THE NIXON/GANNON INTERVIEWS

< Back to Nixon/Gannon Interviews

Transcript: Richard Nixon/Frank Gannon Interview, April 7, 1983 [Day 2 of 9]

interviewer: Frank Gannon
interviewee: Richard Nixon
producer: Ailes Communications, INC.
date: April 7, 1983
minutes: approximately 188
extent: ca. 231kb
summary: This interview, comprising three video tapes, or just over 2 hours, is the second in a series of taped interviews with former president Nixon. The focus of the conversation is the Vietnam War. Watergate is also discussed.
repository: Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries (Main Library)
collection: Richard Nixon Interviews
permissions: Contact Media Archives.

Day two, Tape one, LINE FEED #1, 4-7-83, ETI Reel #13
April 7, 1983

(Four seconds of color bars before time codes begin.)

Day 2, Tape 1
00:01:52
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:01:53
[Offscreen voice]

I need to record a second. There's a slight color or difference from the last time, so I'm just going to record for a second and then play it back against the old tape and match them, and they [unintelligible].

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:01
[Frank Gannon]

Okay.

[Offscreen voice]

Okay.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:18
[Frank Gannon]

What was the difference, though, because--wasn't its w--weren't its component members, in other words, its--its people--weren't they always sort of the--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:27
[Richard Nixon]

The leaders?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:28
[Frank Gannon]

Yeah.

[Richard Nixon]

Yeah.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:29
[Frank Gannon]

So what--what--

[Richard Nixon]

During the war--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:30
[Frank Gannon]

what was the difference--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:31
[Richard Nixon]

[unintelligible]--group, you know. That's right, the intellectual elite and all that stuff. (Sighs.)

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:36
[Frank Gannon]

Since it was the [unintelligible]--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:37
[Richard Nixon]

That's always the problem.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:38
[Frank Gannon]

Why did they suddenly--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:38
[Richard Nixon]

Become hawks?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:40
[Frank Gannon]

Change.

[Richard Nixon]

Be--be what?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:41
[Frank Gannon]

Be--

[Richard Nixon]

W--w--change how?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:42
[Frank Gannon]

Become soft, and become, uh--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:44
[Richard Nixon]

Uh, well, they--they were mixed, you know what I mean, let's face it--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:02:51
[Action note: Sound cuts off.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:03:01
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:03:52
[Action note: Picture returns without sound.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:00
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:35
[Action note: Camera pans photograph of flags.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:37
[Frank Gannon]

There's a striking photograph taken of a ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1953. A gust of wind entangled the American and Vietnamese flags just as the--the winds of war were shortly to--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:49
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
[Frank Gannon]

--bitterly entangle the fates of the--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:51
[Action note: picture returns.]

[Frank Gannon]

--two nations. You were there.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:53
[Offscreen voice]

Sorry. Let's do it one more time. We need to start that over.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:55
[Richard Nixon]

They didn't have the camera on.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:58
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:04:59
[Frank Gannon]

Have you seen this picture? It's really a stri--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:02
[Action note: Sound cuts off.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:22
[Action note: Camera pans photograph of flags.]

[Frank Gannon]

That's right, it was in '56, wasn't it?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:23
[Richard Nixon]

No, no, no, no. I wasn't--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:25
[Offscreen voice]

Frank.

[Richard Nixon]

--in Hanoi in '56.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:26
[Offscreen voice]

Frank.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:27
[Richard Nixon]

Let's hold a minute here.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:28
[Offscreen voice]

[Unintelligible.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:31
[Richard Nixon]

All right, well, we don't care.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:32
[Action note: Picture starts rolling.]

[Richard Nixon]

You think this is Hanoi. You're sure it's Hanoi and not Saigon.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:36
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:38
[Frank Gannon]

Let's do Saigon.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:39
[Richard Nixon]

I think you'd better say Saigon. You see--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:42
[Action note: Picture returns.]

[Richard Nixon]

--if it's the Vietnamese flag, it would--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:43
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

[Frank Gannon]

Yeah.

[Richard Nixon]

--be Hanoi.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:44
[Frank Gannon]

Yes.

[Richard Nixon]

It would be the French flag.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:45
[Frank Gannon]

Yes.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:46
[Richard Nixon]

The tricolor. So I would say this is '56. That's right.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:48
[Frank Gannon]

[Unintelligible.] Yeah.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:49
[Richard Nixon]

Because that's after we were in, too, and that--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:51
[Frank Gannon]

Yes.

[Richard Nixon]

--that'll make the answer shorter. (Clears throat.)

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:53
[Offscreen voice]

Okay, all set?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:05:54
[Richard Nixon]

(Clears throat.)

[Offscreen voice]

Okay, here we go.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:06:04
[Action note: Camera pans photograph.]

[Frank Gannon]

There's a striking photograph taken in Saigon in 1956. A gust of wind entangled the Vietnamese and American flags just as the gusts of the winds of war had bitterly, and were soon to bitterly-- more bitterly, entangle the fates of the two nations. You were there as vice president. Looking back today at the American experience in Vietnam, at the billions of dollars, the millions of refugees, the hundreds of thousands of wounded, the fifty-seven thousand Americans dead, and at the fact that, in a matter of a couple of months in 1975, South Vietnam fell--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:06:44
[Action note: Studio appears on screen.]

[Frank Gannon]

--and the Communists took over in the end anyway--looking back today, do you think it was worth it?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:06:52
[Richard Nixon]

Yes, I think it was, when you consider what we were trying to prevent. We were trying to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. You mentioned, as you properly should, the number of people that it cost. I would say, however, that in addition to the Americans who died, in addition to the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese, the Cambodians, that if you add it all up, that figure--let's start again on that. I got another thought there. I'll start again. Uh--(clears throat)--is this--no--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:31
[Frank Gannon]

This is the photograph.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:33
[Richard Nixon]

Now where are the flags? See--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:35
[Frank Gannon]

They--they--we--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:36
[Offscreen voice]

Let's start it at the top.

[Frank Gannon]

We missed the--

[Offscreen voice]

You want to start at the top again? Or you want to pick it up right here?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:40
[Frank Gannon]

Can we do that?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:41
[Offscreen voice]

Uh, I have to change the shot if we're going to do a pickup here. So let me [unintelligible].

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:45
[Richard Nixon]

Yeah, I--I get the feel of it now.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:49
[Offscreen voice]

You want to take it from the top, uh, or pick it up? Uh, Frank?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:52
[Frank Gannon]

Let's pick it up.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:07:54
[Offscreen voice]

Okay, then give me a two-shot tighter on two, please. Thank you.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:08:01
[Richard Nixon]

Now you--aren't you--you want me to start? Or you're going to--are you going to--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:08:05
[Frank Gannon]

You--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:08:06
[Richard Nixon]

--ask the question again?

[Frank Gannon]

No, you can--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:08:07
[Richard Nixon]

Um--(clears throat). Yes, I would have to say that I--wait a minute. Yes, I believe it was. It is true the cost was enormous--for us, for the South Vietnamese, for the North Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians, in terms of lives lost, but what we were trying to do was to prevent a Communist takeover of those countries. And when we see what has happened since the Communists have taken over--three million, for example, estimated killed and starved to death in Cambodia alone--that is far more than the total casualties, civilian and military, suffered by all those in Vietnam. That was worth fighting against. The tragedy is that we lost it in the end.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:08:54
[Frank Gannon]

Our subject in this conversation with former president Richard Nixon is the American involvement in the war in Vietnam. The American involvement in Vietnam bega--began seriously under President Eisenhower. You were the vice president then. Why did we go into Vietnam in the first place?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:09:19
[Richard Nixon]

Well, first, let's get the history a little more accurately. The American involvement in Vietnam began before President Eisenhower came in in 1953. In 1949 and '50 and '51, the Truman administration, recognizing very properly that what happened in Vietnam would affect us all over Asia, made a major commitment to Vietnam, to the French in Vietnam, and by the time that President Eisenhower came in, one-third of the cost of the French in Vietnam was being borne by the United States. President Eisenhower continued the program which President Truman had initiated.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:10:01
[Frank Gannon]

You visited Vietnam in 1953, before the American involvement had begun seriously and before we had become involved in the--in the war that the French were still fighting. In fact, you not only visited Saigon, but you visited Hanoi. What were your impressions in those last halcyon days of the cities, the country, and the people of Vietnam?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:10:24
[Richard Nixon]

Well, as you already implied, this was the time when the French were still in Vietnam, and it was interesting to see what they had right and what they, in my opinion, had done wrong. We have to give them credit that when they were in Vietnam--this is in both Hanoi and in Saigon--they had built some fine hospitals and schools. They had also built sanitation systems. They had produced certainly a rather substantial standard of living for that part of the world. On the other hand, insofar as the mistake that they made, it was that they were trying, in effect, to stay in Vietnam rather than to prepare the Vietnamese to rule themselves. And--and under the circumstances, that simply would not survive against the onslaught from Ho Chi Minh, who stood for an independent, free Vietnam.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:11:20
[Frank Gannon]

How were we better than the French, or were we better than the French?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:11:25
[Richard Nixon]

Well, in respect, I think the French made a very serious mistake. And that was in having a virtual gulf between themselves and the Vietnamese. I saw that very clearly, for example, when I was in Hanoi and visited the battlefields. One day at noon, I ate lunch with the French officers, and they had a fine food [sic] in perhaps the best French tradition, with a good bordeaux wine to finish it off with. Then I asked to go over to the Vietnamese mess, where the Vietnamese officers were. That idea didn't particularly appeal to my host, but I insisted, because I wanted to see what they were doing. And as we approached the Vietnamese mess, the--as it is called in the service, there was a terrible stench. And I turned to my French escort and said, "What is that? What are they eating?" And he sort of picked up his nose a bit, rather haughtily, and he says, "Probably monkey." Now that little story indicates their attitude toward the Vietnamese--not that they all had that, but it was one where they were superior, where they were not building up the morale, the dignity, and so forth which was essential if the Vietnamese were ever to govern themselves and to carry the fight alone. Now, as far as the U.S. was concerned, we did not make that kind of mistake. On the other hand, the mistake we did made, particularly after President Eisenhower left office, was rather than doing as President Eisenhower did, supporting the government of Vietnam in its efforts to handle the insurgency, the Vietcong and the Vietminh who were conducting guerrilla war against them--that--instead of doing it that way, in the next period they took over the war--in effect, Americanized it. And that was, of course, a fatal mistake.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:13:26
[Frank Gannon]

When President Eisenhower left office, there were roughly a thousand American troops. Under President Kennedy, the number substantially increased. Why and how did that happen?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:13:36
[Richard Nixon]

Well, first, the military personnel that were there during the Eisenhower period were not combat troops. They were training troops. They were not involved in combat. President Kennedy raised the number to sixteen thousand, because he saw that, unless it was raised, there was a possibility that the Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, would not be able to hold the line. And he authorized, in 1962, the Americans to in--to join the Vietnamese in combat units. Consequently, in his last year in office, 1963, there were about five hundred American casualties.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:14:18
[Frank Gannon]

On November second, 1963, American newspapers carried the headlines about the overthrow of President Diem in South Vietnam. It was subsequently revealed that the coup which ousted him was at the least inspired and at the most manufactured in Washington. Was President Kennedy responsible for the murder of President Diem in 1953?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:14:45
[Richard Nixon]

No, I wouldn't say that. I'm sure that he did not intend it. I would be very surprised if he were not greatly shocked by it. However, I think, looking at it very objectively, as, for example, [Marguerite Higgins], an outstanding journalist with the New York Herald-Tribune, and a Kennedy supporter, wrote after she had investigated the situation--looking at it from that standpoint, it is quite clear that the policies which the Kennedy administration adopted toward Vietnam led to the coup, which inevitably led to the assassination of Diem. They set in motion the events which led to it. And--and in this case, General Maxwell Taylor, I think has put it very well when he indicated, in effect, that they greased the skids for Diem's downfall, and, of course, having done that, that's a--the Vietnamese do not play very gently. Diem was one casualty.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:15:46
[Frank Gannon]

Could President Kennedy have prevented the murder of President Diem?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:15:51
[Richard Nixon]

He could have only prevented it had he not listened to and taken the advice of some of his advisors, who were urging that he dump Diem. They were urging that he dump Diem for the reason that they believed that Diem was corrupt, and that also he was too much of a dictator. They didn't recognize that the choice was not between Diem and somebody better, but between Diem and somebody much worse. And so he took that advice. That was a very great mistake, and I'm sure that he regretted it, because President Kennedy, I am confident, would not have ordered or approved the assassination of Diem.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:16:34
[Frank Gannon]

President Kennedy and the Kennedy administration denied any, uh--

Day 2, Tape 1
00:16:40
[Richard Nixon]

Complicity.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:16:41
[Frank Gannon]

--complicity, any--more than any complicity--any involvement in or any encouragement of or any knowledge of the Diem coup. Does that mean that they weren't telling the truth when they said that?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:16:55
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I won't get into whether or not they deliberately misled on that particular point. However, the facts would indicate--the facts of--from people who were there--that there isn't any question but they set in motion the events which led to the assassination of Diem. Let me--let me make the point very clear. We have to understand that the Vietnamese military depended on the United States for support. Without our support, they would be unable to carry on the activities that they were engaged in in trying to prevent the Communist takeover. When the U.S. indicated that we would support them, as was indicated, in the event that they did initiate a coup, that inevitably put in motion the events which led to Diem's assassination. Now, that is the historical record, and I don't think any rewriting of history can excuse those who gave Kennedy that very bad advice.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:18:00
[Frank Gannon]

In 1971, could you have prevented the assassination of President Allende of Chile if you had directed American policy towards Chile differently?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:18:14
[Richard Nixon]

No. I think we have to distinguish between what happened in Chile and what happened in Vietnam. In Vietnam, we have to understand that Diem was our friend. He was our ally. In Chile, Allende was no friend. As a matter of fact, he had joined Castro as a potential enemy of the United States and Latin America. And the second point that should be made is this--that while after Allende was elected by a plurality, not a majority, of the vote, it is true that we, like previous administrations, did everything we possibly could to see if the majority parties who were non-Marxists or anti-Allende could get together and prevent his being elected as president by the parliament. We failed in that effort, and it was two years later that Allende brought himself down. Marxism simply didn't work there. The country was an economic and political disaster area, and the coup which came there came from within the country. Let me put it very directly in terms of the contrast. In Vietnam, a coup against Diem could not have occurred without the support of the United States, because those troops, those generals depended upon the United States. In the case of Chile, the coup did occur and would have gone forward without our support in any event, because Allende had created a situation where the whole country was rebelling against what he had done to it.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:19:55
[Frank Gannon]

It--it has since been revealed in Senate Intelligence Committee--in a s--hearings, Senate Intelligence hearings, that President Kennedy and/or the Kennedy administration were involved in assassinations or assassination attempts against Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, President Diem, [General Schneider] in Chile. Do you think that there are any circumstances in which a president of the United States should desire or seek the assassination of a foreign leader?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:20:35
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I think we'd have to separate desire from seeking it. I am sure that every president at some time is going to say, "Gee, I wish that fellow were gone, or he was off the stage one way or another," but as far as seeking the assassination of a foreign leader in peacetime, and I want to distinguish that, I would say I cannot imagine any president of the United States seeking that. And in the case of Diem, well, it was wartime. It was a different situation than we would normally think of as--for example, during World War II.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:21:09
[Frank Gannon]

What about--speaking of World War II, what about Hitler, or what about--what about Idi Amin? If the director of C.I.A. had come into the Oval Office and said to you, "We have an absolutely foolproof, untraceable way in which we can remove Idi Amin from the scene, which would involve his murder," would you have approved it? Would you have acquiesced in it? Would you have said, "Do it, but for God's sake, don't tell me"? Or would you have forbidden it?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:21:40
[Richard Nixon]

