Conversation 007-021

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Hello.

Hello, Mr. President.

I'm just thinking that the Vice President is really tender about the press, isn't he?

You know, he's really, really... Are you ready to talk?

Yes, I am.

He was really depressed.

Yeah.

Well, damn it, he should be.

Except Bill, he brought a lot of this on himself, you know.

I'm just sitting here talking with Bob Haldeman, and we looked at the situation, and here's really what happened.

You know...

First of all, of course it was a substantive trip, as much as it could be, but he wanted to take it, you know, but there wasn't a hell of a lot of substance in any of those places, but he wanted to take it, so that was fine.

Second, he did the substance fine, but the point is that when I, and I don't use myself as an example, but it shows you that anybody could do the same thing.

When I took my trips in 53 and other times, they were substantive to the same extent his was, and didn't mean a hell of a lot, less actually, as a matter of fact, but

But the point was that I knew that we couldn't give any news out of the conversation, so I deliberately went out.

I mean, remember, he made the point that he, well, he wasn't going to go out and visit factories and shipyards and so forth.

But he should.

He should, you know, because that gives the press something to write about, meeting the people, goodwill, and all that sort of thing.

So what we have to do is to react, say, well, it's substance, and therefore he's not going to do that.

The third point, though, was this, that

In addition to that, he aggravated the whole damn thing by not only refusing to move and talk to the press, but then he said he was too busy seeing people.

But then he played golf every damn day.

Every day?

Every day.

Now, you know what I mean.

I'm no, I don't, every guy's got a judge's zone, but he's brought a lot of this on himself.

I just felt, and you can't blame the press for that statement about Africans.

you know, and Africans and the Americans and so forth.

But I knew he was sensitive as hell, but I guess I think... You know, he needs somebody who's giving him better advice.

You know damn well if you go and play golf 11 times on a trip like that, you can get away with it maybe once or twice.

It was 11 times?

Well, you had two more than Haldeman had.

He said nine.

11.

No, it is 11.

That's right.

No, this is 9 in Africa, I think, the last since he got reached there.

And in most God-forsaken places, there aren't even good golf courses.

I think you can get away with golf a couple of times.

I think so, too.

Particularly if you play with... On a weekend or something.

I played once with the foreign minister of Japan, and that made a big hit in Japan.

There's stories all over the place about it.

Look, I think it's actually good to do something, you know, something that shows, like, for example, I went to the Taj Mahal.

What the hell?

You've got to go to the Taj Mahal, you know.

It was a wonderful sightseeing experience, and

Well, actually, Mr. President, this trip was much too long anyway.

A man shouldn't be out of the country 30 days.

Well, he was gone 30 days, and particularly when he didn't have a hell of a lot to do.

But believe me, as you know, we scraped like hell to try to find countries to go to, and it wasn't easy.

It wasn't easy.

But did you, I think we held his hand well enough.

Yes, I think so.

I really feel a little bit sorry for him.

I do too.

Because he has gotten to bed.

But I'll tell you what I think.

Haldeman feels that he says that he will not listen to his staff.

Is that right?

No, sir.

He will not listen.

That's really the case.

Just a second.

Let Bob tell you on the phone about this.

Hi.

Hi, Bob.

Oh, we were just talking about the staff problem.

He's got a couple guys on there who know something about the strategy of scheduling and all that.

And, of course, Bryce Harlow was with him the first part of the trip and has spent a lot of time counseling him on how to go at this.

But what he does is he listens to his Secret Service men over anybody else.

And they naturally, you know, what they want him to do is stay in a cocoon someplace where nobody can shoot him.

And so he does.

Well, it really is sort of too bad.

I think this is one that's going to be tough for him to make a comeback.

Yep.

Because it looked as if it was just sort of lazy.

Yep.

The thing is, even if he were going to play golf every day, if he had a guy scheduling him right, if he had stopped at an orphanage on the way to the golf course and patted some kids and said he was glad that U.S. foreign aid was helping to keep this orphanage going or something, you know, and then went to the golf course, at least the press would have a story.

The problem here is they programmed him in such a way that the traveling press had no story to write.

So they had to make up some dirty thing and kick him in the balls every day.

Which they would have done anyway, but at least if they'd given him something, they would have had that to write, too.

Some of the golfing partners, you know, he had friends from Baltimore and Frank Sinatra come over to play golf with him, things like that.

