Nixon, Kissinger & Marsh on Vietnam War and Congressional relations

They speak perfectly.
Quote one of the five.
If you look at it from the standpoint of our game, so is the Chinese.
From the standpoint of running this country.
It's time to take my view.
almost anything, frankly, that we could force onto.
Almost anything.
I just come down to that.
You know what I mean?
Because I have a feeling we would not be doing like I feel about the insurgent.
I feel that in the long run, we're probably not doing that.
And it's a disfavor due to the fact that I feel that the North Vietnamese
so badly hurt with the South Vietnamese, probably going to do fairly well.
But also due to the fact that as I look at the tight history out there, South Vietnam probably never would survive.
That makes me perfectly kind of...
I mean, if we can get certain guarantees so that they aren't, you know, looking at the foreign policy process, though, you've got to be, you also have to realize everything.
Winning an election is terribly important.
It's terribly important this year.
But can we have a viable foreign policy if a year or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam?
That's the real question.
If a year or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy.
If it looks as if the result of South Vietnam needs to come,
If we now sell out in such a way, and save it in a three to four month period, we have pushed fresh fuel with the Franks.
We ourselves.
I think that is showing speed.
Even the Chinese won't like that.
I mean, they'll pay verbal.
Verbally, they'll like it.
But it'll worry them.
But it will worry everybody.
And domestically, in the long run, it won't help us all that much, because our opponents will say we should have done it three years ago.
So we've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which, after a year, Mr. President, we are now going to be a backwater.
If we settle it, say, this October, by January 74, no one will give a damn.
President, I had an interview with Mario.
I didn't want to take you out on a strap meeting or anything.
No, I had a brief meeting.
I'm not finished with it.
I don't go much to these staff meetings anymore, but I really couldn't.
Oh, he's doing it.
Oh, my.
Massive work.
Well, sir.
Uh...
The way I, uh...
I sent a funny invitation thing last night to Edgar.
I don't think so.
That's the evidence.
So the problem with God, first of all, there are lines that critics do not believe in.
First, that the Vietnamese really are going to wait until the election comes on.
And second, they don't believe that
of the election that we would take a stronger line which is also what shows that the other one is this critical one is that where we caught the crack here because
The only way I talked to the guys that we could have shifted one or two was to educate them that something is going on in negotiations.
It might be hopeful.
You know, the thing, the bait is pushing you on.
Now, so here we are.
We're caught in a crack where any sensible man knows goddamn well that we're talking, that it's hopeful.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking.
And second, on the other hand,
Otherwise, they wouldn't be talking.
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
We have a few of us.
They break off and we break off.
The other point is that in a private channel, the private channel, the public has 149 of us.
The other point is that on the one hand, we might win the vote by indicating that it was hopeful that we may be part of the administration.
On the other hand,
Maybe, this is the real dilemma we're in, or if we have to meet, maybe encourage a vote of this sort.
So what's our answer?
I don't mean our public answer, but how do we get that out?
Because we may have the same damn problem in the House, so I think we can win in the House on this bill or on any other.
But you see, we don't want to get encouraged by the lack of support in the Congress.
On the other hand, the only way we can get more support in the Congress is to indicate that the negotiations at least have a chance for progress.
There we are.
But the trouble is that if we make too much of it, the end result is
That we fall on our face.
That the North, the East and the East will make us fall on our face and guarantee a vote against us.
Later.
Well, three or four weeks later.
Or two or three weeks later.
See, what we're looking at here is time.
In terms of time, the Congress can't get enough.
There's too much vote.
They'll be out of here by the 25th of September.
The suspect should just go home.
My view is this, Mr. President.
the dialogue you had with him and what you had with Matt and what I heard from Carlos and the rest of them, you know, they asked me, can we indicate that there was any hope?
And I said, no, you can't.
I said, look, I said, if these bastards do come to see that we wouldn't be talking in a private channel unless we had some hope,
then we just can't talk about my life.
You cannot quote us.
That's why I played it out of a hard moment.
We may have lost the boat because I was so hard.
