Nixon & Kissinger on John B. Connally and International monetary system

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Connolly.

I think I shook him quite a bit.

Because he's a big man.

So, you know, it's nothing.

He's kind of a man.

You know, it's interesting.

You go to a small man around here, and he may not have been totally prepared.

And he, you know, you're on the side where Connolly will listen.

It's all right.

I mean, you really, really compare the Mar-a-Lago cabins people with the exception of Mitchell.

It's very confusing.

Well, exactly.

I said to him, I said, John, I couldn't care less whether you, whether they revalue by 12%, 20%, 2%.

If you ever hear me express an opinion on that subject, you know I'm out of my depth.

I want to put the foreign policy implications before you.

And the strategic problem now is not the rate of exchange, but whether we're going to have a positive program or whether we're going to wait and let the situation drift along.

Well, I think he basically agrees.

But he says, and he's right, that the disloyalty of the administration is such that everyone is cutting him out.

Oh, no, no, no.

He, you know, I told him, I'm not... No, no, he meant others are cutting him up outside, to the press, and to the foreigners.

Sure.

And therefore his game plan, which might work, just can't be carried to the absolute extreme.

I think he's ready to go and make a positive proposal.

Did you mention the Kromer?

I mentioned the Kromer thing, he found that interesting.

And he's mulling over two approaches now, either the Kromer approach...

over the approach that he makes of speech and that she puts out the proposal.

I told him it might be a little better to let it generate from the others, because if he makes a proposal, they'll bargain it down, while if they make one, he can bargain it out.

And it puts us into a better position.

I think the biggest problem over there is that he is fine.

But when he gets together with Volker and Walker,

They'll go back to the old Treasury lines.

And I suggest that he said he wanted to get together with me again this week.

No, we had, I stayed nearly two hours with him.

We had a very warm talk.

It's a level, wasn't it?

Did he have good feelings on this?

Good feelings.

On the trip, his intuitions, I mean.

I noticed he's thought so much of the Indonesians, and Saharo, and Saharo is how he wants to make the aid, so he can aid Cambodia, which is a too bad idea.

No, he's a proud man, and he,

He isn't, in all respects, easy to deal with, but he's a big man.

Sure.

And you don't have this little petty crap.

Sure.

I told him a little bit of what you went through last year.

Did you?

Yeah.

Good.

But what did he say?

Well, what did he think?

Well, he thinks, what I think, he thinks the only vulnerability you have next year is your extreme class.

That's what he told you.

And that permeates everything here.

They just don't think you're dangerous enough to tackle.

And, uh, E. Fields is unbelievable.

He's never seen anything like that.

And that was his view.

You ask him, I just tell him, here it is.

He says, he says, until somebody gets carried out feet first from your office someday, uh,

They just want to save us, and that in turn makes us vulnerable.

He feels, for example, I mean, I just told you that on foreign aid, we shouldn't have crafted our foreign aid.

We should have just attacked our foreign policy, our world roles.

I know what they would do.

No, no.

I think it was our first reaction.

That's what you approved that first night.

He had tremendous admiration for you and he was really very candid.

in general, so I would have thought he would have been candid to me, too, on this, too.

And he said it's just that softness in the administration that makes everyone cover his own rear end.

No one is out.

He said these guys ought to be out defending you, talking you up.

I'm just repeating what he said, and I did not put him up to it.

In fact, I didn't put him up to it, because the conversation, as far as I was concerned, was geared to the international situation.

And that, of course, he doesn't do.

He... Bill is very upset that we've been through a lot and so forth and so on.

I heard about the pitch.

I didn't hear about this affair.

That's the point.

Who's going to hit somebody?

Who's going to defend him?

Who's going to stand up to this thing?

And that's really the case.

We've got people that like to be liked.

They like to stay positive.

Now, Comrie steps up.

He's not an ex-Democrat, but he steps up better than anybody else.

Of course, you've got to realize that in the domestic field, of course, that you know that he's so expected to that doesn't come down.

