Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on Budget Message and Bicentennial Celebration

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Are you going to do that before the press?

I'm going to do it again.

I'm not better.

See, we now have it set up with no press for the budgets.

I didn't want any press.

I'm not saying that it isn't kind of a message at all.

I was just wondering whether you wanted to get this on before the press.

Well, are you doing it?

No.

Okay.

It's on.

Okay.

He could go out before camera then.

He is going before camera.

After the budget signing.

Yeah.

And say, the president has just signed the budget and has authorized .

It's not a particularly good subject.

You probably don't see the pointer, do you?

You do, but there's no use for me to be on and have 15 minutes of crap right after.

You see my pointer just more closely than I would have naturally identified it.

Why are you out there with my face on it?

That's it.

See?

And I just feel it's a very smart thing to do.

No, I thought about it.

I think you're better off.

I guess so.

John Perlman has talked with Annenberg over the weekend, and Rizzo is now properly programmed.

John is meeting with Rizzo at 11.30 today.

I wonder if you want to let him, bring him in for a second to say hello to someone from 11.30 and 12.30.

with his advice that he could drop into that meeting if he wanted to.

I think you want to talk to Rizzo separately from his city people.

I'll be meeting with this son of a bitch off the U.S. My God, Henry's got talking months.

It'll take me about two hours and a half, so I'm going to try to get it limited down.

I'm just trying to understand what he's trying to say.

But anyway, you've got to figure it out.

Hi, I noticed they have 45 minutes for this wall.

I guess I'm going to give them that much time.

So is there some reason to go on that way?

You know, you go on for an hour and you give them 45 minutes.

Isn't 30 minutes enough?

I haven't really got anything to talk to you about.

Or is it?

I don't know.

Maybe you didn't arrange it.

But you are.

Then I'll let somebody come in right now.

Okay.

You can go on and on about it.

You have accomplished your ability.

Yep, you heard me.

Okay, well, John, I'll be meeting with Chris.

I'll say just whenever he finishes it.

Well, that's my call.

If the president sees you, go ahead and ask him to come out for a minute.

He'll look out fine.

Sure.

Say, I know this is you again.

I mentioned this to you before.

Who's in charge of the Bicentennial Ball?

I see a weird story.

Well, the Bicentennial was royally screwed up.

And Rizzo made Rizzo.

I mean, that's our ball.

Mahoney's ball.

Who's ball?

Mahoney.

Somebody told me that I ought to speak Mahoney in there.

I told you that.

I know.

And I raised that.

And they say, absolutely not.

There's...

still trying to work out the problems.

And until they get it worked out, there's no point in you talking to Mahoney or anybody else about it.

Who is in charge of it here?

Anybody with his head screwed on tight?

We're supposed to be, you know.

We keep talking about it.

Yeah.

Shultz is the one that's in it right at the moment because the whole hang-up is Fletcher Grossman that's involved in it.

I'm not sure how it's, you know, whether there's, whether it be, I don't know.

I just want to be sure.

It's not a fuzzy problem now.

It's a practical problem.

Well, not just go.

Philadelphia was given the franchise.

Well, Rizzo says now they do.

And if they're going to have a plan that they can do it, that he's got everybody together and he's pushing for it now, when you've got Rizzo on top of it, maybe he'll come back together.

Maybe he'll be able to do it.

It's a Philadelphia problem.

But when they come back, they're going to come back with a big chunk, ask for a big chunk of federal money.

And in the meantime, because Philadelphia was falling apart, they've been trying to work up an owner.

And Maloney's people have come up with a 50 parks idea that you have a central park in each state.

And if you go for that, it's the parks instead of the parks.

I'm sorry.

Fine, I got that.

I got that.

It's just something I didn't know for sure.

Oh, I don't have a sign to say.

Girls.

Oh, but they do that.

Yeah, they always do that.

And that's just wonderful.

And you're a copy of the thing that I was working on.

He was going to try to frame it in that one paragraph, but do you want to see it before it was done that?

No.

You're setting it right and I'm working on that?

Well, these boys were in Kissinger.

Before that?

Yeah, any time.

As you see, I'll be busy until I'm screwed up here at the bottom.

So you don't really need to see a copy until about the time he comes in?

About o'clock probably.

All right.

Get one done and help me get it over with.

Oh, he has it already.

He has the whole thing.

The one that he's working on.

That one paragraph.

Yeah.

I didn't know if you wanted to read it this morning or wait.

Okay.

You know, he can let him work on it and save up as much as he can, and I'll work on it in the second half.

But he could go to Henry and tell him to take it since he mentions it to Henry and work on it.

Yes, he knows that.

And to get him then to bring it in to you, isn't it?

Or do you want him to bring it in and just send it in?

All right.

