Conversation 655-005

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I need to go back for a little more.

I don't know what you're doing there.

I just...

I think a little more.

That's about to take off right there.

I'm paralleling the wires so that you can hear me.

I've got the mic right there.

I'm looking at the mic.

Sir, would it be inconvenient for you to slide your paper in the other direction when you're finished with the page?

The thing I'm afraid of is he might get a bunch of odor, but it just seems to me he might get in the way of the microphone.

Wouldn't it be interesting if I moved a little bit?

I can put it underneath if you want, but that's an actual video.

I thought it was easy, but you could read it and pull it and just take it off the side.

But you know, don't let me interfere.

We were used to it.

Mark and I were used to it.

Yeah, well, that's the reason.

I don't want to interfere.

No, it'd be better if you put it underneath.

How do you feel, Mark?

I don't notice it that much.

It's kind of uncomfortable.

Whatever feels most natural to you at all.

I think it's an honest place.

All I could do.

and your face may just push it off the side.

There's one thing I need to ask you.

Yeah, yeah.

As long as you don't hold that, it'll be okay, because if you don't hold it even entirely now, you'll still get shadows there, and it'll light up.

Uh-huh.

So you want to be careful.

All right.

So I move by that.

All right.

Do I move it a little way?

Uh, sir, would it help if we moved the microphone back a little bit, or move it just a quick way for me?

So it's out of the way, I think, 0% of the way, or just a little bit?

Not that, I don't think it's like that.

Is that better for you?

That's fine.

I'd like to have it so that when your papers are, one paper you are finished, so they're sort of neatly piled up, it looks better, and all I hear is, how's that going?

That's all right, Mike.

It's not a major question.

I hesitate too much to do it this way, too.

You know, that does get... Last time, last time we did one, you put them off to this side, I saw.

And they were a little...

I made this place like this.

And I was like... Well... Whatever she was after...

No.

We'll take it up.

Take one of those and check.

Now, maybe he doesn't like it.

No.

Throw him under me.

Why, you.

I'll try that.

All right.

Well, I had to take you.

I understand.

These little things, sometimes they're a big deal.

Well, it's just a sense.

Tom, all right?

Are we all right?

Is Lincoln satisfied?

Bill?

Let's hear it.

I'll give you a cue from here.

And I won't understand.

I don't care.

I hope it won't distract you if I leave the room and go out and watch it on the truck.

I'll go wherever you want.

Quiet.

What if this hammer broke and this is the only answer?

Well, I don't care about the clock.

You can just deal with this guy.

You can just turn it around.

You can take it out.

We'll get it out.

You might forget it off the stage because I have it behind me.

We'll get it out.

First of all, I'm just waiting for the clock.

Is Bill in inside?

Good luck.

Five minutes, please.

That will last a cool night.

Thank you.

Bill, stand up.

Bill, wait a minute.

Take a little minute.

All right, keep your head up.

You'll be fine in a minute.

Just in case.

Four and a half to air.

Four and a half to air, Mark.

Yeah.

Bill, this is directly to air, in other words, take into account the 45 seconds.

Let's go.

Let's get to, you know, what is what here?

Zero, zero, I mean, 30, 30, zero, zero.

80, 30, zero, zero.

Give me that.

Mark, Mark, what's the actual running time?

20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20.

It's because you're on the call.

If it had not been, if it had not been, you'd hear this.

No, you didn't hear it.

Yeah, well, should I disconnect this and I go?

You'll fly it up.

Yeah, why don't you call her up?

Doctor.

Two and a half here.

Don't leave her.

Send the telegram, please.

Did you see that outside shot?

Yeah, it was nice and beautiful.

We're about a minute and a half from where we're going.

It's actually a little more than that, about two minutes until we go get him on here.

Gotcha, gotcha.

All right, we're getting in here.

A minute 45, exactly two minutes.

We'll tell Mark when we're ready.

Mark, we're a minute away.

and throw him on the side.

Actually, if you could stand there a few seconds there while we put an outside shot.

There you go.

You have 45 seconds, sir.

Bill?

He's not in the office.

He's February 8th.

30 seconds to cue.

Here we are.

About 20 seconds.

15 seconds.

Good evening.

