Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume IV, Vietnam, 1966

217. Memorandum of Conversation¹

Washington, August 24, 1966.

SUBJECT

• Vietnam

PARTICIPANTS

• Senator J. William Fulbright
• W. Averell Harriman, Ambassador at Large

I lunched today with Senator Fulbright. I opened by explaining my assignment and asking for his opinion on the way to get negotiations going. He rather evaded the question but did say there were two matters which he thought were preventing discussions. First was our unwillingness to accept the NLF or VC as full-fledged participants; second, and even more important, Hanoi did not believe that the United States Government had any intention of withdrawing its forces from Vietnam or, in fact, Southeast Asia.

He said he himself did not believe that we would in fact withdraw and pointed to the size of our installations in Thailand as well as Vietnam.

He spoke disparagingly of the September 11 elections because the VC were not permitted to put up candidates. He maintained that all the 550-odd candidates were of the same line of thought—opposed to the VC. He admitted, however, that not very many people would have voted for Viet Cong candidates.

I told him I was convinced that the President had every intention of removing our troops from South Vietnam if the North Vietnamese did likewise. I agreed that North Vietnam doubted our sincerity at the present time but that both Hanoi and Moscow were convinced that the President would be forced by public opinion to change his policies and that we would withdraw as the French did.

He repeated that he had said publicly that Congress was more war-like than the President and would force the President to take action which would involve us with China and the Soviet Union. I disputed these statements but did not appear to have any effect.

Towards the end of lunch he announced he had to go to a conference committee meeting on foreign aid, and the rest of the time was spent on my arguing with him to support the House version.

I left the door open to come back and asked him to call me if he had some constructive ideas.

He stoutly maintains we are overextended in Asia. He was skeptical when I described the new Asian initiatives—Asian Development Bank, ASPAC and ASA peace conference initiative.

Intermingled with the above was a discussion of Arkansas politics and the state of our domestic economy. Needless to say, we did not agree on the latter.

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, POL 27 VIET S. Personal; Confidential. Drafted by Harriman. The meeting was held in Fulbrightʼs office.