Nixon White House Tapes — Conversation 039-001
Date: Thursday, May 24, 1973 at 1:27 PM
Participants: White House operator; Nixon, Richard M. (President); Kissinger, Henry A.
Recording device: White House Telephone
Source: https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/039-001

This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite it as authoritative.

[0:01] I just want to say welcome back.
[0:09] Thank you, Mr. President.
[0:10] Where are you?
[0:12] I'm having lunch with Truett Schultz.
[0:15] Oh, good.
[0:16] Over at Treasury.
[0:17] Oh, fine, fine.
[0:18] And I think we've settled the Vietnam part of this thing and the Laos part.
[0:24] And both of those feel better off than we were with the original agreement.
[0:29] Henry, that's good.
[0:30] And in June, when we publish this.
[0:34] You can do some briefing, I would hope, on Tuesday.
[0:37] I think it would be very helpful if you could.
[0:39] I could do some briefing, Mr. President, on your Reykjavik visit.
[0:44] On your visit with Pompidou.
[0:46] Well, and also the upcoming summit, maybe a little.
[0:48] And the summit.
[0:49] And I can create a little impression of the Vietnam negotiations.
[0:53] And say that we've made progress, but that we can't announce yet, huh?
[0:57] I think it'd be very helpful, you know.
[0:59] We can talk about that later.
[1:01] Right, right.
[1:02] But it's really going...
[1:04] Right, right.
[1:06] It went... Now, don't get back to Washington and let your morale get down now, Henry.
[1:10] No, Mr. President, my morale is fine.
[1:12] And I totally talked to him.
[1:13] I said, you know, you read a lot of stuff.
[1:16] We'll take the Congress four weeks to organize if we do something.
[1:19] And you know what we did in two weeks last December.
[1:26] Yeah, that should be...
[1:28] So we... Well, we've...
[1:31] As you know, we got on, I thought, a very good paper this week on this.
[1:35] I thought it was important.
[1:37] I think it puts the whole thing in perspective.
[1:40] It drives the lips up the wall, but we had to do it.
[1:42] We've got to put this national security issue out there where it belongs.
[1:45] And we have to staunch the hemorrhage.
[1:49] Okay.
[1:49] Good luck.
[1:51] Right, Mr. President.