing, first of all, Henry has got to get the talks moving on tomorrow and then out of the way if possible.

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: Then he will come back. After he comes back then presumably he will be— there’ll be—there will be a letdown here. Everybody will think it was going to go, but that doesn’t worry me. I mean, we can take a letdown.

HAIG: Hmm.

NIXON: And so on. And with—do you see, he mustn’t think it’s the end of the world because the talks don’t succeed—

HAIG: No, no.

NIXON: —right now? I mean, I don’t think—you left Henry in that frame of mind when he left, or is he—? His hopes were pretty high on Saturday when he left, or even after he got back?

HAIG: They were—they were high Saturday.

NIXON: Because when you came back you obviously were [unclear]—

HAIG: And I must say, based on the session Saturday, it was just a question of whether we bought a compromise, or folded, or—

NIXON: That’s right.

HAIG: —they did, but that was it.

NIXON: And then nothing happened.

HAIG: Then nothing happened. They reopened the same issues we had hammered out Friday and Saturday so laboriously.

NIXON: What in the hell do you think happened? I guess nothing in between. I don’t know.

HAIG: Well, I—you know, we’ve done a hell of a lot of things that must be driving them up the wall in an objective sense. I mean, Christ, we have put in a billion dollars’ worth of equipment. We had to—

NIXON: [unclear] Come on—now then, though then—so we were disappointed Saturday. Henry obviously got a hell of a letdown on Monday. See, I can tell more by his reactions from this than by reading thirty or forty pages of—

HAIG: Of course.

NIXON: —why—you know what I mean. You can, too. We all know what it is. Now, the reason he’s down and discouraged is he raised his hopes high. Now his hopes are dead. Now they’re dashed. Well, they should have never been high and they never should have been dashed in my opinion. I think it’s always about where it was. Am I wrong or not? If I am, well, then I’ll start reading all this stuff.

HAIG: No, I think—

NIXON: [unclear]

HAIG: No, I think you’re exactly right, sir. I think this thing, we just got to—all the indications are that they want to settle and I think they will settle. But they’re Communists, and every goddamn nickel they can make from us, they’re going to try to get. And they don’t mind if it takes two months, a month, a week. They’re going to get the best deal they can get.

NIXON: So how are we going to position Ziegler tomorrow [unclear]? Did Henry give any guidance on that?

HAIG: Well, he claims that he has guidance in here. I think we should merely say—and I’m sure his guidance will say this—that he’s returned for consultations.

NIXON: Well, I’ll be in in the morning early enough. As soon as I get in, I’ll call you, you come in, we’ll have a good talk about it.

HAIG: Yes, sir.

NIXON: You and I will get Ziegler positioned.

HAIG: Right—

NIXON: “He’s home for consultation, but there’s still some knotty issues remaining.” I think, frankly, we ought to say we—no, no, we can’t say we’ve made progress, if they’re going to deny it. No, I mean, I don’t know. It is true that there has been progress—

HAIG: There has been progress, and I could—I think we could say that—

NIXON: “We have made some progress but there are still some knotty issues to be resolved and we’re trying to resolve them.”

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: “He’s come home for consultation.” “When will they be resumed?” “Just as soon as we—when both sides agree they would serve a useful purpose.” That’s what I’d say, just like that and get out of the room.

HAIG: Exactly. And then when there’s just [unclear]—

NIXON: Now, let me come to the key point: you really don’t feel we should bomb again? Don’t you? You see the real problem you got there is that if we do, the bastards could use that as an excuse for not talking. And, yes, they might [unclear]. I don’t know.

HAIG: No, sir. I’m afraid, depending on what is really the cause of the hang-up, if it’s this whole array of things, I think we should start racking ’em. And recognizing it’s going to be tough. But, hell, we’ve taken a lot tougher than this.

NIXON: [unclear]

HAIG: It’s not going to be—it’s not going to be that tough.

NIXON: N-n-n-no, no. Well, the election is over. Forgetting the election and that sort of thing, sure it’s the Christmas season. [unclear] but we’ll just say we’re doing this because they—we want, we want to get these negotiations going. Look, I don’t know. What do we say? Why do we say we’re bombing more? What—what’s our—?

HAIG: Well, I think we have to—

NIXON: We’re not going to say a damn thing; we’re just going to start doing it. And they’ll say, “Le Duc Tho was over there,” and we’ll say, “Well, there was a buildup, an enemy buildup.”

HAIG: There was a buildup—

NIXON: That’s what I’d say.

HAIG: There was a buildup. The talks had gone on for an extended period, beyond what we thought would be necessary. We can’t risk dawdling tactics. We’re prepared to stop it just as soon as we get a settlement. Of course, it’s going to stop.

NIXON: But then we must not stop bombing the North until we get a settlement.

HAIG: Until we have it on the line—

NIXON: That’s the point. We must not do it. Now that’s the point, the mistake we made, to stop this damn thing before we had a settlement, Al.

HAIG: And we’re going to get—we’re going to get pressure from Dobrynin. I am confident Henry’s going to come back with some theories as to why we shouldn’t do it. We have to consider that. He may know something we don’t know. Or he may get some assurances from Le Duc Tho that we don’t know about.

NIXON: Right.

HAIG: But, my own instincts are that they only understand one thing. And if they’re going to try to play us right up to the congressional return, that will be even tougher to start again than when these men are back in town. And we get into a weather problem. The B-52s are great around the clock, sir, but they need escorts and the escorts are weather sensitive. So while it’s technical—technically feasible, it’s not, not the kind of thing you can do without reason, with some kind of reasonable weather. Hell, we’ve got another complication as I sat down to try to war-game this: Thieu’s calling for a cease-fire. There has habitually been a holiday cease-fire, and we’re going to have to wrestle with that one, how to manage that problem. And I think that’s, quite frankly, what Hanoi’s very conscious of. They don’t want us to start bombing. They realize, now, that they’ve got a gap that can—

NIXON: When does the cease-fire run? From when to when?

HAIG: Well, he offered—ordinarily, they run it Christmas—

NIXON: Through New Year?

HAIG: —midnight the day before Christmas to midnight the day following Christmas. Then they have another one at New Year’s. There have been occasions when they’ve had them longer. They’ve run them right through the period.

NIXON: [unclear]

HAIG: Thieu offered that today, but that was in conjunction—

NIXON: He offered the longer one?

HAIG: But that was in conjunction with this POW exchange.

NIXON: No shit, he’s done it. They’re not going to give us any POWs.

HAIG: Now, Henry thinks—

NIXON: That damn thing. He knows better than that.

HAIG: That he knows.

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: That was the red herring to take the heat off of him and show his magnanimous spirit. Now, we may have to send the vice president out to, still, to brutalize this guy.

NIXON: Yeah. About what [unclear]? I mean even before we have a settlement?

HAIG: To say, “Look—”

NIXON: What will he tell him?

HAIG: “—by God, we want you to know we’re going, and are you going to persist in this? That it’s going to be your destruction. And we’ve got to take military action. We’ve got to concert on that to get maximum pressure on Hanoi.” Well, I think we have to think about this. Maybe I should do that, I don’t know. But I think Thieu right now is so far off the reservation that it’s going to take some more tending.

NIXON: I agree. Maybe you have to do that. Maybe using the vice president for that is—

HAIG: Maybe premature.

NIXON: But Thieu has got to be told in the coldest possible terms. What in the hell, has he paid any attention to this stuff? And, but—well, it’s hard. We always knew it was going to be hard. It’s just a little harder than we expected. What happened is that Henry got his hopes a little higher than he should have before the election.

HAIG: That’s right. That’s right—

NIXON: I never thought—I didn’t, you know. I didn’t, as you know, have very high hopes, and I don’t think you did either—

HAIG: You never have, and I never have.

NIXON: Huh? Did you ever have—?

HAIG: I never have.

NIXON: Really? I never did. I remember when Henry came in, remember he said, “Well we got three [for] three over there.” [The “three” refers to the three diplomatic triumphs of 1972: China, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam.] I waited—the next morning he cooled off a little. He knew that it was a little bit exuberant. What the hell? You got nothing but a slap on the face from Thieu when you went out there, right? But you know, there comes a time when it must end.

HAIG: That’s right. That is absolutely—

NIXON: That was really the theme of Bunker’s call, wasn’t it?

HAIG: Yeah.

NIXON: As I understood it, he said well—

HAIG: That’s right. We’ve backed this guy. We’ve given him everything. It’s time for him to stand up and face it.

NIXON: That’s right. But we really have, Al. Even Abrams, he sits sort of like a silent rock and never says anything, but even he said it on one occasion that I can recall, he said, “Well, we’ve got to cut him loose to see what he can do. The time has come. He’s depended on us too long.”

HAIG: Yeah, well, I agree with that—

NIXON: Isn’t that really it?

HAIG: Yes, sir. And I agree with him completely. We’re just going to have to—have to manage that in turn. But I think we’re in a hell of a lot stronger position than they are, sir. I really do.

NIXON: Than the North?

HAIG: I think we’re in great shape and we’ve—

NIXON: Why?

HAIG: —got to stay confident and—

NIXON: Why are we in a better position here?

HAIG: Because they are hurting very badly in the South. They’re—

NIXON: Goddamn it, if we just get the bombing going again.

HAIG: That’s right. They can’t face that.

NIXON: That’s why they’re being—if they’re being amicable, the reason they’re being amicable is because of their fear of the bombing. I don’t think there’s any other damn reason to talk. I want you to get that across to him. I—just tell Henry that I do not want him to do anything that will limit my option, very clear option, to resume intensive bombing in the North. And that—you know, in a sense, that’s really better than having to have that option open than to have—than to pay a price to have them say something pleasant as he leaves.

 

“I do not see why Hanoi would want to settle three weeks from now when they didn’t settle this week.”

December 14, 1972, 10:08 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Haig

OVAL OFFICE

 

When Kissinger returned to Washington, he reported to Nixon on the failure of the most recent peace talks to reach or even approach a peace accord. The conversation soon moved to a military solution and the imminent instigation of full-force bombing in North Vietnam. Kissinger himself was no longer confident that the peace negotiations would lead to any productive end, without the introduction of another offensive. Contemporaries at the time and historians since have analyzed the attitudes in the White House, believing that the peace accords probably could have been worked out without bombing attacks, yet Hanoi at the time was a volatile place. Many hardliners believed that the war could and should continue. The bombing may have dissuaded them. In what was one of the most important conversations in the effort to end the war, Kissinger and the president redefined the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam, under Thieu, and to the region in the short term.

 

KISSINGER: First of all, let me give you my assessment of how these negotiations went. They came back on November—they came here on November 20 determined to settle. When Le Duc Tho arrived at the airport, he said, “It would not be understood if we had a second meeting—if a second meeting was requested.” We gave them sixty-nine changes, of which many of them were crap, just to go through the motions of supporting Saigon. Instead of blowing their top, they went through in a very businesslike fashion. They accepted twelve of them; we were down to four.

NIXON: Wait a minute. You’re talking about what day?

KISSINGER: The first day, November 20.

NIXON: Oh. That was the time after the election.

KISSINGER: Between November 20 and November 24—

NIXON: That’s when you got the twelve concessions.

KISSINGER: That’s when we got the first concession—the twelve concessions and, literally, we were within one day of settlement, then. We said, “If we can get two out of three of the other four that were outstanding—”

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: “—we’ll settle.” We would have settled for one out of three.

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: It was easy to do.

NIXON: Then?

KISSINGER: At the end of the third day, he got a message, read it at the table, blanched, immediately asked for a recess, and it’s never been the same since. Immediately then, the next day, he introduced new demands of his own, which he had not done before. And, from then on, he started dragging things. Now—

NIXON: Huh? What was the message? What’s your analysis?

KISSINGER: My analysis of the message is that they probably got a readout of what you said to Duc, and what I said to their local ambassador, which was to say—

NIXON: No, I hadn’t seen Duc by that time.

KISSINGER: No, you—oh, no—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —that’s what we said to him. Or at any rate, they—

NIXON: Well, we had said it, though. We said we’d need to play a hard line with them—

KISSINGER: Then they got a readout of what I said to their ambassador, which was exactly what I—

NIXON: That was probably it. That was it. I think they’re probably infiltrated over there in Paris. That’s what I think.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: That’s even more—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —likely than what you said—

NIXON: That’s it. No, not Duc. I don’t think Duc would do it, but—

KISSINGER: Well, Duc wouldn’t do it himself—

NIXON: But, you see, they got a readout. I think the Paris thing leaks like a sieve. Their rooms are—and those assholes don’t know that their rooms are bugged by the Communists, and the Communists passed it back. And, so?

KISSINGER: Whatever the reason is, they then decided that—

NIXON: That’s when you showed them, that’s when you saw it. That was the turn of events.

KISSINGER: Then, there was a turn of events. Then, he introduced two demands, which he knew we couldn’t meet. One, that the political prisoners ought to be released.

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: And, second, that we should pull out our civilian personnel serving in the technical branches there, which would have the practical consequence of grounding the air force—

NIXON: Yes, of course—

KISSINGER: —and—and grounding the radar, and, in effect, destroying the ARVN. That’s when I asked for a recess.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Because I knew—

NIXON: To come home?

KISSINGER: To come home. This was the first session. Still, we were quite optimistic. We thought that if we kept pushing, we could finish it that week, but we had no assurance that we could get Thieu along, so we wanted you—

NIXON: Duc—

KISSINGER: —to talk to Duc.

NIXON: That’s when you [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Now, in addition to whatever they may have picked up of what we said to the South Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese behavior was so incredible that that gave them an incentive, because the longer these negotiations went on, the better off they were. The greater the tension between Saigon and us—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —the greater the possibility that we would flush Thieu down the drain.

NIXON: I see.

KISSINGER: Without it—without it. And, the third factor was that every day that I was there on the first trip, Saigon Radio put out the content of the negotiations, which we had given them, and were—was keeping a scorecard on the concessions, so that Hanoi must have decided that any concession they made to us would be played in Saigon as a victory for them. So, for all these three factors—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —they put a quietus on the negotiations. Now, when we came back, it was a roller coaster. Up and down, the whole time.

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: And, since we thought it should be settled quickly, and since all the evidence up to then was still consistent with settling quickly, it was not easy to tell, at first, what they were up to. For example, on Monday morning, Al and I saw him alone. He gave us—

NIXON: This was the first day?

KISSINGER: The first day.

NIXON: Yeah, the—but before we get that in, we must also throw into the equation the fact that those two—well, there were more than that—the two sessions I had. You had three or four with Duc when he was here.

KISSINGER: That’s right, they—

NIXON: It obviously was reported back, because we put that to ’em, and it was put in such unequivocal terms that that undoubtedly got back to ’em.

KISSINGER: That got back to them, but that could have worked either way, Mr. President, because they could have concluded from that, “Let’s settle fast, and then the Americans will put the heat on him.”

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: In the first session—

NIXON: If they wanted to settle?

KISSINGER: In the first session, he always asked me what my schedule was for getting the thing done. When you would go on television. When I would come—

NIXON: Yeah, I know—

KISSINGER: —to Hanoi. When the bombing of the North would stop. But the bombing of the North has dropped off so much now because of these idiots in Defense, that we’ve practically given it to them for nothing. We had twenty-eight TacAir sorties today—yesterday. That’s not to say that they won’t pay a price—

NIXON: Well, what’d they say in Paris? They say it’s weather holding that off? [unclear] Bullshit.

KISSINGER: So, uh—

NIXON: Go ahead.

KISSINGER: So that was the situation on—at the first session—

NIXON: At the beginning of the sessions, right?

KISSINGER: At the beginning of the sessions, they wanted to know the schedule. When do we go to Hanoi? When is the speech? When is the cease-fire? And they wanted to know all of this because, of course, they’re planning their military actions around it. Last week, Monday morning, he gave us a very conciliatory talk.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And, frankly, to show you how naive or wrong we were, we thought the only question was with it—there were only four issues left at that point.

NIXON: I know. You remember, you said before you left, you have two days.

KISSINGER: Yeah. Well, we thought it would be done Monday afternoon. We get in there Monday afternoon, he withdraws every concession he’s made two weeks previously and says there’re only two choices: to sign the October agreement, or to—

NIXON: Why’d he do that privately, not publicly? Do you think—?

KISSINGER: Well, incidentally—

NIXON: You don’t think he got new instructions—

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: —to be more [unclear]—?

KISSINGER: No, no. No, no. He did it privately to establish the fact that he wanted peace. Then he did it in the afternoon—

NIXON: Well, that’s all right. Now, why is he trying to establish the fact that he wants peace? So that we don’t go wild? Is that it?

KISSINGER: That’s right. That’s right. They have two problems. They are at the ragged edge, themselves. They are obviously terrified of what we will do.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: On the other hand, they also feel they can play us. And so, their problem was how to get through the week.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Now, they start with this very sharp approach. In the afternoon, he withdraws every concession.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: And says if we want them, we have to give them counterconcessions. So then, I canceled the Tuesday meeting in order to be able to work on the Chinese and Russians, and because we cannot go back to the October draft, Mr. President, for a number of reasons. If we go back to the October draft, we’ll be overthrowing Thieu. We’ve got to get some changes. Secondly, it has now become—their bad faith has now become so self—so evident—

NIXON: Hmm?

KISSINGER: —that many things we could have accepted in October—

NIXON: Hmm?

KISSINGER: —we cannot, now, accept without their being written down. Thirdly, there are many things we could have accepted on a quick schedule for which there’s no excuse, whatever, to accept on a slow schedule, like putting international machinery in place. Now—then, Wednesday, we met, and he was conciliatory again, and he gave us back five of those ten changes we made. Thursday was bad again. Friday, he gave us the one real concession he made of—when I talk like this, that’s a four-hour session, every day.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Friday, he gave us administrative structure. That was the one big concession he made.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Uh—

NIXON: Then he withdrew it Monday?

KISSINGER: No, administrative structure was never withdrawn, but civilian personnel, he found two things which he knew—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —we couldn’t take. One, is the release of political detainees. The other is the withdrawal of civilian personnel. So, every day, they came up in one form or another. And quite diabolically, one day, he said—remember when Al left that Saturday?

