On April 18, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger talked on the telephone from 8:18 pm to 8:24 pm. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 023-028 of the White House Tapes.
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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Mr. President.
How'd your meeting go?
Very well.
I started out by giving them some information we had picked up about the Indians offering consultation treaties similar to the Russian ones to the Indonesians and Japanese.
And it's obvious from their behavior that they have made a decision in Peking to be very friendly to us because I could see that already with the ping-pong team today.
Well, Scali, of course, was completely wrong on that, you know.
He was really uptight, wasn't he?
And he was absolutely charming.
Yeah.
No, what I meant is that Scali was uptight thinking that the ping-pong team might not come or that we couldn't do it.
Actually, they couldn't have been nicer today, remember?
Well, President, with them you always know that it's never an accident and that it's never by design.
I mean, if they could have written something, if you could have written something that would do you the most good in this situation, you couldn't have done it better.
Right.
Speaking of the great friendship and so forth.
Right.
And so then I told him what I was going to do, and I said, all the principles which the president mentioned to you are in full force.
All his convictions as to the source of the real danger is still in full force.
We, however, have a particular problem now which we must solve.
And we will keep you fully informed.
As soon as I'm back, I will call you.
The problem basically is that we're going to there only for that purpose, basically.
That's in effect what I'm trying to say.
And when he left, he said to me, we wish you a good journey.
And I said, that's very generous of you.
And he said, we respect honorable friends.
So it went very, very well.
It was the warmest meeting I've had with him, in fact, ever.
Well, listen, we've got to face the fact that they...
have reasons, just as our Russian friends have, you know, to do things.
And, Mr. President, that for them, an American collapse in Asia is a worse event almost than for us.
Yep, it sure is.
It deprives them of their counterweight.
That's right.
They know whom we are really standing up to there.
Huh.
Yeah.
And, uh... Yeah.
So it's been, uh... Well, good.
It's been very good.
Right, but that's the way to handle it.
You know, the thing about our Russian friends is the way that they, I'm just thinking about the butts thing, the way they take in all the Americans, you know, they took in butts and they took in stans and they took in, you know, everybody else.
And poor Butt saying, you know, that the poor...
He doesn't have the right information.
He doesn't have the right intelligence.
He must not know.
Well, for Christ's sakes, where the hell was Beam all this time?
Is he weak or what?
Well, Beam is a nice guy, but he's a very cautious and careful fellow.
And Beam knows better than this, though.
Oh, yeah.
But he should have spoken up.
Don't you agree?
Beam probably was so overawed to be in the present that that was the last thing that occurred to him.
But, you know, it really, to me, I thought, well, I'll tell you one thing.
We've got to be more careful, though, about, I mean, Butts is one of our best men, about sending any of our people abroad.
Don't you think so, to the Soviets?
Absolutely, especially to the Soviets.
Yeah, because, you know, our guys don't know how to handle themselves.
They get overwhelmed by all this bullshit.
Huh?
Absolutely.
Stantz was taken.
Peterson, in this respect, will be pretty good.
If they don't get to his vanity, he won't be taken in.
But they may flatter him out of it.
Well, I understand.
Butts is a good, strong anti-commerce or anything else.
But, you know, I sort of thought, my God, maybe we are bombing those
innocent women and children.
Jesus.
I know.
He said, Jesus Christ.
I mean, what the hell is he thinking about?
I mean, somebody should have snapped back at this fellow right there.
Don't you agree?
I mean, not him.
He doesn't know enough about it.
But what the hell was Beam there for?
I just can't imagine an American ambassador sitting there and allowing the Soviet chairman to say, why are you bombing these innocent people?
Of course, State doesn't... Well, until we got Rogers out, they weren't saying anything, were they?
They weren't saying a thing, but the great advantage...
of Rogers being out as this, the Foreign Service is really not loyal to the President.
Occasionally it is loyal to the Secretary of State.
So maybe they'll...
So they now have their own prestige involved.
Yeah.
So now they'll pick it up a little more.
We will see.
Right.
Okay, Henry.
Have a good time.
See you tomorrow.
Thank you.
Bye.