Nixon, Ehrlichman & Butterfield on H.R. Haldeman and Legislative strategy

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and I want to get him out as much as I can.

I've got some goals here, and I'll speak to you about this, but I want to show you what I have in mind.

I, for example, in terms of my experience here in the office,

to do the responsible thing on the schedule.

We do a lot of it now, I'm not sure where it is.

Really, I've done the way we're working now.

I've taken over most of the administrative.

I'm responsible for the schedule.

I'm responsible for the day, when the day comes.

I'm not responsible for any of the downstream planning.

All the downstream stuff.

My chairman's assistant, Dave Parker.

This fellow, Dave Parker, has taken over almost all of the office.

I'm not talking about going out of the country.

That's all going to be still with us.

It will be handled very quickly.

But I actually think, like this American's kind of partnership, Dave Clark and Alderman together.

Dave Clark, I don't want to get that out of Alderman's.

I don't want Alderman to have to bother with it at all.

I mean, I could be sweating, but Dave Clark handles that.

He's done what Chapin used to do.

Chapin has been voting 90% of his time, too, you know, here, outside the Washington schedule.

Dave Clark was the one who I see in the office like this American.

He's wearing an IVD and that sort of thing.

Prior to Haldeman's approval and Haldeman's discussions with you, they— Yeah, I'm trying to get him out of the main strength, but how could— That's the way it is.

You can have the partner do it, or you can do it with Bob.

The way the partner's doing it is good.

Oh, I know he's good, but I just wondered if maybe that's—if he should be there.

Because he's going to—I want to get him to go out and study with him and pull Bob out of that, too.

What you're saying is that Parker can work with me as he now works with Haldeman.

Because Parker lays out a plan that he says is quite well thought out.

And he runs it by Haldeman in the final swoop.

Taylor uses his work in ceremonies and this teenage American Republican leadership and Floyd Paxson.

Parker does all that.

Every single day.

I heard that.

I thought I was going to go to Camp David at 5 o'clock.

He's working on it.

goes into his his schedule every single hall every single discussion well it doesn't that well that's the future let me put it this way

But for the cats and dogs, there's no reason for Bobby to worry about them.

There's no reason for Barbara to worry about them.

I mean, it's just not that important.

I mean, it's important, but it isn't something that requires discretion, particularly if you're going to put in a few things and just try to work it out.

So they concentrate on things that are very important.

And it's inevitable that I will talk to him about it.

Because I understand he's in charge and I haven't talked to Parker.

But if I talk to him and he tells Higby and Higby tells Parker, that's a waste of time.

Well, then he shouldn't have, but if I don't have any of those, Parker, I need you still to work.

That's what I want.

Or tell you.

Yeah.

But every single... You could do it.

I can tell you, you and Parker, I just want to cut, you know, cut all of them down.

Every request for your time doesn't come.

Or as Parker said, it's filtered into Parker's office.

Parker sorts out a hell of a lot of garbage.

Comes up with a plan, weekly plan, monthly plan.

He meets with all of them frequently and they discuss that plan.

Whereas chicken used to do this.

Now bird.

And all of them has the feel for what you want to do and what you should do.

It says, discard that.

This is good.

I'll change it this way.

It isn't much of a problem anymore.

Due to the fact that we have this scheme.

From now on, we're not going to do anything except something that affects the election.

Right.

I'm happy to do the little nicey-nice things that we usually do.

I know now that you have me working on that thing.

Well, okay.

You can talk about it.

I'd find it with love.

I'd get it for all of them.

Yes.

Yeah, well, I'll talk to him so that he can...

He has a push in a way.

I think it's... And then, of course, you can always do it.

You have a responsibility.

You can throw it out the box.

And then on the day prior to every day at 2 o'clock,

I meet with most of the key staff here, at least the people that work on your schedule, and we just go over the next day.

That's all I've been interested in, is the immediate following that, and not the downstream planning, but I'm doing it now, and the time I have, and I would love to have the opportunity to do it.

Sure, well, I guess you're right.

We've got to get the quality stuff filtered off.