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: He said, “All right, we’ll take them out of the agreement.” So Monday, he reintroduces them as an understanding, which doesn’t do us any good; we still have to withdraw them. We don’t give a damn whether they’re in the agreement or not; we want them there. Now, they were never in the agreement. We had a full discussion on the subject. It was settled in October. That concession, alone, if we pull out our civilian personnel—

NIXON: It destroys [unclear].

KISSINGER: It’s bigger than all the concessions put together he’s made to us. So, on Saturday, when Al left, we were down to one issue—the DMZ—or so it seemed. We made another schedule. I said, “I’m sending Al back; he’s then going to go with the vice president—”

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: So, the son of a bitch knew the vice president was ready to leave. So he puts on a fainting spell, says he’s getting sick, he’s just—

NIXON: Don’t you think that was a fainting spell, though?

KISSINGER: Oh, that was a fake—

NIXON: An act?

KISSINGER: Oh, he was—ninety percent acting. He’s got a headache. He’s got to—he can’t meet on Sunday. If they wanted to settle, Mr. President, they would have settled Saturday night, if it had taken till four in the morning.

NIXON: That’s why you kept at it, which you were right to do. You see—

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: —you—you’re—you may wonder whether you shouldn’t have broken it off the first day, but I think—I think, and I don’t know whether Al agrees or not; I never asked—but I think it was just well to just to continue to press, and press, and press, and press. If there’s one thing for sure for everybody here, they want the goddamn thing over for a variety of reasons, and many for the wrong reasons, and some for the right reasons. Many think it is over. But, at least, we’ve got to be—we’ve got to play our string out so that we make the record. Right, Al?

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: And that was what you did—

KISSINGER: We—we couldn’t break off the first day.

NIXON: If you hadn’t, we—well, Christ, you knew. You didn’t. You stayed there ten days.

KISSINGER: We had to prove what they were up to, Mr. President. We had to go the extra mile.

NIXON: And to prove it, also, to your colleagues, your loyalists, like Mr. Sullivan, Mr. [unclear], those people, too.

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: Did they finally get [unclear]—?

KISSINGER: Oh, Sullivan said he doesn’t understand how I stood it, and—

NIXON: Is that right?

KISSINGER: But you had no idea, when I—

NIXON: You left him over there [unclear], I see?

KISSINGER: Well, to work on the protocol; I’ll get into that in a minute. So then, on Saturday, we had it down to one issue. It—all we wanted on that issue is that they give us back something they had agreed to three weeks ago. We didn’t introduce a new demand. The issue—Al has explained to you the DMZ issue.

NIXON: Oh, sure.

KISSINGER: The way they phrase it, we would not just leave their troops there, we would abolish the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, after which they would have an unlimited right of intervention. They would be the only legitimate government in Vietnam, while there were severe restrictions on the South Vietnamese. That—then, we might just as well overthrow Thieu. I mean, we’ve got to keep Thieu—not sovereignty, Reston has it completely wrong. [Reston’s December 13 column stated, “It is a question of whether the cease-fire . . . will acknowledge in a few simple unambiguous words that the Saigon Government has sovereign right and authority over all the territory of South Vietnam.”] Sovereignty’s not the issue, because he can have sovereignty with a cease-fire.

NIXON: Reston, I think, he has it wrong. He has it wrong in one sense and right in another sense. That’s really that Thieu is salvageable. To us, it isn’t—that isn’t what worries us. Not at all. But go ahead.

KISSINGER: To us, Mr. President, it seems to me, to sign an agreement which leaves whatever number they’ve got there—let’s say a hundred and fifty thousand, which we think, plus the unlimited right of movement across the border, and, indeed, not just the right to movement across the border, but abolishing the border—that I think is close to a sellout. It’s a demand they never made of us. They had agreed to the other proposition three weeks ago, so it’s not unthinkable to them.

So, what did they do? On Sunday, we had experts meetings to conform the texts. It’s a purely technical thing; third-level people on my staff, third-level people on theirs. In the guise of language changes, they immediately introduced four substantive issues to make goddamn sure we couldn’t settle. For example, all week long, we had fought on the issue. They had agreed that the PRG shouldn’t be mentioned in the text.

On Friday, we made the concession that it could be mentioned in the preamble. And we had then thought that the—that Saigon would pull off the preamble and sign a document without the preamble. And they agreed to that. So on Sunday, in the language meeting, they put the PRG into the—into three places in the text. I don’t want to bore you with all these details—

NIXON: It’s important I get the feel on all this—

KISSINGER: It’s just to give you the feel—

NIXON: I’ve got the feel. I’ve got the feel. I just want to, so I can see what they’re doing.

KISSINGER: That—that they immediately introduce something, which guarantees that there could be no settlement on Monday.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: On Monday, they told me they had no instructions.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: But they—

NIXON: May I ask one question? May I ask one question that troubles me here? As you know, Kennedy, at your instruction, made a call to Dobrynin.

KISSINGER: Yeah—

NIXON: Remember? And we—and which I thought was a good thing to do. And he put it out there, and Dobrynin said he’d convey the message. I got on the phone, briefly, with the same thing, just saying—

KISSINGER: I thought it was excellent. Al told me.

NIXON: —there’s one issue, but the whole point is, excellent or not, do we have the Russians screwing us here, too?

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: You don’t think so?

KISSINGER: No, because Al gave me a report which—

NIXON: Yeah, but you were there when I talked to him, and [unclear]—

KISSINGER: No, but Al gave me a report of something Dobrynin told him of where the negotiations stood, which they had been told by Hanoi, which is so—it’s partly true, and partly so distorted, that Hanoi is lying to them the way Saigon is lying to us.

NIXON: Do you think Dobrynin is—not Dobrynin, but the Soviet is trying to move them?

KISSINGER: Yeah, definitely.

NIXON: Do you think so, Al?

HAIG: There’s something to that, Mr. President.

KISSINGER: Because they know you. Brezhnev wants to come here. There’s nothing in it for them. If they wanted to screw you, they’d do it in the Middle East. There’s nothing in it for the Russians—

NIXON: All right. All right, I get it. I was troubled by whether we had, you know, put a—played a—made a play there which would hurt us where we have a much bigger game, and I just hate to waste it on these assholes. But you did what you could.

KISSINGER: No, what neither—

NIXON: You saw the Chinese, too?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Was that worthwhile?

KISSINGER: No—well, I don’t know. The Chinese never tell us.

NIXON: All right. Come on. Come [unclear]—

KISSINGER: So, Monday—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: So, Monday they come in, just to make sure we don’t settle, they come in with a signing—new signing proposals. So, I figure out a way by which we can accept it, and tentatively accepted it. The next day, he comes in with a DMZ proposal, which is, however, exactly what they gave us the week before—just moving the sentence one place further—and withdraw the signing proposal they had made the day before, and put it into a form that we can’t accept, claiming that he had been overruled in Hanoi. In other words, his communication for that worked very fast.

Then, again, in the form of going through the language of the document, they introduce four other issues. Then—now, this is December 12—six weeks after I told them we want to bring the protocols into being simultaneously with the agreement, five weeks after they say they want to sign the agreement, they, for the first time, produced their protocol for the international commission and for the other commission, giving us just one night to study it. Now, when you see those protocols, they’re an insult to our intelligence.

NIXON: Yeah. I know.

KISSINGER: They have a—they have 250 members in the international commission. They have—each team has liaison offices assigned to it as the same number as the team from the party. All their communications, all their transportation, comes from the party. In other words, the Communists supply all the communications and transportation in their area; they have no right to move out of their building unless the Communists agree to it. We’ll never get anyone to serve on it. And, so, the international commission is a total joke, and everything is insulting. They had agreed. All week long, they told us there’s a great concession, that there would be a team in the DMZ. So where do they put the DMZ team? On the Cua Viet River. Did you know that?

HAIG: [laughs]

KISSINGER: [laughing] They put the DMZ team on the Cua Viet River, which is at Quang Tri. And then, they have a proposal for a Two-Party Commission, in which they give the Communist member—the international member can’t move a—can’t go to the bathroom without Communist permission. Then, there’s a Two-Party Commission, in which the Communist member can run freely around the country, make any investigation he wants, it’s established in every district capital.

In other words, the political—the Two-Party Commission is a way for them to spread the VC all over the country. And then, in the international commission, they introduce this Council of National Reconciliation as one of the parties, as if it were a government.

 

KISSINGER: Less was settled on Tuesday, so, then the only thing we accomplished Tuesday was to go over the language of the agreement. We had it down to two—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: There were only two unresolved issues, one of them a total, cheap, miserable trick on their part, again. They had introduced the phrase that “the National Council will direct the other party.” We refused to accept “direct,” so they said “supervise.” We refused to accept “supervise,” and we finally bargained them down to the word “promote,” which they had accepted. They accepted the English word “promote,” but they kept the Vietnamese word “supervise.” So, in the text that’s going to be circulating in Vietnam [unclear]. All I’m trying to tell you, Mr. President, is here then I was—

NIXON: You were willing to stay there?

KISSINGER: So then I was there on the last day. We had it down to two issues on the text, and one issue of substance. I said, “Let the experts get together and just compare texts once more to make sure we got it right.” So they introduced seventeen changes in the form of linguistics, by changing the obligations on Cambodia and Laos, by taking out a word on replacements, what weapons we can replace. We had said, “destroyed, worn out, damaged, or used up.” They take out the word “destroyed.” I said, “Listen, Mr. Le Duc Tho, why do you take out ‘destroyed’?” He said, “Because, if a thing is damaged, you can’t destroy it without damaging it, so it’s an unnecessary word.” So here we go into an hour’s debate on the philosophical problem of whether you—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Uh—

NIXON: How many [unclear]?

KISSINGER: But, you know goddamn well. Now, all of this we’ve already communicated to Saigon. If we take it out—if this were Dobrynin—if this were Gromyko in the last hour of the SALT settlement, I’d run this through and wouldn’t quibble. But, you know what their strategy is. If we accept their DMZ language, which would be a disaster, they’ve got to sign it. If we accept their signing language, they’ve got the seventeen language changes. If we accept every one of these seventeen language changes, which would destroy again what they granted us three weeks ago on Cambodia and Laos, they’ve got the protocols. And they are now saying all of these things, and if we accept the protocols, which we—I mean, if we did that, we might just as well overthrow Thieu and leave—then they’ve got the understandings. On the other hand, he played a very clever game. He’s—first of all, their book must say that “Kissinger’s a man of great vanity, so keep buttering him up.” So, they kept saying to me, “You and I are the only men who understand this war, so you go back to your president, and I’ll go back to my Politburo.” Here he was sitting with ten little guys all the time, and he kept saying, “You know, I’m trying to settle. I make all these concessions to you, and they overrule me in Hanoi,” he says. Now, when a Politburo member tells you he’s been overruled in front of ten clerks—

NIXON: That’s crazy.

KISSINGER: —you know it isn’t true. So, what they’ve done is quite diabolical. They’ve got the issue in a stage where, with one phone call to us, they can settle it in an hour. But they’re always going to keep it just out of reach, and—

NIXON: Henry, tell me this—

KISSINGER: Now, Laird thinks we can just yield. We can’t yield. They won’t let us yield—

NIXON: Did you talk to—did you get Laird this morning?

KISSINGER: Well, Laird has sent you a memo.

NIXON: Well, wait a minute. How much does Laird know?

HAIG: He knows that things are going bad, that we’re considering other possibilities for reaction—

NIXON: What is he suggesting? To yield?

HAIG: Yeah. Oh, he called. I told you yesterday. He called me the night before and said, “We can’t—we can’t take military action. I’m going to send a memo over.” Well, the memo got here yesterday morning and it just says we’ve got to settle.

NIXON: So what’s new?

KISSINGER: Any terms [unclear].

NIXON: What’s new with him? [laughter] Have we ever gotten anything else with him?

KISSINGER: Oh, no. No, no—

NIXON: November 3, Cambodia, May 8. [Nixon sometimes used shorthand to refer to past speeches. “November 3” refers to his “silent majority” speech of 1969, “April 30” was the 1970 announcement of the Cambodian incursion, and “May 8” was his 1972 decision to bomb and mine Hanoi and Haiphong harbor.]

KISSINGER: Mr. President, if—

NIXON: Rogers has stood firm, though, on this, hasn’t he?

KISSINGER: He hasn’t stood at all as far as I know.

NIXON: Well, no, no, but he’s never indicated any moving—movement away. Does Sullivan?

KISSINGER: No, Sullivan is completely—

NIXON: Well, I know. I think he would if there were—you haven’t heard from Rogers? Now, you’ve briefed him a couple times. How’s he see it? What has he said? I want to know.

HAIG: He’s—

NIXON: This depends on whether we have a meeting or not—

HAIG: [unclear]

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: He’s been absolutely unquestioning on it—

KISSINGER: No—

HAIG: —and what we can do.

KISSINGER: Let me—let me put Sullivan’s view fairly. In the text of the agreement, Sullivan would make concessions I would not make. But Sullivan has now accepted the fact—

NIXON: That there’s—

KISSINGER: —that no matter what concessions we make in the text, they’re not gonna settle. Now, there are a number of possibilities. It is—there’s a ten percent chance that Tho is telling the truth that he’s going back to Hanoi—

NIXON: No.

KISSINGER: I don’t believe it. I just—

NIXON: Yeah—

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: —there’s a ten percent chance. Go ahead—

KISSINGER: In fairness, I have to say there’s a second possibility that they now want to see, for a little longer, how that Saigon-Washington split works.

NIXON: Right. Third?

KISSINGER: There’s the predominant possibility that there isn’t enough pressure on them to make them settle. Now, the reason I wanted to—I—I recommended and am responsible for the accelerated schedule before November 7, is that November 7 gave them a deadline from which they could not—that which they could not evade.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: And, therefore, they had to make rapid movements. I—that—what we are seeing now is their normal negotiating habit. They’re shits, if I can use a—I mean, they are tawdry, miserable, filthy people. They make the Russians looks good.

NIXON: And the Russians make the Chinese look good, I know.

KISSINGER: And the Russians make the Chinese look good. I mean, it isn’t just this crap I’m giving you; it is they never, never do anything that isn’t tawdry. Now, November 7 scared the pants off them. Now, I remember talking to Al about it, and I take full responsibility; he was in favor of a slower schedule—

NIXON: He went along with it. He went along with no problem—

KISSINGER: No, I get a lot of credit, exorbitant credit, when things go well. I have to take the blame when things do not—

NIXON: Who remembers [the 1971] India-Pakistan [war]—?

KISSINGER: Well, no. There I was right. India-Pakistan I was right. This one I wasn’t necessarily right on.

NIXON: Who knows? Who knows!

KISSINGER: India-Pakistan didn’t bother me. On that one, I was right. And that one paid off in China. India-Pakistan was one—

NIXON: What I meant is, at the time—what I’m talking about is, are we going to have enough time? All these assholes in the press said we were wrong. Now, at the present time, the press will say, “We’re quite aware we’re very, very close to peace, and da-da-da-da-da.” They were wrong, and so when it turns the other way, they’re going to say, “Peace has escaped da-da-da-da-da,” and they’re going to be wrong again. And it isn’t going to make a goddamn bit of difference. My point is, you’ve got to remember who the enemy are. The enemy has never changed. The election didn’t change it. The only friends we’ve got, Henry, are a few people of rather moderate education out in this country, and thank God, they’re about sixty-one percent of the people, who support us. The left-wingers, most of your friends, and most—and many of mine—

KISSINGER: Some friends of mine—

NIXON: —are against us.

KISSINGER: I’m using the left-wingers, Mr. President—

NIXON: Yeah. They’re all through with us, though—

KISSINGER: I—

NIXON: —and we’re through with them.

KISSINGER: I have—

NIXON: They don’t even know. They don’t know what’s going to hit them, we believe.

KISSINGER: I have no illusions about the left-wingers. Those sons of bitches are [unclear]—

NIXON: Well, they’re so tawdry, right? Now, let’s come down to where we’ve got to go.

KISSINGER: So—but, the difference—

NIXON: I—understand, Henry—you know, I told it—as Al over here will tell you—as I told you last night. I say, “What difference does it make? It’s done.” You know, what—whether it was before, we should have done it during the election, and so forth and so on.

Looking back, we probably should have let it wait till the election, and the day after the election: whack! You know? And said—or [unclear], rather than whack, said, “You’ve got forty-eight hours, kiddies. Either settle, or get awful hurt.” That’s probably what we should have done, but we didn’t.

KISSINGER: That’s probably true.

NIXON: That’s probably—I mean, from the standpoint of the election, we would probably have done even a little bit better than we did. [laughs] [unclear] It didn’t make a difference; we did very well. But nevertheless, nevertheless, there it is. It’s an interesting thing. You know, you’ve got two interesting analyses of the elections. You’ve got the Lou Harris analysis, who—which thinks that we were quite helped by the idea that we were sort of for peace and progress, and all that sort of thing. You’ve got the Dick [unclear] analysis, which I think is much closer to the truth—that says, on the other hand, it says [unclear]. He says all these things. He says, “Oh, yes.” He says, “It helped the president’s image, and the rest. When—but you came right down to the issues, what really won it, was, it was the comparison between a sellout, a repulsive, peace-at-any-price radical against a sound man.” They said that was what it was really about. You see, that’s why it didn’t make any difference whether you settled or not. But the point is, who was to know, then? Now, though, it’s over. Now, we’ve got to look to the future.

KISSINGER: What we had to balance, then—

NIXON: And, what the hell, how are we going to give them another deadline? We—that’s our problem.

KISSINGER: What we had to balance, then, was to weigh the advantage of an unchangeable deadline against the danger of an endlessly protracted negotiation while our assets were there.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: And we lost the gamble. That’s what it comes down to. We lost the gamble eighty percent because of Thieu.

NIXON: Thieu, ah! That’s right.

KISSINGER: Now, but all of the—

NIXON: If Thieu—if Thieu had gone along, in the first instance, then we could have made the deal quickly that we could have lived with. That was the real problem. That we know.

