Conversation 719-012

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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.

Yes, whenever those teamsters are ready, I will, uh, all right.

Is that gray out there?

That's not gray.

He's just waiting for a car.

Would you like to disagree with this?

Yeah.

All right.

It was.

You haven't seen this young lady in a long cutout?

No.

Thank you.

That made my day.

She really was a magnificent singer.

Thank you.

I think it's very important that .

Oh, yes, I think the press has as well, and I think the gesture this morning on your part that brings you there was, I think the thing is, you play at this point, obviously, the key question, what are you going to do?

The president is going to select the best man for the job.

And we just are not going to comment on that at this point.

So as you well know, that could well be what we want to do.

But we don't want to make you a target at this point.

So therefore, you've got to give the impression that we're here.

Let's stand up, all of you.

That's what I did this morning.

I didn't.

Yeah.

But I said, what'd you tell me?

I said, I just stand up.

I said, I was one of the 17 that got out under consideration.

And the president said, you could say it wasn't a number under consideration, that you're one, and that you know that you're one.

up in Mr. Hoover's conference room.

They were all seated and I stood and I spoke to them about 20 minutes.

And I spoke in sensibilities tone and impact tone, right?

What kind of an individual I was and how I intended to operate and build upon and enrich the legacy of Mr. Hoover and how you respect that.

They reacted very well.

In fact, Mark Trump called me this morning.

He said that was a hell of a session yesterday.

I said some of the fellows I thought were going to retire said that this kind of guy we can serve.

Of course, they may be some of the fellows that should have been one of those fellows.

No, I wouldn't do that.

Some of these people, you know, this is an area in which I'd like to ask you to give me just some guidance.

Like one of the newspaper reporters this morning was pressing on the aspect of my political connections with you and my personal friendships with you.

And I said, my relationship with you is one of my closest friends.

You could say that.

I'd like you to say I miss him.

I have always been a friend of the President, just as Edgar Hoover was.

That's a good line.

What I told him, I said, I have respected and admired the President since he was a freshman congressman and I was a freshman law student.

And I said, if you mean a bi-personal friend, an intimate of the President, no.

But if you mean a close professional friend, working with the President and empowering him and respecting him, he has the answer.

You can find out that you

I think you might even say that

Well, it is common knowledge that Director Hoover was a very close personal friend of the President and his family, which is true.

My God, I've been to his house a dozen times, and he's been, you know, to the White House and to great numbers of occasions.

But also during the years out of office, I'd see him in California, and I'd say, my relationship with the President is not like that.

It is not that.

It isn't on that personal basis.

But on a professional basis, that I've seen him work with the National Security Council and the, you know, of course, since I've come to the Justice Department, I have great respect for him.

But it's not the personal relationship of the Director Hoover had with him.

You see, it's a very subtle way.

Well, the point is, your personal relationship, of course, is one of the things you don't want to do.

But the way to get ahead of it, I think, is neat.

That's a good comparison.

Yeah, and I'll make that as some of the books that come to see me this afternoon.

I think I just put it that way, that the president, I don't know what you might say, that he thought of all the people in public life, that public life, that Edgar Hoover was his closest personal friend, which is true.

I mean, I know nobody else in public life that I have seen more on socially than Edgar Hoover in a private way.

So I have nobody in the cabinet.

I mean, Roberts is a person who I might have seen there as well.

But I've seen Hoover out of office.

I mean, he's the guy that stuck with you in there, huh?

I've seen him in California and Florida.

We've all been down there for years.

Going back for 25 years, my closest personal friend of all the people I've known.

Much closer, for example, than I am, or any member of the camp.

But I didn't know that that was true.

So he was basically a personal friend in a very close, intimate sense.

Whereas you could say that relationship is not one that you had.

I mean, it's because of the way that things have developed.

But anyway, then you could say, oh, man, professionally, you've had respect for many years.

That comes easy.

And you could also do it this way.

