Conversation 440-027

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I'm sure you'd be better with a backpack then or something.

I think it's long, but I'll make it long enough that you can get that.

You know, one thing I wanted to say is that I appreciated that, the fact that you had to meet with George, George McCord, and I know that sometimes we're all in the same boat,

No, but we don't want to put that burden on you.

And the other thing is that I have appreciated the way you've talked about it.

And I think, too, that what we ought to do in this situation is hearing every kind of hearsay and stuff down the line.

It's unoriginal.

We have to lie to the members.

uh, people taking that, and obviously, uh, it was a rather massive attack on, uh, his office, and, well, the whole of White House said, what do we do?

But, apparently, it was a very difficult situation.

I cannot agree that, say, I'm not a liar, I mean, I would consider maybe once, probably so, but then, I don't have to have, you know, a situation where you lay it out, and try to get on with other things, because, uh,

Well, I know that we have time.

But what I meant was that you, I want to be sure you saw that .

And I don't want any of you to do anything that will hurt you or anything.

Let me say that right now we're in a country.

It seems to me that

Smaller people like this should be able to do it.

You've got to be able to do it.

Now, the smaller people can tell if you've always preferred either the morning or the evening breakfast or either the evening like this.

Generally speaking, the mornings were better for you, I don't know.

But then you see, the whole leadership is not really the best place to sit down and just talk politics.

I'm actually really like all the men in there.

That's okay.

What do you think, guys, about that?

My mind goes back to our first leadership meeting, Mr. President, in 1968.

We were talking about this this morning.

Yeah.

When we ran the flag, you know, in 68.

Do you remember?

In the summer, we came down.

Maybe it was in the district.

It was before.

Oh.

This morning.

And we met with the leadership group.

You know, I tried to get the leadership group to reduce its size.

I would like to add on occasion that the bill was put in place.

I think that was the company that came.

That was the company that came.

Well, what I was going to suggest is that I'd also like to invite a person

We've been trying to see if Christ can sort of give us some time now, after the middle of the year, and if he can give us some, we might try to get him to come along.

He'd be willing to come out at that time.

But that's all.

I think if you add to it, you see, if you add other people, then you have really got, in fact, we started, what I mean, we've got a lot of senators and congressmen, and a lot of senators, and you add other congressmen to the Senate,

See, we all trust them.

I have a question.

I'll make a point.

I don't know.

without .

This afternoon, Mr. President, I'm at 3.30.

I have all of our close leadership together.

I'm seeing them tomorrow.

No, I'm seeing the witness tomorrow.

But we had the summer first page.

And unfortunately, we've been over

It's summer.

That's pretty good for summer.

We wrote like hell on that to try to get 40 figures into one.

But you enjoyed it.

Well, then that's done.

You got a good list.

Our reaction was good.

We could do it on a regular basis.

Every third meeting with all of the

Well, we thought that we should figure an agenda, and I fell over to that on the retail.

You weren't able to get that to do it, so now we're holding on to it.

There's a lot to do, and if we can do that, then that's everything.

No good, because we just haven't done that.

I have a topic, and they didn't bring out the topic, but we think it's the most interesting from a legislative standpoint.

How do we deal with this, or how do we advance this?

What might be helpful tomorrow when we have a meeting is you might say that you've talked to the four of us, and you make this suggestion that every second or every third meeting, we would have a chance to outline the agenda.

I think it would make them feel...

In other words, that they were basically not just being told.

Yeah, right.

That's the point.

That's the big point.

There is a problem.

I remember...

comments that would be there for 16 hours with 16 members.

The way it worked out, we had on this, we had seven or eight points to write all together.

We had a leadership part, and we reminded them so that we would definitely...

The leaders picked up.

We had to put this in writing so that

They just weren't coming down.

There were some vague ideas that they happened to have popped in their mind on the way down to the White House that morning.

They put it in writing, and that was what they were supposed to bring out to talk about.

And they were surprised.

There weren't more than six or eight items on there.

And they got all condensed and down and...

really what they wanted to talk about.