KISSINGER: Because if that—

NIXON: But that we can’t say—

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: —due to the fact that we know that Thieu’s survival is what we’re fighting for. Not his, but we know there ain’t nobody else to keep the goddamn place—

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: —together at the moment. Now, we’re in a real box on that. We all know that. But, you see, so therefore, that’s what I mean, Henry. You were basing your whole assumption—we were basing our assumption—on the fact that Thieu would. You remember, when you went to Saigon, you were amazed when you went in and said, “Thieu [unclear]. There is no coalition government. You have veto power.” And the son of a bitch says, “No I don’t want anything other than—we’ve got to have total victory.”

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: That was, that was, that was the thing.

KISSINGER: Even there, the bastard misled us. If, on the first day, he had told us he couldn’t accept it, we could have still tripped our relations with Hanoi, and avoided some of the dangers. But he led us on for three days, said he might accept it, and only on the last afternoon of the last day towards—but that’s water over the dam. I agree—

NIXON: Now, where do we go?

KISSINGER: Well, we are now in this position: as of today, we are caught between Hanoi and Saigon, both of them facing us down in a position of total impotence, in which Hanoi is just stringing us along, and Saigon is just ignoring us. Hanoi—I do not see why Hanoi would want to settle three weeks from now when they didn’t settle this week. I do not see what additional factors are going to operate. I’m making a cold-blooded analysis.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: I see no additional factor, if nothing changes—

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: —that will make Hanoi more receptive early in January.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: I see no additional factor that will make Saigon more conciliatory. On —in—on the contrary, Saigon, in the process of trying to sabotage the settlement, is going to float so many proposals of its own that it knocks out the few props we’ve got left. That Christmas truce proposal of Thieu is a disaster, because it removes the few military pressures that we have got left. Therefore, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that we’ve got to put it to them in Hanoi, painful as it is.

But, we cannot do it anymore from the old platform. We have to do it, now, from the platform of—what we have to do is this, Mr. President, if—my—I’ve thought about it very hard, now. I think I ought to give a low-key briefing tomorrow of just where the negotiations stand.

NIXON: You think you should?

KISSINGER: Well, Al thinks Ziegler should, but I don’t see how anyone else—I went out there and said they were going well. If I hide, now, it is not going—

NIXON: You’re not hiding. Let’s think. All right, let’s think about it. Somebody could give a low-key briefing, so let’s start [unclear]—

KISSINGER: I don’t think anyone else can do it except I.

NIXON: All right, all right, let’s talk [unclear]—

KISSINGER: I was the guy who said, “Peace is at hand—”

NIXON: —let’s talk about that later. Let’s talk about—somebody should give a low-key briefing. What should the briefing be?

KISSINGER: The briefing should be where were we at the end of October, and why did we think peace was imminent? What has happened in the interval, and what is, now, in prospect? We can explain, very convincingly, that with goodwill, peace was easily achievable. But every time we turned over a rock, we found a worm underneath. That, if they wanted a cease-fire, they should have had an international machinery in place. They didn’t do it. That, while they were talking cease-fire to us, we have reams of intelligence reports that ordered them to go into massive action on the first—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —day of the cease-fire—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —and to go on for—

NIXON: They were going to violate it?

KISSINGER: —three days after. They translated the document in a way that was totally misleading as to the nature of—

NIXON: Whether it was a government or a coalition [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Or whether it had to “direct,” or whether it had to “promote.” That, the simplest thing—

NIXON: I mean, the way—let me say, if we’re going to talk about this—Al, take these words down—the way that it should be done. I mean, I’d have all this so it’s done by either Ziegler or [unclear] all these things about the proposed direction. But, the point is, you should say that we had evidence, first, massive intelligence evidence that they were intending to violate the cease-fire and all the understandings.

Second, they insisted on translating the document, and insisted on a change in the document, which would have made it a coalition government, or a Communist—a Communist-coalition government over the people of South Vietnam, something we had insisted we would never agree upon, rather than a Commission of Reconciliation, which had for its purpose [unclear]. In other words, be sure that the violation, the Communist government, that that kind of thing gets into the lead. Go ahead.

KISSINGER: That then—

NIXON: Think of things we could say then.

KISSINGER: That then, even though there was extensive international machinery provided in the agreement, they claimed—

NIXON: They sabotaged the international machinery by making it totally meaningless, so that nobody would even serve.

KISSINGER: But, first, they wouldn’t even show it to us till December 12.

NIXON: That’s right. In view of the—but even that, just say that the international machinery they totally agree—disagreed to set up international machinery to supervise it all in any meaningful way.

KISSINGER: Then, they told us that the demobilization provision of the agreement would take care of their troops. Every time we try to give it one concrete meaning, through a de facto understanding, through giving it a time limit, through indicating—

NIXON: They were using these negotiations solely for the purpose, not of—that is not [unclear] not for the purpose of ending the war, but of continuing the war in a different form.

KISSINGER: And so, we have come—

NIXON: And not of bringing peace, but of having—continuing war in this terribly difficult part of the country. War in South Vietnam; peace in North Vietnam. Well, that was their proposal: peace for North Vietnam and continuing war in South Vietnam.

KISSINGER: So, we have come to the reluctant conclusion that—you have expressed it very well right now, Mr. President—that this wasn’t a peace document. This was a document for perpetual warfare, in which they create—

NIXON: Perpetual warfare in South Vietnam—

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: —and peace in North Vietnam. That’s the way to put it.

KISSINGER: That’s right—

NIXON: “Peace in North Vietnam and perpetual warfare in South Vietnam, with the United States—and the United States cooperating with them in the—”

KISSINGER: Now—

NIXON: “—in imposing a Communist government on the people of South Vietnam against their will.”

KISSINGER: And this is why these negotiations, which could have been very rapid—

NIXON: That’s right. Now—

KISSINGER: —and should have been very rapid—

NIXON: —the negotiations: on the other hand, the negotiations—we have had agreements throughout this period of time. We have reached agreement on all these issues, at varying times, from which they have first agreed and then withdrawn. This can be settled in one day—

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: —if they’re willing to settle. And we’re willing to settle in one day.

KISSINGER: Exactly.

NIXON: No other meetings are needed; just an exchange of messages has been arranged.

KISSINGER: Or—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: Or another meeting is necessary. But—so this is—now, we also have to disassociate ourselves from Saigon to some extent. We have to say—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —“It isn’t—what is the difference between us and Saigon? Saigon wanted total victory. The president has always said that he would give them a reasonable chance to survive. The difference between us and Hanoi is that they will not give them a reasonable chance to survive. So, Saigon’s objections never had a chance.” I—

NIXON: And, on the other hand, I would tilt it. I would say we were ready to tilt it very strongly against Hanoi, and very lightly against Hanoi—against Saigon. I would say that North Vietnam—that as far as Saigon is concerned, they—we understandably express concern about the agreement, about the people—the people of South—but, on the other hand, Saigon had agreed, on May 8, at the time we laid down the conditions of a cease-fire, the return of our POWs, and internationally supervised elections, that they would agree to that. And now, they have backed off of that proposal, and are insisting now on a total withdrawal of forces, which, of course, is not consistent—

KISSINGER: But we have to—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: We had to back off a bit from Saigon, Mr. President, if Saigon—

NIXON: And that backs off.

KISSINGER: In—I agree. In Saigon’s interest, because then, it isn’t Saigon that vetoed it, but it is our judgment that the Communists are—have used another guise to impose themselves. Now, I would recommend that we leave open the possibility of this settlement, if the other side meets the very minimum conditions that we have indicated. I would then recommend that we start bombing the bejeezus out of them within forty-eight hours of having put the negotiating record out. And I would then recommend that after about two weeks of that, we offer withdrawal for prisoners, about the time that the Congress comes back—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —and say, “It has now been proved that the—the negotiation’s too complex involving all the Vietnamese parties. Let them settle their problems among each other. The South is strong enough to defend itself—”

NIXON: “So we will withdraw.” Now, let me ask a critical question. Do you have in this record a clear Q and A, for one thing, where you said, “All right, will you, if we withdraw all of our forces, and stop the bombing and the mining, will you return our prisoners?”

KISSINGER: No—

NIXON: Would you say that they have? See, that’s the trouble, because that’s—

KISSINGER: No, I’ll tell you, Mr. President, why I didn’t do that, because, I think that—

NIXON: Well—

KISSINGER: —the one, they won’t—they don’t want that, now. They want us to [unclear]—

NIXON: Oh, I know they don’t, but it’s one point that we’re interested in hearing, either when we talk—

KISSINGER: But I would—

NIXON: —about—when we talk about going at it alone, without Saigon, Henry, the only basis for our going at it alone is, at this time, the withdrawal of all of our forces, stopping the bombing and the mining, getting our POWs, and continuing to aid South Vietnam—

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: That’s the only basis.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: And, they’ll never agree to that.

KISSINGER: Well, Mr. President, they are not all that strong. I think if you are willing to go six months, they’re going to crack.

NIXON: Well, but Henry—Henry, I know if I’m willing to go six months it isn’t in the cards. Right? I’m willing to go six months, but that I cannot convince the Congress of, in my opinion. I mean, I must say that on that, I would have to respect the judgment of some other people here. We can go for—we can sure go till Christmas. I mean, we can go to till the Congress comes back.

KISSINGER: It’s better—

NIXON: We want to remember that we’re going to have a period—if you’re thinking of bombing North Vietnam for six months, bombing for six months is not going to work.

KISSINGER: Well then we can’t—then we’ve had it.

NIXON: Well then, we have to, then, have a look at our choices.

KISSINGER: Because—because it is possible—

NIXON: Right, but bombing for what? I mean, what do we say?

KISSINGER: Prisoners.

NIXON: We could do that.

KISSINGER: When Congress—

NIXON: But, provided we make the record, which we haven’t made that record, have we?

KISSINGER: No, no, but we can easily fix that, Mr. President, by having the two weeks after the bomb—I would like to bomb for two weeks within this framework, because they might accept it by New Year’s, if they get a terrific shock, now. If then, by New Year’s, they haven’t accepted it, we could at the first formal session in Paris after New Year’s propose prisoners for withdrawal.

NIXON: Prisoners for withdrawal?

KISSINGER: And—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: [unclear] then say, “Now, Viet”—I meant, the way I would say it: “Vietnamization is now concluded.”

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: “The American role is now concluded. For a return of our prisoners of war, we will quit the bombing [unclear].” Yes, you could bomb for six months, I agree—

KISSINGER: You see, my point—

NIXON: —on that basis. But you can’t bomb for six months with the idea that we’ll go back and have some sort of a settlement—

KISSINGER: I think we’re too close on this one—

NIXON: I mean, in other words—your pro—you had that in one of your original proposals last week. But my point is that on this, as far as this one is concerned—

KISSINGER: This one—

NIXON: —I have a feeling it’s out the window. I mean, I don’t want to—

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: —sound pessimistic. I—Al’s—Al, for the first time, is more optimistic even than you are. Al thinks they want to settle.

KISSINGER: I also think they want to settle, but—

NIXON: Do you think they want to settle?

KISSINGER: Mr. President, they are—

NIXON: Do you think they’re going to?

HAIG: Yes, if they get a good kick in the ass.

KISSINGER: They are scared out of their minds that you’ll resume bombing. They have taken shit from me that you wouldn’t believe. I—here is Le Duc Tho, the number-three man in his country, and the things I have said to him, in front of his people, you would not believe.

NIXON: Like what?

KISSINGER: About, you know, about his tawdry performance; about his extraordinary trickery. And then, just making fun of him. When he came up, I said, “Now we get the daily speech.”

NIXON: [unclear] that’s something else.

KISSINGER: And—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: No, no. The point is, I bluster threats from you. The point I’m making is, Mr. President, the reason they were so nice to me is because their strategy is to make us believe—why do they let their experts meet? Why did he come out every day to shake hands with me, so that I couldn’t fight him off? I mean, he just walked up to the guard and stuck out his hand.

NIXON: I understand—

KISSINGER: Why did they do all of this? Because they want to create the impression—

NIXON: That it’s still alive.

KISSINGER: —that the peace—

NIXON: And, of course, they’re leaking it all to the press.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: The press is playing it very heavily until today, and now the press is playing it the other way because you’ve returned, and—

KISSINGER: Yeah, but he’s leaving tomorrow, so they’re going to play it, again, the other way tomorrow.

NIXON: Well, that he’s going home for what? Consultations?

KISSINGER: [unclear] What he’s going to say is he’s going home for consult—

NIXON: All right, where does Agnew fit into this?

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: My own view is very mixed on that. I was—

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: I was all for it when we had Agnew with something solid he was to go to talk about. But you—Agnew, to send that unguided missile out there, even with Haig, and to have him sit down there, and to have that clever Thieu start to say, “Well, we’ve got to have this and this,” and Agnew won’t even know what the hell hit him. That’s what I’m afraid of—

KISSINGER: I’m no longer—if we go the route I’ve recommended, I’m not so much in favor of sending Agnew. I am in favor of—

NIXON: Sending somebody?

KISSINGER: Of sending somebody, maybe Haig—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —because—

NIXON: I think somebody has to go.

KISSINGER: —we have to shut these guys up.

NIXON: That’s right. The point is, I don’t want them to think that we’ve resumed the bombing, and so forth, and that they’ve gotten their way, Henry. That’s the point—

KISSINGER: You see, that’s—what we have to navigate, now, is a route in which we disassociate from them, but stay closer to them than to Hanoi; to lay the basis for your withdrawing; for your offering the withdrawal for prisoners early—

NIXON: I’d have to make the offer of withdrawal for prisoners. I feel this, if I could make that offer, before the Congress convenes—

KISSINGER: You can do it the last week of December.

NIXON: I think that’s what we have to do.

KISSINGER: The way I would play it—

NIXON: I don’t see any other way. I don’t see any other way we can survive this whole goddamn thing—

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: —and, in the meantime, what do we do? Retain the present complement of men there?

KISSINGER: Where?

NIXON: South Vietnam. Twenty-nine thousand [the approximate number of U.S. military personnel still in South Vietnam].

KISSINGER: Yes, I don’t think they make any difference.

NIXON: All right.

HAIG: I don’t think they make any difference, and I think it’d be a bad sign to draw them down—

NIXON: I understand that. I just want to be sure that we know what the answer is—

KISSINGER: But—but what I would do—

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: What I would recommend, Mr. President—

NIXON: I feel the same way.

KISSINGER: —is, first of all, we ought to get Haig over to the Pentagon as quickly as possible. [Haig was scheduled to become vice chief of staff of the army in January 1973.]

NIXON: [laughs]

KISSINGER: He’s—

NIXON: What can he do over there?

KISSINGER: What he can do over there is—we should put him in charge of a Vietnamese task force. We’ve got this chairman of the Joint Chiefs who is a navy lobbyist, and who doesn’t give a goddamn about the war in Vietnam, and we ought to put Haig in charge of it over in the Pentagon. We ought to put one man in charge of it in Saigon, because—

NIXON: Who? Whitehouse?

KISSINGER: No. No, no. I mean one military guy. I’d put Vogt in charge.

NIXON: All right.

KISSINGER: And then, we can get some real banging done—

NIXON: When?

KISSINGER: —instead of having North Vietnam carved up into six little areas— [The U.S. military divided North Vietnam into “Route Packages” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6A, and 6B), from south to north, to allocate bombing assignments.]

NIXON: When? When? When? When?

KISSINGER: —and then—now, the way I would play it, is this: assuming we have the press conference tomorrow or Saturday—there’s something to be said for having it Saturday, because that gets Le Duc Tho out of Paris, although he’ll be out of Paris by the time I’d go on.

NIXON: I’d worry about him.

KISSINGER: Well, I’d just like—

NIXON: You probably think he doesn’t have a stage?

KISSINGER: He won’t have a stage in Moscow.

NIXON: You mean, not to do the bombing, and so forth?

KISSINGER: No, no. The bombing I would, then, resume within—over the weekend. Say something—

NIXON: While he’s still in Paris? What is it that you don’t want to do with him? What is it that you want to—don’t want to do while he’s in Paris?

KISSINGER: I didn’t want him—I didn’t want to give our version of the negotiations while he’s still in Paris—

NIXON: It’s a good plan.

KISSINGER: Let him kick off his own propaganda machine—

NIXON: That’s right. That’s right.

KISSINGER: I’d like to gain the twelve hours it takes to check with him—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —while he’s moving, but he’s going to leave Paris. If we have our press conference at noon, he’ll be out of Paris till six in the evening.

NIXON: Today is Thursday?

KISSINGER: Yeah. We can do it tomorrow—

NIXON: I would not make your press conference, if you do it, I wouldn’t make it—I don’t know. Al and I talked about it last night, and I wonder if, maybe, we shouldn’t do it on the basis of, maybe, more on the Ziegler thing. [unclear]

KISSINGER: I think it’s a terrible mistake. Ziegler cannot answer the questions. It will look as if I’m hiding—

NIXON: Let’s leave you out of it, whether it looks as if you’re hiding or not. [unclear] We may want you to hide for your—for everybody’s good. Your own, everybody else’s. I mean, what do you think, Al? I don’t know. You’re the best to do it, there’s no question about that—

KISSINGER: No, the bombing announcement—

NIXON: —but my point is—my point is—

KISSINGER: I shouldn’t do the bombing announcement. What I think we should do is that I—no one else understands the negotiations well enough to explain. The way—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —we’ve always snowed the press is by just overwhelming them with technical—

NIXON: All right.

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: All right. What do you want to have come out?

KISSINGER: What I want to—

NIXON: Think about it. What do you want to have the press report after Kissinger gives his three-hour briefing to the press?

KISSINGER: What we have the press report is, first of all—

NIXON: In other words, what are the points you want the press to report?

KISSINGER: That peace was imminent; that it was Communist bad faith—not Saigon—that has prevented it; that—

NIXON: In other words, you want that they—I’m trying to get at something more fundamental. In other words, the press will report the peace talks have broken down.

