Word: nixonization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...return to Washington on Oct. 12, Haig and I went to Nixon's refuge in the Executive Office Building. Somewhat exultantly, I told the President that it looked as if he had achieved all three of his major goals for 1972-the first two being the visit to Peking and the Moscow summit. Nixon's principal concern was Thieu's reaction. I was -naively-optimistic...
...Nixon was quite positive that an agreement was unnecessary for the election; its benefit would be too marginal to warrant any risks. Haldeman thought that an agreement was a potential liability; he was certain that Democratic Candidate George McGovern's support had been reduced to fanatics who would not vote for Nixon even if he arranged the Second Coming. On the other hand, an agreement might disquiet conservative supporters. The Viet Nam negotiations, in short, were not used to affect the election; the election was used to accelerate the negotiations...
...into doing what we had refused for four years: overthrowing the political structure in South 'Viet Nam. "In any case, Kissinger goes on, "Thieu's reaction guaranteed that the war would not end soon." Kissinger was barely back in Washington when the North Vietnamese, hoping to force Nixon's hand, went public. They broadcast the terms of the proposed treaty, which had been kept secret until then, and accused the U.S. of stalling on its implementation...
...press conference that I held on Oct. 26 came to be denounced as a Nixon electoral ploy to raise hopes for peace during the last stages of the presidential campaign. This misses the mark completely. Once Hanoi had gone public we had no choice except to state our case. I had two objectives. One was to reassure Hanoi that we would stand by the basic agreement, while leaving open the possibility of raising Saigon's suggested changes. The second was to convey to Saigon that we were determined to proceed on our course...