 to too many Nixon tapes. What I didn't or what wasn't mentioned earlier was the fact that when I was at the State Department I was transcribing as my day job the Nixon tape so I did that for several years. Does a little bit of psychic damage but anyhow. A few disclaimers. I was doing this transcription work my colleague is of Indian extraction so you had a Jew and an Indian literally across the street from the Watergate Hotel transcribing the Nixon tapes for the official documentary record of US foreign policy. A little bit of irony and Nixon was probably rolling over in his grave but disclaimers thoughts and opinions expressed today are my own they're not the US government's they're not the US Naval War College or Department of Defense. Other thing some of the material I have up on the screen there's some profanity it could be deemed offensive so remember the expletive deleted phrase that entered the lexicon that was thanks to Nixon so I have it in the uncensored form in this presentation. Just a broad outline on what we're going to talk about bottom line up front my findings having gone through thousands of pages of records and listening to hundreds of hours of Nixon tapes. I'll then get into some of those findings kind of point-by-point. Talk to you about the sources I used I I really fell in love with the Nixon tapes when I started using them just because it provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective that is incomparable to other history. You can go through documents you could read memoirs this is a very special source there are also special challenges and problems associated with it. I will then go through the snapshots and actually instead of it being a lecture I want it to be a little bit more participatory so these are the snapshots which I can talk about I can either give a two or three minute blurb on each one and we can go through the slides or if there's anything that you as an audience would really like me to talk about China Vietnam the India-Pakistan war and and something called the more Radford affair I'd be glad to do so so just I'll read through these and then raise your hands if you're if you're interested in any of these in particular so the Kissinger exercise which is a little experiment that Henry Kissinger did in 1967 during the Johnson administration going to Moscow and trying to arrange for Vietnam peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese through Hanoi's ally Moscow so in him second one is the election and transition period in 1968 which is interesting and Nixon actually had two back channels and the lead up to the election with the Soviets so what Trump had in terms of his perspective National Security Advisor General Flynn and the Russian Federation that actually had precedents Kissinger was meeting with the KGB operative in 1968 and one of the close aides of soon to be president Nixon at that point who later became the ambassador to NATO for the US was also meeting with the with the Soviets so on behalf of the president so we can talk about that there was a mini Cuban missile crisis in 1970 everyone very few people probably recognize this but it was over Soviet submarines that were being based in San Fuegos Cuba also in 1971 there was the India-Pakistan war and crisis US found itself in a very odd position supporting its ally Pakistan run by a dictatorship that was cracking down brutally on its own people in East Pakistan which later became Bangladesh and US was backing Pakistan and Soviet Union was backing Democratic India so the world's largest democracy this became something of a contention and during this crisis that erupted it was discovered that the joint chiefs of staff the highest military officials in the US were spying on President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger so let that sink in for a second the military was spying on the civilian government because of back channels also Nixon goes to China this is what Nixon is usually associated with as the opening to the People's Republic of China so we can talk about that if you like and triangular diplomacy trying to play Beijing and Moscow off each other for US advantage that's a theoretical concept and the way it was actually practiced is a little bit different and then also in 1972 the North Vietnamese launched the largest land offensive against US allies South Vietnam since the Ted offensive in 1968 US had been withdrawing tens of thousands of troops during the Nixon administration and it found itself kind of in a pickle getting ready to go to Moscow which was supplying the weapons that North Vietnam used to launch this offensive so Nixon saw a contradiction how can we have improved relations with Moscow when they're a Dean Hanoi against US interests so and then last we'll talk about they taunt achieved at the Moscow summit in May of 1972 but just a show of hands or if anyone wants to raise their hand what of these really appeals to you it is yeah okay and you said all so we could do the two to three minutes of pop and okay the precedents and 1967 1968 okay that has a lot of relevance to what's going on right now so I will spend a little bit of attention on that so we have focusing on on Kissinger's activities