Yeah.

If you play with a... First place, I don't think it's a good idea to play very often.

I mean, I didn't get away with it once or twice.

Oh, but he played with King Hassan.

Now, that's all right.

That's fine.

But you're right.

Go to Portugal to play golf with Frank Sinatra is ridiculous.

Yeah.

That type of thing.

Well, you shouldn't play that much anyway.

You can get away with it two or three times, four times, but not 11.

That's too much.

It looks as if that's what you're doing.

Yeah, yeah.

That's more than Arnie Palmer does in a month's tour, probably.

It just creates the wrong impression.

Yeah.

But because he didn't say anything at all to the press, as you say, there's nothing to write about.

He left a void, so they filled it.

That's right.

And they're bound to.

I felt sorry.

I really felt sorry for him because he... Well, it is too bad, but he's a victim of his own.

He doesn't get a good guy who...

Anybody like that, as the president has always recognized, has got to have somebody else schedule him.

You can't schedule yourself.

That's right.

And he won't do that.

He won't listen to what other people think he ought to do.

Yeah.

I think what I ought to do is I have somebody else help me, and then I go over it pretty damn carefully to see...

Taking the Middle East, what they did was they had me overprotected.

I wasn't doing anything.

I was having meetings, but I said, I can't go to that area without seeing a hell of a lot.

I've got to physically see things.

Get out and do it.

That's right, which you did.

Well, it's too bad, but I don't...

He was very happy with the help he had.

I mean, he didn't complain about it.

I mean, Henry had a man and I had a man.

He thought they were both great.

So it wasn't bad.

Well, I don't have the president to worry about this.

We can help some on this thing, I think.

Here, he wants to talk to you again.

Yeah, I didn't want to burn you with it, except to say that, to show you how the thing, his press really, we didn't want to say, has been terrible.

You know, it's just been terrible.

And I don't read it carefully, and neither do you.

Well, you maybe have.

I read it very carefully.

And it's terrible.

And, Bill, look, your trips, for Christ's sakes, they've been... Of course, you know how to handle the press, and you've had some substance, even more substance.

But my point is...

You've done a lot of public things, too, and your wife did public things.

Now, when Pat and I took our trip, you remember, well, of course, the Latin American trip was made news in any event, but they were all enormous successes.

We just, despite the fact that, hell, I had as many enemies as Agnew, maybe more.

You remember?

I know.

But boy, we worked our butts off.

We used to work 14 hours a day.

You have to.

And we used to go out and we'd go to the, my God, I visited, you know, you go to the USIA thing, you go to the University of Purdue and a research station.

good god and pat went to the leper colony in panama and you know and that's the sort of thing that people love you have to do it and for a vice president god damn it it's about all he can do he's going to make it easy he's going to be any we can talk all we want about substance but they know that's a bunch of crap and the other thing is that i think the uh i think though that bars the president to show you how deeply it sunk in here there were some on on my staff and uh that on our staff here that

didn't want us to put anything on.

We asked you to go out there, and I came out to the car and arrest for that very reason.

But we can't just let him take a totally bad rap.

But he's brought a lot of it on himself.

And I just, I don't know, I mean...

I don't know what we can do.

What do you think?

Just hold his hand a little more?

There's a lot you can do.

I don't think there's anything you can do here now.

But you see, the problem, Bill, is his attitude toward the press now is so negative that he refused.

I understand, to talk to the guys on the trip.

Well, now, God damn it, you can't do that.

I mean, you... Well, I don't understand why he doesn't learn from you, because nobody ever got a worse rap in the press than you did, and nobody had a rougher split, and you made a comeback and did it the right way, and they regret you for it.

I never had any friends in the press, you know.

I mean, any political friends, like personal friends, but never any political friends.

But on my trips, my God, I got a good press.

It's almost impossible not to get a good press and trip, mainly because of this.

The press sort of is with you because, you know, you're America over there, and they want you to do well.

That's really true.

Don't you think so?

I'll tell you another thing I found, and I know you did on your trips.

I sort of emulated you.

And that is, if you work hard as hell, they respect you because you wear them out.

On the Middle East trip, I don't know whether you saw the stories or not, but at the end of the thing...

I got high marks for just physical endurance, and they were all saying crazy words.

Absolutely.

I saw that.

As a matter of fact, I remarked to Pat about it.

