On May 18, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, Henry A. Kissinger, Stephen B. Bull, and H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman met in the Oval Office of the White House from 3:06 pm to 3:40 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 500-025 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.
We must know by tomorrow at this time because they wouldn't be so discourteous as when we want to announce it on Thursday, not tell us.
everything they have going on.
They're enormously drastic decisions if they decide to carry them out at all costs.
I just cannot believe it.
And they're breaking off this channel and they're doing it in a way.
And they could, well, but they're not only breaking off the channel, they're undermining your trust in them to a point.
What's the sense of negotiating with them if they let it get to a point where you have an agreed text and then they kick over the traces?
I think it would be better than an isolation.
Dobrynin's probably fighting the Zales himself.
Oh, Dobrynin, huh?
It can't.
There are thousands of speculations.
I asked my Soviet expert whom I had to use, who's a hardliner.
He said in the Johnson period they once waited until an hour before the joint announcement was due, before they finally released it.
It's just a miserable system.
And when it comes to the crunch, I don't think it's the word.
I think if I had to guess if there's any reason other than that they're busy with Trudeau.
Trudeau over there?
Yeah, he just arrived yesterday.
Well, you sent a message last Friday.
Yeah, but Saturday and Sunday, Brezhnev was in Tiflis.
Oh, okay.
And yesterday Trudeau arrived.
Well, I don't know what the reason is except...
Semyonov was called back there.
And they may have the same trouble with Semyonov that we are having with Smith.
And that could be one thing.
Semyonov might have spotted that that public announcement is very favorable to us.
And it may be just screwed up.
And I may just want to score a little poem.
But they know that the truck deal, the Gleason deal, the Sherlin deal, and China is all going to hang.
It's all in the wings.
So, um, I...
I was looking at Vietnam.
I didn't realize that the Cambodian period, the casualties did get over 200,000.
Yeah.
They were over 200,000 last year.
They were rather than we realized.
Yeah.
It certainly went down fast.
And as I said, this week, the 24, we're really using the low casualties to pick up some other things.
I was trying to get McGregor.
He's on the hill working.
And what we really have here is a memorandum, all various true proposals for an update.
And Larry went over
I think we've got to get it sometime.
Oh, we've got to get it before...
The president last week said all they needed was 72 hours to do it.
That was before the word changed, but I just can't believe that the word changed.
They can just say no, that they, uh... Well, the only thing about the word change is knowing how suspicious they are.
The spiritual bastards they are, they might have thought they were maybe under something.
Over here.
On the other hand, Mr. President, if we hadn't made the effort and if then, uh, Rogers and Smith had come around saying if they had done it, they would certainly not have settled for that word.
This way, we...
So we have that word.
Yeah, they'd have settled for ABM alone.
Okay.
We all know that.
That person, Warren McKinnon, he would never build ABM.
Once getting it, he'd gift it up.
And Ziegler and Scali see that immediately, but Ziegler also says to Scali, hell, all the lips are saying, APM only.
I said, that's right.
That's right.
Now, that will sink in, all right.
It just cannot be that they will not let by tomorrow to do it for me.
And if we hear that we just put everything on full blast, I wouldn't screw around with it.
I'd go up there and say, oh, yeah, and I'd just have to get Roger's hand and tell him I just got the word.
At least if someone prepared for it, because, you know, they'll want to see it and put it over.
So they'd probably get something.
Not that they need to.
No, no.
It has the additional advantage that there's less danger of leakage than if it lay at nose simultaneously.
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
Oh, yes.
Wait.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Do you think that being the son of a house, that the soul, not a house, but a son of some goddamn people, slaughtering over there and blubbering over there, every stinking damn amendment, it's just unbelievable.
And Hubert Humphrey's over at me, and so forth.
That's totally irresponsible.
They know that.
Totally irresponsible.
They know goddamn well if we can do that, we'd be offering, right?
It's a Senate without statesmen.
It's a Senate without statesmen at this moment.
Yeah.
I guess everybody...
This chair says it reaches about the center, John.
About the center.
When people like Russell were in there.
You had a core of patriotism.
I'm just going to go over the list.
You have a view of it, right?
