On December 17, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger talked on the telephone from 10:49 am to 11:11 am. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 034-114 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Mr. President.
Hi, Henry.
Tomorrow night, we're going to have Alice Longworth over.
Are you free to come?
Oh, I'd be delighted, yes.
Fine.
Tell me, is Joe back yet?
I think Joe, what is today?
Joe is coming back today or tomorrow?
Uh-huh.
He, uh, he, I'm not sure.
He'll be back tomorrow.
Did his wife go with him?
His wife was with him, yes.
Yeah.
Well, I'll hold it open.
We could see—I don't want too many.
I'm going to just have Mrs. Nixon and Alice and myself.
I knew that before, and I might have Joe and his wife, and I might have Howard Smith who likes to come to such things.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
It would be useful for our purposes.
Oh, yes.
I wonder if there's anybody else of that type that we've talked to lately.
Buckley's too nutty.
Stewart is— I know, but I've had him on the plane.
I don't want to overdo one.
I haven't— How about Wilson?
We might have Dick Wilson.
You just might.
He's been awfully good, hasn't he?
He's been very good.
I don't even know whether he's married.
Well, if he is, that doesn't make any difference.
I could have anybody else you think of of that type that really has stood up on it.
Well, Bill White has.
Bill White has, but he doesn't have a huge following in it.
Dick Wilson.
But White is a fine fellow.
Yeah, White's fine.
Well, fine, fine.
I got an idea, but will you let me know about the—
about Joe when— I'll find out for you and just let— Yeah, give me a—call somebody over here or tell— Right.
Tell Steve or whatever it is.
Now, the other thing I was going to ask you is on the letter for Haig— Did he send it over last night?
Have you had to send— I haven't seen it yet.
Maybe it's a—I'll have to look in the other room.
They may have put it in there.
When does he leave?
He's leaving tonight.
It's a very tough letter.
Yeah.
Well, that's why I want to be sure to get a look at it.
Well, then I'll have a chance to look at it.
I've got to do a church service at noon, so I'll be through.
But I'll have it—well, it should be over there now.
Yeah.
It was supposed to wait for you after the affair last night.
I'll find it.
It'll be around here someplace.
I'll get it back over to you by, say, three o'clock this afternoon.
That would be very good.
And then that'll get everybody on their way.
Right.
And so we can figure.
Because I think there is a better than fifty-fifty chance.
I mean, Hanoi yesterday—I mean, the Paris delegation made a very plaintive rebuttal to what I said yesterday.
Yeah, yeah.
Incidentally, I was looking at—I looked at the papers and I checked.
check Colson to see how the radio had handled it, and said we were about the TV.
But the paper play was about the same, and I thought it was—they all thought it was very objective.
They thought it came true about right.
What was your feeling?
That's my feeling.
The New York Times guy says I was defensive.
Well, of course, they're always going to characterize things, Henry, to suit their own purposes.
But if you see it on television, I did it just the way I did the other one.
Sure.
And no one else is saying that.
Look, you notice after every press conference, Dan Rather says, I'm nervous.
Yeah.
You know, and then everybody else says it's not.
Well, you know what I mean?
It's purely a thing.
They'll say anything they want.
That's their way of suggesting that it was a bad wicket.
Do we care?
We know it's a tough wicket.
It's not a tough wicket, but why is it necessarily bad?
Because the whole thing that counts is how we look four years from now and not how we look four weeks from now.
I really read the act of the people around here.
I didn't have any problem with them, but they said, oh, gee, it's too bad to have to do it for Christmas and have to do it for the inauguration.
Couldn't we just drag along the talks and things are going so well and everything?
I said, look.
You could have.
That was an option you had.
I know we had the option, but my point is it would be harder to do it then than now.
Absolutely.
Because the Congress would be back and they'd be badgering us.
You see, one of the beauties of doing it now, we don't have the problem of having to consult with the Congress.
Nobody expects me to consult with the Congress before doing what we're going to do tomorrow.
You understand?
There's a...
There is.
I think these guys...
are basically wanting to settle.
We had an intelligence... You really think so?
