On May 13, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon and Ronald L. Ziegler talked on the telephone at Camp David from 10:09 am to 10:20 am. The Camp David Study Table taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 165-036 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Yeah.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Hi, Ron.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Sure is good to see.
It's a summit headline in the post.
What is the play today?
Anything new that I should know about?
Well, nothing really to do with the Watergate thing, but the summit's playing well, and the
Post picks up the bipartisan commission out of the Star.
Yeah.
The Star has a good follow-up story on the election panel.
Plan hailed by Lance Eulman, by O'Neill, and by Albert's office at Ford.
So there's a good second half.
In other words, Timmons finally got off his ass and got some of those guys.
Yeah, well, that's what I had to talk about yesterday.
Yeah, but you got a hold of Timmons?
Mm-hmm.
Well, Demons will do it if you tell him.
He just doesn't think of those things, usually.
So we've got the...
It's great if it's all up.
In the start, it says, for the second day now, it says, election panels land hailed.
And then, not the second day, the story starts, and the folks pass it as their left-hand lead.
That's the last joint approval from Congress.
on the coast.
That's sort of a positive line, isn't it?
Yes, sir.
How about the summit?
Did it play?
You haven't seen the time, sir.
I don't have the time, sir.
I was on the way in and called, so I didn't get the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
But the post played the summit well.
Yeah, right.
Now, the Star has the FBI on its own files on secret wiretaps, which is okay, too, because tomorrow Ruckels' house goes over.
It probably goes out, you see.
Well, the FBI works.
Not hunt as a man, but FBI hunts or looks for old files.
Oh.
But that'd be, you know, that'd be cool.
Well, Reva's house is going to point out that the vials are all returned.
That's correct.
The story on that, as you know, Ron, is that they returned over to the White House.
Well, the reason it was there, we can't tell, because it was trying to blackmail the House and the market.
The main story we should use is the things we're taking from the FBI.
That's right.
That's what we use tomorrow.
That's what we use, but that's a subpar thing.
We use it very hard.
Because that gives us a negative to hit.
Very hard.
The files were in the White House and were never used there.
Only because they were, these were, the originals were brought here because there had been leaks from the files.
And I'd start getting the FBI on its leaks.
What are you saying today?
How about we all go back real fast?
The massive leaking of the FBI.
Tomorrow we have the
the positive thrust by Ruckelshaus hitting all those lines.
That's true.
It's starting to work.
Yeah, yeah.
It's starting to work.
Yeah, well, so we'll handle that.
It's a real attractivity that we...
Well, we can't whine about it, but it's a tragedy that with all the things we're doing, Ron, that we have this constant, all this constant crap I'm wondering.
Well, we expected iron, right?
I know, I know.
Oh, yeah, it's going to go on and on and on.
The hearings will go on.
I think your bros were taking the, you know, the right ones.
I think we're on the right track.
In other words, we're...
We're going along with our business.
We're planning our moves.
And we're not, you know, we don't have a series of actions that aren't thought out and being taken.
And it's like this election panel, for example, picked up on its own momentum, Mr. President.
You know, we got it moving a little bit.
Bill got it moving a little bit.
But then the press sought out these people.
And, you know, Bill consulted with them.
And they responded positively.
So the thing is...
My present plan is to try to get those guys together Tuesday.
Great.
I'll send the legislation down.
Great.
We're working on that today.
The material is supposed to be up to you this afternoon.
That's exactly right.
Well, Ron, bye.
Well, one day at least.
You know, if you look at these Watergate Sundays, it seems that that's all it is.
Last Sunday wasn't quite as bad as the Sunday before.
I'll tell you, when I picked up the Washington Post this morning, I didn't chill enough.
I just wanted to see that front page with the UFO summit set and the positive story about the...
They'll have quite a story, I think, when they get poor old, well, not poor, boulders over there talking about, you know, grace and things.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
But there's nothing there.
There's nothing there.
But the CIH, there wasn't anything to do anything.
Well, Mr. President, on that whole thing, as Al and Fred and I were talking about yesterday, this is something that
was the right thing to do.
It had to be done.
If we cannot be on the defensive, what's a little bit done?