KISSINGER: No. No, no. The peace talks are still open—

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: —but that the United States remains willing to settle it. The United States remains convinced that it could be settled—

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: —in an extraordinarily short time—

NIXON: But you see—but—but then, the point is that—I’m trying to give you—you see, you’ve got to get—all right, that one point is the peace talks are not broken down; they are at an impasse. The impasse is the fault, primarily, of the North Vietnamese, who are insisting—who have—well, the points I made earlier. The third point is that we’re ready to resume at any time, on that. But the—then—then, you’ve got to get across the fact that we are not simply quibbling over language and translation—

KISSINGER: That’s right—

NIXON: —and so forth. But what it is really about is—

KISSINGER: What—

NIXON: It’s not only the fate of the South Vietnamese, it’s the fate—the fate of peace there. And also, let’s understand, we have our POWs there, and they have not—and they have refused. We had hoped to get this done before Christmas. We wanted our POWs, and we are—I’d like to get a flavor of stepping up the bombing at this time for the POW purposes, before he [Le Duc Tho] even comes. You get my point?

KISSINGER: That’s right. [unclear]

NIXON: Just stepping up the bombing for the purpose of getting them to talk is not going to be [laughs] a very easy one to wheel.

KISSINGER: But for four years, we have said we would not sell out.

NIXON: I know—

KISSINGER: And what these guys have tried to get us to do—that if they had been willing to implement the agreement of the end of October, it would have been easy.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: But every time we try to make it concrete on any issue that would inhibit their military action in the future—

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —they were impossible. For—on the POWs—

NIXON: I know—

KISSINGER: —we’ve asked them for a protocol, how the POWs would be—

NIXON: What I’d like for you to do, if you would, would be to sit down, later this afternoon or this evening—you’ve got plenty of time to think—put down on one sheet of paper, put five or six positive points you want the press to write, to come out of this. This is what we have to do. And then, let everything play around that, rather than giving the press what they would like. And that is simply a gory and brilliant analysis of what they did to us, and what we did to them, and we had it here and there, they had it there and there, and this and that. That will ruin us. That will really ruin us.

If, on the other hand, we can—the public gets the impression that this broke because these bastards were at fault, that they want to impose a Communist government, they’re still holding our prisoners, and we want to get them back, and, consequently, the president is going to insist on taking the strong action to get this war over with. This war must end! It must end soon! And if they don’t want to talk, we will have to go get ’em. If they won’t return our prisoners, we want to hit them soon. We’re going to take the necessary military action to get them back. That’s what you’ve got to get across—

KISSINGER: And what I would think, Mr. President, is we should not announce the bombing tomorrow. We should just start it—

NIXON: Announce it?

KISSINGER: —on Saturday.

NIXON: We’re not going to ever announce the bombing.

KISSINGER: That’s right, and then—

NIXON: Then we’ve got [to] get—and Laird in?

KISSINGER: Ron [Ziegler] can handle that one.

NIXON: No, just remind them. These have—no, we’ve always been bombing. We’ve just—this is fair—

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: —the weather has been bad. Play that. Let’s be a little bit clever. The weather has been bad.

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: They don’t know better.

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: They don’t know better—

KISSINGER: —it’s known that we stopped north of the twentieth, and I think—

NIXON: All right, fine. Fine. Well—

KISSINGER: And I think we can even use that as an advantage to show our goodwill—faith.

NIXON: All right. Fine.

KISSINGER: But, I think—

NIXON: We’ve stopped north of the [unclear]—

KISSINGER: But I think we should resume that.

NIXON: I didn’t resume that. Why doesn’t he say, “We have resumed bombing. We have stepped up bombing”? Why build it up? Why escalate it that way? Just start bombing north of the twentieth.

HAIG: What I meant, it’s bound to make a hellish splash, Mr. President.

NIXON: When we do it?

HAIG: When we do it—

NIXON: Then why explain it?

HAIG: I—

KISSINGER: No, he should just answer the questions.

HAIG: The next day [unclear]—

NIXON: And what, then? What does he say, then?

HAIG: Henry should say, “Yes, due to [unclear]—”

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: “—the current—”

NIXON: No, see, because of the buildup. That’s what I’d say: buildup of the enemy, buildup north of the [unclear]. I’d put it on the basis, because of their buildup north of the twentieth, it appears that they’re going to resume—

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: —activities.

KISSINGER: No, Mr. President, on the—

NIXON: You see my point? Or, something like that. I mean, not on the basis of—if you start the bombing for the purpose, only, of getting them to accept this agreement, that ain’t going to work. If you start the bargaining, if the reason for it, after January 1, which it must be, is only for the purpose of getting our prisoners back, that will work. But if you, at the present time, you can start bombing, say, “Because of significant enemy buildup activities north of that”—put it on military grounds, not on political grounds. Don’t say that we started bombing because they broke off negotiations. Don’t say that. Now, that’s just the wrong—

KISSINGER: No—

NIXON: —decision.

KISSINGER: —Mr. President, I think there’s a fifty–fifty—

NIXON: They all know why we started.

KISSINGER: I think there’s a fifty–fifty chance if we give them a tremendous wallop, particularly not the sort of shit the air force likes to do, if I may use this word—

NIXON: I went over this with them—

KISSINGER: —but if we did—

NIXON: It is shit.

KISSINGER: If we got all their power plants in one day, so that the civilian population would be without light, knocked out all the docks in Haiphong, so that even if the harbor is cleared, they can’t unload there for months to come, then they would know it’s—

NIXON: What kinds of ships are still left around there? [unclear] aren’t there some?

HAIG: Yeah—

KISSINGER: We’d have to do it with smart bombs.

NIXON: Well, can then we knock out docks, then, without knocking out the ships? [unclear]

HAIG: Yes, there are certain dock facilities that can be taken out—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: I’d frankly take my chance on the ships. Your great asset, Mr. President—

NIXON: All right. Take a chance on the ships. All right—

KISSINGER: —is your unpredictability—

NIXON: Look, I’m going to do it. Now, the other thing is nobody—I am the only one who seems to be for this. I went over this with Moorer and Rush. Incidentally, he’s saying it’s fine. Don’t worry about him.

KISSINGER: No, Rush is fine.

NIXON: He’ll stand fine with us. He—he felt that we should continue, and he thinks that, in the end, that we’ve got to make a deal, and so forth. But Rush will do. He says, “Whatever you decide on, I—”

KISSINGER: We’ve got to make a deal.

NIXON: [unclear] but the point about the—the point about the—the reason I say take out all the goddamn airfields, Christ, the Israelis did it and it had quite an effect. Let’s do it.

HAIG: [unclear]

NIXON: Everything in the air—

HAIG: Including the civilian ones—

NIXON: —including the big civilian—

HAIG: —the military sides of ’em.

NIXON: Why not the civilian sides of them, too? What kinds of planes do you think—?

HAIG: Well, we could hit a—

KISSINGER: Chinese and Russian.

HAIG: Chinese and Soviets.

NIXON: All right, fine. Can you go down the military side of it?

HAIG: They tell me they can do it—

NIXON: Yeah? When?

HAIG: —using smart bombs.

NIXON: Are we gonna have—are we gonna have, though—are we going to have a delay of four weeks before they get it done? These smart bombs can’t be used except in clear weather, isn’t that right? Aren’t they visual?

HAIG: That’s right, sir. And the weather right now is absolutely bad.

NIXON: Oh, shit.

HAIG: So, we’ve got to—

NIXON: Here we are again, Henry. We went through this last year, as you remember.

HAIG: I think the only way to do it is to give them about a—just tell them they have blanket authority to do it, because the worst thing we could do, is do a half-assed job the first time—

NIXON: I know. I know. I know, but, Al, suppose the weather—let’s talk. Suppose the weather stays bad through January 3, when the Congress comes back? What in the hell do we get out of it?

KISSINGER: It’s impossible.

HAIG: After that, you can’t.

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: That—that won’t be.

KISSINGER: We’ve got—

NIXON: It won’t be bad that long?

HAIG: No.

NIXON: That’s all right. Now, the other point is: what about the ’52s? Can’t they get in there now?

KISSINGER: Yes.

NIXON: Well goddamn it, let’s get them in. What’s wrong with getting the ’52s in?

KISSINGER: Well, we’ve done—

NIXON: Are we afraid they’re going to be shot down?

KISSINGER: Well, no. We’ve got the problem, Mr. President, let’s face it: the Chief—the chairman of the Chiefs is a navy lobbyist; he’s not a military commander. The Chiefs—

NIXON: He’s [unclear] ’52s?

KISSINGER: The Chiefs only give a damn about budget categories. May 8, you put your neck on the line and those bastards carved up Vietnam into areas of jurisdiction. They didn’t give one goddamn about the national interest. They gave a damn about their service interest.

NIXON: I know. You remember when Connally [unclear]—

KISSINGER: You were—

NIXON: —[unclear] commander—

KISSINGER: You were right—

NIXON: —so we put that asshole Weyand in there, who was worse than Abrams, if anything. Abrams is a—just a clod. I think he’s a good division commander, and everyone—

KISSINGER: We made it.

NIXON: —liked him.

KISSINGER: You were one hundred percent right. We were all wrong—

NIXON: [unclear] mistake, who was right, and who was wrong. But the point is—

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: —it’s done now. We don’t have anybody in charge out there.

KISSINGER: Well, Vogt can do it. We were all—

NIXON: I need—I need a [unclear] out there [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Well, but he didn’t have the authority, Mr. President—

NIXON: We’ve got poor little Don Hughes is out there running the fighters. He can’t do a goddamn thing—

KISSINGER: Well, because they—

NIXON: You have said it.

KISSINGER: —because they—because there’s—there are four different commands bombing North Vietnam, Mr. President—

NIXON: All right, how do we change the four different commands? Can that be done, tomorrow? I’d like it today.

KISSINGER: That can be done the day you give the order. If there’ll be—

NIXON: That’s got to get done immediately.

KISSINGER: They’ll be—

NIXON: We can’t fart around.

KISSINGER: There’ll be unbelievable screaming.

NIXON: Well, that’s the point. They’ve got to get it done right, for a change. We cannot make these military decisions and take all the heat, and have them screw it up again.

KISSINGER: But we’ve got to get a guy in the Pentagon who monitors it from a strategic point of view, and not a fiscal point of view. And we’ve got to get a guy out there who looks at it from a strategic point of view. Now, my judgment is that if you go bold, if we send a message the day the bombing starts saying, “We are ready to resume right away, but we want to warn you that if this agreement is not concluded by January 1, we will not conclude it anymore, and we will work in a different framework.” That scares them. We have a fifty–fifty chance, then, of concluding it.

NIXON: Why not?

KISSINGER: I believe a better than fifty–fifty chance.

NIXON: We’ve had a fifty–fifty so many times before.

KISSINGER: Yeah, but—

NIXON: That’s all right. I don’t care. I don’t care.

KISSINGER: I have to give you—

NIXON: Suppose it’s ten to ninety?

KISSINGER: No, no. It’s better than ten to ninety. It may be seventy-five to twenty-five, because these guys are on their last legs, too. They are scared to death of exactly what we’re talking about now, and they can’t take much more. If they will not settle by January 1, then, at the end of December, at the last plenary session in Paris before [the end of] December, I would scrap this proposal and go for a straight prisoner for withdrawal and end of bombing proposal—

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: —and then, you’d be in good shape by the time Congress returns.

NIXON: Congress cannot return [unclear].

KISSINGER: But I would not yet do that, because if you do it now—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —then, we missed the chance we have of wrapping up this agreement—

NIXON: [unclear] the proposal last week. The proposal last week said that we would bomb them for six months and just, you know, change the proposal right away.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: We must not do that. We’ve got to play this string out. This string must be played out till the bitter end. It’s not—it may not be bitter, I don’t know. I’m afraid it is, and I’m afraid that they think they’ve got—

KISSINGER: No, Mr. President—

NIXON: —us in a crack.

KISSINGER: No, if they thought they had us in a crack, they’d break.

NIXON: No, no, no. I think what—no, the reason they don’t break, I think, is much more fundamental than that. The reason they don’t break is that they know exactly the kind of a conversation—or they fear—is taking place now. If they broke, they’d know that conversation would take place. They think without breaking it, they’re going to be stringing us along. It’s the same old shit they’ve been through all the time, and the minute they break, they figure they’re going to get bombed.

Well, they’re going to get bombed, even without breaking, because, while they haven’t broken, we know they have. That’s all that. I think—I think the breaking thing, which you, which you’re—they want to keep—they want to keep—they feel that by not—by keeping the negotiations open, by having the peaceniks in this country write, “Well, peace is very, very close. Things are going pretty well,” this and that, that that is a hell of an inhibiting force on me. You see? On the other hand, if they break, then they are at fault, and then they say, “Oh, Christ, we run the risk of getting bombed.” That’s why they’re not breaking, Henry, I think.

KISSINGER: That’s—

NIXON: And you think there may be another reason?

KISSINGER: They still want—they still [unclear]—

NIXON: You think they want peace?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Really?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Why?

KISSINGER: If you read the instructions they’ve put out to their cadres. They have told their cadres, “Just hang on a little longer.”

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: “It’s going—there is going to be peace.” I don’t think they can stand a long war. The factors that made them settle in October—when the mines start going in tomorrow, on Saturday, and they are—they are going to have one hell of a—

NIXON: Incidentally, do we have to wait too long to get the mines in?

KISSINGER: Well, Saturday’s only a day and a half away.

NIXON: Oh, Christ. I’m just trying to think of anything that—well—

KISSINGER: But this is pretty fast action. If you start—if you resume on Sunday—you resume the bombing on Sunday, then I would send Haig out. I don’t—I would not send the vice president under—

NIXON: No.

KISSINGER: —these circumstances.

NIXON: No, no. The vice president isn’t going out. The vice president can’t take this heat. I mean, the vice president will get out there, and what will happen is that Thieu will wrap him right around his little finger. He will, I know. If you send the vice president as a missile with one single objective, with Al there to watch him like a hawk, then he can do it. But the vice president will go out there, and Thieu will say—but he’ll show him, you know, that shit he’ll go through, and the vice president will come back. He’ll say, “All right.” He’ll say the right things to Thieu there, but he’ll come back, and then he’ll argue to the president—to me—

KISSINGER: Because—

NIXON: —privately, “Well, we shouldn’t do this, and we shouldn’t drop this, and we shouldn’t do that—”

KISSINGER: Because Thieu’s—

NIXON: Trying to make his record for the future.

KISSINGER: Because Thieu’s behavior has also been totally unforgivable, Mr. President—

NIXON: Terrible. Never said a goddamn word of thanks for what we’ve done standing by him, and the rest. He needs to be told that?

KISSINGER: He’s—

NIXON: I am fed up with him, totally, right up to the [unclear]—

KISSINGER: He’s been incompetent as a war leader—

NIXON: And, incidentally, they’re delaying the foundation, for it’s going to be withdrawal for prisoners. That’s the point. And that, they will—you think, they’ll accept withdrawal for prisoners?

KISSINGER: Well, he proposed it in a letter to you.

NIXON: I don’t mean Thieu. I don’t give a goddamn what he accepts. Will the North accept it?

KISSINGER: Not for three months.

NIXON: Do you agree?

HAIG: I think they’re going to have to take some heavy pounding.

KISSINGER: I think there’s a better chance that they’ll accept this agreement before January 1—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —than there is that they’ll accept withdrawal for prisoners. But, I have laid the basis of our going to withdrawal for prisoners, and—

NIXON: And we know we can’t wheel together.

KISSINGER: —and, believe me, it scares them. Every time at the meeting that I say, “Now [unclear] remember one thing, this is your last chance of negotiating in this framework. Don’t forget this. Next time, we talk only military.” And every time he pulls back from that [unclear].

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: This is why I wouldn’t play it yet.

NIXON: Well, what should we do with Dobrynin, on this?

KISSINGER: I would just be enigmatic with Dobrynin.

NIXON: Tell him nothing?

KISSINGER: I would say—

NIXON: You’re not going to see him?

KISSINGER: I’ll see him, briefly. I’ll say we are totally fed up.

NIXON: I’ve got a little problem, you know. Tricia’s going to be there. [Nixon’s daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, and her husband, Ed, were then in Europe and expected to be in the Soviet Union during the time North Vietnam would be bombed.]

KISSINGER: They’ll treat her marvelously.

NIXON: Should she cancel?

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: No, we should keep our good relations with the Russians. We should give the impression that they were screwed just as we were, as indeed they were, Mr. President. The account that Dobrynin gave to Haig is, first of all, one they couldn’t have—

NIXON: The main thing to get across when the bombing goes, starts again, Al—remember this is something [unclear] and Ziegler will be talking about—the main point is that I really want this time, Henry, as I said, I don’t want a long talking sheet. I just want to see one page, like I do before I do a—

KISSINGER: No, I’ll—

NIXON: —very important press thing. What are the points we want to pound into the consciousness of these dumb, left-wing enemies of ours in the press? Pound ’em out. Pound ’em out, and forget about it. Make all the other points, because that dazzles them. But remember, we’ve got an audience out there that’s ours. Talk to the sixty-one percent [the percentage of the popular vote Nixon received in the general election on November 7, 1972]. Talk to—I know, everybody thinks they’re dummies—they were smart enough to vote for us.

KISSINGER: Mr. President, they saved us. They’re the good [unclear]—

NIXON: [unclear] But they’ve got to hear it clear and loud and simple. Prisoners, they will understand. Treachery, they will understand. Changes of wording, they will not understand. Dates and da-da-da-da-da-da, they will not understand. But they’ll understand treachery, and they’ll understand the imposition of a Communist government on the people of South Vietnam. That, they will understand. Thieu’s not going along, they’ll understand that if it’s said in a way more in sorrow than in anger, but, that as far as we’re concerned, making it very clear, we are not hostage to either of the Vietnams.

KISSINGER: That—

NIXON: We are the party that wants peace in Vietnam, for both sides. And let the future of this poor, suffering country be determined by the people of South Vietnam and not on the battlefield. That’s what our proposal is. We call on the South and we call on the North to agree to this kind of thing. Call on them both to agree. You can—

KISSINGER: I think that they—

NIXON: —make quite a little show you put on out there.

KISSINGER: That’s—

NIXON: On the other hand, I think it should be done like today.

KISSINGER: No, I think we should wait till tomorrow. Give Dobrynin a chance to get—so that his people aren’t stunned by it.

NIXON: What do you mean Dobrynin?

KISSINGER: I think the Russians shouldn’t be stunned.

NIXON: Oh. Why would they be more stunned today than tomorrow?

