Nixon, Kissinger & Bull on James Reston and J. William Fulbright

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I wanted to mention one thing to you, Mr. President.

Yeah, go ahead.

I called Scotty Reston yesterday.

I said I would on his column.

And about an hour later, he called me up and said, would I be able to stop by his house?

He wanted to talk to me.

So I came to have a talk.

one, eight, thirty, nine o'clock, and he had full-price, and himself, he said, he said, I'm deeply troubled.

He said, I attacked the president, and I wake up in the middle of the night, and I start worrying about why I'm doing it.

He's trying to do the best for his country.

And then I worry about, again, how we can hold the country together, and then I feel it's my duty to attack,

He was going through a real anguish and he said, well, yeah, only because they're completely fuddled.

And then he said he asked for a gardener to come over because we have a...

to take any of your staff on that, because we cannot make, I just marked it there, I know the idea, I'm for interchange of science and all that sort of thing, but I cannot, I might lose Flora, Glee, if you want to talk about it.

But it's a fellow a lot more than that.

I'm not going to go to that neighbor, Castro.

I want that clearly understood, or I'll get it.

We haven't followed up on my order, so I'll get it to Castro, and it's not going to be done.

So I just want to tell you it's done.

Go ahead, what did he say?

Well, on this one, the only thing we were concerned about is that the whole scientific... That's too confident.

Okay.

That's the worst I've been.

That's my answer.

All right, that's fine.

I'm going to go ahead.

He was really thinking, are we doing another... You know, he puts on an act.

No, no, I think they're in trouble.

I construed this as weakness, and he said what he wanted to propose to me was, here he's got the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the president of Common Cause,

Could they say this, that if I came to them, that the national interest requires that they moderate their criticism for a month?

A month?

At any particular time, or for a time.

He said, would you do this?

Bill, will you do it?

John, will you do it?

Then I said, well, it's a hell of a responsibility for me to take, and I'm not sure I'm ever going to do it, but I appreciate your offer, and of course I'll discuss it with the president.

Uh, and I mention it to you... You bring Fulbright in?

I mention it to you...

I think... Well, Fulbright might be scared to break it if he promises it in front of the President.

Yeah.

Guards or...

They're all boys, Mr. President.

I'm mentioning it only as a sign of your strength.

I feel it.

And then, and then you've got, you just have a record of it.

And my point is, Henry, it then gives you something more.

I mean, I lacerated them on Vietnam.

Oh, him and Fulbright, I said.

Fulbright there?

Yeah, Fulbright and Gardner, they were all both there.

Oh, I thought you said... Oh, no, he had them both there without telling me ahead of time.

And Fulbright said...

I said, you know, gentlemen, the thing that I find so disturbing is that I don't care what you think about the president's plan.

I happen to believe we went to the limit of what we could conceive.

But when the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and the senior columnists in the country raised issues that not even the North Vietnamese had raised,

then we are having a moral crisis in this country.

I said, now, if you wanted to argue with me, I said, if you had made exactly the same point as the North Vietnamese, it would be painful enough, but at least we'd be in a reasonable debate.

And, well, you know, John Gardner is such a whore.

And I said, John, you know me.

We've worked together before this.

You can tell these people that we, what I thought about

that the war wasn't being won before.

So if they kept saying the president won victory, I said the president is not a fool.

He's a highly intelligent man.

He reduced our forces from 550 to 50,000.

He won victory in 50,000.

But it was astonishing.

Fulbright was weeping all over the place.

He said, what do you want?

Tell him what you want.

Do you want me to stop criticizing?

Do you want me to participate?

He said, I try to help you.

Well, I mentioned it only, Mr. President.

Why do you think he did it?

Do you think he's worried?

They're worried.

They are totally confused.

You think your course information is... To me, it's a sign of their weakness.

If they thought they had you on their arm, there'd be no mercy.

If I came to Reston in the time of crisis and said, look, at Cambodia, for example, I'd try to tell Reston to moderate his criticism and even took a high...

position because they thought they had you on their own, saying I was interfering with freedom of the press.

Oh, yeah.

You remember I called him up one Saturday.

I said, for God's sake, Cully, with 100,000 people, can't you give the president a chance?

Oh, no, I was interfering with freedom of the press.

Yeah, that's usually what they do.

Uh, but...

But what Scotty was offering me here was to come back and say, whenever I wanted to, to this group of Fulbright, Gardner, and Dresden, I won't do it at my initiative.

And if they ever take initiative again, I'll check with you.

I won't play with them, but I'll check with you.

No, no, I'll check with you.

for reference, that is basically over-established.

That's who you're talking to.

