Conversation 760-010

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Oh, John, all right, happy birthday.

Thank you for having us.

I think we're going to have a formal, I think this is just a photograph.

Well, it is a photograph.

Sit over here.

I've noticed that you sit over here.

This thing lined up, and you started to classify, kind of out of papers, the main thing.

The murder of Jim and all the nastiness.

But, well, it must all have come into our territory, haven't it?

Yeah.

But, you know, you're right.

It's true.

I don't know.

I don't understand.

I don't know.

This is John's 50th birthday.

I've got to say, speaking from my own experience, the 50th is the last year of my life.

I don't want to say what we've got to do.

Okay, if that boy's not used to playing too, no worries, I'll get her out.

Thank you.

Nice to meet you, thank you.

Nobody hear that?

I don't wanna see that.

Be young and be impressed.

See you later.

All right, the, um, this is, that's when it's the part of the magic.

See, there it goes.

Well, this is a report.

This is what we have.

This is what you said.

Oh, sorry.

Well, I mean, I'm not an expert on the problem.

The problem is that it's been reduced to secrecy.

It's been reduced to secrecy.

That's good.

That's pretty good, don't you think?

Now you see, I mean, including the CIA things, which we originally did, the figures are more dramatic.

It's a reduction of about 73%.

The CIA sort of wanted to be left out of the listing to go into

to submit a separate list to a department agency separately.

And since they wanted to be left out of that, we just had to.

It would have been a more, a better percentage here.

Now this percentage doesn't look very good.

The reason for it is the top secret has slid down the secret.

Everything, people, people, people over classify.

Well, I'm not satisfied at all on the top secret.

and use our classification vote.

It's the number of people authorized to pass the vote.

His top secret says a reasonable expectation of grave damage to national security.

Well, we have, I found this on Justice yesterday, we have 140, which would list a special agent charged in St. Louis, Missouri.

I said, well, that would lie.

So in the next meeting, they're going to, I'd ask them to come and justify their top secret a little bit better for me.

I'd like to get that top secret down more.

I'm not concerned with the number of people that can justify it.

What I am more concerned about, frankly, is the number of people who have access to the damn thing.

It's just far too many people in this debriefing business and all that kind of stuff.

There are all sorts of people, for example, the bureaucracy of the State Department, the Defense Department, that I don't trust at all.

They get top secret information.

They should get it.

I've heard this, classified this, and not distributed it.

So I hope you look into that.

Is that part of the job?

Remember we talked about that, right?

You've already done that?

Well, part of that was a major reduction in the total, with almost a million people.

And they reduced it down to about 600,000.

But we can make a separate effort on that.

600,000 people have access to top secret information.

Now, what the hell?

Two people can't keep a secret from 600,000.

I'd like for you to get, I want you to address that problem of reducing that number.

I think it should be 600,000 maybe.

They just don't have to have it.

People, I think the top secret really should be, and almost underneath it, no basis, but that's kind of another thing.

Have we developed, is there any, beyond that, there's the eyes only thing.

Do we have any kind of new classification

That's not a present case, Mr. President.

That's a distribution thing.

And it's quite obviously abused.

It is abused.

What I'm just trying to think of, John, should there be some new classification?

I wonder if Tom Stewart doesn't become so common that it no longer would be.

There used to be a situation that I would never take a Tom Stewart document on this briefcase.

How much should there be then?

You see, they should interrogate them all over, all over.

You know, they do.

One of the specialized outfits, my specialty at CIA, AEC, they have what they call cohort material.

So when I was working in this building, a mere top secret, the clearance didn't really mean much.

The U-2, for example, which they read, which is really, what I think is a really top secret.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you too?

That's what I thought.

All right.

They have a special code word.

This really, this really barreled down what I think a top secret ought to be.

I probably went through most of World War II without even having top secrets.

We copied the British.

The British had most secrets.

So we have that top secret to go along with it.

But that's the thing I want to attack, this top secret.

I've asked for a report as of December to see if they can make an estimate as to whether this has had an effect on leveling off this line and the number of classified documents.