You know, if you hadn't noticed, well, God damn it, there's a lot of people worrying about it.

I don't know whether people ask about it, but I'm just going to be sure that we haven't done something here.

I agree, it's not a lot of people worrying about this, but maybe we can.

I'm wondering, did you find out whether they were going to do a Monday thing?

Yes, yeah.

An in-person Monday thing, which, you know, where they do the color thing, it goes to the big list.

Yeah.

Can they get that true vision to me so I can bring it to the recognition?

I don't know whether there's anything that you ought to or should do about this.

You know, Rose was raising the point about hues.

You know,

Sorry about bleeding and so forth.

The point was that it was disgusting.

You know, we didn't have enough substitutions.

It's important.

I don't know.

Well, that goes back to this original SST.

Some SST breathing.

But whatever it was, I just didn't know what the story is.

The basic problem from the beginning is that the role he would have liked to have had, and he recognized right off that he wasn't going to have it, was basically the sort of the Alan Haig role.

He wanted to be the military guy.

the senior military advisor to the president, rather than the head of the president's military support facility.

Recognizing he wasn't going to get into that role, because he had gone to the War College and all that, he feels that he's a man, a qualified strategist.

And all you know, he didn't have one major assignment.

He's done a lot of things, and that's perfect.

He channels his PWIs.

That's very skilled.

That's right.

But it may be that they should have brought in more on things.

He could have sat in on the briefings and things.

I have no objection.

You know what I mean?

Well, it was raised at the beginning.

It was determined that he didn't want to do it that way.

He recognized that.

I think he's always regretted that, in the sense that he had to wish he would have been in that role.

I was wondering, in view of the fact that you now have the security, you're putting the security man in the NSC now.

Well, I've got a thorough message about that this morning to check with Henry on this.

When John talked to Henry about doing that, when John and I did, the first time, Henry said, absolutely, anything you want.

Then when John...

set it up.

He told John to go ahead and do it.

John set it up.

Henry said, you know, Rogan's not going to put a spy in to take over the operation of my office and all that sort of thing.

John pondered down on that and said, look, you talk to the guy.

I'm going to have nothing more to do with it.

That's the last thing I'm interested in.

You've got to solve the problem.

And then John was just saying this morning that he doesn't know whether Henry's followed up on it or not because he purposely has not followed up on it himself.

But he's virtually certain, and he hasn't done anything.

He suggested that I ought to raise it with him, to be honest with you, before we stand up a tentative show.

That's too old a position for Hughes.

Okay, Hughes is all set to take a command thing, which he wanted to do.

That, I don't think Hughes is looking for a change.

Well, we don't understand either how he's going to get through it now at all.

Well, he's such an outstanding guy, I think, but we know that certainly in the business of being an American, A, isn't the best thing for him because he doesn't have very strong personality and so forth.

Well, I hope the new guy he's got is not too impressive, I must say, but you never know about how it looks.

He's very unimpressive as far as anything except his mental ability and his administrative ability.

I don't care what the mental is, it's administrative if you can run it.

That's all that's about.

what his strength is supposed to be, and that's how we began my work.

We want him around.

Well, I mean, we have really tried about to be so, you know, cooperative.

I think he's going, Dunn's going, you know, he's a very emotional guy, and he's going through a period.

He decided that he ought to move out, and the Air Force decided he ought to move out, and...

You know, not say, in this kind of job, you can move back into a command job.

And I think now that the time is practically up on him, he's thinking about, you know, it's kind of hard to pull up your routes.

Pull up routes and go to Texas, go off to Texas to run an Air Force.

That's the service.

But he does that for a time, and then he goes over to Asia again.

Good.

We'll watch him closely, you know.

I'll see that he gets, he's getting his second shower.

He's pretty good and all that.

That was awfully nice to have him go down there.

It sure was.

I thought he, they all liked him.

The one person I forgot to mention for that dinner, he hasn't been here, I really think we should have had his dead.

We had him over here on the other side.

And he just got to be filled up.

You know, he's a damn nice fellow.

He doesn't mention that he's around.

You know, pushing our side all the time.

And that's how it goes.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

You're absolutely right, Ben.

That's...

Go over and over that list and be sure we don't leave someone out.

Well, we had Bob Brown, for example.

Yeah, my suggestion.

No question.

You had Bob Brown.

You had that.

Chuck Colson, the special counsel.

Yeah.

Well, there's some special counsel we didn't have.

We didn't have John Dean, who is the counsel.

We have Dean.

No, we didn't.

We didn't have.

We didn't have Dean.

Yeah, we didn't.

Well, we didn't have plumbing either.

Plumbing.

Did we?

No.

Plumbing's.

Well, I had him down for a documentary.

Well, be sure Dad knows what we had.

Why don't you just tell him that?

