Word: tho
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nervous ally, unpredictable voters and future historians, Richard Nixon had stayed the negotiations, waiting for the election to pass. But now the momentum has resumed. Ending North Viet Nam's holdout against a reopening of the talks on its nine-point plan, Hanoi's negotiator Le Duc Tho arrived in Paris (via Peking and Moscow) aboard an Aeroflot jet, expressing hopes to "rapidly settle" the remaining issues. In Washington, Henry Kissinger gathered his notes and his aides and flew off to join Le Duc Tho in the "one more" bargaining go-round that would-barring any sudden reversal...
Then Kissinger would return to Paris, where he and Le Duc Tho would initial the draft. The papers could be ready for a formal signing in Paris by U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers and North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh as early as the end of the month, but in any case the signing would take place no later than mid-December. Under the 60-day withdrawal plan, the remaining U.S. troops in South Viet Nam and the more than 500 P.O.W.s known to be held by the Communists throughout Indochina could begin coming home before Christmas...
...Correspondent Jerrold Schecter found a pervasive feeling among sources close to the North Vietnamese that the Communists were ready to settle and "have reached the point of the inevitable." Schecter was repeatedly assured that Hanoi wants a solution and a new era of relations with the U.S. Le Duc Tho was evidently saying much the same thing when he stopped in Peking and Moscow on his way to Paris. Having earlier pressed the North Vietnamese to complete the peace talks, Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev now publicly chided Washington for putting "obstacles" in the path of a settlement...
...diplomat described as "the dance around the fire." But there was ample evidence that the negotiations were still, as a high Administration official put it, "on the track." Within a matter of days after the election, most observers believed, Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Negotiator Le Duc Tho would fly to Paris to fix the final details of a settlement...
Thus, when Kissinger finally sat down for his first secret talk with Tho in 1969, he faced one of the principal architects of Hanoi's campaign not only against the South but also against the U.S., a fact that helped rather than hurt the negotiations. Comments one American official: "His authority makes him easier to deal with. The others are incapable of making decisions." For three years the two have been meeting in a small villa outside of Paris, sipping tea and munching rice cookies while they traded demands, nuances and -more recently-concessions...