THE PRESIDENT'S DAILY BRIEF 10 APRIL 1968

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: President's Daily Brief 1961-1969
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 0005974373
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: T
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: September 16, 2015
• Document Release Date: September 16, 2015
• Publication Date: April 10, 1968

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The President's Daily Brief
--Tryp-Seeret-- 10 April 1968
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DAILY BRIEF
10 APRIL 1968
1. South Vietnam
2. Middle East
Allied forces fanning out from
Khe Sanh are still reporting only light
to moderate contact with the North Viet-
namese in the area. Prisoners report
that the enemy is suffering from low
morale, insufficient food supplies, and
heavy casualties caused by B-52 strikes.
Elsewhere, allied spoiling opera-
tions have gotten under way in the Sai-
gon area and on the coast near the De-
militarized Zone.
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3. Jarring Mission
4. Israel-Jordan
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sign that things are simmering down. The
Israelis are saying publicly that the
"hot pursuit" action of two days ago is
now the approved tactic for dealing with
terrorists. We may therefore see more
short quick border crossings in the fu-
ture.
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5. South Korea
6. Philippines
President Marcos, yielding to do-
mestic pressure, is apparently now will-
ing to replace part of the Filipino
military engineer contingent in Viet-
nam with medical personnel. This is in
spite of word from Saigon that it needs
the engineers more.
Marcos feels he cannot push too
hard for retention of the engineers
since he has just weathered one politi-
cal storm: the recent disclosure of
Philippine plotting to stir up trouble
in Malaysian Borneo. Besides, many
Filipinos, including Marcos himself,
have said they think the need for a
Philippine presence in Vietnam has been
lessened by President Johnson's 31 March
speech.
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7. USSR-Iran
8. USSR
9. Ethiopia
Although Kosygin's visit to Tehran
did not produce anything startling, he
made some modest headway in increasing
the USSR's respectability in Iran.
Satellite photography in late
March disclosed a missile on a launcher
at each of the three completed anti-
missile complexes around Moscow. It
appears that construction of the com-
plex as a whole is on schedule and will
be finished by 1970 or 1971.
Security forces are on the alert
for a student riot at the university
in Addis Ababa today. The students
have long been vociferously critical
of Haile Selassie's government, and
they are strongly anti-US as well.
There were disturbances with heavy anti-
American overtones just last week.
Faced with the unpalatable alter-
natives of giving in to the students or
cracking down on them, Haile Selassie
would almost certainly choose the latter.
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FOR THE PRESIDENT'S EYES ONLY
1.) Special Daily Report on North Vietnam
2.) North Vietnamese Reflections of U S
Political Attitudes
Top Secret
10 1Ar i 1 1968
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Special Daily Report on North Vietnam
for the President's Eyes Only
10 April 1968
I. NOTES ON THE SITUATION
* * *
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Tough Line for Vietnamese Audience: Hanoi broad-
cast an extremely hard editorial on 8 April. The
broadcast was for Vietnamese consumption and was
taken from a commentary in the Army daily the day be-
fore which claimed President Johnson's speech of 31
March was tantamount to an admission of military de-
feat in South Vietnam.
The bombing limitation was forced on the Presi-
dent by world opinion, the commentary said. It claimed
the Tet offensive and General Westmoreland's reassign-
ment as "evidence" the US was near military collapse.
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The commentary, also emphasized the fact that
Hanoi's terms for a settlement of the war were un-
changed--the four points of the North Vietnamese
and the political platform of the Liberation Front--
and warned that the fighting would continue until
these objectives were obtained. It predicted an ex-
tremely bitter round of fighting in the future as
the war entered a new stage.
This is the harshest Hanoi statement on the
war since its offer on 3 April to begin "pretalk
talks" with the US. It is almost certainly de-
signed to convince the South Vietnamese Communists
that Hanoi is not about to abandon them in the
course of contacts with the US. It will also help
to steel the people of the North for continuing
heavy burdens.
* * *
More on Bombing: Hanoi propaganda is continu-
ing to portray US bombings in the area south of the
20th parallel as particularly intensive and inhumane.
On 8 April, in an international English language
broadcast, Hanoi claimed a raid on a Catholic ham-
let on 4 April had killed or injured many people,
including a 60-year-old woman and a day-old child.
Broadcasts such as this are part of the effort
to demonstrate that the US is still harboring "ag-
gressive designs" and not really curbing its mili-
tary activity. Hanoi evidently believes such commen-
tary places additional pressure on the US for a full
end to the bombing.
* * *
II. NORTH VIETNAMESE REFLECTIONS OF US POLITICAL
ATTITUDES ON THE WAR
Pham Van Dong Gives Interviews: Premier Pham
Van Dong has given a series of interviews to non-
Communist correspondents recently in an effort to
reach large Free World audiences. The texts of these
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interviews are not yet available, but, in addition
to Charles Collingwood, Japanese, Latin American,
and French journalists all claim to have inter-
viewed the Premier in the past few days. On 8 April
Hanoi broadcast a part of the conversations with
Collingwood, but only that part which appealed to
the American people to support a US troop withdrawal
from Vietnam. With that exception, Hanoi has not
yet broadcast any of these interviews, presumably
to give the correspondents a chance to get their
stories filed first.
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