Thousands of calls and cables began pouring in to celebrate the great victory. One was from Johnson City:
THE WAY IN WHICH YOUR FELLOW MEN EXPRESSED THEIR APPROVAL OF YOUR RECORD THESE LAST FOUR YEARS MUST BE A GREAT COMFORT TO YOU AND I KNOW IT WILL GIVE YOU THE STRENGTH SO NECESSARY IN THE TIMES AHEAD. YOU AND YOUR FAMILY HAVE ENDURED MUCH BUT I KNOW TODAY THAT IT IS WORTH IT ALL. LADY BIRD AND I WILL DO ANYTHING WE CAN TO EASE YOUR BURDEN AND HELP YOU MAKE A GOOD PRESIDENT IN THE DAYS AHEAD. LYNDON B. JOHNSON.
The dimensions of the victory were gratifying. I received 47,169,841 votes, and McGovern received 29,172,767: 60.7 percent to 37.5 percent. This was the second largest percentage of the popular vote in our history of two-party politics, and the greatest ever given a Republican candidate. Only Lyndon Johnson, running against Goldwater in the unique circumstances of 1964, had received fractionally more: 61.1 percent. I received the largest number of popular votes ever cast for a presidential candidate and the second largest number of electoral votes. No presidential candidate had ever won so many states.
The support was both wide and deep—it was truly a New Majority landslide of the kind I had called for in my acceptance speech in August. I won a majority of every key population group identified by Gallup except the blacks and the Democrats. Four of these groups—manual workers, Catholics, members of labor union families, and people with only grade school educations—had never before been in the Republican camp in all the years since Gallup had begun keeping these records.
A few days later I described in my diary a curious feeling, perhaps a foreboding, that muted my enjoyment of this triumphal moment.
Diary
It makes one feel very humble at a time like this.
I had determined before this election evening to make it as memorable a one as possible for everybody concerned. The tooth episode probably interfered to a considerable extent. Certainly by the time that I had to prepare for the office telecast I was not as upbeat as I should have been.
The rest of the family seemed to think that they got enough of a thrill out of it. I think the very fact that the victory was so overwhelming made up for any failure on my part to react more enthusiastically than I did.
I am at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over me on that victorious night. Perhaps it was caused by the painful tooth. To some extent the marring effects of Watergate may have played a part, to some extent our failure to win Congress, and to a greater extent the fact that we had not yet been able to end the war in Vietnam. Or perhaps it was because this would be my last campaign. Whatever the reasons, I allowed myself only a few minutes to reflect on the past. I was confident that a new era was about to begin, and I was eager to begin it.
THE END OF THE WAR
My first priority after the election was to end the war. Now that the pressure was removed, I hoped that both parties would enter the negotiations with the idea that after some hard bargaining each would accept an agreement embodying less than their most extreme position. I knew that it was not going to be easy. None of the objective factors had changed, but now that there was no election deadline, it remained to be seen what the Communists’ negotiating tactics would be. Both Saigon and Hanoi were already playing a frustrating game with us. Thieu, while urging that we put forward his demands—some of which were bound to be unacceptable to the North Vietnamese—was still pretending that he was prepared to go it alone. And Le Duc Tho was pretending that the Communists were completely sincere in their desire to conclude an agreement on its merits and then to observe its terms. From our intelligence sources we knew that Thieu was secretly telling his military leaders to be ready for a cease-fire before Christmas; and we knew that the North Vietnamese were still planning to capture as much territory as possible just before the cease-fire in order to be able to turn it to their advantage.
The next meeting with the North Vietnamese was scheduled for mid-November. If anything was to come from it, Thieu’s cooperation was now essential. I decided that Haig, whom Thieu trusted and liked, would once again be the best emissary. He left for Saigon on November 9, carrying another letter I had written to Thieu. In it I dealt point by point with the objections Thieu had raised to the terms of the October agreement and clarified the positions that we would present to the North Vietnamese at the next Paris meeting. “We will use our maximum efforts to effect these changes in the agreement,” I wrote. “I wish to leave you under no illusion, however, that we can or will go beyond these changes in seeking to improve an agreement that we already consider to be excellent.”
I also urged Haig to remind Thieu that although I had won the White House by a landslide, he must remember that the Senate was now even more dovish than it had been before the election. There was no question that if we did not have a settlement completed before Congress returned in January, and if it appeared that Thieu was the obstacle to achieving one, the Senate would cut off the funds that South Vietnam needed to survive. The situation was as simple, and as certain, as that.
Thieu handed Haig a reply that repeated his objections, particularly regarding the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. I responded by reiterating that we would not be able to obtain all the adjustments he had requested. I pointed out that far more important than what was said in any agreement was what we would do in the event the enemy renewed its aggression. “You have my absolute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action,” I wrote.