I would have forbidden it, and may I say that while I was president I don't recall any instance where the C.I.A. or any people outside the C.I.A. area suggested that the administration participate in an assassination plot. Apparently that sort of thing did occur in the early sixties. However, I again emphasize I do not believe that President Kennedy personally approved an assassination plot. I would say that, as far as the Hitler situation is concerned, you have to separate that in terms of it being a period of war. Now, during war, we have to understand--is that everything is done to try to eliminate the capacity of the other to wage war. That is why, for example, at the present time, American missiles are aimed at Soviet command centers, and Soviet missiles are aimed at Washington, D.C., and also at our command centers. If those missiles should land, it's going to eliminate whoever happens to be the leader of either country.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:22:43
[Frank Gannon]

Given the record of the C.I.A., do you think that they--during your administration, do you think th--they would have been capable of developing a foolproof and/or untraceable plot of any kind?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:22:55
[Richard Nixon]

No. The record of the C.I.A., certainly in our administration, was very spotty, if I can use British understatement. In terms of what it was able to accomplish, I had very little confidence in them. And I had very little confidence in their intelligence reports. For example, they were always greatly underestimating what the Soviet Union was doing in terms of its missile development. For ten or--years straight, I remember that their estimates were too low. I think during the earlier period, immediately after war, during the Eisenhower period when Allen Dulles was in charge of the C.I.A., it was far more competent than it was later. Now, that is not to reflect negatively on people like Richard Helms and others who served the country with great dedication. I'm simply saying that they s--in my opinion, did not have the capability that they could have had. And I wouldn't have counted on them to carry out such a mission as that, assuming I might have ever ordered one.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:23:59
[Frank Gannon]

Do you think that President Kennedy's involvement with the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro led directly or indirectly to President Kennedy's assassination?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:24:11
[Richard Nixon]

Well, of course, there is the conspiracy theory. I particularly find in my visits to Europe, to France, that they--they believe very confidently that that's exactly what had happened. It could have happened, in--in view of the fact that Oswald, of course, had been to Cuba, and it is one theory that I think you could make a case for. My guess is it probably did not happen that way. After studying it at considerable length, I believe that Oswald was acting alone.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:24:43
[Frank Gannon]

Do you think that Bulgarian intelligence was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:24:51
[Richard Nixon]

Possible. And it's also possible, of course, as some have suggested, if--that if Bulgarian intelligence or K.G.B. was behind the assassination attempt, that the Soviet intelligence, K--K.G.B., had to know about it, and that Andropov, who was, of course, in Soviet intelligence and had been the head of the K.G.B., had to know about it. I would only say, in respect to Andropov, at least, I think he's perfectly capable of that, but I think he's too intelligent to have been involved in it.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:25:26
[Frank Gannon]

If you were president, and it were proven that the Bulgarians were behind the assassination attempt on the pope, and that the K.G.B., with Andropov as its head, were behind the Bulgarians, and he was now in the position he's in, and you were president, what impact would that have, if any, on your dealings with him? There are stories that in the White House and in the State Department now, some forces are trying to soft-pedal the investigation into the so-called "Bulgarian connection," because, should it pan out, that would mean that the--there would be problems in President railing--Reagan dealing with Andropov. If he's--if the finger of suspicion points directly at Androfo--Andropov, what does that mean for an American president in his dealings with him?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:26:17
[Richard Nixon]

That puts a very tough question to an American president. But under the circumstances, the American president, of course, would have to take them on directly about what had happened--obviously would condemn it. They, of course, would deny it. But even though it were proved that that was the case, we have to realize a fact of life. The Soviets lie, they cheat, they engage in assassination plots and murder plots all over the world. But they are there, and we have to deal with them. That doesn't mean that we have to lie and cheat and assassinate, but it does mean that in dealing with them, we recognize those with whom we are dealing--recognize that, under the circumstances, we have to be just as tough and even doubly tough at the conference table if we are not to be taken over.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:27:17
[Frank Gannon]

Did--did John Kennedy--did President Kennedy order the assassination of Fidel Castro?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:27:25
[Richard Nixon]

No. I do not believe that he could have done that. Uh, I w--I--a moment ago, I said that Andropov was capable of it. I do not think that President Kennedy was capable of having ordered the assassination of Castro.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:27:40
[Frank Gannon]

What about in terms of the documents and conversations that were revealed in the--in the s--1970s in the Senate intelligence hearings, the w--which--which virtually proved that--although there were no--there--there--there were no tapes, so there was no absolute proof--but that President Kennedy was involved in the conversations concerning the assassination, and, indeed, the techniques, including the bizarre techniques, the exploding cigars and things like that, that the C.I.A. was planning in order to kill Castro? The--the theory, of course, being that Kennedy's pride and prestige was seriously hurt by the threat Castro had posed.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:28:23
[Richard Nixon]

Well, let me go back historically to how this all relates to Vietnam. I think it's very important for us to understand this. President Kennedy, as you recall, in his very eloquent inaugural in 1961, said, "We will fight anytime, anyplace, in defense of freedom." His first broadcast out of the Oval Office two weeks after he was inaugurated with re--was with regard to Laos, when he said that the United States would keep its commitments to Laos. Then came the Bay of Pigs, which was a failure--a--a failure, in my opinion, because of failing to carry out the plan that President Eisenhower had directed, and which President Eisenhower told me later would never been approved without the use of air power, which, of course, was denied in adequate amounts. And then after that, President Kennedy met Khrushchev at Vienna. And Scotty Reston of The New York Times reported that sk--Khrushchev bullied him, Khrushchev following the usual Leninist dictum, which says, "Probe with bayonets. If you find mush, proceed. If you find steel, withdraw." Now, President Kennedy was not a weak man. He was not a soft man. He was a tough guy, and after all these things happening, he was determined that Khrushchev, and the Communists generally, should not assume that they had found mush. Now that, of course--if--you have to understand that to understand why he felt it was important to increase the number of Americans in Vietnam. That was why he thought it was important to as--have these Americans participate in military exercise, even though it cost some casualties. And--and, unfortunately, I think that was one of the reasons that he was led into the mistake of supporting the coup which brought down Diem, because he had become convinced by his advisors, I think very improperly, that if coup--if Diem left, that they'd have a stronger government. Now, with all this background in mind, we have to understand that President Kennedy may have felt he needed a victory. However, while he might have pr--toyed with the ideas, as we all do from time to time, we n--we may discuss things--I think, if push came to shove, between a rock and a hard place, President Kennedy would not have said, "Go out and knock this fellow off in order to make me look tough"--I don't think he would have done it, not because he was not tough enough to do it, but because he would recognize that doing it would lead to repercussions that would be perhaps more detrimental than it would be positive in the long run. You have to remember that removing a leader from a position, even though it's a Castro, does not necessarily solve the problem. The problems that brought him into power are still there, and the forces that brought him into power are still there. Castro wouldn't be able to survive in Cuba today unless he had some support. I don't believe he's got majority support, but he had some, and that was the case back then as well.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:31:34
[Frank Gannon]

We have some film of you with President Diem in 1956.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:31:49
[Action note: Film clip begins.]

[Film narration]

"The two leaders conferred for an hour and a half. Mr. Nixon extended President Eisenhower's warmest personal congratulations, well-earned by a man and his people who had shown astonishing progress and spirit through two difficult years."

Day 2, Tape 1
00:32:08
[Action note: Film clip image fills screen.]

[Film narration]

"At President Diem's invitation, the visitor from Washington joined him in facing the vast assemblage outside."

Day 2, Tape 1
00:32:20
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:32:21
[Action note: Studio appears on screen.]

[Frank Gannon]

The argument has been made that President Diem was an appallingly corrupt dictator who had little, and deserved less, popular support. You have written a book about leaders. What were your impressions of Diem then, and what is your assessment of him as a leader now?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:32:40
[Richard Nixon]

At first, as far as corruption is concerned, we have to understand--and this does not excuse it, but we have to understand that corruption is endemic in that part of the world--in the Philippines, in Indonesia, the other countries in that area. As far as Diem is concerned, I would not say that he was any more corrupt than those that have succeeded him, for example. The second thing we have to understand, insofar as public support is concerned, and I'm glad we showed this film--that he had a great deal of public support. I was there. I saw it. Now, you can trot a lot of people out in order to welcome a visiting vice president, but, while you can get them out, you can't get them to cheer spontaneously. And there was no question that Diem had a mystique, a strength. He was able to stay in power for nine years, and when he was there, for example, from 1954 to nineteen-fifty--'61, when President Eisenhower left office, he was very much in control. We did not have to have any American combat troops serving with his units, and he had the insurgency very well under control. I think that, if we had continued to support him, we would not have had the musical chairs which eventually led to the enormous American commitment there of five hundred and fifty thousand men.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:34:02
[Frank Gannon]

Getting rid of Diem was supposed to po--to pave the way for victory. That was the rationale for the coup. What were the results of the coup?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:34:11
[Richard Nixon]

Well, General Maxwell Taylor put it very well when he said it led to chaos. And I can--I can say from personal experience I know what happened. I was in Vietnam in '53. Again in '56. This was the first anniversary of Diem's ascension as the leader of Vietnam. And then I was there in 1963, 1964, nineteen sixty-f--I'm sorry. I was there again in 1964, '65, '66, and '67 - four times in the sixties. Each time there was a new leader. 1964--it was Big Minh. I don't remember who was there in 1965. I don't recall who was there in 1966. I think it was Ky. 1967--it was finally Thieu. And that meant--the weak leadership that you had meant that the South Vietnamese simply didn't develop the capability of fighting this war themselves. It also required an enormous American commitment, which would not have been necessary had we had a strong leader like Diem in charge, who could have developed the capability of his own people to defend themselves.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:35:26
[Frank Gannon]

In 1963, when Lyndon Johnson inherited the Vietnam War, there were sixteen thousand American troops there. Five years later, in 1968, there were more than a half million American troops. How did that happen?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:35:41
[Richard Nixon]

Well, it happened because the North Vietnamese, who, incidentally, going clear back to 1961, had stimulated, inspired, and controlled the Vietcong in the South, despite the fact that they always denied that that was the case--the North Vietnamese were able to launch very, very effective attacks, using the Vietcong as well, against the existing governments in South Vietnam. As a result of the commitment of sixteen thousand we already had there, President Johnson felt that we at least had to defend them. He didn't want to withdraw and have the whole situation collapse. And he had to escalate the number we had there, because the enemy was escalating its attacks. And at the same time, we were not doing a good enough job, in my opinion, of preparing the South Vietnamese to do the fighting on their own. Let me explain how it happened, in my opinion. I go clear back to the Korean War. I remember hearing American military people telling me in 1949 and 1950, "The R.O.K.s won't fight. The R.O.K.s can’t fight." And they could fight. The No--the South Korean army today is one of the best armies in the world. But Americans usually are a very impatient people. We believe we know what's best. We believe we can do it faster and quicker, and so we move in and take over. And Ky, Vice President Ky, General Ky, or Marshal Ky, as he was called in Vietnam, put it very well when he said that what the United States did was, in effect, to steal their war, or take it over. And that was the mistake. I must say that I recall very well that Johnson, during his campaign against Goldwater, said that--pledged to the American people that he was not going to have American boys go thousands of miles across the Pacific to do things for--for Asian boys that Asian boys should be doing for themselves. And later on, President Goldwa--I mean, President Johnson, of course, had to eat those words.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:38:00
[Frank Gannon]

We, in fact, have a film clip of that speech, which was made--that particular speech, which was made in August 1964 to the American Bar Association.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:38:08
[Action note: Film clip begins; it is almost inaudible throughout. The speech can be found in its entirety in "Remarks in New York City before the American Bar association," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-64, Volume Two, Item #511, pp. 952-5.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:38:16
[Action note: Film clip image fills screen.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:38:39
[Frank Gannon]

(Clears throat twice.)

Day 2, Tape 1
00:39:43
[Action note: Studio reappears on screen.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:39:46
[Frank Gannon]

It's…chilling as late as 1964 to hear President Johnson talk about two hundred American lives lost in Vietnam.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:39:57
[Richard Nixon]

And that would be about ten thousand casualties when you consider the wounded.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:40:00
[Frank Gannon]

The wounded. Did Lyndon Johnson lie to the American people about our involvement or about his intentions regarding our involvement in the war in Vietnam?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:40:12
[Richard Nixon]

No, not consciously, not in my opinion. I think Lyndon Johnson believed, as sometimes we all like to do, what he wanted to believe. He wanted desperately to believe that this war could be fought on the basis of gradual escalation. He wanted desperately to believe that it was possible to have his Great Society and a war at the same time. He was, without question, a man of peace. On the other hand, he, I think, rationalized himself into believing that the war was going much better than it was ever going, and he rationalized into believing that his way of conducting it, which was the worst of both worlds--neither going all-in or all-out--was not working.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:41:06
[Frank Gannon]

I asked you whether President Johnson lied. Let me put it another way. Given all the good intentions he had and all the things he was weighing in his mind when he talked to the American people and to Congress about our involvement in Vietnam, did he always tell the truth?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:41:23
[Richard Nixon]

Well, that's another way of saying "Did he lie?" and when we say "Did he tell the truth?" certainly what he said was not true. But when you say "Did he lie?"--did he deliberately s--get up there and say, "I know this is not true, and I'm saying something else"--no, I don't think Lyndon Johnson did that. He's--he was a very practical man, very earthy, and despite some of the rather negative things that have been written about him, a--a patriotic man. He wanted to do what was right. He was a peace-loving man. I think in this case he wanted so desperately to believe that things were going well, so desperately to believe that what he was doing would bring a peace, and also a peace not at the cost of surrender to the forces of the Communists. He wanted so desperately to believe that that when he said it he did not think that he was lying. It happened, however, what he said--that his optimistic reports about how well the war was going, his optimistic statements to the effect that we were not going to commit more American boys to do the fighting that should be done by Asian boys--all of these things, of course, I think, did not happen to be true. But I don't believe that Lyndon--Lyndon Johnson deliberately was lying.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:42:46
[Frank Gannon]

Does--does not telling the truth at all times come with the job of being president?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:42:57
[Richard Nixon]

Well, when you ask did Lyndon Johnson lie about our involvement in Vietnam, I--let me put it in historical context. He didn't lie any more than Franklin D. Roosevelt lied. When Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1940, and I remember it very well, said in his campaign against Willkie that we were not going to have our boys fight in foreign wars--now, Roosevelt, at that time, all the records have since shown, was very deliberately and passionately working to get the United States into the war in Europe, because he recognized that, and in retrospect very properly--that we had to do so, that we could not allow Hitler to overrun Europe without it having been a great threat to the United States in the long run. On the other hand, as far as Roosevelt was concerned, it would have to be said that he was misleading the American people. And I think, in this case, Johnson may have misled the American people, but it was no more a lie in the moral sense than it was in the case of F.D.R.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:44:08
[Frank Gannon]

In August 1968, Lyndon Johnson promised you that he would not announce a bombing halt before the November presidential election. In October, with his candidate, Hubert Humphrey, trailing you in the polls, President Johnson went on television and dropped a bombshell of his own. We have a film of that moment.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:44:36
[Action note: Film clip begins; inaudible.]

