Conversation 650-012

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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.

I can tell you the kind of things we're proposing and the types of problems that are

I don't think that's right.

The people on the West Coast are

So we're sort of discouraged.

However, they are meeting again tomorrow.

And the issue that separated them is a relatively narrow one.

It involves...

I don't know if you're hearing what it is.

They have this year's Dictionary dispute now.

We have a long term on the team.

And we thought that that had been cured by the merger of the two.

Bridges went back to the West Coast, however, it was indicative for it.

He had to come on board, and they turned him down.

So in the bargaining, they worked out a device whereby whenever that work that was in conflict was performed by a non-long-term, there would be a tax on the employer, and that tax would go into a fund.

Now, the employers, as part of their contract, have a work guarantee to the workers.

They set up a fund, and they guarantee to pay people a certain wage through the year.

So the employers agreed, all right, we'll be glad to pay that tax, and if teachers are used, then we'll pay into the fund.

But it'll be the fund as defined in our work guarantee.

we will set up a settlement fund for it.

And there's about $5 million, apparently, of where would that go?

And we can, and that was the nature of the issue that they hung up on.

It was a, I think, a rather clever device, I don't know who thought of it, for handling a jurisdictional dispute, but it didn't pan out, but it was close enough so that it seems to me that

there's always a possibility that they might go out and go back and work it out themselves.

I don't see anyway how, unless you wanted to make a big thing out of it with your State of the Union or something of that kind, how we would be in a position to go forward with legislation prior to the State of the Union.

And so Friday would be perhaps our earliest day, Friday and Monday or Tuesday and then.

And I think if it's going to come together, it should be.

I just want to be sure that we are not considered to be laggard here and soft on the agents and all that sort of thing because of the doctorate people have fed up.

Oh, everybody is fed up.

Bridges has always been overruled by these radicals.

So the main thing I'm concerned about is not the legislation, it's the rhetoric at the moment.

And maybe you've got to get something that Zegers can say that's damn tough.

Well, we've got something we aren't doing very well.

It doesn't matter what area it is, we used to do right in most cases, but we don't seem to get there.

So that creates the impression that we aren't doing much.

I know it's hard to get right through the media walls, but on this one, we've just gotten to be having drawn the sword by

at least at least say that we're doing something, you know what I mean?

Not saying, well, we're studying it and I have nothing to say now because it's Joe after this and that, you know what I mean?

Don't give him a half-assed answer.

Because if I thought that this was uncomfortable, the Congress should get busy and pass our legislation.

In the meantime, if it isn't settled, I would drop the term.

We're trying to go over drastic legislation.

In other words, something like that.

A very strong statement should go.

I mean, don't worry.

We all worry about programs and substance use out here.

They don't mean a goddamn thing in terms of what really matters.

And what really matters in this part of the issue is what people think.

And what they think is that we aren't doing a hell of a lot right at the moment because we failed.

So that's all I care about.

I don't care.

The legislation will go up next month.

I mean, I don't think that's going to happen anyway.

But I'd sure like a little good rhetoric on it, give it a panel.

We did some of that yesterday.

I've written a statement, and Silverman, who was here on Arizona, briefed on it.

And today, Governor McCaul is

And we're hoping to arrange some kind of a forum where he can express the concern of the West Coast government about this and call on the Congress to pass a legislation that's been before them or to pass special legislation or in one way or another to deal with it.

And I think we would be ready to go Friday.

The date of the legislation isn't wrong.

It's only been reverent.

So we're driving kind of reverent by all the time we want.

Well, I think that we have made it so clear that we're tired of this strike that we really can't just sit around, as you said, and try and say that, well, we

waiting for the Congress to pass the legislation.

We have to do something different.

And more than that, I think that the sort of thing that we would have to do probably is to have an arbitration bill that establishes either a single or a tripartite arbitration board, probably best a single board.

It would have to have the jurisdiction over the jurisdictional discretion, so it would

the arbitrators that have been involved in the teen suits and the loan sharks.

It is possible to put this over to the NLRB, but since it's been part of the bargaining, it's probably best to just leave it to the arbitrator, we think.

Now, there is a big and, I think, critical issue

Hello.

Well, how are you?

Well, we're glad you're all back in town and in good health on such a beautiful weather day.

Right.

Yes, well, that could be.

Oh, that's right, that's right.

Well, I tell you, we'll contribute to some good cause, like the funds, like the athletic fund at the University of Michigan so they can buy us.

No, no, I mean compensated adequately to the quarterback.

Now, that quarterback was all right.

And I saw on TV, it was a good thing, wasn't it?

Yeah.

Boy, I love the sections with the notes.

They were magnificent.

It was great.

Quite a mass of stuff we're going to do.

I'll be down.

I'd like to be down Tuesday, I mean Thursday at 12.30 if you know.

I'm not going to hold you.

I'm not going to.

Hello, how are you?

Glad to have you back.

Yeah, that's all good.

Yeah.

The only trouble was that they didn't have enough of them.

Well, you're better at kickball, you're better at football games, you're better at poker.

That's right.

I'm always for the home team.

But this time, it's the Cowboys.

Nobody's going to beat them for years.

do something it's different i'm going to give you and it's so that my oral message will not be as an incredible length we're going to give you a written message too you remember except until woodrow wilson except for jefferson all messages that you recall were written but this isn't right the combination will be good we'll give you that tomorrow and the other one on thursday

Okay.

Well, we'll look forward to seeing all of you.

And don't do anything like that, please.

Okay?

Fair enough.

Yeah.

You know, it's one thing I want to say to all you folks.

It's very surprising to me, though, that the House is a much bigger body than the Senate.

You've got 435, they've only got 100.

And yet they've got 10 times as many presidential candidates.

Now, what's the matter with you guys?

Huh?

I think the key issue is the relationship between the arbitrator and the payboard.

The money on the table, by considerable, exceeds any conceivable payboard standards.

So an arbitrator

is either going to have to rule for less than the union has already turned down, or he's going to have to rule something that violates the standards of the pay board.

And it poses, I think, an extremely difficult issue, as we recognize even back at Camp David, that it would for the pay board to handle.

That's right.

So our approach is this, to have the arbitrator instructed to go ahead and arbitrate the dispute in a manner consistent with the Economic Stabilization Act.

Leave the payboard out of it.

And to have his ruling be final and binding and not subject to anybody's review, not subject to the payboard's review or anybody's review.

and thereby to get the pay board off the hook because they won't be able to handle this case and know that it's just too much for them.

Now, the tricky thing about that is that it may be said that we're

We're going around the payboard or we're showing a lack of confidence or something of that kind.

Several strikes.

I think that this approach, which is the one we're on right now, is promising.

You're right.

You're totally right.

Absolutely.

Don't worry about going around the payboard.

All right.

Then we'll proceed on this, and we'll probably be ready to go ahead on Friday in introducing it.

Good.

It will get a big hue and cry.

I agree with you on that.

I think they are in a very weak position to argue and cry about this.

Well, I'll proceed to see that we get as much noise as possible, Nate, about the...

I believe it's a great squeal about the irresponsibility, the tragedy, the...

With all the misery that was caused by the Dock Strike, we just can't let it happen again.

Call for action.

Maybe some of those poor goddamn miserable Republicans might get up and say to us, McCall, uh, McCall, he's got to actually adjust to that purpose.

How about you?

How about some of our Congress Senators and others that are supposed to be down there for the purpose of getting our legislation through in that sense?

We...

We may also be able to parlay our basic legislation onto this, because there are a lot of people in the Congress who say that they're not going to vote on another ad hoc settlement unless it is combined in some manner.

with a more fundamental addressing of the problems now.

But later committees will do it.

But if they get anything out on the floor, that can be amended.

And there are some, I think, who are ready to

tack your bill onto something like this and make the Senate...

Develop one very brief sentence, no more than 15 words, to, uh, to have...

