Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on India-Pakistan War and State Department

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I apologize.

Rogers and Blair.

Mitchell and I would approach the Rogers thing on a political basis, so they've got a thing here where we just can't

... ... ... ...

Well, let me talk a little more about Joe.

Joe, do you have any thoughts as to what the hell do I agree to take with me back?

You'll be tired in a minute.

This is a favorite of mine.

Do you know who I'm talking about?

I'm not, frankly, I wasn't so keen on talking to Franklin.

You know, it was his idea.

That's right.

So, yeah, I'm not talking to him.

And he was talking whether he knew that Franklin was aggressive.

That's right.

And I told him, fine, I'm aggressive.

I didn't argue with him at all.

That may be part of the problem.

We argued with him.

That was the other thing.

So, he decided we had to have the war on him.

Yeah, because of what?

And then you take the study in the papers that if you get down to a grind that memory doesn't come out too long, there clearly is a discrepancy between what he said externally and internally.

But we're not out yet.

Well, that gets to the substance.

Then you've got to get into the...

If you look at it fairly, which a lot of the press are, as even Time says, and all of it, in fact, would be angry

No, but the point, and Klein made this point on TV yesterday when he made the point that history was being lied to, was that, should I suggest that you mention that?

I did, I did yesterday.

I called him and I said, fine.

You know that.

And he, Hurt made the point that it doesn't,

disagreed with the move that the countries made, well, that doesn't mean you're anti the country.

We were opposed to India's military action against Pakistan, but that doesn't mean we're anti-India at all, any more than we're opposed to Japan's, some action that they took that were not anti-Japanese or anti-Mexican or Canadian or anything like that.

We're opposed to any country without being anti that convention.

And on this particular incident, we were clearly opposed to the move that India made, the military move that India made.

He made no bones about it.

He knew her, and I knew him.

He was a warm, welcoming, lavish treatment you could give the Prime Minister.

He was a man.

Trying to stop him.

That's about it.

And, uh, he was happy.

He wasn't angry.

He didn't know what I was doing.

I can feel that the justice system can't win on us.

And obviously, I wish we could, but we haven't got it.

And so you can make an argument for the value of getting a factual story laid out as to what we actually did do.

Because on substance, what we did is just a little bit bad as to what they're trying to make out.

And the substance is consistent with both our public and our private posture.

This week's magazine's had to be buried because it was last week's story.

This last Sunday's paper's buried.

Now what is it going to do with it from now on?

It's now, the story's over.

I think he was reasonable about promising because he was able to pull it all in.

Yeah.

I realized there's a pragmatic fault in talking to a senior person on a website.

And I think that's a long-term evidence.

I don't know about you, but I think that's a piece of your idea.

You've got a couple of the wrong people on that line.

I don't know how to choose.

Basically, I don't know.

.

That's often done after an international...

Thank you, sir.

The State Department puts out a white paper afterwards.

despite that much out of some of the films.

Bill was not Bill's name.

We were just trying to play it cleverly.

We were all trying to move things around.

He was right.

If there wasn't Bill, it was Bill's inability to live his pure opposite.

Actually, that's the real thing.

Bill was not Bill's name.

And that's another case in point.

Yeah.

He makes them mad at India.

There is nowhere you can find him criticizing him or any of his people criticizing the state department or the president.

Right.

Exactly.

Every day, all through the papers, you find the State Department criticizing Henry and criticizing the President.

One more Philip, and he shrugged and said his goodbyes and all that, but there's no way he can get around that.

Very impressive, and we've got to try to get him on track so that he can

I do want to do a little bit of a check on this.

It hasn't come in a lot much, but we're trying to do it.

There's a considerable amount of surprise.

I think we're out of time.

I know we are, but a lot of others are coming back to me.

Kilpatrick on that local TV, talking to a man in San Bernardino, you know, he had the Agostini show that was on last night.

And they were talking about journalism and journalism, and he said, wait just a minute.

Let's get it straight.

Jack Anderson is not a journalist.

Jack Anderson is a cast iron pipe, a sewer pipe.

And that's, you know, very popular all the time.

I was wrong.

You know, what a cheap way he's been playing.

He's milking it out, paragraph by paragraph.

He's playing the way every quarter he's playing.

And he's presenting what he wants.

So whether he's trying, I can't tell.

The fact of the matter is whether Howard Hughes is really Howard Hughes or not.

McGraw, Hill, and Light both think they have his authentic memoirs as dictated personally by the guy that wrote them.

And this voice business that hired you to set up this press conference yesterday told us that that's not a paradise island.

Supposedly, it was Howard Hughes who had said that the memoirs are not...

and the voice experts and all this kind of identify the voice as being kind of used.

And they say that these are now like McGraw-Yell standing in front of the memoirs aren't you?

The memoirs are the whole bizarre thought of how everything is all wrong.

You know, that's the kind of story people are fascinated with.

It's a mystery.

You know, a dream.

It's one of those.

The typical Indian is exactly what the typical American doesn't like.

West Bengal was one of the favorites.

I think they would have rushed us if India had

that allowed him to move forward and not come up with an understanding.

And then you might have broken up as a result, and the rest of them know, and they still break up with you.

So I don't think there's a problem with that.

I just think that we're in a good place now, since we're over the top, and we're just stuck in the middle of it.

I think that's kind of a good point.

I think that's a good point.

And the rest of it wasn't right.

So there's no question about it.

We're in a good place.

I've always had quite a lot of people feel what I've witnessed, held down, and been written down on the streets, shot down, and have of it, and so forth.

I think she loved it when I did it.

I mean, her cooking, her flying, all that stuff, I guess she just did flawless.

Sending that open car in the rain, all those, those are the kind of things people, the list, appreciate.

The kind of things you would do if you didn't have her in the house.

I like it when you have her in the house.

It's really, really helpful.

When I trip around the country, it's all good.

So we didn't expect that.

We figured she'd get two or three days' ride, then it would be good.

We thought that there was something.

There wasn't.

It was on every day.

Major story every day.

Follow-up stories.

Yeah.

Well, coming back to this thing, there's an important lesson.

There's an argument that we should be a good man.

A good man?

Yep.

A good man.

Oh, yeah.

not at this point this other man he started telling me eventually did not know what state was over being homeless how do you know about half of his troubles he dreams of a better time a lot of them he certainly magnifies in his imagination and he claims dreams of some other and alive sometimes very important yeah

I don't think he does that on purpose.

He does it because he gets old.

I don't know if he believes it.

He looked very good at covering the other side of the case.

A big issue he did is public eye.

I don't know if he did that.

They can't not believe it.

I can't believe it.

We're the same, the same, the same.

We're the same.

That's what he thinks.

Let him say it.

Let's talk that through.

One thing that Paulson mentioned to me yesterday

In fact, this is what I think is great about John.

How do you manage your...

Right.

You might as well try to get a thousand.

If you've got a thousand, you're still going to have to... John, this is what I mentioned.

He said, I don't need to do that.

I don't need to do that.

I don't need a present, but it's to me.

Chuck, you don't need to swear.

John doesn't think he's loyal.

No.

He doesn't think he's disloyal.

He thinks his loyalty is only to himself.

He thinks he's self-serving.

He is.

But on the other hand, Colson, Colson is a monster with all of my heart.

Who the hell does a self-server want?

We all live in a way where there's a lot of self-interest.

Let me help him.

Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on India-Pakistan War and State Department

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on January 10, 1972

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