And here's John Gardner, at the end, he said, you know, I laid this out and I said, now you people have been, another thing I jumped on, I said, is on China, I said, I've noticed a very interesting turn.

You are all now talking about China as a burn of sanity.

We are talking about a historical event.

We don't care about the, we'll make some agreements, but that's not so important.

We, what is at stake here is, these people are going to look at the president, and they're going to decide, do we have a view of the future, and is that view of the future worth their working with us?

And while the president, and when they look at the president, they look at the people behind him.

Now, while he's getting ready, all you people do is cut up the credibility of your president.

You're all going to live in the country.

That's great.

I hope you do that again.

I really... What did they say to that?

John Gardner said it was one of the great emotional experiences.

You know, he's such a whore.

And he said, yes.

And he said, Scotty, I want you to know, Henry had told me I could call him any time, but I was a little ashamed, a little embarrassed.

But I'm now going to take advantage of it.

And...

What did Russell say when you took him on on China, though?

On China, he was on my side.

He said, absolutely right.

He said, on China, he'd been there, and they brainwashed him.

And on China, he supported me 100%.

He said, he's a man of his word.

One thing he says is that we ought to give a briefing to the press before they get there so that they don't harass us too much with spot news.

He said it's a great historical event.

He really was, you know, Fulbright was making a few sounds and Dresden just lathered him.

Well, he said the press mustn't harass us every day for news.

He said we should steer the press into the direction of sightseeing and seeing something of China, reporting the mood, because he thinks that the Chinese will take it very ill.

if we sort of gave a daily report on what went on.

Oh, God, you can't walk out and breathe every day.

There's a damn thing.

Absolutely, I couldn't breathe.

And Redston said he would take care of the New York Times in that respect.

But for Redston, he said, I don't like this speech of the president.

I said, well, don't you like about it?

What do you want us to do, lie to the Congress in order to protect the channel in which nothing is happening?

So he mentions these files, or I just...

He said, that was the only proposal.

I said, you realize it's in their nine points, which they published today.

And so on and so forth.

It was an amazing thing.

You could demolish it.

But on Vietnam, it was interesting.

On Vietnam, Redson was against me.

Gardner was sort of half for me in his boring way.

He's never included.

But the interesting thing is, as you say, here was the establishment, and nothing but weakness.

A week ago, could have brought them to us.

A week ago, before your speech, if I had said to the President, please get these people together for me, I want to appeal to them on behalf of the President, he would have said, you're trying to exploit me.

And this is weakness.

If they could launch an all-out attack on you,

He said, we four, he said, the four in the room must try to hold the country together.

We must put some restraint on the debate.

And I said, well, I'll be glad when I think something is against the national interest.

Very badly, I may tell you.

Well, I didn't know what I was getting into.

I thought I was talking to Gandhi.

And I find folk right there.

That's all right.

Well, I'm delighted to get it.

It makes those people, it keeps them a little loose.

Keep them loose, Henry.

Keep them loose.

You know, an interesting thing is that incidentally Bob was talking to Joe on the stuff out there.

I should not say how it was very recent.

I think if I can get it through, it's through the head.

Is it?

Do you understand that these people have already met?

Yes, sir.

Do you have them?

You had them for dinner in September, and they were in Kansas City.

Bob didn't know that it got on the schedule about six, so that's why .

All right.

Now, the other thing I'm going to tell you is that he, uh... Bob, uh, raised the total .

I have a full session.

And, uh...

I said, I have forgotten more than those bastards who don't learn about China.

Well, I've read a book last night, haven't I?

I've read two books now.

I've read stuff.

And this idea of consulting, I don't think, I mean, what in the name of Christ, you know, in a sense, you think of all the meetings that I've had, I suppose that the goddamn establishment

to try to create the impression that I go into these things without them telling me.

That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.

That's one thing I told them all yesterday.

I said, it's really a fortunate event that it's this president who knows so much about foreign policy who's talking to the Chinese, when so much depends not on just following a brief, but on giving an impression of confidence and confidence.

And it was a weird meeting because

How long have you been there?

About two and a half hours.

How long have you been there?

About two and a half hours.

All right, I just wanted to remind you that the watches that you gave the astronauts, they weren't ready the night of the dinner.

You sent them to them three weeks later.

Oh, fine, fine, but we've got to get this to her.

This didn't have the...

What are they going to do with it now, Jose?

I mean, you'll have to wait and put the others at five minutes after, but where is he?

You know, if they need to even spend that much time with him, he has to assist them.

Nixon, Kissinger & Bull on James Reston and J. William Fulbright

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on February 1, 1972

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