Nixon, Ehrlichman & Bull on White House personnel and Energy policy

And I gather there's a little intermural pushing and shoving going on, which is the only reason I get into this.
Debts of Congress and Schultz, and I think, and Henry,
This is the job.
You know, we're negotiating with the Russians.
I'm crazy.
Did I call you?
I guess it was about the, oh yes, the appointment tomorrow.
It's better than songs.
Or if you are ready to meditate.
Oh, I guess I could do it.
Somebody else could do it.
I have to see Greg early tonight.
Somebody I have to see.
No, no, no, no.
I don't like to cancel something.
I'll tell you what you can do.
We'll make Greg at 9 o'clock.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
The breakfast is not ready.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Have you ever talked to anybody who talked to each one of these people?
You know, way back, these other buddies are out of town.
You know, he was for a very long time.
You know, he was for a very long time.
Nobody's talking to him lately.
Now, half of the time.
He's been cut in by Henry.
George says, I haven't heard any more about it.
And he said, I'm getting a little concerned because the region will be back shortly.
And he said, if I am supposed to be picking this up, I'd better be doing something right now.
I think really all he wants is a player to say, well, just say to George, I would prefer to have him do it.
He's more experienced, and I want him to be in on it, but I think that it would be a
You've got this whole economic trade having to do with it.
Manolo, we'll take a look at a little bit of that concept.
You know, juice or lemonade or Coke or ice tea.
Ice tea would be fine.
Thank you.
... ... ... ... ...
I mentioned, I have brought, I brought the planning, and I invited the cabinet to meet with me.
And I tried to try and receive the cabinet, but it was, I mean, it was a question of some kind of result, and I had to agree on this trip.
I mean, it did not travel, so I had to speak to the board of directors, who I had to speak to.
What do you think of that?
What I'm trying to do is to get a procedure step where the principals and the captain will come to the cabin, even when I'm not there now.
Don't you think that's good?
I think it is.
It will work within limits.
I think the idea, if you're opening it, as long as they know you're going to be there, then they're accountable and they'll come.
As you see, there's no reason for me to sit through a terminal discussion for anything that I've already heard.
There's no need for a written paper on this.
Schultz is supposed to report on his evaluation and trade.
And Agnew reports on Agnew.
So it's basically this.
First of all, that's a lot of items, but a lot of George should get them all forward.
We've lost the chairman of our property review board that creates these parks.
Yeah, Rumsfeld's gone, and we've got to restaff that project.
It's been proposed, and I think it's a reasonable idea to make that a part of the domestic council.
Sure.
That way we don't have to add staff.
Done.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Now you need to chair approval, and that's...
I don't know.
You can do it.
I can do it.
Frank can do it.
We've got Stein.
Our holdovers are going to have to get some people on it.
Putting Armstrong on there.
I don't know if she can do it.
She can do it.
Foreign policy is going to do it.
I don't know.
I just do not.
No, I know you do.
But you see, the more you can get off the cold, the more you can get off the others, the better.
I mean, the cold can run a snap and get out of a lot of the terminal bleeding.
Right.
The thinking side, which is more important.
You've got to get Henry to do it.
Well, he'll do it.
He loves to.
He's got to be.
Henry's no good at defeating God unless he presides.
I understand.
For your long-range thinking, Schultz is angling, I guess is the best word to make a trip, but no, that's another subject.
But he is grooming Dunlop to succeed Herb Stein when, as then, Herb retires.
You might just have it in the back of your mind, as you see Dunlop, as to whether or not he would fit.
So there's just that.
Well, it's not him.
I don't want him to do it.
He's the best man we've had in a long time.
Dunlop would give you a fallback, possibly.
It's to get you something that I believe in, frankly, because it's such a damn complex subject.
So it'll be coming at you.
I understand.
You don't have to believe it.
I would think, well, I've got to believe in it in this sense that I don't want to recommend something to you.
First, it's deregulation of natural gas.