But this kind of meeting, if you want to have it overall, it seems to me that there's a good structure, you have a lot of friends, and you can, you know, literally stay honest with each other.

reported directly during his campaign for Johnson on intelligence-gathering activity.

I mean, it's written right there, right open.

Same guy that wrote it, never put it in your column anymore.

But it's right there.

He had something like 20 or so people reporting to him on what the other side was doing.

I think you should try.

The other thing is, there can't be this damn double standard.

And also, if I can suggest something, you talk about little campaigns and just the fact that there's other things.

I think it was my most heaven-stricken most candidacy this time.

I didn't really like the meeting about having violence, not just happening, but shouting down the car of San Francisco.

They smashed our convention, do you remember?

I hate to suggest it, and I ran out of November headquarters, too, you know, with the mail, with the mail all the stuff around.

Then, Adrian, how do you go into that?

Well, Gary has a call to make, doesn't he?

I called Howard yesterday while we were in this meeting.

I'm not trying to divert attention, but I simply say, if you're going into campaign practice, organized violence is the worst thing that can be done.

It was pretty rough.

I mean, it was pretty rough.

Now that you're in October, do you think those are our people that we're out there screaming at?

Why, Mr. President, aren't the contents of these recordings or puzzles, why aren't they made a part of it?

The only thing I ever heard is what he was saying.

Something about some guy apparently was having a affair with some guy.

Was it a man or a woman?

I don't know.

Yes, sir.

That would fall away over the top of this thing like a big thing.

Really?

Well, of course, that isn't a thing.

It's a company announcement.

Ellsberg today has spent his whole day in the hearing passing up suggested questions to Cundey and others.

And Bonnberg is in that filibustering.

I may have to go back later tonight to filibustering.

But I mean the transcript from today, you know, you can't get it until tomorrow.

I hope it's still interesting.

We'll go over it and talk.

All because Ellsberg is in the room and has to mind the tactic in sending out the suggestions.

U.S. President.

He is replying to the crisis and telling you what to do and is involved in the whole business of delaying the hearings as long as he can.

The hearings at U.S. Senate are accepting advice from the people.

I don't think there's anything I have to do with it.

Senator, I put more people in Congress and take them out of the state than the President did in the same understanding of the security thing.

And I think we got some of the news there.

People in this country, you know, are foreign.

They're foreign.

And they know that we've got the technicalities.

I don't know if there's a problem for most people.

We're about to make a hero out of this.

I've been speaking on it.

I was in foreign affairs.

And this is wrong.

And people appreciate it.

And our speakers and our senators can do what they want.

You should read that paper very carefully in the National Security.

We have one coming.

You really ought to listen.

And the Vietnam negotiations were impaired as a result of this.

Now, what the hell do you expect the president to do?

Fail and move forward?

Now, we did a hell of a lot of great things for this country, right?

We ended the war in Vietnam.

We're going to have a good thing in Vietnam, right?

And we're at the amount.

We have a new relationship.

We have a new relationship with China.

If this was the result of the most secret negotiations, they had to be secret.

Or they wouldn't have a problem.

Al, tell them.

Tell them what a hell of a problem we have.

Who was in their comment desk asking that we have this operating?

It wasn't Bob Alden or John Cohen.

It's practically a brawl.

You know, this paper's referred to over twice over China.

My God, do you know what that means for our relationship to the Soviet Union and the U.S. too?

And they've been looking for three times as good as the United States.

So we have a terrible time.

We still have it.

We've got that.

Not to you, but I think it needs to come out of today.

The one thing they can't stand is the fact that we've got movies that interact with people.

And that is it.

There's these invasions and negotiations with China.

You go into Russia, there's one million people out there.

That's a big one.

I know what you're all thinking about.

You see, I can't go out every week.

You know, I was involved in this goddamn thing.

I can't do it.

You know, I can, uh, I'll, uh, uh, however, I have a damn active schedule coming up here.

I was in Barbara on Saturday.

Believe me, if you're, if you saw anything else, you'd be going on to the clinic or to the water station.

I was amazed.

