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Conversation 003-121

TapeTape 3StartTuesday, May 25, 1971 at 8:53 PMEndTuesday, May 25, 1971 at 9:14 PMTape start time02:40:49Tape end time03:01:32ParticipantsNixon, Richard M. (President);  Haldeman, H. R. ("Bob")Recording deviceWhite House Telephone
AI Summary

President Nixon and H. R. Haldeman discussed scheduling logistics for upcoming domestic and foreign policy events, including a meeting with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and various budget-related briefings. They reviewed the success of the President’s recent trip to Alabama, noting favorable crowd reactions and the effectiveness of his engagement with regional media and local editors. Additionally, the two discussed the strategic timing for a future press conference to maximize television audience reach during the Memorial Day weekend, while acknowledging the positive public relations value of recent family photos featuring Julie and David Eisenhower.

Presidential SchedulingPublic RelationsMedia RelationsAlabama TripForeign PolicyDomestic Policy
AudioNARA Description

On May 25, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon and H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman talked on the telephone from 8:53 pm to 9:14 pm. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 003-121 of the White House Tapes.

Nixon Library Finding Aid
Conversation No. 3-121

Date: May 25, 1971
Time: 8:53 pm - 9:14 pm
Location: White House Telephone
                                               70

                           NIXON PRESIDENTIAL MATERIALS STAFF

                                       Tape Subject Log
                                          (rev. 9/08)



The President talked with H.R. (“Bob”) Haldeman.

     President's schedule
          -Meeting with Nguyen Van Thieu
                 -President's call to Henry A. Kissinger
          -Budget meeting
          -National Commission on Productivity
                 -Possible California meeting                   Conv. No. 3-121 (cont.)
          -Meeting with Thieu at Midway
          -Budget meeting
          -California
          -Meeting with Thieu

     [Unintelligible]

     John D. Ehrlichman
          -A possible May 28, 1971 event
                -Kissinger
          -A possible June 1, 1971 event
          -May 26, 1971
                -A domestic event at noon
                -Kissinger
                -Preparation
                      -Patrick J. Buchanan
          -President's May 25, 1971 press questions

     [Unintelligible]

          -An upcoming event
               -Preparation
                    -Kissinger

     [Unintelligible]

     Family contact with press
          -Julie and [Dwight] David Eisenhower, II
          -An advance man
          -Constance Stuart
          -Julie Eisenhower
          -Thelma C. (“Pat”) Nixon
          -Tricia Nixon
          -Writing press
                                         71

                     NIXON PRESIDENTIAL MATERIALS STAFF

                                 Tape Subject Log
                                    (rev. 9/08)



     -Stuart
           -Daughters, Mrs. Nixon
     -Julie and David Eisenhower
           -Coverage
     -Value
     -Stuart
     -Coverage
                                                                     Conv. No. 3-121 (cont.)
President's schedule
     -Trip to Birmingham and Mobile
            -Coverage
            -Crowds
            -George C. Wallace
                  -Winton M. (“Red”) Blount
                  -Crowd response
                  -Previous campaign
                  -Appearance
     -Events
            -Attendees
            -Effect
            -Compared with campaigning
     -Alabama trip
            -President and crowds
            -Demonstrators
            -Crowd
            -Press response
                  -Ronald L. Ziegler
                  -Helen Thomas
                  -Henry Hubbard
            -President's remarks
                  -Tone
            -President's briefing for Southern regional media
                  -George W. Romney
                  -Subjects
                  -President's briefing book
                  -Interest in revenue-sharing, environment, health, manpower training
                  -Interest in foreign policy
            -Public appearances in Birmingham and Mobile
                  -Effect
            -President's briefing
                  -Effect
                  -John B. Connally, Ehrlichman
                                            72

                        NIXON PRESIDENTIAL MATERIALS STAFF

                                    Tape Subject Log
                                       (rev. 9/08)



                   -Effect of editors
              -A reception
                   -Local Alabama press


**********************************************************************

BEGIN WITHDRAWN ITEM NO. 2                                        Conv. No. 3-121 (cont.)
[Personal Returnable]
[Duration: 2m 20s ]


END WITHDRAWN ITEM NO. 2

**********************************************************************


    Julie and David Eisenhower
          -Photos

    Miss USA photo
         -Miami paper coverage

    Julie and David Eisenhower
          -Photo
               -New York Daily News, Washington Post, and New York Times
               -Dogs, fishing, children

    President's schedule
         -June 1, 1971 or May 28, 1971 press conference
         -President's briefing for Southern regional media
                -Effect
         -A May 28, 1971 or June 1, 1971 press conference
                -Sunday papers
                -Television audience
                -Sunday papers, news magazines
         -President's trip to Alabama
                -Television coverage
         -A May 28, 1971 or June 1, 1971 press conference
                -Television audience
                     -Ratings
                     -Memorial Day weekend
                                               73

                          NIXON PRESIDENTIAL MATERIALS STAFF

                                      Tape Subject Log
                                         (rev. 9/08)
Transcript (AI-Generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.

