Nixon, Kissinger & Hansen on Vietnam War and Lam Son 719

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I've talked to... Well, I frankly think, Mr. President, if they don't get the strike off by Friday evening, if the Russians reply, I don't see how we can hit them right after.

Until they've replied, we haven't really got anything, although it doesn't help.

But if they agree to the text of an exchange, I don't see how we can then hit them.

and asked him to exchange letters simultaneously.

And I think we checked on Friday.

I think Wednesday.

Yeah, it seems to have been on Friday at 1.

Hello, Cliff?

Well, I guess I was talking to Chuck Colson.

You know, you were stepping up to the boys down there on that film, on that, you know, that they showed at the center office on Friday.

And I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate it.

Thank you for your guts.

Yeah.

You always like to fight, which is good.

For a good cause.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, I do appreciate it very much, and I know that some of your colleagues are back, so I just want you to know that I'm sure they appreciate what you did.

All right.

That's worth mentioning.

Thank you.

Just send to the Library of Congress, give me a copy of the book.

I think it deals with the philosophy of law, exactly.

Well, in regard to Laos, coming back to that, more consistently,

I want you to make a note.

If you ever find out who that AP guy is, I'm the same man as the guy that was in Cambodia.

I'd lay you money.

I can talk from the side of the right.

where he says, if you agree the vehicle is smart, then he says this is the second phase they've withdrawn from, and that sort of thing, except for that they're in a rubble.

And Porter says, God damn it, this is not true.

It is a consistent plan withdrawn towards actually more productive areas.

Chapone was a publicity stunt.

There wasn't anything particular there.

That crossroads towards which they're moving, first it gives them a defense in depth, and secondly, it's a strategically more productive thing.

We've gotten lots of supplies down there.

I'm getting you a tabulation.

And it's... You see, Harry, I feel horrible this morning.

I said, I won't share.

I don't want to know anything.

I don't want to be, I don't want to know.

I just want to know the truth.

Because if I have to, if I do something impressive right now, I don't want to lie about anything.

I don't want to say that we've cut traffic if we haven't.

I don't want to say that we're withdrawing.

I don't want to say that we're a bad lot of men.

But then, I do think that we've got to fight them all the time on this thing.

It's obvious that they're trying so desperately to make it appear that it's obvious.

Well, of course, what?

No, he would not lie to you, but he might work on the wrong bus.

Well, he might have.

No, he doesn't.

But I spent two and a half hours yesterday, Mr. President.

I'm going to spend two more hours tomorrow.

Because I felt that after you used the figure 55%, I wanted to make sure that the next time...

It's an understatement.

It is an absolute understatement.

Now, of course, the goddamn CIA is hatcheting this the way they did the SS9.

They go through 500...

I don't want to bore you with the details, but...

But once I had driven that guy against the wall.

Part of it is the jurisdiction of the dispute with the Pentagon.

It turns out that whatever criterion you use

Only about 30% of the supplies had gotten into Vietnam and Cambodia, Lizzie.

Do you mind the CIA, the president, saying what they said about Cambodia and that they were wrong?

About 100%.

Right.

You know what I mean?

About 100%.

You know?

Exactly.

Now, I've almost given him this job for a while.

I think all I have to do now, Mom, if he doesn't shape up better.

I think he's personally all right, but can he keep his people wide enough in it?

Well, it's... Well, it's a whole mess.

Unless you do to them what I did yesterday of just humping them around for two hours to make them stay.

No, well, every once in a while there's a good warning shot.

I'm persuaded now that the supply is going into Vietnam and Cambodia this year.

are about 65% below last year.

Are you?

And that's coming down the trail.

And then if you added the beer no grill thing to it, you'd have to say they're getting only about 25% of what they did last year.

But I'm going to go through this exercise again tomorrow just to make absolutely sure.

Henry, let me say, we're not, we don't want to kill ourselves.

Mr. President, I'm going to do this exercise primarily for your April 7th speech.

Because I feel we don't want to kid ourselves.

We may say anything publicly, but I'm trying to get a fair assessment of where we'll be next year.