I'm afraid it's never going to level off completely until your six years is over and your versus a great big hunk of confidence drops out.

the bottom you're going to find a graph that runs along like this and down hopefully down far enough so you see that a thousand people over a thousand people with authority to classify top secret even under this improved situation actually 1500 and the archives just got 114 new bodies to declassify another they're on a treadmill they're

So as I went on, I'm afraid that the number of documents in the government's possession is still going to go up gradually in spite of this drastic improvement.

Until after six years comes and all this just automatically banged up.

It would be a very uneven curve.

I don't think we're going to see very much of a way to solve these things.

One of the very good things in the order that was tied into this is that we required for the first time that the class part be verified.

So we know he has the authority to be listed, and his name has to be on the paper.

It's less likely they're going to abuse it.

If the fellow in responsibility is going to be there, we'll be able to track it down.

And I think those two things coupled, put together, one, you're given the authority,

in writing plus you have to have your name on the paper when it's classified means you will be able to they won't abuse it what is uh do you have a i don't know but the only way we can

operate without setting up a bureaucracy of our own is to decentralize and stay on these people's backs every month and let them do the work themselves.

And they've done a very, very good job of coming close to that.

Everybody has shown every evidence of a superb cooperation now

He claims to be a month old and we're beginning to... Well, we're...

Sometimes there are complaints that we're beginning to surface that they won't show you first, but we'll take care of it.

What's, uh...

I think we should go all the way to the bottom of the edge.

I think you're starting to look...

This is a program long before... Well, we claim that.

We said, you know, Redcliffe was heading out to move to January 71.

We had started the study.

Yeah, we had started the study.

But I would say, one of the great things about the Hillsborough thing, and this would be a publicity question, whether, let's look at it, why are we doing this?

It seems to me we're doing this.

What I think, John, and you, Colby, what I have in mind is this.

I don't even know how to make people honest.

I've seen all this crap about them, you know, that we've got to run to know and all that bull.

That doesn't bother me any more.

But what does bother me is the things that ought to be secret that get out.

But you can't run through them that way.

Therefore, I want you to, if you can, as I always, set up a system whereby it is possible

there's a greater chance that what needs to be secret is kept secret.

And that's really what you get down to.

And I'd rather have that than to aim at any other goals.

We've got to be, you cannot run this government and have this stuff come out, Jack Anderson's column or the New York Times and the rest, over and over again.

And that's the problem I see with it.

I don't know.

What about analogies?

Are you taking advantage of where analogies are at?

I was surprised because our trust so far has been to reduce the amount of classification.

It's a good thing that I'm getting this from you because I sort of thought that that was the big trust, getting stuff declassified.

Well, that's the thing.

I may be sure of that.

the public being the first, there's gotta be right to know that it's Tom that was, and Tom that way, but the real reason that I feel is important, and I think that's, that's, that's such a, I don't wanna, I don't wanna go in and think you're over-classifying people all around something, but the real reason, there's just got to be some things that can be kept secret, and there's gotta be added to the punishments for it, so I wanna be sure that in the top secret area,

but less people can do it, that there are higher penalties for it, and that if we get that, so that we can at least have some way to run it.

Like, first of all, that's a very small thing, but when Kissinger comes back from Paris, to be perfectly frank with you, we don't tell anybody.

The State Department, the Defense Department, the Vice President, nobody agrees with any of that.

But there is sanitize, right?

Sanitize, you know.

a MemCon type of thing, which we looked at, which was very good.

Now, why don't we?

Is it because of a lack of trust in any one of the top divisions?

It is because of this insane business that they feel that they've got to go back and debrief everybody.

By the time they debrief everybody, there's one asshole who's been on the line, who, as you know, will consider, well, I've got a friend in the New York Times, and then he sort of leaks it out and destroys it.

That's why, that's why they say we keep things too closely held.

You know very well though, we've had some very problems.

Watson had a hell of a problem, you know.

He sent a private message to us about the French and their dealings with Algeria with Royal Mac.

It leaked out.

And it practically ruined one of the very serious, the very relations with Pompidou, the fact that Pompidou sent me a message, you know.

And that's what I, what I'm really getting at is that I want you to have in the back of your mind is yes,

Do the very best you can to get rid of the top secret.

I mean, to reduce the classifications and so forth and so on.

Let the public posture be that the public has a right to know that government shouldn't be so much of a secret.

In other words, people have a right to know.

That's the moral of the public posture.

