Nixon, Hoffman & Bell on Vietnam War and Drug abuse

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Thank you, President.

How are you?

Nice to see you.

Good to have you here.

Thank you very much.

You got back to the battle zone, sir?

Oh, that's good.

Yeah, I should have put this down here.

Oh, I'm glad you're doing this for me.

We'll just put it right in here.

Yes, sir.

You want to do the job of sitting, too?

I'd see what you turned out to be.

This is the beginning of the Old Testament.

This is for your personal use.

This is the one I took over to Vietnam for 20,000 copies of the first edition.

Sit down.

Do you catch on where you want to get off?

No, sir.

They get a kind of message that you bring to them.

They might not feel it.

You know, you catch them holding out when all they're sitting around on

Well, it would require good research.

Definitely good.

That's right.

It takes about five minutes to break through.

Sure.

You know, crowds are everywhere.

Everybody on the fire support base that wasn't working was there.

And one base that actually pirated while we were going, of course, those folks couldn't come.

And they sat around on the ground and they clustered around you, one of them, copying autographs and everything like this.

And I talked straight talk to them about Christmas.

and the reality of it all, you know?

Not a dream story at all.

And I'm about to say you're the world.

Come, you just make it right out, right out, and this is the real world where you are.

Yes, they did.

They have this paperback copy which will be distributed to the public.

This is one especially worked out for you.

And this is a wonderful translation.

It's just an ordinary language for ordinary people.

It's a great book.

If you do that, it's a promise.

I had an English professor once who said that.

Of course, the Bible, as we know, is a collection of questions.

He thinks that, he thought that, and he was not a particularly religious man.

He was one of the Quakers.

It's the greatest literature in the Bible.

Let's go ahead and read it.

It is.

There's nothing on the next.

When you get that, I'm going to be ready.

I think it might be ready right now.

It's certainly not a version.

I don't care.

I'll just read it.

I'll do it.

I'll take a look at this.

I'm going to read a couple more.

So maybe you can try.

I don't know if you can read it.

that there's songs to go through the tires, and that's exactly what you want.

And there's such a good, magnificent life.

He said to me that when his recruits come out there, he gets them together.

And he said to them, now, fellas, I know you didn't actually come out here, but you're going to be here for 12 months.

You might as well make the most of it.

And he said, some of you are going to be 80 years of age.

On your 80th birthday, you're going to be dancing with your grandchildren on your knee, and they're going to say, Grandpa, how old are you?

And on that day, he said, you want to be able to say that you're 80, you're not 79, as if there were a year or something like that that you would like to forget about.

I took that story that he told me, and that was the core of the thing.

This is the real world right where you are here.

This is the place to commit yourself to Christ.

And in response to that, the fellas got the idea.

You weren't coming out to hold them.

You really had something to give them, and they clustered around you, and they wouldn't let you go, and they'd say, here, we've got to get into the helicopter.

Just the way they're trying to push you out of your office here, you know, we've got to have a big schedule in front of you.

And I found that these fellows that are behind the lines are fine, dedicated young men.

They've got all kinds of ideas of their own.

But they're, uh, dutiful to their country, and I was glad that they arranged it so I could deal with the G.I.s.

That's the way it was with fire support bases all over.

Fire support bases?

associated with my book, that big board of 60 pages on there.

And at the end, he had a few conclusions.

And if you care to look at them, my daughter said, you're welcome to do so.

What did you find out about the report you covered about the use of dope out there?

I asked Cardinal...

and I'd like to go to you, Tom.

If you had a good job, and you didn't have any questions, or you still didn't agree, or you went after that, that's part of the career.

It's more available.

That's one of the things.

It's great.

I really talk a lot about it.

I talk about it in Vietnam.

Of course, in all of the Southeast, if you go in the whole southern part, you have a superior nature.

It's a dope-ridden place.

It is indeed.

Chinese, Vietnamese, all they can do, they can do that horrible art and all that stuff.

Yes.

I see what you're saying.

And that's why they're a very downtrodden group.

You know, it's mostly what the bill does to them, which is you want to make it 50.

Right?

Also, I mean, I don't know why they want to agree to something that is getting to us.

But it has, unfortunately.

That's a sarcophagus.

That's an individual's reading.

He thinks he's doing great.

But it's like somebody that thinks you're doing great, but you read what you wrote about the next day, and it sounds good.

I met thousands of G.I.s.

It was up in the polar areas most of the time.

I never saw one that was on drugs.

Notice me.

Do you want to go there?

Yes, sir.

And they told me, too, that the boys on patrol don't want to have a pilot carrying a gun around the office, so they take care of that with their patrol.

And the Army, I think, is using that method, too, to help have peers handle a problem.

The young fellas handle the other ocean here in this country.

However, I talked to MPs a little bit, and they said to me that it's done pretty safely.

when he's carrying off a phone, growing his mind with drugs and he's screaming and probably never will recover.

He's on the hard side.

Yes, sir.

And this does occur up there, absolutely.

Another thing, one more thing, is I think the military is taking this more seriously than authorities are on the civilian front.

And I think that it very well might be that the toddlers who are now being trained in this thing

would turn out to be, a year from now or so, the most experienced people that we have in the whole country on how to deal with the drug problem.

This is what I would expect.

I think they're doing more with it in the military.

They don't excuse themselves by saying, you've got to understand, therefore we have it in the military.

That's not their line.

I'm glad.

What do you do, sir?

Yes, sir.

I do it quite frequently, in fact.

I did so before it became a problem, and I really had people criticizing me, saying, well, why are you talking about things like that?

But now you've had the right problem right off the bat.

That's right.

And we say to the young people, and to the older people as well, this is not the answer to the problem, this is to create it.

I'm proud of him.

He might have been a true alcoholism dentist when there is a request for another very great song.

Did he see the one difference, the one difference between dope and alcohol?

I suppose.

Paulism, even advanced ages can be cured.

You have to advance ages to know it's almost impossible.

That's the great tragedy now.

These people are harrowing me.

Of course, even with the news, the news makes me cry the most out of it.

But then alcohol is a horrible sight.

You'll see a lot of them here in Washington.

They're congressmen, senators, reading this paper, and then they betray their careers.

Everybody has its own rights here.

He does what he wants.

Some have a little, some have a lot.

But when they go beyond pale, it's a pretty sad sight as to what happens to them.

Well, you're right.

I don't mind if I was taking a drink.

No, no, I do mind if I was taking a drink.

That's it, that's it.

Well, I appreciate you coming in.

Thank you for the salt.

You said I was going to be free.

I was going to be free.

Second, we're glad to have a receiver.

If I could have something for Suzanne Johnson, who was Miss Illinois and went along with me, that would be a great thing.

That's what she does.

That's the person I need to go.

That's what I said.

That's very good.

That's all I'm going to do now.

This is the presidential seat.

So they might get

Thank you.

Well, thank you.

Well, listen, I appreciate those.

One thing, I'll leave you late at night.

Bye.

And I'll be listening to you.

Nixon, Hoffman & Bell on Vietnam War and Drug abuse

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on February 22, 1971

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