Nixon, Haldeman & Bull on Political strategy and Edward M. Kennedy

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So, the ambassadors, Joe, do you want to do that as a breakfast on the morning?

These are our ambassadors, US ambassadors that we're calling back, you know, from the Chief State Department guys to apply to the Defense Department, Joint Chiefs.

And it can be done either as a breakfast or as a,

10 o'clock, Kevin.

We've got to deal with this.

Dad, Roger's going to the press room afterwards for a briefing.

Okay, I think that's better than doing that for this weekend.

Trying to do a breakfast in there is going to be, yeah.

I don't want to think that's going to be strong anymore, except for dinner.

I just don't think Bob and I ought to pop into those band names.

I don't think they're...

It's one of those things that

It's one of those things, like some of the others, where it's the features, they're coming to the White House and getting the information, spending the time.

They don't have to do this very specific time, that's right.

We can do it in a third.

Dan, he's really working at those meetings.

He does a hell of a job of hammering away at those couple of weeks with a little group.

And I'll see you next week on FDFR.

Which we won't say more than that unless you don't want to have one.

Hunkers!

back for consultations, and Henry suggested it's a good time for you to be in the political situation in Paris and so on.

Okay.

Then, the best time for the chowder and marching day, Eric, we're going to try and do it before summer kind of falls apart at the beach on the 28th, about Monday evening.

Then we get to the question, the, uh,

There are 41 members.

41?

Of whom 19 are now in Congress.

Yeah.

So you could have only the city members.

There are 12 former members that live in the district, in the Washington area.

That makes 31, and then there are 10 former members outside of the DC area.

Well, that'd be 41.

Then there's 36 member wives, which would make 77.

And there's the two widows that suggest if you're having a wife, you ought to have a very good touch.

That makes 79.

Then to bring the guests, what you could do is invite each sitting member to bring a guest, but not the non-sitting members, which would be a way of making a break.

And that would get 38 additional people.

Good.

And we'll get you right up.

That would be 117.

Good.

Excellent.

Now, we have one problem, and maybe it's the problem of Goodell as one of our former members living in Washington.

Social offense.

That's what they want to do, don't they?

Don't they always invite him?

Yeah.

All right.

You can invite him.

And he'd probably come.

Oh, he'd come.

So that thing that we set up once and then canceled a while back of...

You doing a telephone conversation with Mobutu on a new satellite?

No.

I'm not interested in that.

It would be done on television.

That's the kind of thing I don't want to do.

You may get some pressure from the state on it, I think.

No?

Yeah.

I suggested that you might want to consider, as a political problem, you still might want to do it, a reception or something like that for the early bird congressional supporters, which would be

What he has in mind is both the Munn-Aarons group and the 44 who signed the January letter supporting candidates.

That would be purely political in one sense, but it would be good just as a meeting of old friends if you wanted to do it.

In 69, we had the Munn-Aarons group, but we never had the 44 other signers.

And Clark thought that he just might want to kind of renew the bond with that guy.

With that group, the question, whether you want to do it now or wait until fall?

Fall.

Or, I don't know.

What do you think?

Maybe it's a good time to do it now?

I think he thinks doing it now is probably better.

All right, do it.

That's the kind of thing.

In fact, we all know, of course, your hardcore guys are with us on this.

It's not a bad idea to do it this time.

They also, you've got the non-Henry.

Because they're without wires.

His thought is without.

He's recommending that you have only the city members because you've got some problems with Jim Gardner and Jim Smith and Al Watson and so on.

I agree.

68.

Could have been the governor of that damn state.

Yep.

Played the wrong horse, didn't he?

Remember?

I love that he was.

And so is Goodell.

That's right.

Same.

They're the same kind of thing.

I'm all for one of those two.

Bob, we're following up on that.

Dan, Eisenhower Hospital will be at me.

What do you want me to do?

He wants you to dedicate it in November.

Well, we'll be ready.

And if we're not ready, he'll be.

The dedication is going to be the 24th, the 26th, the 27th, or the 28th, which is Thanksgiving weekend.

We're still set up on Midway to provide the television opportunity, and it now becomes much easier to do because they have to move the gear out to the Pacific for the splashdown of the pilot plane.

So it's not nearly as big a task as it is, but that will require learning the

networks, which we can do without anybody knowing it on June 24th.

Our plan is not to make the public announcement until the 29th.

All right.

But, uh, they'd have to start moving equipment, so there'd be some people that would know it.

But they wouldn't know where they were going or what they were doing.

All right?

This is President Paul Coley with New York Times.

He's doing a study on the NOL and FINA, which we're probably going to hear tomorrow or the next day or so.

I'll have to watch you here today.

I'll have to watch you on my side.

I'll have to watch you.

And would it be convenient for you to make it 1.30?

1.30, yeah.

Take the lunch over and have them take the pictures.

Okay.

Now, you said you didn't want Buchanan's political memo to sound.

I've got one.

