Conversation 574-004

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on the data that we have.

Do we agree to a date?

If we disagree, we'll have to vote.

Don't worry about it.

We'll have to vote.

We'd like to see.

Well, the office may say thanks, sir.

a lot of you and we really spoke about the five things.

One was China, Russia, his visit here, this conference we were having, and his constitutional changes in Yugoslavia.

on China, and right at the very outset, he wanted to know what I had said to the Chinese ambassador, what he had said to me, evidently, they were televising this reception given to the prime minister, and when he came through, the Chinese ambassador, prime minister, this was in the government house, he gave a reception for 2,500, 4,000 people there.

And so I said to him, you'll give him these, I'll be Mr. Nixon, Mr. P. King, etc.

I laughed.

And then he said, well, that's something he could work on, but it was something I could do for him immediately, which was to let his people come to this conference without inscribing their names.

I said, well, what's wrong with inscribing their name?

He said, we don't want to be responsible for what you do.

And I said, OK, well, come on.

But Tito almost immediately came to how pleased he was, but how surprised.

He mentioned surprise maybe half a dozen times in connection with your opening up a channel.

And he said he had been working on this for years.

and that he had kind of stood between China and Russia and sometimes felt squashed like a Spanish.

But that he thought that your initiative and that you, above all, were the one person in the world who could do something of this kind.

And he was very pleased with it.

He thought that was a tremendous thing.

And we spoke of

your world comprehension.

And then I said a few words of complimentary about you, and he didn't say whether he agreed or disagreed on that.

I told him that you were, of course, the most knowledgeable, present, and able, and all that kind of thing.

But he then said, once you were reached in Russia, tell him about it.

And so I told Mike to go on to invite me to this conference.

And he said, well, where are you?

And I said, well, I don't know.

The ambassador and some of the people came.

He said, well, some of them are probably lawyers.

He said that he had thought about all that Gorkin and Spernoff, Gorkin being the chief justice, and Spernoff would come.

Well, when I was in Russia, they did come out to meet me at the airport.

He was pretty well briefed on this, and this was quite unusual for them, you know.

Oh, and they handled it at the very highest levels.

And when I was talking to Mr. Gorkin, he said he referred to meeting you in Tunisia.

And when I had seen him before in 1937, well, I had seen him in 58.

And again, and other, I made three plans on that.

And when I first, I had Steve, and these had been replaced.

But he is obviously still one of the top people in,

And they really wanted to come.

I told them about our discussions, and I said that one thing happened was we had a dinner where all the top legal lights, Gorkin, Smirnoff, were there.

So they wanted to know how many Americans were coming to Belgrade.

And I said, well, maybe 100 or so.

Well, you know, with all those 20,000 going into London, obviously there were going to be more than that.

They said, well, I don't know what they heard.

They heard about five.

And they wanted an equal number.

I said, well, you can't have it.

Oh my gosh, he got very indignant.

I said, now look, we've met you a number of times, and you've always talked about equality.

Why can't you have five hundred people?

And so they got very indignant.

I said, well, don't you want to know the reason?

And they said, yes.

Finally, they weren't much interested.

I said, look, with five hundred Russians landing on that airport in Belgrade, he's going to think he's being invaded, and all hell's going to break loose.

He always thought he'd really enjoy that.

He said, that's pretty good.

But he said, no, I understand.

He said, here I am.

Did you, I know you're meeting with a prophet.

He said, could I understand?

He thinks that he should have a lot of credit for what happened really on the China thing.

And he thinks that the Russians have personally insulted him.

He said, here I am, arranged the greatest world law meeting in all of history.

And do they come?

He said, no.

And for no reason.

No reason.

And he is personally insulted.

Then we moved from that to his discussion of jury next.

And I said, well, I don't know when they're coming or anything.

I hope it didn't have rain.

And he said, well, he probably would come in October or sometime in the fall.

And I said, fall was a good time in Washington.

And then we moved then to the conference itself.

He was very interested in this demonstration trial, which had been a lot of publicity.

We were going to have a space just falling on the bullshit theater, you know.

We had six lawyers from all around the world, various damage and other claims, with a court of seven to demonstrate the handling of international claims with Warren Burger, who's acting on this.

And Warren did a good job with that.

He said that he moves very well around the people.

And he was ill, so he couldn't go down to see Mr. Tito, but he did a good job in meeting people for the first time.