I told George, we had an election right here in the city of Pennsylvania.

Nothing like you took me in that thing.

I had two judges there.

We didn't get caught running in both sides.

We all took one.

We took one.

Statewide.

They said, we'll give you one.

We'll give up one.

It wasn't good.

So we went.

Our judges weren't well known.

We were all over the town.

We were judges.

One of our judges kept his boat.

uh, nominations.

He's already elected last year.

He's boring away.

He was 80,000 or so ahead of the Democrats and 200,000 ahead of the Democrats.

Now the guy finished third.

He's got a great chance to overhaul number two by making him a lot, you know.

Number two is part of the state, number four is another.

And we overcame both of them.

The point is, on the last year, he was always dancing.

How can we, on the floor of the House and or Senate, somehow get the information out of this machine?

What else, Rick?

Yes, is that available?

Is it something we can air-braze?

Well, you say it's in the hands of the committee.

So if anybody else can get burned, you can question the justice.

Well, he had Ellsberg up there.

Who were the Republicans on that committee?

Can't they show them better if you show them better?

That's true.

It seems to me so.

And this will get through.

The other person said, I don't want any problems.

No.

And I have not seen the fact.

I did not know.

I just didn't want to tell you.

But from what I've said, it is a grumpy goddamn thing.

Well, it's in the urban areas as well.

The whole general operation is in the urban areas.

And there's no reason on earth why Howard should not request that.

If he's asking for these other tabs, then we're saying this is a path along the village.

That's right.

Yeah, they're looking into all of this.

All right.

What do you think of it?

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

... ... ...

It was a request.

It was a request, but I'm not sure.

It was a conversation.

You see, I wasn't there.

It was a request by Cole to talk to you.

Well, Richardson didn't want it.

I don't know.

I think when we get back from Iceland, we'll be there next week.

Thank you.

Did I make a successful introduction to broader subject?

You were a participant in an active one in the role of the Republican Coordinating Committee of 65, 67, and 68.

And that was the same good mechanism for the National Committee, George, the great list chair, the Republican leadership,

Five governors, if you remember, and all of our ex-presidents or ex-presidential candidates.

I think the troops in the field, Georgia's folks, would welcome the opportunity to have their people meet here this week again to review the president.

The Democrats are having next year, I'm told, many conventions.

which they may or may not think is a good idea after they have it.

It seems to me that we could tie all of the different, you know, governors, national committees, leadership, and the White House together with maybe semi-annual gatherings of that sort.

You came to every one, I recollect.

I knew he came to every one.

That's right.

Ike was very active.

I know.

I mean, we had some damn good people.

I think this would be a way to think to

When would you like to do it?

Did you talk to George about it?

No, I haven't talked to him.

Well, you think I did.

I think it's a good idea.

I was very constituted.

We were planning to go and take away from George's function, but I might have a way to start a reunion.

A lot of them, you see, are gone.

Or you might just set up, you might sit down with George and sit down with the leaders.

It's not always the people you look for.

Okay.

To get them together, just let them frankly feel that they're appreciated as well.

If the group is not too big, I would have them in the White House.

These guys and gals just need to feel their love.

Right, and to create the impression that the elders aren't going off in this direction, the Republican leadership in the House.

All right, well, why don't you set up a plan, work out a plan,

And you submit it to, uh, Daphne and I will get it out and get it prepared.

Now we have to, uh, we did not want to do it.

After this, after the summer, that's going to be the last one.

I would say even after our fall, our summer recess sometimes, early in September.

So we could plan it.

Right, all this other crap.

Yeah, don't do it now.

I had heard.

Right.

There's one other political American, an African American, I thought he was now a governor.

He just got polled.

Of course, there was some looking like the governor's walking already now.

But he told me that he was polled.

There's a point that I think we were agreed on, which is that the Watergate thing is not...

I heard in the elections, the Republicans, it did not show up in a poll that he just finished.

I told him about you, or he was a little worried about you.

I thought about your numbering on the Pennsylvania elections, the state ones.

But it was interesting that he didn't do it.