Day 2, Tape 1
00:45:15
[Frank Gannon]

In your memoirs, you wrote, "Announcing the halt so close to the election was utterly callous if politically calculated and utterly naïve if sincere." Which was it, callous or naïve?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:45:30
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I don't think that you could ever say that Lyndon Johnson was naïve. He used to know pretty much what he was doing at all time, and he was a con--consummate politician. I would have to say, in retrospect, that he was motivated to a certain extent, I'm sure, by political considerations, and he was egged on, ironically, by some of his advisors who were more violently anti-Nixon than he was. I don't mean that he wasn't pro-Humphrey, but I mean that as far as some of his advisors were concerned--people like Clark Clifford and George Ball and Averell Harriman--they egged him on to make this kind of announcement before the election, having in mind the fact that it could tip the scales in Humphrey's favor. I think, under the circumstances, as one of the newspaper articles wrote--one of the newspaper reporters wrote after he heard this speech--it w--happened to be very close to Halloween, and he said that last night--that President Johnson had given Pres--Mr. Nixon a--a trick and Hubert Humphrey a treat. And that's the way it turned out. It almost won the election for Hubert Humphrey.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:46:50
[Frank Gannon]

Weren't you furious to--at the last minute, at the eleventh hour, after all you'd been through and with the presidency so--finally so close, to risk having it taken away from you by what you had to have seen as a cynical partisan action on Johnson's part?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:47:12
[Richard Nixon]

Well, before we go so far in characterizing it as being totally cynical and partisan, let us understand that Lyndon Johnson also was thinking of his place in history. He didn't want this election to go by--he didn't want to see me elected and then to bring the peace that he was unable to achieve. And I think, therefore, he wanted to believe that a bombing halt would work. He later told me that it didn't, of course, and that he was misled on it by Mr. Harriman. But, on the other hand, I would say that there's no question, in the heat of the campaign, that I was very distressed, and all of my associates were, to think that this should be pulled out of the hat right before the election at a time that it was bound to give Humphrey, as we said a moment ago, a treat, and give me a trick, which would defeat us.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:48:05
[Frank Gannon]

Did you let him know that you were distressed?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:48:08
[Richard Nixon]

I let him know, actually, through my associates. I had others call him or his--or his advisors and let them know that we were quite disturbed. He was very sensitive about it, incidentally. He was sensitive then, when Bob Finch had made some statement to the effect that he didn't have all the ducks in a row because President Thieu didn't go along with the bombing halt, and that's the only reason that perhaps it did not succeed in tipping the election scales, because disillusionment set in within a couple of days thereafter, just before the election. That he--I talked to him on the phone, and--and he was violent in his criticism of Finch and what he had said. But later on, about a year later, I had breakfast with Johnson in the White House, and he said to me, he said, "I want you to know that I didn't do it for political reasons." And then I remember how vehemently he talked. You know, he was a very physical man. He sort of grabbed me by the elbow and hit the table, and he said, "You know, Harriman told me at least twelve times that he had an absolute commitment from the Russians that they would lean on the North Vietnamese and that the North Vietnamese would negotiate seriously and reduce their attacks on the cities and their attacks in the South." And he said they--he said all the bombing halts were a mistake--that was a mistake, they were all a mistake, and we never got anything but words from the other side.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:49:44
[Frank Gannon]

It's November 1968, you're president-elect, you're looking at options for Vietnam, you have been elected with a--or you've been given a free hand, arguable a mandate for change, the war is divisive and unpopular, men are dying, Thieu is unpopular and corrupt. Why didn't you do one of two things--either do what had to be done militarily in order to win and end the war by victory, or develop a--a sort of withdrawal-with-honor option, cut our losses, and--and get us the hell out of Vietnam?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:50:25
[Richard Nixon]

Well, first, the--you have two options. One is called the option to the right, and the other is called the option to the left. The option to the right, unfortunately, had been completely taken away from us by the bombing halt. By reason of the bombing halt, I was bound by it, even though I had not negotiated it. And so the negotiations were going on in Paris, and I sent Cabot Lodge over there to indicate how serious we were, to try to find a negotiated settlement. And so as far as taking military action was concerned, I felt that that option had been rea--had been taken away from us. Let me say also that, while you say that I was elected with a mandate, we have to realize that both houses of the Congress were under the control of the Democrats. This was very difficult--different from the situation that President Johnson had after 1964. He had two-to-one majorities in both the House and the Senate. He could have done anything that he wanted in Vietnam and gotten away with it, he--just provided he'd leveled with the Congress and leveled with the country. And that, in Eisenhower's opinion and in mine, too, was his great mistake--gradual escalation. And as a result, we had five hundred thou--a--five hundred thousand in Vietnam rather than sixteen thousand when he came into office, with, of course, enormous more casualties. Now, as far as the other particular option is concerned, the option to the left, I know that there were those among my political advisors who said, "Look, Kennedy started the American commitment in Vietnam, at least the commitment to combat units and combat advisors. Johnson escalated it. Now you can end it and put the blame on them for what happened in Vietnam." In other words, bug out. I couldn't do that, and, frankly, I never considered it. I said, in effect, this is not Kennedy's war, as some would suggest, or Johnson's war. It was America's war. I knew what would happen. I had been there. I had been there going back to 1953. I was there in '53, '56, and four times in the sixties, and I knew that if we were to get out of Vietnam then, the Communists would overrun it. I also knew that if we got out under those circumstances, it would have a devastating effect on our other allies in that area--the Thais, for example, the Filipinos, and so forth. And I also knew, and this is a conviction I have even today, I knew it would have a devastating effect on the American morale, on our willingness to play a credible role in the world, because there'd be instant relief for a while, and then there would be a turning inward and say, "Why did we have this loss of life for nothing?"

Day 2, Tape 1
00:53:12
[Frank Gannon]

What would it have taken to win militarily in Vietnam in 1969, or was a military victory impossible given the guerrilla nature of the war?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:53:23
[Richard Nixon]

In 1969 a military victory over the North was not impossible. In fact, if I have a regret, it was that I was unable to do early in 1969 what I later did in 1972--to bomb and mine in the Haiphong-Hanoi area, because we could have brought the North Vietnamese military capability to its knees. And without the North Vietnamese support, the South Vietnamese would have been able to handle the Vietcong in the South. There was no question about that. Incidentally, there were some--what I call "super-hawks," who thought we should have gone further. They said that we could bomb the dikes in North Vietnam, particularly in the winter--in the wet season. And others said we could use tactical nuclear weapons. I ruled both of those out, for two reasons. One, because I didn't think it was necessary in the event we went on the military option. I thought that the bombing and mining, which I had advocated, incidentally, in the sixties after visiting Vietnam, that that enough would quarantine North Vietnam, which was the phrase that I used. On the other hand, I felt that if we used nuclear weapons, or if we caused hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent people in North Vi--in North Vietnam in order to win the war, it would be a pyrrhic victory. It would have had devastating consequences all over Asia, including particularly in Japan, which is the big prize in Asia today, as it was then.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:54:56
[Frank Gannon]

In your inaugural address in 1969, you said, "Let us take as our goal--where peace is unknown, make it welcome; where peace is fragile, make it strong; where peace is temporary, make it permanent." Less than two months later, you authorized secret bombing of neutral Cambodia. Why did you expand in secret the war you were talking about ending in public?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:55:25
[Richard Nixon]

Well, let us understand first that secret military actions in war are not uncommon. In fact, they're very desirable. President Eisenhower, for example, ordered all kinds of disinformation with regard to where the Americans and the other forces would land on the continent when he went into Normandy. It was deliberately to mislead them, and I would say that, as far as this is concerned, we have to recognize that this was wartime. Now, the reason for it's being secret--and the--first, the reason it was done. The North Vietnamese, despite the fact that we were adhering to the conditions of the bombing halt and were not bombing--they were violating whatever conditions that they were supposed to agree to. They were shelling cities. They were infiltrating more troops, and--and what--what particularly concerned us--they were sending in great numbers of combat forces into the Cambodian sanctuaries. The net result of all that was to increase our casualties. And, as I saw those casualty lists every week grow, I knew that we had to do something. I knew that we couldn't break off the Paris talks, not yet. But I knew we had to do something in order to stop that. Now, the point is--why not do it openly? Well, the reason, interestingly enough, was that the North Vietnamese claimed that they didn't have any forces in South Vietnam. They claimed they didn't have any in Cambodia. They said it was all local civil war. Now, that was, of course, not true. But for that reason, we knew that if we bombed secretly, they could not object, and they didn't. Also, the other reason we had to bomb secretly is that we did not bomb what is called "neutral Cambodia." We bombed enemy-occupied territories in Cambodia. Now, Sihanouk, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, as a matter of fact, wanted the Vietnamese out of that area, but he, since he was neutral, would have to object in the event that we openly bombed. All right, let's look at what happened. We conducted very successful bombing raids. It reduced our casualties because it--it inhibited the North Vietnamese from making their hit-and-run attacks on our troops on the border in that area, and it's only unfortunate that the leak of the fact of--that bombing was taking place--that it became public, which made it necessary for us to discontinue it, because Sihanouk, of course, had then to object to it. And as a result of that leak--it cost American lives. Discontinuing the bombing gave them a privileged sanctuary from which to make their runs at our forces in Vietnam.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:58:20
[Frank Gannon]

Are you saying, then, that the reporter who wrote that story, based on a leak, in The New York Times, which in that case published that story, caused American lives--cost American lives?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:58:28
[Richard Nixon]

He certainly did, without question, and he isn't going to be able to rub the blood off his hands simply by rewriting history.

Day 2, Tape 1
00:58:36
[Frank Gannon]

As you say--or--you say that secrecy is needed in wartime. How did you feel, then, several years later when the House Judiciary Committee considered, although it voted down in the committee--by a vote of, I think, twenty--twenty-six to twelve, a fourth article of impeachment which said that you should have been tried, convicted and impeached, and removed from office because in 1969 you had lied to Congress about the secret bombing of Vietnam--of--sorry, of Cambodia?

Day 2, Tape 1
00:59:11
[Richard Nixon]

Well, first, I would say that the Judiciary Committee, in this instance, I think, showed some responsibility. I'm only surprised that that many members of the Judiciary Committee, in view of what happened in Cambodia later--and--no, strike that. I--I'm only surprised that that many on the Judiciary Committee would even consider that an impeachable offense. The second point is that, if the time ever comes when an American president cannot do what is necessary as commander-in-chief to defend the lives of American servicemen, then, believe me, we'd better give up on this country. I hope that American presidents in the future will have the wisdom and the guts to do what is necessary to protect our men when we commit them to battle. If we aren't able to do that, then we shouldn't send them into battle. And that's exactly what I was doing.

Day 2, Tape 1
01:00:10
[Frank Gannon]

Almost--as you say, almost from the start of your administration, you were plu--you were plagued with a spate of leaks of classified information, and in the early months you authorized wiretaps to be placed on members of the White House staff and on journalists. Looking back today, were those wiretaps justified?

Day 2, Tape 1
01:00:32
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, yes, they were justified. They didn't produce anything in terms of finding out who was doing the leaking, although they might have had the effect of, perhaps--that we couldn't even estimate--of discouraging some of those who might have intended to leak if they didn't know that they might be tapped.

Day 2, Tape 1
01:00:51
[Frank Gannon]

In fact, though, the results were the contrary. The--the leaks not only continued but--but multiplied. How is it that, since these taps were placed and, indeed, were extended as was felt necessary, why didn't they--I think at one point you described them as a "dry ho--"--you described the results as a "dry hole, globs and globs of crap." How was it, since J. Edgar Hoover had said that taps were the most effective way to catch a thief--why didn't these taps provide something, produce something?

Day 2, Tape 1
01:01:21
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I think it would indicate that those who were leaking were doing it quite deliberately. It was not simply a--a question of being careless or speaking when they were drunk, or what have you, as--or speaking to a friend. They doing it--they were doing it quite deliberately, and if they were doing it deliberately, they had to be sophisticated enough to know, in view of what had happened before in previous administrations, that they might be tapped. So they didn't--

Day 2, Tape 1
01:01:48
[Action note: Tape ends.]

THE FOLLOWING IS IN THE ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT BUT NOT ON A TAPE

[Richard Nixon comments continued]

--talk on their telephones. Let us understand the magnitude of the wiretapping that was done, since so much has been made out of it. The total that were wiretapped in this instance were fourteen government officials and four newsmen, a total of eighteen. In fact, the number of wiretaps--these are what we called "national wiretaps"--and, understand, this is during wartime--the number of wiretaps that we had in that period was the lowest average of any time since the Korean War back in 1953. And it's ironic to note that the highest number of--

 

Day two, Tape two, LINE FEED #2, 4-7-83, ETI Reel #14
April 7, 1983

Day 2, Tape 2
00:00:59
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 2
00:01:00
[Richard Nixon]

--these national security wiretaps was in the last year of President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy's administration, in 1963. Now, that doesn't mean that what they did was wrong. It doesn't mean that what has happened in the past justifies what happened--what we did. What I am suggesting here is that the reason we wiretapped was that the leaks were making it very difficult to conduct our foreign policy. We had a lot of things going on then. We had, for example, the--a new relationship that we were attempting to develop with the People's Republic of China. It was just in its early stages. We had relationships with the Soviet Union. We were having, of course, discussions on a confidential basis with regard to Vietnam, but I should point out that the leak which disturbed me the most happened to be the leak of thes--of the secret bombing--

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:02
[Frank Gannon]

You--

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:03
[Richard Nixon]

--because it cost American lives.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:04
[Frank Gannon]

Because it cost lives. You made your first speech to the American people on the subject of Vietnam on May--

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:15
[Richard Nixon]

-seventh.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:16
[Frank Gannon]

--f--I think--May f--in May--

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:19 RN: Yeah.
[Frank Gannon]

--of 1969. It's a speech that you are not happy with. Why not?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:02:24
[Richard Nixon]

(Clears throat.) Well, it was a speech that had been prepared by the N.S.C. staff, and it was written in the typical State Department kind of unintelligible rhetoric. Now, I don't consider myself to be a particularly brilliant writer, but I've had enough experience, I think, to know how to get s--say something very simply to get it across. And from that time on, all the speeches I made during the war, I took as much assistance as I could get from the State Department and the N.S.C. staff, but I rewrote them all to put them in language that people could understand.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:03:01
[Action note: Frank Gannon begins to speak.]

Day 2, Tape 2
00:03:03
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, that was--excuse me, go ahead.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:03:05
[Frank Gannon]

Go ahead.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:03:06
[Richard Nixon]

No--as far as the substance of the speech was concerned, I think it should be noted, too, that it was a--a very conciliatory speech, but it was one that did not have the impact that I would have liked in rectifying what Johnson had done. What had happened there is that he had never gotten across to the American people as to why we were in Vietnam. He tried to, but he never made it as plain as he might. Too many American people had the impression we were in Vietnam solely for the purpose of seeing that Vietnam had an opportunity to have a democratic government. Now, that was important to us, but that wasn't the major reason. He didn't point out the great stakes that were involved in Vietnam, and he had not leveled with the American people on what it would be required to bring this to a successful conclusion. I felt it was necessary to do that, and it was later on that I was able to make those points more effectively.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:04:07
[Frank Gannon]

During the summer of 1969, the domestic anti-war protest began to heat up. It was clear that the honeymoon with the new administration was over. October fifteenth was designated as Moratorium Day, and the idea was that the fifteenth of each succeeding month would be another Moratorium until it had--that had affected your actions and you'd withdrawn the troops and ended the war. How did this escalating domestic protest affect your thinking about the war or your conduct of the war?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:04:40
[Richard Nixon]

Well, the protests had exactly the opposite effect from what the post--protesters intended. They protested against the war. Well, we were all against the war. We wanted to end it. It was a question of how. They wanted to have peace, and they wanted to stop the killing, of course. What happened here was that, by their protests, they prolonged the war because they encouraged the enemy, and the enemy themselves said that, when they congratulated those that were running the October fifteen Moratorium and said, "May your October offensive be very, very successful." And it did have that effect. Now, let me say, another reason, however, that I was particularly concerned about this protest, the one on October the fifteenth, is that we had a synchronized, orchestrated policy in place that we thought would bring meaningful negotiations with the North Vietnamese. I had written a letter to Ho Chi Minh, one which he gave a curt reply to, but which at least opened a channel.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:05:45
[Frank Gannon]

Was this known publicly?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:05:46
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, yes. It became known then. And it became known shortly thereafterwards. I had also initiated talks with the Soviet Union through a contact with Ambassador Dobrynin, in which I laid it on the line as to where we stood with regard to their involvement in supporting the North Vietnamese. I thought that they could bring some pressure to bear, of course, on the North Vietnamese. Dr. Kissinger, in August of that year, had begun the first of twelve secret trips that he took to Paris to negotiate in a private channel with the North Vietnamese, Le Duc Tho. In addition to that, I had taken other actions, on the diplomatic front and otherwise, to indicate that, one, on the one side, we wanted to make a reasonable settlement, provided it was one that did not require us to overthrow the Thieu government or the government selected by the people of South Vietnam. But, on the other side, that if we were unable to get that kind of a settlement, that we were prepared to take the military action to bring the war to a conclusion. But that became an empty threat, believe me, after the October fifteenth Moratorium, because what happened then was it encouraged the enemy not to negotiate seriously, and they didn't for a considerable amount of time after that. And, of course, with all of that kind of disruption in the nation's capitol and across the country, because this wasn't the only place it had occurred, I knew that it would take--tear the country apart to escalate militarily, as I had hoped we would--we would--would be able to do in the event that the enemy continued to be intransigent.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:07:34
[Frank Gannon]

Do we know that the North Vietnamese or the NLF followed our domestic political scene and were aware of the anti-war protests?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:07:46
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, yes. We were very much aware of that.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:07:47
[Frank Gannon]

How--how do we know that?

