Nixon, Haldeman & Ziegler on Anderson papers and Vietnamization

Transcript (AI-generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Names and numbers are often wrong; speakers are not identified. Do not cite it as authoritative — verify against the audio and the finding aid.

Download transcript (.txt) · JSON data

Click a timestamp to play from that point; the page address then links to that moment (e.g. #t=125).

He was invited to the meeting originally, he said, you know, Tom says that you definitely should go ahead with the meeting.

He said he talked, Tom said he talked to you last night about it.

And then, you know, he said he didn't come over.

He didn't swear at him.

No problem.

He doesn't have any sense of security about not being in the meeting.

Not at all.

See, he knows what the purpose of it is, which is pure prayer.

You know, it's just to get the thing going and to be able to say, you've done okay.

And so then I checked back with John a few times.

You're Bob, that John does not respect any of these things, right?

Because there's a great sensitivity there, which is created by the greater being with John on his own.

John has said he has none with regard to you.

He has some with regard to John.

There's been a long problem with his approach to California.

Don't tell John at all.

But John has sped over backwards to be sure to deny his path.

Not that his people know of it.

Pharaoh does anything that even touches upon history or economics.

No.

John understands that.

Keep working on it.

Have you ever seen a problem there?

A little.

It's not the one I really worry more about.

It's not Minerva.

Not as much as Chelsea.

But Chelsea, they told me through those shows, the comic book, that the traitor people are fighting on all the time, and they have to raise some thousand pounds of money so they can help run the show.

I heard a study on after phase two.

Yeah.

Well, Sheltz moved right in and spoke up on it.

And Connie called Sheltz up with me and said, are you sure glad that George didn't just spoke it up?

But he said, Connie didn't feel easy.

This is an interesting point.

Connie said, I didn't feel I should say anything to me because I didn't think it was my place to take on the vice-chairman.

All right.

And so he did face it.

He was very pleased, or at least Pope George was.

He was very pleased George was.

He had taken him home.

He was home and all that.

So these guys are looking for this, you know, to try and maintain this the way, yeah, the way it's working.

Well...

The Vice President said that how you do some work is to control labor column and all that sort of thing.

And that's fine.

The Vice President said you do something that you're not going to do anything about and raise how old people prior to the election.

Now that's, well that's a terrible thing.

You can't do it.

It is a trouble, you know.

It's not hard.

It's not as long as making the study fun if you don't tell them to do it.

Because it is fun.

If you make the study people will know it's fun.

There is no such thing.

We do.

Well, the one fault over here is that Tom's got photocopies of you.

Some of the others is a problem.

It's the main problem.

It's not their fault, I understand.

He's told, he's been told, he's the chief economist.

Now, he's got to be.

They can't have him.

He's called.

Now, that's another question.

Now, here's what Schultz, he said, you know, I wonder, is the bus president trying to move in to become the economic spokesman?

Is that what this was all about?

And Schultz said, no, of course not.

explain to them the history of the White House.

But I'm surprised.

I had a good talk with the Vice President yesterday.

Just a week with the South, where he will talk to me.

So he does feel that he's being had by the White House people and all that.

I think that's probably pretty good.

To save my time, but I actually wanted to see anything about anything who's got an idea that we ought to have cooperation with the Congress with regard to get the Congress to pass legislation declassifying the differences in declassification over the presidential classification that the sector is saying.

It's a disaster.

I had an agent who was talking to me, to senators and others on his own.

It's his own idea.

And they feel welcome to say that he then might recommend something.

And I said, well, I told him about the Reckless study.

I told him to go talk to Reckless on a private basis.

And then to talk to her and then Dean about it, who I said were working on an entire shop.

He mentioned it.

No problem.

Let's get into it.

They should be handled like that, but they were not treated like that.

He came up with an interesting thing.

It may be a totally wrong bit of intelligence, but we'll get to the other.

