253. Memorandum for the Record1
Telephone call to my apartment from President Johnson, 10:00 PM on December 27, 1965.
[Page 716]President Johnson called me from the Ranch to ask my opinion of an extension of the Christmas bombing pause in North Viet-Nam. Secretary McNamara was on the line. The President explained his feeling of the need of the extension to meet domestic opinion and to strengthen all fences prior to asking the Congress for more funds and more men for Viet-Nam.
He had had a strong message from Westy and Admiral Sharp supporting an immediate resumption of the bombing of North Viet-Nam2 and was clearly reluctant to override their military arguments. I told him that I had always opposed a pause in the bombing, feeling that it was futile to expect Hanoi to make any responsive moves during a pause while international attention was concentrated upon their every move. I expressed the view from a military point of view the commanders were right and we should get on with the bombing campaign.
However, in my judgment, a few days delay would not matter from a military point of view if the President felt that, by an extension of the cease-fire, he could expose once and for all the futility of expecting reasonableness from the leadership in Hanoi and Peking. I felt there was no danger to our troops in terms of loss of life or exposure to attack as the result of the extension of the bombing pause for a few days.
I repeated my often expressed fear of being trapped into extended negotiations in the course of a pause.
The President expressed his determination not to be caught and to resume bombing within a few days as soon as he had given our opponents a reasonable chance to respond to the extension of the cease-fire.
- Source: National Defense University, Taylor Papers, T-310-69. Top Secret. This memorandum, dated January 3, 1966, is based on Taylor’s notes, which he took at the time of the conversation.↩
- See Document 245 and footnote 3 thereto.↩