[Richard Nixon]

We know it, too, from a historical standpoint. The war in Vietnam, as far as the French was concerned, was not lost in Vietnam. It was lost in Paris. The French still, after the great loss in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, had substantial military superiority, and they could have won it had their political base stood up in Paris. Now, the North Vietnamese, if nothing else, are historians. They think historically, as do most Communists and Communist leaders, and when they saw what had happened in France, they thought the same thing could happen in the United States. They couldn't win on the battlefield in Vietnam. They couldn't win, particularly as Thieu was beginning to develop the South Vietnamese forces which could carry the ba--carry the load themselves even after we withdrew. And so, what they could not win on the battlefield against American and Vietnamese forces, they hoped to win in Washington, D.C. And that is why they conducted these campaigns of propaganda and demonstrations and so forth all over the nation--in order to force capitulation in Washington, to win politically what they could not win militarily.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:09:09
[Frank Gannon]

We have on film some scenes from typical anti-war protests of those years.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:09:16
[Action note: They watch clip; it is inaudible.]

Day 2, Tape 2
00:09:57
[Frank Gannon]

As you say, these protesters unwittingly upset the plans you had put in motion for peace. How do you feel about these protesters today, looking back on that experience?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:10:12
[Richard Nixon]

Well, now, first of all, that's about as untypical a picture of those protesters as I could possibly imagine. That shows the kind of protest that the media tried to paint of the protest movement generally--peaceful people walking along carrying coffins, demonstrating peacefully. Let's understand what kind of protest it was. It was violent. Some of it was peaceful, but a lot of it was violent. Near Washington, D.C., hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage was done. We have to understand, too, that all over the nation, for example, in 1969 alone, there were, as I recall, forty thousand bombings or threats of bombs. In that period, too, there were over two hundred and fifty cases of arson, and there'd been eighty-six people killed. This was a rough period. This was not a non-violent protest. (Pause; begins to speak again.)

Day 2, Tape 2
00:11:12
[Frank Gannon]

(Begins to speak; pauses.) I'm sorry.

[Richard Nixon]

Excuse me.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:11:14
[Frank Gannon]

One American politician said that the best young Americans during that period went to Canada, not to Vietnam. How do you react to a statement like that?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:11:25
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I was in Vietnam in July of 1969, and I had been there, of course, on six other different occasions. I went out among the troops in the battlefield. I was enormously impressed and, frankly, moved by them. They're just fine young men. And I realized as they were there that over two-and-a-half million young Americans served in Vietnam. They came back, as we know now, usually unappreciated and sometimes even condemned, ostracized, and under the circumstances it had to be a very bitter experience for them. But I can tell you what I feel about it--our best young men didn't go to Canada. They went to Vietnam. Oh, these young fellows, most of them, didn't have college educations, not because they were stupid or dumb, because probably they didn't come from families who could afford it. But they served their country. They did their job, and I feel that the country owes them what they have not received to date--that is, appreciation for what they have done.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:12:39
[Frank Gannon]

How do you feel about the--the mindset behind a statement like "Our best young men went to Canada, not to Vietnam"?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:12:50
[Richard Nixon]

Well, this is what we call the "higher morality." It's the idea that there are some people who are better educated than others, and certainly better educated than whoever happens to be the elected leaders of the country, who should determine what is just and what is unjust in terms of America's political and military commitments around the world. And if they determine that something is unjust or unwise, then they consider that those who protest against it, even though they violate the law, are heroes, and those who serve are really people that do not deserve our appreciation. Well, I don’t accept that. We can't have a country that can be a major force for good in the world, as the United States in my view has been and will continue to be, if we have that kind of anarchy in the intellectual community.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:13:45
[Frank Gannon]

It's also been argued that Vietnam was a racist war on our side, to the extent that, whereas middle-class and upper-middle-class white young men were able, for various reasons--either by going to Canada or obtaining student deferments--were able to avoid service. The average soldier was black, was Hispanic, was poor, was uneducated. Is there validity to that charge?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:14:10
[Richard Nixon]

To a certain extent, yes. It wasn't intended, of course, but that's the way the draft law had been written, and--and under the circumstances, people could avoid service--it wasn't illegal to--by getting education and through other kind of deferments. I--I think in the future, of course, in the event--and I hope we don't ever have that--have to face up to that again--that that has to be modified or rectified, because it isn't right to have some people pay the price and others, frankly, have a free ride. I recall, for example, a--a--a confrontation I had in the 1970 campaign. I was in New Jersey, I believe it was, and--and I was going in to address a meeting of--one of the political meetings in--in a governor's race or something I--up there. No. I'm sorry. This is New Jersey in 1970. I was addressing a political meeting, and--and a young fellow came up to me and grabbed me by the arm, said he was a student. Well, I guess he was, although from his age I think he had been in college a long time. But he said, "Stop this war in Vietnam." And I said, "Have you ever been to Vietnam?" I sa--he said, "No." I said, "Well, look. There are a lot of young people out there in Vietnam fighting so that you won't have to go."

Day 2, Tape 2
00:15:35
[Frank Gannon]

Do you think that a white middle-class or upper-middle-class young American at that time who took advantage of that position--of the loopholes in the law to avoid service was a less good American for doing that?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:15:49
[Richard Nixon]

No, not at all. I--I'm not going to sit here and judge them as they judged those who served, or as they may judge me. No. The draft law is the law, and I don't--I don't think that we have to assume that an individual isn't going to do what's in his best interest. Who wants to go out there and get his tail shot off? Who wants to take that kind of risk? Who wants to have his life interfered with? So they had a right to do that. I understand that. What I do not understand, however, is for some like that to have engaged in demonstrations, to take out, if they had a sense of guilt, their sense of guilt by attacking those who did serve, in effect, by attacking what they call "an unjust war" and, in effect, looking down on those who were stupid enough to have not avoided service.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:16:46
[Frank Gannon]

Do you think that the Communists were behind, in any way, the anti-war movement?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:16:51
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, there's no question that they were behind it. However, I would have to say that the anti-war movement had a life of its own. It was made up of a number of different groups. For example, there were those I just referred to, individuals who just didn't want to get shot at, and I don't blame them a bit. I understand those. And then there were some very honest pacifists, the Quakers, for example, of which I happen to be one--not a very good one--but, nevertheless, they don't--they're against all wars. But there are two kinds that I don't have any use for whatever. One, there are those who got the United States into the war in Vietnam, the brightest and the best, who urged that we get in and then had the war conducted their way, gradual escalation, and win it in economic areas rather than on the battlefield and so forth, and then, once it began to go sour, they turned on Johnson and later on me and sabotaged my efforts, particularly, to get us out on an honorable basis. And then, finally, there is one other group. These are people that were not in government, but they are--they are--our--what we call our "better intellects" in the country, in the great universities, in the foundations. Most of them, of course, in the media as well are in this category, who felt always that they, in effect, were the best thinkers about American foreign policy. They supported what we did in World War I. They supported what we did in World War II, to a certain extent even in Korea, but when it came to Vietnam, they bugged out. And as a result of that, they in effect left a legacy which I think they’re finding very hard to live down, because they know they failed the country, failed to exert the leadership that they could in a very desperate time. Let me point out why. It--it isn't because I question their patriotism. It isn't because I question their sincerity, but I question their judgment, just as I question the judgment of the protesters. They wanted to end the war. Well, if they wanted to end the war, what they should have done was to support the government that was trying to end it and the only government we had at that time that was trying to end it, rather than to sabotage our efforts to end it, which we were trying to do on an honorable basis. And I question their judgment in another way--when they said that the war was won--that it didn't make any difference who won. History has disproved them. What has happened to Vietnam since the United States left? What has happened since the South Vietnamese, after holding on for two years, were denied the support they needed to resist the--the f--the- the attack from North--what has happened there has demonstrated that the cause that we were there--even though we may not have conducted ourselves too well in achieving it, was a just cause. We were attempting to prevent what has happened since, and I make the point again that I have made on previous occasions. More people since the fall of Vietnam and the fall of Cambodia were killed, in Cambodia alone, and starved to death--two to three million--than were killed in the twenty-five years that the French, the Americans, and the South and North Vietnamese had fought in Vietnam. So we were on the right side, and these people in the great educational institutions, in the media, some even in the business community and the rest, that had this "higher morality"--they carry a great burden for bugging out on the leadership position which they should have provided here. Rather than opposing, they should have supported what we were trying to do.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:20:46
[Frank Gannon]

Your November third speech was one of the most extraordinary moments of your presidency, even one of the most extraordinary moments of contemporary political history. You went on television and defined a whole new political constituency and then rallied it to do something that few thought possible to support continued fighting of the war. We have a clip from that famous ["Silent Majority"] speech.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:21:17
[Action note: They watch the clip.]

Day 2, Tape 2
00:22:15
[Frank Gannon]

How did you plan and write that speech, and did you have any idea it would have the effect that it did have?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:22:23
[Richard Nixon]

Well, first, we got to look a little at the background. We had had the October Moratorium, as I pointed out earlier. That had destroyed any chance for us to escalate militarily, and another Moratorium was planned, or they called it something else, a "mobilization," I believe, on November the fifteenth. So, under the circumstances, I knew it was necessary to address the nation. I think what made the speech a success was, first, the tactics I used in presenting it. I remember I drove my staff right up the wall. They came to me almost every hour and said, "The press is really complaining that they don't have an advance copy." I said, "Don't give them an advance copy, because I want to talk directly to the American people." I knew that ninety percent of the press was against what we were doing in Vietnam, and I knew that if they got an advance copy they would destroy--by putting out earlier what I was going to say and by giving their arguments against it, they would destroy the effect of it. So I gave no advance text. I also did not give an advance text to members of my staff, unti--except just a few minutes before I went on I informed everybody concerned what I was going to say, without going into all--detail in every respect. I did most of the writing, with a great deal of help, incidentally, from our N.S.C. staff, from Henry Kissinger and others, but I did the writing at Camp David, and that's where, very late at night--I think it was two a.m. in the morning--the "Silent Majority" theme came into my mind. Not that it's so brilliant, but, as I pointed out in that speech, here we had demonstrations going on all over the country. We had people indicating that our brave young men, our best young men were going to--were not in Vietnam but--

Day 2, Tape 2
00:24:17
[Frank Gannon]

Going to Canada.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:24:18
[Richard Nixon]

That's right. They were going to Canada rather than--than Vietnam. But under the circumstances, I therefore tried to accomplish three things. First, I deliberately in advance did not try to put down speculation as to what I was going to say. Some senators were speculating that I was going to announce a major withdrawal of forces. Others said I was going to announce a cease-fire. Others said that I was going to announce more conciliatory attitudes toward the demonstrators, toward the North Vietnamese, and so forth and so on. I didn't discourage a--any of that at all. So, by the time I went on, it built the biggest audience that I'd had up to that time in the presidency, and I think the biggest audience that any president has had up to that time. And they heard it directly from me rather than through the media, which, of course, would not have presented it the way that I wanted to come through. And, after hearing it from me, it had a dramatic effect, because the mail just poured in, not as stimulated as some of our critics would indicate. But it poured in spontaneously such as you've never heard. It--it had just three major themes in it. One, I did what I felt Johnson had not done adequately. I tried to tell the American people what the stakes were, that it didn't involve just what happened to the people of Vietnam, but what happened to the people in the rest of [Southeast Asia], what happened to the United States as well. Second, I told them what we were trying to do in the way of bringing the war to a conclusion, a program of Vietnamization. That means, in effect, that we were going to withdraw American forces at the same time that we were training the South Vietnamese forces to take over their own defense. And that program eventually was carried out, and carried out successfully. And, third--I made this point very clear--that our policy was not going to be changed. It wasn't going to be affected by demonstrations in the street. I pointed out that I didn't question the right of people to demonstrate, but, on the other hand, that as far as a president is concerned, he must make up his mind after getting the best advice from his associates as to what is best and then follow that course of action. And that is why I concluded with the line, "Our policy isn't going to--in effect, going to be made in the streets. It's going to be made under our constitutional process by the administration," and I called on the Silent Majority to support them, and the Silent Majority was out there. Our approval rating went up to sixty-eight percent right after that, right in the midst of a war and in spite of huge demonstrations. What I was really trying to get across was this--that despite the fact that the media was overwhelmingly against the war, despite the fact that many members of Congress were making great noises to the effect that the war ought to come to a conclusion on any terms whatever, and despite the fact that we had demonstrations, thousands of them, that were very loud--that that was not the voice of America. The voice of America was the Silent Majority, and that sustained me, as a matter of fact, throughout the four years until we got the peace agreement in January of 1983--I mean, 1973.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:27:39
[Frank Gannon]

In addition to enhancing impact and preventing leaks, was one of the reasons you kept the text of the speech from your staff because you suspected that many, if not a majority, of them would have disagreed with the decisions you had made?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:27:54
[Richard Nixon]

Well, there's no question that some of them would have disagreed with it. However, I didn't--I wasn't paranoid--I wasn't paranoiac enough, as someone has suggested, to distrust them and feel that they'd run out and give it to the press. But I also knew that it's a great s--temptation to any staff member who's got a friend in the media, and the media fellow says, "Look. Just for my own information, just so I don't say what is wrong here, could you just give me a little fill-in, just guide me in the right way?" Of course, that's a come-on, and there--there're so many suckers in Washington then, and there still are today, that can be taken on by that--taken on--that could be taken in by that kind of approach. So I just wasn't going to take any chances. It was better for them not to know. And if there's going to be any leaks, then I would be responsible because I was the only one that knew.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:28:43
[Frank Gannon]

On April twentieth, 1970, you went on television and announced--gave a--a very optimistic progress report about Vietnamization. You announced that a hundred and fifty thousand troops were going to be withdrawn over a period of time. Ten days later, on April thirtieth, you went on television and shocked everybody by announcing an American military action into Cambodia. Your critics said that the only thing that changed between those two days, the twentieth and the thirtieth, was that you saw the film Patton twice. What did change, and why did you feel it was necessary to expand the Vietnam War into neutral Cambodia?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:29:25
[Richard Nixon]

Well, first, the business about Patton. I recommend everybody to see it if you can still see it on a cassette or someplace. I like Patton not because of what it told about war, but what it told about people. The character sketches of not just Patton, but Eisenhower, who doesn't even appear on film. You only see him through references by others--Montgomery, Bradley. It's like War and Peace. War and Peace, Tolstoy's great novel, I liked because of what it told about people rather than about war and peace. But what really had happened, of course, that required the action that we took in April thirtieth was that in Cambodia, so-called "neutral Cambodia," there was a chance that it was going to become very unneutral, because what had happened was that Sihanouk, who, of course, had run a neutral government and had a relatively neutral policy, tilting it s--more, of course, to the Communists than to us, but nevertheless relatively neutral--he had been overthrown by a very pro-Western government under Lon Nol. Once that happened, then the North Vietnamese launched a major attack in Cambodia aimed at Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, and they threatened to overrun all of Cambodia, which would have meant that these sanctuaries bordering on Vietnam that we had bombed in 1969--that they would be expanded to the whole country. This would be a threat to our forces in Vietnam that I considered to be unacceptable. We already had very high casualties as a well a-- as a result of those hit-and-run raids. Now, when you say we "invaded neutral Cambodia," that's like saying Eisenhower invaded France when he went into Normandy, or that the British invaded Holland when they went across at the time that those were German-occupied territories. All we did was to move into that part of Cambodia that was totally occupied by the North Vietnamese and by the Vietcong, by the enemy. There--as far as we knew, and nobody, I think, has really questioned this, there were no civilians, only a few, if any at all. And so the purpose there was to knock out these sanctuaries, to save American lives, which we did. And, second, to allow our withdrawal program, which I had announced ten days before, to go forward, because in the event that the North Vietnamese had been able to take over all of Cambodia, we would have had to increase the number of people--Americans in Vietnam in order to avoid a total defeat for the South Vietnamese.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:32:20
[Frank Gannon]

