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NICHOLAS D. KATZENBACH ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS II & III PREFERRED CITATION
Transcript, Nicholas D. Katzenbach Oral History Interview II,
11/23/68, by Paige E. Mulhollan, Internet Copy, LBJ Library.
INTERVIEW II
DATE: November 23, 1968
INTERVIEWEE: NICHOLAS KATZENBACH
INTERVIEWER: PAIGE E. MULHOLLAN
PLACE: Mr. Katzenbach's office at the State Department, Washington, D.C.

K: Oh, I think as far as Viet Nam is concerned--I just think we haven't had a very good, really public information policy; that we've been caught in a good many things in the past--caught in the sense that going too flat with predictions that then did not turn out to be true, so when you make them again you get caught with it--with the old ones. I think progress has often been exaggerated when really it was progress and people were pleased about it and it may have been said sincerely, but when it was viewed against what the total problem was, it wasn't that good. There has been an optimism on the time frame in Viet Nam that I think was never justified, and so I think that this has really been what has hurt. And also some of the inhibitions that you have--you may think what the South Vietnamese government is doing is just incredibly foolish and stupid and corrupt, or anything you want to say about it. Obviously you can't say that publicly, so you have to be terribly bland, and then people don't realize why you can't say this and they think you're just lying to them or you're being stupid or something of that kind.
M: You've run into that, at least on one occasion--pressure from your friends, I believe, up at one of the coastal places. On one occasion your wife was quoted as saying that if they knew what you were doing, they wouldn't criticize that. What did she mean by that?
K: All she knew was that I was spending a great deal of time on Viet Nam. We had what I think is the only secret I know in government. Every Thursday afternoon there was a meeting here at 5:30 in my office in which--we called it the non-group--
M: The non-group?
K: And I had said there would be nothing coordinated, no papers, nobody would ever be quoted on anything he said in here outside this room; but it was to explore problems in Viet Nam and things we might do and what ideas people had. I had a group in which--Walt Rostow has been here, used to be Cy Vance, and John MacNaughton, now it's Paul Nitze and Paul Warnke, Dick Helms--I think I mentioned General Wheeler, Bill Bundy, Averell Harriman, and we'd spend one
hour of trying to get ideas about Viet Nam and having very frank discussions and then nothing that is said in the room ever goes outside of it. But it has served to get some ideas about things that might be good, and I think that's probably the sort of thing that she was mentioning. Nothing has ever leaked out of that meeting, not even the existence of the group.
M: That's the way to have it. Would you say that your advice on Viet Nam has been consistently one direction or another insofar as our commitments and tactics are concerned?
K: No, I think I've generally been more pessimistic about Viet Nam than some of my colleagues in the government, certainly much more pessimistic than Walt Rostow has continuously been. I think I've tended to be skeptical of military reports--I don't mean skeptical of the number killed or that sort of thing. Probably even that you can be skeptical of because you know it's only an estimate, but it is not necessarily an estimate that's always high, but it may be wrong.
M: An estimate is an estimate.
K: It's the best they can do and I don't question that. I think I've been skeptical about the effectiveness of the bombing throughout. It did not seem to me that it was
winning the war for us particularly, and this did not mean that you should just give it up for nothing. I just was always a little dubious. Having bombed myself, I was always a little bit skeptical as to whether every bomb went on target with quite the same precision that gets claimed for it.
M: A lot of bombardiers admit that.
K: I think in that I've tended to be skeptical. It hasn't been really doubting of the Viet Nam policy--I think I've doubted that things were always going as well as we thought.
M: Has this affected your relations with the President in any way?
K: I don't think so.
M: He has let you be skeptical?
K: Yes. I feel so very strongly that a President wants an honest view--he doesn't have to accept it. I've never given President Johnson anything else. Now he may not want to hear--he may prefer to hear a view that's much more optimistic about what's going on, but I think he would agree that you're not doing your job--if you don't feel that way--you're not doing your job if you don't tell him. And so I don't think it's affected--I did the same thing in the Department of Justice. I don't think he always liked to hear what I had to say there, either.
M: You showed me last time how you decreased in estimation with your various appointments. Do you think you would have the same level on leaving--? [Reference to language used on Katzenbach's various official appointments]
K: Well, I certainly hope that President Johnson would say of me that I've never been cowed into not giving him advice of what I felt on any occasion. I don't give them. I made an absolute point in this department that I do not give my advice to the President unless he asks for my advice. I expressed my viewpoint to the Secretary, and if the President calls me or wants me, or the Secretary is away or something, that fact is promptly reported to the Secretary along with what was said. Because you can't have two Secretaries of State, and although the President is entitled to go get advice where he wants it, I'm not sure that I'm entitled to volunteer it to anybody but the Secretary. It would be a very rare occasion when I would do the opposite.
