On June 15, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, John N. Mitchell, John D. Ehrlichman, Stephen B. Bull, and Ronald L. Ziegler met in the Oval Office of the White House from 3:45 pm to 4:30 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 521-009 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Oh, I hope so.
My blood of the department.
You know, you can't get appropriations unless you file a suit.
All Rooney does is run down to see how many suits were filed, and that's the way to get your appropriation.
Can I ask you how many you want?
Hell no.
I would say it's about two thousand.
Here you go.
I guess you got to discuss that.
Discuss.
I'll cycle you.
I'll show you the bags.
I'll show you that.
that I am totally convinced that not only we had to take the action at different times, but that we must be followed up.
And I don't care what the hell the cost is in terms of escalating the rhetoric.
You'll find some of the boys around shaking around because they say, oh, they're advertising an issue that's going to hurt this administration.
But we cannot stand by and allow this cruel, utter, reckless violation of American security.
The attack is on the presidency.
It's on the foundations of the country.
Sure, if you read it carefully, it's on Johnson.
But it's on us, too.
It's on everybody.
Nobody can be present if Stankovich can walk out of the Defense Department with caseloads full of odd documents, turn it over to a paper, and a publisher publishes them without asking to do any goddamn thing.
But also, it bears a branch of mine something.
I don't even have the domestic theory I write memorandum or object because it doesn't make any goddamn difference what police hear.
It all leaks anyway.
Well, I'll tell you if not, it's not a leak.
That's never going to go to the defense.
It's going to be a big part of the scan out of this on us.
Thank God I have the total report.
Because it depends on the job.
Now, it's the whole morality that says that there are moral actions and immoral actions.
If it's an immoral action, then there is, the higher morality is to rat on it.
Now, God damn it.
There is no cause that justifies breaking the law of this land.
Period.
See, that's what this gets down to.
The New York Times says, well, we have an obligation to publish it because we don't believe in the law.
That's what you said, in fact.
We don't believe in the war.
We have the war is wrong.
Information that helps us in doing this, which reveals us, or in the public interest, if we get out and dig it out.
There is no cause that justifies breaking the law.
None.
And by God, particularly, of all that involves, it's a treasonable conduct, because it's leading to conflict with the enemy.
I believe it's treasonable.
Let me say that
But we've got to find a way to get the son of a bitch Ellsberg, or whatever Ellsberg, whatever his name is.
What's his name?
Ellsberg is the one that most people are pointing the finger at.
All right.
I suppose it's him.
We've got to find a way to get him on our own.
That's all.
Well, that's...
He's on our own.
You can't do it.
There's another way.
Committee of Congress.
We can do it.
Now, here's what we're planning to do after your McGovern-Hatfield amendment.
And that's to convene a grand jury in New York and bring these people before the grand jury.
Now, here's what's going to develop in my opinion.
We're going to bring the people from the New York Times in there.
And they're going to say, we have First Amendment rights.
We don't have to divulge our sources.
Now, this is our argument.
This is our argument.
And we're going to have a question of contempt of court.
And I don't think this is going to be bad, because we've got the issue, national security.
That's distinguished from the Black Panther out in Texas.
That's right.
Don't you think so, John?
What's that?
National security?
Yeah.
Then you've got a real conundrum.
And we're not involved.
We're not involved.
This is a Johnson announcement.
That's right.
It's not something that we did.
That's right.
As a matter of fact, this looks to me like the person...
I simply commented, I told Ziegler, I used to comment, well, this is a, this is a, this is, we're not going to comment on all these things that were set in because that's a family quarrel.
We're not going to get into it.
It doesn't involve us.
We started the policy when he came in, and our policy's working.
So if they want to quarrel about how they got into this trouble, let them quarrel about it.
It's a tough way to treat them, but that's the way we have them.
But it's ambitious.
They have been these rats, you know, now on Johnson.
Let's face it, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not wondering.
Sure, they had a contingency plan.
Christ, they've got the contingency plans of the Defense Department for the bombing of North Vietnam.
No one's.
Right now, I know.
They always have them.
Well, I know they've got contingency plans of all magnitude for bombing North Vietnam, because I've seen them.
That's right.
You see, John, you can't just say that Johnson, therefore, knew when he ran against Goldwater that he was going to start a bombing immediately after the election.
