Nixon, Kissinger & Butterfield on Mansfield Resolution

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You don't need to modify that anymore.

I resist.

Well, if changing it, the only advantage would be to reduce .

.

to me the great advantage of the statement is in addition to the vote it shows you leading you being endorsed by the whole bloody establishment the average person doesn't know what to do of course what if you don't do it Humphrey is going to do it on the phone

What we could do is to issue it tonight, in fact, if you wanted to, as a result of this meeting.

And then let...

I think that the, I don't think that it could be improved in style, frankly.

I'm sorry.

I don't think it makes a lot of sense.

I think just the fact that somebody should... Unilaterally, that takes care of it.

That takes care of it.

I would say that.

I would say that it's a great...

a great and essential force for peace in the world.

Would you like to issue it tonight?

Well, I didn't say you can issue it.

Have the others sign it.

Well, the others could then endorse it tomorrow.

That's what Ziegler wants, but he doesn't necessarily have any sense.

You might get more punch if all the others sign it.

Well, I don't think... What does he mean, once again?

Throwing out of this meeting.

Well, it's 6 o'clock now.

He can't play all night.

He has to wait till tomorrow.

We'll just have to work unilaterally.

That takes care of Lance.

I walked out with Lance, and I said, look, inside, if we have to negotiate this, let's do one thing together in this administration.

And he said, all right, you've got my vote.

Whatever you do, you don't have to check it backwards.

The advantage of this, Mr. President, isn't the Mansfield thing.

That's important.

But for you to have to take charge of the damn establishment, they know they were all flapping.

They were all sitting on the fence until you moved.

No one will forget that you were the one who called all of these people, got the men.

They were all sitting around, wringing their hands.

Everyone was saying this is terrible and this thing is going to pass.

McGregor told me yesterday, Scott and Griffin told me, and McGregor, that we had 25 votes to make up, and that was impossible.

When I told them we could get the whole establishment, they said, nuts, we can't get them there.

Against us on everything.

I think Max has made a mistake, and if we follow this now, then we'll resolve the announcement.

Well, we can see him now.

I think you should.

And frankly, I think you should.

You know what I mean?

My relations with the two of them are always good.

I just was quite candid with him.

He's kind of wondering what the hell is he doing here.

Tell us.

I think Truman is key.

He's 87 years of age and so forth.

He doesn't have the right to call Truman a performer.

Yes, he was his secretary of state.

No, I think it is coming.

I had another session for an hour and a half with the premium, all nitpicks on language.

On which part?

Just to conform it as much as possible to his text, because he's got the problem that any major changes now have to go to the government.

But then I read him a memorandum.

Did you get this this year that he can provide it?

Yes, but the way they say it, what they want to say is to concentrate this year on working out an agreement rather than to concentrate on working out an agreement this year.

I think the average reader, that's so elusive a point.

I got it this year.

The next thing is, he says he'll try to get them to change that word.

If not, he has accepted, I've dictated, and I've got the record of the telephone conversation, so if they screw us,

in which I dictated, I said, I said, I'm reading to you a memorandum that I'm putting into the president's file, which I will have to account for your information, in which I said, Dr. Kissinger proposed to Ambassador Dobrynin that we add a sentence indicating that the two, that the agreement and the understanding would be achieved simultaneously.

Ambassador Dobrynin replied that on instructions of his government,

could state that such a sentence was unnecessary because it was fully covered and implicit in the whole text of the paragraph and was also covered in the public statement.

The public statement is what I think is most important.

They're agreeing to the public statement.

I consider that part of the agreement.

Of course.

Yes.

Well, it's a Soviet government statement.

It's a Soviet government statement.

I've now said it, but that's still agreeable to you.

It's a Soviet government statement.

The fact that that is a Soviet government statement answers my question, because that's an interpretation of the other.

Oh, yeah.

And they all, if they go and indicate that, we'll just, we'll screw them.

Now, we have to be, we have to do this precisely.

Exactly.

He wants, he, I get, I said, we'll do it at noon on Thursday, or would you prefer 11?

Well, he'd slightly prefer noon because they have their big evening news at 7 and they want to have it the lead item on their radio.

Good.

Noon is fine.

Just let it have its own time because we don't give a damn.

Just so it's before 4 o'clock.

Noon here, 7 o'clock Moscow.