KISSINGER: Because, today, they’ve had no preparations. I can tell Dobrynin, today, you’re fed up, then Brezhnev will have read it tomorrow, and then, by the time I go on, it will be—also, I—

NIXON: This is not the time when I should tell Dobrynin.

KISSINGER: No, because—I’ll tell you why, Mr. President—

NIXON: All right. Don’t use him.

KISSINGER: Let me tell you—

NIXON: I don’t want to—

KISSINGER: No, let me tell you why not.

NIXON: But understand, I’m ready to—we’ve got to play the big bullet, and we’ll use it—

KISSINGER: No, but Mr. President—

NIXON: —I think that’s the only bullet, but I will not play it, not in front of that—in front of these television cameras, again, and make one of these asshole Vietnam speeches. This is not the time.

KISSINGER: You were right. You were right—

NIXON: We can’t do it.

KISSINGER: No, you were right.

NIXON: You can’t rally people when they’re up there already.

KISSINGER: You were [unclear]—

NIXON: You can rally them when they’re on their ass.

KISSINGER: —I was wrong.

NIXON: No, you’re not right or wrong. It’s just a question of what you know.

KISSINGER: But the—

NIXON: Go ahead.

KISSINGER: But the reason you shouldn’t—

NIXON: Never.

KISSINGER: —intervene directly is we should not make Vietnam an issue in your relations with Brezhnev.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: We should have the Russians in the position where they say, “These crazy, stupid—”

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: “—lying sons of bitches in Hanoi—”

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: “—have screwed us again.”

NIXON: Well, now, the question: what are you going to do about—what should we do—I asked Al about this yesterday—should we get Rogers, Laird, Moorer, Helms in? And we’d have to have the poor, poor vice president, too. I think he’ll listen.

KISSINGER: Yeah. I would do it Saturday morning.

NIXON: Before the bombing?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Yeah, but Laird will—with all the orders [unclear]—

KISSINGER: I wouldn’t evade it.

NIXON: Huh?

KISSINGER: I wouldn’t evade it. I’d say, “I’ve got you in, gentlemen, to tell you you’re [I’m] commander in chief.” Let me give them a brief—a short briefing. I would not ask their advice—

NIXON: Could I ask you—could I ask you—

KISSINGER: Or you could do it tomorrow afternoon.

NIXON: Yeah. Could I ask you, incidentally, you’re going to do the briefing for the press, and we’ll do it tomorrow afternoon, but could you, Henry, take the time, today, to lay the framework for that by enlisting a few people?

KISSINGER: Absolutely.

NIXON: All right. Now, the ones you should enlist, it seems to me—

KISSINGER: Is the vice president?

NIXON: You should tell the vice president, “Look, the spee—the thing is off,” and then say, “The president doesn’t want you to get out there on a loser, and at this point, we’re not ready. Later on, we may have to use you, because we haven’t got an agreement.” You understand?

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: Now, he’ll talk about the fact, “Well, let me go out and negotiate with him.” You can say, “No, Mr. Vice President, you don’t have a negotiating stroke.” [unclear]

KISSINGER: We shouldn’t negotiate with either of the Vietnamese—

NIXON: You understand that the real reason is I don’t want him negotiating with even Guatemala, because, as you know, he doesn’t have what we know, understand. But you point out if you can see him—or Al can see him, either one, either—the second one—

KISSINGER: Yes.

NIXON: —I think you should see—I think—there’s the Rogers thing.

KISSINGER: I’ll see him.

NIXON: And I think—I don’t know how you handle Rogers. I haven’t seen him since the meeting in Camp David, and—but I—but he’s not whimpered about everything we’ve done. So, what do you think? How do you think Rogers should be handled? I just don’t want to face Rogers at the meeting—

HAIG: [unclear]

NIXON: I want Rogers as an ally Saturday morning.

HAIG: [unclear]

NIXON: Tell him our whole foreign policy—

KISSINGER: The fact of the matter is Rogers will try to use it to do me in, but he will not necessarily—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: There’ll be two things happening. Rogers will support you at the meeting—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: —and he will leak out stuff that I screwed it up. Now, those are two inevitable—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —results.

NIXON: Let me say, all that doesn’t matter. How many times have they done that to both of us?

KISSINGER: That’s right. But he’ll support you—

NIXON: One time I screwed it up, the other time you screwed up. The main thing is winning, isn’t it?

KISSINGER: That’s right. I don’t give a damn—

NIXON: The main thing is—look, the main thing is how we look four years from now. Four years we’re going to be here.

KISSINGER: That’s why—

NIXON: Goddamn those bastards. And listen, they don’t realize. I mean, you—I mean, I will not do anything foolish. That’s why I won’t go on the television, or anything like that. I won’t do anything foolish. But—I won’t say anything foolish—but I will do things that are goddamn rash as hell, ’cause I don’t give a goddamn what happens. I don’t care. I don’t really care—

KISSINGER: Mr. President, it’s painful for me, but if you do—if you don’t do this, it will be like the EC-121 [an April 1969 incident when North Korean fighter aircraft shot down an EC-121 Warning Star on a reconnaissance mission over the Sea of Japan; all thirty-one U.S. military personnel on board died]. The Russians—you got more credit with the Russians—

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: —and this—

NIXON: I know that.

KISSINGER: —they’ll pay attention to.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: Now, we’re going to take unshirted hell, again, here in this country. I can just see the cartoons and the editorials—

NIXON: Sure.

KISSINGER: —and the news stories—

NIXON: Sure. Sure. And let me tell you, over Christmas period and the rest, it isn’t going to make that much difference because they ain’t going to have pictures of American casualties, and they aren’t going to have—they’ll hear about there are a few missing planes in action, but, Henry, the war is a nonissue at the moment. Right, Al?

HAIG: Right. Right—

NIXON: Sure, it’s in the headlines about peace, and all that, but that’s the assholes like Reston, and the rest like him. But the average person doesn’t give a damn.

KISSINGER: Mr. President, everybody will have to believe, that can be convinced, that we made a tremendous effort. If it fails—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: And that we will not—we will not agree to a peace that is a peace of surrender. Put it that way.

KISSINGER: That was our position—

NIXON: And that we will not agree to a peace that is a peace of surrender. We will not agree to a peace that is a peace that imposes a Communist government. And that we—and you say that, you lay those conditions on it, but that now, on the other hand, we’re ready at any time to negotiate for peace. They were willing to negotiate as of three weeks ago. Now, it’s time we find out. But that’s the end of it. We’re not going to be impotent under these circumstances, at a time they are building up. You see, the rationale for the bombing, Al, must be a buildup in the North. Just say that. Christ, everybody’s going to think that it’s true.

HAIG: It is true.

NIXON: It’s true. They’ve restored the goddamn power plants, and the rest, so we’re bombing the North again, because they’re building up the North—

KISSINGER: [unclear] they have the biggest—that’s another thing, Mr. President. They have the biggest infiltration, a bigger one than last year, going on right now.

NIXON: Don’t worry about that at the moment. I mean that’s—that’s true, but wait, but my point is, without going into infiltration and the rest, we just have to say, “Because of a—there’s a big enemy buildup in the war, and they’re not going to trick us, so we’re going to bomb them.” We’ll take the heat right over the Christmas period, and then, on January 3, it’s prisoners for withdrawal.

KISSINGER: You can do that. I forget when January 1 is. I think—

NIXON: January 1 is a Monday.

KISSINGER: It’s a Monday?

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: The Thursday before that, whenever that is, it would be about the twenty-eighth of December, we table in Paris. We scrap this plan and table in Paris: straight prisoner, and withdrawal, and end of bombing—I mean, withdrawal and end of bombing for prisoners.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: Let them—they’ll turn it down right away; we’ll be in good shape.

NIXON: Fine. Then we just continue to, continue bombing them. Now, Laird will bitch about the cost of this.

HAIG: Right.

NIXON: Now, what is it? Sure, it’s a problem. How much is the cost of this?

KISSINGER: It’s pretty high.

HAIG: It—

NIXON: Bombing?

HAIG: The real scrub will be about three billion dollars, if it had to go through till—to June. If it stops short of that, we’re talking about one point five.

KISSINGER: I think, Mr. President—

NIXON: You think one point five?

KISSINGER: —these guys—

NIXON: The Defense Department is going to have to swallow it, anyway, because we’re not going to continue to have four intelligence departments, and four tactical air forces. That’s one thing we’re changing over at that goddamn place, when you get there.

KISSINGER: But they were willing to—the other side, we must look at it realistically. The other side was practically on their knees in October. They’d never have gotten as far as they did. It is not a bad agreement. It’s a good agreement, if it’s observed. If it’s observed, the other side will be forced to withdraw. What we have to do, though, is to convince them that we are not easily pushed around. If we cave now, the agreement will be unenforceable, and we will have—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —signed something that—

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: Well, all right. This is the way. Now, let’s—you will go when? You just—last night, we felt that Ziegler should do it. Do you agree Henry should do it now? It’s a tough call, isn’t it?

HAIG: It is a tough call because there is so much in the business of answering questions and—

NIXON: Well, I think Henry has to do it for another reason, maybe. Look, and we can’t claim that he’s hiding—

HAIG: It will—

NIXON: —or that I’m hiding—

HAIG: —look contrived.

NIXON: Huh?

HAIG: It will look contrived. It—

NIXON: Or that I—

HAIG: That’s right.

NIXON: Now—

KISSINGER: Ron has neither the conviction, nor the authority, Mr. President—

NIXON: Well, he has the conviction.

KISSINGER: But he can’t project it because he doesn’t know enough.

NIXON: No, no. I know. No, Ron doesn’t give a shit about the bombing. He doesn’t care. He’s sure to go right ahead and do it. Don’t have any ideas about [unclear]—

KISSINGER: No, no. He has the convic—no, he’s backed the policy—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —but he cannot present the negotiations with—

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: —conviction.

NIXON: I understand.

KISSINGER: I don’t present the bombing anyway. That, Ron should do in answer to questions.

HAIG: The morning it happens, he just—

NIXON: Yeah.

HAIG: —says he’s not sure.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Tomorrow, all we do—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: —is to—

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: —is to explain where we stand—

NIXON: I’m not worried about the bombing as some others are. I think you’re going to have the heat in the magazines, and so forth and on, and Sevareid, and Rather, and all those jackasses. Cronkite will cry buckets of tears. Everybody says, “Why do the bombing over Christmas? Weather is it, and so forth?” Can we get one message to Thieu: please stop the crap about a Christmas to New Year’s truce, right now. Right now.

KISSINGER: Immediately.

NIXON: No—there ain’t going to be no truce. Or do we—or shouldn’t we do that?

KISSINGER: Absolutely.

NIXON: Because I can’t stop this over Christmas.

KISSINGER: Absolutely not.

HAIG: We can stop it Christmas Day. I—I don’t know what to do.

KISSINGER: I wouldn’t stop it. Once we go, we keep going. Maybe Christmas Day—

NIXON: Now, maybe, Al’s got a point. Christmas Day, that’s all, but not New Year’s. Except for Christmas Day, there will be no—there will be no truce, except for Christmas Day.

KISSINGER: We can get that to—

NIXON: Just say, “Except for Christmas Day, there will be no truce.” I don’t want anybody flying over Christmas Day. People would not understand that. There’s always been a truce; World War I, World War II, and so forth. All right, the main thing is for you to get rested and get ready for all this and go out there and just remember that when it’s toughest, that’s when we’re the best. And remember, we’re going to be around and outlive our enemies. And also, never forget, the press is the enemy.

KISSINGER: On that, there’s no question—

NIXON: The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.

KISSINGER: I, on the professors—

NIXON: Always—

KISSINGER: —I need no instruction at all.

NIXON: Always—

KISSINGER: And on the press, I’m in complete agreement with you—

NIXON: It’s the enemy. So we use them, at times. But remember, with the exception, now and then, of a—I think [Richard] Wilson, maybe—there are two or three—Howard Smith. Yes, there are still a few patriots, but most of them are—they’re very disappointed because we beat ’em in the election. They know they’re out of touch with the country. It kills those bastards. They are the enemy, and we’re just gonna continue to use them, and never let them think that we think they’re the enemy. You see my point? But the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. That’s all.

KISSINGER: Mr. President, if you don’t do this—

NIXON: [laughs]

KISSINGER: —you’ll be—

NIXON: I’ll do it.

KISSINGER: —then you’ll really be impotent, and you’ll be caught between the liberals and the conservatives. You won’t win the liberals. And—and, besides, we’ll be totally finished by February. They’ll just be chopping the salami.

NIXON: There’s another one that you’ve got to—you’ve got—that I think is very important, that I want you to—I want to talk, and I want you to get to—I want you to have a private talk with Rush. Rush can work on Laird. And Rush, of course, will be in State, in eventual time. Rush will be loyal.

KISSINGER: Rush is—

NIXON: Rush believed last week, when we got these messages—when Al was coming back—he thought we did—you know, that this is exactly the thing to do, and he analyzed it beautifully. He says the problem is here. He says that Saigon’s interests and North Vietnam’s interests are different from our own, so we’ve got to—

[unclear exchange]

NIXON: He’s totally right. But the point is, we can’t make a deal which plays either interest. But Rush must be sold. Now, what about Moorer?

HAIG: Moorer’s a whore.

KISSINGER: He is. He’s a whore. He’ll do whatever he’s told.

NIXON: Helms?

KISSINGER: I’ll get him.

NIXON: Helms is going to get a marvelous—oh, incidentally, when he goes to Iran, I want him to roam. Let him roam down onto those goddamn sheikdoms. Let him go around, you know, to see the southeast and the rest. I mean he—he’s—

KISSINGER: Helms is a loyalist.

NIXON: He’ll do a lot of good. What I mean is, he’s going to be an ambassador extraordinary over there. [Helms was recently appointed ambassador to Iran.]

KISSINGER: We won’t have any problems with Helms.

 

“Senator, I know this is a very tragic day for you.”

December 19, 1972, 12:21 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Joe Biden

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

President Nixon comforts Senator-elect Joe Biden (D-DE), whose wife and one-year-old daughter had been killed in a tragic car accident the day before. Biden’s sons, Beau and Hunter, who survived the accident, remained in the hospital.

 

BIDEN: Hello, Mr. President, how are you?

NIXON: Senator, I know this is a very tragic day for you, but I wanted you to know that all of us here at the White House were thinking about you and praying for you, and also for your two children.

BIDEN: I appreciate that very much.

NIXON: I understand you were on the Hill at the time, and your wife was just driving by herself.

BIDEN: Yes, that’s right.

NIXON: But in any event, looking at it as you must in terms of the future, because you have the great fortune of being young. I remember I was two years older than you when I went to the House. But the main point is you can remember that she was there when you won a great victory. You enjoyed it together, and now, I’m sure, she’ll be watching you from now on. Good luck to you.

BIDEN: Thank you very much, Mr. President.

NIXON: Okay.

BIDEN: Thank you for your call. I appreciate it.

 

“We’ve got to continue to crack it up there, so that they know we can still come back.”

December 20, 1972, 11:32 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Bob Haldeman

OVAL OFFICE

 

On December 18, Nixon had ordered the launch of Operation Linebacker II, an air assault of an intensity not seen since World War II. On the first day, well over a hundred B-52s flew over North Vietnam and dropped bombs on much wider locations than were specified in Linebacker I or any previous U.S. missions. Hanoi and Haiphong were the central targets in what was to have been a three-day campaign. Nixon and his advisors were in a noticeably buoyant frame of mind as they received reports that the assault was going largely as planned. They began their conversation trading notes on Thieu but were more focused on the endgame in both Vietnams.

 

NIXON: Well, Henry, are you ready to go?

KISSINGER: Haig has joined the club.

NIXON: What’s the matter? [unclear]?

KISSINGER: He got kicked—

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: He got kicked in the teeth—

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: Kept waiting for five hours.

NIXON: Has he seen him [Thieu], and then saw him?

KISSINGER: Saw him. Got a letter to you turning it all down. Demands the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces, totally.

HALDEMAN: Hmm.

KISSINGER: He’ll accept the political framework, now, reluctantly. He accepts the national council. He’ll no longer call it a coalition government in disguise. All he wants is total withdrawal of North—North Vietnamese forces and two other insane conditions. And—he has to be insane.

NIXON: Well, where does that leave us now?

KISSINGER: That leaves us that we go balls out on January 3 for a separate deal. Under these conditions, Mr. President, it’s two—there are only two choices we now have.

NIXON: Uh-huh.

KISSINGER: Actually, I think the North Vietnamese are in a curious pattern. They came to the technical meeting today.

NIXON: They did?

KISSINGER: They didn’t cancel it. They condemned us for twenty minutes about the bombing and refused to talk about anything else, but then they proposed another technical meeting for Saturday. Now, that’s not a sign of enormous vigor. [laughter] Well, we lost three B-52s this morning, and we hit a Russian ship.

NIXON: We lost three more B-52s? That’s six together—altogether?

KISSINGER: Yeah. Yesterday we didn’t lose any.

NIXON: What?

KISSINGER: Yesterday we didn’t lose any.

NIXON: Oh, that’s rough.

KISSINGER: Well, we are scaling down—

NIXON: What do we have to do then?

KISSINGER: Well, tomorrow, we had in any event planned to go down to thirty over Hanoi and scatter the rest over the rest of the country.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And—

NIXON: I wonder what they did to—were these lost over Hanoi—

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: —these three ’52s?

KISSINGER: These SA-2s were designed against B-52s, Mr. President.

NIXON: How much of a flap is going to be developed out of those three B-52s?

KISSINGER: Um, they’re starting.

NIXON: Hmm?

KISSINGER: They’re starting. Kennedy made a speech last night.

NIXON: What’d he say?

KISSINGER: That Congress says that if you fail—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —I fail. He took me on, too. He said it’s got to be taken out of our hands, and Congress has to legislate us out of the war. Of course, what that son of a bitch Thieu has done to us is criminal. We could have ended the war as an American initiative—

NIXON: How does the—how does Moorer feel about the three B-52s? Does he express concern? Or, Laird? Did you talk to him?

KISSINGER: Well, I talked to Laird, but, you know, they say they expected three for every hundred. That’s true.

NIXON: For every strike?