What Long would like to maybe do is do it, but do it in a way that will benefit him with his old wells.
And that's one of the questions, I think.
Whether you do it just on new exploration or whether you do it on old wells, too, so that the price goes up.
And the consumer is going to be paying 30%, 40% more for his gas in the first year, or maybe even more.
So I feel, I think, the deregulation is important.
It's almost essential.
It's something that I think you're going to have to learn.
Well, all of it in a sense, but you may come at it in a staged way.
You may advocate only going up a nickel a year or a nickel a quarter or a nickel every half year.
The idea here is that the price is so low that there isn't any money in it for the walk counter or for the big company to drill well.
The odds are against you because the price is so low.
But that's a kind of question that's buried in this damn thing.
And what I'm in the process of doing is trying to pull it out in fairly simple terms and give it to you as you can hear.
get all bogged down in the details.
It may be that that's a wrong approach and that what I ought to do is impose on a couple of hours of your time someday to just take you through this subject and give it to you as I understand it.
Maybe have Charlie DeBoma sit in.
He's a layman at this too.
We won't get you bogged down until it's technicality.
It might be the best way to get into the subject here.
I'd love to go down and get a suggestion.
If the weather is bad, I'll listen.
If the weather is good, I may not still go there.
What did you do on that one day?
On that one day, nobody's had a sun change.
It's been horrible.
It's been cold.
You go to California, one day of sun, three days of rain and wind.
So that's why I'm going.
I'm checking the weather.
If you do go, if I can hitchhike, I'd be very grateful.
You're welcome.
I feel kind of, oh, I'll tell you what you can do.
You can go down and do a swim.
I'm sorry to do it this way, but I really think rather than to get all bogged down in a lot of reading that you have to wade through on this, maybe to just skip over the wavetops and then have you say, wait a minute, give me more of that would be a better way to get in.
Give you an introduction to something.
Right.
Okay.
Moynihan sent you a very interesting speech that he gave the entering class in Harvard.
It's
almost no defense save good manners.
Now, he says, I do not underestimate the power of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant being well-behaved.
Scenes from Eugene O'Neill's The Harry Eight come quickly to mind.
Yet this is a form of passive defense more appropriate to the bottom holder than to the guardians of a great university tradition.
The fact as I see it is that the ideological initiative at Harvard has been conceded to the extremists
Many ignore their views, but few contest them.
An occasional social democrat wandering in from CCNY rejoins the battle of his youth, but on balance, the Brahmin intellectual tradition stands uncomprehending and not a little fearful before a still resolute politics of organized deception and violence, which is a legacy of the Stalinist era in American intellectual land.
There has been of late a diminution
then it will not any longer matter.
Excommunication against any Roman Catholic who cooperates with the Supreme Court decision on abortion.
Doctors, nurses, hospital orderlies, they call it civil disobedience.
a hell of a lot of people in terms of election.
Against abortion, well, I'm not going to lose you.
But I don't think that the court is going to answer the government.
What?
Our lawyers tell us who's going to come.
Well, what I did, I sent him over to talk to Blackfeet.
He said Blackfeet's the same.
So I think that's good to take care of.
You know, he could sense that.
I read his letter.
He felt a little guilty about having written it.
I reassured him on that.
I thought it was a great letter.
He talked it all out.
I'm afraid.
I don't think there's a place in this town for responsibility.
Don't talk to him about his mission.
Talk to him about the administration.
I won't promise
I'd like to do it for that purpose.
For the purpose of just chatting with her all the time.
All right.
All right.
Well, that's my list of miscellanea for the day.
Were you able to get to Rose on that point?
No.
As a matter of fact, Bob and I talked about his problem with Rose, and we agreed that he would talk to her first, and so I didn't feel I wanted to hit her the same day.
So I'll talk to her tomorrow.
If you approve, I think it's great.
Okay.
Then she is.
Why don't you call her today?
All right.
Call her when you get back.
Tell her that that may defuse the fact.
Oh, it will.