Yeah, we had an intelligence report today in which a very senior Chinese official said that they were pressing Hanoi to settle, that they thought the decision was already made.
But these guys are just a bloody-minded bunch of bastards.
The Britain told me yesterday that they told the Russians that you would have to settle just before inauguration, so you can see their strategy.
Yeah.
They were going to meet me again early in January.
and then make us settle on the bad term.
Well, and make us go back to the October 26 draft, which we could have easily lived with in October, but which if we accept now after all this arguing for changes would make us look impotent.
With this blow they're going to get, they're going to scream for a few weeks, but with this blow they're going to get, they're going to realize it.
They're going to realize it.
It's going to make the agreement enforceable, Mr. President.
They're going to be very careful.
I think that point is probably the most important point.
With this blow, they're going to think twice before they break the agreement.
That's the second point.
The other point, however, too, is that with this blow, God knows which way it will react.
It may be that they will react by being tougher and saying you cannot force us into it.
Well, you know, this has been known to happen, hasn't it?
It's been known to happen, but if they thought they had that option, they would have done it already.
They don't react to our moves that way.
They react to their analysis of the situation.
If they felt confident in being able to face us down, they would have broken off the talks.
Well, let me see.
That's why this blow, I just hope to God, Henry, I went over those, as you know, for the first time.
I don't do target lists usually, but I went over that goddamn thing with Moore and Rush.
And Moore swears that this is everything they can hit that's worth hitting.
I mean, without going into, without taking out too much civilian stuff.
The whole bloody country is again covered with clouds.
So they have to do it with B-52s.
Well, they can still do it with fifty-two, so clouds are no clouds, can't they?
Oh yes, no question.
All right, fine.
So what's the harm with that?
You mean you just can't follow up with the sharper attacks?
You can't take out the power plant in the center of Hanoi and, you know, if we had had seventy-two hours of good weather, we could have done the whole bloody thing in one blow.
But what happens then?
Is the clouds going to last forever?
It always seems that that does, although I don't believe our intelligence anymore.
They don't last until the 20th.
I never believe them anymore.
We have had to cancel 65 percent of our strikes.
I do not believe them anymore, anymore, anymore.
I talked to Clements about this, and Clements
Well, I tell you, he's on the right wavelength on that.
He says our Air Force, he says, is a goddamn evident because we haven't got the right kind of planes.
And he says also they cost too much considering what their job is.
And he's so right.
He's right on both counts.
We have, Mr. President, we have to cancel over 50% of our targets during the dry season.
Yeah.
And now they only have three or four days of what they consider flying weather in a month.
Now that just means they've got the wrong airplane.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, at least the 52s will shake them on it.
Oh, yeah.
Let that double load it.
That's like a 4,000 plane raid in World War II.
It is?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
You mean 100 planes is like 40?
Those planes is like 1,000, and they're flying 127 double-loaded.
That's like 250.
Yeah.
So it's between 4,000 and 8,000 planes if they get them all over there.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
God damn it.
It's going to break every window in Illinois.
You mean just the reverberations?
Yeah.
Well, that tends to shake them up a little bit to the desert.
Yeah.
Huh?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's...
We know how those things are.
I mean, assuming that they're expecting pieces here.
I don't know whether you've been in Saigon when they hit 30 or 40 miles away, how the ground shakes.
I know how the ground shakes when we even used to shoot off a 155, one of our own.
Well, this one is going to be two miles outside.
And there are going to be about 50 of them.
No, I don't think there are going to be too many windows in Hanoi tomorrow.
But it would have been good if we could have taken all power plants simultaneously.
But as it is, what are we going to get?
Marshaling yard?
What else?
Well, we're going to get the shipyards in Haiphong.
We're going to get the marshaling yards, the rail yards, Radio Hanoi.
We'll get Radio Hanoi, will we?
We'll get the transmitters at the outskirts of town.
Yeah, but we'll miss the power plant.
But it'll still be there, and the day that it clears out, they can go in and get it, can't they?
Absolutely.
And that's a standing order to these—to Moore.
He understands that.
Yeah.
But it is a lousy set of airplanes.
I think we're going to give them quite a shock tomorrow.
