Conversation 344-006

TapeTape 344StartTuesday, June 20, 1972 at 4:35 PMEndTuesday, June 20, 1972 at 5:25 PMTape start time00:10:44Tape end time00:45:32ParticipantsNixon, Richard M. (President);  Haldeman, H. R. ("Bob")Recording deviceOld Executive Office Building

On June 20, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman met in the President's office in the Old Executive Office Building from 4:35 pm to 5:25 pm. The Old Executive Office Building taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 344-006 of the White House Tapes.

Conversation No. 344-6

Date: June 20, 1972
Time: 4:35-5:25 pm
Location: Old Executive Office Building

The President met with H. R. Haldeman.

     President's schedule
          -Florida

     Economic advisors
         -Herbert Stein
              -Style of expression
              -Paul W. McCracken

     Watergate break-in
         -John N. Mitchell
               -Activities
               -President's views
         -Burglars
               -Competence
         -Transmitter
         -Pictures
         -Democratic National Committee
               -Suit
                     -Described by Haldeman
                     -Legal aspects
                           -Damages
                     -Strategy
         -Burglary
         -James W. McCord, Jr.
               -Retainer fee
               -Closed-circuit monitors
               -Cubans
         -McCord
         -E. Howard Hunt, Jr.
         -Latin Americans
         -Cubans
         -Bernard L. Barker
               -Bay of Pigs

                             (rev. Jan-02)

-Charles W. McCord
-Colson
-White House
-Hunt
      -Relationship with Cubans
-Colson
      -Relationship with Hunt
-Colson
-Intelligence activities
      -Colson's knowledge
            -G. Gordon Liddy [?]
      -Vernon A. Walters
-Taping system
      -Locations
      -Monitoring
      -Locations
      -Storage
-Possible aid to burglars
      -Committee to Reelect the President
-Perjury charges
-Involvement of John N. Mitchell
-[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
-Mitchell
      -Involvement
-Strategy
      -Guilty pleas
            -Rationale
      -Intelligence
      -McCord
            -Hiring
-Hunt
      -Ngu Dinh Diem
            -Lucien Conein
      -Colson
-Howard Johnson motel
      -Surveillance
-Hunt's relationship with McCord
-Hunt
      -Bay of Pigs
      -Work with Barker
-Hunt
      -Address book
      -Check in Cuban's possession

                                  (rev. Jan-02)

                -Country club bill
     -McCord
     -Hunt
     -Possible White House link
          -The President’s view
     -Colson
     -Committee to Re-elect the President
          -Involvement
     -Wiretapping
          -Brookings Institution
                -Laws
     -Joseph A. Califano
          -Depositions
     -New Hampshire primary
          -Activities of unknown person
     -[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
     -Colson
     -Mitchell
     -Colson
          -Knowledge of break-in
     -Financial committee
     -Democratic National Committee
          -[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
          -Target of burglary

Media
    -Press conference
          -Format
          -Henry A. Kissinger
          -Vietnam
               -Troop announcement
                     -Cuts
                     -Handling
                           -Haldeman’s view
                           -Date
                           -Time of announcement
               -Draft
                     -Draftees in Vietnam
               -Negotiations
               -Bombing
               -Cambodia
                     -1969
    -Television as a medium

                                       (rev. Jan-02)

          -Press conference
                -Scheduling
                     -Political conventions
                -Debates
                -Equal-time provisions

*****************************************************************

BEGIN WITHDRAWN ITEM NO. 1
[Personal returnable]
[Duration: 2m 3s      ]

END WITHDRAWN ITEM NO. 1

*****************************************************************

          -Security
          -Astrodome appearance
               -Motorcade
          -Security
               -George S. McGovern
          -Robert F. Kennedy
          -Security
               -Psychological aspects

The President and Haldeman left at 5:25 pm.

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.

