On April 6, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, Henry A. Kissinger, and John W. Vogt, Jr. met in the President's office in the Old Executive Office Building from 9:26 am to 10:10 am. The Old Executive Office Building taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 329-013 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Who can take charge of that sort of thing?
.
.
.
.
I said, well, why don't you just get the planes up?
You get all the planes you got there, and we'll create them.
I'll take this but Johnny doesn't know what we want to do.
The weather is clear, but yesterday it was bitter.
No, quite a lot.
Quite a bit.
They started suppressing the sands up north.
They probably did about 500 navel shells.
Well, the navel shells and the sands, but are they hitting it far north?
What areas are they hitting?
They were north of Don Roy, sir.
The naval show.
The naval members.
And then they were bombing the Navy aircraft.
What did they do?
Well, we were thinking that the initial strikes were more of the same size.
One hit, another waste.
But the subsequent waves were unbondable.
Right.
Now, I want to be facing two strikes in that area.
Is that clear?
We're starting to be facing two.
Anywhere.
Anywhere up in that belt.
As soon as you get the sand, the sand is compressed.
I thought it was supposed to have been done yesterday morning, but the D-52s have not yet been able to do it because they haven't had a chance to drive through the sand.
We have got to get D-52s into that area.
That's the most significant thing that we can do in terms of dropping something like a high bomb and the rest of it over there.
If you take some stuff out, you can't do anything else.
There's the fire service, for example, and if you concentrate in the areas of the fire service, that's what I meant.
Well, the thing that John told me this morning, the three things that, on that road which they've been shedding, in those three towns, that Maple County Fire, there's a real tonnage of trucks over there.
I'll be pretty sure...
Let me tell you, one way you go, go out.
And you will go out for what purpose now?
Will you be in charge of the air?
I'll take over the 7th Air Force, and I'll be the air deputy.
All right.
Now, the thing that I want to tell you is this, that Washington
all clearly understand the performance of the air out there has not been in my view adequate.
The reason it's not been adequate is not because of the bravery of the people.
And I know there's a great number of those guys in the U.S. but the reason it's not been adequate is it's been routine and by the numbers.
There's been no imagination and so forth.
Now, this is probably the last time the airport is going to have a pop-out flight.
It will very well be.
Historians may write that.
If the Air Force, at this point, doesn't do an adequate job at this time and screws it up as it screwed up in the war because of lack of imagination, lack of will to take risks, it is going to be a very nice case in which you can finish the history of a very fine outfit.
involving many, a lot of many fine men.
The thing I really want from you is to kick everybody in the ass out there and to say, I don't care.
We're not looking for safe targets.
We're not looking for, you know, let's go out and, you know, drop the load of this secondary target out in the boondocks and the mountains and go do our models or something like that.
But we have got to go in here and win this.
this operation.
It cannot be won without David's support.
It's got to be done.
Now that connection
I could not understand why we didn't have a massive strike.
I know what I'm getting at is this.
The whole operation out there, and there are a variety of reasons, but I understand why they realize it's going to be something that they're running for and so forth and so on.
But I tried to back up the military, everything they've done, everything from Sanfei to Cambodia to Laos to the riots and everything else.
And now the main one is that people will be back totally if you do something now.
But there isn't going to be any, there are not going to be any, there will be plenty of medals, but there will be no Dan Gore or Bayley out there.
The medals are the front people are in this for.
We have got to get the Air Force.
I want you to get the Navy commanders in.
I want you to get the Air Force in there, the Naval Air and all the rest.
And don't listen to those old bastards out there who are the young bachelors.
They just want to do it for the numbers.
Let's get us some imaginations, some drives, some risk-taking answers.
The day after you get there, the day after you get there.
Now, I'm going to watch it every morning and every night.
And if we see that same routine of stuff coming in here, I'll give you a different job.
And we've really got to do this now.
This thing is, oh, I don't know if I've heard all the arguments.
I've talked to more of them.