When Bob leaves these long sessions with you and Bob walks through my office, he can stop and I'll just need to do that.

I don't want anything disgusting.

I don't want anything to do with something else.

And then I'll do some sessions with you every day.

Or the marketer.

You'll have to fund it.

The marketer doesn't feel for it.

Yeah, he does.

Or you can come in for the final session with me.

Just keep Bob out of it.

responsibility, and I'll talk to him about it so that he knows he doesn't have to bother with it anymore.

There's a lot of implications on your left.

It's a very big deal, the revenue sharing.

All right, great.

Fine, fine, fine.

One thing, now that you've just started, I heard you got that Soviet minister held around here today, and now it's on again.

I'm honored to see you.

Right, it's on.

I'm working on time right now.

Looks like it's going to be after 5.

After 5, yeah.

Well, you can't come for that.

He won't be in Washington until 5, probably.

He's out of some place.

So, we're thinking in terms of now, 5, 10, it's only a courtesy call.

That isn't going to push it too much.

Camp David.

Well, what time are the people at Camp David expecting you to come?

6 o'clock.

I have a tentative departure at 5.30 for me to get up there.

Oh, I have something for you.

Well, just tell them to run that show a little longer up there, you know.

I mean, they've got so damn many people up there now, anyway, they might as well, you know, have them right on track.

We could do the Romney briefing, and that would run longer.

Yeah.

It would be good for you to be detained by a Russian minister.

Yeah, that's right.

I'd meet him with the Russian minister, and have the party just let the whole damn thing go.

Robert should be alerted that Romney is going to breathe.

So he can call on him.

Call on him.

Don't procrastinate.

I think it ought to be at the end.

So he gets called on.

Call on him for the last

The dinner was, the cocktails would start at 6.30.

Just figure I can't get it because I know this Russian minister will always take 20 minutes.

He's going to wait until 10.

There's a 10-minute talk, 10 minutes of translation.

I'll break candy up with me.

Don't tell anybody that.

I don't want to be bothered to go up there, frankly, and sit into this kind of thing.

Wait me there and say, I'll break it up.

Not everybody else has got secrets for everybody else.

It was just a confirmation.

We were all saying, well, there's a 20-year-old guy living in there.

You see 40 people together.

These old girls.

Well, I mean, you have 50 or 40.

You have 40.

Let's talk about Bob Dole.

We're not able to make it.

He's got a boat on the 7th floor.

All right.

And Richardson has to come back to get a dinner with the Soviet mission.

All right.

Everyone else will be there.

No, it's not a big problem.

He's got a hell of a lot of people coming out there.

We're bringing Robbie in from Wilkes-Barre for this purpose.

So I'll talk to Roger about that.

I mean, I would think there would be no problem, frankly.

We've got a chocolate problem.

Some of the wine houses back here go up in a car and they don't get other empty vans.

I'm just saying, I mean, we're all screwed if it's going to end soon.

You have another chocolate for me?

Yes, sir.

So, isomers policy, of course, is going to get some more of the places we're coming through.

We've got them split up into three chapters, which is fine.

Oh, fine.

Save their time.

Many people's time should be saved, but I see no reason why basically giving your staff people to have a letter right out of the car if you have a problem.

Yes, sir.

All right.

We're in good shape now.

I'll take care of this.

He said Parker had his role now, but I know what happens if I talk to Bob, and Bob talks to Parker, and they say and all the rest of it.

That's a hell of a waste of Bob's time.

Well, I had a few things that occurred to me during the leaders meeting.

What signal could we try to do?

Do we want to veto it or not?

No, we want them to follow it up.

We don't we don't want to confront you with a decision at all possible.

We're trying to focus a little interest in this.

Well, you don't have any choice.

It's your bill.

It does not.

They're going to bring the authorizations down.

They're going to give you your

complete option on the board, correct?

And that's what we proposed.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

He surrendered.

Why would we be opposed to doing that?

Well, your view is politically it'd be better not to have that.

It'd be better to go on a continuing resolution so that the damn OEO bureaucracy was off balance.

They're going to be a potent rallying point for Schreiber.