What we'll do about it is describe it, which is that Walter Mosin-Button, you know, he knows all the staff people, reported to Clark that Muskie's AA had been talking with him, and that Muskie is about to launch a major charge against the president.

the next report in four or five days regarding the Anderson papers.

He knows who the culprit is, he says.

Stole the papers.

He's going to accuse the president of covering it up.

say that there's a double standard of morality that the administration moved to prosecute Ellsberg who did something on a passcode that wasn't vital and is not.

And it's protecting Anderson on something that is vital and is current.

And then he's going to identify the culprit, who is the Secretary of Defense.

And he said, if it isn't the Secretary of Defense, it's the Secretary of State.

He's going to say, it is a cabinet officer, a member of the cabinet.

Now, he's on the right track, but on the wrong looking track.

And then we knew we could kill him with this.

We could really, really, really kill him with it.

That's my inclination is that sucking him out on it would be fine.

The other thing is that he may be muddying the water to a fat and may know more than you think.

There's so many people know who that guy is that I'm kind of concerned it's almost inevitable it's going to come out.

Mitchell and Earl can get a second minute.

Well, there's just as far as we have for that.

I know that.

I don't say that.

That's what I'm just saying.

What do we say that we did it for that purpose?

I don't know.

I'm not at all sure.

See, we've gone on the assumption you can't nail a guy because it would hurt the Joint Chiefs.

I think we've got to reopen that assumption and consider whether we can nail a guy and under what circumstances.

And maybe we should.

If you've got both the right and the left navigating this, why don't we find a guy and nail him?

The thing that I think about is that maybe the joint use is the therapy, if that's it.

So he'll go out and say he did it for the joint use in one way, saying, well, do you see the disorders?

Sure, no, I don't.

I don't know if you can prove it.

You really haven't gotten any proof except holograms.

That's right.

We have a case that convinces us, but we don't have a case that's actually in the court.

That's another problem.

And that's the answer we have.

We have ideas, but we have no evidence in the court.

We have no witnesses.

It's very easy for a politician to go out on his own and make cheap charges that he doesn't have to defend.

Secretary of State.

I hope he hits it on that.

The other danger there, though, is that Laird, who is up against some chiefs anyway, if he attacks Laird, will go out, probably will go out and defend himself, but not publicly, certainly not as a surreptitious man.

All right.

Another interesting development in a different direction.

— 1 min 37 s with no transcribed speech —

So let us as people, I don't know if in Christ they go for defense, or our state.

If you says it that way, it will sound like a straight McCarthyism.

On the other hand, we might have to prosecute this law.

If we could get any proof, and one day we don't have any proof,

You don't have a confession from him.

You haven't been able to scare a confession out of him.

I should know a little bit of the Anderson Papers, a little bit of the why, but I just think it's one of those things.

Parts are out of the column.

The Anderson Papers business has come off

I think it's one, mostly the other way, that to what extent it's still alive, it's on the basis that it was a bad thing to do, even, you know.

Tom Brady.

Well, I don't know.

Could be.

In order to show you what's going wrong now, I set him up.

And the central issue is when he gets back is to train him now that what's gotten him very disturbed.

And he still needs a plane to have a question on this one.

Henry goes, you know, wherever he is, he's got to train him.

Al's planning to hit Henry hard when he gets back tonight.

And try to get his eye on him and shoot him up.

And then Mitch and I are going to meet with him first thing tomorrow morning.

What's his press conference about?

About the idea that the rest of the column, the rest of them are pushing the thesis now that the China opening is the key to Nixon's bid for re-election as a man of peace.

He was determined not to oppose Pakistan and risked the possibility that China would call off the trip.

There was a conflict between Nixon's world military strategy and his domestic campaign strategy.

Considerations of the presidential politics prevailed.

The short-range political advantages of protecting China and reaching a limited compensation with China were decisive.

The argument is that reaching even the beginnings of an understanding of what is Henry's problem, he thinks that he is safe.

