News conference statement by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, January 24, 1973.
(Presidential Documents, Vol. 9 (1973), pp. 64-70)

(Excerpts)

DR. KISSINGER. Ladies and gentlemen, the President last evening presented the outlines of the agreement and by common agreement between us and the North Vietnamese we have today released the texts. And I am here to explain, to go over briefly what these texts contain, and how we got there, what we have tried to achieve in recent months and where we expect to go from here.

Let me begin by going through the agreement, which you have read.

PROVISIONS OF THE AGREEMENT
Chapter 1: Vietnamese National Rights

The agreement, as you know, is in nine chapters. The first affirms the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam, agreements which established two zones, divided by a military demarcation line.

Chapter II: Cease-fire and Withdrawal

Chapter II deals with the cease-fire. The cease-fire will go into effect at 7 o'clock Washington time on Saturday night [January 27]. The principal provisions of Chapter II deal with permitted acts during the cease-fire and with what the obligations of the various parties are with respect to the cease-fire.

Chapter II also deals with the withdrawal of American and all other foreign forces from Vietnam within a period of 60 days. And it specifies the forces that have to be withdrawn. These are in effect all military personnel and all civilian personnel dealing with combat operations. We are permitted to retain economic advisers and civilian technicians serving in certain of the military branches.

Chapter II further deals with the provisions for resupply and for the introduction of outside forces. There is a flat prohibition against the introduction of any military force into South Vietnam from outside of South Vietnam, which is to say that whatever forces may be in South Vietnam from outside South Vietnam, specifically North Vietnamese forces, cannot receive reinforcements replacements or any other form of augmentation by any means whatsoever. With respect to military equipment, both sides are permitted to replace all existing military equipment on a one-to-one basis under international supervision and control.

There will be established, as I will explain when I discuss the protocols, for each side, three legitimate points of entry through which all replacement equipment has to move. These legitimate points of entry will be under international supervision.

Chapter III: Return of POW's

Chapter III deals with the return of captured military personnel and foreign civilians as well as with the question of civilian detainees within South Vietnam.

This, as you know, throughout the negotiations, presented enormous difficulties for us. We insisted throughout that the question of American prisoners of war and of American civilians captured throughout Indochina should be separated from the issue of Vietnamese civilian personnel detained-partly because of the enormous difficulty of classifying the Vietnamese civilian personnel by categories of who was detained for reasons of the civil war and who was detained for criminal activities, and secondly, because it was foreseeable that negotiations about the release of civilian detainees would be complex and difficult and because we did not want to have the issue of American personnel mixed up with the issues of civilian personnel in South Vietnam.

This turned out to be one of the thorniest issues, that was settled at some point and kept reappearing throughout the negotiations. It was one of the difficulties we had during the December negotiations.

As you can see from the agreement, the return of American military personnel and captured civilians is separated in terms of obligation, and in terms of the time frame, from the return of Vietnamese civilian personnel.

The return of American personnel and the accounting of missing in action is unconditional and will take place within the same time frame as the American withdrawal.

The issue of Vietnamese civilian personnel will be negotiated between the two Vietnamese parties over a period of 3 months, and as the agreement says, they will do their utmost to resolve this question within the 3 month period.

So I repeat, the issue is separated, both in terms of obligation and in terms of the relevant time frame from the return of American prisoners, which is unconditional.

We expect that American prisoners will be released at intervals of 2 weeks or fifteen days in roughly equal installments. We have been told that no American prisoners are held in Cambodia. American prisoners held in Laos and North Vietnam will be returned to us in Hanoi. They will be received by American medical evacuation teams and flown on American airplanes from Hanoi to places of our own choice, probably Vientiane.

There will be international supervision of both this provision and of the provision for the missing in action. And all American prisoners will, of course, be released, within 60 days of the signing of the agreement. The signing will take place on January 27, in two installments, the significance of which I will explain to you when I, have run through the provisions of the agreement and the associated protocols.

