Conversation 165-038

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Hello.

Well, I guess that's sitting here hoping that when you go to church today that they don't match you up and down the alleys and so forth like they did.

I don't think they will.

They're not out there today, huh?

No, there's nobody out in front.

That's great.

Probably clear.

Deserve a day off.

Bye.

It really is kind of nice to see them finally recognize something else is happening in the world.

That's got some good stuff.

Very good play, yeah.

I think two PLRs just got to be the hammer away at this.

It was hurt.

It's not going to work.

I mean, it's going to work totally, but what the hell?

Keep running the country and try to let everybody go.

Okay.

Because the amount of attention to this thing, Bob, is such something that I was walking around last night around 1030 with baby, and I said, you know, it's so discouraging.

I mean, here we are.

We're just working like our hell.

that all these bastards were right is this thing.

Yeah, that's it.

Not that I should mention it to you, because God, when you try to go up there to that whole grand jury, but I'm just thinking, you know, of the responsibility of the whole thing.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's, you read the stuff, and they can't put it in its straight terms.

They have to put it in its worst possible light in every aspect of it.

All we can do is let it hang out if it's going to.

And when it does, I don't think they're going to look so good.

You know, the strategy that really I'm coming down is I want to get your feeling about the thing.

You know, I don't think we're going to be able to stop those damn Senate hearings myself.

And if we don't, Bob, I think we've just got to make an exit out of liability.

I'm not so sure, but what's going in there isn't so bad.

particularly, you know, you'll have to be extremely careful, you and John, in terms of always answering, like in a courtroom, when you take the privilege, you've got to do it in a very technical way.

But in the Senate hearings, you could do it in a very different way.

You could say, now that, of course, is under that.

But I do want to say this, that, that, that, and make a speech each time.

Our president had no knowledge, whatever.

It was never discussed in his presence.

See, what I mean is, that's the way I would answer the perfect question myself.

Or otherwise, I'd say, well, uh, uh, Solomon Richards' disgust precedence went to, uh, to the Mexican bugging artist.

Or, I don't know, maybe you have other ideas.

And like you say, on papers,

Sure, I have papers, yes.

But, of course, presidential papers cannot be turned over.

But I can tell you that.

I'll be glad to tell you what is proper for me to disclose.

And I'm going to tell you all about it.

Which is the line I think they ought to take on that.

Yep.

Do you have any other thoughts this morning?

No.

You haven't had a chance to talk to Les Hart yet?

No.

Well, I talked to him on Friday.

Friday, well, I had to talk to you.

But early, he wants to get together again, so I'll do that.

Right.

When do you go back for the ranger?

Monday morning.

Okay.

Monday morning.

And I suppose I'll probably be there most of the day, and I should finish up.

As I understand it, they haven't finished with John yet.

Yeah, unless they have something new come up today.

I don't know that I can think of as quick with regard to the...

meeting, remember, that you and John had to do with Helms.

Yeah.

And members, you know.

Yeah.

And actually, as you know, we, on that, what we did, we grabbed Colton to bring all of his M-coms and put them in the White House, you know, figuring it'd be better to hold there rather than to turn them all over and so forth.

Did you leave a folder in the house, right?

No, I didn't meet with him.

Oh, no, no, I didn't.

I thought it was best not to.

Yeah, I know.

I said, well, I better go meet with him.

And then Lazard said, no, let me meet with him.

And I agreed.

I said, no, probably because basically they're going to ask him that.

Well, what I'm going to say is this, that Kenny, as you well remember, as I was trying to reconstruct this whole Walters thing, first of all, I mean, if you read the whole

a series of stuff and have it all fleshed out.

There's just no trouble, whatever.

If, however, you take one of them, particularly the first one, where it says that Haldeman and Ehrlichman told what Walters thought the president thinks.

There's been five of these people find that it's gone far enough and that we ought to, it's beginning to, you know, that Walters ought to go over and talk to Gray and see what can be done about it.

That's a scary headline.

Nixon ordered CIA and FBI to get together and, you know, flush the water gate.

Or not.

All of them ordered FBI and all without Nixon's authority, et cetera, et cetera, which they might not.

Don't you agree?

Yeah.

Yep.

Looking back at that meeting, you must have notes on it.

