Nixon, Haldeman & Colson on PRC initiative and Vietnam War

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Oh, everyone here, you're free the minute you visit.

Oh, hi.

No, no, don't hurry.

No.

No, don't hurry, don't hurry.

I'll be here at six.

Buster?

Can you see anything now?

Take his hands off.

So flabbergasted, he didn't know what the hell to do.

Well, of course, it's a hell of a shocker.

But he's smart, too.

He said, well, I don't know what the hell he was doing.

He knows it's not that way, though.

He would know.

But that's very damn important.

That's one of the things that's damn important at this point, to have a relationship with him.

Secretary of the Treasury, where he is in on things, and he is a consultant, and he doesn't have this feeling he's pushed aside.

You see what I mean?

You see, with O'Connell in this job, you really then wouldn't just share his facts.

I wouldn't have a second vice presidential staff.

I really wouldn't.

I'd just say he'd use the National Security Council staff.

In other words, he wouldn't try to set up a second empire of his own.

You know what I mean?

That's the right way to do it.

It's that way.

And he'd obviously have to have his own press guy and his own personal staff, but that's all.

No, I have the whole domestic council and all the rest who work with him exactly the same way.

He's sitting on everything.

Right?

Do you think that's what he's thinking about?

It's just good to have a guy of that confidence sitting and to bounce things across.

I mean, do you notice how good he is in the meeting too?

Because there's nothing documentary about the mail.

It's fixed all the time.

It's very, very good.

He thinks and decides what he thinks so that he's ready, and he doesn't word it out, but he's ready when you ask him, he knows what he thinks.

And he changes his mind as the things change.

But the way we're doing this is just getting with it.

I don't want to bring him to the point where he has to be shot and say no.

I think we've got to bring him to the point where he's in on the deal and where he's just very much the man.

And he's also got to strongly realize, he's just got to say that he just can't realize that the president's a little coward.

In fact, he thinks he's the only man who should be president, period.

So, you know, that's something that he'd be glad to hear.

He must know it's true.

And also, he believes it, I'm sure.

Yeah, and I just don't, that, you know, I have no ambition for it.

I just don't believe, really.

I mean, I think...

I think Pat has to say that.

I don't want to interrupt.

Dick Whitlam has a long article in Harper's this month on John Connolly, the Nixon-Connolly arrangement.

He obviously had an interview with Connolly because he's picked up some stuff.

Well, at least it sure appears he did.

He sells out the, he's quite cynical about it.

He puts Conley in the driver's seat.

He says Conley's in a no-lose position.

If things go right, he'll get the credit.

If they go wrong, he'll get the blame.

And he makes that thesis.

But he also gets into the vice presidential thing.

He says if the economy works out, forget which way he goes, if it works out right, then you'll put him on the ticket.

works out wrong, you can't win anyway, so you won't go on the ticket.

And, uh...

There is some talk about his being Vice President.

Yes.

There has been a lot of talk.

I didn't know that this is...

It's not a private instance of, you know, it's in the realm of the kinds of things.

It strikes me more because I know it's for real than I think it does for real.

Have they talked about anybody else in the cabinet?

Not Laird?

No.

Rogers?

No.

No, because they can't.

There's talk always about whether Agnew would stay on the ticket, and if not, what would you do?

It's quite clear that Connolly, though, is coming to the conclusion that Agnew is going to get off.

As I told you, it was pretty much of that, pretty, quite strongly of that conclusion.

He noted the Newsweek piece.

It was pretty bad.

During that piece.

The interesting thing is Newsweek doesn't have anyone with it.

So whoever did the Newsweek piece that picked it up from somebody else was one of those

Two bounce, two cushion bounces.

What is that there?

Oh, November 9th.

It's pretty much the right date.

Yeah.

November 9th.

Let's check out the vice president's birthday.

I don't think you're doing it in and I don't think it's going to be hard to figure out how to go out and figure it out right.

It's one of those right things that everybody comes out where he wants to.

I really think, and I think Bryce feels it, that he wants out.

And not because he feels he's failed so much as he's

Feels he's in an impossible position.

I don't think he'll go away in bad shape.

I think he'd stay on and be in bad shape because as he gets cut up, it does bother him.

He is sensitive.

And he can't fight back.

Right.

If he gets out as a commentator, I keep assuming that's what it is.

I may be dead wrong.

