Nixon, Haldeman & Bull on 1972 Campaign and Presidential Appointments

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And I said, well, somebody at NIH said, well, marijuana isn't as bad as it's going to be.

So that's all over the country now.

You know, I think we've got to get something done better on circulating my press conference statements.

I remember I was passed about marijuana in California.

I don't get it.

It's a straight carrot.

It wasn't played at all.

Everybody needs their carrot.

You probably knew it.

But there was one that still leaves.

Now that question comes.

Good.

Those guys in New York, your view isn't going to change.

Some of those people, I don't think they changed it the other way.

I don't want to change their views.

I just want to make sure that they're, I just feel as a public safety, they have an obligation not to get out.

Insurance, if they're people we put in the damn jobs, I don't know how to do it.

Peterson, put two names down here.

They're all good names.

Some of these are older than we've looked at, but they are.

It's like with Jack Morton, he's an older fellow.

He's a hell of a fellow.

He's a great friend of mine.

Thank you.

He's from Calgary.

He's 69.

I know he's too old.

But all I can say is how old they were, 69.

He really is.

But he's, it's still, it is too old.

He's some tool.

We can't establish a better incentive than that when we're trying to keep others young.

So this is a good studio to be involved in.

But see, I haven't thought of it.

As far as sound, I think it's too old.

We've got it involved in a very short service.

It's sort of missing the point.

I didn't realize it until I got it.

made it quite a bit more difficult.

Whereas, the moment you go down the red line, you're very necessary.

Whether it's out on the main grid, or get runnin', and eventually get sick, uh, or hangin' up there, you don't go down the other red line, but you actually kill yourself.

Rather, it's a very, very important intervention.

Thank you all, and there you are.

They do so not for the purpose of getting drunk.

They drink for the purpose of being social.

People who take drugs drink for the purpose of getting high.

That's a very interesting point.

Yeah, of course, there's degrees of high on marijuana.

He described that, too.

He said there are different types of marijuana, too.

It's not going to Wisconsin.

It's not going to Los Angeles.

Rossman, the president of the Rossman, and so forth, and so on.

But he made it so consistent that you really want to look at it.

There are plenty of nations that have been destroyed by drugs.

No nation has ever been destroyed by alcohol.

The Japs drank, the British drank, the Russians drank, all the strong cultures drank, and all the weak ones used up.

And it's quite obvious why some of the Chinese who may be strong would do the same.

The Japanese are, they're quite robust.

They're Frank Andrews.

How do they do it?

The Japanese are great.

You go further south in the Indonesians.

The Malaysians and the Afghans have some sort of atomic deal.

He's still partying his battle now.

He goes four times a week.

Makes a speech in some ways.

It's good.

It's a wow.

We got that session set up and it worked out, so we're going to have a race, basically, off the record.

Or maybe just in a human way, it would be better.

That's what he did.

I love the fact that the original list we approved did not include time.

It did include ports, because it is a business.

I understand that one guy

And it had, I'm sure it included the New York Times.

Yeah, it did.

Our original list, when I went to Hollywood, it had the Business Editor, the New York Times, and it had the business guy, the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Forbes, the New York, all of these sales people over there.

But it, and there's no reason for me to include the Times.

Because there are business sections that you can go to without anything.

About the time set sometimes.

We're good.

We had a good time.

Do you want to try and catch mention of the pump starter and any of these others now that just didn't put off today?

No, we're not sure if we want to keep hold of them or not.

I'll call them right next time.

He just said if you mess with his, he's going to snap open it.

I know he doesn't, but it's going to be something else.

You got me on it.

See, he had to put a set over at 2.30.

He couldn't just call at 3 o'clock.

He had to put a contract.

So that's what we're doing.

I've heard, as far as Frank's going, that he's

See?

Hanging tight on it.

Well, and it was worthwhile.

We fought for it on this side, and they know it.

We had words of initiative.

They didn't come.

And we didn't go then and say, Carter, get it done.

He came and said he was going to do it.

Yeah.

He's probably going to make a revolution.

The Senators are a shell-shock, because they have a lot of Democrats in the White House.

The Southern Democrats don't have strong leadership, and part of the rest of them are very good.

They've done a good job.

We can tell the public that it's a hell of a hard fight for these guys, who basically are not very strong.

And anyway, when you get that whole household of presidential candidates bouncing around playing their own games,

I'm a leader that nobody can trust.

Nobody has to be trusted.

I'm not sure how to be trusted as a leader.

Who he is, which means somebody who respects him.

