Nixon phone call with Kissinger on Vietnam War and 1972 Election

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Hello.

Mr. President.

Hi, Henry, how are you?

I called, I worked out that situation on the plane.

Oh, marvelous.

Rose will, she'll, I told her to, I'll have her invite Mrs. Longworth.

That would be nice.

And the way you can handle Stewart is simply say that the President is inviting Mrs. Longworth to go and that he would like him to go, too.

I don't want him to feel that he's at all

restricted because of going as a guest but just say that to let him think he's going as a member of the press not just have him sit with her see what I mean good excellent and let's say that we we're that we're arranging that he go down on the same plane you know as one of the one of the pool but we've all worked it out and we'll leave sometime Tuesday Tuesday around noon perhaps something like that

right but we'll let them know the time at a later time all right right well that's very good no it's a good thing to do we're delighted to have them delighted to have them i had a lunch with sabrina and i gave him already some of the points he made this morning and he was extremely pleased and i think uh well it's still fully aboard he said what they are told by the north vietnamese they're also very appreciative that we haven't brought any

that we haven't made any drastic moves on Egypt.

Yeah.

Oh, hell, of course not.

And of course, he says they figured that one reason he said they pulled out so fast is because they think the Egyptian military will get so fed up by their inability to maintain the equipment that they may move on Sadat.

It's a pretty cynical comment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very good.

But I think on that one, of course, that really

you ought to work it out so we can do something on that pipeline thing or something I mean I don't know I don't know how intricate it is but we you I want I want us to have that again as opposed to it on commercial grounds but well I know I know but he doesn't understand this thing we're doing this for political reasons we're not Pete doesn't understand we don't do any of these things for for commercial reasons yeah exactly

but Peterson is obviously under seizing the play very well and is handling it extremely well and we've just got to have Fanning around but it's good that Fanning knows you're going and he's been told now and it was good that he heard it from you and that he's not to say a damn word and so forth and so on and yet Pete's alright if you just say now look the stakes are too high to fool around on this thing because we do as a matter of fact we've got to put something on the plate for them we really have to

Absolutely.

And that we will do.

Exactly.

One other point briefly.

John Ehrlichman had lunch with Howard Smith.

Yes.

And were you there?

You weren't there.

No, I wasn't there.

He made this point.

He said Howard Smith raised a point.

He was trying to think of what they could be up to.

He said something that I think has to fit into your thinking with regard to your trip to Paris.

He said looking at this Ramsey Clark over there,

what his concern is that Ramsey wouldn't be over there just looking at dykes and that he might come back with some screwball offer from the North Vietnamese that, well, they'll release half our prisoners if we'll stop the bombing and all that sort of thing.

I told him, I said that you and I have talked this whole thing over and we didn't think it was going to happen.

And they didn't accept it?

Well, I wonder about it.

That's my point.

As I told him, I said exactly the same thing that

Parsi said, well, suppose they offer to release all of our prisoners if we stop the bombing and withdraw.

I said, well, we might accept that.

You know what I mean?

Who knows?

I said, I don't think they can, because they aren't going to be able to handle two.

But I don't think that that's... Yeah, I was going to offer that, Mr. President, but at any rate, we've offered something very close to that.

And they've turned it down.

And if they do something like this, we will try to scream that they are interfering in the American election, that they are offering to one party what they've refused to the other.

True, true.

But they won't do it.

Except that the, well, we just have to sort of figure that, you remember, I guess what Smith was playing back to, harking back to was,

McGovern's you know foray into Paris and also to you know where he came back and said well I have a commitment that we'll but that turned out to be wrong it did turn out to be wrong I know and I think there's a hell of a lot less reason for them to do it now than there was then in my view for them to to make that kind of an offer because they have the damned election hanging over them and what might happen in that election and they didn't have that then

You know what I mean?

That was an earlier point.

It would be much more in their interest to get us the hell out of there.

I mean, you come down to it.

I don't think getting us out there is now their major objective.

Well, I suppose the bombing... Their major objective is to get us to overthrow two.

I know.

That's right, and that's why I don't think... Because they are not at all sure they can do it themselves.

Yep.

That would seem to be certainly the major thrust of everything you've talked, everything that was in that memorandum.

Exactly.

And if that's the case, then a military offer of this sort is not likely to be, they might come back and say, well, we, they've offered to return prisoners if we overthrow two.

Well, then we can, we can just, we can scream about that too.

We can say, well, that's nothing new.

Yeah.

Right.

Exactly.

But I would, I would, you don't think they would try to use him as a conduit?

No.

Why not?

Why wouldn't they?

Because the sort of proposal that you're talking about, they know with slight modifications they can get from us, because that is, in effect, a military solution.

It's a solution of the military problem.

Now, if they've made any point to me, it's that they don't want to settle military problems.

They want to settle the political problems.

Therefore, it doesn't make any sense to offer to the candidate of a party that, after all, is 21 points behind in the public opinion vote, the thing on the basis of which, if they offered it to us, we would almost certainly settle.

And that is the hard way of doing it.

What they might do is to surface their proposal that they made to me and make that public.

And if they did, that would give us a hell of a problem.

It would, except we say, well, we're negotiating it.

That's right.

But you see, they are doctrinaire.

If they were smart, they would have accepted our proposal of May 31st last year.

That's right.

Because we would have been out of there, and they would have had a good shot at taking over.

A year ago, right?

A year ago, May 31st, 1971.

But they are very doctrinaire.

I think it's more likely.

that they'll string us along in these negotiations through September and then give us a blow in October.

That I think is indeed possible.

But not that they'll make an offer to McGovern that we could accept and that they make it to McGovern rather than to us.

Now with regard to the present military situation too, it would appear that

And we don't know how long it's going to last, but they may be husbanding their resources for the October blow.

You know, we've been, I don't know, they certainly are waiting on their away attack, aren't they?

Well, maybe they're waiting, but also maybe they have lost so many people that they could never get it going.

Could be.

That's my feeling.

I mean, for example, we had a prisoner from the 304th Division the other day.

who said that in his battalion they started out with 550 men in May.

They had gotten 250 replacements and they were down to 180 people in the middle of July.

In other words, they had lost 600 people out of 800.

He said in one B-52 attack they lost 110 men.

Now, if that is true, Mr. President, then...

they may not have the capacity to do it they may have all sorts of plans that's right they undoubtedly would like to do it in October yeah and maybe they can do one tremendous fast that's right well by what they do they're get a tremendous clobbering too as we're compared to that okay thank you

Nixon phone call with Kissinger on Vietnam War and 1972 Election

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on August 11, 1972

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