He may be going on as vice president of Pepsi-Cola or something.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I, you, have been also, and there is no company except General Motors that pays $500,000 a year.

There ain't nothing that's going to pay a former vice president $500,000 a year on the rest of the public relations.

That's my view.

That's right.

I don't know what else it can be.

It just isn't.

You're right.

There isn't anything else.

You know, even as a lawyer, I don't know.

Of course, it could be that it's some land promotion deal or that he'll make 500 or something like that.

He's the type of reporter, you know, some Bob Hobart link letter deal in Palm Springs or something like that.

Or building a new country club or something like that.

Drilling oil wells or something.

It could, he's just, he is enough of a fool and that kind of stuff, and he's sort of,

He was enchanted by that.

He loved that stuff, that other stuff that he's fallen into.

But even if he did that, if he made that kind of dough and had the freedom to move around and talk something, he'd be damned for his life.

Curiously, I don't know if all I can imagine is one of the most conservative men in the world.

Yeah.

It's for the tentative.

Well, it's interesting.

It's not everybody, but it's gotten most.

It's damn near gotten everybody.

The only, it, you know, the Schmitz's people are just talking.

There has to be help.

If you had a second coming in of Christ, there'd be a few people that'd be against it.

And

The birchers, that's their, that's their line.

You gave, gave, which makes it God sent, to a grandson, and he had to grab it.

But it's, it sure does make sense beyond that.

The fact that even Bill Nolan is able to swallow it with a reasonable amount of grace is, I think is amazing.

This guy.

senator for all those years.

What about, let's see, tomorrow, we'd better send something up with regard to the convention.

We've got to have a good...

I'm sorry.

We've got to have a good plan.

We've got to get these out of the way.

We've got to get the convention out of the way.

Get it out of the way.

And those are the ones.

budget meeting started at 9 o'clock.

I have to work out a plan with them.

What I think we ought to do is run three, if they have four sessions, let's do three of them on Friday and one Saturday morning to finish up, and that's the way to get it done.

So you run from, say, 9 to 11, and then another one right then from 11 to 1, and then break to 1, and then run again from 2 to 4 and quit.

We'll start at 8.30 if you want.

If you don't think you need to.

If you want.

You know, since this is the last time we're holding out here anyway, it's just better to get that done.

I think everybody's well off to get the hell out of here Saturday afternoon.

Don't you think so?

— 1 min 34 s with no transcribed speech —

As I told you, I just really feel that the formula for many events now comes clearly in the view that I'm planning, and that is surprise.

I really like the surprise option, and so that'd be the

He said, I'm damn well-planned.

Be a little more disordered.

I'll say that the, like I said, I'm going to go to a ballgame.

I'm going to go to a goddamn ballgame.

So nobody gets there.

We didn't have an escort and all the rest.

What's wrong with that?

That's good.

You don't need an escort.

They don't need to clear the streets.

Escort doesn't.

It doesn't reach you there in two minutes.

Silence.

Give me the other one.

Sometimes when you get there, it comes from the press, of course.

But they get out there.

They know you're there.

They wouldn't go anywhere.

It's fortunate press rights gets on the radio if you want.

I mean, but you don't...

I didn't think we ought to listen to it.

It looks as if we exploit everything.

And so I go to a game because I enjoy the baseball game.

Well, people like that, that you snuck out to the ballgame at night.

That's the kind of thing that anybody would do.

You know, he gets tired of doing his homework and runs out and goes to the ballgame room.

That's why I was asked to go to the game.

That's why, for example, I'm going to do it on occasion now.

I'm not going to do it like Johnson could, that's on occasion, if we get another ball.

I'm going to take Florida to Pierce on the spur of the moment.

I just decided in 15 minutes, oh my God, I'm still trying.

I'm going to spend a couple days with Florida.

Take off.

No arrest convoy.

No news.

What do you think?

I don't think we need to then call everybody.

And then you don't get hung up with that thing of agonizing.

Should I go?

Should I not go?

And is it really going to be good?

And also, I'm really committed to go now.

So I have to go.

How can I leave?

And I'd like to get out of it.

I'm pretty sure.

And then they write that the president canceled his trip to Florida.

Why did he cancel his trip to Florida?

That becomes a big deal.

I think it's great.

You take off for the weekends.

You take off.

You can't do it.

Somewhere every weekend.

And I think Florida, you ought to look at them.

Airline can't date them.

You can just about.