Hello.
Bob, I just talked to Henry and I think we will have to put that tube in in that period of time.
And of course, the economic thing.
you know, that meeting can be put around it one way or another, either before we go or when we return, whatever the case might be.
Oh, you mean the productivity thing?
I don't know.
What the hell was the productivity?
I mean, unless they want to come to California.
What I meant is if we have to go to Midway on the 20th or 30th, that other meeting on the budget.
Oh, oh, yeah, I see.
Right, sure.
Right.
Well, that'd be fine.
You could just stop in California.
Yes, I think it'll work out.
They give dates on either end, in other words.
Hmm.
Do that.
Well, we can go along with that, I think.
Now, uh, one thing, other thing, he said that, uh, that, uh, I mentioned to him that he talked to somebody and said that he was considering going to the office.
No.
No?
I don't know.
Did he talk to somebody?
I don't know.
That's the first I've heard anybody mention that.
I wouldn't want to waste my energy on that.
Absolutely not.
No thought of that at all.
The other possibility is that we might consider, if we think that Friday night is a good day, we think that is not a good day.
Okay.
They're going forward and getting the materials ready tomorrow.
Yeah, we'll have the domestic stuff at noon.
Henry doesn't have his ready, which may be why he's fucking around about something, because he says he's got word on the plane coming back tonight that he wasn't going to have his ready at noon tonight.
I want this prepared about the same way as I do.
I don't want it to be in this one.
But Pat gets the input from both of them, for sure.
No, they won't do two boats.
The panel will put it into one.
Well, maybe that's why... Tell him not to go to the agonist.
We should have him ready.
Tell him to take all day tomorrow.
Yep.
No, I was talking to a few of the people on the show, and they said that I had been, and I came in, and I asked them, I was advanced on intelligence, and he said apparently that
I just want to be sure that, you know, with Pat, she will not sometimes do it, but whenever we can, if we ever have to, we don't have it very often.
Yep, it's a hell of a waste to just have them go talk to the writing press.
I'm sure that all that happened was kind of just the same thing.
They did go ahead, and she said that the recap was there, so they did go ahead, I'm sure.
Exactly what I wanted.
Sure.
I would have, if I had the pastor, I would have, of course, slipped up the whole goddamn, all the color we could do down here.
I think that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, awfully good stuff.
The entire night.
And, uh, I don't think there's nothing wrong with the station.
That's, uh, that's as much as I can find in the long run.
Well, what's not your fault?
It's Connie.
Connie doesn't really know.
You see what the... She's natural.
She's very good at doing it.
I'm never going to have anybody waste their time doing things we want to, you know.
As far as we were concerned, we had our television story.
The crowd, I would not want to have gone on yacking around.
Right.
That would have been a great mistake.
We got to run that.
Yeah.
Great.
Those pictures.
Old field.
Huge.
It's not so solidly pro-American.
That's right.
and so forth, and it will not go unnoticed, of course.
Reception, you know, armistice, all of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Noticed I was closely stuck there.
Oh, you sure did.
That's fine.
Got that red blunt right in the car window, and the, uh,
He doesn't look so hot either.
You don't think so?
No, I thought he had a strange look.
I guess he always has.
Yeah, but he also kind of, I don't know, he had sort of peak motion.
He doesn't need to have the pizzazz that he used to have.
Yeah, yeah.
The only way to do it.
I only wish we could go without Captain Washington's outfit.
Well, we can.
I mean, without the outfit.
Yeah, it must have run him wrong.
Without Congress, the Senate, the governor, the law, everything.
We do pretty well.
But what I mean is that you can just go in and find some bands of that shit.
You could do it all your way and it just works beautifully.
You have the opportunity to stop, get into the crowd, let the crowd come up to you.
The press would find it very hard that the Sprite stuff was true, because we demonstrated with practice that Negroes were extremely black.
Boy, weren't they?
The whites were extremely black.
There were very few freedom of choice signs.
I had one or two.
Hardly any?
Yeah.
I had one or two.
And every place you went, they were young and polished.
It was great enthusiasm, and it was Nichols' enthusiasm.
It shocked me.
Hey, Nichols.
A lot of...
Not a real positive reaction.
What about?
Yeah, very safe.
