Nixon White House Tapes — Conversation 662-005
Date: Tuesday, February 1, 1972 at 11:39 AM
Participants: Nixon, Richard M. (President); Kissinger, Henry A.; Bull, Stephen B.
Recording device: Oval Office
Source: https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/662-005

This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite it as authoritative.

[0:04] I wanted to mention one thing to you, Mr. President.
[0:11] Yeah, go ahead.
[0:14] I called Scotty Reston yesterday.
[0:16] I said I would on his column.
[0:20] And about an hour later, he called me up and said, would I be able to stop by his house?
[0:26] He wanted to talk to me.
[0:29] So I came to have a talk.
[0:31] one, eight, thirty, nine o'clock, and he had full-price, and himself, he said, he said, I'm deeply troubled.
[0:43] 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.
[0:50] He's trying to do the best for his country.
[0:51] And then I worry about, again, how we can hold the country together, and then I feel it's my duty to attack,
[1:01] He was going through a real anguish and he said, well, yeah, only because they're completely fuddled.
[1:09] And then he said he asked for a gardener to come over because we have a...
[1:22] 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.
[1:37] But it's a fellow a lot more than that.
[1:39] I'm not going to go to that neighbor, Castro.
[1:42] I want that clearly understood, or I'll get it.
[1:45] We haven't followed up on my order, so I'll get it to Castro, and it's not going to be done.
[1:48] So I just want to tell you it's done.
[1:50] Go ahead, what did he say?
[1:52] Well, on this one, the only thing we were concerned about is that the whole scientific... That's too confident.
[1:58] Okay.
[2:00] That's the worst I've been.
[2:02] That's my answer.
[2:04] All right, that's fine.
[2:05] I'm going to go ahead.
[2:06] He was really thinking, are we doing another... You know, he puts on an act.
[2:10] No, no, I think they're in trouble.
[2:11] 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,
[2:21] Could they say this, that if I came to them, that the national interest requires that they moderate their criticism for a month?
[2:29] A month?
[2:30] At any particular time, or for a time.
[2:34] He said, would you do this?
[2:36] Bill, will you do it?
[2:37] John, will you do it?
[2:38] 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.
[2:51] Uh, and I mention it to you... You bring Fulbright in?
[2:55] I mention it to you...
[2:56] I think... Well, Fulbright might be scared to break it if he promises it in front of the President.
[3:02] Yeah.
[3:03] Guards or...
[3:04] They're all boys, Mr. President.
[3:05] I'm mentioning it only as a sign of your strength.
[3:08] I feel it.
[3:09] I feel it.
[3:10] And then, and then you've got, you just have a record of it.
[3:13] And my point is, Henry, it then gives you something more.
[3:18] I mean, I lacerated them on Vietnam.
[3:23] Oh, him and Fulbright, I said.
[3:27] Fulbright there?
[3:28] Yeah, Fulbright and Gardner, they were all both there.
[3:30] Oh, I thought you said... Oh, no, he had them both there without telling me ahead of time.
[3:36] And Fulbright said...
[3:45] 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.
[3:52] I happen to believe we went to the limit of what we could conceive.
[3:56] 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,
[4:07] then we are having a moral crisis in this country.
[4:09] 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.
[4:24] And, well, you know, John Gardner is such a whore.
[4:28] And I said, John, you know me.
[4:29] We've worked together before this.
[4:32] You can tell these people that we, what I thought about
[4:36] that the war wasn't being won before.
[4:39] So if they kept saying the president won victory, I said the president is not a fool.
[4:43] He's a highly intelligent man.
[4:47] He reduced our forces from 550 to 50,000.
[4:50] He won victory in 50,000.
[4:55] But it was astonishing.
[4:56] Fulbright was weeping all over the place.
[4:58] He said, what do you want?
[5:00] Tell him what you want.
[5:01] Do you want me to stop criticizing?
[5:03] Do you want me to participate?
[5:05] He said, I try to help you.
[5:09] Well, I mentioned it only, Mr. President.
[5:11] Why do you think he did it?
[5:15] Do you think he's worried?
[5:16] They're worried.
[5:17] They are totally confused.
[5:19] You think your course information is... To me, it's a sign of their weakness.
[5:28] If they thought they had you on their arm, there'd be no mercy.
[5:32] 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...
[5:43] position because they thought they had you on their own, saying I was interfering with freedom of the press.
[5:47] Oh, yeah.
[5:49] You remember I called him up one Saturday.
[5:51] I said, for God's sake, Cully, with 100,000 people, can't you give the president a chance?
[5:56] Oh, no, I was interfering with freedom of the press.
[5:59] Yeah, that's usually what they do.
[6:02] Uh, but...
[6:04] 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.
[6:25] And if they ever take initiative again, I'll check with you.