I think so, yeah.

Just about look at them.

You have to wait another day.

You have to stay two nights to make it worth it.

At least two nights to make it worth going.

It's worth two nights.

But how can you go down there on a Friday night?

Friday afternoon, stay there Friday night, Saturday night, come back here Sunday night.

You really, it's almost worth it on that.

Even if you don't get that third day.

You have all day Saturday.

All day Saturday and all day Sunday.

Come out after dinner Sunday night, you have dinner down there.

Right.

Get there Friday and have dinner and a movie.

Have a movie Saturday night.

And go out on the boat.

and two hours on the plane coming back Sunday night is all the work you need to do over the weekend, which you can put in a little time.

And to that I'm speaking, I'm not bothering, if you know it, for a week before the, while I was in California, and since, I'm not bothering with it in some ways.

I didn't read one weekly.

But I'm not keen on reading it now.

I don't like to read blurbs.

I don't like to read all the stuff where everybody says, this and that is good.

I don't do that.

I did a quick, quick magazine.

So you let me know what you can do anyway on the news summaries and anything in there that I really ought to know about and see.

I'll take a quick look at the front page of each paper, and that's all.

In other words, if he doesn't become a Democrat or things of that sort, then the people are going to think I should know.

But what it is, that kind of thing might be involved in some big development or some major...

We'll have to whip up a briefing book with the idea of a press conference.

Office press conference next week.

I'm sure.

Okay.

I don't think we should be getting ready for him yet because I don't know when this is the right temperature at the moment.

This is only Wednesday.

We should let him get some time over the weekend or something like that.

He can start on Monday.

It's hard for him.

The less time he has, the harder it is.

I wouldn't do it until Thursday.

Right.

So you have a weekend.

Henry really ought to be giving some thought to how you answer the China and Vietnam questions, though, shouldn't he?

The reason that we can't, you don't know in Vietnam.

That's right, that's right.

And I, you all know the two, too.

The whole thing is an office conference, but if we don't do it this week, Bob will do it next week.

Next week, I might even do it earlier in the week.

See?

Everybody has a good one.

Yeah.

Okay.

One thing.

In California, Henry obviously is going to go.

Your thought is not to take any other staff out, is that right?

I don't think so.

We were talking about it, but is there any reason for anybody else to go?

If there is, we'll go, but no.

Henry is going on vacation.

And also, we might have to talk about who shot John.

Do you want Rose out there?

Or should we leave it up to her to go if she wants?

It's really, really debased, ironical at him.

like Galbraith, Gardner, Silas, and of course not writing me, but coming in to tell Henry that.

It is unbelievable.

It really is.

They don't know what to do with a prophet.

Do they?

I mean, they can't do nothing.

They can't attack it.

They can't attack you.

You get one hell of a reaction now when someone starts taking you on when you're now the front symbol for this country and feeding the China.

I haven't thought about that, but you put a shell, a bulletproof shell around yourself.

It seems to me that

virtually impenetrable that they, nobody can take a shot at you between now and the time you make the trip.

Well, it's going to be hard for them to take shots at you on any, if they, if they can, however, except domestically, of course, even domestically.

But if they can just, if some of our guys can get up and outrage and say, what in the hell, the president's on this trip and I'm standing by the president and I support the president.

That's what we really need right now.

You know, we always should do that for Eisenhower.

You know, even when you're just doing it, boy, do the damn thing.

You got a good point there.

We should go to California.

You've got to have somebody there.

You've got to have one person there, you know, somebody to handle basically the papers.

You know what I mean?

There are...

I will have to sign something, you know.

Why do you do that?

We don't need to take the staff.

I don't mean that you need that.

I don't think you need to take Alex and Steve and people like that.

I don't either.

And I think probably you can handle a whole damn thing there.

Because they can process the stuff here and ship it out, so it's...

Okay, we'll slow it down.

There isn't going to be that much.

There really isn't any more than... On the Asian trip, we were gone, what, ten days on those two weeks.

We didn't sign any papers just because... You've got to be prepared to do it.

Yeah.

We basically cleared up beforehand.

Or stock it up till afterwards.

You take a very...

As I told you, it was a ball game the other day.

Did I tell you the Little Negro Boy?

The Little Negro Boy at the ball game?

Well, they were, of course, a lot of them came, but they were autographs and all that.

More and more and more.

That's great.

Well, they always do, but this is a little one, for sure.