HALDEMAN: Every hundred that you move in—

KISSINGER: Yeah.

HALDEMAN: —expect to lose three.

NIXON: Well, that’s what we’ve been losing.

KISSINGER: But, of course, the trouble is our air force. With—to give you an example, every day, they have flown these missions at exactly the same hour.

HALDEMAN: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Then, I told this to them yesterday. They said, “Well, we got so much other stuff coming in.” But these North Vietnamese aren’t stupid. They know at seven ten, the goddamn B-52s are coming. That’s what I think happened.

NIXON: Hmm.

KISSINGER: That these guys—

NIXON: Well let’s come back to the losses again. If they expect three for every hundred, that’s what we’re losing, is that correct?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: We didn’t lose that many, though. You didn’t lose any the second day, did you?

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: Well, we mustn’t knock it off, though.

KISSINGER: Absolutely not.

NIXON: Laird is not suggesting knocking it off, is he?

KISSINGER: Well, he wouldn’t resist such an order, but I think now that we’ve crossed the Rubicon, Mr. President, the only thing that we can do is total brutality. But, we now have a strategic choice. I think there’s a better than fifty–fifty chance that the North Vietnamese will want to go ahead with the agreement, ’cause I don’t see any sense in their continuing the technical talks if they didn’t want to, to settle. It is now also clear to me, or almost clear, that there’s almost no way we can get Thieu to go along without doing a Diem on him.

NIXON: [unclear]?

KISSINGER: No, I know. But I’m just saying what our problem is. We had to scuttle his economic aid; we had to scuttle his military aid. And we can do it. Then, he gets overthrown and—so, what I think we have to do, the only question in my mind, now, is whether we should get to the bilateral—

NIXON: Is Haig on his way back?

KISSINGER: He’ll be in Key Biscayne, either tomorrow night or first thing Friday.

NIXON: He’s not going to see Thieu again?

KISSINGER: No. There’s nothing to talk about. He’s now in Bangkok, and he’s going to Seoul, and he’ll be in Key Biscayne no later than eight o’clock Friday morning. And the only—of course, Thieu kept him waiting for six hours; his schedule is screwed up. That’s another outrageous behavior of Thieu. You know, he kept me waiting once for fifteen hours. But let’s—that’s a different problem. We have two choices now. We can either scrap the peace plan altogether and go immediately to the bilateral, and we then—the North Vietnamese may force on us if they turn it down, too. Or, we can conclude it with the North Vietnamese, if they come along, and, then, if Thieu doesn’t buy it, go, go bilateral. That son of a bitch—you know, if we had known that no matter what we did, he wouldn’t go along—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —we could have settled the week of November 20. I wouldn’t have presented all of his goddamn demands.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Yeah, but what would we just—what would we have settled?

KISSINGER: Well, we could have gotten—we could have gotten eight or ten changes.

NIXON: No, no, no, no, no. But how could we have settled with them, and still retained—?

KISSINGER: No, what we would have had to do, then, was use the fact of a settlement. I think, domestically, we’ll be all right if we get a settlement with Hanoi that Thieu rejects, and then go bilaterally—

NIXON: I agree.

KISSINGER: And then go bilaterally. What’s killing us now is that we have neither a settlement with Hanoi, nor a settlement with Thieu. And if that bastard hadn’t strung us along—I mean, your instructions to me—I mean, that’s not your instructions, but I mean if you—because we had both decided this, my conception was, which I had recommended to you, to do as much as we can in presenting Thieu’s position, so that then, get the maximum from the other side, we can take it back to Saigon. If we had known that no matter what we did, it wouldn’t make any difference, that he was going to demand unconditional surrender, we could have had some sort of agreement on November 21 or 22. Because you and I recognize that most of these changes are bullshit. They are slight improvements, but what makes this agreement go is what you told Duc.

NIXON: Coming back to the B-52 thing, now. The—we cannot back off of this, now—

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: —even if that’s—if it’s three, if they expect three on every one [hundred], that’s about what you have to be, have to be prepared for. But I wouldn’t think that, that—that they would rush into that every time. It would seem to me that—

KISSINGER: Well, the—there are many other targets in the North. They don’t have to hit Hanoi every time.

NIXON: [unclear]

KISSINGER: And, of course, if these sons of bitches had airplanes that could fly—

NIXON: I know. I know. But they don’t have, so we’ve got to [unclear]—

KISSINGER: No, but if they could put a lot of TacAir up with the B-52s, it would confuse the SAMs.

HALDEMAN: If you’ve lost Thieu, why can’t you move right now to settle?

KISSINGER: Well, because now we—they owe us an answer.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: And I think it’s a sign of weakness to send them a note before we’ve got an answer. That—that note we sent them makes it very easy for them to settle.

NIXON: You say they did agree to the technical talks last—since they got your note [unclear]?

KISSINGER: They continued. The technical talks were scheduled for today.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: They came in and just read a statement denouncing the bombings. That’s all right, but then at the end of that statement, they proposed another meeting for Saturday. So far, the Chinese reaction has been very mild. The Soviet reaction has been very mild. We may get an agreement out of this. We may win the Hanoi game.

NIXON: What is the—

KISSINGER: I completely misjudged Thieu. I thought at the end of October, we all thought at the end of October, the reason we held out was because we were all convinced that as soon as your election was over, and he realized it wasn’t just an election ploy, he’d come along. And when we sent Haig out the day after your election, we thought then that this would do it.

NIXON: He, in effect, has said [unclear]?

KISSINGER: We’ll he’s ignored your letters, his usual tactic—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —and stated his demands again. He’s made another crap concession: he says he will now accept that national council—it’s a great concession of him—if we get the North Vietnamese troops out; if we get a commitment from the North Viet—if we don’t recognize; if the PRG isn’t mentioned anywhere in the document, including the preamble; and, one other condition, which is—

NIXON: Well, in effect, what he has said, and we must play this very, very close to the vest, is that he wants us to go alone.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: Now, what we’ve got to figure out, and have to figure it out in the coolest possible terms: we’ve got to figure out how we can go it alone with Hanoi, without sinking South Vietnam.

KISSINGER: That—that’s right.

NIXON: Now, the question is: will the Congress provide aid to South Vietnam, in the event they don’t go along with the settlement? Also, the question is: will Hanoi settle this bilaterally? What the hell can they do, without the condition that we stop aid to South Vietnam?

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: I know the other reason is June 8. We answered we would cut aid down, and accept, if the other side does, and so forth, and so on. Well, put yourself in their position. Here, they’re sitting on that prisoner thing; they know Thieu won’t go along; they know we can’t give them a political settlement. What the hell?

KISSINGER: Well, what they get is—

NIXON: What incentive have they got? Well, they get the bombing stopped, for one thing. And they got the mining stopped—

KISSINGER: That’s why you’ve got to keep bombing.

NIXON: I know—

KISSINGER: That’s the major reason, now, why you have to keep up the bombing. It gets the bombing stopped. It gets the mining stopped. It gets us out of there. We—they don’t have to worry about the DMZ. They don’t have to worry about a lot of other restrictions. And they can gamble that Congress will cut off the aid.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: I mean, it’s unlikely that we’re going to be able to get eight hundred million dollars of aid a year for South Vietnam.

NIXON: We also hold the—you realize your aid promise to North Vietnam is in jeopardy, too. I can’t see the Congress aiding the North and not aiding the South—

KISSINGER: No, we can’t give them aid under those conditions, while they’re fighting in the South.

HALDEMAN: Wouldn’t that be their incentive to let us go on aiding the South?

KISSINGER: Well, they won’t—we can’t give them aid while they’re fighting the South. I think that’s the problem—

NIXON: Never. Not as long as there’s a war. In other words, there’s no cease-fire then.

KISSINGER: No. No cease-fire. But we can make the argument that the North—South Vietnamese can stand on their own feet.

NIXON: That’s right. That’s right. No, I understand. It’s not a very good way to do it, but it’s the best we’ve got.

KISSINGER: Well, it’s probably—I think now, Mr. President, if Thieu were not a cheap, self-serving son of a bitch, because that’s really what’s involved. That bastard can’t figure out how he’s going to stay in office in a free political contest. If he had embraced the agreements in late October, stood next to you somewhere, it would have been easy to make it work, and proclaim it a victory. But, now, he’s made such an issue of it that I don’t see—we may wind up getting an agreement, the guy collapses on us six months later, and I don’t know why he wouldn’t be—not because of the agreement, but because of what he’s made out of the agreement.

NIXON: I understand.

KISSINGER: Now, I still don’t exclude that this devious son of a bitch, that if we did get an agreement, that maybe—that you could argue that he’s making this whole record so that he can say he was raped by us, vis-à-vis his domestic constituents—

NIXON: And that he’d do, if he won.

KISSINGER: —and then, he’ll cave at the very last second, reluctantly screaming, bitching. But—

NIXON: Maybe we don’t want to play it.

HALDEMAN: But I—that’s the question we have to ask ourselves. Supposing we—you make an agreement, which your ally says is imposed on him, and then the son of a bitch collapses a year from now. Whether we aren’t better off early in January—

NIXON: I’m not sure, Bob, that the Colson argument is the one we didn’t worry too much about. You may not recall what it was. Well, I think it’s better. The first thing is going to be damn near moot anyway. His point was that a bilateral agreement, the weakness in it being, well, what the hell, that’s just exactly what McGovern offered.

KISSINGER: No. That isn’t—

NIXON: And Mansfield, and some of the rest.

HALDEMAN: It’s—(a) it’s not; (b) it’s in a totally different period of time, and after a totally different set of circumstances—

KISSINGER: Because what McGovern offered is a unilateral withdrawal, with a total cutoff of military and economic aid—

NIXON: Well, then Mansfield also cuts off—

HALDEMAN: It’s the prisoners—

NIXON: —military and economic aid—

KISSINGER: Well, no, and then we’ll get our prisoners.

NIXON: No. No, he didn’t get that—

[unclear exchange]

KISSINGER: No, no. He would say after we get out, he was sure they would release our prisoners.

HALDEMAN: It wasn’t in his deal.

KISSINGER: But it wasn’t part of the deal—

NIXON: We know. The point is, I listened, I argued, I answered it in a different way. In my view, the main thing is to now finish it the best way we can, as honorably as we can. We have made this last pop at ’em, which we had to do.

KISSINGER: And we’ve got to keep it up, or we’ll never get the prisoners.

NIXON: Oh, I understand that. I mean, you’ve got to keep that bombing of the North, Henry, until you get the prisoners.

KISSINGER: Without that, we’ll never get the prisoners. Incidentally, one thing is fascinating to me from my television performance, from Saturday. I have yet to receive one negative letter. I must have two hundred letters by now, or telegrams, all saying, “We are proud of what you’re doing. Don’t let the Communists push you around.”

NIXON: So, you see, that, of course, would militate against a separate deal, too.

KISSINGER: We’ve got no place to go with a negotiated deal. That’s the tragedy.

NIXON: Well, I’m just telling you that the—the point is that it’s a—there’s no negotiation—

KISSINGER: If Thieu went along, Mr. President, we—by last night, I had come to the view that, on the assumption that Haig could get Thieu’s agreement, that you’d be better off sticking with this agreement—

NIXON: I know. We talked about that.

KISSINGER: —and not going the bilateral route. But I don’t see how we can go the negotiated route, and then wind up with—unless we just blazed right through—get it, and then let Thieu turn it down. That’s another option—

NIXON: What’s that?

KISSINGER: We could just stick with the agreement, bomb the bejeezus out of them until we get the agreement, and then let Thieu turn it down, and then go bilaterally.

NIXON: I don’t like that.

HALDEMAN: You don’t?

KISSINGER: Because, well—

HALDEMAN: That’s easier to sell.

KISSINGER: Well, if Thieu turns it down.

NIXON: No—

KISSINGER: My nightmare is that Thieu will then accept it, saying, “I had to accept this, because the Americans betrayed us.”

NIXON: I think that, basically, we should say, and I think it’s better not to try to get the negotiated agreement, it’s better at this point simply to make a separate deal, and with the North saying, we—it’s obvious that they won’t go along on this sort of thing. We can’t feel that, well, we’ll stop the bombing, we’ll stop the mining, we’ll withdraw all of our forces in return for our prisoners of war, and you decide the situation in the South. We’ll continue to aid the South. Now, it doesn’t do anything for Laos; it doesn’t do anything for Cambodia. It’s tough on that issue.

KISSINGER: But we can help them bilaterally. What Thieu has done to the structure of Southeast Asia—the one thing in which Harriman was right, unfortunately, is that Thieu is an unmitigated, selfish, psychopathic son of a bitch. I mean, here he’s got a deal which we wouldn’t have dared to propose it in August, lest McGovern turn it against us.

NIXON: What was Kennedy’s—the occasion of his attack?

KISSINGER: B’nai B’rith—

NIXON: The speech he gave?

KISSINGER: The B’nai B’rith [unclear]—

NIXON: Oh, Christ.

KISSINGER: It wasn’t an all-out attack; it was a fairly moderate one. But Dole has been popping off. I saw him this morning on television.

NIXON: Again?

HALDEMAN: Really?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

HALDEMAN: What’d he say today?

KISSINGER: He said it is not yet time to take it out of the president’s hands, but if this continues, we may have to be concerned. I mean, it was a sort of a half-assed support of you.

 

KISSINGER: So Haig closed his cable, he said, “I’m proud to be joining the club now.”

NIXON: There’s nobody else—it’s a good thing we didn’t send Agnew, isn’t it? What if Agnew had gone? What would have happened then?

KISSINGER: Well, we would have had to go bilateral. You see, what Carver thinks—the CIA expert—Carver thinks that what Thieu expected me to do in October was to go on to Hanoi and sign the goddamn thing, and that what he’s been waiting for, is for us to sign it, scream bloody murder, and then go along. He doesn’t want to be asked ahead of time.

NIXON: And you think maybe that—you think maybe we should—you really think that maybe we should consider the option of signing an agreement, and having Thieu turn it down? Well, if it could be one where we got an agreement, and, then Thieu said, “I won’t go until they’re all out.” You see, Bob, the position that puts us in politically? That he—he—then there’s a great debate in this country that we’re signing an agreement that allows Communists to stay in the country.

HALDEMAN: Yeah, but you—you’re signing an agreement that’s better than any agreement you had hoped to get. [unclear]

KISSINGER: And not different, because that’s what we’d always proposed to do—

HALDEMAN: It meant bigger objectives. And, then—

NIXON: And then of course—

HALDEMAN: —we’d go the last mile and—

NIXON: And that would be better—

HALDEMAN: —try to drag Thieu along.

NIXON: And then we say, “Well, under the circ—” But I’ll tell you, we could do it as an alternative. What I mean is, I don’t want to go down the road to try to get a political agreement, and then—and they all—then, you see, your agreement would have in the aid to North Vietnam, and all the rest. Then, let us suppose Thieu turns it down. Then what do you do?

KISSINGER: Then you have to go bilateral.

NIXON: Then go bilateral.

KISSINGER: Then you’d have to say to Hanoi you’d implement those provisions that he—

NIXON: That we can. Do you think it’d work then? Do you—do you like the idea of Thieu turning it down there?

KISSINGER: Of course, we may have no choice, Mr. President.

HALDEMAN: That forces him to take the damaging action, rather than in this—if you go bilaterally, you’re taking it. You’re writing Thieu off—

KISSINGER: The tragedy is, I must tell you, if—if I had known on November 20 what we know now, I could have emerged out of the November 20 session with an agreement.

NIXON: A bilateral agreement, you mean?

KISSINGER: Oh, yeah. You know, since he won’t accept it anyway, I could have made something, a few changes, come out, get it signed quickly. That son of a bitch has really hazarded our whole domestic structure.

NIXON: Well, it isn’t that. Our whole domestic structure has survived other things worse than this.

KISSINGER: I know, but he’s doing it for—

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: In—all I’m saying is you’ve got—

NIXON: I know—

KISSINGER: —you’ve shown us all your faith, I mean. When I say you, I mean the administration, because I’m in total agreement with what you—what we’ve decided here. In fact, I recommended most of it; all of it.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: I said it only because the goddamn press is trying to play a split between us.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. I can’t figure those three ’52s. When I talked to you yesterday, you didn’t have this report on it. How could that have—?

KISSINGER: No, no. That’s this morning’s wave. That’s the seven thirty milk run.

NIXON: That’s the first wave? Well, we—in other words, we haven’t even gotten the results of the whole day then, have we?

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: They lost three in one run?

KISSINGER: Mr. President, these North Vietnamese are not idiots. When you come at exactly the same hour, every day, they say, “Sure, it’s a lot of activity,” but they can tell the difference between a B-52—and it is criminal.

NIXON: Well, is there anything I should do? Should we get Moorer in? Tell him? I mean, after all—

KISSINGER: Well, I think we’ll just rattle them. This is the last day which involves his extensive raids in the Hanoi area. We were, in any event, after today—

NIXON: For three days, yeah.

KISSINGER: —going to shift to other targets, because we’ve used up the targets in the Hanoi area.

NIXON: Have you raised with him, with Moorer, the point of us changing the time?

KISSINGER: I’ve got to call—I’ve—yes, I raised it with him yesterday. They say, “Well, they have so many other planes in the area, that they won’t be able to know.” That’s total nonsense. They can tell a B-52 from another plane.

NIXON: Is it too late today to change this, the orders? [unclear] any runs? Well, we’ll hope for the best. Maybe there won’t be any more today. Maybe there will. But if they do, they do. This is war, Henry—

KISSINGER: There’s nothing we can do.

NIXON: That’s right.

KISSINGER: It’s a brutal business.

NIXON: But we have to realize that Thieu has now cost, as you realize, that if we had, knowing these things, we should have made the deal.

KISSINGER: Mr. President, but we couldn’t know these things. If—for the United States to screw an ally, it’s not an easy matter. It was the right decision. If we had been totally selfish, we would have, just after November 7, said, “Don’t come home on November 24 without a deal under whatever circumstances.” Which—I didn’t recommend it. We couldn’t do it. We wanted to see Duc. In fact, that’s why I came back.

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: We thought we could get Duc lined up. These sons of bitches, and you spent three and a half hours with his emissary. We’ve had Haig out there three times. I’ve been out twice.

