American Experience; Nixon; 302; Nixon speech to ABC reporter

He missed his next and welcome to Japan. How long will you be here. Well I'm going to be here a total of three nights and parts of two days. Well I presume the highlight of your round the world trip has been in Saigon. Did what you see there make you optimistic pessimistic. I would say that going to Saigon now and comparing it with the times I've been there in the past that the situation looks better now than it has on the four previous occasions in which I visited Saigon. There is no question now as to the outcome in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong are not going to succeed. The question now is one of time. How long it's going to take and also what will happen after the military phase of the struggle is over. On that score I believe that progress is being made and that we can look to a successful conclusion with then shall we say a reasonable time when everyone seems to be playing a numbers game about the number of American troops

needed to fight you here figures four hundred thousand seven hundred thousand a million. What do you think. No one could be an expert who isn't in the military and even they when you ask this question as I ask everybody I talked to didn't get down to two specific terms.