M: That's then one of the criticisms of the National Security Operation in the White House, I guess. It has volunteered advice on its own and thus acted as a second Secretary of State?
K: Yes, I think that's--I know that to be true. At the same time Walt would not differ one iota in his philosophy of it from what I would do, although it seems to differ in practice. And I think Walt would say that--would state that he never volunteers advice without first checking it out here. And I believe that he believes that to be true.
M: But in practice, as you said while ago--?
K: You see, in government, contact with the President of the United States is a fantastically important source of power.
M: I've noticed that.
K: So that in this sense his staff gains power merely by personal contact which makes it much more important for him to be sure he's having personal contact with his other officials. He has had a good deal with Rusk and McNamara and Clifford in Defense; much less, really, with the other officials of government.
M: On specific policy matters, I expect that one of the things that's going to be most investigated in the future that most needs clearing up is the whole big subject of peace feelers. Recently a couple of books have come out detailing an opposition nongovernment view. You've probably been familiar with Ashmore-Baggs and Kraslow-Loory. [Harry S. Ashmore and William C. Baggs, Mission to Hanoi (New York: 1968); David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam (New York: 1968)]. Can you clear some of this up? What about Marigold, for example, which was in process when you got here apparently?
K: Oh, I think it's hard to--in general, the account on Marigold in Kraslow and Loory's book is accurate. Not all the details are there, but I think generally it's accurate. I think the most difficult part of that was--I was responsible for that--Rusk was away during at least the crucial time of that. I felt really pretty strongly that it
was a phony--
M: That is, the channel was a phony?
K: Yes. Also I thought as I have on other occasions that however strongly you feel that, you've got to pursue it until you can demonstrate--you can't just say, "This is a phony, so I'm not going to have anything to do with it." We did have the bombing, we did have a warning about it, then it did occur again, and they said they'd broken off--in that sense I think it was badly handled, certainly from the point of view in people's confidence. I frankly don't believe that the fact of the bombing would have permanently ended this. I think it was used as an excuse. It's just a matter of judgment. I think we would have been better off if we had not done it the second time.
M: It could have been stopped presumably.
K: It could have been stopped, though there would have been some danger of leaks if it were but it could have been stopped. All you were doing is saying please lay off Haiphong and Hanoi and major attacks for a few days.
M: Which militarily would have--
K: Militarily would have had no significance though that might have resulted in some questions and so forth. It would not have been easy to do, but I think it could have been done.
M: Is one of the problems in that type of thing the number of people that can be informed of what's going on so that you can coordinate the military and the diplomatic--
K: Yes, that's a big problem. All Presidents have had problems with leaks. They don't like them, get angry about them, and they tend to blame them on the State Department even when they're clearly not from the State Department. I made a list of--with respect to the Paris negotiations--of what I thought was an absolute minimum number of people that had to have access to this information in order to make the government run. And without counting code clerks or secretaries, you got to a list of about sixty people.
M: Sixty?
K: I think that if the President had known this, he would have fired me. I don't think to this moment he has any idea that that many people were reading the traffic, and I suspect that that sixty was really a hundred because--
M: And this was more than what had been involved in some of the earlier efforts?
K: Oh I think everybody had this much--Actually my own theory is that you don't get a leak this way; that you get a leak because people know there is something going on and they suddenly have been excluded from it.
M: And think they should be--
K: And think they ought to be in on it.
M: I see.
K: But you can just start counting them up and it just runs to that. I'm not even including foreign people. Whether you include any of your allies or not. My own feeling is that we ran that without a leak throughout that whole period of time with all these people knowing it.
M: And that lasted several months?
K: That lasted several months. I don't think they do on this kind of an issue. And to run it without telling your principal people who are working on Viet Nam is to cut yourself off. Can you imagine doing this without half a dozen people in the CIA knowing about it? I mean, they have to know about it. If you want any analysis done of other sources of intelligence, then they've got to know what we're doing. You can't run it any other way.
M: They're not any good to you in their function if they don't know about it.
K: That's right.
M: What about the Ashmore-Baggs thing in early 1967? Was that
any better than the previous one?