As I told Haig last night, I said, no, I don't.

Let's just put this in the proper perspective with John and Bob.

Yeah, I mean, that's just some of the words that I told him.

Look, get Bernard Walters involved in this thing, which, of course, I'm sure I did.

I said, fine, get Walters back, because I knew he'd know.

You remember, I... Well, I knew he's a man we could trust.

Okay.

And that he would not want to hurt us.

You know, I mean, at the CIA, you know, because we knew that as a name for a day, right?

But I said, do you think for one minute that they would have invited Helms in?

I said, do you think they would have sat there with Helms at the head of the...

a career guy who we knew was not particularly against, but not for us, and to discuss a diabolical plan of conspiracy for the purpose of the CIA.

And that occurred to you, and I hope that's exactly the point.

Yeah.

For example, when you're asked about it, what line could you take, I don't know.

I mean, you, of course, can take the privilege line, but that's not the...

to a certain extent, you can take the purpose in all national security matters.

But again, I suppose it's...

But then I can characterize the reasons for all these things.

But you could simply say, I'll tell you what the meeting was about.

The meeting was about, because there had been, there are four or five CIA people who had been instigated, big people.

We ordered them in.

We didn't want this to involve the CIA.

It's kind of a caper.

And therefore, we...

I told them to get a hold of Sonsville and that and that.

Which is about, about a fair day.

Now, the follow-up things on Walters, things are good in the sense that, and this is the thing that, let me show you.

He went over to Gray, not only Gray, but he also went to, went to Walters.

And on occasion, after occasion,

trying to get Walters to put these goddamn Cubans on the CIA payroll and second, to pay for their attorney's fees.

And I had never known or heard of this before.

You see, the point that I make is I'm now looking at what Dean may say sometime as to whether he says that all of this was cooked up and they agreed that that's what they were trying to do.

Walters stonewalled him and said, well, look,

you're trying to get the president dragged into this damn thing.

I asked whether or not he used the president's name.

He said, no, he did not.

You know, in that, but my point is, my point is that this idea of a whole, you remember we heard these rumors of the fact that there was an attempt to have a CIA cover-up.

Now, this apparently is what this damn thing is all about.

See?

The only purpose of my call is simply to alert you to the facts so that you can be in a position to say, God, you know a bad thing about it.

You did have the conversation.

You did know that Walters was going over there.

That Walters and Gray, too.

Their purpose was not to have this thing...

Uh, we wanted to get the facts.

We were not trying to cover it up.

We didn't want to.

Well, at that point, we didn't know.

We didn't know whether it was a CIA operation.

Well, it was very hard to think how it could possibly be.

Well, except the whole thing was, at that point, was almost impossible to figure out.

Yes, we do.

I thought you could just say this.

We knew the White House wasn't involved.

That's right.

The committee had said they were not involved.

That's right.

We knew the CIA personnel were involved and were working for the committee.

That's right.

We wanted to find out whether this had anything, if possible, to do with the CIA thing.

And we wanted to make sure that they didn't get totally out of line.

But the point is,

The theory of the prosecution, obviously, would be to try to say, ah, this is a part of a White House attempt, maybe our dean at all or anybody, to fabricate the fact that this was a CIA operation, which, of course, would have been impossible if you're going to do it.

Well, I don't know what your attorneys are talking about, but I just want to be sure that you and John were, you know, alerted to that, whatever it was.

Because, goddammit, this is one place where you just didn't have a... You're just doing what your job was.

And you were all the time.

Yep.

And that's the way I...

Isn't it interesting?

What's your theory of the case now as you come on it?

Isn't it possibly that Dean sort of got the bit in his teeth and went far beyond what anybody, you know, like John gave him the set look, go over and talk to Gray.

But, you know, it was because John was so damn busy he couldn't do it.

But I think Dean got himself more and more enmeshed in the damn thing.

Or he might have been enmeshed earlier.

Well, that's the other thing.

What do you think?

I think that's also possible, but I still, I don't know.

I still have a feeling there's a missing link in here somewhere.

That there's a, you know, some connection that, yeah.

A link between link 15 and somebody else?

Yeah.

I don't exactly understand what his, if he went in as deep as it now appears that he was.

Of course, maybe he wasn't.

It's a mistake for us to read anyone.

I don't understand why.

