Word: states
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sunday evening, April 26, the President met with his principal NSC advisers-Rogers, Laird, Wheeler, CIA Director Richard Helms and me-in his working office in the Executive Office Building. Nixon tried to avoid a confrontation with his Secretaries of State and Defense by pretending that we were merely listening to a briefing. To my astonishment, both Rogers and Laird fell in with the charade that it was all a planning exercise, and did not take a position. They avoided the question of why Nixon would call his senior advisers together on a Sunday night to hear a contingency briefing...
...Tuesday, April 28, in a 20-minute meeting with Rogers, Laird and Mitchell, the President reaffirmed his decision to proceed with a combined U.S.-South Vietnamese operation against the Fishhook. He noted that the Secretaries of State and Defense had opposed the use of American forces and that Dr. Kissinger was "leaning against" it. (This was no longer true; I had changed my view at least a week earlier. In my opinion Nixon lumped me with his two Cabinet members because he genuinely and generously wanted to shield me against departmental retaliation.) Nixon assured them he would assume full responsibility...
...Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare, figured that it would set the North Vietnamese back by as much as two years. Thompson proved to be right. But that did not help to defuse a gathering explosion at home. The May 4 killing of four students at Kent State University by rifle fire from Ohio National Guardsmen proved to be a match thrown into a powder...
...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...
...major National Security Council meeting on April 22, three tactical options were considered: doing nothing (the preferred course of the State and Defense departments); attacking the sanctuaries with South Vietnamese forces only (my recommendation); and using whatever forces were necessary to neutralize all of the base areas, including American combat forces, recommended by Ellsworth Bunker, our Ambassador in Saigon, General Creighton Abrams, our commander in Viet Nam. and the Joint Chiefs of Staff...