More of them have admitted things that we haven't done everything for them, including the mess on the box.
And that's what the job of a top commander is.
But it's not your job.
You're going out there in the rescue operation.
That's what you're going for.
If you go out there, I want you to know that you'd be backed and killed
We'll have to take some catches, I know that.
Some guys are going to have to take some runs and things.
Or maybe they have already suppressed the sands.
But the main thing is to win.
And this, we cannot afford to lose this.
Now, for example, we've got the plans ready for the operation around Hyde Park.
This is where it's going to work out.
Now, for example, in this area now, now that the window opened, what are you suppressing sand?
No, that going in today was 200, uh, 187.
And, uh, actually yesterday they made a massive strike.
As you, as you ordered in the D3 area, they did.
They had about 25 D52s.
They had about 25 D52s.
We saw the other 51 saw this, but the other 20 are in now.
And they're 22 and the D3, they're going to have 42 in this.
I don't want to shoot people.
No, no, there were 20 B-52s trying south of the D&C in the context of working.
20 B-52s trying south of the D&C.
But they have no idea where they landed because we can't bomb unless we have spotters in the ground, is that correct?
No, no, sir.
They're bombing with a sky-spot system.
It's a radar control line system.
The man on the ground tells us the target he wants to hit.
This is from the ground radar station, which controls the bombers right from the release point.
That's what they're going on.
I didn't know about the U-52s.
The U-52s.
Oh, that's so wrong.
We have those.
Weather.
That's a problem.
A lot of weather in San Francisco.
And for almost ten days now, we've been in the streets.
We're not doing about that thing.
The problem, sir, has been the SAMs.
I mean, we have to have these escort airplanes.
You know, the SAMs are pressing airplanes with their anti-air radiation missiles on board.
The F-105 is an iron man.
They have to have adequate ceilings and operating air to protect the bombers.
And when a SAM signal comes on, they fire these missiles at them.
That's oppressive.
Now the problem has been the last few days, weather has been so bad that we can't operate those bombs, those anti-radiation missiles in that area.
But it grew quite drastically yesterday and it went to scattered conditions and we doubled the surrogacy in the first six weeks.
It looks like it's going to be a very long night.
It should be good from about 10 in the morning Saigon time right on up to about 7.30 in the evening.
I mean, I'll be starting tonight.
I should be able to sit down and get my bed packed.
Well, they put some tanks already.
Some of our fighters got through some holes up there and knocked out some of them.
They remember that.
And I'm certain that they got some more.
I had no speech in the odd unit about the big guns.
But Roger's solo jet, they were going to hand over their gun.
But the 130s, I don't know about that.
But they're moving in that position.
That's what I read on this morning.
They're moving the big guns.
They're moving some 130-millimeter guns south and west of Quantree.
I think they're wanting to take that highway and perhaps even bring one of these out on the farm.
Sir, when that weather clears, they're going to pay.
When that weather clears, as it is now, they're going to pay to pull that armor out and they're going to catch it.
And any of the guys at the home of the Coastal Plains are going to catch it because they're under the canopy over there.
You're not required to give us the opportunity to allow us women to have the canopy over there.
Well, the main thing is this.
You know, I am totally familiar with the rules.
Man, God, all that sort of thing.
I can't call them.
Now the thing about you is that you had a gut throughout this time.
I know what you've done.
I know that you've been behind the wall because of that goddamn pipe.
But you did the right thing.
Now, you and I can make the best officer we can send out there, who you feel like.
But believe me, I want you to go out there and hear a couple of them, like, not any but very candidly about April.
He's a splendid man.
He's got a fine record in Vietnam.
He's loved by his soldiers and so forth.
He's been through a lot.
He's tired.
He's unimaginable.
He's often tied on or even banged on.
Things start happening and so forth.
These things I understand.
respect him, remember that he's the commander in the rescue.
By that, I want you to view, you understand?