Haig left Saigon convinced that Thieu would come along in the end. There was no doubt in his mind that Thieu knew that total intransigence would be fatal. In the meantime, however, he had been careful not to push Thieu too far. He reported on November 12:
We are now dealing with a razor’s edge situation. Thieu has firmly laid his prestige on the line with his entire government and I believe if we take a totally unreasonable stance with him, we may force him to commit political suicide. I am not sure that this would serve our best interests and therefore recommend the scarier approach of trying to work this problem with Thieu right up to the wire.
Haig correctly pointed out that if we broke with Thieu and then found that the North Vietnamese were still intransigent, we would have burned both our bridges. He concluded, “The price of keeping Thieu aboard is of course risky but I do not believe unacceptable at this juncture.”
I agreed with Haig’s assessment, and in my diary I noted, “Of course, we may come to the hard place where we have to simply tell Thieu it’s this or else, but this does not need to come at this moment.” I told both Kissinger and Haig that I felt December 8 was the final date by which we must have signed an agreement in order to make sure that everything was completely settled by the time Congress reconvened. If Thieu could not be convinced to come along by then, I could be reluctantly prepared to reach a separate agreement.
Whether we could meet the December 8 deadline would depend upon the outcome of the November 20 meeting in Paris.
Diary
Assuming that we get any kind of movement from the North Vietnamese on the agreement this week, and assuming we get what we consider to be a good agreement—well, as a matter of fact, we consider the present one to be good, but this will make it better—then we have to put it to Thieu hard: he either accepts the agreement and goes along with it, or we will have to go our separate ways.
As I told Henry when he began to rumble around to the effect that we have a very good record in this instance, I said, Henry, we’re not concerned about being right on the record. What we are concerned about is to save South Vietnam and that’s why we had to temporize with Thieu as much as we did, because our interest is in getting South Vietnam to survive and Thieu at present seems to be the only leader who could lead them in that direction.
It would, of course, be a disappointment in the event that Thieu does not go along, but under those circumstances we shall simply have to make our own deal, get our prisoners, have our withd
rawal, try to save Cambodia and Laos, and then say that Vietnamization has been completed and Thieu then can do what he likes.
On November 20 Kissinger met with Le Duc Tho for more than five hours. Tho opened by reading a lengthy speech complaining that we had reneged on the October agreement. While its tone was no different from the standard rhetoric we had come to expect, the charges that we had unilaterally prevented an agreement were unacceptable. Kissinger immediately cited chapter and verse from earlier sessions in which he had informed the Communists that the South Vietnamese would have to be consulted before any agreement could be signed. Kissinger finished his opening remarks by reiterating our desire to negotiate seriously to end the war and our intention to maintain the essence of the agreement that had been achieved in October.
He then presented the proposed changes. By the time the ones requested by the South Vietnamese had been applied to the text of the agreement and added to the changes and clarifications we wanted, there were more than sixty of them. Le Duc Tho seemed somewhat taken aback by their number. Most of the changes were relatively minor and uncontroversial. But a few were substantive, the most significant of them involving Thieu’s insistence on a pull-back of some of the North Vietnamese forces out of South Vietnam. There was also a proposal that the DMZ be respected by each party; the presence of North Vietnamese troops in the South would be a violation of this provision. Le Duc Tho simply took note of the list and indicated that he might have some changes of his own to propose. Kissinger had made no distinction between the changes we wanted and those we were presenting on behalf of the South Vietnamese. His approach, however, made it clear that we were prepared to negotiate on all of them. At the close of the meeting he was asked whether this was actually our final proposal. Kissinger replied, “I would put it this way. It is our final proposal, but it is not an ultimatum.” Kissinger suggested that the technical experts meet that night to study the proposed changes. As the session adjourned on a friendly note, it seemed possible that the Communists would treat the proposals as a basis for negotiation and that an agreement might be reached during this round. That morning I dictated in my diary, “The next two days will tell the tale as to whether we get an agreement.”
At the meeting the next day, however, the North Vietnamese countered our proposed changes and hardened their position on the remaining unresolved issues; in some areas they even pulled back to their position before October 8. It seemed that Kissinger’s fears had been realized and that the North Vietnamese, relieved of the pressure of our election deadline, were prepared to stall the negotiations in an attempt to exploit our differences with Thieu. When Kissinger reported that there had been another tense and totally unproductive meeting on November 22, I sent him a message, which I said he could use if and when he saw fit—or not at all—in an effort to get the negotiations moving. The message was in the form of a directive stating that unless the other side showed the same willingness to be reasonable that we were showing, he should discontinue the talks and we would have to resume military activity until they were ready to negotiate. It continued:
They must be disabused of the idea they seem to have that we have no other choice but to settle on their terms. You should inform them directly without equivocation that we do have another choice and if they were surprised that the President would take the strong action he did prior to the Moscow Summit and prior to the election, they will find now, with the election behind us, he will take whatever action he considers necessary to protect the United States’ interest.
