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Regardless.

Yeah.

He was invited to the meeting.

Originally he said he'd go ahead with the meeting.

Tom said he talked to you last night about it.

He said he couldn't come over.

He said he didn't swear.

No problem on it.

He doesn't have any suspicions about not being in the meeting.

Not at all.

See, he knows what the purpose of it is, which is pure prayer.

You know, it's just to get the thing going and be able to say, you've done okay.

And so then I checked back with John, and he goes, you're Bob, that John does not accept any of these things, right?

There's a great sensitivity there, which is created by the creator to be with John on his own.

John has said he has none with regard to you.

He has some with regard to John.

There's only one problem with his approach to California.

Don't tell John at all.

There's none there at all.

But John will spend over backwards.

He'll be sure to deny his path.

Not that his people know of it.

Pharaoh does anything that even touches upon history or economics.

John understands that.

Keep working on it.

Have you ever seen a problem there?

Elizabeth, is that the one I really worry more about, not General, not as much as Chelsea.

But Chelsea, they told you to go show some comedy, both.

That the traitor people are fighting for all the time, and they have created some doubts in comedy's mind, so do they help her on the show.

And he told us that he could come up with an idea to buy it online.

Tell us more about it.

Yes, he told me that he came up with something.

Good.

I've heard a study on after phase two.

Yeah.

Oh, oh, John.

John.

Yeah.

Well, Sheltz moved right in and spoke that one, and Connie called Sheltz after me and said, are you sure, like, that George had just spoken up?

But he said, Connie didn't feel easy.

This is an interesting point.

Connie said, I didn't feel I should say anything to me because I didn't think it was my place to take on the vice-chairman.

All right.

And so he did face it.

He was very pleased, or at least Pope George was.

He was very pleased George was.

So these guys are looking for this, you know, to try and maintain this the way it works.

The Vice President said that how you get to the places where labor is hollow and all that sort of thing.

And that's fine.

But why the Christ would you do something that you're not going to even think about and raise how old people prior to the election?

Now that's, well that's a terrible thing.

You can't do it.

It is a trouble, you know.

It's not so hard to learn.

It's not as long as making a study of time if you don't tell anybody.

Because it isn't long.

If you make a study of people with no time, there is no such thing as good.

Well, the one fault over here is that Tom's got photocopies.

Some of the others is a problem.

It's a main problem.

It's not their fault, I understand.

He's told, he's been told, he's the chief economic man.

He's got to be.

He's got to be called.

He said, is the vice president trying to move in to become the economic spokesman?

Is that what this was all about?

And Schultz said, no, of course not.

explains from the history of the White House.

But I'm surprised.

I had a good talk with the Vice President yesterday.

We can establish a basis now where he will talk to me so he doesn't feel what he's being had by the White House people and all that.

I think that's probably pretty good.

To save my time, but I actually wanted to see anything about it.

I think he's got an idea that we ought to have cooperation with the Congress with regard to get the Congress to pass legislation declassifying the differences in declassification, but with a presidential classification that the Secretary of State

He asked you, I had an objection to his talking to me, the Senators, and others on his own.

It's his own idea.

And that they'd be allowed to say that he didn't like my recommendation.

And I said, well, I told you about the Redcliffe study.

I told you to go talk to Redcliffe on the private pages.

And then to talk to her and then Dean about it, who I said were working on an entire shot.

He mentioned that he had no problem getting to it.

They should be handled like that, but they're not treated like that.

He came up with an interesting, he may be totally wrong bit of intelligence, but we'll get to the, uh, what we do about it.

He subscribed to it, which is that Walter Moser from, you know, he knows all the staff people, uh, reported to Clark that Muskie's AA had been talking with him and that Muskie is about to launch a major charge against the president.

the next report in four or five days regarding the Anderson papers.

He knows who the culprit is, he says.

Stole the papers.

He's going to accuse the president of covering it up.

say that there's a double standard of morality, that the administration moved to prosecute Ellsberg, who did something in the past that wasn't vital and is not.

And it's protecting Anderson from something that is vital and is current.

And then he's going to identify the culprit, who is the Secretary of Defense.

And he said, if it isn't the Secretary of Defense, it's the Secretary of State.

He's going to say, it is a cabinet officer, a member of the cabinet.

That's a good one for us.

He's on the right track, but on the wrong looking track.

And that way, we could kill him with this.

We could really, really, really kill him with it.

Well, that's my inclination, is that sucking him out on it would be fine.

The other thing is that he may be muddying the water to a fat and may know more than you think.

There's so many people know who that guy is that I'm kind of concerned that Thomas and Edward Wilkes are going to come out.

Mitchell and Earl get together a second minute.

Well, there's just a story.

I mean, yeah, but what excuse do we have for that?

I know that.

I don't say that.

That's what I'm just saying.

Why don't we say that we did it for that purpose?