in 67 68 focusing on India Pakistan and the Radford affair and more Radford affair and also we can talk a little bit about the Nixon's trip to China is that okay so we'll go through it pretty quickly so fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a ride okay first what is a back channel right what is what distinguishes a back channel from regular diplomacy so in this definition the from the Oxford English dictionary which traces the origins of the the word but it's a means of communication which circumvents official channels especially in order to facilitate informal or clandestine negotiations now in the context of the Nixon administration you see one of the first uses in 1968 and a political science concept and military having developed a back channel technique but then in the late 1970s it was specifically mentioning the strategic arms limitation talks and the delegation that the US had sent to Helsinki and Vienna was being bypassed by Henry Kissinger so that's how the term back channel really came into common usage in English language and this case and the focus of my book is on a very specific channel between Henry Kissinger over here on the on the left and the long-term Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrinan he had served from the Kennedy administration right before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 up until the close the end of the Reagan administration so he had been around for quite a while but this is the channel the confidential channel when we talk about sources I'll describe it a little bit more but the finding the finding that I had is that back channel diplomacy was both a necessary and effective instrument of policy especially when it supplemented rather than supplanted traditional diplomacy traditional diplomacy is you have the Secretary of State meeting with a foreign ambassador reporting to the president or you have negotiating teams from different powers that meet together at a conference recently you seen about Syria for example Secretary of State Kerry meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov so that's traditional diplomacy conducted from foggy bottom where the State Department is located a few blocks away from the White House now this is different this is to facilitate those informal and clean almost clandestine contacts between the Nixon administration and the Soviet leadership few findings for back channel diplomacy to work it had to appeal to both Washington and Moscow Nixon like secrecy I'm sure you're surprised to find this out so did Leonid Brezhnev the Soviet leader at this point so it had this Kissinger-Dabrinen channel had a blessing from both president Nixon and from General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev the other thing about back channels is it's a good way for secrecy and compartmentalization as a means to avoid leaks you don't want your negotiating position plastered on the front of the New York Times so you can use these types of informal meetings to kind of probe and try to figure out what the other side is willing to give and what they're not willing to give so it has a useful function in that respect and for Nixon who was obsessed with leaks it was really an essential part of his foreign policy it was the use of back channels in general and specifically the Dabrinen Kissinger channel these types of conversations between Nixon between Dabrinen Kissinger were also a safety valve to relieve tensions when there was trouble in the Middle East or when there's trouble in India-Pakistan it's a way to have rational talk between two people who have rapport with one another as opposed to having diatrib in a place like the United Nations can also be used as an accelerator and a break for negotiations when I talked about supplementing rather than supplanting traditional diplomacy and the strategic arms limitation talks it was a good way to try to speed up negotiations for the Nixon administration and conversely the Soviets used it to slow them down to try to get a better deal from Nixon so it can be used by both sides as an accelerator and a break it gave the policy actors a personal stakes and the diplomacy in this high-level diplomacy and the case of Henry Kissinger it benefited him in outmaneuvering his rival for control of US foreign policy who was the Secretary of State William Rogers and actually in the Soviet Union it also had the effect of bolstering Brezhnev but also his foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and also Ambassador Dabrinen Ambassador Dabrinen again became ambassador in 1962 but it was during the Nixon administration on the US side partially as a result of his role as a back channel agent that resulted in his elevation to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union so that was the ultimate mark of his promotion back channels can also have inadvertent effects the Soviets displayed time and again that they were very nervous whenever Kissinger raised the topic of China Soviets knew that the US could try to exploit Sino-Soviet differences which in 1969 resulted in a quasi-war in the frozen tundra of Siberia and northern China a few hundred people were killed it was a fight over these islands that