On January 17, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and William L. Safire talked on the telephone from 3:16 pm to 3:34 pm. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 018-093 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.
Hello.
Hello Mr. President.
How are you coming along now?
When will you have the first draft?
Well, let's see.
I would say I'm just following your outline, and I'm about a third of the way in now.
I can have it late tonight if you need it.
No, no.
No, I don't want that.
Let us say that if you could have something tomorrow by 3 o'clock, that would be better.
Well, I mean, is that enough time, or would you rather wait until tomorrow at 7 o'clock?
No, 3 o'clock I should have it.
And that'll give me something so that you don't get off on the wrong trail that I can work on and pull it into kind of, as I have some ideas on this.
How do you want me to work?
Do I give this to Henry to work on?
No, no.
No, you...
In this instance, you were to work totally on this draft alone.
Right.
You see, because this is basically my thought and bring me the first draft.
Right.
And just don't submit it to anybody.
In other words, I'm not interested now at this point in substance.
I'm interested in form.
Right.
You see, the difficulty is, I'm sure you could tell from the NSC draft was that
it was fine on substance and totally lacking in form exactly and it would have been an utter utter disaster if it had been delivered that way but that's that's all right that's not their fault because they aren't paid to do that kind of work the other hand what really matters here is the form the substance will carry itself now the form is what we have to get into it and that means chiseling all of that interminable discussion about
confusing people about nine points, seven points, eight points, you know what I mean?
Where what comes through are just a few basic points to what we have offered, what they have rejected, what we offered.
Well, first, that we have been, as I said in my outline, that I think beginning, reminding, I think it's not at all, it's always a good idea to
repeated as often as we can of the enormous success we've had in the withdrawal of forces and Vietnamization.
Don't you agree?
Yes.
I mean, that's a lot of people.
The sophisticates, of course, all know that.
But the folks forget.
They forget that 500 million, I mean, a half a million will have been withdrawn by the 1st of May, that casualties are down.
We might even use some rather graphic charts on that to show what has happened, you know, just to show that.
Then that's right at the beginning.
And then say now,
However, it's time to—rather than continuing—we'll continue to, of course, this weekend continue that it's time to make a major effort to bring the war to an end through negotiated settlement.
And here's what we've been doing.
And the fact that we've had secret negotiations for certain reasons, which I think need to be explained briefly.
And just very, very briefly that you've
They've taken place over a period of time.
You've got the lower key, basically the constant references to disinjuring it.
You can see that that's overdone because that will simply irritate.
No need to.
I mean, the point is, I'm the one that proved the whole thing and developed the strategy.
And we just got to say that on this such and such a date, we offered this.
On such and such a date, we did this.
et cetera, et cetera.
You see what I mean?
I completely agree.
Don't you see my point on that?
What I'm concerned with, though, is a reaction that might come that, well, obviously this means the secret talks have failed, too.
That's exactly the point that I raised with Henry.
I said, well, maybe we shouldn't do this.
So he said, well, we agree.
Do you think so?
Well, the way I'm trying to treat it is that just as secret talks can sometimes break a public deadlock,
sometimes a public disclosure can break a secret deadlock and try to offer hope that way.
Well, basically,
In the history of negotiations ending wars, there's always been a neat combination of secret and public talks.
For example, the negotiations ending World War I were that way, you recall.
There were secret negotiations going on between Colonel House and other people all that time.
And then, of course, in World War II, as you know, there were talks long before the war was over.
And then finally they became public and so forth.
And so who knows what finally did it.
but the point is that we are doing this in the thought that by this public disclosure that we will now uh and also we're offering we're going somewhat beyond our offer in other words we're moving the deadline from seven to six months i i think that in terms of the uh in terms of what we have offered and do offer it's a pretty damn good record what do you think
It's devastating as far as everybody's saying, how come we're not here?
Why didn't we answer the seven points?
Why didn't we offer a deadline?
Why didn't we offer a deadline and cease fire exchange for prisoners?
Hell, we've done all that.
It will really trap the hell out of some people who are off on a limb so far, and you can just sew it off.
And we've got to avoid any hint of gloating about that.
No, no, no, no.
That isn't our purpose.
That isn't our purpose.
That isn't our purpose.
That's why I low-key this business as a fact.
I think we can refer to the fact just as a matter of fact, three months later or whatever it was, the Congress passed a resolution
asking for the very thing that we had talked for, that we had offered, and had been turned down on in our secret talks.
I think that's worth making, don't you think?
Yes, yes.
There should be absolutely no gloating.
The purpose of this is not to win a debating point.
The purpose of this is to break a deadlock.
Not to make points, but to make peace.
Yeah, which we've got to really hammer into Henry, too, so that he... Just in terms of form now, you agree that the form of the NSC draft, which is essentially each one of the meetings and going into each one of the meetings is seriatim.
is wrong, and the way to do it is to highlight the key points and just specify what meetings.
Well, what I would, I think you could do some, you say, that is, you are aware of the, we are aware that on the negotiating front this is what we have done.
We have had blank public meetings that have been publicized and some private meetings.
But in addition to that, and as I said in my draft, or my rough notes, that I determined in fall of 1969 that we ought to pursue other channels as well.
See, I've been, I mean, nobody has believed this.
This is going to be pretty good.
You've noticed that I've said rather than the rest, look, we have pursued a number of channels and we've offered these things and so forth.
But then I've
I've never been able to say what, because I had to protect the channel.
We pursued other channels.
And so, that is, after consultation with the Secretary of State and Ambassador Bunker and our delegation in Paris, we decided to initiate some secret discussions with the North Vietnamese.
And then, say, they began on October the 11th.
Twelve meetings were held, or eleven meetings, in which Dr. Kissinger flew to Paris and met secretly with, you know, just briefly.