Because on the other hand, you have the problem that if they think there is hope, then you get the massizers and curses and company even more stricter.
On the ground that they want to get ahead.
On the ground.
You know, this...
a phony argument that they want to have a partnership between the executive and the legislative, and that it isn't fair to the president to make him carry the whole burden.
And you could almost cry when you hear Cook and Stevens, and I have them all in there, and I as much as hope that there was progress last week, so I can assure you that even that argument doesn't have the idea of a partnership.
Of course, this has always been true of science.
And you know, it's a human thing, isn't it?
It's likely, Kevin, that they might have a partnership.
But don't you and I know that there is no way to have a partnership?
Let me just say this.
Let's be quite candid.
Even if we had Nelson Rockefeller as Secretary of State, we couldn't let him out.
You know that.
Nelson is a debriefer.
I know Nelson.
He's not a leaker, but he's a debriefer.
He sits around with his staff.
Now, we could tell Conley because he's such a conniving, you could tell Mitchell that that's about the only two that I've ever told in heaven.
We don't even tell anyone.
And it's a phony argument.
If they wanted to be partners, they should support your May 8th proposal.
That way they could be partners.
But to take a position different from our public position, and totally different from what's being negotiated, the one reason it won't do that much damage
It's because they're not that interested in getting our truth out anymore.
Well, the one main reason that really is reassuring to me is the brotherhood.
Remember, I asked you that question again, and I keep asking it, because the brotherhood is exactly the thing.
They're never going to accept it, because, frankly, if they give the POWs to prisoners or patrol, if they give us the POWs to patrol,
they realize that they don't have a hell of a weapon with which to get us to do anything.
The prices go up.
They aren't willing to give up DOWs for withdrawal because the withdrawal is not their big problem at the present time.
Suppose, let me put that case in another way.
Suppose they say, we'll give you the DOWs provided you stop buying, stop mining, and withdraw.
Why not?
I don't agree with you.
I was just going to ask you what...
They want us to get rid of two.
There's the point.
The point is, right now, they want us to do something politically that they cannot accomplish alternatively.
They want us to get rid of two, and they want us to stop military and economic aid to the South Sea and the East Coast.
That's an inspection proposal, too.
That's an inspection proposal, too.
I know he said it was a withdrawal.
That's right.
I think that was on the 8th.
So, I had even played with the idea that in September, Scott had a compromise proposal that strengthens the Cook Amendment a little more.
We might even let that damn thing through.
Depending on how the negotiation, if we are at the verge of breaking it up, that's a good way of doing it.
Put some Senate
proposal to them, and then let them turn it, publicly let them turn it down.
I must say, in fact, although the amendment, the Brooke amendment is impossible, that we can't do.
Well, the Brooke amendment is law and order.
Order, for Christ's sake, should we trade it?
To get out?
It's a, it's a, it's a shocking, shocking, shocking thing.
I'm not saying we bought all this time just to get back the prisoners that they have.
The mistake we have made is that we haven't been tough enough on our opponents.
Let me say it.
I was very tough on them.
Oh, no, no.
I mean, we haven't done it on them.
When I took the suspensions on there, I said... You couldn't have done it on them.
I thought Goodall had a very clever, an actor who was clever, but he was excelling at 39 votes for the damn thing.
So now the Congress takes responsibility for the war.
They do.
If they want to have responsibility for making policy, they've got to take responsibility for the results.
And I feel guiltier than most.
The two sons of bitches for whom I've done favors,
I told this to Agnew myself when he called me.
He called you?
Yeah, he called me from the floor either before or after he had talked to you and I said, I asked him how did Messiah fall.
He told me, I said, well, that's one, that's tremendous.
Not one.
He told me.
He was not blaming you.
No, no, no.
He had to try.
But he gets pissed off.
I blame myself.
I am, aren't you?
One goddamn time.
You remember also, you didn't Percy let me remember.
You've got Percy on the dice.
And when did Peter, of course, Percy, on the judge, which we didn't need, as it turned out.
When you've got Percy, you can bet you don't need him.
He's with you when most of the Democrats are with you, too.
What is your... Let me say this.