no one really cares about but there was this threat of confrontation between the two great communist powers Soviet Union being the largest landmass and communist China being the most populous country in the world then as today Nixon also kind of showed his hand to use the poker parlance he was a poker player but he showed his hand on the desire for a summit meeting with the Soviets because a summit meeting in which you go to your adversaries capital and you have these toasts and all these great picture moments is a way to look presidential and when you're president the United States elections matter so Nixon had that motivation constantly pushing him in terms of the sources I mentioned the Nixon tapes I tried to compare what Nixon and Kissinger and pals discussed before after and sometimes even during meetings between Kissinger and De Bruyne and or other Soviet intermediaries with the paper record the paper record was jointly compiled translated and published by the U.S. Department of State in this nice little book so it makes my book look skinny right it was jointly jointly published and they did the Russians did a version they did two volumes instead of doing one massive this is just one of the two but they both sides the U.S. side published all of Kissinger's memoranda of his meetings with De Bruyne and this the Russians published all of De Bruyne's this is a really unprecedented event so you have this complete record of these exchanges between these these two very smart very diplomatic and cutting individuals was one and over over the course of four years so a lot of great material and then you combine that with the Nixon tapes and you also combine it with the fact that Kissinger had secretaries listening in on a deadline to every one of his phone calls and transcribing it so those are called the Kissinger telephone conversation transcripts or telecons so between the complete record of the exchanges what's going on in the Oval Office or on the White House telephone you have a really good snapshot between 1969 and 1972 as to exactly what is going on not just with U.S. Soviet relations but in how this back channel is functioning. Snapshots. Henry Kissinger. Let's see laser pointer. Nope. Okay. Middle one. Okay. There we go. Henry Kissinger. It was long known that he tried to negotiate with the North Vietnamese Hanoi through two French intermediaries in 1967. It was operation called Operation Pennsylvania and it was largely seen as a failure but it resulted in something called the San Antonio formula where the U.S. would stop bombing North Vietnam in exchange for negotiations peace negotiations to try to get a U.S. withdrawal and a peaceful conclusion to the war between North and South Vietnam. It was widely seen that these negotiations ended in October 1967. I found that this Soviet gentleman Georgi Arbatov who is ahead of a think tank that was associated with the Russian Soviet Foreign Ministry and also Soviet intelligence the KGB. He mentioned in his memoirs kind of offhanded that Kissinger went in December 1967 to Moscow to try to facilitate negotiations. I read this when I was working on my research and I was pretty skeptical. Okay. This must be a typo. He must have meant earlier. It must have been part of Operation Pennsylvania. So I looked in the official documentary record of U.S. foreign policy and there's nothing on this. I looked in Kissinger's memoirs and nothing on this. So it turns out that there were documents that were declassified in 2009 that showed that Kissinger did in fact go to Moscow in the end of 1967 and did negotiate with Georgi Arbatov. And he tried to resuscitate the San Antonio formula of Operation Pennsylvania. Ultimately it was a failure but it kind of showed that Henry Kissinger was a back channel agent if you want to call it that to the Soviets more than a year before he became national security advisor to President Nixon during the Johnson administration. There he is with President Johnson. And here's Nixon and President Johnson in July of 1968. So a little bit before the election. And at this point Nixon had two intermediaries one Henry Kissinger and the other his later ambassador to NATO Robert Ellsworth as intermediaries to the Soviets. So kind of set a precedent. It's only a normalization for what the Trump administration did in the election and afterwards if you consider Richard Nixon's activities to be normal policy. So but nonetheless it does give you an example that great powers and the potential representatives especially in a democratic environment will try to have a conversation going before they get into office. It can have nefarious purposes but it could also have legitimate purposes. And in this case Nixon used both of these channels to signal to the Soviets that he wasn't an anti-communist ogre as he built his reputation as a red-bater. He really wanted to improve relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. At stake was a potential nuclear conflict. Both powers were in the midst of a massive arms race and Nixon recognized probably correctly that there needed to be a break applied to this and he found some resonance with with Moscow as well. The fun one was this relationship between Kissinger and