It's quite evident that Edgar Hoover, of course,

and the president were on a first-name basis.

I mean, everybody knew that, which is true.

I mean, it was one of the few that was, and the president isn't on a first-name basis with very many people, so you could say you're not.

Well, no, I think these little subtle points had a great impact.

Sure, they did.

They did, but they picked them up.

You've got to remember, they're all in the nation.

They're all in the nation.

one or two exceptions, but generally speaking, whatever, they may say they're enemies of the Bureau, they're enemies of law and order, they're enemies of the administration.

They were enemies of Hoover's, blood enemies, and they know it.

They know it.

They probably practically heard when I made that eulogy today and also when I made the statement out there that they died.

Nevertheless, just consider it as the enemy.

But don't let them know you're considering them that way.

Uber was a master at it.

He hated the press.

Hated them, except for a few that he only had a few people heard particularly, and others .

But his favorite words were, he said, there's skunks, skunks in traffic.

And he always said, that's skunk.

And so you should do the same thing.

Never, never figure that anyone is your friend.

I just don't want to go there.

that you're being taken, but never, never, never do that.

That's the best advice I can give on that.

Some of our boys around here got to learn it the hard way and say, well, we can change it.

We know.

You see, they grow up, just read on.

He's right.

said that, play it clever.

Hoover hated him, and yet he had very good press relations, very rapid, seriously, because they had enormous respect for the old man.

And he was clever as a dickens with his enemies.

He, you know, they followed him.

He would, in private, he talked very boldly, publicly, except for the last, when he did fall off a bit and he lost his judgment, you know, and got in that silly fight.

But you do the same thing.

Play it.

You've got to be a conspirator.

You've got to be totally ruthless.

You've got to appear to be a nice guy.

But underneath, you've got to be steely and tough.

Now, that, believe me, is the way to run that bureau.

And I must say, I had like a kind of house in the Senate.

And I sat around and said, all right, so I love everybody.

And you know, all the right answers.

I think it's horrible.

The Bureau's always been against it.

You know, Mr. Hoover was against it.

Communism, well, that depends.

I've had to do that.

I haven't been doing it.

Now you're going to be right in the vortex of it.

But about everything else, a little of your effects is there.

I would suggest one thing that you might do, if you can, if you could have the senior man

It can't be told.

No, I've already had his resignation.

He volunteered.

I didn't have to ask for it.

Apparently not, because I wanted to talk with him yesterday.

He has resigned.

Now, what I would do there is to, another thing I would do, I would immediately call a meeting of all the offices and the settings, bring them in here.

The special agents in charge can bring them in.

And as a matter of fact, if they all come in, I might pop over.

I was going to try to set that up next week.

I've got to check with Dwight and Steve.

Here he is.

This was not a one-man thing.

But I think if you were to get one of those guys toward the door and come up, say, look, I'm just going around shaking.

I shake my hands a little.

The secretary is, and I shake my hands a lot.

of that building says, well, this guy's a good fellow.

I'd get that done quickly.

I think that's very important for you immediately to establish.

I don't mean committee or any act of that.

I mean the staff.

I don't mean the other people.

But you get around and shake their hands and say, you might even say that,

You can say you were talking to the president.

He said that he believed that Mr. Hoover had always said that what we made the Bureau of Men and Women, and he wanted to come around and thank them for their work and tell them that you looked forward to working with them.

That would go like wild.

Just touching you, just touching that, so sorry.

I'll do that tomorrow morning.

I didn't schedule anything for today.

No, no, not today.

I'm sorry.

Last night, just coming out of the gate, one of the black police officers stopped the car and reached in the car and shook my hand, and he said, we're all very proud of you, and all over the department.

And this thing, let me just have the idea that you're as mean as you are.

Let's hope you are.

He is.

I am.

But you know, I have to cover for that little facade every now and then.

I am.

I'm going to say I am, too.

or basically to put on this.

We all go out and put on the veneer.

I'd like the press.

I can't hardly stand them.