NIXON: He won’t see Bunker.

KISSINGER: Well, he’ll see Bunker, but Bunker has lost his effectiveness, frankly.

NIXON: It’s not his fault.

KISSINGER: No. This guy is a maniac. There’s one basic reality, Mr. President: there’s only one protection for these guys, and that’s the confidence of the United States, and the pride the American people have in the settlement, Congress, and the president. They’ve blown both of these now, and they’re haggling around. And all this bullshit about the North Vietnamese forces in the South, that’s just putting up a condition, which they know can’t be met. They won’t push them out of there. They won’t put—they had four divisions in Military Region 3, the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese have ten thousand men against a hundred and twenty thousand. They won’t push them out of Military Region 3. Then they have the nerve to come to us and say, “You negotiate them out.” And if they had pushed them out, this issue wouldn’t exist. Now, that’s thirty miles from Saigon.

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: Nor did you make one concession different from what you had stated publicly for two years, which they never objected to.

NIXON: Except for the cease-fire.

KISSINGER: On October [7] ’70, you proposed a cease-fire-in-place; on January [25] ’72 you proposed a cease-fire-in-place; and May 8 [’72], you proposed a cease-fire-in-place. And that’s exactly what you got.

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: I mean, no right-winger here can say you made a concession.

NIXON: We’re not going to worry about the right-wingers or what anybody else says. The main thing, now, is to really—to end this war and [unclear]—

KISSINGER: Then the goddamn bastard sends you a letter saying—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —he wants to fight the war alone. That not only keeps all the troops in there, it opens up the DMZ, it keeps Laos and Cambodian supply corridors open. So it isn’t the troops that bother him.

NIXON: When will the word get out that Haig has been rebuffed?

KISSINGER: Oh, that can’t get out, because only Haig and Thieu know. And neither has an interest in getting that word out.

NIXON: No.

KISSINGER: Nor do we have an interest, I think, in getting the word out.

NIXON: No, no. I’ll say.

KISSINGER: Because we don’t have an agreement.

NIXON: That’s right. That’d just make the North tougher.

KISSINGER: Yeah. Well, I don’t know about that; it might make the North settle. If they think they have really got us hung out there.

NIXON: Well, we’ll see. You should—we’ve got to continue the bombing of the North. It does not have to be on the, you know, on the massive basis that we’ve had. You know, the three-day, or whatever it is. We’ve just got to continue to crack it up there, so that they know we can still come back. That’s what they really need.

KISSINGER: Well, Mr. President, it’s got to be massive enough so it really hurts them.

NIXON: I meant massive in terms of the Hanoi area, which is—

KISSINGER: Oh. Oh, yeah. No, no. There—there we should scale it down. You’re right.

NIXON: [unclear] not going to go in with excessive losses, Henry. It isn’t worth it.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: We’re doing this for political purposes and the military effect there is not all that great, as you well know.

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: And the military up there is not all that great, as you well know.

KISSINGER: They’ve also hit a Russian and a Polish ship. It wasn’t one their—

NIXON: In Haiphong?

KISSINGER: In Haiphong, yeah. It wasn’t one of their better days.

HALDEMAN: They sink ’em?

KISSINGER: We’ve already gotten the Russian protest.

NIXON: Well, we’ve had that before.

KISSINGER: It isn’t a bad protest. It’s low-key.

NIXON: As long as ships are there, it’s a battle zone. Now, goddamn it, they know to expect it.

KISSINGER: Well, actually, I think the Hanoi part of it is working out. That’s going almost like May 8, because—

 

KISSINGER: But if the North Vietnamese came back to talk to me, I think it would go like May 8. It’d be a great victory.

NIXON: I agree.

KISSINGER: And then we should settle. And then, Thieu refuses, and then we’ll just finish it.

NIXON: How do we finish it?

KISSINGER: Go bilateral.

NIXON: Oh, yeah! Yeah. That.

KISSINGER: I have given Haig all sorts of instructions how to work out a common strategy, but the bastard never got around to it. I mean, never permitted it. I don’t mean Haig is a bastard. I mean Thieu.

NIXON: Well, Thieu taking that letter and reacting this way, that’s it. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no other track.

KISSINGER: No.

NIXON: Henry, that’s why I’m almost to the view, Bob, and I must say that rather than—rather than making a deal, and then having him publicly turn it down, is to simply say, frankly, publish our letter and his response.

KISSINGER: But then he’s finished.

NIXON: Huh?

KISSINGER: Then we’ll never get money for him.

NIXON: That’s right, too. That’s right. You’re right. We can’t do that.

HALDEMAN: He’s worse off with that than he is turning down the peace offer, because he can make a case for turning down the negotiations. His only weakness [unclear].

NIXON: Yeah, because my letter dictates our going alone, doesn’t it?

KISSINGER: Oh, yeah. No question.

NIXON: And, therefore, we cannot publish that. No, what we would have to do rather than publishing it, we’d simply say that he prefers not to do it. Just state it, and then go bilateral. I’m trying to think about the game to play.

KISSINGER: We can say—

NIXON: My own view is that, in view of his response to my letter, that there—that trying publicly to drag him along is not a good strategy. I just think that it’s not.

KISSINGER: Well, except Hanoi may force it on us.

NIXON: Oh.

KISSINGER: Supposing Hanoi—

NIXON: Says, “We won’t make a deal unless—”

KISSINGER: No. But supposing Hanoi replies—if Hanoi turns down our suggestion of Monday, we’re in good shape.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Or, but supposing Hanoi accepts it and says, “Let’s meet on January 3.” Then, my view would be that we should meet, because that would take the heat off. Settle and then just put it to Thieu.

NIXON: That’s right. That’s what I would do. Put it to Thieu. And, then, what happens? Thieu says, “No, I won’t go along—”

KISSINGER: No, Thieu will probably say, “I’m forced; raped; under duress. I’ll sign it.” That’s what he’ll do.

NIXON: That’s what most people really think, don’t they? Even still, with Moorer and all these guys.

KISSINGER: Yeah, but they’ve all been wrong. I’ve been wrong. Everybody has been wrong.

NIXON: I don’t know [unclear]—

KISSINGER: I mean—I thought, and so did everybody who knew something about this, that he would welcome the terms at the end of October, and that we’d get an agreement with his acquiescence, and enthusiasm, and support. Then, when he kicked us in the teeth at the end of October, we thought, well, maybe that’s the recollection of ’68, and as soon as your election is in the bag, and he knows—

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: —you still mean it, then he’ll yield. So, we sent Haig out. He played his usual game with Haig. Then we thought, all right, we go through the charade of presenting his demands and getting those turned down, and he’ll come along. But he has—just hasn’t. He’s gotten meaner and meaner.

NIXON: The thing now is to treat him with total silence.

KISSINGER: I agree.

NIXON: Total silence.

KISSINGER: Some of my people think you should give him one more chance. I think that’s a mistake. You’ve given him every—

NIXON: That’s the one danger. What—how would you give him one more—?

KISSINGER: Well, we you could say, “On January 5, I’m going to make the following proposal,” but that’s a sign of weakness, because if he reacts as he did—he’s never replied to your proposal to meet him.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: He’s never replied to you, before or after. He’s replied to every overture of yours by just repeating his old proposition. And, of course, he’s created an objective situation now where maybe the South—North Vietnamese can no longer settle, because they’ve been so weakened in the South. The end of October, the thing was nicely balanced, in which they had enough assets left. The CIA station chief in Saigon thinks they’re so weak in the South, now, that they couldn’t survive a cease-fire. Then—

NIXON: Well, gloomy as it looks, something may happen.

KISSINGER: Well it isn’t—your action on Monday, Mr. President, restored the initiative to you. We can now—this thing has got—

NIXON: We’ve got something to stop.

KISSINGER: This thing is going to end.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: They wouldn’t have come to the technical talks if they weren’t weak.

NIXON: Well, they only came to the first—well, that—

KISSINGER: No, no, but they don’t need the technical talks—

NIXON: I know. They only came for the purpose of making a protest.

KISSINGER: Yeah, but they have a chance tomorrow at the public sessions. This is a—this is secret. No one knows they made a protest.

NIXON: Oh, they agreed, then, to more technical talks?

KISSINGER: And then they—they proposed, at the end of that meeting, to meet again on Saturday.

NIXON: But, I suppose that tomorrow they’re going to break off the talks, right?

KISSINGER: I doubt it. Tomorrow would be vituperative. No, I had already thought that in Saigon, if Thieu had caved, we could have sent them a message that said—proposed a fixed date, and say we’ve now got Saigon’s agreement.

NIXON: I know.

KISSINGER: It isn’t that gloomy. I think we’re going to pull it out in January.

NIXON: Well, we’re not going to act on it, at any rate. What’s—I am—I want to keep on top of this military situation, however. I don’t want the military to do stupid things, you know what I mean? Of all the—the plane losses, though, I think, are predictable. If you send a hundred planes over there, with the SAMs down below, you’re going to get some planes.

 

“. . . Then we’ll stop the bombing within thirty-six hours.”

December 27, 1972, 8:39 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

The devastation of Linebacker II continued past the original three-day schedule. It stopped on Christmas, so that the planners could reevaluate the targets, and then resumed on December 26. The following day, North Vietnam sent word that it was willing to come to terms. Kissinger didn’t wait to tell the president in person but phoned him with the news.

 

KISSINGER: We had another message from the North Vietnamese today.

NIXON: Yeah?

KISSINGER: You may have heard from [Richard] Kennedy—

NIXON: No. No, I haven’t talked to him.

KISSINGER: Well, the message said—

NIXON: Because I’ve been at the Truman funeral today. [Former President Harry Truman died on December 26, and the funeral was held in his hometown of Independence, Missouri.]

KISSINGER: Oh, I see. Well, they canceled the technical meeting today—

NIXON: Right. Right.

KISSINGER: But they reaffirmed their offer of meeting on the eighth.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And—

NIXON: This is all private, nothing public.

KISSINGER: The message?

NIXON: Everything is pub—private on this, nothing public. Because if they go public, we go public.

KISSINGER: Nothing public.

NIXON: Okay.

KISSINGER: And they also reaffirmed that the technical meetings will resume as soon as we stop bombing. Now, I sent them a message yesterday after our talk in which I just said if they confirm all these things with specific dates, then we’ll stop the bombing within thirty-six hours.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And that may give us an announcement as early as Saturday.

NIXON: Yeah. That’s good. Because I told you if we could—it’s not imperative, but if we could get it before the first, it would be good.

KISSINGER: Well, I think it’s certain by Sunday, and there’s a fifty–fifty chance of Saturday.

NIXON: Well, we hope so. And if it doesn’t—?

KISSINGER: I thought Saturday had the advantage of making the news magazines.

NIXON: [laughs] Yeah. Oh, the hell with them. But, in any event, if it doesn’t come for them, that’s fine. The main thing is if we could get it by Sunday, even, so that it hits New Year’s Day, and all that sort of thing, that would be good. Because if we—I’d rather not have the New Year’s bombing halt as just a bombing halt, you see my point?

KISSINGER: Well, there’s almost no chance that we won’t hear by Saturday. I mean, all they’d have to do is—if we get the message by Saturday morning, then we’ll—

NIXON: Right?

KISSINGER: —we’ll announce it on Sunday morning.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And—but I think we’ll get the message on Friday, in which case, if you wanted to, we could announce it on Saturday.

NIXON: That’s all right, too.

KISSINGER: And make the Sunday—

NIXON: Because we—we gave them a hell of a good bang, you know? And I’m glad we only lost two—two B-52s. That wasn’t too bad.

KISSINGER: That’s right. Yeah. Yesterday?

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Right. I think we lost another two today.

NIXON: Well, I know. That’s what we expect, don’t we?

KISSINGER: That’s right.

NIXON: We’re hitting about the average.

KISSINGER: That’s about right. That’s right.

NIXON: Two out of sixty today.

KISSINGER: Two out of sixty, yes.

NIXON: Well, that’s—

KISSINGER: That’s less than five percent.

NIXON: Right. But, but, but, they’re—

KISSINGER: It’s a little more than—a little more than three percent. That’s about—

NIXON: But we’re—but, on the other hand, we’re punishing the hell out of them, aren’t we?

KISSINGER: Oh, there’s no question about it, absolutely no question. We had—the French foreign minister today showed us a report from his consul-general in Hanoi saying, “I’ve just lived through the most terrifying hour of my life. An unbelievable raid has just taken place.” And—oh, no, there’s no question about that.

NIXON: Well, we’ll shake them all up, and if we can hold those losses down to two or three a day, that’s about all we can hope.

KISSINGER: And I think that we’ll—by this weekend, we’ll be over the worst of it.

NIXON: Well, we hope so. But we should hear from them by Sunday, I think, huh?

KISSINGER: No question about it. I think we can, unless something new happens. The message is so—it’s written to give them the greatest possible incentive to answer fast, because they can control when the bombing stops. We no longer say we stop on Sunday. We say we stop within thirty-six hours of getting their reply.

NIXON: Good.

KISSINGER: So we could stop Saturday already.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And, frankly, one day’s bombing doesn’t make any difference.

NIXON: Oh, no. If we do it, we get—all—look, if we stop on Saturday, that gets the advantage. It’s just another advantage of having it out of the news, and we’ve done our damage to them. We—we’ve got our message across, Henry, that’s the important thing—

KISSINGER: We’ve got our message across, Mr. President, and we’ve gotten it across before all hell broke loose here, and we’ve faced down the people again, and you have shown that you are not to be trifled with.

NIXON: [laughs] Hmm. I wouldn’t worry about the people here, I mean, their bitching around, and the news magazines. Don’t worry about it, Henry, it’s not all that important. The public isn’t that much concerned about all this.

KISSINGER: Oh, Mr. President—

NIXON: Do you think so?

KISSINGER: I am certain you will go down in history as having—

NIXON: Well, forget the history. But, I mean, you haven’t run into a hell of a lot of flak out there, have you? People are worrying about your bombing, are they?

KISSINGER: Well, I don’t see many people out there.

NIXON: [laughs] I know.

KISSINGER: I’m going to stay out of the social columns on this trip.

NIXON: Well, the point is that don’t let them needle you. That’s the point.

KISSINGER: Oh, I don’t—

NIXON: Right now, the thing is that we’re doing the right thing, we just stick right to our guns, and if we get this—if we can get a response from them, why, that’s good. If we don’t, well then, we go to option two. We’re all ready.

KISSINGER: Exactly. Actually, it doesn’t really make any difference, because the news magazines close on Friday. I just forgot about that.

NIXON: Well, we don’t give a goddamn about them, anyway.

KISSINGER: Exactly.

NIXON: Because if—if something happens before they close, then they’re terribly embarrassed.

KISSINGER: Exactly. Exactly.

NIXON: [laughs] Okay?

KISSINGER: [laughs] Right.

NIXON: Well, enjoy yourself. Bye.

KISSINGER: Thank you. Bye.

 

The capitulation of North Vietnam

December 28, 1972, 4:00 p.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

North Vietnam, which had often dithered in the past, required only twelve hours to agree to basic terms and a date for a final round of peace talks. The administration was then left with the problem of Thieu. The week before, in the midst of Linebacker II, Haig had met with him in Saigon. Haig firmly explained that if Thieu didn’t enter into any such peace agreement as might be submitted to him, the United States would not necessarily continue to support him and his nation. That didn’t move Thieu, who held to his opinion that the United States was betraying him. With the news that the North Vietnamese were ready to finalize the peace accords, Nixon and Kissinger were faced with the question of whom next to send to Saigon, seeking the cooperation of President Thieu. Eventually, the president resorted to letters.

 

KISSINGER: Well [Richard] Kennedy told me—

NIXON: Yeah, he said—he just gave me a brief, then said you’d be calling me.

KISSINGER: Right, [unclear] it’s gone just as programmed. I mean, just as was proposed.

NIXON: No conditions?

KISSINGER: No. No, no. They—it’s all of ours—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —are accepted. So—

NIXON: Now the question is—how about the time now? How does it—? How do we—? What—how does that work?

KISSINGER: We’ll go Saturday.

NIXON: Today is Thursday?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Is that their understanding, too?

KISSINGER: We’ll just tell them.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: I don’t think we should horse around.

NIXON: Yeah, I just want—I want to know what the understanding is.

KISSINGER: Well, their understanding is that we’ll notify them whenever we’ll do it.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And we’ll do that tomorrow morning.

NIXON: Tomorrow morning, then, you’ll have notified them that—what, in effect? What I meant is, I’m trying to think in terms of what—when it becomes public, et cetera.

KISSINGER: [unclear] public—twenty-four hours later. Tomorrow morning, we’ll notify them about the halt.

NIXON: Tomorrow morning is Friday, right?

KISSINGER: And we’ve worked that out with Moorer, and we’ll stop it at seven.

NIXON: At seven, when?

KISSINGER: P.m., tomorrow night.

NIXON: Oh, seven p.m. tomorrow night we stop. Oh, I see, okay. I’d—I—

KISSINGER: Then, we announce it at ten a.m. Saturday.

NIXON: [unclear] the public announcement is at ten a.m. Saturday.

KISSINGER: But that, frankly, Mr. President, we won’t even ask them. We’ll just tell them.

NIXON: Oh, sure. I just want to—

KISSINGER: [unclear] them two hours ahead of time that that’s what we’re going to do.

NIXON: Yeah, I understand.

KISSINGER: Don’t you think? Well, at any rate, I think it’s—

NIXON: It’s what—I see no reason, no reason to do it otherwise. I mean, what are the arguments here—?

KISSINGER: What they can do about it.

NIXON: Huh?

KISSINGER: What they’re going to do about it?

NIXON: Well, I don’t know. I—I know—

KISSINGER: Can we exchange another set of messages?

NIXON: No, no. I wouldn’t exchange any messages. No.

KISSINGER: I think we’ll just tell them.

NIXON: Well, because, basically, they have accepted our proposal, right?

KISSINGER: Exactly.

NIXON: Our proposal was that the—that we would halt on the thirty-first?

KISSINGER: No. Our proposal was that we’d halt within thirty-six hours of an answer.

NIXON: I see. And—so we will be keeping our word? That’s all I want to be sure of, up to a point.