That awful thing we went through, that 73-day trip, you know.

But it was one of the greatest endurance tests in all history.

Goddamn near killed both of us.

But it made a reputation that never left us.

And, uh, you know... Let's respect you for that, but, you know, he was 30 days.

30 days.

And the golf, but not only the golf, but Jesus a week, a weekend here.

And the thing is, Bob was just saying that this kind of a reputation may relieve him.

Every time, every time now he goes out to play golf, they're going to notice it.

He doesn't, he could have played once or twice, but, uh, you know, you can always take it out.

But, but I, I just, I just don't know.

It's just, uh, it's just goddamn stupidity, particularly, Bill.

when we were trying to help him by sending him on the trip.

That's what irritates me.

You know what I mean.

He really wanted to go himself, huh?

Oh, for Christ's sake, sir.

He came in.

He said, I'd like to take a trip, you know.

And, you know, this was not a particularly good time to go for a variety of reasons, you know.

I didn't want to run around over there.

He says, I'd like to go.

That's why we sent him to Korea, you know.

I said, well, we've got to find some place, so that's why the Korean thing came up.

No, he wanted to take the trip.

Actually,

the way it all grew up.

He wanted to go to Greece.

Well, God damn it, we couldn't go to Greece.

And so, and I put Henry on him.

I said, now, for God's sake, talk him out of that.

Then, then, of course, the irony was that after he got up, after he saw the trip, he said he'd like to, wondered if maybe he shouldn't, maybe try to see if he could go over to Peking from Korea.

Well, hell,

You know, that's ridiculous.

But that's all right.

I understand everybody's interest in doing that.

But the whole thing was his idea.

And then we went to work, and your people helped.

I thought it was all right for him to go back to Korea because he had a good rapport with Park.

And we picked countries where it was useful where he hadn't been before.

But I must say, it really is tough.

But it was good of you to go out to meet him.

You know, another thing I was going to say in terms of how we treat vice presidents around here,

And I think this was exactly correct, and I don't complain about it at all.

Did you know that all of my trips abroad that I took as vice president, half a dozen,

I was never met by anybody but an assistant secretary of state.

Oh, Dulles never came to the airport, neither did Herder, except when I went to Latin America and came back from there.

And then, of course, Eisenhower came out.

But when I came back from that round-the-world trip, 73 days, Walter Robertson met me.

And I, frankly, didn't expect anything else.

But, you know, they didn't do things in those days.

But, you know, now it's upgraded.

When I went to Latin America, I...

Well, I had the assistant secretary with me.

But this business, you know, we're really going overboard on meeting him and everything.

We want to, but it's tough.

It's funny, you and I think of so much alike.

I had told my people I was going to meet him even before he got your call because you could tell he's really depressed now.

Sure, sure.

We got us.

keep him bolstered up a little bit.

Oh, absolutely.

I think we can do it, but I, he really, this one is bad.

I mean, the other things, you can sort of get up, but the constant fighting with the press, making half remarks about the Africans, how does that get there?

Well, Bill, there's another thing, too.

On the China thing, of course, he should have said, great,

You know what I mean?

Because, and also right now with the press, well, it isn't, let's see, we have a grudging respect from these guys in the foreign policy field.

That's right, we do.

They're a little scared.

That's right, we do.

And, you know, and if we get a break in the Mideast or Berlin or who knows, there are a lot of things that can happen, but they, but, well, anyway, we'll not worry too much about it except that,

I just felt, you know, we're all so goddamn busy.

I was down there to the Senate today, and I just felt, well, here he comes back, and we worked our tails off to setting the thing up, and the poor guy, we spent all of our time trying to hold his hand.

Don't worry about it.

I'll try my way to be nice to him.

Well, you did.

You did.

But I wanted you to know the background.

Actually, we worked our tails off trying to work that schedule up, and your people didn't.

He would not listen.

They broke their necks trying to be nice to him.

I know.

Well, at least he just wouldn't listen.

That was all.

I think that's it.

That preoccupation of fighting the press all the time.

If you can't win, it's a losing battle.

The point is to fight him, but don't appear to be doing it.

That's his problem.

He wears it on his sleeve.

The first time I thought it was good, you know, the attacks he made, and that sort of sobered him up a little bit.

But now he's...

But now it's sort of a paranoia.

That's right.

You can't win on that one.

Never.

Okay.

Bye.