Nixon, Mitchell & Kissinger on Jimmy Hoffa and Commutation of sentence

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How's John?

How are you?

I'm good.

How are you doing?

Well, I, uh...

I mean, I had a couple of things about this Hoffa thing.

Uh, is there any... Is there any way that it can be handled now other than, uh...

We can't do it through parole.

So I thought that they could call me.

Unfortunately not.

So what we're looking at patiently is so they include more empathy.

There's about somewhere 12, 15 other content protections that will be recommended.

And though I guess

hundreds or hundreds of parties.

But it is a connotation.

And this getting out of jail, but not the story of civil rights.

Actually, of course, the understanding of the dialogue that we had with Fitzsimmons was a Fitzsimmons with James Robert Chan,

Is there any way that we can keep any strength off ourselves?

Like, are there any other wraps that can be put on in case we start to screw around?

There's enough other activities that we can do.

I have heard about this, the ability to keep it restrained.

That's the only exception I know he's looking at at the moment.

It's a bit similar to shooting from what I gather.

It isn't about the one-hopping, screwing around and throwing him out of his job.

No.

But I think Fitz knows.

His cop will do it unless you do it.

Well, Fitz has a different feeling.

He feels that if he gets out of these conditions, he's going to live by them.

Does he?

Yeah.

Did you talk to Connelly about it, did you say?

Yes.

The reason I suggested that was with the pay board and all that sort of thing.

You see there's a situation having taken a strong stand against the funds of labor.

That's what a lot of people think of me and all of us.

You know, so here we are being talked on often.

How did that strike?

How did that strike Connelly?

Connelly was a great user.

Connelly and I went into that in quite some depth, and he came out with, I think, a character that was quite strong.

Plus, he recognized the goody-goody people who would say, oh, we've got somebody in a jail, a populist that's been in a jail at the time of the bomb.

He was a well-receiver of the labor organization.

And most people, he was one of the most knowing people.

He was Bobby Kennedy.

He hadn't been a medic, and they put him in there.

So he served past the normal time of parole.

He's been a model prisoner.

Would you, in this instance, have some sort of a statement, or do you have a press statement or something to make all those points that we get across?

He has been a model prisoner.

He has met all the requirements of parole.

Well, you don't have to get any out of it.

What I'm just trying to say, what's your scenario?

What I was suggesting.

It will not.

Sure.

Yeah, what you might point out is that they, well, frankly,

Well, if it came before you last year, you would not recommend it.

You know, you would not take it as a reserve amount.

But this year, you reexamined it again and decided that you served his time.

There should not be any one that's not a reserve amount.

If he's got any treatment, everybody won't have to show it.

It shouldn't be punitive.

There's no basis for keeping him in jail any longer.

Could you, uh, could you get an arm on Lowe this way?

In other words, um, we have to believe that this is the only thing that's got Lowe's to take off.

We and I correspond properly when you talk.

Could you, could you talk to him safely?

You can't talk to Lowe the same way that, um, how do you run this?

Well, what do you mean you can't just do this and then let's see what Lowe does?

Well, I think he's a guy, you know, you want to call him a little bit, you know, a little bit of a silly expert, but I'm very, you know, a little bit of a keyhole.

I, you know, I can, I can talk to Lois and talk to her a little bit without trying to get into the deal, I think, but that ain't true.

Oh, God, no, no deal.

I was wondering what you were saying.

Well, have you... Go ahead, Tom.

I've had this continuing response.

It must be awful.

Well, it's a terrible subject.

It doesn't even work.

It's an irrational son of a bitch.

He is, Brother Tracy, although on his front page it only says, but I don't know.

This is really the only thing.

This book made me get off to a dead end.

China, Russia, but there's that bugging.

Why is this bugging?

Is this mold?

I don't know what that would be.

When was the list come out?

Well, we controlled it.

I had it controlled.

Dr. Kissinger, I believe.

Hi, Henry.

How are you?

Well, uh...

I think under the circumstances, you'd better...

I got you this stuff.

But I, on balance, I think we probably should do it.

And then make the maximum out of it.

And we're as discreet as possible.

Well, I want to get some commitment to this overall.

Yeah, you should.

I think you ought to get it directly.

