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At 9 p.m. Nixon addressed the nation. In a restrained and powerful address, he repeated his willingness to settle the war. But the North Vietnamese "arrogantly refuse to negotiate anything but an imposition." The only way to stop the killing, therefore, was "to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Viet Nam." He recited the military actions he was taking; he stated our negotiating position, the most forthcoming we had put forward: a standstill ceasefire, release of prisoners and total American withdrawal within four months.
Hanoi asked for increased support from its Communist backers. But there was no rush to the barricades in either Moscow or Peking. On the afternoon of May 10, Dobrynin came to the Map Room of the White House. Out of the blue, he asked whether the President had as yet decided on receiving Soviet Foreign Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev, who was in Washington on a visit. The request could only mean that the Soviet leaders had decided to fall in with our approach of business as usual. Trying to match the Ambassador's studied casualness, I allowed that I probably would be able to arrange a meeting in the Oval Office.
In every crisis tension builds steadily, sometimes nearly unbearably, until some decisive turning point. The conversation with Dobrynin, if not yet the turning point, deflated the pressure. We knew that the Moscow summit [described in last week's installment in TIME] was still on.
From Stalemate to Breakthrough
By the time Nixon and I returned from the May 1972 summit in Moscow, Hanoi's spring offensive had run out of steam. With our bombing and mining making themselves felt, the North Vietnamese army was stalled. Our twin summits, in Peking and Moscow, had undoubtedly engendered a sense of isolation in the North. And they had greatly strengthened Nixon's domestic position, thus removing Hanoi's key weapon of leverage on us. In June we received the first inconclusive hints that Hanoi might be engaged in cease-fire planning. By the middle of September, the evidence was unmistakable.
Throughout the summer, private sessions with Le Duc Tho—"Ducky" to the American negotiators—brought what Kissinger describes as "significant movement, entirely by Hanoi." Probably convinced that Nixon would be much stronger after the November elections, Hanoi began to press for a quick settlement.
Kissinger saw this, he writes, as a great opportunity; unless it was grasped, the U.S. mood was such that even with an overwhelming mandate, Nixon would quickly be "pushed against the grindstone of congressional pressures" to end the war on almost any terms. In this situation, an unprecedented four-day secret session was convened on Sunday morning, Oct. 8. The critical meeting was held in a house in suburban Gif-sur-Yvette, once owned by the French artist Fernand Léger and still adorned with his Cubist paintings and tapestries. Around noon, after Kissinger had laid out the essentially unchanged U.S. position, the North Vietnamese requested a break until four that afternoon.
My staff and I strolled a bit in the clear