You know, only God knows what's going to happen in the whole period of politics, but if we... We're not going to tell you what's going to happen.
We're not going to tell you what's going to happen.
Believe me, you're going to see it.
It's kind of funny.
I don't understand anything we've done, but it looks ridiculous.
I agree with this.
And that includes the bureaucracy and the defense department.
Absolutely.
It's all the same.
And it's good in the HUD, including AGW.
Ray Kelly Richardson, sorry, but it's got to be dumb, because if we can't have these savage bastards taking us down, I'd rather have dumb guys that are loyal than white guys that are just loyal.
I wish I had a conclusion.
Aren't you?
Well, Mr. President, I called Temple yesterday.
It was a decent guy.
I said, you've had a three-column story on my visit to Paris.
Now, actually, from our point of view, I said, that's great.
Not a word that is true, but I'd rather have you write three columns that are untrue
The three paragraphs that are true because it caught the attention to it.
But just tell me, where the hell did you get that crap from?
Because there were people talking all over town.
The people all over town telling me the same.
My visit was a failure.
I tried to separate military and political issues.
I saw that.
They refused to separate them.
They agreed to separate them, but they made you a military issue.
Yeah, I saw that.
I read it, actually.
I thought maybe it had not gotten the wrong reading.
No, I didn't read it.
I know it had not gotten the wrong reading.
Is that Marshall Green?
That's these guys over in Say trying to prove that they are anonymous.
But after all, from your point of view, the Pets, but it shows you what these guys will do if we told them anything.
I mean, after all, it's not in your interest, it's not in the country's interest to put out Pets.
That's what they're trying to do.
Pets on it.
Pets on it.
Pets on it.
And also they're trying to, another thing is this, it's basically Henry, the terrible sin of pride.
They want to prove that the sons of bitches know something and they don't know anything.
Now, of course, I've been trying to think if we can always, if we can give these assholes crumbs so that they can go around bleating about that.
You know, the beauty of the thing we did with Rogers and Prussian was that we gave them some good, well, they were pretty big crumbs.
They were pieces of cake from time to time.
But it wasn't the icing.
We took the frosting.
But at least, you know, it takes care of the ego, right?
And I guess that's what we've got to find.
We can't keep closely held.
Well, that was great to be done, I don't know if I can say so.
I mean, the way you had it all.
You did it.
You did the pushing.
I mean, I could handle some of the negotiations because he was seeing Mr. Amico and he came in on that planet.
And he was awesome.
Well, Ross, as I have to say in this event, is not giving us a bad time on Vietnam, partly because he figures it's going to fail.
He doesn't want to worry about me.
He'll fail.
I think, Mr. President, we have a 50-50 chance of making it succeed.
We're just two or three moves away from bringing it on.
In fact, we can accept practically everything in their proposal, except the political side, which is saying we can't accept.
Now let's look at that just a moment again.
Think about it some more, but...
This would be perfect.
Well, one of the five.
If you look at it from the standpoint of our game,
Almost anything, frankly, that we can force onto.
Almost anything.
You know what I mean?
Because I have a feeling we would not be doing like I feel about the Israeli.
I feel that in the long run, we're probably not doing that.
And it's a disfavor due to the fact that I feel that the North Vietnamese are so badly hurt that the South Vietnamese are probably going to do fairly well.
But also due to the fact that as I look at the tide of history out there, South Vietnam probably would never be surviving.
I'm actually perfectly fine.
We've got to be, we can get certain guarantees so that they aren't, you know, looking at the foreign policy process, though, you've got to be, you also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important.
It's terribly important this year.
But can we have a viable foreign policy if a year or two years come?
North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam.
That's the real question.
If a year or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it's a result of South Vietnamese accountants.
If we now sell out in such a way and save it in a three to four month period, we have pushed fresh fuel over the bank.
We ourselves
I think that is showing speed.
Even the Chinese won't like that.
I mean, they'll pay verbally.
Verbally, they'll like it.
But it will worry everybody.
And domestically, in the long run, it won't help us all that much because our opponents will say we should have done it three years ago.
So we've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two.