I ask for this television time tonight to make public a plan for peace that can end the war in Vietnam.

The offer that I shall now present on behalf of the government of the United States and the government of South Vietnam, with the full knowledge and approval of President Chu, is both generous and far-reaching.

It is a plan to end the war now.

It includes an offer to withdraw all American forces within six months of an agreement.

Its acceptance would mean the speedy return of all the prisoners of war to their homes.

Three years ago, when I took office, there were 550,000 Americans in Vietnam.

The number killed in action was running as high as 300 a week.

There were no plans to bring any Americans home, and the only thing that had been settled in Paris was the shape of the conference table.

I immediately moved to fulfill a pledge I had made to the American people to bring about a peace that could last not only for the United States, but for the long-suffering people of Southeast Asia.

There were two honorable paths open to us.

The path of negotiation was and is the path we prefer, but it takes two to negotiate.

There had to be another way in case the other side refused to negotiate.

That path we called Vietnamization.

What it meant was training and equipping the South Vietnamese to defend themselves and steadily withdrawing Americans as they developed the capability to do so.

The path of Vietnamization has been successful.

Two weeks ago, you will recall that I announced that by May 1st, American forces in Vietnam would be down to 69,000.

That means almost 1.5 million Americans will have been brought home from Vietnam over the past three years.

In terms of American lives, the losses of 300 people have been reduced by over 95% to less than 10.

But the path of Vietnamization

has been the long voyage home.

It has strained the patience and tested the perseverance of the American people.

What a shortcut, the shortcut we prefer to have in negotiations.

Progress here has been disappointing.

The American people deserve an accounting of why it's been disappointing.

And tonight, I intend to give you that accounting, and in so doing, I'm going to try to break the deadlock in the negotiations.

We have made a series of public proposals designed to bring an end to the conflict.

But early in this administration, after ten months of no progress in the public Paris talks,

I became convinced that it was necessary to explore the possibility of negotiating some private chance to see whether it would be possible to end the public deadlock.

After consultation with Secretary of State Rogers, our ambassador to Saigon, our chief negotiator in Paris,

With the full knowledge and approval of President Pugh, I sent Dr. Kissinger to Paris as my personal representative on August 4, 1969, 30 months ago, to begin the secret peace negotiations.

Since that time, Dr. Kissinger has traveled to Paris 12 times on these secret missions.

He has met seven times with Lee Dok-chol, one of Hanoi's top political leaders, and Ministers Wang Wei, head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris talks.

And he's met with Ministers Wang Wei five times alone.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank President Pompidou of France for his personal assistance in helping to make the arrangements for these secret talks.

Now this is why I initiated these private negotiations.

Privately, both sides can be more flexible in offering new approaches.

And also, private discussions allow both sides to talk frankly, to take positions free from the pressure of causing debate.

in seeking peace in Vietnam, with so many lives at stake, I felt we could not afford to let any opportunity go by, private or public, to negotiate a settlement.

As I have stated on a number of occasions, I was prepared, and I remain prepared, to explore any avenue, public or private, to speed negotiations to end the war.

For 30 months,

Whenever Secretary Rogers and Dr. Kissinger and I were asked about secret negotiations, we would only say we were pursuing every possible channel in our search for peace.

They were thus never a lead because we were determined not to jeopardize the secret negotiations.

Until recently, this charge showed signs of yielding some progress.

Now, however, it is my judgment that the purposes of peace will best be served by bringing out publicly the proposals we have been making in private.

Nothing is served by silence when the other side exploits our good faith to divide America and to avoid a conference table.

And nothing is served by silence when it misleads some Americans into accusing their own government of failing to do what it has already done

And nothing is served by silence but enables the other side to imply possible solutions publicly that it has already flatly rejected privately.

The time has come to lay the record of our secret negotiations on the table.

Just as secret negotiations can sometimes break a public deadline, public disclosure may help to break a secret deadline.

Some Americans, who believe what the North Vietnamese led them to believe, have charged that the United States has not pursued negotiations intensively.

As the record that I now disclose will show, just the odds of it's true.