Ask about it, and then we're going to have to go down eventually.

You know?

Eventually, we want to be sure we can have more of a political.

Why don't you say that?

He can't win on those things.

Don't worry about not winning.

You just got to do as well as you can.

I know.

No, but you, no matter what you do, you leave out one guy or somebody, some people.

Be sure to leave, as I want to emphasize again, that really digest thing.

Leave that damn thing to Rosa's final decision, like I told you, so that she doesn't.

I asked her about including somebody else in here.

She said, well, your office is now gone.

You're all little shit.

And I said, now, what was I saying?

I said, I don't think so, because I think they told you you were going next.

And she said, well, I didn't get this.

But you know what I mean?

It's an excuse.

But what I'm getting at is that on that one,

It takes away what it develops out of, I'm sure, is the fact she had with Alex, you know, and what he put her, you know, on one time.

And if she didn't have it, now I'm moving over here to say, whatever, on these political things, then that should be something else.

Let's just say the mentalist thing on those people.

And we'll just put it then on that bold, dirty ground, you know.

And so if there's any question there...

Because we can't have her, you know, making those in the base step.

On the other hand, this is one we're perfect for her.

Oh, I know the list she gave us, the one we, I told you to work on, but we, you know, made note of giving the whole list.

It was way more than they could use.

She asked for a cutback, which I went back to a cutback, and said, all right, here's the list, you know.

She had all the, you know, there's all of them there.

I haven't seen all of this.

I have no idea who this woman is.

They don't give a damn.

That's correct.

It's the only thing.

Dennis didn't raise the question at this point.

I didn't want you to think there was a problem there.

No, I guess I had a question.

His name ran in the program.

Yeah.

Well, you're under something.

There's a summary of that.

We don't have somebody else.

But John Bobbitt said, no sweat.

We just got to realize you can't have everybody every time.

And back out.

We do pretty well with that.

And the real thing is he doesn't deal with the captain much.

That's death and error.

But of course Bob Brown doesn't need her.

I'll be on the ground, yeah.

Yeah, that's it.

The reason is that we've just been an awfully good job on her.

And Michael is having a good summer, ladies.

It's a nice thing, isn't it, Chris?

That's enough to keep her going for six months.

Not at all.

It's that we do very well with the chance of getting the credibility of his client.

And we have client in an awful lot of stuff, don't we?

He's in there having meetings, leaders' meetings, everything.

Well, but we should.

And I suggest that Dent ought to be in on leaders' meetings.

Okay.

How about that?

Maybe that's the way to call him in and say that this year he ought to be in on leaders' meetings.

Because he is a good trooper, Bob.

He's a good trooper.

Isn't he?

Very.

From what I hear, very.

He sure is getting awkward, I like him in the Midwest.

I like his name.

Harry's brother.

Harry's very, you know, he's just solid day in and day out.

He's banging away.

He's got his, he's got his mind and he works it.

Sure does.

I had a thought that might be of interest to you.

It seems to me that with regard to this thing tomorrow night, that you've got to get Henry sat down, if you're not sat down.

And we must involve a total public relations effort on it.

Such as we have sometimes on previous speeches, but sometimes we have not.

This one, very much, this is highly tactical, you know, and it involves, you know, such questions.

Why didn't you set a deadline before?

Why did you oppose the deadline when the Congress put it out?

Does it, what does it do with the POWs?

What does it do for this or that?

What does it mean in this and that and the other thing?

Why didn't you negotiate in secret?

Why didn't you put out these things and so forth?

Now, in this case, Bob, Henry has simply got to trust, we've got to trust, I mean, the likes of Scala, for example.

He's got to be brought in earlier.

Scallop, McGregor, Klein, Coulson.

I'm just thinking of, I don't know who else.

Well, it's that basic group.

And then, of course, you may want to get it together and find a way to get to all the senators, to the Republican senators, and then the Spanish group.

Laird could be brought in to do some of the work on the cabinet side.

Rogers should.

Uh...

You see, Henry's limitation here usually is that people talk to two or three major columnists, you know, a little bit, and they give them a buddy.

And that is about all it is.

Okay?

All set.

We're not just giving them an interview.

They are just pens.

They're all about the country.

If you want to sign it, you just have to get one each to Weinberger and Jones, and you'll get two of your pens there.

All right.

Okay.

Well, I'll be right back, okay?

If, uh... As a matter of fact, would this be a good thing to talk about with Kennedy?

About right now?

Yeah.

You go ahead and get in, and I'll sort it out with you.

Okay, sure.

in peace, then that budget signing is going to be right back in London.

Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on Budget Message and Bicentennial Celebration

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Also recorded on January 24, 1972

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Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on Budget Message and Bicentennial Celebration

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on January 24, 1972

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Cite this conversation