No, and the idea, too, you know, it's not that you couldn't ever let any men count down if we could avoid it.
Never.
But if you could avoid it.
You know why people do men count, isn't it?
Well, I don't either.
And I've never done one in my life.
Personally, you know, that's a very bad thing, unless you just give it to the president.
That was Johnson's rule.
But let me say this.
One of them come.
The point is, when you do them, they're crying out loud.
And you read them out of context.
Like they have in there, Nixon said that you've seen Walters and the one that he had when he saw Gray.
Well, of course I asked him if he'd seen Walters, because I had heard that Walters was doing the investigation on the CIA side.
Can I say it?
Right.
Of course.
Why wouldn't I ask him?
Well, you could have asked him about Walters and the number of others that he was involved in, too.
You have to keep in mind.
No, no, no.
It wasn't that, though.
The point was that he...
That was when I raised, that Joe had called him about hijacking the water.
And he had called, and then he raised the thing about the fact that he thought other people were involved in the Watergate.
And I said, well, have you seen Walters on the thing?
See?
Right.
Like the logical thing.
Sure.
Yeah, when you look back to the first conversation when John and Bob met with Helms and Walters.
because then it makes it look as if, well, maybe we're trying to, and then he's got something there.
The president thinks this is kept online and kept by people, and he wants Walrus to go over and talk to Gray about it.
Well, now, that is a perfectly logical, right thing to do.
Of course, we don't want the CIA dragged into the goddamn thing.
That's right.
See my point?
That's the point of this.
And I think we ought to be very, very, I mean, I think Buzzard tends to be just a little bit
I mean, he's great.
He's good.
He really is.
He's great in the launch.
And he's on what I agree from the standpoint, too, that he says very clearly that if I'm the president of Florida, no one else is going to know.
That's right.
And the fight is, though, the thing is that we want to remember that you can read all these little things between them, but we want to remember that, my God, we just got to take a positive line on all this stuff.
I must have mentioned that.
Christ, I've talked about that.
I honestly thought that some CIA, some normal CIA people, not that the whole bugging was a CIA project, I knew they would never do it, but that they must know something about it.
CIA money floats in such funny ways.
And I wanted to find out from the horse and the rest where in the hell it was all going.
And if they were involved, of course, I would have been delighted.
Oh well, nothing we can do about it.
I think that's, I don't know.
Everyone has that.
On Gray's story, did yours repost him?
Got anything, I mean, or your response to Gray here?
Well, fortunately, it played on the record, on the wires, but it didn't play heavy enough.
And this is what our strategy was, to make it a second-day story, actually.
In other words, Gray's idea that he warned me, I guess, left the implication.
He warned me, and I said, oh, go to hell.
But regarding...
You didn't get that feeling out of it, though, apparently.
No.
And also, Buzzard, who seems to be somewhat familiar with what Gray said, said that Gray did an excellent job.
And our strategy yesterday was to hit it hard.
For those who ask, we got it to hit it hard on the wires, but not... What did you say to him?
I pointed out that, as we said yesterday, that from the very outset, the president has insisted on a complete and thorough investigation.
Time and time again, he pressed the staff to look into the matter.
And I said, any suggestions that the president participated in, approved of, or had knowledge of and cover up is totally unfounded, as pointed out in our statement from Florida and as the president pointed out in this speech.
If we didn't get into, as I said yesterday, into the phone call aspect of it, we couldn't reach Gray.
Right.
All right.
Well, that works just as well.
Good.
Just as well.
Just as well.
Okay.
And then Gray, I'm sure, is going to program.
Well, Gray shouldn't be reachable.
The poor guy probably figures he has some potential criminal liability.
I hope not, but.
And maybe you should talk to White House people, so let's not press it.
Well, the buzzards can talk without a problem.
Yeah, maybe so.
All right.
Well, have a nice day, then.
All right.
Thank you, Ron, and good luck.
Good luck.
Work your strategy up.
I like some of the things Al was saying, that you're going to work up two strategy names.
I don't know how much of a play we can get, but Tuesday the line will be with the bipartisan leaders trying to get that message up there.
All right.
Okay.
Okay, sir.
Bye.