Nixon, Haig & Ziegler on Vietnam War and Peace negotiations

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The only kind of very discouraging development was a speech by Chu this morning to the National Assembly, in which he just flatly reiterated his earlier conditions, rejected the U.S.-Hanoi draft peace proposal, listed the worst parts of it, can't accept the presence of North Vietnamese troops,

described the CNCR as a disguised coalition, which it is not, stated that he could never sign a peace treaty, which did not clearly delineate the responsibilities of Hanoi to cease aggression against the states of Indochina, would never sign, offered a counterproposal, which was purely a red herring that he would

Have a ceasefire through Christmas and New Year's.

Release all of the North Vietnamese.

And then start talks between all the parties, locally, to resolve issues.

Ron, did you get the, the shovel that had the ceiling, the two-fifth of the ceiling?

Oh, yes, sir.

You've got to get the floor.

All sorts of things.

I didn't say anything.

That was all I wanted to check on.

Yes, sir.

Well, Henry, I think he's very well-postured and understands exactly what you want and agrees completely.

He said that they got a message from the North Vietnamese this morning that they still had no instructions.

He said if that's the case, he's of course going to continue on until they get those instructions, if they represent any indication that he gets an agreement.

if they are totally entrenched in an impossible to deal with, to include stating that this is Hanoisia, not just a negotiated deal and represents his new instruction.

He said he thinks we just have to recess quietly, come back quietly, state that we're coming back to consultation, and that we will continue to keep contact through the regular channels during this period.

to stop the military up.

Now, he's quite concerned.

Bunker came in, incidentally, and said that, and he wrote his recommendation after Chief's speech.

He said, now, in light of this, that no one short of Bud Stratton can come over because Chief's on the traces of him.

He's obviously thrown the norm down to us.

So it would be

be foolish to be worried about his sensitivities.

And Henry's view is that, and he wanted, and I've written a memo which is coming out of the typewriter because I just got this message.

His view is that we've now got ourselves a very, very tough problem to deal with.

If we send the Vice President over, he could be rebuffed.

And we've got to decide whether to

go ahead, assuming we get a good agreement, try to push Chew into it, recognizing that there's some risk that we'll have to crush him.

So that's a serious consideration, because we could end up losing all that we've been trying to accomplish.

On the other hand, his instincts initially are that we should

Go ahead.

We decided to do that and make the agreement.

Well, Bunker, I suggest we just go ahead with the war.

No, Bunker is, no, Bunker is, he wants to go on with the agreement.

That's what I mean, of course.

But he hasn't given us a good assessment of what this speech means in terms of Hughes' ability to now back off as Lindy stepped out of.

I think Bunker...

I'm not as concerned about this speech as others.

He's got to stick out there.

I mean, I understand it.

I understand that it's tough and all that sort of thing.

I know exactly.

But it doesn't... Lamb says this.

He says this.

So then you might have come down to it.

You've got to be goddamn pleased that's all there is to it.

We're not getting to the point, Albert, where we can't do it.

ourselves, and unless it is a totally unreasonable position on the confidence part to say anything, even then it's going to be tough.

No, I think... We can no more, we can no more just say, well, because he won't make this, we're not going to make this war.

There's no way.

No, I think we have to go ahead, try and get the agreement.

Above all, not break off the talks, even if they are a training camp.

If they're not and we get an agreement, then we've just got to bring two along, whatever it takes.

And if we risk... How do you bring them along?

Well, I think the Vice President is now the only thing.

Yesterday I would have felt otherwise.

Yeah, I know.

Well, particularly after your message, your intercepted message, which indicated that you had said that he may be, he may be going up and down, too, you know.

That's right.

In all the conditions where he's one day yes and one day no.

But now there's no other emissary that will give him the kind of leverage he needs to step off his position.

Well, then he hasn't got it.

And we cannot respond to it.

No, absolutely not.

You can't.

I can't get to the name.

No, we have to go to just the next best thing.

Well, if they don't have it, they had no instructions this morning.

I suppose there's nothing I can come out of reading today.

Maybe not early.

They got them before this.

at 3 p.m.

This was in conjunction with the two technical discussions.

And they played it fairly honestly.

They just made that simple statement.

Of course, you guess.

That's true.

They may just now have shifted their strategy to kind of split us out from Saigon, keep it in stalemate until Congress comes back,

and then played for his downfall.