Immediately.
I'd say, uh, Dr. Lee, if you want it, you can have it.
The implication of that, so that you see all sides of this, is that Balzano does not get action.
He was the other one that was in the running.
Well, of course, that's my opinion, but I don't know how you see it.
What else can you give him?
Oh, there are lots of things around where you can give him help.
Because he would want to make something out of it.
He's got a promise to hold on.
Don't be far from it.
But he's very active in seeking it.
If he finds something, we're welcome to find him something good where he can operate his new majority activities.
It really is an awful lot of women's activities, children's activities, and that's required.
And anyway, I thought I'd raise this point of your LEA data.
I'm just not keen on public development.
I mean, it sounds like a typical mediocre rate on it.
And personally, I vote with Sandra on it.
I like him.
I've seen him a couple of times.
He's tough.
But a good manager is a second spot.
The other area that I've been talking to people about in Santa Rosa is minority council on the earth.
Wow.
Yeah, very proud of you.
You're smart and tenacious and vicious and all that.
Describe Santorello.
He's a little overboard.
Pretty well.
Not really a doctor.
He tends to overstate the case.
And he's had a long, long, long relationship with me.
How would he get along with Irving?
I don't know.
He's not very well.
I can imagine Irving wants him back.
He needs to be done.
I know he does.
Not that that proves anything.
No, he has a very higher character.
But I just, I sort of like it tighter.
You've got to have somebody who will out-hustle the opposition.
Santorelli will try and
But I don't know if we can get them.
You see, now, Baker's being kind of cute with us, you know, and saying that he doesn't want this guy to be the White House man.
So we're dangling, you know, we're dangling people.
And Wally Johnson is our liaison with Baker.
Well, the California guy was very much in.
I don't know if you've got anybody else.
Well, we've got a pole.
We've got a pole.
A pole.
A guy named Wood.
I'd love to have a pole.
I'd like to have a pole in some kind of position.
And frankly, he could probably be the guy.
But you're running from here.
I think he runs them.
Yeah.
The Attorney General runs them.
And the reason that I have some haste is to get hired.
Okay.
I just think you ought to draw one person in charge.
Get them back.
Get back, get action.
Call her and tell her you get action.
That's too bad it falls on us as a lawyer.
What else do you think you can get Senator Rowley?
Senator Rowley wants to be in the State Department.
And he doesn't really care what.
So he would take the minority council thing and keep a slot open.
Even if the state, what I mean is, well, he doesn't get action.
No.
Santorelli.
Santorelli would like to be in the State Department.
What he would like is that job that Nelson Gross had over there in our county.
Nelson, go on and get him.
Put him in.
He's going back to New Jersey.
Put him in.
He'd be excellent at that job.
Let's just do that.
Santorelli, let's put him over there.
He'd do a hell of a job.
Now that just makes, you know, stir up the people.
Put Santorelli in, I'd like him to pull over and get a job.
Let's put it that way.
Okay, all right.
We've got, you know, they never know all these people.
Well, that's my thing.
I talked to this Polish kid.
Klanich, somehow or another, didn't like him.
Listen, Klanich is prejudiced against Jews, Italians, Negroes, Catholics, and blacks.
And we know that well.
You know what I mean?
He is.
and uh he's typical western but well he's getting great i'm what you want to pray and you're giving him
You tell them we're going to get gray, but tell them that I have a commitment to this poll.
It's a commitment I've made, and I can count on him to handle it.
Senator Rowley, I think what I'd like to do is hold the State Department job open, see if we can get Baker to take Senator Rowley on the Hill.
If Dean still thinks well of that.
Because Dean's got a reason to run this.
And then if Senator Rowley...
Well, there are all kinds of ATW things, for instance, that involve citizen groups, community groups.
Why wouldn't he be a good assistant secretary with Brennan?
Brennan would be...
He'd be a hell of a marketing assistant secretary.
Well, here's a guy that... Well, Brennan would take him.