I can't believe it.
It's because we don't work on it.
Take it or not, it's important.
315.
315?
Yeah.
Yeah.
See, I have amazing work with people who have ambassadors.
So see if they can come now.
See if the buildings, if they are, let me know.
No, it's the center.
And it's all...
I talked to him.
I listened to him.
I held our goddamn hands.
I've seen him over and over again.
And then when you meet them, they're not there.
I mean, that's this guy's person.
You've seen him, you've had him in here.
I went out there and did his silly goddamn thing.
You did his little thing.
I went up on the hill to meet with his crew.
Yeah.
Now he's coming with his own compromise.
He's a little better than Matthias, but he never unequivocally supports us.
He never gets up there and says, the President is right, we shouldn't do this, and I'm with him, and I'm unconditionally against any of these amendments.
That he's never done.
He's always cut at his best.
It just gets solved.
That's one good one.
We're hoping something comes out of our Croatian journeys.
Mr. President, this year, the chances are better than even that we'll get this sort of assault thing.
This first scenario, this assault thing, the Berlin Agreement, a Middle East thing, maybe a Chinese announcement, maybe a summit.
We get four of them.
And I don't even dare to speak of a Vietnam situation.
But supposing we got all these six,
This would be the greatest year in American history.
We can't break it.
No, sir.
We can't.
I can't do it at 4 o'clock.
It's 5 o'clock on Thursday.
That metal is still, that's okay.
That's still okay.
We'll try to open up some time.
5 o'clock Thursday, 7 o'clock.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
And by God, I tell you, we have some system in our lives that we should have in our lives.
People that go abroad for their own purposes, not for balance, for peace, for the present.
If they really know that I'm not meeting these guys, of course they have to go abroad.
He's got to come back.
He's got to come back.
He's got to come back.
Incidentally, Martin sent me an anguish letter, and he sent a copy of it to Volpe, that Volpe shouldn't go there now because they had municipal elections on June 13th.
And Volpe wasn't very eager to go.
He called me and said he'd just as soon go later.
So I said fine.
I didn't have to turn him off, as it turned out.
You didn't much want to talk.
No, I didn't want to talk.
He always says that what really moves him is the confidence you have in him.
He can give him all these diplomatic assignments any time you see him.
You're sending him off somewhere, he says.
Yeah.
Well, we're right.
He is one of the real...
He is a little cautious.
He is a clown.
He was considered by the President quite serious.
He considered himself quite serious.
Uh-huh.
For President?
One of the, one of the, being in the last three to four that were considered the Vice President told me that, uh, actually, uh, Lindsay was one of them.
She was one of them.
And I was absolutely interested.
Lindsay would have been a total, costly disaster.
You would have had the opposition.
Dramney would have been a little better, but still too unreliable and too egomaniacal.
And he's a total egomaniac.
He might have had a divine call to do almost anything.
I think, you know, why was Nelson a student who supported Romney?
Was it just a stalking or a celebration?
No, but I remember it, you know, Nelson ran a very strange operation because I was very close to him on foreign policy.
He never, almost never discussed politics with me.
He's got this idea that specialists handle everything, so...
He'd never have a meeting of all of his advisors.
He'd deal with his foreign policy specialist, his political specialist.
But insofar as I could make out, in 67, he really was not eager to run then, or didn't think he would run.
And he wanted to meet with somebody, so he picked George Romney as the governor who got the most votes.
But he pretty soon, by default, he knew he wasn't going to make it.
And from then on, I thought he probably played his own game.
But he's obviously...
Anyway, when you stop to think about it, back in the year 1963, those were the people we considered.
You're talking about Agnew.
He was certainly at the shoulders above these others, don't you agree?
Oh, no question.
Agnew's got more character and brains than any one of those men.
And he's behaved with great dignity here.
He's got dignity.
He's taken from a hell of a lot of belts.
He's been the subject of a really vicious campaign.
Well, because he told the truth about the press.
He did nothing wrong.
You know, really.
But they will never come.
I don't have too many complaints about the press.
They're...
Their attacks, I think really, in my case, what we hear you have to complain about is the legitimacy of this.
And they give us no credit.
Or damn precious little credit.