a KGB operative named Boris Sidov. The U.S. later threatened to kick Sidov out of the country because the FBI had found some information that he was apparently bragging about his contacts with Kissinger to people who are somewhat suspect. But nevertheless the one discernible result of the Kissinger-Sidov channel was the inclusion of a phrase in Nixon's inaugural address about opening a new era of moving from confrontation to cooperation. And that was included at the suggestion of this one of the exchanges between Sidov and Kissinger. So back channels can have an effect and both these channels between Robert Ellsworth and DeBreen and on the one hand and Kissinger and Sidov on the other hand set a precedent for what Nixon did almost immediately after taking office which is the establishment of this channel between Kissinger and DeBreen. So Nixon takes office in January 1969 and Kissinger goes to the Soviet embassy on Valentine's Day in February and this is when he meets DeBreen and establishes the channel to have a confidential exchange of views on the matters in U.S. Soviet relations. And I fast forward a little bit to 1970 the fall. There's a Cuban missile crisis right. Forcing Soviet submarines to surface and no that was 1962. The Cienflagos crisis was handled very quietly. It amounted to Soviet submarines both nuclear powered and nuclear armed submarines dockied in Cienflagos Cuba in the southern part of Cuba. And it was seen by the U.S. as a contravention of the understanding that ended the Cuban missile crisis that the Soviet Union would not station nuclear weapons in Cuba right. They would withdraw them which is what happened in 1962. So thus began a debate. Do you count a nuclear powered submarine as a contravention of the deal or does it have to be armed with nuclear weapons. What constitutes nuclear weapons cruise missiles or or short range ballistic missiles or this goes on back and forth. It's discovered by overhead imagery. And this is a black and white photos from CIA studies and intelligence. It was declassified article about the Cienflagos crisis and it amounted to Kissinger seen a big deal in this the satellite photos because he as he told Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman who was implicated in Watergate. It's a Cuban seaboard Haldeman and these pictures show the Cubans are building soccer fields. These soccer fields could mean war. So Haldeman didn't quite get Kissinger's meaning. So Kissinger explained that it was the fact that Cubans play baseball and Russians play soccer. So it's a Russian base in Cienflagos and anyways. Everyone in the administration in foreign policy the secretary of state a lot of people aides close to Nixon all advised just raising the matter with the Soviets. The UN General Assembly in in September or October and Kissinger saw this as a menace and decided to use the back channel means as a way to really force the issue ahead of time. So instead of waiting three weeks I'm making an issue with with the green and he did it solidified Kissinger's role and it kind of showed the sidelining of the secretary of state William Rogers over here. And the helper there was H.R. Bob Haldeman in the game of bureaucratic warfare between Kissinger and Rogers. The tapes capture some wonderful things like in 1972 where Nixon talking about his old friend. They've been friends since the 1940s by the way Rogers and Nixon. He says the problem we have here is that secretary of state Bill Rogers has made a big old error in terms of his own place as secretary of state and in history. He's panted so much to be like by his colleagues at the State Department that the State Department runs him rather than his running the State Department. He's panted so much to be like by the press that covers the State Department that the press run him rather than his running them. Socket about his friend. I wonder what he said about his enemies. Also later in 1972. This is a week before Nixon, Kissinger and Powell's go to Moscow for the Moscow summit. Nixon is telling Kissinger that he has to be careful when he's talking to the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko about the special channel because they would have to explain what the hell it is to him. Rogers was kept out of the loop on on these exchanges. There were actually sanitized versions and that were kind of circulated within the bureaucracy. In one case, Nixon and Kissinger invented a chorus exchange and the correspondence between Nixon and Brezhnev to hide what Kissinger had been talking about with Sabrina from his own from Nixon's own secretary of state. So it's a little bit dysfunctional. Fast forward a little bit later from the C.N. Flagos crisis in 1970 to the India-Pakistan war. I mentioned you have Democratic India supported by the Soviet Union and you have the United States supporting Pakistan. Pakistan and its military dictator, General Aka Yahya Khan, known affectionately as Yahya, not Greek grandmother but just Yahya. Yahya had been the facilitator in terms of U.S. Chinese rapprochement. He had been the one who had delivered the notes between both sides and had facilitated this. Yahya and the Pakistanis weren't the only channel that Nixon and the Chinese