Yeah, I don't know.

I'm not at all sure.

See, we've gone on the assumption you can't nail a guy because it would hurt the Joint Chiefs.

I think we've got to reopen that assumption and consider whether we can nail a guy and under what circumstances.

And maybe we should.

If you've got both the right and the left navigating this, why don't we find a guy and nail him?

The thing that I think about, this is maybe the joint use that they deserve to be invented.

So he'll go out and say he did it to the joint use and put it away, saying, well, they exceeded his orders.

Sure, he'll deny it.

I don't know you can prove it on the spot.

You really haven't got anything to prove except holograms.

That's right.

We don't think we have a case on him doing it.

We have a case that convinces us, but we don't have a case that's actually in the court.

That's another problem.

And that's the answer we have, that we have ideas, but we have no, I think, no standard in the court to give no witnesses.

It's very easy for a politician to go out in the sun and make cheap charges that he doesn't have to defend.

Secretary of State.

I hope he hits it on that.

The other danger there, though, is that Laird, who is out to get some of the chiefs anyway, if he attacks Laird, he'll probably go out and defend himself, but not publicly, certainly.

Right.

Another interesting development in a different direction.

I don't know that much of these people, I don't know if in Christ they go for defense or state.

If he says it that way, it will sound like straight McCarthyism.

On the other hand, we find that the prosecution is false.

If, if, if we could get any proof.

One thing is we don't have any proof about it.

You don't have a confession from him.

You haven't been able to scare a confession out of him.

I should know a little bit of the Anderson Papers.

I don't know why.

I just think it's one of those things.

Parts are out of college.

The Anderson Papers business has come off

I think it's one, mostly the other way, that to what extent it's still alive, it's on the basis that it was a bad thing to do, even, you know.

Well, I don't know.

Could be.

You know, what's going wrong now is, I don't know, when he gets back, is the trend now that what's gotten him very disturbed.

And he's still, he's playing down the question.

I don't know.

How he's planning to get Henry Hart when he gets back tonight.

And try to shake him up.

And then Mitch and I are going to meet with him first thing tomorrow morning.

What's his press conference about?

About the idea that the rest of the column, the rest of them are pushing the thesis now that the China opening is the key to Nixon's bid for re-election as a man of peace.

He was determined not to oppose Pakistan and risked the possibility that China would call off the trip.

There was a conflict between Nixon's world military strategy and his domestic campaign strategy.

Considerations of the presidential politics prevailed.

The short-range political advantages of protecting China and reaching a limited condensation with China were decisive.

The argument is that reaching even the beginnings of an understanding... What if Henry is wrong, though?

He thinks that we would say, no, he thinks it's wrong.

Well, that's definitely wrong.

I know, but he feels that it has to be answered.

My idea is that if it answers the answer, it ought to be answered by Satan, then Rogers will answer.

But what they're pushing very hard is that, you know, he says the fears are groundless, that you're not going to be king to sell out and all that, you're going to create an atmosphere of conciliation and with it the basis for your own re-election.

So he says that the Chinese trip will look good on satellite television from the Forbidden City, even if it settles nothing at all.

Bob, it's your turn to speak.

I'm going to say everything that I can.

I can't really say this.

If there's something else, they didn't say this.

Go ahead.

Well, the Times editorial takes a different tack.

They say that the Nixon-Kissinger approach, failing Pakistan over India, brought about precisely what their objective was to foresaw, which was a Soviet victory and a major increase in Soviet influence in the Indian Ocean.

That was Kissinger's overriding concern.

All right, fine, fine, fine.

That's there to do.

Everybody's going to do it.

All right, but the problem we've got is Henry reads all these.

I've been trying to stay one step ahead of him.

He just spooks all this out of me.

And he's told Ron that he wants a press conference set up very long and that he's going to set the record straight or clear up the skeletons or something like that.

And all of us agree that he should not do it.

He's not in the right shape to do it, even if it were desirable to do it.

But we'll see.

We'll talk to him.

Well, the point that I'm concerned about how, in these circumstances, can we go with the Tuesday thing and reviewing the only one free bond?

I think by Tuesday, there's, again, all the real cards being read on Tuesday.

Sub-surface merits and demerits.

The demerit of the problem over at State is a problem.

The problem that merit over here seems to me to be one that's there too.

It gets Henry back on a different subject.

But publicly it puts Henry back in a...

away from the posture of the South Asian failure era, to the extent that anybody is concerned about that, and back into the, uh, the kind of doing all these intricate negotiations, you know, that sort of stuff.

Which is more hell along the way, I think.

Well, Larry's right.

He's a wall-monger.

Does he love him?

I, uh, I, uh, had a long talk with him.

I just give him a lot.

He did very well.

He's so good at what I do.

He made the point.

This was, you know, the raid.

They asked about the raid.