That's good cops and robbers stuff.
Nobody knows it.
And then these meetings were held.
Some progress was made on some of the issues, but the first critical point came in May of 1971 when we offered
and here get it put in, Henry says it better orally that he has written it here, when we offered to give them a deadline provided they would give us a ceasefire and prisoners, POWs.
They rejected that.
Then in August we came back and offered a deadline of nine months.
in return for ceasefire and POW.
They rejected that.
Then in October, we made another offer this time of a deadline and a ceasefire and so forth.
And now, of course, as you know, we have a two-phase offer we're making.
We're offering now, we have offered a deadline
in exchange for POWs in the first phase, and a ceasefire and a new election in the second phase.
So it's really built...
The main thing I want to get across here is that on the negotiating front, we've gone the extra mile, we're doing everything we can, and that people should unite behind this offer and quit nitpicking and back it up.
Then the other thing is that we'll put the heat on them now.
What the hell do they have to offer?
They constantly come back and say,
And incidentally, they always use the term that they have said.
In each case, they reject each author and say that their condition for any kind of a settlement is preconditioned, is the overthrow of the government of South Vietnam.
Never say to.
I mean, that's another thing, the government of South Vietnam, the overthrow of the government.
You noticed I made several semantic things in there, that we overthrow the government of South Vietnam.
This, of course, we refuse to do.
But you see, then this...
What is really quite almost dramatic about this last thing is they offer a few to resign a month before new elections.
Right.
That's a real snapper for the end.
Don't you think so?
Yeah.
He is offered to resign, and it can be conducted so that there can be a new election and so forth.
So that's sort of the feel.
The main thing is to
to remember that we really have, this has got to be kept at 20 minutes.
It just can't go beyond that.
So that's 2,500 words.
That's outside.
That's 125 words a minute.
And I think 20 minutes is what it'll take.
Don't you agree?
Yeah.
Henry, of course, blanched when I told him that my guidance for me was 20 minutes because he wants to sock into this thing just about every detail that ever happened.
uh you know you know how long his draft would take about 38 minutes yeah and and uh you know it's a nice paper but it's not speaking uh but uh i just wonder uh looking past the uh the offer at the end you know this is what we're yeah we're doing yeah on thursday it'll be presented um in the peroration uh is not the point of this whole thing that there are many times that a president
cannot take the people into his confidence, and has to negotiate in secret, and has to rely on trust and faith, and has to expend some of his... And that in studying the ending of wars over the years,
You might say that I, that anyone will recognize that that has been the history, that's the record, that's the, but then go ahead.
In other words, but now I feel that maybe you want to put that at the beginning.
No, I think it would be a hell of a point to make at the end.
But you're taking them into their confidence.
Why?
What do you say?
The point I want to make, and this is not what you'd say, is that you've spent a lot of credibility in doing secretly what you had to do.
Yeah, that's right.
And I realize that I have had to, in order to protect the secret negotiations with the hope that they might appeal, I could not reply when I was under attack or...
failing to respond to the seven points we had answered to it, for failing to offer a deadline.
We had offered a deadline.
You see, that kind of thing.
Is that what you meant?
Yeah, and the fact that, you know, you're not asking for sympathy.
That's what presidents are paid for.
That's right.
However, but now we believe that now that we have reached this point, now as we reach the period when our withdrawal is being completed, it is time to end this war quickly, honorably, and in a way that there will be peace
Not only for the United States, but peace for all of Southeast Asia.
That's a nice line, too.
See, that's another thing you see.
The Vietnamization means peace for America.
Ending our involvement, which is, of course, a very fine term of art.
But what everybody wants, what we want, is peace for us.
Here is the way.
And therefore, let's have it.
As a matter of fact, you might work that theme in even at the beginning where you say that on the course of Vietnamization, this can end our involvement in bringing peace to the United States.
However, what we want our goal is to, through negotiation, is to end our involvement sooner and bring peace not only to the United States, but peace to the long-suffering people, the 40 million people of Southeast Asia who have been plagued by war for 25 years.
That's not a bad thing.
And now let's show you what we're doing.
Now do you want to call on other nations at world opinion or anything like that?
No, no, no.
It's such a futile and obviously weak thing to do.
You know what I mean?
I would do it if I, I mean, but that's Johnsonian.
It's not credible.
I think we just say it out there.
We ask for the support of the American people and of this proposal.
We believe it's an honest proposal.
We believe it's as far as any American would want to go.
It will bring this war to an end, and by supporting it, by having a united front, it will hasten the day that we can have peace.
Now, of course, the South, North, and that even though they, whatever their reaction is, we're going to press this proposal, press it,
and be willing to negotiate on it, not on a taker, something like that.
Okay, I'll get this to you by three tomorrow.
Now, if you'd like, as a matter of fact, three tomorrow, if it pushes you too much, make it seven, if you'd rather.
Now, you just tell me, because I've got things I can do.
I'll deliver it by 3 tomorrow.
Yeah, but I think you prefer to work rather under a pressure cooker.
Anyway, I'd like to get something by then, and then maybe we can start the next draft.
In your first rough cut at it, remember to send it to me first, because otherwise you'll get it.
I don't want Henry to start worrying before he has reason to worry.
I'm sure he's worried already, but I'll get it to you first.
Then you just say that you want to submit to me a rough cut to see if you're on the right track.
Just tell him you're not ready yet.
Okay.
You can just tell him you haven't got anything yet, and then you can bring it back by to talk with me about it at 3 o'clock, as we say, and I'll look at it for a couple of hours tomorrow afternoon and give it back to you.
Then you can go work up another cut and then show that to him.
Perfect.
And tell him that you don't expect to have a draft until late tomorrow night.
Right.
You better tell him that now.
Fair enough?
Good.
All right.
Bye.