Because if we should come to the conclusion that the whole thing is going to collapse next year, I don't believe that's what we're going to do.

But then we can do it now.

And therefore, I'm going at this really with...

with great toughness.

But actually, I was quite encouraged by this meeting yesterday.

The intelligent people are fighting like cats and dogs over their pickets, but that isn't so important.

The ratios, and I talked to Haig on the telephone today.

He's been in Cambodia, and he's now, he's been, he hasn't been at the front yet, but he's been.

He talks with Bunker, and he's talked to his G3s.

He says the striking thing is that with five South Vietnamese divisions out of the country, nevertheless the enemy hasn't been able to pick up his activity.

And that is an interesting fact.

And that the supplies coming into Vietnam now and into Cambodia are a trickle.

So I think we'll have a better grip on it.

I'm going to keep these guys

in the Situation Room so that when we draft our end proposal for your speech.

Now, I found yesterday that we'll have the fact, last evening at your party, Mr. President, of course, not a good example, these 15 Harvard boys came up to me.

These are all these kids, they're all law school kids.

Yes, they're all law school kids.

And some of them had been students of mine.

They said they just wanted me to know

Well, they may be very glad they're coming about me, but that's not the important thing.

They said they want you to know that

They are behind your Vietnam publishing.

They want peace there, but they want it with honors.

Did they say that?

Yeah.

Now, that's not a good sample, I admit.

And they were in the warehouse.

Is this recurring or are there any?

But I didn't look for them.

And they told me of it.

They told you this?

That's right.

And... Don't eat that.

And there was one young fellow there called Hutchinson whose father was under Secretary of Transportation.

Under LBJ.

And another boy, Connor, whose father was a comrade.

In other words, both Democrats and both speaking with enormous warmth.

And I just wondered

Whether in that speech you might consider it slightly more offensive to say you are bringing peace instead of peace of honor.

Oh, don't you worry.

I'm going to say peace of honor every time I get a chance to go on with Howard Smith.

Well, I did it all the time.

After all, you remember it.

It was the theme of the, did you know about the third?

It was all, I don't remember if it was the theme of the third.

I refuse to accept that proposition.

That's the argument that everybody's trying to get me to make.

I will not make it.

I think we're in the goddamn thing.

I think we've conducted it wrong, but I think we were right to do what we're doing.

Now, that's what we're saying.

And it will make you, and it has made you, a strong president.

Well, it's a lot of ways.

Now, we want to remember, most of the people, most of the people think it's now, according to all of us, it's safe to go in.

However, it could be a distraction, a burden you find, a reason to think it's safe to go in because the war has been so badly conducted.

My view is that the people are wrong.

I mean, that doesn't follow the people.

Like I told Salisbury to Christ, he said, we can't follow the establishment of the rest when they're wrong.

That isn't what we're paid to do.

And I think the whole thing with Salisbury and the rest, it's going to get into these...

It's getting to them and...

I don't know, they are a disgraceful bunch, I'll tell you that.

They deserve their country.

And I agree with Haldeman.

I think we can turn this to our advantage.

Well, by May 1st, we're going to be out of there.

I think the impact on...

But we can keep that going all summer long.

We can make a decent announcement in April.

We can announce the end of the combat role in July.

Uh-huh.

The end of draftees by the beginning of the school year.

Maybe even sooner.

The draftees are concerned with the combat role.

Well, the problem you have...

The combat role, hell, even the Air Force is all over here.

Well, the problem with the combat role is...

The draftees, the combat role is very easy, but the draftees...

The problem is what you do with the draftees that are still there.

So you want to do it at a point when you don't have...

to send many more in there of the already... Let me say this.

I don't know what we can do about it.

I know more is where it drops.

I told him this morning I should go down there if I don't get some of the word out out there.

He said, we're trying.

I guess they're just desperate that they don't leave it out there.

And the press, those 150 pressmen up around...

Laos are just hungry that Mr. Edward, they couldn't believe it when they were in Japan.

They don't believe it when they think about these catches.