Chapter IV: Self-determination for South Vietnam

Chapter IV of the agreement deals with the right of the South Vietnamese people to self-determination. Its first provision contains a joint statement by the United States and North Vietnam in which those two countries jointly recognize the South Vietnamese people's right to self-determination, in which those two countries jointly affirm that the South Vietnamese people shall decide for themselves the political system that they shall choose and jointly affirm that no foreign country shall impose any political tendency on the South Vietnamese people.

The other principal provisions of the agreement are that in implementing the South Vietnamese people's right to self- determination, the two South Vietnamese parties will decide, will agree among each other, on free elections, for offices to be decided by the two parties, at a time to be decided by the two parties. These elections will be supervised and organized first by an institution which has the title of National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord, whose members will be equally appointed by the two sides, which will operate on the principle of unanimity, and which will come into being after negotiation between the two parties, who are obligated by this agreement to do their utmost to bring this institution into being within 90 days.

Leaving aside the technical jargon, the significance of this part of the agreement is that the United States has consistently maintained that we would not impose any political solution on the people of South Vietnam. The United States has consistently maintained that we would not impose a coalition government or a disguised coalition government on the people of South Vietnam.

If you examine the provisions of this chapter, you will see, first, that the existing government in Saigon can remain in office; secondly, that the political future of South Vietnam depends on agreement between the South Vietnamese parties and not on an agreement that the United States has imposed on these parties; thirdly, that the nature of this political evolution, the timing of this political evolution, is left to the South Vietnamese parties, and that the organ that is created to see to it that the elections that are organized will be conducted properly, is one in which each of the South Vietnamese parties has a veto.

The other significant provision of this agreement is the requirement that the South Vietnamese parties will bring about a reduction of their armed forces, and that the forces being reduced will be demobilized.

Chapter V: Reunification and the DMZ

The next chapter deals with the reunification of Vietnam and the relationship between North and South Vietnam. In the many negotiations that I have conducted over recent weeks, not the least arduous was the negotiation conducted with the ladies and gentlemen of the press, who constantly raised issues with respect to sovereignty, the existence of South Vietnam as a political entity, and other matters of this kind. I will return to this issue at the end when I sum up the agreement, but it is obvious that there is no dispute in the agreement between the parties that there is an entity called South Vietnam, and that the future unity of Vietnam, as it comes about, will be decided by negotiation between North and South Vietnam, that it will not be achieved by military force, indeed, that the use of military force with respect to bringing about unification, or any other form of coercion, is impermissible according to the terms of this agreement.

Secondly, there are specific provisions in this chapter with respect to the Demilitarized Zone. There is a repetition of the agreement of 1954 which makes the demarcation line along the 17th Parallel provisional, which means pending reunification. There is a specific provision that both North and South Vietnam shall respect the Demilitarized Zone on either side of the provisional military demarcation line, and there is another provision that indicates that among the subjects that can be negotiated will be modalities of civilian movement across the demarcation line, which makes it clear that military movement across the Demilitarized Zone is in all circumstances prohibited.

Now, this may be an appropriate point to explain what our position has been with respect to the DMZ. There has been a great deal of discussion about the issue of sovereignty and about the issue of legitimacy, which is to say which government is in control of South Vietnam, and, finally, about why we laid such great stress on the issue of the Demilitarized Zone.

We had to place stress. on the issue of the Demilitarized Zone because the provisions of the agreement with respect to infiltration, with respect to replacement, with respect to any of the military provisions, would have made no sense whatsoever if there was not some demarcation line that defined where South Vietnam began. If we had accepted the preposition that would have in effect eroded the Demilitarized Zone, then the provisions of the agreement with respect to restrictions about the introduction of men and materiel into South Vietnam would have been unilateral restrictions applying only to the United States and only to our allies. Therefore, if there was to be any meaning to the separation of military and political issues, if there was to be any permanence to the military provisions that had been negotiated, then it was essential that there was a definition of where the obligations of this agreement began. As you can see from the text of the agreement, the principles that we defended were essentially achieved.