Afterwards, after a year, Mr. President,
Vietnam will be a backwater.
If we settle it, say, in October by January 74, no one will give a damn.
Yeah, having in mind the fact that, you know, as we all know, the analogy, the comparison, Algeria is not on all fours.
On the other hand, nobody gives a goddamn about what happened to Algeria.
After they got out of Vietnam, I must say, Jesus, they fought so long, died, and now, I don't know, the North must have its problems.
They're not supermen.
They're not supermen.
They have their problems.
I would like, if I could tomorrow, Mr. President,
to bring in more, and I would appreciate it.
Well, there are two things.
There are no flights, very few flights.
Secondly, they hit very few fixed targets.
They say, I'm ready, I'm ready.
We don't know where they are.
I think they're staying away from the sands.
I think they don't want to lose any more planes.
And the...
I think it's one of the hopes of God is to smash them until they settle.
Can't you get him in today?
He hasn't had a, like, three or four days tomorrow.
Or he's not coming over today.
Let's see if he's coming over this afternoon to an MPFR meeting.
I could bring him in at four.
Four o'clock.
Yeah.
Excuse me, Mr. President.
Do you want to talk to John Marchinello?
Yeah, we're just having a meeting.
Yeah.
Let's go.
Hello.
Hello.
You called me for Mr. Marsh.
Hello?
Yeah.
Hey, how are you?
I, uh, haven't been...
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Well, I've got a few things, but I just wanted you to know, of course, that Chuck Olson and John Connolly, they just think you're doing a great job.
A great job, and I appreciate it.
I know this thing with the Wallace thing is hard, but without you, we just couldn't have you.
You've got all those balls in the air.
And I want you to know that I have total confidence in you.
That's the stuff.
Okay.
Bye.
I guess what I'm really concerned about is that we're starting to crack.
We've got to do everything we can to preserve the possibility of a negotiation.
Again, we have to have in mind that our interests to preserve a negotiation are directly contrary to our interests in winning the vote.
But I do feel that the votes don't have much effect on the negotiations, and that's what we have to balance.
I think that's right, Mr. President.
And also, I think we are in a great position if we have to blow these negotiations, because we can say it.
The day after, I would say, the first time, these bastards loaded, the Democratic Congress loaded,
I know we're limited to the Republicans for the prison.
The day after I get it... You should accomplish.
The day after I come back and report to you with the most comprehensive new piece of it, they vote another one.
So that we can use in September, but I'm not pessimistic.
I think we have a chance of cramming this one.
You see, if we make any progress, Mr. President... Well, you'll make your progress.
I won't have that.
See, if we make any progress...
But I do, Mr. President.
I mean, if they want to settle by October, they have to put some meat into these other forums.
As soon as these other forums talk about meat, meat exists.
You see, what I'm going to propose at the next meeting is that they can't have it both ways.
They cannot pretend there's a sale there.
And...
pretend that they're drunk, if they want to settle by October.
Then, at Clay Bear, at the Leonard's, they should start discussing the content of the Snatchdale ceasefire, conditional on the settlement of all other issues.
They don't have to agree they could make a condition.
As soon as that happens, Mr. President, we're going to move forward.
And they did not reject that.
I proposed it this time, and they said, let's discuss it next time.
But I showed him these documents you made.
And you know how hard life is.
Yeah, I do.
And he says this is the most comprehensive document you've ever had.
Now, I... Well, look, look, we're... We know we're doing the right thing.
But this is not your oath.
There's incentives going down the road that they don't want.
See, I have absolute confidence that they'll never open it.
Withdrawal of prisoners in heaven.
This is, in effect, our proposal anyway.
Yeah.
That's the practical effect of our latest proposal.
Except the ceasefire.
Yeah.
But the ceasefire, I mean, the easiest thing for them would be to say, we'll do it without the ceasefire.
Right.
Rather than come up with a ten-point complicated plan.
They don't want her to do that.
Not a chance.
Goodbye.

Nixon, Kissinger & Marsh on Vietnam War and Congressional relations

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Also recorded on August 3, 1972

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