No, he thinks it's wrong.

Well, that's definitely wrong.

I know, but he feels that it has to be answered.

My key is if it answers the answer, it ought to be answered by Satan, then Rogers will answer.

But what they're pushing very hard is that, you know, he says the fears are groundless that you're going to be king, you're not going to be king to sell out and all that, you're going to create an atmosphere of conciliation and with it the basis for your own re-election.

So he says that the China trip will look good on satellite television from the Forbidden City, even if it settles nothing at all.

Bob, it's your turn.

I'm going to say everything that I'm going to say.

I think they said this.

If there's something else, they didn't say this.

Go ahead.

Well, the Times editorial takes a different tack.

They said that the Nixon-Kissinger approach failing Pakistan over India brought about precisely what their objective was to forestall, which was a Soviet victory and a major increase in Soviet influence in the Indian Ocean.

That was Kissinger's overriding concern.

Alright, time, time, time.

That's there to do.

Everybody is going to be in temperature, right?

Someone may be right.

Alright, but the problem is that as Henry reads all these...

I'm just trying to stay one step ahead of him.

He just spooks all this out.

And he's told Ron that he wants a press conference set up very long and that he's going to set the record straight or clear up the skeletons or something like that.

And all of us agree that he should not do it.

He's not in the right shape to do it, even if it were desirable to do it.

But we'll see.

We're going to talk to him.

i think by tuesday there's a there's forgetting all the real hearts being there today that the

Sub-surface merits and demerits.

The demerit of the problem over at State is a problem.

The problem that merit over here seems to me to be one that's there too.

It gets Henry back on a different subject.

Publicly it puts Henry back in a

away from the posture of the South Asian failure era, to the extent that anybody is concerned about that, and back into the, the kind of doing all these intricate negotiations and all that sort of stuff.

Which is more hell along the way, I think.

Well, Larry's all right.

He's a wall monster.

Doesn't he love him?

I, uh, I, uh, I long for him.

I just give him a lot.

He does very well.

He's so good at what I do.

He made the point.

This was, you know, the raid.

They asked about the raid.

He said, well, the initial raid was 10, and this is 23, and the president's proceeding exactly the way he said he would proceed without any question.

He handled the matter, the North Vietnamese buildup and the reports on the attacks very well.

He said a long time ago, when he returned from Vietnam...

was pointed out that they expected that, but at that time he said the Arvin were capable.

The President feels the administration is going, well, he said the Arvin aren't going to win all of the battles.

We expect some spectaculars, as is the case this time of the year, but we feel the Arvin overall are ready to defend themselves.

So he did a good job on that.

But POW, the only thing he said is, as the President said, there will be a remaining force in South Vietnam until the POWs are released.

He also made the point that the

He's not going to predict what will come after May.

He's made a habit of not predicting.

So it was pretty straight along that line.

Cambodia, he sort of talked around that a little bit by saying that the Cambodian army was the fastest growing army in the history of the world from 10,000 or whatever it is to 200,000, and that people have been saying Cambodia is going to fall for a long time.

The North Vietnamese have made more advances than in the past, but he feels they could hold.

So it was, you know...

Straightforward and in a good assessment, but I think in a positive way.

They were, of course, anxious to get out.

They only... Oh, no, no, no, no.

He just made the point.

He said,

Hello, they weren't screaming.

Yes, he made that point in connection with the possibility of the Tet Offensive and the traditional increased activity.

that the Arvin are well-trained, well-equipped, and are capable of conducting the defense there.

No, it's the defensive side of that.

That Van Alstom does a superb job of setting up the TETA.

What is that?

Well, I take the point that if the North, East, or East were out, or military, they'd go into the 1st or 2nd Corps.

Yeah.

down below that they're going in where they're going to hurt the weakest peripheral area taking a town nobody ever heard of but you see large remarks only for the propaganda advantage of making it look like a victory and secretary large remarks they checkmated the critics because we have said now

that we expect spectacularly.