The next morning you went to the Pentagon for a briefing on the military action in Cambodia. While you were there, you decided to go for broke and take out all the sanctuaries. What made you make that decision?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:32:35
[Richard Nixon]

Well, they showed a map of Cambodia in the briefing, and I noted the two sanctuaries we--we went into. One was called the Fishhook, and the other was called, int--interestingly enough, Parrot's Beak, both of them digging into South Vietnam, of course. And I noticed there were four others, and I said, "What about those?" And they said, "Well, we don't know that we have the capability of doing it. We think we have, but we wonder"--the general who was briefing me on it--"about the political effect of going in." I said, "Listen, the--leave the politics to me." I said, "If we can do it militarily, I want them all taken out. We're going to get just as much political heat for taking out some as we can for taking out all." Let me say, in that respect, the military are not particularly imaginative or creative, generally, in war. That isn't to reflect on them as people. It’s just the way they were, and particularly in this war, because they had become gun-shy during the Johnson years, when they had to fight with one hand, in effect, behind their back, when they couldn't come up with imaginative ideas because it would be turned down because of the political effect that we--it would have. I made it very clear in this briefing that, from now on, politics was not going to determine the way we conducted this war. We were going to do what was right to bring it to an end, to continue our withdrawal program, and to save American lives. It was a good decision, and it eventually worked, of course, because we did save lives, and we also prevented a [Tet offensive] for that year.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:34:08
[Frank Gannon]

As you left the Pentagon that morning, a very dramatic scene developed. You were surrounded in the lobby by well-wishers, and, in an impromptu exchange of remarks, you referred to the protesting college students as "bums." Given the intense reaction to your Cambodian action, wasn't that a very provocative remark?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:34:33
[Richard Nixon]

Well, let's understand how it happened. I not only was surrounded by well-wishers, but one woman came up to me, and she said, "Thank you very much for ordering the incursion into Cambodia, because my husband is serving out there with the units that are under attack, and by what you've done, I think you may have saved his life." And I said, "You know, I've been to Vietnam," and I said, "Those men that are serving out there, you can be very proud of them. They are the greatest." I said, "You know, our college students are the luckiest people in the world. Here they are in the United States while others are serving out there, and here they are burning books and"--wait a minute--is it "pomming"? Not "pomming" ["bombing"?] No--no--I'll s--I'll start again. "And here our college students, in contrast, they're the luckiest people in the world, but what are they doing? They're blowing up the place. They're burning books. And I said, "That's simply hard to understand. They're--they're really a bunch of bums." Now, in other words, I was not referring to all demonstrators as being bums or all college students being bums. I was referring to those who were blowing up the campuses and also that were burning books and so forth and so on. But let's look at the context of that, too. Up until that time, in--in the whole year of 1969 until April of 1970, we'd had a c--we'd had a number of bombings, the number of--no, strike that. Until nineteen seventy--until April of nineteen--I'll start again on that. From the time I came into office in 1969 until April of 1970, at that time there had been a total of eighteen hundred demonstrations on college campuses. But worse, there'd been two hundred and fifty cases of arson. There had been over six hundred injured, two-thirds of them being police, and, in addition to that, there had been at least eight killed. And then I'd had one very dramatic episode just three or four days before which brought it home to me. The demonstrators had burned a research institute at Stanford University. A visiting Asian scholar, a noted anthropologist, had a twenty-five-year research project that he'd been working on there burned, destroyed, a whole lifetime's work. And it just seemed to me this was so senseless, so mindless. I understood people being against the war, but bombing and burning and destroying like that--it seemed to me was totally unacceptable. They were bums, and I'd say it again, if I were to s--if I had a chance.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:37:25
[Frank Gannon]

Within a matter of days, campuses all across the country were either up in turmoil or being closed down. Marches on Washington were planned or underway, and then an event happened which added a whole new dimension of tragedy to this situation. At Kent State O--Kent State University in Ohio, National Guard troops fired into a group of student demonstrator--gu--student demonstrators and killed four of them. There's a--how did you first hear about this?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:38:02
[Richard Nixon]

Well, in fact, I was in the E.O.B. going over some scheduling decisions I had to make, and Bob Haldeman came in from his office, from--the--next to the Oval Office and told me they had just gotten this news with regard to a possible--deaths--he didn't know how many at that point. And I must say that it was a--as shocking an event as I had during the time I was in presidency [sic].

Day 2, Tape 2
00:38:33
[Frank Gannon]

There's a striking photograph of that event at Kent State which seems to summarize all the anguish that people felt. How do you feel when you look at this photograph?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:38:49
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I feel as I did when I saw it, because I did see it in the newspaper. It was a--it was an emotional, wrenching experience for me, certainly the most emotionally wrenching experience I had during the entire period of the presidency, more so even than the resignation. Because you see that--a girl like that--you see, of course, the young man down there, probably dead, and--and you think of your own children. I remember, for example, one of the girls who was shot and killed at Kent State--her--her father made a statement to the effect--"My daughter was not a bum." And I thought of my own daughters. I--I thought back of--their learning to talk and to walk, and their first birthdays, and the trips we took together, going to the ballgame with one and to the circus with others, and so forth and so on, getting them through the teenage years, getting them through college, and so forth and so on, and then (makes "whish" sound)--all gone. And I therefore felt great responsibility for what had happened. I also felt a great deal of anger for those who had done what brought about this sort of thing. And let's understand that this was not just a case of a group of hard-nosed military people shooting down innocent students. Some of those that were killed were certainly innocent. One was even a bystander. But before this happened, Kent State had been virtually a battleground. The governor, Governor Rhodes, had had to call in the National Guard because of the arson that was going on all over town. Just a couple of days before this, they threw lighted flares into the R.O.T.C. building, burned it to the ground, a million dollars' worth of damage. When the fire department came, they cut the hose with machetes so that they couldn't put out the fire. And then they threw rocks at the firemen and injured several of them. Then, when all the demonstrations were banned by court order, they continued, and when the National Guard was trying to quell the ju--demonstrations, they threw rocks at the Guard and threw the tear--the tear gas canisters which had fallen among them, they began to fall--throw those at the--at the Na--at the Guardsmen and drove them back onto a hill. And then, unfortunately, a tragic thing occurred. These young Guardsmen, who were the same age they were, as a matter of fact--one of them fired, and four people were dead. It was a tragedy. It is one that I of course feel a--a great res--felt great responsibility for, but I understood and therefore particularly was disturbed by those that had brought it on, in my opinion, by the kind of actions that they were inspiring.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:42:05
[Frank Gannon]

Your action into Cambodia also elicited considerable support. There's another photograph, which I think is a--a favorite of yours. What does this photograph remind you of or bring back to you?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:42:39
[Richard Nixon]

(After a pause, waiting for the photograph to appear on the floor screen.) Oh. Oh, yes, I see that. These are what you call the "hard hats." I've already indicated that it was very difficult to keep the country together during this war. I could only do it because of the support of the Silent Majority and because of the support of a number of members of the Congress in both the House and the Senate, Democrat and Republicans, and they constitute a majority who did support what I was trying to do, although the minority made most of the news. But we had the opposition of the media. We had the opposition of the best minds in the universities. We had the b--opposition of many in the business community. All of the so-called, or most of the so-called "intellectual elite," the so-called "better people," were against what we were doing in Vietnam. They thought it was an unjust war, that we shouldn't be there, and that in any event we should get out, whatever the cost might be. And yet among those that did stand by me were those that weren't supposed to be listened to. The hard hats, of course, are working people. They are members of--of the unions who get out and work on the buildings and so forth. Most of them don't have college educations. Most of them are considered to be Archie Bunker-type that are too stupid to pay any attention to. But, believe me, they have guts. They got backbone. One of the great problems in--sometimes in our education today--we're overeducated people sometimes, and what we do is to strengthen the brain and weaken the backbone. Well, these people had brains, a lot of them. They didn't have the opportunity to develop, as some of our people in college did, but they still had a strong bent of patriotism and support of our men--many of whom, of course, they knew--in Vietnam. And so, under the circumstances, I appreciated what they'd done. Without their support, we couldn't have hung on as long as we did, because the so-called "better people" bugged out.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:44:53
[Frank Gannon]

On June thirteenth, 1971, you looked at your Sunday New York Times. On the left-hand side of the front-hand page, you read about the coverage of your daughter Tricia's wedding. Then, in the middle of the page, you saw a headline about a series of government documents that the Time--that the Times was about to begin publishing. This was the first appearance of what became known as the Pentagon Papers. Did you have any idea that this was coming? Were you prepared for it? And what were the Pentagon Papers?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:45:22
[Richard Nixon]

No idea whatever. I was very surprised and shocked, and, of course, Henry Kissinger was just as surprised. I remember he called me at Camp David, expressing consternation that this had occurred. The Pentagon Papers--about seven thousand pages of classified secret and top-secret documents, and a study which had been made from those documents, prepared during the Johnson administration by Secretary of Defense McNamara, as to how we got into the war in Vietnam, how it was conducted. It was f--and, frankly, a critique of the war. That's what the Pentagon Papers was.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:46:04
[Frank Gannon]

The finger of suspicion quickly pointed to Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department employee who was a consultant to the R.A.N.D. Corporation and had access to those documents. He admitted that he had taken them and distributed them. We have a clip of his--of one of his press conferences.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:46:27
[Action note: Clip begins; mostly inaudible.]

Day 2, Tape 2
00:47:52
[Frank Gannon]

What are your feeling about Daniel Ellsberg and what he did?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:47:57
[Richard Nixon]

Well, Daniel Ellsberg--I do not question what he was trying to do in terms of his sincerity, if a--if a my ["if I may"?] use a very overworked term. But I certainly question his judgment, and I question the basic, frankly, morality of what he did. After all, he is putting himself above the president of the United States, above the Congress, above our whole system of government when he says, in effect, that he would determine what should be made public, and also from that clip--it indicates that he not only--was not satisfied with what he had done in terms of putting out the records of what had occurred before this administration, our administration, had come into power, but that he would like to get out the records with regard to what we had done in Cambodia and in Laos, which he again, speaking, says was in violation of the U.N. Charter and so forth. Now, it is not for him, who was a former government employee, to make that decision. I think his--I think his decision was wrong. I think he was wrong, for example, on--insofar as his evaluation of the situation. But assuming he was right, that is not our system--it is not our system for people who have been in government to take secret documents and illegally to make them available to the newspapers and, in effect, thereby to give aid and comfort to the enemy. So, some people say--was he a traitor or was he not is really beside the point. There's no question that these documents were valuable to the North Vietnamese and valuable to the Russians, as Dean Rusk said, and also that they gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:49:46
[Frank Gannon]

There is an argument that the Pentagon Papers were sort of a red herring, that in fact they were verbose, wordy, academic, that most of the material was already available in non-classified places, that they were the best argument for studying the classification of documents, and, as a matter of fact, in the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, your administration initiated a entire government-wide study of reclassification. What about the argument that the Pentagon--looking back, do you think the government's reaction to the publication of the Pentagon papers was an overreaction?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:50:19
[Richard Nixon]

Not at all. I wish we could have done more, because if you ever give the seal of discip--not at all. I wish we could have done more, because if you ever give the approval to this kind of action, you're going to have a chaotic situation in the government. You simply aren't going to be able to run it. I would say, too, that when people suggest--and I think Secretary of Defense Laird said that ninety-five percent of them probably didn't need to be classified. Five percent is enough to break a code. And, for example, looking at that, I remember the D.I.A., the Defense Intelligent ["Intelligence"?] Agency, in expressing their concern about the Pentagon Papers, made the point that it would--that some of the more recent ones could have resulted in breaking our code, or at least one of our codes. Second, as far as the C.I.A. was concerned, they made the point that some of their sources were revealed, and, in fact, some of their sources did dry up, and third, very interestingly enough, careful reading of some of the Pentagon documents would indicate that a Russian agent would have been able to find that we had successfully bugged Brezhnev's automobile, because some of the information in there came from a conversation that took place in his automobile. And, further, that we had broken the North Vietnamese code. Now, put yourself in the position of the Russians, who, from reports we had received, received a copy of this--a full copy of this even before the New York Times got it. Or the position of the North Vietnamese. They get this information. They know that their codes have been compromised. They're able to change them. And also, if they're reading our secret codes, they're able to develop their policies accordingly. Just let me sum it up. The Pentagon Papers, even if they should not have been classified--it was a breach of the law for Mr. Ellsberg on his own to determine what should be made public. That was a violation of the law.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:52:27
[Frank Gannon]

Whatever the extenuating circumstances and whatever his intentions may have been, in your opinion, did Daniel Ellsberg betray his country?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:52:34
[Richard Nixon]

In his--in my opinion, Daniel Ellsberg gave--put the question again.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:52:43
[Frank Gannon]

Despite the extenuating circumstances and whatever his intentions may have been, in your opinion, did Daniel Ellsberg betray his country?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:52:51
[Richard Nixon]

I would put it another way. Daniel Ellsberg, whatever his intentions, gave aid and comfort to the enemy. And under those circumstances, that is inexcusable. And I would say, second, as a result of what he did, he, who was a self-proclaimed anti-war activist, although, as Henry Kissinger pointed out, he had been a super-hawk at the beginning of the war--that Daniel Ellsberg, as an anti-war activist--what he did encouraged the enemy. It had the effect, again, of making the enemy more intransigent at the conference table by bringing home to them the fact that there was division in the war here. And under the circumstances, it prolonged the war, and it cost American lives, without any opinion--without any question, in my opinion.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:53:41
[Frank Gannon]

Because Daniel Ellsberg stole the Pentagon Papers and because The New York Times published them, do you think that American lives were lost in Vietnam?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:53:48
[Richard Nixon]

I think the war was prolonged. I think that the negotiations which were very much underway at that point, in secret channels, and Dr. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho--I think these--those negotiations did not make the progress they could have made. There is no doubt in my mind but that that gave enormous boost to the idea that the North Vietnamese had that they could win in the United States, particularly in Washington, D.C., the victory, politically, that they could not win on the battlefield. And it made them resist making the decision they eventually made--to agree to a settlement.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:54:26
[Frank Gannon]

In your memoirs, you write that one of the most moving events of your presidency was at the time when all the P.O.W.s came to Washington for the dinner you gave them at the White House. That afternoon, you had all the P.O.W.s to the State Department auditorium for a briefing in which you filled them in on the things that had happened during their captivity. During that briefing, you referred, not by name, but very clearly, to Ellsberg, and the reaction on the part of the P.O.W.s was very dramatic. We have a clip of that event.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:54:59
[Action note: Clip begins; ends with loud, lengthy applause from Nixon's audience.]

