Nixon, Haldeman & Camp David Operator on Public Relations and Domestic Policy

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I probably got you when you were playing tennis or something.

No, sir.

Not at all.

I got my call the following night.

No, I was on the phone.

I thought you were probably doing everything, right?

No.

So, hopefully we have to keep up here.

Correctly.

So, it's better to get a little bit of sun.

Well, quite a bit.

I told you before the end of the day that

Better to come any place for a day.

That's good.

That's a good one.

I'll place three days for that.

Yep.

Now that's...

I don't know.

I was arguing for it just to get you further away, but you really, you don't need it.

When you get up here, you're as far away as if you were in Moscow.

That's absolutely true.

And it...

And yet you have the advantage of you can like whisk Henry up for a couple of hours or anything like that so that you can maintain a, you certainly have an advantage of having him, well, whisk him up for a couple of hours, but you can do that on the floor too.

And you make, I don't know if you want to make this.

But out of here, you can make news out of here in a different way, though.

I mean, Henry coming up, you've done so much out of here that nobody can ever...

They figured something might be up.

When you're here, immediately now, they start figuring what you may be up to.

Because you've come quietly up here and lobbed several bombs out of here.

There's no, that's, we're, we've got that so solidly locked now, though, either Florida or California or here, that they're working spots.

We've made news out of all of them.

And we use them all, and it's good.

Oh, true.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yep, in another hour or so.

One of those great first Mondays.

I'd like to see the Soviet trip.

Great pictures of that spread on her.

Those things are almost souvenir items.

They're so good, the pictures and stuff.

They're a thing that a lot of people keep.

I wonder what we get around to get them around.

They've run an insert in that.

I just left it in there, a little order form for a special pre-publication offer on the Ion Mix and Julie's book.

picture books and a little coupon that they had an envelope thing, like they put in a news magazine or something on it so people can order hooties sent to Republican women and things like that.

Yeah, but they go, it goes much broader than that.

It goes to our entire support list, which is all the people that have written in.

supporting, indicating support.

Are we working, are we doing an adequate job of working over the mail, for example, or people over vector mail?

That's, you know, I told you it was an enormously important and valuable list.

Yeah, we're computerizing all of that so that we've got classified, we've got where we can by types of people, and then, of course, by area and all that so that we can

get back to them by mail on a local basis.

We've got something like 300,000 identified supporters through the mail from those various things.

A lot of those are repeats.

You pick up all the stuff.

So that's the ones where we know, where they say specifically they support the president as contrasted to the ones who comment on something or thank you for, uh...

Uh, you know, I...

I could be...

I could be supportive to Russia, supportive to China, supportive to...

I think they should be on that list even though they don't say they're going to support you for a while.

Oh no, they are.

That's right.

It's not on the basis of support for election.

It's on the basis of support for a position or a move that you may congratulate me on a speech.

Did you know that Stockholm conference?

The only news it's made is...

The only news it's made was when that goddamn Prime Minister of Sweden marched in and said that the U.S. was polluting the environment in Vietnam.

Yeah.

State Department did.

They just whacked him hard.

They were shocked.

This is it.

terrible distortion of the purpose of the conference.

They couldn't believe that he would have, you know, it was quite a, quite a blind spot.

Oh, did we, did we have an ambassador there?

No, he's still there.

I mean, he's still the ambassador.

He's not there at the moment.

He's here getting on Area 3.

Well, I don't want the ambassador.

Let's assign him someplace else.

I'm just never going to find a suite.

Assign Holland, give him another post, and then just leave the charge A.

He won't bother with it for a while.

You know what I mean?

Have that brief exam right away.

Okay.

The call's been there long enough that it's conscious of that.

Give him another good post.

And we just leave the charge A there.

What I wanted to go over, what did you say to John Redman when he was back today?

He gets back at about 4.30.

I think that would be 9.30 at night his time.

If you want to get together with him, the thing to do would be to have him come up tomorrow.

Unless I'm going back, that's...

Quite a bit of it.

What's the team meeting?

That's the regular staff meeting.

Well, that's typical because everybody there is domestic regular chairing.

I think we've thought that through correctly.

I want to talk to John a little about it and his fact.

I just can't see my going around the country now, you know, uh, talking about revenue sharing, for example, which is falling.