I don't know how the hell you can talk about peace discreetly.

Yes, you would be.

And what we would do would be say, now look here, here's what we can do.

All right, it's your job here.

It's a terribly difficult decision.

The whole bad kind of crowd will get me chipped on our throats.

Well, did you feel that?

He was, you heard him get that impression.

Well, I thought, he was out in Washington when they were doing it.

That's right.

My impression was that Bobby Kennedy gets out and he gets in and he can do the whole thing so that he can put the testers to sleep.

I got it.

I don't care how obnoxious that is.

He set up a special task force

Tell me this.

Could you, for example, there are two people that are, who are very much against you, who are friends of ours.

What is the problem along the line?

Would you have a little chat with him?

Over there?

Afterwards.

I'll give an act that feels better.

That's a conversation.

It's a community sentence.

He doesn't get his civil rights back, but we commute his sentence.

It's not a pardon, but it gets him out of jail.

The ground is done.

He'll be one of how many?

We do it for a hundred or so times.

We do it at Christmas every year, I think, Mr. President.

I have always had, quite honestly, many uneasy feelings about the whole U.S. government going after one guy.

And for all I know, I mean, from the little I've read about him, that's the one that's kind of affected him.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's a very contiguous report.

You know, some of us celebrate.

We'll get that signed up at January 2nd.

Yeah.

The other one is Jimmy Stormont.

He said while a guest home.

Is that right?

Yeah.

All right.

Yes.

I just want you to, let me say, I don't want to hear any more about it.

I just want to answer him another reply I've ever asked him.

I say, well, Dr. Turner, Attorney General, some bitches always recommend it to you.

I mean, I can't blame him.

I mean, I have to.

He's always screwing me up, and I just want to say, well, Dr. Red was up there.

Oh, he's here before, huh?

Here before.

I'll take it.

He's just like Bill Washington.

Yeah.

He thinks you can carry New York State if you don't move too far left.

We're moving right.

That's what he thinks you should do.

To my amazement, he says the truth.

I was talking to him about this press.

I said the press is trying to go after them.

And he said the liberals are totally out of touch with the country.

He says that?

Yeah.

That's why I thought it was interesting.

He said he got 87% of the Italian vote in the last election.

And they can always be democratic by taking the right of tenders, lands, of welfare, and so forth.

Yeah.

And he thinks that you can...

I don't know what he's talking about in the program.

You know what I mean?

He was at dinner last night.

I played, I don't know if I made him, but they were standing in their walk.

I told him, I told his father, who, of course, was one of Henry's favorite dictators, I said, I would tie him up to Medici.

The Aussies would be presuming for us.

You know, they were eventually used to it.

They thought they were a baggy number, but they all swarmed over him.

you know i don't think there's any reason to give an inch on that again don't you agree

on Medellin, huh?

That's pretty damn impressive what he's done for that country.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

This is Marjah.

Marjah was president.

He was to go down here and have dinner on election evening.

He was to go down here.

I knew he was coming down.

He's the head of the National Conference.

So I talked to Marjah.

Well, that's Friday, Thursday, or Friday.

Don't tell us it's coming down.

This is exactly what we're starting.

Oh, great.

I wonder what you're thinking.

Oh, well, Nelson's ready for it, you know.

But Marciotta has proven it now.

Is Marciotta taking a conservative mind?

Oh, always has been.

Has he?

So much so that he beat the hell out of conservatives out there in this place.

That's what I'm saying.

His wife at the W is very happy about it.

That's a hell of a campaigner.

Yes, it is.

Well, you know, Joe Marchiato in Nassau County, on the third side of that, has 32 paid people on his campaign staff.

And that is something like five times more than the whole state of New York did.

This is a real little season.

He knows how to make it work.

Does he have a front row?

Well, he does.

I really think that Nelson really feels this way.

Tell me, how has Nelson, I mean, has he recovered from that, from his Attica problem?

Well, he should have.

Goddamn, he had to, I mean, they had to think.

You know, I'll never forget, I bet you should know, when I was up to Alaska, our old friend Wally Nicole proceeded to come to me and said, you know, Attica was Nelson Rockefeller's chapel clinic.