And we've been doing some work this morning to figure out how to combat that.

There's a guy named Phillips in there.

We're going to pull him out because he knows who the players are over there.

He's with us.

He's very concerned about this.

He's very much loyal.

And he says that they're going to screw us.

That's right.

And so... Well, it's simply that it gives you some leverage.

That's right.

And so I was talking to Peter Dominick before the meeting, asking if there's any way to bottle anything up, and that's what he referred to.

We recognize that if we get a clean bill down here, we don't have any choice but to recommend that you sign it.

You know, poor old Britain does have a problem with that mission.

There's a goddamn thing we can do about it, can't we?

Well, we ordered it in California, except to get those autos, and that's what we have to do.

That's what the hell?

That's what we have to do.

Yeah, well, as a matter of fact, this isn't news.

We know that the auto people have increased their productivity dramatically.

and they're going to make a pot of money, just a pot of money.

And so our feeling was that we ought to start with Milliken, the governor.

It's in his interest to get those guys in and knock their heads together.

And that was a tactic we were on before.

Now, with him bringing this up this morning, I don't know, we'll take another look.

But I still think Milliken could do it.

It's a statewide problem, but it's not really a national problem.

We're very busy on hijacking right now.

Well, we're having that poll taken that you wanted taken on that one question.

And so I'll just kind of put it on the shelf until we see what that says.

But we're doing a hell of a lot with the airlines trying to tighten up procedures to prevent them.

And other than that,

except Delta.

Delta is not cooperating.

They're the ones that got hit for a million bucks.

And they're the bad boys of the industry, let's say so.

But the others are cooperating and we're doing more inspection, more prevention of all different kinds.

They're gonna seal up those stairways

that those guys escaped from and jumped out from.

There's a lot of odds and ends in that.

— 1 min 5 s with no transcribed speech —

anyway uh could i ask you speaking of the water bill what your uh what we're going to be talking about what we thought

So it's great.

It's great.

Sure, sure.

I didn't know he's going to, I think, going to make some sort of a house in the market.

Maybe he wants to come.

Yes, he should be invited.

He couldn't come.

On the water thing, we're doing this.

Baker has now written you a memo.

We told him no meeting because we didn't want him to appear to embarrass us.

The probabilities are that the conference will not clean the bill up appreciably.

It's going to be way, way over the budget.

So that it will be a very clean shot from the standpoint of money.

We don't have any choice in that regard.

And we've passed the word.

Everybody knows that you're looking very seriously to veto on money grounds.

You still retain your options because the word we're passing is conditional.

It's not fixed as it is with the labor ECW thing.

So that's the position of that.

Muskie is going to bring the dollar amount down some in the conference, but not enough to make the kind of difference that we would need in order to be able to solve our budget problem.

He's going to make a little harder choice for us.

Oh, that's the signal.

We told them not to try.

Baker doesn't like that signal, and that's the reason for all of this.

Baker, honestly, is the reason for this.

I've got to have Baker as a sitting in that place of responsibility.

I mean, you get it out of all these guys.

And all of a sudden, she's just going to laugh at us.

She's going to laugh at everything.

Some place, you really have to draw an end line.

You don't know that line for everything.

I don't understand Ford bringing up this labor ECW thing this morning, because the congressional guys had a signal in to him for two weeks that it was firm on DECA.

That business of Scott's on the tactics of end of war, I've got a memo coming to you from Timmons.

because you marked it in your new summary.

Remember, Saksby hit the White House for not keeping the men informed up there.

This was a lot of trail covering this morning on Scott's part, all this hocus-pocus about, I'm the captain on the bridge and all that kind of stuff.

He's lost a lot of support, both right and left, among Republicans.

And he's in some trouble.

Did we prove this?

No, no.

Are you sure?

Well— Of course you don't know.

I don't know, but— I'm not sure.

But Henry may have said, do I have Jackson, and then changed the signal.

Oh, on the Jackson thing.

Now, that's different.

That's different.

Going back to the Sachse thing, where Sachse said, you know, the White House is going to clear marching orders.

This thing has a ring of truth about it, that Scott was covering his tracks.

