Nixon, Kissinger & Bull on Vietnam War and Bombing operations

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people all the time.

What I am concerned about is .

I thought that when we talked to the .

Well, they

any indication that we aren't blocking the hell out of it.

I have had a talk with Moore and I've had a talk with Rush this morning with exactly this theme.

My concern was, Mr. President, that when you say maximum effort, they will interpret this to mean that they should go slow in the south and put it all into the north.

Then you're going to have stories that you are detracted from the battle.

They are flying.

I don't mind.

I just want to hit them.

I'd like to hit them and say, drop them all in three corps, necessarily.

All of them.

But I want what appears to be a maximum effort at some point.

All over the country.

Let me put it this way.

A concentrated effort.

So they say the biggest strike.

concentrated strike.

So we get a story or two out like that in the South.

I don't care.

I just want it to be an argument.

Actually, Mr. President, they have what they're doing in the North now.

They haven't done it the last two days, but they're starting again tonight.

And they haven't done it because of some monkey business that must have been engaged.

They're flying about 150 sorties, Mr. President, in the North.

That's more than we ever flew on any protective reaction strike.

that you ordered, so this is pretty massive.

That's in the area south of 19.

On top of it, they're flying about 600 in the south, and the distribution now is they're making massive, the biggest effort is in military region three.

I genuinely believe that the gravel is going so well all over the country that we ought not to give them bombing targets.

No, we never do.

I think they're doing really...

I get a detailed briefing of every piece of territory.

One point that I emphasize more, which we have never done in this war to date, is that when the enemy starts to break off, instead of reducing the bombing, increase it.

You understand?

That is when you can really punish an enemy.

When an enemy is in retreat, you can kill them.

And of course, we are getting another bonus

This week, 10 more destroyers are going to get on that line, and that we could go forward on.

I mean, that's not affected by anything.

But tonight they're starting again, hitting the north with at least 150 planes.

That's the stuff that's out?

They should report it to you.

I'll talk to him today.

Well, I'll see you around 3-3 and finish it up.

3-3, yeah.

Well, you talk to Bob, you talk to Bob.

I want you to meet him because he's a great problem.

I know Bob isn't sending anybody for us.

It's Romney or Butts or Voltaire.

They've got to come in and report.

They shouldn't report to you.

They shouldn't report to me.

They don't know.

personally not hostile to the President.

He was just convinced that Brezhnev was personally hostile to the President's base, that he didn't like the way the President's conductions of his people.

Now, it doesn't mean anything.

Goddamn it, being the evaluation, I don't give one shit about it.

I don't make decisions based on whether the person is personalized to the hospital or not.

He is an enemy.

I know that.

Isn't that silly?

Why this being of Christ?

What gets me down, though, is how our people are so goddamn naive.

He had a fresh net.

He might, if he were, whether the bus is right or a beam is right, we'll have to listen respectfully.

Well, but there's a bit of an ecomaniac.

He goes there.

We told him before he went that this was to be the president's show.

He doesn't know the big game.

He comes back.

That's right.

He didn't do it, but it was right.

We had to let a lot of blood to get it done.

I believe that Brezhnev has committed his whole prestige to this, to this policy.

And to see what...

But in a social way,

The vitality of your foreign policy is so far the fact that you could attack Hanoi and Haiphong and get really only the most mild mumbling.

Now it's not going to happen anymore.

Because today in China, for two days they didn't cover it in the press at all.

Today they had an editorial in the People's Daily which was so mild.

And then when they protest about overflying them instead of making it public,

They send it through the secret channel, and they say one plane violated.

They give the time, and they don't say you must stop the bombing or something.

Is that Jackass Mansfield and Scott?

Are they over there?

Oh, yeah, they're flying there.

They've been there for 12 hours.

I hope they go ahead and help.

Sorry.

I didn't think the Chinese are going to get there.

You know, if you're with Scoop Jackson, I don't know if the jury is not.

and talk to him in these times.

You know, because he's charging up these guys.