I want you to know that what is going to determine this is not what Abrams decides, because he's going to take you to the rescue at this point.
That's what you decide.
And I want you to take that name and that Air Force, the young folks in the rescue.
and say, all right, fellas, let us read some of this, and maybe get some ideas out.
Let me tell you, I mean, in North Vietnam, I don't mean to just resume what they did in Johnson and Spencer.
We've got something new that has sparkle and interest, and we're going to do it.
But we've got to have recommendations.
We've got to have some ideas to sort things out from it.
What about it?
Not the usual thing, Bob.
We'll have 400 turkeys.
We've got that much of a turkey.
What the hell with that?
Put the 400 in one place so that at least you get something knocked out.
Could you try that a few times?
You remember, generally, you break military history far more than I have.
Yeah.
Well, that's true.
I suppose Napoleon was the best man to use artillery in modern warfare.
He was the only way that he was able to beat the highest security forces.
He didn't have the ability, but the French artillery was damn good.
I mean, they didn't know how to use it.
You also know that in World War II, World War I in particular, there was that massive horrible ground war.
I know this is very interesting, right?
And in World War II, but couldn't put that on.
The primary canon for it is to concentrate and try to bust through a certain area, you know, rather than just spreading it all out.
He who concentrates his forces wins the battle.
He who spreads his forces out gets the hell kicked out.
And here we've got two.
He's got more men than they've got in North Vietnam.
He's got them spread all over the world.
But he has an air force.
The only thing we've got going for us is the air force.
But the air force has got to not play in the routine way of, you know, scattering a few bombs all over the place.
We've got to come up with some ideas.
We've joked these guys and joked them very, very hard.
And you may be satisfied with the way that
I see it.
I don't see it.
Not imagination.
Have you got enough power?
Is there any more you need?
Have you got any more?
If you do, it's out there.
You don't have any airfields for it, man.
You do have more than you do.
No.
Yeah.
But what?
What do you have?
You don't.
You don't.
Not out there.
No.
You've got four carriers, or will they have?
Will that carrier get there in the next three months?
No, are they going to get there or not?
No, they will be on stage.
They will be on stage.
That makes four.
That makes it four.
They'll be used, is that correct?
Where is it?
Get it out of there.
All right.
Let's get the fifth one over.
So if you can just know that we've got everybody around here with a great deal of confidence in you.
But we really want you to run and argue with the airmen.
Wade, Black, all those other fellas out there, they've been there a long, too damn long.
But they have to realize it, as they should have realized at the time of Rouse, this is the game.
Don't lose it.
You cannot lose it.
And, by a hair strike, it can win the war.
I mean, I'm not perfect, and neither of you agree with me on that.
But there will be some... Well, you see, if you get a settlement out of this at this point, and you saw how your friend Kennedy was
You see what he said in Newsom?
Well, he says the whole reason all this happened is because we broke off the negotiations in Paris.
The place you settled this war.
The main thing is that...
You're the guy, right?
You're the guy we're counting on.
Not just, and let me say, not just for this, but for the whole thing out there.
Just, if you could take a call straight from the horse's mouth, you could tell him how I feel about it.
I feel very strongly about this.
I get a message about it.
Okay.
All right.
I'll clear, in the process of coming up with a new reorganization of the paper itself, it would be very useful to me if we could fix that effect.
They had planned in May to eliminate one of the Army four-stars and make the Air Force, 7th Air Force Commander, be a true deputy instead of just his air deputy.
Yeah.
This would be extremely helpful to do that.
Work it out.
The point is, the reason it should be worked out is not to do with personality.
The reason it should be worked out is that all the goddamn thing it's about now is air.
Right, Henry?
This is all been repeated by the chiefs of the police.
The point is, there's a change being made.
Now is the time to do it.
What is your analysis of...
from all the stories that we read this morning on the case regarding the crime.
That it is as big as they indicated it was small.
They're claiming that there's a new crime being filed against them.