Chapters VI and VII: International Machinery; Laos and Cambodia

Chapter VI deals with the international machinery, and we will discuss that when I talk about the associated protocols of the agreement.

Chapter VII deals with Laos and Cambodia. Now, the problem of Laos and Cambodia has two parts. One part concerns those obligations which can be undertaken by the parties signing the agreement-that is to say, the three Vietnamese parties and the United States-those measures that they can take which affect the situation in Laos and Cambodia.

A second part of the situation in Laos has to concern the nature of the civil conflict that is taking place within Laos and Cambodia and the solution of which, of course, must involve as well the two Laotian parties and the innumerable Cambodian factions.

Let me talk about the provisions of the agreement with respect to Laos and Cambodia and our firm expectations as to the future in Laos and Cambodia.

The provisions of the agreement with respect to Laos and Cambodia reaffirm, as an obligation to all the parties, the provisions of the 1954 agreement on Cambodia and of the 1962 agreement on Laos, which affirm the neutrality and right to self-determination of those two countries. They are, therefore, consistent with our basic position with respect also to South Vietnam.

In terms of the immediate conflict, the provisions of the agreement specifically prohibit the use of Laos and Cambodia for military and any other operations against any of the signatories of the Paris Agreement or against any other country. In other words, there is a flat prohibition against the use of base areas in Laos and Cambodia.

There is a flat prohibition against the use of Laos and Cambodia for infiltration into Vietnam or, for that matter, into any other country.

Finally, there is a requirement that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Laos and Cambodia, and it is clearly understood that North Vietnamese troops are considered foreign with respect to Laos and Cambodia.

Now, as to the conflict within these countries which could not be formally settled in an agreement which is not signed by the parties of that conflict, let me make this statement, without elaborating it: It is our firm expectation that within a short period of time there will be a formal cease-fire in Laos which, in turn, will lead to a withdrawal of all foreign forces from Laos and, of course, to the end of the use of Laos as a corridor of infiltration.

Secondly, the situation in Cambodia, as those of you who have studied it will know, is somewhat more complex because there are several parties headquartered in different countries. Therefore, we can say about Cambodia that it is our expectation that a de facto cease-fire will come into being over a period of time relevant to the execution of this agreement.

Our side will take the appropriate measures to indicate that it will not attempt to change the situation by force. We have reason to believe that our position is clearly understood by all concerned parties, and I will not go beyond this in my statement.

Chapters VIII and IX: Normalizing Relations; Implementation

Chapter VIII deals with the relationship between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

As I have said in my briefings on October 26 and on December 16, and as the President affirmed on many occasions, the last time in his speech last evening, the United States is seeking a peace that heals. We have had many armistices in Indochina. We want a peace that will last.

And, therefore, it is our firm intention in our relationship to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to move from hostility to normalization, and from normalization to conciliation and cooperation. And we believe that under conditions of peace we can contribute throughout Indochina to a realization of the humane aspirations of all the people of Indochina, And we will, in that spirit, perform our traditional role of helping people realize these aspirations in peace.

Chapter IX of the agreement is the usual implementing provision.

So much for the agreement.

PROVISIONS OF THE PROTOCOLS

Prisoners of War

Now, let me say a word about the protocols. There are four protocols or implementing instruments to the agreement: on the return of American prisoners, on the implementation and institution of an international control commission, on the regulations with respect to the cease-fire and the implementation and institution of a joint military commission among the concerned parties, and a protocol about the deactivation and removal of mines.

I have given you the relevant provisions of the protocol concerning the return of prisoners. They will be returned at periodic intervals in Hanoi to American authorities and not to American private groups. They will be picked up by American airplanes, except for prisoners held in the southern part of South Vietnam, which will be released at designated points in the South, again, to American authorities.

We will receive on Saturday, the day of the signing of the agreement, a list of all American prisoners held throughout Indochina. And both parties, that is to say, all parties have an obligation to assist each other in obtaining information about the prisoners, missing in action, and about the location of graves of American personnel throughout Indochina.