And it will be on the radio at 7 o'clock sharp in Moscow.

Thank you so much for having me.

If I could just figure out a way to get the, just kind of get figured out a way to handle the Rogers problem.

I mean, the main point being is to, to, to point to, so that he knows that we've been up to this for a hell of a long time.

But that's the thing, Mr. President, that is essential to get across.

No, no.

Well, I can handle Smith because I'll just tell him.

You'll convince him to.

Well, I'll just show him the record.

Yeah.

Well, we can put it on the basis that a lot of it was hypothetical.

See, Rajas on this one has no great pride because he couldn't handle...

I mean, he's never pretended to know their subject.

If this were the Middle East, he'd be right up a wall.

Well, of course, it doesn't involve the CDC leader.

It involves the Defense Department.

That's right.

We had to negotiate because we had negotiated the defense.

Well, one position you can take with Rogers is that you felt you could never do this and carry it.

If you had to do it through a big interdepartmental negotiation, you didn't want to surface it until you knew

that the Russians would fight, and he was gone for the three crucial weeks.

Sure.

I have a sort of unanswered question, but I just say that I think what I would do, though, I think we could place a call to him on Monday and say, look, we've got a break in assault.

I think it would be easier on him and on you, perhaps, if you do it alone.

Why would I plan to?

Unless, I'd be glad to be there, but at least not with the others.

No, I don't know.

And I'll say we got the break in this thing, and it came as a result of, uh, I, I, to proceed, and that's what I'm going to say.

I sent a message to Kosygin.

After Brady came back, uh, he came in on Monday after his, said he had to reply, and we negotiated it.

You could do as you say.

You sent a message to Kosygin a few months back.

But, Lord, which you just, thinking out loud, said that might be a way.

Then the prelim came in just before he went for the party congress and asked whether he could put it to them as a formal proposition.

And we said yes.

Then he came back from it with a specific proposal.

We worked it out while you were in Europe.

Exactly.

We didn't want to do it on the cable.

Bill probably isn't going to be, he isn't going to be able to understand the enormous importance of the simultaneous thing, how this partnership is set up.

That's my point.

I don't, he doesn't know the details of any of these things.

But on the other hand, the smithel over there is... Oh, John Robertsville and Mary Marta, and most of the senators, they may not understand the difference, but they know we've made a big step forward.

See, all the people who were saying there's no progress, whatever Fulbright's saying, he has given up reading the newspapers on Solve because they depress him so much.

They'll have to say... See, I don't want this to appear that the... Was the Soviet author... Has that been depressed?

No.

That's why we have to go next week.

That's good.

And we can prove, you see, what astonished Smith so much is that Semyonov came to him with a fully worked out proposal on something that we hadn't even asked for.

I do see Bob Murphy.

I can't really say.

I talked to him this afternoon.

After our talk this morning, Mr. President, I took the liberty of calling him and telling him you had read his report and how impressed you had been

and that you wanted to see him, and we'll have to set something up next week because he's coming down.

So I've taken care of him.

You know, Lodge was really him.

He's true.

And Lois, that is such a cheap guy.

Here is the foremost accurate.

It is a sad Lodge.

They're all, well...

Basically, except for the military involved in our system.

But, you know, he's been living up there in New York playing golf and chocolate in his people.

He disintegrated, huh?

I mean, I had a girl on that table.

And except for the old man, Ash, his stuff is kind of stuck in the boot.

Bill handled himself well.

Bill is one thing about him, he knows a lot about not getting the game away or the conference, you know.

Well, he came around to that today.

Yeah, well, you can't.

Jesus Christ, you can't.

Now, the funny thing about Bill is that his first instinct is soft.

But once he really is in a fight, he's tough.

He's not a soft guy.

Yesterday, he was all right, but he was...

But once you had your instinct of throwing him into the fight, once he was in there, he...

I'm going to talk tonight to the Board of Directors of the Brookings Institution.

Oh, Christ.

You know what they are?

It's the Democratic National Committee.

Probably.

Oh, it is, yes.

But I thought it would be useful for an outsider sort of thing.

I'll talk to them.

What are you talking about?

NATO?

I'm talking about NATO.

I'm talking about Vietnam.

I can... Just as well to be, as is affirmative as hell.