Oh, Helen Thomas was, you know, her usual bubbling spouse.
Even Henry Hubbard was enthusiastic.
But they were all very impressed.
Of course, they're all, as they do on everything else, they're all trying to figure the political things out.
Well, in all of my remarks, I was also very, very careful not to play to their prejudices.
I didn't hear your thing in the briefing.
I understand it was good.
George Romney was ecstatic.
He doesn't know any better.
I just gave a very big dose, frankly, of foreign policy.
Because I knew that the other subjects
you know i had about did you know that that's damn freaking older they gave me over 40 pages of stuff so jesus christ that's the stuff they're covering with them well they want to hear about the world about the spirit for the country
But also, you know, in public, it's like, you know, it'll be a, you know, it'll be a lot of work.
But the sound experience is going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be.
That has a halibut, that halibut.
Shouldn't it?
I sure do.
I think Scott picked up sweet with a save like that today.
Can't help it, haven't we?
Well, and also in the reef.
As far as you know, John wanted to use comedy in there because he was in Europe.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
I don't mean that our power, but I meant the power in terms of the editors and so forth.
I have to leave that to you.
You might check to see what, I think you can see a lot of the people there.
then some of them we got pretty much in short order.
It may be, and also it may be that some of them have to go on and become too, you know, too much disruption to them.
Well, that's fine.
But I think that's what we're doing.
Now they did, if you had a lot of Florida, I mean a lot of Alabama in the receiving line, they did add
Some local press was receiving them.
They weren't the ones that were in the briefing.
They were the local press that was covering during the day.
Yeah.
But, you know, it was up to the local press.
You know, one thing we've seen this weekend was one of the best pictures of the year.
Julia and David?
Oh, my God.
Isn't that great?
There's several of them.
Oh, I know the different ones, and I've seen two or four of them.
That will be a prize amount at the end.
Wonderful pictures.
And great pictures of them and so forth and so on.
It's just fine that a little girl got her picture in a Miami paper, which is good she saw that.
But this is the one that's much better than ours now.
Yeah.
Well, we see Miss United States all the time.
That picture went, got around, too.
Oh, yeah.
But the Julian Davis picture, I'm curious.
Well, it was carried in the New York News and the Washington Post and the New York Times, too.
They just cannot resist that kind of a picture.
A number of people love dogs.
A number of people love fishing.
number of people that love two rather normal kids, it truly, I don't think, can beat it, Bob.
What do you think?
I'm trying to tell you, John.
It's just one of those things that you get a rare shot like that when you come out of this place.
Well, give some thought to whether it's
Do you think Tuesday might be better than Friday?
I just don't know.
Okay.
Do you have any feelings about it now?
Not offhand, no, I really don't.
I don't think it really makes much difference.
You may be better than later.
Yeah, totally.
I'll get it over with, and then, you know, it's a good time to do it.
A lot of riding.
Well, there'll be quite a bit of news out of what I said at that.
They'll make a lot of money doing what I was talking about earlier.
The media people, because they, you know, in our hermitage, he puts it all on the record.
It's not good.
It was.
I knew it would work, but I didn't care.
Nevertheless, there'd be quite a bit of news and they'd make things up and say, you know, that's all right.
It's kind of the foreign policy we've talked about.
I don't know.
It's a good one.
it might be better to do it here.
But thinking of the TV audience, the hell with the papers, the hell with the emails, and all the rest.
I've covered them all.
They've got enough Tuesdays today, this Tuesday, to pay me off today.
That was a news story.
But seeing that, we've got to think of when we have the better TV audience, Friday through Tuesday.
A lot of times you just have to go on a judgment guess, right?
And I just don't know.
The question of the day, yeah.
On normal ratings, it wouldn't be much different.
But because of Memorial Day weekend, I suppose there's a possibility.
I don't know whether Friday is just a lower rating or a higher rating.
Yeah.
And nobody will be able to tell you.
Except by guess.
Let me do a little check.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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