That is the provocation.

Mr. President, I must tell you, I know no president who would have had the guts to do it now.

That's clear.

To do it with an invitation to Moscow for you in the pocket and a secret invitation to me.

It really showed a lot of gall.

They invite us on Thursday.

I mean, on Thursday they make it definite.

And on Saturday we clobber high five to tell them, all right, you bastards.

This is the game that's going to be played in Moscow.

But it so strengthens my hand in Moscow that it was a risk that had to be taken.

You could have gone.

I could have gone, but in a very weak position.

Well, in a position of only talking about the sun.

Now you're in a position of talking about the non-whole.

The only other thing I want to say is that it seemed to me that at least you should get out of your meeting with Russians.

is that when we return the president should be able to announce that vietnam would be first on the agenda of the moscow summit just just understand i'm not i'm not concluding this but let's discuss this tomorrow

Anything like that could come out of your trip.

Even if you get only that, even though you don't get a settlement, if we could say Vietnam will be on the agenda of our discussion, now that of course makes it necessary for us to get a settlement out of Vietnam.

The only hesitation I have, Mr. President, is they are now scared.

They have to be.

You've got a massive armada there.

We have to make sure they're not just playing for time.

maybe they would agree to that.

Well, no, but this is playing for time.

This gets in five weeks.

I'm just thinking, though, I'm thinking that when you return, if you've got nothing, we've got to come and help.

Or blockade.

If you blockade, do you think there'll be a summit?

No.

Well, then, do you think we should take that risk?

That's the real thing.

Mr. President, you and I should act

towards everybody.

As if we were going right off the cliff.

That's the only way we can make it better.

He is pretty tough.

He's tough.

I saw him on television.

You know, he is pugnacious as hell.

He's so crooked.

Now he's lying on that side.

And he's already put out a statement that there are no limitations.

And he's tough as hell now.

So it's all right.

I saw him tackle Polk right.

He said, you're totally irresponsible, Senator.

How can you say they've violated every understanding?

You ask them to come back to make another understanding that they can break when they haven't even kept the other one?

He was... That's right.

One thing about it is that we'll mobilize our conscience.

That's why I don't want this week to have the go on, for example, of others.

get terribly disappointed and say, well, the president did one, and because the Russians protested, we quit.

Oh, no, this is why I'm so upset.

See, we shouldn't be banging away the last two days.

But tonight they're starting again.

I have more as I am quite assured.

But do you think they stopped that because of something?

We didn't tell them to stop.

I think they stopped it, oh, certainly not.

Maybe because they're just tired.

They stopped it for two reasons.

One is...

that they were making up the sorties and all of this, which is a purely bureaucratic technical thing.

But, of course, it is going so well in the South now, worried, one can hardly believe it.

You check to see if he's free now.

Somebody in the chair, don't run him out, because I have nine people waiting on him in the next five minutes.

One can hardly believe it.

I don't believe a thing.

But let me tell you this, Henry, let's come back before we're all

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We know what we did to them in Laos.

We know what we did to them in Korea.

We know that they've been bombing batteries.

Remember you told me that?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

But all of these things, they have got the work involved to maintain a massive offensive.

And three corps, they haven't stopped.

That's my opinion.

Well, now, we're going to get one more terrific back in three corps.

Those are their best divisions.

Yep.

And how do you get stuff down there?

What?

I think every succeeding wave is going to be a little less.

For example, they've bought the fifth division in Amlok.

That's the lousiest army division.

Where they are now, they'll have to fight the 22nd and the 25th.

Those are the two best army divisions.

Having lost their initial momentum, and while they're moving, they're being clobbered by the B-52s, and the B-52s must strike some of them sometimes.

That Britisher said yesterday to me, he was a guards officer for six years.

He said, don't give me this business.

One of his lips there was saying, bombing never does anything.

He said, listen, I was in the war, and I've seen more people come out of their back doors with their hands up when they got hit.

If you can find them and you can bomb them, it's the most demoralizing form of warfare.