I give it to Price, because he's dilly-dallying around now, and I'm getting to 4 o'clock to get me an absolutely total final draft with no changes, you know, because I can't do any more, because I've got to work on something else tomorrow, and something's come up.

But could you give me one sentence?

Did we have something in there on transportation?

Just say the resumption of the West Coast Giant Bunker, of the total irresponsibility of the need for action now, or something, which might have been in our history.

Can somebody put some purple language in there?

I don't know whether I'm using it or not, but that's all right.

Oh, can I mention one other thing?

I have to say that the IBA, which had both Connelly and Durst, talked about...

of the ceiling on expenditures.

And for it, I think it's good politics.

It's not going to happen, of course.

But I believe that it should not be inducted in the State of the Union because it will be lost there.

It will be one of several stories.

I think it should be a major lead in the budget message.

And I'd like for you to prepare the strongest possible, strongest, simplest,

unequivocal language possible, other than just a ceiling on expenditures for the administration, for the Congress, and for, without any state patches.

Now, as we know, this has been recommended for, as you recall, the only time that anybody came close to it was in 68.

There were several congressional state patches then.

The one in 69 was not a ceiling on the Congress.

It was only on the administration.

I think that the view of the

rather substantial benefit.

This will be a very secondary thing to do, and it should be a major lead in whatever.

I mean, we'll sort of let it get out if you're thinking about this.

But I tend to say that the State of the Union is not the place they were recommending that because I know what happened in the State of the Union.

We've got so many things that are said that

That'll be lost, but it could be a good standard in the budget.

The major thing in the budget will be how much the deficit is.

Secondly, it could be ceiling on expenditures.

Of course, so too...

Give me something on that.

I will.

We have a technical problem at this point.

He's already done it.

The button, well, it's on the press.

The press is rolling.

That is a problem.

Well, I did.

When I said it in the budget message, I should say that let's just add that.

Let's just add that as a presidential statement to accompany it.

See what I mean?

And then we'll get a bigger one.

Don't put it in the budget message.

that view of this, uh, view of the dust and so forth that I've told them on the Congress is a matter of urgency to put on the scene.

You don't have to put up with the questions.

All right.

No, I understand.

We have a hell of a press conference that Connolly and I traditionally, as Secretary of Treasury, if I could give.

Thank you, Mark.

If we could have the presidential statement, I have a statement for the president on the budget at this stage, and then they'll ride that hard.

That's very good.

All right.

Let me see the language on that.

And I'll try to gussie it up a little bit like Jack did.

So it's as unequivocal and strong as

I'll get Pat to do the first draft, and you can be sure it'll be on again.

Yeah, right.

Right.

Yeah, he's good at words, too.

Very good.

He's not really good, but he's really good.

I think a big thing will be that a statement of that kind will have to stand behind at least for a month or so.

Absolutely.

And fight.

Absolutely.

And there's going to be a lot of fighting to do very fast on the budget.

And I say that because the budget fighters, so to speak, have taken our lumps.

We take our lumps instead.

Yeah.

But I mean, now that we get it out and we see this huge deficit and all the rest, let's just stand our ground and fight like hell.

All right.

I'll get that right up and back to you.

The cabinet meeting that we have scheduled for Thursday afternoon, I had thought of two parts, so to speak.

One is kind of a budget briefing showing people what the main features of the 73 budget are and the dimensions and everything.

And then second, showing the departments how much they have actually expended in fiscal year 72 so far

and how much it allows them.

Because the way this usually goes is the cabinet officers fight like the devil to get budget authority.

And they scream and they yell and so on.

And then once they've got it, they hoard it.

And you come to the end of the year, and they think it's a great thing that they don't spend it, or they pour it all out in June.

Defense is among...

It was a culprit.

And the message, it seems to me, we want to give is we've got such an authority.

we're taking our looking on the deficit and so forth now for god's sake let's spend it get it out into the stream of experience i thought that i might give a little lecture along those lines oh i think that's i remember you mentioned this before and i'm totally for it and i'll back it all the way believing we're going to sell them because that might happen and also we need a

We've been doing that for the last two months.

We have got them going now, finally.

All right.

I have a couple of other questions.

Sure.

Pete Peterson, in thinking about his role in the Commerce Department, wants to emphasize the competitiveness of American industry.

He sees that as a good transition from his international job to his commerce job.

That seems sensible to me.

Sure.

In that connection, he would like to take over the chairmanship of the Productivity Commission, which has been something that I've had.

I have been the chairman.

That is a potentially good commission.

For the first time, it's authorized and has funding.

And by this time, we have been doing, and there's been a lot of visibility to it, but we've been doing quite a little work so that it is in a stage where a fair amount can be made out of it.

There's something to draw on by way of genuine work going on.

There's a productivity effort in the steel industry.

There's one in the construction industry that you'll hear about.

I hope we have a Smithsonian thing going.

We have quite a few

efforts underway.

Now, I can see how that would fit in with his ideas and plans and ambitions, and I'm more than ready to turn that over to him.

But before getting down the track on it, I thought I'd better just check and see if you have any particular reaction to that.

It ought to be checked, but we're not doing it.

Well, that's the reason why I think I must have been asked to do it in the first place, was that if it's labor, that's one thing, and if it's commerce, that's another, and if that's the case, it's not.

The old Labor Management Committee under the Kennedy administration was chaired in all but a year by Labor and Commerce.

They passed it back and forth.

And that was not particularly successful because it just broke all the continuity to do that.

But he has a pretty good image, I think.

He has a lot of energy and he's very interesting.

He was looking for a chance.

Well, I'll explore it.

I'll explore it with Connolly and Hudson in particular.

I think he would like to have this said.

when his appointment is announced, so I'll get busy on it, and it can be swept all right by all.

Well, I'm afraid I'm at fault there, but I've had a short tether in terms of what the announcement will be on him, and I've asked him to clear his post-presidential statement with the company, and then let me know.

And he hasn't gotten it in yet.

And so I just told everybody that he's not, no problem.

See, we reacted to a memo that he wrote you.

And we're just thinking about, if he doesn't have a new counsel, if he can't do a lot of things, if he doesn't have a new counsel, he's got too many now.

It would have been a heavy trespass on Hudson and on John Lee and on a lot of people.

And I said, the president feels this is not appropriate.

And .

So he said, well, it's a more of a department I need to launch from the White House and so on.

And I said, well, Pete, I think we ought to talk specifics.

I think we ought to talk specifics.

If you have something that you want the president to say when you're in the House, let's see it.

And there's any point in bringing it here to the president's review until Comey's review.

So I said, all right, follow the steps.

And also, if the pages aren't crunching and crunching, as we see, well, we can kind of look out for him.

He's out of time.

Well, we can do it with your own opinion.

I'll watch out for that.

It's going to be, it's going to be, I mean, Peterson is a self-starter, of course.

That's fine.

He's not going to come in.

Yeah, he is safe when I'm talking about him.

Council of Competition.

Well, that's about as jackass as I do.

It was a move.

It was a trespass.

And it would have taken over, as he spelled it out, there were some other aspects of this memo would have taken over employment as his special province.

Well, they just got rid of it.

That's a joint offer.

So, I would like just to provide

He's getting this into us, and he's getting it around the column.

Take your time.

It's no secret that any of this is a question of breaking news, and so you just announce it when it comes.

And if it's next week, that's fine.

No problem at all.

The only reason I was in all of those questions is because we wanted to make an announcement.

I said, well, I said, there's no news in there.

He called me.

But it's foolish.

You don't make a deal now.

You never make it later.

It's a problem.

You know, somebody walks in and thinks he's going to have this portfolio and that portfolio and that one.

That's something that Peterson talked to me long and hard about in terms of his role vis-a-vis business and planning his role in the future of vis-a-vis business.

And he's already talked to me, the Canada officer,

The thing to do there is to let him have his role.

But just don't plan to do just what he's been doing.