Maybe he did.
Maybe he was considerate.
Maybe he didn't.
But these bastards over there, these are people that stayed on, worked for Johnson, and then ran it on.
They didn't leave until 68.
This is why, John, I feel so strongly now.
I know that this is a tough one, but I have got to the point where I ain't got any liberals around.
I mean, I am very much afraid.
You see, the difficulty, you show me a liberal, generally, and I'll show you a man who believes in the higher morality.
The arrogance is a part of morality.
Their opinion is a part of it.
That's right.
But you see, they are taught, John, John, the liberals think, I mean, yes, you do, but our kids, you're taught in the colleges and universities today that
The law.
You should be the judge of the law.
So if you don't believe, whether it's the religious law or whether it's the law of the land or something of that sort, the highest thing to worship is the intellect.
So an individual who intellectually reaches the conclusion the law is wrong has an obligation to disobey it.
That's what they're saying.
I'm afraid of the liberals.
I really am afraid of them because they look what they did to that poor goddamn boy.
you know he was an honest but they all they were the ones that we can work with he's pragmatic when when he gets the
gets the understanding of the subject.
Uh, this, Mr. President, is the whole... John, you see the reason that I thought we had to go ahead of him.
Now, if I talk to them, I think you should know.
Before I called you, I talked to John.
And I said, John, why don't you do that?
And he says, go.
And I called you and went.
So, let's just get a historical record of how this decision was made.
I want to know.
And I told Zeller to stay this morning when they asked him, for instance, to stay.
Because they've been asking the President, oh, yes.
And the Attorney General called him, and the President approved, yes.
Because, on the ground, that we have an obligation to enforce the law.
And the law has been broken here, and the Attorney General informed me that in order to enforce the law, we would waive our rights.
I mean, we could not enforce the law or put it on.
That we would waive our rights, which would allow us to enforce the law, unless you put them on notice.
And I said, go ahead and enforce the law.
Would you agree, John?
Hello, Mr. Ziegler.
That was a great question that Ziegler had out there today from one of his reporters.
That was, did the President direct the Attorney General to Harris, the New York Times?
And Ziegler said, what did you say?
He made him repeat it.
And, of course, everybody got it.
And, Mr. President, there's another facet of this.
The New York Times is harassed.
You watch now.
Any one of the White House staff, as long as I'm in this office, ever talks to a New York Times reporter again, except me in a press conference.
He has lost his staff.
Just like that.
It's got to be.
In the security area, General Gailer of NSA came over to see me here about a week ago and talked about a number of breaches of the security appearing in Jack Anderson's column and this column.
You know what this is, General?
That's coated, isn't it?
This is coated stuff.
What I mean is the machine stuff.
Some of it is, yes.
Well, that's what he's in.
In other words, this is not that, you know, the kind of security that just secret papers, but he thinks they're using some of the coated stuff.
Exactly, that's reduced paper.
And he is very concerned about it.
So I said, well, we'll move on this directly.
Just give me the information, what you have on my web background, and we'll put the Bureau right on it.
And he says, well, I've got to clear it with the Secretary of Defense.
And I haven't heard from him since.
Whether Nelson is here or not.
What are the circumstances of this New York Times thing?
Somebody just took off with a Xerox set of the stuff.
We don't know, Jim.
Because the Defense Department doesn't really know where the copies are.
That's it.
And, uh, Nykamar had a copy.
Clifford had a copy.
Rand Corporation, where this Ellsberg works, had two copies.
Uh, there's some speculation there's been a copy over at the Brookings Institute that came out of one of these people.
So, uh...
So you see, John, what would happen?
You've got a little son of a bitch that has copies.
And so he sits around, and he decides to give it to the New York Times.
Neil Sheehan of the New York Times is a left-wing communist son of a bitch.
He has been for at least 20 years, to my knowledge.
I know the talk center.
I saw him out there in Vietnam.
And he asks vicious questions.
I know him from way back.
I saw him 10 years ago.
He's federal.
He's...
Because they're a bad actor.
I finally got Henry convinced.
God damn, he was going up to do the New York Times editorial board.
And I said, Henry, you're not going to do the New York Times editorial board?
Never.
Never.
And he isn't.
We cannot allow this.
They did this.
These people showed their total disregard for the security of this country.
And now, as far as I'm concerned, they want a war.