Questions have been raised as to why we have not proposed a deadline for the withdrawal of all American forces in exchange for a ceasefire and the return of prisoners of war.

why we have not discussed the seven-point proposal made by the Viet Cong last July in Paris, why we have not submitted a new plan of our own to move the negotiations off dead sand.

As the private record will show, we've taken all these steps and more and have been flatly rejected or ignored by the other side.

On May 31, 1971,

eight months ago at one of the secret meetings in Paris.

We offered specifically to agree to a deadline for the withdrawal of all American forces in exchange for the release of all prisoners of war and the ceasefires.

At the next meeting in June 26, the North Vietnamese rejected our offer.

They privately proposed instead their own nine-point plan, which insisted that we overthrow the government for South Vietnam.

Five days later, on July 1st, the Army publicly presented a different package of proposals, the seven-point Viet Cong plan.

That posed the dilemma.

Which package should we respond to, the public plan or the secret plan?

On July 12th, at another private meeting in Paris, Dr. Chisholm put that question to the North Vietnamese director.

They said we should deal with their nine-point secret plan.

Because it covered all of Indochina, including Laos and Cambodia, while the Viet Cong seven-point proposal was limited to Vietnam.

And so that's what we did.

But we went even beyond that, dealing with some of the points in the public plan that were not covered in the secret plan.

On August 16, at another private meeting, we went further.

We offered a complete withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces within nine months after an agreement on overall settlement.

On September 13, the North Vietnamese rejected that proposal.

They continued to insist that we overthrow the South Vietnamese government.

Now, what has been the result of these five acts?

For months, the North Vietnamese have been berating us in public sessions for not responding to their side's publicly presented seven-point plan.

The truth is that we did respond to the enemy's plan in the manner they wanted to respond, secretly.

In full possession of our complete response, the North Vietnamese publicly denounced us for not having responded at all.

They had used many Americans to impress the Congress into echoing their propaganda.

Americans who could not know they were being falsely used by the enemy to stir up the business in this country.

I decided in October that we could make another attempt to break the deadline.

I consulted with President Pugh, who concurred fully, in a new plan.

On October 11th, I sent a private communication to the North Vietnamese that contained new elements that could move negotiations forward.

I urged a meeting on November 1st between Dr. Kissinger and Special Advisor Lee Dat To or some other appropriate official from Hanoi.

On October 25th, the North Vietnamese agreed to meet, suggested November 20th is the time to meet.

On November 17, just three days before the scheduled meeting, they said the doctor was ill. We offered to meet as soon as he recovered, either with him or immediately with any other authorized leader who could come from now.

Two months have passed since they called off that meeting.

The only reply to our plan has been an increase in troop infiltration from North Vietnam

and communist military agencies in Laos and Cambodia.

Our proposal for peace was answered by a step up in the war on their part.

That is where matters stand today.

We are being asked publicly to respond to proposals that we answered and in some respects accepted months ago in pride.

We are being asked publicly to set a terminal date for our withdrawals, but we've already offered one in private.

And the most comprehensive peace plan of this conflict lies ignored in a secret channel while the enemy tries again for military aid.

That is why I have instructed Ambassador Porter to present our plan publicly at this Thursday's session of the Paris Peace Talks, along with alternatives to make it even more festive.

We are publishing the full details of our plan tonight.

It will prove beyond doubt which side has made every effort to make these negotiations succeed.

It will show unmistakably that Hanoi, not Washington or Saigon, has made the world war.

Here is the essence of our peace plan.

Public disclosure may gain the attention it deserves in Hanoi.

Within six months of an agreement, we shall withdraw all U.S. and allied forces from South Vietnam.

We shall exchange all prisoners of war.

There shall be a ceasefire throughout North China.

There shall be a new presidential election in South Vietnam.

President Chu will announce the elements of this election.

These include international supervision and an independent body to organize and run the election, representing all political forces in South Vietnam, including the National Liberation Front.

Furthermore, President Chu has informed me that within the framework of the agreement outlined above, he makes the following offer.

He and Vice President Wong would be ready to resign one month before the new election.

The chairman of the Senate, as carried at the head of the government, would assume administrative responsibilities in South Vietnam.

But the election

would be the sole responsibility of the independent election bodies I have just described.

There are several other proposals in our new peace plan.