had tried to work with. But Yahya was seen as a good faith intermediary who was in a difficult situation. At this point in time before the war, Pakistan was divided into two wings. So what later became Bangladesh was East Pakistan and about a thousand miles away was West Pakistan. East Pakistan's population was much larger and Yahya and a great line immortalized by Kissinger for a dictator ran a lousy election. They had an election to try to get away from martial law after one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in history. There was a cyclone that devastated much of what later became Bangladesh. This election was seen as a way to try to reconcile the two halves or the two wings of Pakistan. But as Kissinger said about Yahya, he ran that lousy election and backfired. Because the population of East Pakistan was so great, the majority in the country voted actually for East Pakistan to secede from West Pakistan. So instead of reconciling and bringing it together and addressing this humanitarian crisis, they wanted independence. Yahya could have let the democratic will go forward and could have let East Pakistan become Bangladesh but instead he cracked down, killing tens of thousands of people, sending in forces to try to reestablish order. Refugees fled from East Pakistan and to India. India wasn't real happy about this with tens of thousands and eventually millions of refugees fleeing into India, destabilizing already unstable part of India. India supported the independence movement in East Pakistan and Nixon still kind of turned a blind eye to what the West Pakistanis were doing in East Pakistan and was supporting the dictatorship of Yahya Khan. The Indians in backing the East Pakistani independence movement were training and equipping forces in India and sending them back over into East Pakistan, which is technically an active war according to the United Nations. It happens all the time though. Look at Ukraine today, right? In terms of the backing, Indian regular forces joined with the insurgents, the Mukti Bihini or Liberation Force as they were called, joined them and cross border raids into East Pakistan and Yahya cried, Val, he said this is an active war and this is in November 22, 1971. Yahya is telling Nixon the Indians are backing the Mukti Bihini, they're committing this active war, it means war. Nixon and Kissinger had talked to the Indian leader Indira Gandhi, they said not very nice things about her. I called her a witch and other less friendly terms because she had come to the United States and they felt had lied in their face about support for the Mukti Bihini and encouraging the instability and secession of East Pakistan. The tapes captured the moment in which Nixon learns about these raids and he agrees with Yahya Khan that it's an active war. Yahya bungled it just like he bungled the election, he launched strikes into, from West Pakistan into India and the forward air bases in December 3rd, so about a little less than two weeks after this conversation and that was seen by a lot of observers as the start of the actual India-Pakistan war. Didn't go real well for Pakistan, Bangladesh was able to achieve its independence, West Pakistan was severely discredited after the atrocities committed in East Pakistan and in the process of this whole thing unfolding there were a number of news articles published by syndicated columnist, let's see, that Jack Anderson, Jack Anderson topped Richard Nixon's enemies list, apparently he was number one on the list he kept in his desk drawer. You know Anderson was publishing a series of articles criticizing the US stance on this, that we supported atrocities, what has been termed genocide by State Department officials at the time they're calling it genocide but West Pakistan was doing it in Bangladesh, but in Anderson's columns some eagle-eyed folks at the White House discovered that there were literally direct quotes from some of the most secret documents of the Washington special action group, which was a crisis committee within the National Security Council that was investigating this, so these top secret documents are being quoted verbatim in Jack Anderson's columns, so the plumbers of Watergate fame did their first investigation, which was initially for national security purposes, right, they are supposed to plug leaks, they're supposed to find who is talking to the press and who is leaking secret material, right, they found that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on Henry Kissinger, yeah, so civilian control of the military, right, Nixon understood the reason why the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer was doing this and it was because he was left out of the loop on things like the opening to China, right, hello Pentagon we're going to open relations with communist China even though we haven't talked to them since 1949, it came as a little bit of surprise within the bureaucracy and also just for planning purposes, so Nixon understands why the Joint Chiefs were spying on the National Security Council but Nixon says I don't think Henry would ever let anybody think that a back channel for example would go to Admiral Moorer, we say things back channel the way