Your primary goal, primarily, which we only talk about in this shop, is to see to it that when we need to have something secret, that we can keep it secret and punish people by God if they break it.

That's what we can do.

That'll take some constancy.

That's right, General.

You just don't... You tell the Attorney General the hell with him.

He has to do what he's told on this.

The problem is that we really need to have the top secret classifications respected.

Look, even 25 years ago, when people leaked out top secret stuff, all hell broke loose around here.

Even during the time your father was here, there was a, you know, he would, he'd hit the ceiling.

Remember when July was not broken?

Well, you know, the number three man in the AEC, in the CIA, a fellow named Amory, do you remember Amory?

He was in carpool with Joe Elson.

I remember another time when I was in the woodwork in the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff put a figure...

for a defense budget they recommended, which was out of the world at that time.

It was $7.1 billion.

They'd all given themselves too much.

And Secretary McElroy gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff the very devil, not because of this crooked figure, which is the fact that they put it in the top secret document, which would obviously be in the newspapers the next day.

They didn't even put it in writing.

That used to just sort of, he was livid on the subject, but he gave reason to.

Three people know something that there's... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to... Well, I'd like to get it to...

is to have a security system that whoever is, frankly, in this office, whoever is in this office, can run the government.

Now, we really have to, we are in some secret things.

We've got, I must say, it's really going to become an Ellsberg thing.

The Ellsberg thing.

And then, of course, that terrible leak on the Indian package campaign out of Kissinger's office.

It's now become a virtue for people to go out and leave stuff.

And for Christ's sakes, they get the Pulitzer Prizes for it.

They get the New York Times the Pulitzer Prize for pranking and violating the law on top secret information.

And Jack Asher gets the Pulitzer Prize.

Well, that's young me.

That's me.

Huh?

Did you see the testimony of John Kenneth Gallagher from the Baxter Tube in India?

I made a public statement that he, on purpose, deep-top-secret stuff to the press in order to bank his notes.

That's him.

Did he say that?

Within the last three weeks.

I didn't see it.

It's not unbelievable.

But you know that's the kind of thing about intellectuals.

You see, there is this higher morality business.

The so-called intellectual, most of them, I agree with these schools.

say that they know better and that they will, like Mrs. Ellsberg said, that he will determine what the country has the right to know.

You can't have that.

You just can't.

You may not know everything.

I mean, as you know, we put out everything we can.

But there's this sometimes we have to keep things down, which makes it embarrassing to maybe us.

But the main thing is,

We can't run the government this time.

We can't conduct negotiations in any serious form.

And that's, I would say, just to put it in a whole different perspective.

The Ellsberg Plan came out.

Countries all over the world raised hell and said, look, there are communications.

We've been, like the British and others, very, very forthcoming.

We don't want our communications to get out.

Now, the other thing that I think we should have in mind is that, not only to be a bad situation, but this situation is particularly important for the common stage, you could say.

They are, of course, inordinately suspicious, the Chinese and the Russians, when we deal with them, let alone the Poles and North Vietnamese members.

The Chinese and the Russians are the reason we are able to make deals with them.

that I've been able to, is that I had personal conversations, which I've never leaked.

And they know they can tell me.

And I know what his future people think.

That's what he called hell breaks loose.

Now, that's the reason.

And I didn't show you how these things go.

I was talking to him one day about secretaries and so forth.

I said, do you ever, do you ever use a detector?

He said, no.

All we use is a cemetery.

I asked him, do you ever use a detector?

And I told him the whole story.

I said, well, just a day.

The treacherous monster told me that.

I asked him the same question.

He said, no, he doesn't like to dictate.

He thinks it's too personal.

I can't personally like to use a cemetery to dictate.

Depression, I don't like.

It's difficult.

He said, it's not like that.

I don't like it.

He said, well, he says, when you wake up in the night and want to make a note, it's always good to have a secretary present.

But anyway, my thought is, you're going to digress.

The reason for me to do this, obviously, is the threat of an attack in the direction.

In this period of negotiation with the communists, particularly, the ability of the White House to keep confidential matters of this type is going to determine the success of negotiations.

Because they have a passion for it.

I don't mean they're going to try to screw us, and we won't try to screw them.