I don't get why.

All this crap about who's going to be in charge is nuts.

Well, but planning to do just what he's been doing seems to be a...

It goes to the job, I guess.

Well, that's what everybody likes to think.

It's my role.

So the result is what he talks over.

And 99 out of 100 of them get called.

So we have all the people talking to him.

Still not set about that.

Well, I'll take your time.

Wait till next week.

No problem at all.

No straight.

Yeah, no straight.

And, uh, you know, on the budget thing, uh, they said George, I don't know.

Straighten it a little.

he made the suggestion that you might want to

make a brief opening statement about the budget for television, and then to be followed by a briefing that Tom and I would do.

This kind of a statement would be a possibility for that, and he wanted to consider something of that kind.

Actually, it's Monday.

The budget is Monday.

You have a signing ceremony at 10.30, I believe, Monday morning, and the press comes in and takes pictures of that event and you're setting the budget up.

You could bluntly write a TV press in and make that statement right then and there if you wanted to.

You can move it in until they get the press room.

Put the desk up there.

Place the building.

When I get the statement, I'll be sitting at the desk with Mr. George Hewitt, calling the commissioner to agree to meet me at the press meeting.

The way it's done, the press gets embargoed copies probably on Friday, possibly even Thursday night.

And they then come to an embargoed, on-the-record press conference.

It will be Saturday morning at 10 o'clock, held over at the State Department Auditorium.

It's quite a big group.

Last year, when I did it, Dave Kennedy didn't want to come, so I carried him.

It went on for about two and a half hours, and so I already sensed a thing.

Some are specialists, and they have their strength.

It's a pretty good thing now, of course.

Well, I don't see how you were to come over there and do something which would break as a new thing, which might be desirable, but that would be...

Well, I think it would be good if it was a presidential statement.

I don't know what you're going to say if you don't want to ask that.

Well, a presidential statement read by you or said by you at the time you signed the budget

wouldn't get a big plug, particularly if you did it so that the cameras got set up there, as John suggested.

Suppose I get up the statement and then also try to think of the various ways in which it could be put out and send that in to the station.

It has to be about one minute, because if you're going to make a show, it has to be about about something like a minute, minute and a half.

I'm getting more than I use, or otherwise I use the wrong thing, the right thing.

What's your feeling about Hayward?

Are you as discouraged about his arguments?

I don't know how discouraged Arthur is, but I guess he's pretty discouraged.

It's a question of what you anticipated.

I didn't anticipate that they were going to be able to cut these settlements to the right and left and get away with it.

Arthur seemed to think that he could just stand up and...

cut everybody down to 5% no matter what was going on.

I never thought that that would be the case.

I think if expectations could be adjusted a little bit to reality, the aerospace work that they've done represents progress.

Of course, I think that the construction industry people have made remarkable progress.

Well, in our constituency, is that to be a failure?

Well, I think if you get the level of settlements from 19% to 10%, you've done a hell of a lot.

Sure.

Some such thing as that, and they're pointing downwards.

So it's a question of expectation.

I think the situation inside the board is very bad.

The Virgil Day, the fellow from Brno, awkwardly

seems to be sort of a wild card around and makes lots of public statements.

Of course, the Union people conduct a kind of guerrilla warfare all the time.

They work poor Arnie Weber over something awful.

He's the strong man on the board in the sense that he's the guy who stands up and fights and shut out the deals and so on.

But they call him an administration stooge and whatnot.

So, the feeling is not good in that board.

They judge both as, it is said, not a particularly good administrator.

I think the administrative side of it has been set up right.

We had some OMB people go in and don Rumsfeld.

Of course, he's been working on it for quite a while.

But they have worked him over pretty high.

Much harder than he deserves to be worked over.

both, they could help him.

And he's basically a good person.

We are, incidentally, just because I can see his problem, I've asked Bill Gifford, the fellow who worked with me on congressional relations, to work especially with Bulldog confirmation as it's coming up, and to get him around, get him in the Senate and so on.

But I think the paperwork is in... is in...

It's a shaky enough situation, so I think we ought to always have on the front burner the question of what are we going to do with the brother and be ready to do that.

I keep pinching Mr. John.

I think John has a lot to say about changing.

Sure.

Well, lots of people would like to see the judge gotten out of there.

I think they ought to ask themselves, before they're too careful, how would they like to be chairman of that paper?

It's not an easy job.

It's much easier to be chairman of the Price Commission than Jack Grayson of 194.

I think he's done a pretty good job, although he's blown through the queue lately, I think.

Anyway...

That's much easier to do with seven nice public members than to tackle this labor management problem.

They're not trying to make it work.

They're trying to make it not work.

That's the basic problem.

So I think there are real issues there.

The labor boys

clearly don't want to walk off the board.

They don't want to be tagged with the responsibility for destroying the wage-price system.

And yet, although I'm told Fitzsimmons is getting pretty tight about the judge and so on, and he's been very favorable to us, of course.

But at the same time, President Perry's example, there's a lot of substance.

involved.

They complain about procedure and the judge and all that.

But when you have a ruling that says deferred increases in excess of 7% are not going to be allowed, who are you talking about?

You're talking about the teamsters.

And Fitts suddenly got very uptight about the judge and all the public members and this and that.

When?

Well, when that came down the pipe.

And that is going to hit right into the teamster contracts.

And personally, I just don't think that you're going to turn those future contracts over.

And why it is that Arthur thinks you can do that, I don't know.

It takes a lot of effort and a lot of confidence in the people working at it to accomplish what Dunlop has accomplished in the construction industry and wind this thing down.

You just don't do it with a meat axe.

Well, you can do it gradually, but you can't just... Well, I'll put it another way.

I think Chuck Colson feels that this is upset because both of us give good leadership, or the public members are upset,

dealing straight and so forth.

I think while there's probably reason for people to climb on that, the basic reason the labor people are upset and that Fitts is upset is because it looks as though the pay board might try to be tough enough to make a difference on the contract.

And that's what they're getting at.

Well, I had one request for a position that I sent in, but it has to do with the Magnuson bill on export expansion, which we view as a bill that is not designed to go anywhere but to sort of

mess around in the area.

We have been working with the agencies trying to get an administration position on it.

People are all over the map on what they think.

What we would suggest, and I think I've talked to Connolly about this, Peterson, I thought when he was on board, I'm not absolutely sure on it, but we would like to take the position

that we don't support or attack these individual titles.

Let me come to that.

There's the procedural part and there's the substantive part.

The substantive part has all sorts of devices and gimmicks that would subsidize exports in one manner or another and have the government do this or that or the other.

Our feeling is with a

major study going on in the administration and with a tremendous amount of work having been done on exchange rates and so forth that are designed to promote exports, we need to point to all this and say that we are making these studies and that we have all of this actual work being done and negotiations underway and let's see what comes out of that before we start

taking positions this way and that way on the substance of the legislation, which is far from being agreed within the administration.

So that's one part.

The second part has to do with the proposal in this bill to transfer out of the State Department all of the commercial, business, representational and diplomatic work including the Commerce Department.

This is a bill that Senator Magnuson has up, and we have to testify.

And the reason I'm bringing it up now is that the testimony is presumably scheduled to begin on Monday, so that it's right on us.

Now, Secretary Sands, of course, is strongly in favor of it.

Rodgers, of course, is strongly against it.

My, my own feeling, my, my own feeling is that it ought to pass, but that's, that's going to be a hell of a problem.

It's a hell of a problem for you to go in and fight the Secretary of the State on a matter of this sort.

I just hope to God that the Congress overrides the state's been wrong on this for years.

I don't know of one man that I've sold for a goddamn to the economic advisor.

Not one.

Not one at all.

Well, I think our question is, what position should we take on the bill?

Since the State of Commerce, among others, will be testifying, they will need to have a viewpoint.

I don't know what the edge makes this committee.