Who took that poll?

No doubt.

She got around to going.

Last week, we, according to Marjorie, polled an electorate.

The mayor of Minneapolis, a Republican, first time in I don't know how many years, she was ecstatic.

I mean, they thought they were going to get whatever.

And I think this is the same.

The thing that's hurting is the party leadership and the people.

I mean, the people are the people.

This statement will help a lot because we can get that.

You say there are the answers.

That will help us, but these are the ones that are just up in arms.

Well, I'm sure.

You're looking for that.

Well, I'm going to take a sample of Part 3.

I was a great friend of mine, but I was a man mad at him.

But there was one year the other day, and the southern governor, he was going instead of himself.

He painted the gloomiest, most desolate picture in the chapter.

Funny enough, I said, he was standing there.

Well, I was going to take a letter, and I was betting on the next question.

I was going to tell him, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.

jump away from the administration.

But he then, I saw him chasing down there in Chicago.

And he said, he said, I said, he said, I want to talk to you about my views.

I said, I read your damn views in the New York Times.

And he said, I've changed my position.

Come on.

And he had a press conference yesterday.

He said, what happened was, he got with the other leaders.

He said, we've got to talk to them about these problems and things that are happening.

And he realized he made a heck of a mistake.

But he said, certainly, that our own directors are also responsible.

I'll tell you what, I had to do this.

You know, I was going to play.

I didn't really, I didn't really want to be putting it through this.

It's a kind of statement.

Anyway, I'll do some of that.

It's moving, Jimmy.

It's a kind of statement.

My office is in one of the two big areas of trouble.

First of all, it's very strange.

What defines it is that we're not the same.

We're the first party to come to the world of bad guys.

Thank you.

.

I think this statement is enormously doubtful.

Really?

Yes, because of the truth.

You understand?

No, no, no.

That's why I... That's why I...

I'm sure that's right.

This is the biggest thing going down.

But I...

I hope to the high heavens that the press thing will be done as quickly as possible.

I realize that that's what you want to do, as quickly as possible.

That's another trickle.

so the country can see you sit down and get this thing going.

I think that in the space of three weeks, in other words, if you can do the press conference in the middle of this time, it will change the whole psychology of this.

In any way, the psychology of it is terribly distorted, as we just were talking, in Russia.

And other countries, other countries, they want to,

They want to get a reasonable understanding, and they'll be fairly content.

Fairly content.

At least that's what I have found outside.

You know, once you're in D.C., it's political incest, and an eagerness to have blood, and a bunch of vampires around, and all that.

But I think that in the space of three weeks' time, the whole psychology of all of this thing will be turned entirely around.

in the press conference, I think if you can get across a sense of a feeling that everything is controlled, China, that message you gave, and the issue that

There isn't anything we can do to check that.

But I think it needs some emotional healing.

And some admission from that.

.

I don't blame anybody.

No president has ever been more busy in a campaign year.

I wasn't here, so I'm true.

There was China, there was Russia, and there was any war in Vietnam.

Those were uneasy, and we knew that they were going to have a hell of a lot of support, shall we say, from the best part, and without much support from many segments of the country.

You understand?

I don't know.

I'm concerned that this stuff in cold print is not going to work.

Yeah, I agree.

It is not going to work.

Except that it does need to be because people are concerned.

We did review the definition of the complaint, but that doesn't make much sense.

If you give them more time, it gives them more time.

to dig and to try to find the kind of questions that they wouldn't have time for.

Well, let me say, the problem, basically, is that, I don't think it's going to be quite practical in a while.

It's just sitting on the press conference.

It's going to be a very, very big problem.

Thursday, the whole day of the meeting, there was an urgent war.

.

And the worst thing was that Albert had something to do with that.

Well, the other problem, too, now, is that we haven't been aware of the material that was used by the resources.

They didn't leave it.

I mean, we can't get out and fire Mr. Devin and I that totally eroded by the subsequent revelation.

Yeah, but I get your point.

I think you've made a good point, and I will.

When we say it, we'll get it.

I've pressed up beside him.

