277. Diary Entry by the Assistant to the President (Haldeman)1
[Omitted here is discussion unrelated to Haig’s trip to Saigon.]
At that point, K and Haig arrived. There was some discussion on the wording on the bombing stop announcement,2 and then on the Thieu letter wording.3 The P strengthened the wording that K had drafted—apparently he reviewed it last night—by saying in effect that I have approved every section and so forth. He wants to take out the offer to meet with Thieu—let Haig use that as a bargaining point in discussion, but not put it in the letter. His strategy there is to keep the whole approach with Thieu on our terms, and we don’t want to appear to be begging, especially on the record. He wants to be sure that we get people to stop talking about the Inaugural as being a deadline point by which we wanted to have an agreement; we should kill that line. The P made the point that Haig must take a very hard line on Thieu—that he’s here only as a messenger, not to negotiate, that the P has been totally in charge of all of this, and he will go ahead regardless of what Thieu does. The only diplomacy that Haig should exercise is to trick Thieu, if it looks like he’s not going with us. In regard to shooting his [Page 1004] mouth off before the Inaugural, he’s got to work out some way to stop him from doing that. If he takes on K or the agreement, he takes on the P, personally, and he’s got to understand that.
[Omitted here is discussion unrelated to Haig’s trip to Saigon.]
- Source: Haldeman Diaries: Multimedia Edition.↩
- Ziegler made the announcement on January 15 from Key Biscayne. The transcript of the press briefing in which he made the announcement was printed in The New York Times, January 16, 1973, p. 12.↩
- Document 278.↩