For example, as we offered privately on July 26 of last year, we remain prepared to undertake a major reconstruction program throughout the end of China, including North Vietnam, to help all these people recover from the ravages of a tenorated war.

We will pursue any approach that will speed negotiations.

We are ready to negotiate the plan of our life outline tonight and conclude a comprehensive agreement on all military and political issues.

Because some parts of this agreement could prove more difficult to negotiate than others, we would be willing to begin implementing certain military aspects while negotiations continue on the implementation of other issues, just as we suggested in our private proposal in October.

Or, as we proposed last May, we remain willing to settle only the military issues and leave the political issues to the Vietnamese alone.

Under this approach, we would withdraw all U.S. and allied forces within six months in exchange for an end to the Chinese ceasefire and the release of all prisoners.

The choice is up to the enemy.

This is a settlement offer which is spared in North Vietnam and very South Vietnam.

It deserves the light of public scrutiny by these nations and by other nations throughout the world.

and it deserves the united support of the American people.

We made the substance of this generous offer privately over three months ago.

It has not been rejected, but it has been ignored.

I reiterate that peace offer cannot, it can no longer be ignored.

The only thing this plan does not do

is to join our enemy to overthrow our ally, which the United States of America will never do.

If the enemy wants peace, it will have to recognize the important difference between settler and surrender.

This has been a long and agonizing struggle.

But it is difficult to see how anyone, regardless of his past position on the war, could now say that we have not gone the extra mile in offering a settlement that is fair, fair to everybody concerned.

By the steadiness of our withdrawal of troops, America has proved its resolution to end our involvement in the war.

By our readiness to act in the spirit of conciliation, America has proved its desire to be involved in the building of a permanent peace throughout all of China.

We are ready to negotiate peace immediately.

If the enemy rejects our offer to negotiate, we shall continue our program of ending American involvement in the war by withdrawing our remaining forces as the South Vietnamese develop the capability to defend themselves.

If the enemy's answer to our peace offer is to step up their military attacks, I shall fully meet my responsibility as Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces to protect our remaining troops.

We do not prefer this course of action.

We want to end the war, not only for America, but for all of the people of China.

The plan I have proposed tonight can accomplish that goal.

Some of our citizens have become accustomed to thinking that whatever our government says must be false, and whatever our enemies say must be true as far as this war is concerned.

But the record I have revealed tonight proves the contrary.

we can now demonstrate publicly what we have long been demonstrating privately, that America has taken the initiative not only to end our participation in this war, but to end the war itself for all concerned.

This has been the longest and most difficult war in American history.

Honest and patriotic Americans have disagreed

as to whether we should have become involved at all nine years ago, and there has been disagreement on the conduct of the war.

The proposal I have made tonight is one on which we all can agree.

Let us unite now, unite in our search for peace, a peace that is fair to both sides, a peace

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Good night.

Cross.

Clear.

Yes, sir.

You may go.

Somebody in white?

Please, thank you.

Well, we won't call it again for another three weeks, CBS.

I have any time for that.

Did you like the Christmas special we did?

That was terrific.

Yeah, that's right.

We did that too, I guess.

We don't have that for Eagle Town.

But you're right, you know.

It's a lovely show.

I have had more knowledge from that show than any show that I have done for CBS.

Julie, you know it so well.

She's got a lot of class.

We were important.

We knew we were so good that we didn't get to see as much of the Brextechs and Federations as we might have seen other dogs.

But you really, I've never seen them warmer.

Well, you were all good.

It was a good crew to work with, you know, your people were so nice.

Well, we were very pleased with that.

And as well as we were pleased with the thing that you were here for.

No, no, sir.

That's easy.

I'm glad to hear you.

Thank you.

Well, get to work.

Yes, sir.

Why are you so early?

I work so late.

Thank you very much.

All right, guys.

Well, the production team, believe it or not, you've got a heck of a lot of stuff.

Thanks a lot.

I've never seen TSA do it.

Tony was sweet with me there, and we had a little presentation meeting.

You know, I think he's going to get part of it.

I know.

Thank you.

We should.

Well, thank you for your cooperation, sir.

Thank you, John.

I was very happy to watch.

I appreciate your let-up, because none of us have been able to do that for a long time.