He made a mistake.

Now, on this latest one on Jackson, I honestly don't know.

I don't know the answer to that.

Scott said he didn't want the 8th Amendment.

I know the congressional— Scott, of course, oh, he's just so crowded that he's outdressing himself.

Yeah, Scott's great.

Timmons and Corliss have a terrible time with Scott.

He's terribly hard to deal with.

The need there is, again, should we get SAPR perhaps to work on this and be around?

He will be.

I don't think he's back yet, but he will be shortly.

Here's the plan.

Now, that occurred to me yesterday.

I heard the sign say, well, he's in the crowd, but he's still responsible.

But he says, really, look at it.

Five of these are out of jobs, so forth and so on, aren't they?

What are the facts?

So he, of course, can point out the fact, well, that's not true.

There's only one thing that's so bad, though.

But I think that's quite what I think, which occurred to me.

Now, immediately, we have added four and a half million peacetime jobs, peace production, and we have reduced jobs for defense by two and a half million.

Now, that's a lot of work.

You see my point?

We've got to get about four lines like that on the top.

Well, we have done this, and it will be out very shortly.

What I've done is to have these key fact sheets worked over by a sloganeer.

And I've got a set of... A vote for the spending ceiling is a vote against higher taxes.

A vote to exceed the President's budget is a vote for higher taxes.

Those things, John, people can grab.

You've got to keep hitting it and hitting it and hitting it.

Some of my government people, you know, they're damn good at smoking as a person.

They say, I promise, I pledge a job for every man that wants to work.

What does that mean?

Well, the black man, he's going to be able to do it without an employer, a black resort, and all that sort of thing.

But that catches them.

Well, you've got to combat this thing.

We know we need to combat it more effectively.

were well aware of the need.

And I did have Sapphire do it.

Frankly, the stuff he came up with wasn't any good.

And, well, it was flat.

It just wasn't, it didn't have the pipe.

This is good.

And the stuff that I've gotten from this guy, he's a fellow who worked for Finch.

Finch is a writer.

It's really damn good stuff.

And so we've got it in the mail now, and it'll be out over the weekend.

Well, I was just a little disappointed in Bill, because the stuff he had didn't sell.

It just didn't ring the bell.

I know what you mean.

I grope around when I go out here to the press, and every once in a while you get one.

You're busy thinking about why.

You've got to have somebody who's just thinking about how.

Nothing else.

And he sits there, and somebody comes up.

Well, I'm trying to get everybody... Well, I said, I'm trying to get everybody now thinking in those kinds of terms, and I've got a few of them.

And we'll get more.

I'm trying to get these guys to think in terms of leads or catchphrases.

And we come in here afterwards.

And really, it's a terribly weak thing to do.

We've got a client there, and he's like a problem.

I'm like, what?

sell it, you know, 100 or 100, that's not what you ought to do, or this and that.

You shouldn't even be in meetings.

And then we've got Carlotus and Timmons, and they're all here, and so on.

Carlotus, they'll never suggest about them, they, what do you mean they don't?

What is needed in this room is somebody who's saying, now you're going out to meet the press here, which I'll say, Ziegler doesn't do either.

He doesn't consider that his job.

He doesn't, his job.

Klein, I'll do, but he doesn't, he never, somebody should be sitting, believe me, in that room.

what do we want the leaders to say?

In fact, somebody should have sat and thought about it.

Ahead of this meeting.

Right, right.

And said, here is what we want them to say.

Not here is the trust.

Here are the two or three points we want the leaders to say afterwards.

I shouldn't have to be trying.

That's right.

I shouldn't have to be trying positions.

That's correct.

We did it.

Well, you know, sitting there, Ken Cole and I were dropped on one lance out of that meeting.

And it is possible to do.

There's one that I kind of like that came out of this discussion.

Weinberger was talking about an increase of taxes.

And we could play off the 1,000% thing.

We could say McGovern is behind the taxpayer 100%.

He's going to raise everybody's taxes 100%.

And we've got to find things like that.

That one is good enough.

The balance is pretty good.