Well, I think that whatever position we take, if we were to take the position that we oppose it, nevertheless, there will be a stream of witnesses and a design to develop the point that the State Department is not doing an adequate job of representing commercial interests.

So I think there will be a lot of pressure on states.

My feeling, and I'll tell you what my view on the thing is, first of all, that there is a real big problem in the State Department in the way this has been handled.

And so the fact that the state is going to get flooded up a little bit in these hearings is good.

That's right.

And that we should use the occasion through an internal effort similar to the one that we did on intelligence.

to put a heavy pressure on the state to change itself, and in the process of conducting that effort, not rule out the movement of, or the restructuring in one way or another, of not only how the commercial things are handled, but how agriculture things are handled.

Treasury, of course, has a big interest in this, and so on, so that we look at the way the U.S.,

represents itself in a given country as a mission, what the roles of respective departments are.

And we say explicitly in our testimony that while we would not favor the passage of this massive transfer now, that we want everybody to know that we are undertaking this examination because we do feel they're a genuine company.

That is sort of the way we had done it.

But I know your feelings about it.

You want him to say we're saving him.

Well, he will agree to it.

Stan won't.

Stan wants to go gung-ho to change it.

Well, look, the way you do it, sir, it expands us on the story.

uh the way to do it is to is to get yourself in a little bit maybe a position there i'm surprised but then to push that damn committee to to kick state in the ass that's what has to be done i totally disagree with state i just want my position understood totally

They've been wrong.

They've always been wrong.

The department is totally in that witness field.

So we begin with that.

Now the question is, well, how do we accomplish it without breaking too much time in the cabinet?

And the way to accomplish it is basically is to, you know, let the Congress do the dirty work.

Encourage them to do it.

Well, we could stake out an administration position in favor of that transfer.

Well, I'll tell you my idea.

I'd like to be, let me put it this way, George.

We have a difficult problem here as we have in all the relations we've had with monsters, particularly here between state and commerce.

It's just tight as a tick.

You know what my belief is.

My belief is that I'd put the whole damn thing out of state, put it in commerce, or make them take commerce out of their shapes.

However, and so therefore lean strongly in that direction, but do what is possible.

You see what I mean?

Whether you can have a confrontation in the thing, we can avoid it, fine.

But if you've got to have one, I'll lean that way.

I'll lean that way.

We have to, but I guess you're going to have to have one.

Well, the...

The only way out of a major confrontation of the testimony is this device of a study.

But the study needs to be positioned so that it's serious and so that the scope is such that it isn't just necessarily going to rubber stamp the current situation.

And it's clear in the format of the study that that's the case.

What do you think, John?

You said Rodgers agrees with me.

That surprises me.

Well, I know this one.

I think Rodgers sees that he's on the defensive.

I'll tell you one now that you've got this.

Connolly brought this approach.

I talked it over with him.

the approach that he has to study.

All right.

Study it and have the study come up against it.

Fair enough.

Okay.

Then I'll back it.

Okay.

I would regard this as a possibility in OMB if we were to do it internally, and I believe probably that's the best way to do it.

as a very serious proposition, and we've worked the intelligence party over very hard, and we can do that if we have your support.

I certainly have the feeling that the State Department is in a very fragile and serious state and it needs a

It needs a strong and fresh hand in there in a second term, I think.

Because it seems to me anyway, and you're the expert on this, but it seems to me that you need a safety permit that's good in order to do the work.

And they have lots of talented people, but they're just not being used.

And it's hard to get at them and get them effectively in the way that they want to be in the way that they want to be in the way that they want to be in the way that they want to be in the way that they want to be in the way that they want to be in the way

Because the point is that Bill just constantly defends the goddamn department.

And he says nothing is wrong.

Well, the department is not always right.

The department is in a hell of a shape.

You know, the court finally has had one hell of a time.

I did something today that was so crazy.

It was a pretty shocking day that night.

The court changed it out of it.

By the time the kid was all finished, the police had picked him up.

I wasn't here yesterday.

He showed me an intelligence report.

He didn't clear it.

It was not cleared at all with common.

For all this is just a treachery matter.

That's goddamn not the State Department's matter.

The second fight is, if I'd said it once, I'd said it by Rogers, of course, and others in this field, the expropriation statement would have been out.

It would have been out.

So, anyway, I'm going to have to have a song for you to sing.

Thank you.

I got through 18 pages, I don't know what it was, he said, okay.

But anyway, what happened was that it's totally against my policy, not because I told communists, I may be wrong about my government, but my policy with regard to any country that appropriates America,

enterprises, is to do unto them as they do unto us.

And that you've got to play a tough line.

We're not going to negotiate any goddamn loans.

We're not going to help them at all.

As long as, particularly when he's in trouble now, just lost a couple of parliamentary elections.

And here's the State Department, without telling Tom,

This is Tuesday.

This is Saturday.

Well, I should give it the hell in the air, so I'm going to keep my intention.

I'm going to go up the wall.

He said, I got the message.

Now, around here, you're going to find a lot of soft-headed bastards who say, oh, well, that isn't the right way to do it.

The idea is, I'm very communist, and he's like, just like we used to say about Castro, I mean, he's just a reformer, and he's the way of the future.

You know, do this, and this.

He'll have a reaction against us in other Latin American countries, and people will go up to the wall and so forth.

I'm probably wrong, maybe wrong, I always will guess that.

I happen to be right about Castro when I recommended a very different course in Eisenhower and Pollock due to the fact that Alan Dulles was dead wrong and the State Department totally wrong in their evaluation of him.

But in this instance, you see, when I have decided something, God damn it, the State Department should run around and do it a different way.

Now that's just exactly what they were doing here.

Do you agree with that?

Well, my impression is that the IMD got elected in the first place because we weren't straight up enough on the draw.

That's right.

Well, we were trotted.

We were trotted, but here we didn't, the CIA was not as vigorous as it might have been.

Frankly, it had to be that kind of operation.

But that's not the point.

Now that he is elected,

And he is expropriating.

And he is taking anti-American attitude and foreign policy.

The hell with it.

At this point, on your negotiating, it's such an easy way to take on, not taking him on personally, not taking him on the record.

We just drag our feet into the negotiations.

And who better to do that than Kahn?

Joseph Volker.

But here, this son of a bitch, Weintraub, is over there cuffing the rug right out from under what was, I haven't covered a number of times.

State of the matter, and I'll weigh in on that.

We've had our problems since the last week or so.

Now, there is an honest report.

Well, of course, they're all in front of our house.

But anyway, do you hear what I'm talking about?

Well, well, well.

I think that the...

But I'm all for it.

Let me say that I'm prepared on this commercial, but I can draw a sword on the state if necessary.

I mean, I may not have stated my position strongly.

So have it studied, but I know where I'm going to come from.

And it's going to be heard.

It's going to be told.

It's going to come along.

It's going to get rolled.

Well, if you feel that way, that's an argument for just going in and supporting it still.

Well, if we're not supported, he'd have to come in and present his case.

You know, that's the problem.

He has done build our papers in the pros and cons of this, which statesman represented, which he signed personally, which are basically advices to you.

So the staff work is really holding down this issue.

And they oppose it, and they oppose it, and they give their reasons.

And so you've got the pros and cons already before you.

Well, I don't believe, I think you agree, John, that this is the achievement.

With all the problems we have in the state at the present time, that you can just roll on this, which is an enormous thing.

It's been in charge of a fight for 20 years.

And so let's do it the other way.

I mean, this is a more clever way to do it.

We can roll, but let's roll in our way.

Remember, you've just given me a study, and I'll sign it.

It won't be like the order in the world.

It's not my thing.

We have reversed .

I have to, because I've got to stop by at 2 o'clock and crush the board and be a little lazy.

Would you bring me ?

I thought I was banging my back at him.

I hope he won't cut the much that's going on.

We marched up that mountain and back down again, about every six months.

