Nixon White House Tapes — Conversation 722-006
Date: Tuesday, May 9, 1972 at 2:57 PM
Participants: Nixon, Richard M. (President); Haldeman, H. R. ("Bob"); Butterfield, Alexander P.
Recording device: Oval Office
Source: https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/722-006

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 Do not cite it as authoritative.

[0:01] Thank you.
[0:04] Thank you.
[0:31] Okay.
[0:34] Good job, Joel.
[0:39] Very well.
[0:41] Well, our cabinet meetings, things went well there, apparently.
[0:52] And the departmental meetings.
[0:55] Conley's doing his, rather than the department, he's doing section by section of that.
[1:00] Common?
[1:01] Yeah.
[1:02] Oh.
[1:04] Even different groups.
[1:05] I didn't keep his staff this morning, but most of them.
[1:10] Roger's really cranked up about his team.
[1:11] He said he had a really good team.
[1:15] He goes on and on.
[1:16] I don't know if you see that, but he has a couple of partners who have tears in their eyes, and we're saying this is a great move by the president.
[1:26] Really?
[1:27] All that?
[1:36] Yeah.
[1:36] Did we get a publicity on any of that?
[1:39] Okay.
[1:43] We did?
[1:44] The case of the church issued a thing saying that, very curious statement, where they said that the concern over your announcement
[1:55] The mining and air activity is obscured in moves the President has made toward any American participation in the war.
[2:00] In our view, the President has announced terms that correspond essentially to the formula which we have called over the past two years for prompt termination of our column on the release of prisoners.
[2:08] This is maybe about the ceasefire.
[2:12] This very close to case church amendment was part of the State Department opposition, though we have long sought to have Congress share with the President the responsibility of bringing into our court the effort of our intention to amend the case church amendment to conform to the four-month period the President has now indicated sufficient time for breaking until American withdrawal.
[2:26] Provost and Chief Swire, they leave that out.
[2:30] Our hope that this effort to give statutory support to the promise of American withdrawal and return for our prisoners will be backed by the vote that has to come.
[2:41] That's just what they said then.
[2:52] Right.
[2:53] I don't know what you can do in that business, maybe some sort of a big pull-up.
[3:07] No problem.
[3:09] First of all, our own poll, they'll have 400 interviews tonight.
[3:15] They can help us in the past.
[3:17] And they'll hand-tab.
[3:19] We've got one question, which is the key question, which is just simply, do you support the president's latest moves to bring the war to Vietnam to an end?
[3:28] That isn't exactly right, but it's close enough.
[3:31] And it's worded so that everybody's going to say yes.
[3:35] And it's in between a couple other questions, so they're set up for it.
[3:39] And we'll get a very heavy yes answer on that, I'm sure.
[3:44] And they will hand-tab just that one question.
[3:47] We can have it released on that by noon tomorrow.
[3:50] And Assemblymember is asking the same, or essentially the same question.
[3:56] And he had said before he wouldn't be able to get that out until 5 o'clock tomorrow, but now he said he can get it out at noon.
[4:03] So we'll have a, we'll actually have two polls out at noon tomorrow.
[4:11] One that we control and the other one we don't completely know.
[4:15] The seminar was bad for some reason.
[4:18] I don't think it will be.
[4:21] Seminars have been so strong all the way along that this is likely to come out better than ours.
[4:33] It worked very well.
[4:34] By the way, we're in good shape.
[4:40] And all the guys who were working on it, they were people like that.
[4:48] Yeah.
[4:49] If you said you'd make a statement.