Our judgment is that this is a diversionary move designed to tie down their reserves.
They have moved in some additional measurements, and it is somewhat horizontal.
But they don't have the artillery down here, right?
They don't have the tanks.
And they should not have the supplies for what would have been a sustained operation.
So, isn't that your judgment, too?
So, but it's enough to scare Q off.
I think Q has behaved rather calmly.
The three divisions he's got there can't be moved anyway because they're all three.
He moved out most of his strategic reserve into first and second floor.
He's got a small strategic reserve left in the Saigon area.
I think I should keep it there.
But what about the concern that a big battle is going to come?
I'd like to say that there is going to be a hell of a fight in three quarters.
A big battle is going to come in three quarters.
There may be a battle in three quarters, but the logistic system...
It is just possible that they will never get it all.
But you have one more person to get out there.
Just one more massive strike.
Or are you agreeing we shouldn't have to do that?
I think, I don't know.
We estimate we've lost 40,000 at the 29th Division of the Greatest in the 20th century.
And 30% of the trolling that we are in the area.
Which I don't know.
Now, here we are on April, what, 6th?
Yeah.
By May 15th, the D-300 comes down.
They can't keep this D-300 at the Division of the Greatest.
I don't know.
And, so they're...
Yes, parents who are ready to get it shorter and shorter and shorter.
So it may be, maybe they'll get off and attack, but my point is this, if the normality of the means that we're all now being given are able to launch an attack on all these fronts, they've got to have a lot more than we ever realized.
That's all I'm saying.
I believe they can.
I think we've just got to assume that.
killed, who's got to recognize that he's got to take the risk.
This has to be their last gasp.
I just don't see, if you say 1,000, that when we counted 330 this week, if we brought in one sector alone, if we actually counted, we picked up 180 residents, which is a pretty good indication.
That's like 10,000 American casualties.
And they've been taking that now year after year.
If we can find, though, another place to give them one big job, you see, the concentration department in New Orleans is going to have got that concentrated someplace.
We'll find places to do it.
We may not be able to wait that long on that track.
I'm just feeling the psychological limits here.
And I'd like to think that we may not be able to wait.
The idea is that there's got to be some feeling.
There's got to be some feeling on the part of others.
That's right.
That's why it's so essential to have a B-52 strike over the DMZ.
That will be a signal.
That'll be a hell of a shot across the bottom.
See my point?
I have a good one point.
I'm a beacon who can knock the shit out of something like that.
All right.
We'll find some targets, I'm sure.
Fine.
Okay.
I want to give them something.
Thank you.
Good luck.
You'll do it.
You'll do it.
I'm going to back you up.
But, uh, my God, uh, if all those guys don't lose, I don't know if I'm ready to, sir.
There's so much writing on this, the whole future of American foreign policy, and I want that to...
I got the feeling today that, Henry, I just told Bob, I didn't know when we were talking to Bill, I said, but there's some way some of our people were backing off this thing for fear it would affect our...
are too risky and so forth and so on.
Now, that kind of a line is not to be put out, goddammit.
It should be put out just the other way.
Who's putting out that line?
OK.
You guys got any balls at all?
I don't want to get in my way.
So, I kind of see it.
I kind of see the whole future of the...
They're trying to get in one way or the other.
The Air Force.
The Air Force.
I said, what do you call us?
We own all these goddamn metals, but if you look at this warship, you're doing nothing.
You know what I mean?
You get a great plane, you know what I mean?
That's maybe the last battle the Air Force ever won.
That's right.
That's right.
Probably will be.
Next one will be like that.
You know, more battles like this.
I mean, if you go to war someplace, maybe, I doubt it, some little country, maybe they'll attack Cuba or maybe Argentina.
Jesus Christ.
I just don't think so.
I have a strong feeling about it.
It's all over now.
These guys don't realize it.
It's sad.
It's like the old admirals all cried when they lost their battleships.
They're gone now.
The war has changed.
And maybe it's gone.