He made that point.

He said, when you came into office, he mentioned the figures.

that were in Vietnam when you came in.

And he also said there are 11 divisions when you came in.

He said now there is no active combat force in Vietnam.

He does a good job.

He does.

He's just very cruel and straightforward and deceitful.

I won't take your time now, but I talked to Mrs. Nixon this morning about the interview.

My judgment of it was the way it came over the air was a real plus.

They led into it with the

talking about the success of the trip, and they showed some of Ollie's slides, and talked the first part about the Africa trip.

This is Nixon's answer on the Ivory Coast, I thought was very good.

It's sensational because it shows not only did she go there and shake hands and

It was well received, but she knew what she was talking about.

She told me more than I knew about DeHart.

It was so good, and the way the question was asked set it up so well that it really looked like a loaded thing, because, boy, Barbara Walters said, we don't know anything about it.

We know about Liberia, and we know something about it.

But we don't know much about it yet.

We don't know anything about the Air Force.

Do you know anything about it?

She talked about when it was settled in the apartment.

The other thing in the current situation, and I look at it very critically, and I've had other people do it, and I think that she came off very poised, very nice, very relaxed, smiling.

This, by a wide margin, is the best...

I talked to her already.

You told her?

Yes, I told her already.

And I thought she handled herself with great confidence on the woman's question on women.

And the remarks about you, the China thing.

They asked her what she thought was the most significant statement taken.

She knocked that out of the park with a breakthrough in China that she'd been working three years on it.

She had good remarks about what the meaning of the China initiative was and the Soviet Union.

And it was good.

I want you to get a massive press coverage.

yes i think so their time in with today we're going to have full camera coverage of the 230

large meeting, and then we'll have a separate photo of the five leaders of the... All right.

No, sir.

Incidentally, I talked to Connie, and Connie apparently talked to Barbara Walters last night, who was very cooperative in handling the statements of the interview that Mrs. Nixon would be comfortable with, so I think that is important.

And Barbara said, Barbara Walters said apparently to Connie that

She wanted to cooperate on that.

She understood that there were some questions that were not agreed to.

And I think the interview showed that she didn't... All right, fine.

I'm good.

Okay, thanks, Ron.

I'm glad Larry did well.

He did.

Don't let him talk to me, but I thought he did well that you showed me the transcript.

Okay, you call him now or I'll call him.

Okay.

I'll tell you what I did to do with him, though.

He can't have a press conference, but now he can get Frank to laugh.

In other words, my answer to him is the same.

Me too, that's what you've always do.

That's the reason.

Yeah.

Get Frankel in and say, now Frankel and the rest of them are competitors.

And all the rest.

But for Henry to go out and have a press conference, you know, another thing, he thinks this is a lot bigger than the public consciousness center he is about.

I don't think it's that goddamn big view.

Henry Kissinger's role in this, what does this have to do with China and all that bullshit.

It's huge.

No, it's not.

He's dropped out of the TV first.

You know, TV is, it's done to him.

Oh, I think that's right.

Absolutely.

And that's now, regarding the early talk with Mitchell earlier about what?

about the miss muskie yeah yeah i thought whether or not i don't i think you really get down to the key thing but no use to talk about prosecution if you don't have a case and i think that's the problem here i think we've got a total a perfect circumstantial case and a totally inadequate a legal case so what can i do bring the guy in and have him lie see

No point bringing him in and having him perjure himself and then trying to prove that he just sent 16 others in.

Now, if you've got a nice guy to case against him, you've got to forget about him.

You've got to find something.

He's got to admit something.

And we're going to move on him afterwards anyway, hopefully.

But, well, the thing is, the only way to move on him is to move on Anderson.

You move on him together, you get Anderson.

And then Anderson's either got to plead himself in criminal action, which would kill him,

or privilege, which will also kill him.