we've played lots of them, there have been more back channeled games played by this administration than any in history because we couldn't trust the goddamn State Department, that's the rationale for having back channels and Henry Kissinger's protection of them to try to prevent things from leaking. Nixon says to his Chief Domestic Aid, John Ehrlichman, the thing that is very very bad about this and that we have to watch, I just think that John if this story got out it would be used to destroy the services, here are the services setting up their own Gestapo and so forth spying on the president, Nixon took this seriously, what is he going to do? Cover it up! Also kind of a dry run for Watergate, okay? There's something, there's been foul play afoot, what's the way you're going to deal with it? Cover it up. Not going to get rid of Kissinger because he's indispensable, Kissinger's having a little bit of a nervous breakdown in Nixon's assessment at this point, but Kissinger is indispensable at this time because the China trip and to a lesser extent the Russia trip, Secretary of State Rogers is not, but the point is we cannot have Henry have an emotional collapse, he's the kind of fellow who can have an emotional collapse you know, so in the middle of this conversation who walks into the Executive Office building hideaway office but Henry Kissinger, so they talk nice, try to ameliorate Kissinger's feelings about feeling betrayed and the fact that President Nixon has decided not to punish anyone for spying on Henry Kissinger and the criticism that the US came under for the activities and supporting West Pakistan, so Nixon then moves to try to buck up Kissinger, he calls Nelson Rockefeller and tells Rockefeller to wish the Jewish Henry Kissinger Merry Christmas, but tell Kissinger to pay no attention to this nitpicking, hell India, Pakistan there's no way it's ever going to come out and thank God we didn't get involved in the war and thank God we saved West Pakistan which we did, so Nixon believed that he had by actions at the United Nations in concert with Communist China that India had ended the war once Bangladesh became an independent country and India didn't move to solve its decades-long security dilemma of having hostile Pakistan on both sides of it in the north and then China in the middle Nixon goes to China this is one of the things that Richard Nixon is most remembered for it was probably most remembered for it Kissinger as well he's tried to shape his legacy his office in New York is right above the Chinese reconstruction and import bank which is one of the largest banks in the world same building as Henry Kissinger and he has Ming vases when you walk in and he's very much tried to shape that he's the guy who opened China now it took two sides to tango as they say in dance right and the Pakistanis had been the facilitator but Richard Nixon had was one of those people only Richard Nixon could go to China in terms of the back channel this is where it got interesting though between Nixon and Kissinger Nixon says we're playing a game without being too melodramatic right whatever happens to the election in 1972 is going to change the face of the world now China move I've made not because of any concern about China because I have none not for 15 years but I think we need to do something about the Russians and to have another specter over them so Nixon is using the back channel between Kissinger and Dabrina to really turn the screw on the Soviets look we're going to play nice with China we want to have improved relations with the Soviet Union but we're also going to pursue better relations with Communist China and it is kind of a way to moderate the behavior of both sides for American advantage now Nixon was using China as a bargaining tool to try to get the Soviets to agree to a summit meeting before the trip that opened China in July of 1971 where Kissinger in addition to being the back channel intermediary between Dabrina was also the Nixon's back channel agent to the Chinese in July 1971 before that the Russians had been dragging their their heels in in terms of offering a summit meeting to the US Nixon would mention it it's politically useful to have a summit meeting it's a it's a boost for him in domestic politics and long story short the Soviets aren't willing to play game until after July 1971 and that's when it's announced that Kissinger went and talked to the Chinese and that they're going to have a that Nixon was going to have a summit with the with the Chinese which then made the Soviets rush to try to get their summit in first uh Nixon didn't play ball Nixon went to China in February 1972 and to Moscow in May 1972 so like I said he was trying to turn the screw keep the pressure on uh trying to get good behavior from both but also he saw it in terms of great power politics it's a very powerful position this is it's the sort of position the British were in in the 19th century when among the great powers of Europe they'd always play the weaker against the stronger that's what we're doing with the Chinese see that's straight from the horse's mouth Kissinger also was on board with it playing a cold-blooded game we need it for the Russians and if it serves