U.S. & World

WASHINGTON (AP) ― Documents released Tuesday from Richard M. Nixon's White House years shed new light on just how much the government struggled with growing public unrest over the protracted war in Vietnam. The National Archives opened nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents.

A newly declassified memo to Nixon from his secretary of defense at the time reflects just how much the administration felt and discussed public pressure -- even as it weighed U.S. geopolitical strategy -- in anguished internal debate over war policy.

The seven-page document cautions the president against a proposal from military brass to conduct a high-intensity air and naval campaign against North Vietnam.

Then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said such a plan would involve the United States in "expanded costs and risks with no clear resultant military or political benefits."

With peace talks "seemingly stalled in Paris, with combat activity levels reduced in South Vietnam, but with seemingly rising levels of discontent in the United States, we should review the overall situation and determine the best course of action," the defense secretary writes the president on Oct. 8, 1969.

"The sum total of the considerations ... casts grave doubt on the validity and efficacy" of the proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the memo concludes.

At the time, the Nixon administration was secretly conducting a massive bombing of Cambodia to destroy sanctuaries for enemy troops.

In regard to the war generally, "we must ... act in a fashion which will maintain the support of the American people," Laird wrote. The proposed bombing campaign of the Joint Chiefs sought to drive the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table. The Nixon administration didn't go forward with the Joint Chiefs' plan. But in December 1972, it launched what became known as the "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi when peace talks hit a dead end. The effort stirred anger with the American public. North Vietnam called it a terrorist act.

Laird became the biggest proponent of the concept called Vietnamization, urging Nixon to follow through on a policy of troop withdrawals, putting the burden of fighting the conflict on South Vietnamese troops.

The tape recordings are of Nixon's White House conversations from November 1972 to January 1973 and cover his re-election that fall, steps to bomb North Vietnam and also to make peace with it.

The "Christmas bombing" was one of the most controversial acts in a divisive war and the most concentrated air attack of the conflict.

Focusing on the mundane as well as the significant, the newly released documents include:

_A 1972 memo dated two months after the Watergate break-in saying there would be no name change for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. CREEP, as it was known, eventually became synonymous with the scandal that destroyed Nixon's presidency.

_A complaint from a tobacco executive that his industry hadn't been consulted on Cabinet appointees. "Jack said that both Mitchell and Stans had promised that the tobacco people would be consulted on HEW Secretary and lesser posts. I assume Jack's group raised money for the campaign," says the memo circulated among Nixon aides working on the transition following the 1968 election. In the memo, "Jack" refers to Jack Mills, then executive director of the industry-created Tobacco Institute. "Mitchell" was eventual Attorney General John Mitchell. Stans was eventual Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans.

The newly released records include 65,000 pages from the files of J. Fred Buzhardt, Nixon's attorney in the titanic struggle over White House tapes that ultimately betrayed Nixon's complicity in the scandal.

Other Watergate figures are represented in the collection, too. Thousands of pages are being released from the files of Nixon aides Charles W. Colson, H.R. Haldeman, Patrick J. Buchanan and John W. Dean.

As well, there are more than 8,000 pages of correspondence from and to Nixon's political lieutenants at CREEP, including Mitchell and committee deputy Jeb Magruder. Magruder was the author of the memo about the possible name change for CREEP.

This is the 12th release of Nixon White House tapes since 1980. More than 2,200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House now are available, according to the National Archives, which joined the Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif., in releasing the material Tuesday.

All the recordings in the latest release are being put online.

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