We're going to have a little screaming here.
I'm sure there'll be screaming.
We don't have to scream.
They always do.
They would have screamed otherwise about the fact that the talks had broken down.
That's right.
Now we'll give them something else to scream about.
Absolutely.
They'll scream now, well, the talks have broken down, and we've resumed bombing.
So we never stop bombing.
Handling it is going to be very, very good that way, too, because he's just going to say, what the hell is this?
We're continuing our activities to prevent another enemy offensive.
That's right.
A little bit of truth in that, at least.
Oh, no, they are building up.
I know.
But we are doing it for other reasons.
Oh, no question.
But that's what I mean.
Let him hear this reason.
And the fact that it has some truth in it helps.
The lead doctor asked that we send him a message as soon as he returns.
He's returning tomorrow.
Yeah.
That's the one you told me about yesterday.
He'll be back within six hours after he returns.
He'll get it.
He'll hear this message.
That's what I mean.
Yeah, he'll hear it.
He won't have to be delivered by hand.
Well, we're sending him another one, too, which he'll get about four hours before it hits.
What's it going to say?
It's just going to say, your talks were conducted in bad faith, and the only way to settle is to go back to November 23rd.
Plus, taking out the word administrative structure, which they had agreed to last week.
And
I bet I did to do that immediately.
Well, anyway, when you come to think of it though, you know, as I was looking over all of that crowd and those people that have been in the cabin and the sub-cabinet and so forth, and they're all decent, fine people and the rest
But when you really come down to it, at the top of the heap, you've always got to have somebody that's willing to step up and hit the hard ones.
There are not many that—I mean, much as we love all of them—but there are not many that would do that.
And hell, when you really come down to it, even the Vice President caved on us yesterday because the sum total of his recommendation was to do nothing.
If Congress—you've got to go wailing to choose.
And you can't do anything because Congress will cut you off.
You're penalized.
Look, he was simply telling us, warning us that Congress was going to cut us off, which I already knew was a problem.
But the point was, he would not believe me—not believe me—when the crunch were here, he would not take this chance.
He would not do it.
No, no, that was clear to say.
I mean, he was just—it was a cop-out.
He wanted us to go get to
to, frankly, to convince two that you ought to trust us.
Well, God damn it.
I mean, I was so amazed at that because I know Haig went into that with him.
Well, and we've done it for two months, and even if we did it, where would we be?
Our strategy now has to be to turn on both of them.
Well, basically, Henry is far as reassuring, too.
No one could have reassured you more than I reassured him.
President, you made solemn commitments to him.
And I did it in two different meetings and wasted a hell of a lot of time.
And I also wrote him three letters.
Of course, this insane son of a bitch, if he had gone along with us early in November, then all these fine points that people talk about now, his sovereignty, who has the right to do what, all would have been washed out in the victory.
That's right.
So whatever he can gain, it doesn't outweigh
doesn't even come close to what we had offered him.
I know.
And what he simply turned down.
That's right.
Well, I think you'll see that letter is a tough proposition.
It's fine.
Fine.
I've tried the other.
Now it's going to try this one.
I don't want him to take any heart from the fact that we're hitting an arc.
That's my point.
Well, that's what we got in the letter.
Yeah.
And the more I've thought about it, the more I think that we ought to go to that other option.
early in January, because what we're doing now over his total opposition may lead to his collapse.
Well, the problem with the other option, I've thought about it, which we've really got to think of very hard, is that it is for us virtually going, Henry,
the very defeatist thing that we turned down earlier.
No, not if we keep military and economic aid going, and not as long as we have this letter from Chew asking us to do it.
Yeah.
Well, you know what I mean, though.
After all, what if McGovern and Mansfield will say, well, look, we could have had withdrawal for prisoners long ago, but these insane people wouldn't do it.
You see my point?
It looks like—you see, that's the thing that really sticks in my craw on that one.
Withdrawal for prisoners is what it's going to be.
That is a problem, isn't it?
Well, it's a problem.
On the other hand, the ultimate test is what's going to survive there.
If you do it two years ago, it would have led to—first of all, we couldn't get it two years ago.
That's another total lie of these guys.