They were cut off from the system.

And we can't discount that.

That could be what they're doing.

She'll go over here, sir.

So, we have nursed him along, and we have really played all of his fears.

So, I'm sure he's come along at times, but, I mean, he's let things come on him.

He should have turned the election and so forth.

At this point, we provided all the funds.

We provided the build-up to the meeting.

We stood by him.

There was nobody else in the world standing by him.

all over and that's the way it's going to be.

So I think the key point is that we have stood by and we've proved that we take every great, very, great risk of saving.

I don't think that the compensation

No, he's insisting on total victory.

That's exactly what the conditions are that he's laid out.

We've never shared that view.

He knows it.

In fact, he's never insisted on it.

I don't think we should because there's no way to get it.

And I also think that he's playing for the big stakes, and he's going to push us right up to the goddamn brick, which he's doing now.

And we can't back down again.

Any one of them can back down to Hanoi.

We've got that.

Back down to Hanoi never.

Peter Lynch, right now, he's older.

It may be a moot question because Hanoi may just end up being totally unable to bring themselves around and to be just plain arrogantly negative, which is what they were yesterday.

I don't think they will, although it's conceivable.

It's to their advantage in any event to get a settlement, especially in the light of Tuesday.

because they're going to find out that they're going to be in the white hats, and Q's going to be in the black hats situation.

So I'm trying to think of the overall impact of Q's intransigence will be to make them want to settle.

Yeah, that's another way of looking at it.

Unless, well, it could be that they wouldn't want to settle them.

based on the fact that they think that he's going to go along.

That's going to cause us great problems.

What I mean is this.

One way they can play it in order to destroy our public support or attempt to would say, well, I'm delighted to say that there's no reason for us to continue these negotiations.

The officers won't negotiate it in the total victory, so we're breaking all the numbers.

We could do that all over again.

That's the tough one.

But I don't think that's the way to go, because it puts them in the position of having to give two other than a puppet status.

I think what they would prefer to do would be to get us out of it, then have two of the recalcitrant on the fringes, so that they look like a peaceful country.

They've been able to work out the differences with the United States.

And except for this little son of a bitch

Saigon, and there's a demigod.

We've had peace.

That isolates you a little more consistently with their theory.

Now, we've got to turn out that way.

Yep.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, they come along.

any kind of a basis, any kind of a basis that they have agreed to as to what we were talking about when we first returned.

Right.

Then we go, and we just go hard.

And then, frankly, we isolate, too.

We have to do it.

We're listening to you right now, too.

He did say that he thinks that we should definitely send the Vice President.

But before doing so, he should come back and we should consider, during the year, very, very carefully where that scenario will spin out.

Now, I'll start considering that today.

Don't start talking to the Vice President.

Oh, God, no.

Oh, no.

Don't get him all stirred up one way or another.

No, no, no.

The thing to do, unless this thing is going to work, if it's going to work, then we can breed him damn fast.

That's because it's best not to have him think.

He's got people that he'll talk to that have any brains.

We'll just keep them.

He doesn't know any of this.

Simple facts, obviously.

If we have to go this way, there's nobody better than the vice president.

Because if we have a confrontation with you,

We're going to have to watch our right flank and the left flank.

And he's the best man to be the vehicle for us.

But I do think we better... We don't have to worry about a schedule of pre-Christmas earnings.

No, I don't think there's nothing I'm concerned about.

I don't leave any impression when I ask a person.

I'm just curious.

No, I think Henry's been more concerned about it.

You've never been concerned.

You've made it very clear all along.

In fact, I'm perfectly happy with this.

I think the talks continue for a while.

Let's go ahead and just keep talking.

Keep talking as long as you're thinking.

The only thing I...

And concerned about is the fact that we have to continue talking about doing something new, maybe reseeding the water, or the harbor, and doing some bombing and so forth.

Do you figure that that would be an inevitable, almost an inevitable cause for great trouble?

Well, no, I don't, sir.

I think we ought to wait and see what happens today.

If they get instructions from Hanoi,

and they stay negative, then I think that's justification for doing it, and they'll understand it.

Without it, risking it would have already been a tough decision for them.

On the other hand, if there's still progress today, I don't think we should do it, because that puts an additional strain on the system up there.