I wasn't Elsinore for a chapter, but it was too bad, and so forth.

But God never, he has to do what he did.

He probably comes out strong.

I can't believe that anyone in the world conflicts over God's presence.

No, but it was a question I just started.

Well, to tell you another story, I don't know why the audience came over for a second.

I never heard of it.

I'll tell you, that's all it is, because I've got a cousin who's a judge now.

That's it.

The party leader, yes.

Well, I liked him.

I had never really...

I'd met him before, but I never really did.

But after dinner, as he may have told you, I had seen his wife came up, and I just liked the little guy.

Well, he was a tough little guy, and he had really done more than else in Acapulco.

in the last three or four years has been focused on the legislature and putting backbone into the other camp to generally support.

Is that right?

Yes, sir.

He admires Nelson Raquel.

He admires him, and he's the biggest head in the House of Representatives.

Right, and I think that was .

He told Joe Marciano, the president didn't tell me, but he would decide to, you know, he'd certainly have you, but

that he's going to do it, but he would, I could tell him.

I mean, he really was going on and on about what a disaster for the country would be if any of the Democratic candidates got elected.

But the government, none of them have the strategy of the candidates, and it may be the voting of the government.

Nelson, when the president was agreed to, voted in sixth.

Sixth, yeah.

And the second to that is,

As Joe Mardi Gras has said.

What are Vicks doing now?

Dewey's dead.

Or is he a lawyer?

I don't know.

Go ahead.

The point is that Nelson will go get Vicks because he loves the campaign.

Everybody will know that Nelson is dead.

You know Vicks is the enemy.

He's a real pro.

Don't you agree?

He's just a real pro.

And I like him.

I hope you could pull that off.

Well, that's a statement that was returned every day, too.

Yeah.

The political structure you had last night was with Harry Sears.

Yeah, I told him that you had, that I was counting on him in New Jersey.

That's all I said.

I said, we haven't got anybody else there but you.

Does that answer what you're asking?

working together.

And Cahill's riding at the top of the wave here.

Good.

Yeah, because he's came out so well in his group.

Yeah.

And even to the point where the Ribbon Society is boosting the Vice President.

Cahill is the most conservative, toughest little Irishman.

Have they ever got to that area?

I don't know.

They're boosting anybody to not get here.

Anybody to not get here.

But Nelson's

How did he feel about the media and the attack on San Antonio?

Before I say that, I called Nilton while you were there.

I called Bush just before him because I heard that he had a press conference.

I said, you've done a hell of a job.

And I repeated some of the lines that he said he was sitting there reading your background because I don't know if he got any press on his end.

But I said, made this point.

I said, now it's done.

And he raised the point of morale.

He went through a very interesting exercise.

He said, Charlie Martin was the minister.

He said, you know, Charlie Martin raised this point.

He said, the difficulty, he said, was that the press is like the Kennedys were.

Because the Kennedys were obsessed with the idea of Indian mystery and all of the godlike qualities and so forth.

He said, those of us who work with the Indians up here know that they are all people with the tricky sons and bitches they're on.

I said, how come you got that many boats?

He said, yeah.

He said, we got all the boats except India's, the Russian satellite.

And we even got one Indian.

And he said, put it very, very wrongly.

Well, first of all.

You know, a lot of the Mideastern folks were with us all because they were southerners, like the Israeli men.

And I could see that, you know, a withdrawal that can be a withdrawal.

But then he said there were countries like Zambia and a lot of jackass places like Iran and the Philippines that were kind of dragging him out.

You know what I'm saying?

He said they also...

This idea, you see, this is where the New York Times and the rest are wrong, where they say that if aggression is engaged in by a democracy, it's all right, but where it's engaged in by a dictatorship, it's wrong.

They forget that most of the countries in the world aren't dictatorships.

They've included all these new credits.

The second one, the point that I made to him, which I had hardened to the afternoon,

There's a totally immoral attitude of our critics.

First, they say, they made the point that because there's 600 million Indians and only 60 million were in Pakistan, we're on the wrong side.

We should be with the 600 million Indians.

I said, since when do we determine the morality of our policy on the basis of how many people a country has?

I said, they second reason that they're wrong.

And they said, then they say, but India is a democratic country.