But Jesus Christ did it.
He's smart enough that he, I'm sure, registers all that.
He can go out and use what we've got this morning.
I was saying, that would be a hell of a thing for a three-star to go out and deal with that with that kind of a charge of the commander-in-chief.
He's got a guy volunteering for the assignment because he knows it's fucked up out there.
He knows it's fucked up.
That's why he volunteers.
Yes.
Then he came to Henry and said, I'll give up my fourth star.
He's supposed to move to this new assignment.
He says, I'll give up my fourth star if you'll let me go out to Vietnam and get the main train back.
He saw that they were doing well.
A little bit of a revolt.
The guy, instead of worrying about his own fat ass and the bad guys, is interested in getting out and trying to win the goddamn war.
And then you get in the way you did.
He knows he's got a back.
He knows he told it pretty clearly.
He's not going to listen to his commander.
He doesn't know how to pull this off.
I don't give a shit.
I'm not going to park around with all this.
Abrams is through.
I'm not going to put Abrams up in that.
That fucking Larry isn't going to get his way for once.
He pulls this off.
This guy
Also, even with the German Chiefs, because I'm not satisfied with the way the German Chiefs think about it.
Well, compare him, for example, with much of a level of Cushman.
Cushman is a fine do-it-for-the-book officer, but he has as much imagination without that cup of coffee.
Am I being unfair?
I don't know if I was a battle commander.
That's true.
Battle commanders, on a personal basis, are a splendid battle commander.
I would guess Cushman would be a hell of a guy if they had a little...
I just blend, I just blend the battle command.
Good God, he's made the cross, purple, white, everything.
How many battle commands do you know?
We're a great strategic command.
God damn, two.
I can't mention a bottle for that many.
No, you have to re-ask a bottle.
It's oil, you do it, it's gold.
Huh?
It's oil, you do it, it's gold.
I like that.
This guy, he's not made it.
You're a preacher, and you should have one on the guy.
Well, I love him.
I like his voice.
But he's also all around a certain ring, that piece of pipe thing.
Well, it's a stupid thing to do, but that's too bad.
He was making a point.
At least he was fighting.
Well, I appreciated his fight.
But all the other briefings, you know, you overlook all the others.
He didn't just do birch up.
That's all they wanted to do.
In Cambodia, we hauled them in with the governors and all that crap, and all that stuff going on.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, they've managed for 10 years to avoid it.
They haven't had, like, the backing they've had.
Oh, yeah, when they were bombing it, I think, they were doing it on a...
Well, if Johnson was approving them, we can run this.
How many Ed Hartons missed that minute?
But I've given them a hell of a lot of them.
I over-enhanced these B-52s.
I need to save on land until there's very good escalation.
I mean, nobody's going to care about B-52s anymore.
Not one goddamn bit.
If it's in answer to an aggression,
an invasion for the daughter, don't you agree?
She's gonna lay down.
They've got to continue to hit this, though.
The property taxing that you're raising this morning is relevant mainly in terms of, we do, we lay a high step out there and then drop.
The only thing that we can get away with in that kind of tactic is the China trip.
The reasons that are so fundamental that all of us understand.
because it hadn't been affecting the public consciousness.
And I will identify with it on that.
So we need to be hammering that, too.
I know, but I'm not telling the doctors.
We need to hammer the visuals on that.
Yeah, I told them.
I told Rogers, too.
And then we were able to get it easy in time, and it all worked out.
What?
I will do it.
I hope so.
Anything else, film it off for them.
But let me tell you, anything that will help that program, I would really want to meet or a close friend.
Let's build it up.
It's a very good thing to do.
Let's build it up.
It's a good way.
It's the visual chance for me again.
That's what you need.
I said, do it.
And after that, for weeks, I said, God damn it.
I said, do something.
I said, do it.
Andrew is, I find, probably the best editor.
I'll do Ray as the wrong one for the editor.
I'm always wondering.