That's the only element a leader's got.

I've met a trust person that I respect a little bit.

It's a great deal.

He's a pretty wild old guy.

Scott is a good leader.

You never count Scott as a leader.

Any leader is a leader.

It has done well sometimes, but it is what it can.

You better accept the quadrat in front of you.

I also got a letter.

How much is the title?

Well, he told her she couldn't take the title of the National Committee, which is what we have.

Well, she's now worked on a title.

She's been appointed special assistant to the chairman of the

Chamber of Commerce for Pacific and Southeast Asia Conference or something in June 8th to 11th and she's leaving for the Far East and Southeast Asia to attend the meetings of this summer.

She told Mitchell that she was waiting to hear from me on personal letters

from you to, uh, President Park, President, er, to General, General Jack, and the Prime Minister, and the Air Marshal in Thailand.

And, uh, that's something that hadn't come up before, so I had not done anything about it.

And she, in her letter to me, she just says, I shall look forward to hearing from you before my departure from the Orient, if possible.

And she doesn't say why she looks forward to hearing from me.

Uh,

I just, uh... Henry... Where's Henry?

Henry killed...

I wasn't in a meeting with him.

Who was he?

I don't think we can know.

I don't know.

I don't know who it was.

I don't think he was in a meeting with him.

But someone was here.

Well, what Henry suggested is that I just tell her that, uh...

We don't do personal notes to these leaders because of the complications involved with it, but we will be in touch with our ambassadors to make sure that she's comfortable receiving all that.

Let Henry finance it through the ambassadors.

so that she feels she is getting some kind of entree now.

Mitchell also says he thinks we ought to do whatever we can because she'll be a great value to us in the Vietnamese elections.

And we want her involved in that again.

Or are you using her right now?

I don't know.

I'm sorry.

Henry doesn't do that.

Henry thinks she'd be a disaster if she doesn't actually, you know, just doesn't want to get her involved in it.

Well... She knows all these people.

But we can't send letters around in my name, and anybody, unless they go and raise the police.

with her and her ambassador to say we can't do anything like it with my brother or anybody else you know.

What we could do is that, I think what she really wants rather than get letters to our ambassadors, is she's like, that's, lacking a letter to that or a message to that, rather than a message to our ambassador, which she, our ambassador, she's everybody, is, is about to be the ambassador for any other country that she's coming to.

Telling me we'd have to finish the thing, not the way it ended.

Because that's not the right way to do it.

In other words, if we just do the spells of Chinese and Basquiat, or Korean and Basquiat, she wants to be there to push you and encourage you to be excited about the occasion, to meet the citizens, to meet the people, to meet the people, to meet the people, I'd be interested in many answers.

John Irwin had mentioned that he thought that there were going to be a considerable amount of racial and other disturbances this summer.

I thought probably it would be interesting to know if any of the other might be helpful to those.

I'm curious.

Well, if it's Adam Robertson, again, I could go either way.

Uh, could I suggest that, do you remember the bulletin that I shared with you today?

It's, whatever it was.

I think that could go, in some way, to the mayors, police chiefs, and government.

I think it's, I think it's just a damn significant thing, to let them know what

Ask John about that.

John may not like the idea.

Ernst really is just sort of...

He's just an example of the Washington people.

And we also have, through the L.E.A.A., we're training a lot of those people out there.

I think what John was really thinking was that if they had a...

Does he face that just on the little rumbles that he had up there now?

There isn't much intelligence on anything.

He's looking at the future.

They don't know how that happened, but they're going to find out soon.

Yeah, but that's a common shot of blackness with a black spirit.

I bet that happens every 10 minutes.

The interesting thing is that it's so un-inflammatory now.

In fact, a couple years ago, when we shot a block, it turned the whole city over to a new burn.

Now that you have a block, everybody can run around and shout a burn.

Yeah, well, another difference is sending someone to the police.

Exactly.

It's a very... That's what I'm saying.

He started migrating downtown.

I'm not sure.

I think he is.

I don't know.

He was moderating the lunch at the State Department.

That ought to be over now.

He may be back where he may be up in a minute.

See if he's here, because I'm going to have to have him in there.

Yeah, I'm going to have to wrap him in there.

See if he's here.

Okay, what else?

See if he's here.

If so, I'm going to have to come in with him.

I'm going to have to come in with him.

And unfortunately, I think, trying to figure out this next year, it looks like the convention can't be after Labor Day because of state requirements for, I guess, Ohio, okay?