We'll have a war.
We may get killed, but we're going to fight.
We're going to fight.
I think what we ought to do in about a week is to run a poll on the credibility of the New York Times versus the average newspaper.
I don't know what the New York Times is.
their wire services all over the country.
Classified backage is a First Amendment exception.
I would expect they would be.
There has to be some, John.
There's no problem with that.
The order of security was as far as the First Amendment was concerned.
Have you ever had a case on that?
Nor are there sources of information.
Correct.
You remember that case of that woman reporter?
Potter Stewart wrote such a good opinion on Mary somebody or other, why they would not allow her to...
maintain her First Amendment rights as a newspaper reporter as to her sources.
Well, tell me about Sanctimates.
What is the, what basically is the decision?
John, is it a question of whether we spend $100 million on Sanctimates?
No, it's a question of what we do in all the other cases.
And I had the ONG run me out a list of possible other claims like this that would come up, because it's good politics to do this one.
But we've got Sarkfish,
food additives, cosmetics, medical devices, the decisions under the Consumer Product Safety Bill, Plantable Fabrics Act, the deregulation legislation, the Marine Protection Act,
John, they don't all fall under this classification.
Well, see this is the, their point is, this is the first major plan for denomination in the area of public health or safety, where there's apparently either error or neglect on the part of the government, which resulted in the market rejection.
And then they simply try to find others within that generic class.
But swordfish are not, for instance, on that grass list.
Obviously.
On the what?
Grass list.
That's the list that ATW puts out, says it's the same.
This is a whole treat.
Well, I asked them for other possible claims within the generic category of common faults where market rejection could be a basis for a claim.
And so they just gave me these lists.
And I think we have to look ahead.
The possibility is that the government has always turned these down fast.
Well, I don't know about that.
You remember the cranberries, and you can go on and on and on about the things that have been proved, even when the government wasn't involved.
Have they run these out and tested them under the norms for the court of claims procedure that is in the proposed legislation?
No.
Well, you see, that's the whole ballgame, because there is a proposed...
and a statute and a proposed set of norms which will limit this basically to situations where the government has approved and then has revoked the approval and it goes on with other qualifications to fit it within this context of this cycle of business.
If there were some device by which we could avoid precedental attacks
That's why I say the grass list is the turning point in all of this.
That was the list where they, in effect, approved the use of cyclamens.
Under that language, it's safe and so and so.
And this is what induced the people to go ahead and manufacture a can and bottle and so forth.
And then after that approval,
And without sufficient warning notice or anything else, tango, they just closed the dam.
So these don't...
I didn't feel, John, that was where it went down.
I think they were applying...
The H.E.W.
was applying basically to a... to a... the frightened constituents.
The fact of the matter is that
As I understand it, the mouse would have had to eat nine times its weight in cyclamen before he got cancer.
Well, the interesting thing is, of course, that the lads are the ones that pulled the whistle on this.
There were many factors in the cyclamen.
And they came to the AGW and said, we're afraid our product is very dangerous.
And so they divulged to the government what the tests were.
They were getting this kind of result.
And we
In fact, I'm going to delete that.
The point is that certainly you say that the, why do you say the policy is good to do it for the few?
Is it good to do it if you can limit it?
Well, I think we've got a lot of friends involved in it.
We have our whole California constituency, all the cooperatives out there.
They're the ones that are being hard hit.
Now, there's another factor that they might also take the money and venture into something else.
Possibly.
The other factor is that I understand from people like Jerry Ford, who's been bugging me on this, that whether we approve the bill or not, it's going to pass.
So if it's going to pass, why...
We're going to be foolish to oppose it and let the other side get the credit.
I don't have a review.
Is it basically a private review?
No, no, it's a general statute that will relate to these norms that I've discussed here generally about how you prove your claims in the court of claims.
The arm's name is in the bill.
We certainly have a language that would limit the liability to what we want to limit it to.
Well, it certainly removes the concept of the swordfish.
The government doesn't have any do with swordfish.
Yeah, they did, as a matter of fact.
Well, they found that the swordfish was bad, but they didn't approve the swordfish with uranium or whatever they had beforehand, like they did the cyclamen.
So that's the distinction.
You write that distinction in there, and it'll help a lot.