Well, isn't it?

It just got drawn in over a period of time.

Is it not possible?

Let's face it.

Is it not possible without trying control where we shouldn't?

Mitchell pulled him in.

Yes.

And Mitchell said, well, let's do this.

Yes.

Let's do that.

Yes.

I think more and more because it's possible when you see it here, but more of the thing that Mitchell, like Mitchell was saying to Erlichman, or somebody, or could really be to have Erlichman activate Kambach, right?

Yes.

I don't know who said that.

I mean, that wasn't...

But it didn't come from Ervickman or it didn't come from Haldeman, but it came from Mitchell, didn't it?

Yeah.

Sure.

I think that part becomes quite clear if it's true that Mitchell, which is certainly a period now that it is, that Mitchell was involved from the beginning.

Right.

All the guys now say is the case.

I think you have to assume that.

Telling the truth or not, there was a reason that Erlichman called Kambach, he did it.

No, I think Erlichman called Kambach apparently.

Kambach, all that was done was Dean was told it was okay for him to talk to Kambach, and then Kambach called Erlichman to confirm it.

In other words, I see Kambach didn't talk to me, I trust.

Oh, no.

I have no indication of that.

That's the reason that's suggested.

Okay, well, I just didn't know.

Well, I'm not going to try to deny anything, because after that September 15th thing, I don't know what the hell may have happened.

That's right.

He may have said, look, I'm helping out Ehrlichman or something on a project.

It's just okay.

All right, good.

So I'm just going to say that I know.

But there's no indication of that, any of that.

But then he called Ehrlichman.

Is that it?

Go ahead on early.

Yeah, I think this is right.

That's fine.

I'm glad we're taking this very hard line now on the window.

privilege thing back on track with, uh, with Buzard.

I mean, you know, all poopers and Boehrer and all, and very, very tough on everything else.

So, uh, and, uh, we got, uh, we got garbage, you know, hosing around the election commission, which I think's fine.

That's right.

But you feel comfortable in your, uh, with Buzard, you know?

I think so.

Yeah.

Don't, don't trust anybody, but you should know.

But nevertheless, uh, I just want you to know that I feel I have elected him

at least three or four times.

I said, God damn it, this is what everybody's doing.

We're not going to get this out.

But he believes, too, that the privilege thing is important from our standpoint.

That's good.

Because it is not just in this, but in Jesus.

If you undo it here, you just give a license.

That's one of the great problems in this thing is that we have so many barriers.

Not making law.

We...

We don't know what's going to come up next.

We can have another India-Pakistan.

They might want to get into what kind of a secret deal we have with China.

Well, sure.

Yeah.

Good God.

I'm wondering whether Henry gets it through his papers.

Yeah.

I know what was going on.

Sure.

Incidentally, were you able to work the thing out with Firestone, I hope?

I talked to Pat Schreiber, thought it was, said he's all for it.

You see, I want it for other reasons.

I want the two of you to work on that thing and let's just do it with no publicity and work the whole thing out whenever it's reasonable.

Right.

And it'll be great.

Will do.

Fine.

All right.

Well, in any event, I was just thinking that each Sunday, you know,

things and so forth, but let me say that, by golly, I'm just convinced, Bob, we're on the right.

The main thing, you've got to believe you're right.

The second thing, you've got to fight like hell.

Yep.

Do you have any doubts on that score this morning?

Not whatsoever.

Do you still want me to fight it through rather than... Dad was saying last night that she's seeing where work could call for impeachment.

I hadn't seen that, but it's just...

No, I don't.

I think that that was a back of ways where he said something in answer to a question that if the president has, you know, conducted any criminal acts, then there should be or would have to be an impeachment process.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Sure.

Fair enough.

I don't think he calls for it.

But I'll tell you that the more I think is that we have here our

four years and by God we did a hell of a job and we're all going to fight like hell for not only our personal vindication but we're also going to fight for the vindication of what we stand for and I hope you and John John's feeling good that way and because we can stand together in this thing and the just ridiculous as you say your point though that the press takes something and turns it around

But you know, even that is not new, is it, Bob?

No.

That's happened before.

Sure has.

Well, anyway, any good day, you can move around with no Mother's Day, no damn television cameras.

We hope so.

Okay.

Thank you.