KISSINGER: No, no, we’ll keep our word by two—we’ll be within two hours. We’re stopping within thirty-four hours.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Right.

KISSINGER: But, you know, we got an answer within twelve hours.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: Which shows how anxious, how anxious they are.

NIXON: Hmm. What do you—what significance do you attach to all this?

KISSINGER: Well, I think they are in—practically on their knees.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Because, also in their answer, they said, “We will fix a schedule for the final signing at that next meeting.”

NIXON: [laughs] They always want to talk about schedules, don’t they?

KISSINGER: Yeah, but this one—in considering what we’ve done to them—

NIXON: Yep.

KISSINGER: —that they are willing—

NIXON: I must say this: this should have some effect on our brethren in the press, shouldn’t it?

KISSINGER: As you know, if they had strung us out—if they could have taken it another week or two, we would have had unshirted hell in this country. So—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —for them to accept this within twelve hours is a sign of enormous weakness.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And it’s a very conciliatory reply. They said they’ll come with a very serious attitude, and they hope we will, too, and that it can be rapidly settled.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Technical meetings are starting Tuesday.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, that’s good. Ten o’clock, then. Public announcement, ten o’clock Saturday morning.

KISSINGER: Right, and I think all we should do is just a very brief one—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —just saying, “Private meetings will be resumed.”

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: We’ll give them the date. “Technical meetings will be resumed.” Give the day.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: And then, in answer to a question, which is sure to come, we should say, “Yes, while these talks are going on, we are not bombing north of the twentieth.”

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Well, you—but you’re going to tell them—they already know that, though.

KISSINGER: They will have known that tomorrow morning.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: They’ll have known it for thirty-six hours when we announce—

NIXON: So, basically, you would have Ziegler make the announcement, right?

KISSINGER: Well, Warren will have to do it.

NIXON: All right, it doesn’t make any difference. He can do it. We’ll announce it at—

KISSINGER: At the resumption of the meetings.

NIXON: And then?

KISSINGER: You make a formal announcement of—

NIXON: Then they’ll say, “What about the bombing?” That until the—well, you prepare the answer.

KISSINGER: Exactly.

NIXON: That there—there will no—be no bombing until the meetings are concluded, or something?

KISSINGER: That’s it. While the—while serious negotiations are going on.

NIXON: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. Fine.

KISSINGER: So this has been another spectacular for you, Mr. President—

NIXON: Yeah. Well, hell, we don’t know whether it’s that—

KISSINGER: Well, it took terrific courage to do it.

NIXON: Yeah. Well, at least, it pricked the boil, didn’t it?

KISSINGER: Mr. President, anything else would have been ruined in the long run.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And all the guys who are now saying, “Well, why do we do it with B-52s?”

NIXON: [laughs]

KISSINGER: These are the people who oppose this thing—

NIXON: What with?

KISSINGER: If you did it with DC-3s, they’d be upset.

NIXON: The point is that, as we know, we couldn’t do it with anything but B-52s because, goddamn it, there’s nothing else that can fly at this time of year.

KISSINGER: Mr. President, within ten days, you got these guys back to the table, which no other method could have done.

NIXON: Well, that’s a—just keep right on and—

KISSINGER: And I think it—this way, it makes the weekend papers, and the excitement is going to die—

NIXON: Boy, it’ll make the news magazines, too.

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: They’ll open up for this, don’t worry.

KISSINGER: Mac Bundy called me last night. He said he’s going to write a letter—write a public letter to you and—

NIXON: I’ve seen it. Protesting?

KISSINGER: [unclear]

NIXON: Yeah. Well, of course.

KISSINGER: I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because, what am I going to tell my son?” I said, “I’ll tell you what you can tell your son: Tell him, ‘I got us into this war and now I’m keeping—I’m preventing us from getting out,’” and hung up on him.

NIXON: Good.

KISSINGER: But that New York establishment hasn’t—

NIXON: They’re done. They’re done.

KISSINGER: —hasn’t ever come—

NIXON: Well, the main thing now, Henry, is that we have to pull this off, and it’s going to be tough titty.

KISSINGER: I think now we’re going to turn—we’ve already got a list of economic pressures—

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: —and we’re going to start implementing those next week.

NIXON: On?

KISSINGER: Saigon.

NIXON: Well, yes. Right. On Saigon, though, as I see—and I’m talking to Kennedy a little, which he’ll fill you in, a little this morning, about, you know, some of the concerns as to the options that we had to be considering, here. That’s assuming we go forward with our plan by just talking to the North. My view is, we talk and we settle. Right? With that—?

KISSINGER: Exactly.

NIXON: Now then—then, what do we—at what point do we inform Saigon that we are going to proceed in that way, or that we have proceeded in that way?

KISSINGER: Well, I think this thing is going to happen just before your inauguration. Basically, I’d—I would still send Agnew and Haig out there to give them a face-saving way off. [unclear]

NIXON: Yeah, but, [laughs] suppose he doesn’t. That’s, I suppose, our problem—

KISSINGER: Then we just proceed and sign the documents.

NIXON: Proceed and sign the documents? But they won’t sign if Hanoi doesn’t—if Saigon doesn’t sign. I’m just trying to raise the questions, you understand?

KISSINGER: [unclear] Well, I think it will wind up with Saigon, at least, implementing it, whether they sign it or not.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Well, you’ve got to have that understood with Hanoi then—that they aren’t going to say, “Well”—you see, I—I think you wouldn’t want to have that happening just before the inauguration, have Saigon—

KISSINGER: That’s what I think should happen, Mr. President. If we send Agnew to Saigon before the inauguration, that would get him back by the sixteenth.

NIXON: Yes.

KISSINGER: Then, that I go on the final leg of this exercise, right after the inauguration.

NIXON: Right.

KISSINGER: It stretches it out a little more, and then you could go on around the twenty-ninth or thirtieth.

NIXON: In other words, we would have no announcement before the inauguration.

KISSINGER: No announcement, but obvious activity.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Well, I don’t think, then, I’d send, send—I don’t think I would send Agnew out with the possibility of getting a rebuff before the inauguration. I’m inclined to think I would—I’d have the activity if—you see, the problem we have here, which we’ve got to think about—the problem we have here is that—I—if—we may as well play the inauguration as best we can, and I think you’d better—you may have to string your talk out to shove him past that point. I mean, if we can’t, if we aren’t going to get it—if we can’t get it settled before the inauguration, I don’t want him going out there and getting rebuffed before the inauguration. I don’t think the risk is worth it.

KISSINGER: I think we can be extra—extraordinarily—I don’t think he will be rebuffed.

NIXON: I know, but the point is, if he isn’t rebuffed, then we would settle it, right then. I mean, there’s no—there’s nothing to be gained by having him go out there and just show a lot of activity before the inauguration.

KISSINGER: No, but we—

NIXON: The activity—it’s enough for you to go over to Paris, frankly. I’m inclined to think that much up and down is—the only activity that would be worth anything more than your going to Paris is basically something that I said, you see?

KISSINGER: Right. Well—

NIXON: You see, because I won’t be able to address the matter of—it’s really—see, a lot of this depends—a lot of this affects the flavor of the inaugural address, you understand? That’s the problem.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: And I’m—

KISSINGER: Well I’d hate to have this whole thing—if we—

NIXON: That’s why I don’t want [laughs]—that’s why I don’t want Agnew to blow it before the inauguration. I don’t want to—I don’t want—I don’t plan to—under these circumstances, I can’t say much about it, but I’m going to have to play it very close to the vest.

KISSINGER: Well, if we have an agreement—well, I said it’s dangerous to tie ourselves to a schedule that culminates just before the inauguration, because if anything goes wrong with that, we’ll be in the same position as we were at the end of October.

NIXON: Well then, let’s push Agnew past the inauguration, too, then.

KISSINGER: All right, we can do that.

NIXON: I think that’s the best thing. Just—you mean, you’d take, then—you’d take a whack on the eighth, and then another on the fifteenth? Something like that?

KISSINGER: Well, I think we should conclude it by the eleventh, this time. I just think it’s too dangerous.

NIXON: All right, but you conclude it, it’s going to start getting out, and then Saigon I suppose—you see, my problem—I—I think once it’s concluded—well, we can talk about this later, but you can be thinking about this so that we get a plan—once this thing is concluded, and we agree, the damn thing is going to get out, and then Saigon might blow.

On the other hand, I don’t want Agnew going out there and basically provoking it. If so—I realize there’s a risk if he doesn’t go, but I think there’s even a—at least, we do not have the confrontation before the inauguration. If Agnew goes before the inauguration, Henry, you could well have a confrontation and have the whole damn thing seem to be shattered. So, what we have to do is to work out some sort of a plan, whereby you do your deal, and then we sort of—

KISSINGER: Well, we could put it into cold storage for ten days and just start it on inaugural day.

NIXON: I’m afraid that’s what we’d better do.

KISSINGER: Although it’s a high risk if one leaves these things lying around. But, of course, we may not finish it by the eleventh.

NIXON: Well, yeah. I understand that. Well, the main thing, you’ll have some activity, and we won’t be bombing.

KISSINGER: We can ask Bunker’s judgment.

NIXON: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Kennedy seemed to have some views that Thieu would—was going to be more—might begin to be reasonable, more reasonable, but I think that’s sort of silly, Henry.

KISSINGER: No, I think that’s right.

NIXON: Well, we’ve felt that before, haven’t we?

KISSINGER: Yes, but we haven’t really. The last time, when Haig was out there, we didn’t have a specific proposition to put before him.

NIXON: [laughs] Well, this is going to be goddamn specific, and he isn’t going to like it, right?

KISSINGER: But what are his options?

NIXON: Yeah. I know. Well, I’d rather have him blow, Henry, right after the inauguration, than before. You see my problem?

KISSINGER: Of course.

NIXON: The problem being that I don’t want to have the—and we’ll just tell the North, Look, with the inauguration coming on, we got—we can’t do it, then, but you’re going to send Agnew right immediately after the inauguration.

KISSINGER: That’s right and—

NIXON: That’s—I think you could—I think they’d well understand that, if they’re not being bombed. Get my point?

KISSINGER: That’s right. Getting through with these bastards always is when you let—

NIXON: They might let off—they might get off the hook.

KISSINGER: When you let up the pressure on them, they are again—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —feel confident.

NIXON: On the other hand, we ought to get—hmm—

KISSINGER: But it can easily be done that way, and then we could, perhaps, compress it by having Agnew go to Saigon and have me go to the other places, simultaneously—

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

KISSINGER: I thought there was some advantage in having Agnew come back and then start again.

NIXON: Yeah, but Agnew coming back, I mean, with problems with Thieu and all that, is just not the right story before the inauguration. I mean, I know it’s—

KISSINGER: Well, we—

NIXON: —that’s too high of a risk from the standpoint of our domestic situation.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: I know the risk on the other side, but I think we’d better take the risk on the other side and delay Agnew for five days.

KISSINGER: We can do that.

NIXON: Well—

KISSINGER: It can be done.

NIXON: —I do think we’d better do it.

KISSINGER: That can be done.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: And it may stretch beyond the eleventh, anyway.

NIXON: Yeah. Well, we hope not, but if it does, it does. We just take a little more time.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: And, at least, we’ll get the statements about progress out. Okay. Well fine, Henry.

 

“I am certain, now, he’s coming along.”

January 21, 1973, 10:33 a.m.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

WHITE HOUSE TELEPHONE

 

On January 7, the talks with the North Vietnamese resumed, and on January 13, the parties succeeded in reaching a final agreement on the peace treaty ending the war in Vietnam. As one of the final pieces of business, Nixon and Kissinger continued to look for ways to convince Thieu to commit to the agreement. Kissinger was able to report to the president his optimism that Thieu would embrace the accord. Important locations in North Vietnam had been decimated by Operation Linebacker II, and Thieu, with promises of American support in money and materiel, felt more confident than he had the previous year, in the aftermath of the Easter Offensive.

 

NIXON: Hello.

KISSINGER: Mr. President?

NIXON: I wondered what the latest report was?

KISSINGER: Right. We haven’t had the Thieu answer; we just have his reactions as he received your letter.

NIXON: The second letter? The third letter?

KISSINGER: The second letter—

NIXON: The third letter?

KISSINGER: The letter we discussed yesterday.

NIXON: Yeah.

KISSINGER: And he said, well, he understands that if you’d make these requests, that there must be a very grave situation here. And he’s now, practically, agreed to the agreement. Now, he’s yakking about the protocols.

NIXON: Yeah, he’s been doing that for all week, of course.

KISSINGER: Well, no, he was still—he’s now given up on his objections to the agreement. I am certain, now, he’s coming along.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And he is, just now, making the record of having fought every step of the way.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, do we expect an answer from him?

KISSINGER: We expect some answer today, yes. Which, in my view, will still leave a little crack open. What he would like to be able to say, for domestic reasons, is that his foreign minister talked to me in Paris and got one crappy little concession.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: Now, I have sent Sullivan in to see the North Vietnamese.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And it’s just possible that we’ll get one.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: And I’ll know that tonight.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: But, even without it, I’m certain he’ll come along, now.

NIXON: He doesn’t have any choice. I mean that, as we all well know. Well, in any event, what—you said you’re planning to leave tonight?

KISSINGER: No, tomorrow morning. [Kissinger was to depart for Paris to meet North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho.]

NIXON: Tomorrow morning? Mm-hmm. Well—

KISSINGER: And Haig will be coming back this afternoon.

NIXON: Well, what time tomorrow morning?

KISSINGER: I’m leaving at nine.

NIXON: I mean, what time should we get together?

KISSINGER: Oh, anytime you say.

NIXON: Well, what time—you see, I meant what time [unclear]—well, when everything will be in the bag. That’s what I want to know. Maybe it would—maybe we’d better wait—

KISSINGER: Well—

NIXON: —wait till tomorrow morning.

KISSINGER: Tomorrow morning, we’ll have all the facts.

NIXON: Yeah, there’s no use—

KISSINGER: And I can put off the departure by—

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: —a half an hour.

NIXON: No use to meet before that. Suppose that we plan to meet at, say—say eight thirty tomorrow morning? That gives us a time to—for you to have—you—I mean, you—are you supposed to depart at nine?

 

KISSINGER: I think, Mr. President, at the very worst, if I would—could recommend, if he has not given his formal agreement, then, I would just ignore him. I would not make—and he will, then, the next day, certainly come along.

NIXON: Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: He cannot afford to break with you publicly once you’ve committed yourself.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Well, we’ve told them—him that in the letter, haven’t we, Henry?

KISSINGER: We’ve told him that, but he hasn’t broken with you once he realized—once he accepted the fact that you meant business.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah—

KISSINGER: Every exchange, he moves closer to you.

NIXON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

KISSINGER: He is not acting like a man digging in.

NIXON: Right. Good, well then, we’ll plan—as a matter of fact, we’ll meet, then, at eight o’clock in the morning. Let’s just make it certain.

KISSINGER: Right.

NIXON: And then, that way, we can get the whole thing fired out of the way.

 

“The settlement will last only as long as our two governments go forward together.”

January 30, 1973, 9:30 a.m.

Richard Nixon, Tran Van Lam, and Henry Kissinger

OVAL OFFICE

 

The treaty to end the Vietnam War was formally signed by a delegation in Paris on January 27. As with any treaty, the proof would be in the commitment made to it, between the lines. Tran Van Lam, the minister of foreign affairs for South Vietnam and the signatory for his country in Paris, visited Nixon at the White House a few days after the ceremony. He and Nixon tried to put bygones aside and look forward to the future.

 

NIXON: We must have an even closer relationship as peacetime allies. The settlement will last only as long as our two governments go forward together. You can count on our continued military and material support and economic support. And spiritual support. We recognize only one government in South Vietnam. The Republic of Vietnam will be recognized and assisted. The key to U.S. policy in Indochina is our continued alliance and friendship with Vietnam. I have sent the vice president to show that we are standing firm with our allies [Agnew planned to tour Southeast Asia from January 30 to February 9]. You have stood firm. We respect you for it. The American press shouldn’t discourage you. They don’t represent the American people. You should know you have a friend in this office. We all have a responsibility to cool it now; however, China and the USSR will be urged to restrain their friends.

LAM: We are gratified by your approach. Sometimes we gave a hard time to Dr. Kissinger. But we perfectly understand the necessity of sticking together. We had to show we tried to get the maximum we could. But it finally depends on goodwill between us.

NIXON: There is no goodwill on their side. I have no illusions about that. We must create a necessity. A carrot and a stick.

LAM: I would like on behalf of President Thieu and our National Security Council to apologize for any difficulties we may have caused you. Your statement regarding Saigon as the legitimate government is very helpful to us. I would like to present another point, having to do with the site of the international conference. In Paris we had been assured there would be no demonstrations, but there was one on the day of the ceremonies. We told Schumann it was very hard for the prestige of France. The other side have not insisted on Paris. We prefer elsewhere. In my opinion we prefer some other site.

NIXON: The French must give us an assurance, and unless there is no demonstration we can’t go there. To have a demonstration on this historic occasion will be counter to the spirit of the occasion. Schumann is a crook.

LAM: The secretary-general of the UN is among the participants. Therefore it should be in a UN spot.

NIXON: Let me emphasize this: you have the third-largest army in the world. You must be self-confident. I was glad you had a celebration on the day of settlement. We have a stick and a carrot to restrain Hanoi. After all this sacrifice—now is the important point. The key is our strength and our alliance.

LAM: You will be proud of our people. The problem is how to split the NLF from the NVA. We should scrupulously keep the agreement. We should always put the other side in the position of the bad guy. Can you get French support at the conference?

NIXON: Pompidou is a good man. Let us play the game on the conference very carefully.

LAM: How about a conference with President Thieu?

NIXON: I would like to have President Thieu visit in San Clemente at the western White House. Tell him to propose any date convenient to him. Anytime he says after March 1. Anytime between March and June.

 

Afterword: Within two years, Nixon had resigned from the presidency, the victim of his own activities in the Watergate scandal. Within three years, Lam was in exile in Canberra, Australia, where he eventually made a living running a coffee shop. He had barely gotten out of South Vietnam alive after it fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975.