Nixon, Kissinger, and the “Decent Interval”
Nixon, Kissinger, and the "Decent Interval"
In this conversation, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, discuss a time frame for pulling American troops out of Vietnam. President Nixon acknowledges that South Vietnam will probably fall to the North but he and Kissinger want to make sure that its collapse does not negatively impact the 1972 presidential election or the Nixon administration’s foreign policy. Kissinger advises that they need a “formula” to hold South Vietnam together until which time the public not only looses interest in the matter but that it also holds Saigon, and not the Nixon administration, responsible for the political and military defeat.
President Richard M. Nixon, thirty-seventh President of the United States, 1963-1969.
Biographical sketch from American President.
Henry Kissinger was U.S. National Security Adviser, 1969-1975, and Secretary of State, 1973-1977.
Biographical sketch from the Nobel Prize website.
RMN Daily Diary, August 3, 1972.
Tape 760-6, Richard M. Nixon Library and Museum. Raw audio available through The Miller Center's Scripps Library portal. Finding aids available at Nixon Library.
Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin's record of conversation with Kissinger and Nixon, May 14, 1969. Source: George Washington University.
South Vietnam, The Spring Offensive, 1972. Source: ehistory @ OSU | United States Military Academy.Bibliographies
Bibliography - Vietnam Conflict, Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Bibliography of the Vietnam War, Prof. Edward E. Moise, Clemson University.
Vietnam War Bibliography, Richard Jensen, University of Illinois-Chicago.
Scholarship
John Prados, Vietnam: The History of An Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (Lawrence, Kansas: 2009).
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon's Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kansas: 1998).
Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: 2001).
Conrad Black, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (New York: 2007).
Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence, Kansas: 1999).
Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon Era Strategy (Lawrence, Kansas: 2003).
Archives
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, CA.
Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.
Documents Relating to the Vietnam War, Mt. Holyoke College.
December 21, 1970, HRHD, RMNL.
In the December 21, 1970, entry of his tape-recorded diary, White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman recorded how National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger talked President Richard Nixon out of withdrawing the last American combat troops from Vietnam by the end of 1971.
Nixon, Kissinger, and the "Decent Interval"
See Stephanie van Hover, Marc J. Selverstone, and Patrice Preston-Grimes, "Window Into the White House," Social Education, vol. 72, no. 3 (April 2008), 130-135.
Teaching with the Tapes
Chester Pach, "The United States in the 1960s," Ohio Univesity.
Jeff Woods, "White House Tapes," Arkansas Tech University.