But on the other hand, once you break down the confidentiality, then they don't try to do anything.

But they have absolutely, they know they can't do it.

And they just don't understand how we can do it.

We go to 100 degrees.

So to the extent you can, the client needs to turn to the other people, not just emphasize the client.

We want to have a security system that is as open as possible.

Classified a lot less.

But let's have a category of classification.

that is reliable so that, and then I want to have the punishment for people that leak that stuff.

I want those punishments examined only in the top secret category.

The hell with the other stuff.

I'd rather have the other stuff, but I'd rather have it.

I'd rather have very few things classified as top secret.

Very few.

And then throw the book at the bastards and we put it out.

Don't you agree?

Well, let me just point out a few other times.

The, uh,

The public image of liberality, of fewer classified documents and so forth, will give the basis, the rationale for being tolerant of people who do violate it.

If the public looks at it.

Exactly.

Yes, sure, sure.

The fact that we are being liberal about these things and so forth.

I don't want to sound as cynical as John Taylor.

I do believe in philosophy.

I see this stuff coming in here.

This is confidential, this is top secret, and so forth.

And jeez, I mean, there's no reason for it.

And I just mark it and send it over to the secretary and say, make 30 copies and send it around.

You know what I mean?

And they do overclassify it.

Everybody says, top secret, but it's just sort of their thoughts about something.

I know this, so just stop that sort of thing.

But we have got to have, for example, communications with ambassadors.

Well, the one thing that is unfortunate

Any communication with a foreign government has got to be, got to be, first off, secret.

And there must be the ultimate punishment for it.

Because that determines your ability to deal.

I mean, make it up to your own small.

And also, communist or non-communist, they don't talk to people that break secrets, right?

People are sensitive about that.

No, of course, we'll also have to look at our SBN hospital because you know it's very bad.

Well, frankly, the SBN hospital goes too far.

There are those great loopholes.

That's right.

Absolutely right.

But there are those loopholes where it has to be to an agent.

If you just give it to the newspaper, it's not to a foreign agent and it gets washed.

This is a very good thing.

This will get your site down a lot more.

You have to, you direct, and I'll say this, you have to, and I don't, you have to, I want the SBA to review, and I'd like to have, we're going to have something within 60 days, right?

I don't want to go during the election.

Right after the election, we want something, and we submit it to the next Congress.

Fair enough, very good.

And the other thing is the British have just, I had about a year's study of Lord Frank's on their official secrecy.

because they're running into the same problem.

Frank from the British Foreign Commission, John and I, her husband and I met about two months ago and came over.

I have to visit her around here.

They're going to come out in October with their findings, which will be very useful just from the point of view of background.

We recognize that we have to, in fact, I think they've been studying it for, since we came into office, injustice.

And I can get, we can get one thing.

One thing about it, if the British were everybody, I'd say we can get the British community involved here in town.

The main thing is, get something that will get out of the press.

You cannot allow a press to have a free hand on a subject.

That's the guilty thing.

You can't have a Jack Anders to publish on the town.

That's the worst place.

So get that law.

You can't do anything about it.

I wonder if, uh, we want to, uh, certify anything that should be done.

I wonder if we want to associate this particular committee with that action, or would we rather work underground?

Oh, underground.

Oh, that's what I meant.

What I meant is that you are a follower.

It's fun, this thing, too.

No, I want you to do that.

Just say that I'd like to have a study major.

They've got lots of lawyers over there.

Just say that the British are having a long, we need one, we want an evaluation, have a study major.

That's what we do.

But you do look over.

All of them get out in front of you.

The press will jump down there and go, oh, they're going to try to suppress people, repression and all that kind of stuff.

But it's going to be done.

Well, anyway, we don't have any press for you today, but this is a new little gimmick.

This is a money clip of the ceiling.

Which is for any important person.

Oh, thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

That's the birthday.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

There's how many girls you have.

You have three daughters.

Three daughters.

How many?

Barbara.

Okay, Julia.

I've done it.

I've done it already.

Okay.

All right, you've got a couple minutes left.

All right, go ahead.

Max, you're doing the job.

We've changed places.

This goes now for all of us.

Good to see you.

Thank you very much.

I'm happy to return.

As I said, I know in public, we're trying to put everything out.

Privately, just give us a way to have it.