The International Commission has the right to visit the last place of detention of the prisoners, as well as the place from which they are released.

International Commission of Control and Supervision [ICCS]

Now, to the International Control Commission. You will remember that one of the reasons for the impasse in December was the difficulty of agreeing with the North Vietnamese about the size of the International Commission, its function, or the location of its teams.

On this occasion, there is no point in rehashing all the differences. It is, however, useful to point out that at that time the proposal of the North Vietnamese was that the International Control Commission have a membership of 250, no organic logistics or communication, dependent entirely for its authority to move on the party it was supposed to be investigating; and over half of its personnel were supposed to be located in Saigon, which is not the place where most of the infiltration that we were concerned with was likely to take place.

We have distributed to you an outline of the basic structure of this Commission. Briefly stated, its total number is 1,160, drawn from Canada, Hungary, Indonesia, and Poland. It has a headquarters in Saigon. It has seven regional teams, 26 teams based in localities throughout Vietnam which were chosen either because forces were in contact there or because we estimated that these were the areas where the violations of the cease-fire were most probable.

There are 12 teams at border crossing points. There are seven teams that are set aside for points of entry, which have yet to be chosen, for the replacement of military equipment. That is for Article 7 of the agreement. There will be three on each side and there will be no legitimate point of entry into South Vietnam other than those three points. The other border and coastal teams are there simply to make certain that no other entry occurs, and any other entry is by definition illegal. There has to be no other demonstration except the fact that it occurred.

This leaves one team free for use, in particular, at the discretion of the Commission. And, of course, the seven teams that are being used for the return of the prisoners can be used at the discretion of the Commission after the prisoners are returned.

There is one reinforced team located at the Demilitarized Zone and its responsibility extends along the entire Demilitarized Zone. It is in fact a team and a, half. It is 50 percent larger than a normal border team and it represents one of the many compromises that were made, between our insistence on two teams and their insistence on one team. By a brilliant stroke, we settled on a team and a half.

With respect to the operation of the International Commission, it is supposed to operate on the principle of unanimity, which is to say that its reports, if they are Commission reports, have to have the approval of all four members. However, each member is permitted to submit his own opinion, so that as a practical matter any member of the Commission can make a finding of a violation and submit a report, in the first instance to the parties.

The International Commission will report for the time being to the four parties to the agreement. An international conference will take place, we expect, at the Foreign Ministers' level within a month of signing the agreement.

That international conference will establish a relationship between the International Commission and itself, or any other international body that is mutually agreed upon, so that the International Commission is not only reporting to the parties that it is investigating. But, for the time being, until the international conference has met, there was no other practical group to which the International Commission could report.

Cease-fire and Joint Military Commissions

In addition to this international group, there are two other institutions that are supposed to supervise the cease-fire. There is, first of all, an institution called the Four-Party Joint Military Commission, which is composed of ourselves and the three Vietnamese parties, which is located in the same place as the International Commission, charged with roughly the same functions, but, as a practical matter, it is supposed to conduct the preliminary investigations, its disagreements are automatically referred to the International Commission, and, moreover, any party can request the International Commission to conduct an investigation regardless of what the Four-Party Commission does and regardless of whether the Four-Party Commission has completed its investigation or not.

After the United States has completed its withdrawal, the Four- Party Military Commission will be transformed into a Two-Party Commission composed of the two South Vietnamese parties. The total number of supervisory personnel, therefore, will be in the neighborhood of 4,500 during the period that the Four-Party Commission is in existence, and in the neighborhood of about 3,000 after the Four-Party Commission ceases operating and the Two-Party Commission comes into being.

Deactivation and Removal of Mines

Finally, there is a protocol concerning the removal and deactivation of mines which is self-explanatory and simply explains-discusses the relationship between our efforts and the efforts of the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] concerning the removal and deactivation of mines which is one of the obligations we have undertaken in the agreement. Signing The Documents

Now, let me point another problem. On Saturday, January 27, the Secretary of State on behalf of the United States, will sign the agreement bringing the cease-fire and all the other provisions of the agreement and the protocols into force. He will sign in the morning a document involving four parties, and in the afternoon a document between us and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. these documents are identical, except that the preamble differs in both cases.