Well, that's why I think that their objections are a little spurious, because I believe that the Commerce, the Treasury, and I don't know who else has been involved in this, have all agreed that this was a proper form of relief for these people proving their claim for a court of claims.
But at the end, the others wonder about our liability.
What I like about it, John, is that we've got to do something for our friends.
Well, I would think, Mr. President, that if what I hear is correct and our legislative people ought to be able to get a reading on it, the bill's going to pass anyway.
We've done it before.
Well, that's for sure.
I don't have any congressional reason.
Could we leave it this way?
Let's do a quick legislative reading on it.
And it is one of the best.
I don't believe in getting up there and fighting, bleeding, and dying.
I feel like it's a crime out loud.
These are our friends.
Have you seen, John, the proposed letter to the Judiciary Committee which outlines the limitations on the bill?
This is a declining proposed letter to sell it.
No, all I'm saying is that one of these works.
Well, I'd better leave this copy with you so you can understand the basis of the invitation.
All right.
Very well, we'll get the order to take it.
It looks like it has a fair chance, but we'll just get behind it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so what do we have?
We're going to have to put up another legislation.
Well, this is a lot better than some of these other drills, you know, where they...
just appropriated money for the government, the Agriculture Department, to pay it out to the cranberry growers.
When the cranberries weren't there, it was just the market that went south because it was DDT.
Yeah.
I want to make sure that that cranberry was done.
That's right.
It was made by the Vice President of the National Area.
One time, almost, I don't like cranberries anymore, but I had to sit there and eat it with my picture on the table.
In order to keep the cranberry marches from going broken.
Not whatever year that was, I don't remember so well.
Wisconsin area, wasn't it?
They just swapped the country.
They don't want us to damage here.
I'm not, I just can't get excited about it.
Well, I guess it's a cigarette when it's cooled down.
But the distinction I was making is this is not where the Agriculture Department has to lay it out directly to the farmer.
They're going to have to go to the Court of Claims and prove their claim, and it will be a series of judgments over the period of time.
Of course, we've had to take a wish.
Within the formula put forth in this suggested legislation.
I'm here for a time statement.
I'll just come back to that one.
This settles that.
Is there a way to make it clear, through some kind of very cogent public statement, the real seriousness of this, the jobs of Social Security?
It should be, and it should come out of the fence.
It sounds, at first blush, kind of repressive, that there's pages and pages of ancient history, and it looks like the kind of stuff that should read any memoir or secretary of defense or something.
Well, no, there's history that has not been declassified.
Sure, but you could take it beyond classification.
What we did in connection with that, John, was last night we got Buzz Hart,
from the defense to provide an affidavit with respect to that.
But this was a rush job with a temporary restraining order.
There should be a better analysis of these documents where layers whose jurisdiction they're under should come out with that type of a statement as to why this is not just equivalent with words.
It's a matter of subjectivity.
I'll see you in a minute.
You need to pinball two or three times in that position.
There's a thing that helps the enemy to know, even though this is old stuff, and it affects the safety of our troops now, or they can't say that.
You have to be very careful about what classified material you're putting out.
I understand.
Make sure that you do it in the right way.
The average person, I think, doesn't like secrecy of the earth.
And you've got to convince him that what's been done is a reprehensible thing.
And then once you do that, I think he's with you, you know, for the national security.
So far, it's been too soon.
Sometime over the weekend, if we get put together or something, it's really killed his heart.
Do you want to talk to Larry about it, or do you want me to?
Oh, I think you should.
I think it's your case.
Well, it's my case, except, as you know, we're bringing a criminal indictment.
There's got to be a very limited...
amount of compensation out of the Justice Department in this area.
But I'll talk to Mellon about it.
Did you hear the court decision?
No.
They ran into temporary instructions.
Good.
I hope the bastards have to pull all the type out of that newspaper.
It hasn't been announced yet.
I know.
They have an order in there, apparently.
The TRO, they've granted the temporary injunction.
Which is what you asked for.
Well, this is what you get before you prove your case.
Now we'll have to go in and prove the case unless they cease and desist.
Maybe when the grand jury starts on Thursday, they may cease and desist the whole thing.
We'll find out how much cuts they do have.
When is the TR returnable?
How many days?
I don't know.
I just got this very quick.
They had a horrible job getting the judge to entertain them.
They were all too busy.