And I think this is a good, wonderful representative of our country.

Well, Tito was very interested in this because we had changed the locale of the accident to the Parliament Building in Yugoslavia.

And so what we'll face is the request of the foreign minister, Yugoslavia, since she said the Russians were not coming in, in strength, and so forth.

Uh, we discussed that, and then he went to constitutional change in his own country.

He said he understood I was a constitutional lawyer, so I don't know that.

Anyway, uh, then he spoke of his returning government to the localities, and so forth.

He said he understood that you were interested in that subject, and I said yes.

It's hard to tell that they've had a few different, uh, problems in connection with it.

Uh, Mr. President, that is about it.

He was very

vigorous for a 79- or 80-year-old man.

And when he finished, he seemed like he wanted to talk forever.

But see, we had about 80 people who had gone down there with me.

And they were waiting about three miles away.

And so he said, you go on down.

And he would come.

Well, he did come driving himself an open convertible.

I think it was a Lincoln Continental.

And you heard him a long way before he got there because he was really driving fast.

And he come up and he slammed on his brakes.

And then he spent upward of two hours, almost three hours.

He had each person come and sit by and have their photograph made.

And he spoke to them about their country.

And well, like the guy in the representative, he spoke, gave a message to the Pope.

And most of these people were the chief justice and some of the ministers of justice of their country.

And each one of them, he spoke of his knowledge of their country, which was very, very good.

It's very interesting.

It's very interesting to send this picture of Charlie and me meeting to the Yugoslavia office press people.

They probably liked it.

and when I gave him your letter, he read it and put it in his pocket and they took it out and read it again and then gave it to his second parent and told her to go lock it up.

Well, a detective did think that it needed to be locked up.

Yes, he did.

Was it Hart?

Not particularly so, but...

Yes.

Well, that's Jovanovic.

Jovanovic is the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, and I'd say he's probably the number three man there, but obviously they're very...

He had very close friends.

I mean, just you can tell.

He would run over here and tell me about this little garden and such.

This great tribe and all the different bricks of his place there.

And I think it's obvious to see the thing that I said that pleased him most was what a beautiful place.

All right.

Well, he's proud.

It really is.

Well, there you are.

Yes.

Oh, yes, we had local chief justices, and that presented a few problems, as you can well imagine.

Who is the president?

The conference itself was very interesting as a president.

We had people...

And of course, there's no question, just before this, the China thing happened, and you were a constant subject of discussion.

I think at least among the lawyers of the world, really, they represent the thinking of the people.

You're the number one leader of the world.

And if there's any one thing I would recommend to you, it is that when you make a speech to the United Nations, you make it first.

really move in the history of this country, which could be called a selfish move, you know, to protect us.

in this economic picture.

And I think that our country has always been out there helping other people.

And I don't really think that this should be construed, but it is so being construed.

I would really urge you to talk about a new, do this rule of law thing I've urged on you before.

Talk about a new security system for the world.

Build on your negotiation.

disarm them, and so forth.

Not giving up, but aren't using them as a screen behind which you build.

But you need to kind of recapture the moral leadership of the world, because if there's any one thing you are, you're number one in the world.

And you ought to really do something to, I think your comments on the

recapping some of the basic things in America that go on very, very well as I travel around the country.

And you had to do the same thing.

Well, we had to do that.

It's harder to be able to play a world role.

Oh, yes.

All America.

Play a world role.

And we in America will never be able to do that.

So that's the problem.

Well, actually, there are people who are turning in for a very long time and say, look, let's work on the ghetto.

Forget all these poor guys on the ghetto.

Do you mean?

I believe.

Yes, you can.

They must do that.

Well, I just think you've gotten such a wonderful reaction.

And of course, the great thing that you have, as I get it from the people abroad, is you have their respect and you have their admiration.

And so you have something to build really big on in the, you know, from a flag to fly, a great moral leadership.

And I think that this in-the-rule rule of law idea, not work or not work, but it's working together because the one thing about it is all the nations in the world can work on that.

You hear this emphasized so often among the lawyers, a little fellow from Nepal gets up and says, I come from a little country, but I didn't feel the law as much as anything else.

Things like that.

The little countries really feel that this is something they can do.

Well, aren't we working on this now?

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Weeks of ex-arms are studied to be completed in about a month, sir.

Because basically, it's something that I didn't make, and frankly, this doesn't come sentient.

No, no.