The reason for this somewhat convoluted procedure is that, while the agreement provides that the two South Vietnamese parties should settle their disputes in an atmosphere of national reconciliation and concord, I think it is safe to say that they have not yet quite reached that point; indeed, that they have not yet been prepared to recognize each other's existence.

This being the case, it was necessary to devise one document in which neither of the South Vietnamese parties was mentioned by name and, therefore, no other party could be mentioned by name, on the principle of equality. So the four-party document, the document that will have four signatures can be read with great care and you will not know until you get to the signature page whom exactly it applies to. It refers only to the parties participating in the Paris Conference, which are, of course, well known to the parties participating in the Paris Conference.

It will be signed on two separate page. The United States and the GVN [Government of the Republic of Vietnam] are signing on one page and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and its ally are signing on a separate page. And this procedure has aged us all by several years.

Then there is another document which will be signed by the Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the afternoon. That document, in its operative provisions, is word for word the same as the document which will be signed in the morning, and which contains the obligations to which the two South Vietnamese parties are obligated.

It differs from that document only in the preamble and in its concluding paragraph. In the preamble, it says the United States; with the concurrence of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, and the DRV, with the concurrence of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, and the rest is the same, and then the concluding paragraph has the same adaptation. That document, of course, is not signed by ether Saigon or its opponent and, therefore, their obligations are derived from the Four-party document.

I do not want to take any time in going into the abstruse legalisms, I simply wanted to explain to you why there were two different signature ceremonies, and why, when we handed out the text of the agreement, we appended to the document which contains the legal obligations which apply to everybody-namely, the four parties-why we appended another section that contained a different preamble and a different implementing paragraph which is going to be signed by the Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

This will be true with respect to the agreement and three of the protocols. The fourth protocol, regarding the removal of mines, applies only to the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and, therefore, we are in the happy position of having to sign only one document.

SUMMARY OF THE NEGOTIATIONS

Now, then let me summarize for you how we got to this point, and some of the aspects of the agreement that we consider significant, and then I will answer your questions.

As you know, when I met with this group on December 16, we had to report that the negotiations in Paris seemed to have reached a stalemate. We had not agreed at that time, although we didn't say so on the-we could not find a formula to take into account the conflicting views with respect to signing. There were disagreements with respect to the DMZ and with the associated aspects of what identity South Vietnam was to have in the agreement.

There was a total deadlock with respect to the protocols, which I summed up in the December 16 press conference. The North Vietnamese approach to international control and ours were so totally at variance that it seemed impossible at that point to come to any satisfactory conclusion. And there began to be even some concern that the separation which we thought we had achieved in October between the release of our prisoners and the question of civilian prisoners in South Vietnam was breaking down.

When we reassembled on January 8, we did not do so in the most cordial atmosphere that I remember. However, by the morning of January 9, it became apparent that both sides were determined to make a serious effort to break the deadlock in negotiations. And we adopted a mode of procedure by which issues in the agreement

and issues of principle with respect to the protocols were discussed at meetings between Special Adviser Le Duc Tho and myself, while concurrently an American team headed by Ambassador Sullivan and a Vietnamese team headed by Vice Minister Thach would work on the implementation of the principles as they applied to the protocols.

For example, the Special Adviser and I might agree on the principle of border control posts and their number, but then the problem of how to locate them, according to what criteria, and with what mode of operation presented enormous difficulties.

Let me on this occasion also point out that these negotiations required the closest cooperation throughout our Government, between the White House and the State Department, between all the elements of our team, and that, therefore, the usual speculation of who did what to whom is really extraordinarily misplaced.

Without a cooperative effort by everybody, we could not have achieved what we have presented last night and this morning,

The Special Adviser and I then spent the week, first on working out the unresolved issues in the-agreement, and then the unresolved issues with respect to the protocols, and finally, the surrounding circumstances of schedules and procedures.

