On May 21, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, George P. Shultz, John D. Ehrlichman, Henry A. Kissinger, and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House from 2:59 pm to 3:39 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 503-015 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
I think it would be well with Julie.
That's that.
And I'll probably slip over for the dinner.
Through the redacted, uh, follow-up on this thing, let me give you the fourth part of the story.
I believe the first prisoner is very simple.
It should be the fact that this brother of mine can't
Sir, you can't say January 8th, just say January 8th.
That's a hell of a lot better, but I'm not so sure.
We avoided, they avoided saying it yesterday, kind of close it, but Scali makes the point.
I think he's right.
Saying January 8th is a hell of a lot better than saying early January.
I thought January 8th.
No, I think they just kind of fell into the, you know, we weren't giving any details, but that...
I'm going to talk about it any second.
The meaning of this is that it's, uh, on both sides.
Well, I've got damn folks on the special hold when they do that.
Third, that the most open issue of the nation, whatever, will be aborted.
And will not be bothering you.
I explored the business of Peterson going to Munich that you suggested looking into.
And John Connolly was a little worried about it on the grounds that we have a very big delegation apparently going there already.
It's a banker's invitational meeting, and apparently there are some three members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve settled from the Treasury.
I think it's good that he's there.
Also, the banking group is so incestuous.
It's good to have somebody whose background is different and deal with it a little bit more.
I testified this morning on Rubikoff's international trade hearings.
Only Fannin and Rybakov were there.
They had all kinds of questions from other people.
And I was thankful that we have the posture of, by gosh, we consider international economic matters to be of first-class importance, and we consider the U.S. interest in something we're going to go out and fight for and trade for and bargain for.
And as far as we're concerned, the gloves are off.
We intend to represent our people.
And if you didn't have that posture around the Senate these days, you'd just be out of the place.
At the same time, it's very easy to make it completely compatible with a reasonable expanding world trade posture.
So I found it a very comfortable position to sort of talk around.
Went well from then to then, right?
Yeah, well, they're all, they all have no confidence in the kind of people who were in the seat for many years.
They just have no confidence in the State Department.
The State Department is just blamed on every other sentence.
Mm-hmm.
Well, they're right.
They're right.
The State Department, the South Islanders, the South Islanders, they're trying to have a negotiation.
We've got to get back to the end of the country.
and where they feel about it.
Their criticism, Rivikov's criticism, which he suggested reflected others too, of the council, which he thought was a good idea.
His criticism is, well, there's too much State Department in it.
And you have this special operations group that's chaired by the State Department and so on.
And they're just going to overwhelm people.
That's, well, first of all, the President.
Secondly,
If you don't know Peterson, if you think he's going to get pushed around, he isn't.
But it's interesting how they have on them.
I think one of the ways to get that around, too, is to start having Peterson doing some of these congressional, I don't know, his, I don't believe his second term yet, probably, because he's not from the wrong group.
I think he is.
He's a hero.
He's unmodified.
He has shown it to some Republican congressional people, I think.
Staffing.
And I know he's ripped to you about it.
And your messenger that he's very anxious to have
work with him.
I've talked with him in detail about it.
He's very attractive to me.
He's most interested in, in all the world, is intelligence.
He's just, he knows a great deal about it and he wants to see it reformed and he's very encouraged and hoping that's going to come about.
So very interested in defense and science.
And as a result of that, he's
and to the possibility of being in the great fields of ABC as kind of a sleeking agency.
Sure it is.
But it has a great capacity for mountain research and probably more receptivity to actually get the appropriations than the Defense Department does.
Maybe that's kind of a guy we need in that rat's ass column there.
Well, what he'd like to do is be chairman of the ABC, I think.
And that's possible, too.
He's a competitor in his mind to something.
He'd like to.
You wanted to see Schlesinger in this slot with Pete.
I think Pete is so capable and is very uncomfortable that he could take a man of lesser independent capability than Schlesinger and do very well.
I mean, I think Pete could find a man, it seems to me, that could fit his needs.
He just needs to guide him.
after all these projects and so forth and follow through and so forth.
The thing is that in AEC, I would just put another humdrum, you know, go along, well, what's our budget this year?
Are we going to keep this or keep that?
That really is a sleeping dog.
It really is.
And it's a total, it seems to me, a total captive of Congress.
Let me argue with you a little bit on Pete's needs.
All right.
He has set up for himself, and talking with you, what looks to me like a very important, very exciting, and also very difficult with AEC.