Pakistan is a totalitarian country, a dictatorship.

And therefore, India says we should be on the side of the dictatorship and the side of the democratic country.

And I said, if aggression is engaged in by any country, it's wrong.

And in a sense, it's even more wrong for a democratic country to engage in it because democratic countries are held with a higher degree of morality.

And I said, international morality will be finished.

The United Nations will be finished.

you adopt the principle that because a country is democratic and big, it can do what the hell it pleases.

I really think that puts the issue to the sun.

So, we even have a legal application.

What all the Pakistani government has, they have.

They have.

They've rolled it up.

Not on the basis of that, but on the basis of the treaty.

The treaty, I understand.

We have a backlash from the treaty.

It gives us an out, doesn't it?

Right.

Well, I mean, I understand.

It could, but this doesn't.

This mansion is empty.

It's a deal.

It's a greeting gift, sir.

It's light.

But, but this one's locked into India by name.

And we've got to do everything to find them as the aggressors.

So how do we play this in the house, Frank?

I don't know.

Well, the next time they say, here I am, here it is.

and drove Pakistanis, and said, you have the right to be...

I've got that.

Mitchell.

I think, I think, at the right moment, that they say, you have the right to be committed as a dictator, and I ask you, you should serve the service of the country that you're carrying out a commitment.

Thank you.

There's no way it can't be done.

I just got a message here from the Shah that he can send ammunition.

He's doing it now.

He cannot send airplanes.

A, because the Pakistanis can't fly the airplanes.

B, because it's an agreement.

C, most importantly, because the Soviet-Indian treaty makes it possible for the Soviets.

He's proposing that the Jordanians

and their planes to Pakistan, because the Pakistanis can fly to Afghanistan, and then he sends his planes to Jordan with Iranian pilots to cover Jordan while they are

I should think we could get a commitment from Israel not to bother George Washington.

The Israelis should be on our side on this one, aren't they?

Well, when you talk to her, you tell her, Henry, that this is a goddamn Russian ploy.

That's what she's got to do.

As long as the war with these Pakistanis still was likely a victory, but the Indian plan was not clear.

They were going to move their forces from these Pakistanis to the west.

They would then smash the Pakistanis, and force the Canadian forces.

And next, the part of the Kashmir that they liked to visit Pakistan and then call for, after that, that happened.

And then we had another federal government position on saying that the destruction of West Pakistan now would be a mortal threat to the security of Iran.

And when they had that, the centrifugal forces in West Pakistan would be liberated, and Balochistan and the northwest frontier would be consumed, and so the stuff ran away.

West Pakistan would become a sort of immigrant Afghanistan type state.

East Pakistan would become a good time.

All of this would have been achieved by Soviet support, Soviet arms, and Indian military force.

The impact of this on any country that is threatened by the Soviet Union, or by the Soviet side, they have to deal with now.

I've talked about this.

In order to check my judgement, I discovered what my judgement was when I asked him.

He thinks it will have a catastrophic impact on the community.

No one could now be able to tell the Israelis who they ought to accept the NFC, or give up on it for territory or anything else, because they won't believe the NFC.

The Irish have heard those things.

They get a bad cover from the Soviets, and the Indians are going to have to try another round, and maybe hope.

The Chinese, not this part of it, my judgment, up to a certain point, is being aggressive and is helping us all the time.

But if it turns out that we handled the completed memorandum of Pakistan, then they don't conclude, all right, we played it decently.

But we're just too weak.

And that they have to break their circumnavigation, not by giving it to us, but by moving either to a country or India.

So I think this, unfortunately, has turned into a big watershed that is going to affect not just the global situation in South Asia.

Now, I don't mind not saying publicly that we are losing the point, but the fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, we are confronted with a tough situation.

And it seems to me that what we have to do now, or what I would recommend is

where we went wrong before, is not to try to scare the Indians in time.

I think...

But how would you scare them?

If we had designed...

If we had understood...

I understood it, but I thought I took a little bit of it instead of getting my head on.

I don't know what would have affected them.

Well, what would have affected them is if, for example, Mrs. Candy's vision.

You did exactly what all your advisors recommended.