They've downgraded South Vietnam in every argument.

Not every pro-communist got that.

That's what they got.

What do you think?

Absolutely.

Two, in fact, the two South Vietnamese divisions have been in Laos for seven weeks.

There's just no way the North Vietnamese can explain that away.

The North Vietnamese, they gave it one good shot.

But basically, if they were strong, if this were the North Vietnamese of three years ago, we would have been in deep trouble.

But they gave it one good shot.

And since then, uh, they've, uh... You know, what do you think about this idea that they would pack fireboats, you would have baseball and firebases over here, and we would draw from them... Mr. Benjamin, all I know is that we had always planned to withdraw from them at about this time.

Maybe you don't want to get out.

That's why I said it was the case.

You read that in case of the AP dispatch in Washington, D.C. Oh, yeah.

The most things we've got there that you could ever read.

South East and East were drawn to it.

Was it there?

No, they were withdrawing from the base and the rest.

We got yesterday, we got 300 trunks, each of which was 55 gallons of P.O.L.

Well, it just marks that we are over 4 million pounds of rice now.

Now, we're close to 6 million pounds.

We're about 3,000 tons of rice.

so that we're getting all of this stuff has to be transported down again.

They were doing the same stuff, I remember, during Cambodia when I briefed every week.

I briefed them every week during Cambodia and they were nitpicking that we had got only 30% of the supplies.

We want that.

We want that one.

But not till August.

Not really till August, Mr. President.

At first, in July, they were still saying, well, it doesn't mean anything in their right back.

Well, they said even after that, though, with the Cavaliers, you know, with the South Park, they had to cut the roads in Mount Penn.

They had Mount Penn lost 30 times, I believe.

30 times at least on the torch, and Mount Penn was lost, wasn't it?

They haven't cut a road in Campo yet in three months.

I don't know.

I just told you, we're right.

We're not right.

Communism is the way of the future.

That's all there is to it.

You know that?

If the argument that all this support and all our sacrifice cannot now hold its own, then it's done.

I just smell signs of negotiations if we just give them the sense that we, through the summer, through the summer, after September,

We ought to pull out all this lunch.

For example, the Indian ambassador who had had me for dinner and took me in previously, and I asked him for lunch today.

I told Bill about it, because there was no...

The state is not happy.

I also refer to her very nicely.

I don't know, but I'll call her.

And also for her as a woman, she'll get a copy of it and send it over to the State Department.

They probably didn't.

That's something.

What about letter of coordinates?

It would have to be a very personal one.

Oh, it would be personal, sure.

He's thrown out, wasn't he?

Yeah, and he's still deputy leader of the party.

All right.

When it's power, it's power.

I just want to be sure nobody gets sent home.

Why did he throw him out?

What was the trouble?

Well, he had kept his senses mended within his party, and he was in trouble to begin with.

He was still pretty damn ready to let us know.

Enormously ready to let us know.

He's very humble.

He was the ablest, I thought, of the commonwealth leader.

Who was the man that you knew?

Yes, but more intellectual.

The good thing about Gordon was that you were dealing with an eminent... Baldy guy.

Baldy guy.

I remember that toast at the steak dinner that was really lovely.

Oh, yeah?

And... Aren't you unusual here?

The line was shot.

It was nice last night.

Yes, I thought it was.

It was a response about the losing election.

It was nice.

I think it was.

The whole party had a very warm feeling to it.

I think it was nice to hear that.

We had the engagement on, but I don't think it was so far away.

It was nice to hear it.

And also, we need Irish to help build up.

Otherwise, nobody's gonna pay one damn attention to the Irish coming to the White House, except for that shamrock stuff.

But now, it'll be a secondary story, but it'll be in every story around the world, half the Irish in the White House, blah, blah, blah, right?

I'll see you at the briefing on Friday for lunch.

Your point is, you don't want to bomb that.

Jesus Christ, you've got it.

Well, it only takes one strike.

Well, luckily today they shut down a plane in South Vietnam from batteries filing from across the DMZ.