AEC would, and Jim, of course, is conscious of that.
of that, the defense aspect of ADC, which he's very much interested in.
He's conscious of the fact that ADC is on the usage, so that he would still maintain at least some involvement in intelligence, but it wouldn't be the reorganization that he's interested in.
But anyway, he has
this task now beginning to sort of form, and I think it really isn't quite the way we anticipated in the council.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
It's better.
having a small group, looking at every item.
He thinks more staff, so that's what he wants.
He should have, he's going to need about three more.
It's ridiculous to have a jackass department like HUD and transportation that has six assistant secretaries and an economy over there.
I mean, it's set for three guys.
He can't pay more than $30,000 or something like that.
And what is the pay?
Well, I think that's right.
So give him what he needs.
He's just got to have them.
Because I want to build, I really would like to see him build a staff so that he can really be the amount of man in the administration.
He can't do it now because he knows.
Well, just to take the test and compare, the field of national security, that has built up over the years.
a big intellectual base to work from.
And there are, you take up a topic and you don't find the answers in this amount of work, but you find a great deal of analysis.
You find patterns of thought you can draw on that you can sort of peel away.
And you've got something to go forward with.
If you take a field like international economics and international monetary problems, if you thought about this council in those terms, well, those are established disciplines, and while there's lots of room for difference of opinion, people know how to think about those subjects at least.
And when you start to put this mosaic together that Pete has been struggling with, of the balancing of security, of foreign policy,
of foreign economic, of the domestic development, and so on.
It's a very hard thing to think about.
And Pete is now in a position, I think, where he's identified these problems, and he's very excited about them.
And all right, now, let's go, but where exactly are we going?
And what I'm getting to is, I think Pete needs really superb people to... Can I talk about your end of the... Well, what I... We can offer any others afterwards.
They might go into this paper and say, look, here's our current need at the present time, or any of those others.
If we get the reorganization, the ADC will change.
And...
This is one concern I would have about looking too strong ahead of the ABC.
But he might want to keep it.
Right.
I think Schlesinger could be talked into it.
And I've been trying to help Pete in this regard.
Putting it in terms of a broad assignment, he really is not that interested in just international trade problems unless he finds a motor bell.
when he's, you know, worried about the sugar and the this and the that, he's willing to do that, but doesn't consider that exciting.
This other is, and the intelligence is, what he is really, I think, sort of gunning for is to get some kind of designation from you as having a special presidential endorsement in the intelligence area.
for a short while to try to help bring about this reorganization if we wind up going ahead with it.
And I suppose in early June we'll have a pretty good idea exactly how we want to do that.
It's sitting there now, almost ready to be plucked, but it's going to be a lot of hard work to do it and get the thing changed around and so on.
And I know Henry has his views.
But that combination,
And I think some direct arm-twisting with you, from you, would probably put it over as far as Schlesinger's concerned.
Well, I think that that's a problem, and that's something Pete would have to accommodate to for a period of time.
And my guess is that on the intelligence, the
There would have to be a burst of effort to get something accomplished, and then after a while, I think I would probably have to put a great proportion of my time into it, as he would put some, and we have some other people.
All right.
Why don't you work on a scheme where Mikey, I mean, where Mikey goes to school.
I think that's fine.
That's fine.
I think you're right, Peter.
You're probably listening.
Well, he's a strong mind, and he has a lot of... We'll see those foundations and things like that.
And another thing about it is, Pete wants...
I've decided that I desperately want to get this guy, and I think it would probably just help Pete a lot if we could help him do that.
Why don't we just do the other job, too?
The intelligence job.
I think it's another perfect thing, doing too many important things, but yet he knows the intelligence field very well.
It isn't as though he has a lot of learning to do there.
It's a matter of following through on what is universally regarded, as far as I can see, as a very good
piece of analysis.
I don't know whether you've read the longer document on intelligence.
No, I haven't.
It's a very good piece of work.
I understand.
It is.
As good as any I've seen around.
And he would like to follow through on it.
I would.
For the budget, as much as well as other things.
We're losing our friend, Jerry Rossell, over at Labor.
He's going to go back to Standard Oil.
He's written you a very vicious letter of resignation.
He has to go back.
There he is.
He's been very good.
He's a very good man.
He'll be coming to you shortly.
Just so that there's no question about my views on it, we're probably going to have to have a
My views are so strong on that.
I think it's so wrong to move in that direction.
