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He was almost abrupt with the Thieu regime. Saigon's wishes "would be taken extremely seriously," he said, but "we will make our own decisions as to how long we believe a war should be continued." He spoke warmly to Hanoi. He insisted that the Oct. 31 deadline had been Hanoi's creation, and that while he had promised "a major effort" to meet it the U.S. did not feel bound by it. Things had been delayed by various problems—the most important of which seemed to have arisen in Saigon. But he "understood" Hanoi's disappointment, and reassured the North Vietnamese that "peace is within reach in a matter of weeks or less," provided that the two sides held "one more" session in Paris of perhaps three or four days. After that, Washington and Hanoi could "move from hostility to normalcy and from normalcy to cooperation."
But for the moment, Hanoi was still at the hostility stage. At a Paris press conference, North Viet Nam's reedy-voiced spokesman Nguyen Than Le chortled that certainly his colleagues would like to see Kissinger again—but only to "down the champagne" after the agreement had been signed. From Hanoi, Le Due Tho sent word to Kissinger that he would meet him in Paris this week on Monday—but only if the U.S. was ready to sign on the Tuesday, Oct. 31 "deadline." At week's end the Soviet news agency Tass took the highly unusual step of reporting that Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin had personally urged the North Vietnamese to continue negotiating.
What had driven Washington and Hanoi so close to a final agreement after so many years of stalemate? One big factor was the U.S.'s new relationships with Moscow and Peking, which no longer find it in their interests to duel with Washington over a scrap of Southeast Asian rice land. Nixon believes that his decision to resume full-scale bombing of North Viet Nam and mine its harbors was also "very, very important." It is hard to measure how badly Hanoi has been hurt by these measures. But it seems undeniable that the failure of Moscow and Peking to challenge Nixon's moves was a signal that Hanoi could not ignore.