So we've got more capital in the bank, we can say.

But I must say that if we have an Air Force that takes two weeks to get a bloody strike off because it claims that there's cloud cover, what would they do in Russia where there's always cloud cover?

I have horrible doubts about the Air Force.

I think there's something out there that we don't know what it's about.

It may be there's bureaucracy at the top of that thing that we're not getting through.

But now I know they're in trouble.

Oh, no, they're being fucked, but they say they...

I talked to Moore again this morning.

You had already talked to him.

I just told him to leave the deal on his own.

Well, I think it was good.

They say they need a 5,000-foot ceiling and 10-mile visibility.

I thought more of a joke how many places in the world they could count on that when they really needed it.

You certainly can't count on a 5,000-foot ceiling in the Soviet Union.

I'll tell you.

No, no place.

They're ground-bombed.

Of course.

In the desert, you can't see it.

Horrible place.

Well, anyway, I don't know.

We just burned my table to see that he got cut.

But she's a son of a sinner.

Day after day.

Oh, well.

Well, it isn't true.

Well, if it is true, it is true.

I don't think they're taking a whack.

Our bar will tell us that.

I think our board will tell us.

Hank would find it out from Abrams.

I think they're moving around.

They are doing what the plan is.

When they went to Chipone, I said to Hayes, I wish they were going instead of Chipone to where now they're going because it would have more deaths and it would cut the roads better.

Well, they had to take Chipone for their own reasons and now they're swinging around and going.

to that place.

But the ADP writes that they've been driven out of Chabon by superior linemen.

And even, quote, one of our people saying that we couldn't get in with air cover and a helmet.

You saw that?

It's just...

I know.

It's complete nonsense.

Some of our guys are coming some too out there.

Maybe.

But it's no achievement to find some junior officer.

Our helicopter losses have gone down.

Our casualties are quite low.

There's no indication that this stuff is true.

Okay.

No, we can't afford to kid ourselves in this building, whatever we may put out in public.

I'm not worried.

And that's why I'm drilling these doors.

That's why a lot of people in the press corps are so underestimated.

We've never lied to them yet.

We've never lied to ourselves.

Johnson lied to himself and to them.

We have never lied to ourselves harder than Becker.

I got out of the house on anything, every report.

And they don't give us the credit that they're...

I must say, I...

I...

I... Connolly is a tremendous asset to you, incidentally.

At that dinner the other night, there was Rolly Evans and a number of people were there.

What did they do?

There was a Monday night that I mentioned to you that I was going to.

Oh.

Cato gave the dinner for him.

Cato.

Oh, no, you didn't mention it to me.

I didn't.

I mentioned to you I was going there when you called me Monday night.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When was the last dinner?

We were going for dinner, yeah.

So I called you at 8.15.

I said, get the hell over there.

That's right.

And...

David Cutter, who isn't very bright, made an endless toast, which was meaningless.

But his response calmly really praised you as one of the gutsiest men he had ever known and thought for.

And coming from him, with people like Jolie Evans and a lot of Democrats...

Everybody else had this job.

He could do it.

Oh, he's got all the character.

He's got quick intelligence.

He's a true judge of men.

He's a powerful leader.

The question as to how he would come over on television remains to be seen.

You can't tell.

But he would be a little too hot on television, you know what I mean?

Johnson, while he came over, well, personally, came over terribly on television.

All these texts have these squinty eyes which tend to look shifty.

It's because of the sun.

I don't know whether he does or doesn't, but nevertheless, he would come over as a powerful man.

And, uh, you know, you put it in here.

I just, uh, you think of, you know, Agnes.

I find it kind of difficult.

Your point is a... Well, I'm prepared to lay one of my members in check.

Is there anybody else you got?

Not many of them.

They're as strong as he is.

Oh, no.

Except for Conley, he would be better than anyone.

I had meant to ask you...

Richardson could go.

Yeah, but he couldn't get across.

Couldn't get across, but I think Richardson's got the character.

I don't know whether he's got his back, though.

But he's very able.

He could certainly hold any cabinet position.