So, because the first state is Ohio, and it's on the 29th of what August?

Oh, no.

Okay.

But we're going to have to go...

And then the week before that is the Olympics.

So we're going to have to go to the middle of August.

Apparently.

There's still a horse around.

All right.

It's okay.

The horse is in the side of the scouts.

The breaker is in the center.

He's up there working.

See if...

That's all right.

So go ahead and...

So it would have been good to kind of go a little higher and just center it a little bit on the bottom.

You can go for a waiver in one of two states, but you can't get it on the other.

Talked to him about key men's stuff.

He firmly believes Inspector cannot handle Pennsylvania.

He says he will be very valuable and will use him as a key guy.

He doesn't have a scope to handle the state.

He considers strength a possibility but doesn't think he's strong enough to handle it.

Okay, Ohio, he had a long talk with TAP this morning, and he put some damp water on the list, as you'd expect.

He says it'd be very helpful with the money people.

But, uh, not only for you, but for a lot of other areas.

And what they're thinking about doing now is that, well, we're still looking for how to go at it, but they are going to look to get a group of local, of state legislators mobilized as a sort of a crew for us, and also as an anti-Gilligan operation, because Gilligan's getting a free ride, and nobody's really taking them on.

They're going to mobilize them after that one.

He's still looking for leadership.

In Illinois, his feeling is rather than set up a political thing first, that what we should do is go for a very high-level citizens' group.

He's been working with Rumsfeld on this.

Get that set, and then put our political organization in under it.

so that we don't have to deal with Ogilvy and the machine and all this stuff, but can rather work our political thing as ostensibly a part of the citizens' organization.

That's the direction he's looking at.

I re-raised the Volpe thing with him again fairly strongly, and he said, he said, I know what you mean and all that, but I just can't say strongly enough that I really can't see it.

All my instincts say it would be a disaster moving on.

But in political terms, he's worth a lot to us.

He's our Catholic.

And Sidney had dinner with Bopey.

He's also our Catholic.

He had dinner with Bopey the other night at the Harkins.

And Bopey was saying if he only knew what the President wanted, he'd be doing it.

I said, John, he spends an hour a day on the telephone with John Ehrlichman, going over and over what the president wants.

He knows precisely what the president wants.

What he really needs is if he can only have two hours a day to have lunch with the president every day, then every day will work out fine.

John said that.

Well, he said more to anybody else.

You know, really.

And for less reason.

More demanding to get him in and react with him.

Well, he does know what Preston wants.

He knows precisely and clearly what he wants.

But he's being pigmented.

He's trapped us in his rail pack steel.

Yes, sir.

I guess you can't blame him for the SST.

Oh, well.

you could have sensed that you had it.

Look, it's a whole lot different having a cabin officer who really had a stroke dealing with the problem.

A recruiter dealing with the problem, let's face it.

A recruiter did a hell of a job.

A recruiter is a God, not just a man, a God.

You know what I mean?

It's like, let me put it this way, if Conway, Secretary of Transportation, we had a speaker, and he was great, absolutely, and that said, Moby is a great, dramatic, emotional speaker,

He rants and moans and rhymes and rants, but he is what he believes.

They believe him, but they don't take him seriously.

I think that's really it.

Nobody really takes Hogan very seriously, John.

I think that's right.

I don't think anybody can, but John very much, very much likes the idea of unsold at OBV.

He does.

He was...

That's all would be a very good stroke.

That's all.

And he also agreed that if it isn't bad, and he said he's been working with Rumsfeld a lot on the Ohio thing.

And Rumsfeld knows he's got to do something for it.

From 018, I think Rumsfeld could run that.

Mothering it from there.

Yeah, I think he could do a lot of travel and get a good deputy to run it, which Rumsfeld's good at.

He knows how to do that.

And he said, I want you to talk to Ritzville and get the job done.

Sure.

Let's get it.

He's got a good job.

Keeps his cabin status.

Not on the title of counselor.

No.

He's OEP.

don't say anything about the cabinet, and just say, just come these through, to come to cabinet meetings, you know what I mean?

That's, they will be invited to all cabinet meetings.

Well, a big, big, big error is that he has to see.

Yeah, which is one thing.

He gets in a stroke in that, he sits and knows, and you want a guy running the OEP who can run, and who is, who will run politically, and who will get the political mileage out of it that's potentially there.

The way the old OEP guys used to do it.

and I'll see you at the top of the piece.

Nixon, Haldeman & Bull on 1972 Campaign and Presidential Appointments

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on May 18, 1971

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