That's where they are.
That's where they are.
But their attacks on me, at least they're not as vicious and personal as they were on Johnson.
In fact, I don't know.
Oh, I do.
You know what I mean.
I don't get it.
I don't get it too many times.
Well, de facto, Mr. President, that you have performed, whatever may happen, a spectacular foreign policy achievement to get 300,000 troops out of Vietnam in the face of constant riots in this country without the country there collapsing.
Restoring the faith in the alliance.
Getting the Russians never to challenge you.
Facing the term.
The ships out of Cuba.
The ships out of Cuba.
The Jordan.
The Jordan, thanks.
The Cambodia.
This is.
And Laos looks better every day.
Laos looks better every day.
And it may.
And after all, as I said, at this time next week, we'll probably look back on this day and
sort of thing.
It's one of the chores that you have to wait for a phone call from these sons of bitches on a four-hour day.
It's such a pain in the neck.
They're just a bunch of thugs.
Basically, they cannot do anything generously.
It's not in their nature.
Of course, another thing that could motivate them would be their desire to make the overture themselves.
If they can do that, and they can, of course, they could come back and say, let's do the whole thing in Vienna.
That's another thing they can do.
Which nobody has done at all.
and which would take some of the credit away from us here.
But we have enough of a record.
We just, at that point, we say, fine, we'll do it in Vienna, and we'll still get it out.
But if they're really going to be nasty, but then if they say we'll do it in Vienna, I'll say, fine, and we'll do Berlin at the Four Powers meeting.
And I'll tell Rush to stonewall it there.
Well, it can't be settled yet.
We can prevent a Berlin agreement if we want to.
At any rate, we can delay it for months.
That's why I don't believe they'll do it.
10,000, it's maybe, Semyonov, maybe, it may be that God damn for us.
They gave so much.
When you look at that record, they gave on every item in a figure.
Now, they're asking them to give another.
We're not making it conditional, but when the President asks for something, it's for them to give.
Those that work, as Gus, we said, work towards.
Work out.
Or elaborate.
I told them to use either workout or elaborate.
Well, I was thinking about damn bureaucracy.
But they can do it.
And probably we find out it was that they couldn't assemble five people.
This is something they had to clear.
If we had to clear it through our whole bureaucracy, we'd have to spend a day or two on it.
Look where we went if we didn't have ADM in the market.
That was the way we've been able to husband.
If we had not had ADM, if we had done all the things Jerry Smith wanted us to do, dribbling our concessions out a little at a time so that we had nothing left, if we had done the trade when they wanted to, I mean, we can now really let the trades
If we can't open up, we shouldn't go all the way yet, because... Oh, we've played a tough, tight game, and it's now paying off.
Price Harlow, with whom I had lunch today, said that he was very pleased to see you leave that foreign policy establishment he said overkill held.
He said the significance of that group was that for the first time, all these old guys who used to come in and regularly fight under Kennedy and Johnson and Eisenhower were now behind President Nixon.
They are.
They all supported Captain Eisenhower.
But he didn't agree with Rogers on that?
Absolutely not.
Because it's basically Rogers' state and the whole land bunch down there.
A very good surveillance question.
Oh, yes.
Oh, we certainly, Mr. President, gained from it.
Without it, we would have had nothing.
That's what got us the headlines for three days.
I think the Mansfield Amendment is defeated, but if now we had a bunch of men in the Senate, we'd be in good shape.
Our position, I guess, must be, right at the last
I think the decision must be not to let any of our guys off the hook.
Without getting out and fighting, we just can't do that.
We want to have another deal.
But we're not going to approve any of it.
Right?
Unless they come up with one during the day, then we can't go along with it.
But I don't see what it would be
Well, if they could say it, if they could put it in the first paragraph of the main story, I'm biased.
All of that is a sentence to the Senate.
But even the first paragraph saying we support you, etc., etc., it was a sentence.
We cannot accept when they say we request the president to end the negotiations.
That's not their constitutional right.
They can't make you do something.
If they said we favor continuation of the policy or acceleration, that's one thing.
And they cannot say that the purpose is to reduce forces unilaterally in that country.