Well, Brennan, he wants people who are his friends.
Balzano was a great supporter of Brennan.
He could run something.
You want to get Brennan to say, here's a name.
He's on the top of our list.
He's great.
He's a great supporter.
You see what I mean?
Let's have, let's take the same risks with Poles and Italians and Catholics that we take to the blacks, okay?
To the blacks, we're putting dumb people in terrible, just because they're wrong.
But I want you to call, I'm sure if I was on a roll,
This is one of the best.
I want him to say no.
This is the same thing.
Good.
How about that?
Who can talk to the president?
George.
Well, George, I think, has that pretty well in control.
But I want both sides on something.
I just told George, if there's a hell of a guy, don't force it on him.
Have him go over and talk.
Well, we've got a number of them over there.
You know, we have filled... Let me take one minute.
Bob's situation.
Oh, yeah.
I talked to him.
He wanted to put the bullet on Rose.
And he said she volunteered.
She hadn't thought about how much time was left.
I think that the problem there is complicated.
The fact that Taylor may have gone in.
Maybe not.
These guys sit around all the time.
It's not a good thing.
It's difficult.
It's difficult.
I doubt that Taylor went in because Taylor came to me and has been coming to me right along and has not expressed any dissatisfaction.
He is taking on a job.
He really wants to go out
and um did he feel that we were going to kick him down now that's the thing she says she says he came in well i doubt that he's done i really doubt that i thought you could do it because everybody says he hadn't taken a drop in order to take the job in dallas
Bill is, I suspect, very sensitive about the idea of a political appointment.
See, they were all here during the Rufus Young days.
And they all got written roughshod over by Johnson and his hand-picked guys.
And that memory is still very vivid with me.
When we first got to know Duncan back in 1968,
And he didn't think he was the logical choice because he had never had field experience.
So he opted to take field experience now with the hope that after he got some, we would bring him back in and then move him up and that it could never be too late.
I can't vouch for that.
I'm getting all the second-hand.
Well, any of that.
What is involved here?
Well, Chapin reports... She hates Chapin's opinion, so that's a curious...
I think what is involved here is the view of your attention to some of
but it wasn't what happened, so many of them died.
And she has a terrible, terrible memory.
And I mean, it gets really, it bothers me.
It's too great that they have their cliques and sit around and grouse, but let me say this.
Without, I mean, you have to do it all in your home.
First, you want to hold a baby.
Bob should have somebody other than him.
You may not sense it, but I have had nobody who does not feel that way.
I know he's an artist in comfort.
He's probably in a discussion, but he's not the good man to be a writer.
He's too much like Bob Jones.
Not like Bobby.
He isn't like Bobby.
Bobby is not that one.
Now I know what you mean.
Higby is a, frankly, a sort of upstart little, you know, Larry Higby.
Sounds like a kid, right?
No kid.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
See, he means, he means, frankly, a 10-cold type of call.
He really means one.
Or as the advice would be, he really means that kind of person.
The Bible says, he calls and says, call this one or that one.
So Higby calls for that one.
And there are some policies.
And he has this trip, I don't know exactly what they do, just can't help but show the cold.
When he calls people, everybody calls it sort of a half-assed, apologetic way.
As a matter of fact, Steve leans over backwards, and he's got a telephone in stock at this.
He said, well, you know, I want to do it.
I don't want to impose.
And he just likes stealing and the truth.
I know what you mean.
I know that he causes Bob insurmountable problems throughout the state.
Bob's just got to realize it.
Don't make him fire us.
But he's got to put him in a position.
Bob's got another kid over there, Mr. Terry O'Donnell.
who is an academy graduate, but very, very easy going to become an Irishman.
Well, this ought to have you, you ought to use a fellow like that for this course.
This is a tough one, you've got to do it.
But what you're getting at is really Bob's relationship to the staff inside.
Now the other thing that I was going to mention is something to do with physical skills.
I don't know.
I'm a hell of a lot of people.
I know the rules about, you know, spam kind of stuff.