Day 2, Tape 2
00:55:31
[Frank Gannon]

What do you think should have been done to Ellsberg?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:55:34
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I think what should have been done unfortunately failed because our legal processes didn't turn out to be as acceptable as they should have been. He should have gone to prison for what he did.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:55:48
[Frank Gannon]

One of the reasons he didn't was because over Labor Day weekend--well, if--I shouldn't say that, because one can't prejudge what the jury would have decided. But the reason the case was dismissed--one of the reasons the case was dismissed was because over Labor Day weekend, 1971, two White House aides broke into the office of his psychiatrist, presumably to look into the medical records, to find out about his motivations, about his sources, about things he was privy to, and what he intended to do with this material. Looking back, do you think that the Ellsberg break-in was justified on national security grounds?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:56:28
[Richard Nixon]

I would say, as far as the break-in is concerned, I cannot recall it ever having come to my attention or my having approved it. And, as I look at what happened there, breaking into a psychiatrist's office, it seems to me to be a bizarre move to take. However, we have to understand that, as far as those who did undertake it was concerned, that we had some indications that Ellsberg was a somewhat unstable personality. Henry Kissinger said that he was brilliant--he knew him at Harvard--but that he tended to be erratic and emotionally unstable. And Ellsberg had also indicated, in this clip we just saw, that he would like to get out information with regard to some of the current activities we were engaged in. Now, let us understand, at this very time, that--that the Pentagon Papers, for example, came out two weeks before Henry Kissinger took his secret trip to China. If that trip had been exposed, his cover would have been blown. We might not have had the China initiative. That's one reason for secrecy there. It took place at a time that Kissinger was engaged in secret conversations with the North Vietnamese in Paris. As a result of this particular exposure, that is, the Pentagon Papers exposure, as I've already indicated, I believe that they became more intransigent at the conference table. At least when we look at the records there, they certainly cooled off on any m--c--any moves that they might have been made in terms of a reasonable settlement. So, under the circumstances, it is, I think, understandable as to why people who had the responsibility, which--Bud Krogh and his associates--he was the young man who was in charge of that particular investigation--understandable that they wanted to do everything that they possibly could to find out what made him tick. They considered that he was a potential leak in the future and that a leak in the future might jeopardize one of our major foreign policy initiatives.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:58:38
[Frank Gannon]

How did you feel when Bud Krogh went to prison and Daniel Ellsberg went free?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:58:43
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I thought it was a terrible miscarriage of justice. I mean, Bud Krogh was an outstanding servant of our administration. He did a magnificent job in everything we gave him to goo ["do"?] He was one of my favorite young men, among many young men in that White House staff. And I am delighted now that he is back in the practice of law and very, very successful. He certainly deserves everything that he has. He has not been made a national hero, and Ellsberg has. He would not be welcomed, I'm sure, as Ellsberg'd be, in the--the high areas of our great university think tanks and so forth. But, as far as he's concerned, he's a real man. I wouldn't say that for Ellsberg.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:31
[Frank Gannon]

I think we can--sorry, go ahead.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:33
[Richard Nixon]

Do we--I want to--yeah. Go ahead. No, no.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:38
[Frank Gannon]

Can we go on for a minute?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:40
[Offscreen voice]

We just ran out of tape. We've got to change reels, if you want to change [unintelligible].

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:43
[Frank Gannon]

Let's--why do--we're up to the time. Why don't we break?

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:47
[Richard Nixon]

Then we can--

[Offscreen voice]

We have two minutes of tape on the machine, but I'm afraid it'll tear at the end. I'd rather change reels if [unintelligible].

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:51
[Richard Nixon]

Okay.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:52
[Frank Gannon]

Let's break.

[Richard Nixon]

We can do it. I have--I have a thought--I--I'll catch it when I get back.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:55
[Frank Gannon]

Okay, we've done two hours. Let's break for lunch and come back.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:57
[Richard Nixon]

Okay, fine.

Day 2, Tape 2
00:59:58
[Offscreen voice]

Okay.

Day 2, Tape 2
1:00:06
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 2
1:00:09
[Action note: Color bars appear.]

Day 2, Tape 2
1:00:14
[Action note: National Video Center information appears.]

Day 2, Tape 2
1:00:27
[Action note: Color bars appear.]

 

Day two, Tape three, LINE FEED #3, 4-7-83, ETI Reel #15
April 7, 1983

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:11
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:14
[Action note: Picture appears.]

[Richard Nixon]

--we just haven't got the time.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:16
[Frank Gannon]

Well, we can--we'll get the basic stuff down now, and then we--at-- at a--at a--at the last taping--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:20
[Offscreen voice]

[Unintelligible] makeup there.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:22
[Richard Nixon]

Hm?

[Frank Gannon]

At the last taping, where we've--because we've got--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:24
[Richard Nixon]

Mm-hmm.

[Frank Gannon]

--some more sessions, so we can come back and, uh--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:26
[Richard Nixon]

If you want to fill in something?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:27
[Frank Gannon]

If we feel that something we've left out is very important, or--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:30
[Richard Nixon]

Okay.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:32
[Frank Gannon]

The best thing is to do it right now, and use what we get.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:37
[Richard Nixon]

Having in mind, too, you don't have to have everything.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:39
[Frank Gannon]

No, no.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:40
[Richard Nixon]

There are just some good things you're not going to get in.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:42
[Frank Gannon]

Yeah.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:43
[Action note: Richard Nixon clears throat four times.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:01:47
[Offscreen voice]

Ten seconds to studio. [Unintelligible.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:02:01
[Frank Gannon]

Looking back, where do you think Lyndon Johnson went wrong on Vietnam and--and why?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:02:11
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I think Lyndon has received a bad rep, if I may say so, from the instant historians. Lyndon Johnson was a devoted patriot. He was a consummate politician, and he was devoted to peace. The problem was that he sometimes couldn't separate himself in each of his different identities. For example, he was devoted to the Great Society. He knew also that he had to bring the war to a successful conclusion. But he put it very bluntly, in his colorful way, once when he said that he didn't want to have the Congress of the United States debating "that bitch of a war in Vietnam" rather than the woman he really loved--the Great Society. And that's Lyndon Johnson, vintage Johnson. And so what happened was he tried to have it and eat it, too, as they say. He wanted to have peace, but he didn't want to pay the price. He wanted the Great Society above everything else, and yet he didn't realize that if he didn't handle Vietnam, the Great Society would be cast into disrepute a--as well. Another point that he went wrong on was in trusting some of the people he inherited from President Kennedy. Some of them were good, like Dean Rusk, and honorable. Others were not. The problem was that Johnson didn't know which were and which weren't until too late, and some of those that got us into Vietnam, and then proceeded to mismanagement--mismanage it, carried over into Johnson. He later, in his rather earthy way, said to me once, he says, "They screwed me," and I think really what he was objecting to, not so much that they screwed him, because he played pretty rough himself at times, but because he was unable to do anything about it and didn't recognize it until it was too late. And then the third thing, I think, I think would be summed up by something that Winston Churchill wrote in his History of the First World War, which I think was his best of his two--the better of his two world war histories--where he says--said, "In war, a commander may have a policy of audacity or one of patience or"--let me see. I'll repeat there. That--Winston--I think a--another place where he made a mistake was summed up by the way that Winston Churchill wrote it in his book about the First World War, when he said a commander could either have a policy of audacity or one of what he called "prudence," but he could not have both at the same time. And Johnson did not have an audacious policy, one of using that enormous power that he had, together with the huge mandate he had in--with both houses of Congress, to bring the war to a quick and sharp conclusion. And, on the other hand, he temporized and escalated on a cautious basis, gradual escalation, and then misled the country as to what was happening. All of this brought him neither the victory that he wanted nor the peace with honor that he wanted. And it was a great tragedy, because Johnson was devoted to peace. He was devoted to his country.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:05:31
[Frank Gannon]

Who were some of the people who screwed Johnson?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:05:37
[Richard Nixon]

I think it wouldn't be useful to name names of some of the higher-ups, but I would say what we're talking about are people--and they are the most important of all--at the second level in the bureaucracy, in State particularly, a few in Defense, et cetera, who at the beginning went along in this macho business that--"Well, we've got to be strong and hold the line everyplace in the world against Communism," and then, when push came to shove, didn't want to do what was necessary to stop Communist dir--insurrection and revolutionary warfare in Vietnam. And then, when they began to see the media turning against it, they turned, too. And, as a result--let me put it bluntly with regard to Johnson. We sometimes hear today, people say, the conservatives, "Let Reagan be Reagan." Johnson's problem was nobody told him, "Let Johnson be Johnson." If Johnson had been Johnson in Vietnam, he would have finished it before I ever got to be president. And maybe if he'd finished it, I would have never been president. So--who knows?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:06:48
[Frank Gannon]

Looking at these P.O.W.s must be a very emotional thing for you.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:06:55
[Richard Nixon]

Yes. It was one of the great events in the White House, the biggest dinner ever held. We held it outside on the lawn for six hundred fifty of them and their wives. But also, I thought back to all the times that I've talked to their wives, their mothers, their children, and so forth, when they were in captivity. I think back to what they had done for their country and what they went through--some of them there five, six, seven years, going through torture, and real torture. And I think what men they were, and I'm proud that the country could produce such men, because they were really heroes in a war which had very few heroes. (Pause.) For example, you hear this--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:44
[Frank Gannon]

Y--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:45
[Richard Nixon]

--t--yeah, excuse me. You wanted to--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:48
[Frank Gannon]

We were going to--The New York Times. We were going to talk about The New York Times--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:53
[Richard Nixon]

Yeah, yeah. [Unintelligible] want to finish that [unintelligible].

[Frank Gannon]

--and the P.O.W.s.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:55
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, yes.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:56
[Frank Gannon]

Loo--

[Richard Nixon]

I'm sorry, yeah.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:07:57
[Frank Gannon]

Looking--looking--looking at these P.O.W.s must be a very emotional--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:01
[Richard Nixon]

Well--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:02
[Frank Gannon]

--thing for you.

[Richard Nixon]

Yes--

[Offscreen voice]

Excuse me. Excuse me a second. Just keep rolling, everybody. Frank, just take that question over. [Unintelligible in background until 00:08:11.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:06
[Frank Gannon]

Yes.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:07
[Richard Nixon]

Yeah, I see, we wanted to--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:08
[Frank Gannon]

Sorry.

[Richard Nixon]

I--I was leapfrogging. But that part is a good part to include in the later point. Go ahead. (Makes sound.)

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:17
[Frank Gannon]

Looking at these P.O.W.s must be a very emotional thing for you.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:08:21
[Richard Nixon]

Yes, it is, when I think what they went through--torture, all those years in captivity. I know this from having talked to their wives and their mothers over those years before they came home, and I also think of how I just wish we could have got them back sooner. And I must say that I couldn't possibly disagree more with what the publisher of The New York Times, or somebody representing The New York Times, had said in that famous Pentagon Papers case, that the right of The New York Times under the First Amendment to print these top-secret documents, the Pentagon Papers, should take precedence over the right of P.O.W.s to come home a little sooner. Let me say I think that's obscene. I believe in the First Amendment, but as Lincoln said about the right of--of--excuse me. Wait--I'll start that--I--I--I--I believe, of course, in the First Amendment, but we have to realize that this was wartime, a--and in wartime, I don't believe anything can take precedence over the responsibility of the nation and the commander-in-chief to bring home their P.O.W.s and to save any American lives. And anything that prolonged that war, which I believe the printing of the Pentagon Papers did, and its publication certainly, I think, cannot be justified on First Amendment grounds.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:09:53
[Frank Gannon]

Different critics went to North Vietnam and to Hanoi. Jane Fonda broadcast over Radio Hanoi urging American bomber pilots not to run--to do bombing runs over North Vietnam. She, Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general, other anti-war leaders, met with various groups of P.O.W.s and came back and reported that they were being well-treated. We have two clips of Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark just after they had come back from a visit to North Vietnam.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:10:28
[Action note: They watch clips.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:10:50
[Richard Nixon]

(Under his breath.) Jesus.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:13:11
[Frank Gannon]

How do you feel when you see film like that?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:13:14
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I frankly am not surprised at Jane Fonda, because you--you kind of expect a celebrity, a movie star, to be a bit erratic a--at times. But I just can't believe that Ramsey Clark would talk that way, a former attorney general, whose father was a fine attorney general and a great justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, making such absolutely stupid, asinine, false comments. And I just hope that he sometimes does talk to some of these P.O.W.ses [sic] who returned. Talk to Jeremiah Denton, who described what had happened to the P.O.W.s in a book was--which was entitled When Hell Was in Session. Look at the analyses made by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, which indicate that over sixty percent of the prisoners were tortured. Get the story with regard to some of those that saw Ramsey Clark and that saw Jane Fonda. One of them, who had a broken arm, was hung by his arm like this until he agreed to see her. He didn't want to do so. Another who refused to see Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda had both of his legs broken because he wouldn't do so. And, in addition to that, they did such things as to take them and pull their fingernails out in order to get them to see visiting delegations to show how humanely they were being treated. No, they were not treated in that way. And may I say also that, when Ramsey Clark talks about bombing hospitals and dikes and so forth, he knows much better than that, because all bombing, of course, is inhumane in a sense, because some people, civilian or otherwise, may be killed. But, on the other hand, that is simply not the record.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:14:56
[Frank Gannon]

If you met Ramsey Clark or Jane Fonda at a--at a reception, or if you met them today, would you shake hands with them? Would you talk to them? And what would--what would you say to them?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:15:08
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I don't think I'm going to be confronted with that problem, so therefore I'm not going to answer the question.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:15:14
[Frank Gannon]

Do you think that because of Jane Fonda's and Ramsey Clark's visits to North Vietnam, the war was prolonged, the casualties were increased, and, as you say, the P.O.W.s were tortured?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:15:29
[Richard Nixon]

Yeah. Ironically and tragically, yes, and I say that--"tragically"-- from their standpoint. I don't question that both Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark wanted to bring the war to an end, just as I wanted to bring it to an end and as Johnson wanted to bring it to an end. But, on the other hand, what they did gave aid and comfort to the enemy by causing division in the United States, by causing more support against the war in the United States, and, above everything else, by encouraging the North Vietnamese to hold on. Like when you hear Jane Fonda say, "I hope that Nixon is defeated," and so forth, well, you can see what that does to the North Vietnamese as they loo--sit across the table from Henry Kissinger. They're going to say, "Well, maybe he will be defeated. We'll wait for McGovern." And they did do that for quite a while. It was only when they thought McGovern was down the tube that they finally negotiated seriously. But, believe me, as a result of what Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark and others who went over there, who said they went for the purpose of stopping the war, as a result of what they did, they prolonged it. And they were responsible, without intending it. But they were responsible for the deaths of Americans who were killed.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:16:38
[Frank Gannon]

You say that people should expect actresses to--or celebrities to be erratic. Why, then, do--do the political--does the political involvement of celebrities have such impact, and why does the media give it such coverage?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:16:54
[Richard Nixon]

Because the media likes actors. Now, fortunately, I'm glad they like one actor--President Reagan. But he is much more than an actor. He is a--he is a world statesman, in my view, and has demonstrated that, and he uses that enormous acting capability to communicate very effectively with the American people. But, let's face it, the actor, whether he's in politics or anything else, is a much more interesting, capable performer than one who is not an actor. And I say that as one who was definitely not an actor.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:17:28
[Frank Gannon]

The fact that the P.O.W.s were tortured, does--does that--couldn't that be the result of the--the intensity of emotion that their captors felt for them? Does that necessarily apply to the entire--to--to the enemy or to the nature of the enemy in that conflict?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:17:46
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I've heard that argument. Well, that was an exception. After all, these people had been bombing innocent people in hospitals, and therefore it was justified, or, at least, if not justified, it is understandable that they'd want to torture those that had been doing it. But let me tell you--that was a way of life for these people. The North Vietnamese were as brutal, as cruel, as any aggressors in history. And just two or three examples that come to mind. I remember, for example, reading that, after 1968, that in Hue, a town that they overran in Vietnam--that they uncovered a mass grave with twenty-eight hundred people in it, and many of them had been buried alive. I recall another incident in the great offensive that they launched in 1972. If they came into a village that they felt might have people that were supporting the other side, our side--was concerned, they would take action against them. And, in one case, they took a--fifty men and a hundred and fifty of their children and their wives out together in a--in an area. They buried the fifty men alive, but, even worse, made their wives and children watch when they buried them alive. Others, they disemboweled while they were alive and made their wives and children watch. You could go on and on. The point is that the atrocities and engaging in atrocities was a way of life for these people. Like in our case, when Calley, in that famous Calley case, engaged in actions against civilians which were beyond and in violation of the rules of engagement as we laid them down, he was prosecuted. I refused to pardon him, and he had to pay the price for it. In North Vietnam, he would have got a medal for that. That's the difference between the two.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:19:44
[Frank Gannon]

Is it a--would you say it is a racial--maybe not use these words, but that it is a racial stereotype to say that the North Vietnamese are a vicious, brutal people?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:19:54
[Richard Nixon]

Well, let me say that the Vietnamese as a people, traditionally, in Asia have considered to be the most militaristic, the most aggressive. And there is a different attitude, or has been historically, in Vietnam, in China, for that matter, a different attitude toward human life and so forth than in some other areas. Let us all understand that those who happen to be of European background and so forth shouldn't say, "Now, that never happened with us." You look back at the earlier stages in European history, and there are some pretty horrible examples of brutality, and even of our own history in our treatment of Indians and the rest. But let me say that in--in today's world there is no bru--more brutal example of--of what I would say would be inhuman treatment than what was visited not only upon our vee--on our P.O.W.s, but also on civilians in South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese. It was deliberate, it was ordered, and those that did it were commended for it.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:21:00
[Frank Gannon]

Around the fall of 1972, the North Vietnamese indicated that they were prepared to reach a peace agreement before the presidential election in November, and negotiations reached a new pitch. Henry Kissinger came back, and at the end of October he went into the White House briefing room and told a anxiously waiting nation and world about the state of the negotiations. We have a clip of that briefing.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:21:30
[Richard Nixon]

We've got to get the offensive in, May eighth, before [unintelligible].