I know we better as editors, but we do it better than a very sound writer.
The CD-O wasn't the right guy either.
No, I know.
He's a great footer.
rake or something and say you've got to destroy the tank, that'll set all that water for something.
It only does it if it's .
Well, you can exercise this well.
You tell Sapphire to get it down to 15 and it works.
He'll get it down to 15.
That's the part he knows, and he knows what to cut.
He cuts the part that doesn't.
You have to worry about building the gate.
Sapphire worries about making the point.
There's a real difference.
It's going to be alright.
Very nice.
And if you can get it to a way of worrying about building a case, a president doesn't have to build a case.
All he has to do is make the law.
That's what he must do.
He needs to be able to do it.
I know that I cut out of it.
It's got laws, it's got everything, all the levels, all the things, and I'm down.
I know that.
But I didn't get across a few emotional points about him.
He got criticized in the press for it.
What the hell does he care?
And Tex McCreary came up to me and said, I will guarantee you that you people don't do this because I can tell by looking at you.
And it's a simple basic government that you should do everything you do, every public thing you do.
That's a discipline that if you put yourself to, you will solve about 80% of your problems.
Sit down and write the headline that you want to come out of whatever it is you're doing.
And then...
Take a sketch and draw a picture if you want to go with that headline.
And forget about the rest of the story.
And force yourself.
Like right now, we're going over to Philadelphia.
What's the headline we want out of that?
And what's the picture we want out of it?
I don't know.
I do know.
But I think we do it, Mr. McCullough.
Maybe not.
And the picture you want out of it is Nixon and Cardinal Kroll shaking hands with Frank Rizzo standing in the background smiling.
Or something like that.
But, I mean, it's that.
Okay.
His point is, before you even decide to do an event, before anybody sits down to write the speech,
Or decide whether you enter from the back of the hall or the front.
Or whether the van plays head of the chief or anything else.
Or whether you drive or helicopter.
Sit down and write the headline and draw the picture.
And then plan everything.
Either that's that headline and that picture and don't worry about anything else.
Now that's the same discipline that Scali's talking about.
McCurry's a little old-fashioned looking at the drug, and that translates to theory, but McCurry's taking almost exclusively the TV and the print.
Scali's point is, write the 30-second story and show the 30 seconds of film.
Determine what 30-second film clip you want.
Who the hell does that?
Christ never thinks that way.
Never.
But we are getting our revenge.
God is doing that.
Yep.
Chapin.
Part of it.
Run the Ziggler.
The Ziggler.
Ziggler does do a very good thing.
That's right.
Now we've got to move that thinking over here.
And I'm going to start doing it by refusing now to accept anything until the headline in the picture shows.
That's right.
Or the 30-second script and the 30-second, you know, stereo.
Right.
Then we'll stage the event around that.
If we start doing that, I think we can make that hell of a lot more effective.
You know something?
Just looking at Kennedy's stuff.
I think he doesn't have the time.
There's no question.
Kennedy's stuff.
Oh, he's got his tomorrow.
One of the reasons that it was done better when I was doing my stuff along, even though it wasn't that good, one of the reasons it was done better was that I always thought in those terms like,
Look, in 66, I traveled this goddamn country alone.
Sure, you can write something, this and that.
But I, without a deterrent, what the hell was I going to do?
Then I'd admit it somewhere.
Or, you know, the TV.
Now, that's first publish.
I'm too busy not to do it.
I should be thinking like I am here with a book.
I really have to do that, Mr.
And the brightest guys ought to come in to me and say, here's an idea.
What should we do?
Cast of 100 people around here should be looking at that only that way.
That's what the Jersey Council should ship.
You don't want to push Herbert and his crowd into that.
Why Herbert?
They're not going to start doing too long to Herbert when they talk to Christ's crowd.
And just get the people in and say, you know, we've got to do it.
And they rumble around about presidential arrests.
Herbert, that's right.
His presidential is presidential.