That's one of my eight, ten-year-old boys without some hand in bed.

He said, well, good luck.

Whatever that trip is, you're going to change.

Even an eight-year-old boy.

Whatever that trip is.

The awareness on that must be just, must be pretty high.

I don't know, you can't tell.

Well, you can, it must be quite aware.

It's very hard for anybody to avoid knowing him.

We had a big audience to begin with that night.

They all talked.

He had 45, he had a quarter of the population.

Not a person, pay attention.

The papers with banner headlines, that hits a hell of a lot of people, you know.

That still reaches a lot.

Then you have the news the next night, the news the next night, the news the next night.

And then from news magazines.

And, of course, on the other hand, Bob, that Pentagon Papers had that kind of play, too.

Yeah, but they didn't understand those.

And also, the Pentagon didn't care.

And they didn't have all that kind of play in the rest of the country.

They did on television.

They did it in the papers.

On the television.

They didn't get any awareness there, but I think that's more because they didn't understand it.

They didn't know what they were talking about and didn't care.

That may be it.

It's like, you know, if you're watching a television thing and they give a five minute thing about trout fishing in the Andes or something, you can sit and watch the whole thing and when it's all over you don't know what the guy was talking about because you're only interested in trout fishing in the Andes.

You missed it.

You're not having something so bad?

No.

Good.

I don't like people who are sensitive, though, whether they're in this office or the other.

Well, I'm sure he moved into one house.

I think that's one point.

And so the word of mouth, it creates the awareness.

Well, it's something that captures the imagination much more than some newspapers printed a bunch of old papers about how the war started.

Jesus Christ, Nixon's going to China.

How many people have spent their whole adult lives?

Most people, really, have spent their whole adult lives

Nobody goes to China without, with China not being a part of the world as far as any communication and contact is concerned.

Take it easy, son.

Take it easy.

Don't worry about it.

I mean, 21, 22 years, 20, 21 years.

22 years, but maybe it was 40, yeah, 49.

So anybody?

Under 40.

China's been closed.

I really hope you follow my suggestion on the coast of the U.

The U of China.

Yeah, there is...

There's surely something there.

But it's gotta be, gotta really seize upon that.

I was gonna, Rob just raised the question, he called my response on it just now.

On that, Mike Collins' job, he wondered what you would think of Bob White as a guy to bring in.

He just, he did advances.

Oh, yeah, the Bob White, you know, the Harold Tribune guy just now.

I guess Missouri.

What kind of a feeling you would have for him instead?

He's fine.

He's been suggested to him.

He just kind of treats him, I guess.

I like him.

He's for us.

He's a liberal, but he's for us.

He's a Democrat, I think.

That is what that is.

But he's all right.

Yeah, I'd say he'd be fine.

I don't know if he'd do it.

I think he's probably...

And maybe he won't bother.

Yeah, but he may do that.

Maybe just exactly what he wants to do.

Eliminate.

Sit out a little bit of sleep.

No, he's had enough of that before.

He'd love to come back.

And he's written some damn good stuff.

I'll tell you, his little paper has had some.

He's a good writer, exceptionally good editor.

He is a good writer.

Maybe if he could come back here, it would be better to use him someplace other than in the Public Commerce Office of the State Department.

That's still right.

He's enthusiastic.

He's probably interested in you.

All the great diplomatic coup and Americans' recent history is that Vietnam is finished.

He said these guys will never be confident enough of themselves to get out on the land.

They were before.

Even if nothing happens in Vietnam, we can keep this thing going now through the fall and winter just by having one event after another related to China.

Just telling you what he said.

And I showed him the memos, and I gave him some fill-in.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, geez.

I worked out what I told him he was going to get the memos that I prepared for you.

And on the end... No, he didn't know.

But he...

I got Hague.

I called Hague in and I showed him the attendance at the meeting.

And he didn't know the man was there?

No, he was perfectly all right.

I think we're sort of part of our program.

We're in good shape now.

He's breathing and you want to breathe yourself and whatever on that basis.

And he left enthusiastic.

Chuck, what I want to cover with you briefly

I think there is a very great opportunity here on a political side to work you.

And I hope we've got that, I understand, in your hands now on our stage.

Yes, and I've read some of it.

Who the hell has it?

I don't know that he's on board yet.

He's coming back.

Well, the point is that we're going to start with your sponsor.