Incidentally, I just remembered while you were talking about that, he has sent embargo on anybody in the administration of the foreign travel for the balance of this year, right?

I don't know.

And what I thought I'd do is bring up the very first thing I was going to ask you about, or come to contact with, before we see you in this room, so that you have just some feeling of what the situation was.

And I've got a couple of questions about direction of that.

I'm good.

On food stamps, the Department of Agriculture drafted regulations, and they were, it was a bad job.

It was very bad for politics, but it wasn't, it wasn't, uh, probably because I'm a little more confident.

No, I'm fine.

I'm sorry.

You know, I'm not really, I'm not kind of, uh, much tonight.

Anyway, when you see Thursday night, it might come up or I don't know what context it might come up in.

But in any event, we tried to kind of gloss this off.

The regulations have been catching a lot of flack, particularly from our own governors.

So we reversed it over the weekend.

Let's put on a statement.

It was a tree under pressure, but they fell a lot better than what we would have done otherwise.

We did the same thing on Clear Cut in the timber industry.

We rolled a train where he was the executive order and I think he or the timber industry wanted to leave it.

So it became a public controversy before it ever got to you.

He was for banning clear-tribe timber industries that would affect jobs and their ability to do business and so on.

It was a bad proposal from a political standpoint.

So you rule no, no taking the word.

And I've got a lot of praise from guys like Tom McCall and the fair amount of great environmentalists.

They've got a fairly decent promise on the highway.

They stand for the environmental groups who, you know, I think we're terrible at that.

It's pretty bad.

It tends to have how somebody really stands when you

In fact, his close-in entry.

And let me try that one.

Boyer reported to you that he could sell a lot of airplanes overseas.

In really getting Northrop and other guys in here and giving them a certain degree, it develops that there are almost no present possibilities.

There's a lot of wreck, but there are no present possibilities with one person on the site.

So there's no fair play on that.

But we are going to lay the line down.

So as soon as one of those can solicit business, then we'll get some future trade on it.

That's a big one, of course, if you need to look at pushing for all sorts, right?

Clint East, apparently, has confirmed that Bob May have gone into this regard.

I don't recall him, but it's a record reading that if he got out early enough, he'd get 32 to 34 negative votes, and there would probably be between a four- or six-week delay between nomination and confirmation, during which he'd get fought pretty hard.

But he can be confirmed.

And so he would suggest that that's right.

We will look at it as well.

Sorry.

I think that's the spirit of it.

We've gone ahead with the ACIR business, and that's come along very well.

Now I've got your message that you want John Connolly to lead on this thing.

Well, the tax.

Well, the tax, right.

Now, I want to be sure that I understand exactly what you mean by that, because the Vice President feels he has a kind of a franchise with this ACPR, and so take it that you want it to become a sister act with Richardson and Connolly and the Vice President all involved.

I think I'm down to it.

It will be a tax decision, right?

All the rest is crap.

I mean, you're going to have to help schools.

You're going to have to have property tax.

It's important, but it's not fundamental.

You can't do anything until you make the tax decision.

I mean, it all falls.

It's a house of cards, right?

So the other guys who build the cars, he's got it.

Tommy's got the eggs.

He doesn't have money.

Look at that reason that he is...

He's got to be brought in on the sequence of a message that there won't be anything before you for a decision until the ACI process is over, which will be in June.

give you back the whole thing, the clean slate to the left, and then you'll have the McElroy stuff and the H&R stuff, and you can take your price.

And so, in the meantime, particularly during the time you're out of the country,

I wasn't clear on what you desired with regard to the roles of these different people.

And before we began...

I have no idea.

Now, you and the Vice President talked about declassification of the new official seat design.

And so he's off and running on that.

He told me that he was going to export it and do it on his own and then come back and make a recommendation to me.

He wants you to find folks for it.

I told him to talk to Ray Bush.

Talk to you.

Well, it is.

and sort of referring to somebody else.

And so we'll leave it open for that.

I just wanted to know something.

Oh, yeah, well, as a matter of fact, I've been talking to this guy about his interest in therapy.

We've got Ambrose all positioned and we've got the Eterna General and all of his guys assigned in blood.

So I thought I had everybody in the panel and I finally don't have Tommy in there.

So I'll circle around.

So where's the way this is going to go?

Where's the way this is going to go?

Are we taking it out on Terry?

No, no.

I don't want to get a joint operation.

We're using his guys.

We're using Ambrose to head it.

Why isn't he independent?

Well, he now tells my fellows that he doesn't remember hearing about this, and he's not sure that he's agreeing with them.

I just had a brief conversation with him just now when he came out, and I'll go see him and get back to work.

Yeah, his bureaucracy is objecting to this thing.

being currently a justice operation, being a drug operation, they're going to get all the pictures of the operation.

Now, this is a street pusher.

We're going to make an attack.

We're going to get the grand juries to get the street pushers in and get them handed in.

This thing, Dan Burroughs told me about it on television.

And so we got the money.

We got Dan Burroughs.

We got the position.

It's supposed to be a joint operation.

We need higher organizations.

We need a lot of courage and participation.

And so he's essential to it.

We need the other U.S. attorneys, you see, for the grand jury.

So it's very, very important to have a credible issue.

We'll see what we can get done.

Let's see.

The Richmond case.

Uh, Humphrey did not say what the new summary said he said about the .

I just watched the tape of it, and he's still very vocal.

Uh, Morgan will come at you with your options on Monday on this, but it's going to take a little bit of your time.

I won't.

Okay.

All right.

I'm sorry not to be able to shoot from an upholster on this.

It is an incredibly touchy, complex process with a political air all over it.

And I just want to be sure that you're in a fair shot.

I don't, I suspect the politics in it may not be where you think it is.

And I want to challenge your assumptions on it.

And I'm going to have about a half hour of your time to do that.

Morgan is about as hard-line a guy as you will find on it.

And he is literally...

I'm just taking a shot at this one.

So that gets right on the job.

And so give us a little time in the middle of the week.

We'll air it out for you.

And then you can, as Marker called Marker, come down to the side of the grand suburb and say, hold on, not necessarily.

It's a question of what you do at this time.

Now, he makes the result.

It's a terrible result.

Oh, I see what you do about it.

Oh, what you do about it is really the issue here.

Well, I know.

Good, good, good.

All right.

Now, I don't think there's any, well, I just want to be sure that everybody, as I said, everybody understands that I don't share the COVID.

Oh, I don't know.

I've got to bring these people all the way.

Well, no, they don't.

As a matter of fact, in this meeting, we had Bickle and Coleman and these other guys in there, George was there.

Everybody agreed this is a terrible result that we're just sort of being taken to.

by this line of cases.

And the prediction there was that some judge was going to do exactly what that judge did first.

And there are a lot of other worse things to hear down the road if you go first agency.

They're harder cases.

They're coming.

And you're going to have some really crazy stuff happening.

Now the question is, what do we do to try and stop it?

The only thing that occurs to me is this.

I'm not so good at stopping it.

Protecting this problem is impossible at this point.

Because of the judges we've got.

But I'm very interested in having

a strong position that has been taken.

That's why I'd like some legislation.

Well, if we can.

I cannot believe, I just cannot believe that they can't do some legislation for it.

Now, my understanding, we rejected the Constitution.

Don't, don't lay that on me quite yet.

That very well may be something we don't have any choice about.

Griffin, I was with the leadership up there this morning, and there

And you just might have to take a decision on that, even though you might decide you didn't want to.

Well, of course, I can't do that in the past.

Well, it may be one of those issues.

You know, you'll stand up the first time.

There you are.

So, we're not just wiping that off the page and saying that's something we don't have to worry about.

It's the first thing we have to do.

No, there's seven different forms of that.

And none of them are very good.

It's not very good.

None of them are.

And they all have side effects.

It's like a kind of soap.

You know, it will cure your disease, but it will create nine more problems for you.

And so we may have to come up with a constitution.