He has a very, very problem growing out of that role.

And, uh, and he gets got, or discovered at times.

The other point is that, where he comes through sometimes in the punchline at the graveyard, everybody said he did it all the time.

He saved us.

Dole was a disaster.

He came on strong.

Now, in other words, that shows something, the mark of a man, right?

Oh, yes.

You know what?

I think he really got it, didn't he?

I don't think he has a subtle mind.

You do?

You think so?

— 1 min 40 s with no transcribed speech —

I wanted to do a Dewey's funeral on Sunday, privately.

Would you like to?

I'd like to go if you would let me, because I admire him very much.

He worked with us here.

I saw him, and we were talking about him recently.

Just about 68 years of age, he'd seen his best years.

What the hell did it all have left for him?

Not really.

He was living alone.

I talked to him only last week about joining the Fiat again.

He was getting a little long-winded there.

That's been his last one of my years.

We get old before we want.

And nevertheless, Dewey has always been one that sort of rambles.

But on the other hand, when Greene comes down to it, he wants to punch somebody in the face, and then he is correct.

Oh, he was a gutsy man.

And a great admirer of yours, and he never died of telling me how he had spotted you at a time when...

I mean, during the Senate.

The thing about it is this, that he...

He just admires guts.

Politicians do.

He had, he had guests.

I guess he had guests.

Sometimes.

Back to what I'd very much like to go on about.

We'll take the whole thing over.

I've got your stuff.

In the meantime, do you look at those figures?

I don't want to rely on you, but you know, hey, this is like a call to a spot.

Anything that I should know about?

No, it was just that I'm not because...

We get so hard here on these secure lines.

He also said Cambodia, the situation looks very good now, but it's almost all due to what the Vietnamese are doing with the Cambodian Army.

It's very well organized.

Well, that's great.

The Vietnamese, that's great.

And there, it's using 75% of the air support is Vietnamese.

And there, it shows...

Henry, let me tell you this, though.

Bell layers the imposition while ascension to our policy now.

Mr. President, you would be the landing star.

Without Cambodia, without Laos, we would be dead.

Without Cambodia, we wouldn't be there now.

They would have come out of these sanctuaries now.

They would have had all of Cambodia.

They would have hit us out of these sanctuaries.

What made the immunization code not lay on what you did in Cambodia,

And I think law is going to turn out as well.

It's turning out all too well.

It's turning out.

I personally, well, I mean, we started law in five weeks.

There are five weeks that have come to an end, or seven weeks have come to an end.

They've been in, what is it, the seven weeks?

They went in on the 8th, 15th, 16th, 17th, or five weeks.

Five weeks is right.

Yes.

They just did six weeks.

Next Monday it will be six weeks.

So they're in six weeks.

But we know they'll be in at least three or four more weeks.

No, sir.

Oh, yes.

The last one won't be out until about May 3rd.

I tell you, we've got to get across the point, sir.

Is there anything that can be done to him later?

I really don't believe it.

Can anybody say anything to get across the point?

Well, I'll say it's right.

It's true.

This is just a very good idea.

We're withdrawing.

I don't want to get into military tactics.

I shouldn't get into that.

They withdraw according to the plan.

I would make the point again that you, they're not withdrawing.

They're going after the, they're cutting the roads that was open.

There's not an internet barrier for the purpose of occupying territory.

There's a purpose of cutting and disrupting lines of communication.

That's why they're moving around.

Every indicator we have, you take Route 940.

People argue about the census and so forth.

But at least they tell us they're relative.

There's practically no truck traffic left on 940.

And that means that we've cut three...

made to root in the South Vietnam.

And the only one that may still be operating is 23, which is out in the open, where we are killing trucks like crazy.

And, uh, I have a few...

The truck killed about 10 to the 3rd line, and then it was arrested.

Nixon, Kissinger & Hansen on Vietnam War and Lam Son 719

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Also recorded on March 17, 1971

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Nixon, Kissinger & Hansen on Vietnam War and Lam Son 719

AI Summary

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NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on March 17, 1971

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