Bob and I have been

about attention and I have been working on it sort of jointly with this person.

We've got a young fellow that won't work.

And we've got a young man who's, or you met, who came in with John O'Neill, Mel Stevens.

Yes.

Very, very young.

Yes.

Great job with some of the veterans.

Right.

And he's working.

We're moving him over into that youth area.

The point is that I think there is a great opportunity now to make a major breakthrough with youth.

The China thing increased.

Sure, and it's about their generation.

The Vietnam thing as time goes on, in one way or another, is going to re-illuminate the China thing as an enormous positive, because it's their generation.

Don't you agree, Henry?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, they can also delay it with stuff.

That's the reaction, which they're indicating.

It has a strong youth appeal.

So, what I was thinking, is that this may be the opportunity.

you know, a lot of young people in a way that is much more dramatic than we had ever dreamed of before.

And to anybody under 25, China has been a close nation for its entire...

I mean, it doesn't ever hurt a lot.

That's right.

It's exciting.

It's like one of those, or Mars, or something like that.

We can remember when China was open, and there was two times a kid under 25 can't.

That's right.

And so I was thinking if you would...

If you could really dig into them.

Well, I think, Bob, you better beef it up.

Let's get it beefed up, the youth thing.

Do we have enough of a, you know, you prepared, I understand.

It's a big memorandum.

You chucked it.

Bob Finch is not going to follow through on things.

You know that.

He just didn't come to it.

He's just busy with other things, you know.

He's in California and a lot of other things.

Well, what you would think is that Steele works under you, and he's great, and he's the guy that's putting together, he's putting together, and then Ritz is the guy that's the political guy that's at it.

But I think he's got a plan for, he's got an enormous opportunity because this is something you see where we're not going to deliver it simply to college.

And you're particularly going to hit, in terms of colleges, the Midwest, the far west, and the south.

In terms of the, you're going to go for high school, which are the college and the non-college.

That was an old Brock plan, I think, was working all the non-college youth.

That was their base Brock, is how you want to bring them in.

But I would like to see this soccer team work that group.

Well, this is, there's no question,

which wasn't the China initiative, at least the sample feelings you get back, it has hit the young people.

I've had that report from three people, including one who said, it's not our time with young groups last weekend.

It's kind of interesting.

I was talking to my daughter, who's now in London at the Stanford campus there.

So what did they think of the China announcement?

And do you know, Craig,

history professor at Stanford, who's apparently very outstanding.

Well, he's the guy that's running her thing.

She has two courses under them, a colloquium and a lecture course.

That's why she went to London at this time was because Craig was conducting a course.

And they only have three professors and 80 kids, so she can get pretty close to them.

But she's got two courses under Craig.

And I said, what did you think?

She said, we talked about it all through the colloquium today.

That was the subject.

And I said, well, what did they think?

And she said, well, it was very interesting.

The kids, all the kids in the class were just practically overwhelmed.

They were really excited about it.

I said, what did Craig think?

And she said, well, the kids were saying, this is going to re-elect Nixon, and some of them were saying that's a tragedy, that Nixon's going to get re-elected as a result of this.

But Craig jumped in and said, that's

Besides the point, Nixon was going to be re-elected anyway, but this makes his re-election a very important, epic, turning period in American history.

And he was arguing, the kids were arguing Nixon would have lost if this is not got him elected.

Craig was arguing Nixon was going to win either way, but now it's as good as it is where before maybe it wasn't going to be so good.

She said they could take the clinics for the whole thing, you know, on that basis.

She said there's a huge stir in London about the whole... Oh, yes.

Oh, I get leather.

...radio and everything.

It's all tremendous fuss about it, but it was interesting that there's a little isolated campus there.

You should have seen the Bratton column last week.

Is that right?

Oh, yeah.

She's from London?

No, no, Bratton from San Clemente.

Yeah.

In the London Sunday Times.

He wrote a column about Sheldon afterwards.

Yeah.

I mean, he didn't describe, he just described your study.

He didn't describe about the long planning and the magnificent specificity.

For a British newspaper, there's a bit more adjectives there than they use up in a month, usually.

And I get every second of the kids' association with him.

The sense of drama, of doing something, of there's something to get a hold of.

The boldness, the secrecy, and with all this talk, they really want a leader.

They want strength.

I've said this all along.

This has been my point all along.

They're starving.

Well, that's the whole point.

They don't get it from their parents or their professors or anybody else.