Well, I wanted to go to Mitchell, I think, because that's what I thought, at least, for a few days.

No, I think otherwise, but I don't have any questions.

I have the uneasy feeling that if I get into this day after day after day after day,

What I mean is, he writes good stuff, but there's nothing he can do about it.

He doesn't even think about it.

He's got his analysis of Teddy, you know, and he spurts these out as he goes along.

It's very helpful, but the question is, if there's something that you think I should do, see and do something about it.

But let me say this, since I don't plan to make any press conference statements about it, since I don't plan to talk to any of our own people about it, unless it's going to affect the decision, I don't think I could get it.

Let us suppose, for example, let us suppose that I had gotten, I did it to you, when he wrote that long thing about Muskie,

Understandably, everybody else was going to eat.

But everybody said musky is a great danger.

You've got to do the long, long memorandum about it.

I suppose I'd have gotten all stirred up about it.

So we went through the rounds.

You've been a mistake.

You shouldn't have.

But we did some of the things that he suggested doing.

And they worked pretty well, as he points out.

We did the musky thing.

He's making the point that we do some of the same kind of it on Teddy.

And on Teddy, he says, like, all the while, oh, I quite have constant revenue.

is killing him, you know, has certain risky chances.

He hasn't been able to shake the indecisive charge, and he hasn't been able to shake the bad temper charge.

And why would he do it with Teddy?

Oh, he wants to hang him on the left, the left.

Make sure, keep pushing him left, keep, all right?

Because he portrayed as too reckless, too immature, too irresponsible.

And, uh,

His foreign policy position should be portrayed as shocking, alarming, frightening, dangerous, and he's fighting war in Europe.

Not by us, you know, getting other people to do it.

And we've got, see, Hubert whacked him, you know.

Right through Teddy.

For what?

Teddy hit you on something, and Dole just blasted him that this was a terrible assault or something.

Yeah, it was.

No, it wasn't assault.

It was a Chinese assault.

I don't know.

He was on the left.

He was on Vietnam.

That must have been it.

Remember what?

Dole hit him back hard.

And Huber got up on the floor and said his titular leader of the party inserted his mantle.

And he did.

And hit Kennedy.

Following Dole's thing.

And during Dole, I was talking to Dole this morning, he said Teddy called him.

Called to him as he was leaving the floor and said, what the hell are you doing?

hitting me on this, you don't think I'm going to sit and let you get away with it, do you?

Teddy said, well, you're not going to take a senator on the floor.

I said, I sure am when you talk like that.

Yes, sir, the Humphrey thing was what created it.

Sir, Dole taking him on didn't make such a fix about Dole that Dole stimulated Huber.

I really wanted the Teddy Kennedy thing hit hard.

Now, that's, I've already said that, but I would rather, I'll tell you what, I feel that

I feel it's very important in my own, in my own attitude, Bob, that I not be around, you know, worrying about the kind of stuff that everybody in the staff wants to worry about.

That, you know, Sapphire wrote me a memorandum.

I'll get another one from Ray on mood and tone.

And Garner will say, you know, we've got to do this or that.

And that's what this is all about.

See what I mean?

Now, I don't see that unless there is something that you just look at and say, there's something we should do differently that we're not done.

But my general feeling is that I should not get involved in the surgery.

Are you sure you're ready to be?

Yeah, I just wanted to be sure.

Now, excuse me, you've got to see just Andrew.

You've got a political group.

Feed it in.

Right.

And feed it in and talk them hard.

Buchanan's analysis is brilliant.

It's his and Sears' together.

It comes up with a dang good conclusion, which is the main objective, keep Kennedy on the far left of the party to prevent his inroads to the center.

So if he is the nominee, we have a clear shot at the conservative Democrats.

Yeah.

And they can be nominated by the left wing of the party.

So the LBJ, the South, and the conservative Democrats will feel they've been run over by the unrepresented radicals.

It's going to be hard.

So let's scoop on that.

Skilteddy on the top.

I just don't know what the goddamn country is.

I can't see that.

I can't.

Look, if they remember the Rockefeller's divorce, how the hell am I going to even forget this, huh?

It's pretty rupturing stories.

Let's not get any into them.

And it's like, for example, my attitude on the new science.

I don't read word for word every day.

I read quite often.

I mean, not, you know, I practice the talk behind the piece, but I get to view what's going on.

But there's nothing that is more, that would be more detrimental to my whole attitude.

And to read is, you know, it's regurgitating.

all the crap that I know they're going to say, you know?

And that's another reason why I try to keep all of this on me, all the personal stuff.

What the hell do I care if they're nagging about this or that or the other thing?

Unless there's something for me to do about it.

That's your job.

You're to look at that if there's something for me to do about something that impresses it and you were doing it wrong.

And we do it.

But I think it's best to have some peace of mind.

That attitude is a very effective attitude that these people have.

And that's what...

It's actually the most effective because they see they're not being effective.

I don't think that's what was effective with the NBC people.

It had to be.