Day 2, Tape 3
00:21:33
[Action note: Tape begins: "Ladies and gentlemen…."]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:21:34
[Richard Nixon]

You going to come back to that?

[Action note: They watch clip.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:22:07
[Frank Gannon]

What did the announcement, which turned out to be premature, that "peace is at hand," do to your ability and to Henry Kissinger's ability to negotiate a peace to end the war?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:22:18
[Richard Nixon]

Well, Henry Kissinger realized right after that conference that he had overstated and had, in fact, mis--uh--spoken what he intended. And what it did, of course, is that when he said, "Peace is at hand," before the election, the North Vietnamese said, "Well, now they have to have peace before the election." And so they got more intransigent as a result, rather than reaching the agreement that was needed to be reached on some of the outstanding issues between them and the South Vietnamee--ese.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:22:51
[Frank Gannon]

There are widespread stories in articles and memoirs of the time that during this period, under the enormous pressure of going back and forth and trying to negotiate an end to the war, that Henry Kissinger became extremely emotional, that he threatened to resign several times, or re--submitted his resignation, that he became almost pathological in his dislike and distrust of President Thieu, that he became almost obsessive in his commitment to signing the agreement on a certain deadline. Is there any truth to those reports?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:23:25
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I think he would be the first to say that it was a very emotional period for all of us and that he would be the first to say that he was, at times, emotional, but I must say in his defense that there were reasons for that. You mentioned the fact that he was pathologically--almost pathologically concerned about Thieu's intransigence. Let me say he was even more concerned about North Vietnam's in--intransigence. It was tough. He'd been negotiating with them, with the Chinese, with the Russians, and so forth. It was a superhuman job, and I don't know how he kept his senses about him to the extent that he did. But I remember after one of his trips--I think it was just before the "peace is at hand" statement--he came in and told me of the very great problems he was having with the North Vietnamese on a little piddly change in the agreement that the South Vietnamese wanted. And he said, "They're just shits, the North Vietnamese. They're just tawdry shits. When it comes to negotiating, they make the Russians look good, just"--"they make the Chinese look good, just like the Chinese make the Russians look good." Let me repeat that. I remember his coming in, and he just threw up his hands, and he said, "You know, they're just shits. When it comes to negotiating, they make the Chinese look good, just like the Chinese make the Russians look good." Now, Thieu was difficult, but there were reasons for him to be difficult. He mistrusted the North Vietnamese, and facts proved him to be right. He thought they were going to break the agreement. He also had to prepare his population for it. And so, consequently, he wanted to buy as much time as he could to get the right kind of a deal. It was only after I gave assurances that he--that we would back him up, and also when I put some very heavy pressure on him that if he didn't go along, we would have to make agreement by our--on our own, that he finally did agree to the peace agreement which we eventually signed.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:25:22
[Frank Gannon]

Is it at all arguable that a more even-tempered negotiator than Henry Kissinger might have had a--or that the presence of a more even-tempered negotiator might have had an effect on the progress of the peace talks, and that an agreement might have been reached earlier?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:25:39
[Richard Nixon]

No. No, I would disagree with that totally. I think Kissinger did--did a monumental job on that. See, it was hour after hour after hour that he had to negotiate. When you're negotiating with Communists--I've done a little of it over my period of time, too--they just want to wear you out. And Henry had enormous stamina and enormous patience. No. I would have to say I am just surprised he was able to do as well as he did.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:26:06
[Frank Gannon]

The--uh--you--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:26:07
[Richard Nixon]

And, also, he got a deal.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:26:10
[Frank Gannon]

You mentioned the assurances that you gave President Thieu. They later became controversial. Is it constitutional, is it legal, for a president, unilaterally and in advance, to make commitments of American military action?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:26:27
[Richard Nixon]

It depends on the circumstances. In these circumstances, I believe so, because the military action which was pledged was for the purpose of keeping a peace agreement which we were to agree to and which I was sure that Congress was going to approve, or the Senate would approve. And if, in order to keep that agreement, in order to keep our commitments under the agreement, it was necessary to use military force, I think it would be justified. And I was simply indicating that that's what I intended to do. If they signed the agreement, we, on our side, would see that it was kept, because the agreement provided, among other things, you know, that we would provide to the South Vietnamese an equal amount of arms as was provided to the North. And that part of the agreement was not kept later, t--as you well know.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:27:14
[Frank Gannon]

How did you feel when the Congress refused to honor those assurances that you had made?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:27:20
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I thought it was a tragedy, just as much was the tragedy in that year, 1973, and 1974. And I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that eventually would lead to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, because you u--must understand that when people say, "Well, that agreement was no good"--that for two years after the peace agreement of 1973--for two years the South Vietnamese kept every provincial capital despite the fact that the North had new equipment that they received from the Russians, were launching offensives, breaking the agreement virtually every day. That's an indication of the fact that, had the Congress not cut the legs out of--from under Thieu by cutting back on the tanks and other materiel that he needed so that the North Vietnamese had a four-to-one advantage in heavy artillery and tanks when they launched their final offensive, South Vietna--nam would be free today, and we wouldn't have had the [boat people] and the other tragedy that has been visited upon that poor country.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:28:28
[Frank Gannon]

In a recent article in The New Yorker, William F. Buckley wrote in passing--it was a diary that he kept, and he wrote in passing that if Richard Nixon had been president, had stayed on as president, that we wouldn't have had [boat people]. Is that true?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:28:45
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I would hope so. As a matter of fact, even though I was under, as you know, a rather sustained and eventually fatal attack on the Watergate issue--that I was trying as best I could to serve what I considered to be the responsibilities of the presidency. That's why, for example, in 1973, when Israel was about to go down the tube, I nevertheless ordered an alert of American forces, which was a very risky things to do around the world, and ordered a huge airlift to--to Israel to save them. That was when Watergate, of course, was beginning to heat up. I am sure that if I--if I had been able to stay in office, that, first, I would have done something in order to prevent what eventually happened. But, second, it wouldn't have been necessary to do anything due to the fact that I had already established my credibility with the North by what I had done just three weeks before the Soviet summit in 1972, when I ordered the bombing and mining of Haiphong, even though it might risk the summit, and what I did--the most difficult military decision of my whole presidency, at the--at the time of the Christmas--so-called Christmas bombing of 1972, which brought the whole war to an end through the peace agreement. Those actions indicated that I was willing to take any political risk in order to prevent the North Vietnamese from winning the victory that they wanted to win.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:30:14
[Frank Gannon]

People often wonder how Watergate weighs on you in these years after your resignation. Would you say that the knowledge that because of Watergate you had to resign and because of your resignation Vietnam fell is part of the--the--the legacy you take from Watergate?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:30:38
[Richard Nixon]

Yes, to an extent. It may have fallen anyway, had we stayed in there. I should point out that, before Watergate became an issue, however, it was getting to be a very dicey problem. You may recall that early in January, right after our overwhelming election victory in November, that the Democratic [caucus] in the House voted by a margin of two to one--a hundred and fifty to seventy-five--and in the Senate by a margin of almost three to one--thirty-six to twelve--to withdraw from Vietnam in return from--for our prisoners of war, which, of course, would be a total capitulation, and which would've resulted in even the denial of two years of non-Communist government for the South Vietnamese. Fortunately, we were able to prevent that, because, within a week after they passed those resolutions, on January the ninth, my sixtieth birthday, I received a call from Henry in Paris that we had made the deal, which I announced on the twenty-third.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:31:41
[Frank Gannon]

When did you realize that you weren't going to get a preelection peace settlement, and what did you do as a result of that realization?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:31:51
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I can't say specifically, except I would speculate about four to five days before the election. This was after the "peace is at hand" statement. It was when the reports that Henry was having, insofar as his meetings with Thieu were concerned--that they weren't going that well, and that he was unable to bridge the gap which existed between Thieu and the North Vietnamese. And then, at that point, when it was so clear that I was going to win overwhelmingly, there was nothing that the North Vietnamese could do to affect the election--let me put it another way. Curiously enough, as long as it was--as the election was a close thing, of course, and a hope that they might win, that was a deterrent to them, a deterrent for any--for their agreeing to anything. Why deal with Nixon? Wait for McGovern and get it all, because he was offering terms that had already, as a matter of fact, been turned down by the North Vietnamese, but which went much further than what--anything that we had offered. The other thing is that, as you got closer to the election, however, and it appeared that we were going to win overwhelmingly, I think they realized that I was not going to make any further concessions. And so they said, "Well, we'll wait till afterwards," and then hope to wear us out then, and that's what happened, of course.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:33:25
[Frank Gannon]

Why did you initiate the Christmas bombing, the massive bombing of North Vietnam, beginning just, I--I think, on December eighteenth, right before Christmas, in 1972?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:33:38
[Richard Nixon]

Well, let's contrast that with the earlier bombing. The first bombing that took place, bombing and mining, was on May eighth of 1972. That was three weeks before the Soviet summit. That was initiated because of a--a huge North Vietnamese invasion, with twenty-four divisions, of South Vietnam, and people said, "Oh, don't bomb, don't mine, because we've got to have the Soviet summit." And I said, "Look. No president can go to Moscow and sit in there in the Kremlin and negotiate with Brezhnev with Russian tanks rumbling through the streets of Hue and Saigon." So we bombed, we mined, and they still had the summit.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:34:16
[Frank Gannon]

Did you think they wouldn't--did you think the summit would be cancelled?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:34:18
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, I though it was a very close thing, and Henry thought it was about twenty-five percent only--chance that they would go forward with it.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:34:25
[Frank Gannon]

If you had known in advance for sure that the Soviets would cancel the summit, and that would mean that the S.A.L.T. agreement would have fallen away--if you had known for sure in advance that they were going to cancel it, would have--you still have made the May eighth speech and announced the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:34:42
[Richard Nixon]

Absolutely. Absolutely, because if we had gone there to the Kremlin with Vietnam having fallen or in the process of falling, Brezhnev would be looking right down my throat, and we wouldn't have gotten even the deal on S.A.L.T. that we got. And many people, of course, among my friends in the hawk community think that wasn't a good deal either, although I happen to think it was. No, absolutely not. I remember John Connolly, who, in his rather colorful Texan way, put it to me. He said, "Look," when I asked him what he would do about this particular matter, about risking the summit and so forth--he said, he said, "You can lose the summit"--he was speaking politically--"but you cannot lose this war." He says, "If you lose this war, you're going to lose the election." And he said, "Go ahead and bomb and mine," he said, "and then stuff it right down their throats. I don't think they're going to cancel." Well, he proved to be right, and I'm glad he did.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:35:43
[Frank Gannon]

Throughout your administration, almost from the very first days, you initiated a policy of linkage, where you insisted to the Soviets that, in order to get things that they wanted, they had to help us or agree to things that we wanted. One of them was their help in pressuring Hanoi to end the war. How much did they ever do that, and how much did they really want to help us? How much did the Soviets really want to help us end the war?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:36:11
[Richard Nixon]

Well, they were between the rock and a hard place on that one. They wanted good relations with us, not simply because of arms control, but because they were very interested in what we would be able to do together in the economic area, where they really wanted to have cooperation, and a lot of things were developing there that were very promising for them and for us as well. On the other hand, while they wanted good relations with the United States at that level, they could not afford as the leader of the international Communist movement, to be caught not supporting a war of liberation by their allies in North Vietnam in South Vietnam, particularly because they didn't want to give the Chinese a chance to say that the Soviet had turned off on the--and backed down from their support of North Vietnam. And so, under the circumstances, they were in a very difficult position. On the other hand, my view is that they came down, not very heavily but at least in a way that was helpful, on the side of better relations with us. I think, in other words, without the Soviet Union nudging the North Vietnamese, we wouldn't, probably, have made the progress we did before the election and thereafter. And I think that after the election, while we don't have any specifics on this, I think that they perhaps did use their influence toward getting an agreement. Now, having said that, however, I th--I think that it was more a question not of their going to the North Vietnamese and say, "Look here. Make a deal." I don’t think that's the way it is. But I think the way it happened was--and the same thing, I think, happened with the Chinese-- the Soviet Union and the Chinese did not encourage the North Vietnee--namese to stick it to us. And that made a very big difference, because the Chinese, because of our initiative toward China, while they were still supporting, vocally and orally and publicly the North Vietnamese, weren't giving them the needle that they normally would de--prob--be giving, of provocation, and neither were the Russians. And I think, as the North Vietnamese, who are very suspicious anyway--as they looked at the Soviet and they looked at our meeting and clinking glasses with the Soviet in Moscow, as they saw us meeting with the Chinese in China--and, of course, eventually they became enemies of the Chinese--that probably gave them a little pause, and they didn't want to be out there alone. So all of these factors, I think, helped bring it about.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:38:55
[Frank Gannon]

When you initiated the Christmas bombing, there was an enormous uproar and furor. One senator said you had taken leave of your senses. One--another commentator said that it was Stone Age tactics. Why did you do it, and why did you do it in such force at such a time?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:39:16
[Richard Nixon]

Well, I would say that as far as the bombing was concerned, it was without question the most difficult military decision that I made, because everything seemed to be going so well. We had won the election overwhelmingly. The peace agreement seemed to be on track--we--at least we thought it was. And then what happened was that, for reasons that we could not understand, the North Vietnamese backed off of the position they'd taken on October twelfth, before the election, backed off even on the matter of our P.O.W.s. They weren't going as far as we had insisted they were going with regard to their being returned without any conditions whatever. There were other matters that many people think are not important, but they were very important, certainly to the South Vietnamese, and we considered them also important to us. So, under the circumstances, what I saw here was that the North Vietnamese were waiting for the Congress to get back. They had pretty good intelligence insofar as what was going in our Congress, and they probably anticipated what I indicated happened a little earlier in this broadcast--that the Congress was going to put great pressure on us just to bug out without any agreement whatever, such as we had initi--had already reached earlier, before the election. So, under the circumstances, I decided that it was time to get it over with, and get it over with before the Congress got back. And so we bombed, and we mined. Now, let me say one other thing. When they talk about Stone Age tactics and carpet bombing and Christmas bombing, all of these charges are, one, wrong, and two, mythical. First--well, perhaps the Stone Age thing--I don't know what they mean by that. But as far as Christmas bombing, of course we didn't bomb on Christmas. We took a forty-eight-hour period when we didn't bomb. Not that that doesn't mean that we didn't bomb before and afterwards. But the second point is--insofar as carpet bombing is concerned, Anthony Lewis and other commentators practically went out of their minds, because they said we were bombing thousands of innocent people and hospitals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Not true. Our--we lost some [B-52s] because we insisted that it not be area bombing. It was very precise. It was on military targets only, and the North Vietnamese later admitted that less than nine hundred people were killed, civilians who were living right in the area. Now, that's too many, but, on the other hand, this was not aimed at ci--at Northern--at civilian populations. It was only on military targets. It was effective. It brought the North Vietnamese to the conference table, and they made an agreement. And it ended the war as far as we were concerned and at least temporarily as far as the South Vietnamese were concerned.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:42:10
[Frank Gannon]