K: No, the great danger with Ashmore-Baggs--one danger was that Ashmore just talks, talks, talks. Baggs was more responsible. They wanted to go, and we didn't really want to use them. These would not be our choices. And the great difficulty of this is, with a private person is, really how responsible and how responsive they are to the guidance that you give them. Now Baggs and Ashmore obviously had all kinds of ideas of their own as to how peace ought to be gotten, and we ran into the great danger on this of, if they were saying anything for us, everything Harry Ashmore thought would be assumed by Hanoi to be U.S. policy, so you really get a lot of wrong signals on this. If you contrast that with Henry Kissinger's mission in Paris, the degree of professionalism just totally differed. Henry put forward ashisown a number of ideas. Ever idea that he put forward as his own was something that we had cleared here and was in fact United States' policy.
M: With /Herbert/ Marcovich and /Raymond/ Aubrac, which was a little later.
K: Yes, which can be made to work and can be useful. Because it's a deniable contact. They're in a position to deny anything. We're in a position to deny that Kissinger was in any sense speaking for the United States, and it can be useful in terms of exploration.
M: Now, is this the initiative that did ultimately lead to the Paris talks, beginning this year?
K: No, I don't think so, although I think it probably played a role. That was where the San Antonio formula originated, but then became public later on. But that was not the initiative that led to these--
M: Was this a formal diplomatic initiative that did lead to them, finally? How did that come about? This was after the /Nguyen Duy/ Trinh announcement of what--December 4th or something, 1967?
K: Yes, it really came about with absolutely no prior understandings. It really came about quite honestly as the result of the President's March 31st speech. Although I thought there were some signals from them--some indications from them--it was my prediction that stopping only down to the 20th or 19th parallel would not be enough. And I did not expect them to respond as they did.
M: But they did immediately after the 31st speech?
K: Yes. Of course I made that judgment without the benefit of the last paragraph of that speech.
M: Right.
K: Which may had had something to do with it.
M: It undoubtedly could have had something to do with it. What about the difficulties, I think, in February of 1967 when Robert Kennedy got into the peacemaking act and came back? You are, I guess, one of the two outside observers to that episode. I wonder if you can clear that up for me.
K: That was a perfectly ridiculous episode. The truth of it is that President Johnson thought, with perfectly good reason-- [interruption] In many ways this was absolutely ridiculous, because what happened was that the President thought with quite good reason to think it,that Bob Kennedy was getting involved in some kind of peace feeler and getting it public to do this in order to embarrass President Johnson. Senator Kennedy knew that he had not done this in fact, and therefore could
not figure out what President Johnson was trying to do to him by accusing him of doing things that he knew he had not done. So there was complete misunderstanding on this. What had happened was when Senator Kennedy was in Paris, he had gone and talked with [Etienne] Manac'h who was their expert
on Viet Nam and Manac'h had said various things, none of which impressed Senator Kennedy very much. With him at that time had gone an Embassy officer who was more impressed than Senator Kennedy or than any of us were with something that Manac'h had said, and partially I guess impressed with it because he didn't know as much as people back here knew. He had sent a cable back here saying tha the thought that Senator Kennedy had been given a peace-feeler. He had
spoken about it with Senator Kennedy. Senator Kennedy said, "Oh, I don't think there was anything of that kind, but you know more about it than I do, so go ahead and report it any way you want to." That came back in a telegram that got extremely wide distribution in the government. It was so unimportant that I did not even know the existence of the telegram and had an awful time finding it, because I kept looking in the NODIS series messages and this was one that simply must have gone to 300-400 people. One of these people sees this and gives it to the press, and the press makes a big story out of Kennedy peace-feelers. President Johnson assumes that this is something Kennedy himself has leaked, or that somebody in the State Department has leaked for Senator Kennedy's benefit. And so you get all this great, big bru-ha-ha out of total innocence on Senator Kennedy's part, in my judgment, and totally good reason on the part of the President to be suspicious as to what Senator Kennedy was doing; all of which caused by that silly set of circumstances.
M: What about the famous meeting on February 6. You were one of the two objective advisers apparently.
K: Well, it wasn't a very pleasant meeting because there was by this time the suspicion of President Johnson as to what Senator Kennedy was trying to do to him and Senator Kennedy as to what President Johnson was trying to do to him was fairly acute. And the President was quite harsh in terms of things that he said to Senator Kennedy.Senator Kennedy really didn't understand it, and I've forgotten the details of it, but it ended up that way with his saying that he didn't think he had had any peace-feeler, which he did. But he was quite angry; both men, though they didn't raise their voices, were quite angry.