Well, it's very interesting to see how the HUD had everybody do an exercise and draft a statement.
And the HUD statement is quite a hard line.
Very interesting.
The federal government will not force housing on communities that don't want it.
They've picked up the line.
We had a meeting with Ronan Mitchell this morning.
And we'll meet again next Thursday.
And I would guess that over that following weekend, we'll finish the draft.
But I think it'll be satisfactory.
We've decided to split off the Blackjack, Missouri case as a separate issue to be treated separately on John Mitchell's recommendation to you, whatever that is.
And not in this statement of ours, but as a separate issue.
Well, it's going to be treated separately.
I think he's a mixed lines up right now as to what he should do.
The line that you suggested is that there are other two cases, and I'll leave it back to the lower court for a timeline.
Well, interestingly enough, the Republican county executive down there in that county has given us some inputs on it, apparently.
And John wants to take a look at the political side of the local play.
He's against the incorporation of the town in Blackjack.
He would like to see the federal government get in.
He thinks there's a lot of- Who is this?
This is the Republican county executive.
The guy ran for governor?
No.
No, this is a four-term, four-term Republican county executive.
So- They are all nuts now.
Well, John, I want to take a look at it.
He'll be talking to you.
That's no old Senator Rice.
He's talking about that part.
Just get the hell beat out of him, not the middle of the other department.
Apart from the votes, it isn't the right thing, Mike.
some distance away from Salton Hour.
But the other one has come along well.
Actually got a pretty good draft statement coming in.
I'm going to have Price take a look at it now just to get the language in shape.
Well, that's come along.
I have asked Whitaker to
try and pull together all the polls that he can find and any other evidence that he can find one way or the other on the question of whether these pollution and environment things are really politically significant or not.
He made a first cut at it and I would think that by the time we're ready to do this overall review
We're going to be able to give you some fairly objective evidence on a question of whether this is something we ought to be spending our time on.
There's one incident that is not useful that a witness should not get on.
He's got three polls that are working and the ones you did yourself.
You know, you've got to be sure.
Harris' poll list at one time had an enormous number there, but he loaded the question.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
to really show, not when you go in and push people and push them around.
I've asked that in each case, we be provided with the question that was asked, rather than just the numbers.
And so that's the kind of thing we're beginning.
I think there's an awful lot of folklore in this area about just how much plot this thing has and what groups.
And so we've got to break out on it.
DIRD is doing some work on it.
Yeah.
So we just keep an open mind on that for a while.
And that's it.
We have to remember that our major concern at the present time is to not destroy a lot of American interests and create jobs.
I just thought we were about up to doing that.
Well, I should tell you another thing we have going on that.
I've had Ruckelshaus, Mrs. Maurer, Elliot Richardson, everybody that we do the regulatory business in,
with Morris Stans and Jim Hodgson and Peter Flanagan and Peterson and others.
And I put this to them.
And we are going to be meeting periodically now toward the development of some very clear guidelines for these folks as to the kinds of things we do and don't want to have happen in regulation and the kinds of clearance processes that we're going to require.
And so we're moving on that.
John, let me give you an example.
When I was talking to Borlaug when he was here, here's the guy in front of the Nobel Peace Prize.
If he had not discovered and developed those strains of small wheat, all experts agree, and I've used the word wisely, that millions of people in India, Pakistan, and part of Mexico and other parts of Latin America
not be living today, I'm going to starve.
I talked to him about, and he brought up the subject when I was sitting down at dinner.
He brought up the subject.
He said, you know what?
I'm terribly, desperately pressed by the attitude of your administration on DDT and chemicals and so forth.
He says, you must not let this happen.
He said, those that believe in that
and so forth through plants, and I think it's the only kind of a plant that's read that people approve that it's kind of a consumption, is that it has never known any pesticide chemical or so forth and so on.
He said that I know that anybody in my field who really knows the whole side knows that always a pesticide or a chemical does set up some
the benefit that it creates is to balance.
And that is something that we're not doing.
If we finish doing it on the pesticide thing and all the rest, then everybody is going to absolutely start getting mad about this.
You can forgive a guy like Ruckelshaus who only hears from one side.
What we have to do is to develop a scheme so that we get a balance automatically in the system.
Somebody like Warhol's House can't make a decision in response to his pressures without subjecting it to the review of people who have had their say in this.
Sure, it's like the people of John Lennon across the nation.
And we'll hear from all the little ideologues who want to bust up companies because they're big.