Well, I think it's far better to have a poor constitution than a very, very bad one.

Yeah.

it's it's not all that work and we've got one that's available if that's what we have to do legislation no legislation there's several different things that could be proposed but

I'm frank.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to suggest to you.

I'm inclined to think rather than any sort of legislation, which then becomes an albatross around here, like every comma and every cross, too, that a clear statement on a subject might be the best thing for you to do.

Where do I stand?

Oh, I stand here.

And maybe it's in the press conference.

Maybe it's a little different.

Maybe it's something else.

But it's the best protection you have against, because the thought you would give of getting injured, it's the best protection you have against unforeseen side effects.

And, well, Humphrey's statement is a pretty good example.

He tried to have it both ways.

And he said in this television piece that he's for the neighborhood of the school and he's for...

Well, he said the problem here is the problem here is quality education.

And that statement probably was a very terrible study, very terrible on his part.

And so when he got all that short last name on his CV as abandoning his liberal principles,

So where's Muskie?

And the other guy, who was it?

Muskie Hall.

He dodged Bob Weeby.

His performance Sunday was pathetic.

It really was.

It was like, terrible.

I don't think it's the same thing.

Bill Rogers would disagree with that.

I thought he came off well.

It's not something good in the back.

I think there are two reasons there, as I outlined to you.

First...

because illicit is a very keen sense of VR.

It says anytime that you're attacking a man, the audience is always in the favor of being on the side of the horse on the bench under assault, which I think is true.

The second one that he made, however, I think it relates to something else,

Bill is not one in his own answers to questions.

Every step of him is a hard one.

He doesn't like to.

In other words, he likes to do what he believes in the equivocation, et cetera, and don't answer the question.

You can avoid it.

Now, I do, too.

I mean, I don't answer, but I have to.

But I think you always have to give me an answer if you're being...

Karen, he didn't do very much to say something.

He didn't do anything.

He didn't give a difference.

And he's got the rubber apple, and the others didn't let him get away with the thing.

They break right in, so you're not in.

It's your surprise.

Beyond that, I think, I'll rather run there.

At the same time, it seems to me that under what in this town has to be canceled,

Needless to say, they went after him to be sure, but everybody that's gone in the press... And then he lost his temper.

I mean, he just blew his cool completely.

And you sort of get this deception.

I watched another man in a very low boiling point.

Okay, that is all of the list that I really need to get into.

We've got the problem with executive signings.

But that's something we can deal with once we're here.

Yeah.

I wonder if this is a part of the job.

I'm going to hold it here.

There we go.

People get great assets in commerce, in sales, in spokesmen.

But we've heard about jobs probably very much also.

He's whacking at his house, and I've been in the White House, and he will sometimes perhaps find it difficult to, maybe he'll find it less difficult, but he knows that things have to be set down, you know, like a man, in other instances.

What I'm getting at is this.

You've got, you see, Peterson, Hodges, Connolly, and in some instances Rogers are all involved in various deals and out there in other areas of the trade ground.

I'm having Connolly keep a wire on that one because of the fact that he's going to make a fine deal.

But nevertheless,

We can't have a situation where feet either sit and run together and come together.

Now, I do see confidence in that.

I have to.

I have to because that is a very empirical object.

But I can have a situation where either St. Lawrence-Hodgson or that kind of Rogers are in dread.

And, uh, and, uh, the, uh, the, uh, so there still must be staff working on that sort of thing.

You understand?

Right.

It's just got to change.

Also, it's not clear of the others.

Well, I think you're going to get that picture.

A very smart guy.

Amazing to me what a slow learner he is about how the organization works and all it takes to be effective.

But the businessman in government usually is a disaster.

He's really a disaster.

I remember Colonel John Wilson, a disaster.

He was a needle in my heart.

We had the two worst secretaries in the country, possibly in action.

One man told his actions.

One of the best is Packard.

Packard is a decent man, a good worker.

He's one of the few businessmen who proved that he could hack it.

or guaranteeing that lawyers are taking money from the outside rather than businessmen because politics is not business.

It's manipulation.

It's, you know, a lot of things.

And that's why Compton is basically a lawyer rather than a businessman.

And, of course, the former governor is a better problem than Steele because he's a straight-laced businessman.

He is a regular, but what you have to do is to point him and use him in ways where he's out front, where he can make his speeches and all that.

But you can't allow him to come in and grab a whole lot of stuff.

Everybody's fighting for his little piece of ground here, my friend.

Yes, sir.

They're sure fighting for that little piece of territory.

That's part of Russia's problem.

They're just fighting for it because he says all the state has to do is the economics.

So he says he'll take this away from us.

But he said, well, the whole point is we won't take it away.

He'll reorganize about that department.

Put some competent men in there to run.

Isn't that right?

They're not doing that now.

No.

The point is that they do not have people as...

They are not up to the mark.

Both levels of work are one.

One level is sort of the policy type stuff, monetary and trade and all that.

What should be our stance and how should we do that?

That you can think of it economically.

Then there's just the humdrum work

in an embassy, helping the businessman who comes over and wants to know how the hell you find your way around it.

Who do you talk to in this country?

I mean, who's on first, right?

Hell, they don't do that either.

They'll take them out to dinner, and they're very gracious, and they're good at meeting them at the airports and all the rest, and they can speak the language.

And you see, most of the people who criticize state, I mean, I have this pretty good example of a book,

Here's the wrong reason.

He said, well, the main thing for a foreign service officer is that he must identify with the people and speak to them and where they go and put sandals on them and all the rest.

That isn't the problem with our people.

The trouble with the state department people is they lack jobs.

principle, and frankly, knowledge, and the people that really amount to anything.

They can't relate to that business.

They can't relate to that relationship.

They're against it.

They're against it because they grew up, frankly, at a fucking school.

Isn't that the other thing where they are taught that business is evil?

Well, the Commerce guys that we saw in Japan are doing a pretty good job.

They're from the Department of Commerce.

They're from Agarco.

They're not supposed to be there.

They are there, and they suffer.

They're the attache of the State Department guy who really doesn't have a strong connection to that.

He sort of works with the government.

He doesn't have any connection.

It's a real dilemma, it seems to me, because it's easy to say that I'm doing a job, so get the stuff out and let somebody else do it.

At the same time, when you consider broadly the importance of having some kind of coordinated

U.S. mechanism abroad, whether it's run by the State Department or the Treasury or anybody else.

You need to have that, just as we have struggled to get some kind of coordinated presidential regional council out of Denver in the United States.

You need to have something like that, and somebody has to be in charge.

And I suppose what you need is strong ambassadors who will take charge, but they in turn themselves need to have some kind of

knowledge and institutional base to go on.

So if the State Department is shattered, as it can very easily just fall into total disrepair, then we'll have to invent a new State Department or a new State Department.

The difficulty is the person trying to charge is the...

The second is that the person, the...

The Kissinger operation, which, in view of my own lack of confidence in the State Department, had been indispensable to me and, of course, very helpful.

But the Kissinger operation, on the other hand, has been very detrimental to State, and detrimental many times, needlessly so.

Like, I know they, I know all the names of the men.

But that's, that's pretty much their personality.

But the problem is that, uh, we, that, uh, Henry, Henry is the, uh, suspicion of two of you.

We all know bright people are arrogant.

At least they're not arrogant.

They know they're smart.

They're confident.

But when you consciously and deliberately, over and over again, humiliate a proud man,

Inevitably, he set up an impossible situation.

And that's what Henry has done.

He humiliates these people.

I mean, in these so-called Edison papers, I mean, a few of the prophets got the point.

And as they pointed out, there was nothing new in them, but it was a fascinating study of the inner workings of the bureaucracy.

I'll say it was, because you saw Henry and Cisco and others at each other's throats and so forth and so on.

They probably didn't say they didn't get stomped out of the room, but on all the other museums she does.

But the point is, that is the problem, you see, that you have.