Hi.
Hi.
We can't do business before this weekend.
Yeah.
Beats us.
Beats us today.
Or should we get today?
Yeah.
Yeah, he writes so much better.
He's a better talker.
It was so cautious that it was just
You know, nobody ever came away and said, blah, you know.
First time he says, we've got bad news today.
We've got good news today.
And as bad news as he tells you what we're going to do about it, you've got to get further on that Mitchell operation.
You know, that was stupid.
I don't think he did.
I think Elizabeth was surprised.
That's right.
I don't think he did.
I also think that's the reason I think he's here.
He's got that good attitude.
He's got these guys, apparently, pretty competent, a bunch of people, and they've been doing other things.
They've been doing other things.
They've been doing other things.
And they've been doing this for a while.
They have a cell phone in there.
And it's not great.
Well, they have a three-channel transmitter, and there are two of the channels going out.
This is a walk-by something, and it's pretty early.
Get those untangled and get pictures of the stuff that's inside.
That's, I've talked to them since this, they have filed a suit.
Directly sued the committee for reallocating after voting in the national committee for $1,000,000.
$100,000 damages and $900,000.
I don't know what the law means.
I mean, I don't know how long it takes.
It means that they could, that's the kind of thing they, once they file and the judge orders, you know, accepts the thing and starts the suit going on.
We saw it a couple of months ago.
There's technical delays in the police
There is a tie between that one guy and him.
I had a day off, so it wasn't even a big problem.
Get out of there.
It's fortunate, right?
It's fortunate in a way, a bizarre story.
Yeah.
What do you think, sir?
The bizarreness almost helps to discredit it.
This person looks like he doesn't know what's going on.
He doesn't know what's going on.
Yeah.
He doesn't know what's going on.
He doesn't know what's going on.
No, it's not a permanent, it's not a regular monthly, it can't be, but he had a regular monthly fee at the National Committee, also a purpose-intensive guard duty at the National Committee.
Apparently, he set up, installed some television, closed circuit monitoring stuff, and they have six guards, which I'm super impressed.
I don't know.
Well, McCord, I guess I was going to say, McCord, I guess we'll say that he was working with humans who wanted to put this in prison for their own political reasons.
McCord?
disappear, or in the process of disappearing.
I'm going to let him disappear if you want me to please.
I'm going to plan for this day all along, and the whole process that I want him to disappear until I'm left with nothing in the way.
And, uh, yeah.
And that, at least, the original thought was that that was good, that the bloodline disappeared.
But it may be caused by him on the basis of his ties to the human sea.
He was
In the Bay of Pigs thing, and it's one of the human partners, the guy with the American name, was his deputy.
In the Bay of Pigs operation.
And so they're kind of trying to tie it to the national business.
But we are.
Yeah.
Yeah, the original thing.
The original story is the same.
You can see that they based it pretty much that way.
Now, of course, they're kind of covering these guys too.
Colson, the white ass, they're gone.
And he's gone.
It's strange that Colson doesn't run out.
I mean, he's going home.
And so, of course, the same time, he wasn't insulting Colson in the back.
You know, he killed him.
It's not what the nature of this consultancy.
Instead of this, you know, basically, you know, getting out of all of this.
You know, what he did to that.
At least a lot of that's kind of amazing.
Based on his personal experience with his friends.
You know, that's good for him.
I don't think he, I think we all knew that there were some intelligence, you know, some activities.
We'll get more.
I just want to report more on some info here and there.
Uh, I don't think, I don't think Charlie was specifically hit, you know.
This pilot was on the way away with some people, and, uh, he, he did, uh, on the second guess, and, uh, we're not sure.
He seems to have made all the money himself, but he doesn't give us any of his money.
He has this band of students here.
They're not detailed, you know, exactly what was going on.
They both are on the White Sox country.
They sweep this office in Europe, you know, over on this bus.
And right now, they're going to sweep all the rest of our, all the people, every TV, bus line.
You know, it's very, very tight.
And it's everything that they call it.
You know, here on the ground, you know, you should be able to push that up.
It should be, because over there, that's the reason that I need that patient to go forward.
There's my waters.
That's a real help.
They put it there, and they got it in the cabin room.
The cabin room water zone.
It's apparently okay.
It is pretty good.
It's overlapped, but sometimes they say it's extremely good.
I haven't listened to it.
Okay.
We're just kept, they're locked, they're, nobody monitors those tapes.
We're obviously, and they are kept on tape, stacked up and mocked up and, uh, super secure.
There are only, um, three people that live in here.
That's what we can do, we don't touch them.