It's a difficult thing to do.

Rare to do.

And we're going to do a lot of it.

Well, and we're going to do a lot of it.

But frankly, we've got to do this.

We've got to do it.

I might say that I think the biggest news in the next two or three days would be something very, very terrible.

I mean, then again, I'll say that again.

It's very, very, very, it's very, yeah.

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

But it's a question of time, not when.

It's a question of whether there's a time or when.

If you see me, I want you to follow me.

This question, I have several of our members.

To me, today, it's going to be asked to speak to a young session in the college.

That's good.

I can tell you a little more.

Boy, hell, huh?

Hell, huh?

You see, he's in a different position.

He is not the head of government.

He's the secretary of the party.

We have no problem with this one.

Of course, he can speak for himself.

You know, I'm interested in the nation of Calvary.

Huh?

Oh, sure.

Yes, sir.

You know, we ought to go to the rest of the area because I was a good man.

Just like Kershaw was, but...

.

Surely, for their own gain, it's not a question of .

But that even if I should ask a question, .

I understand the problem.

The idea, I don't know if they grossed through the idea that you instead of having a full conference, they have some collective thing, maybe four or five, where you can sit and chat with whatever you're doing here, but with them, that's not the effective form.

I don't know if that's what you mean.

That's what I said.

And what's another format?

Well, that's what the bigger employers are now.

You know, what you choose to do.

You know, I've done it before.

I've done it before.

Is the network going to be, is that more relaxed for you or is that the same?

I don't, I mean, there's nothing wrong.

You know, in other words, it's a different format.

It's both of them.

Are there any ground rules on who you represent when you're standing after the biggest playoff conference?

Are there any protocols or standards?

No, no, I'm just very fair about it.

I don't even know about it.

I've got a belly full of them already.

I think a lot of other people have them.

Well, maybe we, maybe we all have them.

Well, they've been, they've been streaming out there the night coming on.

They're smiling when they come on.

Right.

They don't mean to take them on.

We're not going to take them on.

They're all alive.

I just figured.

That's all right, right?

Yeah.

That's why I was over here.

The main thing is we've got to make sure that we're doing the right thing.

Or you can...

They can't follow through with the questions, but it looks like you're taking on a whole new line.

Well, let me say this.

Just for your own satisfaction, you've got to know, unless I'm regretful, this is a painful experience.

I can't ever be better than you on that.

He said that we've got to try to lay out everything we've got in this day and age.

There are the other shepherds in the water.

I always thought we were going to have problems with the man sitting here.

Maybe he's the biggest thief in the water in the world, but what the hell do you want to do?

Do you want to quit?

Or do you want to move forward?

What the hell would you like to do?

He's got great things to do for this world.

I thought he was going to do it.

Well, I don't know.

You had enough of it.

There will be some students that are going to take some time.

All right.

Monday is a pretty good.

Thank you.

and we got everybody but four.

We have 39 Republicans, fresh, and they're both with us.

And I think we .

Even though you don't .

See, we're under.

Let me tell you this.

This is not something that I want to do.

Oh, I planned to.

What did I plan?

Oh, I didn't want to press you to have a lunch break.

I don't know where that came from.

This morning.

They were pressing for one of these.

You did.

That was an alcohol and cold water.

Who did it?

The author.

Fine.

And you said, I'm going to make a statement.

And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's when you wrote the draft, yeah?

But I just may as well do that.

This has no name.

Thank you.

was radio cameras.

And most of them had fascination with it.

But we didn't want to watch that.

Uh, but, uh, don't set the gallery.

Remember the whole thing about, put the band on the president's side.

No, no, no.

No, it's just him.

It's his active energy.

It's his lack of even curiosity.

You know, it's a mystery.

You know, it's the other way around.

Now, as soon as they left that mystery and went out there,

We don't let people in.

We don't let them go on vacation.

We don't let them take kids to school.

We don't let them do a bunch of jobs.

We don't tell us how to do it.

And then the same with students.

It's just a good time to do it.

Check it out.

We're going to do a special lesson for you.

Thank you.