And they haven't felt they got it from the President.

Certainly not from their government.

Anywhere in the government.

And these kids are too young to remember Kennedy.

Some of them.

A lot of them.

But what Ashton said about Kennedy is dead right.

He was just a total fraud.

I mean, Kennedy never did anything.

He talked a great game.

I mean, you had done better by far than Kennedy before this.

And what exactly did Kennedy do?

There isn't anybody who could name five things.

He seemed to handle the missile crisis well, but there's two things to be said.

One, the missile crisis should never have occurred.

It was a mismanagement.

We had a similar thing in Triunfoegos, and we settled that within a week without a great drama.

In fact, ours was a little harder because the submarine base is harder to determine.

That's right.

Secondly, the only way he settled it is by making a deal in which we gave up bases we had always had in return for a base they had never had.

So that's what... That lost to America.

That's right.

He never announced that.

But this was the deal between Bobby Kennedy and Dupree to give up the bases in Italy and Turkey in return for the base in Cuba.

It was kind of interesting.

It took Teddy Kennedy...

four full days to find that comment on your charge.

It took less than 24 hours to take out a letter from Dean Acheson to John Kennedy praising him to rebut that life article before he cut that out just like this.

But when he finally decided he was going to praise him, he outdid himself.

Yeah, but he realized that the young people to whom he's appealing wouldn't have any nagging.

Now that may be

to be exactly right.

He saw the young people coming in.

Therefore, he had to join them rather than attack them.

Here, he states them like, that's the way it works.

The only ones that are not have been miserable are the Republicans.

As I was saying, that was the most disgraceful performance of Republican leadership thing ever.

You greet them, I give a little something.

They're just lying around about the

I don't know what one has to do to get the approval of the Republican leaders.

The young people think there's a possibility that, sure, they're going to be, and it's going to be hard for them to turn around, you know, that the rest of the, the curious thing is that the, so many of them put the China thing in terms of an election.

Well, that, of course, is premature, because basically all things pass, and they tend to be blurred as time passes on.

It has such a dramatic impact that, well, there's only one real comparison, and it's Glassboro.

And Glassboro is a nothing.

Mr. President, Glassboro is not even a vague comparison.

Glassboro, it's perfectly expected that when the Soviet prime minister comes to the U.N. and he meets the American president, it would have been amazing if they hadn't

Kosykin was here anyway.

He already had the Khrushchev visit, a Russian premier visiting America.

It isn't that big a deal.

That's not a big deal.

The American president visiting China is... For them to meet, but in this case, an American president totally on the defensive, battered, and just with willpower, sticking it, and then suddenly moving out.

and doing something totally unprecedented.

Has any president ever visited China?

No.

Nobody's ever been there?

No.

Any China?

No.

I think that's what made it so breathtaking for these people.

If Kosygin had come to the UN last year, and you had then met him anyplace, it would certainly have got a lot of headlines.

But it would not have established your leadership position to that extent.

That's right.

It wouldn't have stuck to the foundation.

It would have been a good surface design.

Well, the events past, the impressions and images done, and this image of the ground, this forest head, tell them that they may forget the reasons why, that they feel...

It's like the leader here, my friend Harris, that's my name.

What's his point is, that's it, the leadership.

He said that what it has done is to take the Britannic peace image and just, it's there, you can't work it out.

And also it's a new angle and also it's a latitude because people now have that impression, which they had before, but they now have it reinforced to a degree that it would be very hard for them to get another image developed.

That's going to be the feeling on that issue.

I believe the Democrats really know no place to go.

I think they're going to stand feet over two domestic issues.

Oh, they already are.

You can see them starting now.

Calcrate, when he was in with me yesterday, said that foreign policy is dead, and he said any Democratic candidate who does it now, they've had two shots at it in Cambodia and this time.

Both times it evaporated on them.

He said they're going to concentrate on

Undomestication.

They are ancient.

I don't know.

Maybe it won't be hard.

Send him up.

I'm going to send him to China as the advancement.

It'll be a lot of hell to fix him up.

He can straighten out and say it's a damn shame the Chinese law is even in America.

He'll cut himself in half and show him why he does it.

Well, I think the judge can have a little fun with that, will he?

Yes, sir.

We'll pick it up and take it.

It just occurred to me that here we are, you know, we've got all these plans, how are we going to do them?

Of course, we've got to organize the rest of it.