The state of things is so expensive.

I ain't really got to launch one, although...

has finished his year, I have much more suspicion of him and much more contempt for him than he has.

He's one of them, in a sense.

He has great respect for their liberal background and their training and so forth.

And I had yet to know on a major issue if the State Department was right.

Because I had fought them through here.

They were wrong on China, they were wrong on Kiwi Meds, or they were wrong on Cuba.

But I could go on down the line.

And I've been through it all.

I could have told this to Bill once.

But the point is, the State Department has to be led.

Now, where Bill has missed the mark, and we all respect him, and here's where Henry has missed the mark.

Henry said, Bill is dumb, not smart.

He's so wrong.

Bill is smart as hell.

Bill is not profound.

But he has other things.

He's quick, intelligent, reliable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

He has never been the one who has said and discussed to me the law or anything.

So he's always getting some terrible answers about tomorrow's story.

And this is great.

The problem that we have here is that Biddle has made a Biddle error in terms of his own place as Secretary of State in the history.

He has had so much to be liked by his colleagues in the State Department that the State Department runs him rather than his own State Department.

He has had so much to be liked by the press that cover the State Department.

the press run him rather than them now the next result of all this if you were to ask the people of the state department and the people of the press to cover the state department do you like bill rogers you get about 90 percent if on the other hand you were to poll the country

In terms, do you know a lot about the Secretary of State, who he is?

Or, do you consider him a strong Secretary of State?

You might get 30.

Now, that's a tragedy.

It's a tragedy because a man so able should focus.

He would tend to blame the messenger, because, well, God made a case that he was out there getting all the headlines and the rest.

But you see, if Bill, when we had to go through some pretty goddamn hairy experiences around here, or I was in the streets, he never stepped up and did it.

He couldn't.

I can't believe it.

A lot of us, like your third, and so forth and so on.

You never saw him get something.

He did it well, but once everybody knew it was coming, it hurt him.

Well, that's weird.

Well, pretty much, pretty much.

Not always.

No, he was in fantasy.

I called him once, Dr.

Climax, and he made those statements.

But the ones of Christ he has, he's got his best headlines.

But he doesn't really realize it.

His whole theory has been, unfortunately, is, how do I do it?

Did they like me?

And, as I've often said to you about the Press Conference Society and so forth, Radler hates my guns.

The Press hates my guns.

But they may respect me.

This is the difference, for example.

The only man who was really Secretary of State

He sends properly to Corridor Hall.

The only one.

And he wasn't much.

I mean, he was better than Aslan.

And I say he wasn't much.

He was at least a sick couple of the old boomers.

He was somehow pretty good.

It was Foster Dulles.

Now, I'm no one to say Foster was right or wrong about Suez.

He was wrong about Aslan Dan.

But Foster Dulles, nobody in the press like him.

Nobody in the state of America liked him.

He'd have gotten a 30% raise in terms of the new life fostered on us.

But if you ask the people of America and the world, who is the second greatest state?

90% knew.

And when he died, the whole goddamn world came to see him because he was a man.

Now, it's only people with the government around converting that.

I mean, it's just, I don't know what it is.

It's this damn media that sets the world in.

I don't mean I want people who want to be unpopular and mean and popular and stupid and the rest of it.

In fact, there's a line in between.

But believe me, if you're particularly insane, you count out, you count out your death if you're constantly

or sign up to these guys.

I mean, I know them.

And it's better when he's gone than around.

He'll leave no legacy to love.

He really does.

You know, they will realize that under his leadership, the department has fallen into total disrepair.

And that is, I think, that's the problem in the long run.

And maybe it ought to be allowed to just disintegrate.

But as I said, I think that if we don't have a State Department, we have to invent one.

Speaking of foreign affairs, you have been a marketer, as I understand it, on White House staff and administration people going abroad during this year.

Yeah, because I'm traveling.

You're gone, good deal.

But I just, I think we've got to appear to be working on some of the problems at home front.

People go gallivanting around.

It's inevitable.

They're going to accuse me, if I think of others, but they're going to be exempted.

Well, those exemptions ought to be stamped out.

Oh, absolutely, okay.

Well, you've got this stuff on the environmental conference.

That is the big problem.

The other problem for me is this.

I don't want anybody to go around the next back and forth.

No, really, I'm serious.

And I love to have them go, and the other thing is to go, and I think it's a fine thing.

It's good education for the environment, for any purpose.

Oh, that's fine.

The environment is great.

We should be represented.

Our people should go.

Oh, that's fine.

No problem.

That's not a great conference.

It's not.

I'm not going to send it like a fancy rum stoker who roars around into Europe again or something.

That was my idea, not this year's.

See, you can see the difference.

That's what I meant.

No, I had known that there was a lot of not good with sessions that had to do with something in the form.

No, I really am very, very sorry about what's happened.

You see, I, having said what I have about the State Department people, I've known many of them through the years, and I've had them abroad, and I know, you know, God, they've been under the service of a, you know, starry-eyed, and some of them are really superb men.

They're fine people, fine, loyal people to me.

Listen, this is just medicine.

They're not as sophisticated and good and well-mannered and don't speak the languages.

Look, the Russians are a bunch of barbarians in Rome.

The British are all washed out.

The Americans are usually the best ambassadors in Rome.

Usually.

Oh, most of our career, you wouldn't say, been this bad.

I guess they're obsolete.

And I guess really the real problem is they believe in something.

They've got to believe in something.

And, you know, I think that may be the real extent of Bill's problem.

Bill is so tactical that he doesn't believe in a hammer.

On the other hand, it's totally a...

Well, he wants to be tactical in the residence.

Now, that shows up in the negotiation.

Well, because their style is to start negotiating.

And based on the work out, it doesn't happen.

And the results try to put away against the law, but, you know, we sit in our security council meetings, and they're almost painful.

They are painful, because what we do discuss matters of resolve and act that way.

And we will try to give the background and the options to the rest of the bill is to the patient to say, well, let's see what we can do.

And we're going to be talking about all this loss and so forth, and what are their motives, or why do we think we're doing this, and I think he's very patient about that.

And of course, that's the most important thing, because once you have decided what you think the other guy's up to, what your motives are, what their interests are, what your interests are, it is then, if you are guided in whatever tactical move you want.

The tactics are very important.

They can ruin the best fantasy, but God save us from tacticians who are not strategists.

That's the problem.

You've got to play the true.

You always have to do it.

I like your...

You know, you're working on your field of knowledge.

You can't just say, well, what are we going to study bridges today?

You've got to say, now, what is it we're putting on the mountain?

What are the great forces that are involved?

That's a real problem.

Our problem, of course, we have a problem with that.

Most people really want to be strategists.

Usually you don't have enough dedication to want to do the right kind of damn excuses.

I'm sorry.

I'm just one of the politicians.

I'm a politician, but I don't want to be a communist.

Well... See you, everybody.

See you, everybody.

I don't know why.

He and his wife are not co-ed or whatever people do.

I mean, it still is incompatible.

Totally, he was going to continue on and so forth, have a daughter and so forth and so on.

And he has a girlfriend and she has a boyfriend.

Which, of course, we changed the joke, but he's so worried about me.

Worried about me.

I wondered if the President was compensating for us.

And I said, close.

And I said, fair enough.

And I said, it's time to go back and read two books.

Both of which I have read times previously.

I said, read Blake's This Way and Laura Cecil's No Way.

Here are two of the great prime ministers of the 19th century.

That's it.

Read it and personalize it.

See how much of an effect it will have.

The only time this is going to affect me, though, is for sure.

The rock part of it is probably very immobile.

I think there were other reasons for it to be down for more than a mile.

But Kennedy wouldn't have been brought down if he hadn't proved any comfort.

Nobody gives a goddamn if he played around with a girl or if he was drunk.

But they cared very much that when the girl was drunk, that he would pass, right?

But this is Fort Dole.