But if we had recommended you to be brutal to her rather than to be nice to her, and if you had said, I just want you to know, our whole plan was to do it.

Exactly.

I mean, you did exactly what we all recommended to you.

Matter of fact, I could have brought you some anything unless it was tougher than I was.

No, I inferred it was going to be taken by dinner.

I told her that it was getting late.

any war would be very, very, you know, what President Rogers said, he told her that it was parallel.

Well, we didn't give you, we told, our feeling was we shouldn't give her pretext to come back home and then say that she has no friends and she's got to go.

That was a mistake.

The mistake was that we should have understood that she was not looking for pretext, that she was determined to go.

And that, secondly, we should have been much tougher with her.

What have we done now?

We should have told them what we finally told them on Sunday, that this would mark a watershed in our relations, that there could be no Middle East negotiations, that this thing would flow.

We would have had to play it tough.

And thirdly, we should have, and once the cat was among the fish, when they moved on November 22nd, we had...

We had cut off as you wanted to, but we couldn't get the bureaucracy to do it.

We could have cut off the economic aid for the first or second day, left all of us instead of waiting ten days and diddling it up.

We've done all that, but I ordered all of that.

You know that.

I'm not left alone.

The mistake was that in every other crisis, what I had to analyze, I explained myself, what I had to analyze properly was that in every other crisis, our basic attitude was to help with the State Department, let them screw around with the little ones.

But I forgot that in the other crisis, we had all the elements of position, so it was late.

When we moved, since nothing could happen until we moved, we didn't pay for the delay.

In their situation, we were in a fast-moving situation.

If we could not hold up so that the delay accelerated the situation, we were always a little bit too late.

We always did the right thing too late.

You ordered it at the right moment, but we maneuvered too much.

But that's now what we're doing.

We never stopped.

It's the end of the industry.

Some of you could have done that.

I wondered.

But anyway, we've got the same problem in the West now.

Now what do we do?

Well, we have two choices.

I'm not kidding.

I told Alex Johnson a few minutes ago that I was, that I told people all the rest of Chess when they went to see Mrs. Candy or she wouldn't recognize what nationality he was talking about.

Well, forget what he was doing.

Well, the trouble is we have to convince the Indians now

We've got to scare them off and attack them as much as we possibly can.

And therefore, we've got to get another tough warning to the ground.

I mean, if you, but you're paying a price because you are risking the summit.

On the other hand, the summit may not be worth a damn if they lose, if they kick you around.

We've got to war with the Russians.

I would encourage the Jordanians to move their two quarters into West Pakistan and the Iranians to move their quarters into... We're now turning into a mountain.

A mountain to move the squires.

But the fact is that militarily, the tanks are weak.

And we have only one hope now.

There is a wild whim of the Indians.

and the things he's going to ask of us, and to convince the Russians that they're going to pay an enormous price.

It may not work, Mr. President.

We've gone pretty far, and we can't make up six years of military in town.

We should never let it get out of balance.

Well, then we did.

Again, if they had asked Johnson.

Frank Johnson?

Yeah, that is great.

That's great.

But again, this is an example of where the bureaucracy got us.

You promised Yaya on your first visit to send some arms there.

Well, it took us eight years to feed it, to get the bureaucracy to fulfill your time.

And the arms were just starting to move when the Macaulay camp and the first dance.

So, it isn't...

I know.

We are not too flattered.

We did all today.

We didn't know that there would be an award in 71.

But it took a year to get your promise to Yaya worked out.

Now, let's see.

First, with regard then to the planes, what's the purpose of the symbolism?

The purpose of the planes is, I think we're going to travel.

I think the best hope is the planes are hybrid.

And if we did this, we could give a note to the Chinese and say, if you're ever going to move, this is the time.

All right.

So we'll do it.

Well, all they have to do is.

put their forces on the border.

I must warn you, Mr. President, if our blood is cold, we'll be in trouble there.

Well, we'll lose.

But if our blood is, if we don't move, we'll certainly lose.

We'll lose the plot with the Russians.

But they will lose without us.

What we have to do, Henry, is to vet it out and call

So I think what we need to see here...

I'm not going to have a meeting.

No more goddamn meeting to decide this.

I meant I'm not going to have a meeting.

Or do you want a meeting?