I've been trying to think about that, and I want to come to those tapes and see if we're following those, and, um,
Yeah, but there's nothing...
I feel like this is a nightmare.
When you think about it, you think it just can't be true.
Something like this just doesn't happen.
I agree with you.
That is going on.
We're going to have to handle it.
We're going to have to work it out.
We're going to have to work it out.
He has to have... Fortunately, John has a...
several steps you know what he had he hasn't been specific but now it's unfortunate because if he had it probably wouldn't happen
Seriously, I think he probably called Mitchell and said, I've got to get somebody to check things out and be sure we're secure.
Anyway, I called him and said, get this guy over here and check your premises out.
I saw him.
It was true.
It was true.
It was true.
It was true.
It was true.
I'm starting to get all the circumstantial stuff.
Maybe it's better not to sit in the meantime.
Maybe it's better just to plead guilty.
We have to respond.
The Democrats would love to hear you say we heard it in court because
So we figured it was safe for a guy and for us to use it.
Well, they've gotten pretty killed, you know, getting stuck in the oil traps.
And we went in there to get this because we're scared to death that this crazy man's going to become president and sell the U.S. out to the companies.
Very nice casualty.
We're going to be conservative.
The adventure is about to fall off.
I did not have everybody else in the thing.
It was a good idea.
I mean, I wanted to just follow along.
Where is he?
I did a bit of fishing involved in that side of the thing.
I was in a DM thing.
Oh, yeah.
Come in.
I've seen hundreds.
They died fighting when they came through when they came to claim the hunt.
Hunt and Supreme Enforcement.
How was he working?
He was across the street in the Howard Johnson Hotel.
A direct line of sight for him.
across the street, and that was the only place they had the receiving equipment for the boats.
But it's hard to work for a bunch of people.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know if that's something I haven't gotten answered, is how apparently McCord had not working with him, or had McCord working with him, and with these people.
So they're all tied together.
When he ran the Bay of Things then, he was working with this guy Parker, one of the Cubans, who was arrested.
How did he, how does the press know?
They don't.
Oh, Daniel Hudson, Daniel Hudson, because they found his name in the address book, and two of the Cubans, Parker's book and some, one of the other guy's books.
He's identified as White House.
And,
Also because one of the Cubans had a check from Hunt.
This article says it was a check for $6.90 or something like that, which Hunt had given to this Cuban to take back to Miami with a mail that was the biggest country club bill.
And one of his identities is in a Cuban base, I mean a Miami base, and he uses Hunt, yeah,
That's probably something to be non-resident-induced.
They had that checked, so that was their time.
Well, in a sense, if people come on, the fact of the matter is, Paul's the cure.
The court has called him the cure.
He appears to be the cure.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know why I did that.
Why aren't there any?
I don't know.
We'll be looking at the latest question.
Oh, here it is.
I'm going to change it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But it seems to me they're the toughest thing they've got for us in the money business, the deposition business.
And it seems to me he's a... Calabano's the smartest guy they've got.
Right, right.
Yeah.
See what comes out of there.
Yes, we did.
Yes, we were riding yesterday in the primary season.
And we had a victory.
I think it's the other way on this one.
If close to knew about it, it was not at all, and I'm sure, you know, Johnson's, because this was, I don't know, a slight idea.
I didn't either.
Out of there, I mean, we were getting weeks and months of things here and there, but I didn't know.
And the diet committee wasn't worried about it as much, except for this financial thing.
They thought they had something going on there.
Yeah.
But I asked that question.
They made all that trouble.
Why in the world would we think the Democratic National Committee did it?
That's a truthful source.
They didn't say they were going to divide the English thing, but they didn't.
At the time, it's funny, they didn't have a suit, so they didn't know what they were up against.
There was the possibility of a counter-attack.
I've got this to run by you.
You think that...
If we decided to go in that direction, then the three networks would work before the policy, but rather than doing that, raising our bases, it would be, I mean, I can still handle the domestic issues well, but the way to just say to the people that, you know,
And they don't help us.
They always make it more to those our customers, rather than to the other customers.
True.
Very good.
What is your view as to how we ought to handle the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement of the announcement
Henry's gone, and we'll wait to see about various things.
We'll have a truth announcement, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Which I would urge you to do on Wednesday, do the press conference on Thursday.