That's where it got it.

Of course, this is Kansas.

Kansas just couldn't make a difference, I would think.

Well, four years.

What's the difference?

And by that time,

I'm not sure it makes that much difference even there.

So they got a divorce.

It would be different if you were speaking with a secretary openly.

It would be different at all.

That would make a difference to that.

So they got a divorce, and people said, well, maybe they didn't get along.

People are much more tolerant now than they were, and they shouldn't be.

They shouldn't be anybody's issue yet.

I've never seen one yet where the fault is on one side.

Have you?

I have handled one divorce case in my career.

I haven't.

Oh, I did.

One criminal case.

One of the nine.

But we did it as young lawyers.

There wasn't much else to do.

Default divorce is not a large sort of thing.

That's the story of this.

That's the story of that.

That the authority told him he had to go through the jury and all that sort of thing.

But I could talk to him.

There was always, always the woman.

You could talk to the woman.

You could damn well hope the ball wasn't on the side of the other guy.

Greatest hat.

It appeared to have curved over.

Oh, he got over it with the...

Worried about that, I said, Frank, I said, I'm going to start by taking Kennedy to the ball.

I said, I don't know anything about it.

I don't know if it's the leadership that's going to speak to him this morning.

Well, I don't know.

So, if they were to take Kennedy's speech, you know, Tom, this morning, he was really, really mad.

He said to me, he said, you know what he did?

No, he said, here's Fred Harris.

Of course, this is called Tom.

Saying, Tom, he got Nixon oil money in Texas in 68 because Nixon sold out a good piece of the Christ States.

I was for depletion before John Connolly probably thought of it, because I was a young lawyer in California in 1939 and 40, you know, and it makes you say those trigger wells in Santa Fe Springs.

Well, then, you know, you took in the taxes.

You were for depletion.

I was, oh, well, I've been for it all the time.

I've always worked for it.

Everybody did that, and I never waited one bit.

But, and I mean, the other point was they forget to mention Connolly's supporters on 368, you know.

He went to the Antigone with him.

That's why he lost Texas.

So all that, but that one.

So they had a lot of comparison.

Now they, not comparison.

Now they had a lot of comparison in the post-war period.

So they, well, they, when actually they went and did other such practices, they used to do other things as well.

That's fascinating to me.

Do you know how many of these lawyers were in here yesterday?

They said it was mental fraud.

They filed a complaint with the Justice Department.

And they say this is an absolutely phony deal.

They can prove it.

And Mayhew is probably behind it.

Mayhew should come to account.

And Dean said they are really steamed up.

They're loaded with affidavits.

You know, the one thing about him is my unfortunate stupid brother.

You know what, is that, one thing about him, plus, which I noticed, one that was, that was just decent enough to put out, was that with all the sadness to God, and my poor, pauper mother,

in order to save her dumb son, turned over a $225,000 piece of property unsatisfied alone.

So unsatisfied.

But it's true.

It was absolutely true.

I was the one who made him do it.

My mother called and asked whether she should do it.

I said, of course she's going to do it.

My point is, too, that

He knew the only time that I ever, I've never met you like most other people, but I talked to him on the phone once.

He called me, interested me, I don't know what about, 1959.

He wanted to be sure, unlike in Russia, that we took a 707.

He said, if that's one thing we're ahead of, then be sure you take a 707.

And we did.

How was that?

It was all of a sudden.

How are you?

Which is the only time that I've ever heard of him.

So you read all this crap about him.

But also, here's the data on the economy.

They call what Kennedy said, that I'm delaying the war, that, you know, I'm trying to keep two in power, or they're sure of re-election and all that sort of thing.

It was a vicious struggle.

And when you say the leadership was madder, they were mad enough to go out and do something?

I'll tell you exactly what happened.

We were sitting in Hugh Scott's office.

And Scott, interestingly enough, brought it up, and Jerry tagged in, and Les, and so on.

And they were really steamed up.

And McGregor said, okay, I've got a speechwriter in the outer office.

His name's Noel Cook.

He's got a speech for each one of you.

And they said, great, let's get him right now.

Got up, went out, got Noel, and he handed each one a prepared...

and they're going to start down there this afternoon.

I think they have to play.

I don't know.

We'll be able to see if they can crack them over the weekend and get them to play.

But I bet you just keep hammering away.

Just pound away.

And they agreed that when we set up, this was a declaration of war, and they were going to be on the canopy from now on.

And so we'll see.

Maybe they dropped an argument.

They said this was a declaration of war.

Yeah.

He also had some very incorrect things to say about what happened in the civil rights area.

I marked that in the news summary.

I said that it was the worst since re-instruction, or it could have gotten saved.

I mean, when did the dual school system end?

What did his brother do, Hank Johnson?

What happened on food stamps?

What's happened on minority business enterprise?

What's happened on, well, so many things.

The record is just astounding.

We put it together.

Well, I'm glad they are stood up a little, John, period.

Because they, you know, also they'll enjoy it.

You know, it gives them a slug, you know.

And these guys are drawing the sword, and they want to be part of the tale.

I'm inclined to think that we're going to find, and it will have to be after the trip's brought, that we may have to make the Congress.

You're laying the foundation in a long studio of the text, and it's all laid out there as sort of a handbook for anybody that wants to keep score on this.

Wasn't that something?

Yeah, I remember the old games and everything.

They can't run those anymore, you know?

Now, I don't do this because it's liberalism.

You can't even play Pixie anymore, the old black joke.

The old black joke.

Yeah, I think it's bad.

It's too bad all the great folks have done it.

Oh, well, that's a good person.

We should go down back.

Do you think it will?

No, that's going to be for after that census.

It's very bad.

Oh, my precious.

You know, you have a big team.

And if you turn it to a lot of the plausible acts, sir, I think they're going to get some confidence.

They're going to find that they've got a view.

They said the one thing they've got a view of.

is to do their thing, you know.

And everything ain't sitting behind this desk.

It really isn't.

Most of them.

It may be at some other desks.

I mean, you know, of course, socials and disasters and mayors.

But socials?

That doesn't prove blacks are worse than...

Yeah, I mean, they commit burglars or whatever.

They're charlatans.

Yeah, this is a very, you know, phase up there.

I don't think that's probably what's happening there.

No, I don't think that's happening.

He's black.

Yeah.

He's just, you know, this is a murder.

Murder.

Accessory to murder.

Oh, God.

And that is really, like, bad.

Because he's very close to the camera.

That's not us.

So, you know, it's going to be a local thing for the sheriff.

But he did pretty good.

He gave it pretty clear that he was an accessory after the fire.

If you haven't been on his staff.

You don't think we should throw a store at the Congress Center?

Well, you're not being all I know with them in this long stay of union.

You're pointing out their delays and so on and so forth, but I don't think you're being anything right this week in declaring war on them.

I could be wrong, but it just seems to me a sensible man, whether it were not to appear open and say, let's fight the issues for six months and then we'll fight the Congress term.

Let me say, the one thing that we don't remember is

You talk about an enemy.

You know, many people like the conflict there have an enemy.

And so, of course, he often says, and I'm sure other veterans would agree, why not labor?

Why not come and make labor there?

I mean, the meaty thing was enough.

That's enough.

Would you agree?

But if I can get good sentence and maybe keep bringing for us our neutralized, it's very important.

Would you agree?

I think the construction people are

It's good.

The second one, though, is looking at it.

Well, it's like, well, we can buy the drugs.

Tell her it's mine.

Go ahead.

That's fair.

But you know, when you take the institutions of government, nobody is like a police officer in a conference.

You realize that?

But I mean, if they screw around enough, if they screw around enough about children, then the thing to do is for them to start talking about their recesses.

You know, we got up there today, talking business.

The first thing they wanted to talk about was the recesses.

I'm never going to be off for Memorial Day.

I'm never going to be off to Lincoln's birthday.

Good luck.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you.