Another interesting intelligence.

We are finding, we got an intelligence report today, and we don't know how they value it.

We'll see the North Vietnamese are saying, hey, the naval gunfire is shaking them up.

Secondly, they are, one thing I'm glad about is that we don't have the New Jersey anymore.

If we had the New Jersey out there, they'd say, with the 16-inch guns, they'd be in a hopeless position because that could interdict all their roads.

Why did we get it out there?

Well, I checked already that it was more than it would take four months to get it ready.

Well, the Newport News is aged on text.

That'll reach in here pretty well.

And that's coming in, I think, next Monday.

Why didn't we see some electricity out there?

Because everything was coming out of it.

They say they can handle air attacks from a logistics point of view, but they cannot handle naval gunfire because it comes without warning.

It can disperse.

Oh, I hope to Christ they're shooting up the goddamn shipping up there, too.

Oh, yes.

Oh.

Are we?

We have a ship back.

The fishing boats, everything is sailing up there.

The water just sank down.

Mr. President, we have blockaded, in effect, everything.

But are we locking up our Vietnamese small boats?

Oh, yes.

We sank yesterday.

We sank two small boats, either torpedo boats or something else.

And, uh...

Now this, and after all, this is less than two weeks, a little more than two weeks that you've turned this whole thing around.

Moore has said he has three more schemes that he's going to come by with.

Like what?

I don't know.

He wouldn't tell me.

No, but I meant, you mean air, land?

He didn't say land, air or sea.

Well, I think he's got it on the table to look at.

At least they're thinking now, aren't they?

They're now thinking positively.

Well, we drove the middle of it.

We drove both.

Everyone outside is doing a superlative job.

Good.

Of course, he knows what we want.

And he probably scares the shit out of us.

Well, Abrams, Moore told me that he talked to both last night.

He said he got the message across to Abrams.

I have not done it.

I wish I had been able to.

I've done everything I could.

I told Mark to tell Abramson what he's going to do.

If it weren't for you, Mr. President, it took you four days to make the belief you meant it.

Unbelievable.

Be more careful with me.

I mean, when you took this thing over,

was falling, the was retreating.

We had no reinforcements ready, no proposals for reinforcements to send out there.

were saying we had an inflation order.

No authority to of the DMC.

We had to put this whole thing together.

still says we had an inflation order.

Never.

The atomization was ready to drop.

They were in panic.

It isn't just a technical matter.

Without the reinforcements you poured out, the morale problem was decisive.

They see all these guns and so forth, and they should feel better.

Don't you think so?

Oh, yes.

And the psychological impact of that attack on Manoa is very interesting.

Joe Kraft has an article this morning considering that he's violently opposed to everything we're doing.

It's very mild.

Of course, he's saying, again, we should knock off the summit.

And we know that the Democrats would like that.

He's still desperate to want to knock off the summit.

Of course.

Isn't he?

But it helps us with it.

I think that we must have no illusion that if they don't have a sign, we have no other choice than to blockade.

I don't really see that.

That's clear, but what isn't clear is if we don't get anything, whether we then blockade and we indirectly knock out.

We knock out the sign.

That's the question.

I don't know by Sunday what there is.

You haven't had no reply from North Korea to the East?

No, but that I wouldn't expect.

If you think of it, Mr. President, I came to bring in a note for the North Vietnamese between our first and second wave of attacks.

They drank, and that note must have reached a noise the day that Haiphong was burned.

and for Russia to transmit a notice and instead, if in itself, must be an unsettling experience for them, because up to now, Russia has taken the notice that they wouldn't, uh, that they wouldn't know what's going on.

In fact, they have a huge amount of power.

For three years, we tried to get them engaged, and they never did it.

We'll have to judge it by what you get.

But I think that the credibility of our position, if you come back with nothing, that the amount of Lakers that produces amounts would be totally impaired.

They've only altered it to blockade.

That would mind you.

Nixon, Kissinger & Bull on Vietnam War and Bombing operations

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on April 18, 1972

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