Now, if Mitchell doesn't harass you,

I mean, mystery doesn't come weeping over him.

That story performed last week.

Well, he said it was unbelievable.

It was an unconscionable list of her heels.

to go through it.

Well, to put you through it when you have to get ready for television.

Yeah, hell, I was getting ready for a lot of other things too, not just that subject.

And they were worried about that, but then I had to answer questions on page two.

They didn't answer it fast enough, but I had to be prepared for it.

And everyone knows, Mr. President, that what we're doing is precarious.

So you're going to be great.

There's no good choice.

There is a question of which is the least bad.

We took the least bad.

And it makes things good.

Congressman Maynard called me.

They're voting on the Boland Amendment tomorrow.

It's the house version of the Manfield Amendment.

And he's worried that we may lose it.

Why the hell would we lose it?

I just can't understand why.

Well, I'm writing and getting a speech written for him.

I'm getting it over with.

Mr. Maynard.

I think, Mr. President, if they really screw us, if then there's going to be a deadlock this Friday, this Saturday,

You might consider going on television earlier and saying, this is what these guys did to us.

This is what these guys did to us the week before the last one.

The week before this one.

Discuss the Poland Amendment.

That's if it fails.

If it looks good, we...

But I think we'll get Connolly, I think Connolly will move in the right direction.

If Volker can be, I also suggested to him that we should let Schulte and I should start having our breakfast meetings again.

And I think he agreed to that, yeah.

I think it's very important.

See, he doesn't know a hell of a lot about the foreign policy side of this.

And he said he found our talking points, which I sent him to try to ask.

And he handled them very skillfully.

You know, he told me that he went in there in every case like a country boy.

And said the president asked Dr. Kissinger to prepare these talking points especially for you.

And then he just read them.

Which was very clever.

Much better than if he sounded as if he had said this himself.

Right.

Exactly.

And this, which also shows a certain kind of unselfishness.

And I'm really impressed.

It's very perceptive in his, in his comments.

How do you like it?

Okay.

It was so amazing to me how a man can think of himself in that category.

Unbelievable.

Well...

I think that's George Allen.

I saw him in the library.

Yeah, he was a great boss.

I took hands with him.

He's a good friend of Freeman's.

I think we're doing very well, Mr. President.

Well, that was outstanding.

That was really great.

And I've heard news.

We haven't seen time yet, and they've treated us very respectfully.

You know, they're sort of petty nitpicking around.

But, uh... Let me see.

Oh, got a big play, and it's all they hold.

They're writing it the way we want it written.

They say there's some unanswered questions.

What if I'm not able to go get help?

We know ourselves.

Now, the major thrust that comes across from the way we handled this last one and the way you handled the press conference is you're up to something, you have a strategy, you know what you're doing.

Then, of course, they can pick away at the fringes of it.

But if you had given the final announcement, they'd be roaring now.

They'd be introducing resolutions, and two a month would really be handsome enough.

It's, uh, there looks like no force is too big.

What are you going to do about the prisoners?

They know.

And we couldn't be more right.

And I think we're in basically good shape.

Connolly thinks you're unbeatable, except for the weakness of our own internal race.

Well, what do you think we should do?

Fire you?

Do you fire me?

I think you want to stay here.

I must say, in retrospect, I think we should...

I was against it, but I think we should have made a change in state last summer.

At that time, I thought we had it under control, and I...

It isn't just, well, either then or this year.

Oh.

This spring.

This summer.

Yeah, this summer.

It isn't so much that what Bill does, it's that everyone in his bloody department thinks they can take us on and lead, and they just don't build any of your loyalty.

On the other hand, one has to weigh the danger.

I don't know.

of having him out, and the fact that a new man couldn't really reorganize the department now.

Connolly thinks that this is a big weak spot.

He told me this practically.

He also thinks defense needs a strong man.

Those, he thinks, are the two.

