The drafts we went through on the speech will tell the story of how it developed. Perhaps the most important section was that on the Soviet Union, and Henry was very impressed with what I finally came up with on my own. It had to be done with great subtlety and I think we have stated the case as well as we possibly can to give them a way out if they want to find one.
This whole period has been terribly hard on the family. Tricia and Eddie have decided to stay up there at Camp David. I am so glad that both girls are making great use of it, because no one knows, as I told Rose, whether we will have it to use after this year, and I want them to have the most pleasant memories of these years.
On Monday morning I informed the NSC that I had decided to go ahead with the bombing and mining, and that I would announce the decision in a televised speech that night.
Diary
Monday was a pretty tough day because the NSC meeting ran over three hours, with Laird opposing the decision and Rogers saying he would be for it if it worked. Connally and Agnew predictably took a very strong position for it. The record will speak for itself. Of course, in fairness to Laird and Rogers, both of their reputations are on the line, and I think they have very serious doubts about whether the action will succeed. The real test, of course, will be whether they support once the decision is made and on that I have no doubt.
The biggest question mark remained the Soviet reaction. On Monday morning I sent a four-page letter to Brezhnev explaining what I had decided to do and why. I reiterated my dedication to developing our new relationship into a foundation for world peace and said that I did not intend to let the situation forced upon us by the actions of the North Vietnamese divert us from the path upon which our two countries had embarked:
In conclusion, Mr. General Secretary, let me say to you that this is a moment for statesmanship. It is a moment when, by joint efforts, we can end the malignant effects on our relations and on the peace of the world which the conflict in Vietnam has so long produced. I am ready to join with you at once to bring about a peace that humiliates neither side and serves the interests of all the people involved. I know that together we have the capacity to do this.
The final copy of my speech was not ready until after five o’clock, and I marked it up for reading and then went to get a haircut at 5:30. I had my usual light prespeech dinner of a small bowl of wheat germ for energy around six, and then went over the text until half past seven.
I jogged in place for about ten minutes and took a long cold shower before going over to the West Wing for a meeting with the joint congressional leadership in the Roosevelt Room.
The room was comfortable and warm, with a fine fire burning in the fireplace. I looked around at the familiar faces, some tense, some wary, all alert: Carl Albert, Hugh Scott, Bill Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, John Stennis, George Aiken, Jerry Ford, Hale Boggs, and half a dozen others. Some would oppose me, others would only reluctantly support me while wishing that I had not made this decision. As I described the situation and the actions I had decided to take no one interrupted or asked any questions.
I acknowledged that this was very strong medicine. It had been a very difficult decision for me to make and I knew that it would be a very difficult decision for them to support.
“If you can give me your support, I would appreciate it,” I said. “If you cannot, I will understand.”
There was complete silence as I rose and left the room.
Kissinger had invited Dobrynin to come to the White House shortly before I was to deliver the speech. When he described what I was about to say, Dobrynin became terribly agitated. “Why are you turning against us when it is Hanoi that has challenged you?” he asked.
Kissinger remained cool. Dobrynin said that he did not see how matters could do anything except take a very bad turn.
I delivered the speech at 9 P.M. After describing the military situation and the deadlock in the negotiations, I said, “There is only one way to stop the killing. That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam.” I continued, “I have ordered the following measures which are being implemented as I am speaking to you. All entrances to North Vietnamese ports will be mined to prevent access to these ports and North Vietnamese naval operations from these ports. United States forces have been directed to take appropriate measures within the internal and claimed territorial waters of North Vietnam to interdict the delivery of any supplies. Rail and all other communications will be cut off to the maximum extent possible. Air and naval strikes against military targets in North Vietnam will continue.”
I then presented a new peace proposal, which became the reference point for the terms of the final settlement the following January:
First, all American prisoners of war must be returned.
Second, there must be an internationally supervised cease-fire throughout Indochina.
Once prisoners of war are released, once the internationally supervised cease-fire has begun, we will stop all acts of force throughout Indochina, and at that time we will proceed with a complete withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam within four months.
Now, these terms are generous terms. They are terms which would not require surrender and humiliation on the part of anybody. . . . They deserve immediate acceptance by North Vietnam.
I concluded with the carefully phrased message to the Soviet Union that I had personally drafted: “We expect you to help your allies, and you cannot expect us to do other than to continue to help our allies, but let us, and let all great powers, help our allies only for the purpose of their defense, not for the purpose of launching invasions against their neighbors. . . . Our two nations have made significant progress in our negotiations in recent months. We are near major agreements on nuclear arms limitation, on trade, on a host of other issues. Let us not slide back toward the dark shadows of a previous age. We do not ask you to sacrifice your principles, or your friends, but neither should you permit Hanoi’s intransigence to blot out the prospects we together have so patiently prepared.”
