Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume IX, Vietnam, October 1972–January 1973

209. Conversation Among President Nixon, the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), and the Assistant to the President (Haldeman)¹

Washington, December 20, 1972.

Nixon: Well, Henry, are you ready to go?

Kissinger: Haig has joined the club.

Nixon: What’s the matter? [unclear]—?

Kissinger: He got kicked [coughs]—

Nixon: [unclear]—

Kissinger: He got kicked in the teeth—

Nixon: Yeah?

Kissinger: Kept waiting for five hours.²

Nixon: Has he see him, and then saw him?

Kissinger: Saw him. Got a letter to you turning it all down.³ 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—[coughs]—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 3d 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 20 minutes about the bombing and refused to talk about anything else, but then they proposed another technical meeting for Saturday.⁴ Now, that’s not a sign of enormous vigor.

Nixon: [laughs]

Haldeman: [laughs]

Kissinger: 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—all together?

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 30 over Hanoi and scatter the rest over the rest of the country.

Nixon: Um-hmm.

Kissinger: And—

Nixon: I wonder what they did to—were these were 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.⁵

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 100. That’s true.

Nixon: For every strike?

Kissinger: For every hundred.

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 7:10, 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 50–50 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 Diem⁶ on him.

Nixon: [unclear]?

Kissinger: No, I know. But I’m just saying what our problem is. We had to scuttle him 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 8 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 Theiu. You know, he kept me waiting once for 15 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 20th. I wouldn’t have presented all of his goddamn demands.

Nixon: Um-hmm. Yeah, but what would we just—what would we have settled?

Kissinger: Well, we could have gotten—we could have gotten 8 or 10 changes.

Nixon: No, no, no, no, no. But how could have we had 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 21st or 22nd. 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.⁷

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 them⁸ 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: Um-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 8th. 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 $800 million 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.⁹ I have yet to receive one negative letter. I must have 200 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 Brith—

Nixon: The speech he gave—?

Kissinger: The B’nai Brith [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.¹⁰

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.

[Omitted here is discussion of domestic politics.]

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.¹¹ 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 20th what we know now, I could have emerged out of the November 20th 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: Um-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 7:30 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 they 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 7th, said, “Don’t come home on November 24th 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 3½ 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 10,000 men against 120,000. 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 30 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 [25th] ’72 you proposed a cease-fire-in-place; and May 8th [’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 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, goddamnit, they know to expect it.

Kissinger: Well, actually, I think the Hanoi part of it is working out. That’s going almost like May 8th, because—

[Omitted here is discussion of domestic opposition to the bombing.]

Kissinger: But if the North Vietnamese came back to talk to me, I think it would go like May 8th. 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.¹²

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,¹³ we’re in good shape.

Nixon: Um-hmm.

Kissinger: Or, but supposing Hanoi accepts it and says, “Let’s meet on January 3d.” 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, how would do you give him one more—?

Kissinger: Well, we you could say, “On January 5th, 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.¹⁴ 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 100 planes over there, with the SAMs down below, you’re going to get some planes.

[Omitted here is additional discussion about the loss of planes, targets in North Vietnam, and the use of B–52s.]

1. Source: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Tapes, Conversation 827–10. No classification marking. According to the President’s Daily Diary, Nixon met with Haldeman beginning at 11:32 a.m. and Kissinger beginning at 11:33 until 12:16 p.m. in the Oval Office. (Ibid., White House Central Files) The editors transcribed the portions of the conversation printed here specifically for this volume.
2. Scheduled to meet Thieu at 11 a.m., Haig and Bunker finally saw him at 3:30 p.m. See Document 206.
3. Printed in Document 206.
4. December 23.
5. For Kennedy’s speech, see Haynes Johnson, “Kennedy Praises Nixon, To Extend Olive Branch,” The Washington Post, December 13, 1972, p. A1.
6. Former South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated during a 1963 military coup. For the documentary history of this event, see Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, volume IV, Vietnam, August–December 1963, Documents 209–278.
7. See Documents 131 and 134.
8. See Document 185.
9. See Document 182.
10. For reference to Dole’s appearance on television, see John W. Finney, “Doves in Senate Hold Off Criticism of Snag at Paris,” The New York Times, December 18, 1972, p. 1.
11. See Document 165.
12. See Document 189; for Thieu’s response, see Document 206.
13. See Document 185. Nixon discusses the message in his autobiography. See RN, p. 736.
14. See Document 205.