He thinks those are the two big

to pick weak points, he says, no one, neither of these departments is up there fighting for you or out among the press fighting for you.

They're all out.

And one has to say, last week, particularly the defense, this really was their whole strategy of how they can get credit for themselves.

I don't know whether, I'm not sure that we ought to fire the cabinet member now.

It's too late.

But what they could be told is, you do this now.

You know, I told Rafin of the possibility, without saying it was a Russian offer, I packaged it as if it were a possible idea, and he ran back to Israel right away.

And he's now...

We've got a message that he's on his way back, and he has an order to see me straight off the airplane.

See now?

We don't know how much they're gonna pay.

Good.

Well, we'll grasp that one tonight.

Well, you haven't got all the facts yet.

We'll have to see what happens.

What's the next step on Connolly's list?

The next step on Connolly's list, I'm going to see him again this week.

What about those letters?

Ziggy, you heard he hasn't got the impression that they're trying to cut him from here.

Absolutely not.

That's what I said.

No, no, Mr. President.

He went over basically because, you know, he's a very perceptive fellow.

I told him that I frankly haven't gone with you into the detail I was going to attend.

I said, I'm not coming as the President's emissary.

I'm coming as your friend.

I said, I'm not going to give you any trouble.

I'm not going to work against you.

I'm not going to have a confrontation with you in front of the President or anything like this.

I'm telling you as a friend, you've now smashed the existing system.

No one would have had the guts to do it except you.

All these guys who are crying now would have settled last September for the cheapest term.

Now, I tell you, it is my judgment if you want to emerge as a statesman out of this, you have to move into the constructive phase.

It's always a question of timing.

And he said he agreed.

I said, I'm not in there to tell you.

He agreed, for example, that...

that there might be a 5% change in the price of gold.

Did it?

Yes.

As long as there's no convertibility.

I...

But that's one way it's going to go by.

How hard is it for you to argue this version?

Goddamn conceit is on the bridge that we can get into.

You do this with whom we do, Mr. President.

You can have a series of smashing meetings.

If we can get this sorted out before...

I hear you've got a great problem with Schultz, Schultz and Pierce.

Oh, you'll go along with it, huh?

Fighters.

Yeah.

I'll talk to him.

All right.

I'll play that live.

You see, Mr. President... You see, let me tell you about the price of gold.

I don't give a goddamn.

It's gold, chrome, and toilet paper.

As long as they can't concern it.

Well, it helps.

I'm using this.

Oh, of course, I'm straight.

My point is, I'm going to get into Pompidou, get something into him, and if we can do that, Jesus, that's great.

You see, the Germans...

are willing to do a 10% overall, but they cannot, they can do 10% against us, but they cannot do 10% against the French.

If we devalue 5% and they revalue 5%, then they're going only 5% against the French, but 10% against us, which is good.

While if they do a revaluation against everybody of 10%, that's too much for them.

And Connolly agrees with that.

I'm not worried about it.

5% doesn't worry about it.

No.

I said 3 or 4.

He said, no, Al, we can go up to 5 if we do it.

No, we didn't do that.

I got busted wide open that way.

Well, that's what I think you should do, Mr. Preston.

I think you should be the guy who puts the new international system together.

It'll be a floating system.

No, no, no.

It wouldn't be necessarily floating.

It would be

Well, how can it not be floating?

It's not convertible, it has to float.

Well, you could do it with SDRs.

That's convertible.

Well, that means it's a good thing to go in the present so that we can keep it open.

One of the things that you will take here is, you know,

For a future study, cutting the multinationally and transferring it to bilateral, I don't know what the hell's going to happen.

I think we're going to get the hell out of some of this multinationality.

I think it is, uh, it is, we are spending, I don't know, each of us should do as well as we've got.

And, uh...

Nixon & Kissinger on John B. Connally and International monetary system

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Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on November 15, 1971

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Nixon & Kissinger on John B. Connally and International monetary system

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on November 15, 1971

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