M: Were you on other occasions sort of a link between Senator Kennedy and the President because of your past friendship with Senator Kennedy?
K: Not very much, really, no. I think the personalities of the two men were so in conflict in a way that it was really impossible--
M: The feud was real then.
K: I don't think either one wanted to think of it as a feud, and certainly President Johnson made lots of gestures to the Kennedy family and to Bob Kennedy. Bob knew this.I think he in a way wanted to respond. I just don't think he liked President Johnson. Their style was very different; their personalities very different; and I think they just tended to rub each other the wrong way.
M: What role did Kennedy staff people who had by that time mostly left the government play in this?
K: Oh, I think they played quite a bit of a role in this in terms of sort of egging people on sometimes in their public statements and so forth. I don't really know.
M: This is a pretty good breaking place if you have to go to a meeting; why don't we break right there? DATE: December 11, 1968
INTERVIEWEE: NICHOLAS KATZENBACH
INTERVIEWER: PAIGE E. MULHOLLAN
PLACE: Mr. Katzenbach's office at the State Department,
Washington, D.C. M: [At] the end of our last session, we had been talking about the various peace feelers, or alleged peace feelers, in connection with Viet Nam, and you had just commented that the decisive event in occasioning the talks was the President's announcement of March 31 and not any prior feelers from either side, but that that event had been the one. Now I suppose the obvious direction from there is to move to the next critical period. What was the decisive event that brought the next break, that is the total bombing halt in late October of 1968?
K: I think the decisive event on that was that we got as far as we had ever thought we could get with respect to the DMZ and attacks upon cities. And the point that we had thought was the most important--people in Saigon, the Ambassador and others--was their agreement that it would be all right for the South Vietnamese to join in the talks. We always anticipated and expected that we could never get that, if we got it at all, without their bringing members of the NLF. And that did take quite a bit of time to persuade them to that point which they eventually came to. That would have seemed to us, prior to that time, on the advice that we had, to be the most important point to the South Vietnamese.
M: But there were no specific circumstances that caused the timing--of course, there has been a lot of comment on the timing since it happened to come so near our election.
K: No.
M: Nothing particular in that connection?
K: No, nothing at all in that connection. I think it came there because it took that long to get there. It might have come a little bit earlier than that if there hadn't been
problems as to the timing of when we wanted the meeting and there were strong feelings within the government here that we had to have an agreement to meet with the South Vietnamese President very quickly as a justification for stopping the bombing. And they didn't want to meet that quickly and there may even have been some--I think there were some--misunderstandings on that point. We were insisting on their meeting twenty-four hours later and I think maybe within this government, there were some misunderstandings. They had agreed to meet with us on substantive matters twenty-four hours after the cessation of bombing, but they had never agreed to meet with the South Vietnamese there twenty-four hours later. I think it may have been misunderstood here, [some] picked up an earlier comment of theirs and said we wanted to meet twenty-four afterwards. That just took a lot of time.
M: What about the South Vietnamese? Did their reaction subsequently regarding their participation or nonparticipation surprise our government? Was that contrary
to what our understanding had been?
K: Well, we thought up till the 29th that there was no problem--that they were in complete agreement with us; and by the time they indicated they had some reservations about it, we had already committed ourselves in Paris and with other governments--that we were going to move ahead on it. So it would have been almost impossible for us to have turned around at that point. If you look at the traffic on it, and I think people will, it's traffic based a good deal on the Ambassador's judgment rather than on their absolute commitment. The traffic [says] "I explained all of this to President Thieu [of South Vietnam], who nodded"--that kind
of thing.
M: I see. No explicit written agreement that applied--
K: Nothing absolutely explicit on it, but I think a fair reading of it would be that we could assume he was in agreement since he expressed no disagreement.
M: After that difficulty arose, did the President take any direct role in trying to get the ship back on course again?
K: Well, the President has taken on this a direct role all along, and he did in this. It's all in the written record, letters, communications, and so forth. There's really
nothing to be added to the written record on that.
M: Does the State Department feel pretty sure that we can make peace today on better terms than we could have at a previous period--six months, a year, a year and-a-half ago?
K: I guess; but we couldn't get anybody to talk back then so--
M: So it's an academic question?
K: So it's an academic question. It's very hard to know the answer to that, because a good deal depends on their assessment of what the United States is going to do and a new administration and so forth. They might feel that we simply wanted to get out of Viet Nam so badly that they can do what the Koreans did. This may be the first of 187 meetings or whatever it was. I don't know any way of knowing this.