It's not ball flatness, I ask for sure.

It just... No, I don't see any merit to it at all.

If you're going to turn to domestic issues, any domestic issue, you ought to turn to some dramatic crusade on dope or, or, uh,

or something on the spending problem, spending tax and all that, or some non-inflation, if you do something like that, then nobody's going to listen to you or care.

What I really expect is the positive domestic issues.

And I really think that on the positive domestic issues, we've made our record.

And so you'll have Ronnie, and Mopi, and Rickinson, and the rest go around and bitch and moat about those same things.

And Martin, Martin will moat about the environment, the parks and all that.

People were taking in on the environment issue, they really do, because of its very high invisible

support by the fanatics and the people just got the impression that it's an old man country, you know what I mean?

And I think we've been taking another 10 weeks of it.

They're rushing around, you know, they better bring us in.

That's fine, we'll do it.

What I'm getting at is that for us to do that, I just don't think that it's worth a hell of a lot of spending of money to put it that way.

Do you need those since we don't spend any money on them?

No, I was referring, frankly, to the water bill when it comes up.

Yeah.

The water rights and things like that.

Also, there's a tariff order on the floor.

We're not going to put $150,000 on it.

We're going to put $150,000 on it.

We're going to work on August 1st.

Now, that is just silly.

It's going to be stopped if we have to kick Ronald's house out of the job.

I mean, it's going to be stopped.

They do want to tear down the structure.

I'm just impressed about it.

I told you last time, I'm not going to let him go right over and tell him to go right so that I can go at him at the right time.

I don't think he knows it himself.

Right?

Absolutely.

Now, with regard to the, with regard to the

I don't think it's that necessary.

I don't think it's as hard to understand.

Well, plus the fact that people don't want to understand it.

All they want to be told is, this is what we should do.

That's right, that's right.

And the spectacle of the President of the United States being, you know, to go to an inquisition on that content, how many traditions they would use it for that purpose, too.

Yeah.

And you're not in a position to...

hedge an answer or anything like that.

Henry can do a lot of things, turn things around that you couldn't do.

I would have to be very more private, candid about this and that and the other thing.

Every statement would be... No, it was just that it was the thing to...

But I think on the other hand, the Henry thing is that it was an option to compromise the Senate.

whether, for instance, if we lose the busing thing, which we may, in any other sense, get ready for your constitutional amendment, determine whether you're going to come out at any point on it because we haven't signed this bill yet.

Well, yeah, except I took issue with Jonathan's thing, but now the latest thing is that the bill is going to come through without the busing.

There's something about that.

I'm close to the slides that they're meeting, and we've got to sign the goddamn thing.

I don't know.

I don't get it.

I don't know how the job gets back to them.

Is the wrong group to be figuring that out?

I don't know.

It's a problem with me.

It is really.

I'm curious how they all get in.

I'm not born in a higher education building.

As long as you build.

We're going to try to sneak the higher education, go strip to the anti-busing provisions through the House Thursday.

And what you, you know, have that figured out is the, what, what the position is.

And now, the story now is the, the plan on the deadline is to hold it, leave it at 4.15.

and extend it only to October.

So as to force you to go back in October for another increase.

And at that time, try to throw tax reform in.

Lob it into the middle of the campaign.

That's what Mills is all about.

It is, that is, Mills apparently has somebody, Mills is, is uh,

Let's figure it out early.

We ought to decide this afternoon, so we ought to let them know.

Here's the...

Okay, exhibit open in San Francisco.

One of 12,000 persons viewed it.

Largest one-day account they've ever had.

What are we saying?

It's an exhibit of photos and gifts.

You know, the China gift display.

They finally got it on the road.

They've had it here.

They apparently have two of the three local TV stations used a good clip of the exhibit Monday night.

Chronicle and Examiner both published stories on it.

It's on a 13-city tour now.

Rizzo, we worked out the invitation to Italy for him from the mayor of Rome and it all worked out and he said that he

Doesn't think he can leave Philadelphia for any extended period during the summer, but very much appreciate it.

You're remembering it and following up on it.

Obviously, we scored on that.

Oh.

You're right.

Yeah, whatever it's going to be, you know her or anything.

Nixon, Haldeman & Camp David Operator on Public Relations and Domestic Policy

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on June 8, 1972

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