I know that basically they're not disloyal in the sense of loyalty to anything else like communism, right?

But they have the loyalty to the country.

They have the loyalty to the country to lose.

They're bad, bad money.

I got her, I'm not going to lose.

But, you know, what I said the other day, I knew she was true.

And, you know, I pointed that out for a baby person.

The little message that you had in there, I thought, well, beautifully done.

You know, Ron called me yesterday after he was all over.

He had Rather in his office, and Rather was

I said, why didn't they make that speech?

And who wrote it?

I was tagging the press, and I told them the words.

I said, one, I wrote it, and two, you believed it.

I believed it, and I felt it, and I held it in long enough.

Well, I had a factual, a lawyer's factual presentation, and they found it very difficult to quarrel.

Sure, as I pointed, or rather, as a son of a bitch, don't ever see him.

I said, don't ever, ever, ever see him.

I can assure you, because he will cut you up.

All you do is build him up and he gets 60 bucks for every shoot he gets somebody on.

I would not see him at all cut up, totally.

Recognize that.

Hoover hated seeing us with an utter edge.

You hear me?

Well, Chancellor, too.

I have a chance for you to get boxed up.

The Chancellor is so dumb.

but not a smarty, not an over-funny, but he's clever.

Had nothing to do with CBS, I'm sure, nobody.

Very good.

They are out to get the girl.

ABC, Howard Spinn, people like that, they're close, but they're decent.

Some of them, some of them, not all of them.

But rather that much, don't see the news.

I don't know, I would suggest something.

I wouldn't be in the news much.

I don't think, I wouldn't go, now they'll watch

where don't go on.

I don't think.

I don't think it's worth it.

I mean, you better chin around.

But I would stay away.

I would just very quietly do your job, particularly when you're coming at this point.

And we'll see later.

There may be a time when you better get out and show yourself.

But I would do it more with formal speeches as I can.

That's the way I would approach it.

Sometimes I take the tail tall of the press and think, look, I'm sorry, I'm so tied into the job, I can't do it.

Don't have press conference.

I don't have any press conference at all.

None.

Unless, you know, it's indicated that Ron or somebody or John or Ron should say, you've got to do it on this particular subject in this area.

You've got the message out.

No, I wouldn't do that at all.

There's one thing for the memory of that group, don't do anything to those sons of bitches and see if you guys...

They hate him.

They malign him.

Another group, Timeline.

Never see anybody from Timeline.

Never, never, never.

You may have them in your afternoon group, but remember, they're real, real outcasts.

Now, this is worse.

Timeline, I just, I think we generally feel that maybe you can do something that they don't like citing that.

No, no.

They have a total, total hater of the Bureau.

Or, you know, New York Times.

I never let them in the office.

Anybody that got the Pulitzer Prize and were exempted from the papers must not be in that office.

It had nothing to do with me.

I think everybody, but I think your best guys have not done anything, you know, after you do this thing today.

You've got to do something so that they don't think you're hiding.

But then I'd be here.

After that, I'd say, well, now, fellas, I'm too busy running the barrel, and I just can't go.

Do I have to talk to that tiny woman?

There'll be some time, yeah.

Oh, she's all right with me.

She's all right.

Bonnie Angelo's all right.

And I say to my finance secretary, you know, the people that have been, that Bonnie Angelo is a nice little girl.

It won't come out the way you expect it doesn't, does it?

No, I don't think so.

No.

But, um, it's re-election.

The President thinks it's alright for me to go over and volunteer, or if he wants me to stay away, I understand that.

But I haven't been over there to do anything yet.

I'd stay out of it.

Fine.

I don't want anyone to say yes or no.

We should get out of it.

I mean, it's perfectly fine for you to do it.

But don't ever be among the targets.

Don't ever do it.

That's what I was going to say.

And you could say that the, I think that you might say to him on the end, well, you have your support of the president.

And he asked you about it, and you said, no, you shouldn't be in it.