The first time they ever agreed to split military and political issues was October 8th.
So the others offered it, but it could never have been accepted.
We, in a way, offered it.
Now we have two more years of Vietnamization.
We have the Vietnamese able to stand on their own feet.
And they've asked for it.
And they've asked for it.
It's a totally different picture.
You know, too, he'd be damn surprised when he gets that, wouldn't he?
You know, I don't think, you know, you see, this is the way, if you did it this way, the way you do it, you just blandly say that you, we accept, you go ahead and we'll prisoners for so forth and so on.
For all your reasons, I've been very hesitant about it.
But I myself think that
One of two things is going to happen.
Either the North Vietnamese are going to dig in, which I don't really believe, or they're going to cave quickly.
And I think that's more likely.
I don't see how they can dig in either, because they just can't figure they can take this for indefinitely.
No.
Now, the one thing that can encourage them
some of the statements, public outcry of the media in this country.
But they've seen that not affect me before.
And they saw us also.
Let's face it, that's the beauty of the election.
They saw all the same public outcry was murderous during the election campaign.
And we went 61 to 38.
That's right.
They just cannot be sure enough of getting you.
They've tried it for four years.
And I just don't think they have enough self-confidence in order to do it.
And I think that the Chinese, actually, I think the Chinese are squeezing them harder than the Russians.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
We sent this note to the Chinese on Friday midnight saying your allies are a bunch of liars and they're tricking you.
If you'd like to hear our story, we'd be glad to tell you.
Within six hours, eight hours, we get a phone call saying, come on up and tell us why our allies are liars.
And it fits in with all the intelligence reporting we get.
Do you have any further intelligence reporting on Q?
No.
The goddamn bastards on their radio today put out another insane statement about my press conference in which they said, in effect, it means the talks have collapsed completely.
that we will never resume them unless the other side changes its approach completely.
And it's so idiotic.
I may toughen up the letter.
I mean, it's so idiotic from their point of view because if the talks resume, they'll resume in the old framework and we'll settle almost on the terms we've got.
So then they've now tucked themselves into another hole in which what they could have presented as a victory
they have now turned into a major setback.
I don't bother you with a lot of this stuff, but, for example, on the two-party military commission here, the communists are now trying to use this to spread communist cadres into every village.
It doesn't make any difference how it's going to come out.
Once it hits our press, it's going to be a big issue.
If this idiot in Saigon had signed the agreement early in November, you'd never have heard of the two-party commission, and no American would have given a damn
how it was set up, and he would have had a total veto over it.
So he's getting himself marginal word changes and paying for it with tremendous difficulties later on.
Yeah, de facto.
I understand.
And he, of course, doesn't understand how he's undermining your confidence.
Yeah.
Well, he's done that.
It's finished with him, you know.
Well, here you invite him to meet you at Midway, which after all was a great imposition.
That's right, that's right.
And he doesn't even have the courtesy to reply.
Not even the courtesy to turn him down.
That's right.
That's why this letter, I'm going to take a hard look.
It may be tougher than you think.
Well, it's pretty tough now, but— We'll see.
But you know— It'll get better.
Absolutely.
But in the meantime, what we have to do, Henry, as I said,
is to strike forward now.
We know it's tough.
We're going to take some heat.
We don't give a damn how they characterize it.
They're going to take some heat because of the bombs.
Some people are going to say that we're doing this and that, but as far as we're concerned, let's take all the heat that we need to take, remembering that it's never going to be easier later.
Never going to be easier later.
Four months from now, five months from now, six months from now, if we had had to do these
I mean, if this thing were still going on, we would have been voted out of the war.
Now, we may still be, but at least we will have given them a hell of a whack.
Mr. President, you're making the peace enforceable.
You are shoring up the courage of the other countries in that area.
It's the courageous and strong action, and it's, after all, what the people voted for you.
They didn't vote for you as a party.
We'll expect that dinner, incidentally.
It'll be 7.30.
Will it be black tie?
Black tie, yeah.
Just black tie, yeah.
And I'll determine whether we have anybody else.
I'll let you know about it.
Let me know whether Joe is back.
Okay.