Companies are evil, they're corrupt, they're evil, and so on.
We have completed that aside, and I just feel so strongly in this, but let me say that this whole business about pesticides, DDT, et cetera, and environment goes with it, and safety goes with it, and tourism goes with it, has become a racket.
It has become a racket, and the thing is that it is, but there are some people that are out there gaming against the universities
professors and, you know, and associates, press professors and so forth, not the really able ones with the jackasses, are all jumping around in this because rather than disciplining themselves in teaching, well, they just want to be out leading some goddamn cause.
We're going to stop believing.
There's been some very superficial thinking done about public policy in this area.
I don't think you can afford to go to either extreme on this because it's a balancing of interests all the way through.
Let me say though, we're going to go to the other extreme in order to vote for the middle.
I think this is where my political inquiry comes in because
I would hope he would not go to the other side to pull it to the middle at great political cost.
Not too great.
And I think we ought to go, we ought to do with our eyes open.
We ought to know what we're getting into.
I said we've got a job to do because that's the way that political costs, through three million jobs lost to, certainly, there's certain costs to putting the goddamn airbag in the car.
That's right.
Well, that's the thing we're setting about anyway.
And we're trying to get a line around this whole subject.
John, you've seen the memorandum that I've sent to Reckletown since two or three days ago.
Basically, what we're trying to do on that is to say to it that in these various actions that you're taking or supposing, you haven't built another vacation.
You haven't done it.
And so on.
And before you go ahead, do that.
Well, you know, that'll slow it up then.
But you know, it isn't.
Maury has come up with a very interesting idea.
He says, you know, now, by law, everybody has to file an environmental impact statement every time the government wants to do something.
He says, I propose that every time we do something in this area of safety or consumerism or the environment, that we be required to file an economic impact statement.
How many jobs is this going to cost?
How many businesses is this going to
that's going to cross the consumer so that we can weigh the thing and see what is going to do it.
And that's what's coming out of this thing.
And then it'll fly across all regulatory operations.
That's it.
Let's go.
We have a movie set up.
I told Julie that she said that if you're not expecting, that it's all set up on that basis.
I said that this is possibly, you might be able to get away with it.
She said that if he comes, we'll be surprised.
Yeah, their twist on it this week was it was the first time since December or something that accidental
Deaths that exceeded the military casualty.
One of these things that one loves each other, it is, you know, it is fun to get some of that.
That's all right.
It's still, that's still anything that's manageable below 100.
So I should have, I should have.
I don't know whether Bob has had a chance to tell you the tube droplet.
Well, you talked about the tube droplet on the 7th.
I've talked about that.
But the tube droplet is, he emotionally doesn't want to do it on the 8th.
Yeah.
Insisting that it be the 7th or the
Well, the problem that makes me uneasy is, Mr. President, his National Assembly is going to pass an electoral law on the troops, which means that I suspect, and I'm checking with Plunkett, that he may want to come back from a meeting with you to promulgate the electoral law.
I just wonder whether the impact on the liberals here will be he comes back from a meeting to promulgate the law.
They're going to claim them and do everything.
And the other point is that the hell with the impact on the liberals here.
The main thing is the impact on the country there.
Will it help him?
I'm for that.
I'm for that.
And also, as far as the situation is, since it is two years, two years after the other one, I think it gives a great justification that we decided to have a meeting just two years later.
to check the progress.
I'm not worried about the impact on the liberals here.
Well, then I'm going to talk to them.
I will tell them I'm going to do it on the 7th.
That's a great opportunity.
7th works, logistically works okay.
Yeah.
If we could, the only other thing is it's very important to get that word to as quickly as we can to somebody else.
Have a good one.
How do you do that now?
Well, I can do it in two ways.
I can either ask, have Funker send me a back channel that I show the director.
And have Funker explain that he's sending a back channel in order to keep it out of the bureaucracy.
And I just show him the back channel.
Or have Funker put it into a regular channel.
I put it into a back channel that I show him.
Why don't you put it in the back?
If you do, you can take it over to the Secretary of Business, of course, but the Secretary of State only, I'll send it to the business channel only, because I want to prevent the danger of leakage.
Right, right, fine.
Okay, have them send it back to me, and so forth, and that we, and that Bunker is to say it's very important, we should do it at this time, and provide an opportunity to make this announcement, and so forth.
You take it to Rogers.
Fair enough.
Well, on him, I would disclose only to Rogers.
Conclusions?
Yes sir.