Oh, they didn't want to step up for it.
So, okay.
They were not moved to the 950, no?
Article 4.
No, can't be stepped up.
It's the wrong type of restraint.
Well, with the facilities we have in this government, if we want one out, we can leak it and then put it in here.
Don't make changes.
Don't make changes.
He's so busy revising his book.
That's his book now, isn't it?
Is he subpar gone that he can't revise it, or is he... Yeah, December release date on it.
He's still shouting the text around.
He gave Henry some of the chapters to read when we were down in Texas the other day.
There's a rumor around that the branch is denying that Lee has called this book back in to redo that chapter.
I don't think he ever let it go.
He gave Henry five chapters to read or something of that kind.
So he's still in that gallery.
But what he should do is, excuse me, if the rest of it is to deal with the Kennedy administration, what he should do is say, look, you fellas are doing all this about my administration, here, let me give you my knowledge of the Kennedy administration.
John Ervin had the thought of it.
Defense ought to make a statement, or somebody ought to .
And she'll suggest that it should be defense.
Senator Ford, why this is such a breach of security?
Why it affects the national interest?
The early response is that most people don't like secrecy, and they don't care whether something's top secret or not.
They think it ought to be in the paper.
Unless they're made to understand
Why isn't that going to the nation's interest?
Well, it seems to me the... What do you think ought to be done?
It depends on how widely this, your case, and the federal district court has disseminated as well.
Your case is finished.
Well, there is an affidavit that was filed, but it's only Fred Buzzard.
As I say, it was put together during the middle of the night with...
But certainly not a case that can be made about specific subject matters that are covered in here, not that you set forth specific subject matters, but relate to them in nature and how they can damage the national security, the defense posture, the foreign relations, and so forth.
I think somebody has to say, look, any time you talk about troop movements or any time you expose how we develop contingency plans or any time you
tell ABC, whatever it is, then you put our men in jeopardy, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
No, Rodgers did a pretty good job today.
Rodgers says no.
Secretary Rodgers says, look, we are not going to draw a judgment or assess the formulation policy of the previous administration.
He said, however, we are concerned about the handling of highly classified material, which is exactly the premise I used in my brief.
this afternoon, this morning.
What moved out of my written report... And he went on to say that he had already had inquiries from foreign governments concerning the protection of our material.
Well, it's our relations.
I mean, I just had the ambassador to France in here, our ambassador to France, in a highly secret document.
was leaked by the goddamn African Bureau of the State Department, where he sent a message from Pompidou to me with regard to a loan that the Exxon Bank stupidly is being urged to make to El Paso Natural Gas to buy natural gas from Algeria, which is from an expropriated firm in which they have not compensated the French government.
I thought that we wanted that to be made secret for the obvious reason that he wanted us to act, but he didn't want it to appear to be much pressure.
The son of a bitch in the State Department put it out.
That was the top secret document.
I've got to find out who put it out, and the son of a bitch is going to be fired.
Or I will fire the top guy in that department.
We've got to do something about this.
I've got to find out.
Well, it's actually kind of nuts, Phil, that it's affected this whole relationship over your parents.
I think that's a very good point.
A point you raised is what we were struggling with.
What is the impression that now is created in the public mind?
Are we going to become entangled in this in such a way that this administration, the Nixon administration, is suppressing information, although we have a good argument to make from the standpoint that we've had with the classifying material?
That hasn't really...
come forth yet in the, in any of the... Well, that's the sort of thing that doesn't come forth until the press gets a little reading as to how the people are taken.
That's all.
We'll move ahead here to the next case.
Well, let me ask you, I'd just like to know if there's anybody that has any character left in the press corps.
At least when I handled his case, there were out of the, well, there were many in those periods, House committees, and the legislature,
There were four reporters out of 60 who felt that it was improper to turn top-secret documents over to a condom station.
Only four.
Are there any of these bastards that think this is improper?
Or are they all for total disclosure of top-secret information?
I don't think any of them have...
I don't think there's anyone out there.
I don't think the story would exist.
But I don't think that this press corps, at least the press corps I've been dealing with, have focused on the scope and the meaning of this.
Their questions have been more or less, well, you know, this is history.
This has happened.
These were mistakes made by previous administrations.
Why can't the American people be aware?