You know, get two stories out of it, first of all, and also get the, don't let the, hit the truth announcement before the speculation on it builds up to the point where the press conference, the spec conference, where the counter is.
I agree.
So I'd say that you're going to have the press conference next week, and then probably wait until Wednesday to announce the press conference, and also Wednesday announce me, and announce the group, and then we're going to announce the press conference tomorrow evening.
We are going to make some cuts, trips to such and such, and we're going to meet the press tomorrow night.
We're going to do certain things on it.
Well, I'm not so sure.
I would think it would.
On the other hand, there aren't any grantees really there now.
Not really.
Not to speak of.
But nobody knows it.
I think the announcement is so bad.
Well, people know it.
But, you know, you've got to give this grantees a chance to do it.
He's sure as hell not sure he's not going to.
Even if there aren't any there now, he's probably not sure.
And that's more important.
And it's the end of the draft.
Thank you.
That's...
The inequity of the draft is now still a...
It's going to continue to be a problem.
It hasn't gotten even a bit of sort of moral inequity.
I just think maybe we could, uh...
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
and they might have, at times, they may have had them, but we know now that they will.
Because, you know, we don't try to let them go out and let us in at any time.
We just want them to get out and go away.
We just want them to get out.
That's the point.
And the other may, may sort of support the in the lane better than just a customer, as a customer.
And I thought where that was the issue, whether we can avoid it or not.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
and he is hot for it, regardless if he uses a cool thing or a 3-on-1 kind of thing that's much more cool.
And then, you know, we've had many people who have spoken to us and wanted to say something and tell us anything.
And their reaction to the story.
If you're doing a press conference now instead of the three-on-ones, that it sets you, it resumes a press conference format so that you can do one or more later.
It would be harder to do if you don't do one now.
It would be harder to do one now than to have you do one then.
You would not agree to it.
No.
You can only do one if you want to do the next one.
Now you can do two.
If you want to prepare for it, do another one.
for the recovery and due to the week after the demo drafts, he has a 22nd person.
And you can do another one.
And you have to put your suit in clear of shade.
And there you go.
Three weeks.
And while you're right in the middle of the platform,
Oh, no, we've got here a week before.
We could do on the 10th of August.
Before the basic activity starts.
I think it is.
Unless we have something to do with Vietnam.
There's a, if it stays presidential, it covers a range of presidential candidates.
It covers a range of what's going on.
There's still a happier candidate.
There's still a, uh, I don't know.
I don't know about that.
I don't know what the point of it is.
We may have to, uh, increase the amount of candidates.
There's a lot of candidates.
There's two candidates.
The force would never get together to do that.
Yeah, that's right.
Each one of them might do it at a time.
I'm sure it would be the other way around.
Well, I would know that, but I'm the second time.
I don't know why you would do that at all.
I agree.
You're still much better off with your depressed patterns, which forces all three members, even if they have to give equal time, because they won't all three get together on equal time.
for the other guy.
I would do all three networks and not actually look for questions.
I wouldn't.
I would say it's part of the interest of the president.
The interest of the president is any part of it.
I don't intend to abuse the office by giving you the campaign, but I don't actually have questions on the job.
I don't have questions on the facility.
I don't have questions on the company.
Okay.
I don't want to talk too much.
What about the security factor, you know?
Yeah, right.
I think the general meaning seems to be that you have some, but not a lot.
You have a thing in the astrodome.
You have an able or capable ability for something.
But you don't have to figure that something might be wrong.
It's going to be a problem.
You have to figure, you see that on the security thing, and that's where most of them never saw it.
Unless he, unless he, you know, if he starts complaining, I'm switching names, and then he could be.
You're not going to, you don't scare anybody.
He's just the type that stirs up, or could become the type that stirs up emotions.
I mean, I tried to pull some Kennedy types up.
Bobby Kennedy, yeah.
Yeah.
The security is a hell of a problem.
It's going to, even if it's not a real problem, it's going to be a problem to, you know, psychologically to a lot of people.
They're not going to want to see our president have, well, Graham is an example of it, isn't he?
Yeah.
But it is just going to be a problem to a lot of people.
A lot of people on your side are just...
We're playing square middle Americans.