So you have to make a hand-off to the guy who knows.

Here, there's only two who know, it's here.

Okay.

Boy, it must be rough before we've gotten that egg.

Henry sits here not believing.

You know, by March 10th of December, one thing he's to show you is our problem, and it's not that problem.

of course if you can't, it's over, it's sensationalized, and it's a cover-up, and we're going to have a real problem with the reappointment of McNamara, and Bull, and others, and the White House, and the White House busting.

Then I read that there was something, and I saw what it said, that Henry Kissinger got the president to endorse McNamara.

Now that's only talk from Henry Kissinger.

Also,

I also look to my left and tell you John Collins, John Collins really, I don't know if Henry's got it, but Henry's put it out.

I got that, he just did it.

This is, Henry for publicity is really,

It's worse than we realize, Bob.

It really is.

Now, he put that out.

I gave him instructions.

I said, Henry, I'll be forward.

Because we can't defeat you.

So you can let us know privately.

But I said, we can't go to public because there's a race dog on the right.

I'll never forget it, I said.

That's right.

And I told him this.

I told Conor.

Conor kept his goddamn lip up.

So Henry had to go strut around in the press.

He had told the president.

well you don't get involved he does some of this stuff doesn't he yes yes he does he does probably not as much as we think he does but he does no question this news topper thing now is his his first step of trying to do the thing you want which is to go to the big story or big two or three stories of the day that deserve attention

Remember you said, yeah, instead of just doing the jury, he wanted a judgment call.

Yeah.

And that's what he's trying to do.

He says, first, to be a non-vestigation.

That's right.

The other big story is the Richmond decision, which has far more reaching implications.

That's right.

Very good.

So he's also had, of course, to respond thoroughly to some threats, like just pay attention to the registration.

So he's confused.

There's no lack of attention to a description.

Well, except he had a couple years to put in.

I told Johnson, which is sort of surprising, I said, it wasn't one of our judges.

He said, you told him that.

And I said, it wasn't.

I said, has anybody gotten it out?

Of course nobody's gotten it out.

Goddamn, he's a Democratic judge.

What is a judge?

And that's the thing, don't you agree?

That kind of interest, you get on your mind.

Let me ask you four things again.

Now, it's easy to get out because the Libs all think it's a great landmark decision, so they'll think they're giving the Democrats credit by giving them the appointment.

Can I ask you this?

What are your feelings about getting back to the Henry King?

It was the best of what he could say, and I love it.

to answer the same thing and get Ian Frankel, who will be enormously rich, rather than going out and make a press thing and then have that be the big story.

If you don't mind his doing that, I think that's the ideal.

I'm all for a compromise, and I fall for it as true to true.

I argue that we ought to do a whitepaper type thing.

He thought that was a good idea.

The whitepaper should be in the state of the word.

Well, I tried that, and Henry said, no, that's the wrong place for it.

It doesn't fit that format or something.

I told him that before he was all for it.

He probably saw that as being a way to lose his press conference.

He wants to have his press conference.

But I think the Franklin thing will do it.

Because that would give him, if he does more than that, he's going to spread it to a hell of a lot of people that are no longer running the government.

And it's not a contention, but the rest of the line,

that we'll do anything in order to save China.

This is not the first time it's been read.

And it was written about the Russian trip, too.

And they're all going to keep reading about it.

It's a logical dynamic.

And everybody says the China trip is pure George Meany.

It's pure politics.

What the hell are they talking about?

The water.

The water, I'm not sure you heard it.

I don't know.

I agree.

All the others, I don't know.

The only thing I have to add in regards to that part is that the tire is super fragile.

It's cold.

Nixon, Haldeman & Ziegler on Anderson papers and Vietnamization

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on January 13, 1972

Cite this conversation

Nixon, Haldeman & Ziegler on Anderson papers and Vietnamization

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on January 13, 1972

Related conversations

Cite this conversation