And the posture we have taken is, without judging or assessing that period, the fact of the matter is, without drawing the world's attention here,
Well, this morning at the briefing, they began to do a little grasp of that.
I think now that the court has upheld that argument, they will... Well, don't mean to help me on that.
That's only a term.
Well, okay.
Well, okay.
It's at least a proposition.
It's all right.
I've been brought to that point.
I'm going to shake him up.
Oh, it's a hell of a lot better.
You can turn it out.
Put it to your fruit.
Yeah, yeah.
This means you drew a good half a day of the middle tonight.
Too good.
Oh, I have a terrible loss of my confidence in the press conference.
Trouble?
Well, I at least have one satisfaction.
It's nobody.
I hate you.
I'm here trying to get you to talk.
Nobody in this White House staff, under any circumstances, whatever, is to give anyone, have any private conversation with a member of the staff, a leader, by telephone, in person, anyone.
The excuse is not to be that they're lying to us.
The excuse is I'm just too busy.
Now, that includes everyone.
Schultz is not talking about the voters.
It includes the council of the economic advisors.
So, a little story over there.
Shut the goddamn mouth.
Nobody should be there.
Or if you're concerned, handle it just like everybody else did.
I'll handle it with a press conference.
You can handle it and agree.
They are never going to be in the White House again.
I'm never going to have a New York Times reporter in my presence.
This is Nixon.
That's up there.
Never in my presence.
No New York Times reporter could be in a pool in that White House again.
Never.
Is that clear?
Yes, sir.
That's what we do.
They want to play this kind of a game.
They're going to play it.
But that's the way they're going to play it.
Was there any scream about the defendants that we added to it?
We put in Scotty Reston and Tom Wicker and made everybody we could find was an officer.
I was asking briefly today, first question off the bat on this was, do you have any comment on the president's ordering the attorney general to continue harassment in the New York Times?
I said to the questioner, I said,
I understand your question, right?
Do you want the word, Harrison, which is in second use as harassment?
Is the public correct?
You know, if we had not, if the government had not taken this action, then you would have been asking why not, because of the existing federal legislation.
If we hadn't taken this action, we would have basically condoned
Well, we weighed our right to move on, I think.
We would, in fact, acquiesce to that.
That's the problem.
Did the Times ask you to do it?
No.
It wasn't Brad, Dan Radcliffe.
It sounds like him.
There's no problem with McGovern-Hatfield, is there?
No.
As far as I know, they should win at least four or five votes against him.
Well, I think the idea of a statement is good, but if it's going to be done, who the hell around here is going to write it?
That's my point.
Somebody with knowledge of the documents.
That's got to be true.
Well, God damn it, the Defense Department's big enough.
Have they got anybody smart enough?
No.
It's got to be...
The documents are so voluminous that no one can really... To make the case that I'm sitting here talking in very simple terms about what this means, what it is that you cannot have, that you cannot have material that is classified.
Publicly printed, you cannot break the classification.
I always think that Fred Buzzard, who is a good lawyer, has been working on this thing out for 48 hours straight without sleep.
I'd like to see it.
I think I could do a little bit on that.
So I went through this all in his case.
We want that.
in a very different way.
Different in the sense that here they, in effect, turn over, they break the classification for a different purpose.
But it does help the enemy.
And was intended to.
If here the man's apparent case could put something together, I would think,
See, if the Defense Department releases something like this, immediately its credibility drops about 65%.
Well, we're going to release it.
We can't be commenting on the negative evidence in a criminal case.
That's what I meant.
Another thing you can do is to have a client's office in your government.
What about that?
Well, and that automatically becomes a... Well, a lot of the White House...
Does Rogers have any greater credibility?
He's got this point in connection with the diplomatic relations.
Actually, he could bridge off of what he said this morning, where he referred to the fact that he had received complaints.
Well, I'm sure he did.
Foreign governments are extremely goosey about any information.
They really believe in this security stuff.
What we do, too, we put a hell of a lot of things into wires, cables, and so forth that we don't want to leave out.
Why do people get codes?
But what's your purpose of all this?
Roger's statement could be explained by how costly it is.
You're very good at this kind of stuff.
Well, would you try to give some thoughts now on how we can get it out and maybe talk to, why don't you talk to Scali and see what he thinks?
I do think John's got a good point.