He said, well, the initial raid was 10, and this is 23, and the president's proceeding exactly the way he said he would proceed without any question.

He handled the matter, the North Vietnamese buildup and the reports on the attacks very well.

He said a long time ago, when he returned from Vietnam...

was pointed out that they expected that, but at that time he said the Arvin were capable.

The President feels the administration is going well.

He said the Arvin aren't going to win all of the battles.

We expect some spectaculars, as is the case this time of the year, but we feel the Arvin overall are ready to defend themselves.

So he did a good job on that.

The POW, the only thing he said is, as the President said, there will be a remaining force in South Vietnam until the POWs are released.

He also made the point that the

He's not going to predict what will come after May.

He's made a habit of not predicting.

So it was pretty straight along that line.

Cambodia, he sort of talked around that a little bit by saying that the Cambodian army was the fastest growing army in the history of the world from 10,000 or whatever it is to 200,000, and that people have been saying Cambodia is going to fall for a long time.

The North Vietnamese have made more advances than in the past, but he feels they could hold.

So it was, you know...

Straightforward and a good assessment, but I think in a positive way.

They were, of course, anxious to get out.

They only told them to take 15 minutes.

This is 70,000, which is the right number.

Sure.

It's a little more than the rest.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

He just made the point, see?

Hello, they weren't screaming.

Yes, he made that point in connection with the possibility of the Tet Offensive and the traditional increased activity.

that the Arvin are well-trained, well-equipped, and are capable of conducting the defense there.

No, it's the defensive side of that.

That Van House outcome does a superb job of setting up the Tet offensive.

What was that?

Well, I take the point that if the North, East, and East were out for military, they'd go into the 1st or 2nd Corps.

Yeah.

And Secretary Larrick remarks, they checkmated the critics because we have said now,

that we expect spectacularly.

He made that point.

He said when you came into office, he mentioned the figures.

that were in Vietnam when you came in.

And he also said there are 11 divisions when you came in.

He said now there's no active combat force in Vietnam.

He does a good job.

He does.

He's just very grueling and straightforward and deceitful.

I will take your time now that I talked to Mrs. Nixon this morning about the interview.

My judgment of it was the way it came over the air was a real plus.

They led in

into it with the talking about the success of the trip and they showed some of Ali's slides and talked in the first part about the African trip.

This was Nixon's venture on the Ivory Coast I thought was very sensational because it showed not only did she go there and shake hands and

It was well received, but she knew what she was talking about.

She told me more than I knew about the argument.

It was so good, and the way the question was asked set it up so well that it really looked like a loaded thing, because, boy, Barbara Walters said, we don't know anything about it.

We know about Liberia, and we know something about it.

But we don't know much about Liberia.

We've never heard anything about Liberia.

Do you know anything about it?

This has next been shot.

She talked about when it was settled in the apartment.

The other thing in the current situation, and I look at it very critically, and I've had other people do it, and I think that she came off very poised, very relaxed, and smiling.

This, by a wide margin, is the best...

I talked to her already.

Yes, I told her all this.

And I thought she handled herself with great confidence on the woman's question on women.

And the remarks about you, the China thing, they asked her what she felt was the most significant statistic, and she knocked that out of the park with a breakthrough in China that she'd been working three years on it.

She had good remarks about what the meaning of the China initiative was and the Soviet Union, and it was good.

I want you to get a massive press coverage.

we're working on that right of the uh he said he got some damn good figures will anybody use this yes i think so the other time and with today we're going to have full camera coverage of the 230

large meeting, and then we'll have a separate photo of the five leaders of the... All right.

No, sir.

Incidentally, I talked to Connie, and Connie apparently talked to Barbara Walters last night, who was very cooperative in handling the statements of the interview that Mrs. Nixon would be comfortable with.

So I think that is important.

And Barbara said, Barbara Walters said apparently to Connie that

She wanted to cooperate on that.

She understood that there were some questions that were not agreed to.

And I think the interview showed that she didn't... All right, fine.

I'm good.

Okay, thanks for asking.

I'm glad Larry did well.

He did.

Tell him that you talked to me and that I thought he did well and that you showed him the transcript.

Okay, you call him now.

I'm calling.

Okay.

I'll tell you what I had to do with him, you know.

He can't have a press conference, but now he can get Frank to laugh.

In other words, my answer to him is the same.

Me too.

That's what you always do.

Yeah, two or three?

Yeah.

You have Frank Lennison, now Frank will have the rest of their competitors and all the rest.

But for Henry to go out and have a press conference, you know another thing, he thinks this is a lot bigger than the Public Consciousness Center to be a response about.

I don't think it's that goddamn big view.

I mean, what Henry Kissinger's role in this and what it's just had to do with China and all that bullshit.

It's a huge commitment.

No, it's not.

He's dropped out of TV for it's, you know, TV is, it's done to him.