After the next session in Paris on November 23 Kissinger reported that although he had made limited progress in specific areas, we were still far apart on some of the provisions that Thieu considered most important. Therefore we had to face the fact that barring a sudden change by the North Vietnamese, we were not going to have an acceptable deal. He felt that as long as Saigon held out for so many substantial alterations, not only would no agreement be reached but the North Vietnamese would continue to retract concessions they had already granted.
Kissinger considered that we now had two options open to us. Option One would be to break off the talks at the next meeting and dramatically step up our bombing while we reviewed our negotiating strategy in order to decide what kind of agreement we would be prepared to accept with and without the South Vietnamese. This was the option Kissinger favored. Option Two would be to decide upon fall-back positions on each of Thieu’s major objections and present them as our final offer. If the North Vietnamese agreed to them, we could still claim to have improved on the October terms. This proposal, as Kissinger put it, “would be substantially better optically, and marginally better substantively, than the agreement we concluded in October. It gives Thieu the minimum that he has asked for if he wanted to be reasonable, which he shows absolutely no inclination of being at this time.”
The corollary of Option Tw o would be a complete break with Thieu if he refused to accept the agreement it produced. I knew that this would be a serious step to take, but I strongly opposed breaking off the talks and resuming the bombing unless it was absolutely necessary to compel the enemy to negotiate. I was also becoming irritated by some of Thieu’s tactics, and I felt that we could no longer be in the position of forestalling an agreement solely to buy him time. Therefore, if Kissinger could reach a satisfactory agreement, I wanted him to do so. Then Thieu could make his own decision about joining us or going it alone.
In my message replying to Kissinger’s cable I made it clear that I did not consider that Option One was open to us any longer:
In my view the October 8 agreement was one which certainly would have been in our interest. You should try to improve it to take account of Saigon’s conditions as much as possible. But most important we must recognize the fundamental reality that we have no choice but to reach agreement along the lines of the October 8 principles.
Almost immediately I became concerned that, in my attempt to encourage Kissinger to pursue Option Two, I might have overstated my reluctance to resume the bombing if there was no other choice left to us to make the enemy negotiate seriously. I felt it was essential that he not be denied this bargaining chip, and consequently I sent him a cable the next morning, November 24, saying that if the Communists remained intransigent, he could suspend the talks for a week so that both sides could consult with their principals. I said that I would be prepared to authorize a massive bombing strike on North Vietnam in that interval:
I recognize that this is a high-risk option, but it is one I am prepared to take if the only alternative is an agreement which is worse than that of the October 8, and which does not clear up any of the ambiguities which we and Saigon are concerned about in the October 8 draft.
Our aim will continue to be to end the war with honor. And if because of the pursuit of our strategy and the accident of the timing of the election we are now in a public relations corner, we must take our lumps and see it through.
In giving this direction, we all must realize that there is no way whatever that we can mobilize public opinion behind us as in the case of November 3, Cambodia, and May 8. But at least with the election behind us, we owe it to the sacrifice that has been made to date by so many to do what is right even though the cost in our public support will be massive.
When Kissinger informed Le Duc Tho that I was prepared to take actions as strong as the ones of May 8, the North Vietnamese immediately became more conciliatory. This seemed to confirm our suspicions that their intransigence was in fact a negotiating tactic. They did not want the talks to end any more than we did and were therefore prepared once again to engage in serious negotiations.
The problem, as Kissinger presented it in his reporting cable that afternoon, was that while we had now considerably improved the agreement over the October 8 terms, there was no possibility that we could come near anything that would satisfy all of Thieu’s requirements. We knew from cable intercepts that Thieu was in a deliberate stalling pattern; this meant that no improvements in th
e agreement would have any effect on him until he decided that he had sufficiently prepared his people to accept it. So despite our intensive efforts and the improvements we had been able to make in the agreement, a major break with Thieu seemed inevitable if we were going to complete the agreement right away. Kissinger therefore once again recommended a week’s recess during which we could force a reckoning with Thieu and then, on the basis of his decision, formulate our own final position.
I still believed, however, that it was important to keep the negotiating channels open and working. I considered Thieu’s position to be ill-advised, and I felt more strongly than ever that if we could get a good agreement, we should do so and let Thieu make his choice accordingly. I immediately replied to Kissinger that I thought it preferable for him to stay in Paris and continue talking as long as there was even a remote chance of reaching an agreement. I said that I would even “take risks in that direction.”
The North Vietnamese were still stonewalling the negotiations, however, so after another inconclusive session on November 25, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho agreed on the desirability of recessing the talks for several days.
I met with Kissinger as soon as he returned from Paris.
Diary
He arrived back around 10:30 and we spent an hour on it at that time. I had to back him off the position that we really had a viable option to break off the talks with the North and resume the bombing for a period of time. It simply isn’t going to work. While we must play the card out with the North Vietnamese as if it would work that way, we must have no illusions that we now have no option except to settle.
We sent a message to the North Vietnamese that we would return to the talks with the idea of making one last effort. In order to demonstrate our good faith and desire to reach a settlement, I ordered a reduction of the bombing of North Vietnam.
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