Ambassador Sullivan remained behind to draft the implementing provisions of the -agreements that had been achieved during the week. The Special Adviser and I remained in close contact.

So by the time we met again yesterday, the issues that remained were very few, indeed, were settled relatively rapidly. And I may on this occasion also point out that while the North Vietnamese are the most difficult people to negotiate with that I have ever encountered when they do not want to settle, they are also the most effective that I have dealt with when they finally decide to settle. So that we have gone through peaks and valleys in these negotiations Of extraordinary intensity.

Now then, let me sum up where this agreement bas left us, first, with respect to what we said we would try to achieve, then with respect to some of its significance, and, finally, with respect to the future.

First, when I met this group on October 26 and delivered myself of some epigrammatic phrases, we obviously did not want to give a complete checklist and we did not want to release the agreement as t then stood, because it did not seem to us desirable to provide a checklist against which both sides would then have to measure success and failure in terms of their prestige.

At that time, too, we did not say that it had always been foreseen that there would be another three or four days of negotiation after this tentative agreement, had been reached. The reason why we asked for another negotiation was because it seemed to us at that point that for a variety of reasons, which I explained then and again on December 16, those issues could not be settled within the time frame that the North Vietnamese expected.

It is now a matter of history, and it is, therefore, not essential to go into a debate of on what we based this judgment. But that was the reason why the agreement was not signed on October 31, and not any of the speculations that have been so much in print and on television.

Now, what did we say on October 26 we wanted to achieve? We said, first of all, that we wanted to make sure that the control machinery would be in place at the time of the cease-fire. We did this because we had information that there were plans by the other side to mount a major offensive to coincide with the signing of the cease-fire agreement.

This objective has been achieved by the fact that the protocols will be signed on the same day as the agreement, by the fact that the International Control Commission and the Four-Party Military Commission will meet within 24 hours of the agreement going into effect, or no later than Monday morning, Saigon time, that the regional teams of the International Control Commission will be in place 48 hours thereafter, and that all other teams will be in place within 15 and a maximum of 30 days after that.

Second, we said that we wanted to compress the time interval between the cease-fires we expected in Laos and Cambodia and the cease-fire in Vietnam.

For reasons which I have explained to you, we cannot be as specific about the cease-fires in Laos and Cambodia as we can about the agreements that are being signed on Saturday, but we can say with confidence that the formal cease-fire in Laos will go into effect in a considerably shorter period of time than was envisaged in October, and since the cease-fire in Cambodia depends to some extent on developments in Laos, we expect the same to be true there.

We said that certain linguistic ambiguities should be removed. The linguistic ambiguities were produced by the somewhat extraordinary negotiating procedure whereby a change in the English text did not always produce a correlative change in the Vietnamese text. All the linguistic ambiguities to which we referred in October have, in fact, been removed. At that time I mentioned only one, and therefore I am free to recall it.

I pointed out that the United States position had consistently been a rejection of the imposition of a coalition government on the people of South Vietnam. I said then that the National Council of Reconciliation was not a coalition government, nor was it conceived as a coalition government.

The Vietnamese language text, however, permitted an interpretation of the words "administrative structure" as applied to the National Council of Reconciliation which would have lent itself to the interpretation that it came close or was identical with a coalition government.

You will find that in the text of this agreement the words "administrative structure" no longer exist and therefore this particular, shall we say, ambiguity has been removed.

I pointed out in October that we had to find a procedure for signing which would be acceptable to all the parties for whom obligations were involved. This has been achieved.

I pointed out on October 26 that we would seek greater precision with respect to certain 'obligations particularly, without spelling them out, as they applied to the Demilitarized Zone and to the obligations with respect to Laos and Cambodia. That too, has been achieved.

And I pointed out in December that we were looking for some means, some expression, which would make clear that the two parts of Vietnam would live in peace with each other and that neither side would impose its solution on the other by force.