our purpose to go we need it for the Russians and if it serves our purpose we'll go against the Chinese right now the Chinese are making our policy go you get two summit meetings or you get none uh that it was an example from the tapes actually and the next one is a one of those telecons that I mentioned so you had two recording mechanisms and the telecons were very good but it's not quite a literal transcript of what was said so you can because of the nature of the sources I use you can do those kinds of comparisons for the conversations now we'll skip ahead to 1972 to march north vietnamese east offensive I mentioned earlier it's the largest north vietnamese offensive against south vietnam since tete in 1968 the largest offensive by far during nixon's presidency at this point there were less than 60 000 american troops still in in south vietnam nixon took office with 550 000 american troops in south vietnam in 1969 so he's been withdrawing them and he's been increasingly relying on american air power to deliver results on the battlefield or at the negotiating table this Easter offensive the level the momentum the uh speed and the brutality of it uh really take nixon and kissinger by surprise they've been talking to the soviets who have promised to reduce aid to north vietnam over the preceding years and instead north vietnam launches this massive offensive so nixon and kissinger felt again like they had been lied to much as they had been lied to by endera gondi about supporting uh about wanting to avoid war and and not supporting the east pakistanis well they see moscow's line that this offensive would not have been possible without soviet weapons and material especially not on this scale and this wasn't an insurgent uprising like tete in 1968 these were tanks streaming into south vietnam so nixon is kind of in a pickle and is deciding how is he going to respond uh especially if south vietnam looks like it's going to collapse how can you possibly go to Moscow in may toast to brezhnev and and kasegan and the other soviet leaders if russian tanks are kicking the hell as nixon would say out of south vietnam and the us ally and threatening a collapse of the us ally public opinion doesn't make this distinction vietnam and improved relations with the soviets weren't the same thing it takes nixon a little while to see this this divergence but nixon considers canceling the moscow summit preemptively so nixon also and over the course of the preceding years had decided to withdraw american troops but then rely more on air power so this is a conversation from the fall of 1971 where they're seeing signs of a build-up in north vietnam for a potential offensive but nixon at this point says to help with the election essentially it must have occurred to you henry that regardless of how the election comes out in november i'll over the next year i'll still be president until january 20th and i'll be commander in chief do they realize they being the soviets and the north vietnamese that here they have to deal with here a man who if he wins the election will kick the shit out of them and if he loses the election will do it even more and incidentally i wouldn't worry about a little slop over and knock off a few villages and hamlets and the rest this would be war i wouldn't worry about a soviet ship you know that was in high fong harbor so it's kind of you could make a case that uh this is a war crime having this kind of attitude not caring about collateral damage but that's how nixon approached it and he was sending signals uh both through de brian and uh de brian's wife irina de brian and uh nixon enlisted henry kissinger and nixon's own wife pat nixon to set up a lady's tea about how much nixon and pat and the family were looking forward to the trip to moscow the next month and that they hope what's going on and in vietnam doesn't have a negative impact on on the summit meeting which is going to be great and you're going to have a bunch of agreements we're going to have a detente and improve relations between the soviet union and the united states and super power relations are finding them on fundamentally more important than what is going on in india china now nixon was very proud of his wife um a little conversation here mrs nixon raised the point i hope i just hope it won't hurt the visit mrs de brian squeezed her hand and said almost with tears in her eyes i hope not i hope not so he got that message across so nixon is using back channels and not just the kissinger de brian channel but again even enlisting his own wife to reinforce these messages with the soviet leadership so they're trying to justify kissinger believe that the u.s. could have the moscow summit and that uh the u.s. could escalate its use of air power in the north again it took nixon a little while to catch on to that eventually uh it was on the result of let's see there's b 52s going across and in may on may 8th 1972 nixon announced operation linebacker he loved football references so military knew this and tried to name operations to appease the president but launches this operation which is the largest aerial bombardment of north vietnam in years in fact in many ways it was an escalation from rolling