[6:27] I won't play with them, but I'll check with you.
[6:30] No, no, I'll check with you.
[6:35] for reference, that is basically over-established.
[6:38] That's who you're talking to.
[6:42] 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.
[6:56] You are all now talking about China as a burn of sanity.
[6:59] We are talking about a historical event.
[7:01] We don't care about the, we'll make some agreements, but that's not so important.
[7:05] 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?
[7:19] And while the president, and when they look at the president, they look at the people behind him.
[7:24] Now, while he's getting ready, all you people do is cut up the credibility of your president.
[7:30] You're all going to live in the country.
[7:33] That's great.
[7:34] I hope you do that again.
[7:36] I really... What did they say to that?
[7:38] John Gardner said it was one of the great emotional experiences.
[7:43] You know, he's such a whore.
[7:45] And he said, yes.
[7:46] 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.
[7:54] But I'm now going to take advantage of it.
[7:58] And...
[7:58] What did Russell say when you took him on on China, though?
[8:02] On China, he was on my side.
[8:03] He said, absolutely right.
[8:05] He said, on China, he'd been there, and they brainwashed him.
[8:10] And on China, he supported me 100%.
[8:13] He said, he's a man of his word.
[8:18] 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.
[8:28] He said it's a great historical event.
[8:30] He really was, you know, Fulbright was making a few sounds and Dresden just lathered him.
[8:39] Well, he said the press mustn't harass us every day for news.
[8:44] 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.
[8:56] if we sort of gave a daily report on what went on.
[8:58] Oh, God, you can't walk out and breathe every day.
[9:01] There's a damn thing.
[9:02] Absolutely, I couldn't breathe.
[9:03] And Redston said he would take care of the New York Times in that respect.
[9:08] But for Redston, he said, I don't like this speech of the president.
[9:13] I said, well, don't you like about it?
[9:15] What do you want us to do, lie to the Congress in order to protect the channel in which nothing is happening?
[9:20] So he mentions these files, or I just...
[9:24] He said, that was the only proposal.
[9:25] I said, you realize it's in their nine points, which they published today.
[9:31] And so on and so forth.
[9:34] It was an amazing thing.
[9:36] You could demolish it.
[9:38] But on Vietnam, it was interesting.
[9:41] On Vietnam, Redson was against me.
[9:44] Gardner was sort of half for me in his boring way.
[9:48] He's never included.
[9:51] But the interesting thing is, as you say, here was the establishment, and nothing but weakness.
[9:56] A week ago, could have brought them to us.
[10:00] 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.
[10:12] And this is weakness.
[10:16] If they could launch an all-out attack on you,
[10:19] He said, we four, he said, the four in the room must try to hold the country together.
[10:25] We must put some restraint on the debate.
[10:28] And I said, well, I'll be glad when I think something is against the national interest.
[10:34] Very badly, I may tell you.
[10:44] Well, I didn't know what I was getting into.
[10:46] I thought I was talking to Gandhi.
[10:49] And I find folk right there.
[10:51] That's all right.
[10:52] Well, I'm delighted to get it.
[10:54] It makes those people, it keeps them a little loose.
[10:57] Keep them loose, Henry.
[11:00] Keep them loose.
[11:03] You know, an interesting thing is that incidentally Bob was talking to Joe on the stuff out there.
[11:08] I should not say how it was very recent.
[11:11] I think if I can get it through, it's through the head.
[11:13] Is it?
[11:16] Do you understand that these people have already met?
[11:18] Yes, sir.
[11:19] Do you have them?
[11:19] You had them for dinner in September, and they were in Kansas City.
[11:22] Bob didn't know that it got on the schedule about six, so that's why .
[11:25] All right.
[11:25] Now, the other thing I'm going to tell you is that he, uh... Bob, uh, raised the total .
[11:40] I have a full session.
[11:42] And, uh...
[11:46] I said, I have forgotten more than those bastards who don't learn about China.
[12:04] Well, I've read a book last night, haven't I?
[12:06] I've read two books now.
[12:08] I've read stuff.
[12:09] 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
[12:26] to try to create the impression that I go into these things without them telling me.
[12:30] That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.
[12:33] That's one thing I told them all yesterday.
[12:35] 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.
[12:51] And it was a weird meeting because
[12:56] How long have you been there?
[12:58] About two and a half hours.
[12:59] About two and a half hours.
[13:01] How long have you been there?
[13:02] About two and a half hours.
[13:04] 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.
[13:13] You sent them to them three weeks later.
[13:16] Oh, fine, fine, but we've got to get this to her.
[13:19] This didn't have the...
[13:23] What are they going to do with it now, Jose?
[13:25] I mean, you'll have to wait and put the others at five minutes after, but where is he?
[13:30] You know, if they need to even spend that much time with him, he has to assist them.