The balance is very good.

I think the idea, that's why I got .

He said, he says $1,000 or $1,000 increase in tax for the average taxpayer, so that we can have a $1,000 handout for people on welfare.

Yep.

Well, those numbers that CAPS worked up, we will now put in a one-pager.

And we broadcast.

We can't do it with White House auspices.

We can't use White House money.

So we get it over the committee.

And we'll do this thing.

I know.

I told them when I was out there that they were going to take some of those things and send them some time.

That's what they do.

No, sir.

I put them on the date.

We'll find out what happened.

I don't want them getting here and destroying them.

I don't want to leave them.

They can let them rot in the ground first, but they didn't bring anyone to destroy them.

They just have to put on a plane with somebody.

They have planes that come.

I know, sir.

I imagine we lost them.

Yes, sir.

Once a week, all of your sons?

Yes, sir.

No special plan?

No special plan.

All of your plans are done.

Well, go here, please.

All right, come on.

That's the one.

Yes, sir.

I have to get to work.

I didn't know there was a bottle in there.

I didn't know it was a cup.

Herb is in town.

And I'll let you put your best people, John, in this whole business of how long one-liners and slogans, right, etc.

Well, God damn about the substance.

This is what I'm going through right now in tax reform.

George sent over here a very scholarly document on tax reform, and I said, George, this isn't worth a goddamn.

You can't package it politically.

You've got to send me something that'll sing.

And he said, well, we're going to be responsible.

We've got to live with this.

And I said, we may not be able to live with it unless we've got something that meets the McGovern tax challenge.

And I said, I didn't see enough stuff on property tax.

Well, he said, the President has a lot of misgivings about property tax.

And I said, now look, George, the President is going to talk about property tax.

He will either make up something or he will do something that you can get behind.

He'll follow your recommendations.

is itself politically.

It's awful hard to get a guy to think about those kinds of things.

So it's coming anyway.

We'll have something for you on that after a while.

Sure, sure.

Why don't we just tax them?

Well, no.

We've changed the law since then.

Those guys got away with that before the 69 reform.

I thought that everybody was to pay something.

That's the 69 reform.

We said, sure.

They've taken old numbers.

And the reason is that the 69 numbers aren't out yet because the 69 Act went into effect in these tax returns we all filed last April.

And those returns are all coming in and being tabulated.

And we'll have the numbers over here in another two or three weeks.

Sure.

But our answer up until now, we've been preaching this everywhere we can get anybody to listen, is that they're using old numbers.

That's not true.

That's right.

Because it's a lie.

If your parent wasn't around, he doesn't know what's been taxed.

Didn't know there was a reform?

Actually, we've taken $9 million off, and everybody pays something that's similar.

Exactly right.

And should there be a mistake in the 69 reforms, so that loopholes remain, we'll be the first ones to come forward.

Anything with regard to your audience animal, Brian, did he show or not?

I haven't heard.

I haven't heard either.

Well...

I don't know when it was set.

It may have been set today or tomorrow.

My requirement was that it had to be before Wednesday, before close business Wednesday.

Yes, sir.

I sure will.

He doesn't show.

That's right.

He doesn't show.

That's right.

Now, Mitchell also said...

Yes, there is.

And there's a Department of Interior file on it.

Where the hell is it?

We've got it.

Where is it?

I've sent for it.

I have nothing.

I just got the Sergeant Shriver one yesterday.

And I sent for the Duke-Gimmelman file.

The IRS.

I got the Shriver one from here.

There was a White House file on Shriver.

I've sent for whatever the Justice Department has on Shriver.

I have not sent for anything on Shriver from IRS.

Oh, okay.

Kimmelman and I have sent for him from the Interior and the Justice, because he was in hot water with the Interior also.

We've got an airport now.

Okay, I'll keep on.

I think you have no doubt about it.

Right.

Nixon, Ehrlichman & Butterfield on H.R. Haldeman and Legislative strategy

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Nixon, Ehrlichman & Butterfield on H.R. Haldeman and Legislative strategy

AI Summary

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NARA Description

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Also recorded on August 8, 1972

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