thunder under the johnson administration it's also the introduction of smart weapons laser guided bombs are first used in operation linebacker so you're seeing a revolution in military affairs going on nixon made the decision to escalate the bombing continue the withdrawals of american troops and go through with the moscow summit and i talked earlier about that divergence between american public opinion for detente and american public opinion for vietnam well that was the result nixon finally has this realization in early may after going back and forth over for the entire month of april based on the advice of his treasury secretary john connelly john connelly was democrat he was with john f kennedy when kennedy was assassinated and he carried a bullet fragment in his body from that assassination until the day he died he also became a republican and tried to run unsuccessfully in 1980 for the republican nomination but nixon saw and connelly uh what's been said is walter midi image he really admired connelly and uh here you can see the mancrush that nixon has for connelly connelly with his animal-like decisiveness which i also have but and kiss the journey off that you're much more subtle sir connelly march quickly the point he says look the summit is great i hope you don't knock it off i think you can do both i eat the summit and the bombing and i hope you can do both you gotta remember you can do without the summit but you cannot live with the defeat in vietnam so do both there's john connelly so nixon does this and uh the day after he announces that he's going to massively bomb north vietnam he invites the visiting russian trade minister to the white house and uh there are kissinger and de brianon smiling coyly at one another all smiles in the room a day after this massive operation nixon also feared that the soviets might cancel the summit because north vietnam was its communist ally mosca was providing aid to north vietnam diplomatic top cover for years and it was a competition between the chinese and the and the soviets in terms of showing their revel revolutionary uh bonafides who supports revolution against the capitalist imperialist more is it going to be mosca or is it going to be beijing so nixon was concerned that the soviets might preemptively move to cancel it so that was one of the reasons why he had this tea between his wife and mrs de brianon and it's another reason why it's all smiles the day after he announces this bombing campaign it makes the message very clear both through traditional diplomacy and reinforces it and the channel between kissinger and de brianon that look the us has interest in vietnam so union has interest in vietnam we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this because the superpower arms race is frankly more important and we need to have ways to try to manage that competition and the cold war because the risks of escalation are too great now they go through with the summit the anti ballistic missile treaty is signed the interim agreement on the limitation of strategic offensive arms is signed and seven other agreements are signed as well ranging from medical cooperation on cancer research and and other medical breakthroughs to collaboration in space in outer space who remembers the apollo soya is docking in 1975 okay so that was made possible by the agreement signed in may of 1972 in fact the docking adapter that both sides work to uh agreed to work on together uh is still used in an updated form on the international space station well they're lasting effects of detente and having improved superpower relations so also there's uh the avoiding naval incidents at sea and since i work at the naval war college i have to point that out but uh you know the adherence to the agreement is somewhat uh it goes in waves shall we say but nevertheless it is signed and there are agreements as a result of better cooperation between the great superpowers the great powers are there current parallels here's the russian ambassador to the united states currently uh kisslock and here is national security advisor and rhod Island native michael flinn and uh can't forget that that's all important it says it's a sign of strategic thinking so i hear um there are other examples of the last administration this is the omani foreign minister and the iranian foreign minister and apparently the joint comprehensive plan of action on the iranian nuclear program uh that was worked out through back channel intermediaries with the omanis serving as the the back channel between both sides so the u.s and iran weren't talking directly but the u.s was talking to the omanis and the omanis were talking to the iranians and playing telephone back and forth so back channel diplomacy still relevant still used and not just in the united states so um with that i'd be honored to take any questions you might have or continue discussion sir how did kissin just come from originally and how did he get so greatly uh approved appreciated by the next administration um he was a professor at harvard the prestigious later became the john afghanity school of government uh he did his initial he was born in in germany and uh fled in the 1930s when the nazis came to power