Remember, with an event, the thing is to play is not China.

The thing is to play is the thing that Henry mentions.

It's what Powell has done.

The leadership is what their generation is.

No, in fact, we shouldn't push China too hard now.

Because they've got problems.

And also, we really have to get it off the newspapers for a while.

I think it was the... Yeah, but at least we ought to stop pushing it.

We're going to be in deep trouble with the Chinese.

I think we're pushing it.

We are pushing it.

Pushing itself.

You mean...

I think if we build up those, they're going to start squeezing us.

This is a tough bunch.

This is the toughest bunch we've been up against.

Oh, they already have?

Sir?

We'll try our...

I must say...

Except you have two meetings tomorrow, don't you?

I have just one.

They're combined.

But because they had to change tentatively in all of one meeting.

That's good, and I just hear that pretty short shrift.

Well, I don't think you need to tell them anything.

I won't give them any more news.

Yeah, there's nothing news that he's talking about.

It's a good chance to see him kissing you face to face.

Shake the hand that shook the hand that was showing the line.

Okay.

He's stumbling away over there, I tell you.

He's excited.

Well, uh, I'm excited to get started on that.

I want to get this to be a show.

Well, I think at least it's up my areas.

In turn, he's in good shape now.

The funny thing about the Vietnam thing, they'll start coming back as, I guess, some of the jackasses will.

But, you know, a big communist is what a communist is.

They've got to be goddamn leery about what they do here, right?

Exactly.

Because they're not sure what we might do.

That's right.

And because they haven't got the image of an incompetent warmonger to work against either, which is the one they had so hard to, tried so hard to build up.

And as you pointed out, Mr. President, our experience has been that whenever we've broken the back of one of these waves, it took them at least nine months to build it up again.

They haven't got nine months to build it up again.

Is that your feeling?

I haven't thought of it that way.

I mean, it hasn't.

I think one way or another.

In other words, they sort of run waves, don't they?

That's right.

And this time it's going to be much harder, because that whole picture they had filled up of the warmonger, the war criminal, the guy who likes to kill, who has no ideas for peace, it's just gone, and they just can't get that back.

The one that says, you know, like some of the kids are saying, that Williamsburg possibly would be a murderer, and all that sort of thing, right?

It's a hell of a time.

It's pretty hard to attend.

The mayor has said, look, let's go talk to the Chinese, right?

That's right.

That's my point.

Who has the imagination and the daring and the cool to pull it off secretly, to secretly stick tight?

They can't do it.

They can't do it in nine months.

Now, incidentally, I would not have too many hopes, Mr. President, if I were you, for the next Monday meeting.

If these guys are

have anything left, they have just got to show me that they're not going to be intimidated.

But they're working against the election deadline in Vietnam.

That's going to be a wasted meeting.

Yeah.

Of course, we could be lucky enough to pull it off again so that it could be announced from California, say, towards the end of August.

It's got a lot of advantages to do it from California.

You don't have to consult Congress.

You've got a great alibi for not having the ambassador there.

And the timing and everything works well.

If almost anything we could announce could come from there, on this subject, even if we go to the other extreme, you know, just to not forget now.

As I've said before, we're going to pay a price now.

Because we want this to be the dividend, don't we?

It doesn't have to be.

I have my instinct.

If we can't settle it, if we can't settle it, Mr. President, then in Paris,

Then we ought to make perhaps one more shot at it when I go to Peking, and then we ought to announce it in October and get it out, get it done with.

Announce the total withdrawal?

Yes.

But take one more shot to see whether we can bring it back from Peking.

Maybe get them to invite Sam Vanton, their prime minister, up while I'm there.

Good.

You may go to Paris.

It's not Thanksgiving, but you may go to Paris.

I read the transcript of the last meeting, Mr. President, and that smells to me like we're getting it.

I've just never heard them say, we agree to point two, we agree to point six.

They've never said this.

They said we've made the biggest progress today, but I didn't give them anything.

Of course it makes sense.

I suppose the China thing, they said it back then.

But I think the China thing makes the settlement slower but more sure.

More sure because they realize... Because they realize there's just too many goddamn things going on to which they're vulnerable.

Nixon, Haldeman & Colson on PRC initiative and Vietnam War

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Also recorded on July 21, 1971

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Nixon, Haldeman & Colson on PRC initiative and Vietnam War

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on July 21, 1971

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Cite this conversation