What was that Christmas of 1972 like for you? Your daughters and their husbands were away. You and Mrs. Nixon were alone in Florida. The press was almost unanimously against you. Congress was up in arms. What was it like to spend Christmas of 1972 at Key Biscayne for Richard Nixon?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:42:31
[Richard Nixon]

Pretty dreary. The weather wasn't that good in Florida, either, at that time. You know, sometimes it can be rather poor even in December, but that wasn't the real problem. Weather doesn't bother me that much. But--well, like Christmas calls. You know, usually I get a lot of telephone calls on Christmas. I don't recall but about one or two that year, from members of the Cabinet and so forth. I don't mean that they were all opposed to the bombing, but I mean they probably knew it was a very tough time and everybody was terribly let down, terribly depressed. We'd won a great election victory. Peace was at hand, and then all of a sudden--boom--we were catching hell from all sides. Obviously, I, did--frankly, didn't torture myself, and Mrs. Nixon didn't either, by watching the TV. If we had, we probably would have lost our Christmas dinner, which was not a bad one, incidentally--prepared by the Filipino chefs. But, anyway, we survived it, and--but I would say it was perhaps as depressing a Christmas as we--certainly as depressing a Christmas as we had during the White House years, more so than the Watergate Christmas.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:43:40
[Frank Gannon]

Did you feel that people deserted you?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:43:44
[Richard Nixon]

No. I understood what had happened. By that, I meant that if people--see, I try to put myself into the position of the person sitting in front of that tube and--and hearing the commentators go on and on about the horrible bombings and so forth, or murder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And--and if they hear all that, then obviously they're going to be very confused, and some of them are going, at least temporarily--going to lose their support. They're going to think, "Maybe the guy is out of his mind. Maybe he is just a brutal barbarian," et cetera, et cetera. I understood it, but what sustained me in that period was that I was convinced it was the only decision we could make, I--convinced it was right. I was also convinced that it would break the deadlock in the negotiations. Henry Kissinger agreed that that was the case, and, thank heaven, we proved to be right.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:44:38
[Frank Gannon]

On January twenty-third, 1973, you went on national television from the Oval Office, and you made the following statement.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:44:51
[Action note: Clip begins: "Good evening…." Mostly inaudible.]

Day 2, Tape 3
00:45:09
[Frank Gannon]

How did it feel, at last, to make that announcement?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:45:15
[Richard Nixon]

Well, it-s a--you have many mountaintop experiences as president, and you have some very deep in the valley, too, as you know, but that--that had to be not only the greatest experience as president but also, th--I think, of all my public life--greater than being inaugurated for president the first time or the second time, or even winning the vice-presidency, of course, with President Eisenhower, a pretty good partner, winning the presidency in '52 and '56. And the reason for it, I suppose, is that I was so deeply involved in the Vietnam issue. You see, people forget--some do, I think--that I've lived with the Vietnamese and with this issue for thirty years now, in this year, 1983. It was 1953 I first went there, and I didn't think of Vietnam as just a nation far away, a people we know very little about, as one former secretary of state once described one country. But I thought of them for the good people they could be. I knew of the suffering they had undergone. I knew of the sacrifice that had been made, first by French and then by Americans, to ke--to prevent the Communists from taking over. I knew of the brutality of the North Vietnamese. I knew, for example, from a conversation what I had with a Catholic bishop of Da Nang in 1956--this was after the two countries--after the partition of Vietnam--that was when the North Vietnamese took over in the Hanoi area, that fifty thousand civilians at least, most of them Catholics, were executed and four or five hundred thousand were starved to death. I knew that all these things had happened. And then another thing that's in a very personal sense as a president, and only a president goes through. You know, I signed the letters that went to the next-of-kin. I didn't see them all. I couldn't. I of course developed the letter. It was a form, but it was all, of course, from the White House to the next of kin. And also, I had, on Christmas--it was my practice quite often during the war to make Christmas calls, and--and I called the next-of-kin, the wives--the widows, I should say--sometimes the children, sometimes the fathers of people that had died there. And--and those were heart-rending experiences. And then, of course, I had thought of the P.O.W.s who were also to come back. And I guess what I am really trying to say is that, for me, it wasn't just a political experience or a--a diplomatic experience--and those can be great--like going to China is a great diplomatic experience, a very highlight [sic]--but this was an emotional experience that--that completely overwhelmed all the rest. And to think that finally, after, frankly, twenty-five years of war in that poor country, we were going to have peace, an uneasy one, but peace, and that what we had fought for and sacrificed for for so long had been achieved. Believe me, it was an experience that I have--had never had before and, of course, do not expect to have again.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:48:31
[Frank Gannon]

How would you answer the critics who say that, in fact, it was a--it was a rather misleading speech in that you knew, or you certainly anticipated, and--as indeed was the case in a couple of days, that the North Vietnamese were going to break the accords, and to have been accurate or absolutely truthful, you should have said, "We now have a very fragile peace in South Vietnam, but in order to make sure it lasts we're going to have to continue very heavy, substantial bombing of two neutral countries, Cambodia and Laos, for at least the next several months with the risk of substantial casualties and losses during that time." Would that have been a more accurate context into which to put the January settlements?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:49:16
[Richard Nixon]

It might have been accurate in retrospect, but it wasn't at the time. After all, this statement was made on the twenty-third. The agreement wasn't signed till the twenty-seventh, and I wasn't about to say on the twenty-third that "We expect, after we sign this agreement, to start bombing Ca--Laos and Cambodia." The reason we bombed Laos and Cambodia later, and that was in February, of course, and in March--the reason was that the North Vietnamese, not, frankly, to our surprise, continued to violate some of the provisions of the agreement. At least we thought they were provisions to the agreement, although Cambodia and Laos wasn't covered in them as specifically as we would have liked. And so, therefore, in order to preserve the peace in South Vietnam, we had to bomb their sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:50:04
[Frank Gannon]

There are schools of thought that, although you were sincerely dedicated to the proposition that the peace agreements could work, that others, Henry Kissinger among them, really only saw them, as the phrase became, as "a decent interval" between the withdrawal of American forces and the inevitable, and some people felt, desirable, fall of South Vietnam. Is there any validity to that argument?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:50:34
[Richard Nixon]

Well, others may have thought it, but I did not think that at all. And I wouldn't have made that kind of a deal if I'd thought so. Let me say to those who say, however, that we should not have made the agreement and we should have just continued to bomb until we had bombed the North Vietnamese back into the Stone Age--let me say that that was no longer politically viable. Witness, before Watergate, what the Democratic caucus had done in early January. That shows you that--that--that we were--we were doing all that we could do politically in order to ma--to hold on as long as we did. The second point is this. Oh, I knew the agreement was fragile, but, on the other hand, I also felt that with the credibility that I had in the minds of the North Vietnamese--witness what I had done in May of 1972, when I bombed and mi--ordered the bombing and mining of Hanoi and Haiphong, and the so-called Christmas bombing of 1972--I thought that that very threat would be enough to at least keep them from launching a major offensive. And let me say that, for the balance of my service as president, it did, and, as a matter of fact, for two years after the peace agreement, the North Vietnamese, while they were violating the cease-fire and so forth and so on, did not conquer a provincial capital. Let me just understand one thing. You talk about who lost Vietnam. The American soldiers didn't lose Vietnam. Neither did the South Vietnamese lost Vietnam. It was lost because the Congress of the United States, egged on by the media and by the best and the brightest in the intellectual establishment, et cetera, cut back on the aid, military aid, to South Vietnam, to balance what the Russians were doing for the North. And I would say to future presidents and so forth, whatever our foreign policy is, anyplace in the world, particularly in small countries like this, let's just be sure it's an even fight. Let's be sure we do as much for our friends and allies as the Soviet Union does for its allies. If we don't, we are going to lose without ever having a major war.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:53:04
[Frank Gannon]

Some political commentators today say that now that we have recovered from the trauma, and it's taken this long--of the first war America lost--that people are going to become intensely interested in it again, and indeed, there's going to be a populist revision and people are going to look around to answer the question, just as in--in the forties they asked, "Who lost Europe?" and in the fifties they asked "Who lost China?"--that a--an important political question in the 1980s is going to be "Who lost Vietnam?" Do you think--and the--and--in--in populist terms, the answer is going to be Congress, the media, the universities, the corporate boards? Do you think that there is going to be a bitter revisionism in which people are going to look to point a finger and say, "Who lost Vietnam?" and--and who are they going to point the finger at?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:53:55
[Richard Nixon]

I rather doubt it. I think there should be. I think there will be a few who will write that and a few who will s--perhaps, say it. But we have to understand here that, as far as the intellectual leadership of this country is concerned, that in a figure of a percentage of at least ninety percent, they felt, one, at the end, we--it was a mistake to be in Vietnam in the first place; two, that it was conducted improperly--they didn't like the bombing or anything else; and three, that we shouldn't have go--we should have gotten out earlier; and, in any event, four, good riddance. Now, it is true that they have a bit of a guilt complex now, somewhat a guilt complex [sic], when they see the genocide that has been visited upon the Cambodians and the murder and the repression that has been visited upon, of course, the South Vietnamese as well as the Laotians. But, on the other hand, even that they rationalize by blaming the Nixon administration for brutalizing the Cambodians. We were trying to prevent those who either starved to death or killed three million, or two million Cambodians, whatever the case might be. And here they blame us for doing it.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:55:21
[Frank Gannon]

Isn't it true, though, that--

[Richard Nixon]

So, it does show you that, as far as the intellectual leadership of this country is concerned, that on Vietnam I think they had a vested interest, as it turned out, in defeat there. And now they have a vested interest in seeing that history is not rewritten to report what actually happened.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:55:42
[Frank Gannon]

Isn't it true, though, that in Cambodia at the beginning of the American extension of the war into that neutral country, there were about six thousand Khmer Rouge forces? As the American bombing went in and more and more of the country was devastated and more and more of the people were forced to make choices, they swelled the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, so that when the Communists finally took over, there were sixty thousand of them, and it was--they were able to impose this deadly, genocidal, brutal rule, so that it really was the American extension of the war which led to the swelling of the Khmer Rouge, which led to the--

Day 2, Tape 3
00:56:17
[Richard Nixon]

No, I don’t buy that. That's the Shawcross argument, and I ca--I can only say that, looking at Cambodia and what happened there, there's no question in my mind that Cambodia, just like the Vietcong in--the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Vietcong in South Vietnam--they--they developed, of course, their own capabilities. It is true that they expanded their--their control over parts of the country, but the--but the idea that we drove them back into the country that brutalized them, why, that's nonsense. They were that way before we ever came in. And let us understand, too, let's understand, when we talk about what the United States did, as far as Cambodia is concerned, we weren't going in there to kill Khmer Rouge. We were going in there to knock out Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, who were using neutral Cambodia as a launching pad to kill Americans and our South Vietnamese allies. And my only regret, incidentally, about the so-called incursion of Cambodia is I didn't do it earlier. I wish I'd have done it earlier in January, and I should have done it--of nineteen--early in January 1969, shortly after I became president. I think it might have raised a lot of problems then, because, you remember, the election was pretty rough. You remember what happened to Hubert Humphrey at Chicago. He had demonstrations. I had some pretty rough demonstrations. And under the circumstances, therefore, remembering, too, what happened on Inaugural Day [sic] when the Secret Service wouldn't even let me ride in an open car down to the inaugural stand because of the demonstrators, thousands of them, out there. Under the circumstances, to take that sort of action then might have been difficult, but, in retrospect, had I had it to do over again, knowing that the North Vietnamese had no intention whatever of honoring the conditions or agreements, whatever they were, about the bombing halt--having all those things in mind, what should have been done was to move in on their sanctuaries in Cambodia earlier and knock them out.

Day 2, Tape 3
00:58:32
[Frank Gannon]

It seems that a most common denominator of your retrospective thought about Vietnam is that, if you have one regret, it's that at every point you regret that you didn't move earlier, harder, faster. Is that true?

Day 2, Tape 3
00:58:48
[Richard Nixon]

Yes, that's true, having in mind the fact that it would not make sense to move earlier, harder, and faster if it proved to be, shall we say, disproportionate to what you might gain. I know that you usually think of Clausewitz as being one who simply is an advocate of total war, which is not true. He was a very sophisticated observer about warfare generally. He makes the point, and other military analysts have made the same point, that force must always be used having in mind the goal to be gained and the risks and the costs in the event you use that amount of force. That is why bombing dikes, I think, would have proved to be counterproductive throughout Asia. Using tactical nuclear weapons, the same. I think, however, insofar as bombing and mining North Vietnam is concerned, or moving into the Cambodian sanctuaries--that was a possibility in 1969, except for the fact that we were hamstrung by the bombing halt, and also by the American opposition. We had to lay the foundation for it, which we did do, by developing our Vietnamization program and by also developing our withdrawal. Let me say finally, in that respect, an argument against the proposition I've just laid down--why did w--didn't we do it earlier--is that in those early days, also, we were thinking about an initiative toward the Russians, we were thinking about an initiative toward the Chinese. I did not yet know how they might react. I don’t mean that they would intervene, but I thought it was vitally important in my presidency to make a breakthrough in China, and also to make some move toward negotiation, rather than a confrontation, with the Russians. I didn't want to take action in Vietnam early in the administration which might abort those initiatives before it started. So there are arguments the other way, too.

Day 2, Tape 3
01:00:51
[Frank Gannon]

Within a couple of months in 1975, South Vietnam ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper. We have some film of those last days in Saigon.

Day 2, Tape 3
01:01:12
[Action note: They watch clip; inaudible.]

Day 2, Tape 3
01:02:00
[Frank Gannon]

Was America humiliated in Vietnam?

Day 2, Tape 3
01:02:05
[Richard Nixon]

The United States, in the minds of the world--yes, I think, was humiliated. But let me distinguish--not our fighting men. They didn't lose this. I think what happened there was that the United States, insofar as its being a nation with the will and with the credibility to stand by its friends when the going got particularly difficult, that that was, of course, very seriously eroded by what happened there in Vietnam. Let me say, incidentally, as I look at that, I saw them getting on those boats in the Saigon River--but I think of the boat people. Thousands and thousands, of course, as you know, tried to escape from South Vietnam by boat, and the last number I saw, at least forty thousand drowned. We don't know how many starved to death in these overloaded boats and so forth and so on. But I should point out that, with all the talk about Thieu's, and earlier, Diem's, corruption and repression and so forth--that at least under them they had some freedom. They had some free press. They had some free parliaments, freely elected parliaments, and so forth. They had some opposition. And now they have none. And I should also point out that there were never any boat people. All the traffic was from North to South. And I should also point out that there were reasons for these people to leave. I--we talk about atrocities, and we think of people being, for example, buried alive and disemboweled and so forth and so on, but one that really, really touched me, I mean, very deeply, I--I suppose--to show you the ends to which they go, the cruelty of these people--one poor devil who was a barber had been found--that he had cut their hair of several American servicemen, and--and so they took him and chopped off his hands, like that. That's what these people were going away from, and that's what they're having today.

Day 2, Tape 3
01:04:05
[Frank Gannon]

Do you think that there are still American--missing American in actions in Indochina?

Day 2, Tape 3
01:04:11
[Richard Nixon]

Oh, I think so. I would be surprised if there were not. Unfortunately, I have no idea as to how possibly you can do anything about it.

Day 2, Tape 3
01:04:24
[Frank Gannon]

I think that's our, uh--

[Action note: Sound cuts off. They chat.]

Day 2, Tape 3
01:06:11
[Action note: Screen goes black.]

 

Go to: Transcript, Day 3

< Back to Nixon/Gannon Interviews