If I had been an NBC executive, I would have been terrorized by that conversation.

I agree with you.

They got that well and I wasn't being bothered.

They wouldn't get to me.

But I knew exactly what they were doing and I didn't believe them.

They said they were not biased.

And I knew damn well that I knew what economic power that had to be used, and that I'd use it.

You know, that's the reason, that's what they ought to be taking away from here.

I think they did.

Tell us the speech.

It's fascinating, because what you did, you did cut almost exactly half of it.

You ended up with a text that ran almost on those 15 minutes, and you added about four minutes of ad-lib, of ad-lib.

I ran 19 minutes total.

And it was about as long as it could be.

And what you added was that anecdote about the North Dakota couple and the North American.

And the start of the beautiful North America at the end.

And the start of the beginning.

I had to spend a minute.

Yeah.

And the North National.

Yes.

And the start about the vocal appreciation of each other.

Would you not agree, though, that that really is the problem?

You've got to get somebody else to take a whack at these things.

He will not edit it down.

It wasn't very hard editing.

It shouldn't have been for him because you took out...

All stuff that obviously didn't fit.

It was pitfall, but it just went on and on and on.

It was dragging in what the Department of Agriculture was.

It's like a mini State of the Union, you know?

You put in what agriculture has done, what we're doing in the field.

Well, he started hitching revenue sharing.

Revenue sharing.

Reorganization.

See, I know how that's done.

So he patches it together.

Yeah, it's not the way to do it.

Well, it was.

He'd do a hell of a job.

Well, he still has a lot of confidence.

25, maybe 30 minutes.

Yeah, well, it was 25 minutes at least.

and 30 that I always have to have with your medicine.

I think maybe that, I think one way we could get at it is my rule is that I never want to see anything that's more than 2,000 words.

And then I'll just be rigid in that.

2,000 words, if it's more than 2,000 words, send it in.

Just kind of get to...

I don't want to be too hard on these requests for me to see people and so forth.

I hate people and the rest.

You know, I should do some things.

And I realize that I can't be, you know, all I'm suggesting is that from now on, I just want to, I think we just make a cool damn judgment on what we do.

So when you get a request for ambassadors, for foreign ministers, for

They're all the rest.

It just comes down to, is it going to help us?

Is it going to help us compare that?

The Lombardi thing does look important.

It got all over the sports pages.

Did it?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

And I'd agree with that part of the news on the scene.

You tie it to Catholics.

You tie it to Italians.

You tie it to football fans.

You tie it to a guy that's considered a great guy by a lot of people.

It wasn't a sport of greatness, was it?

Yeah.

That's where we wanted it.

Which it worked in.

Hell yeah.

That's where it means something.

People would say, it also hired in New York.

And in New York.

And it buttered up our biggest contributor.

See, that was worth going.

I know it, but then I just saw it on there.

Yet that was not important.

I'm not sure that the committee on Italian migration was working.

I don't think it was.

I don't think that got much.

Except for those people that were there.

Maybe John Bowlby.

But this I knew had a snack to it.

The minute I saw it.

You put your finger on it, Bob.

That's the real thing, isn't it?

You gotta see, who are we doing this for?

Are we doing it for the cabin officer?

Are we doing it for the group?

Are we doing it for us?

You know, for our own image?

And we just gotta be pretty goddamn ruthless on that.

That's why, if you gotta watch what we do, a lot of that, I don't think we should cut down too much on the, you know,

open hour type things, because I think those are ones where we, well, you get, you play to a specific group, you don't get any national stuff on any of them, but you play to an interest group in terms of their interest, whatever it is, whether it's, you know, building a football field house or what, or a union group, stuff gets, those unions,

The ones you know who trotted in to give you a membership card or some crap like that.

Boy, that's good.

Print that all over there.

Union publications.

You don't get any union publications very often.

No.

Except in bed.

Yep.

That's where they're mad at something and then... Yep.

I'm trying.

Shows that you don't have it.

You don't have it.

All right.

We've got 40%.

Maybe...

Well, then vote for us.

Yeah.

You know, we're in a position to... We're in a position to...

But now, I think this is not all.

Oh, I just want to make sure that what I'm going to do

He's been working with Rogers, working with Larry.

Rogers got us to play this paper this morning.

He's very good at something.

And he really fell in love with it.

Very, very good.

I think that more than anything else is going to pick up.

Say, we talked about six-grade goals.

Let's get about six.

It's like this, this, this, this, this.

Everything's got to be related to it.

And we're trying to sell people on three points and maybe leave six impressions.

Is that what it is?

I think that's what you've got to get down to.

I'd like to see that after you run that by Moore and Sapphire.

That's enough.

The other thing is that then you see you can put, you can point Henry.

Yeah, well, he doesn't even point at all.

There's not much in the picture.

Sure, quite early.

John is all a paparazzo, so it's all trying to get the same thing done.

Nixon, Haldeman & Bull on Political strategy and Edward M. Kennedy

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on June 10, 1971

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