Criticism in Congress and the media was immediate and shrill. Teddy Kennedy said that the mining was a “futile military gesture taken in desperation. I think his decision is ominous, and I think it is folly.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch stated that the nation would not support me because “in this case, the cause of war isn’t one of honor but of dishonor.” The Wall Street Journal reported that informed diplomatic observers were now guessing that the summit would be postponed indefinitely. Most of the television reports were focused on this question, and the network commentators unanimously concluded that my speech had seriously jeopardized the summit. NBC’s Moscow correspondent said that it would be hard for the Kremlin to swallow my decision, and that it would “practically kill prospects of a summit.”
The reticence of the military planners continued to be a problem.
The bombing proposals sent to me by the Pentagon could at best be described as timid. As I wrote in a long memorandum to Kissinger, “I am concerned by the military’s plan of allocating 200 sorties for North Vietnam for the dreary ‘milk runs’ which characterized the Johnson administration’s bombing in the 1965-68 period.”
Having gone through the agony of making the decision and having accepted the political risks it would involve, I was determined to have it carried out the way I intended. I continued the memo:
I cannot emphasize too strongly that I have determined that we should go for broke. What we have got to get across to the enemy is the impression that we are doing exactly that. Our words will help some. But our actions in the next few days will speak infinitely louder than our words.
I am totally unsatisfied at this time at the plans the military have suggested as far as air activities are concerned. . . .
Our greatest failure now would be to do too little too late. It is far more important to do too much at a time that we will have maximum public support for what we do.
What all of us must have in mind
is that we must punish the enemy in ways that he will really hurt at this time. . . .
Now that I have made this very tough watershed decision I intend to stop at nothing to bring the enemy to his knees. I want you to get this spirit inculcated in all hands and particularly I want the military to get off its backside and give me some recommendations as to how we can accomplish that goal. . . .
I think we have had too much of a tendency to talk big and act little. This was certainly the weakness of the Johnson administration. To an extent it may have been our weakness where we have warned the enemy time and time again and then have acted in a rather mild way when the enemy has tested us. He has now gone over the brink and so have we. We have the power to destroy his war-making capacity. The only question is whether we have the will to use that power. What distinguishes me from Johnson is that I have the will in spades. If we now fail it will be because the bureaucrats and the bureaucracy and particularly those in the Defense Department, who will of course be vigorously assisted by their allies in State, will find ways to erode the strong, decisive action that I have indicated we are going to take. For once, I want the military and I want the NSC staff to come up with some ideas on their own which will recommend action which is very strong, threatening, and effective.
The Soviet news agency TASS issued a stinging denunciation of the mining as “fraught with serious consequences for international peace and security” and an emergency meeting of the Politburo was held in the Kremlin on the morning after the speech. I was fully prepared for an official statement condemning my actions and canceling the summit.
The next day Dobrynin met with Kissinger in the Map Room. Ignoring the usual pleasantries, Dobrynin coldly announced that his government had instructed him to read an official note. To Kissinger’s immense relief, it turned out to be a relatively mild and private protest about the blockade and about a Soviet seaman who had been killed when a bomb accidentally hit a Soviet ship in Haiphong Harbor. When they met again the next afternoon, Kissinger casually asked why the Soviets had made no mention of the summit.
“We have not been asked any questions about the summit,” Dobrynin replied, “and therefore my government sees no need to make a new decision.”
Kissinger said, “Should we have asked any questions about the summit?”
“No,” Dobrynin replied, “you have handled a difficult situation uncommonly well.”
During their meeting I had been visting Manolo at the hospital where he was recuperating from surgery. The moment I returned Kissinger rushed into my office to tell me the news. “I think we have passed the crisis,” he said exuberantly. “I think we are going to be able to have our mining and bombing and have our summit too.”
The next day, Dobrynin called Kissinger saying he had a message from Moscow. It turned out to be about procedural details for the summit. He even brought up the question of the state gifts to be exchanged. The Soviets were planning to give me a hydrofoil for use at Key Biscayne, and he said that Brezhnev would not look unkindly on receiving a new car for his collection of luxury automobiles.
It now seemed certain that the summit had survived the speech. The media pundits and congressional critics who had been predicting disaster dropped the cancellation line and began to concentrate on allegations that our bombers were hitting civilian targets.
Early Monday morning, May 15, I was back at my desk ready for a heavy day of meetings and appointments. I was talking with Don Kendall late in the afternoon when Bob Haldeman came in and asked if he could see me for a moment in the private office. When the door was closed behind us, he said, “We just got word over the Secret Service wire that George Wallace was shot at a rally in Maryland.”
