113. Transcript of a Telephone Conversation Between President Nixon and the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger)1
RN: Henry, you ought to inform Bunker that I have directed that we go ahead so that Bunker knows we are taking a hard line on this thing.
HK: Absolutely.
RN: And inform him so that Thieu knows that there is no fooling around here and that this bargaining is—the time is over—the fellow has got to be out of his mind after the letter that I wrote2—if after that we don’t get anything why it may be one of those breaking of relations.
HK: He wants to send an emissary to see you personally too.
RN: Is that what they said?
HK: Yeh.
[Page 422]RN: No.
HK: They can’t do that while we are negotiating in Paris—
RN: No, no, no. Not going to be any emissary—anything they have to say—is to be transmitted through Bunker—that’s the way it is to be done.
HK: Right.
RN: And that we’ve had enough emissaries and that sort of thing—so we’ll just ready to—we have any—I just think that Bunker has to get to him a message from me to the effect that we are going ahead and and as pointed out in my letter we’re going to negotiate as hard as we can for the best position we can and that we’re on this course and that he must realize that we will not be subjected to harassment on this thing.
HK: Right. I think that essential to the negotiations.
RN: —there are to be no ultimatums to be come from them under any circumstances.
HK: Now I have the substance, it just came in3 and again the trouble with them is every draft we give back to them already incorporates 70% of their changes. This has now been going on for three weeks. Now they sent us another batch of changes. I would say again we could accept 50% of them but the trouble is if you accept all of these on top of all the others we have an entirely new document, and Le Duc Tho is going to walk out.
RN: No, no no—just say that the document that we already have is the basic framework. And that’s that. And we’re going to do the best we can, and he’s to know that that’s the situation.
HK: After Haig went out there—we already incorporated all the changes they made to me when I was there. Since then we have made two more revisions—based on comments they gave to him and comments they sent us afterwards. Now they have given us yet another 10 pages of comments. And the end result of that is to kill the agreement.
RN: How does it kill it?
HK: Because they are changing everything—for example, wherever they talk about the U.S., they say the U.S. will withdraw its forces, they want to say the North Vietnamese will withdraw—
RN: No, no, withdrawal has to be handled on the basis that we already suggested.
HK: And so they keep putting in needles—there is a phrase which says U.S. forces and those allied to the U.S.—
[Page 423]RN: We rigged the deal so Bunker can handle this—we don’t need to send an emissary—I don’t mean Haig—but—
HK: I think we should wait until we see what we get—if Hanoi kicks us in the teeth then we don’t have a problem, but if Hanoi accepts the changes we are bringing then an already good agreement becomes excellent and then we might consider sending somebody.
RN: Yeh, all right, but be sure Bunker tells them we are going forward and the document is—what we already have will be the basis for it—we’ll do the best we can, but the negotiation involves give and take on both sides.
[Omitted here is discussion unrelated to Vietnam.]
- Source: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, Kissinger Telephone Conversations, Box 17, Chronological File. No classification marking.↩
- Document 107.↩
- Kissinger was referring to the South Vietnamese memorandum; see footnote 2, Document 112.↩