This is now a public relations problem.
performing the American people as to what the hell it's about.
I'd also like to have something prepared, because I may want to comment upon it when I go up to Rochester.
I just may want to say something.
I think it's important to cast it in some way, too, so that it becomes the
It becomes the Johnson Papers and the McNamara Papers and whatever the hell it is.
It's on the Texas Papers.
Well, it's tested, we know.
I mean, let's get a tag for it.
Let's get a name.
So that the case is called the Kennedy-Johnson Papers.
The Kennedy-Johnson Administration.
That's what I call Kennedy-Johnson Papers.
What is it?
The Kennedy-Johnson Papers were...
That's also the McNamara study.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what it was being referred to primarily.
Well, it's the Kennedy-Johnson, I call it the Kennedy-Johnson Papers.
I think John's got a point.
I guess get that down.
Kennedy-Johnson.
Because it is both, you know.
The Kennedy-Johnson Papers were questions on the questionnaires.
And you see how they hone that.
I'd like to see Teddy urge that his brother's papers be made public.
And then we have these boats.
Very good, you know, the murdered GMs in there.
Cattle washes, slimy participations in it.
It's pretty nice.
The Times would have already had transmitted those on the wire to its subscribers, wouldn't it, for tomorrow?
I don't believe that.
I'm not sure.
I don't think they promised.
I don't think they would have.
They have to be taken on.
You cannot allow this kind of security breach without taking them on.
That's it.
Do you want to wait until after Haspel, McGowan?
No.
For the criminal activity?
Hell no.
I think she started meeting with what the hell it was.
Why should you have your Hatfield MacGyver?
You never suggested that.
I had heard that it came from you.
Hell no.
No, no.
I didn't say that.
You could die as cast last night.
This morning's papers covered that.
Hatfield, whatever rap we're going to take on Hatfield MacGyver has been taken.
Go after her.
Okay.
I got this one.
The hell with it.
Go.
Fair enough.
Yes, sir.
Now, can you call in that son of a bitch Ellsberg right away?
Ellsberg, what's his name?
Ellsberg.
Ellstein.
Well, we don't know.
It's either Ellstein or Gale or Halpern.
All three of them have the papers in their accents.
That's what we hear.
All right.
Has it decided that Rogers is going to put this statement out, or is that for a future decision?
I really think it's...
I think he's the best man if he'll do it.
But he seems to mean he's stuck his son.
After all, he's also a former attorney for the Associated Press.
Well, he's also a former attorney general.
He's a former attorney general, and he's a State Department, and my God, who has a greater interest in classification than the State Department?
And Bill Spence, as I understand it, must have yesterday afternoon gone through these papers.
So that...
Could I ask this?
I've got to see Kitty now.
If you don't mind, John, could you and Erwin and Ron get on the phone with Phil?
I don't want to force you on it, but I want to come at you and three of you get on the phone.
We just talked about this.
He won't do it on me.
Believe me, I feel so strong.
And I can do it.
You see, when I have to do it in Rochester, I'll just make a little statement, give a little play.
I have no concern.
I mean, I could be more relaxed about it.
I know that there's no way you can win if you find a concern.
I know that there's no way you can fight the prince, but I do know I'm right in this, and I'll fight these sons of bitches if it costs everything you've got.
All right, it's going to be done.
I'm doing it.
I know because they're disloyal to the country.
They know it.
They want this country to lose.
They want it to go down.
They want it to become like they are, and by God, they're going to be fought.
Now, that's all that's true.
I'm not concerned at all about the New York Times or the press.
The area that was Jonathan talking about, the area that was Jonathan talking about, the area that was Jonathan talking about, the area that was Jonathan talking about, the area that was Jonathan talking about, the area that was Jonathan talking about,
Yes, sir.
Well, that's the point.
That's why I say we've got to make that, you know, they're going to try to create that impression.
You see, when you say you're not worried about the Times, or you're not worried about the press run, the Times and the press are the ones that are going to try to say that we're hiding something when we don't allow them to read every no-disc, non-top-secret paper.
See, that's what they're going to try to say.
That's what the battle is.
And that's why the battle has to be for all out.
You've got to fight every dirty thing you can think of.
Give it to them.
We shall find out.
Have fun.
Yes, talk to them.
We've got a lot to look at, but we'll go here.
Why are you a threat?