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This Copy For PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON'S NEWS CONFERENCE #35 Held in the East Room At the White House Washington, D. C. October 26, 1973 At 7:01 P.M. EDT (Friday) Official White House Transcript THE PRESIDENT: Will you be seated, please? Ladies and gentlemen, before going to your questions, I have a statement with regard to the Mideast which I think will anticipate some of the questions. because this will update the information which is breaking rather fast in that area, as you know, for the past two days. The cease-fire is holding. There have been some viola- tions, but generally speaking it can be said that it is holding at this time. As you know, as a result of the U.N. resolution which was agreed to yesterday by a vote of 14 to 0, a peacekeeping force will go to the Mideast, and this force, however, will not include any forces from the major powers, including, of course, the United States and the Soviet Union. The question, however, has arisen as to whether observers from major powers could go to the Mideast. My up-to-the-minute report on that, and I just talked to Dr. Kissinger five minutes before coming down, is this: We will send observers to the Mideast if requested by the Secretary General of the United Nations, and we have reason to expect that we will receive such a request. With regard to the peacekeeping force, I think it is important for all of you ladies and gentlemen, and particu- larly for those listening on radio and television, to know why the United States has insisted that major powers not be part of a peacekeeping force, and that major powers' not intro- duce military forces into the Mideast. A very significant and potentially explosive crisis developed on Wednesday of this week. We obtained information which led us to believe that the Soviet Union was planning to send a very substantial force