How could anybody sit in that meeting when we were all sitting in there?
None of those guys are experts.
How in the name could they sit in there and go out and do anything when they're in the middle of the country and they're not voting on all the amendments?
Jesus Christ, did you think it was compelling?
None of them had another case.
All they were doing was wailing, we've got to be forced on them.
My plan was to do this
If we do this, if we get this announcement on this evening, I'm hoping that there is a silver message going on.
And if we get the announcement on my plans and the restaurant on the next evening, that would be a good one for that.
But if the announcement goes over to the next evening, I'm not going to have the restaurant on the same evening I have the announcement on the next evening.
The only thing I'm sorry about is the announcement.
No.
But it'd be well, sometimes, to make one.
Johnson, and others, to make it one.
Mine's not.
It's just a whack.
Well, time just isn't... No, it's going to be time for changes.
We can't make it any longer.
It's got to be time for changes.
I know there's something that's never been like this.
I didn't mean to make it look like this, but there's a whole deal of teasing and talking about it.
I don't know how he did it, but I don't know about this.
Well, I had a few other guys.
One of the guys didn't come to work, but I just was pure courtesy.
That's right.
I said it over and over again.
I forgot what I said.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
Mosbacher was here.
I was in for 15 minutes and I forget why I had to leave, but there was something.
At that time, I've said to everybody that the time I was here, which was at least half the time, no commitment.
When I was here, it was a purely sort of social...
He was talking about how much he approved of our speech, you know.
Oh, yes.
And so forth.
I mean, a lot greater.
He gets his orders.
He's a good soldier.
He's prepared.
He talks hard.
Oh, yeah.
It's a new experience for him.
He's been...
Emotionally, he's... Bryce really believes in the right to get in those bombs.
Oh, yeah.
And he volunteered it.
I didn't ask his attention.
What does he think of the leadership of the Senate?
Well, he says there's no one up there like Russell or like the people that were up, or Johnson, or even Dirks, people that could wield the others.
He says not only have they no leader, they all know they aren't any good.
So they all distrust each other, they distrust their own judgment.
And he says it's an inchoate party now.
And
he said there isn't much we can do in the situation because we can't crystallize the leader.
Of course, he says the Democrats.
The worst of it is that there are too many of their presidential candidates all maneuvering against each other and against us.
And there just isn't a statesman in the bunch.
He thought that what you did this morning, and I didn't ask him about the Mansfield Amendment.
We just had a general talk.
I haven't seen him since he left here.
And he is a fine man, very loyal to you.
I told him the Mattias Amendment, and
He said it to me.
On many grounds, we couldn't possibly accept it.
He's such an imploding guy.
The guys that I can't stand are these sanctimonious bastards.
That whole class is manic.
They're all part of us.
All these guys who speak high moral principles.
And he's got his constituency.
I don't expect any coming.
I expect to get kicked from T-Box.
The rest of these other bastards claim to be Republicans.
And the rest, they don't have to be slaughtering those people.
That's the difference.
They are just huge criminals.
And savages, in fact.
If only, for example, Travis... Travis is straight cold blood.
Travis called me last night about the messiahs.
I said I was against it.
I told you that.
He said, I expect this from you.
I said, that's not important what you expect from me.
The point is that I don't understand how you, Jake Chavez, can report it.
Now, if I had said this to Percy or Matthias, they would have fled all over me.
But he knew I was right.
He said, well, I'll come back and take another look at it.
At least he didn't give me the... these guys... Well, you've got to go on, and then they go under everything, because they know I've got so much principle, as if we didn't have any.
That's right, and they are trying to save you.
There's no communication.
Communication for them means you agree with them.
And as soon as there is a hot situation... Well, and it's really sad.
A man like Percy could be a potential, could at least be thought of as a presidential candidate.
Instead, he will always be a boy scout.
He's all over the lot.
Nobody trusts him.
Nobody districts him.
Yeah, I, uh, you've heard of Colson or anything?
Yeah, why don't you read it?
Colson's good to me.
I tell him that he's kind of a good shit.
Well, just read it.
Do you want to listen?
Let's play it again.
You need to do it.
Oh, God.
You can't be the power that you have to be, but...