We're going to be accused of demagoguery or dullness or something.
One way or the other.
In other words, if something goes over, they say it's demagoguery and emotion.
If it doesn't go over, they say it's dull.
So what the hell?
We're going to catch you either way.
The other argument is somebody's going to write a headline.
and somebody's going to select a picture, why the hell shouldn't we do it instead of some pinko, anti-Nixon guy in the bowels of a newspaper sitting or on a television network cutting it?
Why don't we decide what content's going to put on it?
And that's this argument.
They say give a 10-minute speech on everything you do, and I keep saying give us a 60-second speech.
I'm going to keep talking.
We're going to have a revolution on that thing.
I'm not going to quit.
I'm not.
I want to.
And also, you know, Bob, the best thing you've done in this respect is to assist with our problems.
Assist with our problems.
That you do very well.
But you've got to be nice to them.
We come back to them and say, I don't want two and a half minutes.
Even if they're wrong on that, he'll say, well, they'll go three or four minutes on this.
Every time Dave Adgers got us to a minute or a minute and a quarter, give them a minute or a minute and a quarter and do it well so that it doesn't tear your meeting cut off.
That's right.
That's right.
I give them the choice of what to run.
Decide it ourselves.
You can go out and do 30 seconds to a minute.
Anything you do, you should do it.
We can translate this down to even the very smallest of things.
A picture opportunity in the office.
You've got to decide what's the picture and what's the caption.
Do it every day.
And then we shouldn't get anything like that.
Now that's what you do, subconsciously, every time.
I have very little success with it, though, because I have people in on who stands by the flags or who sits in the chair there and all that.
There should be a damn picture.
We have a hell of a lot of light, as I said, even in the Easter picture.
We had nobody up there, as I told you.
We worked our ass off with that.
The heroes had their dresses.
We should have had half.
We'd go 35, 40 minutes down and go to the church.
Who the hell was up there?
A nice little commander camp.
Nobody knew what we should do about the picture afterwards.
Nobody got the television up there.
Now that was a mistake.
Easter's a hell of a good shot.
Somebody had to set that picture up.
thing on that end that we were trying to keep it.
I don't know.
But we decided, if you remember, the night before, right then, certainly somebody
We've got to get this team in there and handle properly.
Don't you agree?
I realize I know what happened.
Lots of things are going to be done now.
We've got to make decisions within the last eight hours.
That's it.
We've got to get a bunch of people to move.
We think only this way.
Move in as I told you.
Any time I move, any time I move, any time that I move, you're going to get somebody there to say, don't you all stand here and there and the other place, you know?
I did agree.
Otherwise, I end up doing it.
That's not good.
I mean it literally.
When I say it's tough to plan on any of these events, I should have a square with a picture drawn.
It shows what it stands for, whether there's an airplane in the back row, a cross, or the front stoop of the church, or the Lincoln Q, or whatever it is we're going to do.
Then it's a gap.
It's a little church.
At least we'll know where it is.
That's another way to try to follow up.
to see if that family picture could get approved by the kids of this.
Yeah.
That will be back.
If they approve, they'll sell it here.
The other one, this is better.
I think it's a very good picture.
I think it's very good.
The expressions are good.
The flowers, the moverside.
You know what I mean?
It's a good, warm picture.
Good family.
But I think it's going to seem good.
You're right, you're right.
That's what we have to do.
And incidentally, you can't do it in terms of, I'm not saying that you can't do it in terms of saying, well, it's TV, Mark could, doesn't.
Now, Mark is fine at drawing me a little diagram, saying you walk in here, you walk in here, and you're right.
I need to know that.
That's all.
But then I have to determine that he's no judge.
That's right, you see.
And maybe we need somebody.
You need a creative person.
It determines what it is we want on TV.
And Mark is superb at getting it on.
But he's got to be given the script that shows this is what we want to have happen.
Now we've got to get the cameras and the lights and the sound equipment in certain places so that this will come out.
We can do it.