There's no promise, and it represents a noise view.

When Henry comes back for a recess, then I think we should start right away, as soon as he gets back.

First with the receding, and with very heavy airstrikes.

And we can measure that carefully, too.

Then they won't break off.

Or if they do, they would have done it in any event.

And that we have to be careful of if they come back.

But Henry, what we have come today with instructions from the North to do nothing.

We have to be very careful to keep them in a position that they don't go public.

Because there'd be no way Henry can quietly break it off if the North comes down and says that

that they get stalled out and that they're breaking off the talks and the U.S. demands are unreasonable.

That's something we have to be very careful about.

But going public on the basis of their more entrenching attitudes, I don't think we can be able to handle it.

Well, we can handle it, but there will have to be some explanation to that.

Yeah, some.

What I meant is the way it expands, where it goes to Dan Park and so on, I thought you said it.

Now, that's the main incentive for enemies, gracefully getting away and saying, you have to come back and consult with you so that they don't feel like they can do anything, even if they were trained.

And then we bomb.

And we come back, and then we can bomb, and then we can explain what the problems are in a low-key way and get the jump on them.

We don't want them to get the jump on us.

That's what they do.

careful maneuvering by Henry, if the decision is that we have to take a reset.

What you should do is just say, well, look, I have to go home.

You've been a lot tougher than we anticipated.

I'll have to discuss this with the president and with our allies.

We'll keep in contact with you through our special channel.

And we'll take the lead on what he should say.

to accompany me to the hotel.

Why, yes, if I can expect, I don't need to be retrospecting too long.

This results in retrospecting how we should not have allowed Henry to

feels so compulsive about an election deadline.

He felt legally, you know, that that would help the election.

That was his problem.

He felt, and there's some justification for this.

I disagree completely with the election line, but it is in my business to be an expert on it.

But he also felt, and there's some justification for this, that they were working against that deadline and that we'd get our greatest concessions from them.

Now, their attitude since would suggest that he may have been right.

But it doesn't mean that those concessions were enough to bring it to where we accept it.

We could have taken over.

The whole point is, the whole point is, the other way you could have allowed them to vote is to say, all right, you're being unreasonable.

We're fighting God.

We're not going to let you negotiate anymore.

And let it be one hell of an inflammatory agent who hasn't been touched.

And we were the ones who felt like we didn't do it.

And say, now we have a mandate.

Settle or else.

You've got 48 hours.

They don't say, we're going to bomb the hell out of you.

And you could have said, see, that debate would have been an incredible way to do it.

rather than to create the impression before the election that they were being reasonable, that we were very close to a settlement, you know, peace is at hand, all that stuff.

And some assholes would interpret that as meaning that we were held to the fact that we had created the impression that we were going to have peace, that therefore after the election our hands were tied because we had an obligation or a promise to get it.

See, we didn't need to be in any position to promise peace.

No reason.

That's what I'm worried about.

No, it's precisely that issue that was a source of your strength, if I can keep it that way.

That was the point.

We did not have to have the peace issue working for us.

We did not have to be promised peace.

We did not have to deal with anything.

All we had to deal with was being a hard, hard-nosed man.

But that's the result of the worship of the Holy Spirit.

It was all in our heart and our open relation.

I had no credit for it.

At least, it turned out to be reasonable by the time we were alive.

Well, that's what earned the bridge.

What it is now.

I don't know what changed us in Hawaii.

We lost a hell of a lot.

We started in October, by the time we ended, but in a way that really means something.

No, I think the bombing in the mine is what made the difference, plus the fact that they failed in their offensive, plus the fact that you've got them isolated from the mine picking, or from Moscow picking.

It's all these things, not any one.

But the one that's eroded the most seriously is the bombing, and the effect of the bombing.

I mean, you were in error in not changing bunkers sooner, too.

Not a good bunker is not everything right, purely because a fellow just wears out after a certain length of time.

I mean, he wears out as well.

See you later.

Okay.

As soon as you get the, you should get a message from him very soon.

He breaks off early.

I won't speak to him.

I already am.

Yes sir, we should be up by noon in the latest.

And I think they'll probably stay on till tomorrow because they haven't got instructions and they just have another session tomorrow.

Nixon, Haig & Ziegler on Vietnam War and Peace negotiations

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on December 12, 1972

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