Well, I think that's right.

Absolutely.

And that's now, with regard to your only talk to Mitchell earlier about what?

About the Miss Muskie.

I think you really get down to the key thing.

No use to talk about prosecution if you don't have a case.

And I think that's the problem here.

I think we've got a total, a perfect circumstantial case, and a totally inadequate, illegal case.

So what are you going to do?

Bring the guy in and have him lie?

See?

There's no point bringing him in and having him perjure himself and then trying to prove that he just sent 60 miles in.

Now, you've got that high tide case against him, or you've got to forget about him.

You've got to find something.

He's got to admit something.

And we're going to move on him afterwards anyway, hopefully.

But, well, the thing is, the only way to move on him is to move on Anderson.

You move on him together, then you get Anderson in.

And then Anderson's either got to plead assault or criminalization, which would kill him.

or prison, which will also kill him.

So you have to hand it down to the guy who knows.

Here, John, there are only two who know.

It's here.

Okay.

Boy, it must be rough before we let go of God and man.

Hey.

Henry says here not to let go.

You know, like Mark said, there's only one thing he needs to show you is our problem, and it's not that problem.

of course if you can't, it's over, it's sensationalizing, and it's a cover-up, and then we're going to have a real problem with regard to the reappointment of McNamara, and oh, this is the wife of the White House bussing.

Then I read this or something, and I saw what it said, that Henry Kissinger got the president to endorse McNamara.

Now that's only come from Henry Kissinger.

Also,

I also look at my left and tell you, John Collins, John Collins really, I know, I know that Henry started it, but Henry just put it out.

I've gotten at him, he just, this is, this is, Henry for publicity is really,

It's worse than we realize, Bob.

It really is.

He put that out.

I gave him instructions.

I said, Henry, I'll be forward.

Because we can't defeat you.

So you can let me know privately.

But I said, we can't go to public because there's a race out on the right.

I'll never forget it, I said.

That's right.

And I told him this.

I told Connick.

Connick kept his goddamn lip up.

So Henry had to go strut around in the press.

He had told the president.

But you know Dan Roe and Bobby does some of this stuff, doesn't he?

Yes.

Yes, he does.

He does.

Probably not as much as we think he does, but he does.

No question.

This Nooch-Topper thing now is his first set of trying to do the thing you want, which is to go to the big story or big two or three stories of the day that deserve attention.

Remember, you said you had it.

Instead of just doing the jury, you wanted a judgment call.

Yeah.

And that's what he's trying to do.

He says, first, the Vietnam death situation.

That's right.

The other big story is the Richmond decision, which has far-reaching implications.

That's right.

Very good.

So he's also got, of course, the refinance of the draft, like the space tension over the restoration.

So he's confused.

There's no lack of attention to a description.

Well, except he had a couple years to put in.

I told Johnson, which is sort of surprising, I said, it wasn't one of our judges.

He said, you told him that.

I said, it wasn't.

I said, has anybody gotten it out?

Of course nobody's gotten it out.

God damn, it's a Democratic judge.

It wasn't for Johnson.

And that's the thing, don't you agree, that kind of interest, if you get out here, right?

Let me ask you four things again.

Now, it's easy to get out because the Libs all think it's a great landmark decision, so they'll think they're giving the Democrats credit by giving them the appointment.

Can I ask you this?

What are your feelings about getting back to the Henry King?

It was the best of what he could say, and I love it.

answer the same thing and get in Frankl, who will be enormously rich, rather than going out and make a press thing and then have that be the big story.

If you don't mind his doing that, I think that's the ideal.

I'm all for a compromise, and I fall for it.

It's true to true.

I argue that we ought to do a white paper type thing.

Kate thought that was a good idea.

The white paper should be in the state of the word.

Well, I tried that, and then Kate tried it on Henry, and Henry said, no, that's the wrong place for it.

It doesn't give it the proper, it doesn't fit that format or something.

So I told Henry that before he was all for it, and that was the last one.

He probably saw that as being a way to lose his press conference.

He wants to have his press conference.

But I think the Franklin thing will do it.

Because I would give him, if he does more than that, he's going to spread it to a hell of a lot of people that are no longer running for government.

And that's not a contention.

But the rest of the line...

that we'll do anything in order to save China.

This is not the first time it's been read.

And it's been read about the Russian trip, too.

And they're all going to keep reading about it.

It's a logical dynamic.

And everybody says the China trip is pure George Meany.

It's pure politics.

What the hell are they talking about?

I'm just gonna do the best you can.

I want to be fair to you.

You got anything you want to add on that?

You really don't?

I don't.

But you really didn't share any of it, right?

You really don't know either, because there's actually one of those.

The what?

The one I'm not sure you were referring to.

Oh, okay, because we didn't just infer it.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's cold, right?

And it's brittle and it's a different color.