It wouldn't hurt if, well, let me do this.

We'll have a basic meeting in the morning, and I'll then present you with the choices.

What I would rather do is I think the Western meeting is fine.

Why don't you figure out now what these two choices are?

In other words, I see the choices.

In other words, take the line.

Do one of two things.

First, we can let the goddamn thing just be carried on.

It's not our woman.

It's not our woman, which is basically the state law.

Our husband is the state law.

We already have John.

He already asked for help.

But what I'm getting at, Henry, is that we've got to look at our options here.

All right, now if we let it go, your theory is it will certainly screw up the South Asian area.

The other, your greater fear, however, is that it will encourage, it will make up the Chinese, stir it up to the face or something else.

I would have it move toward India or toward Russia or both.

And it will encourage Russians to do the same thing someplace else.

That's the dangers on the one side.

In the Middle East, and it will affect countries like Iran and Indonesia, confronted either with a Soviet threat or a Soviet client threat.

And Iran will be confronted by both with deciding that we are just not ready enough.

I mean, with all our good intentions, we have just too many conditions.

All right, fine.

Now that's one side.

Then we go on and still go through with it.

We go through the sun and all that crap.

I think the other possible reason for it is to do these things.

You understand, I, for doing anything, gave her the chance to not work on it.

That made, that is an amulet of her.

What's the crisis, Keating?

Do I suck it around again?

So, uh, Keating, uh, did you draw Roscoe?

I told Alex Roscoe.

Keating, uh, the Indians had the nerve to call in Keating and assess the data to make sure that there's proof that these bullets passed.

Because it matters.

There's one other thing.

I think if they're going to play it at all, you've got to do it fast and hard.

The worst thing could be to wait for every little thing to develop as we had done the talking stuff.

What about Indian aid?

Is there anything more that we can do there?

We can't really see all the others.

Remember, on this, I was for doing it more openly.

Oh, yeah.

And all we've done, remember, the whole line was, well, let's do it, but not say anything.

Well, we've done that.

That hasn't worked.

Well, no, we did it all.

On the economic side, you know what I mean?

I don't remember.

Two weeks ago, I got Connolly, and before he went to a reporter, we said, now you cut off everything we can.

We told him everything, Henry.

Yeah, but Connolly, the difference was, you told both Connolly and Rogers, Connolly moved the same afternoon to cut off XM, where it is, and he'd been holding up loans at the World Bank.

They took two weeks.

to prepare for certain papers.

The day we announced on the .

They did it in the form of a release that said what we would continue to share.

So we didn't give the Indians the real shock effect when they still were only winning.

The Indians were not claiming they were invading.

They said they were .

There's a border over the dam.

But what we should do, Mr. President, and we have another 24 hours to make the decision, and I don't want to talk too into it now, because we should do all these things simultaneously.

I talked to two of our current leaders, Mr. President and Mr. Obama.

I talked to Congress this morning, Mr. President.

I think we ought to have, I think, a big success in the April.

I think we ought, I think what we do is that the leaders you meet, the most able and the ones that can affect more other countries, even affect Italy and Germany.

I think also, and you'll understand,

And he has a better understanding of both the financial and the international question than you, when you told him.

Yes, and he agrees completely.

Actually, I find Conway and he also do a very good job.

Well, that's the point.

If we could settle with what we do, the Germans would be thrilled, the British would be left out, but the British are just making trouble anyway because

They don't have another deal.

They're just making themselves obnoxious to prove that they can handle us better than any of us.

And the deal you will get from the British is no different from the deal you'll get from what we do.

In what you discuss at your meeting, I'm just strongly urged, don't let, keep as much of them in the hand as you can.

What I mean is, let's do the carrier thing.

Let's get the, give assurances.

And I would tell people in the State Department, they don't need to know right now.

what you get, given the parking lot.

The Secretary of State will say that's illegal.

I'd rather have lead jobs, you know, not to say that if they move against our law, they are not to have more gas.

I mean, I've got to tell them that.

That's an order.

You're goddamn right.

We give the permission privately.

Well, we've done worse.

Nixon, Mitchell & Kissinger on Jimmy Hoffa and Commutation of sentence

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on December 8, 1971

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