... ... ... ... ... ... ...
they have the officers all the officers they have the doctors and they have the military that's a very great mistake meaning they're restricted from the other restraint and you can't have them there and have people or your assistant now they are restricted and they've got ten percent
Now, Bob should not do that.
That's assertive too much because the other man is beautiful, is big, and what he ought to do is this.
I know where he probably may go.
He has private conversation in his career.
What I would do is to let them use him at the lower level, for example.
But he should have every officer job.
He should be out on that.
He should be eating with the men that are off.
And every one of the military aides should be down there.
And the other room should be more basically secret service.
Can I get you a secretary address?
Yeah.
Bob doesn't notice that, sir.
No, I see that point.
Well, it's quite obvious to me.
If I had ever seen it, I haven't seen it.
But I checked it.
That is what the situation is.
I don't believe in eating with secretaries the other day.
I don't believe in the Secret Service thing yet.
I don't believe in that.
I know I have to enlist with them.
But I think officers and the rest, you can't have your assistants, if it's ever even out there.
Put them out there.
Can you get this through?
I think so.
I think I can, yeah.
I don't know what the origin of it is.
In fact, that's a rule I...
When you're up there, I'll find out.
Well, no, I'll tell you.
I'll find out.
I'll call my back and find out what the origin of that is.
I'll find out what the rule is.
And then you speak to Tom and say, well, don't talk to me in a grouse.
I say, no.
I just say, you know, it's really better.
See, the thing is, Tom, I'll do it, but I'm very, very...
August, which I know exactly why it was done.
By the configuration of the new plant.
So I said, well, I don't know, why don't you get a cost picture of what it would cost to do the thing right?
And so they got Albert Adjie back.
There's an active discussion going on about this.
It should be active.
And I would really get at it.
And I must say, I know that the staff people work.
And I know that they need the space.
But then...
We've all got to, everybody should sort of feel, kind of make everybody feel a little bit.
I mean, I would, I'd make big general factors that way.
Secretary's happy and all the rest.
It's a big problem.
It's a big problem for God.
And Bob doesn't, I don't think that, well, I think the problem is him.
Partly.
Partly.
I don't think they care enough about these people.
There isn't anybody I have more affection or respect for than Bob.
But in one typical situation, Bob never eats in the mess.
He always eats in his office.
Now, it makes a difference.
He should.
I can't eat in the mess.
You can.
I can.
But I can.
You should.
I do.
And everybody gets a chance to talk to the writer about how to overcome.
You see, the mess, particularly when the mess is his equals, I mean, all those people are.
I can't because I don't even try.
I never even try.
There's no question on such a basis.
But you see...
The thing is, when you combine all these things together, that's how the grousing began.
So they look at that.
They look at the little chicken chip thing up there.
That's a big, beautiful thing.
If I know the room, I saw that they went back there and got that.
It's very small.
It's a small little thing.
They're all cramped.
They had to wait for each other.
Even if it were the biggest room in the building, the fact that they're segregated out is bad news.
All officers, military aides, doctors, and...
They are officers in the armed services.
And God damn it, they rank with Higby.
They rank with your man, right?
They should sit out there with the rest of them.
I know where this originated.
It originated when we were over in the little building.
I'll bet you money I'll check this, but remember Little Holly over there?
There were two small dining rooms, and you could not have a conversation.
without it being heard all over the place.
And there were times you were talking business, and it was, you know, it was like in the head of the hangar.
Yeah, that's like a part of all the difference.
You're absolutely right.
But I'll bet you if you check it, that's the origin of it.
Yeah, but you see, it's probably his favorite, you know, I don't know if you've heard about it.
He, there again, it's his business.
Now, I walk into this, and I should go back to what I did.
I walk into the secretary's offices, because you see how they're going to have a lot of feeling.
Damn right.
Where did that come from?

Nixon, Ehrlichman & Bull on White House personnel and Energy policy

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on March 15, 1973

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