This is now explicitly provided, and we have achieved formulations in which in a number of paragraphs, such as Article 14, 18(e) and 20, there are specific references to the sovereignty of South Vietnam.

There are specific references, moreover, to the same thing in Article 6 and Article 11 of the ICCS protocol. There are specific references to the right of the South Vietnamese people to self-determination.

And, therefore, we believe that we have achieved the substantial adaptations that we asked for on October 26. We did not increase our demands after October 26 and we substantially achieved the clarifications which we sought.

Now then, it is obvious that a war that has lasted for 10 years will have many elements that cannot be completely satisfactory to all the parties concerned. And in the two periods where the North Vietnamese were working with dedication and seriousness on a conclusion, the period in October and the period after we resumed talks on January 8, it was always clear that a lasting peace could come about only if neither side sought to achieve everything that it had wanted; indeed, that stability depended on the relative satisfaction and therefore on the relative dissatisfaction of all of the parties been a rejection of the imposition of a coalition government on the people of South Vietnam. I said then that the National Council of Reconciliation was not a coalition government, nor was it conceived as a coalition government.

The Vietnamese language text, however, permitted an interpretation of the words "administrative structure" as applied to the National Council of Reconciliation which would have lent itself to the interpretation that it came close or was identical with a coalition government.

You will find that in the text of this agreement the words "administrative structure" no longer exist and therefore this particular, shall we say, ambiguity has been removed.

I pointed out in October that we had to find a procedure for signing which would be acceptable to all the parties for whom obligations were involved. This has been achieved.

I pointed out on October 26 that we would seek greater precision with respect to certain obligations particularly, without spelling them out, as they applied to the Demilitarized Zone and to the obligations with respect to Laos and Cambodia. That, too, has been achieved.

And I pointed out in December that we were looking for some means, some expression, which would make clear that the two parts of Vietnam would live in peace with each other and that neither side would impose its solution on the other by force.

This is now explicitly provided, and we have achieved formulations in which in a number of paragraphs, such as Article 14, IB(e) and 20, there are specific references to the sovereignty of South Vietnam.

There are specific references, moreover, to the same thing in Article 6 and Article 11 of the ICCS protocol. There are specific references to the right of the South Vietnamese people to self-determination.

And, therefore, we believe that we have achieved the substantial adaptations that we asked for on October 26. We did not increase our demands after October 26 and we substantially achieved the clarifications which we sought.

Now then, it is obvious that a war that has lasted for 10 years will have many elements that cannot be completely satisfactory to all the parties concerned. And in the two periods where the North Vietnamese were working with dedication and seriousness on a conclusion, the period in October and the period after we resumed talks on January 8, it was always clear that a lasting peace could come about only if neither side sought to achieve everything that it had wanted; indeed, that stability depended on the relative satisfaction and therefore on the relative dissatisfaction of all of the parties concerned. And therefore, it is also clear that whether this agreement brings a lasting peace or not depends not only on its provisions but also on the spirit in which it is implemented.

It will be our challenge in the future to move the controversies that could not be stilled by any one document from the level of military conflict to the level of positive human aspirations, and to absorb the enormous talents and dedication of the people of Indochina in tasks of construction rather than in tasks of destruction.

We will make a major effort to move to create a framework where we hope in a short time the animosities and the hatred and the suffering of this period will be seen as aspects of the past, and where the debates concern differences of opinion as to how to achieve positive goals.

Of course, the hatreds will not rapidly disappear, and, of course, people who have fought for 25 years will not easily give up their objectives, but also people who have suffered for 25 years may at last come to know that they can achieve their real satisfaction by other and less brutal means.

The President said yesterday that we have to remain vigilant, and so we shall, but we shall also dedicate ourselves to positive efforts. And as for us at home, it should be clear by now that no one in this war has had a monopoly of moral insight. And now that at last we have achieved an agreement in which the United States did not prescribe the political future to its allies, an agreement which should preserve the dignity and the self-respect of all of the parties, together with healing the wounds in Indochina we can begin to heal the wounds in America.

Now, I will be glad to answer any questions.