If we get 50% of the things we've now got for him, and if we get Berlin and salt this summer, or this year, we can then go back and remind them of the linkage problem.

Oh, look, this salt looks like we've never got salt.

Well, then we do.

It will read that way on speed.

And the beauty is that we've got five weeks where no one can contradict it.

because they will now recess and not reassemble until July 1st.

And then if we've got the summit coming up, we've got to get the Chinese thing working.

If that son of a bitch Abrams hadn't screwed us on flowers, we'd have everything this year.

As it is, these

These Vietnamese are going through some tribulation right now because if they wanted to kick me in the teeth...

The war would be over.

If the war would be over, we'd have won.

If Abrams had done what he was supposed to, we would be... We would.

Oh, the war would be over.

If we had...

But even as it is, see, if they simply want to turn down a meeting, Mr. President, for that...

That they could do, that they've done several times to me before.

So the fact that they don't reply at all and that little one is running around Moscow and speaking shows that there's some kind of indecision.

Now what they'll wind up with, we don't know.

I told you that Radio Peking, in describing the demonstrations here, has deliberately stayed away from attacking you.

Well, I didn't think about the demonstrations or whatever they were.

You remember with Johnson, during all the period he was in, they burned his apogee and raised hell and so forth.

In my case, while in Iraq, it isn't nearly as personal.

Now, if you notice, part of it is they know damn well that I...

But it's not nearly as personal.

Johnson killed a poor son.

But he also showed that he was vulnerable.

Your great strength is that you make the impression that you're not, and it is true that you're not being shaken by these demonstrators.

By God's image, that's right.

He acted as if he were effected by them, that he was afraid of them.

They're going anonymously to places and so forth.

And that is his self-pitying public statements.

Yeah, they're powerful.

a terrible burden this office is.

You know, that is something that I never, you know, understand.

What the hell?

Burden.

It's a burden.

Well, it is a burden in the sense... You don't say it, though.

In the sense... No guy, no man who sits in a high position ever says, geez, I got a tough job.

You don't do that.

Look at all the poor people, you know, who have dreary lives.

They got the tough jobs.

But you have the tremendous advantage over him.

that in foreign policy, I mean, also domestic policy, but especially in foreign policy, you know exactly what you're doing.

He was really totally confused between his instincts, which were alive, and his advisors, and his ignorance.

He really had no antennas at all.

I dealt with him.

When I brief him now, I haven't done it in a long time,

With you, first of all, he's interested.

He doesn't really give a damn about foreign policy.

He doesn't think along.

He absorbs the information, but it isn't.

What interests him is politics.

When you talk about the Senate and how to get votes, that he loves.

That he's creative on foreign policy.

He's doing his job by listening to you.

So he'd never had any ideas of his own.

He'd never had a framework within which he could absorb it.

When I first started working with you, for you, what impressed me so much, and I, at the Daily News, they quoted Emmett Hughes as my having made a derogatory comment about you before 68, which incidentally I hadn't made that way, but as you know, I had supported Rockefeller.

And then they asked me to give my assessment now that I've worked with you.

So I spoke about half an hour about you.

And the thing that I told them, that's the thing that after I started working for you that impressed me so much, now I take it for granted, was no matter what the country was that I mentioned, you had been there, you knew the people.

All I had to do was say one sentence and you knew what it meant.

One didn't have to explain the basic situation.

Kennedy, that wasn't true, incidentally.

Kennedy didn't know any of the world leaders when he came in.

And an isolationist.

He's an isolationist.

He's a Montana isolationist.

I know this.

And these NAM senators are going along because they want to do the popular thing.

Let's not kid ourselves.

But I was very aged.

I really, I was right on that word.

Vance said Muskie and Humphrey to vote before him.

And I was told they wouldn't do it.

Either way, you're in good shape.

I don't know.

But if it passes, the house turns it down.

I think it's the way the votes have been going.

The fact that it's even now where last night it was 20 votes against it.

Mr. President, I consider this a godsend.

You were gonna have to make a tough fight on something.

It's a good thing they attacked the sacred cow of the... And this way, you have a chance to lead them.

We get a statement signed by all of them.

And, uh... All right.

See you.

So, here we go.

or whatever they got, I ain't here to say.

But we'll set that to a good use, and whatever you want.

Nixon, Kissinger & Butterfield on Mansfield Resolution

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on May 13, 1971

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