And it's a very good shot that I could make across the bow.

Everything is a new practice that we're all also working on.

Get one of, uh, get, get, for example, uh,

You may have made a speech out there.

Well, so did you when you arrested him.

No, no, no, no, no, but I, you know, I just fall here when they hit him.

But I meant, you didn't cover more of the intricacies of the fence.

See, what we have to do in order to get into this, Charlie, I'll have to say something quite substantive.

to do with that, or just take time for a lot of stuff.

And you've got to be careful in there.

Something grabs you.

You've got to turn knowledge enough to get you to the World Government to appreciate it.

You've got to get the World Government to appreciate it, to also have the problems of a lawful city, a 200-mile limit.

and all that sort of thing.

But at least it's settling things under the rule of law, you see.

Yeah.

What's that?

At least it's settling things under the rule of law.

Sure.

Sure, I'm for that.

And I think it's a flag that you can fly.

Remember Henry Luce used to say, well,

some leader, some nation, someday is going to be the law man of the world.

With your background, he had a phrase, some leader will nail it to his masquette, and this will be the great thing because this is what the people of the world want.

I don't think I'll do it with him.

But aren't you re-strengthening it by your channel?

Some say, no, no, no, no, no, but it's caught with too many problems.

You know, the Israelis in the air, there's no aggression, everybody's fighting, and it's awful hard to do it.

But I think what matters is that there's no better report than the White House.

You know, that's a little bit of stuff there.

But I'd like to see something on this.

I would say it's, I think the White House is going to come up with something.

to have a very good talk tonight to make on it.

We might, it is the kind of thing that maybe ought to be told us.

It might be, because it's more thoughtful than that, it maybe ought to be, it might be an occasion for, it has to be something we want to get broadly distributed in text.

We might want to do something like one of those Sunday radio events that I do, which is anyone can carry on.

I don't know that you, I think you don't really need it, but there is such a job.

I've heard that a legal bar is as good, Charlie, as an international bar.

You know what I mean?

So they're lawyers.

Everybody wants an exact against the star.

You get to run the lawyers.

It was such a wonderful time.

I get the point, I get the point.

But I think we ought to do it.

I wanted to have something here.

We just haven't developed anything yet.

Tell you what, put our guy, our young federal leader,

to work with and talk to you, Charlie, or they talk to you now or so about the whole thing and things, what do you think ought to be in these?

You know it's a spongy area.

Spongy because everybody talks, everybody thinks different things in part for what you think we ought to say.

See my point?

And under the circumstances and the language is more important than anything else.

The commitment is more important.

This is the thing.

Now what you have to guard against is the feeling upon the part of the United States that they do not want to put the interests of the United States as vital interests under some international core body.

That is what we're talking about.

What we're really talking about is that where we have the

all sorts of conflicts that don't involve violators.

Nobody would suggest that no rule of law people would say that we're going to let a world court decide whether we build an ABM or something like that.

That's what we're talking about.

That's right.

That's what we're talking about.

The Minnesota spaceship happens to come down here.

Now what the hell is going to happen?

Are we going to go to war?

Are we going to have a war?

That's a very good example.

We had 3,000 people watching the Trump.

They televised it and really tripped.

And six lawyers from Japan, Italy, from the United States, and Yugoslavia.

It was terrific.

And, of course, the audience was delighted.

They got a big kick out of it.

And the court started asking these foreign lawyers questions, like they did to you at the Supreme Court.

But they're not used to being questioned.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

Well, yes, and this was the big, really, event of the whole thing.

It's kind of been a real, here we go, oh, it wasn't.

But another thing is, how does Berger think of this idea, in my opinion, such a talk?

I would discuss it with him, discuss it with him.

But I would think he'd be for it, very much in favor of it, because I think he would see, I went down to Williamsburg, and I was with Tom, Clark, and Berger, and put myself behind my whole, you know, reform, justice, and all that sort of thing, which they greatly appreciated.

You've got a prison report on there, but there's no law thing, Charlie.

There isn't any reason at all why we can't do it, Alan.

I mean, it's something that none of this doesn't cost us a cent.

It just puts the direction out there.

I'll tell you a poem that wrote a lot about it.

Pat and Dulles, both of them.

Go back and get what they both said.

I'm not saying you do it, but let's have some good research done.

And I'm thinking of something about 2004.

Dulles' last speech to New York Bar was on this.

The next time I see you guys,