I asked if he was alive. Haldeman said he was. He said that the gunman was white, but we didn’t know anything more about him yet.
The shock of the Wallace shooting forced memories back to the horror of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. However terrible and stunning this new blow, I was determined not to let the country be talked into a climate of fear.
An editorial in the New York Times the next morning suggested that because of the mood of violence in the country, candidates should stay away from outdoor rallies and campaign only on television or in closed halls where security could be assured. I told Haldeman that under no circumstances would I let my Secret Service detail be increased.
Around noon John Connally came to my office after having announced his resignation and George Shultz’s nomination as Secretary of Treasury. I told him and others in the room I was going for a walk.
“When?” Ron Ziegler asked.
“Right now,” I said. “Come on.”
I decided to walk with Connally back to the Treasury Building. When we emerged from the East Wing just across the street from the Treasury Building a small crowd gathered, and I stopped to talk with some young people with cameras and several foreign visitors. A rather distinguished-looking man said that he was a lawyer who had gone to the University of Virginia Law School. As I started to cross the street, he said, “Thank you for coming out today.”
At the end of the week I went to see Wallace at the hospital.
Diary
I stopped in to see Wallace on my way to Washington Friday morning. I was again impressed about the attractiveness of Mrs. Wallace. She has great verve, and I can see must be an enormous asset to him in his campaigning.
He seemed very up for the meeting although I sensed that he did not hear or understand too well at times. He was very proud of the showing he had made in the primaries. I told him that I would send somebody out to brief him after the Russian trip, which pleased him. He said that he would like to consider going to Walter Reed at another time, and I told him it would be available at any time when he was in the Washington area—that it provided perfect security and was a particularly nice room.
He is, though a demagogue, somewhat sentimental in terms of his strong patriotism, like most Southerners, and it came through loud and clear in the meeting. He pointed out that he had taken on both Humphrey and Muskie on the ground that they had voted for all the actions that got the United States into the war in Southeast Asia and now were criticizing what I was doing to get us out. There was a floral flag by his bed, and as I left I told him to keep the flag flying high. He saluted and said, I certainly will to my Commander in Chief. I saluted back and left the room.
SUMMIT I
On Saturday, May 20, Air Force One left Washington for Salzburg, Austria, en route to Moscow. After we were airborne, Kissinger came into my cabin and exuberantly said, “This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times! Three weeks ago everyone predicted it would be called off, and today we’re on our way.”
At 4 P.M. on Monday, May 22, after staying overnight in Salzburg, we landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport.
A light rain had begun to fall just before we arrived. President Nikolai Podgorny officially greeted me; Kosygin and Gromyko were also there. Aside from a small crowd standing behind the fence and waving little paper flags, it was a very cool reception. As our motorcade raced along the broad and completely empty streets toward the Kremlin, I noticed that fairly sizable crowds were being kept behind police barriers a block away down the side streets.
Pat and I had been given an entire floor of rooms in one of the large wings of the Grand Palace inside the Kremlin. As we were looking around our ornately opulent quarters, Kissinger arrived with the news that Brezhnev was waiting to welcome me in his office.
Brezhnev’s office was the same room in which I had first met Khrushchev, thirteen years before. Like Khrushchev, Brezhnev looked exactly like his photographs: the bushy eyebrows dominated his face, and his mouth was set in a fixed, rather wary smile. I was sure that neither of us, standing shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen at the American Exhibition thirteen years before, had imagined that we would one day be meeting at the summit as the leaders of our countries.
We shook hands an
d stood talking while tea was brought in for us. He gestured to a long table at one side of the room, and he and I sat down on opposite sides of it with the Soviet translator Viktor Sukhodrev at the end. There had been concern expressed that I should have a State Department translator present also. But I knew that Sukhodrev was a superb linguist who spoke English as well as he did Russian, and I felt that Brezhnev would speak more freely if only one other person was present.
Brezhnev’s tone was cordial, but his words were blunt. He said that at the outset he had to tell me that it had not been easy for him to carry off this summit after our recent actions in Vietnam. Only the overriding importance of improving Soviet-American relations and reaching agreements on some of the serious issues between us had made it possible.
After he had made this almost obligatory statement, he warmed perceptibly as he began to talk about the necessity and advantages of developing a personal relationship between us. He said that the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt was warmly cherished in the memory of the Soviet people, who remembered him as the first President to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1934 and as the leader of the alliance against Hitler during World War II.
I said that I had studied the history of the relationships between Stalin and Roosevelt and between Stalin and Churchill. I had found that during the war differences between subordinates were usually overcome by agreement at the top level. “That is the kind of relationship that I should like to establish with the General Secretary,” I said.
“I would be only too happy, and I am perfectly ready on my side,” he replied expansively.
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